Concerning the US Protests and Our Rules
- Thread starter Plykiya
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@Halo so going by that logic, we should get rid of all surgeons then due to a few bad apples? You know how stupid that sounds. Maybe if people wouldn't be such assholes, the police wouldn't have to get physical. So the police are supposed to stand there getting pelted with rocks and bricks while the city burns to the ground. That's a load of bs and you know it. They can peacefully protest all day long but as soon as they start throwing rocks, brick, smashing windows, burning cars and buildings and looting, all bets are off. They don't have the right to riot and loot and if they do, whatever they get, they deserve.
Oh and newsflash, there are crap people in every profession. You can't just dismantle a profession every time some asshole does something stupid.
Oh and newsflash, there are crap people in every profession. You can't just dismantle a profession every time some asshole does something stupid.
@a-rabid-velociraptor "a few bad apples" heh, good meme. I almost thought you were serious.
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@Tamerlane First, it might not be a problem if everyone was progressively getting more and more well off. Unfortunately, they aren't, and haven't been for some time. Economics is not a zero-sum game, but it's a matter of degree. If the economy grows 2%, and 1% of the people increase their take by 3% of the economy, then the other 99% saw a small reduction, in which case it's close enough to zero-sum for their purposes.
And that is in fact how things have been operating for several decades, although there's been a lot of fudging of statistics to try to avoid admitting it. The United States government has adopted methodologies which consistently understate inflation, for instance, a notorious example being substitution in food baskets; if the price of steak goes up and people can be assumed to have substituted some cheaper form of meat at the old price for steak, that wasn't inflation. Worse, discussions of income growth often refer to core inflation, which leaves out shitloads of stuff that has increased in price faster. You'll often see people talking about average incomes growing when that tells nothing about who the income is going to, mentions of household income that ignore changes in how many wage-earners are in a household, and so on and so forth. Mind you, inflation has still been low in recent decades no matter how you measure, but if you understate it even 1/8% per year, over 40 years flat wages would actually be a 5% pay cut, plus compounding. Even with all these distortions, what is most often seen when incomes are talked about half-seriously is the appearance that wages at the median have stagnated, staying about the same or growing a tiny bit, since the mid 70s or so (while those at the top have grown several hundred percent). But if you look at everything, start to incorporate changes in taxation and redistribution transfers by government, changes in expenses that aren't included in most inflation measures such as user fees for government services, measure inflation more accurately etc. and look at where people end up, you find that the lowest incomes have gone down quite a bit, everyone up to about the 70th percentile has gone down some, while the top 1% and, far more so, top 0.1%, have seen huge increases. This makes a stat that's been much harder to hide a lot easier to understand: The massive shift in wealth from the bottom to the top, where the majority in the US hold far less wealth than they used to, while the top hold hugely more--as percentages, but even in simple dollars per person. If income were stagnating one might expect wealth to stagnate; one reason it actually hasn't is that incomes have mostly dropped rather than stagnating. Of course this doesn't really mean any given individual's income has dropped; individuals tend to start at lower incomes and eventually get better jobs, promotions and so on as they get older. What it means is that if you look at any given age group, they're doing worse than people of that age 40 years ago--again, except at the top of the wealth distribution. This is in fact the case, and most clearly the case for millennials and younger.
Although, even if the lifting-all-boats hypothesis were the case, I think the coronavirus has made fairly clear that the value of work has relatively little to do with how much skill is required to do it. Many jobs without which society would grind to a halt require little skill, while many jobs that require a great deal of skill have either little economic impact or actually harm the economy (eg hedge fund manager, advertising executive). If "marketability" mandates that the less-valuable or even damaging job grants massive riches while the more-valuable job leaves people dependent on food stamps, this strikes me as an argument that "marketability" might not be the best way to decide compensation.
Your point about supply and demand for skills has some salience, but it doesn't make the skills explanation work. Again, show me the masses of jobs that demand some skills that people haven't been acquiring and are thus going unfilled. They don't exist. And if they did exist, it would be a big problem for market theories in the US. A great deal of US higher education is private. Surely people should be gravitating to educational institutions that supply the skills they need for employment, and the private education institutions, competing for students, should be dynamically shifting to supply those skills. Where's the theory that explains the basis for this supposed mismatch?
