Is Economic Theory a Tool of the Rich?
Ron Unz là một thương gia Mỹ tại Los Angeles California Mỹ. Là một đảng viên đảng hũu khuynh bảo thủ Cộng Hòa, nh7ng lại có những vận động chính trị ngược chiều với "Trung Ương Đảng"/ Năm 1994, Ron Unz tranh cử thống đốc California, nhưng thất bại. Hiện nay Ron Unz đang vận động cho việc tăng mứcf lương can bản cho công nhân đồng bộ với chính sách của đảng Dân Chủ cầm quyền.
Một trong những luận điểm tấn công của Ron Unz là lôi các lập luận bịp bợm vô bằng chứng của đám chuyên gia kinh tế sừng sỏ hiện hành về lương bổng ra để chất vấn là lật tẩy. Máh khóe dùng tiền trả theo giờ lao động để định năng xuất vẫn thường hay rêu rao rằng "hãy để thị trường quyết định lương bổng theo năng xuất".
Ông lấy ngay thí dụ điển hình rằng, theo đúng lý thuyết kinh tế, các giám đốc ngân hàng tài chính sở dĩ có mức lương 50 triệu mỹ kim là vì năng xuất họ cao, so với các công nhân có lương thấp vì công nhân "năng xuất" thấp. Cùng một lý thuyết này, Ông lại so sánh tiếp chẳng hạn như tên vua xứ hồi Brunei có lương hàng trăm tỉ mỹ kim cao hơn các giám đốc ngân hàng tài chíhh Mỹ rất xa. Như vậy có nghĩa rằng năng xuất của tên vua xứ Brunei này phải cao hơn các giám đốc ngân hàng tài chính Mỹ!!!
Và chúng ta cũng có thể nói mụ nữ hoàng Anh Elizabeth 83 tuổi đi vớ vẩn cắt băng khánh thành vẫy chào theo đ7n đặt hàng của chính phủ lòng vòng, có mức lương cao hơn cả tên vua xứ Hồi, như thế theo lý thuyết, hẳn bà già này năng xuất lao động chắc chắn cao vời vợi. Hoặc những tên trong hoàng gia Arap Seoud năng xuất phải cao hơn nữa vì lương của bọn này chẳng mấy ai bì kịp!!! Trong khi bao nhiêu kỹ sư, và cả nhà bác học Steven Hawking "năng xuất" cứ thấp lè tè!
Tại việt Nam hiện nay, năng xuất của những thằng đảng viên Cộng Sản, xét theo mức "thu nhập" hàng triệu mỹ kim của chúng, thì năng xuất của bọn đảng viên đầu trâu mặt ngựa này, dĩ nhiên là cao hơn cả các chuyên gia, kỹ sư trong các công ty hảng xưởng sản xuất các mặt hàng kỹ thuật cao cấp cho nhân loại đang sử dụng!!!
Ron Unz nhìn vào thực tế cả nền kinh tế Mỹ, phát triển năng xuất gia tăng trong mấy thập niên. Lương bổng các chuyên gia giám đốc tăng vùn vụt cả chức lần- 500%-1000%. Trong khi đó "lý thuyết lương bổng tăng theo năng xuất" không áp dụng cho giới công nhân thợ thuyền. Trong mấy thập niên lền, lương của họ coi như không thay đổi khi kể đến lạm phát.. Hiện nay tất cả đang tranh đấu chỉ để được 10-15 $/1 giờ 40 giở /tuần nghĩa là 600$/tuần chưa tính thuế!!!
Ông Ron Unz qui kết rất là mất lòng "rằng hầu hết các thuyết trong kinh tế học hiện đại chủ đích là làm rắc rối vấn đề gây rắm rối cho người dân hơn là giảng giải tạo hiểu biết cho họ (that much of modern economics is more intended to obfuscate and confuse rather than enlighten)
Theo kinh nghiệm "khoa bảng" kinh tế và chính trị của Tôi, nhận định này rất đúng nhất là trong lãnh vực tài chính ngân hàng, lý thuyết bịp bợm hoàn toàn. Tuy nhiên chưa đủ sát. Lý thuyết kinh tế chủ đích tạo ra những phức tạp không cần thiết, không chỉ để lừa đảo người dân mà còn "tạo tính đặc biệt độc quyền" (exclusiveness)s nngăn chặn dân chúng làm họ nản lòng không thể chất vấn những phi lý của cả hệ thống, và mặc nhiên chấp nhận là đúng và coi như lãnh vực "vượt tầm hiểu biết"
Thật sự, không chỉ trong lãnh vực kinh tế, chúng bày trò phỉnh gạt bằng thủ thuật phù thủy ngôn từ chuyên môn, mà ngay trong khoa chính trị xã hội, luật khoa cũng vậy. Chúng đẻ là vô số những cái gọi là "từ chuyên môn" để làm hàng ráo cản tạo dựng dộc quyền diễn giải và tử đó quần chúng phải lệ thuộc vào nhóm "thầy cãi" này!
