Posts tagged “economics”
I just got my green card after a six-year wait, so I've been thinking hard about why Americans should support immigration reform. The short answer: immigration is basic economics. It creates wealth for everyone, keeps goods affordable, and immigrants only come when jobs exist. Love your country? Make immigration easier.
The tech industry is broken: 3% unemployment for programmers, 20% for construction workers, and we're still hand-crafting websites like artisans. We need knowledge factories, training less-skilled workers to assemble standardized software products. Stop fetishizing craft. Build assembly lines. Fix the economy.
Immigration is an economic force that moves labor from high supply to low demand areas, creating global prosperity. The fear that immigrants will cut your salary by 5% ignores the far greater gains from immigration-fueled growth. America's restrictive policies are self-defeating, economically and morally.
I grew up in an oil-producing nation where we've "had 30 years of oil left" my entire life. Production tracks prices, not depletion. Proven reserves have risen for a decade. We have plenty of time to transition away from oil -- the apocalyptic countdown clocks are nonsense.
Mattress sales are booming while everything else looks pretty fucked. That's the economy right now.
Oil hit $100 a barrel, and the BBC reported it right on cue. For Americans and Brits, that's terrifying. For Trinidad? We're celebrating.
The dollar is weak. Come visit while everything's cheap.
I dissect a passionate anti-Tesco rant point by point, revealing how each complaint about the supermarket giant is really just globalization working as intended: bigger stores, cheaper food, greater access, fewer arbitrary national boundaries. The real villain here is nostalgia, not progress.
The EU's anti-liberalisation argument contradicts itself: if jobs are fleeing east, why would workers flee west? They're going where the jobs are. Liberalise, jobs follow people home, problem solved. Unless welfare tourism is the real issue, which is fixable separately.
Based on conversations with my dad, a multinational executive, I argue globalization is self-limiting. As companies standardized products globally, they lost market share to local brands better suited to regional tastes. Past a certain point, uniformity hurts profits, meaning globalization stabilizes rather than endlessly expanding and homogenizing culture.
Fair trade coffee eases our guilt by ensuring farmers earn a living wage, but it doesn't fix the underlying economic problem of too many workers and too few opportunities. We're not really solving anything. We just want to feel better about our moccha lattes.
Slate's piece on the economics of suicide is full of wild stats: 3% of Americans have attempted suicide, there are 1700+ attempts daily, and failed attempts correlate with a 20% income boost. Genuinely bizarre stuff worth reading.
I know I shouldn't enjoy the Dow's 355-point drop, but I can't help it. It's like watching the Titanic sink. Horrible, yes, but you can't look away. Friends say I should care more about the economic fallout. They're probably right. But I'm still watching.
Dreading graduating right into a recession, which means I'll probably have no choice but to do a PhD and wait it out.
Corporate scandals are making it risky to buy a copier, pay electricity, or make a phone call. Looks like the recession started in 1997 and everyone's been faking profits since. Anyway, off to New York for July 4th!
The so-called economic recovery looks shaky as markets freefall. A recovery built on borrowed money for cars and houses won't last. Consumers will crack just in time to torpedo my job prospects. Fanfuckingtastic.
The Economist profiles Cambridge's tech scene but seems baffled that companies there prioritize good products and lifestyle over IPOs. I find that attitude odd. Maybe not every tech hub needs to clone Silicon Valley, and maybe that's fine.
