The era of reduced expectations

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In other words, honest commentators are aware that they can't put together the reliable figures that a honest peer-review process would accept as publishable, but the parrtisan propaganda machine has no such inhibitions.

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Despite the best efforts of the banking system that you so uncritically admire, the US economy is still growing, if not all that fast.

Investing in educating kids is a long term investment. It pays off over their entire working life. At the moment the US system seems to be investing less than it profitably could. One of the weaknesses of the US system is that expenditure per student varies from district to district, and children from low income districts end up with lower educational outcomes. This also happens in countries where the expenditure per student is determined by region or across the country as a whole, but the differences in outcome tend to be less dramatic in these countries.

Educating the children of the poor is a long term investment, but it does pay off in a variety of different ways. Lower criminality and better health outcomes are part of the payoff when you do it right.

Interesting. How exactly did that work? The people who might have employed your SO's teenagers were getting subsidies to employ the children of illegal aliens? How did those employers prove to the subsidy-givers that the teenagers that they did employ were the children of illegal aliens? And why didn't the immigration service use this information to deport the illegal aliens involved?

Only after the Indian education system has picked out the particularly educatable poor and given them degrees in computer science.

In fact the US doesn't deliberately lure poor immigrants (not the least-skilled, since immigrating illegally takes tenacity and enterprise) any more than the European Economic Union does. Many EU countries did import "guest workers" but now the EU is big enough to include a lot of sources of low-paid labour, and the illegal immigrants from Africa are being discouraged.

But you are less open to the idea that their children - or the children of low-paid US citizens - might be educated well enough to maximise their eventual contribution to the US economy. That would be a long term investment, and the right-wing lacks the wit to perceive the advantage of any long term investment, not in education nor in averting climate change.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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That's called "foreign aid". A lot of it ends up in the pockets of corrupt politicians. Organisations like "Practical Action" do better.

Looking at you and Jim Thompson in action, this may not be a bad thing.

Probably better than you, but you aren't in a position to understand that.

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None of the welfare benefit that you are complaining about paying for wouldn't be available to an indigenous worker. How could they not be?

 Milton

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The existence of welfare benefits doesn't remove all rewards for working harder. In an ill-constructed system it may reduce - and at some specific thresholds - completely eliminate the officially recognised financial incentives. Financial incentives aren't the only rewards that encourage people to work harder - and better - and welfare certainly don't trap people in poverty.

You may not have the wit to recognise that working reliably for an employer for a low wage is a way of learning more about the job and improving your chances of getting moved to a better-paid task that calls for more skill and a better grasp of what's going on, but low- paid employees get reminded of this from time to time.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Thanks for the promotion. I hope I can live up to the honour by educating one of my slower students.

My contention was that if the illegal immigrants from Mexico were primarily interested in the benefits of the - inadequate - US welfare system, they would keep on going to Canada, which offers a slightly less inadequate welfare system.

In fact they do seek America's illegally low wages and abusive conditions because, bad as they are, they are better than they can get where they come from. They might do even better in Canada,if they were aware what Canada had to offer, but staying alive through a Canadian winter is a moderately skilled job, which may put them off.

In my professorial mode, I should point out to you that constructing straw man arguments may be fun, but since you seem to have done it to evade the point I was making, it does make you look both dishonest and stupid.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

"Hop Sing" wasn't a guest actor. Guest actors used such appearances for resume enhancement not to live on.

I actually have an answer for that! When a person crosses the Rio Grande, their marginal product goes up by ... six, ten, something times ( don't remember the exact figure ).

So there's no point. I realize you were not being serious, but as it happens...

This is a big deal, because we can underpay them by our standards and overpay them by their home standard. And eventually things equalize out...

Sorry, I meant the *main* corn subsidies, not the ethanol mess. I mean the general Earl Butz programme and what it's evolved into.

Basically, we overproduce, and that margin means people can make more relaxed estimates of shortage risk. The paradoxical result is that things are actually cheaper. I don't know what happens to the surplus but it's not apparently a major problem.

I won't argue that the ethanol boondoggle is disgusting.

It might. It might not. it depends. There is actually a writer who apparently, in a fit of Steinbeck-ism, endeavored to become a lettuce cutter in the California Central valley. Turns out it takes years to make a good lettuce cutter. It's not like logging for a summer.

And the "history" includes basically being run off in parts of our noble country. That's not their fault, and it's really not ours - the Mexico City regimes could not hold El Norte. We stole it fair and square ( or as close as anybody could get to that ).

This is a little harder to swallow for those from South America, although there were plenty of 19th century "filibuster"ers* who made an godawful mess down there that's still giving dividends. .

*the William Walker type, not the parlimentary type.

Probably not. But we let a lot of Russians in at critical times in the past. If you look at why we don't any more, it's mostly because of people like Hearst.

My parents have sponsored two families to come to this country. So i am biased in favor of immigration.

Okay.

You usually don't have to.

You can't. But it generally doesn't create many problems - Manuelo* is not gonna show up to work at a retail place or a Starbucks because he doesn't have the cultural and social capital.

*of the Robert Earl keen song of the same title.

Milton

Work is nothing more than a necessary evil. Consumption comes first - demand leads production. As we continue to "progress", more and more stuff that used to be a living will not have the marginal product necessary to support people doing it. It'll get automated or it'll go away - or people will make hobbies of it.

We choose cheaper stuff that's basically the same all the time. Even if we wnated to change that, I doubt we could.

