Have Economists Contributed to Inequality? (fastcompany.com) 299
A new book by Nobel prize-winning economist Angus Deaton"feels like an existential crisis," writes Fast Company, "as he questions his own legacy — and wonders whether policies prescribed by economists over the years have unintentionally contributed to inequality" in America.
Angus Deaton: People who have a four-year college degree are doing pretty well. But if you go to the people who don't have a college degree, horrible things are happening to them... The opportunities are getting bigger and bigger, but the safety net's falling further and further away. . . I think of it as much broader than income inequality: People without a BA are like an underclass. They're dispensable...
Fast Company: Why has Europe been able to avoid so many of these rises in inequality and "deaths of despair" and the U.S. hasn't?
Deaton: Anne [Case, my wife] and I wrestled with that in our book Deaths of Despair. One reason is that we don't have any safety net here... The other story is we've got this hideous healthcare system... we're spending [almost] 20% of GDP. There's no other country that spends anything like that. That money comes out of other things we could have, like a safety net and a better education system. And it's not delivering much, except the healthcare providers are doing really quite well: the hospitals, the doctors, the pharma companies, the device manufacturers. Not only does it cost a lot, but we fund it in this really bizarre way, which is that for most people who are not old enough to qualify for Medicare, they get their health insurance through their employer...
Fast Company : The theme of your new book seems to be something of an existential crisis for you as an economist. How much are economists to blame for some of these issues?
Deaton: [...] I think there are some broad things that we didn't do very well. We bent the knee a little too much to the Chicago libertarian view, that markets could do everything. I'm not trying to say that I was right and everybody else was wrong. I was with the mob. I think we thought that financial markets were much safer than they'd been in the past, and we didn't have to worry about them as much. That was dead wrong. I think we were way overenthusiastic about hyperglobalization. We had this belief that people would lose their jobs but they'd find other, better jobs, and that really didn't happen. So there are a lot of things that I think are going to be seriously reconsidered over the next years.
But he admits economists are short on solutions for economic inequality. "When they say, 'Well, what would work'" there's this uncomfortable silence where you feel foolish. Everybody's quoting [former Italian philosopher and politician Antonio] Gramsci [saying that] the old system is broken but the new system is struggling to be born. No one really knows what it's going to look like."
The book is titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. But in the interview Deaton still remains hopeful about America, calling it "a very inventive place," and noting that in the field of economics "there's always hope and there's always change; economics is a very open profession, and it changes very quickly."
Fast Company: Why has Europe been able to avoid so many of these rises in inequality and "deaths of despair" and the U.S. hasn't?
Deaton: Anne [Case, my wife] and I wrestled with that in our book Deaths of Despair. One reason is that we don't have any safety net here... The other story is we've got this hideous healthcare system... we're spending [almost] 20% of GDP. There's no other country that spends anything like that. That money comes out of other things we could have, like a safety net and a better education system. And it's not delivering much, except the healthcare providers are doing really quite well: the hospitals, the doctors, the pharma companies, the device manufacturers. Not only does it cost a lot, but we fund it in this really bizarre way, which is that for most people who are not old enough to qualify for Medicare, they get their health insurance through their employer...
Fast Company : The theme of your new book seems to be something of an existential crisis for you as an economist. How much are economists to blame for some of these issues?
Deaton: [...] I think there are some broad things that we didn't do very well. We bent the knee a little too much to the Chicago libertarian view, that markets could do everything. I'm not trying to say that I was right and everybody else was wrong. I was with the mob. I think we thought that financial markets were much safer than they'd been in the past, and we didn't have to worry about them as much. That was dead wrong. I think we were way overenthusiastic about hyperglobalization. We had this belief that people would lose their jobs but they'd find other, better jobs, and that really didn't happen. So there are a lot of things that I think are going to be seriously reconsidered over the next years.
But he admits economists are short on solutions for economic inequality. "When they say, 'Well, what would work'" there's this uncomfortable silence where you feel foolish. Everybody's quoting [former Italian philosopher and politician Antonio] Gramsci [saying that] the old system is broken but the new system is struggling to be born. No one really knows what it's going to look like."
The book is titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. But in the interview Deaton still remains hopeful about America, calling it "a very inventive place," and noting that in the field of economics "there's always hope and there's always change; economics is a very open profession, and it changes very quickly."
Of course they did (Score:3, Insightful)
At least for the last 20 years, definitely. What do you think happens when to the value of labor when you make capital essentially free for 20 years (low interest rates)? Hiring senior wall street execs to run the Fed and Treasury didn't help.
Re:Of course they did (Score:5, Interesting)
Why has the EU fared better than the USA? Well, for starters countries in the EU have tend to have stronger socialist democrat systems, i.e. the idea that the state should provide assistance to those that the capitalists toss aside. But even that is being steadily eroded by a particularly aggressive European Central Bank. Now that the UK's left the EU, they're free to abandon all their hard-won human & labour rights. They're currently seriously proposing to engage in human trafficking (refugees from the UK to Rwanda).
How much worse is it going to get before we descend into war or start having violent revolutions?
Re:Of course they did (Score:5, Insightful)
What keeps the European economies afloat is that apparently people over here noticed that an economy doesn't get rich by producing cheaply but by selling their crap. Now, we in the so called first world have a very lopsided industry with most of our GDP coming from the tertiary sector, i.e. services. Services are notoriously hard to export. The only relevant way to do that is to have people come to you as tourists and spend their money here. And that only goes so far, you can't prop up an industrialized economy on tourism alone.
