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
A procrastination in of itself
Yeah, though as I said the term affordable housing has been redefined, it's 50% of the average rent of the area, which in a luxury area can easily not be anywhere near affordable for even middle class people.
So they only build affordable housing if they're made to, they don't build as much as they are meant to be made to build and what they do build isn't even affordable anyway.
As for us having people able to put up houses, aren't we about to kick all our builders out fo the country due to them begin Eastern European?
edited 10th Jul '17 5:15:02 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
Figure of Hourai
Some but by no means all.
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A procrastination in of itself
Enough to have a significant impact on our ability to carry out construction work.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
@ Silas's idea, that does remind me of my question back in the beginning. Could all this be avoided by a large capital gains tax on home sales (hopefully eliminating the incentive to treat a home as an investment rather than a place to live)?
But I had focused on NIMBYs and homeowners who are actual being rational (on an individual, short-term level). Your idea seems aimed at changing the behavior of developers in particular?
Also,
@Fighteer. Krugman appears to be saying things change—"a demonstration that economics is not physics." (Or trying to bring Smith and Malthus down from economic godhood). Not sure I like what him having to post that implies...
edited 10th Jul '17 5:56:59 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
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![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Got some source for that other than the gutter press? Let alone the assumption "leaving the EU" instantly leads to everyone emigrating or having to leave at this stage.
edited 10th Jul '17 5:52:32 PM by RainehDaze
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Wouldn't the gutter press (which are Tory-dominated) be the ones denying that claim because they want people to overlook the negatives of Brexit?
Figure of Hourai
I mean they're the ones who've been decrying the evils of immigration, so any reports from that angle about Polish builders... 
A procrastination in of itself
I'd have to read the Gutter Press to get any information from them, but no I've no source for my assumption, it's a purely speculative guess based on odd bits of unsourced information I've picked up over the years.
X4 Obviisuly any tax would have to be tiered the same as income tax to not seriously harm the market, but yes that could work. Keep in mind that I'm looking at this from a London perspective, our problem here isn't the NIMBY lot (they're a problem down in Kent though), it's that developers don't care about building housing that we can afford.
As for reducing the time on adverse possession, while it could work it would have huge side effects and would likely just lead to a massive increase in the anti-squatting industry, be that in the form of Guardianships, security guards or property checkers.
edited 10th Jul '17 7:47:40 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
Figure of Hourai
Then, given every construction sign I've seen, builders I've met, and the surprisingly large number of building and decoration related shows I've watched in recent years, I'm pretty certain the British construction industry isn't reliant on Eastern Europe to exist.
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United Earth
The whole reason squatting is a movement is that owners keep prices artificially high by keeping perfectly good apartments closed. At least in Spain that's how it goes.
A procrastination in of itself
Than I shall defer to your expertise.
I'd not even that squatting isn't always done in evidential buildings, often you'll get buildings that are zoned for office or commercial use being squatted.
edited 12th Jul '17 5:17:44 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
United Earth
I don't mean that they occupy those specific apartments. I mean that they squat because of those apartments.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
The law in the night
As usual, the regimes responsible for the mess never learn anything from it, instead they double down their mistakes.
The Economist: As Venezuela crumbles, the regime digs in
Nicolás Maduro draws the wrong conclusions from the economic crisis
EVERY weekday morning, a queue of several dozen forlorn people forms outside the dingy headquarters of SAIME, Venezuela’s passport agency. As shortages and violence have made life in the country less bearable, more people are applying for passports so they can go somewhere else. Most will be turned away. The government ran out of plastic for laminating new passports in September. “I’ve just been told I might need to wait eight months!” says Martín, a frustrated applicant. A $250 bribe would shorten the wait.
As desperation rises, so does the intransigence of Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” regime, whose policies have ruined the economy and sabotaged democracy. The economy shrank by 18.6% last year, according to an estimate by the central bank, leaked this month to Reuters, a news agency (see chart). Inflation was 800%.
These are provisional figures, subject to revision. They may never be published (the central bank stopped reporting complete economic data more than a year ago). The inflation estimate is close to that of the IMF, which expects consumer prices to rise by 2,200% this year. The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, puts last year’s economic contraction at 13.7%. That is still much sharper than the decline in Greece’s output at the height of the euro crisis. In 2001 Venezuela was the richest country in South America; it is now among the poorest.
