BrandorKP posted:

There is a cross over point where nuclear makes sense for containerships. Things were getting close enough in 08 before the crash, that shipyards had been bid out, the ports for the service had ok-ed berthing nuclear vessels, etc.

Mark Jacobsen posted:

We rejected nuclear for several reasons. First, it's not carbon-free, no matter what the advocates tell you. Vast amounts of fossil fuels must be burned to mine, transport and enrich uranium and to build the nuclear plant. And all that dirty power will be released during the 10 to 19 years that it takes to plan and build a nuclear plant. (A wind farm typically takes two to five years.)

MiddleOne posted:

Uh, Reagan? Thatcher? Nixon? TRUMP?????





EDIT: Like sure, but only if you pretend that economic ideas manifest into politics from the aether.

Helsing posted:

This completely ignores the larger political economic differences between the first thirty or forty years of post-war history vs. the contemporary "globalized" period since the 1980s. Contemporary globalization creates a situation where labour exercises less political influence at the national level, and where national governments in general are generally restrained from implementing the kinds of social democratic and pro-labour policies that helped maintain labour's share of income growth between the 1950s and 1980s. Globalization may have brought cheaper imports but it also fundamentally changes the political balance forces within each country and this in turn influences how income is distributed.

TheNakedFantastic posted:

These people are vetted and selected by a system designed to offer up people with positions already in agreement with the ruling classes (or in Trumps case is literally the ruling class)

Kekekela posted:

Then you've got to deal with meltdowns, nuclear waste storage, etc as well as...

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/02/22/jacobson.nuclear.power.con/

Exposing the Myths of Neoliberal Capitalism: An Interview With Ha-Joon Chang posted:

...

As for the other myths and lies about capitalism, the most important in my view is the myth that there is an objective domain of the economy into which political logic should not intrude. Once you accept the existence of this exclusive domain of the economy, as most people have done, you get to accept the authority of the economic experts, as interlocutors of some scientific truths about the economy, who will then dictate the way your economy is run.

However, there is no objective way to determine the boundary of the economy because the market itself is a political construct, as shown by the fact that it is illegal today in the rich countries to buy and sell a lot of things that used to be freely bought and sold -- such as slaves and the labor service of children.

In turn, if there is no objective way to draw the boundary around the economy, when people argue against the intrusion of political logic into the economy, they are in fact only asserting that their own 'political' view of what belongs in the domain of the market is somehow the correct one.

It is very important to reject the myth of [an] inviolable boundary of the economy, because that is the starting point of challenging the status quo. If you accept that the welfare state should be shrunk, labor rights have to be weakened, plant closures have to be accepted, and so on because of some objective economic logic (or "market forces," as it is often called), it becomes virtually impossible to modify the status quo.

Austerity has become the prevailing dogma throughout Europe, and it is high on the Republican agenda. If austerity is also based on lies, what is its actual objective?

A lot of people -- Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Mark Blyth and Yanis Varoufakis, to name some prominent names -- have written that austerity does not work, especially in the middle of an economic downturn (as it was practised in many developing countries under the World Bank-IMF Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s and the 1990s and more recently in Greece, Spain and other Eurozone countries).

Many of those who push for austerity do so because they genuinely (albeit mistakenly) believe that it works, but those who are smart enough to know that it doesn't still would use it because it is a very good way of shrinking the state (and thus giving more power to the corporate sector, including the foreign one) and changing the nature of state activities into a pro-corporate one (e.g., it is almost always welfare spending that goes first).

In other words, austerity is a very good way of pushing through a regressive political agenda without appearing to do so. You say you are cutting spending because you have to balance the books and put the house in order, when you are actually launching an attack on the working class and the poor. This is, for example, what the Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition government in the UK said when it launched a very severe austerity program upon assuming power in 2010 -- the country's public finance at the time was such that it did not need such a severe austerity program, even by the standards of orthodox economics.
...

What is your professional opinion of Donald Trump's proposed economic policies, which clearly embrace neoliberalism and all sort of shenanigans for the rich but oppose global "free-trade" agreements, and what do you expect to happen when they collide with Ryan's austerity budget?

Mr. Trump's plan for American economic revival is still vague, but, as far as I can tell, it has two main planks -- making American corporations create more jobs [at] home and increasing infrastructural investments.

The first plank seems rather fanciful. He says that he will do it mainly by engaging in greater protectionism, but it won't work because of two reasons.

....

CheeseSpawn posted:

In turn, if there is no objective way to draw the boundary around the economy, when people argue against the intrusion of political logic into the economy, they are in fact only asserting that their own 'political' view of what belongs in the domain of the market is somehow the correct one.

CheeseSpawn posted:

Just dropping some easy Ha-Joon Chang reading in the thread.

quote:

What is your professional opinion of Donald Trump's proposed economic policies, which clearly embrace neoliberalism and all sort of shenanigans for the rich but oppose global "free-trade" agreements?
...
When the price of iPhone and Nike trainers made in China or GM cars made in Mexico go up by 20 percent, 35 percent, not only American consumers but companies like Apple, Nike and GM will be intensely unhappy. But would this result in Apple or GM moving production back to the US? No, they will probably move it to Vietnam or Thailand, which is not hit by those tariffs.

