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One aspect of our economic problems is the practice of abortion over the last 35 years: we're down 40-50 million people.

To Tom:
What about the people who have been negatively affected by the housing mortgage fiasco? The market doesn't exist outside of the human condition. This isn't some game of Monopoly in which people can just put away the board and the paper money after a couple of hours and not be any for the worse of it.

Amy,
I didn't hear the comment you are referring to but there is a difference between the amount withheld from people's checks for insurance premiums and the cost of health care. I'm not sure about the numbers on the premiums but I do know that health care costs nationally climb at roughly the rate of 2 1/2 times inflation.

The market has performed perfectly. Speculators have been driven out of the market so housing prices can come down and people can buy them for HOUSING. In the tech bust dog puppets selling marginal goods were driven out and YouTube emerged. If anything there has been too much money chasing marginal investment opportunities so these mortgage instruments were bundled and the market responded by saying this was a very bad idea and the greedy learned another lesson of the market. Beware stupid stuff! Beware new fangled economists. Adam Smith still rules and-
please Milton Friedman come back.

Maybe I heard wrong, but I thought Jared Bernstein said near the beginning that the cost of health insurance premiums deducted from employed people's paychecks was going up at 10x the rate of inflation. Then near the end he said actual health care costs were going up at ~2-1/2 times the inflation rate. That's a 4:1 disparity!

I won't be able to go to his event at B&N tonight, but maybe someone reading this could ask him (& report back here)?

Pat,

Too bad you could move down South where you get more for your money but then will your disability payments will be decreased to match the lower cost of living.

I have a Master's Degree. I worked for the federal government in the Washington DC area. I earned about $70,ooo plus per year. I had to retire on a disdability and my Disability payment is $2300 per month. I had to move to NJ where my family lives. The president told me I was well paid! I do not feel that I can survive on this amout. Ouch!!@
Pat

Is "adequate health" a human right?

Q. Does "hands-off" Libertarianism promote "robber-baronaism" (sorry for the gross hypenation)

On the subject of tradeoffs, much of the money being spent in Iraq isn't going to pay people for various services they are providing, including the troops. Don't we have to consider what these people would be doing for a living if they weren't being "employed" there?

Continuing...If Lovelock is correct, only 1 to 2 billion of us [including our children, etc.] will survive by the year 2100. How does the long-term triple-whammy [reduced fuel, climate warming, and economic dislocations] affect today’s economist who looks at the global economy though a 1975 world view? That view, learned from professors of the 1950’s, assumes continued prosperity, assumes new and cheap energy, assumes new water, assumes new jobs, assumes enough new land for housing and agriculture and assumes enough capital.

The smart 2008 economist will use the “Limits to Growth” and “Gaia” models and see each of the current crises we’ve looked at this year and last as warnings that we are unsustainable and that collapse is coming. He or she will recommend, as Lovelock does, sustainable retreat, not sustainable development: less air travel, no big cars, smaller homes, smaller families and less consumption. She or he will see the credit crisis and service/retail economy’s slump as indications that “limits” have been reached. She or he knows that not all cycles oscillate up and down forever: some, as Jared Diamond and others have noted, have a sudden, terminal collapse. The opposite of a sustainable economy is an extinct economy.

Coninuing... In the 1930’s depression at least the population still had cheap fuel. In 1930 the US population was about 123 million and grew by 9 million [7.3 %] in the next ten years. The World population was about 2.1 billion and the growth over the next decade was 230 million [11.1 %]. Just for comparison, 1990 to 2000 US numbers are about 256 million, growing about 29 million [11.2 %] while World numbers are about 5.3 billion, growing about 800 million [15.3 %] in the decade. Also for comparison, the ANNUAL World population growth exceeds twice the population of the US’s 35 biggest cities and suburban counties. For a world economy that is an enormous quantity of water, agriculture, housing, jobs, and energy to be added year after year, all in a period when these things are running out!

Which economist today does what a global environmental scientist does: models the effects of environmental change well into the future and sees what is a sustainable population and the economy needed for that population?

...more

The problem with economists in this final century of capitalism is their out-of-date models. However, the triple whammy of peak-oil ending cheap energy, global warming causing agricultural failure and migration, and the economic dislocations they cause, will leave the economists of 2060 -- all of us, really -- trying to figure out why our economy collapsed. Like the blind men exploring the elephant, today economists, each in their own specialty, seek answers that fit existing patterns. Secular bull markets are followed by secular bear markets; within each are cyclical bears and bulls.

But let’s assume the three Asian tragedies this year are related to these three effects: cheap oil feeding extra millions in China and Myanmar; warming of the oceans producing stronger storms; and agricultural changes inflating food prices. Paraphrasing the UK’s Dr. James Lovelock, Gaia isn’t happy. Gaia will make adjustments in its life-support systems, trashed by the human population, and whichever species can adapt will survive in the new climate. Those human survivors won’t have cheap petroleum, cheap food, and cheap money. ...more

So long as we base our country's economic "health" on how well Wall St. does, the middle will always be squeezed.

