You! As usual.

And it’s not twice the price – it’s something more like 2.8x the price. I think that’s called the “Keynesian multiplier.”

I read and enjoyed all your thoughts on it – you’re just bent out of shape that I still disagree with you on the issue of training expenses. You keep defending your experience. Well john, I’ve never belittled your experience the way you’ve belittled mine several times at this point. So please – spare me the sob story about how crafty I am with reinventing arguments and refusing to give due deference.

If you want to argue against Krugman’s point, that’s fine. Krugman may have implied the need for widespread job sharing. I never did. I was just trying to gauge whether the disagreement with Krugman was purely over the government intervention, or whether there were other concerns about job sharing too. I never made any claim that this shoudl be widespread practice.

“Could someone explain to me exactly what the argument against job sharing is?”

I provided several reasons why most firms reject job sharing, both during normal times and during recessions. I explained exactly why job sharing is expensive, which, as a corporate controller and labor planner, I am expertly qualified to explain. Rather than learn from this “exchange” with someone who has decades of real-world business experience, you tried to invent a new argument. As you so often do, you have rephrased your question:

“Under what conditions is job sharing economically justified?”

I never claimed that job sharing is always the wrong policy. But given that this blog is about Paul Krugman’s advocacy of widespread job-sharing, I think it makes sense to point out such action would be foolish for most companies.

DK, you should have been a comedian.

“Who commenting on here can tell me “how it is done in the real world”?”

Clearly, no-one could possibly have anything to teach anything to a clever little one such as yourself who has lived as long as a whole quarter of a century. Why, we were all groping in the dark for decades until you enlightened us.

“There are billions of ways that it “is done” in the real world.”

And you don’t know any of them.

…IT ONLY SATIATES THEIR FRAGILE EGO.

So frequently huh? I’d ask how you can so frequently think I so frequently do so many things, but that sort of infinite regress gets old.

Nothing I wrote suggests I think you’re taking a top-down approach; it’s obvious to me that you are not. (How did you reach the conclusion I thought you were?????)

I’m really very curious how you can so frequently see what’s not there and miss what is in things written here.

I opened the exchange simply by saying that job sharing makes sense under certain circumstances – while I never said job sharing always make sense, john dewey said “I’ve heard many executives and finance managers argue that job sharing is just too expensive” (completely undifferentiated with no recognition that what may make sense in some companies doesn’t make sense in others – for john dewey it’s “just too expensive”).

I’m clearly and obviously not taking a “top down” approach because I say repeatedly “often is”, “right for their companies”, “without knowing the details of how each firm is run…”, and I also list conditions under which job sharing is probably more profitable and when it is less. It’s always qualified when I write about it – sometimes it’s sensible, sometimes it’s not.

How, after reading all that, could you possibly think that I’m advocating a top down position? I’m really very curious.