I know that you know, but politicians are not economists or not economists first. These issues are being discussed in specialist circles, but it is generally fairly difficult to address them in a conversation that isn't one-on-one outside of the said circles. Beyond personal conviction, it is more important for a politician to satisfy win-sets of the interest groups, be those oil companies, labor or hippies, rather than apply a policy that the experts consider best but will remove both the politician and his coalition from power for the next electoral period. It is not economics or even democracy, but any system that does not have a ruler with unquestionable power over the entirety of his constituents.
Amazing comment. Yes, Keynes adjustable peg worked out just great, didn't it? Don't take it personally, but you sound like a member of some cult. Keynes was a fantastic economist superstar, just like Friedman and arguably Marx, but he was not the second coming of Christ. He also also was not a prominent advocate of minimum wages. Just because 1) Friedman disagreed with Keynes on expansionist fiscal and monetary policy and 2) Friedman was a prominent opponent of minimum wages does not mean that 3) Friedman and Keynes disagreed on minimum wages.
I don't think Keynes would disagree with... well, just about anything in Mankiw's book. Quite frankly, I don't know why you guys keep bringing him up like he was some kind of antithesis to classical economics. Keynesian writings occupy a very important place in the development of economic theory regardless of what school you are from. Quite frankly, his expansionist policies aside, he helped to liberalise the shit out of the international economy at Bretton Woods, which so far proves to be a fairly good deterrent against warfare between major nations.
That is hardly true. You (not you specifically, of course) have just elected a president who has already manage to ruin several years of trade negotiations. Those trade agreements are hardly going benefit American corporations, but they will, complete distrust of democracy aside, very much benefit certain sectors of the working class. Not for very long and at the cost of everyone, including the same workers, but it is a public decision against the interest of a serious portion of more economically minded individuals. I am not saying that there is no injustice in the world and that all externalities are well-accounted for, pollution being one of them, but let's not go into absolutes here.
I am sorry, but are we talking about a capitalist country or the U.S.S.R. here? Who exactly are these marvelous businesses that pay their employees for not doing anything?
The people who want more than welfare are not and have never been the problem. If you are a career oriented individual or someone who works at least to a considerably degree out of passion or due to conviction, you will not be on welfare for very long. I am yet to meet a chronically unemployed individual who is churning out ten CVs a day looking to get his foot in the door. For that matter, volunteers really shouldn't be living off welfare either.
I don't see your case. A dollar to a person who only has one dollar is worth significantly more than a dollar to someone who has ten, unless you argue that a charity dollar that we have only one of should be split between them equally. If that is not your stance, I don't see how your statement is valid. By the same logic, someone who is guaranteed income is considerably less inclined to work than someone who is not entitled to anything. The only benefit for the society as a whole from this entire business is that those on welfare are also less likely to commit crime to obtain necessities.
It is a bad argument though. From a utilitarian point of view every extra dollar you make bears less utility than the one before (a dollar to someone who has one dollar is more important than to someone who has ten, hundred and so on). This disincentivizes attempting to earn more at all levels of society, but particularly at the bottom decile, which is, as you well know, also the one that is at the center of this discussion. Let us not get into the whole discussion of how the society is also supposed to pay for this. You make everyone pay more so that the least productive members of the society can earn less.
This is essentially the very antithesis of minimum wage policies though. As you yourself described, the incentive is to work hard to keep the exceedingly well-paying job. This does not occur when all jobs at your qualification level pay the same.
Since nobody is moderating you up, I'll just write that I agree with you. I don't think there are many other disciplines that are as butchered by laymen as economics and political science.
You would expect it to have expanding influence on SMEs, but it is a bit premature to say that they are expanding. Wages and minimum wages in particular are only a small portion of total costs incurred by a business, more so in some sectors than in others. Advances in economies of scale productivity that large enterprises benefit from can easily offset the burden of having to pay lower minimum wage. As jeff4747 pointed out, large companies would also attract better labour, so the point is moot at best.
Which is precisely the issue. Minimum wages have turned entry jobs into jobs for teenagers for middle income households. This has been an observed phenomenon for at least thirty five years, perhaps more.