Fuck knows we tried...
So what you need is a population that has money to buy those services. Of course, if you pump more and more money into the top 0.01%, this will break down. Because no matter how crappy some billionaire's hair looks, he doesn't need twenty haircuts an hour.
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And pretty much for the same reasons that the US is facing now. A small sliver of aristocracy, a vast, vast sea of downtrodden masses and a tiny but determined layer of people who'd want to kick the old lords out... well, of course to become Caliph instead of the Caliph, but you don't need to tell that to the masses below.
The difference is that the aristocracy in the US has noticed that in time and has instead put up their own pretender to be for the masses. I'm just as surprised as anyone else with half a
Re:Of course they did (Score:5, Insightful)
no 1st amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech (people getting arrested over there for jokes, simple statements of opinion?)....
There is article 11 of the European charter of human rights.
http://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-cha... [europa.eu]
Many places guarantee freedom of speech. The difference is often how it's interpreted (judges) and applied (police).
In the USA, the freedom of speech has mostly been abused by corporations ("corporations are people") to interfere in elections. Many countries have laws to limit corporate spending, the USA doesn't. One effect is that consumer and privacy rights are pretty weak in the USA, and that the arms/military lobby is strong.
and no 2nd amendment.
Good thing. It's part of the reason why there are much less murders (and violence in general) in Europe (at least west of Ukraine and Russia), Canada, Japan, Australia... all the developed world except the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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You are using two sources with likely two different methodologies to count what is considered a violent crime. Or also whether it's being reported or not.
Homicides is a much better indicator, because well, at lest in developed countries, they are important enough that they will all be accounted for.
Intentional homicide rate is 6.8 in the USA vs 1 in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This accounts all intentional homicides, no matter if it's by gun, knife, club or whatever.
But anyways the UK is only on
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While Europe is a nice and fun place to visit, I'd not want to live there...extremely high taxation on my hard earned money...tiny living spaces...no 1st amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech (people getting arrested over there for jokes, simple statements of opinion?)....and no 2nd amendment. And for us in the US, sure we need to adjust things, BUT...we have to keep in mind that equality of opportunity is not equal outcomes. Equality != Equity and we need to keep it that way.
So essentially you're saying you don't like Yurp because we won't put up with mean, offensive, loud-mouthed, violent, aggressive arseholes toting firearms in public. Yes, please stay in the USA.
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Except that you can end up where everyone only cares about themselves. The extreme version is every housing lot is its own fortress, they neighbor's house could be on fire but it's not my problem since it's on the other side of the border. Having a better community overall is better for everyone, even if some individuals could do lots better at the expense of others. Sure, it sounds too socialist, so American propaganda says to ignore the neighbors, and if they're poor and unable to pay medical bills the
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1. Luxembourg
2. Ireland
3. Singapore
4. Qatar
5. Macau
6. Switzerland
7. United Arab Emirates
8. San Marino
9. Norway
10. United States
11. Denmark
12. Netherlands
13. Hong Kong
14. Brunei
15. Taiwan
16. Iceland
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The problem is trade (Score:2, Insightful)
Out medical costs are high because we subsidize the rest of the world.
The pharma industry but also the device industry - domestic and foreign charges way more in the USA than the rest of the world where there are price controls. They make their obscene profits here, some profit in the rest of the developed world, and than occasional take some loss for PR sake in the developing world.
Its not a market problem its a political problem. The trouble is who is going to tell Merck or Novartis - hey charge American
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Out medical costs are high because we subsidize the rest of the world... if you do say look you have to sell a given volume of product at the same price to everyone and you have to make those same volume options available to everyone one than that has some really negative consequences for some markets that will be entirely priced out and ultimately undeserved as a result.
Or you could just limit overall corporate profits. A good start would be doing away with "externalization" of costs by making sure that fines and civil suit awards substantially exceed the profit generated by the bad actions. Add to that the enforcement of total transparency around things like - in the case of Big Pharma - clinical trials and their raw data.
Corporations are not people and do not deserve the same rights, permissions, and forgiveness, and privacy that individuals deserve.
Re:The problem is trade (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or you could just limit overall corporate profits. A good start would be doing away with "externalization" of costs by making sure that fines and civil suit awards substantially exceed the profit generated by the bad actions. Add to that the enforcement of total transparency around things like - in the case of Big Pharma - clinical trials and their raw data.
Corporations are not people and do not deserve the same rights, permissions, and forgiveness, and privacy that individuals deserve.
Any rule or law that you add just adds to the cost of doing business, and if the cost of doing business in your locality gets higher than the cost to move somewhere else, then the affected companies leave.
Also, any corporation of significant size consists of hundreds, thousands, or millions of legal entities. This is due to lots of reasons, including legal compliance, limiting liability, branding, etc. (My wife herself has several due to keeping the different lines of her home business separate)
So you lim
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The Inflation Reduction Act [wikipedia.org] directs CMS - the body overseeing Medicare - to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. Here are the first 10 drugs [hhs.gov] that will get tackled. There will be others. I'd like to see medical devices end up here, too. It's not a
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Well, to be fair...the IRA had a LOT of other crap in there that a lot of people couldn't stomach.
Bring stuff like that out into separate bills, or at least smaller more targeted ones and then let's see who votes for what, eh?
I realize there are negotiations, tit for tat....and some things are packed in to get something through, but let's keep it
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True - and they guy up the thread that criticized some of the Bush era restrictions on medicare negotiating drug prices has a valid point also.
