This is what I - and many-many-many others - are currently experiencing:
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More people than most think.
For most people, one big bill or missed paycheque is all it would take to leave them devastated. And it’s ridiculously easy for that to happen.
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Economics really strikes me as suffering from the “Assume a perfectly spherical cow in a frictionless vacuum” problem. Pretty much all the standard ideas are based on logic and rationality that assumes a truly free market full of fully-informed perfectly-rational participants on equal footing, doing game theory calculations as they trade. The whole science is basically a study of how and how badly those ideals fail in the real world, and wild guesses about how to deal with that (like the optimal unemployment rate or inflation rate) and even guesses about how to calculate those things (like which ‘basket of goods and services’ is representative of actual costs of living, or which combination of unemployed and underemployed people should be counted in the unemployment rate).
That’s how we end up with things like ‘record low unemployment’ while more people are out of work than any time since the Great Depression, or ‘record low inflation’ while people’s major basic living expenses (housing, healthcare, education) are skyrocketing at unprecedented rates but wages remain stagnant. The theories and math all work out just fine as long as you don’t have to acknowledge that one pesky flukish outlier known as reality.
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The whole “rational” thing has been under question for a long time, too, because people don’t behave “rationally”. Or they do, but they don’t behave like an economist sitting at his desk.
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It forms the basis of a well-known joke:
A physicist, an engineer and an economist are stranded in the desert. They are hungry. Suddenly, they find a can of corn. They want to open it, but how?
The physicist says: “Let’s start a fire and place the can inside the flames. It will explode and then we will all be able to eat”.
“Are you crazy?” says the engineer. “All the corn will burn and scatter, and we’ll have nothing. We should use a metal wire, attach it to a base, push it and crack the can open.”
“Both of you are wrong!” states the economist. “Where the hell do we find a metal wire in the desert?! The solution is simple: ASSUME we have a can opener”…
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A friend of mine does indexing for books and ends up doing lots of Economic books.
He’s convinced that the only people who must truly understand economics know enough to not write books about it.
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Or in some cases, even fully understanding it… Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, and much of what he said wasn’t what many right wing economists say he meant… he was very much pro-regulation, and very much concerned with the moral consequences of economic activity. He would likely be horrified by how terms like “the invisible hand” are deployed by people looking to excuse human degradation. It’s an incredibly selective reading of Smith that is projecting their own biases back into the past…
That’s what made Marx so ground breaking, that he wanted to ground everything in material evidence, rather than assume that the theory is the thing itself.
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I dunno, Marx made a lot of weird gender assumptions though – like assuming women had never worked outside the home prior to the Industrial Revolution. (Karl, look at a Breugel painting!)
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Sure, and he also made some erroneous assumptions about non-Europeans as well. Plus, he was rather teleological in his thought processes, which can be limiting. I’m not saying that marx got everything right, but he gave us a good foundation to build off of, at the very least. Grounding an analysis in how things actually are (the material conditions of life) instead of some ideal is a great place to start. We can certainly take that lens and use it to discuss things he either dismissed or ignored, like race and gender.
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the nature of capital has yet to settle, so it makes sense that understanding happens only in retrospect.
what i take issue with is how confident people are in economists’ theories, despite those theories seeming so often wrong
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Capital In the Twenty-First Century pointed out that published economists whose theories politicians like, mostly tend to be privileged fucks who went to elite schools, rubbed shoulders with the rich, and wrote papers justifying whatever the rich wanted.
(Or maybe that was in one of Listen, Liberal’s rants about “meritocracy”. Bit of both?)
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It’s been a thing since the rehabilitation of Ricardo.
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Um…pretty sure the Constitution is clear in levying taxes is the sole purview of Congress. Yup, Article 1, Section 8.
Pelosi needs to begin impeachment investigation ASAP. I’d call this an abuse of power, but it’s not even a power enumerated to the Executive Branch.
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G/O is getting blowed up.
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I know that banks have long-since blown up the original definition of “vice-president” being someone who is expected to act in the president’s stead… but still, holy crap does G/O Media have a lot of people with that title.
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THIS BITCH…or both of them, if you like.
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Yes, it’s Gizmodo, but this is horrible:
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Talk about wasting an opportunity.
Accessibility generally makes sites better for disabled users and everyone else. Unless Dominos wants their web site to be difficult to use to maintain dark usability patterns or something (ie: encourage people to inadvertently order more than they meant to), there is no excuse.
And if they do, well, that’s just justifying being unethical.
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