271–280 of 477 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are generating mountains of debt yet again, unfortunately.
> We are generating mountains of debt yet again, unfortunately. We never really stopped.
Instead of paying execs money they were paid in shares. Execs took decisions that were bad for the company holistically but good for the share price.
The author obviously wants you to believe that it was the abandonment of the gold standard, but there are several other theories that have more credence with mainstream economists. The early 70's was the start of a horrible period of stagflation: stagnation coupled with inflation. Some do blame the loss of the gold standard, but the leading theory is the OPEC oil crisis. Others blame market regulations, the EPA was p…
A fairly simple explanation that for some reason I don't see a lot of is the drop in union membership density around this time period. Such a drop would decrease bargaining power and therefore decrease the rate of wage increase
The author obviously wants you to believe that it was the abandonment of the gold standard, but there are several other theories that have more credence with mainstream economists. The early 70's was the start of a horrible period of stagflation: stagnation coupled with inflation. Some do blame the loss of the gold standard, but the leading theory is the OPEC oil crisis. Others blame market regulations, the EPA was p…
Peter Thiel (who I don't agree with on everything) had a really great take on this once (can't find it at the moment), and basically laid out a strong case on how we haven't really recovered from the oil shocks of the 1970s. I do think that the early 1970s was the culmination of a bunch of different cultural, political, economic, and social trends meeting together and creating a very different global consensus. BTW,…
A lot of charts with no context, but my main takeaways are that the US is not in record debt, in fact it was well over 100% GDP in WWII and under that now. Based on the news you'd think US is over spending by records numbers. The numbers are records but as a percentage of GDP they are not. Another surprise is the S&P PE ratio. I thought it was really high now, but actually 2008 was the high point by about twice as mu…
>in fact it was well over 100% GDP in WWII You can't win a war with sustainable budgeting. If you have to use WW2 to prove that the national debt wasn't bad than that's probably a sign it's bad.
The author obviously wants you to believe that it was the abandonment of the gold standard, but there are several other theories that have more credence with mainstream economists. The early 70's was the start of a horrible period of stagflation: stagnation coupled with inflation. Some do blame the loss of the gold standard, but the leading theory is the OPEC oil crisis. Others blame market regulations, the EPA was p…
> And energy is a massive component in the price of almost everything we consume. Is it really? What would be different if energy was much cheaper? Would we have more advanced rockets or robots or phones? Better CPUs? More and cheaper housing built in dense cities? Cheaper education or medicine? More job security? Even more food? I realize that energy is an important input into some industrial processes, but I don't…
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2019/04/05/149-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The graphs show two things: A relative increase of income for the wealthiest and a relative decrease for everyone else, specifically in the US. The 70s and 80s mark a political shift to privatization of public service/infrastructure and deregulation of and trade-agreements for the investor market.
Yeah, liberalisation just made rich richer. All that government debt went to entrapanuer not working mass. If capital accumulation is too fast then he need to put in somewhere. If that somewhere is housing then normal working people can't compete.
It's more like WTF happened between 1945 and 1971. I think that was an ahistorical period of low income inequality, and now we're back to "normal" such as it is.
> I think that was an ahistorical period of low income equality You mean low income inequality, right? That post WWII era in which the US was pretty much the only developed nation with it's manufacturing capability still intact. That and the GI Bill explain how that era was exceptional - a large number of folks who returned from WWII got free college educations.
The biggest reason for the wage drop is the trade with China. The US and China started trading in 1971: https://apjjf.org/2013/11/24/Dong-Wang/3958/article.html As with any economic question, it's usually not due to one reason. The combination of energy price and workforce age comes into play. But the biggest trigger of all was the trade with China. That put a serious pressure to job competition, and led to significa…
Total US trade with China was vanishingly small well into the 1980s, and didn't start to become significant relative to total US trade until the mid-to-late 90s[1]. I think there's a better argument for trade at large, since ~1970 was a turning point for many _other_ Asian countries, in particular Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, etc. There wasn't a clear, sharp line, though. [1] https://static.seekingalpha.com…