As you think about kicking in to Ian Welsh, just remember that "Dumb Davy" Brooks gets paid NYT $$$ to write that, er, stuff

by Ken

I hope it's not news to you that nobody has come anywhere close to figuring out a new working model for providing and paying for content on the Internet, or that the idea that content is and should be "free" has now spilled over into more and more print media. So in what I'm about to write, I want you to bear in mind at all times that "Dumb Davy" Brooks actually gets paid to write that infernal drivel he oozes ad nauseam over the NYT op-ed page.

Regular readers know the esteem in which I hold Ian Welsh, whose blogposts have frequently illuminated this space. Considering the body of knowledge and understanding Ian brings to bear on the subjects he tackles on his blog, ianwelsh.net, I want to call attention once again to that crucial distinction: David Brooks -- and countless other clueless pundits of his ilk -- get paid for their efforts, while Ian of course doesn't.

Just by way of example, here are the quick-take posts Ian offered yesterday and today:

I’ve never understood why people care what the CBO says
2014 FEBRUARY 19

by Ian Welsh

On raising the minimum wage:

President Obama’s plan to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would wipe out about 500,000 jobs by late 2016, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office…

…The CBO cautioned that its estimates of job losses were subject to wide fluctuation and could come in lower than 500,000 and as high as 1 million.

“In CBO’s assessment, there is about a two-thirds chance that the effect would be in the range between a very slight reduction in employment and a reduction in employment of one million workers,” it said in a report Tuesday.

Let me summarize: we think it will cost jobs, but we have no idea how many.

The fact is that empirical studies on raising the minimum wage have found no consistent pattern of job losses.  Sometimes you even get job gains. This is pure economic modeling: “well, if prices increase, buying must decrease, and labor is a market”.  That’s economic theory in a nutshell, the problem is it doesn’t work that way in the real world all the time.

In real terms, the minimum wage was much higher 40 years ago.  Did they have worse employment, or better employment than us?

Raising the minimum wage means that a lot of people have more money to spend, and spend it they do, because people earning that little spend every cent they have.  So it increases demand. It decreases borrowing from payday loan places, which charge usurious interest, and that also increases spending, because payday loans very quickly cripple the buying power of those who take them.

Economic modeling is, well, hard, and it’s not a science, because economics is not a science.  When the CBO says there’s a two-thirds chance a # is between negligible and a million people, they might as well be confessing to this.

Go ahead and raise the minimum wage.  It might increase employment, it might decrease employment, but it will help most minimum wage workers.  And because there are so many other things going on in the economy, any post-facto study on the affect will also be questionable.
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147 Companies control 40% of the World Economy
2014 FEBRUARY 18

by Ian Welsh

Wealth and income are important, but power trumps. What matters is control, and control is even more concentrated than wealth.  This study found that control was about ten times more concentrated, in fact. (PDF)

Most of the companies on the list are financial companies.

Why? Because financial companies can create money. It’s hard to make more money than people who can make money.  The only folks who come close control bottleneck resources like oil, or have what amounts to oligopoly control over something people need (pharma, for example.)  Money is permission: you can’t do squat in a market economy without it.  Those who can create it, or who have excessive profits, control what other people can do.

It is for this reason that Jefferson said that banks were more dangerous to democracy than even standing armies.

Money making and differential profits lead to differential power. Over time, if your rate of return is higher than everyone else’s you will gain so much more money than them that you can buy them out, or out-bid them. The first thing you will do, if you have any sense, is take control of government, because government, which controls the rules of the game (legislation) and violence, is the only other power which can destroy you.  Once they are under control (and the bailouts proved Western governments are under the control of financial institutions), the only remaining threats are your own ability to drive yourself off a cliff, and the very small chance of revolution, which is likely to happen only after you’ve destroyed yourself in any case.

Recently Ian took matters in his own hands and launched a fund-raising drive, with set levels of writing he would commit to doing at various fund-raising levels. I don't remember exactly what they were, but the fact is that the drive went well, with a lot of people supporting Ian not just with the usual lip service but with actual bucks.

Fundraiser Succesful
2014 FEBRUARY 11

by Ian Welsh

We raised $5,445 in one time donations, and $250 in recurring donations.  Multiplying the recurring donations by 3 takes us over $6,000.

Starting this coming Monday, for 3 months, I will do my part, and, on average, write two significant blog posts a week, plus have an average of an article a weekday for you to read.

The donation page is still up, and if you wish to donate or subscribe you still can.

My most sincere thanks to all my donors.  When I started I really had no idea if we’d raise more than few hundred dollars.  I am humbled that so many people find my writing worth supporting.

I kept reminding myself about Dumb Davy, and that made it pretty easy to make my exceedingly modest contribution. And while I know I should have gotten around to this post while the drive was in progress, maybe it's just as well, because it seems to me that there's going to be a significant issue of ongoing support.

There are any number of Ian's recent major pieces I meant to call your attention to, so one thing I would encourage you to do, if you haven't looked at Ihis website lately, is to go there and browse some of the more substantial pieces he's been churning out, and ask yourself if you could have found anything comparable anywhere else. If so, I'd love to know where.

Donate

The simplest economic principle is this: people do more of what they’re rewarded for. When you donate, it tells me you value my writing and that I should write more.

(Please never donate if you are having trouble paying for food, housing or healthcare.)

If your donations or subscriptions add up to $100, email me and I’ll dedicate a post to you or your designee so long as it’s not someone I despise (e.g., Goldman Sachs or the KKK).

If your contributions add up to $500, email me and we’ll discuss my writing an article on a subject of interest to you. This must be on a topic I have something useful to say about.

If you need to e-mail me about anything, you can reach me at admin-at-ianwelsh-dot-net. If you prefer to donate by mail, my address is at the bottom of this page. Canadian $ subsciptions and donations are near the bottom as well.

I hope you’ll subscribe or donate. Thank you for your support.

Ian

Maybe I shouldn't have singled out Dumb Davy so exclusively. I trust you can make your own lengthy list of scrivening leeches who get paid for their leechery. We still don't have a new economic model to carry us into a new era of properly compensated writing. But the one Ian has created for his invaluable work works for me.

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