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28 Feb 2018

Students often ask me why, even if I question the reality and applicability of the rationality assumption, I think it is useful. Recall earlier in the term when I showed you the simple calculation about buying cars and the impact on the planet. If people bought the cars that were cheapest for them, then they would end up doing more good for the planet than if they short-circuited the price system and tried to purchase cars with the direct intention of doing good for the planet.

Here is another example of why I think there is great value in rationality.

Imagine a world where voters are more self-interested than they are today. Also imagine that in this world, voters are more rational and forward-looking than they are today. Explain why in that world, we would expect true democratic societies to end up spending a larger share of their government budgets on real, actual, genuine public goods. You might think of a real, actual, genuine public good as something like clean air and water, intellectual interventions that make us all better off, etc. Note, keep in mind that one of my core beliefs, and it is useful for answering this question, is that people like free.

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rayanimranLv2

26 Feb 2023

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Deanna HettingerLv2

1 Mar 2018

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Related questions

Demand curve:

The demand curve is the graph depicting the relationship between the price of a certain commodity and the amount of it that consumers are willing and able to purchase at any given price. It is a graphic representation of a market demand schedule. The demand curve for all consumers together follows from the demand curve of every individual consumer: the individual demands at each price are added together, assuming independent decision-making. Demand curves are used to estimate behaviors in a competitive market and are often combined with supply curves to estimates the equilibrium price. Demand curves are usually considered as theoretical structures that are expected to exist in the real world, but real-world measurements of actual demand curves are difficult and rare.

The demand curve will move downward from the left to the right, which expresses the law of demand.

If the price of corn rises, consumers will have an incentive to buy less corn and substitute other foods, so the total quantity of corn consumers’ demand will fall. The degree to which rising price translates into falling demand is called demand elasticity or price elasticity of demand. If a factor besides price or quantity changes, a new demand curve needs to be drawn. For example, say that the population of an area explodes, increasing the number of mouths to feed. In this scenario, more corn will be demanded even if the price remains the same, meaning that the curve itself shifts to the right.

According to my view, the demand curve for the Apple Video iPod will increase. According to the given paragraph iPod is thinner and lighter. The hardware and software ecosystem offers good content options and also portable. These are the main qualities expected by the customers. Henceforth customer wants to buy this product in the future also. If the price of the product increases in the future the demand for the product also increases because customers demand more products thinking of price increase in the future. At the same time if the price decreases in this case also customers will buy the product because they think that the good product is coming at a reasonable price. The demand curve for Apple Video iPod in the future may be like follows.

What is your opinion on a competitor product which has similar features to that of an i-pad or say it is better than i-pad and is offered at a comparatively cheaper price, how this will affect the i-pad demand curve and why?

bronzemule740

WRITE a one-sentence summary of each paragraph!

The Undeserving Rich

By Paul Krugman
Published in the New York Times, Jan. 19, 2014

The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s, real wages for the bottom half of the workforce have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more). While we can and should have a serious debate about what to do about this situation, the simple fact American capitalism as currently constituted is undermining the foundations of middle-class society shouldn't be up for argument.

But it is, of course. Partly this reflects Upton Sinclair's famous dictum: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. But it also, I think, reflects distaste for the implications of the numbers, which seem almost like an open invitation to class warfare or, if you prefer, a demonstration that class warfare is already underway, with the plutocrats on offense.

The result has been a determined campaign of statistical obfuscation. At its cruder end, this campaign comes close to outright falsification; at its more sophisticated end, it involves using fancy footwork to propagate what I think of as the myth of the deserving rich.

For an example of de facto falsification, one need look no further than a
recent column by Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, which first accused President Obama (wrongly) of making a factual error, then proceeded to assert that rising inequality was no big deal because everyone has been making big gains. Why, incomes for the bottom fifth of the U.S. population have risen 186 percent since 1979!

If this sounds wrong to you, it should: that's a nominal number, not corrected for inflation. You can find the inflation-corrected number in the same Census Bureau table; it shows incomes for the bottom fifth actually falling. Oh, and for the record, at the time of writing this elementary error had not been corrected on The Journal's website.

O.K., that's what crude obfuscation looks like. What about the fancier version?

I've noted before that conservatives seem fixated on the notion that poverty is basically the result of character problems among the poor. This may once have had a grain of truth to it, but for the past three decades and more the main obstacle facing the poor has been the lack of jobs paying decent wages. But the myth of the undeserving poor persists, and so does a counterpart myth, that of the deserving rich.

The story goes like this: America's affluent are affluent because they made the right lifestyle choices. They got themselves good educations, they got and stayed married, and so on. Basically, affluence is a reward for adhering to the Victorian virtues.

What's wrong with this story? Even on its own terms, it postulates opportunities that don't exist. For example, how are children of the poor, or even the working class, supposed to get a good education in an era of declining support for and sharply rising tuition at public universities? Even social indicators like family stability are, to an important extent, economic phenomena: nothing takes a toll on family values like lack of employment opportunities.

But the main thing about this myth is that it misidentifies the winners from growing inequality. White-collar professionals, even if married to each other, are only doing O.K. The big winners are a much smaller group. The Occupy movement popularized the concept of the 1 percent, which is a good shorthand for the rising elite, but if anything includes too many people: most of the gains of the top 1 percent have in fact gone to an even tinier elite, the top 0.1 percent.

And who are these lucky few? Mainly they're executives of some kind, especially, although not only, in finance. You can argue about whether these people deserve to be paid so well, but one thing is clear: They didn't get where they are simply by being prudent, clean, and sober.

So how can the myth of the deserving rich be sustained? Mainly through a strategy of distortion by dilution. You rarely see apologists for inequality willing to talk about the 1 percent, let alone the really big winners. Instead, they talk about the top 20 percent, or at best the top 5 percent. These may sound like innocent choices, but they're not, because they involve lumping in married lawyers with the wolves of Wall Street. The DiCaprio movie of that name, by the way, is wildly popular with finance types, who cheer on the title character another clue to the realities of our new Gilded Age.

Again, I know that these realities make some people, not all of them hired guns for the plutocracy, uncomfortable, and they'd prefer to paint a different picture. But even if the facts have a well-known populist bias, they're still the facts and they must be faced.

cerisechimpanzee766

You are working at an investment firm that has many investments in Lithuania. You have been asked to do a simple simulation showing the potential effects of Lithuania building a high-speed rail network, and what will happen if there is worldwide pressure on interest rates. All amounts are in millions of Litas. (The Lita is the Lithuanian currency. For this example use the exchange rate you compute, not the actual exchange rate). Government spending is projected to rise by 50 percent due to construction of the high-speed rail network

This is the status quo scenario

Total Output is equal to 5,000

Government spending is equal to 1,000

Tax revenue is equal to 1,000

Consumption is equal to 250+0.75*(Y-T);

The level of investment is 1,000-50r;

Net Exports are 500-500?,

the world real interest rate is five percent Assume that there are three political parties in Lithuania and each think that building the high speed rail network will have different effects on the economy. They have hired you as a consultant (moonlighting from your investment firm) to do an analysis showing what happens if their beliefs end up being true

a. THE LIBERAL PARTY believes that increasing government spending to build the high speed rail network will increase both G and GDP. That is G, will increase to 1,500 and GDP will increase by 500 too. Compare what happens to the economy (relative to the status quo) if the Liberal party is correct. How do private savings, public savings, national savings, investment, net exports, and the exchange rate change from the status quo?

b. THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY believes that building a high speed rail network will put people to work (thus increasing G), but that it will ultimately be useless (there will be no overall wealth created), so GDP will be unchanged. The conservatives are also concerned that the government taking on new debt will be a bad sign to Lithuaniaï¿½s creditors, and that borrowing the money for the high-speed rail system will cause the interest rate to rise 20 percent. Under this scenario, how do private savings, public savings, national savings, investment, net exports, and the exchange rate change from the status quo?

c. THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY believes that taking tax money and using it to build a high-speed rail network does nothing more than take money from one group of people (taxpayers) and give it to another group of people (the construction industry) and that there is no productive economic impact. How do private savings, public savings, national savings, Net exports, and the exchange rate change from the status quo?

d. Please compare situations a, b, and c. Who do you think is correct, and why?

e. The Libertarians use a microeconomics explanation about taxation to argue that the economy will be helped most by simply reducing taxes, even if people only save the money that they donï¿½t spend on taxes (C is not affected). They say that this phenomenon is assumed away by most macro-economists. What are they referring to?