A discussion on America and Iran and the economics of the society you'd like inhabit

brianthebard wrote:

Are you proposing a what if situation or are you talking about Obama? Because he's not a muslim.

I know he's not.But he is black and I reckon a christian could not become head of state in Iran whereas a muslim at least in theory could in the U.S.

Also, lolz at the Bismarck welfare state! Socialism was illegal for several years during Bismarck's term(s) in office and when he finally did give in to demands by workers it definitely didn't come anywhere near creating a welfare state.

That wasn't my post

GuanYin

Hobbes wrote:

He is voted in. He and the administration he sets up speak for America.

Thats pretty narrow and unrealistic thinking. He was the country's commander in a time of war. He was voted in on that fact alone and even then only by an extremely narrow margin.

The US will never remove a president while there are large numbers of troops under enemy fire.

If any act says anything about the countries political stance it was the congressional and senate elections which have effectively removed Bush's power.

And having the freedom to choose between only two people to vote for is not freedom.

Agreed, however you can't compare the US's political governance with that of Ireland or, say, the UK.

Effectively you have 50 separate countries voting for one overall leader. I'd be interested to see what type of system the EU would adopt if we were actually governed from Brussels in the manner the US is governed from DC. I dount we'd have the multi-party system we're familiar with.

So what? We compare which is the best place by which one does the least wrongs? They are both as bad as each other.

Its a fairly stupid question topic for a thread, considering it's far too blanketed to be a fair question. The extremes of lifestyle in the US are as extreme as the EU. States vary as much in lifestyle as Dublin and Kosovo do. Iran is much less varied.

Like America it depends very much who you are and your rank in society.

Moreso where you live to be honest. It's still quite easy to come here with nothing and make a nice living, as thousands of Irish immigrants here will testify.

mike65

I can't belive the title of this thread.

Shall the comparitive merits of living in say Britain and North Korea follow?

Mike.

GuanYin

mike65 wrote:

I can't belive the title of this thread.

Shall the comparitive merits of living in say Britain and North Korea follow?

Mike.

I dunno, have you ever been to Cornwall?

brianthebard

Tristrame wrote:

I know he's not.But he is black and I reckon a christian could not become head of state in Iran whereas a muslim at least in theory could in the U.S.

Tbh I think you will find it is equally hard for minorities to get elected in any country. Afaik Obama is only the fifth African American senator. And he hasn't been elected to president yet( despite what some democrats would like to believe). In theory a muslim may have the possibility of being elected but that doesn't make it any truer. Christianity is a recognised religion in Iran at least, and while there have been attacks, deaths, etc over the years a lot of that can be attributed to a sense of paranoia that Iranian Christians may be west leaning. While there has probably been more harassment in Iran because its been happening longer, in many ways this is very similar to the treatment of muslims in the US post 9/11 and the incarceration of muslims, both US citizens and otherwise, at Guantanemo Bay without trial or any other niceities.

That wasn't my post

Sorry for the confusion I was too lazy to quote Ibid cause my post was under it.

brianthebard wrote:

Sorry for the confusion I was too lazy to quote Ibid cause my post was under it.

It wasn't my quote either

brianthebard

Ibid wrote:

It wasn't my quote either .

In that case I was just being lazy.

purple'n'gold

IMHO Sen. Barack Obama has two chances of being elected president, slim and nil, and Slim just left town.

brianthebard wrote:

Are you proposing a what if situation or are you talking about Obama? Because he's not a muslim.

Also, lolz at the Bismarck welfare state! Socialism was illegal for several years during Bismarck's term(s) in office and when he finally did give in to demands by workers it definitely didn't come anywhere near creating a welfare state.

I don't know much about german history, but this is from wikipedia

The 1880s were a period when Germany started on its long road towards the welfare state it is today. The Social Democrat, National Liberal and Center parties were all involved in the beginnings of social legislation, but it was Bismarck who established the first practical aspects of this program. The program of the Social Democrats included all of the programs that Bismarck eventually implemented, but also included programs designed to preempt the programs championed by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels. Bismark’s idea was to implement the minimum aspects of these programs that were acceptable to the German government without any of the overtly Socialistic aspects.

Bismarck opened debate on the subject on 1881-11-17 in the Imperial Message to the Reichstag. Applying the term applied Christianity to his program, he outlined a program that actually had nothing to do with Christianity directly, but was an attempt to dump the wind from the sails of the afore-mentioned parties.

