Economics Thread

acesfull86 said:
https://webfiles.uci.edu/schofer/classes/2010soc2/readings/4%20Krugman%201993%20What%20Do%20Undergrad%20Need%20to%20Know%20About%20Trade.pdf

"Pop internationalism proclaims that everything is different now that the United States is an open economy. Probably the most important single insight that an introductory course can convey about international economics is that it does not change the basics: trade is just another economic activity, subject to the same principles as anything else. James Ingram's (1983) textbook on international trade contains a lovely parable. He imagines that an entrepreneur starts a new business that uses a secret technology to convert U.S. wheat, lumber, and so on into cheap high-quality consumer goods. The entrepreneur is hailed as an industrial hero; although some of his domestic competitors are hurt, everyone accepts that occasional dislocations are the price of a free-market economy. But then an investigative reporter discovers that what he is really doing is shipping the wheat and lumber to Asia and using the proceeds to buy manufactured goods-whereupon he is denounced as a fraud who is destroying American jobs. The point, of course, is that international trade is an economic activity like any other and can indeed usefully be thought of as a kind of production process that transforms exports into import."
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"One of the most popular, enduring misconceptions of practical men is that countries are in competition with each other in the same way that companies in the same business are in competition. Ricardo already knew better in 1817. An introductory economics course should drive home to students the point that international trade is not about competition, it is about mutually beneficial exchange. Even more fundamentally, we should be able to teach students that imports, not exports, are the purpose of trade. That is, what a country gains from trade is the ability to import things it wants. Exports are not an objective in and of themselves: the need to export is a burden that a country must bear because its import suppliers are crass enough to demand payment."

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Paul Krugman from 1993, making sense on international trade.
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Re: The bolded part

Someone should tell the American workers that have taken such a beating that "international trade isn't a competition." I know lots of people from my hometown who have gone knee deep into student loan debt for a 4 year degree, then had to move to a metro area to find a job, and are making less than high school grads used to make at the multiple local manufacturing plants.

Of course, this was before the era of "free trade" incentivized those employers to move production to Asia and Mexico.

The free trade environment is optimized for increasing the wealth of corporations and their stockholders. That has no relation to what is in the best interests of most Americans.
 
How To Fix Stagnant Wages: Dump The World's Dumbest Idea

The Advent Of The World’s Dumbest Idea

The fact is that in the 1980s and beyond, public companies began embracing a very different idea as to the purpose of a firm: the idea that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. Then, as executives were compensated massively with stock options to sharpen their focus on increasing shareholder value at the expense of everything else, and activist hedge funds began reinforcing the focus with corporate raids on firms that didn’t buy into the doctrine, public companies began to focus totally on maximizing shareholder as reflected in current the stock price.
 
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Want A Better Economy? History Says Vote Democrat!
https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fadamhartung%2Ffiles%2F2012%2F10%2Fjust-the-facts.jpg
 
sturg33 said:
Anybody, uh... wanna defend Bernie's "Tax BEZOS" proposal?
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He seems determined to out-do himself with terrible ideas and remind us daily of his economic ignorance. Bernie, maybe sit the next few plays out.

In the name of reducing the taxpayer burden paying benefits to low-skilled, low-paid workers, Bernie wants to make low-skilled workers more expensive to hire. I bet that results in none of them losing their jobs, and instead of paying just a portion of their wages/benefits, we (taxpayers) won't end up paying for all of their wages/benefits. He wants to punish companies currently giving opportunities to low-skilled workers, while companies not currently giving opportunities to these workers completely escape the tax. Punish the wrong people, harm those you are claiming to help, and somehow come up with a lose-lose-lose situation. What a gem of a plan.

Here is a guy who gets credit for standing up for the poor despite his continuous stream of sophomoric schemes that will make the lower classes worse off. His whole deal is attacking the rich, consequences be damned.
 
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if Bernie had his way we would become like France where firms are very cautious about hiring new workers because it is so hard to fire anyone
 
Sanders is an idiot. See sturg33, I can call someone on the left as crazy as I do Ron Paul.

I do think the incentive packages some of these state and local governments put together for private industries border on the ludicrous, but as per usual, Bernie uses a paint roller when he should be using a water color brush.
 
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50PoundHead said:
Sanders is an idiot. See sturg33, I can call someone on the left as crazy as I do Ron Paul.

I do think the incentive packages some of these state and local governments put together for private industries border on the ludicrous, but as per usual, Bernie uses a paint roller when he should be using a water color brush.
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both are crackpots...to coin a phrase
 
it is worth keeping in mind that there is a continuum...a lunatic is worse than a crackpot who in turn is worse than a flake
 
Newly released data from the Census Bureau show median household income rising 1.8% in 2017. This follows increases of 3.2% in 2016 and 5.2% in 2015.
 
The left likes to celebrate single parent households but the data shows this is a losing recipe.

Having kids out of wedlock is not a good thing for anyone

[Tw]1039548942038577154[/tw]
 
sturg33 said:
The left likes to celebrate single parent households but the data shows this is a losing recipe.

Having kids out of wedlock is not a good thing for anyone

[Tw]1039548942038577154[/tw]
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I think this is correlation not causality. The causal factor is education and the increasing return to education. And the adults in two-parent households tend to be better educated than the ones in single-parent households.

But there are well educated people who head single-parent households. It would be interesting to look at the data for them. I suspect it would confirm my thesis.
 
nsacpi said:
I think this is correlation not causality. The causal factor is education and the increasing return to education. And the adults in two-parent households tend to be better educated than the ones in single-parent households.

But there are well educated people who head single-parent households. It would be interesting to look at the data for them. I suspect it would confirm my thesis.
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Being both 100% parent and 100% income earner greatly reduces your ability to earn higher income, in my personal opinion.

I don't have a child, which frees up a heck of a lot more time for me to find other ways to focus on making money.. whether that's working longer hours to earn better performance reviews/bonuses... researching investment opportunities... or creating my side business... all of which I have done

(oh, and before 57 screams about my privilege, I grew up lower class)
 
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