Defining ‘Rich’. It’s Easy: Whomever Can Exit Participation In The Market
On Economix at the NYT, Bruce Bartlett writes that it’s difficult to count who’s ‘rich’. The first thing to know is that there is no formal definition of who is rich, middle class or poor. Of course, there is an official definition for the poverty rate, but that figure is just a back of the…
Is Membership In The 1% Club Education Or IQ?
Greg Mankiw makes a case for graduate school education: Apart from their bank accounts, Gallup finds education to be the greatest difference between the wealthiest 1% of Americans and everyone else. The Gallup analysis reveals that 72% of the wealthiest Americans have a college degree, compared with 31% of those in the lower 99 percentiles.…
Defining Capitalism
“Capitalism as it is used in common discourse, refers to a decision making-methodology in it’s narrowest form, and a general bias in it’s broader form, that is used by members of a population that describes a broad spectrum of property definitions from the most several (individual) property, to the most shareholder (collective) forms of property,…
Inverting The Argument: Inequality Is The Product Of Diversity
Over on Stumbling And Mumbling, Chris Dillow writes about inequality, and refers to OECD Gini-charts on inequality and trust, in an effort to suggest it’s ‘how we believe’ one thing or another that determines redistributive policy. As if conservatives simply need to ‘feel differently’ in order to desire a more egalitarian society. I try to…
Why Are Artificial Breasts All The Rage In Columbia?
A friend posted a humorous advertisement from Columbia, where young women are advocating that ‘natural is better’. Someone asks why this kind of thing happens. An exacerbated interest in youth and sex is a cyclical expression of human behavior that is usually caused by the intersection of: (a) the ‘winter’ period of a civilization wherein…
From Freedom To Slavery: The Five Evolutionary Stages Of Fiat Money
1) Fiat Money(1) The operating principle behind fiat money is to require taxes be paid using it. This creates a demand for the fiat money that cannot be satisfied without widespread trade that makes use of it, or is conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the money needed to pay the taxes. 2) Fiat…
Doolittle’s Chart’s On Political Preferences
The world needs cartoons it seems. In macro economics, these ‘cartoons’ consist of a set of standardized charts the goal of which is to inform policy makers as to the actions required of their monetary policy for the purpose of reducing unemployment by fooling people into spending by using disinformation about their current ‘wealth’. However,…
My Friend Karl Smith’s Progressive Framing
Karl States: “I actually think this issue brings up extremely deep philosophical questions that virtually no one I can find wants to engage in.” What are you talking about? No one wants to engage in those conversations? You haven’t posted an issue yet that hasn’t been addressed in the past century pretty thoroughly. Or at…
An Anti-Masculine Bias In Pornography Actors?
An article on slate that says that men are homophobic when watching pornography. In other words, this is another feminist-appealing anti-male rant. The straight male performer must be attractive enough to serve as a prop, but not so attractive that he becomes the object of desire. Complete nonsense. It’s all about self image and arousal.…
Labor and Education Numbers Illustrate What’s Wrong With Progressives And Keynesianism
On Modeled Behavior Karl Smith uses these diagrams, and from it concludes: “The United States is becoming more educated faster than the economy would absorb educated workers.” Actually, that statement would attribute value to education that is not demonstrated by the numbers in the market. It would just as likely suggest that ‘education’ has lost…
Keynesian Absurd Optimism
From Modeled Behavior The desire of the expanders to expand is always exponential. In the end you only need one of them and they will attempt to take over the entire economy. What’s stops them is competition, scarce real resources and financing. Thus if you are in a world where no one else is looking…
Why Do Left-Leaning Economists Ignore IQ Data?
It’s pretty obvious: because it would undermine their entire philosophy. And no, there is no debate among researchers over the genetic, race and class composition of IQ. That debate is only conducted among the political class. Conservatives observe natural laws. Not ideology but natural law. Hierarchy is just letting the best people have the freedom…
Efficiency and equality are dirty words.
