creativesoul wrote:if wealth is equivalent to the amount of goods and services that are available in the marketplace, then what do you call the financial quantification of one's property when rendered in monetary terms?
That's the stuff that people can buy more of as a society becomes wealthier.
It's also the result of producing goods (these things being the goods which are neither destroyed nor discarded on consumption).
Incomes are a source of wealth as well - in fact they are what that wealth is made out of.
You can describe that wealth as stored or surplus income if you like.
Not that any of this matters. Your if statement is false because that isn't an accurate paraphrasing of "Wealthier" or "able".
If I build a house for a horse upon shaky foundations, I have created an unstable stable. This does not contradict the law of non-contradiciton because stable and stable and stable are being two different things with one word. You seem to be having difficulty with this idea, wealth is one example, progress another.
creativesoul wrote:
I argued that there were once good paying employment opportunities for a much larger swathe of American citizens(manufacturing and building trades in particular). That is true, irrefutably so. That particular swathe of Americans voted overwhelmingly for Trump. I am in the middle of explaining how we've gotten where we are in today's America(Trump is the president elect).
You then charged me with trying to retain low value-added work at a high pay, and then subsequently inferred from that that there is a profound failure in my understanding the concept of productivity and it's role in economic growth. That charge was both, based on your interpretation of the facts and false. That's the second time I've let you know.
You argued other things other than the supposedly "irrefutably true" claim that there used to be a golden age for white people of low education (those are I understand the people whose swathes of votes carried the election). You claimed for instance that Mexican immigrants have caused "quantifiable harm to American workers and their families. American workers would have those jobs." As I have mentioned, there are a shit ton of academic studies out there looking for this quantitiy - it is nowhere to be seen.
You also argued that "American workers would have more spendable income and the economy would be more robust as a result of more money being in the hands of more Americans.". The work you describe is low value-add work. One way to know this is so is to look at whether it can be done by low skilled workers cheaply. If so, then little of the value of the end product results from the guy on the production line with the spanner, more comes from the designers of whatever product this may be, or for that matter the designer of the manufacturing process used.
In that same quote you made a claim that "the economy would be more robust as a result of more money being in the hands of more Americans". That 's a fairly straight forward claim I think.
So let's consider an opposite idea that has been widely sold. The claim of some rabid right wingers was in the 80s (and in your country I understand still actually is!) that reducing taxes give entrepreneurs so much extra vigour that they create millions of jobs and boost the economy to such an extent that the state takes in more taxes than it has forgone through the cut. Technically, in some extreme cases that has been known work in a sense, but we all know it's Magical Money Tree bollocks on the whole - and this has been borne out by many studies, some are bold enough to argue that the Laffer Curve is entirely fictive.
The same is true of your claim. The boost to purchasing power for a portion of consumers is outweighed by the rising costs imposed on consumers and the redundancies through cost cutting pushed further down the supply chain. This is known.
Trump fans don't like experts telling them stuff they don't want to know, every expert who tells them they will have to learn new skills because the old ones aren't valuable enough is deemed to be dishonest. The true believers who remain convinced that tax cuts pay for themselves are similarly discriminating. Neither is better or worse than the other, you are all just picking something that agrees with your prejudice because that's the ultimate meaning of "common sense".
Now I'm not a credentialed economist, I'm just a guy who, well, reads
The Economist and things like that. But they use experts to write that stuff. And experts have this thing they do where they don't rely too much on common sense - they like to look for actual evidence. I admit, prior to actually taking an interest in such stuff, I also assumed that if we protect our companies from low cost foreign competition it would make us collectively richer, and that immigration to the rich world from the poor is a sort of charity that we are morally obliged to provide in spite of it driving down wages. It came as quite a surprise to learn these things which seemed so commonly sensible are myths.
I suppose therefore it's true that "Identifying and removing falsehood from one's thought/belief system is always great for those who are capable of doing so." It's just a shame that you started a big old thread about "being able to set aside one's own thought/belief on matters" when you have no intention of doing any such thing.