21–30 of 66 posts
Wall Street earns the most, because it is the center of crony capitalism. (Not healthy captialism, but the theft side)
Does "it" earn the most? What is the definition of wall street? In my circles, those in tech have far out-earned those on Wall St, especially on a dollars per hour and quality of life metrics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does "it" earn the most? What is the definition of wall street? In my circles, those in tech have far out-earned those on Wall St, especially on a dollars per hour and quality of life metrics.
Are people in your circles among main shareholders or CIOs in top US investment banks?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US health system had managed to merge bad attributes from different systems into a system that’s incredibly bad. Highly regulated, tons of unaccountable bureaucracy, lots of barriers for market entry , protectionist, lack of consumer choices and also highly capitalistic. The problem is that the US can’t decide what it wants so we have a system where a lot of people make a lot of money whole being protected from c…
I think that is largely a misconception from people who live in the US and think the US is the worst of all possible worlds (based largely on the politics of the last decade or so)...it isn't. Not even close. The US is an extreme example of a system that optimizes totally for choice...and it achieves that aim. The UK is an extreme example of system that optimizes totally for access. They both achieve their aims but t…
I'm not sure this is true, or at least, I don't understand what pre-requisites for this to be true the U.S. posseses. Insurance is not allowed to trade across state lines, the private marketplace has a small selection of plans, most people get their insurance from their jobs meaning they only know the details of their medical plans AFTER a non-trivial time down payment (in other words, the transaction costs are high)
I think the criticism that the U.S. system doesn't really have that many positives is a fair enough assessment.
I'm trying to understand this. If I sell you something does that count as part of GDP? If I sell my labor to a company does my selling of it become part of the GDP? Then the company sells the product I produced for it, is that added to the GDP as well? Or is it only when a company sells something that it is counted as part of the GDP?
The quick answer to your broader question is that there are multiple ways of slicing how GDP is computed, and yes, economists are aware of them and have thought through the edge-cases as well as being aware of where the measures fall short. E.g. in your example, see the Value-added approach: https://quickonomics.com/gross-domestic-product-gdp/
But so then if I produce nothing but just sell something at profit which I already have is that part of the GDP?
If the value of my stamps-collection increases and I sell it at considerable profit is that an increase in GDP?
A fundamental assumption of mainstream economics is that market prices are approximately correct. This is more for pragmatic reasons than anything; you need some sort of prices to compare unlike things and it's often easy to get some consensus on what the market price is. If you want to calculate GDP some other way then you will need to decide what millions of prices "should" be and persuade others with your argument…
Yes. Market clearing prices are set by the intersection of desire/need and scarcity.
Health care prices can be virtually as high as you like if you can make health care scarce enough, because pretty much everybody wants to live.
The greatest profits are usually found where scarcity meets desperation.
This is also why most large corporations spend half of their time trying to tweak the desire side (advertising) and the scarcity side (market manipulation/intellectual property/contractual exclusivity/lobbying) in a bid to secure margins. De beers is probably the clearest example of success in these endeavours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quick answer to your broader question is that there are multiple ways of slicing how GDP is computed, and yes, economists are aware of them and have thought through the edge-cases as well as being aware of where the measures fall short. E.g. in your example, see the Value-added approach: https://quickonomics.com/gross-domestic-product-gdp/
A good resource thanks. "It measures the total value of all goods and services produced". But so then if I produce nothing but just sell something at profit which I already have is that part of the GDP? If the value of my stamps-collection increases and I sell it at considerable profit is that an increase in GDP?
A fundamental assumption of mainstream economics is that market prices are approximately correct. This is more for pragmatic reasons than anything; you need some sort of prices to compare unlike things and it's often easy to get some consensus on what the market price is. If you want to calculate GDP some other way then you will need to decide what millions of prices "should" be and persuade others with your argument…
>Does anyone really believe health care prices are correct? Yes. Market clearing prices are set by the intersection of desire/need and scarcity. Health care prices can be virtually as high as you like if you can make health care scarce enough, because pretty much everybody wants to live. The greatest profits are usually found where scarcity meets desperation. This is also why most large corporations spend half of the…
Everybody needs food, too, but food is as cheap as dirt.
Mazzucato is one of the most suspect economists out there. Courts a huge public profile, is apparently an expert on innovation without ever having worked in the private sector, and all the conclusions appeared tailored to win more consulting work with left-wing parties. Her conclusions also tend to be far too simplistic. The reason why the UK has moved to using the private sector more is because the other way was ban…
>She seems to believe that the public sector can innovate...okay, where is the evidence of this? Well, she wrote a whole book about it, she's not just asserting it. The public sector played a huge part in the genesis of the Internet for one thing. >The examples of successful innovation are cases where private incentives have been merged with public funding. All very suspect. But another pretty critical point of that…
And my exact point is that there is a distinction between saying:
1. The public sector played a huge part in the genesis of the Internet.
2. The public sector can make wise investments, and we can definitely control this.
Point 1 is true but point 2 does not follow logically from it. And, again, there is a lot of evidence that point 2 is definitely not true.
I am not particularly sure there is any need for quibbling over definitions. It is just about incentives. To take the UK as an example: stuff like ICFC/3i, which was publicly funded but run on a commercial basis (another example is NEB/BTG, this failed...until Thatcher), worked and pretty much all of the nationalised industries failed because there were no budget constraints (the purpose of the 1975 Industry Act was to ensure nationalised companies employed a lot of people who would then vote for the govt...it didn't matter if a private sector manager was employed i.e. British Leyland).
Again: the distinction between what works and what doesn't is fairly well understood. The issue is that Mazucutto looks at something like ICFC (btw, I know she looked at this because I have talked to people who she has advised) and says: look the public sector can get things right (i.e. confirmation bias). When the point is that how you design things matter massively (a point which is often made less explicitly). Ownership is basically irrelevant but for someone who wants to grow the state, i.e. most of the people she advises, that seems like the most relevant point.
Really valuation as a pursuit was abandoned for a damned good reason - it took a lot of time to get it through most of humanity's thick heads that value is circumstance based. Even something outragously useful like a fountain of youth would become relatively worthless if it was nearly ubiquitous like oxygen. Likewise the public sector section is annoyingly simplistic in that it doesn't grasp the difference between ne…
(Obviously I'm disregarding all the derivative concerns that inevitably would arise from introducing immortality. After all, it's simply one possible example of a vastly undervalued innovation.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that is largely a misconception from people who live in the US and think the US is the worst of all possible worlds (based largely on the politics of the last decade or so)...it isn't. Not even close. The US is an extreme example of a system that optimizes totally for choice...and it achieves that aim. The UK is an extreme example of system that optimizes totally for access. They both achieve their aims but t…
>The US is an extreme example of a system that optimizes totally for choice...and it achieves that aim. I'm not sure this is true, or at least, I don't understand what pre-requisites for this to be true the U.S. posseses. Insurance is not allowed to trade across state lines, the private marketplace has a small selection of plans, most people get their insurance from their jobs meaning they only know the details of th…
Have you been to a place that doesn't optimise for this? The US is one of the only places in the world where if you are sick, the medicine (if it exists) is 100% available.
I have a relative who lives in a place that doesn't have this aim...she is sick, medicine exists but "policy" is not to cure people who have that illness because the return on investment isn't high enough...in fact, she can't receive treatment at all for it outside of primary care. This happens quite frequently with cancer/epilepsy outside the US too...the medicine exists, you just can't get it...
...and you are complaining about only having a "small selection of plans"...must be nice. Try selecting from one plan that might not cover you when you get sick (and if you get very sick, there might be nothing beyond primary care i.e. your local doctor who isn't a specialist).