THE U.S. IS NOW PRETTY MUCH AT STATISTICAL FULL EMPLOYMENT (around 5% if you are an economist—decidedly less if you are out of a job).
PAY SHOULD BE GOING UP—BUT, MOSTLY, IT ISN’T. COSTS ARE.—MORE THAN YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO THINK
WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN ECONOMICS DOESN’T WORK THE WAY IT IS SUPPOSED TO?
Speaking of costs going up, you have got to love this absolute gem of corporate bull. Does the woman think we are idiots? She probably does. Some of us probably are.
It’s from GalleyCat.
By Dianna Dilworth on Aug. 3, 2015
Textbook prices are up 1,041 percent since January 1977, according to new numbers released by NBC News.
The media outlet looked at Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data and determined that these prices have gone up three times the rate of inflation. A spokesperson for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, claims that students are ‘captive consumers.’ While this number sounds staggering, not everyone in the industry agrees with the math. NBC News has more:
Marisa Bluestone, spokeswoman for the the Association of American Publishers, called the BLS data “misleading” because of the “law of small numbers” where a small item that increases from $100 to $200 will appear as a 100 percent increase whereas if tuition increases from $10,000 to $11,000 it’s only a 10 percent increase.
As for as economics is concerned, the important thing to understand is that it is not a science. It’s a professional discipline, based upon a bunch of theories (frequently misunderstood and misquoted), which certainly help when it comes to understanding an economy, but which depend on so many variables that the results are very far from predictable. Indeed, economists are notoriously inaccurate forecasters. No problem. They just revise the figures.
That said, even if economics is not a perfect compass, it is (normally) better than none. It depends a great deal on the economist—and the brand of economics he or she practices.
The best version, in my opinion, is behavioral economics which relies less on financial models—and more on studying how we humans behave.
We’re damnably odd, you know.
But, of course you do.
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