On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:11:19 -0700, Lysander wrote:
> On Nov 1, 2:03 pm, The Trucker
verizon.net> wrote:>> On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:18:25 -0700, Lysander wrote:
>
> Most of this is emotional appeal but I will address what needs to be
> addressed here.
None of it has to do with emotion. But utility DOES encompass that also.
>> I certainly agree that some of the folks that post here have absolutely
>> no understanding of political economy. I have yet to find any person on
>> the earth who claims a degree in neoclassical economics that has much of a
>> clue as to what _real_ political economy might be.
>
> I have yet to find a person who claims to have a degree in
> neoclassical economics. There is a major misconception that current
> economics is neoclassical. For at least 20 years that has been a hard
> claim to make. I certainly don't have a degree in neoclassical
> economics. My research had nothing to do with neoclassical economics.
> It had some loose basis in Schumpter but the guts came from Dixit and
> Stiglitz who helped end the dependence on perfect competition.
All of the economists that have degrees since the Neoclassical ninnies
rode into town would, to me, be neoclassicals. I will not debate this
nit. I speak for clarification only.
>>The last sentence
>> above hints at the problem in that the neoclassical economists never
>> actually define what "fix" might mean.
>
> Exactly. I do not define fix. I can and will give analysis if the
> policy will "fix" the problem as intended. It is debatable as to if
> inequality is a problem and if it is what is the ideal distribution.
Glad to hear it, Bosco. Get out of the way then and let the real people
fix it.
>> They will ever be vague about what
>> the word "good" might mean in "good economy".
>
> I never use that term. It is you and other people who try to speak on
> economics who have no training that use the word good economy.
I will accept that, have accepted it, and will continue to do so. I do
not intend to allow any trumped up asshole in a university to brainwash me
in the way you have obviously been brainwashed.
> I can
> compare growth rates or levels of real wages but leave to others if
> they think that is good or not. Good is normative statement and has no
> place being defined by an economist.
That may well be. That is why I am not very interested in your field of
econometrics.
> Just as physics doesn't define if
> having 10 million pounds of rocket is "good" only that it will get the
> rocket X distance.
Then stay in your world and stay out of mine.
>>This is because
>> neoclassical economics is concerned with maximization of returns to asset
>> OWNERS as opposed to maximization of long run natural utility.
>
> Not true of modern economics nor is it true of neoclassical economics.
LIE.
> A simple look at a chapter on efficiency in a micro text book will
> show that consumers and suppliers are rated equally when determining
> social surplus.
>
>> IN their
>> fundamentalist religious order ownership is the key to maximization of
>> productivity and all other considerations are secondary.
>
> Not at all. My own research was about what drives productivity. That
> being how R&D increases productivity and makes CONSUMERS better off.
And the ownership of the knowledge is, for you, the fundamental building
block.
> Any optimization of endogenous growth models or any models where
> externalities are presented usually starts finding the optimal rate of
> CONSUMPTION. The social planner maximizes utility, based on
> consumption, for society given the harm or benefit from the
> externality.
>
> You have no idea what neoclassical economics is much less what the
> modern, post-neo-classical, economics entails.
Fine... Keep the shit to yourself. The basic points remain the same:
You are fundamentally anchored in ownership as the essential pillar of
economic "growth?". Yet you say you have no goals.
>>> Sometimes the answers aren't easy. We know in the short run that
>>> minimum wages tend to reduce employment,
>>
>> Then there is the constant lying or false framing or false presentation as
>> in this case.
>
> I suppose if you call theory that holds the test of data lying then go
> right ahead. Science calls it the way to do things.
Before we lose the context here let's make sure that we understand where
we are: I assumed that your comment was about minimum wage laws as opposed
to minimizing wages. If that is incorrect then I can't even imagine what
the hell you think you are saying. I am almost dead certain that you will
be able to find literature to back the claim that minimum wage laws cause
unemployment. The right winged neoconomist profession will have certainly
supplied many such studies.
>> The objective of _real_ political economy is not
>> employment. The objective is long run utility maximization and that
>> actually is achieved by less "employment"; less labor; less ardent
>> necessity of discomfort.
