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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (51638)	3/4/2008 3:47:12 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542531

You can have economies of scale even in things much simpler to produce than aircraft, and probably more important than economies of scale (at least in many cases) are focus on comparative advantage, and increased specialization. You need a plot of those metrics vs population size. My claim is that from 300M to 6B it is pretty flat. Real income per person has increased, income distribution has gotten more unequal but not massively so. Americans can afford all sorts of things that they couldn't in the past. Perhaps you could put some comparative numbers on these two claims: 1) Real income per person has increased: 2) Income distribution has gotten more unequal but not massively so. IIRC, real income for working class Americans has been flatlining, while income distribution has gotten significantly greater. If you are dumb enough to compute real income using all the population, well of course that masks effects. In any case a couple of decades in one country doesn't show the full benefit. The US isn't the only country that has benefits from the trade, you have to look at the world as a whole (one point to notice is the countries isolated from trade tend to do much worse), and a couple of decades isn't really the long run in this context. No kidding. That is why I pointed out that IMO, almost all of the benefits of global trade are disequilibrium related. And sure, that helps those on the bottom countries in many cases, but not all (Ag for instance). If all countries on the global had roughly equal stats (education, income, productivity, etc) then I claim the benefits of global trade (6B vs 300M) would be greatly reduced. In the mean time, we are bootstrapping the poorer countries which are capable of manufacturing, or providing remote services (China, India) until things get into equilibrium with the West. No surprises there. The basics (concepts of supply and demand, price signals, etc. are really solid, and the next level up from that comparative advantage, benefits from trading etc., have hundreds of years of real world evidence behind them. Then why can't economists agree on anything? Why do you have supply side vs. demand side camps? Why do we have someone running for Pres pushing a gold standard? These are major differences, not minor ones.