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Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

economist.com

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Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#431

Post by refurb »

arethuza wrote: post #405
refurb wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP is a complex measure as it depends on what that hour of work produces. And GDP also includes production that required no labor at all (i.e. see Ireland's incredibly high GDP per capita due to multi-nationals funneling sales through the country).

I was trying to think of some objective measure for "hard working" - I don't really equate this measure with simply the number of hours worked.

I get where you were coming from. I'm not sure there is a better measure.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#432

Post by local_crmdgeon »

cozos wrote: post #89
jandrewrogers wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US manufacturing continues to grow almost monotonically, it is wildly successful. The only thing that has declined is manufacturing jobs due to the high levels of automation used in American manufacturing.

what are some successful stories of American manufacturing?

Boeing, the modern car industry, Macbooks, Pratt and Whitney, Cummins, Caterpillar, the Norfolk Ship Yards,, the modern cardboard/"fiber" packaging industry, our incredibly green Forestry industry, the growing modular housing industry.

Apple Google Amazon Rocketdyne Tesla HP Cisco Systems

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#433

Post by local_crmdgeon »

cozos wrote: post #89
jandrewrogers wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US manufacturing continues to grow almost monotonically, it is wildly successful. The only thing that has declined is manufacturing jobs due to the high levels of automation used in American manufacturing.

what are some successful stories of American manufacturing?

The Permian basin uses technology that is almost all made in America and is now the largest oil producer on Earth. The industrial base in TX is absolutely incredible and rarely discussed.

Likely a big reason SpaceX moved there.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#434

Post by kalimanzaro »

jonahrd wrote: post #430

This is a very 'Economist' article-- looking at macro trends instead of what actual Americans are feeling. Sure, healthcare has expanded, GDP has risen, even pay has gone up. But the _cost_ of healthcare has rapidly ballooned, the _cost_ of education, housing, etc has rapidly ballooned. It's very precarious to live in the US without a healthy savings account. That's why people are saying the economy is shit right now…

even for macro trends, the E likes to cherry pick its graphs. The US PPP trend has been sad for a while now, (thats not even per capita)

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/US-GDP-at-purchasing-pow...

There was another E agitprop piece recently, implying that the internet contributed to 20% TFP growth since 1990s, but the reality is that most of that growth happened before 2005, with a decline since then. I had to check the data because Krugman had just blogged about "the internet did nothing for productivity" (for the nth time?)

https://archive.ph/RgOq3

in both pieces, the E lifts America pretty much by comparison to its closest peers, who happen to be social democracies running out of natural resources and boomers.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#435

Post by alex_sf »

diordiderot wrote: post #366
alex_sf wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the US somehow unique in history for this? If the US is simply better at it, isn't that relevant? It's not like other (former) superpowers didn't do the exact same things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_involvement_in_regime_c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_involvement_in_regime_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Third_World_relations

Touché. I suppose inwardly focused benevolent systems wouldn't spread because they wouldn't want overthrow other systems

Can a benevolent system be inwardly focused? How benevolent is it to ignore your neighbor?

If we say that it's not a pretend virtue to care about democracy and freedom around the world, then wouldn't it would be a reasonable imperative to interact with the world?

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#436

Post by MisterBastahrd »

schuke wrote: post #396
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, Americans are definitely NOT ambitious to a fault. The vast majority believe that a 9 to 5 is a great accomplishment worthy of applause. Have a job that affords you a roof over your head? Hero. Have a job where you need public assistance because your employer won't pay you enough to make ends meet? Villain. American rhetoric is ambitious. Americans in practice are just as lazy as everybody else. Americans will p…

I think here ambition needs to be distinguished from hard-work. For example many Chinese are hardworking but not ambitious, they work very hard for many years to become a civil servant. On the other hand, many in the US believe they can achieve anything. Plus it could be those exceptionally ambitious achieve exceptionally great results, much like the top few companies pull the entire S&P 500 upwards.

Except that's just not true. The vast majority of Americans don't actually believe "they can achieve anything." The proof is that they never actually try. It's merely rhetoric that we use to punish the most vulnerable. For the vast majority, we either never reach a spot where we're comfortable because of a lack of skills or training or we get there and then lament our luck when things don't go our way with layoffs and technical obsolescence. This is of course discounting MLMs, which aren't real entrepreneurship.

Neither is part-time work. I get a 1099 NEC from a few companies each year for "consulting," which basically means I get a retainer to fix a few things that break on their servers should something go wrong. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm just getting a few extra checks.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#437

Post by kalimanzaro »

even for macro trends, the E likes to cherry pick its data. The US PPP trend has been sad for a while now, (thats not even per capita)

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/US-GDP-at-purchasing-pow...

There was another E agitprop piece recently, implying that the internet contributed to 20% TFP growth since 1990s, but the reality is that most of that growth happened before 2005, with a decline since then. I had to check the data because Krugman had just blogged about "the internet did nothing for productivity" (for the nth time?)

https://archive.ph/RgOq3

in both pieces, the E lifts America pretty much by comparison to its closest peers, who happen to be social democracies running out of natural resources and boomers.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#438

Post by pb7 »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #411
chrisco255 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's true that unions are so valuable, why is it that in most industries in the U.S. workers are far better compensated? Take tech as one example of a non-unionized industry that has still secured for itself work-from-home, sometimes unlimited PTO, extensive maternity and paternity leave, sometimes five to six plus figures in bonus and stock compensation, etc plus pre-WFH the dankest office accomodations which reg…

I suspect you will find that most workers are better compensated outside the US than in the U.S. Tech is probably an outlier. Service workers, which far outnumber tech workers, farmers, taxi drivers, etc are all better compensated in nearly every other European equivalent country than in the U.S. As far as why tech workers are better compensated in the US? Well, for one thing, tech workers are not similarly compensat…

>I suspect you will find that most workers are better compensated outside the US than in the U.S.

Huh? The US has the highest median disposable income in the world[0], let alone tech which blows Europe out of the water even in the lowest of cost of living states.

You're not going to find accurate income information for service workers because service workers notoriously do not report their cash tips which make up for a large portion of their income. That means the median is even higher.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#439

Post by arlort »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #277
ip26 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations My heart swells at this part and I want to cheer.

To outsiders, this dogmatic 'exceptionalism' appears revolting. My 2c.

Am outsider and not revolted, nor consider it particularly exceptionalist, now you have 4 cents

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#440

Post by HDThoreaun »

ido wrote: post #305
nrp wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, among the Asian Tiger economies, their massive growth first unlocked during a period where they were not meaningfully democracies and their governments intervened heavily to pick winners. The proximate success of their economies was export oriented industry, but the industries and the companies within them were more or less hand picked by the ruling regimes. The remarkable thing is that Korea, Taiwan,…

And of course the biggest (in scale) economic success story of our time is China the last couple decades - which is not a democracy at all as well as having massive government intervention and ownership.

China was an economic backwater until they implemented free markets. The Chinese miracle is probably the biggest and most obvious example of how important free markets are to growth.
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