They project stable employment in manufacturing through 2012, and they say that the new jobs created in manufacturing will pay more than those lost.
I think the idea that they project this trend all the way through 2012 is kind of neat, since if it’s true that would mean that this recovery, which began “officially” in Nov 2001, would run for more than 10 years, thereby breaking the Nineties record, and keeping intact the trend of longer and longer cycles.
It’s also great news, of course, should it turn out to be true.
You keep saying this, and I simply don’t understand it. If you take your analogies and experiments back to the real world, this statement of yours is equivilant to suggesting that fixed costs do not matter at all. And your right, I simply do not understand such a position.
Why can you not say that FC+MC<=FR+MR or you are losing money. (FC-Fixed Costs, MC-Marginal Costs, FR-Fixed Revenues, MR-Marginal Revenue just so I’m clear)
for instance:
Of course it does. If you look at total costs, bidding $1.01 when the last bid was $0.99 simply means that you are willing to spend $0.01 to prevent yourself from losing whatever your previous bid was. That is, you would never bid over $1.00 unless each and every bid were a commitment to relinquish that money regardless of the outcome of the auction. That’s why they rarely go over $2.00. Once someone has bid $2.00, he is simply paying $1.00, while his closest opponent is paying nearly $2.00. It is certainly possible for the bidding to go higher. And if you are correct that only marginal costs count, then it always should go higher. Presumably at some point the bidding will start incrementing in pennies. That is, the marginal cost of making a new bid will always be $0.02. Never more. If the marginal cost to bid is always $0.02 and the return is $1.00, why would anyone stop bidding? The answer is that the cost is not $0.02. it is $0.02 cents plus whatever that person has already bid. At some point, the biddres realize that they are throwing good money after bad, and the bidding stops. If marginal costs were the only consideration in this experiment (as you seem to be saying) then the biding should never stop.
Now, the fact that the bidding goes over $1.00, certainly indicates that marginal costs are important. But the fact the the bidding rarely goes over $2.00 would seem to indicate to me that it is not the only thing under consideration.