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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 13h \ on: Uncommon Opinion: Tariffs are for Free Trade (Financial Times, Oren Cass) econ
Productivity falls, in the US anyway, where the typical factory requires more labour than a decade ago to produce the same output.
Does he mean "unit labor costs"? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ULCMFG
Because "output per hour" is flat-ish: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHMFG
So I guess he means "labor became more expensive when measured in USD"? If we were to measure it in sats, it'd look different. Is it possible that the issue was caused by an internal factor (ZIRP) rather than an external one?
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @denlillaapan OP 13h
quite possibly. I'm not sure what he means, exactly... currency-infused competitive disadvantage or something?
Not sure how internal ZIRP was. Almost every country ran monetary policy with a similar outcome
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 6h
If everyone else was doing ZIRP first and the Fed was forced to because all the other printers were doing brrr, then yes. That's not how I perceived it - rather the contrary - during those years but I may very well be observing it wrong.
However, ZIRP causing it or not, i still find it likely that such wage increase has an internal cause rather than an external one, but I need to do more research for that.
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