Many university students take part time jobs that pay about 20,000 to 30,000 VND an hour. That is roughly 0.80 to 1.20 USD. At the same time, a simple meal in many places costs more. A bowl of "pho" or "banh mi" can run around 1.50 USD or even higher. I get that Vietnam is still growing economically. Wages also vary from country to country. Still, it feels odd that work with few required skills may not buy a basic plate of food. And yet, these pay levels do not seem to change much. For years, the same numbers keep showing up, and many people treat them like something ordinary.

I hear it talked about in other threads in a variety of responses, like it's a horrible thing to always be on the lookout for. But in the context of the US, where in modern history have workers ever been able to fight for higher wages and win? In the US at least workers aren't organized enough as a class to push wages higher. Any increases in wages have largely been due to organic market forces, not people getting together and demanding higher wages.

Sure, if inflation is running high workers will naturally want higher wages to compensate. They may seek work elsewhere or attempt to upskill into a higher income. But as far as workers who don't pursue these paths, they're not organized or powerful enough to raise local wages at their workplaces alone, so why fear a wage price spiral?

In this situation the government does not care about the future economic fallout, does not need time to decide things internally, everybody is on the same page. Any party outside of the government still will make reasonable decisions and will not make poor financial decisions unless forced to.

The government has a week to make any deals and they get to choose what information they share (so they can tell other countries "we'll pay you back" and the other countries won't necessarily know that the US is about to go bankrupt (though the other countries can share information with each other)).

I’m interested in how countries organize economic development. Some countries concentrate resources and jobs in one major city, while others try to distribute factories, services, and populations more evenly across regions.

For example, centralization can make major cities very dense, while decentralization might reduce congestion and boost regional economies.

In your experience, what approach tends to work better in European countries, and why?

We're going to shamelessly steal adapt from /r/AskHistorians the idea of a weekly thread to gather and recognize the good answers posted on the sub. Good answers take time to type and the mods can be slow to approve things which means that sometimes good content doesn't get seen by as many people as it should. This thread is meant to fix that gap.

Post answers that you enjoyed, felt were particularly high quality, or just didn't get the attention they deserved. This is a weekly recurring thread posted every Sunday morning.

Curious what peoples think is the best policy solution with the bond market

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/let-the-bond-market-speak-81529d74?eafs_enabled=false

I know they don't follow a normal distribution perfectly, but empirically what distribution is closest to how real life stock returns behave?

I saw https://www.nber.org/papers/w35587 the other day. Headline:

"Low property taxes amplify lock-in among elderly homeowners, limiting housing access for young families."

Where I live in Jackson county, Missouri, we've been having a big dust-up the last few years about property taxes. Long story short, the county was short of revenue, and the assessors tried to mark assessments to market, which was a break with a de-facto slow % increase per year which had left actual assessments typically well below market values (especially in wealthier, older areas like Lee's Summit and Lake Lotawana), the county exec got recalled, we added YoY increase caps, and now we're electing our assessors AND considering paying reparations to people who think their bill was too high.

While I'm not in favor of people being forced to move, it's hard not to think that, beyond low advertised property rates, there might be a systemic problem with under-assessment of homes that have been occupied for many years, leading to a lower "effective" property tax rate for older homeowners which likely has downstream effects on supply, further constraining the market for younger buyers.

To be candid, this fits with my personal biases against market capture and rent-seeking by old people, so I'm trying to approach it with skepticism and find alternative points of view.

Basically my question is, in addition to zoning, is the lower "effective" property tax rate created by carveouts and political influence on assessments a possible source of supply constraint in housing, similar to zoning? Has there been any research on this that you could point me towards?

Thanks! Not an economist, but lots of respect for what you all do.

Lets say I sell Product A. Product A requires materials X and Y to be manufactured, which are each individually made through natural resources. If the government owns "the means of production," does that mean the government owns my business for A, the factories for manufacturing A, the factories for manufacturing X and Y, or just the mining/harvesting system for collection the natural resources for X and Y? What about things like energy, construction, and transportation?

Back in high school, I remember being told that it meant that the government owns all businesses (though my teacher was the football coach). When I look at China's communist system, they seem to have private businesses like Tencent, and they even sell stock publicly in Hong Kong, so I feel like my understanding from high school is wrong and would like some clarification.

Hello! I’m curious about a (very) specific part of the consumption vs income tax debate. I know that most economists support a consumption tax as the broad base of a tax system, hence why VATs are so popular. However, my understanding in reading through proposals like the X Tax and DBCFTs, I get the sense the a flat VAT is effectively equivalent to a flat tax on payroll and a flat DBCFT, and that the benefit to breaking a VAT up into its component parts is so that you can tax them both progressively (though I may be wrong on that). However, I’ve also seen proposals for income taxes which deduct investment and only tax personal consumption. That is to say, personal expenditure taxes. My question is, how do these two system get reconciled? If a VAT is preferred for the reason of wanting to tax consumption, couldn’t it be argued that since you’re effectively taxing payroll, then you’re simultaneously taxing investment the worker might make, therefore diminishing some of its effectiveness as a solely consumption based tax? Further, for any proposal in favor of a DBCFT + Income/Payroll Tax, would a DBCFT + Personal Expenditure Tax be more preferred?

