There was talk about renaming the Krugman thread for this purpose, but that seems to be going nowhere. Besides which, I feel the Krugman thread should be left to discuss Krugman while this thread can be used for more general economic discussion.
Discuss:
- The merits of competing theories.
- The role of the government in managing the economy.
- The causes of and solutions to our current economic woes.
- Comparisons between the economic systems of different countries.
- Theoretical and existing alternatives to our current market system.
edited 17th Dec '12 10:58:52 AM by Topazan
I think that sugar plant harvests create dangerous dusts.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Also sugar plantations are in really hot and humid climates because of growing requirements.
Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy
Yeah, you really don't want to breathe in raw sugar. It literally shreds your lungs, like asbestos, but it also screws up your metabolism while doing it.
Not Three Laws compliant.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
So it's basically the tropical equivalent of coal mining?
Tropical coal mining without sleep, coz during the harvest season the sugar canes have to be processed very quickly before they go bad.
The law in the night
Lets see:
- Incredibly poor working conditions
- The landlords would beat the living shit out of anyone who'd step out of line
- Sugar dust can lead to all sorts of lung problems
- Overworking the slaves to death
- Tropical weather brings all the problems related to heat and humidity
- The living conditions favored the spread of contagious diseases
- More tropical diseases like Dengue Fever and Malaria
Life expectancy for slaves: less than 30 years.
Inter arma enim silent leges
Like mining slaves, in other words.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I highly suspect the Energy Lobby is the reason most states don't stay on Daylight Saving Time. Am I wrong?
Jupiterian Local
More like inertia. It's too much of a pain in the ass to change, so no one bothers.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Causing freakouts over sourcing since 2018
Krugman is not impressed by the results of the US election
.
Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.
Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.
Under any circumstances, putting an irresponsible, ignorant man who takes his advice from all the wrong people in charge of the nation with the world’s most important economy would be very bad news. What makes it especially bad right now, however, is the fundamentally fragile state much of the world is still in, eight years after the great financial crisis.
It’s true that we’ve been adding jobs at a pretty good pace and are quite close to full employment. But we’ve been doing O.K. only thanks to extremely low interest rates. There’s nothing wrong with that per se. But what if something bad happens and the economy needs a boost? The Fed and its counterparts abroad basically have very little room for further rate cuts, and therefore very little ability to respond to adverse events.
Now comes the mother of all adverse effects — and what it brings with it is a regime that will be ignorant of economic policy and hostile to any effort to make it work. Effective fiscal support for the Fed? Not a chance. In fact, you can bet that the Fed will lose its independence, and be bullied by cranks.
So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened.
Professional Forum Ninja
(Noah Smith, Bloomberg) Peak Finance looks like it's over
Basically that regulation and automation are about to crush the industry. There's already signs of retrenchment. Jobs being lost and moving out of New York City. And Passive Banking where investors' money is pushed into a general investment portfolio and just allowed to stay there, is becoming a growing trend.
edited 16th Nov '16 12:23:48 AM by PotatoesRock
While I'd ordinarily play the World's Smallest Violin for the troubles of the poor bankers, it sounds like this retrenchment won't actually solve the problem of the financial canopy economy or HFT, but exacerbate it.
Would a financial transactions tax resurrect the need for human financial portfolio managers?
edited 16th Nov '16 2:01:13 AM by Ramidel
No longer a forum herald
Better the air be slowly let out of the balloon than popping it, I'd say.
Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)
@Ramidel: It would help, but really what they need to do is go back to requiring that all lenders have a minimum number of deposit account holders- which is to say, only traditional banks should deal in securities.
Professional Forum Ninja
No longer a forum herald
I think you mean "stock", not "stick". Anyway, no sympathy here, since anyone ought to know the issues with insider trading.
In before Jim Sterling puts this under his "Oh, Ubisoft!" segment.
Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)
Fed Chairman Janet Yellen spoke in front of Congress yesterday about a variety of topics including her support of Dodd-Frank, but this particular part about infrastructure spending caught my attention. . .
Yellen cautioned lawmakers that if they spend a lot on infrastructure and run up the debt, and then down the road the economy gets into trouble, "there is not a lot of fiscal space should a shock to the economy occur, an adverse shock, that should require fiscal stimulus."
In other words, lawmakers should consider keeping their powder dry so they have more options whenever the next economic downturn comes along.
I would be interested to see what other economist have to say about this, because if it's true that the US economy is already nearing maximum capacity then that doesn't speak well for the current and future prospects of the US economy.
Lost in Space
Yeah, Yellen is wearing some kind of "I must be centrist and neutral" blinders that cause her to continue to ignore the economic reality on the ground for many people. If her narrative is that the economy cannot produce enough jobs to sustain full employment because of structural reasons, she should come out and say so. This is just throwing formulaic non-responses at the press in the hopes that they'll stop asking questions. Not that they ever do ask questions, or at least not the right ones.
edited 18th Nov '16 9:09:23 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Jupiterian Local
Her point isn't entirely wrong. The US's unemployment rate is hovering at around 5% now, and has been for a while. That's about where you want it to be, generally speaking. A massive employment drive at this point may attract people who have left the workforce entirely (and thus don't count as "unemployed") back, which is generally a positive, but many jobs will simply shift around — particularly in the construction industry.
Now, this will still have a positive effect on the economy. It raises demand for workers and thus adds pressure to increase wages, and the knock-on effects of a good infrastructure for economic activity is nothing to sneeze at. But it will also have other, less positive effects. If you pull people away from building houses because they're building roads instead, then housing prices rise, which is bad. If you build the wrong projects (bridges to nowhere, etc) then once the project itself is finished, no further benefits to the economy will be had (and now someone is stuck maintaining those projects anyway).
There's also some legitimate question over whether we could end up building the infrastructure we wish we had 20 years ago, instead of the one we're going to need 20 years from now. Things like self-driving cars and fully-electric vehicles may significantly change the way things look in the not-too-distant future, but if we spend a bunch of money revamping our infrastructure now, then it'll be another two or three decades before we get another big project to make those changes.
So I'm not saying that infrastructure projects are a bad idea in general, but there are very legitimate reasons to be cautious about them.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
The unemployment rate doesnt reflect wage stagnation, which is the primary problem right now (and, I believe, a main reason Trump got elected).
It's just that even at this point the Labor Force Participation Level is still not back to pre-crisis levels (even among "prime age" workers), which tells me that (if Janet Yellen is correct) that quite a few jobs that were lost in the recession are not coming back (at least not anytime soon).
That does not bode well for the remaining un/underemployed or for wages.
Lost in Space
Yeah, the problem is that Yellen's statement contains the fundamental (and unspoken) assumption that our LFPR is simply never going to recover; that the labor force stagnation we're in right now is the "new normal". This bespeaks a continuing need for social investment to pump up general standards of living.
The converse idea is that we are approaching saturation of our production capacity, which is the other way that you get inflation. Anyone who's seen all the shuttered storefronts and vacant factories around the nation could dispute that theory.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The natural unemployment rate is zero. Or, well, practically, ~ two percent due to people sorting out transitions from one to another job. That people accept five as "As low as it goes" is a remarkable demonstration of the power of propaganda. Five is the number that eliminates upwards pressure on wages. That's super convenient to the one percent, it's not the natural state of the economy.
I understand why any mine work would be more deadly, but what's so bad about sugar? I mean, yes, you can work someone to death doing literally anything, but you're making it sound like something about the sugar specifically is the problem.