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The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

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Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#541

Post by yodelshady »

neverrroot wrote: post #88

Could the energy policy and the costs of electricity for the industry have contributed to this outcome in the eurozone? Just as an example, Germany has the highest electricity prices in the world (20% higher than second place Italy), and starting April, switched to being a net electricity importer, after it shut down the last remaining nuclear power plants.

Yes, it can and does.

Go to a chemicals conference these days and half the research is on managing blackouts. In the best case your plant, which is the same CAPEX in Europe as it is the US, is producing 25% less.

There's only so much sugar-coating you can do. The atmosphere's like a funeral.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#542

Post by Dylan16807 »

ffhhttt wrote: post #531
Dylan16807 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This history suggests there was opportunity at one point, at least. The culture/language being widespread doesn't say anything about the USA being better. How does that reinforce his point?

People still move there because it offers significantly better opportunities for most high-skilled people?

You're adding new reasons. That's not relevant to what I'm saying.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#543

Post by emptyfile »

imtringued wrote: post #486
Tade0 wrote: post #461

The title is misleading. The Eurozone does not include the entire EU - there are quite a few countries with their own currencies(notably Czechia, Poland, Romania), which coincidentally saw some of the highest growths in the region during the last two decades. Meanwhile some Eurozone countries like Greece, Italy and Spain actually saw a decline. Hard not to draw such conclusions when your set includes all the troubled…

>which coincidentally saw some of the highest growths in the region during the last two decades. That isn't some coincidence. The biggest beneficiary of the Eurozone relies on the suffering of its less successful members and this is ultimately reflected by the fact that poorer countries in the Eurozone don't catch up with the rest of the EU and in fact the opposite happens. Meanwhile for EU countries outside the Euro…

[dead]

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#544

Post by didntcheck »

amrocha wrote: post #424
nonethewiser wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By my own anecdotal estimation Well here is an actual study that found the poorest 20% of Americans consumed more goods and services than the average people from affluent countries. Including Europe. https://www.justfacts.com/news_poorest_americans_richer_than... This matches my anecdotal observations of everything being smaller in Europe, people owning less, and energy being so expensive.

Consumption is a terrible proxy for quality of life. It's also terribly USAian of you.

Not really. Europeans aren't some superior noble ascetics. People want to consume, and their demand exceeds their ability in practically all situations. So USians are getting more of what they want while most Europeans would jump at the ability to do the same. For the record, I am European myself

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#545

Post by panick21_ »

slibhb wrote: post #27
dralley wrote: post #4

I'd rather this be displayed on a line chart than a pair of bar graphs. 2008 is an oddly specific year, a year when the US was in the midst of the housing market collapse and ensuing chaos. Yes, Europe was impacted too, but this chart doesn't show how much, relatively speaking.

The housing crisis is interesting. Post-crisis, Europe adopted austerity measures and the US went the other way. I bet that explains this gap more so than (from the article) unions and Europeans being lazy.

What matters far more is that Eurozone adopted tight money policy, while the US didn't. People love to focus on Fiscal policy and even many economist got drawn into that. But the reality is that monetary policy actually sets aggregate demand.

Doing fiscal austerity isn't bad if your monetary policy keeps AD stable. Doing the opposite and spending more is also not really bad as long as monetary policy is correct.

The US had bad monetary policy that was partly responsible for the recession of 2008/2009 but corrected it eventually. The Eurozone never corrected in and held to an extreme tight monetary policy for years and at the same time doing austerity.

And that simply can't work, if your AD is collapsing, trying to save enough to pay back huge nominal debt is simply impossible.

Yanis Varoufakis who was Finance Minister in Greek proposed debt payments indexed to NGDP, so that if AD was going down they would have to have less debt payment. But this was rejected by

Countries with their own currency, like Sweden, Switzerland and so on did better despite having many of the same pressures and not going on fiscal spending spree.