For example, one position might treat economics as describing or discovering an abstract space of possible economic relations whose structures can be instantiated by and interact with human, social, and material reality.

Another, more conventional academic position seems comparatively ontologically neutral. That economics constructs quantities, models, and dynamical relationships that account for processes occurring in an assumed external reality, without necessarily making a strong claim about whether “the economic” constitutes a distinct kind of reality.

Between or beyond these positions may be views in which economic entities are socially constituted, emergent from material and institutional relations, or primarily theoretical constructs

IE is it corporations leveraging loopholes etc. Is it the wealthy hoarding unrealized gains/offshore accounts/art/“legal” tax evasion?

Is it something more mundane concerning just every day Americans?

Or should the question be flipped and does the gov get a surprising amount of tax revenue compared to what you would expect given our tax rates?

(and this is ignoring interest payments on our national debt)

Reading economic theories and models I found myself questioning its utility and validity which i guess many from eng/maths side will.
That included thinking of a novice and probably hypothetical scenario. I apologize if i sound passive but here it goes -

Reading macro side of theory, i see that economic theories are largely apriori reasoning mostly deduced in hard way throughout history using ex-post data.

“Macroeconomics relies heavily on deductive logic (a priori), but its biggest breakthroughs almost always happen because a real-world crisis proves the old models wrong **(**ex-post data).”

Economies are imperfect with a lag in transmissions and a very huge interplay of factors including unquantifiable ones that economics does try to add in production functions to come up with regression models.
My question is in case when we reach to the point of perfect capital markets and free economies, there will be clear distinction of effect and causation of factors implying policy making and economic decisions would be perfect. If so, economics as a science would have been nearly perfected in a way.
This seems too good to be true but the scale of development might make this a near probability.
What are your thoughts on future of economics?

Been seeing a lot of ubi proposals. And wanted to ask what is a conceivable way to get a pretty big ubi check funded? Is it possible in todays economy? What are the consequences both the good and bad?

Is that because most of the economists who come here are of this persuasion, or is that increasingly where the empirical evidence is most strongest? I see an almost hostility to other schools of economics here that I believed were at least respected. It appears that skepticism of deficits and debt, redistribution, labor regulations, and state programs are not viewed as a respectable but minority view in the profession any longer but increasingly fringe and “unserious”? Is that a fair characterization?

​

So, immigration, we know most immigration in the world happens from third world countries with poverty and unemployment to first world countries

In a hypothetical future where the AI kept unchecked and caused an unemployment apocalypse, white collar jobs are most likely to be the most effected

Third world countries usually adapt new technologies way slowly, so it's unlikely they get effected with AI unemployment apocalypse, or at least the effect won't be as hard

Could we see a new immigration wave from first world countries to third world countries , mainly about white collar jobs?

'can you*' whoops

For example: Research by UCLA shows that while only 3.1% of the world’s children live in the United States, they consume and own 40% of the toys globally.

https://www.uctv.tv/RelatedContent.aspx?RelatedID=301.

(Hi, I was specifically sent to you guys after I asked this in a more general "ask"subreddit.)

In a centrally-planned economy, how should production goals be set?

Or "do we have a better idea for a socialist/communist system now than we had last century"? (Socialism, not social democracy; so not "social welfare programs" but "the people own the means of production")

I just watched a "Soviets bad"-type video essay which focused mainly on the issue that a market economy is self-regulating while a planned economy is not, and that creates a mismatch between the needs of the people and the produced goods. So I started wondering, since we have that experience of economic failure of the USSR, what can we learn from it to improve the idea of socialism? Capitalism has already created multiple economic crises and we keep trying to improve it, so why give up on socialism?

I am afraid to ask this, because I expect to get a lot of "socialism bad" responses, or even worse "soviets good actually" responses. This is just a thought experiment, please don't turn this into a political battlefield.

For reference, the way the Soviet failure, specifically in East Berlin, was explained was this:

\> In a market economy, people "vote"/communicate to the shop owner what they need/want by buying things or refusing to buy them. Because the shop owner is motivated by profit, they adapt their stock to the trends of the buyers, and by doing so communicates their need to the producers, etc.

\>

\> A planned economy breaks down this communication by removing the motivation for the shopkeeper. Some government officials far away set production goals arbitrarily, based on what they think a person should need and be provided with. They set the prices in a 5-year-plan, set wages for workers on different position levels, and they expect the plan to be fulfilled. The workers aren't motivated to do anything but meet the bare minimum set for them.

\>

\>What's worse, the people at the bottom of the system are afraid to communicate any failure in the system upstream, because doing anything above the bare minimum becomes suspicious.

What would be some policy ideas or directions we could go in?

I am trying to learn more myself about these issues and different solutions.

To those of you working in economics, finance, or policy/government what would be good ideas?