as someone who only has a vague understanding of the way money and economics work, can someone better educated help me understand basic questions I have that i cant get into my head.
is growth/wealth a zero-sum game? I.e. how does wealth creation happen exactly, and is it always at the expense of another group (i.e. is there a law, like the conservation of matter/energy for money)? consider a country/developed countries as a whole. is the source of their wealth ultimately how much they can produce and utilize of the natural resources under their control? if a given country experiences a rapid development, is it because they have, through technology, increased their efficiency in exploitation of natural resources (including human resources)?
what surprises me about modern countries is how little they seem to depend on exploitation of natural resources. they move numbers about. ultimately these days just modify computerized files in a regulated, coordinated way, and exchange money between each other. how do they grow in such a system?
These are probably very basic economics 101 questions. but i slept through my economics 101 10 years ago, and now I have to ask you.
and MONEY being the Standard of exchange for GOODS & SERVICES
Wealth of any Nation is it Capability to produce GOODS & SERVICES
The “Joker” in this card game is the Government, because they control the Money Supply, which mind you is not real wealth but simply a medium of exchange.
So here is a very enlightening article from the Wallstreet Journal that argues the case for Labour Unions and Wallstreet; what I like the most is the writer’s characterization of borrowers that collapsed the system a few years ago
He calls them “NINJA” meaning No Income No Job or Assets :D:
Perhaps you also caught CNBC’s Erin Burnett and Mark Haines interviewing AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka last Thursday morning in front of the New York Stock Exchange, prior to a labor union rally near Wall Street later in the day. Talk about shock and awe! Shock at the blatant hypocrisy. Awe at the depth and breadth of economic illiteracy. This was populist demagoguery at it’s finest, and one could write a book on the distortions, fallacies and misinformation in just this one seven minute interview. Let’s take a look at some highlights:
Haines: What do you want? What are you trying to prove or point out today?
Trumka: Well there’s three things that we want to say. These guys destroyed eleven million jobs. They wrecked the economy. They got bailout money. And they haven’t learned a lesson. So we want them to do three things. We want them to pay their fair share, to create the jobs that they destroyed. Two, we want them to stop fighting Wall Street reform, because they send a legion of lobbyists to D.C. to stop it from happening. Three, we want them to start lending to small and mid-size banks so they can create jobs.
Have we entered the Twilight Zone? A person takes on a NINJA loan (No Income, No Job or Assets), pushed by a lender that is ultimately implementing Congress’ push to increase home ownership. Their mortgage payment rises, they default on the loan, and it’s Wall Street’s fault? Aided and abetted by legislators, union contracts and guaranteed benefits accelerate the growth in state and local budgets, pushing many to near bankruptcy, and it’s Wall Street’s fault? The Federal Reserve and Treasury tell banks to boost their capital ratios, and everyone complains about bad risk management. Banks respond by tightening lending requirements, and Wall Street has destroyed eleven million jobs as a result? What the?
Trumka: We’re fighting to create jobs. There’s nobody out there right now except the labor movement that is fighting to create jobs and taking these guys on. They destroyed eleven million jobs. America needs those jobs back. The labor movement is out fighting for them.
Without a doubt, labor unions have saved jobs. They’ve saved them by ensuring that capital that might have better been re-directed away from the control of bad management and/or into more productive uses stayed where it was, preserving jobs in companies that should have shed them, or even preserving whole companies. But how about actually creating jobs, as in, truly new jobs? It seems like Mr. Trumka doesn’t understand that first and foremost, governments, unions or even small and mid-size banks,* do not create jobs. *Risk-taking entrepreneurs create jobs. And when the legislative outlook is as cloudy as it is right now, they do the prudent thing, which is to say, they preserve their capital by hunkering down.
Trumka: They destroyed $13 trillion worth of wealth for the rest of America.
