notch898a

>Also, the quality could go down, but may more people could be educated, resulting in a large net gain.

That's an aggregate gain, why are you comparing this to per capita gains.

>Even if the quality of education is reduced, it's not nearly zero. Partly because of education (and health, freedom, political stability, etc.) we are far more productive than illiterate neolithic peasants farmers.

Worker earns more real value than neolithic farmer, but I don't think anyone was saying they weren't.

>Education isn't the only source of skills, of course. There is training, and also people are far better informed now, for example, due the the Internet (or disinformed).

There was also training in the 1960s and 1970s. The median worker likely has more optionality to become an above median worker now, although whether the median worker themselves has better training today than in the past decades is debatable.

>Lots of people saying something doesn't at all make it true; in fact, it should make you skeptical that they are following a mis/disinformation herd and don't know what they are saying.

This is true, but if everyone is saying US high schools produce dogshit, the world is not going to be inclined to pay a reputational premium to US workers graduating from high school. Perception is part of value, and in markets indeed the buyers believing something has value creates real positive demand. This can be seen elsewhere i.e. felons get depressed wages, even if their conviction was bogus or not something that effects their work. The very fact our education is seen as going downhill creates lower value/quality for our workers -- so as you can see what I said was highly relevant.

Being a gold bug is irrational because gold is backed by "it's pretty" but paper is backed by men with guns.

People often forget.... so is gold. And it's much harder to print. Plenty of the people with guns want gold. In fact in the lawless parts of Brazil/Guyana/Bolivia even unschooled forest dwellers pay their "tax", trade, create debts, hire security, and buy food with it all with minimal friction in handling it. Plenty of people hate on gold, but it is the tongue that everyone understands.

I'd argue the educational gains in the past 30 years have been negative.

The markets appear to indicate the worker value hasn't improved much lately, but capital has.

>Educating and training people, giving them general and specific skills, makes them much more productive.

And yet if you talk to almost any American, they will explain that the educational system has gone downhill. If the product produced through education is of lower quality, I would not expect the wage demanded to be higher.

Productivity increases may be mostly due more to improvements in capital vs improvements in labor, though. If I make my peasants plow the field by hand, and then buy a horse, I'm not going to pay the peasants more for that. Rather I'm going to tell them they should be glad they are able to use the horse, as their muscles are less strained. I may even pay them less as it's less intensive.

Yes the place I stayed was a crammed together house of people that can only be described as a slightly upgrade over a crack house on the South side. It was in the hood with people selling loose squares on the corner. My presence was only tolerated in the area because I had "business" in the area as a paying tenant to a known member of the neighborhood.

There's no way in hell this was some place that pleasant white upper class families were staying on vacation or something. The people that rented it were happy to have market penetration to people who weren't in the neighborhood to cause problems, and most of the "tenants" were working class people who had one foot in the hood and one foot working their way up in legitimate jobs closer to the loop.

AirBnB IS the new halfway house.

Think of it as property tax except the taxes pass directly to the barons at the top rather than to a politician and then the barons at the top.

The problem I ran into when I lived in Chicago was there were quite a few renter protections built into the city statutes. So landlords were quite weary of renting to someone like me with bad credit and rental history, as eviction could be burdensome. AirBnB allowed long term residents like me to actually get a place to stay by side-stepping renter protections and allowing a landlord to take a chance on a bad apple. Without AirBnB I would have been homeless.

We could just create "mortgage perpetuals" where you perpetually pay an interest on the land value without ever paying the principle on the land itself. For the improved structures above the mortgage period could be the expected life of the structure itself.

There's room to squeeze people a lot further than they're already squeezed.

When life happened before, you sold out. Now they'll just rent it out. Even the divorce lawyers will realize it's more profitable to have a two party rental income arrangement.

Sell it and do what with your dollars though? USD is in a free fall with massive inflation and equities are in turmoil. Furthermore the fed is signalling the end of raising rates so bonds aren't going to do you much better.

If I had property I'd be holding onto those sweet sweet negative real interest mortgages for dear life.

Isn't that an argument against Rothbard being successful? You can't meaningfully auction off a child in the US. Although I guess some may argue he's been successful to the extent that in some parts of the US you can electively terminate your unborn offspring, which is a firmly Rothbardian viewpoint.

No criticism of the ineffectiveness of government is complete until we've blamed Rothbard.

I never even disagreed to the conclusion about reduced alcohol related deaths, friend. Not only am I not skeptical of the study, I completely acknowledge the results. The study never tried to disprove substitutive effects of intoxicant use, which is what I am pointing out.

I don't think I've said anything that suggests I disbelieve what the study said about decreased alcohol related deaths. So sure, I believe that positive result.

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_effect . Yes nothing else is a perfect substitute for alcohol (some benzos are close though), but other substances are imperfect substitutes to become intoxicated. Substances substitution is a prevalent theme in drug abuse.

Increasing the cost of alcohol not only decreases the relative cost of cheaper substances, it also decreases the relative cost of more expensive substances.

It is counting alcohol related deaths, not deaths from substitution effect to other intoxicants.

Utopia: We raised the price so people starting using less alcohol!

Reality: We raised the price so people shifted to more black market drugs that didn't show up in this particular study!

It was a joke to illustrate a piece of what's happening.

2000 Euro sounds pretty good on US salary. I might work remote from Munich and snap that up. You could just convert it to a city of international remote workers or something, no need to have cashiers, bus drivers, and stuff like that in the city.