Ngay trong tôn giáo, bọn giáo sĩ cũng tung hỏa mù "thần học", giáo sĩ với bằng "tiến sĩ thần học" một loại tiến sĩ chuyên bốc phét chuyện trời ơi hù dọa kẻ yếu lòng... bọn giáo sĩ luôn dùng hoa ngữ đại ngôn để độc quyền diễn giài :kinh thánh" "tạng điển" hầu củng cố địa vị ngồi trên nắm óc quần chúng của bọn này.
Lý thuyết kinh tế là công cụ cho bọn giầu có
Lý thuyết chính trị là công cụ cho bọn quyền chính
Lý thuyết thần học là công cụ cho bọn giáo quyền, giáo sĩ
====
Giài pháp là Chúng ta phải tự học, tự trau dồi kiến thức- giúp đỡ lẫn nhau, cùng với nhau hội thảo tranh luận lý giải- cùng nhau, vận động kéo nhau đi lên, để thoát khỏi khung sườn chính qui của bọn nghiện nhập quyền lực bạo ngược này.
Ron Unz created momentum for raising the minimum wage. One consequence of Unz leading this fight was to smoke out free market economists and show that their economics serves as a justification for enormous earnings for the rich who are in control and minimal earnings for everyone else.
Unz shows that one of the tricks used is to measure the productivity of labor by wages paid. Janitors and waitresses have low productivity because they are paid low wages. In contrast a member of the Oligarch Class, a hedge-fund manager pays himself $50 million from the hedge fund’s profits, qualifying himself as high productivity. Compared to the Sultan of Brunei, even this hedge-fund manager has low productivity.
Unz emphasizes that he has no professional qualifications as an economist. I would put it differently. Not blinded by economic doctrines that economists such as Michael Hudson, Herman Daly, and myself have shown to be false, Unz is capable of clear-headed thought and hits the nail on the head.
Unz stimulates thinking, something most economists no longer do.
PCR
***************
By Ron UnzWhen I first began investigating the minimum wage a couple of years ago, one of my early surprises was its sharp decline across the decades, having fallen by roughly one-third in real value since its 1968 peak.
This drop was greatly magnified when we considered the economic growth of American society given that our per capita GDP had roughly doubled during that same period, meaning that the minimum wage had declined by almost 70% relative to average income. A 70% drop in a crucial parameter of our wage structure is quite remarkable and clearly explains why lower wage workers could generally support their families a few decades ago, but today subsist in desperate poverty despite massive government social welfare subsidies. I emphasized some of these statistics in my December 2013 New York Times piece on the subject, pointing out that even raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour would merely make up a fraction of this long lost economic ground.
I was hardly the first person to note these remarkable facts, and earlier that same year Sen. Elizabeth Warren had pointed out that if the minimum wage had merely kept pace with the growth in average per capita income, it would have reached a rate close to $22 per hour. Given such figures, the increases to $9 or $10.10 advocated by the Democratic leadership in Congress stood revealed as the paltry and pusillanimous goals that they were.
The devastating power of this simple economic point is easily apparent to the business lobbyists tasked with blocking an increase, and they have regularly suggested that this argument is totally misleading because it ignores that the gains in national economic output have hardly been uniform across all sectors. The doubling in real per capita GDP has been driven almost entirely by increases at the high end, in sectors such as computer software, finance, and biotechnology, with little of it due to changes in the value of the work produced by janitors and waitresses. They argue that wages must follow productivity and if the output of nannies is roughly unchanged from forty years ago, it is absurd to expect their real hourly wages to double or triple. On the face of it, this rejoinder seems quite telling, and I have never seen an effective rebuttal provided in the numerous articles and columns by liberal wage advocates I have read on the subject.
