Drat!  Someone has finally uncovered my imperialist global plans!!!  Note to henchmen:  dispatch the ninjas, immediately!!

There is a grain of truth in Mr. Bailo's remarks...

For example, environmentalists cheering the rise in fuel prices because it will reduce consumption, forgetting about people who cannot easily move or switch jobs to reduce consumption... there are independent contractors, service people, et cetera who have to drive to earn a living.

Rather than dismiss Mr. Bailo with a wave of the hand, how about telling him why his analogy is inappropriate? Why is there no parallel bewteen economists forgetting about people -- which bothers me very much and I appreciate the original post -- and environmentalists forgetting about people?

It might be time for each of us -- including myself -- to hold up a mirror and ask ourselves whether our harsh criticism of others applies to us as well.

Mr. Bailo cares about the natural world as much as anyone else and deserves some respect, even if you disagree with him.

Another victim of Jean-Paul Marat's ghost and his virtual guillotine?

...for a good attempt to address both the environmental and the human goals of justice at the same time.  We can do both -- and mainstream economics (read: neoclassical economics) does neither.  Economists have generally (although not always) looked at labor as a cost, something that is homogenous, instead of as a factor of production with many different skill levels, because it would upset their models.  That's one reason why people concentrate on the cheapness of Chinese labor, as if wage levels were the only determinant of competitiveness, instead of the competence of labor, engineers, and scientists, which is why Japan and Germany (and Europe, combined) have just as big trade surpluses with us as China.  So people are just treated like interchangable commodities, not an important component of wealth, within mainstream economics.

Bailo occassionally pops up with a quote that makes me think he is a leftist of the Alexander Cockburn sort, that is, pissed off at the global corporate elite (as am I), but believing that there is no global warming and that there is something called abiotic oil, that is, it comes from the Earth and so will never run out.  Although, the "imperialist global plans" was pretty funny, I guess that's Limbaugh-Hannity stuff.

"You see, economists (and the reporters who love them) often pretend that the "economy" is somehow different from real people."

Maybe if you specifically said macroeconomists who love to aggregate individual actions, then I might agree with you.

But to say that economists in general think the economy is abstracted from people is completely ridiculous and shows that you may not have had much actual training in microeconomic theory and philosophy.

The only thing micro-economists are concerned with is individual actions -- that's people.  I'd ask you to clarify between the micro and macro aspect of economics, because if you did, then you'd be making a better point.

Talk about missing the forest because all of these darn trees.

The reason housing affordability has suffered is due to the credit bubble that manifested itself in a housing mania.  

There is no other way asset prices can increase faster than underlying wages sustainably.

Haven't you heard of NINJA loans, Neg Am, Option Arm, Stated (Liar) income & asset loans.

Hint, these are the loans that New Century, Countrywide, Bear Stearns, BNP, Citi, German Banks and others are choking on this very minute.

The housing bubble has just begun to unwind and will be many years will the market clears out the mal-investment.

For the environmental gristy tie in, the housing bubble created lots of environmental and social damage.

More and larger homes
Divorces, Bankruptcies and Foreclosures
Excess Granite Quarries
Felled Forests for wood flooring
CO2 emissions from excess concrete and tile manufacture
CO2 emissions from energy to heat, cool and power the excess buildings.

I would like to see Grist take a look at the environmental, social and economic costs of the housing bubble.