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LeoMarr posted:Are we going to see even more countries thrown into an Austerity death spiral because of this economic climate? Greece's issues are resurging as austerityXXX takes its toll as well as the possibility of a brexit. This could be the last hurrah of the EU. The economic core areas of Germany and Japan are in deflationary death spirals, but the periphery of Europe that Germany's forcing austerity on are more likely to just elect fascists like Poland/Hungary and tell the austerians to piss off. Not sure which is the better outcome
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Jan 21, 2016 18:36
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ToxicSlurpee posted:When China has its coming implosion and damages the world economy expect to hear a bit of "we need a world government to make sure this doesn't happen, people are literally dying because of greed" and a cacophony of "PROTECTIVE TARIFFS!!! ISOLATIONISM!!! TRADE IS BAD!!! GLOBALIZATION IS AWFUL!!! XENOPHOBIA HATE HATE HATE THE CHINESE ARE AWFUL AND DID THIS ON PURPOSE ALSO IRAN IS INVOLVED SOMEHOW!!!" Meanwhile those 62 people that effectively own everything are going to mysteriously and suddenly own more while money they touched just happens to find its way into the pockets of people that find reasons to justify austerity. It's funny because the mainstream Serious People opinion on China for years now has been that none of the normal rules apply to it and it's completely unreasonable to expect it to be a liberal democracy which respects free trade like any other country. And then the result is a dying shitshow economy, as bad an internal situation on civil and human rights as it ever had, and Putinesque expansionism in foreign policy icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 09:54 on Jan 30, 2016 |
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Jan 30, 2016 00:15
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:Plenty of countries in Europe are older than the United States (most of them are even!). A nation isn't just a party and its government. Constitutionally speaking most of them actually aren't. The UK is probably as old or older depending on when exactly you consider its 'constitution' and the modern system of Westminster parliamentary government established, but not by very much. The institution of Prime Minister only existed since the mid 1700s, and the concepts of a an institutionalized system of government vs opposition in parliament, and the modern electoral system only since the 1830s. As for the rest of Europe, you can sort of identify them in waves. The Scandanavian countries adopted modern constitutions in the early-mid 1800s, then France, Italy and Germany didn't solidify till the 1870s. Everyone else is way later than that icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Jan 31, 2016 |
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Jan 31, 2016 08:48
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Denmark, and Sweden after it threw us out. Sweden and Norway only date to 1810, and Denmark only to 1848
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Jan 31, 2016 08:59
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ocrumsprug posted:Sorry if this is off topic. At this point there's basically nothing more, what they've been doing since the gfc has itself been unprecedented by the standards of most of history Basically governments need to implement fiscal policy to fix it, stuff like stimulus and actual laws. But that's not gonna happen, at least in the US, so well feedmegin posted:Firstly, I'm not sure why you think the Great Reform Act established a 'modern electoral system' and the one before it was somehow wildly different. It's not nearly as Great as you think. Secondly, this is a bit of a slippery slope. Does the US lose constitutional continuity every time it passes an Amendment? Immediately-post-establishment US had a pretty different electoral system to now (only rich white men get to vote, the Senate was not directly elected), but despite the system being different we don't claim it's a different government. If you take the establishment of the office of prime minister the UK is older, but only by a few decades. Every other major European country is younger icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Jan 31, 2016 |
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Jan 31, 2016 19:18
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:I'm arguing that most identify as being French, not citizens of the Third Republic or some poo poo. People don't view their nationalities by whatever their current government is. That's a uniquely American thing going. Most 'French' people didn't identify as French before the Third Republic
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Feb 1, 2016 05:14
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the solution is socialized public housing. also nationalize everything else too. full communism now
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Feb 11, 2016 21:39
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If you read the op-ed pages, liberals will assure you that there is actually no problem with wage growth and that actually, productivity has to grow faster before you can expect anything at all, never mind nobody's gotten anything at all for 40 years of solid productivity growth. Larry Summers had a piece in the WaPo just the other day about it. A few weeks ago Matt Yglesias basically declared victory in his podcast on the basis of the numbers the BLS just revised away, saying anyone who wants any more is a racist Bernie Bro who wants to steal food from the mouths of third worlders
icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 02:15
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Paradoxish posted:Yes and no. There was real, sustained wage growth at the very tail end of the 90s, for example. The crazy amounts of inflation that were happening in the late 70s also make the picture a lot muddier, because the high wage growth during that period wasn't actually keeping up with inflation at all. Just looking at wage growth alone makes it seem like it went off a cliff in the 80s, but that's only because wages weren't compensating for out of control inflation. http://www.epi.org/publication/unde...d-why-its-real/ Real wages declined for a good 25 years in the 70s and 80s, not because of inflation but because of deliberate economic policy to stop the inflation by curbing persistent excess aggregate demand. 70s inflation was over by 1982, and yet wages continued to fall for another 15 years. So the very slow, off and on growth since the late 90s essentially translates to 0 since the early 70s As for education somehow being the solution to 90%+ of productivity gains going to a tiny elite, it won't do anything. College enrollment and completion rates have skyrocketed over exactly the period the statnation has. There simply aren't enough of these elite jobs for an appreciable number of people to do. Here's a good blog post with more details http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/07/education-wages-and-economic-inequality quote:In fact, median wages for men with a bachelor’s degree or more have declined by about 7% over the past 15 years, and are only slightly higher than they were a quarter century ago. (I don’t have the comparable figures for women at hand). As Krugman notes when commenting on a recent paper regarding the “skills gap” for workers: Neither are any of the other solutions liberal wonk types like to talk up like the labor force participation rate going to do anything. This problem is massive, and would require massive structural changes to fix (essentially socialism), and current American liberalism appears to have absolutely no interest in doing that icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 19:21
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Wouldn't be very elite if there were. For real though, it's telling how intractable a problem this is that the overwhelming liberal response to this issue has been to obfuscate it, play it down and divert attention to stuff that won't do anything like education, labor force participation, and productivity growth rates. Every single op-ed I've seen on the topic has been about why it's not really a problem, the real problem is X TL/DR Marx was right icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 19:40
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Well, I will say that after witnessing liberals and Democrats play down and ignore the inequality issue, seeing a purestrain Republican "poor people have refrigerators! refrigerators didn't even exist 200 years ago!" is refreshing in a weird way
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Aug 12, 2016 16:54
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Here's a good article from 538 displaying the most of the standard liberal response to wage stagnation: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-2016-election-is-about-dividing-up-the-pie/ You've got an implicit endorsement of the Greg Mankiw Econ 101 framing of Growth vs Equality as naturally opposed, although at least they acknowledge it, an overwhelming concern with productivity growth, and an unquestioning assumption that productivity growth will lead to wage growth despite the last 40 years showing that to be false quote:Don’t expect that rhetoric to change any time soon, no matter what happens in November. In recent years, growth has been weak not just in the U.S. but worldwide, despite aggressive efforts by the Federal Reserve and other central banks to jump-start the economy. A growing number of economists worry that the aging population and other trends have caused the underlying growth rate of the economy to slow. Economists aren’t sure why that is, or what can be done about it. But with less growth to go around, the distribution of that growth will become an ever more important political issue.
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Aug 12, 2016 18:23
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Paradoxish posted:I mean, what else are you going to say? Large scale institutional change really isn't on the table over the short term or, probably, ever. I doubt that there's some horrible conspiracy where evil politicians are keeping The Truth from the masses so much as politicians saying things that will let them keep their jobs while hoping that everything works out. The state of the economy is purely a political topic, so everyone is just going to read what they want to see in the data and longterm trends anyway. I mean, to be fair nobody really has any concrete idea of how to fix the wage growth inequality problem, but I do think it's reasonable to expect a party nominally working for the economic interests of the majority of the public to act like they give even a single gently caress about the problem. You really can't say that for the people in charge of liberalism today
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Aug 12, 2016 22:37
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Put regulations back on the banks. Increase minimum wage to where it should be. Tax the rich as heavily as they used to be taxed. asdf32 posted:Direct spending on infrastructure to prop up the labor market while fixing roads and increased taxes on the rich. Redistributing wealth by taxing and directly transferring money, while theoretically possible, would basically be as politically unfeasible as actual socialism on the scale required to make a meaningful dent in that wage vs productivity graph. The ideal solution would be to simply pay people what they deserve in the first place. Minimum wage won't have much effect on most wages, as the minimum wage won't be high enough to affect the median. Same with infrastructure spending, it's not big enough to have that great an effect. It's this, at least in my opinion Ardennes posted:Would be a conspiracy to say maybe they just really don't care that much and the few American politicians that do notice there is a problem aren't in a position (or aren't allowed) to be in a position to do anything about it?
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Aug 13, 2016 01:27
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Munkeymon posted:So they don't care but are still trying something that's politically feasible, unlike naked redistribution, just not enough in your opinion? They're trying things that won't fix the problem, knowing they won't fix the problem, and not seeming like they would do more but for political realities. So yes, I think it's fair to say they don't particularly care
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Aug 18, 2016 23:42
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Munkeymon posted:Right, so they actually are acting like they're trying, just not in a way you'd like which is? icantfindaname posted:They're trying things that won't fix the problem, knowing they won't fix the problem, and not seeming like they would do more but for political realities. So yes, I think it's fair to say they don't particularly care try reading my post again also lol at this Munkeymon posted:leftist virtue signaling Munkeymon posted:leftist virtue signaling
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Aug 19, 2016 16:21
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john stuart mill thought the natural end state of liberal society was an economy composed to anarchist collectives
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Aug 19, 2016 18:28
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OhFunny posted:Of the concerns listed in the OP. It looks to me like the most immediate danger 11 months later is the collapse of the Italian financial sector. eh, italy's been in continuous crisis since the early 90s, what more could a bank collapse or two do? worry about le pen more
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Nov 26, 2016 08:55
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watch Trump appoint the reincarnation of Volcker to the Fed board and get crushed in 2020
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Jan 1, 2017 07:13
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JeffersonClay posted:No, that would work great. it actually wouldn't, because that's simply not enough money to pay for a full-featured cradle-to-grave welfare state. you have to tax the middle class
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Feb 24, 2017 20:01
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Confounding Factor posted:? You wouldn't need to tax the middle or lower income brackets at all. Got any data/numbers you can provide that support your claim? Bernie's healthcare plan envisioned an extra 6.7% payroll tax and a 2.2% income tax on individual incomes under $200,000, and that's for an optimistic assesment of how much the program would cost http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/jan/13/how-much-would-bernie-sanders-health-care-plan-cos/ Then on top of that free college tuition would be a lot, and more generous social security benefits would be a lot. Euro countries pay for this stuff with VAT sales taxes for the most part I'm not a tax expert and I'm at work so I don't have a more thorough case to make than that but it seems to be widely accepted in discourse on this topic
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Feb 24, 2017 20:20
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Cerebral Bore posted:It wouldn't work because even if you're able to pull off going back to 50s tax rates you're still leaving the capitalist class in control of the economic power in society, and they will use all of that power to roll back all your accomplishments as fast as they can once they get the opportunity. For an example of this in action, see the past four decades. That too
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Feb 24, 2017 20:24
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SickZip posted:Russia was rapidly industrializing pre-revolution as well. Progress was sharply knocked back by the Civil War but it wasnt the complete backwater portrayed by pro-communists you should read robert c allen's book on the ussr. he argues tsarist growth was almost entirely fueled by the late 1800s boom in commodities, specifically grain from the ukrainian steppe in russia's case. he says that industrialization required a big push and a sacrifice on the part of consumers that a theoretical tsarist or liberal government would not have been able to muster political support for this also means the nazis would have won and killed 100 million slavs
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Feb 27, 2017 18:57
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SickZip posted:basically, it's really hard to not see a jump in living standards when you industrialize, anyone in power tends to look good when it happrns, and industrialization tends to have a momentum that persists through various government forms Living standards actually decreased in Britain until the 1870s. As long as you can pull surplus labor from the countryside wages don't go up, you see this in basically all industrializing countries
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Feb 27, 2017 19:02
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Panama Red posted:As I'm doing some work on the history of neoliberal economics, I'm wondering why there hasn't been a greater movement back toward the "embedded liberalism" of the 1950s and 1960s. It seems to me that what ended the post-war economic boom was the contradiction between having a fixed exchange rate, no capital controls and autonomous domestic economic policies (the impossible trinity) because free-flowing capital flows meant there was too much pressure to appreciate or depreciate national currencies. Is there any traction in the advocacy of economists like Dani Rodrik to basically bring back embedded liberalism but with capital controls? It seems to me the last several major economic crises showed us that unregulated capital movement is a recipe for disaster, and in the case of the underdeveloped countries, who never benefited from the Golden Age of Capitalism (save for a few export-oriented economies, as long as the advanced capitalist nations didn't flood their products with cheap overproduced goods), capital controls would DEFINITELY be in their interest (just look at China). Does it just come down to neoliberal economics still being the prevailing economic school of thought of the day? How many more stats on missed development goals and rising global inequality do we need for that to change? Or is there something more profoundly wrong with embedded liberalism than an ideological bias against it? Capital controls were the bedrock of the Bretton Woods/embedded liberal system, it did not in any way involve free capital flows. Currency devaluation happened in spite of them, because they were fundamentally unsustainable in light of stagflation and poor economic performance. In countries that persisted with them they led to balance or payments crises like in India and other third world socialist states, and then neoliberalism happened anyways 15 years later. That's why the postwar era ended, and why the power of labor had to be broken, because it was getting too much of a share of the economic product and causing inflation. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Mar 1, 2017 14:09
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Triangle Shirt Factotum posted:Got something to read that supports that statement? Well, that statement is more how it was framed at the time by the people doing it, than my own opinion. But the wiki summary is a basic source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_displacement_of_Keynesianism#Labour_militancy
