What I said in a previous comment, "We have the money, we have the workers, but
we have no idea of what to do with them", wasn't meant as tongue in cheek.
What I meant was that it's silly to print a lot of money and keep interest
rates very low unless you have a carefully and fully worked out program on what
to do to get the economy moving. The rebuilding of crumbling infrastructure
could do a lot to get the economy moving again.
Canada, under the Harper government, has had an "Action Plan" program for
several years. However, this has depended on local governments calling the
shots on what available funds should be spent on -- a new sidewalk here, a new
culvert there etc. -- when what's really required is a series of larger
projects that employ labor and capital in amounts that really make a difference.
Ed
________________________________
From: Arthur Cordell <[email protected]>
To: "'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'"
<[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, May 3, 2013 2:26:50 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Capitalism is killing our morals, our future
I think the current program is “we don’t know how to do anything else”. “and
we just hope that this doesn’t lead to inflation”
I agree we need a new economic thinking, one that takes in both positive and
negative externalities and has an eye on the future (7 generations??) but that
is not what is being taught in university and is very definitely not being
practiced by economists in industry or govt.
arthur
From:[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2013 1:14 PM
To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Capitalism is killing our morals, our future
That's not true. If you just print without a program, then you would be right
but none of us have advocated such a thing. We are talking about Central
planning of the infrastructure and a logical process for the private sector.
Today, the only option is one or the other. That makes no sense. The
problem with economists is they have no imagination and speak in dogma. We
need imagination and a new economics that involves both realities in a logical
fashion. America's market is like the way Europe does their forests. They
let them be or they cut them down. dumb! dumb! dumb! you have to be willing
to plan, take responsibility and manage.
REH
From:[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2013 11:00 AM
To: 'Ed Weick'; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Capitalism is killing our morals, our future
Economy is on life support. All the economic docs can say or do is print,
print, print.
From:[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2013 9:02 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Capitalism is killing our morals, our future
We have the money, we have the workers, but we have no idea of what to do with
them.
Ed
From:Ray Harrell <[email protected]>
To: "'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'"
<[email protected]>; [email protected]
Sent: Friday, May 3, 2013 1:03:22 AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Capitalism is killing our morals, our future
May 2, 2013
Not Enough Inflation
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Ever since the financial crisis struck, and the Federal Reserve began
"printing money" in an attempt to contain the damage, there have been dire
warnings about inflation - and not just from the Ron Paul/Glenn Beck types.
Thus, in 2009, the influential conservative monetary economist Allan Meltzer
warned that we would soon become "inflation nation." In 2010, the
Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development urged the
Fed to raise interest rates to head off inflation risks (even though its own
models showed no such risk). In 2011, Representative Paul Ryan, then the
newly installed chairman of the House Budget Committee, raked Ben Bernanke,
the Fed chairman, over the coals, warning of looming inflation and intoning
solemnly that it was a terrible thing to "debase" the dollar.
And now, sure enough, the Fed really is worried about inflation. You see,
it's getting too low.
Before I get to the trouble with low inflation, however, let's talk about
what we should have learned so far.
It's not hard to see where inflation fears were coming from. In its efforts
to prop up the economy, the Fed has bought more than $2 trillion of stuff -
private debts, housing agency debts, government bonds. It has paid for these
purchases by crediting funds to the reserves of private banks, which isn't
exactly printing money, but is close enough for government work. Here comes
hyperinflation!
Or, actually, not. From the beginning, it was or at least should have been
obvious that the financial crisis had plunged us into a "liquidity trap," a
situation in which many people figure that they might just as well sit on
cash. America spent most of the 1930s in a liquidity trap; Japan has been in
one since the mid-1990s. And we're in one now.
Economists who had studied such traps - a group that included Ben Bernanke
and, well, me - knew that some of the usual rules of economics are in
abeyance as long as the trap lasts. Budget deficits, for example, don't
drive up interest rates; printing money isn't inflationary; slashing
government spending has really destructive effects on incomes and
employment.
The usual suspects dismissed all this analysis; it was "liquidity claptrap,"
declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute. But that was four years ago,
and the liquidity trappers seem to have been right, after all.
And it's worth mentioning another issue on which the inflation non-worriers
have been vindicated: how to measure inflation trends. The Fed relies on a
measure that excludes food and energy prices, which fluctuate widely from
month to month. Many commentators ridiculed this focus on "core" inflation,
especially in early 2011, when rising food and energy prices briefly sent
"headline" inflation above 4 percent even as the core stayed low. But, sure
enough, inflation came back down.
