Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 313 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?

#241

Post by aguyfromnb »

koheripbal wrote: post #216
PKop wrote: post #212

These twitter accounts: https://twitter.com/LukeGromen https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact https://twitter.com/darenpa72 blog: https://www.lynalden.com/ Common thread is topics around currency dynamics, and US Dollar reserve currency affecting..many things: trade, markets, geopolitics.

It's hard to under-emphasize the long term impacts of the Fed's actions to print (not literally print but buy assets (treasuries, corporate bonds, and even amazingly public EQUITY) in exchange for cash), and the impact it will have on the USD - the global reserve currency. Anyone who claims to know for certain what the impact will be, is a fool or a liar. We are in unprecedented monetary policy times. Maybe USD is ce…

>Anyone who claims to know for certain what the impact will be, is a fool or a liar.

Why do you need to know for certain?

If you're trying to make money, or even just "get by", you look at probabilities of possible outcomes and make your best guess on how to approach the problem. A mentality of "no one knows for sure, so it's pointless" is oddly unscientific. You only need to be "right" some of the time.

Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?

#243

Post by aguyfromnb »

vincentmarle wrote: post #222

I’ve studied Economics. It took me a while to realize that it’s far from a deterministic science despite all the fancy math and models (my first clue should have been that it’s in the department of “Social Sciences”, doh!). I wish more of my time was spent learning chaos theory, probability, and systems thinking, rather than solving Lagrange multipliers by hand. I have learned a lot more from reading Nassim Taleb’s b…

>my first clue should have been that it’s in the department of “Social Sciences”, doh!

Because judging a subject based on it's faculty classification is oh-so-scientific. Economics is a scientific study of social phenomenon; where else would you like it to be placed?

Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?

#244

Post by dacohenii »

Not reading per se, but I've listened to Marketplace podcast [0] almost daily for years at this point, and I find it invaluable for economic news and interpretation -- especially now.

Also recommend Marketplace's podcast Make Me Smart [1], which is an informal deep dive on a single subject. It's nominally a weekly podcast, but they're now releasing a 10-minute daily version.

Finally, NPR's Planet Money [2] and their daily podcast The Indicator [3] are entertaining and education as well.

[0] https://www.marketplace.org/ [1] https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart-with-kai-and... [2] https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money/ [3] https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-plane...

Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?

#245

Post by caseysoftware »

nl wrote: post #206
caseysoftware wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the Keynesian view where you can move a lever (cause) and measure the changes (effect). Unfortunately, there are way too many variables, interactions, etc, etc to have any real confidence in those measures. It's further complicated by the idea that the normal tools (primarily interest rate & money supply delivered via subsidies, etc) are beyond their "normal" operating ranges. When the Fed rate was 5% and loan…

That's the Keynesian view where you can move a lever (cause) and measure the changes (effect). Thats not Keynesian economics at all! Or rather it's a view that people from schools of thought completely opposite to Keynesian also believe. Does anyone not think this? Eg, Quantitative Easing: does anyone (Keynesian or not) think it does nothing?

Everything does something but it's hard->impossible to directly map cause to effect. The problem is there are numerous causes and effects all playing out at once and they all interact.

Or to put it another way: it's the three-body problem extended to millions->billions of bodies which use psychology+perception as the main force instead of gravity.

Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?

#247

Post by refurb »

Back in 2007 I listen to Econlib podcast quite a lot. The host had some really great guests on and did a very nice job in digging into the issues.

https://www.econlib.org/

Yes, the host is a libertarian, but I don’t think he forces it on his listeners. He’ll often have people on who aren’t anything close to libertarian. He’s also quite upfront about his own biases.

I learned a ton from that podcast.

Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?

#249

Post by jennyyang »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #220
fanzhang wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Austrian School seems to have been wrong about the last 15 years' money printing causing inflation. In particular, the general Austrian school would have predicted a lot more inflation by now. The prediction on this has fared so poorly that the last 15 years has given rise to a school nearly diametrically opposite to the Austrian school: modern monetary theory. (My understanding of the Austrian response to this i…

I think there is a lot of inflation if you measure it properly. We say inflation is low because we adjust for quality. So they say sure, a car costs more now than in 2000 but it has more features so if you adjust for quality it is cheaper. Same goes for other goods like computers, smartphones, etc. The problem is, the cheaper versions of these goods don't exist anymore, because the more expensive version is effective…

The government changed the way they measured inflation to purposefully downplay it. For example, if they were measuring the cost of Levi's jeans, and they went up too high, they would replace them in their index with cheaper non-name brand jeans to show that inflation didn't occur.

And same thing goes with groceries. When ice cream used to be a pint, it's now 14 oz. They have decreased the size of things like food packages over the last 15 years, and I don't think that's taken into consideration in the inflation index. Recently they decreased the size of orange juice by 15% but kept the price the same. That is the definition of inflation.

Post reply on HN