I have just read someone’s medium regarding the pathetic increase of US labour wages and the fail of US capitalism. I won’t argue about the pathetic percentage, nor will I argue about winners-take-all mechanism. Yet, comparing to the Medieval peasants (that the author keeps claiming) whose expected life-span are only a mere 30’s, most of the time are starving, assets and live are not protected by laws, and for sure who cannot enjoy ranting via Medium and any other social network, or comparing to our grandparents 50 years ago, the time when people are hard to access and analyse data and discover that their wages seem decreasing, we are good enough.
No, I never mean to say that US and other capitalist society are free from any kind of problems and toughness. Indeed they share similar problem with other types of societies running on alternate doctrines. The difference is never about whether or not a specific society operating on a specific ideal are free of challenges and people can have their lives improved every single second. The difference is not even about equality of chance. It is about the opportunity cost to take for changes.
Medieval lords will never allow you to challenge his grabs on his asset, or, if you dare to challenge, you will have to be brave and strong and cunning enough to face his armies leading by his champion. Our grandparents need to go to library and sit there for the entire day to find the relevant data and draw the chart on pencil with ruler, and calculate for results on hand or at best by slide rule. And, trust me, no matter the extreme right or the extreme left societies, none will allow you to write anything about “labour wages are stalling for decades and there must be something wrong about the way we operate our economy”. Perhaps you are brave enough to write, but your heads and hands may be sent to the 4 corners of the country before you can publish. Oh, and the pure planned economy will simply allow no flexibility: you won’t dare you produce too much steel and too less titanium alloy, and hence force your military aircraft use steel instead of titanium alloy, as is the case of MiG-25 during Soviet era, though, I wonder, most so-called economists can still remember this word: Soviet.
What amuses me most is that, it is through Economics 101 I first know about the term“opportunity cost”, and yet how few economists really teach in details about it, or, even, really mention it. According to my unreliable and feeble memory, my high-school teacher only mentioned this term twice in his 1minute skimming through. I chose mechanical engineering during my college year, and yet still took economics as electives. Both 101 and 102 combining together, I could only recall the professor talking about it for less than 2 minutes.
But this is still not the biggest amusement, the biggest one came when I read works about economics just not very long ago. The entire Austrian school is actually built on the illustration and application of opportunity cost. Ok, I am an amateur, and again according to my unreliable and feeble memory, this is the school that can really explain economic cycle, at least the closest approximation. Now my pea-sized brain will simply ask: shouldn’t our economics, and economists, talk more about opportunity cost, apply them on mathematical models, and attempt to solve some, even just one or two, social problems, instead of making rhetoric statements accusing any kind of -isms by not even telling us the simple-minded any other available alternatives off the shelf?
Enough ranting. I believe you guys won’t mind, because, after all, I am only a mere and humble civilian, not the economists.
David Chan
dtwchan@yahoo.com
