Friday, August 19, 2011
Economics and my understanding
To get to the question let us review a few notions. Some of these ideas come from The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers by Robert L. Heilbroner. We work for money. Our money buys things. Hence by the transitive property we work for things. Most of these things are unnecessary but a portion of them are. The necessary portion sates our problems i.e. our problems of food, shelter and clothing. In the past, society operated to quell our needs either via tradition, one worked like one's father, or by force (slavery). This resulted in the malthusian trap. Capitalism, a new way to ensure our problems are met vs tradition and force, ensures we work by promising to give us things which we collectively work at. The definition is argued but 3 things often agreed upon are 1)Organization of labour especially division of labour. 2)capital investment for higher production 3)protection of private contracts and private property by the relationship between the state and market. A clear faith based system as one knows that if the farmers all quit tomorrow, the food supply would be depleted quickly yet almost nobody stores a year supply of food in their shelter. We have become so efficient that we can provide to those who have no hand in making any thing. The problem, according to Keynes I think, is that it is a feedback system. With everyone producing, prosperity starts. People buy profit products (overpriced in the sense making them costs less than selling them). With everyone producing, more overpriced products can be bought. If one is good, many times is better. Greed and competition hurl the profit products down. Some profit products even become cheap, it costs more to make than to sell,and this cannot last. Some people must be told to stop producing, this in turn slows their consumption. This appears to induce a negative feedback. People consuming less, which leads to more unemployed workers=> lessening things again. The masses hoard money hence things are not disposed of as quickly hence we get a glut of certain things. This, too, leads to worker unemployment which again lead to lesser things in the end. What stops this cancerous cycle? Keynes thought possibly nothing. He then recommended that it was up to govt's to get us out of this deleterious cycle. The govt's must spend, even if its burying bottles of money for a group of people to dig up. This will stop the unvirtuous cycle and start another prosperous one. Joseph Schumpeter said what got us out of these vicious cycles was creative destruction. No better recent example is the Apple iPhone vs the Blackberry. New innovative products that before the consumer didn't have a choice to purchase like air conditioners, TV's, microwave ovens, PC's, cellphones etc. All products most common people own that JD Rockefeller (an extremely wealthy man of his time) didn't. Friedman, an empirical fellow, liked observational historical data. It showed that crunching the money supply caused recessions.
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