Break up the eurozone. That’s what should be done. Why create another even more totalitarian bureaucracy that abuses our freedoms in europe to match the one in the USA? The west is special because no one was unable to consolidate power, and had to rely upon the balance of powers, specialization and trade. China solidified,…
Krugman Watch: What Will Happen With Conservatives In Three Houses Of Government?
Paul Quotes David Frum saying: Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country…
Is The US Any More Or Less Redistributive Than Europe?
On the Economist’s View, a Dr Why, a commenter says In the United States, countercyclical fiscal and monetary policies redistribute income mainly from the rich to the poor, which is politically acceptable. In Europe, countercyclical policies also redistribute income from the German pensioners to the Greek civil servants and the Italian Mafia, which is much…
Why does the right lean toward NGDP targeting?
On Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Nick Rowe asks “Why isn’t NGDP targeting a lefty thing?” and asks why the right seems to support it, instead of supporting inflation targeting. My reply was: Nick, I think you miss the point that from the right’s position, NGDP targeting would require that the government focus its efforts on industrial…
Can We Predict Bubbles? And Don’t We Really Want Them?
Predicting Bubbles on Modeled Behavior: I think we can see and measure booms and bubbles. I just think we’re lying to ourselves when we say we want to stop them. We WANT people to live beyond their equilibrial (‘natural’) value to the world market. Bubbles and credit help us do that. If predicting bubbles meant…
Krugman Watch: Culture Is A Status Economy
The assertion that Europe’s crisis proves that the welfare state doesn’t work comes from many Republicans. … The idea, presumably, is that the crisis countries are in trouble because they’re groaning under the burden of high government spending. But .. the nations now in crisis don’t have bigger welfare states than the nations doing well…
Economics is a subset of politics, not the other way ’round. In the long run we are all human.
from Modeled Behavior on the Jobs Report …here is the long-run trend on private sector service sector employment. Notice that its just as strong as the last recovery though coming sooner. Not quite as strong as the 80 and 90s. On the other hand goods and government over that period look like this To the…
Jarrow On Predicting Asset Bubbles
In, How to Detect an Asset Bubble, Robert Jarrow, Younes Kchia and Philip Protter describe the method by which asset bubbles can be deduced from the asymptotic behavior of prices. I can just about follow the reasoning, and it make sense – although they don’t explain WHY it makes sense as a series of incentives…
Why 30 Large Companies Paid Only 18% Tax
Rick writes: RE: “One big one is accelerated depreciation that lets them write off equipment faster than it actually wears out. Deductions on executive stock options help. So do tax breaks for research and development and for making products in the United States instead of overseas. Offshore tax shelters play a role, too.” They enacted…
Profit Is Not A Motivator – It’s A Sensation.
On a facebook conversation Ron writes: Capitalism and Socialism have become emotionally charged misrepresentations of their ideals, so I won’t go there. Profit is not a driver, it is a derivative of the current market system. If profit really was a motivator, we wouldn’t have Wikipedia, nor the pursuit of knowledge through the arts and…
Fashion Is Signaling – Of Course ‘Best Dressed’ Means ‘Most Influential’, Not ‘Most Beautiful’.
Vanessa Friedman of the Financial Times writes about her frustration that the ‘Best Dressed Lists’ actually contain the ‘most influential people’, not the best dressed. See Is Kate Middleton best-dressed or best-addressed? So anyone want to join me in a campaign to change “Best Dressed List” to “Fashion’s Most Influential”? It would unquestionably bring some…
Krugman Watch: Austerity Class? Or is it a Starve-The-Beast Class?
Paul Krugman Quotes Ari Berman today: The central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis—when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them—did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue…
Religions Establish The Terms By Which The Population Consents To Be Ruled
In practical terms, Religions establish the terms by which the population consents to be ruled. Religions differ from systems of ethics, in that they are far harder to alter in response to fashion – ethical systems have a predictable and known life cycle that ends in skepticism and abandonment of the necessary self sacrifice that…
