Seeker Blog

You're fallaciously posing a dichotomy between the "natural living" of 19th-century American late-feudalism/industrializing capitalism versus the "failures" (failures by what metric, compared to what capitalist competitors?) of "socialism" (actually social democracy).

Here are a few facts to the contrary:

* Europe is not "bankrupt" from "socialism". In fact, even the most successful European countries (the Nordic states and Germany) are far more social-democratic than the "successfully capitalist" Anglo countries, most particularly the United States of America.

* Why is Europe "bankrupt"? Trade imbalances, and a monetary policy aimed at maintaining those trade imbalances for the benefit of the incumbent capitalist class rather than correcting them for the good of all citizens. It's not just net-importer nations like the "PIIGS" undergoing wage deflations and heavy debt, Germany has actually been leading Europe in wage deflation, not to mention that it does actually have a public debt issue. The cause of the Euro troubles, after the Great Recession itself of course, is the German use of mercantilism; the mercantilist system in Europe is not broken but working as (inadvertently, nobody outside Germany intended for Germany to become a mercantile empire) designed.

Citation: http://seekerblog.com/2012/01/17/euro-crisis-german-unit-labor-cost-repression-is-the-primary-cause-of-periphery-stress/

* When have the successful Western nations been at their richest, in terms of…

If everybody decreases their labour cost everything else being equal, then obviously you don't get a competitive advantage from it. You just made everyone poorer. See also http://seekerblog.com/2012/01/17/euro-crisis-german-unit-labor-cost-repression-is-the-primary-cause-of-periphery-stress/ for the same line of arguments. Germany essentially gained market shares at the expense of other eurozone countries (0-sum game) instead of actual increases in productivity (which is not a 0-sum game).

As far as pressure for decreasing labour cost, this is pretty much uncontroversial. I did not say that Germany had a gvt authority setting salaries, but various factors such a pressure from high unemployment in the early 2000, and lower-than-eurozone inflation helped it (see e.g. http://www.voxeu.org/article/how-restore-competitiveness-eu - even though that article argues something closer to the opposite of what I am arguing here).

>I mean, don't use the ASE socket that is almost the same as the metric bolt you are working on

Just use whatever fits tightest. Fasteners get smaller from rust.

Some people organize their sockets by size and ignore which unit they're sized in.

> they can answer even relatively difficult questions. This is not, in my experience, true of Frys.

This is only because you don't know what you don't know and don't have reason to ask complicated or very specific questions at the auto parts store whereas you do at the computer store. The median parts counter person has the same depth of knowledge across basically all industries.

https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/

As you might be aware Japan had a “lost decade” during the 90s. It experienced almost no growth of the GDP. There are many theories as to why, but the most convincing one is: The Japanese “Baby Boomers” retired during this decade.

Richard Koo has a different view on this, one that should also inform the thinking in the US and rest of the Western world these days. According to him, the Japanese "lost decade" was caused by an asset price bubble collapse in housing. The parallels to the global financial crisis are fascinating.

See, for example, his talk which is linked here: http://seekerblog.com/2009/04/11/richard-koo-more-on-the-balance-sheet-recession/

The author, Farhad Manjoo, is romanticizing a

I started feeling Murray Gell-Mann amnesia (https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/) reading him a while ago and sent him a tweet about an important thing not discussed in some article, and his sarcastic response made me realize that he doesn't care very much about getting stories as right as he can: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/07/03/why-you-really-cant-trust-the-media-claire-cain-miller-and-farhad-manjoo-get-things-wrong-in-the-new-york-times.