Unbalanced Trends
A recent New York Time article featured one of the many ways that government commands the economy to favor large corporations over small businesses. The article uncovers a new twist in the old “trickle-down economics” made popular in the Reagan era. Large corporations can borrow money at low rates, but they are saving it for [...]
Continue reading about Our Triple Redistributive Economic System
Perhaps I should not be commenting on health care reform at this point, since I do not dissect the various proposals, including the current legislation. Here’s the problem: no health care reform will be close to ideal at this point. Like most things in our increasing paternalistic society the ideal to my mind would involve [...]
(Started on 6/27. Update added below on 6/28) As I was writing Systems out of Balance I tried to keep abreast of the misinformation being used to persuade us to continue with laissez faire policies. The enhancement of liberty and wealth were the most dominant types of misinformation when I started. Laissez faire economists twisted [...]
I received an anonymous comment the other day that casts some doubt as to whether a true meritocracy would benefit the middle class because of the vitality function (curve). In essence I have addressed this already on The Middle Class Forum in a post that brought up the Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle theorizes that [...]
Earlier on this year I displayed graphs of trends since the late forties that our productivity has shifted towards the financial and service sectors and away from producing goods, and that the main impetus for this shift occurred in the seventies. There are consequences to be expected from such a shift in the economy. Here [...]
Continue reading about Economic Trends – Middle 20% since 1953
Economics is about resource distribution. Laissez faire folks like to say it is about scarce resource distribution, to which I beg to differ, but I’m not a grand economic scholar. Over the past few months I have shown a series of graphs that showed resource distribution in various sectors, as represented by income in those [...]
Continue reading about Our Resource Distribution Has Changed. So What?
If you want ultimate fixes to a problem, you should be focused on ultimate causes. The only economists apparently in this pursuit are behavioral economists, as they have been revealing for us just how unnatural greed is. The rest, even the “good guys” from a middle class perspective (hint, not laissez faire economists), are busy [...]
In Systems out of Balance I often point out the similarities between economics and ecology. Both disciplines look at resource distribution; ecology focuses on natural systems of resource distribution, economics on cultural systems. In particular I draw parallels between the survival strategies of organisms and the survival strategies of economic systems. Our own economic system [...]
Recent graphs have shown economic trends since 1948 in regards to our economic productivity. These graphs were spurred in part by a recent emphasis on consumer spending and saving financial markets as solutions to our current predicament. But our financial markets and consumer spending took off from the seventies up until recent events, suggesting that [...]
In the last entry I claimed I would have something to add about “communist” branding. However, before I get to that, and to help make sense of what I have to say, some more data on economic trends will be helpful. This is once again from the National Income and Products Account tables readily available [...]
Continue reading about Economic Trends – Private Enterprise Income