With job competition now in India/China..are our "good economic" days over?

[Gustaf]

US workers get paid more than Chinese ones because they're more productive. As Chinese productivity goes up, so will their wages. Thus, there will be no problem. That, at least, is the simple and short version.

Certain sectors can be disproportionately hurt of course.

[Gustaf]

US workers get paid more than Chinese ones because they're more productive. As Chinese productivity goes up, so will their wages. Thus, there will be no problem. That, at least, is the simple and short version.

Certain sectors can be disproportionately hurt of course.

Is productivity the only variable in determining real wages or is it even the largest variable?  Ideally, it would be....people should get what they pay for....but why get a $900 plasma screen TV when a $50 14 year old 27inch TV at the pawn shop does the job?

Not everywhere always, but, basically, yeah, productivity determines real wages.

As for why people buy plasma screen TVs, I wouldn't know, I never bought a tv in my life.

[Gustaf]

Wrong, Gustaf. Productivity only determines wages once there is a macro-economic environment in which there is demand for the production.  Which is why capitalism doesn't work.

I am glad to hear that our beloved opebo is capable of solving millions of interconnected input-output functions simultaneously and instantaneously in order to bring about a functional command economy that even remotely resembles our current macroeconomic environment. When are you going to be crowned as the greatest mathematician/economist of all-time?

'Command economy'?  No one suggested such a thing, p.

For any market, there are only two options known to mankind: free markets or markets with government intervention. You clearly have more confidence in the latter and feel that markets should be completely controlled by government, but do you realize what that implies mathematically?

Eh. I'd rather say that there are free markets with substantial government intervention and planned markets with only limited freedom.

I don't know of any market devoid of government intervention. And not even planned economies, as far as I know, are completely without some market mechanisms.

Of course, there is a dividing line between market economies like those of the West and planned economies like those of the old Soviet bloc. And it's also true that an economy that implemented Opebo's various fantasies would die very, very quickly.