Intelligent Analysis of Labor Force Participation

That's the trivial solution. The Scandinavian solution is to make your welfare good enough that growing up poor doesn't make you so malnourished that you can't take advantage of an education, and to make your education system sufficiently well supported that even poor kids in poor neighbourhoods can get a good education.

Social mobility in Scandinavia is a lot higher than it is in the US - where income is more heritable than height.

Poor choices imposed by poor support while growing up. If you don't get enough of the right food as a kid, you can't take full advantage of what education is on offer. Where the schools in poor neighbourhoods are resourced to cope with the problems of the poor kids that use them, dropping out of high school becomes a lot more likely, and having a kid out of wedlock becomes the only accessible career choice.

Emigrate to Scandinavia early enough, and you'll be much less likely to do any of them.

As they are in Scandinavia.

It's the Republicans who don't want to spend money on job-creation. They want any stimulus spending to go to their constituents, despite the fact that if you've got money already, you are less likely to spend the stimulus money you get, killing the Keynesian multiplier.

One of James Arthur's more persistent mantra's. Scandinavian governments can spend welfare money effectively, but US governments can't (according to James Arthur - of course, right-wing administrations do have a vested interested in spending welfare money ineffectively as a justification for not spending it at all).

What James Arthur can tell is restricted by what his right-wing ideology allows him to see. More liberalism and a better safety net hasn't produced a generation without fathers in Scandinavia. There may be more unmarried mothers, but with better support policies the fathers are more willing to stick around and help with the kids, and the bad effects of absent fathers are compensated by better schools and child-care.

But adequate welfare and good schools work pretty well too.

John Larkin also believes in extreme greenies who advocate depopulation as a useful way of reducing CO2 emissions. I'm not sure that any actually exist. It is one of those trivial solutions - no people = no anthropogenic global warming - that serve to make a rhetorical point, but it doesn't feature in any policy proposal that I've ever come across.

The US federal government may have fifty inadequate work-training programs. Denmark takes the job more seriously, and theirs seem to work.

The Cato Institute predictably emphasises the inadequacy of US work-training programs. It doesn't seem to have noticed that other countries have done better.

Australia had a 99% employment rate in the 1950's. Some employees needed more supervision than others, but industrial safety doesn't seem to have been threatened - though this is the period when people started taking it more seriously.

It's been tried, and doesn't seem to work. Industrial cooperatives work, but they look much more like regular organisations - the workers are effectively share-holders, and get to make their voices heard at the annual general meeting. for the rest of the year they do what their managers tell them.

With better welfare and schools - as in Scandinavia - it becomes a much smaller segment of society.

Or her.

Not all that aggressively. The tax take in the US is about 30% of the national income. It's 55% in Sweden, 50% in France and 45% in Germany.

Effective welfare and good schools are expensive, but they do make for a productive economy. Germany exports almost as much as the US, with only a quarter of the population.

China exports about half again more than Germany and the US - a lot of it to the US - with perhaps four times the population of the US and 16 times the population of Germany. Once China trains it's workers to the point where they can demand decent wages, the situation will become more complicated. There are third world countries around to be exploited, but nowhere near enough to replace China.

If you think Americans don't nourish their kids, why don't you just say it? Why always the smarmy, passive-aggressive insinuation?

It's wrong, but at least say whatever it is you're trying to say.

The not-nourished-enough is yet another Progressive People Who Know Better project. They've turned our schools into cafeterias and daycare centers, tripling the cost, without making any achievement difference whatsoever.

So, it's just more boring nonsense.

Why don't you look up what percentage of American kids get school food assistance, /then/ tell us we're not feeding them? Correlate that to under-performing schools.

That wasn't a problem prior to the Progressives' Great Society. The whole money thing is another phony issue--once upon a time inner-city schools had zero money, yet excellent standards.

Economist Walter Williams has spent a lifetime living it, researching it, and writing about it. Thomas Sowell, too.

Right. Since the free food fiasco didn't work, it couldn't be the left was wrong and we wasted all that time and money, it was the wrong *type* of food. The whole wrong-headed experiment failed because the GOVERNMENT food from the cafeterias wasn't the *right* kind.

