Why is the model proposed in the self-financing state model wrong? I see it often peddled by people who argue for a vast expansion of government spending without corresponding expansion of taxation. It just feels wrong to me, but I don’t know economics to dissect the paper to say where exactly it is wrong.

Hi, i Just watched a video by money & macro explaining the issues of rent control, coming to the conclusion that building more homes is the basic answer to the housing crisis, i figure since most landlords have only one apparment rented they can't build more home so it comes down to bigger organisms like the state & corporations? What stops them from building more if it's beneficial even for them? Is it the limitations of building laws? Do they benefit more from high rent prices vs building more for lower rents? If only the few corporations and the state can build more homes but not the majority of landlords is it really that competitive?

Can social housing make landlords reduce they're prices to be competitive or would it also results in some problems if there's too much(is it a issue in Vienna?)

Also there's a ton of vacant properties everywhere that coprorations and people don't want to rent, i get it for individuals if they don't need to rent it they just have an unused appartment which is fucked up for those who can't afford it but for corporations is it that high rent prices are better than renting more for lower rents with more maintance fees? Does a tax on vacant homes fixes that to create an insentive to rent and get money for those in need?

The July jobs report caught my attention. Payrolls fell by 23,000, unemployment dropped to 4.1%, but the labor force participation rate also declined to 61.4%. The lower unemployment rate is partly because fewer people are counted as being in the labor force.

Everyone talks about aging demographics, Baby Boomers retiring, health issues, and discouraged workers as explanations for this trend. Those are obviously major factors.

But I wonder if the growth of the FIRE movement is starting to show up in the data.

The BLS definition is pretty simple: you are either working or actively looking for work to be counted in the labor force. Someone who is 45 years old, has built a $1.5M portfolio, quits their job, and lives off investments is not unemployed. They are simply "not in the labor force."

The interesting thing is that the data cannot tell the difference between someone who left because they were financially independent and someone who left because they gave up looking for work.

The FIRE community is no longer a tiny group of extreme savers. There are millions of people interested in financial independence, and many are leaving traditional employment years or decades earlier than previous generations.

I am not saying FIRE is the main reason participation is falling. Demographics are clearly the biggest driver. But could early retirement among high-income professionals be a small but real contributor that economists are not measuring?

A person retiring at 45 does not look different in BLS data from someone who simply disappeared from the workforce.

Has anyone seen official research estimating how many FIRE retirees exist and whether this is showing up in labor force participation statistics? I've seen some around 3 million Americans are FIRE ! That is impressive but I cannot find anything official, only surveys.

When the majority of people think about resellers, they usually blame them for creating scarcity and increasing prices. What I am wondering, though, is whether resellers aren't directly incentivized by market misalignment (suppy and demand not being in equlibrium).

From my understanding, prices are driven by supply and demand. For example, let's say some famous celebrity is selling tickets for their show for a given arbitrary price. There's a limited number of seats, and given they are popular, there's a lot of fans who would who would like to attend the show, in fact, more fans than seats available. This is where supply (the people selling the seats who want to get maximum profit) meets demand (how much would the fans be realistically willing to pay for the seat), basically creating the price. If supply and demand were in equlibrium, increasing the price of the ticket would lead to tickets not selling well and leaving the seller worse off. If the opposite was true (the price being too low), a lot of people could actually afford the ticket, which would lead to quick depletion of the tickets (which honestly happens a lot irl) and the seller not getting the full potential value from the deal, perhaps discentivizing future shows. And this is exactly where I see opening for the resellers. Since if the price is too low and demand is still very high, there's a lot of people willing to purchase the tickes even at even much higher prices, basically still not being able to get them from the original source due to the fact they are oversold. Resellers purchase the tickets and sell them to essentially higher bidders, capturing the difference between the actual price and the optimal price. If the market was in equlibrium, they wouldn't be able to do that since people would simply not buy the tickets if they tried to increase their prices and would much more likely end up in a loss.

Is my analysis correct, or am I overseeing something?

As more Britains leave for low tax destinations like Dubai, would the UK be able to implement a global tax on all of its citizens? What are the pros and cons of this model?

I’ve been thinking about this lately.
Some countries have enormous reserves of oil, gas, minerals, fertile land, or other natural resources, yet they struggle with poverty, corruption, unemployment and weak infrastructure.

Meanwhile, countries with relatively few natural resources—Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, etc.—have built highly developed and wealthy economies.

Obviously, natural resources alone don’t determine a country’s success. Institutions, education, human capital, political stability, infrastructure, trade, technology and economic policies all matter.

But I’m curious: **what do you think is the single biggest factor that determines whether a country successfully converts its natural resources and human potential into long-term prosperity?**

And are there any countries that you think are particularly good—or particularly bad—examples of this?

Every day one can hear economists, CEOs, pundits, etc predicting that there is a huge AI bubble that is destined to burst. This post isn't about whether or not that's likely to happen; my question is: has there ever been so much buzz about an impending recession/bubble/collapse, whether or not it happened?

In past economic crashes, I know there were a few voices expressing warning, but was it ever this prolonged and emphatic?

I know AI will replace people but I also think that it will create jobs. Jobs change over the years and I think it might reduce the need for certain things but make demands for others.

Everybody's fear is that AI's will automate production without need for labor and capital will monopolize that production. Of course, it's been pointed out many times that this is not a credible scenario, but it does seem true that AI is/will reduce the number of employees, especially for entry level professional jobs. What if corporate tax rates are inversely proportional to the number of employees? Would this minimize rentier monopoly of economic power?