The fact is any complex rules wont work, complexity means the system gets gamed. It always means that. Unless you basically slide the lever all the way to 'nationalize it' sooner or later some actor will find a way to use the system to their advantage in a way not previously imagined.
Having a truly functioning marketplace requires the rules be relatively simple, well
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The ACA is stupid - creating an 'insurance market' where you more or less forbid the most critical predictors for underwriting be used is no market at all
I would say that's not specifically a problem of the ACA, it's clearly a problem with the concept of for-profit health insurance as a substitute for a proper medical safety net in the first place. I've always thought that the ACA was not a very good solution and no wonder. It was the compromise solution that was acceptable to the Republicans so it could get passed... up until it actually happened, then they complained to high heaven about it. There are a few good things that survived in it like preventing i
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What drug prices were negotiated under Obamacare? I'll answer that for you - none, the provisions were left out because pharma is powerful.
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Re:The problem is trade (Score:4, Informative)
Rubbish. The US healthcare system is expensive because it's run for the benefit of corporations, whilst providing worse care outcomes than the majority of western countries for all but the richest patients.
$12,914/year per person is spent in the US on healthcare, and 10% of people don't even have health insurance. Meanwhile, healthcare in the UK (for example) costs $5,387/year, covers everyone in the country, and is free at point of demand.
https://www.healthsystemtracke... [healthsystemtracker.org]
Re:The problem is trade (Score:5, Insightful)
"Out medical costs are high because we subsidize the rest of the world."
No. Our costs are high because of obscene profits.
"They make their obscene profits here, some profit in the rest of the developed world, and than occasional take some loss for PR sake in the developing world."
That's half right, you assume the "developed world" and "developing world" are not profitable enough, how do you know that?
"Its not a market problem its a political problem."
The "political problem" is leaving it to the "market" to produce the "market problem". It is the idea in the US that unbridled exploitation is an entitlement of the rich.
"you have to sell a given volume of product at the same price to everyone and you have to make those same volume options available to everyone one than that has some really negative consequences for some markets that will be entirely priced out and ultimately undeserved as a result."
Price control for the in-group, the shaft for the out-group. What a surprise! That's literally what we have today, except you're the out-group unless you can find your way into a class exception. Artificially high prices, exceptions for insurance companies, no insurance? Sucks to be you.
"You'll have a bunch of university students protesting your perpetuation of systemic inequality and suggesting you have to than submit to mass migration and accept terrorists who behead children as justified."
And demonize others for the results of your hypothetical shitty plan. Smells Republican, though I think it's hysterical that, as usual, you're for big government to the extent that it benefits you.
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The trouble is who is going to tell Merck or Novartis - hey charge Americans only what you charge the German healthcare system for your products or you're getting banned from the US market place - when that means probably citizens who depend on those products might literally die.
No they won't. People are not dying in Germany either. Merck and Novartis are still happy to sell their products in Germany, and they make a profit there.
Why would they stop selling a profitable product?
The pharma industry but also the device industry - domestic and foreign charges way more in the USA than the rest of the world where there are price controls
The doctors and the insurance companies also charge way more in the USA compared to the rest of the world, to cover their bureaucracy. And none of that money subsidizes anything in the rest of the world.
My last experience in a US hospital is when my wife went for a 20 minutes visit at the ER (maybe 10 minute
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Meanwhile we Constitutionally can't put export tariffs on product so domestic supplies are free to deal with say Canada if they want to, without having to make those prices available here.
Nothing in the Constitution prevents the government from imposing and export tax or tariff. But the problem is political because any change will hit at profits; not just big Pharma but the plan mangers and plans as well.
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By the logic being espoused here, an export tax would make things worse. The other countries would not raise their price controls. Actually most don't have price controls, they just negotiate much better prices at a national level. Ever noticed how you pay much more than your insurance company does for the same thing? Governments pay even less than insurance companies.
So if your logic holds, pharma companies would simply increase costs for US customers to maintain their profit levels. As if their prices are
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Export taxes would just result in the drug manufacturing being moved out of the USA, so it would hurt consumers. There would have to be substantial changes to the tax code to keep them from using shell companies and other shenanigans to shield income so that we could properly dis-incentivize moving the production. And it would get challenged in court, tied up for years, and by the time SCOTUS decides it is actually unconstitutional (because they are partisan hacks), everyone will have given up anyway. We're
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Nothing in the Constitution prevents the government from imposing and export tax or tariff.
Really? Could of fooled me and the Supreme Court!
https://constitution.congress.... [congress.gov]
This is exactly why we need civics test before people are allowed to vote. Half the people casting ballots haven't got a clue what our basic organizing document says.
I guess you're in that half as the very thing you cite states:
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Export Clause’s restriction on Congress’s taxing power does not extend to several taxes, such as a tax on all property alike, including property intended for export but not in the course of exportation11; a nondiscriminatory tax on an exporter’s income;12 and a stamp tax to identify goods intended for export.
So yes, the Constitution does not have a blanket ban on taxing exports' and thus
Re:The problem is trade (Score:5, Insightful)
Out medical costs are high because we subsidize the rest of the world.
The pharma industry but also the device industry - domestic and foreign charges way more in the USA than the rest of the world where there are price controls. They make their obscene profits here, some profit in the rest of the developed world, and than occasional take some loss for PR sake in the developing world.
