Tag Archives: economy
Employment and the Steady State
It is necessary here to repeat a point made or implied earlier, that the level and rate of change of economic activity and the level of unemployment are to a large extent independent of one another. Not totally independent of course, each is one determinant of the other. … Read more
Full Wage Indexation – Kindergarten Economics
Full Wage Indexation (FWI), indexing wages to the full Consumer Price Index (CPI), that is, increasing money wages at regular intervals by the same proportion as the rate of price increases during those intervals, is intended to maintain living standards by maintaining real wages. … Read more
Fight Unemployment or Inflation First?
Public sector employment and transfer payments are limited by the amount of revenue which can be raised, which in turn is limited by how much the private sector can provide without ceasing to be viable, or how much can be borrowed without creating a “deficit bomb”. … Read more
Supply-side Economics and the Laffer Curve
So-called “Reaganomics” practiced during the 1980′s by the Reagan Administration in the USA was nothing more than a distorted Keynesian Great Depression policy practiced in the wrong context.
The theory was that large tax cuts would boost economic activity by giving people more money to spend on goods and services. … Read more
Hard Work – Virtue or Vice?
People working overtime for extra pay, or purchasing more goods more often, or performing any act that increases their rates of consumption, may justify themselves or be justified by governments or the media with the argument (consistent with current economic thinking) that by doing so they are boosting the economy, creating wealth, giving employment to people. … Read more
Digression: Depletion and Inflation
Throughput of resources, a first derivative of wealth, is of two kinds, gross and net. Net throughput is the flow of goods and services in the economy. Gross throughput is net throughput plus the resources required to extract and process wealth into these goods and services. … Read more
Visual and Noise Pollution
In terms of physically damaging, poisoning, or depleting the earth’s living environment, there are no such things as visual or noise pollution.
These are red herrings in the sense that, for example, people who object to the noise of rock music, traffic, or children at play, or object to the replacement of an ornamental old building by a stark new one, feel entitled to attach their cause to the environmental cause (feeling licensed by the use of the word “pollution” in describing what they object to), thereby distracting attention from issues of real importance to the living environment and diverting energy that should go into resolving those issues in the environment’s favour. … Read more