throwaway37585

Venezuela has a legitimate elected president

You mean an illegitimate president: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_presidential_electi....

Brazil ousted a honest one

You mean a corrupt one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Dilma_Rousseff#....

through a coup d'etat

Through impeachment by a supermajority of the lower house and the upper house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Dilma_Rousseff#....

what Maduro and Venezuela will never do

Yeah, he's too busy expropriating what's left of Venezuela's wealth for himself.

as their "political" prisoners were responsible for more than a hundred of deaths

Where the fuck are you getting this from? Stop pulling lies out of your ass.

Antimatter has opposite charge, not opposite mass. Antimatter is not antigravity.

Which comment do you consider incendiary?

And two can play that game. Judging by your incendiary comment history on your account, why should I believe your question is in good faith?

I love it when people comment on my account name as if it were some sort of rebuttal. It exposes the lazy thinkers.

What entitles companies to hire cheap labor anyway?

What entitles you to decide what labor companies hire?

Why do you think U.S. government healthcare spending would decrease if it had to cover more people?

The US spends a disproportionate amount on healthcare because its system is privatized. Healthcare is cheaper relative to the degree of nationalization, as your own data shows. Switzerland and Germany are closed to the American model (although not as bad) and cost more. You specifically said “tax and spend,” not just spend, because you reduce costs with societal-level economies of scale. Of course you spend more in a privatized system - you have a bunch of vultures trying to profit off people at their weakest and most vulnerable... All your data points show is that privatizing what should be public goods makes them more costly, less efficient, and produce worse outcomes in aggregate.

Wrong. I specifically linked to data showing government healthcare spending, not private healthcare spending (https://imgur.com/a/BzaVX6w). Read again.

Education in the US suffers from a similar problem because of its patchwork and variable system of state and federal funding, much of which was specifically designed to disadvantage the poor and minorities.

I don't disagree with this. There are other important factors, of course.

There isn't "still" slack, the slack is growing as the laborforce participation rate is lower today than it was in 2013.

The labor force participation rate is currently about 62.8%. In 2013, it was at most about 63.8%, only 1 percent higher [1].

How can it be in a "booming" economy that fewer people want to work and real wages are also falling?

Real average hourly earnings for June 2013 were $10.31 [2]. Real average hourly earnings for June 2018 were $10.76 [3]. Real earnings increased over that period. So what are you referring to, exactly?

I haven't seen an economic explanation for this.

This reminds me of a how a creationist says “Well, I haven't seen an explanation for this" and proceeds to dismiss an entire field.

The lack of evidence that they are more than just theories, I want the data.

Lack of evidence about what? Be specific.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/realer_07162013.ht...

[3] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/realer_07122018.ht...

That’s the reality of privatized healthcare.

What makes you say this a problem with "privatized healthcare" rather than a systemic problem with how it works in the U.S.?

How is that an "indictment" of "the capitalist system"?

Interesting that you mention that. Relative to the size of its wealth, the U.S. spends a disproportionate amount on health care. Even as a high income country, the U.S. spends more per person on health than comparable countries. Total health expenditures per capita, U.S. dollars, PPP adjusted, 2016 [1]:

United States: $10,348

Switzerland: $7,919

Germany: $5,550

Netherlands: $5,385

Austria: $5,227

Belgium: $4,839

France: $4,600

United Kingdom: $4,192

See [2] for a breakdown by country of government/compulsory healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP: https://imgur.com/a/BzaVX6w. The U.S. comes out on top, by far. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the problems with U.S. healthcare won't be solved by pouring more money into it, but rather by addressing systemic issues with the way it works?

Regarding education:

The United States spends more than other developed nations on its students' education each year... Spending, of course, only tells part of the story and does not guarantee students' success. The United States routinely trails its rival countries in performances on international exams despite being among the heaviest spenders on education... The average first-year high school teacher in the United States earns about $38,000. OECD nations pay their comparable educators just more than $31,000... Among all educators, U.S. payrolls are competitive. The average high school teacher in the United States earns about $53,000, well above the average of $45,500 among all OECD nations. [3]

The United States spent $12,300 per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level, which was 29 percent higher than the average of $9,600 for OECD member countries reporting data... At the postsecondary level, total government and private expenditures on education institutions as a percentage of GDP by the United States (2.7 percent) were higher than the OECD average (1.6 percent) and were higher than those of all other OECD countries reporting data. [4]

Again, has it ever occurred to you that maybe the problems with U.S. education won't be solved by pouring more money into it, but rather by addressing systemic issues with the way it works?

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

[2] https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-glob...

[4] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

The same article the GGP linked to explains why wages haven’t grown as quickly:

Economists believe that the unemployment rate can dip even further because there's still slack in the job market.

Productivity and inflation are lower than in previous periods of growth, and economists believe that has kept a lid on wages. The erosion of workers' bargaining power has also played a role. Another explanation: Employers are turning to new workers — such as younger people and those just re-entering the job market — to fill positions vacated by better-paid veteran workers who are either retiring or taking new positions elsewhere. Economists are confident that wages will keep climbing as competition for workers grows. Dozens of companies have already announced pay hikes and more attractive benefits to lure workers. On Thursday, Costco said it would raise starting wages for US employees by $1, to a minimum of $14 an hour.

What do you find unsatisfactory about these explanations?