Venezuela’s salsa-loving president, Nicolás Maduro, has responded to bad news with bluster (he blames foreign and domestic “mafias”) and denial. Soon after the leak of the central bank’s estimates he fired its president, Nelson Merentes. Mr Maduro may have held him responsible for the leak. Or he may have punished him for a botched attempt by the government in December to introduce new banknotes.
A currency swap makes sense. The 100-bolívar note, long the highest denomination, is worth less than three cents on the black market. Shopkeepers sometimes weigh them instead of counting them. They are to be replaced with a new set of notes worth up to 20,000 bolívares.
The government’s stated reason for making the switch—to punish hoarders—made no sense. Who would store up the world’s fastest depreciating currency? Its execution was tragicomic. After Venezuelans had queued for days to return to banks bills about to lose their value (sometimes in exchange for notes with even smaller denominations) the replacements failed to show up. Chaos ensued as Venezuelans returned to the banks to withdraw 100-bolívar notes. Their demonetisation is now scheduled for February 20th.
The change at the top of the central bank does not portend better policies. Ricardo Sanguino, the new president, is a Marxist former university professor who has spent 15 years as a loyal parliamentarian from the ruling socialist party. He will have less influence than Ramón Lobo, the newly appointed economy tsar, an economist with little high-level experience.
They are unlikely to deal with the causes of Venezuela’s penury. These include controls on foreign exchange and prices of basic goods, which lead to shortages and corruption; unrestrained public spending; the expropriation of private industry; and the plundering of PDVSA, the state oil company, which provides nearly all of Venezuela’s export revenues.
Ordinary Venezuelans have lost faith in the regime, if not in chavismo, the pro-poor populism espoused by the late Hugo Chávez, who ruled from 1999 until 2013. Mr Maduro, his successor, has an approval rating of 24%. In December 2015 Venezuelans elected a parliament dominated by the opposition.
Mr Maduro’s response has been to cling on to power more tightly. The electoral commission, controlled by the regime, has blocked a referendum to recall him from office. The supreme court, manned by government loyalists, has blocked almost everything the national assembly has tried to do. On January 15th Mr Maduro delivered his annual state-of-the-nation address not to the legislature, as the constitution requires, but before the court.
The regime says it wants dialogue with the opposition but has done little to enable it. Talks mediated by the Vatican and by Unasur, a regional body, broke down in December after the opposition accused the government of reneging on promises, including to release political prisoners and restore powers to parliament.
Mr Maduro’s recent appointment of a new vice-president suggests that the regime is moving further away from dialogue and reform. He replaced Aristóbulo Istúriz, a moderate by chavista standards, with Tareck El Aissami, a hardliner. One of Mr El Aissami’s first acts was to announce the arrest of Gilber Caro, an opposition politician. He had an assault rifle and explosives in his car, the government claims; his party says the weapons were planted.
Mr Maduro appears to be making two bets. The first is on disarray among the opposition. Divisions within the Democratic Unity alliance, a grouping of many parties, are widening as their efforts to defeat chavismo falter. It lacks a leader who can appeal to poor Venezuelans who feel betrayed by the regime’s empty promises.
Mr Maduro’s second hope is that oil prices will bounce back. They have already recovered from $21 a barrel in 2016 to $45. But PDVSA has been so badly managed and starved of investment that it will struggle to reap the benefits. Output fell by 10% last year and no rise is likely in 2017. Venezuela’s foreign reserves have dwindled to less than $11bn; its easy-to-sell assets are about a fifth of that. Mr Maduro vows that 2017 will be the “first year of the new history of the Venezuelan economy”. That will not shorten the passport queues.
edited 16th Jul '17 5:17:24 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent leges
Who Am I?
They cant learn. Their power and status as a rentier class depend on not letting the system be reformed. Once power and wealth within a community reach a certain level it is very hard to decentralize it again.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Regarding adverse possession timers of one year: I'm not cool with that as the method to enforce "use it or lose it" on land, largely because that would increase the expense of land rights enforcement, and partly because that's not what adverse possession is supposed to be used for (it's more commonly a settlement of boundary disputes, or cases where a property was acquired under a bad title deed - squatters are very rarely able to meet the requirements).
edited 16th Jul '17 11:19:10 PM by Ramidel
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
Like reflections in the glass!
