Against Economics

Re:Against Economics by tjpaudio on Thursday November 14, 2019 @06:23PM (#21540635)

I would write this author off, this is a rant and nothing more. "We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages..." Wages are certainly going up in places with low unemployment, its just not distributed as evenly as it was in prior history.

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Re:Against Economics by lukifer on Thursday November 14, 2019 @06:46PM (#21540835)

For context, David Graeber is an anarchist anthropologist who has written extensively about economics. His two best-known works on the subject:

- https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290/

- https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...

His views are surely influenced by his a-priori politics, but I've found his ideas thought-provoking to say the least.

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Re:Against Economics by QuesnayJr on Friday November 15, 2019 @11:05PM (#21550939)

Graeber is also the person who wrote this sentence:

"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages..."

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Re:Against Economics by hogFeast on Thursday November 14, 2019 @08:07PM (#21541344)

For context: this idea is basically a fetish amongst those around Corbyn.

Danny Blanchflower was, at one point, influential amongst the Corbyn crowd. Around 2013-15, he made a prediction that wage growth wouldn't rise as unemployment fell. This was true for a while...until 2015, and wage growth was nearly 4% a few quarters ago.

The idea that high employment won't cause wage growth is something that you will, however, hear repeatedly from Corbynites.

Btw, economists, unlike the author, tend to be quite sensible on the Phillips curve and understand that the relationship varies.

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