However, let us step back a little and ask ourselves to consider the definition of “productivity,” especially for a service-sector worker of the sort we are considering. Now as both I myself and my sharpest libertarian critics have emphasized, I have absolutely no professional expertise in the “dismal science,” but productivity is obviously directly related to the rate at which economic value is generated and economic value is defined in terms of market prices. So if the hourly wage of a cleaning lady is $9 and the price charged for her service is $11 (including overhead), those figures represent her productivity.
But suppose the minimum wage were raised to $11, boosting her personal wages to $12 per hour and the all-in cost of her services to $14. Assuming her job remained in existence, which it probably would, the market price and productivity of her work would have grown by one-third, although her scrubbing and washing remained completely unchanged. And her new, higher wages would remain just as closely aligned with her new, higher personal productivity as had been the case earlier since productivity is defined based on wages and costs for the service involved rather than the other way round.
Moreover, minimum wage critics have endlessly touted the recent CBO report analyzing the impact of a wage hike. Yet according to that report, some 98% of impacted low-end workers would see dramatic rises in their wages while only about 2% might lose their jobs as a consequence. So according to this analysis, the proposed minimum wage hike would raise the economic productivity of 98% of America’s low-wage workforce—could any politician ask for a better talking-point?
Perhaps my self-declared economic ignorance is shining through at this point, and my expert critics in the economics professoriate can seize on these naïve suggestions to ridicule and humiliate me. I urge them to do so. But it seems to me that much of modern economics is more intended to obfuscate and confuse rather than enlighten, and the disastrous American economic policies of the last decade or so tend to strengthen my suspicion in this regard.
These days, a large fraction of the more vocal and visible economics experts draw much or most of their incomes from the financial subventions of our Oligarch class, and perhaps coincidentally, their claims and the personal interests of their benefactors seem rather closely aligned.
We have been discussing the productivity of low wage workers, but let us now consider the productivity at the other end of the economic spectrum, which has allegedly risen so rapidly over the last few decades and thereby supposedly justifies the massive financial rewards there accrued.
How do we measure the productivity of a hedge-fund manager, a service-sector worker who annually earns $50 million for his management skills and financial manipulations? Unless I’m missing something, the only metric available is the market price he charges for his services, namely that same figure of $50 million per year. So just as has been claimed by those pro-market pundits, his income closely corresponds to his productivity, but his is merely a restatement of the relevant definitions. If the painter of blotchy canvasses can sell them for tens of millions of dollars, his economic productivity is enormous even if his artistic skills are minimal.
This same argument would presumably apply on the international scale as well. If an African dictator or the current God-Emperor of North Korea’s Kim Dynasty allocates to himself 5% of the entire national income of his impoverished country, the annual dollars involved may reach into the billions, demonstrating that his economic productivity exceeds that of almost any brilliant American business tycoon, even though the likely benefits he provides to his suffering country are hugely negative. Perhaps the Sultan of Brunei may spend most of his days playing polo or watching TV, but his ongoing productivity—as manifested in the diligent 24-7 gushing of his oil wells—remains far greater than that of any investment banker or elite lawyer.
So when regular columnists in Forbes or other publications cite the fact that over the last generation or two, the economic productivity of our elites has skyrocketed while the productivity of most other Americans has stagnated, I suspect they are simply restating the leftist claim that the rich have gotten richer while no one else has. But it’s nice to hear those sentiments coming directly from such a contrary source.
Meanwhile, on a more practical matter, I’ve become much more hopeful that a California minimum wage hike along the lines of that contained in the initiative I failed to qualify for the November ballot may soon be achieved via different means.
A few weeks after my $12 minimum wage initiative began receiving considerable media attention, State Sen. Mark Leno of San Francisco introduced a bill in the California legislation topping my proposal by raising the minimum wage to $13 per hour.
I’d assumed the measure had little chance of passage. Last year the Legislature had been unwilling to consider a figure higher than $10 per hour and leading Democratic constituencies had actually criticized my initiative as unreasonable and unwarranted when it had surfaced.
However, it appears that the huge shift in the political and media momentum on the issue over the last few months, perhaps partly due to my own efforts, may have altered that ideological situation, especially in California. After recently meeting and talking with Sen. Leno and his staff, I now believe his legislation has a reasonably good chance of being enacted this year at least in some form, which is very heartening.