Your general conception of where jobs come from, though, strikes me as suffering from neglecting the issue of demand. Entrepreneurship, which doesn't strike me as a real economic concept at all, cannot create jobs arbitrarily. Jobs can only be created if someone would pay for their output. If people don't have the money to pay for that output, they won't, and either the job won't be created or whoever did create it will go out of business and it will disappear again. This is one reason distribution is important.
The NAIRU has pretty math, I'll give it that. But it doesn't actually happen in the real world the way the NAIRU predicts, so clearly the NAIRU neglects factors that are important which would change how the math works. We've recently had an unusually clear indication of that in perhaps the only useful thing Trump ever did. Until the pandemic hit, the US had actually been seeing a gradual decline in unemployment to levels unusually low by recent standards. Many at the Fed wanted to increase interest rates to head off the inevitable increase in inflation. Some people lobbied against this, and Trump, who is ignorant, didn't know enough about the conventional wisdom to understand how terrible it would be to let unemployment stay low, and was desperate to keep the economy looking positive until his election. So he insisted on keeping interest rates low, they stayed low, unemployment kept dropping to levels which absolutely for sure in the opinion of the Fed and many prominent economists were certain to lead to spiking inflation . . . and inflation stayed basically flat. So much for the NAIRU.
Hyperinflation is in any case not a real risk. Inflation, sure, but hyper not so much. All the cases of hyperinflation I have ever heard of involved the existence of very large debts denominated in outside currencies (or in gold, which is effectively an outside currency) and/or concerted attacks on the currency by speculators. It has never just been caused by an overinflated economy or even printing currency (although printing currency has often been involved--just not as the primary cause of the problem). Those can lead to inflation, certainly, but not hyperinflation.
The general point here is the same I was making about Gates: There is no "the economy" which functions a certain way and can be taken as a given. Institutions and society shape how things work all the way down. Not only that, but while the economics discipline mostly is engaged in the project of acting as if there were, powerful economic actors in practical terms mostly do not. As well as engaging in pseudo-maximizing behaviour on the playing field marked out by current rules, taken to be all about positive sum games, a very important part of what they do is about real maximizing by changing the rules and playing field itself, a process which is essentially more politics than economics and which economics generally ignores even the possibility of. And that latter process very often is essentially zero-sum, at least the way current elites play it. That is why, for instance, the wage share of the whole economy, once thought to be a constant, has been dropping since about the 80s.
So in specific if they can get central banks to increase profits, by depressing wages, by creating unemployment, by reducing economic growth via interest rate hikes--as rational self-interested actors they should be expected to do that. It might reduce the overall size of the pie, but if it more than makes up for it by increasing the take of the ones successfully lobbying, it's rational self-interest. Money spent buying laws and institutional behaviour tends to have rates of return vastly higher than money spent on normal investments. It would be failure to take such actions which would be hard to explain. And employers always seek to reduce wages, although when all of them are individually successful it creates a collective action problem of generally reduced demand.
Of course there is another wealthy group that benefits even more explicitly from very low inflation. Inflation in moderate amounts has no real impact on economic growth one way or another, but it has a redistributive effect--it takes away money from creditors and gives it to debtors, by making debts worth less. It also makes bonds less valuable since they have predefined yields, so bondholders have strong reason to prefer very low inflation and even risk deflation rather than allow inflation to eat up the value of their holdings.
Oh good lord, no I wasn't suggesting we reduce the work week to 20 hours tomorrow. What I was saying is that the main reason reduced work weeks rarely get considered at all is, again, that having spare people who can't get work disciplines the rest of the work force to accept lower wages. There isn't much other explanation for the fact that the work week has been held largely constant as productivity multiplied and most other factors changed significantly. And even if the explanation is something different, the fact remains it's a blind spot--economists who talk about job losses or even the rise of part-time work almost always assume that what constitutes a "job" is a constant, not something that could ever change in any way. So for instance, even if they say that the majority of work will end up part time and that is a huge problem, they are tacitly assuming that "full time" as currently understood will remain the minimum for making a living--the notion that that isn't hard-coded into the economy but might be a variable just does not come up.