Bismarck’s program centered squarely on insurance programs designed to increase productivity, and focus the political attentions of German workers on supporting the existing government, and ceasing their political clamoring for additional relief from current working conditions. The program included Health Insurance; Accident Insurance (Workman’s Compensation); Disability Insurance; and an Old-age Retirement Pension, none of which were then currently in existence to any great degree.

Based on Bismarck’s message, The Reichstag filed three bills designed to deal with the concept of Accident insurance, and one for Health Insurance. The subjects of Retirement pensions and Disability Insurance were placed on the back burner for the time being.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck#Bismarck.E2.80.99s_Social_Legislation

So Chomsky isn;t as foolish as you think he is

Tristrame wrote:

The only generalisation?

It was the whole point I was trying to make,

It's because you exaggerate the inequality and you don't care about perspective.Either way it doesn't make the inequality and disadvantage the huge problem you make it out to be. millions of people took to the polling booths and changed the ownership of congress or hadn't you noticed?

And another set of billionaires get to make the decisions for America. And they still refuse to fulfil their mandate and force a withdrawal from Iraq

routinely? yeah and right... :rolleyes:

Semantics

AbusesToilets

With regards Obama's ability to get elected,it's worth remembering that there's only been one non-protestant/christian elected in US history.
TBH i haven't seen anything from him that is particularly interesting,he's doing a fine job riding his looks and "uniqueness" but not much substance to him.

brianthebard

Akrasia wrote:

I don't know much about german history, but this is from wikipedia
So Chomsky isn't as foolish as you think he is

Not saying he's foolish, just that he is grossly over exaggerating the level of welfare put in place by Bismarck.

Ibid wrote:

Ah Noam, the bastion of the dis-affected. A crutch for the masses, you might say.

Alas he's fairly off-the-mark when he claims that Bismarck ran a Welfare State. I don't have any data for exactly what government spending was as a fraction of GDP, so I completely admit this is educated speculation, but it certainly wasn't anything like €120 a week if you're unemployed.

Chomsky speaks of Ricardian and Malthusian economics, neither of which lived before the publication of national accounts, the advent of JM Keynes and the intervention of government, the rise of the monetarists and the Thatcherite-regimes that subsequently followed. Comparing modern economics to Malthusian economics is akin to comparing the Irish legal system to the Brehon Laws.

Observe the trend in government expenditure, not only in real terms, but as a fraction of GDP. Keynes changed everything. The free market is an illusion.

Yes the free market is an illusion because if such a society/economy would ever exist, it would collapse within a very short time.
Most free market economists are merely satisfied with a close to zero regulatory environment while still having the state there to provide stability and security.
Your graphs show government spending, they don't show the true distribution of wealth. In most of the world, the proportion of national wealth being held in the hands of the richest 5% is on a constant upward trajectory, while the share of the wealth owned by the poorest is on a downward path.
This happens within countries, and globally.
http://hdr.undp.org/docs/statistics/understanding/resources/HDR_2003_2_2_global_income_inequality.pdf

Human Development Report 2002 noted that
while the definition of global income inequality is
fuzzy and its trends ambiguous, there is widespread
consensus on its grotesque levels. This has
not changed. Incomes are distributed more unequally
across the world’s people (with a Gini coefficient
of 0.66) than in the most unequal countries
(Brazil, for example, has a Gini coefficient of
0.61). (The Gini coefficient is a measure of income
inequality that ranges between 0, indicating perfect
equality, and 1, indicating complete inequality.)
The richest 5% of the world’s people receive
114 times the income of the poorest 5%. The richest
1% receive as much as the poorest 57%. And
the 25 million richest Americans have as much income
as almost 2 billion of the world’s poorest
people (Milanovic 2002, pp. 51–92).

Akrasia wrote:

It was the whole point I was trying to make,

you didn't make a point though,you generalised.

And another set of billionaires get to make the decisions for America. And they still refuse to fulfil their mandate and force a withdrawal from Iraq

Ah I see it's money you don't like ok.

Semantics

so you're another one of those posters who give one word irrelevant replies when faced with someone showing you what you said is generalisation in the extreme.
Grand so but don't expect me to take you too seriously.

In most of the world, the proportion of national wealth being held in the hands of the richest 5% is on a constant upward trajectory, while the share of the wealth owned by the poorest is on a downward path.

