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
United Earth
Launder the world's money?
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
A procrastination in of itself
Banks in London and New York do a lot of money laundering for dictators, nations under sanctions, drug cartels, oligarchs and I think on rare ocasions even terrorist groups.
It's why the EU sanctions against Russia after Ukraine were so weak, the British government didn't want to loose the business that comes from laundering the money of Russian oligarchs, so it blocks sanctions that would end said money laundering.
edited 3rd May '17 4:48:35 PM by Silasw
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
Lost in Space
That, plus we let everyone else buy our dollars as a hedge against weakness in their own currencies. Essentially, we insure them against their own macroeconomic failures.
edited 3rd May '17 4:49:22 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
United Earth
Another reason Brexit is stupid, and a good riddance.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
Can anyone offer an opinion on the alternatives to measuring an economy in GDP. For example:
- The Social Progress Index
- The Social Progress Index is an aggregate index of social and environmental indicators that capture three dimensions of social progress: Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity. (They're slightly elaborated on the chart in the page itself—still highly subjective).
- The Index has four key design principles:
- Exclusively social and environmental indicators: our aim is to measure social progress directly, rather than utilize economic proxies.
- Outcomes not inputs: our aim is to measure the outcomes that matter to the lives of real people. For example, we want to measure the health and wellness achieved by a country, not how much effort is expended nor how much the country spends on healthcare.
- Actionability: The Index has been structured around 12 components and 52 distinct indicators. The framework allows us to not only provide an aggregate country score and ranking, but also supports granular analyses of specific areas of strength and weakness... [helping] change-makers identify and act upon the most pressing issues in their societies.
- Relevance to all countries.
- the Genuine Progress Indicator
- A metric used to measure the economic growth of a country. It is often considered as a replacement to the more well known gross domestic product (GDP) economic indicator. The GPI indicator takes everything the GDP uses into account, but also adds other figures that represent the cost of the negative effects related to economic activity (such as the cost of crime, cost of ozone depletion and cost of resource depletion, among others). The GPI nets the positive and negative results of economic growth to examine whether or not it has benefited people overall. (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gpi.asp From Investopedia).
- In (relatively old) news: Beyond GDP: US states have adopted genuine progress indicators & Abolish GDP in favor of a genuine progress indicator
- A metric used to measure the economic growth of a country. It is often considered as a replacement to the more well known gross domestic product (GDP) economic indicator. The GPI indicator takes everything the GDP uses into account, but also adds other figures that represent the cost of the negative effects related to economic activity (such as the cost of crime, cost of ozone depletion and cost of resource depletion, among others). The GPI nets the positive and negative results of economic growth to examine whether or not it has benefited people overall. (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gpi.asp
Vermont [in 2012] became the first state in the US to pass a law introducing a new metric for measuring economic performance and success.
Systems thinker Donella Meadows, the founder of the Vermont-based organisation that I now direct, cut to the heart of GDP’s limitations when she wrote: “If you define the goal of society as GDP, that society will do its best to produce GDP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency.”
To get a feel for how GPI differs from GDP, imagine two heating-oil trucks leaving from the same utility company: one safely completes its deliveries and the other has a major oil spill on the way to its first customer.
The truck that spilled its oil would make GDP go up because of all the spending to clean up the mess. By contrast, both oil trucks would make the GPI go down: remediation spending would be counted as a negative, and so would the cost to society of emissions from heating with oil and the costs of any long-term damage to aquifers and streams.
Vermont offers an excellent example of how GPI and GDP differ in practice. Prior to 1970 GPI used to be slightly higher than the GDP number. Then, the two indices began to diverge, with GPI holding steady while GDP continued to increase. In 2011, Vermont’s GPI per capita was 40% less than state GDP due to rising income inequality and a strong dependence on fossil fuels.
What would make the GPI go up? Getting more energy from renewables; increased energy efficiency; reducing the income gap; putting more reliable, durable products on the market (have you heard of planned obsolescence?); volunteering more for your community; preserving wetlands, forests, and farmland; shorter commutes and transport routes. In fact, there are 26 ways the GPI can go up, all measured in dollars that boil down to a single number.
There's also that old Easterlin Paradox where he noted that places with higher GDP per capita don't seem to have any more happiness than places with lower, after a certain trigger level. But that's easily enough solved by looking at the first derivative: places that have growing GDP are notably happier than places with static or falling. It's not the level it's the change that matters there.
The problems with GPI are a little different. For a start it includes some things that wouldn't be universally agreed upon as making things better. It insists that loss of wetlands is a deduction from the well being of the people. Also that an increase increases it. Which argument leads us to the idea that reflooding the Pontine Marshes or the Fens would lead to an increase in the wealth of the nation. This would come as a surprise to those whose land disappears under the waters, also as one to those who then contract the inevitable malaria (and yes, both areas had endemic malaria before they were drained, the former right up until Mussolini drained them in the 1920s).