And that is in fact how things have been operating for several decades, although there's been a lot of fudging of statistics to try to avoid admitting it. The United States government has adopted methodologies which consistently understate inflation, for instance, a notorious example being substitution in food baskets; if the price of steak goes up and people can be assumed to have substituted some cheaper form of meat at the old price for steak, that wasn't inflation. Worse, discussions of income growth often refer to core inflation, which leaves out shitloads of stuff that has increased in price faster. You'll often see people talking about average incomes growing when that tells nothing about who the income is going to, mentions of household income that ignore changes in how many wage-earners are in a household, and so on and so forth. Mind you, inflation has still been low in recent decades no matter how you measure, but if you understate it even 1/8% per year, over 40 years flat wages would actually be a 5% pay cut, plus compounding. Even with all these distortions, what is most often seen when incomes are talked about half-seriously is the appearance that wages at the median have stagnated, staying about the same or growing a tiny bit, since the mid 70s or so (while those at the top have grown several hundred percent). But if you look at everything, start to incorporate changes in taxation and redistribution transfers by government, changes in expenses that aren't included in most inflation measures such as user fees for government services, measure inflation more accurately etc. and look at where people end up, you find that the lowest incomes have gone down quite a bit, everyone up to about the 70th percentile has gone down some, while the top 1% and, far more so, top 0.1%, have seen huge increases. This makes a stat that's been much harder to hide a lot easier to understand: The massive shift in wealth from the bottom to the top, where the majority in the US hold far less wealth than they used to, while the top hold hugely more--as percentages, but even in simple dollars per person. If income were stagnating one might expect wealth to stagnate; one reason it actually hasn't is that incomes have mostly dropped rather than stagnating. Of course this doesn't really mean any given individual's income has dropped; individuals tend to start at lower incomes and eventually get better jobs, promotions and so on as they get older. What it means is that if you look at any given age group, they're doing worse than people of that age 40 years ago--again, except at the top of the wealth distribution. This is in fact the case, and most clearly the case for millennials and younger.
Although, even if the lifting-all-boats hypothesis were the case, I think the coronavirus has made fairly clear that the value of work has relatively little to do with how much skill is required to do it. Many jobs without which society would grind to a halt require little skill, while many jobs that require a great deal of skill have either little economic impact or actually harm the economy (eg hedge fund manager, advertising executive). If "marketability" mandates that the less-valuable or even damaging job grants massive riches while the more-valuable job leaves people dependent on food stamps, this strikes me as an argument that "marketability" might not be the best way to decide compensation.
Your point about supply and demand for skills has some salience, but it doesn't make the skills explanation work. Again, show me the masses of jobs that demand some skills that people haven't been acquiring and are thus going unfilled. They don't exist. And if they did exist, it would be a big problem for market theories in the US. A great deal of US higher education is private. Surely people should be gravitating to educational institutions that supply the skills they need for employment, and the private education institutions, competing for students, should be dynamically shifting to supply those skills. Where's the theory that explains the basis for this supposed mismatch?
Your general conception of where jobs come from, though, strikes me as suffering from neglecting the issue of demand. Entrepreneurship, which doesn't strike me as a real economic concept at all, cannot create jobs arbitrarily. Jobs can only be created if someone would pay for their output. If people don't have the money to pay for that output, they won't, and either the job won't be created or whoever did create it will go out of business and it will disappear again. This is one reason distribution is important.
The NAIRU has pretty math, I'll give it that. But it doesn't actually happen in the real world the way the NAIRU predicts, so clearly the NAIRU neglects factors that are important which would change how the math works. We've recently had an unusually clear indication of that in perhaps the only useful thing Trump ever did. Until the pandemic hit, the US had actually been seeing a gradual decline in unemployment to levels unusually low by recent standards. Many at the Fed wanted to increase interest rates to head off the inevitable increase in inflation. Some people lobbied against this, and Trump, who is ignorant, didn't know enough about the conventional wisdom to understand how terrible it would be to let unemployment stay low, and was desperate to keep the economy looking positive until his election. So he insisted on keeping interest rates low, they stayed low, unemployment kept dropping to levels which absolutely for sure in the opinion of the Fed and many prominent economists were certain to lead to spiking inflation . . . and inflation stayed basically flat. So much for the NAIRU.
Hyperinflation is in any case not a real risk. Inflation, sure, but hyper not so much. All the cases of hyperinflation I have ever heard of involved the existence of very large debts denominated in outside currencies (or in gold, which is effectively an outside currency) and/or concerted attacks on the currency by speculators. It has never just been caused by an overinflated economy or even printing currency (although printing currency has often been involved--just not as the primary cause of the problem). Those can lead to inflation, certainly, but not hyperinflation.
