Dean Miller fights a daily battle to get the papers to report what some outrage or expense costs in terms of percentage of the budget, instead of "really big numbers" that mean nothing to nobody.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/
Buying more air missiles also creates work. Some of it is in my state. I know nice people who work for Raytheon--good liberals. Doesn't mean that I support it.
All of these numbers are wildly inflated, since they never take the other wastes into account. Estimating, say, that some class of employees wastes 30 minutes a day on Facebook is fine, but assuming that those 30 minutes would otherwise have been peak-productivity work minutes is bogus.
3: Oh yeah.
I've had to do time studies tracking how my time is used. They are so complicated that you have to spend about 35 minutes on the time study, but there's no line for "time spent on time study."
4: But that wasn't how we billed, and we were paid per person per day. We had to bill fee for service interventions for a few times a week in order to bill the Feds so that the state can recoup Medicaid funds under Medicaid Rehab Option.
It made it look to DMH like we were spending way more time on administrative stuff than we were.
I'm so happy nobody looks that closely at my time use.
I have to account for my time at work. I do have an entry for the time I spend accounting for my time.
10: It may just be me. I don't know that anybody looks very closely at how I account for the time that isn't billable.
Reminds me of back in 2009, when money from the first round of stimulus was being spent on highway repair projects, and they'd have signs in the work areas proclaiming "Putting America to Work--Project Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act." And then there was a series of investigative tv news reports by conservative enterprising young reporters exposing how much money was being "wasted" in making and putting up those signs. And I thought, "Um, guys, you're missing the point here . . ."
We're switching to a very explicit time tracking system (because corporate overlords); I had exactly the conversation in 4, 9, and 10 with my boss yesterday.
12: Next they could do a story on how much money was wasted covering the story of money wasted by the stimulus. That's also Obama's fault!
13: These were only for 2-week intervals.
The basic answer to Heebie's question is that the money is considered "wasted" because it could have been spent in ways that would have provided more of a stimulus (or other sorts of benefits) that simply paying someone.
So medicare winds up paying a godzillian dollars on complicated medical billing. Sure this employes people--there are people whose entire job is built around teaching the health care coding system. But this isn't good stimulus money because it doesn't provide any multiplier effect. You are just giving money to one middle-class person, which is almost as useless as a tax cut.
Money spent on repairing bridges has a huge multiplier, on the other hand. The money goes to working class people, who will spend it quickly, and get lots of money circulating. And then afterwards, you have a bridge that will stay up. And that makes future economic transactions possible.
16: I don't think that this is entirely fair. I agree that building a bridge is better, because you have something useful, but there will be a multiplier effect from having one person employed as a billing and coding specialist. I would argue that it would be greater than a tax cut, because someone with a job is more likely to spend money than a whole bunch of people who just got a $200 tax cut.
I thought the guys that try to measure multiplier effects wind up finding that construction comes out light-years ahead of any other form of stimulus. I might be misremembering.
As for the workers, I was imagining that health care coders have more income and are more likely to save than construction workers. I might be wrong about that, especially for the highly skilled construction trades.
16: it's not very correct to say that everyone involved in health care administration is middle class in terms of income and everyone involved in repairing a bridge is working class. In fact it's not correct at all. That chap driving the heavy plant is on an average of $86,000 a year in New York. The woman administering his health care is on an average of $56k.
http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Medical-Administrator-l-New-York,-NY.html
http://work.chron.com/salary-bulldozer-operator-3430.html
The bridge still probably has a greater multiplier, because having bridges is good for the economy.
18: I'm happy to believe that the multiplier is greater when you are building a bridge than when you are paying a healthcare administrator. BUT, there is still a multiplier when you pay a healthcare person. I would also argue that either paying for a bridge or a healthcare person has a greater multiplicative (is that a word?) effect than a tax cut would.
I've seen no estimate of how much wasted time is spent turning off caps lock. Now that's time that would actually be used more productively.
But building the bridge gets 100 billing clerks to work ten minutes faster, thereby eliminating X number of billing clerk jobs.
I just happen to have Michal Kalecki Today open on my desktop...never mind two economists, five hands.
Rules of thumb:society has basic needs like bridges and medical records. Satisfy them.
2) Government spend til you have inflation.
3) Tax away the inflation
4) When you can't tax away the inflation, you have encountered supply constraints, like oil or labor shortage
5) Adjust spending to meet the new needs, like solar energy or robots
6) Repeat
Most years (well, hopefully) you don't want stimulus. The inefficiencies are presumably not temporary.
On topic for the post title: From the Bud Light Boat apparently docked on the Hudson next to the Intrepid.. Alex Pareene aptly called it a vision from hell.
19: I was using a bad stereotype. My apologies.
20: Yes, comparing health care spending to tax cuts was overstated. More apologies.
Ultimately, though, you want to measure things by their real value, not the number of people they employ. A shorter commute makes people happier. Medical billing is almost as big a source of sadness as caps lock.
On ultiplier effects, much of the money spent on the bridge goes for stuff like steel, which is money wasted in the sense that it only enriches the shareholders of a multinational steel producer, who will just line their bank accounts. The money may also leave the U.S. By contrast, almost every dollar spent on healthcare goes to local people as paychecks, from minimum wage janitors to doctors. (expenditures on software, stethoscopes etc,. are tiny compared to salaries). These local people are likely to spend their money in the neighborhood. That's a genuine multiplier.
And we need good health as much as we need bridges.
I've seen no estimate of how much wasted time is spent turning off caps lock. Now that's time that would actually be used more productively.
This is part of the reason I always remap caps lock to ctrl.
And we need good health as much as we need bridges.
Yeah, but we aren't talking about health, we are talking about impractical health care billing systems, which more than likely actually damage people's health by making it hard to prioritize care properly.
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The Real Post: Taco cat backward is taco cat!
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A shorter commute makes people happier.
It's not enough that I have a short commute. Assholes who talk about things like The Knockout Game and bitch about income taxes they don't even pay must have a longer commute.
1st heebie's right;h-g is always right
Okay, I think until a real half-assed economist comes along
1) There is no real difference in marginal propensity to consume between a construction worker and a billing clerk, multipliers should be close enough.
2) The bridge is preferred by economists, as compared to a billing clerk or an oral historian because a) they like to divide spending between the construction worker, trucker, concrete factory, architect blah blah an somehow say all these little pieces are bigger than one big one....diffusion index!
Heebie is right money spent is money spent, as long as the banksters don't get to fondle and massage the stuff.
3) also economist like productivity. We don't need no more fucking productivity. Apple is not sitting on 150 billion in cash between the economy is inefficient.
We are making too much stuff and have too much idle capacity because we have too much monopoly.
4) We need waste and lots of it.
5) Increasing wages/wages, inflation, volatility turnover bankruptcies all eat capital and productivity. We need to destroy a lot of capital constantly if we want a high employment/consumption society
We need waste and lots of it.
Taco night ahoy.
The only true waste is the waste of a human mind.
34: I thought it had a jello-like consistency and would break apart neatly.
You mean before you eat and excrete it?
I also have issues with this type of figure! I think focusing on the money obscures the real problem. Let's say a tax code complication forces you to spend 2 hours filling out some stupid form, as well as $50 as a fee to request information from some agency. The $50 is just getting transferred from you to someone else and isn't disappearing or making society poorer overall. On the other hand, the 2 hours is pure waste ("deadweight loss").
Only one more chance for the OP to be true.
Unless cannibalism is the real topic.
How sad it is to lose one's taco, or not to have a taco at all.
Let's say a tax code complication forces you to spend 2 hours filling out some stupid form . . . the 2 hours is pure waste ("deadweight loss").
Depends on your point of view.
I am somewhat put in mind of The Grifters (the novel, not the film) where Roy is called in by the new manager at his cover job (pointless multi-product door-to-door sales gig) where he thinks he will be hassled for not producing enough, because of course he only holds the job to have an excuse to conduct his short cons all over LA. But then it turns out he is the highest-producing salesman in his region, because all of the other bums skive off from it to actually drink beer instead of running scams on bartenders, but Roy needs to work hard enough to be assured of keeping the job. And then the new sales manager offers him a manager gig, which of course he doesn't want, because then he couldn't do his scams.
Isn't there something in a Deighton or LeCarre novel about figuring out who the spy in the office is by finding out who does their job most efficiently?
Anyhow, 95% of everyone is phoning it in 95% of the time. We could live in a post-scarcity worker's paradise if everyone just did 5 hours of actual work every week instead of goofing off and being inefficient.*
*Offer may not apply in sweatshops, chain gangs and subsistence farming economies.
To a first approximation, all economic impact estimates are bullshit anyway.
We could live in a post-scarcity worker's paradise if everyone just did 5 hours of actual work every week instead of goofing off and being inefficient.
As an Unfogged commenter, I think you've got a bit of a Pauline Kael problem here.
This is exactly what I've always thought about the TSA. I hate them so much.
42: There's also that New Yorker cartoon with the 4 panels:
Panel 1: Guy at the office, thinking about his golf game
Panel 2: Guy playing golf, thinking about having sex
Panel 3: Guy having sex, thinking about drinking at the bar
Panel 4: Guy drinking at the bar, thinking about the office
(or something along those lines)
Isn't there something in a Deighton or LeCarre novel
It would be an aside, an observation a character would make, rather than a situation. I don't recall but it would be in character for either.
46: Has there ever been a more unfortunate-yet-apropos name for a device than the "Rapiscan*"?
* Long-"a" optional.
The rain in Spain falls mainly on the Rapiscan.
46: I always avoided the scanners until they got rid of the Rapiscans in favor of the new ones which probably don't work but don't show quite as much.
Also, the OP title to 46. That's kind of a fun read, even if it's infuriating.
Something something broken windows fallacy something. Which is not always a fallacy?
It's the first derivative of a fallacy.
Oh man, don't tell Tom Perkins about that.
54: Which is almost never a fallacy. Under monopoly capitalism, almost by definition you always have excess capacity.
I had read 54 to be talking about the broken windows theory of policing. Bastiat's theory is obviously very different, yet the same kind of people talk about both: they believe that replacing broken windows doesn't actually stimulate the economy, in fact arresting the people who break them ultimately cuts down the murder rate. Might the name, the idea of the one have influenced the other, within rightist discourse?
If you add up all the "$X wasted" in a year is it more than the GDP?
Argh. These were the instructions on a recommendation I just filled out:
Please rate the applicant in comparison to undergraduate students you have known at your institution that have applied to graduate school. Or, if you feel more comfortable using another group as a basis for comparison, please indicate that group here.
I barely saw this at the top of a long list of Likert scale questions, but when I noticed it, I had to dock the student down, because that's an extremely small, talented pool that she's being compared to.
I feel like the way the application was created, many recommendation writers won't notice the smaller comparison pool, and that my student will come off looking worse than she is.
Couldn't you just indicate a different reference group that would be more applicable to the way you filled out the form originally?
