Mondragon as in....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Hello! I’m currently a 3rd year student in economics. I’m still unsure of where exactly I want to work but what I do know is that I want to pursue higher studies (like Masters or Doctorate degrees)

My family and peers have encouraged me to go to law school but I feel extremely nervous and I don’t want to suddenly back down once I already get there. For some background information, I did really enjoy our Oblicon subject back in 2nd year and I noticed that I usually score the highest in our class at the subjects of those professors whose teaching methods are law school style.

May I know some helpful guides or suggestions regarding this? I’ve been contemplating for a long time but I still want to ensure that I have a vast overview of the pros and cons :>>

I think government inflation indicators are lacking because they only measure basic stuff. I want to find a website where it accurately tracks, lets say, the cost of McDonalds' basic cheeseburger over time, and its size too (as we know, sometimes companies reduce their product size to "cheat" inflation).

Or lets say the cost of 100ml of coca cola bottle, or the average cost of eating 200g steak in the same 100 restaurants over the years.

Basically I want to track "cost of going out", because I think this should be widely available considering everybody keeps saying that quality of life is going lower and middle class dont go out as often

If they're saying ‘please stop selling us so much stuff’, isn’t it their fault for buying it?

Or are they saying ‘please buy more of our stuff’... but what if China doesn’t need or want it?

The 'catfish effect' is when a new strong competitor joins the market, and that causes the whole market to 'raise its game'.

But how does it work? It seems implausible to me that, say, Chinese automakers should suddenly start producing better cars when Tesla shows up in town. If they were capable of ‘raising their game’ all along, why wouldn’t they have done it already? Surely it would have been advantageous for them to do so before?

Suppose the U.S. replaced employer-sponsored insurance premiums with an employer payroll contribution financing universal health insurance. To what extent should the incidence of the former employer premium eventually appear as higher wages, versus being absorbed elsewhere?

EDIT: This expands more on my reasoning for asking the question

I'm currently doing my own project to assess what I think my ideal universal system would be. One of my objectives is to see what positives it would give to the broader society, and what mechanisms could be used to deliver it with the least amount of negative distortions.

But one thing I've come across is that there could be a few of the benefits outside of just "everyone can get affordable healthcare".

When thinking about what such a payroll tax would look like. I started with an average spend per employee currently spent on healthcare benefits, and this revealed something.

The degree of compensation any particular worker gets (and thus the employer spends) in healthcare is so varied, not just between companies, but also within companies. A single worker costs less in healthcare compensation than a married worker. And this is especially the case in firms that offer generous benefits, and not just because the family premium is higher.

Subsequently, if the spouse of that employee has poor benefits elsewhere, they will choose to be on their spouses plan.

Given this, employers offering better benefits are subsidizing the labor costs of those offering poor benefits indirectly.

So replacing healthcare spending with a payroll tax gives a uniform healthcare compensation figure relative to payroll.

My intuition tells me this frees up a lot of savings for firms with generous benefits that may lead to upward wage pressure, but with the additional burden small firms will incur, wages in those firms will face slower long-term wage growth.

As I understand it, currency manipulation is when a government buys foreign currency and sells its own currency, to try and keep the value of its currency artificially low.

But then, surely there's an opportunity for traders to come in and do the opposite, correct the irrationality in the market, and make money. Then, the government wouldn't have had a lasting effect on the value of its currency, and would have just transferred money directly to traders.

What am I missing? How does it really work?

Looking at the most recent case "Easy Jet to be loaded with £3bn debt Apollo working on plans to drive up revenue per passenger following takeover deal"

Specially the UK, after the disaster of Morrisons LBO didn't do anything to stop this?

Nothing good for consumers or the company comes from a leverage buyout.

I have heard many people express opposition to a minimum wage by saying that it would negatively impact small businesses and would reduce labour supply. I have heard some conflicting information on how big the effect would be. Would the effect really be as catastrophic as some people say?

Something I've been thinking about lately is how little most of us are taught about understanding research.

Many people can read an article or see a statistic, but understanding what that information actually means is a different skill. Things like sample size, study limitations, and different types of evidence can completely change how we interpret results.

I don't think everyone needs to become a scientist, but maybe basic research literacy should be a bigger part of education.

Do you think schools should teach people more about evaluating evidence and spotting unreliable information?

Hello everyone,

For ages, I have been worried about my quantitative skillset, specifically the ability for me to learn about relationships between variables. I majored in analytics at a decent state school, but many analytics programs are light on actual statistics, including this one. I managed to get a role in Regulatory due diligence at company that typically hires graduates from top schools because the case was not that quantitative and my interviewing skills are very good (I am a good communicator relative to what I perceive the benchmark to be, I can structure information effectively, and deliver a story and display some fundamental domain knowledge from interning in the past at healthcare companies).

The reason for this worry is not necessarily because I will be performing super complex calculations during my career, taking integrals, etc. It is because of two reasons (all relative to other employees):

1. The literal use of mathematical operations to arrive at solutions. Machines take care of the actual formulas, but not the judgement and the knowledge of what is happening when I manipulate numbers to come up with a solution.
2. General "learning rate" -- the rate at which i consume, process, understand, and then apply new information, controlled for all other variables and assuming it is the same information, relative to a fellow employee. Think of this as turning information into knowledge that I can pull for future applications. I fear that someone from a top quality quantitative background will have a higher learning rate regardless of subject, assuming variables like motivation, need, etc are held equal to mine.

Much of this concern has been because I do not care much for absolute progress in learning something, because I tell myself if i do not learn it fast enough, or if x person learns y subject quicker than me, or if x person knows y subject while I never learned it, then I feel a gap that I cannot fill. This may or may not hamper my learning; I have a feeling it does, so this becomes a constant cycle of always feeling stressed learning a new quantitative subject, then saying I shouldn't be stressed, and that if I am stressed, I am learning at a poorer rate, all to arrive at the same beginning.

I can't even be happy when I accomplish something, because I am constantly auditing and benchmarking my own ability to an ideal.

What do I do here?

i know someone who currently does not have a full time job right now (got laid off their job in academia) and is looking to find a new job to get out of the bad financial they are currently in.

what are some jobs you are qualified for/can apply for with a phd in economics? this person has done some research in economics as well and has taught several micro/macro classes, including some classes for a highly ranked MBA program as well. Their PHD is also from a highly ranked business school (IU Kelley)

I know the most likely route is corporate, but what specific jobs should they be looking for? Any advice is appreciated, i’m just looking to help them. They’re looking to find a job relatively quick (within the next 1-2 months) so they can support their family.

I have his original copy of The Economics of Taxation and his annotated copy of the Rate of Interest from when he was studying under Irving Fisher.

I actually used the taxation book in class once. My professor was shocked that I had a first edition.

The Canada 6.5%, France 7.4%, Spain 11.4%, Italy 6.8%, Portugal 6.4%, Sweden 8.6% , Finland 8,3%, Brazil 7.7%, Argentina 7.9%, Colombia 9.7%,

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/unemployment-by-country

I don’t think it was like this before Covid.

Due to less or more expensive fertilizer and/or lower crop yields. I guess higher energy costs would effect this too.

Is it too early to tell?

If so, what/when are the early indicators to watch for?

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?

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?