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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

Senate Everything you always wanted to know about economics*

Discussion in 'Community' started by 3sm1r, Aug 14, 2019.

  1. blackmyron

    blackmyron Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Oct 29, 2005
    Face it, Ender, economists are just modern-day fortune tellers. "Dial 1-900-ECO-NOMY, qualified economists are standing by now to take your call!"
     
    Lord Vivec likes this.
  2. Ender Sai

    Ender Sai Chosen One star 10

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    Feb 18, 2001
    Why is it people who don't understand economics say this?
     
  3. 3sm1r

    3sm1r Force Ghost star 6

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    Dec 27, 2017
    Paul Krugman engages in active debates with Wolff, who happens to be an economic professor, but random dude on a SW forum tells me to ignore him and mock him because he "doesn't understand economic models", so...
     
  4. Ender Sai

    Ender Sai Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2001
    Krugman is also a) Keynesian and b) the victor in those debates.
     
    DarthPhilosopher likes this.
  5. 3sm1r

    3sm1r Force Ghost star 6

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    Dec 27, 2017
    How is his being Keynesian supposed to matter? Victor or non victor, he does engage with him.

    Besides, while Wolff is a self-described Marxian economist, in his program he spends most of his time praising Nordic countries with social democratic systems, so the stuff he advocates for is usually not so different from what people like Krugman and Stiglitz also believe.
     
  6. blackmyron

    blackmyron Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Oct 29, 2005
    Ender, this is just a physics degree holder taking the piss out of 'soft science' economics. :p

    In all seriousness, economics has always been in dire need of housecleaning, because it often seems dominated by people that are more interested in pushing an ideology than doing actual science.
     
  7. Ender Sai

    Ender Sai Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2001
    Which I'm sure is a perception easy to form when you're getting news 3rd hand about econ.

    So basically the thread is "everything you always wanted to assume about economics, but remain too afraid to challenge."

    If you're unsure why Keynes matters then we need an Econ 101 thread, rather badly.

    It's sufficiently different that he routinely brands Krugman a "centrist", which is peak idiocy quite frankly.

    Marx has a number of massive shortcomings as an economist. Whilst he's right to highlight capital, unregulated, is bad (to be fair, unless you're a libertarian, most people concur complete lack of regulation is bad) he has significant blindspots. The LVT is nonsense. He has no idea how firms optimise output through management. He has no idea how price signalling works. And arguably LVT and the assumed tendency of the rate of profit to drop off are inconsistent. In the same way Sanders has hitched his brand to a failed ideology, Wolff's hitched his entire career to a myopic and flawed school of economics that's best taught as a historical curiosity.
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2021
  8. 3sm1r

    3sm1r Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Dec 27, 2017
    Your arrogance is not backed by a proportionate post quality, and this is why you are boring. If you want to come off as a pretentious jerk, well, it's not super pleasant but I can live with that, but it could be helpful if you at least came out with some interesting ideas, just to provide some pay-off for enduring your posts. No matter how obnoxious a poster is, I'm ready to learn from them if they can provide something worth to be learned, and so far you haven't done that.

    In the merit of the discussion, I roughly know what Keynesian economics is about - and with "roughly" I mean that there is surely much I could still learn, but from the top of my head I do know it's about significant government intervention to stimulate the economy/ reduce unemployment, as opposed to laissez-faire, and the catch up phrase to make that point is something like "government paying to dig a hole and then to cover it back"- what I was unsure about was you pointing it out in that particular context.
     
  9. Ender Sai

    Ender Sai Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2001
    It's a bit of an oversimplification of what Keynes did. In effectively inventing the concepts of modern fiscal and money policy, Keynes was able to figure out how to control peaks and more critically, troughs to the point where we haven't had a repeat of the 1929 move from recession to depression as a result. But Keynes fell out of favour with 1970s stagflation which is why in pariticular the Milton Friedman school of thought took off. Which was at its peak in terms of irony when the lassiez-faire US Reagan admin used Keynesian economics to boost the US economy through defence spending.

    He also effectively birthed the mixed economy by not just conceiving of fiscal and monetary policy conceptually but by designing optimal levels of state involvement to keep unemployment as close to a theoretical 0 point (usually 4-5% unemployment) as possible.

    The reason it is material that Krugman is a Keynesian economist is that Keynes, unlike Marx, is an economist who solutions to problems worked. Marx, in terms of raw advocacy of ideas to resolve the problems he identified, never rises above woefully inept. So Krugman has tethered himself to a winning horse, and the only real criticism I'd make of Keynes is that controlling the troughs avoids the cleansing potential of a massive depression. Similar to the way in which bushfires promote bush regeneration, it's the application of Schumpeter's idea of Creative Destruction to market economics. The downside of course is the massive human cost, which may be necessary but nobody - me included - would want to pay that price.
     