Actually US healthcare costs are so high because about 45% of the US healthcare spend [economist.com] goes to "the intermediaries—insurers, chemists, drug distributors and pharmacy-benefit managers (PBMS)—sitting between patients and their treatments". Most of this doesn't happen in countries where healthcare is viewed as a centrally managed social good rather than a source of profit.
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Do you listen to yourself? How delusional can a single person be?
The reason Merck (a German company) and Novartis (from Switzerland) charge what they charge in the US is because they get away with it. It's that plain simple. They charge it because it gets paid. What are you, some pinko-commie that you hate free enterprises fleece dupes who pay too much for their junk?
The real reason healthcare costs a fortune in the US is that it's less regulated. Have you ever heard some ad telling you to ask your physicia
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What a bizarre argument. The underlying assumption is that the pharma companies will always require making obscene profits, and if the law doesn't allow them to elsewhere then they must do so in the United States.
What would happen if the US added price controls? The universe divides by zero and the Earth is swallowed into a black hole?
The reason healthcare is so expensive in the US is because it can be. What are you going to do, not pay and die? Any kind of socialised or price regulated medicine is socialis
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Greed exist in all systems because its something innate to the human being.
However good systems manage and even make use of the greed for better results, never allowing any of the extremely greedy people to get too much power.
Last time we had a system like that, we got computers, and cars and all sorts of technological innovations out of it
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Every system that tries to "reward cooperation" gets quickly corrupted by greedy individuals and turned into a kingdom.
All it takes is half dozen very talented and greedy individuals to destroy a system that has no systemic solution for it.
If your system depends on something like "if we find greedy people, we shot at em", you don't have a solution, you have a cope.
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Every system that tries to "reward cooperation" gets quickly corrupted by greedy individuals and turned into a kingdom.
That's not a fact, either, it's sheer opinion based on lack of imagination regarding what a "system" could be. More importantly, though, it's wrong, because ethnology has proof of such systems, even if only for comparatively small populations. And I didn't say "try" to reward for a reason. What I mean is a system in which people simply do not gain advantages through competitive behaviour, while they do through cooperative behaviour, because that's how the economy would work. That economy might not even be b
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Hmm...you seem to be trying to imply that this is a bad thing?
You don't believe that striving for excellence in all endeavors is a good thing??
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Hmm...you seem to be trying to imply that this is a bad thing?
You don't believe that striving for excellence in all endeavors is a good thing??
The US health care system is definitely not best. On a world scale it is pretty average*, giving results similar to many 3rd world countries, with much more funding.
according to metrics such as:
-life expectancy
-infant death rate
-maternal mortality
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Hmm...you seem to be trying to imply that this is a bad thing?
You don't believe that striving for excellence in all endeavors is a good thing??
The criticism here is not that striving for excellence is a bad thing. The criticism is that America does not strive for excellence, because so many of those in power believe that it is already the most excellent in the world and therefore has nothing to learn from anyone else.
Part of this is marriage rates (Score:4, Insightful)
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Fun fact: according to certain studies, the accessibility of inexpensive energy since the industrial revolution played a big role in enabling divorces. During the medieval era, when individuals had to work the land for sustenance, it was calculated that a mature adult's labor could provide for approximately 1.5 adults. Consequently, choosing to divorce and live independently, especially when raising children, was deemed impractical from a survival standpoint (for most people).
This brings me to another topic
Re:Part of this is marriage rates (Score:5, Insightful)
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For reference, a healthy human adult labourer can only output about 0.5 kWh in an 8 hour workday. The average energy use in a US home is over 1 kW, so over 24 kWh per day.
This is a very good reference point. It means that if we didn't have this cheap energy, a typical US home household would need ~48 human slaves to function (this is an approximation of course). Add to that the rest of services and goods we use during the day (food, transportation, cars, networks ...), and the end result is that compared to the time where human labor was the only thing, we are using the equivalent of 400-600 slaves per day to sustain our lifestyle.
Which brings the question: was slavery ended
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So you're saying streaming a movie over 4G consumes half a kilowatt of power? I did find one source that agrees with that, but is it really right? All the other sources on the internet say a 4G transmitter requires 2.5-10 kilowatts, and that statistic implies a single tower could only serve 2.5-10 phones streaming a 4K movie. That's not realistic, unless the bitrate has been artificially inflated (is the movie being transmitted uncompressed?)
A more grounded source [wirelessmoves.com] says:
A single base station site serves around 800-1200 subscribers. 120 kWh of daily power consumption divided by 1200 subscribers means that the energy consumed by a base station per subscriber is 0,1 kWh per day
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Before industrialization most people were subsistence farmers so you had to work as a community and families to survive. With industrialization there was enough extra production to support people going off to factories and buying food in cash then. The development of artificial fertilizer really caused production, and then populations, to skyrocket.
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The question is what is the cause of falling marriage rates. Is it some moral decline, some deterioration of the fabric of society? Or is it that people are now less willing to accept unhappy or abusive relationships, and we don't really teach them how to be good partners?
Of course back in the 70s, a single person could easily earn enough to support a family, own a home, car, the odd holiday. The fact that they can't now seems to be the problem, not that the parents are trying to maintain two separate house
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The question is what is the cause of falling marriage rates. Is it some moral decline, some deterioration of the fabric of society? Or is it that people are now less willing to accept unhappy or abusive relationships, and we don't really teach them how to be good partners?