I think it does make some sense for the government to invest in infrastructure during a recession. But not because of the Keynesian thinking of pushing up AD, but rather because it just make sense invest in infrastructure and its slightly cheaper during a recession.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#547

Post by bubbleRefuge »

logicchains wrote: post #510
thomasz wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, we are not allowed to print the world reserve currency like there is no tomorrow, and we do not possess the qualities of the US that make them the natural haven for capital in times of global turbulence. That being said, the policy of austerity implemented during the Euro crisis was pretty catastrophic and arrested growth prospects for a whole generation.

>That being said, the policy of austerity implemented during the Euro crisis was pretty catastrophic and arrested growth prospects for a whole generation. It was an austerity policy in name only given government debts have only continued to increase since then. There's a demonstrated correlation between high government debt and lower growth.

Not in the US

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#548

Post by modo_mario »

fakedang wrote: post #335
onetimeusename wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> due to a failure of integration. whose failure? Why are Europeans the default racists? The US is not even integrated and is going through large scale migration right now that has never happened before so the success of US integration is still too early to say. What does integration look like because the US has ethnic enclaves, everyone knows that. It's absolutely right that the US promoted demographic change to Eur…

European people aren't called racists as much as they are called deluded and self-righteous. The European govts were so confident of being in the right that they failed to counter the social changes happening in their own backyards, while lecturing other countries on their policies. And by Europeans here, I mean the EU, the govt of some individual WE countries and a small minority of vocal activist personalities who…

I think you forget that many of the southern countries that did say no to immigrants (recognizing that most of those did not intend to stay in their countries but they ended up stuck with them when faced with more closed borders) pushed for a redistribution scheme. In fact when italy didn't have french backing for this they did what a few balkan countries had been doing and simply bussed migrants to the border which caused a quick reversal of stance.

Additionally many blame the likes of Merkel for the self righteous stance unaware of the fact that she (and her Dutch partners and such) had the greatest effect on building down inflow with an agreement she started brokering with turkey well before her famous comment. On the other hand fences and hard rhetoric in Hungary or the like did not visibly affect the numbers of incoming refugees.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#549

Post by janalsncm »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #385
janalsncm wrote: post #158

This is a bit of a frame trap. Here’s another metric: ==2021== Life expectancy in EU: 80 Life expectancy in US: 76 ==Rolling back to 2008== Life expectancy in EU: 79 Life expectancy in US: 78 What’s the point? Maybe GDP isn’t the most important indicator. The US can double it’s GDP by making healthcare more expensive and extracting every last dime from the elderly, but can it actually improve quality of life for peop…

What is a "frame trap", and why do people get irrationally upset by the US doing well at something or the EU doing poorly? This post is about GDP growth. What has life expectancy got to do with it, and how are you contributing to any discussion? Has anybody here said that "GDP is the most important indicator"?

The post is ostensibly about GDP growth. However, if you read the comments both here and on Twitter you’ll see that we humans are quick to jump from cold economic facts of GDP into more broad points about economic stagnation.

My point is to suggest that maybe top line numbers don’t tell the whole story. Maybe in a society where wealth is hyper-concentrated, the heuristic coupling of GDP growth and social progress breaks down.

Flip the US and EU, it makes no difference to me. My point is that GDP is a poor metric for most things we should care about, and maybe we should get off the paperclip maximization train and onto the well-being maximization train.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#550

Post by rootw0rm »

beebeepka wrote: post #426
FredPret wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US economic performance is all the more OP if you take into account that it's a huge country of 350m people and has a diversified economic base. For a tiny banking nation or petrostate to be rich is unsurprising. But when it's half a continent, the world really ought to take out their notebooks and go into full copycat mode - at least as far as economic policy and attitudes are concerned.

Are you suggesting the EU should start pillaging countries? What petrostate should we liberate to becone self-sufficient? As luck would have it, the US achieved that right after conquering Iraq

I'd personally recommend liberating Venezuela
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