"People getting trapped in poverty" is a big, complex thing. I've gone on enough for now. Basically, we are not trees - when it's

1928 and you can leave Greenville, Ms to go to Detroit, you probably ought to.

if we're serious about the dual mandate ( I think we are not ) then there's an entire other thing that has to happen, and IMO, that's about monetary policy.

--
Les Cargill

Hence there has to be a reward for it, or people won't.

No it doesn't. Were people lined up to buy iPods before Apple invented them? I've got a notebook full of any number of advancements. Investment, production, and marketing all come before demand for a product.

Unless you're following old-line marxist thought, which recognizes only existing, big industry, and tries to accommodate that. (That's what we're doing today.)

That's irrelevant to whether [people will work considerably harder without any reward]. They don't.

That's the trap--we've created a huge deadband where there's no reason to work harder, and within which people can live comfortably as they are, on the dole.

Only the most disciplined of people can survive that uncorrupted.

James Arthur

Not strictly true. It's also a large part of many peoples social lives, and sociological studies of the unemployed and the recently re- employed show that the motives for wanting get back into work are by no means entirely economic. People will opt for work when they are stuck in a welfare trap which means that it actually costs them ( though not very much) to get back into work.

This is no kind of counter-example. Steve Jobs was unusually good at perceiving demand, so it lead to development followed by production

Who is we? You are your small coterie of non-investors?

Not for you. Obviously, working for you isn't the socially rewarding experience that working for other people can be,

Comfortable, but isolated. For most people, work is a social experience, and sharing the experience of doing things for other people is valued as an additional benefit beyond the wages earned.

And some people go mad, and obsessive, and see themselves as disciplined when everybody else can see that they've lost it.

At least I'm aware that I'm not disciplined ...

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

message

fading?

plenty

I do not quite believe in can't move; just the same, i am beginning to consider really onerous commuting (rent a studio to sleep in sunday/monday nights through thursday nights and drive 100+ miles home for the weekends). I really do not want to have to sell my house.

YMMV

?-)

@ BS You sanctimonious idiot. The US is a welfare state, i have direct experience living here. Moreover, i have met and even worked with persons that originally came here illegally. Some turned out to be hard workers, and some turned out to be welfare con artists, and some turned out otherwise but not many. The two major types often intermarry, resulting in continuous marriage friction. I have seen too much of it to doubt its reality.

?-)

Most people barely work for enough to cover expenses.

Sure it does. If you make stuff nobody wants, it goes in the landfill.

The iPhone/iPad are a blip, a consumer fad object. it's hype. They're not *completely* that, but a lot of them are sold as fetish objects, not as computers/phones per se. They're a marketing triumph and to an extent a good package design, but either is substitutable-for by something half the price and twice the function.

To be sure, but most stuff never really makes it to market.

Old-line capitalist thought ala America has always been that way, too. There's always been a significant emphasis on consolidation and incremental improvement.

We *are* doing that today but only because wages aren't supporting demand properly. Companies are regressing to "core competencies">

"Dead band" is the perfect term for it. But you can't exactly be comfortable on the dole. You can be more comfortable with the right sort of dead-end corporate job, though.

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Les Cargill

I just got done doing that for a year, except I bought a house at the new location half way through, after it was clear the new position was going to be permanent. I moved my wife to the new place in October. We spent the last two months commuting on weekends to finish the projects that needed completion and move the remainder of our stuff.

That's next. It went on the market last week.

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I will bet at least some were from Caribbean islands or central America.

?-)

ect

But none of living in country with a welfare system that actually works properly. Neither the UK nor the Netherlands is actually a Welfare State in the terms that the immediate post-war British Labour government had in mind, but - as Will Hutton pointed out in his 2003 book "The Wordl We're In" - they've both got good enough welfare systems to make the labour force flexible enough to be reasonably mobile and productive. You haven't got there yet.

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We've seen how James Arthur's selective vision works. You may have the unique knack of seeing the world as it really is, but somehow I suspect that what you notice is conditioned by what you expect to see. Putting it another way, anecdotal evidence sucks.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Nope. I asked them, in my broken 'Spanish' >:-} ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

From personal (direct) more or less successful experience with braces; before age 14 they may well be a semi-futile choice. The mouth and teeth are still growing a lot. At ages below that it is increasingly a vanity issue.

Sane people do, extreme religious left and right whinge types do not.

And fictionally located in Nevada, not AZ.

Close to Virginia City, which actually does exist. East of Reno/Sparks.

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence  
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." 
                                       (Richard Feynman)

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Ahem, the conductor (president) calls the tunes and sets the tempo, the orchestra (congress) plays the tunes. Get it?

?-)

Of course it isn't really that lopsided either way, but the base is president / conductor points the direction.

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      ...Jim Thompson

And at the moment the Republican majority in congress wants to play a completely different tune. The president would like to conduct, but the first violin has other ideas.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

??? (That's too ambiguous to understand.)

Few people will work extra if there's no profit in it.

I really don't understand what you're talking about--you can't landfill something unless it was produced first. Yes, the landfill is where a great deal of new stuff goes--just look at Obama's "green jobs" stuff.

That's a separate question from what is and is not successful.

Creating products, I tried asking customers over and over, but they never had any idea what they wanted or what was possible. So, I made my best guess, we built it, and customers lined up. That is, there was no demand until after the thing was well under way, as details leaked.

James Arthur