Tag Archives: inflation
Living Standard and Quality of Life
Another indirect adverse effect of environmental degradation on economic well-being arises from the effect of the degradation on people’s perception of their economic condition.
A further illustration of the erroneously perceived conflict between environmental conservation and economic well-being lies in this frequent reaction to some piece of environmental devastation: “Oh, well, at least it creates jobs for some people who wouldn’t have one otherwise.”
Certainly the degradation will keep some people busy for a while, but because of the depletion of the resource on which their jobs depend, there will be a net loss of jobs. … Read more
Value Inflation – the Trigger, not the Bullet
The direct addition of value inflation to the rate of price increases is quite small. The larger effect arises from secondary influences, in whose shaping human psychology plays an important part. These influences are triggered by the small value inflation component and its corollary, a slowing of the rate of net throughput increase relative to gross throughput increase. … Read more
Misconceptions in Practice
The inadequate or wrong concepts of current economics lead to a number of misconceptions, some examples of which will be given.
“Soak the Rich”
The “soak the rich” taxation policy sometimes advocated or practiced by the political left is based on a confusion about the nature of wealth. … Read more
When the Boom comes
During the 1970′s and 1980′s governments and people generally in the more perfluent nations were waiting for an economic “upturn” or “recovery” to reduce what had become chronic high unemployment. The underlying assumption was that the high throughput-increase rates, the so-called “economic growth” rates of the 1950′s and 1960′s, were normal and that the more sluggish throughput-increase (TI) rates of latter years were an abnormal phenomenon that could be expected to speed up in time through this or that brilliant policy initiative or going back to the early economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; or by eliminating (depending on your point of view) businessmen, unions, migrants, taxes, civil servants, or computers; or just by waiting. … Read more
The Problem of Government Debt
A major problem for economies around the world is government debt. This matter has been mentioned in other posts. Many governments have been running a deficit on their annual budget for years. It is not universally realised that these deficits are cumulative. … Read more
The Idea of Proportionate Flows Applied to Wages – the Stagflation of the 1970′s and 80′s
Misnamed “Keynesian” deficit financing policies applied in more recent years to “recessions” have contributed more and more to inflation and less and less to alleviating unemployment.
These policies have come to exacerbate the very disease, unemployment, they were meant to remedy. … Read more
Interest Rates and Ratio Distortion
It is necessary for a lender of money to charge interest because the purchasing power of each money unit is generally expected to fall with time. This has been the trend historically and the very operation of the economy tends to make it so. … Read more
Ratio Distortion and Consumption
Before and during the Great Depression there was under-consumption due to chronic under-payment of workers – fewer goods and services were being consumed than available workers and plant could structure. But what of the stagflationary situation, when chronic overpayment of workers was the distortion affecting more perfluent economies? … Read more
Non-renewable Resources – Leave Them in the Ground?
The principle of consuming resources at a rate no faster than their rate of renewal appears to be untenable in the case of resources whose renewal rate is almost zero, as is true of fossil fuels, gas, oil, and coal, also fissile uranium and thorium. … Read more
Who needs the Snail Darter?
A subtle, indirect but nevertheless important further way in which environmental depletion damages economic health is through the extinction of species.
A particular species may not be throughput directly in the sense that a particular economic activity is based directly on that species. … Read more