economics

The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer (link via kottke)

Late Friday night I finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. This one’s been in my personal queue for several years; I sort of randomly found it on the shelf while looking for something to read on the plane to New York last week. It’s a psuedo-scientific exploration of what it’s like to live on minimum wage in America, and I can’t say that I was very impressed. Ehrenreich is a competent author and she weaves a half-interesting tale, but as a Democratic-tainted exposé it was nowhere near as good as Rivethead or any of Michael Moore’s mockumentaries. More than anything it seemed like just a whining liberal complaining about how darn mean all those big corporations are. She comes down heavy on Wal-Mart — Who could blame her? — but there’s nothing earth-shattering in her story. I’ve worked plenty of minimum wage jobs in my day. It’s back-breaking and demoralizing and all that, sure. I know that. Doesn’t everyone? There’s just a lack of any true revelations or fact-reporting in this book for me to recommend it. If you want to read about the plight of the common American, the state of “the poor”, or anything truly brilliant concerning the U.S. economy you should grab P.J. O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich, Levitt’s Freakanomics, or Schlosser’s Reefer Madness. And this is as good a time as any for me to give another round of applause to Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox. Read that.

I am apparently in a reading frenzy these days. I just knocked off Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market by Eric Schlosser. The book is not all about marijuana, although it would certainly be compelling enough if it was only concerned with that one topic. Instead it’s three essays on the economic monster that is the Black Market in America. The first is on the “drug war”, the second is on migrant workers in California, and the third is about the porn industry. All three are deliciously intriguing and certainly more than enough to convince even the most apathetic reader to actually do something as maniacal as vote.

Schlosser also wrote Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, which was just incredible. I read that one in one sitting. It’s frighteningly enlightening.

by P. J. O’Rourke

P. J. O’Rourke is one of my favorite authors and his treatise on economics did not disappoint me.

The book is comprised of eleven satire-filled chapters covering the study of economics and the impacts of economic theories on several nations. O’Rourke deftly explains how communism has created a catastrophe in Cuba and how socialism has somehow survived in Sweden. He presents Tanzania, Albania, and Russia as examples of economic theory gone horribly awry and how the suffering and poverty of the peoples of those nations should be unfavorably compared to the relative prosperity of the United States and Hong Kong. He takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the planet - from a corporate magazine-financed viewpoint - and shows, warts-and-all - what can happen when good politics is combined with poor management.

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The airlines need to play an especially ruthless game of chicken with their customers since a seat on Flight 3206 from Miami to Chicago, unlike a washing machine, becomes worthless if it isn’t sold in time. So as every flight gets nearer, the airline is willing to accept less and less at the very time some of its passengers are willing to pay more and more. The infuriating rules about Saturday night stayovers and so on are a crude alternative to administering truth serum and asking, “So how much are you really willing to pay?”

This is an excerpt from Consuming Gets Complicated, a link I discovered on the consistently excellent blog Follow Me Here …. The essay makes a reference to how capitalism equates to a game of chicken between the consumer and the seller. A wealth of information on this type of situation, and how often it occurs in everyday life, can be found by reading Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone. It’s really a fascinating book and I highly recommend it.

Brunei’s economic collapse was made explicit with an auction of Prince Jefri Bolkiah’s depleted assets, which included gold-plated toilet-bowl brushes.