I had to hurry up and use this phrase as my headline before the Lake Superior State University puts it on their banned words/ phrases list for 2010: http://www.neatorama.com/2010/01/04/banned-words-of-2010/
Actually, I am reading a book about economics that I know will blow my mind. Well, it already has. “Intellectuals and Society” was written by Thomas Sowell, an African-American professor of economics at Stanford. If we had to elect just any anonymous black guy from the academic realm as POTUS (as some people did), why couldn’t it have been this guy?
The tidbit I’m chewing currently asks the question: Why do we assign emotional-drama labels to economic factors such as price? Market determines price, based on the interaction between supply and demand.
Instead, we let our intellectuals (he already covers in Chapter One the difference between intellect and wisdom) attribute human characteristics to a scientific fact like price. How can a price be greedy? Or how can a wage be deemed unfair, when it’s simply the price of labor in a market? If we have a low supply of nurses compared to the demand for them, they can require a pretty nice price for their labor (wage). Likewise, if we have a lot of people (high supply) who choose to pick cotton (probably driven by attained skill set), the wage would be pretty low.
The unfortunate thing is the labels STICK and become part of the public debate with no one questioning the underlying practice.
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Dr Sowell is a true national treasure.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read this book, but read his columns voraciously. I am sure it will enlighten and entertain you.