Are real wages lower than 40 years ago
While rolling around the internet I found the following:
Lets have a look shall we.
Interesting! But something seems a bit off – surely this can’t be true!? Let us investigate.
Can we blame universities for inequality in educational attainment?
I can see where this article is coming from. Inequality in educational attainment can translate into inequality in incomes. If people from poor households have lower educational attainment then we have a generational link between low incomes, which implies lower income mobility. This is something that we may find unjust.
Why do I say “may”, well this depends on the cause doesn’t it – why does this inequality exist.
Now I don’t disagree that educational attainment is associated with income inequality, and the narrowing of gaps in educational attainment has been associated with lower income inequality. I also don’t disagree that, looking at a person in isolation, lower mobility can be associated with lower opportunity.
But I am from a low income area and I am not sure we can blame universities for the fact that they primarily have students from higher deciles.
Bleg: Is this due to capitalism?
Is the Sims the critique of modern capitalism we've all been missing https://t.co/T01dR6Hv5m
— Unlearning Economics (@UnlearningEcon) September 17, 2018
I hear this sort of thing a lot – and want to hear your views. I will give a view in the future.
Also we used to just play Sim City 2000 in economics class at high school and I thought it would be cool if the individuals in the city followed rules – something they talked about for the latest Sim City but didn’t really do. So remember any model we build to explain this is sort of like that, just maybe less entertaining with a dearth of colourful sounds.
10 years after Lehman
I have been enjoying the live tweeting of the Lehman Brothers failure – with a 10 year delay.
Then 10 years ago today I tried to provide some predictions. The terms of trade fell a little more than I expected (to their 2005 levels rather than to their 2007 level), but otherwise they weren’t that bad – credit rationing was predominantly in the construction sector, mortgage rates fell, and in NZ the crisis was nothing like the Great Depression. But this:
As long as the information transfer between market participants begins to improve again this crisis will be a historical point of interest in a years time – rather than the beginning of the end.
Glad I conditioned it on the idea that there were be a recognition of loss between debtors and creditors – because once that didn’t happen in Europe the crisis just kept on trucking. With everything calming down by mid-2009 the world was recovering. Then Greece in May 2010. Then my goodness just look at this this cluster. Finally in 2012 there was a recognition of the need for a lender of last resort in Europe.
If you want a retrospective I did one back in 2014 😉
On school spending and teachers pay
"We then narrow our focus to black families in the South, where state-wide minimum teacher salary laws created sharp differences in teacher wages between adjacent counties. These differences had large impacts on schooling attainment"https://t.co/WOnenclZxu
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) September 12, 2018
Interesting. Education, and schooling attainment, seems to be a big issue over here in NZ as well – with a political consensus that we care about this issue, but conflict about “how” school quality relates to this (or is even measured). So lets have a chat.
“Left Youtube” is overusing the labour theory of value
While I have been MIA over the last four years a lot has changed on the internet and in terms of economic and social discourse. The weird infatuation of the alt-right with “globalists” and nonsensical economic arguments is particularly upsetting – and I’ll be discussing how the decline in persuasiveness of economists has helped these types of people fill the void in the future.
My concern four years ago was that the non-rationalist identity politics of the left would open this type of negative nationalistic politics on the right – or would at least be used as a foil for it. The refusal to actually state our assumptions and values is a failure irrespective of the intentions we hold. In that way, when exploring Youtube I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the leftist video blogs – and their willingness to fully articulate their views. Key examples of this are Shaun, Contrapoints, and Philosophy Tube.
However, these channels are distinctly “anti-capitalist” in terms of wanting sizable change in the status quo. I am a mainstream economist that believes in incremental change. A full discussion of this would be interesting – but give me time. But to do so we need to get something clear about the labour theory of value that I am hearing them describe – it doesn’t make sense as a justification for anything let alone as a “theory of value”.
Note: The actual labour theory of value has been defined many ways – and the most profitable Marxian interpretation I’ve seen is trying to understand LTV as part of a subsistance wage argument on factor income shares. That isn’t the focus here.