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Mar 1, 2017 18:06
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call to action posted:The opponents of neoliberalism should probably develop a compelling vision for the future, first, because I haven't seen one. Scandanavian social democracy seems to work very well. Remember the Anglosphere Trotskyite/Bennite far-left of the 1970s, that neoliberalism developed in opposition to, was very much not a left-liberal social democratic movement icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Mar 1, 2017 23:25
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Panama Red posted:Social democratic corporatism seems to be the closest thing people on the left point to as a credible alternative to the status quo, typically with the Nordic model being the exemplar. Tripartist corporatism doesn't work when the industries in question are actually run and owned by the state, because a labour government cannot credibly deny wage increases to labour unions AKA their own constituents. Britain's having so much stuff nationalized, which was at least in part the influence of the Trot/Bennite far left, caused tripartism to implode into stagflation. Nothing like that happened in the Scandanavian social democracies
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Mar 2, 2017 15:15
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Condiv posted:he's raising prices on americans buying american goods as opposed to foreigners buying american goods? Yeah apparently it's actually not a bad idea and according to textbook econ theory it should have no effect on domestic prices because currency markets should adjust. But if the econ textbook theory is wrong (heh heh heh) and prices do go up the huge brunt of it will be on old people living on a fixed income
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Mar 2, 2017 18:32
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Condiv posted:well, the tax is lowered on income from the US to 20% and a 20% tariff on imports, but the article seems to say that sales on exports are untaxed. which means that americans pay more for all goods while every other country gets cheaper american exports. i don't think his base is gonna be happy about a macbook being theoretically cheaper for people in france and britain than it is for americans. at least if you're following typical republican tax logic. According to articles I've seen on the topic the dollar should strengthen versus other currencies, which would negate the effect of imports being more expensive, as more people want to buy dollars to buy untaxed American exports. Of course that depends on international currency markets working like they do in the textbook (they don't) and Trump has stated repeatedly he wants the dollar to be weaker not stronger, so... http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/27/news/economy/border-adjustment-tax-trump-trump-congress/ quote:The whole thing only works if the dollar rises roughly 20% in value, and quickly. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Mar 2, 2017 |
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Mar 2, 2017 18:51
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Squalid posted:How does this proposal compare with European consumption taxes? I read somewhere that VATs as implemented in most EU countries replicate the effects of a border adjustment tax but I'm not sure how exactly they compare Matt Yglesias' podcart on.Vox did a segmen on it, if you can stand the sound of that guy's voice for more than 30 seconds icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Mar 2, 2017 |
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Mar 2, 2017 19:03
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Crowsbeak posted:That is a joke right. you're right, even that's way too long to expect the average, un-hardened civilian to take
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Mar 2, 2017 19:26
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call to action posted:The labor market is tight enough to raise interest rates, but not wages. Why'd that be? The federal reserve targets employment, not wages. Wage growth is caused by productivity and technological improvement, not monetary policy
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Mar 15, 2017 22:55
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call to action posted:Oh wow and here I thought that affecting employment would affect wages, silly me Going beyond full employment causes wages to rise, but the purchasing power of those wages doesn't necessarily rise. There will just be inflation instead unless there is productivity growth
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Mar 15, 2017 23:11
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call to action posted:Yeah I did Econ 101 too, it was definitely a great course in "how to explain why we can't help workers" It didn't happen because of loose monetary policy, no, it happened because of unions
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Mar 15, 2017 23:19
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Raenir Salazar posted:So why did the major steel production move to China? Weren't those facilities *massive* and expensive to build in the first place? Or did they not actually move and just got upgraded and as a result didn't need 90% of those workers anymore? well, mostly b/c the chinese government invested a shitload of money in steel facilities. if the Free Market had chosen what economic activity to do in China it wouldn't have happened, at least not nearly as fast. developmentalist planning and free markets arent the same thing
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Mar 17, 2017 18:24
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Orange Devil posted:It was a really poor move by China because those mills were a state project which didn't turn a profit for the state within 4 years - A neoliberal Pretty much yeah. I didn't say neoliberalism was good
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Mar 17, 2017 22:24
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call to action posted:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/business/economy/jobs-report-retail-employment.html Well, now that Obama's out of office you're free to openly criticize economic performance again
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Apr 8, 2017 05:56
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uncop posted:By most of the rest of the world, do you mean... The Eurozone? Because it seems to me that USA has been pretty average among first-world countries that have currency sovereignty and haven't enacted or haven't been politically able to enact full austerity. What other countries are there in the first world? The UK's and Canada's economies have not done better than America's, Australia's has but only because it's a mining and commodoties rentier state, Japan is Japan, .... Maybe Sweden has registered better growth? That's about it
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Apr 9, 2017 19:50
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Surely Sweden is mega Russophobic tho, what with their lost empire and all that?
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Apr 10, 2017 09:27
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