Obviously, I would have very much preferred that my own initiative be the vehicle for raising the California minimum wage and a successful initiative campaign might have been a powerful means of nationalizing the issue in November. But with the failure of my attempt to qualify the measure for the ballot, I am glad to endorse Sen. Leno’s effort and will do whatever I can to help it become law.
Although a state-level minimum wage of $13 would be by far the highest in America, the figure is not at all unreasonable. California’s cost of living is about 30% above the national average, so a $13 rate here is roughly the same as a $10 minimum wage at the federal level, a figure now backed by the Obama Administration and almost all the Democrats in Congress, and even endorsed by conservative Bill O’Reilly on his FoxNews show.
Democrats hold super-majorities in both houses of the California legislature and they only require a simple majority to raise the minimum wage. So all that is necessary for enactment is that they retain the support of the sizable block of moderate Democrats and Gov. Brown, and this would surely be facilitated by the number of prominent conservative Republicans who have now endorsed a large hike in the minimum wage. Just within California, influential moderate billionaires such as Eli Broad and Rick Caruso have now also endorsed a minimum wage hike in that range or even higher, as has Peter Thiel, a billionaire who has strongly rightwing views on economic matters.
If my recent initiative drive to substantially raise the California minimum wage helps spur legislation producing a roughly similar result, I’d count my project a considerable success regardless of the particular circumstances under which the result was achieved.
This drop was greatly magnified when we considered the economic growth of American society given that our per capita GDP had roughly doubled during that same period, meaning that the minimum wage had declined by almost 70% relative to average income. A 70% drop in a crucial parameter of our wage structure is quite remarkable and clearly explains why lower wage workers could generally support their families a few decades ago, but today subsist in desperate poverty despite massive government social welfare subsidies. I emphasized some of these statistics in my December 2013 New York Times piece on the subject, pointing out that even raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour would merely make up a fraction of this long lost economic ground.
I was hardly the first person to note these remarkable facts, and earlier that same year Sen. Elizabeth Warren had pointed out that if the minimum wage had merely kept pace with the growth in average per capita income, it would have reached a rate close to $22 per hour. Given such figures, the increases to $9 or $10.10 advocated by the Democratic leadership in Congress stood revealed as the paltry and pusillanimous goals that they were.
The devastating power of this simple economic point is easily apparent to the business lobbyists tasked with blocking an increase, and they have regularly suggested that this argument is totally misleading because it ignores that the gains in national economic output have hardly been uniform across all sectors. The doubling in real per capita GDP has been driven almost entirely by increases at the high end, in sectors such as computer software, finance, and biotechnology, with little of it due to changes in the value of the work produced by janitors and waitresses. They argue that wages must follow productivity and if the output of nannies is roughly unchanged from forty years ago, it is absurd to expect their real hourly wages to double or triple. On the face of it, this rejoinder seems quite telling, and I have never seen an effective rebuttal provided in the numerous articles and columns by liberal wage advocates I have read on the subject.
However, let us step back a little and ask ourselves to consider the definition of “productivity,” especially for a service-sector worker of the sort we are considering. Now as both I myself and my sharpest libertarian critics have emphasized, I have absolutely no professional expertise in the “dismal science,” but productivity is obviously directly related to the rate at which economic value is generated and economic value is defined in terms of market prices. So if the hourly wage of a cleaning lady is $9 and the price charged for her service is $11 (including overhead), those figures represent her productivity.
But suppose the minimum wage were raised to $11, boosting her personal wages to $12 per hour and the all-in cost of her services to $14. Assuming her job remained in existence, which it probably would, the market price and productivity of her work would have grown by one-third, although her scrubbing and washing remained completely unchanged. And her new, higher wages would remain just as closely aligned with her new, higher personal productivity as had been the case earlier since productivity is defined based on wages and costs for the service involved rather than the other way round.
Moreover, minimum wage critics have endlessly touted the recent CBO report analyzing the impact of a wage hike. Yet according to that report, some 98% of impacted low-end workers would see dramatic rises in their wages while only about 2% might lose their jobs as a consequence. So according to this analysis, the proposed minimum wage hike would raise the economic productivity of 98% of America’s low-wage workforce—could any politician ask for a better talking-point?