I think a big part of it is the rise of feminism encouraging girls and young women to dream of a future in the corporate jungle instead of homemaking. While I am certain that some women are happier and better off for this, we have no way of knowing how many young women were pushed off a path where they would have been happy for a path that ends up making them miserable instead. I strongly suspect more people(both male and female) would be happier if homemaking were considered to be a career just as valid
Ooops (Score:2)
Millions of lives ruined. Seems the careless way he tells his naive mistake, is exactly what got him here. It's profit over all else. Looking for excuses, to hide your real motivation, excessive greed.
stopped listening (Score:3, Insightful)
The number of economists spouting bullshit theories has increased exponentially.
One of them crying "mea culpa we might have been wrong!" is hardly going to suggest they've suddenly become insightful.
Plus anyone who quotes Gramsci is a fucking moron.
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Differing goals (Score:5, Interesting)
Different people value different things.
Some people want a workplace where they are valued, more than they want higher income. (me)
Some people want to work from home, more than they want higher income. (me)
Some people want a stress-free workplace, more than they want higher income. (me)
Some people want to spend time raising their own children, more than they want higher income. (me)
Some people want to work fewer hours, more than they want higher income. (me)
Some people want higher income at the expense of all else. (not me)
Each of these goals leads to differing levels of income, i.e., income inequality.
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I believe the article isn't addressing the situation described here. It's probable that your income surpasses your actual needs by a considerable margin, making minor fluctuations inconsequential to you. Furthermore, income disparity is a natural outcome (haha), especially in non-communist societies, as people have different jobs, and well, there is this notion called supply and demand.
The article, however, focuses on profound inequalities that result in an unfair distribution of opportunities for succeedin
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I grew up in poverty, I benefitted from free school lunches (reserved for those below the poverty line). I escaped poverty not through government handouts, but through hard work. I *wanted* to escape. For those who want this, and will work to achieve it, the US has plenty of opportunities.
And nobody in the US needs to go hungry. They are a myriad of groups, including the government, giving out free food. I volunteer with an inner city charity, teaching young men trade skills. Guess what, they all have cell
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You're not wrong, for many who have little, the road is hard and long. This is also true for people with physical disabilities, such as paraplegics. No paraplegic can achieve a life *equal* to people with full mobility, but they can achieve a life that is *equally fulfilling." Some give up, but others persevere.
With all that misfortune in your life, would you say you've achieved a fulfilling life? If not, I would urge you not to let go of the dream! Money isn't fulfilling. Impacting people's lives, is.
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Some people have skills and abilities that make them more valued than others. A doctor has special skills backed up by over a decade of training and are few in number. People who can clean rooms don't require any special skills and so are very common. One gets paid more because for each one of them there are hundreds of the others. The doctor is far harder to replace than the person sweeping the floor.
An important purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
All that GDP "wasted" on America's health care system does more than just line the pockets of the health care industry. It keeps workers desperate. And desperate workers are pliant workers. Can you really put a price on how that serves our over-class?
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Sadly it feels like the goal of American capitalism is to ensure that workers' monthly wages are always $1 less than their monthly expenses.
It's not economics that is causing the problems (Score:4, Interesting)
it's what we call humanity. The US system fails because we evaluate the system using dollars. The thing is the US system offers treatments that are not available anywhere else in the world. At the same time it neglects a large part of the population. We then compare this system with other systems and only highlight its failings. As an example the Canadian system. In the Canadian system it doesn't matter how much you make. If you don't have the right connections you don't have a doctor and you spend your life on waiting lists or years waiting for treatment. People die because they waited too long in the emergency room.
If you look at, and analyze any healthcare system you will realize that there are the privileged and the not privileged. I don't know of any system that treats all humans on an equal basis. To say this is just an economics problem is to close your eyes to all the systems that are failing that are not just based on economics. Humanity just likes to step on some in order to move others up and then pay lip service to the stepped on. The stepped on would do the same as soon as they have the opportunity.
The proof is in the world around us. We haven't learned anything from WWII or any other conflict. It's us vs them. Just look at US politics where all are American. It's the same all over the world. It's always us vs them. The thing is you can't hurt them without hurting us. To sustain any system it requires all types but in every system we have "them" that are excluded where "us" closes their eyes because "us" is not affected.
In the Canadian system if your are rich you can always go down to the US and receive treatment so economics opens some doors to fix some problems. It doesn't stop humanity from imposing border restrictions to ensure its failings.
Re: It's not economics that is causing the problem (Score:2)
The thing is the US system offers treatments that are not available anywhere else in the world.
Name one.
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One of the most famous is when Robert Bourassa went to the US for cancer treatment. Hip replacement is common to avoid the pain of having to sit waiting for 2 or more years.
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For those who are unfamiliar with what the parent is saying, Robert Bourassa was a Canadian politician who went to the US for treatment for melanoma 33 years ago! Note that this was for surgery that can be performed by surgeons the world over. Hip surgery is also available all over the world. Certainly people do travel from all over the world to get medical procedures in the US, but some people don't seem to realize that people all over the world travel to other destinations all over the world for medical p
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Here for the lazy.
https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/coroner-calls-for-review-at-jewish-general-er-after-death-of-young-man
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/akeem-scott-died-family-crarr-1.6894027
I believe your republican talking point of "people die on waiting lists' is exactly that, republican propaganda,
This just make my point. The us vs them. BTW I'm not a republican.
