economy
sastyk | July 27, 2010Interesting query and discussion at Martin Wolf's blog about how economics came to conflate natural resources and capital, and whether it should continue to do so. You'll want to read the comments too!
The idea that land and capital are the same thing is evidently ludicrous. It requires us to believe that the economic machine is self-sustaining -- a sort of perpetual motion machine. Capital is the product of savings and investment. It is the result of human frugality and the invention required to imagine and create new capital goods. Labour is also -- and in today's circumstances,…
sastyk | July 13, 2010"How did you get there, Roo?" asked Piglet.
"On Tigger's back! And Tiggers can't climb downwards, because their tails get in the way, only upwards, and Tigger forgot about that when we started, and he's only just remembered. So we've got to stay here for ever and ever - unless we go higher. What did you say, Tigger? Oh, Tigger says if we go higher we shan't be able to see Piglet's house so well, so we're going to stop here."
-AA Milne, "The House At Pooh Corner"
Note: I wrote this essay several years ago, and have been thinking about it a lot in relationship to the BP problem, so I…
sastyk | July 10, 2010I've been meaning to write something about this New York Times article that suggests that affluent homeowners are strategically defaulting more than middle class and poor ones, but Mike the Mad Biologist said it better.
While I realize regulation has become a four-letter word, regulation does force the regulated to act in certain ways that they would otherwise not. To the extent we want an ethical economic system, it needs to be structured and enforced in order to remove incentives and advantages for unethical (or 'athetical') behavior.
But I realize that would be like totally Hitler
What I…
j7uy5 | June 30, 2010From Media Matters:
It is difficult to understand how so many errors could be crammed into
one simple chart, merely by accident. It is even harder to
understand how the artist could end up with a straight line, after
incorporating numerous errors, unless it was an done with the intention
of being misleading.
First, (problem #1) the Y-axis does not start at zero. That is a
fairly
common error. Sometimes it is done innocently, and a notice is
posted. For example, "Y-axis does not start at zero, to better
show the change," or something like that. OK. That's minor.
The Fed does the same…
sastyk | June 29, 2010This weekend in the Washington Post, there's an article about a couple who first met while serving in various capacities during WWII, who just celebrated their marriage in DC this weekend after a "62 year engagement." This would be a romantic story in any context - but it isn't a story of parted lovers who finally found each other again after decades apart. Instead, it is of two men who have lived a life almost wholly together, sharing work, family and community, but who lacked legal and social recognition.
What's interesting about this story to me is not simply that it is a charming love…
sastyk | June 24, 2010From HuffPo, this article about the likely outcome that the Democrats will fail to pass an unemployment extension - unfortunately it was bound to happen sooner or later, but it will be crushingly hard on millions of people who have just been barely making it, and now aren't.
The legislation, known as the "tax extenders" bill, would reauthorize extended unemployment benefits for people out of work for six months or longer, would protect doctors from a 21 percent pay cut for seeing Medicare patients, and would provide billions in aid to state Medicaid programs.
Come Friday, 1.2 million people…
sastyk | May 17, 2010We still don't have the faintest idea how much oil is spewing out of the well in the Gulf. Nor do we have the faintest idea what the full environmental consequence of what may well be the biggest single-event human-caused. ecological disaster of all time (the very fact that I have to add the word "single-event" to that statement should tell you something). We know that it is almost certainly more than all the low estimates to date, and we know that the ecological consequences will be huge, lasting and we do not understand them.
That is, we know some of the potential effects, we know they…
sastyk | April 30, 2010I can't think when I've heard something as disingenuous as Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein's claim that he was "humbled" by his questioning by Congress. Oh, wait, I can...in the musical Chicago, when Billy Flynn, the star attorney points out to Roxy Hart that because people are idiots, we can only sell one idea at a time.
Blankfein's message is that Goldman is good for the economy, that ultimately, Goldman and its ilk are here to serve us and make our lives better. His presentation is reasonable, calm, and sleazy - but he's definitely hoping you'll believe it - that the problem is a…
revere | April 20, 2010The Icelandic volcanic eruption is still causing havoc in Europe with ripple effects elsewhere as people and planes are grounded for travel in or out of much of northern Europe. Pressure from the traveling public, air carriers and business is mounting to let passenger and cargo planes fly again. What's changed? Not much. There's about as much uncertainty as there was a week ago, just a lot more pushback. The recriminations are already starting: EU and national transport authorities "over reacted." They should have ... done what? At the same time airlines like Air France-KLM are conducting…
sastyk | April 15, 2010As you know, Greer and I at times have our differences in perspective, but I think this week's column is particularly acute, and offers up two point that I think are really essential to grasp when thinking of the future.
