mistersix posted:Keven posted:1 time a Professor (liberal arts class) was out so a different professor was there and she spent an hour explaning how the hicks and hillbillies in the south are racist, but in college we're progressive. Later i found out she was, literally a south african expat. Well that's a story from Keven's neck of the woods.
thats maybe better than the time i had a microecon class taught by a greek fascist
no way, that sounds awesome as hell
Occupy Wall Street has thrown off many sparks. A little one landed in academic economics. On November 2, a group of Harvard students walked out on Greg Mankiw’s intro economics course – according to the professor himself “about 5 to 10 percent of the class stood up and quietly left.” Later that day, the Harvard Political Review posted an open letter the dissenters had written to Mankiw:
We are walking out today to join a Boston-wide march protesting the corporatization of higher education as part of the global Occupy movement. Since the biased nature of Economics 10 contributes to and symbolizes the increasing economic inequality in America, we are walking out of your class today both to protest your inadequate discussion of basic economic theory and to lend our support to a movement that is changing American discourse on economic injustice.
The main complaint of the dissenters, expressed in every paragraph, was bias: “There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.”
A trope began in the comments thread below: it was ironic that these undergraduates had walked out on Mankiw, a leading light of the New Keynesians, apparently thinking that he was an anti-Keynesian. Had they waited until the second semester, when Econ 10 turns to macroeconomics, they would have found the class steeped in Keynes, learning from a guy who said in 2008: “If you were going to turn to only one economist to understand the problems facing the economy, there is little doubt that the economist would be John Maynard Keynes.”
The liberal candidate: The executive director of Lambda Legal, an organization that describes itself as the oldest and largest organization promoting gay rights in America, calls President Obama's announcement to support gay marriage "historic."
All i have to say is this:
http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2012/03/glee-episode-movingly-highlights-lgbt-youth-bullying-and-suicide/
choose wisely my friends
TROT_CUMLOVER posted:i love ows, they are the cutest liberals
Occupy Wall Street has thrown off many sparks. A little one landed in academic economics. On November 2, a group of Harvard students walked out on Greg Mankiw’s intro economics course – according to the professor himself “about 5 to 10 percent of the class stood up and quietly left.” Later that day, the Harvard Political Review posted an open letter the dissenters had written to Mankiw:
We are walking out today to join a Boston-wide march protesting the corporatization of higher education as part of the global Occupy movement. Since the biased nature of Economics 10 contributes to and symbolizes the increasing economic inequality in America, we are walking out of your class today both to protest your inadequate discussion of basic economic theory and to lend our support to a movement that is changing American discourse on economic injustice.
The main complaint of the dissenters, expressed in every paragraph, was bias: “There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.”
A trope began in the comments thread below: it was ironic that these undergraduates had walked out on Mankiw, a leading light of the New Keynesians, apparently thinking that he was an anti-Keynesian. Had they waited until the second semester, when Econ 10 turns to macroeconomics, they would have found the class steeped in Keynes, learning from a guy who said in 2008: “If you were going to turn to only one economist to understand the problems facing the economy, there is little doubt that the economist would be John Maynard Keynes.”
holy shit lmao
The Political Philosophy of Redistributing Income
We have just seen how the economy's income is distributed and have considered some of the problems in interpreting measured inequality. This discussion was positive in the sense that it merely described the world as it is. We now turn to the normative question facing policymakers: What should the government do about economic inequality?
This question is not just about economics. Economic analysis alone cannot tell us whether policymakers should try to make our society more egalitarian. Our views on this question are, to a large extent, a matter of political philosophy. Yet because the government's role in redistributing income is central to so many debates over economic policy, here we digress from economic science to consider a bit of political philosophy.
Utilitarianism
A prominent school of thought in political philosophy is utilitarianism. The founders of utilitarianism are the English philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). To a large extent, the goal of utilitarians is to apply the logic of individual decision making to questions concerning morality and public policy.
The starting point of utilitarianism is the notion of utility—the level of happi¬ness or satisfaction that a person receives from his or her circumstances. Utility is j a measure of well-being and, according to utilitarians, is the ultimate objective of I all public and private actions. The proper goal of the government, they claim, is I to maximize the sum of utility achieved by everyone in society.
The utilitarian case for redistributing income is based on the assumption of diminishing marginal utility. It seems reasonable that an extra dollar of income provides a poor person with more additional utility than an extra dollar would provide to a rich person. In other words, as a person's income rises, the extra well-being derived from an additional dollar of income falls. This plausible assump¬tion, together with the utilitarian goal of maximizing total utility, implies that the government should try to achieve a more equal distribution of income.
The argument is simple. Imagine that Peter and Paul are the same, except that Peter earns $80,000 and Paul earns $20,000. In this case, taking a dollar from Peter to pay Paul will reduce Peter's utility and raise Paul's utility. But because of diminishing marginal utility, Peter's utility falls by less than Paul's utility rises. Thus, this redistribution of income raises total utility, which is the utilitarian's objective.
At first, this utilitarian argument might seem to imply that the government should continue to redistribute income until everyone in society has exactly the same income. Indeed, that would be the case if the total amount of income—$100,000 in our example—were fixed. But in fact, it is not. Utilitarians reject complete equaliza¬tion of incomes because they accept one of the Ten Principles of Economics presented in Chapter 1: People respond to incentives.
To take from Peter to pay Paul, the government must pursue policies that redis¬tribute income. The U.S. federal income tax and welfare system are examples. Under these policies, people with high incomes pay high taxes, and people with low incomes receive income transfers. Yet if the government uses higher income taxes or phased-out transfers to take away additional income a person might earn, both Peter and Paul have less incentive to work hard. As they work less, society's income falls, and so does total utility. The utilitarian government has to balance the gains from greater equality against the losses from distorted incentives. To maximize total utility, therefore, the government stops short of making society fully egalitarian.
A famous parable sheds light on the utilitarian's logic. Imagine that Peter and Paul are thirsty travelers trapped at different places in the desert. Peter's oasis has a lot of water; Paul's has only a little. If the government could transfer water from one oasis to the other without cost, it would maximize total utility from water by equalizing the amount in the two places. But suppose that the government has only a leaky bucket. As it tries to move water from one place to the other, some of the water is lost in transit. In this case, a utilitarian government might still try to move some water from Peter to Paul, depending on the size of Paul's thirst and the size of the bucket's leak. But with only a leaky bucket at its disposal, a utilitar¬ian government will stop short of trying to reach complete equality.
Liberalism
A second way of thinking about inequality might be called liberalism. Philosopher John Rawls develops this view in his book A Theory of Justice. This book was first published in 1971, and it quickly became a classic in political philosophy.
Rawls begins with the premise that a society's institutions, laws, and policies should be just. He then takes up the natural question: How can we, the members of society, ever agree on what justice means? It might seem that every person's point of view is inevitably based on his or her particular circumstances—whether he or she is talented or less talented, diligent or lazy, educated or less educated, born to a wealthy family or a poor one. Could we ever objectively determine what a just society would be?
To answer this question, Rawls proposes the following thought experiment. Imagine that before any of us is born, we all get together in the beforelife (the pre-birth version of the afterlife) for a meeting to design the rules that will govern society. At this point, we are all ignorant about the station in life each of us will end up filling. In Rawls's words, we are sitting in an "original posi¬tion" behind a "veil of ignorance." In this original position, Rawls argues, we can choose a just set of rules for society because we must consider how those rules will affect every person. As Rawls puts it, "Since all are similarly situ¬ated and no one is able to design principles to favor his particular conditions, the principles of justice are the result of fair agreement or bargain." Designing public policies and institutions in this way allows us to be objective about what policies are just.
Rawls then considers what public policy designed behind this veil of ignorance would try to achieve. In particular, he considers what income distribution a per¬son would consider fair if that person did not know whether he or she would end up at the top, bottom, or middle of the distribution. Rawls argues that a person in the original position would be especially concerned about the possibility of being at the bottom of the income distribution. In designing public policies, therefore, we should aim to raise the welfare of the worst-off person in society. That is, rather than maximizing the sum of everyone's utility, as a utilitarian would do, Rawls would maximize the minimum utility. Rawls's rule is called the maximin criterion.
Because the maximin criterion emphasizes the least fortunate person in society, it justifies public policies aimed at equalizing the distribution of income. By transferring income from the rich to the poor, society raises the well-being of the least fortunate. The maximin criterion would not, however, lead to a completely egalitarian society. If the government promised to equalize incomes completely, people would have no incentive to work hard, society's total income would fall substantially, and the least fortunate person would be worse off. Thus, the maximin criterion still allows disparities in income because such disparities can improve incentives and thereby raise society's ability to help the poor. Nonetheless, because Rawls's philosophy puts weight on only the least fortunate members of society, it calls for more income redistribution than does utilitarianism.
Rawls's views are controversial, but the thought experiment he proposes has much appeal. In particular, this thought experiment allows us to consider the redistribution of income as a form of social insurance. That is, from the perspective of the original position behind the veil of ignorance, income redistribution is like an insurance policy. Homeowners buy fire insurance to protect themselves from the risk of their house burning down. Similarly, when we as a society choose policies that tax the rich to supplement the incomes of the poor, we are all insuring ourselves against the possibility that we might have been a member of a poor family. Because people dislike risk, we should be happy to have been born into a society that provides us this insurance.
It is not at all clear, however, that rational people behind the veil of ignorance would truly be so averse to risk as to follow the maximin criterion. Indeed, because a person in the original position might end up anywhere in the distri¬bution of outcomes, he or she might treat all possible outcomes equally when designing public policies. In this case, the best policy behind the veil of ignorance would be to maximize the average utility of members of society, and the resulting notion of justice would be more utilitarian than Rawlsian.
aerdil posted:let's write about different ways to view economic inequality and only mention utilitarianism, liberalism, and libertarianism, why yes i am an american economist, here's my macroeconomics textbook
32nd most cited economist in the world!
Ironicwarcriminal posted:cleanhands posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:gay marriage is yet another ploy by the ruling class to divide and weaken the solidarity of workers and it's hilarious/sad that so called leftists can't understand this
i dont know shit about it, can you elaborate or gief links pl0x
Yeah I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the centres of gay advocacy in the country are also the powerhouses of liberal hegemony.
*spends decades denigrating the rural and regional masses both rhetorically and economically, wonders why they won’t buy wholesale into your agenda*
pretty much all non-academic advocacy for anything is based in centers of enormously wealthy liberals, why single out gay marriage
camera_obscura posted:what if i'm liberal
then let's be friends, because liberalism is cool!
cleanhands posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:cleanhands posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:gay marriage is yet another ploy by the ruling class to divide and weaken the solidarity of workers and it's hilarious/sad that so called leftists can't understand this
i dont know shit about it, can you elaborate or gief links pl0x
Yeah I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the centres of gay advocacy in the country are also the powerhouses of liberal hegemony.
*spends decades denigrating the rural and regional masses both rhetorically and economically, wonders why they won’t buy wholesale into your agenda*pretty much all non-academic advocacy for anything is based in centers of enormously wealthy liberals, why single out gay marriage
you know how absolutely every discussion in LF turned into a nauseatingly predictable and shitty wheel of pointing out a thing and whining and then pointing out a way to help it and then pointing out how the way to help was ultimately rooted in the shitty thing which kicked off another round of pointing out things and whining?
IWC is the hand that turns that wheel.
I believe the phrase due him is "thank you"
getfiscal posted:camera_obscura posted:what if i'm liberal
then let's be friends, because liberalism is cool!
none of the things you like are cool. im sorry to break it 2 u
apart from the chinese cultural revolution i guess. do you still like the chinese cultural revolution