Got it.

You've admitted the problem in a single sentence: 50 years of progressive theory turned 'having children out of wedlock' into an 'accessible career choice.'

That produces many of the other problems you, having created them, complain about.

Law-abiding poor black people suffer the nation's highest rates of criminal victimization from assaults and homicide.

More than 50 percent of homicide victims are black. Would anyone claim that this victimization is caused by racist groups preying on the black community? In addition to victimization, the level of lawlessness in many black communities has the full effect of a law banning economic growth. "

"Most of the major problems that many black people face are not amendable to political solutions and government anti-poverty programs. Let's look at some. In 1940, 86 percent of black children were born inside marriage, and the illegitimacy rate among blacks was about 15 percent.

Today, only 35 percent of black children are born inside marriage, and the illegitimacy rate hovers around 70 percent. Today's breakdown of the black family is unprecedented. It began in the 1960s with the War on Poverty and the harebrained ideas of the welfare state. ... By the way, the welfare state is an equal opportunity family destroyer. Today's illegitimacy rate among whites, at nearly 30 percent, is higher than it was among blacks in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded the alarm. In Sweden, the mother of the welfare state, illegitimacy is 54 percent." --Walter E. Williams, Prof. of Economics, George Mason University

Hey, nice use of The Big Lie, Bill.

And yet again (plus projection, bonus slime, class-warfare, and zero-sum economics).

Coupled with pop-economics.

Are you citing Scandinavia--the epitome of local--as evidence for centralized? I'm running out of polite phrases. Let's try, "You're not thinking this through."

Our states are European country-sized. 'Working' in a tiny Scandinavian backwater--which has not been proven--is no proof monolithic control works when outsourced to thousands of miles away.

Show us all of Europe efficiently administered from Athens with one set of laws. That's what you're proposing for the U.S.

Pure fabrication. As valid as 'left-wing administrations kill kittens and puppies.'

Cheers, James Arthur

So you're way is that of the socialists (USSR, China, North Korea, and backdoor socialist Nazi Germany), yet it is the capitalists/conservatives that are like the USSR, China, North Korea, and Nazi Germany.

Gotcha. That makes perfect sense. You did all that within the space of two paragraphs. Amazing.

Totalitarian governments like those mentioned imposed socialist / communist principles on everyone, and destroyed the economy by nationalizing most businesses and putting inept party bureaucrats in charge and trying to control production and distribution. And they adopted strongarm tactics of the Gestapo and KGB and severe limits on freedom in an attempt to keep people from fleeing to "greener pastures" that were then successful capitalistic countries.

By the 1950s, automation and the resultant greatly reduced need for workers, was still in its adolescence and such countries needed lots of workers. Now workers are so productive that half the present work force could probably be sent home (or each person could work 3 or 4 days a week) with little impact on the availability of needed goods for consumers. Many jobs are superfluous and could be performed by machines and on-line commerce.

Now, what I am proposing, is a voluntary and viable alternative to the "rat-race" that has become the norm for middle class Americans, and it is based on proliferation of highly advertised "must have" new technology and cars that are the pinnacle of unfettered growth and crass materialism. Most people may very well prefer this lifestyle of competition and bragging rights, even when it has serious deleterious effects on physical and mental health. But perhaps 10% of the population may be enlightened enough to consider an alternative, if it were easily evaluated and adopted.

But, as usual, conservatives want to roll back the clock to the McCarthy/Ike years which have little relevance to today's global economy and our present social condition. We should end the "war on poverty", but first end the "war on drugs" which has backfired and practically guaranteed the present desperate conditions of the poor people in our country.

Paul

The money never left the banking system. The Fed paid "interest on reserves" to keep it out of circulation.

Scandinavia is not the United States. Our overall social spending is very effective in the U.S. We just don't understand our poverty problem ( partly because of LBJ's half-banked War and I think a lot more because of monetary policy ).

Again, you cannot even begin to compare Scandinavian countries with the US. The complexities are completely out of whack.

They do. It's unusual, but you can find them.

In general, a rising lifestyle keeps population growth down. So let's get GDP moving again.

