121–130 of 131 posts
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Human development index (HDI) Genuine progress indicator (GPI) Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) Gross national happiness (GNH) The Gini coefficient Just to name a few. None of which is perfect, but at least better than the GDP when it comes to actually saying something about the quality and state of an economy.
> The Gini coefficient Why do I care how much someone else has?
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> Yes. This is something else virtually every economist will agree on. A statement which only help to make his point about economists being ignorant crocks. GDP is heavily doubted as a good measure of standard of living in all other social sciences. Examples of what the GDP measure fails to take into account: ecological sustainability, wealth distribution, non-market transactions, underground economy, non-monetary ec…
I don't understand your argument here. You won't find an economist (or any other person person) in the world that thinks GDP exhaustively covers every aspect of an economy and how it provides a standard of living. What you will find is that they all agree GDP is the best available measure to determine a standard of living that is derived from some level of economic production. If GDP is a terrible metric for determin…
The problem with economic sciences is that the GDP measure is used without critique, without fully understanding its trade-offs or by simply ignoring it deficiencies. That I believe is very careless when you are in the end dealing with the lives of real people.
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I read your comment with great interest as it reflects a lot of my reactions when I took economics, particularly from the way Mankiw teaches it; much like this blog post, he starts with roughly 10 "assumptions" that the course will make comprising general consensus opinions that most economists use to make their theories. These are such broad assumptions like "people always make rational decisions", "people always th…
What I said about supply and demand curves is well within common presentations by econ profs. What you did was patch up such presentations. There are many ways to do that, and with enough such patches the theory can have fewer counterexamples but, then, look so narrow it looks useless. One way to patch up the theory is to say that transistors in 1955 are NOT THE SAME good or product as transistors in 2010. Then my da…
I do this, and it's a real problem. It takes me forever to buy groceries.
Here's one broad way Mankiw and company are going wrong. I start with three preliminary points and then point to the going wrong: (1) They have physics envy . In particular, they want to sit in a small, dark, closed room and with just pure thought , with little to no contact with any real economy, come up with some economics version of Newton's second law F = ma or Einstein's result in special relativity E = mc^2. No…
do you have a blog ? seriously, this was a superbly informative rant.
The older stuff is pretty stellar, I wrote an post on Metafilter about it a few years ago: http://www.metafilter.com/66006/The-Unqualified-Reservations...
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> The Gini coefficient Why do I care how much someone else has?
Rich man in a ghetto or rich man among friends. Pick one.
Rich people don't live in ghettos - that's why ghettos have a very "good" Gini coefficient. (Ghettos would be better off if they did have rich residents.)
I didn't hate rich folks when I lived in a ghetto. Was I doing something wrong?
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- Businesses are, in fact, what generates most of the wealth and innovation in a country wealth and innovation are not the only things worth optimizing , nor are they the most important.
Money, not necessarily. But wealth means "stuff people want".
on the other hand , aren't good relationships considered wealth by your definition ? Businesses do relatively little to facilitate those(in more primitive societies they still had relationships , and probably at least as good as ours).
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I don't understand your argument here. You won't find an economist (or any other person person) in the world that thinks GDP exhaustively covers every aspect of an economy and how it provides a standard of living. What you will find is that they all agree GDP is the best available measure to determine a standard of living that is derived from some level of economic production. If GDP is a terrible metric for determin…
The reason why GDP is still used is because we have a lot of historical GDP data available and it is a fairly simple measure to understand and collect data on. Nor do we have a good enough alternative measure yet. We do have several candidates, but just as you state they all have weaknesses that needs to be understood. The problem with economic sciences is that the GDP measure is used without critique, without fully…
> The problem with economic sciences...
Honestly, this is hard for me to read.
Lectures on the inadequacies of the GDP are Macro 101 stuff. Throughout college in my different econ classes the shortfalls of the GDP were frequently discussed by several different teachers.
This economic sciences conspiracy to prevent indictments of the GDP you're trying to present as fact is completely fabricated and gives a bad name to economists that do discuss the shortcomings of the GDP (read: every economist ever).
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Rich man in a ghetto or rich man among friends. Pick one.
> Rich man in a ghetto or rich man among friends. Pick one. Rich people don't live in ghettos - that's why ghettos have a very "good" Gini coefficient. (Ghettos would be better off if they did have rich residents.) I didn't hate rich folks when I lived in a ghetto. Was I doing something wrong?
Interesting that all economists seem to be pro-business, anti-tax, anti-worker rights. You would almost think that most economists worked at banks or for university business schools. In other research naval officers believe in a larger navy with lots of ships
Yep, many economists do work for those institutions. And yep, all of them have /some/ particular axe to grind (everyone does -- I do, you do, etc). That doesn't mean that what they're saying isn't correct. - Businesses are, in fact, what generates most of the wealth and innovation in a country - Taxes, whether personal or corporate, are not economically efficient. Government can be compared to an electrical grid -- t…
Keep in mind the polar opposite of the power grid is that everyone keeps a personal generator they build with their own hands and continually feed fuel they gather with their own hands.
Sometimes a little ineffiency in one place allows you to be more efficient in other places. Don't knock the power grid and transitively the federal government.
"A minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers. (79%)" The fair market price for young and unskilled workers would be lower than the minimum wage, yes. Is this a good thing? For young workers, if young is less than 18 (ie, still in school), then this is OK. But, for unskilled workers? That entire class would be in poverty, as if they aren't on the edge of it now.
I'd say that maximizing employment is not the only goal.