I suppose that Mr. Trumka is making some generalized reference to the total reduction in stock market valuations, reflected in peoples’ 401K’s, pensions and other savings vehicles. Markets may have dropped, but is Mr. Trumka actually claiming that these Wall Street firms had the power to move the markets to that magnitude, all the while resisting the obvious opportunity to profit wildly as they controlled its every move? Evidence would seem to prove the contrary. But wait a second. Don’t the unions lead the class-warfare chant that says that most of the stock-market wealth in this country is held by the “rich”? So then it would be the “rich” that took most of the $13 trillion dollar hit. What are we complaining about then? They can afford it, right?
Burnett: How can they create those jobs? I mean, that’s my question. What would you say to them today, if you had Lloyd Blankfein standing here from Goldman Sachs? Mr. Blankfein I need you to do X, to create a job, what do you do?
Trumka: I’d tell him to do a couple X’s. One, pay your fair share. Give us a transaction tax of a quarter of a penny, we’ll get 150 billion to 300 billion dollars, and we’ll start creating jobs in America. Two, start lending to small and mid-size organizations and businesses out there so they can start creating jobs. And three, starting paying your fair share, pay the same level of taxes that they rest of us do, so that we have the revenue in this country to save teachers, to save firemen, save police officers and get this country back on track.
Ah… now we’re seeing the prize. Somebody get the drool buckets. Hundreds of billions of dollars of additional revenue to be brought into government control, so they (and their union buddies, presumably) can direct the money as they see fit. But of course!
And regarding paying the same level of taxes that the rest of us do, let’s see: First, nearly 50% of filers don’t pay income taxes, but my guess is that that’s not what Mr. Trumka would have the banks emulate. Second, all the income of the banks’ employees gets taxed like “the rest of us” — because it’s all the Same Street. But lastly, all of the corporate taxes that the banks (or any company) pays represent funds that could have been spent on something else, such as higher wages, benefits, capital investments, even hiring new employees (i.e., creating jobs).
Trumka: They [the banks] need to start lending. Everyone agrees that the lending market is still locked up, that these guys aren’t lending.
Here’s an idea Mr. Trumka: Organizations like yours take in billions each year in “deposits” from your “customers” (the forced dues of your union members, to be perfectly clear). Loan some of it out. If there are so many worthy businesses out there in dire need of loans, and the banks are doing such a terrible job at meeting that need, surely you must be implying that you know of a better way. So do it yourself. Between your union, and Andy Sterns’, and ***** Weingarten’s, and Ron Gettlefinger’s and the rest of them, you could probably scrounge up capital on par with many of the supposedly non-lending Wall Street banks, so it seems like a huge opportunity has been laid at your feet. President Obama would probably go for it. Stealing the Wall Street bank’s customers would be the sweetest revenge, would it not?
Now that you already have mentioned, natural resources include human capital. It is this capital that developed economies are exploiting efficiently.
A simple comparison of Chief Executive and check-out clerk at Walmart should make things clearer. In terms of ‘labour’, the check-out clerk is probably putting in much more time, physical energy and effort into his/her job but the CEO is earning much much more than him/her. The difference is skill, knowledge and luck.
If you exploit resources in a ‘regulated and coordinated’ way, you are bound to use them more efficiently than others and hence produce more ‘economic surplus’ (see wikipedia) which you can sell to other economies to grow.
It is not a zero-sum game, but only if you try to measure ‘comfort’ and ‘development’. If measured in monetary terms, you do grow. When you ‘develop’, you produce more given the same input and can therefore use the ‘extra’ production for ‘facilities’ and ‘comforts’ of modern life or sell it to others.
When I look at the list of 100 most influential people in the history of world by Micheal Hart, I find that most of them are from 16th century to 19th century, are academics, scientists, poets, philosophers, artists and politicians from the geographical area we know as Europe. This is the age where European nations developed rapidly through tremendous improvements in technology and knowledge (human capital).
What is more interesting for me is that other parts of the world might have had better writers, philosophers, scientists, artists and so forth but the difference is that Europeans READ and APPLIED works of their great men in their daily lives.
Perhaps, it is the emphasis on reading and pondering which develops human capital instead of mindless computer coding by our techies used as cogs in the machinery of western corporations now.
