kashare

At sethimothy's suggestion, we began reading Economics in one Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.  It started straightforward enough, setting as its goal to discuss some common logical fallacies in relation to economic theory and practice.  The first couple chapters are fine; he seems to take a rather disgruntled tone, but it's difficult to find someone discussing economics without such things.  He introduces the concept that many people profit from disaster, believing that destruction creates demand, when all it really does is create need whether or not that need can be satisfied, and money is simply redistributed from some markets to others through destructive acts.  So far it's simple and pragmatic, as is the discussion of government spending in that spending to generate tax income is a fallacy in itself: the money you spend is from either tax income or debt, and must then be supplied with tax income, so it isn't generally creating new tax funds.

Then we get to the third chapter, where he equates this with jobs.  Hazlitt was a hard-line conservative libertarian, which is why we suspected his outlook would be unwelcome even if some of his information and insights might be useful.  He states without irony, "for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else."  This is nonsense.  The creation of one job does not automatically destroy another.  He's specifically discussing an example of public works projects done to create jobs, works that do things like create bridges which were unnecessary.  However one may feel about an unnecessary bridge — it's not the most appealing prospect — the creation of a bridge that wouldn't otherwise have been created doesn't rob anyone of work.  It does mean that tax money is going to a bridge rather than, say, education, public health, or what have you, but it doesn't automatically make existing employment disappear in favor of newer, temporary employment.  It doesn't disrupt the private industry, because the private industry wasn't interested in creating that bridge, and much of the time the government pays private industry to do its work anyway.

It's true that no new money is created, just redistributed, but that's part of the point.  The more people make money, the more they have money to save and to spend.  The wealthy and the corporations might have been spending that same money that instead became taxes that lead to government-funded projects, but the wealthy don't need more money; the poor do.  Fairness, of course, has never had a place in traditional economics, at least until the past some years that we've actually begun doing empirical research into economics to test theories and see what pans out.  We've learned over the past decade or two that indeed fairness is a very important part of economics, and people do not simply act only in self-interest, but this book was written before all that; this edition was from 1979, and the original was from 1946.

In any case, working to create jobs means more people saving money and spending small amounts of money, but more importantly, it means that unemployed people can gain experience in whatever tasks they perform, increasing their employment value; it means they're earning through production the money the government's paying them from taxes instead of gaining it through Food Stamps benefits or the like; and that income can help them gain better housing, better education, and so forth, which in turn means a more productive generation of citizens.  That isn't to say that building a useless bridge is a good idea, but there are always useful projects that can be done; one need not look far.  Unfortunately Hazlitt is simply spewing conservative libertarian propaganda and not bothering to notice his own logical fallacies.  Throughout the chapter, he makes it clear that he's against all public works which aren't specifically toward building government offices and the like which allow the government to function, and frankly that's just a silly prejudice.

Every now and then, someone (usually my mother or mmsword's father) sends me one of those e-mails about how easy kids have it these days and all the things that didn't exist in their youth.  These things drive me crazy, because they are always inaccurate.  Just this morning, I've received the biggest whopper of them, targeted at the just-over-30 crowd.  I'm not over 30 or even quite 30 yet, though I'm getting real close; I know a lot of people just on the cusp or already in their 30s; and most of us have a sense of history and how inaccurate these claims are.

"I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet."

Some form of electronic inter-networking has been around since the 1950s.  Not including dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS), public access to Internet service providers, e-mail, and the World Wide Web has been common since the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Even if you were born in 1970, access was readily available by the time you were 18 and ubiquitous before you reached 30.  I was raised in an isolationist cult, and I remember people using Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online as a child.  Of course, we all had very limited access and were only supposed to use basic e-mail services and check the weather.

"Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us."

Excuse me?  In the United States of America, there have been criminal court cases involving child abuse since 1655.  We've been concerned about children since far longer than we decided that women and non-Whites were people.  The Children's Bureau was established in 1912; the Social Security Act was amended to fund child protection in 1958; and Child Protective Services was established with the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) in 1974.  And yes, they cared, even if you didn't.  The Adoption Assistance and Child Wellfare Act was passed in 1980 as well.