Perhaps my self-declared economic ignorance is shining through at this point, and my expert critics in the economics professoriate can seize on these naïve suggestions to ridicule and humiliate me. I urge them to do so. But it seems to me that much of modern economics is more intended to obfuscate and confuse rather than enlighten, and the disastrous American economic policies of the last decade or so tend to strengthen my suspicion in this regard.
These days, a large fraction of the more vocal and visible economics experts draw much or most of their incomes from the financial subventions of our Oligarch class, and perhaps coincidentally, their claims and the personal interests of their benefactors seem rather closely aligned.
We have been discussing the productivity of low wage workers, but let us now consider the productivity at the other end of the economic spectrum, which has allegedly risen so rapidly over the last few decades and thereby supposedly justifies the massive financial rewards there accrued.
How do we measure the productivity of a hedge-fund manager, a service-sector worker who annually earns $50 million for his management skills and financial manipulations? Unless I’m missing something, the only metric available is the market price he charges for his services, namely that same figure of $50 million per year. So just as has been claimed by those pro-market pundits, his income closely corresponds to his productivity, but his is merely a restatement of the relevant definitions. If the painter of blotchy canvasses can sell them for tens of millions of dollars, his economic productivity is enormous even if his artistic skills are minimal.
This same argument would presumably apply on the international scale as well. If an African dictator or the current God-Emperor of North Korea’s Kim Dynasty allocates to himself 5% of the entire national income of his impoverished country, the annual dollars involved may reach into the billions, demonstrating that his economic productivity exceeds that of almost any brilliant American business tycoon, even though the likely benefits he provides to his suffering country are hugely negative. Perhaps the Sultan of Brunei may spend most of his days playing polo or watching TV, but his ongoing productivity—as manifested in the diligent 24-7 gushing of his oil wells—remains far greater than that of any investment banker or elite lawyer.
So when regular columnists in Forbes or other publications cite the fact that over the last generation or two, the economic productivity of our elites has skyrocketed while the productivity of most other Americans has stagnated, I suspect they are simply restating the leftist claim that the rich have gotten richer while no one else has. But it’s nice to hear those sentiments coming directly from such a contrary source.
Meanwhile, on a more practical matter, I’ve become much more hopeful that a California minimum wage hike along the lines of that contained in the initiative I failed to qualify for the November ballot may soon be achieved via different means.
A few weeks after my $12 minimum wage initiative began receiving considerable media attention, State Sen. Mark Leno of San Francisco introduced a bill in the California legislation topping my proposal by raising the minimum wage to $13 per hour.
I’d assumed the measure had little chance of passage. Last year the Legislature had been unwilling to consider a figure higher than $10 per hour and leading Democratic constituencies had actually criticized my initiative as unreasonable and unwarranted when it had surfaced.
However, it appears that the huge shift in the political and media momentum on the issue over the last few months, perhaps partly due to my own efforts, may have altered that ideological situation, especially in California. After recently meeting and talking with Sen. Leno and his staff, I now believe his legislation has a reasonably good chance of being enacted this year at least in some form, which is very heartening.
Obviously, I would have very much preferred that my own initiative be the vehicle for raising the California minimum wage and a successful initiative campaign might have been a powerful means of nationalizing the issue in November. But with the failure of my attempt to qualify the measure for the ballot, I am glad to endorse Sen. Leno’s effort and will do whatever I can to help it become law.
Although a state-level minimum wage of $13 would be by far the highest in America, the figure is not at all unreasonable. California’s cost of living is about 30% above the national average, so a $13 rate here is roughly the same as a $10 minimum wage at the federal level, a figure now backed by the Obama Administration and almost all the Democrats in Congress, and even endorsed by conservative Bill O’Reilly on his FoxNews show.
Democrats hold super-majorities in both houses of the California legislature and they only require a simple majority to raise the minimum wage. So all that is necessary for enactment is that they retain the support of the sizable block of moderate Democrats and Gov. Brown, and this would surely be facilitated by the number of prominent conservative Republicans who have now endorsed a large hike in the minimum wage. Just within California, influential moderate billionaires such as Eli Broad and Rick Caruso have now also endorsed a minimum wage hike in that range or even higher, as has Peter Thiel, a billionaire who has strongly rightwing views on economic matters.
If my recent initiative drive to substantially raise the California minimum wage helps spur legislation producing a roughly similar result, I’d count my project a considerable success regardless of the particular circumstances under which the result was achieved.
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