Who could be a "Democratic Reagan?"

[Makemakean]

*Jerry Brown kicks down a door brandishing the Laffer Curve graph*

The Laffer curve really is one of those things that I find it really difficult to imagine how it ever was controversial or subject to debate. If anything it seems something of an economic truism. If you put the tax rate at 0%, then the revenue collected is obviousy going to be 0. If you put the tax rate at 100%, then the revenue collected is obviously going to be 0.

Assume that the rate of revenue collected will be close to continuous, apply the extreme value theorem, and boom, there you have it. Any economist, regardless of what school they adhere to, who argues against you, is plainly mathematically illiterate and can be dismissed as easily as you would dismiss a fellow telling you that sometimes 2+2=5.

 

[Kimkatya]

The Laffer curve really is one of those things that I find it really difficult to imagine how it ever was controversial or subject to debate. If anything it seems something of an economic truism. If you put the tax rate at 0%, then the revenue collected is obviousy going to be 0. If you put the tax rate at 100%, then the revenue collected is obviously going to be 0.

Assume that the rate of revenue collected will be close to continuous, apply the extreme value theorem, and boom, there you have it. Any economist, regardless of what school they adhere to, who argues against you, is plainly mathematically illiterate and can be dismissed as easily as you would dismiss a fellow telling you that sometimes 2+2=5.

this is much funnier to read if you imagine this:
Say this thread is a room, and Time Enough makes that joke. You then hear a rumble from above, before hearing someone scrambling down the stairs. The door is broken down, and in comes Makemakean, talking about economics.

 

[Makemakean]

this is much funnier to read if you imagine this:
Say this thread is a room, and Time Enough makes that joke. You then hear a rumble from above, before hearing someone scrambling down the stairs. The door is broken down, and in comes Makemakean, talking about economics.

I'm not an economist.

I'm a mathematician and a physicist.

That's what my degrees are in.

I certainly would not rule out that I make hillariously wrong statements regarding economics, just as I would not expect an economist to not make hillariously wrong statements about physics or mathematics.

But I try to be as intellectually honest as I can.

And I look at the Laffer Curve and go... "Yeah... your point is...?"

 

[Kimkatya]

I'm not an economist.

I'm a mathematician and a physicist.

That's what my degrees are in.

I certainly would not rule out that I make hillariously wrong statements regarding economics, just as I would not expect an economist to not make hillariously wrong statements about physics or mathematics.

But I try to be as intellectually honest as I can.

And I look at the Laffer Curve and go... "Yeah... your point is...?"

i honestly didn't intend to offend, apologies if i did

 

[Makemakean]

i honestly didn't intend to offend, apologies if i did

Oh, you certainly didn't offend!

I just felt a bit like "Did I say something stupid? Probably should make a statement to the effect of 'Sorry if I did, but I'm just trying to say how I feel about things'..."

 

[Makemakean]

Makemakean lives in a beautiful Platonic world of spherical cows and we should never attempt to bring him down to the grimy less-quantifiable reality the rest of us have to live in.

You mock me, sir, but if you had seen the spherical cows that I have seen, you too would kneel in awe and worship.

 

[Steve Brinson]

The Laffer curve really is one of those things that I find it really difficult to imagine how it ever was controversial or subject to debate. If anything it seems something of an economic truism. If you put the tax rate at 0%, then the revenue collected is obviousy going to be 0. If you put the tax rate at 100%, then the revenue collected is obviously going to be 0.

Assume that the rate of revenue collected will be close to continuous, apply the extreme value theorem, and boom, there you have it. Any economist, regardless of what school they adhere to, who argues against you, is plainly mathematically illiterate and can be dismissed as easily as you would dismiss a fellow telling you that sometimes 2+2=5.

I mean, nobody’s arguing that the Laffer curve isn’t a real phenomenon - it’s just that talking about it assumes that there’s some kind of consensus on where the peak is and what the slopes look like and how much the Laffer curve actually matters relative to other day-to-day phenomena. Certainly if people talked about “well, the Reaganites assumed that ‘70s America was on the right-hand slope and needed to go to the left, and the Democrats assumed that the peak was well to the right of where the American economy was”, that would be one thing, but it probably hurts that the curve is associated with Laffer himself.

 

[Nofix]

You mock me, sir, but if you had seen the spherical cows that I have seen, you too would kneel in awe and worship.

This has nothing to do with the proceeding conversation, but I just realized I'm surprised there haven't been many spherical cows in video games. Be it action platformers like Mario, or JRPGs, or some kind of satirical, economics-based, critically acclaimed but low selling indie game. It seems like the kind of funny phrase that someone would adapt to the medium, even without any knowledge of economics or engineering or physics or whatever.

 

[Luke_Starkiller]

"You know who ELSE is a spherical cow?"

 

[Roger II]

I certainly would not rule out the possibility of the Democratic Party adopting a position reasonably reminicent of the Australian Labor Party in the 1980s. That could make for a somewhat interesting timeline if handled correctly, say, I dunno, have Ford win in 1976, and then the Democrats win in a massive landslide in 1980, and, err-... Well, I leave the rest up to you.

Now, the conversation that you are quoting from took place three months ago, so forgive me if my memory is a bit foggy on the details, but the issue I was trying to address was notion that the shift in a more monetarist/neoliberal/etc. direction politically in the United States in the 80s could be reduced down to the tremendous personal popularity of Ronald Reagan, and general public dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter. My point was that Reagan was merely riding a wave that was already there, he did not bring about the wave, nor did Jimmy Carter in as far as that is concerned. And my point was further that what with this being a global trend, it did not make sense to ascribe it either to white backlash against the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s.

But sure, it is perfectly possible for the Democrats to be the ones to establish the new monetarist consensus.

My apologies for dragging this out of the dust; I saw the thread had been revived and didn't see how old it was. I think you're basically right tbh and I think a lot of the confusion comes down to other people not doing a great job picking apart the global monetarist wave from the US backlashes against civil rights and social liberalism given that TTL they got pulled into one party.

 

[Roger II]

This also goes the otehr way tbh-it's depressingly easy to imagine a TL where for *reasons* monetarism doesn't become a global consensus but there's still a hard-right backlash on everything but federal spending and government intervention in the 70s and 80s. ALthough I did read an article this weekend about how the polarization on abortion largely preceded Roe and had more to do with trying to poach Catholics from the democratic coalition and tie being pro-abortion to feminism/Women's Lib (and it wasn't until the 60s that being pro-abortion was as big a deal for *all* feminists.