Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Right. It was wrong that "structural changes and hysteresis on the downside had made it next to impossible to get those missing prime-age workers back into employment." Since the time he feared it was next to impossible we've learned that it's not, and they're coming back, just not as fast as we'd like.

Which is why he's arguing that we are not currently at full employment (I agree!) and the fed shouldn't start acting like we are (I also agree!).

ETA: Implicitly, he's arguing against your point that labor participation is trending down, btw.

This is only true if "long term" means beginning from the historical peak.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Only if you think of people as units of labor and only units of labor. If those labor units are also consumers, you at least have multiple effects you need to account for.

Maybe on net labor loses, except that basically every attempt to get to an empirical answer says no.

Yeah, again, "stuff costs more" is not a net positive for anyone.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

You might be onto something there, Dr. Solow.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

One driver of measured median wage stagnation might be simple demographics.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

apropos of globalization, it's kinda old and kinda stupid: https://theawl.com/all-spicy-food-is...a-317740a93ee3

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Fundamentally, the dominance of America in the post-war years was a result of the effects of World War II everywhere else. Germany and Japan were wrecked, as was much of Europe. China was in revolution. As everywhere else got back to normal, they were bound to catch up.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Exactly. And we exploited that advantage, gifted to us largely by geography (we did not have our infrastructure and resources destroyed), for all it was worth.

It was a nice run. It created an abnormally robust middle-class. That's over now. We have to compete with the rest of the world. And as far as labor costs go, their advantage is near insurmountable.

... unless we reset the chessboard with another war.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I don't believe he is, and that's not my point. Measures of labor participation are trending down, but my view (and Delong's, I think) is that people are not currently participating because the economy is not serving them and they have become discouraged and unhappy. This means economic loss, because regardless of what "full employment" might mean to different people, the economy is not fully employing its human resources. It also means political turmoil.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

That explains relative position, not the absolute position. Post-War America was itself on a big upswing economically, not just drawing from international markets but drawing from the strength of its own market.

Now, the US build up for the war had something to do with that, of course, but I think your point and mine aren't opposed to each other, they're explaining different parts of the same point : the US was in a good position compared to itself historically and compared to others.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

American Exceptionalism at its best!

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

This is loopy. Our work force has huge productivity advantages over many, and we continue to have geographical advantages. The last six months aside, we have a stable political environment conducive to business and innovation, and a government that respects the rule of law.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Agreed, but dominance (your word) is relative.

Maga
 

We won't have to. That war already started in Europe and Merkel and her feckless pussy allies in France and Belgium continue to supply the ammo. In 3-4 years, most of Sweden and France, large swaths of Belgium, Germany and Denmark, will become unvisitable (and uninhabitable).

So, yeah, set the pawns and move the rook and the bishop to protect the king. Jimmy crack corn - I don't care. Never thought I'd become an Isolationist, but fuck 'em. Reap what you sow.

HOWEVER, I only logged in here thinking you guys - someone, anyone - might be talking about how Hillary has now completely gone fucking insane.

No comments on this? The last 2 days have been scary.

Blaming her loss on the DNC? The NYT? Facebook? Netflix? FFS, Macedonian tech? CNN - a friendly network, to say the least - listed some 30 targets she now blames for losing.

Her public meltdown is approaching the level of Captain Queeg with the marbles and the strawberries. Or for the kids that don't know film, Chuck in "Better Call Saul".

Every day she opens her mouth, another vote is cast - rightly or wrongly - for the GOP. (Chelsea too, for what it's worth.)

SlaveNo(Hillary - the gift that keeps giving)More

Re: Maga
 

I biked through "Little Mogadishu" on my way to the office this morning.

No idea why you're still paying attention to what she's saying.

Elizabeth Warren
 

Aside from my general dislike of her persona, she was on Pod Save America this week (where I actually was fine with her persona) and said some things that make me worry about her.

Asked whether we should break up the banks, cable companies and airlines, she casually said, "yes." And then went on to mention retail drug store competition and Walmart in a discussion about antitrust enforcement.

As if retail isn't dying right now. And as if drug stores, for the non-drug stuff they sell, aren't just as much subject to competition from online and mass retailers. Sure, like convenience stores, they have some degree of protection from competition on non-drug stuff because people will still have to come to them for drugs, but it's not like people are going to switch where they get their prescriptions week-to-week because of the price of whatever incidental purchase they make at the same time. More drug stores doesn't really change that. And as to the drugs, it's not like the real issues aren't with the distributors and PBOs. But people know what a drug store is, so that's what gets in the sound bite.

Same thing for Walmart and "killing small businesses." Most of that is competition on the merits. You might be able to find some novel monopsony theories if you dig around in their practices, but the surface stuff people complain about is pro-competitive.

Moreover, antitrust can't really protect small businesses. There's very little it can do for companies with 25 employees. But if you stray from protection competition into protecting competitors, you certain can do a lot of harm to consumers by protecting the inefficient employers with 1000 employees from the more efficient one with 5000.

And as for those break ups, what are they going to do? How does anyone benefit from more regional cable monopolies? They don't. There's still one set of wires going to everyone's house. The options are regulate their prices and offerings or publicly own the distribution network a foster competition on supply of content. No court is going to order that. You need to make the political case for it and do it via the political process.

It's more or less the same thing with airlines. Unless you're going to dictate that your broken up airlines serve concurrent route systems, they're going to avoid head-to-head competition with each other. Heck, it might be even easier to do with more, smaller airlines. Also, the low hanging fruit on airline competition is allowing foreign carriers to operate domestically.

And that brings us to banks. Is there really a lack of competition there? Or are we trying to solve bank-regulatory issues - e.g. too big to fail, moral hazard, etc - with an antitrust remedy?

There's room to criticize the past decade or so of antitrust enforcement. Maybe Whirlpool/Maytag shouldn't have happened. Although I still think DOJ would have had a hard time countering the argument that Korean and Chinese manufacturers were going to kill Maytag, even if the Chinese manufacturers haven't turned out to be as successful as we might have thought.

But most of what's now fashionable on the left to complain about as lack of antitrust enforcement is not particularly susceptible to antitrust enforcement.