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While the statisticians and political wonks keep saying and trying t prove the economy is doing great - better than ever. The average joes and Janes are looking at their personal finances, their towns and their friends and saying - "No it is not"
People can say everything is rosy and quote stats until they are blue in the face. However if your local businesses are still struggling and closing, your family is struggling like never before and our friends and acquaintances are all right there with you, the stats are not going to convince anyone. Everyone is pretty much aware by now that stats get twisted and data manipulated or improperly collects so you can us it to "prove" whatever you want it to.
The economy is flat, it seems that no one except maybe the uber rich are doing as well as they were eight to ten years ago. There is little indication things will get better any time soon.
Yes there are help wanted signs all over, but most are for part time minimum wage jobs, or part time barely over minimum wage jobs. Raises and bonuses are a fraction of what they were and family expenses, especially health insurance and medical costs have skyrocketed.
Statisticians can point to this or that data and tell me 'You are all doing better than ever before, but that does not put money in our bank accounts that is not there and it does not reduce or eliminate any skyrocketing expenses.
There are lots of jobs in the trades, but for whatever reason it is exceedingly difficult to get into the training programs. Some people speculate it is intentional to maintain the labor shortage in trades and drive up labor rates. No idea if that is true. However the trades are not going to solve the economic malaise, even if they do eventually open the doors to the training programs.
Outside of trades, engineering, and a few other specific areas, the market is generally terrible. In part we have an imbalance. Too many lawyers, MBAs, computer game designers, and psychology majors, not enough pipe-fitters, electricians, welders, engineers or computer programmers (lots of IT people around, but not too many coders). However very few jobs seem to be paying anywhere near as well as they did ten years ago.
In my profession (law) first years are starting at or near the same wage I started at in 1988. I have heard there are 100,000 admitted lawyers unemployed or bartending/selling shoes while they look for work. Engineers are in demand, but the pay is not worth celebrating and they rarely move up much, or at least not very quickly (most of my younger friends are engineers).
While the statisticians and political wonks keep saying and trying t prove the economy is doing great - better than ever. The average joes and Janes are looking at their personal finances, their towns and their friends and saying - "No it is not"
This is the worst possible way to support a position on either side... you are basically saying you have some remarkable insight with your finger on the pulse of the average American's viewpoints that quashes any of the more scientific attempts to reach conclusions on the same issue. The United States has 330 million people, how many have you talked to about the economy?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Coldjensens
The economy is flat, it seems that no one except maybe the uber rich are doing as well as they were eight to ten years ago. There is little indication things will get better any time soon.
False. The economy has been growing slowly, much slower than in other recoveries but definitely not flat.
False. There are plenty of people doing just fine who aren't uber rich, including me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Coldjensens
Yes there are help wanted signs all over, but most are for part time minimum wage jobs, or part time barely over minimum wage jobs. Raises and bonuses are a fraction of what they were and family expenses, especially health insurance and medical costs have skyrocketed.
You have locked your "analysis" into looking at help wanted signs, which indeed are often for lower paying jobs, and displaced that as representative of the job market as a whole. There are millions of workers who didn't get their job from seeing a help wanted sign.
There are lots of jobs in the trades, but for whatever reason it is exceedingly difficult to get into the training programs. Some people speculate it is intentional to maintain the labor shortage in trades and drive up labor rates. No idea if that is true. However the trades are not going to solve the economic malaise, even if they do eventually open the doors to the training programs.
Outside of trades, engineering, and a few other specific areas, the market is generally terrible. In part we have an imbalance. Too many lawyers, MBAs, computer game designers, and psychology majors, not enough pipe-fitters, electricians, welders, engineers or computer programmers (lots of IT people around, but not too many coders). However very few jobs seem to be paying anywhere near as well as they did ten years ago.
In my profession (law) first years are starting at or near the same wage I started at in 1988. I have heard there are 100,000 admitted lawyers unemployed or bartending/selling shoes while they look for work. Engineers are in demand, but the pay is not worth celebrating and they rarely move up much, or at least not very quickly (most of my younger friends are engineers).
