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The anti-inflation pivot of 2022

adamtooze.substack.com

111–120 of 308 posts

Re: The anti-inflation pivot of 2022

#111
post #11

Month to month inflation has been flat or near flat for some months now. It’s seems like we had a price spike in December/Jan for various reasons and now things have stabilized. If trend continues it seems we should be back in normal yoy inflation rates shortly once we start comparing against that post spike floor

Don't forget that the Covid stuff finally seems to have settled to some kind of new "normal," and that it's a once-in-a-century event that is going to be very hard to make any comparisons to.

... assuming there are no further variants, and hand-waving long covid away, sure, it's settled.

I think we'll find that just like reports of Mark Twain's death, rumors of the end of the pandemic are greatly exaggerated.

Re: The anti-inflation pivot of 2022

#112
post #99
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fields are macroeconomics and labor economics. I don't understand your other question, so it's hard to answer. What do you mean by "discovered"? Discovered by whom, the employer or the the employee? But you may be interested in knowing that models of labor markets are often based on matching models - you've got two groups (employers, employees) and everyobdy is trying to find {one,many} members of the other group…

> The fields are macroeconomics and labor economics As I understand it, those are mainly concerned with reduction in labor costs. Job discovery is a phrase used by Clayton Christensen to describe finding a job to be done. He uses it to describe finding a product to sell to people to perform some function in their lives - a job to be done by a product that you make. I'm using it as an alternative to the idea of "job c…

Saying that jobs are "discovered" instead of created is akin to saying that code is discovered instead of created. When you program you create code, there are many ways to structure it so the code will look vastly different, therefore it doesn't make sense to say that the code was discovered, it was definitely created.

Jobs are the same, when you create an organization there are countless ways to structure it and you will create different jobs depending on how you do things. Job creators are the people who create organizations, the better they do their job the more these organizations can do with less people so the more wealth there will be to share, so job creation is an extremely important job.

Re: The anti-inflation pivot of 2022

#113
post #37

I think the US (and Canada) just needs to ride the tide and let all the other boats sink. Pretty much everyone else is screwed. I think people are underestimating the second order effects of the US still having stable energy and farming capabilities. We'll see more stuff get done here and less stuff done elsewhere. Unemployment will be great here no matter what we do really. It will suffer in other countries. Though…

I ask this question every so often on economic threads - Are jobs created or discovered? What field of study is most associated with "new jobs"?

And while we're at it, if a tree falls in a forest with nobody around to hear, does it make a sound? I don't think there's any difference of facts to debate around created or discovered, just semantics.

Re: The anti-inflation pivot of 2022

#114
post #8

Here's the lesson I want people to learn: we had 40+ years of stagnant real wages (overall; there are exceptions). What happened in the pandemic was: 1. People realized going into an officce to work was unncessary and even anachronistic for many jobs; 2. Employers like employees in the office as a form of control; 3. Employers made short-term decisions to lay off huge amounts of people (even after taking PPP loans fo…

I think corporate taxation is the only way out of this mess. Tax the profits, take money out of the system. It makes extra sense given that most of this money was injected into the system in 2020 anyways. It's not like it was 'earned' even in the traditional neoliberal capitalist sense. It was an economy-wide bailout and now that it has served its purpose, it's time for the money to return to where it came.

Trying to tackle inflation by suppressing wages is both immoral and silly. How is that a 'free market' solution? It's the equivalent of price controls. I am glad that the Fed has taken that as their position, only because it seems to have made people across the political spectrum realize that there is a real antagonistic relationship between the architects of the system and those living within it.

Re: The anti-inflation pivot of 2022

#115
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now Gen X are included in the anti-boomer rhetoric. Great. As a tail-end UK Gen Xer, while I have some wealth I have built from working for over 20 years, I missed out on houses costing 2-3x your income just as much as the younger generations did. I'm not sitting on a million dollar property that I paid 10c for in 1972, largely because I wasn't born then...