You have to know who is kidnapping you first though. I don't think most people would be able to figure it out in time when a bunch of camouflaged federal police jump out of an unmarked van. You've got maybe a second at best to make the decision, and if you've done nothing wrong the idea some unmarked federal police force you've never seen before is going to snatch you up is probably not even in the realm of your imagination, thus it must be criminal kidnappers.

The people doing that were CBP deployed in Portland under statutory authorization passed in the wake of 9/11. CBP are a federal police force who aren't required to follow the constitution within 100 miles of the border (so no need to follow constitution in portland) and any case would go to federal courts where 99% of cases end up in plea deal.

The way he phrased it made it sound like EITC drawers aren't poor, and that's why it doesn't count. If the people earning it are poor, it should count towards figures that are helping the poor. It's also worth noting some programs phase out below the EITC phaseouts, so EITC helps keep these people from falling off a cliff on the income producing side or being punished too harshly for earning more money, while simultaneously providing additional benefits that financially incentivize employment.

I don't agree with Brueig here, but if his claims EITC, Medicaid, and CTC don't help alleviate poverty that's a damn strong argument he's making to eliminate them.

This guy Matt Brueig says EITC and child tax credit skip the poor. I think this guy may be a trolling by trying to convince me these things don't help the poor thus they should be repealed.

He also says health care doesn't count as bills so it shouldn't count.

I honestly can't tell if this guy is just so fucking rich he has no clue what's going on, or he's trolling.

I would predict with tighter security, those with families would be more likely to get caught (and thus recorded in the statistics). If you've ever travelled with a child, you'll understand what I mean. Whether that means the proportion that are families is greater or less is an open question. The model being used for illegal crossing right now has changed a bit, as we have an agreement with Mexico to immediately send them back while allowing (most?) others to claim asylum and not be sent back until seen by a judge. Mexican are more likely to have single men working crossing than most other latin nations, for example.

The effect is the cartels are dumping the families and "other than mexican" to intentionally get caught (they want to get caught to claim asylum. Legit asylum seekers go through the process and fakers just disappear after release), overwhelming the resources of the CBP, and then while CBP is overwhelmed the Mexicans and others like migrant workers cross the desert. Such action would seriously skew the statistics.

It would be terrifying to find out the same reason that makes us the largest economy, also is the reason why we have so many in poverty.

All of these stories are valid and probably true for the people that tell them. But I can't help but also recall the stories I read of people talking about being poor in the 3rd world, and it being so much less stressful because everyone else was poor and it wasn't seen as some failing but rather everyone was dealing with together.

Being at the bottom of the social pyramid, even if not poor, has its own problems. Circumstances obviously change from person to person and place to place but some individuals seem to react better to being the middle a country of poor than being poor-rich in a much rich country.

The executives will have no choice but to take risks. Depositors, knowing their funds are covered no matter what, will chase banks with the highest yield. Eventually, the only way to compete higher is to take greater and greater risks. He who takes the most risks gets the biggest interest rate, he who does not loses his depositors to someone who does. In the end the conservative actors implode from losing their depositors and paying special assessments for 'insurance' risk of competitors, and aggressive actors pump up from those chasing high yields and then explode with their depositors getting bailed out.

What the fdic just did was insure 100% at a "systematically important" bank while charging a special assessment to all the banks, even if the same designation and thus extended insurance did not apply to them. It's the worst of both worlds.

> Nobody realized this until a few weeks ago, and without the government's scramble to respond everyone would have moved their deposits to the big banks, killing all the others.

Hopefully no one will take this as a political endorsement but this is the most exquisite exchange I've seen illustrating your point by Secretary Yellen and Senator Lankford.

https://youtu.be/CX6O--sk48A?t=5430

Based on her response I anticipate we will continue to see the effect you predicted. Yellen was pretty much speechless in the face of presentation that people will start moving their money to banks designated as ones worthy of "systemic risk" designation.

There's also often little punishment for a provider acting outside of consent or court order.

For half of my confinement, the health care providers had neither my consent nor a court order allowing care. Some of them chose to touch me against my will anyway. I presented a signed/sworn affidavit with the signatures of two doctors, another nurse, an HSI detective, and a federal judge showing they had acted before they had a court order or consent. The state board rejected the claim, stating medical care providers can provide care involuntarily even when the patient is alert/oriented/capable of informed denial of consent even when there is no order and in my case even when there was no evidence of altered mental state or mental disorder.

That is, the state board's claim is a health care provider can do what they damn well please under the banner of health care without consent, regardless of the (lack) of presence fo a court order or other legal basis otherwise. There's simply no punishment.

The interesting thing is, when they finally did get a warrant to act without consent, they refused to do anything further. By then, their legal department got involved and realized I was going to sue the ever living shit out of them when nothing was found. That is, in the end it was discovered for some health care providers they never gave a single shit about the rights of the patient; the only thing that talks is money.

Final note:

To others reading this who find themselves in a similar situation, learn from someone who learned the hard way. "I don't consent" or "patient rights" or "get a warrant" don't work, even though they should be said for posterity. Here's what does: "lawsuit", "HIPAA complaint", "I will file a grievance", "I will be informing the medical board" (yes many of these may not work, but the doctor may not want the hassle even when they do have an order authorizing care.) Your denial of care has to involve something that makes things extremely inconvenient for them, simple appeal to ethics and patient rights do not work. THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE.