https://twitter.com/cjsnowdon/status/578909327999762432
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A.J.P. Taylor said something similar
15 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history, international economic law, international economics, labour economics, labour supply Tags: age of empires, age of migration, economics of immigration, George Orwell, great migrations
.@JudithCollinsMP showed that @JacindaArdern does not know when to stop digging
13 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in economics of crime, law and economics, politics - New Zealand, poverty and inequality, welfare reform Tags: crime and punishment, family poverty, law and order, New Zealand Labour Party
Judith Collins today in Question Time showed that Jacinda Ardern does not know when to stop digging. Ardern quoted a snippet of the question put to the police minister at the recent police conference.
That selectivity allowed Collins to right to quote the conference question in full and her full answer, which was not just about money poverty but also about
“… a poverty of ideas, a poverty of parental responsibility, a poverty of love, a poverty of caring …”.
Later Collins said she does not agree with Labour saying today that poverty causes crime.
The Labour Party showed that it is no longer rooted in working class values when it argues that poverty is not linked to a poverty of responsibility and of parental love.
There are plenty of poor people who do not resort to crime and who despise those that do, in part because they often make them the victims of their crimes including burglary.
The rise of a working rich in Australia
12 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, politics - Australia, poverty and inequality, survivor principle Tags: superstar wages, superstars, top 1%, top incomes
Source: The World Wealth and Income Database.
Average duration of US, Canadian and Australian unemployment since 1968
12 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in business cycles, job search and matching, labour economics, macroeconomics, unemployment Tags: Australia, Canada, long-term unemployment, social insurance, unemployment duration
Firing Line – Thomas Sowell w/ William F. Buckley Jr. (1981)
11 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, discrimination, economic history, labour economics Tags: racial discrimination, Thomas Sowell
#homeslessnessinquiry champions contracting-out @NZLabour @NZGreens @Maori_Party
10 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in economics of bureaucracy, politics - New Zealand, poverty and inequality Tags: homelessness
Did they swallow a dead rat! After complaining bitterly about the privatisation of social housing and the contracting out of government services and in particular social services generally, the New Zealand Labour Party, the New Zealand Greens and the Maori Party all accepted that part of the solution to better emergency housing services to the homelessness is to fund community housing providers to build them houses. A greater role for the private sector, be it the NGO sector, in solving pressing social problems.
Source: Cross-party enquiry into homelessness.
It is pious to say that NGOs should build new social housing but existing social housing should not be sold to them to administer better than the bureaucrats.
The private sector has always been the last line of the defence for the social safety net for the homeless. Hotels and motels are used for emergency housing. There are plenty of them and it takes very little time to book into one as long as WINZ sends along the documentation to guarantee payment.
The report of Labour, the Greens and the Maori Party included reference to the Kate Amore data on homelessness which comfirms its credibility. That data shows that homelessness has fallen significantly in NZ since 2001 and 2006.
Homelessness is a by-product of bureaucratic inefficiency. So few people are actually sleeping rough or in shelters on any one night that is really an issue of why are those people are not in a shelter or permanent social housing.
The problem of homelessness is the efficiency of the bureaucracy in identifying these people, putting them in temporary quarters be at a hotel or motel if necessary, and then moving them into social housing.
No one is surprised at a homelessness shelter is run by a church or charity all with the assistance of government funding. No one seriously expects bureaucrats to be any good at running homeless shelters or the hotels or motels where the homeless are occasionally booked in.
Lazy Australian top 0.1% only increased their income under @AustralianLabour
09 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history, industrial organisation, politics - Australia, poverty and inequality, survivor principle Tags: antimarket bias, entrepreneurial alertness, superstar wages, superstars, top 1%, top incomes
Australia’s top income earners are a lazy lot. The top 0.1% only ever had a rising income share under a Labor government in the 1980s. Even the top 1% had a pretty lean time until the 1990s.
Source: The World Wealth and Income Database.
Discrimination—a mountain of evidence and no solutions
08 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics, gender, labour economics Tags: racial discrimination, sex discrimination
Thomas Sowell – Robert Bork Hearings (1987)
07 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, development economics, economic history, economics, labour economics, law and economics Tags: affirmative action, racial discrimination, Robert Bork, Thomas Sowell
Robert Lucas on the voluntary and involuntary unemployment distinction
05 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in job search and matching, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, Robert E. Lucas, unemployment Tags: involuntary unemployment, job search, search and matching
Robert Lucas in a famous 1978 paper argued that all unemployment was voluntary because involuntary unemployment was a meaningless concept:
“The worker who loses a good job in prosperous time does not volunteer to be in this situation: he has suffered a capital loss. Similarly, the firm which loses an experienced employee in depressed times suffers an undesirable capital loss.
Nevertheless the unemployed worker at any time can always find some job at once, and a firm can always fill a vacancy instantaneously. That neither typically does so by choice is not difficult to understand given the quality of the jobs and the employees which are easiest to find.
Thus there is an involuntary element in all unemployment, in the sense that no one chooses bad luck over good; there is also a voluntary element in all unemployment, in the sense that however miserable one’s current work options, one can always choose to accept them.”
I agree that we all make choices subject to constraints. To say that a choice is involuntary because it is constrained by a scarcity of job-opportunities information is to say that choices are involuntary because there is scarcity. Alchian said there are always plenty of jobs because to suppose the contrary suggests that scarcity has been abolished.
Lucas elaborated further in 1987 in Models of Business Cycles:
A theory that does deal successfully with unemployment needs to address two quite distinct problems. One is the fact that job separations tend to take the form of unilateral decisions – a worker quits, or is laid off or fired – in which negotiations over wage rates play no explicit role.
The second is that workers who lose jobs, for whatever reason, typically pass through a period of unemployment instead of taking temporary work on the ‘spot’ labour market jobs that are readily available in any economy.
Of these, the second seems to me much the more important: it does not ‘explain’ why someone is unemployed to explain why he does not have a job with company X. After all, most employed people do not have jobs with company X either. To explain why people allocate time to a particular activity – like unemployment – we need to know why they prefer it to all other available activities: to say that I am allergic to strawberries does not ‘explain’ why I drink coffee.
Neither of these puzzles is easy to understand within a Walrasian framework, and it would be good to understand both of them better, but I suggest we begin by focusing on the second of the two.
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