Doubt that.
First year associates are making $180,000/yr now. I really doubt they were starting at half that in 1988. The problem is there's tens of thousands more would-be first year's with a shiny new bar card than there are legal jobs for them all to be employed. For the least qualified, that's an issue. At the low end it's between pulling espresso at Starbucks and taking whatever crap one can get. One of the reasons I avoided going to law school. I'd be fighting for the crap or pulling espressos. More people are realizing that which is why the fourh-rate law schools can't fill seats but there's still plenty of suckers and people relying on nepotism where it's just pro forma.
Trickle-down economics does not work. It's been proven before, and there's quite a good chance that it's about to be proven again. If you are an average Joe or Jane, your economic enemies have names like Reagan, Bush, Romney, and Trump. If you keep letting them scare you with silly nonsense diversions and fluff, your situation will not soon get any better.
The American Economy is - comparatively speaking and in pure economic terms - doing quite well.
Though, it's undoubtedly been rough for those involved in routine-based work and that's a problem that is going to need to be addressed heading into the future. Before that's addressed I have a difficult time calling the state of the American economy 'good', unqualified: it's clearly unprepared for a shift to a more cognitively-intensive economy: a shift that, frankly, has been obvious for the last two decades, and successive governments have just ignored.
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Originally Posted by Malloric
One of the reasons I avoided going to law school.
That graduates from first-rate schools can get jobs sounds better than what's happened in my country.
I can recall working at a call center where one of my colleagues was a law school graduate - graduated with a LLM from our top 2 school and then passed the bar*. He found somewhere to take him on right before I left but before he'd had been unable to get work close to a year. I know someone else - former vice-chair of our FLAC society - who has a LLM from our number one school and, two years out, she works as a legal secretary for the county-council. The culture inside law firms here is also really rough on the newly initiated, and they just take it because the competition for the place to begin with is cut-throat.
So, despite being eligible to take the bar in a few months (when I graduate) I have zero plans to go near it. Thankfully I opted for a double degree.
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* I live in a country where you did law as an undergraduate degree course before attending law school.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pub-911
Trickle-down economics does not work. It's been proven before, and there's quite a good chance that it's about to be proven again.
I can never be sure what someone means when they invoke the phrase 'Trickle-down Economics' - it's as much a snarl word as 'voodoo-economics' (or 'neoliberalism' for that matter) - but, unless you believe that Kaldor-Verdoon's Law holds**, I have no idea how you can regard improvement on the supply-side as being incapable of improving net welfare.
You might, for example, have an issue with the distribution of that welfare - i.e. growth tends to be majority appropriated by the rich - but so far as growth-theory is concerned, the supplyside is all there is***.
Misallocation of resources is also the largest inhibitor of growth (Jones 2015, etc.).
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** In such a case, that can be addressed.
*** Yes, I have read Keynes (OK, I lied, but I have read contemporary neo-Keynesian business cycle literature) and if that's your response, you probably haven't read him. The demand-side is only consequential insofar as the short-run business cycle is concerned. In orthodox theory it is presumed that the economy is in equilibrium in the long-run, either because of market mechanisms, or when that's operating at a reduced pace, government stimulus.
Last edited by I Notice Romance; 12-01-2016 at 11:47 AM..
I don't think there's all that much mystery involved in trickle-down economics. As described by proponents, you give lots of money to people who already have lots of money, and then that money somehow finds its way from those people to other people who previously did not have lots of money at all. The logic and mechanics of the migration are left unclear.
As for "voodoo economics," that was a term applied with some reason by George H.W. Bush to claims by Ronald W. Reagan that he was about to cut income taxes, crank up military spending, and balance the budget within three years.
That unhinged sort of claim is not uncommon in the world of magical economics, a place where high-falutin' terms are often developed and applied to perfectly ordinary observations -- such as that there is some general and perhaps even regionally persistent relationship between labor productivity and output. No one should be surprised by this.