A healthy economy should be measured by how well the population fares... money wise, access to healthcare, time for themselves and family... not whether a company had a good day on Wall St. That reflects how well the stock holders did.

RAI:

When I hit the "Submit" button, I immediately thought of intelligence analysts, as well as palm readers, bloggers and New York Times columnists. However, read my list again. Alarmists of all types, including global warmers, are always, always dead wrong. (Do you remember the Club of Rome from the ‘70s? If not, wiki it.)

By the way, according to the Mayan calendar, the end of the world will be on December 21, 2012 (the winter solstice). Let’s meet up again on 12/22/12 and see if Mayans and the global warming alarmists were correct. (Oh, I just forgot. Manhattan will be under water by then.)

Gary

I have long believed that Social Security would end up pretty much fine because the boomers will likely not retire as quickly as workers have in the past, partly because we are healthier and partly because they can't afford to. My thoughts have been along the line of developing policies to entice employers to keep older workers happily employed. One such policy is like the one in Florida where for small medical insurance groups (up to 50 employees) the premium for insurance is cut to 1/3 of the prior premium when someone turns 65. I'd like the guest's comments on these thoughts. Thank you.

This isn't new news. It has been known for some time. Perhaps the key is to publicize it.

"The industrialized countries, which accounted for 40 percent of the world’s population after World War II now account for only 20 percent, though they earn 85 percent of the world’s income. In coming decades, the industrialized world is expected to make up only 12 to 15 percent of the planetary population[1], as 90 to 95 percent of all births take place in the poorest countries. The fact that this is happening at a time when income and life expectancy rates are moving up illustrates just how uneven this material growth has been, and how what is really growing is the disparity between rich and poor[2].

Never before – not at the time of various democratic revolutions in Central Europe in 1848 or at the conclusion of World War I – has wealth disparity been so great as after the Cold War. And never before, because of the global communications revolution, has this disparity been so visible. The human race is like an awkward adolescent whose political and social mechanisms are not keeping up with his physical growth."

Robert D. Kaplan – The Ends of the Earth – Random House, 1996

[1] “Immigration and the Press of the Poor.” The Washington Post, November 21, 1994.

[2] The rich nations of the industrialized world consume 70 percent of the planet’s energy, 75 percent of its metals, and 85 percent of its wood, according to the UN.

What Bush tax cuts? In NYS many more each year pay the federal AMT! Perhaps that is why median incomes are going down.

This phrase attributed to Disraeli and popularized in the U.S. by Mark Twain: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. How do economists who rely on statistics avoid using them (even accurate statistics) to bolster inaccurate arguments?

Gary:

Re your 2nd question, good economists are more informative and more entertaining than any of the other categories you mentioned. (Your list should have included intelligence analysts, global warming deniers, and others too numerous to mention.)

Can you please explain the record profits of the oil companies?

I understand that their costs have increased per barrel of oil, and therfore that cost is passed on to us the consumer at the pump. What I can't figure out is that if they are passing the costs to us, and we are buying the same or less fuel than we were a year ago, how are Exxon and BP, and the like, making record profits.

It would stand to reason that they should be making their normal profit, if they are passing only their extra costs on to us.

Question # 1: what's the difference between astrologers and economists?

Answer # 1: astrologers know they're bullsh_ting on the future and economists seem to think they can accurately predict the future.

As we all know, economists are excellent predictors of future economic conditions, as evidenced by their successful predictions of five out of the last three recessions.

----------------

Question # 2: what do astrologers, economists, securities analysts, political pundits, military strategists, business futurists, evangelical rapturists, global warming alarmists, movie directors, tarot readers and fortune tellers all have in common?

Answer # 2: they always get the future dead wrong--consistently.

Can you please make a distinction between Medicare and Social Security? Is Social Security really in that much trouble if taken alone? I understand why Medicare is in trouble.

How long will this Vongerichtification, i.e. super-luxurification, condofication, of NYC last? It seems like NYC is immune from the housing slump that's going across the U.S. Will the law of diminishing marginal utility apply to these ever increasing building of condos in NYC? Shouldn't this be similar to the dot-com bust? How can one stop this Vongerichtification of NYC? Will a recession sop this? Depression? I want my (old) NYC back!

On separate note, will there be a student loan crisis, similar to the sub-prime mortgage crisis?

Americans need to

Spend less
Eat less
Burn less gas, use less electricity and water

And

Study harder
Save more
Get out and see the world
Think of their future

Question: Please define in plain English what a MARKET is. . . . and how does the term "inelastic" apply to markets?

Then, please define: "Market Rate" and explain whether it is the same as, or different to: "What The Market Will Bear"

Question: What is the economist's definition of "Price Gouging"..."Profiteering"...and "Greed".....

P.S. The last time I asked an economist about "Greed" he hemmed and hawed and said, "Let's just call it the 'more' factor"........

Thanks!