School

I have often found Paul Krugman annoying. This is not because I think his political opinions or writing style are annoying. It is certainly not because I find Paul Krugman personally annoying (I will not say whether or not I have ever met him in person.) The reason I find him annoying is because of the respect for reliance on him from stupid liberals who hate whatever is not equality, especially those who opposed Obama because of his emphasis on bipartisanship. Eventually I got so sick of liberalism that I became interested in right-wing politics, until I got disgusted with the stupid conservative's hatred of whatever is not himself, his only thoughts about the world being how it is good or bad to the extent that it is like him, his only knowledge about the world being whatever is necessary to condemn whatever is different from him (either directly or by making up a few excuses).

Anyway, despite Paul Krugman's role in the stupidity of my own anxious, whiny political evolution, he has written an interesting article today. The point is that people exaggerate how important education is for a person's economic fate. Many jobs that would require higher education are easily replaced (or at least diminished) by globalization and technology, while many jobs that do not require education are not as easily replaced. Delivery boys (which is Fry's job in the old TV show Futurama) and janitors are all right. Many lawyers are not.

This has a general effect of "hollowing out" the American economy. There are going to be a lot of poor people. There are going to be some rich people. The middle class is not as important as it has been. Here is where Krugman's article becomes tricky.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

Notice that he writes "broadly shared prosperity" instead of the middle class. This, I believe, is correct. Technology and globalization are too strong to be fought as they destroy the middle class by hollowing it out. The fairest and most efficient solution is to make sure that people who are not at the top have enough money and access to resources that they can make the most out of their lives.

A strong welfare state is definitely part of this, but Obamacare may not be. Obamacare may expand access to health care and lower the amount of money the economy spendson health care in the long-term, it may put too many costs on a few people who would subsidize it through higher premiums that they cannot really afford in order to be fair. Also, I am not sure about bargaining power for labor unions. That seems like an attempt to restore the middle-class by raising wages for a few people according to the desires of the union at the expense of low prices and at the expense of the ability of a single worker to negotiate for herself with an employer under the rights and responsibilities they are directly assigned by the state, instead of having to go through the alternate sovereignty of a labor union. But maybe I'm wrong. It definitely makes sense for the bellatores, the warriors, to continue to be a middle class as they will need to be better off than the less successful people who may try to fight. Labor union rights may be important for this necessarily reduced middle cass. Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin pointed in this direction when he exempted the police and fire fighters (who can be turned into a kind of police) from his attempts to limit collective bargaining.

Ugh, for a long time I thought I was one of the big winners (while I secretly knew that I was not), but now I only hope that I can be a big winner. It was hard for me to do this, and for a long time it involved raging against technology and globalization (which I sort of do still), but now I am focused on living the best as I can as who I am, as someone whose middle-class possibilities may have been hollowed-out.

Economy and Ecology

Paul Krugman has an interesting essay in the New York Times. The subject is the rise in commodity prices caused by the increasing prosperity of China and other recently poor countries along with droughts caused by unusual weather. Krugman mostly argues with people on the right who have said that this is a symptom of inlation which they say is caused by the policies of the Federal Reserve. This is interesting and true. There is so much unnecessary paranoia about inflation. The Federal Reserve is making money available to try to stimulate economic growth, but because of the weak economy, the money has not been spent in ways that have caused any serious increase in inflation that would discourage those who, like Rush Limbaugh, want Obama to fail, and also those who are highly fearful of inflation because of their deep fear of change or deep hostility to people who can think in abstract terms instead of considering money only as something they can use consistently to sustain and define themselves. Krugman does not discuss long-term risks of inflation by the Federal Reserve making so much money available and negative consequences associated with that inflation, like weakening the predictability which is important for a funtional economy (even for people who are not deeply fearful of change) and redistributing wealth in arbitrary ways that do not at all reflect how far people go in contributing to a market of goods for consumers, but it would be unreasonable to expect him to because there is no reason to give arguments for the people he is arguing against.
What is most interesting, however, is something that is only at the edges of this essay. When Krugman writes that "over the past year, extreme weather — especially severe heat and drought in some important agricultural regions — played an important role in driving up food prices. And, yes, there’s every reason to believe that climate change is making such weather episodes more common" but he does not bother to connect this speculation to what he had written before in the same essay about "As more and more people in formerly poor nations are entering the global middle class, they’re beginning to drive cars and eat meat, placing growing pressure on world oil and food supplies." As more people drive cars and eat meat, the resulting pressure is not only economic in terms of greater demand for agricultural goods and fossil fuels, but also possibly environmental. As more and more people drive cars and eat meat, there are more cars and cows. As there are more cars and cows, there is more emission of greenhouse gases might contribute to climate change. As long as there is more emission of greenhouse gases from countries like China, and if there are already enough greenhouse gases being emitted to cause climate change, then the only changes in countries like Paul Krugman’s America that could have any effect on climate change are very deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. If the only changes in countries like America that could have any effect on climate change are deep reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, it may not be worthwhile for the government to impose cap-and-trade or carbon tax programs that only make things more expensive for Americans whose lifestyles or jobs require the emission of greenhouse gases while not actually addressing climate change in any serious way. While one could say, as I used to say, that it is possible that any step in the right direction may be good enough to address aspects of climate change in some way as opposed to eliminating it completely, that possibility may not be probable enough to justify cap-and-trade and similar policies and I only said that in the first place to argue with stupid blowhards. So there!