Gyroscopic Investing

Lowe wrote: A small town, more or less of a single racial and religious background, where social policing is possible.

Jan Van wrote: Cool. Guess the MMT folks have a thing to model their Job Guarantee after.

Of course, them Canadians were a bunch of socialist commies. 

The Job Guarantee jobs would ‘hire off the bottom’, in the sense that minimum wages are not in competition with the market-sector wage structure. By not competing with the private market, the Job Guarantee would avoid the inflationary tendencies of old-fashioned Keynesianism, which attempted to maintain full capacity utilisation by ‘hiring off the top’ (i.e. making purchases at market prices and competing for resources with all other demand elements).

A cash infusion in childhood seemed to lower the risk of problems in adulthood. That suggests that poverty makes people unwell, and that meaningful intervention is relatively simple.

Bearing that in mind, Randall Akee, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a collaborator of Professor Costello’s, argues that the supplements actually save money in the long run. He calculates that 5 to 10 years after age 19, the savings incurred by the Cherokee income supplements surpass the initial costs — the payments to parents while the children were minors. That’s a conservative estimate, he says, based on reduced criminality, a reduced need for psychiatric care and savings gained from not repeating grades. (The full analysis is not yet published.)

But contrary to the prevailing emphasis on interventions in infancy, Professor Akee’s analysis suggests that even help that comes later — at age 12, in this case — can pay for itself by early adulthood. “The benefits more than outweigh the costs,”? Emilia Simeonova, a Johns Hopkins Carey Business School economist and one of Professor Akee’s co-authors, told me.

stone wrote: It is a sort of ghastly mash of soviet ideology about the need to herd the proles around and blinkered MMT theorising IMO.