The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill & Anthony Myatt & Tony Myatt

Author:Rod Hill & Anthony Myatt & Tony Myatt [Myatt, Rod Hill, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Textbook bias, Theory, Reference, Critical thinking, Economics, Microeconomics, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781842779385
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2010-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

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on $14,000 Hermès Kelly alligator handbags would be replaced by increased

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spending by lower-income families on real necessities. It would also encourage xternalities

people to engage in untaxed consumption: working less to spend more leisure time with friends and family, going for a walk or reading a library book. All of these activities have been reduced by the wasteful consumption arms race.

Frank asks ‘If this tax is such a great idea, why don’t we already have one?’

(ibid.: 225). He attributes this to the widespread, and false, belief that imposing higher tax rates on the rich will cripple the economy. He’s not optimistic about such a policy actually being adopted when political programmes apparently have to be explained in ten-second sound bites.

Other forms of collective action can also help to address these consumption externalities. If spending to keep up with the Joneses leads people to work excessively long hours, increases in legislated minimum holidays could help.

Business owners, however, have an interest in promoting the cycle of work-and-spend. As the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously put it:

‘Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.’ In the European Union, where social democratic parties have long been strong and unions organize a large part of the labour force, people are entitled to a minimum of four weeks of paid leave per year, although some countries legislate five or six weeks (European Union 1993). In the United States, in contrast, where unions are weak and the very wealthy have disproportionate power, people are entitled to no weeks of paid leave, and about a quarter of the workforce has no paid holidays of any kind (Ray and Schmitt 2007).

Questions for your professor: Do consumption externalities

exist? If so, why doesn’t the textbook mention them?

Air pollution

‘Unfortunately, the will of our elected officials to curb air pollution and the indifference of corporate polluters to the silent cumulative violence they inflict on our people through air pollution persists.’ Ralph Nader (2004b: 168) The burning of fossil fuels creates carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and fine particulate matter. Breathing these invisible pollutants and other pollutants that form from them (such as ozone) damages the interior of the lungs and directly influences respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses and lung cancers (Davis 2002: 70). While the thick smog in big Chinese cities gets a lot of attention, even the much lower levels of particulates (achieved through public pressure) in the world’s wealthiest countries are still killing substantial numbers of people and causing breathing problems, such as asthma, for many more. About two million people die prematurely every year from the 159

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