Mankiw, Introduction to Economics. Read it, then post again. I am sorry if I sound like an ass, but it is obvious that you don't even have the basic grasp of economic theory and there is no point in me writing my own introduction in this comment when someone has already done so before.
This is an entirely baseless claim. There is an external correction system and economists have been well aware of it for quite some time. The term being externalities. This typically refers to parts of the economic process that cannot be regulated by supply and demand mechanisms alone and require collective action, i.e. a government. A classic example of this is pollution controls. You can't expect the individuals to, as people like to say, "vote with their wallets" on whether the factory next to them should be pouring poison into a nearby river. By electing official to represent them and agreeing to abide the authority of the said individual, the externality can be addressed, e.g. through fees per barrel of poison added to the river, and the externality is said to be internalized.
I would suggest you actually take a course in a subject before you lambast us for being as smart as you.
In that case, the person can just as well decide not to work, but proxy by having no food or just voluntarily and die as a result, just as he would die deciding not to consume essential goods. Assuming you agree with mwvdlee and not just toying with absurd scenarios, this line of reasoning is tantamount to having your cake and eating it too. Needless to say, the separation of labor market from the overall market is still unclear at this point.
What said person? The same said person that can have the decision taken from them by not having food? I am sorry, but I sense a bit of a double standard here.
Employers react to market movements whether it is with regard to wages or labor. If one thinks that is wrong, one may as well say that one disagrees with the entirety of economics as a discipline and I would urge the said person to provide us with a new one since we can't seem to figure it out quite that well. What is not strictly part of economics is policy making. You can have nine out of ten economists tell you that something is a bad idea, but then you will have a politician swoop in with the popular vote and the society will implement the said policy regardless. This is hardly limited to economics and you don't need to look further than the whole "evolution controversy" being raised over something that in expert circles is considered a done deal.
Who exactly do you think works in minimum wage jobs? Look, you can set minimum wage to $100/hour and you will have a fantastic increase in average wages—nobody is disputing that—but you should not be surprised when you create an enormous deadweight loss in the economy and the overall prosperity drops.
That is a nice dichotomy of Keynes vis-a-vis neoliberalism, which most people would probably associate with Keynes' intellectual rival Friedman. While Friedman indeed advocated having no minimum wage, I would like to point out that this was not his central point of disagreement with Keynes'. Rather it was on the matter of whether the government should intervene in the business cycle to smooth out recessions. I also object to the idea that Keynesian economics is not taught. His normative policies are by no means heterodox, although there is disagreement on whether they are better or worse than the suggestion to not implement them by Friedman. If anything, this thread reeks of layman Marxist economics, which are both heterodox and largely not taught past their historical role due to their high specificity and different vocabulary being used for what are essentially specialised cases of general phenomena.
I doubt we were ever not running into it. Don't need to go further than/. You can count the number of people here who are all right with universal surveillance on one hand.
Business news are considerably less leftist than general news. They are also the only kind of publications that occasionally run genuinely positive news.
If there is still anyone thinking that Wikipedia is in any way neutral, they need do little more than learn a language or two and compare a couple of articles locked for editing. Look at the one for GamerGate. Off the bat, it's described as a hate movement and no credence is given to the participants' claims that they oppose corruption in video game journalism. Now look at several foreign articles, such as the German one, which immediately describes the movement as an anti-corruption movement. You may be on either site of the fence, but either way at least one of the articles has to be very biased given the circumstances. That these people want to check news for facts is the joke of a century.
The thing is that this is really not nearly as much of an issue for most people as the style of emoticons you get on Twitter. I think we really should get off the high horse at those point and realise the simple fact that not everybody is interested in activism.
It would help you if you actually read more thoroughly. DB does not even track delays shorter than six minutes. The fact that it is late all the time is not even disputed by DB at this point, who blame it on the fact that they have too much money and keep renovating their routes.
