Tag: economics

Teacher Rubber Rooms

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

i wonder where we would be today if the republicans had spent the last 8 years doing something useful like union bashing instead of chasing gays and starting wars.

Against cash

This would allow the setting of negative nominal interest rates. about time some country does this.
2015-12-27: Some stats

Bills and coins now represent just 2% of Sweden’s economy, compared with 7.7% in the United States and 10% in the euro area. This year, only 20% of all consumer payments in Sweden have been made in cash, compared with 75% in the rest of the world

2017-12-28: NYT, always the luddite, calls it “jarring”. I welcome this trend.

Cashless businesses were once an isolated phenomenon, but now, similarly jarring experiences can be had across the street at Sweetgreen, or 2 blocks up at 2 Forks, or next door to 2 Forks at Dos Toros, or over on 41st Street at Bluestone Lane coffee. In Midtown and some other neighborhoods across New York City, cashless is fast on its way to becoming normal.

2016-08-20: The death of cash will make a lot of petty crime unviable: good, but it needs to come with radically lower fees.

apart from facilitating crime and tax evasion, cash hampers central banks from setting negative interest rates. In the absence of cash, everyone must keep their money in the form of digital bank deposits. During recessions central banks could then use the banking system to deliberately corrode people’s deposits via negative charges, ‘inspiring’ them to spend rather than hoard.

The emergent consensus among economic and political elites is that this is the direction to go in, but to manufacture consent for this requires a drip-drip erosion of public resistance. Hearts and minds must be shown that the change represents inevitable and desirable progress.

2023-04-21: The decline isn’t fast enough but continues despite stupid posturing like the “payment choice” act. These estimates also only cover POS, not black markets.

Shrink Flint

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods. The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

now do it for all suburbs.

The Quiet Coup

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. 1 of the most alarming is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the US, it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

after 3rd world infrastructure, the us takes the next step: 3rd world oligarchies.

we’re watching the most pitched, highest-stakes, most determined battle between politics and finance which has been staged. I am expecting finance to win.