The economy is made up of real people

[pmb]

It turns out that unemployment is not funemployment for most people. For every percent increase in unemployment, 47,000 people die [1]. This is very very bad. This means that the increase from the 2006 low of 4.6 percent[2] to the current rate of 8.1 percent [3] our economy has killed more than 150,000 people. And the most optimistic economists

Comments

Berkeley

[mlissner]

Hey! I'll thank you to leave Berkeley out of this.

Re: Berkeley

[auranja]

Woah. It's a small world on the internet. You know PMB? You and I were previously employed by the same county, although I was disgruntled, and you seemed not to be. I was the one who always invited you to see strange performance art.

[clipdude]

I totally agree. But I think we should also demand another provision: regulatory barriers to prevent any company from ever again becoming “too big to fail”. Allow me to quote at length Rep. John Campbell (R-California):AIG made some dumb decisions, and in a normal thing, they fail. They fail, the stockholders lose their money, everybody loses their job, nobody gets their bonuses. Same thing with Lehman and the rest of these. But because of this interconnectivity part, [. . .] because if AIG goes down, probably many other banks-not just in the United States, but worldwide, big ones, big people-go down as well, which starts to bring down some others, and that’s what this “too big” or “too interconnected to fail” [means].

And I think what we want to get to [. . .] is, well, we don’t want anything that’s too big to fail. Because then, by definition, we can’t let it fail, which means the people running that company will make decisions knowing they can’t fail, and if you know you can’t fail, you’ll make a lot of bad decisions.
No company

[boojum]

It's becoming increasingly common knowledge in industry that if you have someone who is absolutely indispensible, then you should fire them immediately. (Or, for the timid, send them on a series of vacations so the company can gain competence without fear of losing them entirely. Phone- and email-less vacations.)

A friend of mine pointed out that the difference between "too big to fail" and "too important for us to allow any monopoly-breaking competition" is pretty slim.

[auranja]

For every percent increase in unemployment, 47,000 people die [1]

We never think of it this way, do we?

[pmb]

I hadn't before, but I will now...

[bonboard]

I appreciate the point, and it's sobering.

But manufacturing steel kills people. Manufacturing leather, rubber, paper, mining coltan, distilling spirits, and burning coal kill people too.

Without data, I would wager that a 1% decrease in unemployment kills at least 20,000 people; so AT&T, IBM, Intel, and Google would face similar liabilities to AIG.

The deaths are maybe a little less depressing than suicides and homicides, but not that much less.

[pmb]

Most of our employment is service-sector based and not manufacturing based, so I doubt your back-of-the-envelope calculations. But as you said, we are arguing without data.

And deaths at work are far less depressing than partner-related homicide and suicide.

[punkrockgrrrl]

Funemployment is generally a sarcastic term. I might enjoy getting to finally prioritize various projects that'll lead to better jobs, but that doesn't mean I dig the poverty and the fact that I have only had half of the two surgeries I need for Evil Uterus.

That being said, I think we are already troughed out. I think we are now cramponning up, as opposed to continuing to shit and dig.

[pmb]

I hope you are right about the through, but I kind of doubt it.

[pmb]

Hrm. Except for how single-payer health care with mild copays actually seems to be the cheapest system going as a whole, I suppose you are right. But surely you must acknowledge that this is an instance where your libertarianism/ancapitude is advocating for what is actually a *less* efficient system for allocation of health care? All the evidence points that way... We seem to get less bang for our medical buck than any other nation in the world.

For what I pay for other peoples' medicare in taxes, I would also get single-payer health care for myself in every other OECD country except Turkey and Mexico, and Mexico was about to start it up until they collapsed into an almost-narco-state.

[snailprincess]

I actually don't think the evidence is so strong for single payer being the most efficient way to allocate health care. Also, even if it ends up being the most efficient system in the short term, I feel like there is a huge risk of drift off of efficiency once you start it. If you have no open market system to tell you how much things should cost you will likely drift off of efficiency over time, even if you started out efficiently. But you'll have no way to know.

Also, there's a risk of the social services you're talking about actually increasing structural unemployment. Europe with it's rigid labor markets tends to have an unemployment rate several percentage points higher than our own. By your calculation you might end up killing 100k extra people a year.

[pmb]

The evidence is universally in favor of single-payer health care. You can worry about drift and theory all you want, but we've been conducting a massive real-world experiment here with our system and Canada's system and the various European systems, and while we can argue about how *exactly* single payer should be implemented, it is impossible to argue that our system is better overall