If you are interested in anecdotal evidence, I am yet to travel from Frankfurt Airport and arrive on time. And if we want to talk about context, yes, trains are fantastic, if you travel in Japan, they are utter trash if you travel in Germany or some third world cesspool. Implementation, it matters.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that you know, but politicians are not economists or not economists first. These issues are being discussed in specialist circles, but it is generally fairly difficult to address them in a conversation that isn't one-on-one outside of the said circles. Beyond personal conviction, it is more important for a politician to satisfy win-sets of the interest groups, be those oil companies, labor or hippies, rather than apply a policy that the experts consider best but will remove both the politician and his coalition from power for the next electoral period. It is not economics or even democracy, but any system that does not have a ruler with unquestionable power over the entirety of his constituents.
Amazing comment. Yes, Keynes adjustable peg worked out just great, didn't it? Don't take it personally, but you sound like a member of some cult. Keynes was a fantastic economist superstar, just like Friedman and arguably Marx, but he was not the second coming of Christ. He also also was not a prominent advocate of minimum wages. Just because 1) Friedman disagreed with Keynes on expansionist fiscal and monetary policy and 2) Friedman was a prominent opponent of minimum wages does not mean that 3) Friedman and Keynes disagreed on minimum wages.
I don't think Keynes would disagree with... well, just about anything in Mankiw's book. Quite frankly, I don't know why you guys keep bringing him up like he was some kind of antithesis to classical economics. Keynesian writings occupy a very important place in the development of economic theory regardless of what school you are from. Quite frankly, his expansionist policies aside, he helped to liberalise the shit out of the international economy at Bretton Woods, which so far proves to be a fairly good deterrent against warfare between major nations.
Pun duly accepted. :)
That is hardly true. You (not you specifically, of course) have just elected a president who has already manage to ruin several years of trade negotiations. Those trade agreements are hardly going benefit American corporations, but they will, complete distrust of democracy aside, very much benefit certain sectors of the working class. Not for very long and at the cost of everyone, including the same workers, but it is a public decision against the interest of a serious portion of more economically minded individuals. I am not saying that there is no injustice in the world and that all externalities are well-accounted for, pollution being one of them, but let's not go into absolutes here.
I am sorry, but are we talking about a capitalist country or the U.S.S.R. here? Who exactly are these marvelous businesses that pay their employees for not doing anything?
The people who want more than welfare are not and have never been the problem. If you are a career oriented individual or someone who works at least to a considerably degree out of passion or due to conviction, you will not be on welfare for very long. I am yet to meet a chronically unemployed individual who is churning out ten CVs a day looking to get his foot in the door. For that matter, volunteers really shouldn't be living off welfare either.
I don't see your case. A dollar to a person who only has one dollar is worth significantly more than a dollar to someone who has ten, unless you argue that a charity dollar that we have only one of should be split between them equally. If that is not your stance, I don't see how your statement is valid. By the same logic, someone who is guaranteed income is considerably less inclined to work than someone who is not entitled to anything. The only benefit for the society as a whole from this entire business is that those on welfare are also less likely to commit crime to obtain necessities.
Looking forward to your revision of the economic theory. PM me once it comes out in print.
It is a bad argument though. From a utilitarian point of view every extra dollar you make bears less utility than the one before (a dollar to someone who has one dollar is more important than to someone who has ten, hundred and so on). This disincentivizes attempting to earn more at all levels of society, but particularly at the bottom decile, which is, as you well know, also the one that is at the center of this discussion. Let us not get into the whole discussion of how the society is also supposed to pay for this. You make everyone pay more so that the least productive members of the society can earn less.
This is essentially the very antithesis of minimum wage policies though. As you yourself described, the incentive is to work hard to keep the exceedingly well-paying job. This does not occur when all jobs at your qualification level pay the same.
Since nobody is moderating you up, I'll just write that I agree with you. I don't think there are many other disciplines that are as butchered by laymen as economics and political science.
You would expect it to have expanding influence on SMEs, but it is a bit premature to say that they are expanding. Wages and minimum wages in particular are only a small portion of total costs incurred by a business, more so in some sectors than in others. Advances in economies of scale productivity that large enterprises benefit from can easily offset the burden of having to pay lower minimum wage. As jeff4747 pointed out, large companies would also attract better labour, so the point is moot at best.
Which is precisely the issue. Minimum wages have turned entry jobs into jobs for teenagers for middle income households. This has been an observed phenomenon for at least thirty five years, perhaps more.