So certain developments found on the US politics thread had a certain word uttered. Autarky. According to Wikipedia the term means a self-sufficient economy (though it also implies self-sufficiency in general for nations). With this I ask is a self-sufficient nation a desirable quality in an environment that is founded on cooperation?
edited 17th Jul '17 3:33:36 PM by MorningStar1337
Figure of Hourai
No nation has all the raw materials necessary for a fully-modernised industry and country. It's a fantasy.
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You can't operate a self-sufficient high tech sector without global trade for one. China holds the lions share of mineable rare earth elements required to make much of it, for example.
America has the agricultural capacity to produce much of its own food if we had to but it's dependent on migrant labor (that can't all be automated) and there a few major things we can't produce ourselves like coffee, chocolate and tea (and in non-edible agriculture, rubber).
We have become more self-sufficient in fuel over the course of the Obama administration but a lot of that is a switch to domestic natural gas. To rule out foreign fuel imports entirely we would have to resort to increasingly dicey extraction methods like fracking.
Many of our staples like clothing are cheap because they are produced in overseas markets where the labor is cheaper. Either these goods would become more expensive or workers rights cut to maintain them at their current price.
And those are just the problems I can think of without looking up more.
Who Am I?
The answer is "yes, were such a thing possible." Unfortunately it isnt.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Lost in Space
This is an interesting article from Equiblog: Equitable Growth in Conversation: Robert Solow.
It's an interview between Equitable Growth's executive director and chief economist Heather Boushey and Robert Solow, an economics professor and Nobel laureate with more distinctions to his name than I care to list. The subject is the most important issues to our economy right now, and the interview covers labor rights, the role of unions, inequality, and full employment.
The short version is that, while trade unions are, historically, an irreplaceable equalizing factor in the power dynamics between labor and management, the necessary social environment for unions to flourish no longer exists. Whisper the word "union" at a board meeting of a for-profit corporation and panic ensues. Meanwhile, more and more labor is being done on a hands-off, contract basis that effectively eliminates any personal relationship between worker and boss that might grant some bargaining power to the former. Loyalty as a critical solidifying factor in that relationship is all but gone.
We keep talking about what it means to be at full employment, and poring endlessly over labor market statistics, but we still are seeing no signs of the kinds of market forces that true full employment produces: namely, demand for workers at the bottom end of the labor market that creates upward wage pressure.
edited 20th Jul '17 7:03:21 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Eh.. The entirety of the danish labor market is unionized. All of it. Retail, manufacturing, services, contractors and code monkeys. I am studying comp-sci. The entire student body is signed up with the programmer union before they even graduate.
When people say "Unionization is impossible today" They are either lying, or more charitably, buying into a completely bullshit narrative.
US unions did not die - they were murdered. By deliberate political intervention. They can be revived the same way.
Always beware of TINA - (There Is No Alternative) is a much beloved tool of those who would grind the people down, because when it is believed it extinquishes the very possibility of resistance
edited 20th Jul '17 8:05:16 AM by Izeinsummer
It's stated right at the beginning that it's about the US economy.
yes. But high-tech modern economies with a high degree of unionization exist. Therefore, it is not impossible to have one. I brought up Denmark to do a proof of possibility by existence.
This is a generally useful thing to do when people start talking about things being impossible- Look around, are people and nations doing it? Then the supposed impossibility is a lie. Again, always beware TINA. Because it really is an obnoxiously common rhetorical and political tool
And specifically as regards the US - De-unionization was a political project. It did not just fall out of trends and globalization, or technological disruption or any such nonsense. Politicians expended huge amounts of energy and wrote lots of laws, and were hugely hostile to unions on an administrative level to bring it about. Repeal the laws, the unions will suddenly have a "miraculous" reemergence.
edited 20th Jul '17 8:31:24 AM by Izeinsummer
Jupiterian Local
"The conditions for successful unionization do not currently exist" is not the same thing as "the conditions for successful unionization cannot be re-created". You're arguing against a point that no one made.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
I'm pretty certain the country still has builders capable of putting up a house if the big luxury developments pull out.
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