Similarly the loss of farmland isn't particularly a fall in the wealth or income of the nation. GDP captures this rather better: moving land from say, £10,000 a hectare to £1,000,000 as it has housing built upon it is an addition to value, not a deduction. In this sense GPI is trying to codify a certain set of highly contentious ideas into the one metric by which we must judge everything. The same is true of the insistence that the distribution of income, the equity of that distribution must count. Some people might indeed say that a more equitable distribution is a better world. But I think we'd all agree that that's not actually something that the entirety of society agrees is so?
A much greater worry though is that the people promoting GPI don't actually even understand the GDP they're criticising. Here's a piece in Nature:
If a business used GDP-style accounting, it would aim to maximize gross revenue — even at the expense of profitability, efficiency, sustainability or flexibility. That is hardly smart or sustainable (think Enron). Yet since the end of the Second World War, promoting GDP growth has remained the primary national policy goal in almost every country.
No, GDP does not equate to turnover of a company, just as it does not equate to turnover in a nation. It equates to value added in a nation and thus must do so to the value added in a company. Which is, in the corporate case, the profits made by the company plus the wages paid by it.
Who Am I?
I've long felt that GDP should not include the value of financial speculation. The buying and selling of securitized debt adds nothing to real productivity or the standard of living for anyone. On the other hand, sales of used goods should be included, since it preserves value that would otherwise be lost.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Oh, bother.
So does anyone else think MLM such as Amway are awful? And not just because Betsy Devos is connected to it?
I'm just wondering if my urge to flip off the Amway branch near where I live every time I walk past it is normal.
![[down]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png "[down]"){kind=icon}
I hope your brother turned him down. Preferably as rudely as possible.
edited 9th May '17 3:40:24 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
use political terms to describe, not insult
Lost in Space
Yes, MLM is awful. We could go into the reasons, but they're covered by plenty of articles and videos already.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The law in the night
My mother lost a shitload of money thanks to Herbalife through their MLM schemes and overpriced products you could get cheaper on a pharmacy.
MLM is a reworked pyramid scheme made to look legit under the eyes of the public and the law but works almost as the same. Theoretically you can make a lot of money with it but in practice only a few people actually make money while the rest struggles to break even. Those who do make money with it are the figureheads used to show that if you work just as hard you will be as wealthy as them, while of course the whole thing is rigged to be hard to make money with and you need to invest a lot of money before being able to do anything.
Not to mention those MLM selling schemes are obnoxious as fuck.
Inter arma enim silent leges
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
Well, Nox beat me to this post by an hour, but yes, I've always considered MLMs to be technically legal pyramid schemes. I based my whole accounting project around proving it, but, by sheer coincidence, out of a list dozens not one MLMs posts its financial statements, and they're set up in a way to avoid being required reporting their financials to the SEC. Not suspicious in the slightest...
That's before you even get into recruitment. That one sales pitch sounded like a guy trying to induct me into a new religion. (Incidentally, China bans MLMs outright).
Oh, bother.
Now I'm wondering if someone might find a way to merge an MLM scheme with Uber or Airbnb like services...
Disgusted, but not surprised
Lost in Space
The hallmarks of an MLM scheme are that you have to pay to enter, you earn perks for buying more stuff (as opposed to selling it), and you can only see real earnings from signing up people below you in the pyramid. Fundamentally, your customers are the other people in the business rather than any notional end consumer.
The "sharing" economy doesn't fall into this pattern because there are actual services being proffered and consumed: hotel stays, transportation, and so on. It's not like Uber drivers are hiring Uber drivers and taking a cut of their earnings as commission, then selling rides to other Uber drivers.
edited 9th May '17 9:27:33 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Oh, bother.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Out of morbid curiosity I googled "MLM Uber":
https://rayhigdon.com/advanced-mlm-recruiting-become-uber-driver/
Pretty funny roleplay actually. ![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
Trying to recruit your own Uber customers for an MLM...
edited 9th May '17 9:29:26 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
Causing freakouts over sourcing since 2018
Well, an MLM here tried starting an airline, only for it to turn out to be a "sponsoring" of an existing airline when they were pressed for a license.
This managed to get the airline in trouble, as they didn't have a license to operate either.
Lost in Space
Going back a bit to the discussion of SPI/GDI as alternatives to GDP, one must make sure, when using any particular measurement of anything, that you clearly define the objectives of that measurement. If your goal is to measure economic output, then GDP is a very good tool. If your goal is to assign some abstract moral value to certain things that is not obviously expressed in monetary terms, then you may prefer a different system. Each system has a purpose and a methodology.
As was noted above, one of the flaws of GDP (gross or per-capita) is that it fails to capture the perception of well-being among the populace, which trends with the delta of GDP rather than its absolute value. But GDI assigns arbitrary value to things that is not uniformly agreed upon, and may lead to perverse incentives (such as re-flooding wetlands).
There are already many indices of social progress, economic equality, business vitality, and so on, that exist independently of GDP. I'd say that it makes for better policy to consider them each on their own merits rather than to try to synthesize them into one aggregate value that may not accomplish the same goals.
edited 15th May '17 11:59:47 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Who Am I?