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As a percentage, based upon the 8400 people reported who died waiting for healthcare in C
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The real problem is that people die on waiting lists in healthcare all the time regardless of the insurance system. Consider organ transplant lists. Doesn't matter if it's heavily socialized medicine or capitalist insurance, there simply are not enough transplant organs to give one to every person that needs one, so people die waiting on lists. The only exception are places where the rich and powerful can buy organs or, possibly in some cases, have people murdered to supply them with organs. That model obvi
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As an example the Canadian system. In the Canadian system it doesn't matter how much you make. If you don't have the right connections you don't have a doctor and you spend your life on waiting lists or years waiting for treatment. People die because they waited too long in the emergency room.
Just swap "right connections" with "money" and you've described the US healthcare system with its 26,000 a year dead due to not having insurance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] .
Also, Canada is a sample size of one in terms of wait times in countries with socialist healthcare systems and yet you're creating all these broad conclusions based on this. This means at best you dont understand how to do statistical comparisons or at worst are just being dishonest. If you compare across the board between all oth
Focus on 4 year degree (Score:4, Interesting)
Why the focus on a four year degree? Not all who don't have a four year degree are doing poorly. Most skilled tradesmen do very well actually.
And many with four year degrees are having a hard time.
And our economy needs skilled tradesmen. It doesn't seem like a good idea to somehow imply they are than others because they don't have a degree.
It seems that perhaps if you draw that division between people, perhaps you aren't living in the real world?
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ref: https://www.indeed.com/career-... [indeed.com]
ref: https://smartasset.com/retirem... [smartasset.com]
Re:Focus on 4 year degree (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know who downvoted you to a 1, but the 4 year degree has serious problems. I'd argue that mass 4 year degrees are one of the most harmful things Western Society has done to itself.
Let me preface this by saying, I am pro-education. I'm talking specifically about mass 4 year degrees, where everyone is expected to get a 4 year degree. Often it doesn't really improve the person's ability to do a job.
1. Education inflation. I'm in Canada and here it is very common to have to do a 4 year degree before you enter a specific program (med school, nursing, teachers college...). In many countries you can go straight into those programs. I don't think Canada's workers end up 'better'. The 4 year degree is basically just inflation. You need it just because other people get it. Now, even some tight program expect you get a masters degree. Well sure, if you're comparing applicants, and one has a bachelor and one has masters, surely you take the one with the masters right? This can definitely increase inequality as generally wealthier people have the time to get multiple degrees. The rest of the people need to get on with life.
2. The Birth Rate. Most western countries are suffering and part of the reason here is when you are able to 'start a life'. The longer your education, the longer people feel it takes to 'get started in life'. All these educational requirements do in increase the time it takes for you to get started in life. It's not uncommon today to be in school until your late 20s. Then you have to find a job. Feel a bit secure in the job, by that time you're in your early 30s. Then you have to squeeze in getting the right partner, pray the stars align and you can get pregnant. Maybe you can squeeze in 1 or 2 kids tops. There is no reason to spend so much time in school. It should be much more common to get a basic education. Get to a job. Start a family. Once you get some experience, maybe it is worth getting a masters degree... But so many people want all that education front loaded. It's very detrimental.
3. Unions have actually played a part here too. I'm in Canada again and it's weird to me that they too have participated in all the preference for 4 year degrees and masters degree. You should just magically be paid more or get preference just because; even if it has nothing to do with your ability to actually do the job. Like being a bus driver should have nothing to do with how much education you have. You should be a darn good driver and have good customer service skills...
4. Government subsidies. This one is tricky, but I'm going to say we're all subsidized to some level. What's tricky is so often people don't want to admit they're subsidized. A lot of government spending goes into things like universities. If you work in one, you're subsidized. If your city gets one, you're subsidized. Even healthcare. One way to see it is the government is helping the poor. The other way to see it as government funding healthcare workers.
Again, I personally don't think there's anything wrong with a subsidy. But you have to recognize it. These people often don't see it as a subsidy. So when the government tries to fund other people, they just see that as a subsidy and rail against it. What we've done in general is shielded educated workers (Somewhat) from the market, while exposing the poorest to complete global competition. It's sick in my view.
5. Neglecting trades. with so much spending on education focused on the 4 year degree, that has removed funding for things like trades in high school and earlier. Once again hurting a lot of people; often on the poorer end of the system.
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What ? You mean a 4 year Humanities Queer Theory and Racial Marxism degree won't be much better than a Plumbing or Carpentry apprenticeship ?
Why would Colleges lie to me ?
A safety net? Are you insane? (Score:3)
How exactly do you plan to extort and oppress people without the constant threat of losing their home and living on the street? You'd have to pay living wages because they'd notice that, hey, after expenses for gas, traffic tolls, insurances and so on, I don't make any more money from working than what I'd get from social security, because social security is pegged at the bare minimum for survival. So why the fuck should I work?
I.e. exactly the problem Europe is currently running into. Wages have been depressed to the point where people noticed that, after expenses for working, what they got left over is no more than what they'd get as social security money because that IS the bare minimum for survival.
Re:A safety net? Are you insane? (Score:4, Interesting)
How exactly do you plan to extort and oppress people without the constant threat of losing their home and living on the street? You'd have to pay living wages because they'd notice that, hey, after expenses for gas, traffic tolls, insurances and so on, I don't make any more money from working than what I'd get from social security, because social security is pegged at the bare minimum for survival. So why the fuck should I work?
The minimum payment for social security is based on the federal minimum wage [ssa.gov]. So is eligibility for SNAP [cbpp.org]. If they increased the federal minimum wage it would increase the minimum payments for social security, and make millions of Americans eligible to food aid. Ironically, more people would be required to work to get SNAP because work registration is based either on hours worked, or weekly earnings exceeding the federal minimum wage * 30 (with some assorted exclusions for people caring for young children or the disabled, etc.)