Similarly with misallocation, a thing that no one would endorse, but that borderline and dyed-in-the-wool heterodoxers are indeed fond of worrying and wailing over. Certainly Ron Paul bored many a Congressional hearing with such diversions, and I have another such just a tick down the road from me here in the mysterious Tyler Cowen. The best rule I have found is to let these people talk, but to have other people standing by who can attend to all the listening.
The logic and mechanics of the migration are left unclear.
People with cash have four options.
Invest it. This results in an increase in capital accumulation (physical or human). If physical-capital deepening occurs then labor becomes more efficient and compensation rises. If it invests rather in labor then the increase in labor demand results in an increase in compensation. In some cases it will be invested in R&D which has long-run consequences for wage growth. Lots of modern research points to agglomerations which can result in second-order effects making this even more attractive.
Save it. In such a case the cost of loan-able funds declines and it facilitates investment by individuals who can make more productive use of the cash. Re: above. Recall that the financial system exists to transfer surplus capital to those in need of it.
Spend it on Consumption. I imagine this is what you want working-class people to do with it. So I see no reason to defend it.
Purchase goods from abroad or Invest abroad. In such a case demand for foreign currency increases and supply of the domestic currency falls. Recall that the capital and current account balance each other - So you can fill in the gaps with what was described above.
It is most efficient that people invest their money as this results in increased levels of capital accumulation and technological progress - C and Y, respectively, in the Solow model - which drives long-run growth. That's the reason that giving tax cuts to richer people - with a higher propensity to save and invest - is more efficient than giving it to poorer people. Though, for equity reasons, it's obviously not a good idea to put all your stock in this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pub-911
As for "voodoo economics," that was a term applied with some reason by George H.W. Bush to claims by Ronald W. Reagan that he was about to cut income taxes, crank up military spending, and balance the budget within three years.
Yes. Reagan was obviously off his rocker.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pub-911
That unhinged sort of claim is not uncommon in the world of magical economics, a place where high-falutin' terms are often developed and applied to perfectly ordinary observations -- such as that there is some general and perhaps even regionally persistent relationship between labor productivity and output. No one should be surprised by this.
If you are trying to conflate what I am defending with the idea outlined in the paragraph above you're incorrect - and, honestly, rather baffling.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pub-911
Similarly with misallocation, a thing that no one would endorse, but that borderline and dyed-in-the-wool heterodoxers are indeed fond of worrying and wailing over.
This is just an ad hominem.
In Growth Economics the consequences of the misallocation have been at the forefront of the field for more than the last decade. Jones (2016: 2.6 & 4.6 - 4.12) is a good and non-technical summary since I don't have the time myself right now to provide an exhaustive overview of the field.
I suggest you google the names of the individual scholars for their research affiliations and the realization that none of them are heterodox authors*.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pub-911
The best rule I have found is to let these people talk, but to have other people standing by who can attend to all the listening.
It's worth noting that through your multiple ad hominems in this paragraph you didn't begin to address the point at all.
Last edited by I Notice Romance; 12-01-2016 at 02:40 PM..
The non-seasonally adjusted (the one that includes holiday jobs) population to employee ratio is 59.9%. If that could edge up to 60% by December, I'd be pleased.
Hours per job are 34.4. Oddly enough, ten years ago, it was 33.7. Weird that people think the economy is nothing more than part-time jobs. U-6 is 9.3%. Maybe the reason more folks want to work full-time is that there's more cool stuff to buy. Ten years ago, nobody even had a smart phone.
The non-seasonally adjusted (the one that includes holiday jobs) population to employee ratio is 59.9%. If that could edge up to 60% by December, I'd be pleased.
Hours per job are 34.4. Oddly enough, ten years ago, it was 33.7. Weird that people think the economy is nothing more than part-time jobs. U-6 is 9.3%. Maybe the reason more folks want to work full-time is that there's more cool stuff to buy. Ten years ago, nobody even had a smart phone.
There were a lot of cool houses to buy 10 years ago.
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