Kudos for the can opener joke. Humor often illuminates. I have some about actuaries. Old Soviet jokes seem more and more to the point.
Seriously though we do need experts in their place. Vance is the smartest politician around and makes the error of thinking others are like him. Likewise, I did not join other conservatives in celebrating the demise of the Chevron doctrine. We have replaced bureaucratic tyranny with tyranny by ignorant, capricious and even more unaccountable judges.
By far the greatest scandal in the history of the economics profession, at least in my opinion, occurred in the East Room of the White House thirty years ago on the eve of the NAFTA vote in Congress. That was when the dean of American economists, Paul Samuelson, flanked by six of his Nobel prize winning colleagues, stepped up to the microphone to say that “protection had never resulted in a net increase in the number of high-paying jobs.”
This from the man who fifty years earlier in a celebrated paper, "Protection and Real Wages," had created a sensation by proving that a tariff on labor-intensive goods made in a low wage country could prop up the wages of workers in a high-wage economy.
A couple of years later Samuelson admitted in a Newsweek column that "of course" American workers were now in wage competition with workers in China and that henceforth, according to his famous "factor-price equalization theorem," wage rates in the two countries could be expected to converge.
In other words, at the crucial moment when it counted Samuelson deliberately misled the Clinton administration and the public at large on a most important policy issue affecting the future wellbeing of American working people. That none of his Nobel prize winning colleagues chose to clarify the situation tells you all you need to know.
“Sixty years ago revenue estimates, distribution tables and cost-benefit analysis played no role in the policy process. Now they are all commonplace.”
60 years ago, we built stuff, had a broad middle class, and widely economic prosperity, and a lower GINI coefficient.
Most sane people would conclude that, having spent 50 years doing "A" and producing poor outcomes, perhaps we ought to stop doing "A". An advanced degree in economics is required to realize that the correct response is instead, "do more of A".
The end of job growth? Smaller populations will help humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and save the other species we share the planet with.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food.
Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable.
Paul Krugman recently looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions. "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.
Thanks for Jason Furman link. But he's clearly talking about the politicians who pick up (& typically exaggerate) the evidence-free claims of 2nd-rate economists for strictly political (versus actual public policy) ends.
That's a problem with politics (& the pollitically-slanted main stream media), not economics.
Kudos for the can opener joke. Humor often illuminates. I have some about actuaries. Old Soviet jokes seem more and more to the point.
Seriously though we do need experts in their place. Vance is the smartest politician around and makes the error of thinking others are like him. Likewise, I did not join other conservatives in celebrating the demise of the Chevron doctrine. We have replaced bureaucratic tyranny with tyranny by ignorant, capricious and even more unaccountable judges.
By far the greatest scandal in the history of the economics profession, at least in my opinion, occurred in the East Room of the White House thirty years ago on the eve of the NAFTA vote in Congress. That was when the dean of American economists, Paul Samuelson, flanked by six of his Nobel prize winning colleagues, stepped up to the microphone to say that “protection had never resulted in a net increase in the number of high-paying jobs.”
This from the man who fifty years earlier in a celebrated paper, "Protection and Real Wages," had created a sensation by proving that a tariff on labor-intensive goods made in a low wage country could prop up the wages of workers in a high-wage economy.
A couple of years later Samuelson admitted in a Newsweek column that "of course" American workers were now in wage competition with workers in China and that henceforth, according to his famous "factor-price equalization theorem," wage rates in the two countries could be expected to converge.
In other words, at the crucial moment when it counted Samuelson deliberately misled the Clinton administration and the public at large on a most important policy issue affecting the future wellbeing of American working people. That none of his Nobel prize winning colleagues chose to clarify the situation tells you all you need to know.
“Sixty years ago revenue estimates, distribution tables and cost-benefit analysis played no role in the policy process. Now they are all commonplace.”
60 years ago, we built stuff, had a broad middle class, and widely economic prosperity, and a lower GINI coefficient.
Most sane people would conclude that, having spent 50 years doing "A" and producing poor outcomes, perhaps we ought to stop doing "A". An advanced degree in economics is required to realize that the correct response is instead, "do more of A".
The end of job growth? Smaller populations will help humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and save the other species we share the planet with.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food.
Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable.
Paul Krugman recently looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions. "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.
Thanks for Jason Furman link. But he's clearly talking about the politicians who pick up (& typically exaggerate) the evidence-free claims of 2nd-rate economists for strictly political (versus actual public policy) ends.
That's a problem with politics (& the pollitically-slanted main stream media), not economics.
Thank you for introducing me to Jason Furman!