a savings glut is the thing that Krugman has suggested, and is the thing which makes sense to me.
Which stinks because I hate Krugman.
Economists’ projections of interest rates and unemployment have proved too high
21–30 of 164 posts
Re: Economists’ projections of interest rates and unemployment have proved too high
#22http://archive.md/nUmz5
Thank you for your service
Re: Economists’ projections of interest rates and unemployment have proved too high
#23The official US inflation measure is garbage.
It doesn't include enough of the big 3 costs in people's lives : housing, education and healthcare.
It includes whacky stuff like "oh your cellphone is faster now than 5 years ago, we're going to say that you're getting 10x the phone for roughly the same price and use that to disprove inflation".
It ignores asset inflation (stocks, real estate, venture capital, everything else) driven by QE. The average person never saw the QE because it went straight to banks and inflated asset prices. Rich people with assets made 4x their money. Wage slaves saw none of it. None of this is counted in inflation measures.
Re: Economists’ projections of interest rates and unemployment have proved too high
#24The official US inflation measure is garbage. It doesn't include enough of the big 3 costs in people's lives : housing, education and healthcare. It includes whacky stuff like "oh your cellphone is faster now than 5 years ago, we're going to say that you're getting 10x the phone for roughly the same price and use that to disprove inflation". It ignores asset inflation (stocks, real estate, venture capital, everything…
Could you point me to resources where I could learn about this?
Re: Economists’ projections of interest rates and unemployment have proved too high
#25If you can find me economists that have predicted economic activities/results with any level of accuracy (e.g., greater than 50% even), then I will find you ~10 times as many prominent economists who have predicted the opposite. Economists probably predict things accurately at a rate lower than throwing a 20 sided die into the air and guessing which number will be facing up when it lands.
Does that matter? Well, if they can’t predict things with any degree of accuracy based on the data given, this must mean that they don’t understand the ends that are achieved by the means that generated the data, doesn’t it?
If economists don’t understand the outcomes that result from the inputs, then they shouldn’t be trusted to advise on the inputs?
TBH, why do we even care what “economists” think at all, given the above? Economists are no better, from an objective value perspective, then tarot readers. Economics, as a study / practice, has been corrupted by the followers of Keynes, and by the worship of monetarism, and, as a result, fails to provide any value to the economy, let alone to society as a whole.
Business leaders. Business leaders provide value to the economy by staking their own success on being able providing enough value to turn a profit. Business leaders make predictions, and when they fail they don’t make money (they probably lose a lot of money). If their predictions come true, they become rich. Economists just sit on the sidelines, watching and squawking like railbirds, and postcasting things to boost their ego, staking nothing but the time it takes to type out 280 characters of their precious wisdom.
Re: Economists’ projections of interest rates and unemployment have proved too high
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Satoshi got it extremely wrong, to the point that if he had any economic background at all I’d suspect the first wave of crypto currencies to be a sick joke: artificial scarcity (and more generally, inflexible money supply) of the kind engendered by bitcoin and its ilk are the exact embodiment of what money must not be if one is to not artificially crimp the economy’s growth. There’s a very good reason why we came of…
"we" came off of the gold standard because Nixon was having trouble paying for the Vietnam war. Printing money doesn't create wealth, it redistributes it to the printer: this is seigniorage and it is a tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage
Whatever the case, it’s bit of odd bedfellows when extreme conservatives and some people on the left see the bi-metallic standard as something to go back to.
What’s the case for it?
Re: Economists’ projections of interest rates and unemployment have proved too high
#27Paywalled, couldn’t read. As an economist, strongly allergic to this kind of title. The theory of endogenous money (as opposed to non monetary and/or fractional reserve banking theories) accounts for what is described in the title fairly effectively: money needs to be viewed as a medium of exchange, and it needs to be plentiful so that information never gets bottlenecked: this will surprise no software developer if t…
There's something I don't get about endogenous money vs. fractional reserve. Namely, the factual claims. So fractional reserve says that money is created by loans between banks as restricted by the money multiplier and endogenous money says that banks can create unlimited money. [1] My question is not which of these is true but rather how can this be under dispute? Aren't the workings of banks established by laws and…
As a non-economist: Is there really any practical difference by now?
Re: Economists’ projections of interest rates and unemployment have proved too high
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bingo. Money is only a useful medium of exchange if it is stable, and deflationary currencies are inherently volatile.
Don't delude yourself to thinking that the volatility of Bitcoin is due to it's constrained supply. It's because it's used for speculation almost exclusively, and not for it's intended purpose: buying stuff.
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Re: Economists’ projections of interest rates and unemployment have proved too high
#29Is it because say unemployment has proven to be a strange concept these days with "underemployment" being a larger concern?
Perhaps they were simply predicting the wrong thing / things that don't seem as relevant.
Re: Economists’ projections of interest rates and unemployment have proved too high
#30I'm not a subscriber so I can't read the article but I have a personal hypothesis about this. Developed economies have begun to enter a post scarcity state. Daily goods like food and household items are not responding to inflation because they are no longer scarce. The combination of economies of scale, automation and cheap foreign labor have brought many goods to this point.
Meanwhile, things which are still governed by scarcity, medicine, property, education are skyrocketing in price. In part because those are more opaque markets with some bad incentives but also in some part ecause people can devote much greater percentage of their income to these things.
What it really looks like to me is these economies are straddling a the line between acarcity and non-scaecity. I'm no economist though.