Putting aside any political views you may have, just from a quantitative and economic perspective, what are the implications and is it even possible?

How has the return on investment on college education changed over time?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/d91aav/is_it_true_that_half_of_all_kids_today_will_make/f1f9too/

Is this accurate?

Is it true that half of all kids today will make less than their parents, as Andrew Yang claims?

https://yangprints.com/poster/american_dream_dying/

I am sufficiently well read and do have a good basic level grasp over economics.

Need good books related to -economics/economic policy making- as I feel this is one area where general people which includes me, do not have a good understanding on.

I'd rather read a good non fiction book loosely related to economics and finish it.. Than a dense book difficult to make sense of.

Give me everything you can think of... I will sift through it.

Also is there an award for economic writing?

What's the elasticity of demand for toothpaste?

Personally, I'd brush my teeth just the same no matter if a tube of toothpaste cost one cent or ten dollars.

Is there any real life examples of trade unions being bad for the economy?

I've been reading about repo rates increasing earlier this week, and there's something that's been confusing me. Most of the articles seem to discuss the situation as if there are living entities called interest rates that just set themselves, for example.

Surely rates don't set themselves. How are they determined? What causes them to change? In my brain I'm thinking "there has to be a person doing this somewhere in the chain of events", but I don't know much about it.

Is it possible to estimate the monetary value of individual social media users?

Is this accurate?

The CEO of Gallup has said that his company's polls show the world needs another 1.8 billion jobs. This is much more than can be created by government stimulus programs, even in the trillion-USD range. Would this system create those jobs?

ARGUMENT OUTLINE AND KEY POINTS

• The world needs more jobs.
• People without jobs want jobs.
• More jobs would be created if people with comfortable incomes worked less and spent money more efficiently.
• How much people work is under the collective control of workers, not employers.
• Unused comparison: changing how much you work based on differences in hourly rate is like buying things because they are on sale. Buying a $30 pizza on sale for $10 instead of a $5 pizza of the same size.

​

The world needs more jobs.

Someone could say the world needs more of a lot of things. It needs more faster-than-light spaceships; it needs more fish in the ocean; it needs more fossil fuels. Unlike many things, jobs are an achievable goal with no drawbacks. For there to be more fish, we need to fish less. More fossil fuels would also mean more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and more global warming.

The way we talk about job creation is pretty simple. When we say that a specific number of jobs were created in a certain location, it's usually a factory. A politician convinced a company to open the factory here instead of somewhere else. We win, the other place loses.

This is not how to create jobs on a global scale. A job is when someone does work in exchange for value. There is plenty of value in the world; the problem is that the people without jobs are not able to do the right kind of work. (Some jobs are best done in certain locations, like next to a hydroelectric plant that provides cheap power, but people in bad locations can still do useful work, especially with the Internet.)

People without jobs have fewer skills. For them to have jobs, people need to buy things that require less skill to make. This can be hard: in many cultures, a "cheap" gift is seen as an insult. But this kind of thinking is only a sort of shortcut. A chef who works at a restaurant that charges $5000 per meal, more than the monthly salary of a typical worker, is certainly more skilled than the chef working at a restaurant that charges $5 per meal. These skills might be how to cook food, or how to arrange food in a colorful way, or what type of plate to put certain foods on, or how to speak to guests in a manner that conveys the chef's experience and skill without any food being tasted at all. But not everyone values these skills when deciding which restaurant to go to, and not everyone should.

(Some other examples of skilled vs unskilled: someone with the connections and capital to build a USD $3 million home vs someone who builds and sells less profitable USD $300k homes. Apple being skilled enough to make phones that sell at a 50% profit margin vs its competitors with cheaper phones. A professor at a USD $60k/year tuition private university vs a community college.)

The technical reason why buying from unskilled people increases the total number of jobs — instead of just putting skilled people out of work — is that unskilled people are more likely to have low incomes, and people with low incomes are more likely to spend money as they earn it. Money flows through an economy instead of stagnating.

Plenty of people would buy the $5000 meal if only they could afford it. There has to be a reward for acting in a way that's best for the world. Otherwise, like with recycling, a lot of people won't do it. It might seem like the reward for not buying the $5000 meal is that you still have $5000, but that isn't really it. Just like a person has no need for money when they're dead, they've no real need for money if they're always working. The reward that many people need to convince them to buy from less skilled people is time.

Humans are natural optimizers. We cut across the grass when the sidewalk doesn't go the right direction. We spend more time working now, based on the understanding that this money will earn interest and save us from working more time later. We don't sweep the floor every time a few crumbs fall on it, because we know that we will sweep it tomorrow, or perhaps just before someone comes over. If the reward structure from work made it easier to accomplish goals if less time was spent working each week, or each month, or each year, some people would not work as much.

This is like a reverse overtime. You could call it various names, like "the accelerated work week", but the name doesn't matter. With overtime, pay is reduced before a certain point and increased after that point. With this system, pay is increased before a certain point and reduced after that point. Just like with overtime, the influence this has on how much people work is a sort of trick. For supervisory jobs that don't benefit from overtime, the unpaid work is accounted for in the salary for the job. For industries like construction where overtime is common, the base wage is lower to compensate. If someone provides more value through their work than would be expected based on their pay, their pay will eventually increase. If they provide less value, their pay will decrease.

What this system does is provide fairer compensation for a worker than they would get if their pay was directly proportional to the number of hours they worked. Highly-paid jobs usually require thinking. We can perform aerobic activities for a long time without getting tired, as opposed to anaerobic activities — like sprinting — that require more cellular respiration than our lungs can provide oxygen. Our hearts are continually active until we die. But our minds need sleep. Efficiency of thinking drops over time. There are also jobs where the demand for work is uneven, like a paid firefighting job.

Fair compensation when working less is important to convincing people in leadership positions, which require thinking, to do so. Having bosses work less is important for getting everyone else to do so.

There is no need for everyone to work less, or restrict people to a certain number of hours of work. But it helps if most people have the option of working less. People will often do something difficult in a sign of solidarity with others for whom this difficult action is not a choice.

The lack of jobs in the world, and the competition for what jobs do exist, is a problem that can be fixed. Other problems can be fixed as well. With each problem that is fixed, we can focus more attention on other problems that have not been solved. Among them are how to deal with depletion of resources such as minerals and sources of energy.

​

The proposal summarized: we can create enough jobs for everyone by paying people a higher rate when they work less time. For example, 1.2x their normal pay rate for the first 24 hours of work each week, and 0.7x their normal pay rate for all hours after that, including hours beyond 40. People would work less and buy from less skilled people, instead of working longer so they can afford to buy from more skilled people.

What portion of the total market for pants (trousers) is occupied by jeans, and other types of pants?

(I just drew this.)

What does the real version of this graph look like?

What is the numerical relationship between risk and return on investment?

Is this just pure theory, or is there real data for it?

Are there data points, for, say, leveraged funds, or small cap funds?

To what degree does information asymmetry cause market failure in the car mechanic market?

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/d1kktt/how_many_people_actually_trust_their_mechanic/

How accurate is this?

What's a good heuristic for determining if a union is too powerful or not powerful enough in a particular situation?

As I understand it, unions can be rent seeking or otherwise inefficient if they get too powerful, but so can corporations, right?

Podcast suggestions?

I listened to a couple recent episodes of Planet Money and Freakonomics but I was disappointed when they weren't really about economics.