guest post by eve abel
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read this first :
"there is probably very little we can do right now in terms of deciding who gets what in the year 2030.
That's because any decisions we make are subject to reversal through the political process
. In 2030, old people either will or will not have the political clout to claim a bigger share of the pie. If they have that clout, they'll use it, and if not, not. And they won't be bound by anything we decided to do back in 2012.
Therefore
the only thing we can do today to alleviate the future crisis is try to ensure that there will be more goods available in the future.
OK,
what determines the future availability of goods?
Three things:
the amount of work young people do in the future,
the amount of work old people do in the future,
and
the quality and quantity of the stuff (machines, factories, raw materials, etc.)
that we leave for them to work with.
There's not much we can do about dictating the work habits of people in 2020. They'll choose their own work habits, and they'll pass their own laws to try to influence each others' work habits.
the only thing we can do now to address the underlying crisis then
is to encourage saving,
because saving means investment,
and investment means that when 2030 comes around
we and our descendants will have more and better machines and factories to produce more and better food and aspirin and television sets."
brief version
more saving today means more and better machines and factories tomorrow
question
true or untrue ?
if you answer true
then
you just put yourself
on the road to trickle down gultch
when you figure out why that is the case
come back here and worship my graven image
-- my graven image btw is under construction now even as i tap this out --
hint
marginal propensity to save out of income
as a function of rising income
saving is a morbid cottage industry
it has no necessary place in a modern pure credit economy
we all should spend as we earn
letting the transfer system pre empt what fraction
now only prudence sets aside
and for God's sake
this is far worse then wrong
" beware! The time for all this is not yet..."
that's johnny keynes and when he wrote it
the nasty little hortation was already hopelessly wrong headed
okay take the rest in pikers:
".. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not."
good grief !!
" Avarice accuulation and usury must be our gods
for a little longer still. "
"For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."
and to boot
did this master of essay prose
ever write a more ham footed passage ?
i love ya john you old poof
but you were frightfully conservative
