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Domain: mercatus.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to mercatus.org.

Comments · 55

  1. Re:With all the recent US layoffs ... by Bartab · · Score: 2, Insightful · on NHTSA Has No Software Engineers To Analyze Toyota

    Hint: There exists state jobs, which are massively in excess at the moment - compared to lossage in every other field.

    Basically, the "stimulus" has been used to shore up failing state budgets to avoid public employee layoffs. Then these jobs are listed as "saved or created", and Obama takes a bow. Meanwhile, productive jobs in the private sector are experiencing 10% unemployment - that's people looking for work, the official Unemployment Rate. Alternative measures reaches as high as 18% in the month of January 2010.

    http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab15.htm
    Select U-6.

    Public sector jobs experience "only" a 4% unemployment rate.

    http://mercatus.org/publication/public-vs-private-unemployment

    Shouldn't the least productive, public tax fed jobs be pruned first?

    Oh but wait, those jobs are unionized - primarily - and the system allows the union to get their representatives on both sides of the negotiation table.

  2. Re:The Underground History of American Education by Brass+Cannon · · Score: 1 · on Schooling, Homeschooling, and Now, "Unschooling"

    Great idea... In New York? Not bloody likely. According to a George Mason University Feb 2009 ranking of the 50 states in terms of personal and economic freedom, New York ranks, you guessed it, dead last. Link to the white paper below. http://www.mercatus.org/PDFDownload.aspx?contentID=26154 I will check out the essay you cited. Thanks.

  3. Cowen on handling pandemics by General+Wesc · · Score: 1 · on US Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu
    Tyler Cowen wrote a very-readable study about handling flu pandemics. This was 2005 so avian flu was the predominant example, but his advice is still germain (as it was intended to be).

    (Tyler Cowen is economist who co-writes Marginal Revolution, an economics blog (among other things).

    Wash your hands.

  4. Private industry responses by TheSync · · Score: 1 · on IBM Using Complex Math To Manage Natural Disasters
    There are already many large private industries that extensively study the most efficient ways to distribute materials in a responsive way.

    Lessons from the Private Sector and the Coast Guard During Katrina

    Private-sector planning for the storm began days ahead of landfall. On the Friday prior to the Monday landfall, Home Depot activated the "war room" at its Atlanta headquarters, negotiating with various vendors to get needed supplies staged to move into the hurricane zone. Wal-Mart's response began slightly earlier. As part of its regular operations, the company maintains an emergency command center...

    ...Between August 29 and September 16, Wal-Mart shipped almost 2,500 truckloads of merchandise to the affected areas and had drivers and trucks in place to ship relief supplies to community members and organizations wishing to help. Home Depot provided more than 800 truckloads worth of supplies to the hard-hit areas and also used buses to transport 1,000 employees from other areas into the region. Wal-Mart also provided a large amount of free merchandise, including prescription drugs, to those in the worst-hit areas of the Gulf Coast.

  5. Re:I think Marx would shit a brick if he could see by mjh · · Score: 3, Insightful · on What The Bubble Got Right
    what happens when those you outsource to abscond with your R&D results and your domestic nerd base is so atrophied that they can't compete?

    What has happened in the past when this exact same situation came up is that the smart people who lost there jobs became available to do other things. The same thing will happen this time around. The nerds who are no longer programming will be free to spend their brain power on something else.

    Byron Caplan puts it like this:

    ...most non-economists see downsizing as a serious problem. Economists disagree. Before my introduction to economics, I certainly would have found the very notion of "benefits of downsizing" to be paradoxical. Studying economics allowed me to see that this apparent paradox is only common sense. Labor is a limited and valuable resource. When workers stay at jobs where they do little or nothing, society loses what those workers could have produced if they looked for a more productive way to spend their time. Perfect job security is the way to lock in perfect economic stagnation. Downsizing is obviously a temporary misfortune for those affected. But at root downsizing is about firms figuring out ways to achieve more with less. Without such efforts, the modern world as we know it would never have been born.

    If you replace "downsizing" with "outsourcing" the sentiment is still true. It's detrimental to the economy as a whole to retain workers in the US when there are workers available elsewhere who are willing/able to do the job more efficiently. The US workers are not freed up to do something else and we (as a society) are forced to pay a premium wage for a less than efficient work force.

    Each one of us outsources every day. I know of no technologist who also does all of the following:

    • makes all of his/her own clothes
    • grows or produces all of his/her own food
    • builds his/her own house
    • self insures against casualty
    • produces their own electricty
    • obtains, cleanses, and distributes their own water
    • etc, etc, etc.
    All of those things are outsourced by individuals to someone else. No one has the time to do ALL of that AND be a technologist. So what has happened when they outsourced those activities? It freed them up to be technologists. The same thing is true when the job of technologist gets outsourced to elsewhere. Smart people are freed up to do something else.