Of course, I mean my way, not your way because I don't buy Keynes that much. He lived in a radically different world. Read Galbraith ( a Keynsian) "New Industrial State" again, some time. Might as well be about Middle Kingdom Egypt.

The conservatism is a *reaction* to this change, not a cause ( it's lagged by at least a decade all along ).

"Other countries' largely rebuilt from scratch after WWII. The US didn't, and it might be as disruptive to "catch up" as WWII was in Europe.

Scott Sumner also points Aus. out as an example of closer-to-monetarist monetary policy... but it might be just proximity to China.

Fender Musical Instrument Corp is like this, and they still got Bained.

Germany is neo-Mercantilist.

Exploited??? China called *us*, buddy. They've had massive, rapid GDP growth - from dire, Great Leap forward poverty to US-in-1900 in sixty years, maybe just fifty.

There is a heroin epidemic in the USA, and it's hurting all sorts of people of all colors. Consider how many millionaire actors and musicians died of overdoses. I know of a couple of young white middle-class guys who are being killed, or have been killed, by heroin.

Some people just can't resist the stuff, and it destroys them. Heroin dealers are murderers.

Marijuana isn't as immediately harmful, but it appears to be bad for the developing brains of teenagers. Bad for drivers, too.

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I do, from time to time. The problem with American kids is the way you defi ne "nourishment". Enough calories is a good start, enough trace elements an d vitamins turns out to be almost as important. Some field trials in South America demonstrated that protein supplements were a good idea - with them, the kids were more active, got exposed to more of the environment and seem ed to have learned more. The trials were set up as double blinds, so the Ha wthorne effect didn't screw up the results.

You understood it correctly. Most people seem to.

Parents can force children to eat a more healthy diet. Cafeterias and dayca re centres don't have that kind of clout. In fact if the children can stuff themselves on empty calories, engineered by the fast food industry to be a ttractive to kids, they don't have an appetite for the kind of food they ou ght to eat.

It doesn't make sense to you. because everything you process is considered in terms of its utility to your right-wing political agenda. If it isn't us eful, you don't process it.

School food is primarily palatable - so it gets eaten. Fine details of nutr itional quality don't get a look in.

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Back in the days when anybody who didn't look promising was encouraged to g o out and get a job. Confining you efforts to the easy-to-teach kids makes maximal use of scarce resources, but wastes a lot 0f harder-to-exploit tale nt.

And they make good livings telling right-wing nitwits what the right-wing n itwits want to hear. Economists do make a habit of that.

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Very likely. The Scandinavian system supports the mothers from the births o f the kids - and their "wrong-headed experiment" produces a lot fewer teena ge births than the US system, which is a world leader (at about 50 per 1000 15- to 19-year olds, where even the UK can only manage 30, and Sweden. Den mark and the Neterhlands are below ten).

It always was an accessible career choice, but you had to be more careful a bout nailing down the father when he - and his relatives - were the only pe ople likely to support you and the kid.

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You've got a mess, and you aren't doing anything effective to tackle it. Th at isn't a good reason to reject solutions that work elsewhere.

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The Swedes don't bother to get married before having kids. The unmarried mo thers of Sweden do have their kids later than the Americans with whom Walte r E. Williamsn is misleadingly comparing them, and while the kids may be il legitimate - in the sense that the parents aren't married - they are rarely fatherless.

Really? Where's the inexactitude in that statement?

In fact the big lie here appears to be yours.

Serious economists are neo-Keynesians. The Monetarists you idolise are a br anch of the entertainment industry, telling the rich what they want to hear . There aren't enough of the rich to make Monetarism "popular economics" bu t the economic power of the rich is enough to sustain a lively industry of nonsense-spouting parasites.

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The various Scandinavian governments set their - high - tax rates centrally , and collect the taxes through a national tax system. They may spend the m oney locally, but the countries only have a few million people each.

Much the same system works pretty well in Germany.

Another of your bizarre straw men. Where did the European Union get into th e discussion? And what makes you think that any of it might be administered from Athens? Brussels is the administrative centre, and the European Parli ament - such as it is - sits in Strasbourg.