For the second time this week looking at a post like that I'm forced to put on my marian finnucane Gift grub voice and say ...Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand Hoooooooooooow are you going to solve that ?

Akrasia wrote:

Yes the free market is an illusion because if such a society/economy would ever exist, it would collapse within a very short time.
Most free market economists are merely satisfied with a close to zero regulatory environment while still having the state there to provide stability and security.
Your graphs show government spending, they don't show the true distribution of wealth. In most of the world, the proportion of national wealth being held in the hands of the richest 5% is on a constant upward trajectory, while the share of the wealth owned by the poorest is on a downward path.
This happens within countries, and globally]

The divergence between the rich world and the poor world is absolutely harrowing, I completely agree.

Unfortunately that has little do with the free market.

What has happened is that governmental bodies have adopted foolish policy after foolish policy implemented by inadequate and corrupt governments to a populace that do not work as hard as their European or North-American counterparts in a geo-physical climate that is not conducive to economic growth while first-world bodies practice protectionism (yes, protectionism, the antithesis of the free-marketeer) to the detriment of developing nations.

To suggest that free markets have caused the problems that LDCs face is ridiculous.

Tristrame wrote:

Ah I see it's money you don't like ok.

No, it's inequality. Are you deliberately misrepresenting my position?

so you're another one of those posters who give one word irrelevant replies when faced with someone showing you what you said is generalisation in the extreme.

No, when you rely on taking individual words from what i say and completely ignoring the context, it's semantics. I said police routinely use violence against protestors and you post 2 examples of peaceful protests to challenge my use of the word routine and ignore the real issue of significant state repression of protest and dissent in America.

For the second time this week looking at a post like that I'm forced to put on my marian finnucane Gift grub voice and say ...Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand Hoooooooooooow are you going to solve that ?

That's just a condescending way of saying "So what if capitalism is making poverty worse"
There are alternatives, I don't think you're stupid enough to believe this "end of history" nonsense

Ibid wrote:

The divergence between the rich world and the poor world is absolutely harrowing, I completely agree.

Unfortunately that has little do with the free market.

What has happened is that governmental bodies have adopted foolish policy after foolish policy implemented by inadequate and corrupt governments to a populace that do not work as hard as their European or North-American counterparts in a geo-physical climate that is not conducive to economic growth while first-world bodies practice protectionism (yes, protectionism, the antithesis of the free-marketeer) to the detriment of developing nations.

To suggest that free markets have caused the problems that LDCs face is ridiculous.

So how come income inequality has been increasing faster over than the last 20 years than before and fastest in the countries with the lowest regulations?

And are you seriously saying that Africans and south Americans are poor because they do not work as hard as Europeans? The teenage girls who make Nike Shoes probably work more hours in one week than many rich executives works in a month

Since NAFTA, inequality in Mexico and the United states has increased massively. Free trade agreements facilitate the race to the bottom as capital always flows to the cheapest least regulated places to do business. (until these economies collapse because of the inherent unsustainability of laissez faire capitalism.

Akrasia wrote:

No, it's inequality. Are you deliberately misrepresenting my position?

oh you mean perfection? Sorry thats never been available in this world,I hope you are not disappointed.Theres nothing wrong with aspiring it though.I recommend a sabatical for you say out in Africa working for concern or Bóthar.
Trust me it will be much more effective soulwise for you than platitudes on the internet when it comes to desires of equality.It will feel like you are doing something.
As for expecting enough other people to do the same,that will only happen when you come up with the process for the eradication of selfishness from the human psychic.

No, when you rely on taking individual words from what i say and completely ignoring the context, it's semantics. I said police routinely use violence against protestors and you post 2 examples of peaceful protests to challenge my use of the word routine and ignore the real issue of significant state repression of protest and dissent in America.

I show you widespread protests with not a tear gas canister in sight and you choose to ignore it because it doesn't suit you.
You said routine I call that generalising which is misinformation which in actual fact is ironic.

That's just a condescending way of saying "So what if capitalism is making poverty worse"
There are alternatives, I don't think you're stupid enough to believe this "end of history" nonsense

You'd want to be looking for an alternative to the human race while you are at it because the human race is selfish.
They look out for the "self".

