Bretton-Woods fixed $35 equal to one ounce of gold.

The Minimalist guesses that $35 buys one ounce of real saffron.

Here is the original link. Here is the original article citing the price of saffron.

Atrios writes:

I’m basically a “free trader,” but it’s time we stop pretending it’s that simple.

Try this highly complex story on for size:

The US Commerce Department has said it may impose tariffs of up to 123% on Chinese, Malaysian, and Thai plastic shopping bag producers.

The Commerce Department said it would continue its investigation and reach a final decision in June.

The US imported about 100 billion plastic bags in 2002, worth more than $127m, and China supplied about 30%.

The list of items causing trade tensions between the US and Asian countries already includes Vietnamese cat fish and Chinese-made bras and colour TVs.

The Commerce Department issued its preliminary ruling after complaints from US packaging firms, including Sonoco Products and Interplast Group.

They say unfairly cheap Asian plastic bags are losing them $300m in sales a year.

Strain your mind, can you figure this one out? And I am a free trader, not a “free trader.” Thanks to Don Boudreaux for the link.

The most expensive dresses can sell from anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000. They are popular for weddings in the United States and the Middle East, but otherwise do not garner large numbers of orders. Note also that the sector is highly regulated and in typical French fashion:

The Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the governing body that oversees the couture business in France, enforces archaic and unyielding regulations–defending tradition and, in the process, driving most practitioners out of business. To receive official designation as haute couture from the Chambre Syndicale, a fashion house must employ 20 or more full-time skilled technicians in France and produce a minimum of 50 new designs for day and evening wear in each of the two fashion seasons, although the conditions are somewhat looser for new houses that wish to start producing couture.

How then do the designers make money?

…couture…serves two other purposes for the houses that produce it. One is that couture represents what the designer John Galliano called the “laboratory of ideas,” where the act of creation is given free rein. Many who watch the coverage of the couture shows marvel that anyone could be possibly expected to wear the extravagant and seemingly uncomfortable designs on display, but couture is not really designed to be worn; rather, it affords an opportunity to try out cuts and styles that can then be incorporated, in more modest form, into wearable prêt-à-porter.

Couture also serves to create a brand identity that rubs off on the perfume, cosmetics, and leather goods–few of them high-design products in themselves–where the profit margins are fat and the real money is to be made. Ironically, many people will buy a $150 bottle of perfume to participate in the lifestyle suggested by the $15,000 couture dress they cannot afford, while in reality the dress was produced in large part to seduce them into paying too much for the perfume.

Here is a list of papers on the economics of fashion, but the topic remains underexplored. So much of economic activity is about buying dreams, and we don’t yet have to analytical tools to analyze this kind of problem.

The major economic successes of Chile are commonly considered to be a free market miracle. To be sure, there is much truth to this characterization. The Pinochet regime engaged in extensive privatization and deregulation and moved to free trade. Agriculture, services, copper mining, and telecommunications all boomed. The Chilean economy has been the envy of Latin America for some time now. The country also has few problems with corruption.

The reality nonetheless is more complex than a simple market story may imply, read this thorough account. The Chilean state has grown stronger as the Chilean economy has prospered. In the 1990s, Chile has doubled corporate taxes, almost doubled its minimum wage, and more than doubled spending on health and education. Here is another account of how social spending has gone up during the 1990s. Chile also has maintained tight capital controls on foreign investment until 1999. The vaunted Chilean social security privatization in fact superimposed a system of private accounts on an already-existing governmental system, which did not disappear. Yet in the 1990s the country continued to prosper. Chile grew by an average of 5.9 percent a year.

The bottom line: The world has seen massive liberalizations over the last twenty-five years and all for the better. But with few exceptions these reforms have strengthened rather than overturned welfare states. New Zealand, for instance, also has not cut its welfare spending. Welfare states are, in part, the price we pay for public order, whether or not they always make economic sense. When it comes to economic development, the question is not state vs. market. Rather poorer countries need both stronger markets and stronger (as distinct from more tyrannical) states. Chile is generating strong institutions across the board, in both private and public realms. In contrast, look at Mexico, where government taxation takes only 12 percent of gdp. In Mexico the problem is not to cut the absolute size of government per se (although I can think of some obvious and good steps in this direction, such as introducing more electricity competition) as to reduce corruption and improve the quality of governance. Until market-oriented reformers understand this basic distinction, we will continue to give bad advice and generate only mixed results for market-oriented ideas.

Like John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman before him, Robert Shiller is that rare economist who uses economic theory to design new and better ways of doing things. I highly recommend his book, The New Financial Order. (Indeed, I hope that Shiller will one day receive a Nobel prize for his work in economic design.) For some time, I’ve also been wanting to recommend The Atlantic magazine. This month’s issue is superb and includes the best piece on the state of the American economy that I have read (the link will take you to the online version but the magazine itself contains a number of useful charts and much else – buy it!). From that piece comes this quote on Shiller’s work:

A more radical variation on this concept comes from Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, who believes that continuing financial-market innovations may soon enable private insurers to offer “livelihood insurance” that could protect workers from potential declines in their occupations (though not against an individual worker’s underperformance within a flourishing field). Similar products might insure against the eventual devaluation of specific academic degrees in the United States (such as those in software engineering or Russian language), or even against declines in the performance of the U.S. economy as a whole, relative to the rest of the world. (As Shiller notes, the fact that the past century was a good one for America does not necessarily mean that the next one will be.) Collectively, these products might lessen the large and arguably increasing risks inherent in the U.S. capitalist system.

These are bold ideas; it may be hard at first to wrap one’s mind around them. And it is perhaps ironic that financial markets–which are regarded by many people as amoral if not immoral–might ultimately solve some of the problems that socialist and utopian thinkers have been trying for centuries to address. But as improbable as livelihood insurance may sound, advances in data collection, data analysis, and financial-risk theory are lowering the technical barriers to such a system. Government action could help the creation of livelihood insurance on a large scale. Part of the government’s role would be technical–for instance setting the standards for the collection and sharing of personal income data that are necessary if livelihood insurance is to work. But two equally important tasks would be the articulation of a new vision of society–one where people are protected against the unexpected shocks that accompany rapid economic change–and the promotion of financial-services products that can sustain that vision. Without large markets covering a wide range of occupations, carriers offering livelihood insurance might have difficulty hedging their risk sufficiently.

Addendum: Robert Shiller’s homepage has lots of useful information.