BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-04-17 Su: Say, rather, that if you wanted to live a comfortable life before 1870, humanity was so poor that the only way to do this was to figure out some way to take a substantial share of stuff other people were making and grab it for yourself—and then find some way to make that grabbing stable, and also to convince yourself that you deserved to grab so that you could then be happy with yourself about doing so. And that requirement for how to live a comfortable life—it, to say the least, profoundly marked humanity and its history. Now and in the future—since 2010—however, we are rich enough—technology is advanced enough, growth is fast enough, and women have other ways of gaining social power than being the mothers of sons enough that Malthusian pressures no longer keep us so poor—that we can all lead comfortable lives, in the sense that it is straightforward to produce enough, so our collective economic problems are ones of distributing the enough and of using it appropriately to make us happy rather than miserable. In between 1870 and 2010—during the long 20th century—things were both marvelous and terrible, but in the context of previous human history more marvelous than terrible...
Does anyone today believe with Keynes that maintaining full employment with good monetary policies (and or fiscal policies aiming only at equating aggregate demand and supply) would result in more equal incomes? Would that work even w/o technical progress? It would surely be more difficult with technical progress.
Well... I kinda do. A high-pressure economy with low interest rates, if you can stay on the tightrope. The long run is a succession of short runs, after all...
Well, OK, in that sense, I can too, though I'd put the emphasis on maintaining real income growth for which non-un-employment is a necessary but not suffuent condition. Hence neo-liberal policies like reducing trade restrictions, taxation of net CO2 emissions, shifting from wage taxation to a VAT for SS and health insurance, higher skilled immigration, de-Nimbyfication of public investment, lower structural deficits.
Does anyone today believe with Keynes that maintaining full employment with good monetary policies (and or fiscal policies aiming only at equating aggregate demand and supply) would result in more equal incomes? Would that work even w/o technical progress? It would surely be more difficult with technical progress.
Well... I kinda do. A high-pressure economy with low interest rates, if you can stay on the tightrope. The long run is a succession of short runs, after all...
Well, OK, in that sense, I can too, though I'd put the emphasis on maintaining real income growth for which non-un-employment is a necessary but not suffuent condition. Hence neo-liberal policies like reducing trade restrictions, taxation of net CO2 emissions, shifting from wage taxation to a VAT for SS and health insurance, higher skilled immigration, de-Nimbyfication of public investment, lower structural deficits.
Touché...