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  10. Ghost

    Ghost Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Oct 13, 2003
    https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/th...aiwan-leaving-everyone-vulnerable-11624075400

    One Taiwanese company manufactures 92% of world’s microchips - this is too much power for one company. Especially one based on a small island in the middle of geopolitical tension and a potential battleground between superpowers.

    What can be done about it, to help other companies compete against such a giant? Or at least to make this company spread its manufacturing to other places?
     
    Darth Smurf, Sarge and 3sm1r like this.
  11. 3sm1r

    3sm1r Force Ghost star 6

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    Dec 27, 2017
    Apperently making chips is prohibitively complicated, so it must be tough to be and stay competitive.
     
  12. Sarge

    Sarge Chosen One star 10

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    Oct 4, 1998
    When is the price of lumber going to come down? I need to rebuild my dock!
     
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  13. Ender Sai

    Ender Sai Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2001
    Taiwan has always had to maintain a strong economic footprint to help it carve out a niche against China, who seek to deny the reality of Taiwan's existence as a country. Taiwan originally started as a place for cheap labour, and most of us of my age will have had their childhood toys imprinted with the words "Made in Taiwan." But cheap labour is not an infinite resource, as it contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more an economy succeeds off the back of the labour, the more wages go up and the less "cheap" the labour is.

    The KMT government in the 1960s invested heavily in building out an electronics market, based on the success Japan was having. This was smart, i.e. the opposite of what the mid-rank Army Officer and the Bus Driver did in Venezuela. Cheap labour wouldn't last for ever, Taiwan needed to move into specialised industries where excellence in the field would make you world leading. So they did.

    TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) pioneered so many innovations in chipsets (the idea of fabless manufacturing is theirs, breaking the vertically integrated model in favour of outsourced component construction) that nobody else was even trying to get close to that it got to this point because nobody was trying to compete. The closest to my knowledge is Samsung, but they're still a long way off TSMC and UMC's share of market.

    The simple reality is that if anyone's going to compete it's going to need billions of dollars of investment, or the equivalent in state funding via tax breaks etc to set up a rival base. You'd need to poach top engineers and designers to get the know how in house, and be prepared to try and fail on the route to taking them down. If I were the KMT or DPP, I wouldn't want to break TSMC or UMC up, so the answer has to lie in the market. Samsung's destroyed Apple's dominance of the handset market, so there's precedent for it. Right now I think people are put off by trying to get up to the quality of Taiwanese output in a reasonable timeframe.

    Lumber futures are down >40% in June, and last I saw is that the price per board square feet (why can't you people just do metric! :p) is expected to stabilise at $600 (peak was $1700).
     
    Last edited: Jun 22, 2021
    Ghost likes this.
  14. Ender Sai

    Ender Sai Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2001
    I'm not sure if the JC's silly enough to believe rent control is a good thing or not, but I see a lot of left talking points pushing rent control as a serious policy alternative and not a joke given its known history of failure.

    Just in case anyone thinks it's a good idea, here:
    https://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/
     
  15. anakinfansince1983

    anakinfansince1983 Skywalker Saga/LFL/YJCC Manager star 10 Staff Member Manager

    Registered:
    Mar 4, 2011
    The NPR podcast Throughline is doing a series about capitalism. I just listened to the first episode while out on my bike, and it’s really good:

    Link

    Vivek Chibber is my favorite. Ghodsee had some good points, particularly about capitalism devaluing work like caretaking, but she also brought up lower fertility as if it were a problem as opposed to a necessity if we’re going to save the planet.

    The two of them going after Cato Institute buddy Caplan was glorious. Caplan actually put forth the idea that as long as poor people are better off than they were 100 years ago, everything is fine and we bear no responsibility as a society to help them any further.

    The panel did distinguish between the American version of “poor people can get ****ed while I go to Mars” capitalism and what Ender calls “cuddly capitalism,” which was worthwhile.
     
  16. VadersLaMent

    VadersLaMent Chosen One star 10

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    Apr 3, 2002
  17. VadersLaMent

    VadersLaMent Chosen One star 10

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    Apr 3, 2002
  18. Sarge

    Sarge Chosen One star 10

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    Oct 4, 1998
    What I want to know is, can you loan me fifty bucks? I'll pay you back Tuesday.
     
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  19. Ghost

    Ghost Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Oct 13, 2003