It is the intention and it is really the effect of what goes on. And how could it not be the intent? If the wealthy are, as economists believe everyone to be, efficient maximizers, they will seek to gain as much money and wealth as possible. If institutions, laws, politics, central banks, have impacts on the economy which can affect how much money they gain, then an important way to gain as much money and wealth as possible is to affect what those institutions do. And while it is true that there is money to be made by positive-sum games, growing the total size of the economy . . . there is also money to be made, often more and faster, by taking it from other people. So we should expect that the wealthy will attempt to shape the actions of institutions to take money from other people and give it to them. What else would they do?
The general point here is the same I was making about Gates: There is no "the economy" which functions a certain way and can be taken as a given. Institutions and society shape how things work all the way down. Not only that, but while the economics discipline mostly is engaged in the project of acting as if there were, powerful economic actors in practical terms mostly do not. As well as engaging in pseudo-maximizing behaviour on the playing field marked out by current rules, taken to be all about positive sum games, a very important part of what they do is about real maximizing by changing the rules and playing field itself, a process which is essentially more politics than economics and which economics generally ignores even the possibility of. And that latter process very often is essentially zero-sum, at least the way current elites play it. That is why, for instance, the wage share of the whole economy, once thought to be a constant, has been dropping since about the 80s.
So in specific if they can get central banks to increase profits, by depressing wages, by creating unemployment, by reducing economic growth via interest rate hikes--as rational self-interested actors they should be expected to do that. It might reduce the overall size of the pie, but if it more than makes up for it by increasing the take of the ones successfully lobbying, it's rational self-interest. Money spent buying laws and institutional behaviour tends to have rates of return vastly higher than money spent on normal investments. It would be failure to take such actions which would be hard to explain. And employers always seek to reduce wages, although when all of them are individually successful it creates a collective action problem of generally reduced demand.
Of course there is another wealthy group that benefits even more explicitly from very low inflation. Inflation in moderate amounts has no real impact on economic growth one way or another, but it has a redistributive effect--it takes away money from creditors and gives it to debtors, by making debts worth less. It also makes bonds less valuable since they have predefined yields, so bondholders have strong reason to prefer very low inflation and even risk deflation rather than allow inflation to eat up the value of their holdings.
Oh good lord, no I wasn't suggesting we reduce the work week to 20 hours tomorrow. What I was saying is that the main reason reduced work weeks rarely get considered at all is, again, that having spare people who can't get work disciplines the rest of the work force to accept lower wages. There isn't much other explanation for the fact that the work week has been held largely constant as productivity multiplied and most other factors changed significantly. And even if the explanation is something different, the fact remains it's a blind spot--economists who talk about job losses or even the rise of part-time work almost always assume that what constitutes a "job" is a constant, not something that could ever change in any way. So for instance, even if they say that the majority of work will end up part time and that is a huge problem, they are tacitly assuming that "full time" as currently understood will remain the minimum for making a living--the notion that that isn't hard-coded into the economy but might be a variable just does not come up.
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@a-rabid-velociraptor The swapping-cops-for-social-workers schtick is an idea I want to like, but I don't really trust social workers. Devil would be in the details; if it was another paternalistic setup people would just be trading cops shooting them for social workers taking their kids away. For me, the important thing is more that whatever is done has some control by and roots in the community being policed or social-workered or whatever. Let them decide for themselves how they want it to work.
On the question of whether police violence has, on average, followed protestor violence or preceded it--ie who starts it--there's a lot of anecdotes both ways. This is the biggest database I'm aware of for the "Cops tend to start it" position:
https://www.google.com/url?q=https:...558000&usg=AFQjCNGbHHR6A9EwdxU4EzkuR7rhj5BbJw
Mind you, I think in theory, the police are being paid handsomely to deal with stressful and dangerous situations. It's their job. Serve and protect, and all that. So they should fucking deal, especially since it's their damn fault in the first place that everyone's mad at them. It's not like any of them have gotten hurt; they're armoured up like crazy. I have little sympathy for the big tough cops acting out because their fee-fees are hurt.
You know, everyone knows being in a protest is dangerous 'cause the cops are violent; it's been like that forever. And in the US it is generally hard to get people to come together in any political cause. Yet now, masses of them are doing it anyway. I don't understand why some people seem to be able to tell themselves that it's all happening for no real reason. Not understanding what the reason is means just that--not understanding what it is, not that there isn't one.