So all those inflation fears were wrong, and those who fanned those fears
proved, in case you were wondering, that their economic doctrine is
completely wrong - not that any of them will ever admit such a thing.
And, at this point, inflation - at barely above 1 percent by the Fed's
favored measure - is dangerously low.
Why is low inflation a problem? One answer is that it discourages borrowing
and spending and encourages sitting on cash. Since our biggest economic
problem is an overall lack of demand, falling inflation makes that problem
worse.
Low inflation also makes it harder to pay down debt, worsening the
private-sector debt troubles that are a main reason overall demand is too
low.
So why is inflation falling? The answer is the economy's persistent
weakness, which keeps workers from bargaining for higher wages and forces
many businesses to cut prices. And if you think about it for a minute, you
realize that this is a vicious circle, in which a weak economy leads to
too-low inflation, which perpetuates the economy's weakness.
And this brings us to a broader point: the utter folly of not acting to
boost the economy, now.
Whenever anyone talks about the need for more stimulus, monetary and fiscal,
to reduce unemployment, the response from people who imagine themselves wise
is always that we should focus on the long run, not on short-run fixes. The
truth, however, is that by failing to deal with our short-run mess, we're
turning it into a long-run, chronic economic malaise.
I wrote recently about how, by allowing long-term unemployment to persist,
we're creating a permanent class of unemployed Americans. The problem of
too-low inflation is very different in detail, but similar in its
implications: here, too, by letting short-run economic problems fester we're
setting ourselves up for a long-run, perhaps permanent, pattern of economic
failure.
The point is that we are failing miserably in responding to our economic
challenge - and we will be paying for that failure for many years to come.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell
Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2013 12:15 AM
To: [email protected]; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,
EDUCATION'
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Capitalism is killing our morals, our future
Well said:
REH
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 11:50 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Re: Capitalism is killing our morals, our future
REH wrote:
> First we think of the mega system of the US as a home budget and now a
> human body.
>
> I don't think I would "buy" either metaphor. It's a big blinking
> system much too complicated for such comparisons even though the body
> is complicated and doesn't break down well into the mechanical models
> when it comes to mapping.
It's hard to put find a metaphor for how a computer works that could explain
it to, say, a bright, literate, educated late 17th c, gentleman. And a
computer is an engineered, blueprinted artifact.
The biological system -- the biosphere in all its Gaian complexity -- is sui
generis. Nothing else exists that will serve as a model or metaphor to
explain it. We can model little pieces -- Isle of Langerhans function or
population dynamics of Sable Island horses, say.
But, in general, we have to find out what's there and discover how a given
"what" interacts with its surroundings, then do that a million times,
building up our knowledge of Gaia.
The human body, the human brain or the socio-economic system of the US (or
of the Pakistan or of the world) are similarly sui generis or nearly so. And
they're subsets of Gaia, of the global biology system.
A unique factor of the global system of living things is that evolution,
popularly described at the level of ecological niches, actually takes place
at the molecular level so Gaia is integrated all the way down from
populations of large organisms to the level molecules -- from giraffes and
forests down to dietary trace elements in diet or systemic effect of ppm
pollutants.
I my view, the chief failure of economics is just about what McClosky points
to: failure to look at what's actually there at all scales and try to
describe it. Instead, simple models are constructed, their properties
hypothesized as properties of the real world and and further models are
constructed in an attempt to match the real world.
It doesn't work well.
The result is, as the piece from Marketwatch [1] opines, pressure to create
a society that matches market concepts in place of a market economy that
serves society.
Good medical practitioners understand and allow for the underlying
complexity of biology, for the fact that "disease models" and therapies are
"best guesses" and "best practice". Pharma companies, in contrast, do not.
For them, a pathological condition, a set of presenting symptoms, is a
marketing opportunity.
Just as we're appalled that some physicians adopt the viewpoint of the
pharma companies, we should be appalled when people in government,
education, justice and other social domains adopt the viewpoint of Wall
Street and Madison Avenue. We should be outraged when such people
manipulate those social domains into operating under the rubric of Wall
Street and Madison Avenue.
Hmm.., Not sure I've said anything new here. So there you go...
- Mike
[1] http://www.marketwatch.com/Story/story/print?guid=01AA1916-AEA6-11E2
-BA04-002128040CF6
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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