Megan actually wrote the following;
Once again, Megan demonstrates that you should learn what jargon means before attempting to use it in your own work.
But hey, at least she found a way to not feel guilty about redoing her kitchen.
The positional competition may not be doing you any good directly, but if it raises national GDP, it will indirectly help you, and everyone else in the country. If you don't want to conspicuously consume just to aggrandize yourself, you should carefully consider whether you don't owe at least it to your neighbors to install the new granite countertops.I'd explain, or snark at, the reasoning behind this, but that'd require there to be reasoning behind this. I think the answer lies in this passage;
One can argue that higher taxes, by raising the cost of each extra hour spent working towards the acquisition of another positional good (and thereby encouraging people to consume some more hedonically beneficial leisure), actually make everyone better off.but fuck if I can make heads or tails of what Megan is trying to say. The parenthetical clause in particular is simply mystifying. How does raising costs encourage people to consume? Does she mean it encourages people to not consume and instead seek leisure?
Once again, Megan demonstrates that you should learn what jargon means before attempting to use it in your own work.
But hey, at least she found a way to not feel guilty about redoing her kitchen.
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The parenthetical clause in particular is simply mystifying. How does raising costs encourage people to consume? Does she mean it encourages people to not consume and instead seek leisure?
Yes, this is exactly what she means. For some economists (and for some people who wish they were economists), the word "consume" is perfectly appropriate for use in situations where most normal people would say that nothing is actually being consumed. That is because they believe that people have a binary choice in how to spend their time: you can either produce, or you can consume. So by default, if you've fallen asleep in the hammock in your backyard on a Saturday afternoon, you must be consuming something, since you are obviously not producing anything. The "something" they came up with is leisure.
Personally, I think this reveals a lot about how these economists view people and their roles in society.
Wow. I'd feel foolish for not realizing that was 'proper' use of jargon if the jargon itself weren't so mindbendingly stupid.
I assume this is a way to recast unemployment as possessing a hidden good? Something that crazy just has to be part of a pathology in some way.
Yeah, it is quite stupid. This kind of thinking is a huge part of why I left the discipline in the first place. To me, it says that the economist who adheres to such a mindset completely fails to understand the richness that is life on earth, and I finally realized that I did not wish to surround myself with such people in my professional life.
So I'm not sure if the reason for it is something as pathological as what you suggest. But it very well could be.
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