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Right but you have the protagonists and antagonists in your metaphor reversed. The academic economists are the ones that claim to be professional engineers but

by CPLX 5y ago

Right but you have the protagonists and antagonists in your metaphor reversed. The academic economists are the ones that claim to be professional engineers but keep building bridges that fall down while everyone keeps screaming they have no idea what they are doing. The Midwest‘s jobs empty out, the former Soviet Union is plunged into violence, the top 1% capture nearly all the productivity gains from the digital revolution, entire generations are unable to house themselves, pay for school, or raise children. Yet these assholes keep saying just trust me and let’s try more “free markets.” Who’s handwaving again?

CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>Yet these assholes keep saying just trust me and let’s try more “free markets.” People don't listen to economists, and it's not "free markets" that are being tried. You're raging against a system where market rights have been increasingly encroached upon over the last century, as a result of politically instituted government interventions, that according to basic economics, reduce productivity growth, exacerbate income inequality, or both. Two major examples: 1. The rapid rise of social democracy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... Which is feeding the emergence of a highly paid cadre of government workers: https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-government-workers-california-paid-twice-much-private-sector-workers https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-governme... To say nothing of the rapid expansion of the regulatory bureaucracy, and the barriers to competition it creates for major private sector incumbents, and highly paid consultants/lawyers/lobbyists who know how to navigate it. 2. The rapid increase in land-use restrictions in the major high-productivity population centers, which according to many analyses, has massively increased income inequality, while inhibiting productivity growth. E.g. this study estimates that reducing land-use restrictions in just three cities: New York, San Francisco and San Jose would increase GDP by 36.3 percent: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 This finding was echoed by the White House's Council of Economic Advisers in 2016: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/Housing_Development_Toolkit%20f.2.pdf https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...
notahacker 5y ago
Except you know full well that you've constructed a straw man here, and professional economists are not all saying "let's try free markets". Although that would be the logical response to concluding that modelling public policy outcomes is impossible so government should just give up trying, which is why the Koch brothers have invested so much money in promoting that view...

by CPLX 5y ago

CryptoPunk 5y ago

>>Yet these assholes keep saying just trust me and let’s try more “free markets.” People don't listen to economists, and it's not "free markets" that are being tried. You're raging against a system where market rights have been increasingly encroached upon over the last century, as a result of politically instituted government interventions, that according to basic economics, reduce productivity growth, exacerbate income inequality, or both. Two major examples: 1. The rapid rise of social democracy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... Which is feeding the emergence of a highly paid cadre of government workers: https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-government-workers-california-paid-twice-much-private-sector-workers https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-governme... To say nothing of the rapid expansion of the regulatory bureaucracy, and the barriers to competition it creates for major private sector incumbents, and highly paid consultants/lawyers/lobbyists who know how to navigate it. 2. The rapid increase in land-use restrictions in the major high-productivity population centers, which according to many analyses, has massively increased income inequality, while inhibiting productivity growth. E.g. this study estimates that reducing land-use restrictions in just three cities: New York, San Francisco and San Jose would increase GDP by 36.3 percent: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 This finding was echoed by the White House's Council of Economic Advisers in 2016: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/Housing_Development_Toolkit%20f.2.pdf https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...

notahacker 5y ago

Except you know full well that you've constructed a straw man here, and professional economists are not all saying "let's try free markets". Although that would be the logical response to concluding that modelling public policy outcomes is impossible so government should just give up trying, which is why the Koch brothers have invested so much money in promoting that view...