This is Easterlin’s Paradox, the observation that a country in general does not get happier as it becomes richer. This is very controversial, with statisticians analyzing and reanalyzing data and crunching it a bunch of different ways. In the latest volley in this eternal war, Easterlin’s side came out with data from 37 countries over 30 years, including many countries that underwent spectacular growth during that time, and confirmed their original conclusion
.. Here we see a lot of cultural variation in this apparent happiness-income relationship. For example, Latin American countries are consistently poor but happy; Eastern European countries are usually richer but sadder than African countries, et cetera. Looking at the original graph above, you’d expect Chinese growth to make them much happier; looking at this graph, you notice that China’s three rich neighbors – Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea – are all about as happy as China. South Korea, despite making five times more money, is less happy than China is. If China’s income quintuples, why would you expect it to look like France or Ireland rather than South Korea?
.. A UN report theorizes that although richer countries tend to be happier, this is more likely due to factors other than income, like freedom, social trust, and stable families.
.. Let’s assume for a second that all this is true. National income does not matter for national happiness, and if China’s growth continues to skyrocket then in twenty years it will be as rich as Japan but not an iota happier than it is today. What do wedo with this kind of knowledge?
.. Or let me ask a more specific question. Suppose that some free trade pact will increase US unemployment by 1%, but also accelerate the development of some undeveloped foreign country like India into hyper-speed. In twenty years, India’s GDP per capita will go from $1,500/year to $10,000/year. The only cost will be a million or so extra unemployed Americans, plus all that coal that the newly vibrant India is burning probably won’t be very good for the fight against global warming.
Carrier workers see costs, not benefits of global trade
“When I learned about the impact of trade agreements, the theory was that workers would be ‘released’ into the labor market and hired back at slightly lower salaries,” Mr. Autor said. “That’s not what happened. And no amount of cheaper air-conditioners will make these workers whole.”
.. “When I learned about the impact of trade agreements, the theory was that workers would be ‘released’ into the labor market and hired back at slightly lower salaries,” Mr. Autor said. “That’s not what happened. And no amount of cheaper air-conditioners will make these workers whole.”
.. “When I learned about the impact of trade agreements, the theory was that workers would be ‘released’ into the labor market and hired back at slightly lower salaries,” Mr. Autor said. “That’s not what happened. And no amount of cheaper air-conditioners will make these workers whole.”
.. Although the company’s stock has vastly outperformed benchmarks in the last few decades, the shares have badly trailed the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the most recent five years.
Wall Street is looking for United Technologies to post a 17 percent increase in earnings per share over the next two years, even though sales are expected to rise only 8 percent.
.. Although the company’s stock has vastly outperformed benchmarks in the last few decades, the shares have badly trailed the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the most recent five years.
.. Wall Street is looking for United Technologies to post a 17 percent increase in earnings per share over the next two years, even though sales are expected to rise only 8 percent.
.. Temporary workers, who have contracts lasting from three to six months, earn 163 pesos a day, or $9.40. Permanent workers make 330 pesos for a day’s work, or $19.
Reviving the Working Class Without Building Walls
Any long-term strategy to improve workers’ lot, of course, must include improving their skills. But just kicking the challenge down the road under the fuzzy prescription that all America needs is better education and training — a favorite of policy makers and their economic advisers — is no longer acceptable for workers who have suffered multiple rounds of dislocation over several decades.
.. Stepping into the vacuum, the technologically endowed of Silicon Valley are talking about a future that bypasses the labor market entirely. They areoffering up a universal basic income — financed by taxing rich capitalists and an elite corps of computer programmers tasked with making sure the robots perform meticulously — as the tool to satisfy people’s basic needs without any work involved.
,, the United States suffers the highest incidence of low pay among its members. A quarter of workers earn less than two-thirds of the median wage.
.. over the last few decades, about 13 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product was redistributed to the top 1 percent from the rest of the population. “It is not crazy to suggest,” he said, “that some percentage of that could be shared with a broader group.”
.. any plan to help Mr. Trump’s beleaguered supporters may end up entangled in ideological knots
Donald Trump, the Winning Wild Card
For a while the base of the G.O.P. has been far closer to where Trump is on the issues than their leadership. The base of the G.O.P. has never really been true “free-traders,” they’ve always been “fair traders,” the leadership of the party wants to embrace some form of amnesty for illegals, the base of the party does not.
.. Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.
.. “You could make a case that the politics of rage has gone from George Wallace, morphed into Nixon and the southern states strategy, then Gingrich and his merry band, into Fox News/Limbaugh/Tea Party Republicans,” Larry O’Brien III (a son of Lawrence Francis “Larry” O’Brien, who was John F. Kennedy’s chief political strategist) wrote me, adding
It’s not quite linear, but is Trump a sea change, a big leap, or merely the next iteration?
.. Trump is simply reflecting what poor voters already know: that they have been sold a bill of goods. They respond to his naked hatred of people of color and women because that is the language and the argument they have known their whole lives, but they also like his apparent attacks on the people who betrayed them.
.. The big question,” Baker writes,
is whether such a politics will be a dead end that tries to set the clock back by being a white people’s populism — treating African Americans, Hispanics, and other ethnic/racial groups as the enemy. Or whether it will be a forward thinking approach that formulates an economic policy designed to reverse the enormous upward redistribution that has been engineered by the leadership of both political parties over the last three and half decades.