People need to stop asking what's better for the "economy" and start asking what's better for themselves. If the two don't align, it should be tough luck for the "economy", not the people.
People need to stop asking what's better for the "economy" and start asking what's better for themselves. If the two don't align, it should be tough luck for the "economy", not the people.
"The economy" is often just another way of saying "everyone in aggregate."
Of course "the economy" is a vague, undefined term. But it's easy to think of various specific measures like median household income or the unemployment rate that capture this dynamic.
So regarding your final sentiment, I think that often "the economy" and "the people" are the same thing. If something raises the unemployment rate, that will bad for "the economy" and also "the people."
This is an incredibly blinkered view. The economy is important, but there are many other factors as to whether a given policy is overall good for the citizenry or not.
Sure, but I don't think I claimed that economic factors are the only thing that can be considered when evaluating policy. Maybe it came off that way because my comment was focused on the jobs issue being discussed.
I guess I did not express it well, but I wanted to highlight that "the economy" and "the people" are not in opposition. "The economy" is a vague term that usually approximates something like "the material well being of everyone in aggregate." There are lots of other things one might value besides material well being, but "the people" and the "the economy" and not opposed forces.
Hasn’t it been known for a while now that wages are decoupled from the Economic gains that have been happening since the 80s? That gap is just going to the billionaire class now. Source:
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Elon Musk and I are doing quite well financially, in aggregate.
Obviously how wealth is distributed is a hugely important factor, which a "good" economy does not necessarily take into account.
This is why it's not productive to discuss issues using vague, undefined terms like "the economy."
Wealth inequality is a well defined economic measure and I see no reason why one couldn't use it as a yardstick when evaluating an economy, same as we use the unemployment, inflation, GDP, median household income, and so on. And indeed many economists do use it, and there are many well regarded books and papers that examine wealth distribution.
It leads to the intuition that an economy where 100 people consume 10000 (let's say of energy because it should be inflation-independent) per week and 1 person consumes 100000 is worse than an economy where 100 people consume 9000 per week and 1 person consumes 10000. That is, you can strongly reject or disapprove of changes that strictly increase everyone's wealth or consumption.
I think this is not only mistaken but would wrongly lead people to often oppose economic growth, which is likely to increase inequality at least somewhat in many circumstances, while increasing almost every other measure of welfare. They often point in opposite directions.
The case where inequality is most important is when there are things whose supply is fixed or very inelastic (famously land, maybe housing), in which case you are in more of a long-term competition or bidding war with other people for some of those things. That might be a reason that total consumption is an imperfect metric too, because maybe your consumption of one thing with elastic supply (food?) went way up as the economy grew but your consumption of something with inelastic supply (housing?) went down at the same time.
Yea, I don't disagree with any of that.
I think wealth distribution should be allowed to freely float within a large range, but at extremes it may have bad effects. You don't want a communist regime that tries to enforce complete equality, nor do you want a Russian style oligarchy where a few control almost all the wealth. US is heading towards the latter.