How would Sherdog fix the economy?

I think so? Nothing wrong with your hobbies being on your mind though.

My "hobby" is a national issue and states I don't live in are using common sense in defiance of federal law. Legalization is hardly an obscure notion that me and a couple kooks are peddling. :cool:

Maybe though I'm misunderstanding how bringing this multi-billion dollar industry out of the dark hurts the economy. Sure seems like it helped Colorado when they pulled in so much in taxation that had to issue refunds.
 
My "hobby" is a national issue and states I don't live in are using common sense in defiance of federal law. Legalization is hardly an obscure notion that me and a couple kooks are peddling. :cool:

Maybe though I'm misunderstanding how bringing this multi-billion dollar industry out of the dark hurts the economy. Sure seems like it helped Colorado when they pulled in so much in taxation that had to issue refunds.

Right with you. When I mentioned "hobby" that wasn't meant to demean its significance as an issue. In fact, I think drug laws in general are a significant reason why we have AA's acting out and taking up a large portion of violent crime.... which has even more pervasive implications.
 
Right with you. When I mentioned "hobby" that wasn't meant to demean its significance as an issue.

I know. Just taking the opportunity to point out it's one of the biggest ongoing stories of the decade and a historical grassroots movement. Bringing it up is hardly written off as a personal interest. Now if I said something about facilitating the firearms industry then that would be different. Lots of articles on the net speculating how a legalization boom would effect economics.
 
I know. Just taking the opportunity to point out it's one of the biggest ongoing stories of the decade and a historical grassroots movement. Bringing it up is hardly written off as a personal interest. Now if I said something about facilitating the firearms industry then that would be different. Lots of articles on the net speculating how a legalization boom would effect economics.

With that in mind, I'm not of the solution, like many people, to legalize and tax/regulate though. I'm just of the opinion to legalize.
 
As an economics student, I'm curious what my fellow sherdoggers would do to fix the current economy if they were placed in a "benevolent dictator" type of position. What would your top priority (don't say "jobs") be for getting the economy back on track?

Responses need not be in-depth, just clear enough to encourage discussion.

Here's mine. I'm kind of into urban/labor econ, so my policies revolve around what economists in these fields generally support. By no means is this supposed to be exhaustive:

1) Decouple healthcare and labor markets (there is a lot to unpack here, and it doesn't necessarily mean a single-payer system).

2) Modest minimum wage increases in major cities, generous expansion of EITC (alternatively wage subsidies, direct cash transfers could be used)

3) Encourage mixed-use development in major cities, discourage driving to reasonable extents (either through gas taxes, toll roads); couple with public transit where population density is high enough

4) Open the US to trade, but as this is done, implement worker retraining programs so that people are able to continue supporting themselves

Anyway, apologies for disappearing for a bit there. Finals were kicking my butt (calculus 2 brutalized me).

SAying "fix the economy" is pretty vague.

What you really want to ask is how do we fix the horribly uneven wealth distribution, that this current economy facilitates right?
 
With that in mind, I'm not of the solution, like many people, to legalize and tax/regulate though. I'm just of the opinion to legalize.

What??? No special taxes? :eek:

I get you. But that's the upside for all the anti-freedom assholes. Somehow there already won't be extra money in the budget between the regular taxation levels and the absence of prohibition expenditures. But whatever.
 
I dont know.

Well sure you do, and of course there isn't a set amount of goods and services over time. On top of that and despite government's best efforts, productivity is still going up! The profits the "capitalist class" is reinvesting instead of being diverted into the black hole of government bureaucracies via taxes is wonderfully beneficial to the general standard of living.
 
My "hobby" is a national issue and states I don't live in are using common sense in defiance of federal law. Legalization is hardly an obscure notion that me and a couple kooks are peddling. :cool:

Maybe though I'm misunderstanding how bringing this multi-billion dollar industry out of the dark hurts the economy. Sure seems like it helped Colorado when they pulled in so much in taxation that had to issue refunds.

You might like the idea of legalizing marijuana, but it is completely irrelevant to this thread. Just funny how people think that whatever their personal hobbyhorses are are what's needed to help the economy.
 
I'd focus on family health. Think of all the money that can be saved on unnecessary costs if people took relationships seriously and parents raised their children properly.
 
Well frankly you're the only one that's been asking the questions mate, and I've already been answering them. Also the peer review has nowhere near the weight in macro as it does in the hard sciences. It's a simple constraint of only having one sample size in econ, no control, and no other experimental group.

Also you're conflating some of what I wrote. The stagnation of the 70s was the result of shitty monetary policy, and yes. Volker's rate hikes were extraordinarily important. In fact, the reality of stagflation should have put a nail in the coffin of the Keynesian theory.

Gross speculation in modern cycles (post CB est.) to the extent we've seen are a product of the monetary policy, not the initial cause. The distortions speculation can promote, affect an over reaction by monetary policy, because the price of credit wasn't initially allowed to be discovered in the first place.

Now just to cross our "t's", absent that occlusion of appropriate price discovery (central banks fixing the interest rate arbitrarily), you'll still have speculation that can produce misallocations. The difference is that they're not as pervasive or significant (i.e. the depression of 1921).

We see deflationary pressure during recessions because the prices were raised during the boom. The recession is when any given bid-up sector can't find anymore buyers to continue the price increase, thus the bubble pops as people exit and prices fall.

Quite a bit to unpack here. First, the stagflation of the 70's was /not/ a result of shoddy monetary policy. It was, as I said before, the result of a negative energy shock. Stagflation is what recessions look like when brought upon by such a supply shock--rising prices and rising unemployment.

I don't necessarily it's a sound precedent to look to the fed to keep interest rates low because a specific sector of the economy is engaging in risky behavior. Look at the lead up to 2008; average nominal GDP between 2001-2007 is around 6-7%. Compared to much of the second half of the previous century, that's not exactly robust growth! Why should the rest of the economy fall into more of a tailspin when the problem isn't one of easy money, but moral hazard (as was the case in 2008) or information asymmetry?

The idea that demand is simply a consequence of supply is a foundational principle within classical economics. And the Laffer curve is a touchstone of supply siders.

It seems like you're trying to make the acceptance of supply-side economic theory among "real" economists equivalent to the level of respect shown creationism among biologists. And I think that's a huge distortion.

I don't think you understand what I'm trying to say, so I'll just reiterate it here. Supply-side economics refers to a set of prescriptions, relevant at a particular time when policy advocates were trying to figure out solution to a particular problem our economy was facing. It is (was) by no means a research paradigm, which is something totally separate from a set of prescriptions advocated for by a particular group of people. Look up RBCT, New Keynesianism, Market Monetarists...even heterodox schools of thought like MMT or Marxians. You know the difference between a particular school of thought versus the policies someone keen to one of those perspectives might advocate for, yeah?

I'm not trying to deny that economists have used their authority as economists to advocate for shitty policies. As an old-school social democrat, some of the most prominent macroeconomsits (Friedman, Prescott, Mankiw) have fucking awful politics! However, there is a difference between saying "I agree with Mankiw on all of his politics" and "I believe the IS-LM model is useful for XYZ".

It's funny you brought up the Laffer curve, though. Most economists I know think we can raise taxes and be totally fine, it just isn't a political reality.
 
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