Zyklon B Zombie posted:

I was just looking at current consumer debt levels in the United States and am thinking back to right after the 2008 crisis how households were aggressively paying down debt and saving money and it just seemed like everyone was going to spend their money a little more sanely from then on. It seems it just took 5 years for everyone to forget just start turning their credit and loans back on full blast again. It seems like that weird period where everything is going great as long as the economy keeps chugging along, but as soon as there is any sort of economic shock it will all fly apart.

JeffersonClay posted:

Zyklon B Zombie posted:

I was just looking at current consumer debt levels in the United States and am thinking back to right after the 2008 crisis how households were aggressively paying down debt and saving money and it just seemed like everyone was going to spend their money a little more sanely from then on. It seems it just took 5 years for everyone to forget just start turning their credit and loans back on full blast again. It seems like that weird period where everything is going great as long as the economy keeps chugging along, but as soon as there is any sort of economic shock it will all fly apart.

Ytlaya posted:

Yeah, this is kinda true. Unless you apply tariffs to nearly every developing nation (or mandate stuff be made in the US), those jobs aren't going to come back here. And in many cases even if they did they would be automated (in situations where cost of American labor > automation > cheap labor).

While there may be specific industries that we should try to bring back to the US, generally speaking the solution isn't to try and get most of these jobs to return, but to instead reroute the productivity gains to Americans through wealth redistribution.

Of course, this doesn't mean we shouldn't still attempt to create and enforce regulations requiring US corporations' supply chains to meet a certain standard when it comes to labor rights, but the motivation for that is a humanitarian one rather than some attempt to bring jobs back home.

cheese posted:

The last 30-40 years have been double bad for the American worker: not only has technology and globalization replaced so many jobs, but the increases in productivity driven by that technology has been siphoned off the by the 1%.

cheese posted:

As real wages stagnated at the end of the post WW2 boom, consumer credit filled in the gap. You now have situations where a family of four needs both parents working full time PLUS significant debt to afford standards of living comparable to what was achieved with just one wage earner in the prime boom year. Those times were unsustainable, but there should be a middle ground between the two extremes.

JeffersonClay posted:

Standard of living calculations are tough because while a TV is still a TV, the TV we have now is a lot better than what they had in the 50's. I'm struggling to think of a class of goods that are not substantially better now than they were in the 50's, although there must be some. I'd say furniture but I really like my memory foam mattress.

JeffersonClay posted:

The rush to reduce consumption, save, and pay down debt contributed significantly to the recession, and policies like reducing interest rates were designed specifically to counter that impulse. Credit is not a bad thing. Spending is not a bad thing. the worst impacts from the financial crisis stemmed from the unavailability of credit, both for employers and consumers. Government might want to discourage borrowing and spending if inflation is high (by raising interest rates and maybe austerity), but definitely not when the economy is slow.

Paradoxish posted:

What you're implying here is that consumer debt is beneficial in an absolute sense, which isn't true. Credit as a useful tool for the middle class is entirely dependent on consistently rising wages and healthy inflation. Without those factors, you're actually reducing buying power over the long term and creating an unsustainable spending bubble.

Credit stops being a good thing when it benefits creditors more than debtors.

cheese posted:

As real wages stagnated at the end of the post WW2 boom, consumer credit filled in the gap. You now have situations where a family of four needs both parents working full time PLUS significant debt to afford standards of living comparable to what was achieved with just one wage earner in the prime boom year. Those times were unsustainable, but there should be a middle ground between the two extremes.

Bertrand Russell posted:

Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous.

Paradoxish posted:

What you're implying here is that consumer debt is beneficial in an absolute sense, which isn't true. Credit as a useful tool for the middle class is entirely dependent on consistently rising wages and healthy inflation. Without those factors, you're actually reducing buying power over the long term and creating an unsustainable spending bubble.

Credit stops being a good thing when it benefits creditors more than debtors.

JeffersonClay posted:

Standard of living calculations are tough because while a TV is still a TV, the TV we have now is a lot better than what they had in the 50's. I'm struggling to think of a class of goods that are not substantially better now than they were in the 50's, although there must be some. I'd say furniture but I really like my memory foam mattress.

JeffersonClay posted:

Less spending and more saving wasn't some happy byproduct of the recession, it was a cause of the recession.

JeffersonClay posted:

That said, consumer debt is beneficial in an absolute sense. Even assuming an economy with no growth and no inflation, debt allows consumers to buy things now instead of later. People benefit from the ability to buy a home with a mortgage, or a car with a loan, as opposed to renting the same and building up savings to eventually buy.

readingatwork posted:

What unholy orifice are you pulling this from? The cause of the recession was widespread fraud among the investor classes where they went out of their way to make lovely loans, mix them with good loans, and then sell them off before they whole thing exploded taking down both the good and bad loans together. "Consumer saving" has literally nothing to do with it.

readingatwork posted:

What unholy orifice are you pulling this from? The cause of the recession was widespread fraud among the investor classes where they went out of their way to make lovely loans, mix them with good loans, and then sell them off before they whole thing exploded taking down both the good and bad loans together. "Consumer saving" has literally nothing to do with it.

