Wages aren’t stagnating, they’re plummeting. Many economists have expressed concern that median wages have stagnated since the 1970s, as illustrated in the following chart from the Economic Policy Institute. Source: Economic Policy Institute. For workers in the 10th, 20th and 50th percentiles, median hourly wages haven't grown much at all since the early 1970s. But a few economists have argued that this misses what's really going on: Since the 1970s, women and racial minorities have become more integrated into the general workforce. So while white men, white women and racial minorities of both genders have all seen gains, the argument goes, the lower wages paid to women and racial minorities push down the median wage figure enough that these gains are disguised.
Edward Conard's new book "Unintended Consequences" makes a case along these lines, using the following chart (via Evan Soltas). The second and bigger problem is that Conard's central contention - that wages have increased for each gender and racial group - is simply false. The Shock Doctrine 2009. The capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011. AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears.
An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power.
The Zurich team can. 1. £13tn: hoard hidden from taxman by global elite | Business | The Observer. A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network. James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer. He shows that at least £13tn – perhaps up to £20tn – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks, which vie to attract the assets of so-called high net-worth individuals. Oil-rich states with an internationally mobile elite have been especially prone to watching their wealth disappear into offshore bank accounts instead of being invested at home, the research suggests.
How Money is Made / Created: Ben Dyson Explains the Debt Crisis. Www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Trade-Off1.pdf. The Financial Crisis Was Foreseeable … Thousands of Years Ago. Economists, Military Strategists and Others Warned Us … Long Ago We’ve known for 4,000 years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse.
And see this. We’ve known for 2,500 years that prolonged war bankrupts an economy. We’ve known for 1,900 years that rampant inequality destroys societies. We’ve known for thousands of years that debasing currencies leads to economic collapse. We’ve known for hundreds of years that the failure to punish financial fraud destroys economies, as it destroys all trust in the financial system. We’ve known for hundreds of years that monopolies and the political influence which accompanies too much power in too few hands is dangerous for free markets. We’ve known for centuries that companies will try to pawn their debts off on governments, and that it is a huge mistake for governments to allow corporate debt to be backstopped by government. We’ve known for 80 years that inflation is a hidden tax. We Have Forgotten What the Ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, the Early Jews and Christians, the Founding Fathers and Even Napoleon Bonaparte Knew About Money.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock has repeatedly pointed out that we have reached “peak credit” – and there will not in our lifetimes be as much credit as we saw from 2000-2008. I noted last year: Michael Hudson is a highly-regarded economist. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. He is a former Wall Street economist at Chase Manhattan Bank who also helped establish the world’s first sovereign debt fund.Hudson says that – in every country and throughout history – debt always grows exponentially, while the economy always grows as an S-curve.Moreover, Hudson says that the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians knew that debts had to be periodically forgiven, because the amount of debts will always surpass the size of the real economy.For example, Hudson noted in 2004: And Hudson wrote last year: That is what our money system is.
Community-Wealth.org: Wealth-Building Strategies for America's Communities. The New Totalitarianism: How American Corporations Have Made America Like the Soviet Union. Photo Credit: Viajar24h.com July 15, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The great power struggle of the 20th century was the competition between Soviet-style communism and "free-market" corporatism for domination of the world's resources. In America, it's taken for granted that Soviet communism lost (though China's more capitalist variant seems to be doing well), and the superiority of neo-liberal economics -- as epitomized by the great multinational corporations -- was thus affirmed for all time and eternity.
There's a small problem with this, though. It's not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that's awful enough). With tongue only somewhat in cheek, here are a few ways in which Americans are now becoming a new lumpenproletariat, subject to the whims and diktats of our new Soviet-style corporate overlords. Reduced Choice and Big-Box Censorship. Capitalism’s Brave New World. There is a certain view of economics that regards Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as both a utopian scheme and a vision of the future. Free-marketers and libertarians will be awed by the spectacle of an untrammeled labor market: A cavalcade of employers make available a wide variety of work.
The jobs and compensation are exhaustively defined. A multitude of laborers examine this menu and decide which jobs appeal to them and whether the compensation is adequate. No one is forced to take a job he doesn’t like. No one gets tricked into a job he didn’t sign up for. In the world of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, there is no employment discrimination, none of the inefficiency and unfairness produced by credentialing regimes, and no workplace politics. The hippies are wrong in the particulars. It’s worth appreciating the breadth of the change microtasking represents. Microtasking also obliterates geography—you can work from a bar in midtown Manhattan, a basement in Montana, or a brothel in Manila.
Roubini Says 2013 `Storm' May Surpass 2008 Crisis: Video. The U.K. Riots And The Coming Global Class War.
Thinking outside the 1930s box. 7 October 2011Last updated at 14:38 There are two kinds of people at present: those who know in a vague way that the 1930s was a bad time, and those who have studied the detail and understand the economics of why it went bad. The latter are now getting publicly terrified because they can see, very clearly, the danger of doing it all again. They include Sir Mervyn King on Sky last night: "This is the most serious financial crisis at least since the 1930s, if not ever.
" And Barack Obama, whose comment "Europe is scaring the world" hit the nail on the head. But even as people dig out their old books about that concatenation of accident, stupidity and miscommunication that caused the Great Depression, I want to throw in another thought: it could be worse than the 1930s if we let it happen. I suspect this is what was in the back of Mervyn King's mind when he added that "if not ever" comment. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. You may ask how it could possibly get worse than this.
Is there a way out? a1ym4.jpg (500×7403) Great Stagnation...or Great Relocation? "I was on top of the Westin Hotel being shown the sights of [Shanghai], and I had a sudden crisis as I looked out at the extraordinary skyscrapers the architecture and the art deco. I thought to myself, well, the mandate of heaven has passed from us and come home. " - Gore Vidal, 2007 I'll say this about Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation hypothesis: it has really made me think. Although I was resistant to it at first, the more I look at the evidence, the more compelling it seems. Income growth in the U.S. really has slowed down since the 1960s, and more recently, in all the rich countries. Cowen's idea has much to recommend it. On the other hand, the idea that our stagnation is driven by exogenous changes in scientific discovery - we just didn't find enough new stuff this half-century!
I just have a hard time believing that a slowdown in scientific discovery could cause incomes to go down. Therefore, I have been thinking about alternative theories to explain rich-world income stagnation. 1.
Economics Studies/ Articles. Www.concept67.net/pdf/economicdesign_p1.pdf. "They've traded more for cigarettes / than I've managed to express"; or, Dives, Lazarus, and Alice. "They've traded more for cigarettes / than I've managed to express"; or, Dives, Lazarus, and Alice Attention conservation notice: 1000+ words on the limits of welfare economics, in the form of a thought experiment or parable superficially tuned to the holiday (and brooding on my hard-disk for months). Gloomy, snarky, heavy-handed, academic, and obvious to anyone who knows enough about the subject to care.
Have you no friends and family to whom you should be showing your love (perhaps in the form of food)? Let us consider a simple economy with three individuals. Alice is a restaurateur; she has fed herself, and has just prepared a delicious turkey dinner, at some cost in materials, fuel, and her time. Dives is a wealthy conceptual artist1, who has eaten and is not hungry, but would like to buy the turkey dinner so he can "feed" it to the transparent machine he has built, and film it being "digested" and eventually excreted2. To achieve this, he is willing and able to spend up to $5000.
Marxian Economics. US.