>
> The Trucker does not realize the labor leisure tradeoff or how the
> wage is the opportunity cost of leisure.
Labor is cost. Opportunity has value. Opportunity cost is a
contradiction in terms.
> What the Trucker is calling
> "political economy" is the typical socialist Utopia where everyone is
> ultralistic and works for society's good and it is falsely believe we
> can acheive so much more by working less.
And what the lying pig is attempting to do is to claim that anyone that
does not subscribe to his silly shit is a (Martha hide the kids) SOCIALIST
trauma, trauma. This is, of course, the commie paint brush reaction when
any of these snake oil salesmen are called out.
> How much does being out of a job and almost starving relieve
> suffering?
In a truly free market without private ownership of natural resources it
is almost impossible to be without a means of support. Only in your world
of privilege for those who pay for the latter day lie machines is that
possible.
>>It should be quite evident to anyone who actually
>> thinks about it that higher wages would mean less employment outside the
>> home and more time spent in pursuit of the personal life of home and
>> family. People don't actually _WANT_ to be overly employed.
>
> Bullshit. The data show otherwise.
OF COURSE THEY SHOW OTHERWISE! How can they not show otherwise when every
person in the nation is told on a continuing basis that respect or sex is
only available to them that owns a new car. What would you expect with a
health care system consisting of "protection" salesmen that won't
and don't even deliver what they are supposedly selling. It is a constant
rip every day of the week. The normal people spend their life trying to
find safe harbor and there are none.
> Part of the disparity in wealth is
> because lower taxes on the rich have they WORKED MORE!!!
Who cares? I really don't give a rat's ass how much more money some rich
asshole takes to the bottom line. I don't care about how much tax he
pays. I care about MY utility. But this gets to EXACTLY the point I have
already made: The focus on what the _RICH_, the _OWNERS_ do is the focus
of YOUR economics.
> The labor
> supply curve may be backward bending at some high level of wealth but
> the data surely is not showing it. High wages give a higher
> opportunity
Yes! High wages give a higher opportunity.
> cost to not working.
There isn't a _cost_ to not working. It is like saying that I am going to
get burned for not pissing in fire.
> Look at Lionel Richies comments on
> when his daughter was young. He worked even more when he had very high
> wages.
I will not "look at" some anecdotal piece of crap as supporting "proof"
for your inane haunted house of mirrors.
>>> all else constant, so you
>>> raise income for some and put others out of work.
>>
>> That may actually be true (I am not convinced that it is), but this does
>> not necessarily harm them and should not UNDULY harm them. The purpose of
>> welfare and the highly progressive income tax is to "encourage" those
>> with the capacity to control the "goodness" of the economy to take steps
>> to prevent the excruciating pain of welfare payments, i.e. they can use
>> their wealth to insure a system of gainful employment or they can just
>> pay people for being unemployed. That would be the definition of "fix"
>> in the true science of _real_ political economy.
>>
>
> What is this pipe dream?
It is a well designed system of taxation and government oversight. It
worked very well until Kennedy started cutting taxes on the rich.
> I don't know what you are smoking.
I don't smoke.
> You must be a Gene Rodenberry fan.
I admit it. I liked ALL the Star Treks.
>>
>>> The elasticity of
>>> labor demand and labor supply are important in seeing how big the loss
>>> of employment is. In reality, we see that employment doesn't drop as
>>> Card and Krueger did with bad data but it is usually because there are
>>> other factors changing too like demand for the product that also
>>> effect employment. Even if in this case we would expect to see a break
>>> in the trend of employment, assuming it is trend stationary, meaning
>>> employment is less than what it would have been. The time series test
>>> may or may not have been done. I haven't taken the time to review the
>>> literature.
>>
>>> Minimum wages can actually be a factor in why so many poor turn to
>>> crime and get arrested. Drug dealers often make less than minimum
>>> wage. Why do it? Two reason they see the guy higher up making a lot
>>> and hope to be the dealer's supplier one day or they can't find jobs
>>> because the minimum wages made employment lower than what it should
>>> be. To compound this things like TANF benefits are cut for the family
>>> if Junior goes to work for McDonalds. If he sells drugs and gets in a
>>> gang his ill gotten earnings are not taxed and the administrators of
>>> TANF never know about. Government policy contributes to crime and the
>>> poor being in prison.
