“Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”The average for the country is supposed to reflect its level of happiness. The Cantril Life Ladder is available for India from 2006 onwards. The report also includes measures that one might think affects the answers given on the Cantril Life Ladder, such as per capita income and life expectancy, and survey measures such as perceived freedom to make life choices, perceived corruption, and so on. India is generally improving on these measures over the 2006-2018 time period. One interesting thing is that countries with poorer improvement on these measures can be happier than India.
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| Korea |
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| India |
| Index | India 2015 | When China |
| Human Development Index (HDI) | 0.624 | 2003-2004 |
| Demography-Median Age (years) | 26.6 | 1990-1995 |
| Education-Adult Literacy Rate (% ages 15 and older) | 72.10% | before 1990 |
| Education-Expected years of schooling (years) | 11.7 | 2006-2007 |
| Education-Mean years of schooling (years) | 6.3 | 1999 |
| Education-Population with at least some secondary education (% ages 25 and older) | 48.7 | 1995-2000 |
| Health-Infant Mortality rate (per 1000 live births) | 37.9 | 1990-1995 |
| Health-Life expectancy at birth (years) | 68.3 | before 1990 |
| Health-Under-five mortality rate (per 1000 live births) | 47.7 | 1990-1995 |
| Gross Domestic Product per capita (2011 PPP $) | 5730.1 | 2000-2005 |
| Gross National Income per capita (2011 PPP $) | 5663.5 | 2005-2006 |
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| Human Development Index 1990-2015: China and India |
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| Gross National Income per capita (2011 PPP $) |
Furthermore, if a border adjustment did somehow yield a permanent reduction in the trade deficit, such a reduction would lower rather than raise American living standards; we would forever send more goods and services to foreigners while receiving fewer goods and services from them in return.Here "living standards" is implicitly defined to be the amount of goods and services we consume. But suppose our exporting a bit more meant some more good, stable jobs in the US. What is the economic value of that? how is my quality of life affected by having close to full employment in my neighborhood and having a political environment that cannot be Trumpified?
More than a month has passed since the 8 November announcement by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that high-denomination currency notes would be scrapped and remonetisation would occur through replacement of new notes and deposits of old notes in bank accounts. Often termed “demonetisation”, this policy has created considerable confusion among commentators, some ill-informed, some politically motivated. A number of fallacies continue to persist—concerning the value of “unreturned” versus “returned” money, the existing “stocks” versus future “flows” of black and counterfeit money, the short- versus the long-term impact on black money, and the expansionary versus contractionary effects of the policy reform—allowing opponents of the policy to claim, prematurely, and without evidence, that it is a failure. We clarify in what follows.
Watch the income distribution in America change pic.twitter.com/WS80BT2UlT
— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) December 18, 2016
Amitav Ghosh, the acclaimed 58-year-old Indian novelist, is describing his extraordinary Ibis trilogy which has just concluded with the publication of the equally stupendous Flood of Fire. A decade in the writing, this exciting, passionate and scathing account of the First Opium War deserves to stand as one of the outstanding achievements of 21st-century literature.
...
In Ghosh’s telling, English merchants’ expansionist policy of selling opium, grown in India by near-slave labour, and sold in China where there was a vast illegal market, did not simply mark the foundations of the British Empire. It signalled a new form of global trade and politics, laying the foundations of outsourcing, migrant populations and truly international foreign relations – all driven by advances in military technology and realpolitik.
...
“It’s strange that the world pays such little attention to the Opium Wars, but opium was perhaps the largest single trade of the 19th century. All the profits went to England. All the work was done by Indians. All the silver came from China which was consuming it. It was one of the most iniquitous things that has ever happened in the history of mankind.”
Our tax code is custom made for wealthy people. Earned income vs. investment income is the crux of the issue. Consider a bright middle class kid whose family scrimps and saves all their after tax income to give the kid a good education. Then the kid goes on to benefit society, maybe a doctor, teacher, scientist, etc. The investment made by his family in his education is taxed at earned income rates: fed income, state tax, local tax, payroll tax. The kid pays 40-50% when all is totaled up, for benefiting society.(via dailykos) Eugene Robinson writes in the Washington Post:
Then, take a rich kid who drinks his way through school, his family realizes he’s a loser, so they buy him some Brazilian government bonds paying 10% interest, maybe with money that’s never been taxed in a trust or an offshore account, and he leads the idle rich lifestyle of tennis, golf and vacationing year round. His income is taxed at 15%.
