Specifically, krugman believes that inflation is required to confuse laborers to stay in their jobs and not take pay cuts (sorry, can't find ref), which creates labor stability.
so yes, it is about economists. interest rate policy is crafted around this principle and designed to screw the have nots (it is not only krugman, it is encoded in the fed's dual mandate). since every country has a central bank with a similar mandate its hard to know if gettimg screwed is inherent in captalism or if it's only a feature of central bank capitalism.
It's maybe telling that the nordic central banks have the lowest interest rates in general
> The gap between haves and have nots is more related to politics than economics IMO
in human history there have been few societies that haven't had a widening gap; gaps typically have contracted during times of revolution. no social democracy in the current epoch doesn't feature a widening gap, so i would doubt that active redistribution helps all that much (inflation is a compounding effect that overtakes all redistribution)
He is explaining a market dynamic, not prescribing a political policy. He's correct: with zero inflation, normal market dynamics means that some jobs become less valuable over time, and others become more valuable. This is natural progress caused by all kinds of factors like scientific advancements. In such an environment, it is very difficult for employers of the now antiquated jobs to cut wages. So they simply cut jobs instead, leading to higher unemployment. Inflation mitigates this effect by effectively giving workers of antiquated jobs pay cuts (in real terms) rather than firing them. What politicians do with this knowledge is a policy choice. You are shooting the messenger.
You cant be serious. Inflation is a policy. it is mandated in the fed charter. and at the end of the article, he says "let's have more inflation". he is prescribing it.
> rather than firing them
Absolutely nuts outcome. why dont we enable capital to be lazy terrible dishonest management instead of having them actually respond to market forces with hard truths and look their employee in the eye and fire their employee. what could go wrong with this sort of social policy?
I strongly disagree with your policy prescription. I would prefer lower unemployment. Workers are still free to leave their jobs and seek out better wages. It's just that they're no longer forced out, and I think that's an objectively better outcome.
well im sorry your worldview has been captured by depressing corporate fetish of measurement and Goodhart's law.
imagine a society where not everyone had to be employed. some could afford to stay at home and take care of the kids, or take care of someone else's kids, the elderly, or just do random social improvement activities.
well in a society incentivized to maximize the employment statistic, the society will craft policies to incentivize people to be employed, and a lot of unemployable social good will be imobilized and the capacity to do it will be undeployed. by far the worst mechanism to do this is inflation, whose mechanism of incentivizing individuals to be and stay employed is a compounding treadmill which if you fall off, youll be homeless or foodless or both.
> there's no way the top 10% receive 10% of the services.
Depends on how you value the service of protecting that wealth. Prooperty rights enforced by the state, and the more property one has, the more one benefits from that.
I think you misunderstand. The comment your responding to was arguing against this assertion:
> no way the top 10% receive 3/4 of the services
I think the argument is that the main service USA taxes pay for is defending property and keeping order (via force and infrastructure) such that property rights are honored. The rich have disproportionate property, so they receive disproportionate service.
you keep bringing in property but that's irrelevant to begin with, as that's a wealth construct and I'm only talking about W2 income. if you make more money, you will pay more taxes regardless if whether or not you own any property, so your point is moot.
all 50 states already levy property taxes on real estate so that's already accounted for separately
Property is not just real estate and state property tax is not what is keeping the american billionaire class safe and growing richer.
If you've asked this question in good faith, perhaps isolating and over-defining "income" or "property" is limiting your understanding of the broader question we're responding to: do rich people pay more or less tax compared to the value they get from government? Most here seem to be in agreement that rich get more value from our government than poor do because they have more at stake.
This is irrelevant, I'm not talking about GDP. I'm saying that people generally don't pay money for things they don't value, ergo when people are paid money, it's for things that other people value.
Right... and GDP being a bad metric (for most decisions) doesn't have any relevance to the discussion. It doesn't imply anything about the thing it measures.
By analogy, good engines produce power. A speedometer measures the engine's power under a set of conditions. However, a speedometer is not (by itself) a good way to measure an engine because there are other factors you care about. The fact that a speedometer is a bad measure of engine power does not mean that engine power is unimportant or bad.
If I said, "high max speed means good engine," or "high GDP means economy is working well," your comment would be relevant.
I did not say that. I said "the overwhelming majority of transactions in an economy are of mutual benefit to the transactors."
Being of mutual benefit to the transactors is not the same as being of value for your neighbor. A transaction being mutually beneficial to the transactors is neither necessary nor sufficient for the transaction to be generating value.
Consider FooCorp paying an advertiser to convince people to buy its gizmos rather than the market leader Bar Inc.'s widgets. This is then followed by Bar Inc. paying the same advertiser to convince the same people to go back to buying widgets again. Each transaction is to the benefit of both the advertiser and the respective manufacturer, but taken together leaves the world in the same state as it was to begin with. No value was created. In fact, value was destroyed (the opportunity cost of labor by the advertiser).
An example of a transaction that is not to the mutual benefit of the transactors, yet increases value is the levying of fines against behavior which has externalized costs greater than their internalized gains. The fine is not to the benefit of the party it is levied against, but the effect of deterring negative-total-value behavior is equivalent to creating value.
I'm not convinced >99% of people's jobs are of the value-creating kind but it's certainly well above 50%. Several of the largest companies in our industry are arguably of the negative value kind. Insurance companies that accept premiums but deny legitimate claims certainly are.
And then cries of disgust and demands of professional services 24/7 for free because someone found a bug in your hobby project which turned out to be useful for some megacorp or VC funded startup.
> You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that.
I'm not so sure about this. Both require visualizing something upfront, evaluating the resulting images and understanding what needs to change.
It's a bit like digital and analog photography. Digital makes the skills of getting a good exposure less relevant and allows post-processing. But a photographer still needs to know what makes a good photo.
This doesn't invalidate the original point though. Making a living as a photographer became harder with the advent of digital photography.
> The logic of most prominent programming languages, such as Python, is based on English vocabulary and syntax — using terms like “while” or “if not” to trigger certain actions — which makes it that much more difficult to learn for non-native speakers. Furthermore, many of the most popular educational resources for learning to code, including Stack Exchange, are also in English.
It seems to me that the latter is a much bigger problem for Spanish. Programming languages have relatively few keywords. I imagine English keywords might be a big problem for people who doesn't know the latin alphabet though.
“If not” (i.e. else) translates to “si no”. Imagine finding that in a line of code… You need a tilde “‘“ to say “yes” (sí) but… are you really going to introduce keywords with accented chars?
"si no", is a clear spanish construction. Everybody understands its meaning and it does not need a tilde.
You could use "otro" (=another, =different) also, that is even shorter, has the advantage of being a single word instead two, and is used routinely in dichotomic keys.
I understand, but I must say that it doesn't sound very efficient to be working in an office for 8 hours every day in order to have useful spontaneous connections every once in a while. Meetups and other events also provide such interactions without having to be there all the time while coding, writing, etc.
The someone was Pedro's brother Miguel. After losing the war, he was banished and his descendents removed from the succession line, but they now claim to be heirs to the throne of Portugal (which nobody really cares about).
This all happened after the royal family escaped the French invasions to Brazil and Rio de Janeiro became the capital of Portugal. The story of Pedro, the independence of Brazil and the Portuguese liberal wars is really interesting.
