1. Different views on when rapid economic growth will resume.
2. Markets in everything, diseconomies of scope edition: university beef.
3. “I guess we had better make sure…”
4. How much monopsony power does Walmart have?
5. The new service jobs, markets in everything.
Given the current state of the world, I think UNC surprise inspections to check that courses are “real” can only have the affect of increasing the number of “fake” courses.
It’s sorta along the lines of if the NYC public library announced they’re going to randomly go through their books to make sure no one has stuck a slice of pizza in them. Certain bad behavior is unthinkable until someone puts it in your mind that other people are doing it.
By that logic, wouldn’t you also be against the publication (and publicizing) of the report about all the AfAm classes that didn’t actually exist? And muckraking in general?
I think this was John Locke’s argument against teaching theology: it would start people thinking up flaws in the standardly accepted arguments for God.
1. Getting monetary policy right via NGPLT would help, but I wonder if we’re increasingly an economy that produces regulations rather than goods and services. Some of this is good — China’s growing GDP pretty fast, but you wouldn’t want to breathe their air or drink their water, to say nothing of building codes — and some of it makes less sense, like the $200K we paid to preserve and guard an “endandered” landscape shrub. Either way, it seems to be the one unstoppable U.S. growth trend.
2. Markets in everything, diseconomies of scope edition: university beef.
From the article:
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“Anything like a university brand meat has an incredible halo,” he said.
Then there is the saturation factor. Just how many Notre Dame Fighting Irish throw pillows for example, could a person really want? Dinnertime, by contrast, comes around like clockwork.
- – -
We have college branded credit cards and many states have college branded license plates.
Using the “comes around like clockwork” criteria, why not toothbrushes, razors, cars, coffee, toilet paper, milk, etc., etc.
Nostalgia sells.
Every single thing you mentioned already exists
Yeah, those totally exist already. With maybe the exception of milk.
Beef? What about horse meat? It’s the nouvelle vague, you know.
Apropos of what someone said about Notre Dame throw pillows above … I’m going to check my Notre Dame throw pillows for horsemeat.
Such a waste of resources.
We care about deaf people and their ability to listen to the music while we do not care about people next to us, who live in poverty and struggle to be able to send their kids to schools. We should have people like this sign language interpreter in our schools to help children get over their racism and xenophobia against immigrants and poor people in general.
We? The US? Is it even logically possible for us to be MORE xenophilic?
The monopsony argument for a minimum wage died with the advent of mass motorization.
Re the monopsony labor market. I don’t know anything about labor economics, so I made up my own model. The model has an intermediary (the firm, or cartel of firms) that sits between the market for low-end labor and the market for labor’s product, and which is trying to maximize its profit. Well, here’s the thing: in the usual argument for the minimum wage, the product demand curve is steep, so raising the wage doesn’t cut employment much. But for the monopsony argument to work — that is, raising the required wage increases employment — the demand curve needs to be pretty flat. So which is it, minimum wage fans, steep or flat? Or do you have a different model?
Now recognize that the labor supply curve is below the marginal cost of employment, and you’re home! Adding workers pushes up the wage.
If the labor supply curve were flat, the monopsony argument wouldn’t hold.
Don’t look at me: I’m just a trade hand applying the terms-of-trade argument for protection, which is identically structured.
That’s the product demand curve that’s flat (or not), sports fans. Don’t look at me either. I’m just an engineer type.
If the final product demand curve is flat, and if wages and rents are given, and there is constant returns to scale in production, then the labor demand curve will NOT be flat, ingegnere, unless there is zero substitutability between labor and capital.
Cheers,
Dismalist
If the product demand curve is flat, you won’t be able to move the firm’s optimal employment level up very much by jacking up the required wage, however steep the (unregulated) labor supply curve is. It’s the labor SUPPLY curve we’re talking about, isn’t it? Anyhow, I’m done here.
Is slow growth US the new normal?
By choice, yes. 2016 we get another choice.
Question: If we really did get rapid growth for a couple years, what would increase faster?
A) Tax revenues
B) Interest payments required to service government debt
At this point, I’d bet on B, which means the government is now in the position of not wanting economic growth.
“How much monopsony power does Walmart have?”
Considering they push for minimum wage increases, I suspect the answer is “almost none.”
Was going to go into a diatribe about efficiency wages, but I thought I’d Google first, to get some facts. Came up with this http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-21/business/37213769_1_wage-nfib-wal-mart, which says Walmart is sitting on the fence, as of now.
Is this half the truth, or wrong, or outdated?
#3: It is a shitty job to be a professor indeed. First, having to swallow their pride and give a B to the incompetent quarterback in the U football team. Then adding insult to injury, they have to cover the manager’s fault. The dean is getting away by blaming professors, bravo.
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