Welcome the the club, mate. I'm a tail-end boomer (born 1963), and missed out on most of that gravy train boomers had. Apparently we are all selfish right-wing assholes. Boomer hate is stupid. The enemy are the elites, corporations and billionaires.

> Boomer hate is stupid. The enemy are the elites, corporations and billionaires.

Hate of any generation - especially an individual member of a generation based on their membership in it - is stupid.

However, the critique against Boomers by younger generations is not about you as an individual, but is about largely Boomer-backed policies that pull up the the ladder of affordability behind them for housing and education.

That doesn't mean every Boomer is to blame, or that the wealthy among younger generations don't often advocate the same positions as Boomers. But as a cohort, Boomers' voting patterns at both a national and local level have tended to exacerbate the specific problems of housing and education unaffordability.

Re: The anti-inflation pivot of 2022

#116
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know high inflation makes it worse to be poor right? Especially core inflation.

Everything is bad for the poor though. Rising rates fixes inflation, but reduces employment. As it turns out, unemployment is bad for the poor. Lowering rates improves employment, but comes with inflation risks. As it turns out, the poor also hate inflation. Screwed if you do, screwed if you don't. Dual mandate says that the Fed aims for as good employment as possible, while also aiming at a targeted 2% to 3% inflati…

> EDIT: My understanding is that core-inflation isn't about "good or bad for people", its about "good or bad for statisticians".

Bad for making decisions. If there's too much noise in a signal you can't steer the ship. If you do try to take action on noisy data, there's a big chance that you'll over- or understeer, especially when effects are slow to be seen.

Re: The anti-inflation pivot of 2022

#117
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now Gen X are included in the anti-boomer rhetoric. Great. As a tail-end UK Gen Xer, while I have some wealth I have built from working for over 20 years, I missed out on houses costing 2-3x your income just as much as the younger generations did. I'm not sitting on a million dollar property that I paid 10c for in 1972, largely because I wasn't born then...

Welcome the the club, mate. I'm a tail-end boomer (born 1963), and missed out on most of that gravy train boomers had. Apparently we are all selfish right-wing assholes. Boomer hate is stupid. The enemy are the elites, corporations and billionaires.

I do find the Boomer hate to be absolutely incoherent, but not new. Ultimately, the biggest factor is your economic class. If you're a boomer, but you're poor, you will live just as poorly as someone who's a poor Gen Z. If you're black and poor, you have far more in common on a day-to-day basis with a white poor person than with a black millionaire/billionaire.

Re: The anti-inflation pivot of 2022

#118
post #19

> It is the most concerted effort to slow down growth and employment in the interests of monetary stability that we have seen since the 1980s. I see it as a war of generations. The boomers/genXers are eager to preserve their wealth and are once again dumping on young people. The 70s was a period of high inflation, it was also, according to piketty a period of high income equality for the world over. The central banks…

[deleted]

Re: The anti-inflation pivot of 2022

#119
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask this question every so often on economic threads - Are jobs created or discovered? What field of study is most associated with "new jobs"?

Jobs are more often created than discovered. Tomorrow we might discover a new kind of math, requiring newly trained mathmeticians in a novel field. Those mathmeticians will need admins, business services, places to work, food, etc. Thus even the discovery of a few jobs has more jobs created than found.

The mathematicians don't need any more food than they did before the new kind of math was discovered. Why would you count that as job creation?

Re: The anti-inflation pivot of 2022

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that the Covid stuff finally seems to have settled to some kind of new "normal," and that it's a once-in-a-century event that is going to be very hard to make any comparisons to.

... assuming there are no further variants, and hand-waving long covid away, sure, it's settled. I think we'll find that just like reports of Mark Twain's death, rumors of the end of the pandemic are greatly exaggerated.

> rumors of the end of the pandemic are greatly exaggerated.

Only if people are stupid enough to repeat the last two years of nonsense. Take away all the fear mongering and testing and you probably wouldn't even notice covid was a thing. You'd get sick like you always do and just shrug it off as "that thing that was going around" like we all did in 2019...

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