201–210 of 369 posts
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Tell that to the Canadian government. It currently considers massive deficits fine because of our debt-to-GDP ratio, despite GDP being driven by a real estate bubble for the last several years.
Once again show me an economic policy that is tied to GDP
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> Democracy is just executing the will of the majority. Only if you’re a dictionary. Democracy as practiced routinely resists the will of the majority (eg attitudes towards climate, reproductive rights), and also routinely reinforces minoritarian protections once established (eg accessibility for people with disabilities). Democracy is ultimately the same thing as any other governing philosophy, except it’s more mall…
You’re quibbling over the layers of indirection a representative democracy adds, but it doesn’t fundamentally change. If the majority of people wanted to strips rights for those with disabilities, they would be well within the constitution to do it. > Democracy is ultimately the same thing as any other governing philosophy, except it’s more malleable by people without concentrated power than most other systems. Certa…
It's hard to overstate how terrible this idea is. GDP is a concrete measure that is difficult to fake. Once you start arguing about the economic value of volunteering, divorce, income inequality, and crime -- you've opened the door to never being able to trust GDP again. Should we create new metrics to track progress? Sure. Should we stop tracking GDP? No way.
I’m not sure how true this is. There are international standards, updated over time, with variable adoption by per-country agencies tasked with measuring GDP.
These agencies typically rely on surveys of industry specific activity to measure different metrics and at times imputation and inference of unmeasured or missing values to form a picture of overall economic activity, from which a single GDP figure is derived.
All of which is to say “measuring” GDP is nothing like measuring a concrete physical quantity such as temperature, and there is ample opportunity to fiddle with the standards or fudge the statistics, either innocently or nefariously.
See for example how incorrect construction data cleansing lead to Japan overstating its GDP for several years.
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Well, imagine you're campaigning in a Democratic Party primary against an incumbent president from your own party who keeps bragging about how much GDP increased during their administration.
Here's what he said when signing the Public Broadcasting Act:
> It announces to the world that our nation wants more than just material wealth; our nation wants more than a 'chicken in every pot.' We in America have an appetite for excellence, too. While we work every day to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of all to enrich man's spirit. That is the purpose of this act."
And here is Johnson talking about his "Great Society" goals[1]:
> The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.
> For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.
> The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.
> Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
> The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.
> The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.
> It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
> But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
**
> Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?"
[1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-univer...
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What do you mean when you say China fakes its GDP?
The Economist recently reported on a study that used the brightness of countries' lights at night as proxy for GDP[1][2]. The study suggests China and other autocracies have significantly exaggerated their GDP growth over the last twenty years. [1]: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/09/29/a-study-... [2]: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/how-much-should-we-tr...
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In the UK we have Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees Mogg, both of whom can and do regularly quote classical literature. You can have them. No, really, please take them.
Boris and Jacob strike me as politicians that understand how to play the UK system masterfully. Doubt either of them are the solution for the country but neither is anyone in labour. The corruption precedes them by centuries, and anyone who tries to fix things - like remove the special status of the City of London now will get a shorten career. Kinda like in the US to even have a chance to be the presidential candida…
For sure, because it would sink the country, these days the UK is more dependent on the city than the city is on the UK
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While RFK sometimes got help from Edwin Guthman and Peter Edelman, he also spoke extemporaneously sometimes, most famously when he had to announce the death of Martin Luther King to a crowd that hadn't yet heard the news: https://kennedykingindy.org/full-rfk-speech
Where are the politicians today who can quote Aeschylus at will? What happened to our national discourse that we’ve filled it with dimwits?
It's hard to overstate how terrible this idea is. GDP is a concrete measure that is difficult to fake. Once you start arguing about the economic value of volunteering, divorce, income inequality, and crime -- you've opened the door to never being able to trust GDP again. Should we create new metrics to track progress? Sure. Should we stop tracking GDP? No way.
It's trivial to fake. Just pull some asset values out of your ass, which Wall Street does a million times a day. GDP became a lot less useful when the economy shifted from mostly tangible goods to mostly intangibles (e.g. software) and services, then utterly useless with the over-financialization of our economy. There are many measures that are more informative than GDP (or GDP per capita), that enable more rational decision making. GDP is just a vanity number.