[52] Unemployment and Inequality.

Hello everyone,
I would like to share with you my presentation about the Global Economy and wage inequality and its relation to unemployment.

Without Equality of Opportunity, Freedom is the privileged of a few, and Oppression the reality of everyone else.

Freedom, Equality, and Fellowship!

Jorge

Trade, Unemployment and Inequality by Jorge Rojas Vallejos

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[51] Happiness: The case of air quality.

Hello everyone,
I prepare this presentation about Arik Levinson's paper called "Valuing public goods using happiness data: The case of air quality" published at The Journal of Public Economics. This paper is quite insightful and brilliantly written. It is a real pleasure to read this kind of article. Enjoy!

Here is a link to the article from the author's website. Click here

My presentation is below. Cheers!

Jorge Rojas

Happiness and Air Quality

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[50] Inequality and International Macro

Hi everyone,
Another idea on inequality. Building bridges of progress requires us to think about inequality and growth.

All comments are welcome.

Jorge Rojas

Working paper on Tariffs, Growth and Inequality

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[49] Working Paper on Inequality (Micro)

Hi everyone:
I am starting my second year and I am getting into the topics that I am really interested in. These topics are: inequality, poverty and economic growth. As an engineer, I firmly believe that the job of an economist is to maximize social welfare. If you want to maximize profits, then you should talk with a business person hehehe :)

Any comments about anything are very welcomed and appreciated.

Thanks guys,

Jorge Working Paper on Inequality and Poverty

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[48] Socialism versus Social-democracy.

Very often people confused socialist ideas and social-democratic ones. This discussion could take hours, perhaps days. However, I will try to be concise and as precise as I can. A socialist basically believes that the economic system today is one called "Capitalism" and that system must be removed from the whole world using violence if necessary. A few socialists are more moderate and tend to use the euphemism "forceable revolution" instead of what it is, violent revolution. These old-fashioned elements of the left-wing tradition believe that the people should get weapons so that "the people" may be ready to "protect" the revolutionary process. Once "the people" have achieved the control of the government then they move to something called "democratic centralism" which is an idea that has not worked in any place in any time in human history. In 1906 some revolutionaries attempted to implement this idea and the result was a coup from the Bolsheviks and the later rise of Stalin. We all know what happened afterwards.

On the other hand, we have the Social-Democrats. These people in the left-wing tradition are the ones that, I believe, learned from the historical mistakes. The social-democrats firmly believe in democracy, in the democratic institutions and the improvement of the standards of living through incremental reforms that preserve incentives and move towards a more meritocratic society. Social-democrats advocate change in the base of electoral victories, no a bloodshed among brothers and sisters. Many social-democrats understand that the economic system today is a distortion of capitalism. Capitalism in its pure state is a system in which we have great levels of competition and hence the market price of goods is equal to its marginal cost. People have high levels of information and so on. What we want to do is to use the existence infrastructure and fix the problems. Thus, we can move forward in a peaceful and democratic way.

In my opinion, social-democrats are more humble than socialists. I say this because many socialists think that "the people" are asleep, that "the people" need a group of leaders who can provide the answers and lead them to the "right" ideas. I believe that this kind of thought is responsible for regimes such as the one in the Soviet Union in the last century and regimes such as North Korea and China in the present time. I know that democracy has some problems that we must try to fix, but quoting Winston Churchill "... democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried".

I believe in social justice and democracy, hence I am a social-democrat.

Freedom, Equality and Fellowship.

Jorge Rojas

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