Month: November 2012

by Doctor Science

Why can’t self-proclaimed capitalist, free-market businesspeople recognize the law of supply and demand? In particular, if you can’t find appropriately-skilled employees when you offer salary $S, Adam Smith says you should try offering $S+n. If that doesn’t work, you offer $S+2n. The cost of labor isn’t something the employer decides ahead of time, it’s determined by the free-market value of the labor needed to do the job.

But per links from Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice and her commenters, many employers seem to think that if they can’t find employees willing to do a job at a particular wage, it *must* be because there’s a lack of appropriately-skilled workers. (I’ve talked about this before, with regard to farm labor specifically.)

What are they teaching them in business school? And what are they teaching them in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and other sources of continuing business education?

Rembrandt, The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. 1637.

Read more

by liberal japonicus

Every cloud has a silver lining. From a Dem point of view, having Romney as a candidate may have been all silver lining, but it is hard to imagine the tiniest glimmer from the Republican side, as this Amy Davidson New Yorker piece makes perfectly clear. Of course, if you are a heighten the contradictions kind of person, you might argue that Romney's candidacy was the best thing to happen to the US since Watergate. Or Vietnam. Or maybe even the Civil War. (in fact, if you look at things that way, US history tends to be full of silver linings)

But I'm not one of those folks, so for the nation, I think this is great

One of the quirkiest rituals of the presidential election—the straw poll of Republican voters in Ames, Iowa—is obsolete and should be eliminated, Iowa's GOP governor says.

"I think the straw poll has outlived its usefulness," Gov. Terry Branstad said in an interview about the political jamboree. "It has been a great fundraiser for the party, but I think its days are over."

While everyone has concentrated on the ideas that the Republicans need to change or revise, all that talk is about the basic principles, and functionalist that I am, if the structure of how they select a candidate doesn't change, I don't see those basic principles changing that much. It also seems the if progressives want more of a voice, they are going to have to argue for similar changes as well, though after Obama's victory, it's would be the Republicans that will do the heavy lifting for changing any system. I'm wondering what everyone thinks should be done to change the way we nominate a candidate and how it would actually happen. The wikipedia article gives a dizzying array of proposals, but how these go from drawing board to implementation, I have no idea.

Is it merely because of considerations of efficiency and state law that (most?) Repub and Dem primaries are on the same day? I'm thinking that, absent that, and given the Republican predilictions, I wouldn't be surprised if they would change their system to a regional one, and have the first region be all the states of the former Confederacy…

I'm sure many of you saw this, but I am reminded of the  Iowa Nice video  and I have put it (censored version, slightly NSFW) below the fold.

Read more

by Doctor Science

The 2012 Presidential campaign can be explained with a single image:

Huh? you say: that looks almost exactly like the final result:

Yes. And yet, that first map is based on predictions made by David Rothschild and Chris Wilson at Yahoo’s The Signal blog, in February.

Read more

via liberal japonicus

Sound interesting? Well, it's below the fold.

Read more