My nerves are showing here, but economic-policy-by-literary-allusion is, I kid you not, a bad idea. Policy questions should be decided by cause, effect, evidence and discussion. "You've got sympathies for Ebenezer Scrooge!" is possibly the bottom of the barrel of counters if you seriously want good outcomes.
As Ha Joon Chang points out in his book Economics: The User's Guide, economics is about political arguments yet pretends as if it's a science. Hence most economists don't like the politics of Pinkety's economics. Which is what the op was alluding to though he did not mention explicitly... because they depend on money from people who don't like forwarding that political agenda. Secondly, it seems that the math that he used to make some of those arguments is not up to par so that makes it easy to dismiss his political arguments, and that's the issue when you go up against the status quo you better have inscrutable math because they are going to find any reason to dismiss you.
The problem with economists is you get a different answer to the same question depending on their political leanings. No wonder it's called the dismal science.
Tyler, anyone who understands economics would know that in a true economy, you would not even have had to work at all to resolve the issue. The infinite and unfortunate truth, is that such a low amount of people actually understand anything about economics. They idiomatically and unquestionably believe that economics are to be conflated with politcs. Which is the root of the primary issue. A primary issue out of which a cyclic abundance of subsequent issues abound and are used in an ever revolving manner so as to keep what is known as the Establishment machine turning. However i have made peace in that i have recently accepted the vastly regrettable fact that the weakness and propensity for humanity as one to disillusion and misunderstand not just the most basic externalities but even those internalities surrounding our species will simply never expire.
58 percent of the general public think that tax cuts are good for the economy, while 37 percent of economists do. So, the lesson learned is.....the general public is more qualified to set policy than experts.
A great article about how economics, economists, and econospeak are political tools used to mean anything at anytime, including opposite things at the same time (Australian political examples):
I can't upvote this enough; some people live in an alternative universe full of unicorns and bubble wrap but short of a basic understanding of economics and statistics.
I think you're much too generous. You can look at political decisions in most countries and see that politicians don't, on average, understand economics. For that matter, a great many economic theories (which are often presented as facts) don't hold up when tested.
In summary, economics is hard. But making something (internet/web) increasingly unusable is just pure ignorance.
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