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WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

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Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#421

Post by arp242 »

tboyd47 wrote: post #394
crazygringo wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Thomas Piketty [1], it's mainly a result of a bifurcation in education, and dramatically rising managerial compensation helped with tax cuts. I personally also think this is the main answer. In other words, all our massive productivity increases have come from people with a ton of education, and they reap all the rewards, helped with lower taxes. The median worker isn't any more educated and hasn't reape…

LOL, as if people actually learn productive skills in college.

I'm not looking forward to being treated by an autodidact dentist, but to each their own.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#422

Post by dnautics »

trixie_ wrote: post #420
dnautics wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree, but it's also crazy to suggest that inflation affects society evenly.

70% of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank. Say there was 0% inflation for the last 50 years, how much do you think the number above would change?

The percentage would be lower, average savings higher. Because people's wages would have eroded less, and money not keeping it's value is incentive to live a consumptive lifestyle.... Bitcoiners hodl, for example, in spite of crashes and even with the risk it all goes to zero tomorrow.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#423

Post by ethbr0 »

kjs3 wrote: post #395
ethbr0 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that... but you'd be surprised how chaotically the sausage is manually made in the inner workings of health care. Provider side has it semi-sorted (at least within the same facility). Everyone else (insurance, etc) is attempting to clean semi-structured / inaccurate data passed to them, and generate a coherent result.

Spouse of a medical practice manager at a mid-sized practice here. Provider data is wildly variable in quality, to be sure. But if the insurance companies are trying to clean the data, they're not using the 'result' to make the system more efficient (except maybe for them at the expense of everyone else), because "we get bad data" gives them another reason to deny the claim. My wife and all of her peers spend inordin…

Absolutely. But it happens on the opposite side as well. I can say that major insurance companies have to deal with major hospitals (in addition to individual practices) miscoding stuff.

Not even because they want more money! It's more wrong vs correct. And is done just because "that's the way they've always done it" (and they're used to the insurance company fixing it on their side).

The biggest benefit of the move to automated processing and electronic records is it doesn't leave room for Dr. Sue and Mr. Green to have a non-policy understanding on how to handle claims.

It got things done, but it made it impossible to scale when you were trying to untangle 1,000,000 "special cases."

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#424

Post by stosto88 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #25

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…

You got to be fucking kidding me...

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#425

Post by Aicy »

ocommentator wrote: post #170
refulgentis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many, many, many, more of "the 99%" benefited than the theoretical benefit of opening the US to competition did to "the 1%". https://ourworldindata.org/exports/share-of-population-livin...

Exactly, it would be interesting to look at the growth in real income and income equality from a global perspective.

How come this graph leaves out North America?

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#426

Post by trixie_ »

dnautics wrote: post #422
trixie_ wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

70% of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank. Say there was 0% inflation for the last 50 years, how much do you think the number above would change?

The percentage would be lower, average savings higher. Because people's wages would have eroded less, and money not keeping it's value is incentive to live a consumptive lifestyle.... Bitcoiners hodl, for example, in spite of crashes and even with the risk it all goes to zero tomorrow.

Are you sure people would have saved the money versus buying a better car, house, electronics, etc..

Are you sure inflation is the reason people live a 'consumptive lifestyle'?

I'd argue it is 'cheap' access to debt - student loans, housing loans, credit cards, etc.. that has prevented people from saving.

Historically though the savings rate to today isn't much different than 60 years ago - around 10% in 1960 down to around 7% today.

Bitcoin is an asset/investment like any other, including the dollar, and all can go to zero under the right circumstances. That is why no single asset should be HODL'd in spite of others, diversify.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#427

Post by brandmeyer »

iguy wrote: post #418
brandmeyer wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This free money would pull qualified people away from more productive endeavors. If this was actually happening, we would see the impact in increasing labor prices, not stagnating labor prices.

We did? I mean salaries in finance from the 80s on were much higher than in the 60s. They went from being some kind of accountants to being masters of the universe. And incomes of people near the top, in all fields, increased relative to the median too.

The argument is about government spending "crowding out" commercial spending. I have a very hard time believing that any government spending programs are affecting the demand for financiers' labor.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#428

Post by raiflip »

throwaway-8c93 wrote: post #355
raiflip wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drip is definitely correlation until proven to be causation. So it is possible the drop was a function of a common underlying cause. The reason no other explanation makes sense to me is that any purely market based explanation, like energy or China, we would see a corresponding drop in US labor force productivity, but the whole point is that that productivity did not drop. One question i have for you is, why didn…

It's not a fair fight. In the end, there is a huge asymmetry in power, all the real power lies with the corporation. Behaving with clemency and goodwill is a privilege bestowed upon employees (and unions) that can be unilaterally revoked. If push comes to shove, the corporation can very much steamroll any resistance, especially when times are bad, and even more so once the corporation diversifies the risk by becoming…

Eh I can see where you are coming from, but I don't necessarily agree with that. At least here in the US, corporations never accepted to unions as legitimate. It always took giant draw out strikes.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#429

Post by DobryMorozov »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #180
djur wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we narrowly averted disaster. Did you know that amendment required a supermajority to raise taxes?

At this point I kind of wish a supermajority was required for every vote. Then neither party could control legislating over the objections of the other. This trading back and forth every so often thing doesn’t seem to be working great.

There already is a filibuster so to pass legislation in the senate the majority needs 60 votes. The only exception is budget reconciliation which was why both the Affordable Care Act and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act were both part of the filibuster exempt budget process.

It's definitely a negative thing as nothing significant will ever get done

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#430

Post by taffer »

ehmish wrote: post #417
taffer wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially, this website wants to make you believe that going off the gold standard (which only existed on paper at the time) is the root cause of all the bad things in the world. All documented by cherry-picked numbers and shoehorned graphs. And now we are supposed to buy Bitcoin to make everything better. It is crazy that this wacky stuff is upvoted on HN.

Ignoring their conclusion aboutwhat they think it was, it's interesting that _something_ happened in 1971, personally I think it's more likely the opening of trade with china than going off the gold standard. It does a good job of showing the sheer broadness of the effect on American society.

> it's interesting that _something_ happened in 1971

Why do you believe that this is true at all? Someone on the Internet just cherry picked some numbers and shoehorned some graphs to make a point. You could pick any year, and with enough data butchery, you could find all sorts of spurious correlations to all sorts of things.

By the way, until the 1980s, China was a dirt poor Third World country that was more or less irrelevant in international trade. In the 1970s China exported fewer things than, for example, Nigeria, Venezuela or Poland. The rise of China took place in the 1990s and 2000s. It is completely impossible that trade with China in the 1970s caused any noticeable change.

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