On the question of whether police violence has, on average, followed protestor violence or preceded it--ie who starts it--there's a lot of anecdotes both ways. This is the biggest database I'm aware of for the "Cops tend to start it" position:
https://www.google.com/url?q=https:...558000&usg=AFQjCNGbHHR6A9EwdxU4EzkuR7rhj5BbJw
Mind you, I think in theory, the police are being paid handsomely to deal with stressful and dangerous situations. It's their job. Serve and protect, and all that. So they should fucking deal, especially since it's their damn fault in the first place that everyone's mad at them. It's not like any of them have gotten hurt; they're armoured up like crazy. I have little sympathy for the big tough cops acting out because their fee-fees are hurt.
You know, everyone knows being in a protest is dangerous 'cause the cops are violent; it's been like that forever. And in the US it is generally hard to get people to come together in any political cause. Yet now, masses of them are doing it anyway. I don't understand why some people seem to be able to tell themselves that it's all happening for no real reason. Not understanding what the reason is means just that--not understanding what it is, not that there isn't one.
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I noticed that this @Halo guy has been posting snark remarks and mocking jabs at other posters many times already. And so did some of other commenters, who sounded like they came straight out of Twitter or r/politics. Did our draconian mod give up on this thread and let them loose and am I seeing some sort of bias? If other people were banned from commenting for random harmless shitposting, I can't see why these guys are allowed to get away. "Rule 1: Be Civil". My ass. Either apply the same rule for everyone, or don't have any rule for anyone.
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@Mr_Detective Really? If you're gonna ban people for snide remarks you might as well draw the line at banning everyone.
@ewarnet
it means the electoral college system effectively makes the votes of all other citizens moot.
the people who cast the electoral ballots don't actually HAVE to vote in line with the population of the relevant region.
it's also how you can lose the popular vote and win the electoral vote. and no, trump isn't the first time it happened, either. iirc the last 3 republican presidential victories happened that way.
it means the electoral college system effectively makes the votes of all other citizens moot.
the people who cast the electoral ballots don't actually HAVE to vote in line with the population of the relevant region.
it's also how you can lose the popular vote and win the electoral vote. and no, trump isn't the first time it happened, either. iirc the last 3 republican presidential victories happened that way.
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@ewarnet it's a partisan shitfest with two sides trying to backstab one another. Nobody hates Americans more than Americans from the opposite side.
- Washington's Farewell Address 1796
Also, voting has absolutely no power over the issue of police brutality, which this protest at its core, is all about. Politicians don't want to be nowhere near this issue.
Code:
They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.Also, voting has absolutely no power over the issue of police brutality, which this protest at its core, is all about. Politicians don't want to be nowhere near this issue.
Sure, if Covid-19 makes a comeback and we get another round of a nationwide lockdown. 🍿Oh, and if one of the candidates kills a minority.
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@Purplelibraryguy
Still waiting for an answer even I am honnestly still impressed of how you are able to write a novel about a point while making your point and argument more confusing. You should Really try to be more short and more clear and put more facts and less sophism. It could came from my unability to read long text but still.
Still waiting for an answer even I am honnestly still impressed of how you are able to write a novel about a point while making your point and argument more confusing. You should Really try to be more short and more clear and put more facts and less sophism. It could came from my unability to read long text but still.
I am happy that the police officers in question were charged, but it should not have taken so long. That is an institutional 'us vs them' problem here in the United States.
But, remember that 100 or so people a year are killed unjustly by Police, should I say White Lives Matter over the thousands murdered by black criminals every year?
How about lives matter and leave it at that.
And for the ignorant above making stupid comments about Covid2, first it is summer in the North, thus no virus problems. Second, this was mostly a panic and money grab problem in the first place. I have interviewed 24 doctors in 12 countries since this started and the death toll they have told me is ~100,000 for the world as opposed to nearly 500,000 flu cases.
So why did w close down?
But, remember that 100 or so people a year are killed unjustly by Police, should I say White Lives Matter over the thousands murdered by black criminals every year?
How about lives matter and leave it at that.
And for the ignorant above making stupid comments about Covid2, first it is summer in the North, thus no virus problems. Second, this was mostly a panic and money grab problem in the first place. I have interviewed 24 doctors in 12 countries since this started and the death toll they have told me is ~100,000 for the world as opposed to nearly 500,000 flu cases.
So why did w close down?
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