>>
>> I think I'm gonna go puke. Once you fall into the web created by the
>> false framing you will spend huge amounts of time arguing over a bunch of
>> nits that are not really germane to the actual issue; the issue being
>> utility as opposed to employment.
>
> Utility maximization is what drives the want to work and the want for
> income.
Yet another totally false god of the latter day neoconomists. There is no
"want for work"; there is only a want for income.
> The wage offsets the denial of leisure.
HUH!!! Look moron, people work so that they can have pleasure. That is a
pretty simple and straight forward deal.
> It is simple if poor
> people do not have jobs they turn to crime to make money.
Most don't, but we will follow the stupidity trail here and see where it
leads.
> The welfare
> system only reinforces this by keeping young poor from working and
> obtaining job skills.
Doncha just love the way they wrap the two totally separate items in the
one piece of brown paper. That way you gotta buy em both. Otherwise, of
course, they wouldn't be able to sell the terds with the diamonds. "Obtain
job skills" is the diamonds and the "working" is the terds. It is
entirely possible to "obtain job skills" without "working" the rich kids
do it all the time. And the "welfare system" need not keep people from
working even if it currently does.
> When the family faces welfare cuts and EIC cuts
> due to their kids working they encourage the kid not to work.
I would say that we needed to _FIX_ that as opposed to destroying the
welfare system and the progressive income tax system. We needed to "fix"
that which took income away when people went out and got a job.
> The lack
> of work makes them more likely to go to crime.
So why not pay the welfare and the unemployment. It's cheaper. OH, yeah,
I forgot..... Yer a Republican and it is more important to punish the
poor than to structure an economy where the middle class has a decent
life. The idea that a prosperous middle class induces the poor to rise up
seems totally lost on a Republican bent on punishing people for being poor.
>>It is exactly this false framing and
>> tap dancing that finances inane stupidities such as "we have a labor
>> shortage" or, "those jobs that Americans won't do".
>>
>
> No economist has claimed there is a labor shortage nor that Americans
> will not do jobs. A shortage is defined as the wage being too low so
> that labor supply is less than labor demand. No economist I have ever
> heard of has claimed that Americans would not do a job. I have heard
> the claim and agree that Americans will do it but they demand higher
> wages than illegals do. This means the job may not get done because it
> is not profitable to hire Americans at $8.00 when a hour's work nets a
> value of production of $7.00. That is not a shortage.
But what you and your ilk refuse to see is that the reason the produce
will only get $7.00 is because the "land rent" and other economic rents
are sucking up $2.00. And if the cost of labor rose to $8.00 then the
production would continue on land that provided an owner with less rent.
He can't just build a #($^%%#%% bowling ally. He can take a cut in rent
or have nothing. The land is not gonna jump up and run off to Mexico or
support a shopping center in the middle of the California countryside.
>>>> The Gini coefficient isn't that great of a measure, so how should
>>>> wealth (or is it income) disparity be measured?
>>
>>> The Theil index is rising in popularity.
>>
>> Probably another piece of eye candy to keep everybody busy trying to
>> understand all the numbers and the math and the unstated assumptions.
>>
>
> Why don't you find out what it is before you make your assumptions. I
> know don't bother you with the facts.
I thought I had adequately conveyed the point that I don't give a damn
what it is.
>>>> How does changing the distribution of wealth and income affect
>>>> economic productivity?
>>
>>> I think that is a question for further research. This is not really my
>>> specialization so I am not going to say the literature does not exist.
>>> Only I haven't seen it.
>>
>> And what is quite amazing, of course, is that this is the primary question
>> that is to be addressed, i.e. as productivity increases we should see LESS
>> employment because such an increase in utility is the objective of the
>> enhanced productivity.
>
> You are making assumptions that do not hold up in the data.
