"Several economists I know seem to have assimilated a norm that the post-real macroeconomists actively promote – that it is an extremely serious violation of some honor code for anyone to criticize openly a revered authority figure – and that neither facts that are false, nor predictions that are wrong, nor models that make no sense matter enough to worry about."
Paul Romer, The Trouble With Macroeconomics
If Bloomberg television quoted his views correctly today, then a well known academic economist they cite explains that we have full employment, even though the labor participation is so low, because the video games available to consumers have gotten so good that people would prefer to stay at home and play them rather than work.
And so they don't work, and therefore we can ignore them and the economic engineers of the Fed can claim full employment with a straight face.
If the games were not so good, then people would get bored staying at home and would go to work. It is just a rational actor's choice.
Since when is work, for the majority of people at least, an optional choice for one type of pleasure and entertainment and diversion compared to others? Let's see, shall I go to the movies, go fishing, or go to work today?
How many moons are there on this guy's planet? What a knucklehead application of economic models and ideological stereotypes that makes reality into a kindergarten caricature.
Of course people would rather do whatever they wanted if they had the choice, rather than work at something that someone else gives them to do, especially for the 90% whose jobs are tedious and repetitious.
Why is it that the stooges of the moneyed interests always run to monetary economic incentives models to examine the choices of their masters, but do not seem to be able to apply them to the people who do the day to day work?
If anyone dare propose something that would diminish the elephantine incomes of their patrons by a few percent, they have a holy conniption fit about these 'job creators' being discouraged about building businesses. Why, if I get a penny less than $120 million this year for spending so much of my valuable time creating and promoting financial frauds, I don't think I will even bother to get out of bed.
Perhaps Mr. Economist should consider the time honored, common sense proposition that people are reluctant to take menial shit jobs for poverty wages, unless they are absolutely coerced into it. So rather than enhance the incentives, let's increase the coercion, for
them.
Perhaps Mr. Economist might consider the revolutionary notion, a corollary to their own economic incentives models, that more people would be working if there were
more jobs that paid
living wages?
How much anecdotal information about people staying in long lines over night for decent jobs can they ignore in their stereotypical models?
When people say, I cannot attract good talent for jobs, do they ever consider raising the pay to attract a better caliber of candidate? Oh no, the free market only works from the top down.
What a world we have, that has such creatures in it. In fairness, the rubbish emanating from the left of the economic auditorium is often equally nonsensical. And that is because economics is too often a science that is flexible enough to serve whomever pays for it in a culture that considers greed to be the highest good, and for the market to be god.
Have a pleasant evening.