Mankiw, Introduction to Economics. Read it, then post again. I am sorry if I sound like an ass, but it is obvious that you don't even have the basic grasp of economic theory and there is no point in me writing my own introduction in this comment when someone has already done so before.
This is an entirely baseless claim. There is an external correction system and economists have been well aware of it for quite some time. The term being externalities. This typically refers to parts of the economic process that cannot be regulated by supply and demand mechanisms alone and require collective action, i.e. a government. A classic example of this is pollution controls. You can't expect the individuals to, as people like to say, "vote with their wallets" on whether the factory next to them should be pouring poison into a nearby river. By electing official to represent them and agreeing to abide the authority of the said individual, the externality can be addressed, e.g. through fees per barrel of poison added to the river, and the externality is said to be internalized.
I would suggest you actually take a course in a subject before you lambast us for being as smart as you.
In that case, the person can just as well decide not to work, but proxy by having no food or just voluntarily and die as a result, just as he would die deciding not to consume essential goods. Assuming you agree with mwvdlee and not just toying with absurd scenarios, this line of reasoning is tantamount to having your cake and eating it too. Needless to say, the separation of labor market from the overall market is still unclear at this point.
What said person? The same said person that can have the decision taken from them by not having food? I am sorry, but I sense a bit of a double standard here.
Employers react to market movements whether it is with regard to wages or labor. If one thinks that is wrong, one may as well say that one disagrees with the entirety of economics as a discipline and I would urge the said person to provide us with a new one since we can't seem to figure it out quite that well. What is not strictly part of economics is policy making. You can have nine out of ten economists tell you that something is a bad idea, but then you will have a politician swoop in with the popular vote and the society will implement the said policy regardless. This is hardly limited to economics and you don't need to look further than the whole "evolution controversy" being raised over something that in expert circles is considered a done deal.
Who exactly do you think works in minimum wage jobs? Look, you can set minimum wage to $100/hour and you will have a fantastic increase in average wages—nobody is disputing that—but you should not be surprised when you create an enormous deadweight loss in the economy and the overall prosperity drops.
That is a nice dichotomy of Keynes vis-a-vis neoliberalism, which most people would probably associate with Keynes' intellectual rival Friedman. While Friedman indeed advocated having no minimum wage, I would like to point out that this was not his central point of disagreement with Keynes'. Rather it was on the matter of whether the government should intervene in the business cycle to smooth out recessions. I also object to the idea that Keynesian economics is not taught. His normative policies are by no means heterodox, although there is disagreement on whether they are better or worse than the suggestion to not implement them by Friedman. If anything, this thread reeks of layman Marxist economics, which are both heterodox and largely not taught past their historical role due to their high specificity and different vocabulary being used for what are essentially specialised cases of general phenomena.
I doubt we were ever not running into it. Don't need to go further than /. You can count the number of people here who are all right with universal surveillance on one hand.
Business news are considerably less leftist than general news. They are also the only kind of publications that occasionally run genuinely positive news.
If there is still anyone thinking that Wikipedia is in any way neutral, they need do little more than learn a language or two and compare a couple of articles locked for editing. Look at the one for GamerGate. Off the bat, it's described as a hate movement and no credence is given to the participants' claims that they oppose corruption in video game journalism. Now look at several foreign articles, such as the German one, which immediately describes the movement as an anti-corruption movement. You may be on either site of the fence, but either way at least one of the articles has to be very biased given the circumstances. That these people want to check news for facts is the joke of a century.
The thing is that this is really not nearly as much of an issue for most people as the style of emoticons you get on Twitter. I think we really should get off the high horse at those point and realise the simple fact that not everybody is interested in activism.
It would help you if you actually read more thoroughly. DB does not even track delays shorter than six minutes. The fact that it is late all the time is not even disputed by DB at this point, who blame it on the fact that they have too much money and keep renovating their routes.
If you are interested in anecdotal evidence, I am yet to travel from Frankfurt Airport and arrive on time. And if we want to talk about context, yes, trains are fantastic, if you travel in Japan, they are utter trash if you travel in Germany or some third world cesspool. Implementation, it matters.
That's nice of you to report in, That-One-Village-In-Germany-That-Does-Not-Have-Delays? http://www.handelsblatt.com/un...