Updated 4/12/2018 Arindrajit Dube wrote a paper in 2004 that explains several ways that the minimum wage is flawed in the US, including: The minimum wage is too low. It isn’t adjusted for inflation. It isn’t adjusted for local cost of living…
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Highest International Inequality Zones
Branko Milanovic wrote a good article about global inequality measures which ends with an examination of the pressures for immigration. if you classify countries by their GDP per capita level into four ‘worlds’, going from the rich world of advanced…
Posted in Medianism
Is The South-East Quadrant Of Asia Special?
China, India and nearby countries have been the most important drivers of world GDP from the dawn of agriculture until the industrial revolution when Europe finally boomed along with some European offshoots like the USA. Asia has always been the…
Posted in Development, Globalization & International
¡¿”No one actually knows who is in the middle class”? That is crazy. It isn’t rocket science.
Ezra Klein complains today that “no one actually knows who is in the middle class” because he wants to define a dollar income that can define the “middle-class line” like the way we define the poverty line. In the New…
Posted in Middle class
National Debt is NOT like Personal Debt
Note: There is a newer version of this post. Krugman explains that government debt can never be repaid when we owe it to ourselves. Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve…
Posted in Macro, Public Finance
Interest Burden Is More Important Than Total Debt
Who has a bigger debt? Total Debt Outstanding Interest Rate Monthly Payments Barry $100k 2% $370 Ronny $40k 11% $381 Both Barry and Ronny have the same incomes and both expect to pay off their debt in 30 years at…
Posted in Macro, Public Finance
See page about The Positivist Fallacy
I wrote a new page about The Positivist Fallacy which explains why positivism is impossible and the whole normative-positive distinction is illogical and useless at best or may even be harmful at worst. An example of how positivism has been harmful is the…
Posted in Medianism, Philosophy and ethics
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