How women got more economical freedom - the biggest failure of modern politics?

Yes, in as far as I've been taught. Mine was more of an illustration. Perhaps I should have used only examples of purchasing of drugs so as to eliminate the tax idea altogether. Which is another discrepency in the GDP=total production model: drugs are a significant part of our economy.~:)

I must admit I was very wrong. It turns out on the international level, what I thought was true isn't true. You have provided me with much interesting information and I've now realized that it's my own country that is crap, perhaps due to another causality than I first thought, perhaps not.

It is often not the system of government that is at fault it is how it is used/abused... lack of accountability is a prime reason for the abuse.

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Originally Posted by Kanamori

Yes, only to a certain extent though, and especially with labor laws (overtime, etc.). If you increase your production enough, ie more than a sliver, it is more cost efficient to hire more people rather than to pay them more per hour. And if there is unemployment, I can think of no other way to increase fulltime employment than through an increase in production.

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You are using an outdated view when looking at employment. Income from capital require no employment and no actual work. The importance of capital combined with technology has changed the old "production based"view. Compare GDP per capita and you will see that there are countries with small values, but still appear "rich". This is due to their capital income which is used for consumption.
Further more, we will in the future see an increased part of the population NOT being a part of the employed mass.

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Originally Posted by LegioXXXUlpiaVictrix

I didn't say that. I said that extremely low wage is all consumed to cover the basic needs. Slightly higher, and people can start saving, and will do so because they have such a small safety margin. The poorest would also like to save, but can't. You need to get much higher wage before you start spending a larger percentage of your wage again.

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But then there´s no point here. Only a small part of the population have so little income that they can´t possibly save any and this part is the least affected by emancipation. The point is that due to higher wages, the average household will be less concerned with saving money and by consequence, spend more.

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As for your economical argument, saving is a bad thing if you want the growth which is necessary for a capitalism to avoid huge unemployment. If there's not enough demand, i.e. consumption as opposed to saving, the capitalism results in unemployment.

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I find that too simplistic. Saving is - most of the time - a form of investment and investments are good for the economy. Less spending is bad if the people don´t have money to spend but if they just use the money in another way, the money is still in the economy.

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Finally, I again ask what kind of exports and imports these statistics are measuring. Is it only governmental import/export, or are also companies involved, or are only companies and no governmental affairs included? It matters a lot.

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As far as I know it´s the total amount of export of the entire economy. Anyway, it´s a simple truth that America is an import oriented country and Germany an export oriented one and Germany has higher unemployment.

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Originally Posted by Bmolsson

The importance of capital combined with technology has changed the old "production based"view. Compare GDP per capita and you will see that there are countries with small values, but still appear "rich". This is due to their capital income which is used for consumption.

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I'd be interested in seeing some examples or a book describing this.

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Originally Posted by Kanamori

I'd be interested in seeing some examples or a book describing this.

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I got all this on a seminar held by a senior economist from Handelsbanken (Swedish large bank). It was a real eye opener for me and it explains a great deal on why the Europeans economies are as they are today. Unfortunately I don't have any direct references to literatures.

Use a better lever, produce more with less labour.

In other words a Japanese car plant that uses robots is going to have a very productive capital and less labour then another plant that hand crafts the cars using unskilled labour.

These days the production of goods is becoming increasingly automatized and employs less and less people. Well, unless they can be gotten cheaper, but that is then why production is moved into for example SE Asia and similar minimal-wage areas. QED; how many manufacturing industries you know that haven't been mothballing their facilities, firing employees and "optimizing production" via automatization and the "China phenomenom" for the past decade or more ?

Thus far they haven't managed to do the same with the production of services (well, given that computer tech help numbers these days may well connect you to India this is debatable), but then again I for one have for a while now suspected the enterpreneurs of that field are starting to run out of sensible business ideas... Or at least I fail to see why else they would produce such weird stuff.

It's not only automation of factories, but the products itself as well. A very good example is table calculators. In old times a mechanical calculater required a tremendous amount of energy and manpower to be produced, while today a electronic chip made automatically out of a teaspoon of sand do the job even better.