McConnell, the most disciplined communicator in Washington, D.C., was able to keep it together when asked whether he had concerns about Trump’s ability to manage classified information. He was silent for a couple of seconds, giggled to himself, and finally said, in a very soft voice, “no.”
One of the things that my professor said yesterday stuck with me. “If an economy does not produce enough capital goods, it will not be able to grow.” So, he said, you always want your economy to be producing as much as you possibly can, aka you want it to be ‘on the Production Possibility Curve’, but you don’t want the balance of what you produce to be weighted too much towards consumer goods, and not enough towards capital goods (and training and whatever). And you also want to be producing those things with as few resources as you can. (It’s murky whether ‘money’ counts as a resource here. Economists seem to randomly flip-flop between counting it as one and not counting it as one, and they never ever tell you until you’ve already misunderstood them, when it’s too late. I think many of them get a kick out of this.)
So. Sure, some of this is obviously true. If you don’t have the equipment you need to do your job (we’re assuming a closed economy here) and your equipment is slowly breaking down, all other things being equal, your economy is shrinking, not growing. And what’s the point of not producing everything you can? Sure, you don’t want to be polluting too much, but if we want to pollute less, we can produce more jazz dance classes and solar panel research facilities instead of more cars. However, entirely absent from the conversation so far, and from my textbook so far, is another concept which seems to fit right here, and which seems every bit as important as the capital goods/consumer goods balance. And that is that if you want your economy to grow in the future, in addition to that balance, you can’t be producing things with the fewest possible resources, at least if you count money as one of those resources. Because if you pay your workers starvation wages, then they won’t be able to buy anything tomorrow. (And won’t be willing to work anyway. I would make some kind of snide remark about the American South having solved that one, but… oops, I just did.)
Now, I’m not saying anything new here. Practically everybody knows the quote from Ford about paying his workers enough to buy his cars, and too many of them trot it out proudly when given the least opportunity. But I find it quite telling that it is simply not part of the Econ 101 conversation at this stage, where you’re talking about how you grow the economy in the future, and where it would fit perfectly into the discussion. Why isn’t it here?
Also missing is the subtler point that the relationship between producing capital goods and consumer goods has to be a curve, with an optimum point. Why? Well, assuming a closed economy, if you produce zero capital goods your machines all fall apart and you can produce much fewer goods next year. If you produce zero consumer goods, though, your workers all die and you can produce zero goods next year. If you produce few capital goods, your equipment is crappy and/or badly maintained and you produce fewer goods than you might. If you produce few consumer goods, then your workers may well all be fed but their morale will be crappy, and as little as Americans (workers or employers) like to admit it, morale has a huge impact on the productivity of a worker.
Instead, the textbook, and the teacher, painted this as competing interests: more production next year if you make more capital goods, a higher standard of living this year if you make more consumer goods. That’s true at some places on the curve, and just completely false on others. The Soviet Union, an example he trotted out of a place sacrificing consumer goods to make capital goods, is a beautiful example of what I’m saying too: their productivity was horrible. Some employees were literally negative inputs, sabotaging the things they were working on as they were making them, destroying the value that other people had already added. A major reason that the Soviets were so unhappy was because they were so poor. (The brutal repression may have been another reason, or it may well have simply been the reaction to the unrest caused by that extreme poverty.)
You don’t have to go into this now, I guess. But if you don’t, then why go into the ‘an economy can’t just make consumer goods’ argument? It seems like you should be making both or neither.
I don’t know. What I’m learning so far seems woefully incomplete… not just in the ‘this is only a 101-level course’ way, but in the ‘welcome to class, here are your blinders, they are required wearing anytime you are thinking about economics for the rest of your life’ sort of way. And isn’t it funny exactly who those particular blinders just happen to benefit?
Via Wonkette:
I am a responsible gun owner. I passed the asvab with a 93. Just because people own firearms doesn’t automatically stupid.
Perhaps, but apparently it does the verb and almost the entire restrictive clause.
There’s a giant pie fight going on over at Daily Kos. Some women decided they wanted to have a discussion about how women are treated in our society. And they requested that men sit on the sidelines for this one. Some of them did it politely, and some of them did it less politely. (“STFU men” being the most extreme example of the latter… pretty mild by my standards, but whatever.)
Predictably, neither strategy was entirely successful. It’s funny: if you asked people to comment about their experiences climbing Mount Everest, and that people with no experience climbing Mount Everest not comment, almost everyone would comply. But I guarantee you of the people didn’t comply, all or almost all would be men.
We (white guys) just can’t seem to wrap our minds around the idea that not everyone always needs our opinion in every place. Says the guy who has two blogs and comments on half a dozen more. Uh… yeah. Guilty! But when someone asks me not to comment, I neither feel compelled to disobey, nor take it personally.
We, as a society, have a long way to go, when one of our most ostensibly feminist online communities has so much difficulty with that concept.
