每个人的经济学

• 小张i读书

  2022-05-24
  银行业务（在某种程度上）是种信任骗局，但对社会有用（如果处理得当的话）因此，银行业务是不是在骗取你的信任呢？某种程度上来说是这样。严格来说，信任骗局是骗人相信某种假东西。而银行业务的情况是，它要让人相信的东西可真可假，真假取决于有多少人相信它。如果有足够的储户相信银行有能力在任何时候还钱，银行就真的有能力还。如果有这个信念的储户不够，那银行就没能力
• 小张i读书

  2022-04-11
  工作工作是人类生存的基本条件英国喜剧《万能管家》的原著是PG。伍德豪斯（PG。Wodehouse）写成于20世纪30年代末的《万能管家吉夫斯》（Jeeves andWooster）系列小说。对剧中热心肠但无知的贵公子伯蒂·伍斯特（Bertie Wooster）来说，工作是其他人干的事。然而，这样整天无所事事的富人或者说有闲阶级（leisure class）毕竟只是社会的极少数，几乎在整个人类历史，工作都是人类生存的基本条件。直到19世纪，今天西方富国的大部分国民在当时每周都还要工作70到80小时，有的甚至超过100小时。我们知道，他们周日早上通常还要去教堂做礼拜，算下来除了星期天，他们每天至少工作11个小时，有时甚至达到16个小时。而在今天，即使在穷国也没什么工作需要工作这么长了。全球每周平均工作时间为35一55小时。即使是这样，除掉周末和带薪假期，大多数成年人醒着的时候也有一半时间在工作（如果算上通勤，就不止了）。
• 蛋卷强

  2017-04-18
  Currently, around 1.4 billion people - or about one in five people in the world - live with less than $1.25 per day. The number goes up to around 1.7 billion people, or one in four people in the world, if we adopt the multidimensional definition of poverty. One counterintuitive fact is that most poor people do not live in the poorest countries. Over 70 per cent of people in absolute poverty actually live in middle-income countries. As of the mid-2000s, over 170 million people in China (around 13 per cent of its population) and 450 million people in India (around 42 per cent of its population) lived with incomes below the international poverty line.
• 蛋卷强

  2017-04-17
  Under the new regime, the financial sector has become much more profitable than the non-financial sector, which had not always been the case. This has enabled it to offer salaries and bonuses that are much higher than those offered by other sectors, attracting the brightest people, regardless of the subjects they studied in universities. Unfortunately, this leads to a misallocation of talents, as people who would be a lot more productive in other professions - engineering, chemistry and what not - are busy trading derivatives or building mathematical models for their pricing. It also means that a lot of higher-educational spending has been wasted, as many people are not using the skills they were originally trained for. The disproportionate amount of wealth concentrated in the financial s...
• 蛋卷强

  2017-04-17
  The point is that, however deftly you may pool, structure and derive your financial products, it is in the end the same subprime mortgage borrower in Florida, the same small company in Nagoya and the same guy who borrowed money to buy his car in Nantes who have to pay back the loans that underlie all those new financial products. And by creating all sorts of financial products that link different bits of the system, you actually increase the intensity with which the failure by these people to repay their loans affects the system.
• 蛋卷强

  2017-04-17
  The problem is that market exchange rates are largely determined by the supply and demand for internationally traded goods and services, such as the Galaxy phones or international banking services, while what a sum of money can buy in a particular country is determined by the prices of all goods and services, including those that are not internationally traded, such as eating out or taking a taxi.
• 蛋卷强

  2017-04-16
  Once poor people are persuaded that their poverty is their own fault, that whoever has made a lot of money must deserve it and that they too could become rich if they tried hard enough, life becomes easier for the rich. The poor, often against their own interests, begin to demand fewer redistributive taxes, less welfare spending, less regulation on business and fewer worker rights.
• 蛋卷强

  2017-04-13
  Following the Great Depression, the limits of laissez-faire capitalism came to be widely accepted. It was agreed that the government should take an active role to deal with the failings of unregulated markets. At the same time, the success in wartime planning during the Second World War diminished scepticism about the feasibility of government intervention. Electoral successes by parties of the left in many European countries, thanks to their key role in fighting fascism, led to the expansion of the welfare state and greater labour rights.
• LeeOoNaaAaaa

  2021-07-05
  跟大多数经济学家不同，马克思和他的一些追随者注意到了工作本身的意义。他们认为工作不只是为了赚钱消费而不得不忍受的负效用。他相信，工作能够让人类发挥他们与生俱来的创造力。他批评了资本主义企业的等级结构，认为它阻止了这种创造力的发挥。他强调，分工越细工作内容就越重复，这样的工作会扼杀人性，乏味到令人头脑麻木。有意思的是，亚当·斯密在称赞劳动分工对生产具有正面影响的同时，也在担心这种碎片化的工作会对工人造成负面影响。
• justice

  2021-01-08
  历史还迫使我们质疑一些理所当然的假设。一旦你知道今天不能买卖的许多东西，比如人（奴隶）、童工劳动、政府官职，在过去是可以买卖的，你就不会认为“自由市场”的边界是由某个永恒的科学定律划出来的，进而认为它可以重新界定。当你知道，发达资本主义经济体增长最快的20世纪50年代到70年代，管制多税负重，你就会立刻怀疑“减税和减少管制才能促进增长”的正确性了。历史能够凸显经济理论的局限。生活往往比小说还离奇，历史上有许多成功的经济经验（国家、公司、个人，各个层面都有），任何单一的经济理论都没法对其提供令人满意的解释。比如，如果你只读《经济学人》《华尔街日报》，你只会听到新加坡的自由贸易政策以及它对国外投资的欢迎。你可能会因此认为，新加坡的经济成功，证明了自由贸易和自由市场最有助于经济增长。但如果你听说，新加坡几乎所有的土地都是政府的，85%的住宅都是由建屋发展局提供，国家产出中22%来自国有企业（而世界平均水平是10%左右），你就会怀疑之前的结论了。没有哪一个学派一一不管是新古典，马克思主义还是凯恩斯一一的经济理论可以解释新加坡这种自由市场和社会主义的成功组合。像这样的例子会让你对经济理论的威力有了更多的怀疑，在得出政策结论时更加谨慎。最后一点也很重要。我们之所以读史，是因为道德责任一我们应该尽量避免拿民众做“活体实验”。从前社会主义阵营的中央计划（以及后来该阵营中俄罗斯等国的“大爆炸”式改革，回归资本主义），到20世纪30年代大萧条时期后大多数欧洲国家的“紧