381–390 of 509 posts
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what new medicines have come out of europe recently? (serious question)
The Pfizer vaccine for one.
I personally think we're in recession and the reason is datapoints outside of this GDP print, what companies are saying, and the fact I know people that have been laid off already. What I find pathetic is that saying we are in a recession is now a political stance. I think we all know that if a Republican were President the entire narrative would shift, with most of the press saying we're in recession while Fox, etc…
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The Pfizer vaccine for one.
And mRNA tech came from Europe? (seems like it came from USA to me) And isn't Pfizer an American company? You're talking about the German company right? Would they have been able to do without Pfizer backing them?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-vaccin...
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Rocks when dropped will eventually fall. You can catch the rock and hold on to it, but will eventually put it down, you can do something crazy like build a wind machine that keeps the rock afloat, but entropy demands the machine go out one day and the rock will fall. Best case is you catch the rock, and put it down gently so it doesn't break, but rock will go down.
In this analogy, political corruption is playing the role of gravity. Covid could have been prevented by mechanisms that Trump removed. The US inexplicably kept juicing the economy with zero interest rates through the end of Obama and all of Trump. 2008 could have been prevented by depression-era regulations that were removed due to heavy lobbying and traceable payments to (bipartisan) politicians. Whatever bubbles p…
People inherently will try to put things to their benefit and to what incentives them. It takes a lot of structure to make the cost benefit of the incentives to outweigh the perceived benefits. It starts with something relatively good, but slightly pushed and snowballs from there. "I got stuff done that fed all these people! Surely making sure i get a little extra food is fair.....". Maybe someone notices and say "thats not fair", then why would the person go through a bunch of effort to make sure everyone is fed again and not just themselves? Altruism?
Every social structure ever created to stop this has failed in Human history, its reasonable to say every one that will ever get created will. They will be exposed to powerful forces of erosion and entropy. Maybe you can get a machine system that rules over humans that has different incentives or something, but any system that seeks to curb corruption will fall sooner or later. You can try to make in the system a desire to repair itself, but that in itself becomes an incentive and then we see purges.
You can build a tower to keep your rock up and defy gravity, but that tower WILL fall one day.
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Not just Europe—price controls (de jure or de facto, the latter via e.g. establishing a monopsony) are, as best I can tell, the main unifying factor in healthcare systems in the entire OECD except the US. Those systems differ a lot, but at some point and on some level, they all fall back on price controls, apparently to good effect.
Just looking through the OECD's datasets [0], I see a lot of health care quality and utilization measures missing for the US and many other OECD countries. How are you defining "good effect"? [0] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=49344# I was able to find some incomplete data that suggests the US is pretty good on the metric of wait time, compared to many European countries and Canada: https://www.oecd-ilibra…
My short-version argument would be—and I'm a little annoyed at having to explain this, because I've been explaining it to people on the Internet for 20 damn years, it's so not-hard to find this info that it's kinda difficult not to have been exposed to it, and it seems like it should be common knowledge at this point and like some folks are going way out of their way not to understand it—that the "good effect" is precisely that the US spends 50-100% more than any of these countries, per capita, and does not smoke the rest on practically every metric, instead doing a little better in some areas, a little worse in others, middle-of-the pack on others still. It sure as hell looks like we're paying a huge premium for similar outcomes, which also explains why there aren't a lot of people in other countries begging their governments to adopt a system like ours (a fact one has to explain when cherry-picking metrics to make the US look good—OK, so why aren't others rushing to copy us? At least some of them should be, if we actually do have an unambiguously better system).
The "good effect" is that other health care systems spend far less, and also don't bankrupt people over medical bills, while achieving roughly comparable results.
If I came to you and told you I had a process to produce a Tesla knock-off that produced a car a little better in some ways, a little worse in others, but pretty damn comparable, at 50-70% of what it costs Tesla to produce a car, and then showed you dozens of factories I'd already built that were demonstrably doing exactly that, you wouldn't ask me how I was defining "good effect" when I used that to describe the results of the One Weird Trick of my process. It's obvious.
Were you not aware of the vast differences in costs & accessibility between OECD healthcare systems? By which I mostly mean between the US and everyone else.
No group of people, Republican or Democrat, can stop the perpetual cycles of human history. At best, we can only delay the inevitable.
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Let's see who breaks first.
The real scary moment will be when you see the White House and Democrats re-define what stagflation is. After all, this is a recession. Inflation is comically high - despite the incredibly massaged CPI number. The third and last criteria for stagflation is high unemployment, which it seems like we're heading into as soon as this last post-lockdown boom in consumer spending falls off a cliff. Stagflation is very scary…
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I'm not and have not argued that. That's where I believe you may be leading with emotion.
As an aside it's pretty bad form to accuse the person you're talking to be emotional. It's implies that your argument is logical and correct, and the other person's is incorrectly clouded. Can you clarify what your argument about the stimulus is then?
I have no argument for, against, nor interest in engaging in the shaving of a yak that is bald. You're in a debate with a single participant.
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Now recessions are racists then?
That wouldn't be the implication of a title like that and I suspect you know you're being disingenuous. It would mean that some of our most important decisions are being made by people from a single background that doesn't reflect the makeup of their stakeholders, the American public. As a thought exercise, would you think it's not notable if the 8 person board was entirely female .. or entirely black?
It’s shocking that you somehow think race or gender can effect the categorization by economists of economic conditions. It’s fairly quantitative situation and I’m at a loss how different backgrounds would effect that analysis.