US right-wing administrations do spend welfare money ineffectively - as you keep on telling us. Other people do better. Dog pounds do euthanise unwant ed pets - but both left- and right-wing administrations use them to do the same job.

American exceptionalism strikes agai8n.

More American exceptionalism.

So produce a link to one of their we-sites.

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Change has been with us - and accelerating - since the industrial revolutio n.

Keynes is dead, and the prevailing economic orthodoxy is Neo-Keynesian. Joh n Kenneth Gailbraith was a brilliant popularisor and author, but he wrote h is books for the audience that was going to buy them then. I can't say that I've re-read any of his books recently.

At the end of WW2 German infra-structure wasn't working. The destruction th at stopped it working was localised, and rapidly repaired. That was 70 year s ago, enough for almost three cycles of depreciation-over-25 years and rep lacement.

There were a couple of huge WW1 lathes in the George Kent machine shop when I was working there in 1975. They were still there precisely because they were hardly ever used, and it wasn't worth investing the money in something more modern that wasn't going to used very often either.

Any "catching up" happened a long time ago. The US was anti-trade union in the 1880s and has stayed that way ever since. The Cato Institute institutio nalises that, rather than any reaction to WW2.

No. It's proximity to the US. Australia's current government wants Australi a to be as much like the US as it can manage. It isn't making them popular.

Hostile takeovers have that effect.

So you have told us before. It's a nonsense claim.

You were glad to exploit them, and being exploited put more money in their pockets than they could get any other way. Now that they are richer, they c an sell their services for a better price, and can afford the luxury of rej ecting low bids.

There may very well be a heroin epidemic, and its use certainly can cause great harm and causes many users to die, but the "war on drugs" has been worse than ineffective against what should be a medical issue. I think it is better for someone to live a (possibly short) life stoned on drugs, than to be thrown in jail for crimes necessitated by their overwhelming need for drugs that are impossibly expensive because of supply-side limitation due to the draconian DEA policies. Many of those who died from overdoses might have been saved if there were not such a great stigma and need to hide their addiction because it might have caused criminal penalties.

Limiting access to things that may be unhealthy should be in the form of education and perhaps some regulation and taxation, rather than criminalization and incarceration. Drugs that cause bizarre and dangerous behavior, such as PCP, should rightly be banned, but otherwise it should be a matter of personal choice and responsibility. The ban on alcohol didn't work. Regulation and heavy taxation of tobacco has helped reduce use, along with education. They tried to ban the "Big Gulp" in NYC - that was a gross violation of human rights and abuse of governmental power, even though it purported to help reduce obesity and diabetes. My views are quite libertarian when it comes to control of what I choose to do with or put into my body, as long as I do so in private and it does not directly harm others.

Paul

It's only a matter of time until someone synthesizes a super-heroin that is immediately addictive and impossible to kick. No feel-good psychology graduates are going to talk people out of that. It's not working for heroin, in the cases I know about. "Rehab" is a repetitive and mostly useless process.

Let's legalize the possession of small amounts of stuff and kill the dealers.

The ban on alcohol didn't

The tobacco companies cut the states in on the revenue stream. Money talks.

It is in nobody's enlightened self interest to actually know how destructive heroin is.

it's mainly anecdotal, but there's a guy who claims most people mostly just grow out of heroin addiction.

I would not be surprised if the obama tobacco taxes were not a big part of why our growth rates are low.

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Historically, medical people who could get regular supplies of pure opiates cheaply would stop taking the stuff in their forties, and survived their a ddiction unscathed. The "harm minimisation" approach doesn't try to duplica te that, but it recognises that addiction isn't - of itself - all that dama ging.

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Anybody who can ignore the dominant contribution of the US banking system a nd their Global Financial Crisis is crazy enough to be a Tea Party supporte r.

ng after the vacant SED babble by individuals too ignorant to fathom they'r e out of their league.

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omprehend this statistic. The cbo is non-partisan:

rs don't know what they're talking about, all they care about is confirming the misbeliefs of the mindless by telling them what they want to hear.

now overwhelmed by demographic factors, mainly age, to the point of being u nusable as such. No need to get all excited by thoughts of "super-productiv e" people churning out super-sophisticated robots to perform all the work t o be done.

Not this one: