yesss

had a productive and rewarding day today. really hit a groove with research and im locking onto some things that may make this whole thing pretty useful to the amorphous academia thing. so thats good. last night i watched 'there will be blood' again. its interesting watching that amongst the aura of the screw up in the gulf. made it even more chilling i think, and i couldnt, for better or for worse, stop picturing daniel as bp ceo tony heyward. his loss i suppose. but hey, i try to be fair with those people. sometimes (always) reality is reality though, and we cant change that. theres a thing called atonement that is pretty handy in times like these and from what i saw of heyward in front of congress today, he doesn't grasp that. its all of our losses.

on a hot day like this.

i love the rhythm. 2+2+2+3

astor

thought you guys might find this interesting. joe stiglitz is a very good man. i could bore you with his efficiency wage equation, which is very cool, but i wont. but actually i will. basically, businesses do not see the societal implications of unemployment. Firms would rather not lower wages of employees in times of recession (they do, to a point, but ultimately layoffs inevitably ensue). When this occurs in aggregate on the macro level, you get the tremendous surge in unemployment in recessions. Socially, this is incredibly detrimental. think of the costs of unemployment. unemployment has a spiraling effect both to families and to the economy. It can all be deferred with wage cuts. yes thats yucky, but it beats the alternative. you dont have to worry about government spending increases on unemployment benefits, etc etc. the list is endless. unemployment is not a good thing, but we can all tighten our belts very very tightly if it comes to it. we're humans, we're rational. you can live on 10,000 dollars or less a year if you need to, it isnt pretty, but you can. you can also retain most of your consumer behavior (the good kind) at that level too, so your impact on the economy pressures it towards steady state (which is not a bad thing) . and i hope i havent lost you all by this point. but basically, the argument is that firms can have the same wage payments with pay cuts and retain a higher level of productivity than they would with massive layoffs resulting in a decrease in productivity. society remains functional, nobody is destitute, and we're all happy. it a positive approach. and beyond that, the practical implication and connection (i argue) is that job protection is cheaper than job creation. now that might make you think of tariffs and the like, but i mean it in the workforce sense. that its pareto optimal (an efficiency situation) to keep everyone working. why the free market people call that socialism and beyond that a 'bad thing' ill never know. call me a bleeding heart but

What he says is true, environmental degradation is not encapsulated in GDP, in a sense, its the antithesis of GDP. As with GNP. blame that one on Bush I. wed be looking at the world totally different in the face of htis recession if we still used GNP politically. (for development economics, we still do use GNP in comparison with GDP, which is the best way to use it i think. especially when we aggregate industry sectors) ie, the flows of money out of developing countries, and impoverished areas on a local/regional/state level need to be visualized.

i apologize if none of this made any sense, this one was probably more for me.