I suspect the person you are replying to was not referring so much to academic economists as a whole (which would include Coase and Piketty and even probably Marx) but rather the mercenary subset of economists who get signal-boosted by powerful interests in order to promote the self-serving narrative of the day, and yeah, that subset of economists dodges subjects like inequality and externalities with more finesse and agility than Neo dodging bullets in the matrix.

The gutter mud soaked knife-fight practice of economics and the erudite study of economics is one of the more jarring discontinuities between how we talk about how something works and how it actually does.

The consideration of externalities that don't impact the bottom line is so alien to the real observation of the rites of capital that it might as well be written on the inside of a particularly boring rock in the oort cloud.

They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics.

Leaving aside the fact that the Economics prize isn't actually a Nobel Prize, topics which historically haven't been given enough attention are exactly where the highest impact research takes place.

If externalities had always received the attention they deserved, Coase would have never received his prize, because his work would not have been so important.

Externalities were a very big part of my first-year microeconomics course circa 2008, FWIW.

What is "finish the job"? Iran is a large populous country that's mostly been a unified polity since Cyrus the Great. They are a different people and culture from their Arab neighbours - how will the Arabs rule and why will the Persians follow them? American colonial rule will be more disastrous than the experience in Iraq or Afghanistan - in those days cheap autonomous drones didn't drop grenades on soldiers.

The present US President is smart enough to realise that now. In this case he let himself be misled by Israelis & their supporters that Iranians would rise up and replace their own Government. That indeed might have happened if the US had intervened when the Iranians were actually protesting some months before the present crisis but that window was missed. Now the US President are looking for a way out without and Iran is looking to haggle on the price.

The US are incapable of finishing the job. That's what they tried to do in Iraq and look how it turned out. Iran is much more organised, has a competent secret police, is huge and better armed than Iraq was. It's physically impossible to carpet bomb the country like Israel is trying to do to Lebanon, so whatever you do you can be sure that there will be plenty of armed partisans. If the central power disintegrates, there will be a mess of Kurdish forces, the remains of governmental armies, and you can expect other interesting groups to show up along the borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if the US were lead by competent people with a decent strategy it would be worse than a long shot. And they are not.

They are also incapable of forming a coalition. They pushed the Saudis and all the Gulf states, who hate Iran with a passion to the moderate "maybe starting a war was not such a good idea" camp. The latest noises about forcing them to make friends with Israel is exactly what you would do if you wanted to be absolutely sure that they will never help you. The noises about annexing Greenland and Canada made sure that nobody in Europe is going to be part of any coalition there willingly.

That's what happens when you take stupid decisions on your own because you're a big bully boy and allies are for chumps.

Absolute delusional take, considering that the US is not trustworthy as they started bombing twice during negotiations. Not to mention that the US keeps moving the goalpost every time Iran agrees, because the US gets its orders from Israel. The US should get out of the region. Enough havoc has been caused because of it.

Yes. The Port of Los Angeles had a huge problem with empties when Hanjin went bankrupt. Everybody thought the South Korean government would bail out Hanjin, one of the largest shipping lines. There was no bailout. Port of LA finally shipped most of the empties to Fontana, CA, an inland city which exists mostly to move freight around. Three freeways, two rail lines, Amazon and WalMart plants, and an auto mall that's all truck dealers.

If you want a used 20' container, they're under $1000 right now in the Fontana area. Probably much less in quantity.

which then leads to negative values for the cans, and makes it profitable for some trucking outfits to run "tiltload" container trucks, that can autonomously off load an empty can ,somewhere convienient or other wierdness where filling a can with an otherwise unprofitable comodity ,like hay, then drives a whole industry driven by water cost and the return value of cans, or scrap metal, and who knows what else, "half cut" cars, etc.