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[Zangi]

I thought my high school's AP history was decent.

AP is the advanced course or something?  (Ah, google says Advanced Placement....) 

Majority of students don't take AP?  Also, I suppose quality of classes may differ between states/counties...

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Majority of students don't take AP?

I don't really know. Anyone is allowed to take AP, there are no prerequisites and most of my AP courses were very full. They both look good on a record and can give college credit if you are exceptional in them.

All but one of my AP classes was full, so I could see lots of people taking them.

[darkrider2]

I thought my high school's AP history was decent.

AP is the advanced course or something?  (Ah, google says Advanced Placement....) 

Majority of students don't take AP?  Also, I suppose quality of classes may differ between states/counties...

We had those AP classes too, I only took the Calculus and Economics ones.

Also the value of schooling can vary wildly from district to district.

[SalmonGod]

If what was implied is that minimum wage needs to be increased then you are asking for a double-edged sword. If minimum wage increases then the price of goods will increase as well to some degree which will in turn make the "gallons of milk per time worked" approximately the same.

This is true, but... forgive me if I say something stupid here.  This is less knowledge and more my personal conception of the way things work.

There is a limited pool of money.  If it weren't limited, it wouldn't be worth anything, as scarcity is the main factor in determining value.  The total pool of currency that exists is basically representative of the total sum of actual non-monetary stuff in the world.  If you manage to hoard the entire pool of currency, you essentially own the world.  So these numbers don't just exist in a vacuum.  They are a relative, abstracted measure of the portion of the global pie that you can claim ownership of.  Most people are in debt, and essentially own nothing.  The majority of the population live as indentured servants (through many layers of abstraction so that it doesn't feel as such) to the upper class, who indirectly own pretty much everything.

So it's not that the number we associated with minimum wage isn't large enough.  It's that the CEO's number is too much larger than minimum wage.  They control too large a portion of the pie, which puts extreme pressure on everyone else to compete for the remainder... and that competition takes the form of the lower classes vying against each other for permission to grow the upper class' portion of the pie even further, making their situation even worse in the long run....

My history classes in grade school were essentially a small acknowledgement of the native american genocide in elementary school, when we weren't old enough to develop a perspective or comprehend the gravity of that portion of history, and from then on afterwards mostly constant glorification of our military conquests.

[Eagle_eye]

I don't think it's really correct to say that money represents exactly the value of everything owned in the world. There's so much abstraction that money essentially behaves like an independent entity, simply because people treat it as one. Most people seem to see money as something that is valuable in itself, and not just a representation of other things. For example, the Koch brothers: they have billions of dollars that are utterly useless to them. They will gain no material benefit whatsoever. Nonetheless, they do whatever they can to keep and accumulate more of it. Most of that money will not be going back into the economy, but they haven't removed the equivalent amount of physical stuff from society.

[SalmonGod]

Most of that money will not be going back into the economy, but they haven't removed the equivalent amount of physical stuff from society.

But physical stuff is removed from society.  People like the Koch Brothers have shitloads of money that they don't use.  Coincidentally, we have shitloads of houses and food that just goes to waste, because nobody can buy it.... because in an abstract sense, it's owned by people like the Koch Brothers.  They don't directly own all that wasting food and shelter, but all that money sitting in their bank accounts represents potential ownership of stuff that other people are being denied access to.  Ten billion dollars represents potential ownership of any thing or collection of things totaling ten billion dollars in value. 

This is from an article I posted a couple pages back.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, there are 66,000 taxpayers who individually control $20 million or more in assets, and all these people put together are worth $4 trillion—more than the net worth of the majority of the US population.

So if there are roughly 311,600,000 people in the U.S., that means 0.0002% of the population reserves more potential ownership of stuff than everybody else combined.  Whether it goes to waste in the process or not, that portion of goods and services is reserved for them (through economic abstraction, of course), and the rest of us get to compete for the remainder.

Equalization of incomes would represent a spreading out of potential ownership of stuff, and thus less stuff going to waste and less people going without.  The numbers mean nothing individually, only relatively.

[palsch]

There is a limited pool of money.  If it weren't limited, it wouldn't be worth anything, as scarcity is the main factor in determining value.

In one sense this approaches being right, but broadly it's completely wrong.

The sense that this is right is the sense in which the various national banks/reserves try to keep this fairly true. The world works on fiat currency so limitations on the pool of money are entirely arbitrary and determined by the governments that control the monetary supply. But in reality the actual size of the pool is less what is managed and more the end 'value' of money, through controlling inflation rates.

The biggest problem here is that inactive money is entirely valueless. Money only matters when it is moving from A to B. The actual pool size doesn't matter much compared to the transactions taking place. The movement of money determine the value of money far more than the actual amount in the economy. An economy suffering from too little money moving around can take an increase in total money in the pool (say, a government stimulus) with minimal to negative impact on inflation given the right circumstances.

