Forum Post: Call Upon Economist Paul Krugman to Support Working Less as the Answer to the World's Problems
Posted 11 years ago on Dec. 21, 2012, 12:15 a.m. EST by Misaki
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Paul Krugman is the political economist with the greatest influence on the debate about economic policy.
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Economics is a complicated subject. With deficits, interest rates, and differences in education and skill levels it is not reasonable to ask a normal person to decide whether a course of action is realistic.
But it is the job of economists to understand all this. In a recent Op-Ed by Paul Krugman, many highly rated comments suggested that we could fix unemployment simply by having skilled workers reduce their hours down from the 50~60 that many are working now so that companies could hire more people.
If skilled people work less we might have more preventable deaths, in an ideal world without things like war or poverty. But we don't mind this.
Call upon Paul Krugman to create a uniquely American solution to the world's and our nation's problems that involves working less, or to concede that he is not willing to.
And save the environment too!
http://www.care2.com/causes/want-to-stall-climate-change-and-be-happier-just-work-less.html
That's the idea. It's just unfortunate that intelligent people did not support the longer arguments that could have included this kind of stuff.
The evidence is that people are less likely to "believe" in global warming when unemployment is high, even the President has said that climate change is lower priority than job creation, and people only have time to care about a limited number of issues.
While this is not proof that people would reduce fossil fuel use or use them in a less harmful way (which would probably be more expensive) it suggests that this would happen especially since there will have to be a transition to sustainable energy sources in the future anyway.
And that's enough confidence to list it as a result when people are not willing to read longer arguments.
all of the gains of productivity have gone to the master class the last 50 years. we should be working half the hours for the same pay we make today, couple that with the fact that minimum wage has not kept up with inflation and/or cost of living. well then you can see how screwed we are. declining wages, declining benefits. and a whole group of people who don't get that it is their beliefs and ideals that have and continue to crush upward mobility in this country. you should be able to make a living on minimum wage. if it had kept up with not just inflation but productivity increases it would be north of 15$ an hour for an adult. what we need to do at this point is pull out of all the free trade agreements immediately, bust up all the mega businesses that are essentially monopolies, the too big to fails and the too big to jails. and for gods sake break up big agriculture they are feeding us poison. we can put 10-15% of our population farming goods instead of 1-2%. millions more can be put to work building autonomous buildings and retrofitting existing ones to make them as autonomous as possible. you want to see the economy take off like a rocket ship that is what you do. we can probably move the entire populace to at a minimum a decent working class lifestyle if not upper middle class. and that aint too bad.