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May 3 - June 13, 2022
“They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”
MEANINGFUL JOKE
unhappy workers do not make for a productive workplace.
The fact is that unless there is a disaster pushing them out, most poor people prefer to stay home.
If I cross the road to avoid passing by a beggar, I won’t have to reveal to myself that I lack generosity. A good student may fail to study for an exam in order to have a ready-made excuse that will preserve his perception of being intelligent, should he not do well. A would-be migrant who stays home can always maintain the fiction he would have succeeded had he gone.68
since trade allows each country to specialize in what it does best, total income ought to go up everywhere when there is trade, and as a result the gains to winners from trade must exceed the losses to losers.
gross national product (GNP), the total value of goods people in each country can consume.
Where there is much more disagreement, and therefore more scope for learning, is about the best way to run an economy once a nation gives up extreme government control.
correlation is not causation.
Sticky lending means existing firms that should have been put out of their misery continue to hang on.
The value of a brand name is that it wards off competition. That the buyers are so much richer than the producers makes it very important for the seller or the intermediary to focus on quality rather than price.
Blighted towns are meant to shrink while others take their place. It is the way of history.
We don’t like changing our minds because we don’t like to admit we were wrong to begin with.
we look for evidence that we are right; we overweight every piece of news, however thin, that supports our original position, ignoring the rest.
Psychologists these days encourage parents to tell their children not that they should be nice, but that they are nice, and all they have to do is to behave in conformity with their natural kindness. That applies to all of us.
One obvious downside of sticking to our own is we don’t get exposed to other points of view.
The winner does not need to deliver economic or social benefits even to his own supporters as long as the supporters worry enough about the possibility of takeover by the other side; knowing that, he or she will do their best to stoke those fears. In the worst case, the winner can then use the power gained in this way to take control of the media to shut down any alternative voice, so there is no more competition to worry about.
contact reduces prejudice,
contact may not be enough to produce tolerance; it may be necessary to have shared goals.
It would take forty years for GDP per head to double with a growth rate of 1.76 percent, but only twenty-eight years at 2.5 percent.
Capital-scarce economies grow faster because new investment is highly productive. Rich economies, which are, in general, capital abundant, tend to grow more slowly because new investment is not as productive.
One implication of this is that any large imbalance between labor and capital should get corrected. Economies overabundant in labor grow faster, and since incomes grow faster, savings do as well. So these economies accumulate capital faster and become more capital abundant. By the reverse argument, economies with too much capital relative to labor accumulate capital more slowly.
accumulation tends to go down as well. Second, that as capitalists as a class accumulate more and more capital, the productivity of capital becomes lower because there are not enough workers to work with it. In economics this is known as diminishing returns.
In essence, cities grow horizontally, by outgrowing their formal boundaries, rather than vertically through taller and better-quality buildings.
the study shows that tax cuts benefitting the top 10 percent produce no significant growth in employment and income, whereas tax cuts for the bottom 90 percent do.56
“there is no compelling evidence to date of real economic responses to tax rates at the top of the income distribution.”57
Tax cuts for the wealthy do not produce economic growth.
there are no general principles, and no two growth episodes seem alike.
In a given economy, productive and nonproductive firms coexist, and resources do not always flow to their best use.
Part of the reason poor countries are poor is they are less good at allocating resources.
The general conclusion is that the damage from climate change will be much more serious in poor countries.
Sectors that become more profitable may invest in new labor-saving technologies instead of hiring more workers. The new wealth may be used to purchase goods made in another country. We
the evolution of inequality is not the by-product of technological changes we do not control: it is the result of policy decisions.
the urge to show off is less strong when people feel good about themselves.
