The rich world needs higher real wage growth

Post by samatman » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 7:43 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #28

mozumder wrote: post #6

Or better yet, reduce prices all around. Think of all your expenses and look at ways to systematically reduce them for everyone. Start with food, get a meal down to less than a dollar. Rent is high because everyone wants to move to certain dense areas, while moving away from more spacious/rural areas. This is unsustainable. Offer incentives for people to move elsewhere, including jobs programs and subsidizing mass tr…

But why does everyone want to move to dense urban areas? You assume that there’s some small, easy-to-offset group of factors, like public transit or “jobs programs,” and that if the government just did something with these things, it would equilibrate population dynamics appropriately. I’m not convinced. I think people are more driven by status symbols and glamor. Living in a city is considered relatively more “high…

Post by pembrook » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

_9vpl wrote: post #142

baursak wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/1991/10/-quot... "The magazine is written by young people pretending to be old people... If American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves."

This article is nearly 30 years old.

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 7:49 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98

Joeri wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article really demonstrates how meaningless most economics reporting is, it's nearly as bad as markets/finance reporting. The problem is not with the reporting, it’s with the field. Economics is pseudoscience. It has all the trappings but none of the explanatory or predictive abilities. So you get articles like these that use a lot of jargon pretending like they’re making a strong case, but there’s no strong con…

> Economics can’t be a science yet Macroeconomics, yes. Microeconomics is a proper science. It has theories which make predictions which can be demonstrated in experiments.

Post by maxerickson » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 7:56 PM UTC

oriol16 wrote: post #135

Animats wrote: post #100

The emphasis on oil may reflect a European perspective. Only 19% of US oil is imported now, and the US generates very little electricity from oil. The US is a natural gas exporter. If the US wants energy independence, it's within reach. At the other extreme, Japan imports essentially all its oil, as does the UK. Both import most of their natural gas.

US burns 20mbd and produces less than 10mbd. Are you sure imports are only 19%?

Post by stale2002 » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 7:59 PM UTC

temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #37

tfehring wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably cheaper and certainly more environmentally friendly to keep building upward in urban centers than to build mass transit to exurban areas. Urban areas already provide significant subsidies to exurban ones via taxes and cross-subsidies - see, e.g., [0] and [1]. The comparatively high cost of living in high-density areas is driven by a combination of those transfers and pricing distortions created by local…

It's certainly not cheaper, for developers, to build highrise aparments in the city than upscale tract homes on tiny lots in an exurb. And environmental impacts and the responsibility for transportation are both externalities easily pushed to someone else. This is what actually happens.