Tristrame wrote:

oh you mean perfection? Sorry thats never been available in this world,I hope you are not disappointed.Theres nothing wrong with aspiring it though.I recommend a sabatical for you say out in Africa working for concern or Bóthar.
Trust me it will be much more effective soulwise for you than platitudes on the internet when it comes to desires of equality.It will feel like you are doing something.
As for expecting enough other people to do the same,that will only happen when you come up with the process for the eradication of selfishness from the human psychic.
I show you widespread protests with not a tear gas canister in sight and you choose to ignore it because it doesn't suit you.
You said routine I call that generalising which is misinformation which in actual fact is ironic.
You'd want to be looking for an alternative to the human race while you are at it because the human race is selfish.
They look out for the "self".

you accuse me of generalising and then go and say "the human race is selfish" as if that's the end of the discussion. That is ironic
man is selfish, but he is also social. Capitalism is an artificial economic and social system built entirely on competition and individualism. Of course that is going to have an effect on how people behave.

There are viable alternative ways of organising using principles of cooperation, mutual aid that are far healthier and more efficient ways of organising society. We don't even need to go all the way to true socialism to make a real positive difference. We just need to reign in corporate exploitation and take away most of the incredible amount of power that a tiny number of individuals have over the fate of the world and give that power back to the people through improved forms of democracy and governance.

Akrasia wrote:

you accuse me of generalising and then go and say "the human race is selfish" as if that's the end of the discussion. That is ironic
man is selfish, but he is also social. Capitalism is an artificial economic and social system built entirely on competition and individualism. Of course that is going to have an effect on how people behave.

Capitalism didn't invent selfishness.
It was the other way round.

There are viable alternative ways of organising using principles of cooperation, mutual aid that are far healthier and more efficient ways of organising society. We don't even need to go all the way to true socialism to make a real positive difference. We just need to reign in corporate exploitation and take away most of the incredible amount of power that a tiny number of individuals have over the fate of the world and give that power back to the people through improved forms of democracy and governance.

\o/ \o/ \o/

akrasia for world leader.

Oh wait you have to convince the selfish people democratically of course

Akrasia wrote:

So how come income inequality has been increasing faster over than the last 20 years than before and fastest in the countries with the lowest regulations?

Well you said it yourself. Africa has stagnated. The OECD countries have grown. There're no foul forces here. To give you but one reason, the West has adopted and implemented the use of the internet and mobile phone technology to great success. This lowers communications barriers and generally makes everything more efficient. More efficient means less time doing stupid things like waiting around and actually doing something productive. Thus we grow. Africa is still doing the stupid things like waiting.

And are you seriously saying that Africans and south Americans are poor because they do not work as hard as Europeans?

Is it the reason? No. Is it a factor? Certainly.

The teenage girls who make Nike Shoes probably work more hours in one week than many rich executives works in a month

There're academic papers and empirical data showing that the actual labour hours (not just your emotional anecdote) Americans work damn long hours.

Since NAFTA, inequality in Mexico and the United states has increased massively. Free trade agreements facilitate the race to the bottom as capital always flows to the cheapest least regulated places to do business. (until these economies collapse because of the inherent unsustainability of laissez faire capitalism.

You see the problem with that is America is NOT a free-trading country. Quite the opposite. It probably has more barriers to trade than any other OECD country.

nesf

Ibid wrote:

Observe the trend in government expenditure, not only in real terms, but as a fraction of GDP.Keynes changed everything.

Keynes changed everything? It was a tad more complicated than that, the two world wars in that period, and the subsequent rebuilding and social change might also have something to do with it tbh.

Ibid wrote:

The free market is an illusion.

The market is an illusion, a crutch for poor macro-economists.

nesf wrote:

Keynes changed everything? It was a tad more complicated than that, the two world wars in that period, and the subsequent rebuilding and social change might also have something to do with it tbh.

Of course it did. My point was that Keynes changed everything in economics with particular reference to the role of the State. Laissez-faire was the style of the time before Keynes came a knocking. Laissez-faire is not practiced or preached anywhere since Keynes. I was using the quoted graph to emphasize this point. The fact that I chose America, the constantly-quoted source of all evil, is no coincidence.

The market is an illusion, a crutch for poor macro-economists.

