Yeah, I used to believe that too. But it’s not true; American workers are shockingly productive compared to European ones, even when you take hours worked into account. And having worked for a German company in the past, I can see exactly why (too long to go into here).
Owner’s Equivalent Rent for measuring housing inflation is the clowniest, most useless way of computing that in the universe. Owners mostly have no goddamn idea how much it’d cost to rent their own place. I bet if you asked (and the gummint does) the owner and compared that to the actual rent they could get those owners would be off by 40%+.
Maybe the various levels and layers of wrongness balance out. But I doubt it. And even if so, why should we depend on that? Just a terrible, terrible metric.
A $5 shake in 1994 is $10.73 now. The place down the road I order shakes from charges $6.50 I believe.
Noah is correct. The “China cycle” was widely denied because believing it was real was associated with racism, partly due a very successful Chinese propaganda operation focused on PMC liberals that equated believing in the cycle with such. That influence operation worked and was fairly brilliantly done by the CCP in that it got a lot of bang for the buck renminbi.
Those days are mostly over now, so you no longer roundly get accused of racism when the Chinese do something harmful or at least not very nice and get called out on it.
Though they don’t usually complain about this specifically, the one bit of NIMBY griping I agree with is construction noise. It is terrible, long-lasting, and hugely disruptive. Especially since I sleep at odd hours, it is particularly disturbing to me and my oddball non-schedule.
There is not likely to be any nearby construction in the neighborhood where we bought anytime soon but I’d sure dread it if that ever came to pass. No, I would not oppose it, but if it were something that was going to last years as much construction does I’d strongly consider just moving.
That was mostly due to WFH and will not look so rosy as RTO becomes more entrenched. Most of the gain is due to people being more productive working from home, both in absolute terms and because they work longer hours. MBA types don’t care about productivity, though; they are concerned with power.
It is worrying that countries like Germany, Canada and the UK have thrown their whole economies in the toilet and don’t seem inclined to do much about it. We were strongly considering immigrating to Canada, but with their downward trajectory it’s not even a real option any longer.
The US at least is on some sort of track to try to correct the worst of this tendency to self-destruction. But if we could just defeat rampant NIMBYism, we could do a whole lot better.
“Hollow out” is a good way to put it. Economists tell us that NAFTA was a net benefit to everyone. They have pretty little charts and graphs to “prove” it. However, those do not take into account much of the actual economic effects, the political follow-on impacts, the foreign policy implications, international competitiveness effects, or the necessity of domestic production and supply chains in the case of war.
Economics, therefore, captures maybe 10-20% of what’s important about trade agreements like NAFTA while lying about it in the name of the plutocrats the entire time. Good work.
My assessment is that Harris will be slightly better than Biden for Ukraine, while Trump will be substantially worse. And one big reason is that the Trump campaign is being indirectly bankrolled and assisted by Russian money and propaganda, and to a lesser extent by the Chinese as well.
Trump is loyal to one thing, and that is cold hard currency. He’ll never quite be Putin’s lapdog, but he’ll be tame enough as long as the money spigot keeps flowing. And that’ll mean bad things for Ukraine.
Most NIMBYs are liberals, so that makes sense. Though some of the worst NIMBYs are on the right, absolute numbers matter; that 80%+ of NIMBYs lean left means that in blue cities, not a damn thing gets built.
Which might have an actual positive effect (not overall) in this way: the non-affluent are forced out and into swing states. And these people are more likely to vote Democrat.
Coupons are a time tax on the less affluent that allows companies to price differentiate based on ability to pay — with plausible deniability as anyone can use a coupon.
Want to see pure evil? Well here you go:
No, this is not correct. There is very much a tradeoff, definitionally. “Allocative efficiency” refers to producing goods and services that meet consumer demand, e.g. producing the colors of cars that people want to buy. It is future-oriented, generally. However, Pareto efficiency (rather, optimality) is where a person cannot be made better off without making someone else worse off. The two concepts are related (sometimes) but not the same thing at all. To expand that thought a bit, Pareto efficiency is about finding the correct balance between allocative and productive efficiency, not just concentrating on allocative efficiency alone1.
The person who wrote that is confused and should read their textbooks again, but more closely this time.
As recently as five years ago, this was widely said to be impossible. But it turned out to not even be that hard, considering. (This is per capita, but still very positive.)
Billionaire Donors Have It Out for This Legal Prodigy, but President Harris Will Need Her.
If Harris wins and fires Khan, that will be a huge unforced error. I’m glad that seems to be off the table now. Obviously, it’s great that billionaires hate Lina; it means she is doing her job correctly. She’s the best thing that has happened to the FTC in ages.
I’m biased as I’m a Khan OG; I’ve been reading her papers and work since she was still in law school. And she’s a good example that wisdom has little do to do with age. She’s only 35 now, but became FTC chair when she was 32. And she was incredibly smart and wise already when I started reading her when she was 23.
Just shows how busted that whole discourse is, really (to veer completely off-topic).