I would argue that GDP is actually not a very good measure of economic output. It's possible that no one number ever could be.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Just wanna say on the money laundering thing: What that ultimately means is that the US effectively has a resource extraction economy, and US dollars are quite literally an export commodity.
This isn't a bad thing necessarily (it's not like anyone can call the US dollar in or anything), but it means that the US requires a higher level of wealth redistribution to ensure that our citizens benefit from this use of our dollars, and it means that we need to encourage immigration and foreign workers to support our citizens' privilege. (I'd prefer not doing it the Gulf way, myself.)
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
Who Am I?
Do you have a link on that?
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
So, Sweden tried a workday experiment
What really happened when Swedes tried six-hour days?
Assistant nurse Emilie Telander, 26, cheers as one of the day patients at Svartedalen's elderly care home in Gothenburg manages to roll a six in a game of Ludo.
But her smile fades as she describes her own luck running out at the end of the year, when after 23 months of six-hour shifts, she was told to go back to eight-hour days.
"I feel that I am more tired than I was before," she reflects, lamenting the fact that she now has less time at home to cook or read with her four-year-old daughter.
"During the trial all the staff had more energy. I could see that everybody was happy."
Ms Telander is one of about 70 assistant nurses who had their days shortened for the experiment, the most widely reported of a handful of trials in Sweden involving a range of employers, from start-ups to nursing homes.
Designed to measure well-being in a sector that's struggling to recruit enough staff to care for the country's ageing population, extra nurses were brought in to cover the lost hours.
The project's independent researchers were also paid to study employees at a similar care home who continued to work regular days.
Their final report is due out next month, but data released so far strongly backs Ms Telander's arguments.
During the first 18 months of the trial the nurses working shorter hours logged less sick leave, reported better perceived health and boosted their productivity by organising 85% more activities for their patients, from nature walks to sing-a-longs.
However, the project also faced tough criticism from those concerned that the costs outweighed the benefits.
Centre-right opponents filed a motion calling on Gothenburg City Council to wrap it up prematurely last May, arguing it was unfair to continue investing taxpayers' money in a pilot that was not economically sustainable.
Saved from the axe at the eleventh hour, the trial managed to stay within budget, but still cost the city about 12 million kronor (£1.1m; $1.3m).
There's also been an increase in pilots in the private sector, with advertising, consulting, telecoms and technology firms among those testing the concept.
Yet while some have also reported that staff appear calmer or are less likely to phone in sick, others have swiftly abandoned the idea.
"I really don't think that the six-hour day fits with an entrepreneurial world, or the start-up world," argues Erik Gatenholm, chief executive of Gothenburg-based bio-ink company.
He is candid enough to admit he tested the method on his production staff after "reading about the trend on Facebook" and musing on whether it could be an innovative draw for future talent.
But the firm's experiment was ditched in less than a month, after bad feedback from employees.
"I thought it would be really fun, but it felt kind of stressful," says Gabriel Peres, as he slots a Petri dish inside one of the 3D printers he's built for the company.
"It's a process and it takes time and when you don't have all that [much] time it kind of feels like skipping homework at school, things are always building up."
On the other side of the country, his concerns are shared by Dr Aram Seddigh, who recently completed his doctorate at Stockholm University's Stress Research Institute and is among a growing body of academics focusing on the nation's shifting work patterns.
"I think the six-hour work day would be most effective in organisations - such as hospitals - where you work for six hours and then you just leave [the workplace] and go home.
"It might be less effective for organisations where the borders between work and private life are not so clear," he suggests.
"This kind of solution might even increase stress levels given that employees might try to fit all the work that they have been doing in eight hours into six - or if they're office workers they might take the work home."
edited 21st May '17 2:13:21 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives
That's personal analysis on my part.
The alternative workweek Ive actually tried that I liked the best was 3x12, 3x0, repeat. - that is, three 12 hour days, 3 days off, repeat, and pay no attention whatsoever to the weekday. Long days were really good for very productive code sessions, and the days off let you recover and keep your life in order before diving back in. Also pretty decent from an employers point of view because you can keep 12 hour manning permanently with just two teams and very simple scheduling.
A procrastination in of itself
12 hour shifts are murder with a physically demanding job though, it may work for office work but if you're running about, carrying things and generally working in a high stress-high pressure situation you end up spending a ton of time just recovering.
I work 11-14 hour bar shifts, it's not fun stuff.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
United Earth
Different jobs entail different schedules. Imposing one standard for all is misguided. And the Center Right can go fuck themselves.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
DeLong via Project Syndicate: "Where US Manufacturing Jobs Really Went"
Bullet-point takeaways:
There is absolutely no evidence that NAFTA, et. al., have caused any significant loss of manufacturing employment in the U.S., and "renegotiating" them would do nothing to improve manufacturing.
edited 3rd May '17 3:32:19 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"