The market is not an illusion. Have a look at adverts.ie or the price of land in Second Life; they follow basic market principles. The free market, this theoretical concept that economists [primarily micro-economists btw

] use as a launching-pad for extrapolation, doesn't exist within any political framework. To claim that there really exists such a thing as a "free-market economist" is not true. Even California has tax rates of 9.1%.

nesf

Ibid wrote:

Of course it did. My point was that Keynes changed everything in economics with particular reference to the role of the State. Laissez-faire was the style of the time before Keynes came a knocking. Laissez-faire is not practiced or preached anywhere since Keynes. I was using the quoted graph to emphasize this point. The fact that I chose America, the constantly-quoted source of all evil, is no coincidence.

I would agree that his theories, and more importantly their uptake by Governments, did have a huge effect on the world economy, but I'm not totally convinced whether it was the man made his environment or the environment made the man, if you know what I mean.

Ibid wrote:

The market is not an illusion. Have a look at adverts.ie or the price of land in Second Life; they follow basic market principles. The free market, this theoretical concept that economists [primarily micro-economists btw ] use as a launching-pad for extrapolation, doesn't exist within any political framework. To claim that there really exists such a thing as a "free-market economist" is not true. Even California has tax rates of 9.1%.

I was just having a bit of fun with you. Though whether the market (in general)is a physical thing or not is not exactly a black and white issue. I'd personally lean towards it's an aggregation of individual transaction but not a thing in and of itself.

The market is not a physical thing but it acts in a very, very organised way. And it almost always does. Of course it fails and fails terribly and people need to be looked after, but in markets where people enter of their own free will and thus don't need "minding" (say for stocks and shares) it can work incredibly well.

To illustrate this, let me show you how the currency markets are currently running.

This is a square matrix of (11x11) dimension which in human terms is pretty much too big to deal with. To those who haven't studied maths post-Leaving Cert, it would probably take you a whole day and about a hundred pages to do the necessary calculations on that before you could start dividing it, etc.

But it's coherence when done by the market (the millions of people who are trading in different currencies every day) is unreal. When we go to the bank to change currency, we have to pay them a little fee for their trouble. But when the market is trading there is no such fee. So when you trade €1 into a £s you just use the actual exchange rate.

Let me take an example of when you have €100. Turn that into GBPs, you get (€100 x 0.6802) = £68.02. Then you turn this into Canadian dollars, you get (£68.02 x 2.2624 ) = CN$153.89. Turning this into US$ you get (CN$153.89 x 0.8688) = US$133.70. Turning this back into Euro gets you (US$133.70 x 0.7479) = €99.99. So you end up with what you started with (the 1c difference comes about from us only using 4 decimal places).

That level of coherence is amazing. I chose the currencies randomly, you can try this experiment with as many currencies as you want and you'll get the same result. Millions of people trading billions of euro in exchanges the rates they reach are exactly as they should be.

But then it's not so amazing. If it wasn't such coherence, people could lose money. People's self-interest guides the market to stability like that. So yes, the market is just an aggregated result. Quite democratic really, isn't it?

nesf

Ibid wrote:

Let me take an example of when you have €100. Turn that into GBPs, you get (€100 x 0.6802) = £68.02. Then you turn this into Canadian dollars, you get (£68.02 x 2.2624 ) = CN$153.89. Turning this into US$ you get (CN$153.89 x 0.8688) = US$133.70. Turning this back into Euro gets you (US$133.70 x 0.7479) = €99.99. So you end up with what you started with (the 1c difference comes about from us only using 4 decimal places).

Eh, the lack of arbitrage isn't a "natural" aspect of the market, but an indication of how heavily traded the currency markets are.

I'd disagree with you that there's a difference.

It's a result of Perfect Competition.

Ibid,

I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make but I think you are bit wrong as you seem to be overestimating market stability.
The prices all equal out because otherwise arbitrage would exist, if this was the case people would 'flock' to the price and the subsequent trading would cause the prices to adjust and the arbitrage gap would be squeezed and eventually elminated (NB this takes place in a matter of seconds / minutes)
And these opportunites occur quite often, but are quickly traded out.

However the markets are not 'stable', and a quick look at financial economic history will show that time and time again the same errors are repeated which lead to crashes; again and again and again.

In regards to the currecncy 'democracy': George Soros

original_psycho wrote:

The prices all equal out because otherwise arbitrage would exist

Correction: the prices are all equal because people adapt them to suit. Although of course there are crashes and tumbles - I never suggested otherwise - the fine-tuning is best achieved through a market mechanism.

The free market, where the government doesn't come in and distort things. The free market, the source of all evil.*

*According to Akrasia, who seems to have disappeared.