Jordan is NOT aligned with Iran. It is more closely allied with Saudi Arabia and us.

Lebanon IS aligned with Iran, through Hezbollah and the military.

the reason we back Saudi Arabia is this SA/Iran split in the region.Plus oil. Plus cool hand-holding opportunities.

pacino wrote:Jordan is NOT aligned with Iran. It is more closely allied with Saudi Arabia and us.

Lebanon IS aligned with Iran, through Hezbollah and the military.

Thanks for the clarification.

What a mess. Turkey has always been a crusader for war and violence.

SK790 wrote:

pacino wrote:Jordan is NOT aligned with Iran. It is more closely allied with Saudi Arabia and us.

Lebanon IS aligned with Iran, through Hezbollah and the military.

Thanks for the clarification.

Now, I'm sure a million Syrians flooding over the border into Lebanon is complicating this relationship...

Didn't figure I'd ever be saying this, but I'm prety glad we have John Kerry to try and simmer this down

Sound like a Russian rescue helicopter was downed by Syrian rebels. I am assuming they used US TOW missiles.

Wheels Tupay wrote:Sound like a Russian rescue helicopter was downed by Syrian rebels. I am assuming they used US TOW missiles.

Where'd you hear that? The last 3 pages or so of this thread?

SK790 wrote:Arguing that something is "Econ 101" is bullshit/doesn't apply to the real world

Studies show Welfare programs do not, in fact, make people lazy

good reads

this picture: https://www.instagram.com/p/-csshny1F0/

SK790 wrote:Arguing that something is "Econ 101" is bullshit/doesn't apply to the real world

For example, Econ 101 theory tells us that minimum wage policies should have a harmful impact on employment. Basic supply and demand analysis says that in a free market, wages adjust so that everyone who wants a job has a job -- supply matches demand. Less productive workers earn less, but they are still employed. If you set a price floor -- a lower limit on what employers are allowed to pay -- then it will suddenly become un-economical for companies to retain all the workers whose productivity is lower than that price floor. In other words, minimum wage hikes should quickly put a bunch of low-wage workers out of a job.

That's theory. Reality, it turns out, is very different. In the last two decades, empirical economists have looked at a large number of minimum wage hikes, and concluded that in most cases, the immediate effect on employment is very small. It's only in the long run that minimum wages might start to make a big difference.

I'm not seeing the contradiction here, other than the confidence of the writer. Minimum wage hikes have a small delterious effect on unemployment that grows over time? That is basic economics 101. Policy surprises can have a short term effect, on a micro and macro level, but that people adjust to the new laws and incentives.

Another example is welfare. Econ 101 theory tells us that welfare gives people an incentive not to work. If you subsidize leisure, simple theory says you will get more of it.

But recent empirical studies have shown that such effects are usually very small. Occasionally, welfare programs even make people work more. For example, a study in Uganda found that grants for poor people looking to improve their skills resulted in people working much more than before.

Wow, what a squirmy paragraph. First the magnitude of the effect is "usually very small." Next, in a brilliant pivot that suggests it supports the point, he offers an example of a program that does not subsidize leisure. So we learn that skills training that raises wages... leads to people working more. How is skills training subsidizing leisure? It's boosting the returns to labor, which is an incentive to work that all economists would agree is one of the most worthwhile forms of public assistance.

Current textbooks, including Mankiw's, almost all play down the role of data and evidence. They sometimes refer to the results of empirical studies, but they don't give students an in-depth understanding of how those studies worked. Yet this wouldn't be very hard to do. The kind of empirical analysis now taking over the econ profession -- often called the "quasi-experimental" approach -- isn't that hard to understand. Simple examples could even be done in the classroom, or as homework assignments.

This is laughable. Yes the curriculum can and should reflect recent economic breakthroughs, but let's not pretend academic papers are easy for anyone to understand. I suspect that the author is bouncing, for his own convenience, between arguing that the entire economics curriculum needs a shifted emphasis and that econ 101 is inadequate as an intro to the dismal science. Or at least I hope that's his error, because the alternative is that the author is greatly overestimating the breadth of material that can be covered in a single semester.

That is difficult because TOWs are wire guided and do not have a thermal warhead. Not impossible, but really hard.

Wheels Tupay wrote:Sound like a Russian rescue helicopter was downed by Syrian rebels. I am assuming they used US TOW missiles.

Gimpy wrote:Turkish news has reported that Turkmen forces shot the pilots as they were parachuting down.