So in short, the feds won't let us have anything nice in part because if they did, they'd have to let more people eat.
GDP, perhaps? (Score:4, Insightful)
If economists did anything, it was to promote the idea that the entire nation could be easily distilled into a handful of numbers - the main one being Gross Domestic Product, GDP.
Our decades (centuries?) long obsession with GDP lets politicians chase bigger and bigger deals, at the expense or more and more of the ordinary people who'll never see any benefit from them. The other Great Economist Myth, that of trickle-down-economics means that unless you're one of the very tiny few involved in the big deals done by the politicians, then you really never will see any benefit from them - hence inequality.
Ultimately then, economists mismanaged politicians, or perhaps politicians proved to be so slimy and impossible to hold to any standard that economists were never going to be able to "manage" them in the first place.
Re:GDP, perhaps? (Score:5, Insightful)
The focus on GDP should definitely share a good portion of the blame, in a sane world GDP would be an economic footnote and the primary focus would be on median household income instead.
Summary (Score:2)
"We got it wrong, and we don't know how to fix it. We're totally ignoring the possibility of copying other countries that have done it better for the same reason we got it wrong in the first place - we believe in American Exceptionalism. Now buy my book and make me rich."
This guy is still part of the problem.
Retraining (Score:4, Insightful)
"I think we were way overenthusiastic about hyperglobalization. We had this belief that people would lose their jobs but they'd find other, better jobs, and that really didn't happen. "
He's right about that. It was hard enough switching between extractive and physical metallurgy even though they are both covered under metallurgical engineering. An attempt to change me into a database programmer or a web developer is most likely doomed to failure.
People are not interchangeable CPU modules.
No. (Score:3)
Why do we all have to be economically equal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Blaming economists for != is like ... (Score:2)
the danger of ignoring power in economic analysis (Score:2)
Free markets can't exist when some actors are allowed to coerce others, coercive force is always converted into economic rent.
Coercive force comes in four valences: active versus passive, and focused versus diffuse. Passive/diffuse is both the most powerful and the hardest to see: it is not direct extraction (one person directly taking from
Economics is a crippled profession (Score:3)
Economists have to produce answers which are acceptable to the ruling class, because any popular understanding that people can use democracy to make their lives better by voting for wealth redistribution is too big a threat for the ruling class to allow it to exist. This means economics is not allowed to be a science, it has to be intensely ideological. Which means it will always give wrong answers. I remember taking an economics course in school, it started with how banks create credit with the lend-borrow cycle. As a starting point for economics, it's farcical, it's a starting point for "don't ask where the profit comes from".
Fortunately, a couple of decades later, I came across a single-page description of how profit comes from underpaying labour based on the labour theory of value. And I finally understood how capitalism works, which no economics course or anything else in mainstream culture is going to tell you. (The tendency for the rate of profit to decline is another important one, but it's a lot harder to understand.)
When they give cover for bad capitalism (Score:3)
There's nothing wrong with studying the economy, But we've let that study get increasingly taken over by special interests. Much more so than any other science.
Ugh, again, there's *no* Nobel Prize in economics (Score:4, Informative)
FFS, there's no Nobel Prize in economics. Alfred Nobel was adament that economics isn't a science, since when a theory is falsified the proponents of that theory just claim "the conditions weren't right" and keep believing the theory. That's not how the scientific method works. He specifically did not allow economics into the foundation's list of sciences.
The prize is correctly called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. It was started in the late 60s when the free-market capitalists needed yet another prop for their ideas about how economies work and knew that by attaching the name of Nobel to a bank prize the "science" of economics would be given more legitimacy.
Economics is no more a science than astrology, Feng shui, tarot, and water dowsing.
Deaton didn't win a Nobel prize, a bank gave him some money to keep the system legit.
Markets can't work if we don't see prices (Score:2)
Surely not! (Score:2)
It's not like forced privatization, public-private partnerships, NAIRU and derivatives like structural deficits or debt ratios, peddling the debt medicants, caring about some abstract misleading indexes over people's lives, deregulation, right to fire, employment phillips curve, waiting for CCS wunderwaffen, wars coups and more wars, export led development, letting the market sort necessities, and all other sorts of unsupported rubbish have ever had bad effects. No, it's commies, terrorists, Xi, Putin, the
Economists are like newspapers (Score:2)
Yes (Score:3)
Especially considering, if this man is to be believed, that they've been following a libertarian economic model. I see this thinking in how almost every economist likes to bash on rent control because it is "economically inefficient". They only see the world in relation to a market economy and ignore the non-market benefits of such policies.
Re:Economics opinion writer (Score:5, Insightful)
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Facts are that the works of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School Of Economics are DESIGNED to put money into the hands of the wealthy.
Anything derived from "Supply Side", "Trickle Down","Laffer Curve", or "Neo Liberal" is just bullshit used to justify giving wealthy people tax breaks, when they should be carrying their share for medical and social welfare programs
These are the root cause problem for our current homeless (largely due to poor mental health and addiction care) situation and were used by rig
Re: Economics opinion writer (Score:3)
Not only does that not address what he mentioned, but actually if you look at the distribution of who pays the most taxes, it's even further skewed towards the wealthy.
https://www.dailysignal.com/wp... [dailysignal.com]
In other words, they do in fact pay more than their fair share, not the other way around.