OH COURSE NOT!!!! Where do you get your "data" but from the lying sacks
of shit that will cheery pick data to match the snake oil.
> You are
> assuming that people are satiated at rather low wages. This doesn't
> seem to happen. The only evidence of this is in South Africa where
> young South African males work in the diamond mines in Botswanna make
> extremely high wages, for the region, and retire early.
Like they want income, not work?
> We don't see
> the wealthy working less now that taxes are much lower than the
> 1970's. That could be because the taxes are only lower on paper.
> Cutting out the loopholes made the rich pay about what they did
> before. In fact we see the wealthiest working more and disparity
> rising.
That is not the least bit surprising to me. These people do not work for
wealth. They work for power. There is nothing that they cannot already
purchase that any normal person would want. It is a pure lust for power.
Most of us call it greed. There is a train of economic thought that I
think was popularized by Hayek wherein the people were all made better of
because of this lust for power. As the power mongers harvested the earth
creating all sorts of baubles and lip gloss and TV's and Walkmans for the
masses the masses were wealthier and happier than ever before. This was
the "good" economy. This is incorrect. Freedom, liberty, self
determination, and true leisure are more a factor of "utility" than are
hoola hoops and lip gloss. There are also environmental limits to be
considered.
>>> Try this it may have some of the answers. The paper tends explain more
>>> about how productivity has affected inequality but it may be of use.
>>>
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11842>>
>>
>>> Most of the literature I have seen has taken the opposite approach
>>> meaning it studies how productivity affects inequality. So we get
>>> things like how education differences can cause inequality.
>>
>> Productivity gains need not result in increasing disparity in wealth and
>> in the stunted gains in overall utility that result from such disparity.
>
> You are confusing macro productivity with productivity among groups.
I am not the least bit confused, thank you. Nor am I running some sort of
race to see which "group" gets the most lip gloss.
> Basic labor theory shows that the higher marginal product a worker can
> produce, the higher his wage is. That marginal product is a measure of
> productivity. The higher the productivity the higher the wage. So if
> returns to education rise and more education means more productivity,
> due to perhaps skill biased technological change, then the gap between
> the wages of the educated and the less educated rises. This is exactly
> what has happened in America. In the 1950's the additional return to
> education was small. High school grads didn't make much less than
> college grads. Today there is a much bigger disparity. Leading to
> bigger disparity in wealth.
The links you provide above do not say that. They say very clearly that
the disparity in wealth is occurring between the productive class and the
owning class, not between the strata of the producers.
>> The control of this problem was well illustrated by the 95%% top tax rates
>> of the 1950's.
>
> Please no one paid 95%% tax rates. This was the era of supreme
> corruption where anyone who might get caught in the 95%% bracket bribed
> a senator to make a special tax deduction so they didn't have to pay
> 95%%.
Always the conspiracy shit with you people isn't it. All the rich people
conspired with the government for tax breaks. WOW. Yet there were no
huge deficits and unemployment was low and lots of small businesses
bloomed and on and on. Well guess what Billy Bob? They still conspire
with government only now it is for subsidies and handouts because the
taxes are to low to offer much a return for a tax break. The major
difference is the debt. Gobs and gobs of debt.
> And while a highly progressive income tax is not the only
>> means by which the adverse effects of economic rent privatization can be
>> addressed, the decrease in overall utility gain seems strikingly
>> coincidental with the tax cuts that began with Kennedy in 1960.
>
> By what measure?
We work more now and have much less actual personal gain like retirement
and health care and other things that really matter to our own self
determination. We have a lot more toys, but we have a lot less real
assets on which we can rely.
>> For it is
>> the privatization of economic rent that creates and maintains the
>> disparity in wealth and a highly progressive income tax is a tax on
>> economic rent, the source of destructive wealth disparity.
>>
>
> It has little to do with it. Read something besides Rousseau and
> George.
It has EVERYTHING to do with it.
--
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers
of society but the people themselves; and
if we think them not enlightened enough to
exercise their control with a wholesome
discretion, the remedy is not to take it from
them, but to inform their discretion by
education." - Thomas Jefferson
http://GreaterVoice.org/extend
