Projections, by their nature, require assumptions. There are no definitive answers given the sheer quantity of variables inherent in any economic projection.

I assure you that if you look, you'll find myriad economists - typically behavioralists that fetishize opportunity costs - that support subsidizing healthcare and investing in infrastructure. I support initiatives like a gas tax, for example, because I don't believe that GDP growth should be the end-all-be-all of economic pursuits. Economics, like any science, is full of dissent and built on assumptions subject to constant debate. Physics geniuses built space shuttles and disagree still on the nature of the motions sending them hurtling through matter that they cannot agree on how to define.

Apologies that it isn't all conveniently figured out for you.

May I ask what you do? Perhaps we can all sit around and disparage it without trying to understand it, as seems to be considered fair and just to do to economists when times are bad.

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the broad outlines of "free market" economics can be recited by a child

actually thinking about answers to issues is nothing like reciting the catechism

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The catechism informs the strategy. I'm all for being practical - and practical suggests that you're going to have to entertain a variety of opinions from a spectrum of dissenting experts. For every "free market" acolyte you will find an interventionist, and they will all share the gravitas of certainty when they state their views. You were grossly generalizing for no apparent reason, and you deserved to be called on it.

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i welcome other strains of the creatures.

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Fair point, but you seemed to disparage the science in your first post. I'll always defend the study of economics, even if the conclusions and outcomes aren't always favorable.

Agreed that the WSJ could do with a larger breadth of opinions, of course. I am glad to see the gas tax drum being beaten, though.

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Economics is not a science.

A science requires a testable, repeatable outcome with a control subject. The study of macroeconomics provides neither. It is purely a historical and philosophical study of a complex system.

If you want to break down a simple response... how can you call it a science when economists spouting off their theories on CNBC have an effect on the outcome? Compare that to a real science, where the testable outcomes of Einstein's or Newton's theories didn't change when they spoke to the public.

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WHAT?!

Heisenberg does not invalidate every other kind of science. Observation biases outcomes, commentary biases research. Economics is every bit a science, though admittedly its experiments are less controlled/rigorous.

Back to the textbooks with you.

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As opposed to the policies and practices of free-market ideology, which has left the "uneducated middle class" (you actually mean working-class, but are too timid to say it) swimming in Champagne. The past 8 years of policy, unfettered deregulation, and job elimination have already reduced that class to barely above "subsistence' levels.

You've a flair for theory, but your above posts give no hint of what these out-of-work people are meant to do- stop being uneducated? Stop being working-class? That's far more fanciful than any solid plan to bring back jobs, including manufacturing. Technologies such as solar panels will need workers to make them- you have a problem with this, because it's cheaper to buy from China, say?

Put it on the tab- again?

It's very grand of you to pronounce that there's no inherent dignity in "making things"- projecting your own scorn for people who do work with their hands making things. Perhaps you ought to ask workers whether they think there's dignity in honest work, or whether they'd prefer to be unemployed , lectured that they ought to aspire to be educated paper-pushers instead, lectured that if only they'd gone to college they wouldn't deserve their fate. Well, even white-collar openings are scarce, there's a glut of college grads, but when your car breaks down, DO tell the mechanic how undignified his labor is.

It's funny, you're casting manufacturing as some Dickensian nightmare, but I would bet dollars to doughnuts that you also loathe unions and are in favor of abolishing them. In other words, I'll bet you'd support abolishing the very things meant to make manufacturing dignified and give workers some dignity, better wages, working conditions, and leverage with owners. Just so you can then go and say, See? Manufacturing is a hellish nightmare, we're better rid of it.



(If you are in fact in favor of unions, I would be heartily surprised. As if.)

Reminds me of Bush's philosophy of government. See, we told you Government is the problem- just look at how we're fucking it up!

"Inviting manufacturing back to America invites the pollution, low pay, and long hours of legitimately frightening human rights disasters in fascist developing nations.

Fascist developing nations. Right here, I lose respect, this misuse of the word "fascist"- a lot of right-wing sorts do it. China? 1930's Italy? Please explain which countries are "fascist", and why the American people who seek jobs are meant to be guilt-tripped by this. Also, why do you act as if low pay and pollution weren't already problems that your economic prescriptions have ferociously exacerbated in the past 8 years anyway? Your sort truly don't seem to mind it at all.

Pollution (by way of slashed environmental regulations for business) and low wages means more money for your idols and masters, right?

You seem to package a lot of the same old tired ideas in such supercilious language and technocratic cant that any legitimate points you might have are lost in your pompous, lecturing style.

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No policy will leave the uneducated working class swimming in champagne! My prescription is to provide education in needed industries for displaced workers - retraining the workforce and offering legitimate opportunity to the downtrodden. Manufacturing is a false potion, an appeal to the memory of heady days that are never to return. That is the best option offered, a lifeline so that the rungs of society can be ascended by those with the wherewithal. I have no disdain for the man that fixes my car, I do not slam my empty water glass upon the table of a restaurant like some tyrant. But do I expect my extensive hours on the job and massive educational investment to reap more rewards than a perusal of a Chilton's.

Labor is always dignified. Should it be compensated equivalently, as if an hour spent lubricating my differential was equivalent to an hour spent drafting wholly original financial instruments? Of course not. Despite your arguments to the contrary, what I do is not easily understood, what I know cannot easily be learned, and the fruits of my labor are valuable. Pushing papers, indeed. You know nothing, but I would not expect you to - it's more convenient to be ignorant. You have a taste for convenience, as if solutions to intractable problems like the oppression of the working class were as simple as loosening the purse-strings of cartoonishly evil adversaries.

I understand what I suggest does not sound wonderful. Would that it did! But I will not lie to you like your fellows. I will not pretend that "making things" is the only possible pursuit in an economy that brings sustained success, good wages, and an impervious economy. As badly as we suffer, China's government is suppressing rebellion and their stock market makes the Dow look like a beacon of performance. How much pleasure their laid-off impovershed must feel! How much bloody dignity in the breadlines! Our workforce is modern, educated, and capable of so much more than the simple construction of consumer products - we can plan, manage, strategize in ways that are truly unique. A 12-month recession does not invalidate the world's largest economy.

As for Unions, what good they've done us! Michigan thanks you for your prudent approach to labor rights, for the sustainable industry created by the cooperation of workers to bleed their employer dead and surrender our premiere "making stuff" industry to more agile competitors. Wonderfully done - I look forward to collectively bargaining for the scraps left to us by the Asians.

Your argument is lazy and rife with contradiction. This man is like Bush, you say, the free-market maven whose rapid escalation of government spending rivaled the Great Society, the most wrongheaded Keynesian caricature in human history. Yes, because we can characterize the Bush years as a failed experiment in market economics! You've certainly won on those terms, the extent to which they resemble reality be damned. Pay no mind to facts that inconvenience you, the facts that the supposed deregulation and "small-government" philosophy of George W. Bush are and were a lie.

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Always looking on the bright side.

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Apparently, on a gossip blog, you take the pulse of economic consensus rectally.

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the mind fairly reels.

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