But the combination means that there's a problem, because in a free market you would expect the opposite: in times of low unemployment, companies would need to increase wages to attract employees. That this is not happening is a blow against...

It sounds like you’re setting up a strawman and attacking it. See above.

because the labor market doesn't behave like a free market.

No one believes the labor market is or behaves like a free market. Again, this is a strawman.

Not the parent, but how about all of Western Europe?

You're going to have to be more specific. What about "all of Western Europe"?

As much as economics wants to tout itself as a science

Is this going to be a game of definitions? What qualifies as a "science", in your view? Do you consider sociology to be a science? Psychology? Ecology? Geology? Anthropology? Archaeology? History? Linguistics?

tested in real countries over the past 75 years

Which 75-year-old policies are you referring to, exactly?

it just retreats into some dressed-up version of American Exceptionalism

What you could possibly mean by economics being a "dressed-up version of American Exceptionalism" is honestly a complete mystery to me.

to explain the failing of its own prescriptions.

Which prescriptions are you referring to?

Chavez and Maduro are not leftist.

Are you serious? Do you know anything about the beloved "Bolivarian Revolution" and its policies?

More than half of the country support the government

Please provide a credible source for this claim.

Brazil is a real dictatorship, Venezuela isn't

What's your evidence for this outrageous claim?

One of the most important lessons of economics is that “good intent” does not always mean “good results”. Do you have any reason to believe that higher taxes and spending will lead to better outcomes, or higher net societal welfare?

Consider how U.S. education spending per student has ballooned over the last few decades, while outcomes have stayed flat (and in some cases deteriorated).

taxes and regulation are substantially lower than periods of broader prosperity

Source?

first thing that came to mind was how anti-communism played out in vietnam, chicago boys of chile, and the contras in nicaragua

What does this have to do with the Chicago school or libertarianism?

you could also argue the underdevelopment of the third world by washington consensus (free market) policies

I have no idea where you got this from. The evidence indicates the complete opposite. Free markets and free trade are a boon to developing countries.

China's economic liberalization reforms (agricultural decollectivization, privatization of industry, elimination of price controls, protectionist policies, and regulations) lifted millions out of abject poverty. India's economic liberalization reforms (making the economy more market-oriented, expanding the role of private investment, reducing import tariffs, deregulation of markets, reduction of taxes, and greater foreign investment) similarly led to a vast reduction in poverty and extraordinary economic growth, particularly in sectors opened to competition.

the seemingly detrimental policies enacted after the collapse of keynesianism in the 70s

Which policies are you referring to, and why do you think they were detrimental?

Regarding the Great Depression, I suggest you read what Friedman had to say about it.

Lowest unemployment rate since 1969

an indicator that our current ideology... is broken

Read the very article you linked to:

The jobless rate ticked down to 3.8% in May, another sign of the strong economy and tight labor market. That tied the lowest unemployment rate since 1969. Since then, the only other time unemployment was this low was in April 2000. "It fell for all the right reasons. We had more people coming into the labor market. We saw employers digging deeper into the pool of unemployed," said Josh Wright, chief economist at the software firm iCIMS. The jobs report painted a picture of an economy with opportunities for almost everyone. Black unemployment fell to a record low, and the gap between black and white unemployment shrank to the narrowest ever measured. Job openings are at a record high, and businesses are hungry for workers. That has helped underrepresented Americans find jobs. The unemployment rate among African-Americans and Asian-Americans has been steadily declining. It has also dropped among low-education workers and even teenagers. Over the past year, the unemployment rate among 16- to 19-year-olds has fallen from 14.1% to 12.8%.

Not to mention you haven't established the connection to "low taxes, limited regulation" that you claim. Others could equally claim the problem is that taxes and regulation are too high. This is a classic case of "I'm going to cite bad statistics and blame X without explaining the causal connection with X or whether the alternative would be better."

How is this relevant to my question?

This is a classic case of "I'm going to cite bad statistics and blame X without explaining its causal relevance or why not-X would be better."

I meant counting in the broadest sense, which is where numbers themselves emerge from.

Are you asking how define quantity without quantity?

Also, I think it's fair to say there are quantities that no human has ever "experienced".

Just wanted to say there's nothing wrong or embarrassing about sharing our mistakes. Take heart in the likelihood that, by sharing this, you've probably saved a reader from a similar injury.

Why is this (or the demo I linked to earlier) not a satisfactory representation?

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-1ab704621d3c845630ab6f....

is the idea of "quantity" anything more than a human abstraction?

What, to you, would not qualify as a human abstraction?

How do you define quantity, and can you do it without the notion of counting and discrete objects?

Absolutely. See Tarski's axiomatization of the real numbers, for instance.

What's the rest mass of a photon? What's the electric charge of a neutrino? What's the spin of a Higgs boson?

If the universe is not truly quantized... mathematics is not related to physical reality

How does that follow? Mathematics is perfectly capable of modeling continuous quantities.

What makes you say the "chigago-libertarian ideology" is not credible, let alone "inflicted misery" on people?

1. Unfair according to whom? You're presenting your opinion as if it were fact.

2. To put it bluntly, the fact that you equate tax incentives with direct subsidies suggests you don't understand economics. https://mises.org/library/no-tax-breaks-are-not-subsidies

You don’t seem to know what the word “protectionism” means. Tax incentives are not protectionism.

an abuse of privelege

What privilege?