Paradoxish posted:

.
Debt has a cost. If that cost isn't offset in some way by future earnings, then debt reduces consumer buying power over time. Or, to put it another way, credit cycles work like business cycles and booms are always followed by busts. It has nothing to do with people paying down debt or saving and I don't know why you think that it does. It's literally just a consequence of the use of credit in the present reducing purchasing power in the future. Hell, this was one of the major contributing factors that led to the Great Depression.

quote:

People choosing to save too much can have a negative effect on the economy, but I'd argue that people only choose to do that when there are deep structural issues in the first place.

JeffersonClay posted:

Standard of living calculations are tough because while a TV is still a TV, the TV we have now is a lot better than what they had in the 50's. I'm struggling to think of a class of goods that are not substantially better now than they were in the 50's, although there must be some. I'd say furniture but I really like my memory foam mattress.

JeffersonClay posted:

Yes, debt isn't free because you pay interest. So why would anyone ever get a mortgage or a car loan? Because it can be worth a lot to get something right now that you can't afford right now. This is more true the poorer you are. Is it possible for people to waste their money by buying poo poo they don't need on credit? Sure, but that's true of everything people buy, not just debt.

quote:

It seems like you believe that people are systematically taking on too much debt, and that's where the disagreement is.

quote:

Why debt has grown: The rise in the cost of living has outpaced income growth over the past 13 years. Median household income has grown 28% since 2003, but expenses have outpaced it significantly. Medical costs increased by 57% and food and beverage prices by 36% in that same span. [1]
How much debt we have: Total debt is expected to surpass the amounts owed at the beginning of the Great Recession by the end of 2016. [2] Americans will soon owe more than they did in December 2007 — but that doesn’t mean another recession is looming.
The cost of debt: The average household with credit card debt pays a total of $1,292 in credit card interest per year. This could increase to $1,309 after the Federal Reserve voted on a rate hike of a quarter of a percentage point.

quote:

People choosing to save too much can have a negative effect on the economy

VitalSigns posted:

Those times weren't unsustainable. The American worker is more productive today than in the 1950s. Those goods and that standard of living exist: people have all that stuff now.

Letting the ultrarich hoover up all the productivity gains and more, while forcing people into debt peonage to the 1% to support their families is entirely a political decision. Instead of ballooning consumer credit, we could have chosen to simply pay people enough to afford the standard of living that they are now getting anyway on credit.

asdf32 posted:

They can't and don't completely try to take this into account in inflation adjustments. Otherwise, for example the billion dollars of 1964 computing (or so) in out pockets would throw stuff off. So it's true that that goods across the board are better than they were and/or stuff didn't exist like many drugs, surgeries or medical treatments. Among the things this means: wage stagnation isn't quite wage stagnation.

uncop posted:

Steve Keen has pretty wonderful youtube lectures on The Great Recession and financial crises in general. Basically it's not so much that people taking less credit caused the crisis, instead that itself *is* the crisis. Housing bubble bursts => people start taking less credit, banks stop giving easy credit => aggregate demand falls. They don't even have to start saving paying their debts down, just taking less credit yearly in a high private debt to GDP environment is enough.

If you follow the data, we are actually in for a series of these serious crashes rather than the mild recessions of old, because the current widespread economic policy to beat recessions is to get corporations and people to take on more debt. Credit-fueled demand is the only type of demand that has historically had large enough fluctuations to cause this level of crisis, and we are still at 150%+ private debt to GDP ratio and it's not going down.

shrike82 posted:

Relitigating the GFC as being caused by a pullback on debt issuance, consumer or otherwise, is bizarre.

Paradoxish posted:

The problem with this is that without rising wages, a thing you can't afford now is also a thing that you can't afford in the future. Not only that, but you're paying more for the privilege of doing it. That's a huge issue when you're looking at the economy in aggregate because it means that either consumer spending will inevitably drop over time as people are forced to pay down debt or creditors will begin to load additional debt onto already overleveraged consumers. Either option is completely unsustainable and will cause a credit crunch sooner or later.

quote:

You also seem to be missing the fact that the primary advantage of debt isn't just to buy something now, it's to leverage future increases in earnings. You get more spending power both now and in the future because the cost of the loan relative to your income will decrease over time. Without wage increases and inflation, loans are literally just a tax on people too poor to buy things with cash..

JeffersonClay posted:

I'm giving the orthodox story here. Bad mortgages and hubris made the financial sector melt down. That was a bad thing because it blew up the entire credit system, which created a huge demand shock, which caused layoffs and business failures, which impacted demand even more in a positive feedback loop.