The first is that technical feasibility is not all - that technical feasibility rests on a complex bed of other feasibilities. Thus, simply observing that it is technically possible, to, say, create zero impact cities or whatever does not usefully tell us whether we are going to do it. For example, it has been technically possible to eliminate most causes of death in…
sastyk | April 13, 2010To make up for yesterday's frivolity, today I am going to be very, very serious, and deal with weighty serious things. There will be no levity - not from me, and certainly not from my very serious readers. In fact, if I detect signs of levity from any of you, especially those of you with sad proclivities towards levity (Risa, Edson, Lora...I'm talking to you!), you will be publically denounced from my pulpit (I have to go build a pulpit now.)
More practically, I'm going to try and catch up on some things people have asked me to write about, many of which are more serious and require more…
sastyk | April 2, 2010I'm a day late with Nate Hagen's piece, but I just have to link here - it has a beauty and elegance I really admire, and Id do wish him the very best of luck in his new venture. In fact, I'm starting to think that maybe I can cash in too!
OK - here it is in a nutshell - though I used to think the main problem with economic theory was that it ignored biology on the demand side and ecology on the supply side, I now see the reality is that neither biology nor ecology has incorporated enough economic theory. Basically, my efforts at falsification of positive economics even down to the day to day…
sastyk | March 14, 2010First of all, may I ask which New York Times editor was responsible for permitting the coinage "femivore" to pass into language. Talk about illiterate (linguistically a "femivore" would be someone who ate women) and uneuphonious - yes, yes, I get that you want to get a Michael Pollan reference in there somehow, but come on... any writer worth her salt could do better than that.
Now to the meat of the thing - the essay, which profiles Shannon Hayes's book _Radical Homemakers_ attempts to argue that focusing on food has given women a new set of choices.
Hayes pointed out that the original "…
sastyk | February 23, 2010In January, the same month that unemployment "fell" to 9.7% (by which we mean we only lost a few hundred thousand jobs, and we hadn't yet done the inevitable upward revision), we learn that about 20% of Americans were underemployed or unemployed and finding it hard to make ends meet. This compared to the BLS numbers at U6 at 18%, which have been widely criticized, but are still being used. This means that the Labor Departments reliance on the birth-death model in recession. is yet again called into question.
BTW, several commenters correctly pointed out that I made an error in my original…
sastyk | February 21, 2010From Alternet, a good piece on what it really means to be one of the six million Americans with no income at all save food stamps:
In March 2009, in the midst of the worst job crisis in at least a generation, Eva opened the last welfare check she will ever receive. She is one of a growing number of people in the United States who can't find work in this recession but don't qualify for government cash assistance, no matter how poor they are or how bad the economy gets.
Without the help of welfare, Eva doesn't have enough money left at the end of each month to feed her daughters full meals.…
sastyk | February 16, 2010Robert S. McElvaine's _Down and Out in the Great Depression_ is a fascinating look at America during the Depression. Compiled from letters written to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, it presents Americans in their own words, saying what they thought was most important in the Depression. Besides the pleas for help and the accounts of the situation on the ground, there was a profound anger at those who needed help. "Paddle your own canoe or sink" one letter wrote. A "Poor Southern Arkansas Woman" wrote that she felt she was a slave required to carry thousands of idle men on…
sastyk | February 12, 2010Everyone needs to read Don Peck's superb Atlantic Magazine piece on why the jobs aren't coming back anytime soon. It confirms what I began writing back in late 2008 - that most often economic crises of the kind we have been seeing last a decade or more.
Most recessions end when people start spending again, but for the foreseeable future, U.S. consumer demand is unlikely to propel strong economic growth. As of November, one in seven mortgages was delinquent, up from one in 10 a year earlier. As many as one in four houses may now be underwater, and the ratio of household debt to GDP, about 65…
sastyk | February 10, 2010Increasingly, the cost of staying wired is eating up a huge part of people's budgets accordinging to The Times:
It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on…
sastyk | February 5, 2010Every news media I looked at it is trumpeting good news - while unemployment increased in January, we're thrilled that it was only be 20,000 jobs. Because of this, the unemployment rate fell to 9.7% amid, as we learn on CNN "hope the economy will add jobs soon."
What's buried in the middle of the report is the real news - that revisions in employment estimates show that we lost 1.2 million jobs more than the previously estimated 7.2 million. This was higher than predictions, which expected an additional million lost jobs. That means that one in every seven jobs lost since December '07 went…
sastyk | January 26, 2010The New Economic Foundation's Report on the infeasibility of continued economic growth is yet another bit of analysis that points out the obvious - we have radically overdrawn our resources and that has consequences. One of them is that we can't draw down natural resources infinitely. The other is that infinite economic growth is (duh) not possible. It also observes that continued economic growth isn't actually benefitting most of the people we ostensibly care about benefitting:
...Why growth isn't working
Between 1990 and 2001, for every $100 worth of growth in the world's income per…