Instead, the story must involve things like a skills gap — it’s not lack of jobs; we have the wrong workers for this high-technology globalized era, etc., etc. — even if there’s no evidence at all that such a gap is impeding recovery.
And the ultimate example of a seriously bad idea is the determination, in the teeth of all the evidence, to declare government spending that helps the less fortunate a crucial cause of our economic problems. In the United States, I’m happy to say, this idea seems to be on the ropes, at least for now. Here in Britain, however, it still reigns supreme. In particular, one important factor in the recent Conservative election triumph was the way Britain’s news media told voters, again and again, that excessive government spending under Labour caused the financial crisis.
Does Immigration Harm Working Americans?
CIS, a research organization that tends to favor tight immigration policies, found that even now, almost seven years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans are working than in November 2007, the peak of the prior economic cycle. Balancing the 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans at work, there are 2 million more immigrants—legal and illegal—working in the United States today than in November 2007. All the net new jobs created since November 2007 have gone to immigrants.
.. Since the time of Adam Smith, economists have agreed that the secret of economic growth is specialization. Rather than everyone baking his or her own bread and sewing his or her own clothes, everyone chooses one occupation and then trades for the products others make. The more individuals specialize, the more productive everyone becomes. The more people trade, the more widely the benefits of productivity are shared.
.. Immigrant labor enables middle-class Americans to buy a roasted chicken and pre-washed salad at the supermarket or to check a box and have their holiday presents arrive at their door already gift-wrapped. Upper-income Americans live easier and more efficient lives thanks to millions of low-paid immigrant workers they never see and whose names they never know
.. Among high-school dropouts only, immigrants accounted for 23 percent of the increase in hours worked between 1990 and 2006. Among high school dropouts in their 30s and 40s, immigrants accounted for over one-third of the increase in hours worked.
.. they aren’t denying that immigration pushes wages down in the jobs that immigrants take. They concede that immigration does do that. They celebrate that immigration does that. Instead, they join their celebration of immigration’s wage-cutting effects with a prediction about the way that the natives will respond.
.. But that’s not how things are done. In the United States, the hypothesis of native-immigrant complementarity is deployed to justify policies that intensify competition for the lower and middle echelons of the society, rarely near the top.
That 1914 Feeling
In some ways, what defenders of the euro should fear most is not a crisis this year, but what happens once Greece starts to recover and becomes a role model for anti-establishment forces across the continent.
.. Guess whose reckless lending mismanagement and business incompetence you’ve never seen in the paper since they drove Greece and half of Europe into lender-induced bankruptcy ?
Deutsche Bank
Commerzbank
Credit Agricole
Societe GeneraleStop bailing out the rich and punishing the poor for 0.1% bankster stupidity and greed.
.. The big mistake was made by the European governments (particularly Germany, France and the Netherlands) in guaranteeing and thereby nationalizing (the down side of) the loans made by rich people, big private insurers and banks to Greece. In my view, the private money-lenders should have been left to fend for themselves. They would have had to take “hair cuts” or cut interest rates or left to see their investments go belly up.
.. History seems to teach us we rarely solve any really big problems – or even many small ones – but rather simply push them off on someone else in the future. I expect that is how it will go in Greece just as it is going with regard to Climate Change and every other problem we face.
John Nash, ‘A Beautiful Mind’ Subject and Nobel Winner, Dies at 86
Dr. Nash was widely regarded as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, known for the originality of his thinking and for his fearlessness in wrestling down problems so difficult few others dared tackle them. A one-sentence letter written in support of his application to Princeton’s doctoral program in math said simply, “This man is a genius.”
.. A University of Chicago economist, Roger Myerson, went further, comparing the impact of Nash equilibrium on economics “to that of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences.”
.. Dr. Nash’s solution, contained in a 27-page doctoral thesis he wrote when he was 21, provided a way of analyzing how each player could maximize his benefits
.. The Nobel, the publicity that attended it, and the making of the film were “a watershed in his life,” Dr. Kuhn said of Dr. Nash. “It changed him from a homeless unknown person who was wandering around Princeton to a celebrity, and financially, it put him on a much better basis.”