Re: Economics opinion writer (Score:3)
To be fair, there isn't much about economics except for a few basics that wouildn't be mostly opinion anyway.
Re: Economics opinion writer (Score:5, Insightful)
"Claiming equality of outcome as a goal should be one of the basic myths of economics."
He didn't claim that, so the point is moot.
"Not sure if this guy ever had a degree in economics but his alma mater should revoke it just for making that claim."
And your troll license should be revoked for such a transparent lie.
Re: Economics opinion writer (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems this guy can't even get the basics right. Claiming equality of outcome as a goal should be one of the basic myths of economics.
Wide scale wealth inequality is massively unhealthy for a democracy as its the middle class that keeps everything stable. It's one of the biggest reasons why third world democracies are so unstable while first world ones typically are not.
So basically, a certain amount of wealth equality is in the interests of all first worlders, including economists.
Re: Economics opinion writer (Score:5, Insightful)
The rich upper classes established the legal principle that all debts must always be paid in full
This is not true at all, or at least it didn't play out this way. And your suggestion that a debt jubilee benefits the lower classes rather than the upper classes is mostly backwards. A debt jubilee benefits whoever has the most debt, and rich people have a far greater ability to accrue and maintain debt than poor people do.
In Rome they did have tax jubilees, a new emperor would often declare one when he was crowned. The way that worked was: a rich person would bribe the tax collector to delay payment of taxes, and then wait for a jubilee to wipe out that debt. A poor person would actually have to pay the taxes, and those taxes became extremely onerous in the late empire.
There aren't many modern day jubilees, because it's terrible policy, but Iceland had a jubilee on housing debt in 2011 following the recession of 2008. That gave money to people who had a mortgage within a certain time period. So to benefit from the jubilee you first needed to have purchased a house (or condo), which immediately excludes any responsible person who couldn't afford to do that. This was a jubilee for middle class people, and irresponsible poor people. And, of course, if you had a house which you had already paid for then you didn't get anything from this either.
And then there was Trump's signature legislation: a massive jubilee for corporate tax debt, paid for by middle class home owners. This closely paralleled how it worked in Rome. Those companies were delaying paying their taxes, waiting for a jubilee, and the people who actually end up paying for that are the ones who can't afford to stash their money in tax shelters for an indefinite period of time.
The jubilee in Iceland was a redistribution of wealth downwards: the money came from the assets of several failed banks, meaning that it came out of the pockets of investors in those banks who are mostly upper class. And the money went to homeowners, who are generally middle class.
And of course the Trump jubilee was a redistribution of wealth upwards. The money came from the middle class and went to the upper class.
In both cases though, they benefit the irresponsible, the corrupt. and the lucky. Jubilees are tools of populism, and like most populist policies they seem good as long as you don't think too hard about them.
No, it just turns out... (Score:5, Informative)
No, it just turns out you dont know what you're talking about. Europe does in fact have significantly less inequality than the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and we do spend absolutely ridiculous sums on our healthcare that they dont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
Even former Eastern Block nations have better inequality than we do.
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Yes, their poor are somewhat poorer than ours, their median are much poorer than ours and their rich are dramatically poorer than ours.
Most research on poverty gets this wrong, because most research focuses on relative poverty, e.g. what percentage of people in a given country fall into a particular percentile bucket of people in that country. In fact [justfacts.com], the poorest 20% of Americans have higher average consumption per person than the averages for all people in most OECD nations, including the majority of its European members.
Except what you're telling me isnt true at all (probably the reason you arent citing sources) Using a consistent metric for all countries the US has poverty levels well above most Western nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] https://confrontingpoverty.org... [confrontingpoverty.org]. .
But inequality per-se isn't a problem that needs to be solved, and if we're going to do cross-national comparisons of poverty we should actually make them cross-national comparisons of poverty, rather than just veiled inequality comparisons. The commonly-used measures of poverty only measure inequality, making "The US has the highest level of relative poverty in the OECD countries" a straight restatement of "The US has the highest level of inequality in the OECD countries". Those two statements appear to be saying different things, but they are not because "relative poverty level" is the same thing as "level of inequality".
Wealth inequality ties to all sort of social problems https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/... [imf.org] . Given that other first world countries do so much better than us in regards to this we know it's possible for ourselves to do better and so we should. It i
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Seems to me this guy never lived in Europe
He's 77 years old, and spent his first 37 years in the UK, moving from Bristol to Princeton in 1983.
Re: Leftism is Failing (Score:2)
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what would the medical system cost if there wasn't the private insurance layer sucking up funds to give to their shareholders? how much of that 20% GDP is just going into the pockets of the rich shareholders?
That's a bit unfair. There's also plenty of bureaucracy and middlemen sucking out value too.
Re:The US and tax rates (Score:4, Informative)
Tax rates in Europe can go to 40% of income, that would never fly in the US as long as we emphasize the individual and self reliance.
WTF are you talking about? The highest Federal income tax bracket in the US is currently 37%. Additionally, almost all states implement an additional income tax of their own. In high tax states, this can be up to another double digit income tax -- in California, for example, the top state income tax bracket is another 12.3% on top of the Federal 37%, for a total income tax of 49.3%. Additionally, those making over $1 million in CA must pay an additional 1% surcharge, which means over 50% of their earnings are taken as taxes by some level of government -- and I'm not even counting the additional municipal surcharges that are in place at the county level etc.
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You're right that the current economy is a con-artist economy. It's rooted heavily in speculation and not the goods and services that make economic engine