"There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes!"

This is the least ridiculous claim, but it's still inaccurate.  The MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 format has existed since 1991, following earlier codecs (such as MP2) from the 1980s.  Napster itself didn't operate until 1999, but file sharing has existed since the BBS days in the late 1970s, Usenet since 1980, file-transfer-protocol (FTP) since 1985, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) since 1988, and in many other forms since then.  iTunes has only existed since 2000, but digital media players such as Windows Media Player have existed throughout the 1990s (1991 in the case of WMP).

"There were no CD players!"

CD players have been in public circulation since Sony released the CDP-101 in 1982.  CDs and players grew in popularity throughout the 1980s, and cassette media effectively died in the early 1990s.  This is just silly.

"We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! [...] And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either!"

I'm not sure exactly when "call waiting" and "caller ID" services were established, but I know my own family had both these services in the early 1990s, and I know the first patents on caller-ID services were granted starting in 1969.

"There weren't any freakin' cell phones either."

Sure there were.  Car phones were first invented in 1946-47 and were first used publicly in the 1950s.  Portable versions have existed since 1957, and they were shrank to "pocket" versions in 1958.  These grew in popularity through the late 1960s, though they were trapped to local areas until the 1970s, when they were finally able to "roam."  Car phones have been popular since the 1980s and cell phones have been ubiquitous since the 1990s.

"We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-end resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600!"

The Atari 2600 was released in 1977.  If you're in the 30s crowd, you were no older than 7 when it was released.  You might only have been 14 when the first PlayStation was released in 1994, and there were 3-D games on the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) and Mega CD (Sega CD) back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Let's not forget the Intellivision, Famicon (NES), ColecoVision, Sega Master System, Super Famicon (SNES), 32X, TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and Sega Saturn.  Shortly thereafter the Nintendo 64, and even the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 were released by the time people born in the 1970s reached 30.  The Gamecube and Xbox were both released in 2001, when those born in 1970 would just be turning 31.

"You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on!"

Not that this is a real issue, but cable television has existed since the 1930s (1940s in the U.S.), and satellite television has existed since 1962.  These are the services which eventually outmoded TV Guide with electronic program scheduling transmission, though I'm not sure exactly when.  The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has been online since 1990, listing details for films and television shows.

"NO REMOTES!!!"

Nikola Tesla invented the first remote controls in 1898.  We've been building remote-controlled robots since the 1900s, airplanes and radios since the 1930s, and televisions since the 1950s.

"There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning."

Cartoon Network's been airing since 1992, when some people 30 or over today were 12 years old, but well before then stations would air after-school blocks of animated programming and shows like The Flintstones had been airing in prime-time slots since 1960.

"And we didn't have microwaves."

Oh, please.  Microwave ovens were invented in the 1940s.  They became wildly popular throughout the 1950s and 1960s.  Almost no one born in 1970 in the U.S. was born into a household that didn't have or soon acquire a microwave oven.  I don't recall ever having seen a household without one.  So if you were born in the 1920s, sure, you grew up without a microwave oven.  You might even be in your 60s today and not have had one until you were an adult, but you totally got one by your 20s at least.

"And car seats - oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on."

Child safety seats have existed since 1962.  If you were born in the 1950s or earlier, sure, you might not have gotten that.  Some form of child seat has existed since the 1930s, though, even if most of them were more "booster" seats than "safety" seats.

--

Well, that about covers that e-mail.  I think it's about time for some breakfast.

Testing Semagic's capacity for posting to multiple journals at once, namely LiveJournal and Dreamwidth.

They got me here on Dreamwidth
I don't know what to do
I'm here and I'm on Facebook
And on LiveJournal too
I'll never have a MySpace page
So I have no worries there
But of my poor attention span
Buzz and Twitter have a share
It isn't that I'm complaining
I'm just bored of sitting here
And for writing silly poems--
It's been well over a year
So I guess I'll end this thing
Since my friend's back in the chat
And to those who've read this through
I'll tip my invisible hat