Also, Apple is obviously a hotbed of misandry. I dictated this article on my iPhone, and discovered that no matter how I say it Siri always turns the word men into the word mad. Here:
Men men men men men men men men man man men men man man and man man men.
Oh fuck you Siri. NOW you get it right.
Many of the same conservatives who think the government can’t find its ass with both hands are perfectly happy to advocate increased nuclear energy dependence United States. This despite the fact that they know that in most cases the government would be running the reactors.
It is probably safe to say that they are not objectively pro-Fukushima. But I must admit I’m having little trouble replicating their thought processes, if that is indeed the proper turn of phrase.
Of course, many of them do think that that reactors should be run by private companies. Unimpeded, naturally, by onerous regulation or inspection regimens. This has the benefit of being internally self-consistent, although its consistency with reality is dubious at best. A brief thought experiment — imagine the Richmond California refinery fire was actually Fukushima — can give you a pretty good idea of what would happen in such a circumstance.
Fukushima could certainly been a lot worse. It could still be a whole lot worse. Unregulated, uninspected free enterprise destroyed an entire town with a fertilizer plant. I’m not sure I wants to know what it would do if it got its hands on a nuclear reactor.
This is not to say that I am unalterably opposed to nuclear energy. I think that some of the new reactor designs, funded adequately and overseen carefully by the government, might be a good partial answer to our energy problems. I just don’t see how it conservative could possibly think so.
It depresses the fuck out of me that, in 2014, the kind of thing these women are tweeting about still comes as a surprise to some people.
I won’t tell you what it does to me to know that a large proportion of men either literally won’t believe it, or won’t care even if they do.
I didn’t really expect my first post to be on something like this, but there is a rousing (and by rousing I mean kind of depressing as fuck) discussion of ‘trigger warnings’ over at Balloon Juice, and I think it’s worth noting what is really happening there.
First, a note on Balloon Juice: it’s a blog I’ve been visiting since about 2004, back when it was one of the few more-or-less rational conservative blogs on the Internet. I visited it then because I wanted to know what was going on with the people who were desperately clinging to the Republican party, despite clearly being nowhere near conservative enough to fit into it after its full-out sprint to the right. And over the following few years, I found out: they were mostly giving up and moving to the Democratic party. The owner of Balloon Juice did, and a surprising number of the commenters followed. I now read it to keep my eye on what the ex-Republican set thinks.
There’s one rule of Balloon Juice if you’re a ‘far-left’ liberal: you don’t read the comments. The commentariat may be mostly Democrats now, but many of them are deeply distrustful of anything left of center, and unwilling to acknowledge the idea that this makes them, well, centrists. Their response is often outright mockery. And thus, when I read that they were talking about trigger warnings, I really really really should have known to run the other direction.
For those of you who aren’t up to speed here, a trigger warning is any warning placed at the beginning of a piece of writing, or before a problematic part of a piece of writing, warning that the stuff coming up could cause severe discomfort in some readers. It was originally coined because some people, when they read about rape, suffer what amounts to flashbacks to their own experiences with rape. From there, it has spread, somewhat, to other traumatic experiences. Although frankly, not much: trigger warnings are still relatively rare, and mostly only used in cases where, you know, people might actually be traumatized by content. One blog might say, “The following contains a frank discussion of rape; some people might find it uncomfortable” Another might say, “This article contains a description of my beating at the hands of my stepfather. If that kind of thing is liable to upset you, be careful.” Of course, if the article starts out with a paragraph that makes it obvious what’s coming up, then you don’t need an extraneous warning. But if it starts with a paragraph of vivid description of violence or other tragedy, a warning doesn’t seem like it would be entirely out of line.
It’s important to note, by the way, that the words ‘trigger warning’ are not required by the Secret Feminist Cabal Conspiracy to actually appear. It is a term of art, a description of a thing, not a regulatory requirement.
Now, there’s an argument, typified by that Balloon Juice post and the ensuing comment thread but really going on all over the internet, that says the following:
What’s funny about this argument is that it’s all more or less happening on the Left. The Right doesn’t care, they just point and laugh. It’s just the Left who feels the need to justify their hostility towards the idea of trigger warnings. (I here use the term ‘Left’ to mean ‘Center Right and Leftward’, so at least in this context Obama is part of the Left. That’s going to be a rarity on my blog, so treasure it.)
And, that said, there are completely obvious answers to all of the arguments above. Starting with: if you don’t have a trauma that you have to worry about when reading, skipping over trigger warnings should not be a difficult thing for you. If it is, then there’s something wrong with you. Sorry, but yes, it really is as simple as that.
As for the points, such as they are:
Personally, I know there are people out there who are more sensitive than I am, and yes it bothers me, and I’m trying to be a better person. But it’s so hard, when there are so many people out there who so richly deserve to be ridiculed.
I’ll have more to say about some of this stuff soon… specifically about the tendency for the center-left to aim all their weapons to their left. It’s amazing how reliable it is, and it’s hard to understand American politics without understanding it, yet I rarely see anyone talking about it.