Turkey may have been backing Turkmen in Syria due to Russia's assault on Turkmen for opposing Assad

Russia and Turkey are at odds over Assad and the Turkmen are in the middle of it all as minorities in Syria.

It goes back to the 1930s, and the rush to become the major Western country to have the most influence with the House of Saud.

The British were pushing really hard to get the Saudis to buy into what they were selling, but didn't have enough juice. The Saudis also saw how the British colonial practices impacting Sunnis in Mesopotamia, the TransJordan and other colonies in the Middle East, and that was enough to tell them to get bent.

I think we ended giving the King his own airplane and a fleet of Cadillacs or something insane like that to seal the deal. Our industrialists and petroleum companies realized they were sitting on a sea of oil, and that was step one in the birth of our alliance with the Sauds.

pacino wrote:the reason we back Saudi Arabia is this SA/Iran split in the region.Plus oil. Plus cool hand-holding opportunities.

but what about the hand holding?

Luzinski's Gut wrote:That is difficult because TOWs are wire guided and do not have a thermal warhead. Not impossible, but really hard.

Wheels Tupay wrote:Sound like a Russian rescue helicopter was downed by Syrian rebels. I am assuming they used US TOW missiles.

I think the helicopter was on the ground, which raises the question of how wise it was to land in that area.

Werthless wrote:

SK790 wrote:Arguing that something is "Econ 101" is bullshit/doesn't apply to the real world

For example, Econ 101 theory tells us that minimum wage policies should have a harmful impact on employment. Basic supply and demand analysis says that in a free market, wages adjust so that everyone who wants a job has a job -- supply matches demand. Less productive workers earn less, but they are still employed. If you set a price floor -- a lower limit on what employers are allowed to pay -- then it will suddenly become un-economical for companies to retain all the workers whose productivity is lower than that price floor. In other words, minimum wage hikes should quickly put a bunch of low-wage workers out of a job.

That's theory. Reality, it turns out, is very different. In the last two decades, empirical economists have looked at a large number of minimum wage hikes, and concluded that in most cases, the immediate effect on employment is very small. It's only in the long run that minimum wages might start to make a big difference.

I'm not seeing the contradiction here, other than the confidence of the writer. Minimum wage hikes have a small delterious effect on unemployment that grows over time? That is basic economics 101. Policy surprises can have a short term effect, on a micro and macro level, but that people adjust to the new laws and incentives.

Another example is welfare. Econ 101 theory tells us that welfare gives people an incentive not to work. If you subsidize leisure, simple theory says you will get more of it.

But recent empirical studies have shown that such effects are usually very small. Occasionally, welfare programs even make people work more. For example, a study in Uganda found that grants for poor people looking to improve their skills resulted in people working much more than before.

Wow, what a squirmy paragraph. First the magnitude of the effect is "usually very small." Next, in a brilliant pivot that suggests it supports the point, he offers an example of a program that does not subsidize leisure. So we learn that skills training that raises wages... leads to people working more. How is skills training subsidizing leisure? It's boosting the returns to labor, which is an incentive to work that all economists would agree is one of the most worthwhile forms of public assistance.

Current textbooks, including Mankiw's, almost all play down the role of data and evidence. They sometimes refer to the results of empirical studies, but they don't give students an in-depth understanding of how those studies worked. Yet this wouldn't be very hard to do. The kind of empirical analysis now taking over the econ profession -- often called the "quasi-experimental" approach -- isn't that hard to understand. Simple examples could even be done in the classroom, or as homework assignments.

This is laughable. Yes the curriculum can and should reflect recent economic breakthroughs, but let's not pretend academic papers are easy for anyone to understand. I suspect that the author is bouncing, for his own convenience, between arguing that the entire economics curriculum needs a shifted emphasis and that econ 101 is inadequate as an intro to the dismal science. Or at least I hope that's his error, because the alternative is that the author is greatly overestimating the breadth of material that can be covered in a single semester.

I think it's fairly common to teach macro first, then micro.

The Nightman Cometh wrote:

Luzinski's Gut wrote:That is difficult because TOWs are wire guided and do not have a thermal warhead. Not impossible, but really hard.

Wheels Tupay wrote:Sound like a Russian rescue helicopter was downed by Syrian rebels. I am assuming they used US TOW missiles.

I think the helicopter was on the ground, which raises the question of how wise it was to land in that area.

Well, it seems to me it's one thing to shoot down a fighter jet--that can be explained as "a regrettable incident" but quite another to shoot a helicopter on the ground (or guys in parachutes).

The rebels downed the helicopter, not Turkey.