The total pool of currency that exists is basically representative of the total sum of actual non-monetary stuff in the world.

Again, it's only the transactions that matter. If I hoard a billion dollars I would theoretically control a negligible fraction of the world's worth, given any measure going by production. However, spending that billion dollars in concentrated ways I could have a far greater impact, as a billion dollars is always a significant transaction and powerful market force. The impact of concentrated currency exceeds it's stationary value by far.

This is true even on the lower scale, but in different ways. Having a hundred dollars in the bank gives you few economic options. Having a thousand gives you far more than the ten-time buying power would inherently suggest. That tenfold increase is more like a hundred-fold increase in economic power. Going up to ten thousand is an even bigger increase in power. A hundred thousand and you can start exerting serious economic influence, far, far beyond what you can simply buy with the money from the perspective of the guy with a hundred bucks and change.

But going back to the point, stationary money is money not exerting economic influence. Not representing 'stuff'. So if people were truly just removing money from the system by hoarding it they would have minimal-to-no impact on the actual market. They could always distort markets by joining them later, but while just sitting on mattresses made of money they aren't actually doing any real damage.

In reality such savings do impact the market through their investment and management, but that tends to be through the abstraction levels of investment vehicles and funds.

[sluissa]

Well, if it makes you feel any better...  history class doesn't really teach much...  much less the 'bad' stuff about the US.

Pretty much all of taught history in the US is either horrendously over simplified, half-truths, and in the worst cases, just plain wrong. (*cough* Christopher Columbus *Cough*) That is, when it's taught at all... The worst part is I didn't even realize this until I was given access to a university level library and told to do my own research on things.

Only time it seemed to get better was in the classes that focused very specifically on a certain subject, time period or geographical area.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Am I seriously the only person in America who had an actual accurate history class in high school? Shit, our textbook explicitly compared Japanese internment in WWII to the concentration camps.

[sluissa]

Except for a History Channel documentary, (Back when they had actual history shows.) I'd never heard about Japanese Internment in the US until college.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Except for a History Channel documentary, (Back when they had actual history shows.)

This may have been during History Channel's Hitler Phase, the beginning of their downfall that lasted from about 2004-2008 and was back to back shows about Hitler, all day, every day. At least that was still history even it it was hyperfocused, now its aliens, conspiracy theories, and reality tv.

I'd never heard about Japanese Internment in the US until college.

I think I first learned about it in Middle School. You all have had a terrible education.

[Zangi]

Am I seriously the only person in America who had an actual accurate history class in high school? Shit, our textbook explicitly compared Japanese internment in WWII to the concentration camps.

I think I first learned about it in Middle School. You all have had a terrible education.

No... its cause your school must be a magical place...  full of unicorns... and the groundskeeper must've been Abe Lincoln himself. 

Twas Public School, at least for me...

[Heron TSG]

Am I seriously the only person in America who had an actual accurate history class in high school? Shit, our textbook explicitly compared Japanese internment in WWII to the concentration camps.

This is the value of having a teacher who knows what they're doing. We had books, but didn't use them much. I don't think the books said anything like that, but all of my teachers who broached the subject made it abundantly clear. That was in middle school and high school. My college class that touched on the subject didn't make it out to be so bad. (Presumably because the teacher didn't do jack shit and we basically read a book for credit.)

[Eagle_eye]

Yeah, I was taught about the Japanese internment in 6th grade, and I live in Texas. We've spent plenty of time going over the destruction of native societies in the Americas, and never once was Columbus presented as a hero.  We went over the Pullman strike, abuse of labor in general, the Alien and Sedition acts, imprisonment of protestors against WWI, all sorts of subversive stuff, and this was all in middle school. Something must be very, very wrong with your teachers.. :\

[Reelya]

There is a limited pool of money.  If it weren't limited, it wouldn't be worth anything, as scarcity is the main factor in determining value.  The total pool of currency that exists is basically representative of the total sum of actual non-monetary stuff in the world.

I think that conception is a bit off. For instance, one person could own all the property and have money on top of that (with everyone else working for him and renting housing, clothes etc, buying consumables).
Wouldn't that person own greater than 100% of the value of the material goods then? That shows that money's exchange value is cumulative with property, not counted against it.

A better approximation is to say that money's value is determined by the number of people trying to buy goods at any time compared to the number of sellers. So only the money and goods being bought and sold at any one time define the market value of money in this sense.

Basically there can be a lot of money held, but if many people save it rather than spend, prices will drop. This may be followed by a reduction in production, but the producers specifically do not try and match total money supply, they try and match total liquid money supply (the amount people are willing to spend).

Similarly, a drop in production will have the same price effect as producing goods but withholding them from sale, even though prices will be affected the same in each scenario. So it shows total goods which exist are not the determining factor, but total on sale, are.