How much of this eruption is scene-setting, prepareing for the rise in crime that will follow the end of the boom. And how much of an indicator can we surmise from this good news about wage growth? Like maybe this is a new way(old way?) to forecast a top.
I also wonder how much Clinton's pathetic need for awe-struck desire will strengthen the forces who proclaim the pathology of the poor. His actions haunt the pronouncements of these whores.
I notice too, that this article never really lets you compare apples with apples. Where are the specific figures for white men?
p
At 10:07 PM 2/5/99 -0500, you wrote:
>
>> A sustained sub-5% unemployment rate and a
>>significant hike in the minimum wage are the main reasons
>
>Doug, I don't think the first is the reason as much as the thing that
>itself needs to be explained. (As for the min wage hike, I understood it to
>be part and parcel of welfare reform, i.e., in order to force people to
>work the min wage simply had to be increased minimally while welfare was
>cut back.)
>
>At any rate, as the WSJ quotes some expert today, the US boom is not
>inspite of but because of the world wide slump: speculative capital flight
>is driving overconsumptionism from equity inflation; credit terms are
>eased, resulting in debt driven investment (in 1998, US absorbed more than
>4x the foreign capital it did 1994); commodity prices are depressed,
>boosting profitability. Moreover the stock market has been driven higher by
>centralisations and buy backs and other acts of financial sabotage. There
>is no inherent strength to the US economy; it's a bubble economy that was
>only blown bigger by Big Al's last rate cuts. But most importantly from a
>Marxian point of view, that is from the pt of view of the global
>proletariat, the capitalist system has entered a general crisis in which no
>*general* advancement is possible.
>
>At any rate, about this Murray thing, I guess what I am saying is that the
>book is a failed scientific project: it does not show that g accounts for
>much of the inequality in income; it does not rigourously prove that
>inherited cognitive ability is more important than SES in accounting for
>social outcomes; it does not prove that g is anything more than a
>statistical artefact; it does not provide a careful refutation of those
>geneticists and biologists who think there is no where sufficient evidence
>to claim as even plausible deep racial differences in cogntive ability (and
>we have a right to maintain a very high burden of proof in this area).
>
>The point of the book is simply to counsel equanimity in the face of ever
>higher levels of unemployment and eviseration of the Keynesian welfare
>state. The point of Murray's editorial is that his mightly AEI supporters
>still need him and his racism and will need him even more in the next
>recession, i.e., some sort of ideological defense against mass
>unemployment, now only hidden by ever higher incarceration rates. Murray is
>not going away because unemployment, recessions, the Democrats and the
>Republicans and capitalism are not going away. The only thing about to
>disappear is the American oasis.
>
>rakesh
>
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