So I guess our system favors loafers over people who benefit society.
“The issue I think that’s going to play out this election is that question of Warren Buffett’s secretary,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said Wednesday on CNN. “We want her to make more money, we want her to have more hope for the future. . . . [But] this notion that somehow the income that Warren Buffett makes is the same as a wage income for his secretary, we know that’s not the same.”
In other words, it’s not just that the rich are better than the rest of us but also that their money is better than our money.
Krugman: Manufacturing firms often stand or fall not just on their own merits, but because they do or don’t have a surrounding cluster of related firms that are suppliers or customers, provide a ready pool of suitable labor, and so on.
On the ultimately decisive economic front the Government has added to its own burdens by its blind and bland acceptance of Gandhi's policy towards decontrol. The Mahatma's approach to economics is unashamedly pre-feudal, and he has converted the doctrine of laissez-faire beyond the dreams of Adam Smith into what is little less than a branch of metaphysics. We now have the spectacle of a Government trying to create a modern State and depriving itself of the power to tackle food-hoarders and price-ring profiteers save through appeals to their social conscience, the one commodity in which they are totally lacking. The decontrol policy has been opposed by Mountbatten as well as by all responsible Civil Service advisers without exception. It is the outcome solely of the Government's awe of Gandhi. It is causing almost at once a vicious spiral of inflation, and will involve an extra eight crores of rupees on Civil Service salaries alone to meet the rise in prices. Altogether it is estimated that some one hundred and ten crores of rupees will need to be pumped in to meet the cost of Gandhi's economic ideas. Sugar and salt have both rocketed up to one rupee eight annas a seer - the rise in the price of salt being no less than five hundred per cent.
Recently, House Speaker John Boehner channeled Rand when he said, "Job creators in America basically are on strike."
....
This idea that Boehner put forth in a recent speech before the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., could have come straight from Atlas Shrugged.
Businesses, Boehner said, need to be set free. Instead, "they've been antagonized by a government that favors bureaucrats over market-based solutions. They've been demoralized by a government that causes despair, when what we really need is to provide reassurance and inspire hope in our economy."
Boehner uses the language of slavery when he says, "We need to liberate our economy from the shackles of Washington."The problem with Boehner's (and all the other examples in the NPR piece) is that corporations are doing very well.
Corporate profits in the second quarter grew to $1.467 trillion annualized-up from $1.455 trillion in the fourth quarter (previously $1.476 trillion). Today's report includes annual revisions. Profits in the second quarter rose an annualized 3.3 percent, following a 39.9 percent surge the quarter before (previously 35.2). The upward revision to the first quarter is due to a downward revision to the fourth quarter. Profits are after tax but without inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments. Corporate profits are unchanged on a year-on-year basis, compared to up 2.8 percent in the first quarter. Growth in profits is extremely volatile over recession/recovery periods and is slowing from the spike in late 2009 and early 2010. The recent peak in year-ago growth was 115.9 percent for the fourth quarter of 2009.and
The new figures indicate that corporate profits accounted for 14 percent of the total national income in 2010, the highest proportion ever recorded. The previous peak, of 13.6 percent, was set in 1942 when the need for war materials filled the order books of companies at the same time as the government imposed wage and price controls, holding down the costs companies had to pay.
There have been 10 years when corporate profits as a share of national income exceeded 13 percent — 1941, ’42, ’43, ’50, ’51, ’55, ’65, ’66, 2006 and 2010. In eight of those years, the economy, as measured by real gross national product, grew at a rate of greater than 6 percent.
The exceptions were 2006, when real growth was just 2.7 percent, and 2010, when it was 3 percent.
Oh, brother.
When a self-promoter like The Donald jumps on a bandwagon, you know it's getting a little old. For all his big reputation, Trump's career over the past two decades is littered with the wreckage of high-profile deals he cut at the peak of each boom. Think: Trump Taj Mahal casino (bankruptcy, 1991). Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts (2004). Trump Entertainment Resorts (2009).
Or the "Trump International Hotel & Tower," a luxury condo development in Fort Lauderdale planned and built in… happier times.
News that Trump is backing gold comes after the metal has already skyrocketed in price. Gold has so far jumped nearly 30% so far this year, and more than 500% in a decade.
What's next?
