While I've been laid up, I've been reading Krugman and Wells' introductory economics text. (I've been aware that there are gaps in my basic understanding of economic principles, and if I'm going to read an intro text, then why not the best, you know?) The book is wonderfully clear and well-written, and introduces a lot of key ideas pretty early in the going.
Which is a good thing, because I'm not very far in yet. But the book is already giving me a framework to think about economic issues that I didn't have before. For instance, K&W ask, "How do we know how well [a market] economy is doing?" The yardstick they give is whether that economy is using its resources efficiently: "Economists say an economy's resources are used efficiently when they are used in a way that has fully exploited all opportunities to make everyone better off. To put it another way, an economy is efficient if it takes all opportunities to make some people better off without making other people worse off." (Emphasis in original.)
Putting it like that tells you right away that our economy is doing a pretty crappy job right now: we have plenty of work that needs doing and isn't getting done (just in terms of crumbling infrastructure alone), and lots of people who have no work. We have not fully exploited all opportunities to make everyone better off - far, far from it. The notion that our economy's doing what it should, and that it's just going to take time to work things through, is wrong - our economy is leaving massive amounts of unused resources on the table, and as a result, wasting big chunks of the lives of millions of Americans.
It would be nice if one of the two major parties still considered high unemployment to be enough of a problem to actually talk about it on a regular basis.
Yglesias asks what Americans have less of than they used to. Krugman answers, time. Glad to hear him say it, because while it's been one of my main axes to grind for maybe 15 years now, it's never been on the political radar at all, and more people read Krugman than read me. But I'll say it again: enshrine two weeks' vacation and one week's sick leave in the law. Who could disagree with that? And overtime shouldn't be a free resource for employers, excepting only workers making a few multiples of the median wage.
If the government needs more revenue, a financial transactions tax would be a good place to start.
Bobby Jindal wants to increase taxes on 80% of Louisiana residents in order to finance a tax cut on the rich. He won't be the GOP nominee in 2016 no matter what K-Drum thinks, more's the pity: the ads would write themselves. But to borrow a riff from Atrios, I'm old enough to remember when the GOP wanted to cut taxes for everyone (they'd cut taxes for the rich a lot more, of course, but they'd at least cut everyone's taxes to some degree). Yet over the past year or two, it seems to have hardened into GOP dogma that the moochers and takers aren't paying enough taxes and should be paying more, in addition to the continuing orthodoxy that the rich are paying too much in taxes and should be paying less.
Good luck with that message at election time, guys.
Open thread.
Does K&W have anything to say about the "zero marginal product worker" concept that's so fashionable among libertarians and other conservatives?
Posted by: Lori | January 27, 2013 at 09:01 PM
l-t c,
Very impressed with the self-improvement efforts. I found microeconomics pretty challenging in college. I seemed to have a better feel for macro. I suspect that this might be one area where decades of work might actually be helpful in understanding the abstractions.
Glad you are on the mend.
I continue to be up to my eyeballs in work -- had to spend the day in the office today. Hopefully going to catch a little bit of a break later in the month.
Posted by: Sir Charles | January 27, 2013 at 09:11 PM
l-t c: So glad to see you bring up the issue of time. Americans are the most overworked people in Western industrialized democracies. I ranted about this six years ago, and the only thing that has gotten better since is that more people have free time because they're unemployed. :-/
Posted by: Lex | January 28, 2013 at 09:03 AM
boy scouts are close to ending ban on gay members and leaders. and it's about damned time.
Posted by: kathy a. | January 28, 2013 at 03:37 PM
I was a Boy Scout during my pre-teen years, and enjoyed it tremendously. I hope they are indeed getting a clue about this, because I think my son would enjoy Scouting too (hell, we were hiking in the woods, a frequent pastime of ours, when I blew out my Achilles tendon the other day) - but I wouldn't even suggest it as long as they exclude gays.
Posted by: low-tech cyclist | January 28, 2013 at 06:04 PM
l-tc and Lex -- Yes, there are the hours in the day time loss. Then there is the how-long-must-one-work time loss. My spouse, who *retired* originally in 2000, just prior to the tech-bubble burst, went back to a post #4 in his working life due to substantial retirement fund losses. He's still at it and reluctant to do the final bail from the work force -- academic that he is. He's not alone. Time enough to retire safely? Possibly. But once one leaves, nada mas payroll check. Another category of "less time."
Forever employment. Overworked in a different sense. He loves teaching, loves his work, but at some point... And of course, some younger academic reasonably awaits a retirement.
Another wrinkle. A different cohort.
Posted by: nancy | January 29, 2013 at 12:09 AM
On another topic, I'm disappointed, but not surprised, to note that, at the end of last week, they overpromised what the filibuster 'reform' would do.
Specifically, they said it would limit debate on sub-cabinet level executive branch appointees and district court nominees, which would have been a tangible step forward: it would have guaranteed up-or-down votes on such nominees.
But now that the text is up on THOMAS, it's clear that only post-cloture debate is limited.
Not that that's totally useless - using the 30 hours of post-cloture debate on each nominee was one way the GOP used up big chunks of time in 2010 to gum up the works and limit the number of nominees that Obama could get through the Senate, even when they'd been approved by huge majorities - but in a session of Congress where the Senate will have plenty of time to consider nominees, getting to cloture in the first place is the key step.
Which reminds me of my earlier point: a citizen shouldn't have to understand all this crap to have a clue about why his government is fucked up.
Posted by: low-tech cyclist | January 29, 2013 at 09:24 AM
It's being reported that a unique, highly valuable, & irreplaceable library in Timbuktu has been torched.
Hat tip, Sully.
Posted by: oddjob | January 29, 2013 at 01:13 PM
On another topic, I'm disappointed, but not surprised, to note that, at the end of last week, they overpromised what the filibuster 'reform' would do...
Which reminds me of my earlier point: a citizen shouldn't have to understand all this crap to have a clue about why his government is fucked up.
Indeed not, which is why it's fair to excuse anyone who has concluded that the whole point might be to own a government in suffocating stasis.
Lone Ranger joke one-off comes to mind -- "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."
Posted by: nancy | January 29, 2013 at 07:08 PM
O/T. I know some of these people: a game of tag that has lasted for 23 years. One participant was my son's so-so math teacher. Looks like his mind was semi-elsewhere. :)
Posted by: nancy | January 29, 2013 at 10:04 PM
Turns out the *tag* story was at the top of reddit today. I suspect it speaks happily to friendship, history, aging and camaraderie. 'You're it.' Long term playful attachments -- we could sure use more of that these days.
Posted by: nancy | January 30, 2013 at 12:26 AM
For l-t c:
http://xkcd.com/552/
:)
Posted by: oddjob | January 30, 2013 at 11:20 AM