Spiralling round the black hole of inequality

"Economist's View" argues that the Gini Index will go on rising until someone positively stops it:

Once income concentration becomes a reinforcing cycle of the kind we are witnessing, it is never stopped by pure market forces. Only extensive government intervention, of the kind that will inevitably create high controversy, reverses this trend.

Read the rest of Mark Thoma's piece here.

Unemployment a good thing? For economists?

A thought-provoking piece from Mark Thoma, in which he argues that many jobs that have gone deserved to go; it's the creation of new ones that should occupy our minds.

There is a pipe-smoker-in-a-leather-chair comfortableness about this (I'm not sure what the unemployment rate is for economists; should the 10 - 15,000 who failed to predict the credit crunch all be sacked?), but he may be right.

However, the allegedly self-righting mechanisms of the market may not operate quite so efficiently in a single nation's economy when there are other major causes of disequilibrium at work in the world, including quarrelsome international politics and sharp disparities in global wage rates.

An image: picture a man in his study, happily using a tiny screwdriver to adjust the mechanism in a carriage clock, while a block of frozen waste hurtles silently towards him from a passing jet liner.

PS:

Coincidentally: "... if you fail to heed the roar in your ears and fail to look up what will inevitably come, while it may surprise you, does not surprise anyone who has passed sixth grade math." - Denninger