How Can Anyone Actually Be This Stupid?
19th August 2019
A certain American professor – of sociology, naturally – called Matthew Desmond has decided to pleasure us with the ignorance of his knowledge of the subject under discussion, economics. I’m not the first to note this and doubt I shall be the last. But in his introductory paragraphs in the New York Times Magazine – a place where the editors clearly don’t know enough to catch such errors – he tells us that:
“Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it. In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods…..
If the price of goods is constantly being depressed then what is that doing to the real wages of the workers? Good, excellent, you now know more economics than a professor of sociology. Actually, than two such professors plus the editorial team of the New York Times Magazine. For, just to explain for those who might be sociology professors or editors, if the price of things declines then you can buy more things with your labour. That’s what declining prices means. And, equally true and equally obviously so, being able to buy more things with the rent of your labour means that your wages have just risen.