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Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

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Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#561

Post by throw4847285 »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #545

I like Vinod Khosla's take (on Twitter): Stop measuring GDP and instead measure the total income of the bottom 50% of the population and optimize policy for that. Additions and exits from this group can also be tracked. We get what we measure. Will this raise income inequality?

That's just Rawls's Original Position but restated poorly.

That would make a great sci-fi story: somebody wakes up with amnesia within a John Rawls thought experiment. I'm not smart enough to write it, but I'm giving the idea away for free.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#562

Post by analog31 »

luizfzs wrote: post #255

But is the majority of the population thriving? It is very misleading (at best) to say the economy is strong when a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck. A handful of companies are thriving, but barely any of its employees.

Something I wonder, along these lines, is whether we're measuring the right thing. For instance, does "thriving" depend on things like life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, quality of health care, pollution, crime, incarceration, traffic deaths, and so forth? The way I think about it, "economics" is supposed to study the quality of life, not just a few isolated numbers that happen to be in units of dollars.

Do any of our "rivals" have entire regions with the levels of poverty seen in places like Mississippi, southern Ohio, or northern Michigan? I grew up in an area with patches of poverty like that.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#563

Post by chii »

dragonelite wrote: post #397
georgeecollins wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of macro economic statistics should be taken with a grain of salt, or more literally: approximations with a measurement error. PPP GDP is useful to compare, particularly politically because if the cost of goods in a country is lower people are more likely to be healthy / comfortable with less income. I think it is a little dubious when you use PPP to compare th3e size of two economies because 1) you are taking…

gdp is really bad, countries don't even use the same counting methods. I think in the Netherlands they started using criminal activity to pad up gdp growth. Also money printing and inflation is a good way to up gdp. I like energy production and consumption a lot more, modern economies pretty much come down to using energy to either transfer or modify goods, services or data.

> energy production and consumption a lot more

which is all well and good, except when you have increases in efficiencies in energy consumption, which would show up as a drop.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#564

Post by abenga »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #386
luizfzs wrote: post #255

But is the majority of the population thriving? It is very misleading (at best) to say the economy is strong when a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck. A handful of companies are thriving, but barely any of its employees.

US Federal Reserve studies indicate that the percentage of US households with no excess income after necessary expenses (as distinct from "ordinary expenses" as a term of art) is on the order of 10-15%. This definition roughly matches most people's intuition of what "living paycheck-to-paycheck" means. That isn't nothing but it implies 85-90% of Americans are not actually living paycheck-to-paycheck. There is another…

Why would we assume that "people across the economy reduce spending" == "people across the economy will have more money"? Don't at least some (I would say many) of the people in the economy make income from this unnecessary spending?

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#565

Post by forgotoldacc »

RajT88 wrote: post #320
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #201

Tech is the problem. The internet is global (or perhaps two or three regions), and winner takes all - so global value creation is being experienced everywhere, but being monetised in the US stock market. Take tech out of the equation and the US is pretty much on par with EU, and China and India are just burning the coal for everyone else.

The US has the highest disposable income per capital out of the whole world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per... For all the workers are living paycheck to paycheck, they are sitting on a gigantic monetizable pile of money. Consider this: the most popular languages in YouTube videos are English and Spanish. And did you ever notice how most videos, when they talk about units, talk about Dol…

Disposable income is the money people have after taxes.

You can have 10000 dollars of monthly disposable income and be well above the global average. You can have 9999 dollar rent with only a single dollar left. A single basic peanut butter and jelly sandwich could cost 100 dollars. Your disposable income is still massively above the average. Your discretionary income would be very low, though.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#566

Post by agent13 »

throw4847285 wrote: post #561
sriram_malhar wrote: post #545

I like Vinod Khosla's take (on Twitter): Stop measuring GDP and instead measure the total income of the bottom 50% of the population and optimize policy for that. Additions and exits from this group can also be tracked. We get what we measure. Will this raise income inequality?

That's just Rawls's Original Position but restated poorly. That would make a great sci-fi story: somebody wakes up with amnesia within a John Rawls thought experiment. I'm not smart enough to write it, but I'm giving the idea away for free.

[flagged]

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#567

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

7thpower wrote: post #124
ossobuco wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cheap Chinese plastic junk will continue to eat the world That's a thing of the past. Check the consumer electronics produced today in China. Mobile devices, EVs, infrastructure, newer products are simply incredible, and I'd argue ahead of western technology on many fronts. Cheap plastic stuff now gets produced in other less developed countries.

This is a fact that most in the US refuse to confront. China has mastered making high quality goods at scale. It does not matter how they got there, the fact is they did, and there are some pretty staggering military implications that are not really being discussed.

That's the repeat of Japan story. "Cheap Japanese junk" was a motto in 1950-60s.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#568

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

threetonesun wrote: post #122
ossobuco wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cheap Chinese plastic junk will continue to eat the world That's a thing of the past. Check the consumer electronics produced today in China. Mobile devices, EVs, infrastructure, newer products are simply incredible, and I'd argue ahead of western technology on many fronts. Cheap plastic stuff now gets produced in other less developed countries.

A quick skim of Amazon for literally any product would prove this comment entirely wrong. Do they produce quality goods now? Sure. But it's also still where most of your just barely above garbage quality goods come from.

Because that's what buyers want - cheap garbage.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#569

Post by seanmcdirmid »

amluto wrote: post #515
jandrewrogers wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US Federal Reserve studies indicate that the percentage of US households with no excess income after necessary expenses (as distinct from "ordinary expenses" as a term of art) is on the order of 10-15%. This definition roughly matches most people's intuition of what "living paycheck-to-paycheck" means. That isn't nothing but it implies 85-90% of Americans are not actually living paycheck-to-paycheck. There is another…

IMO a major deficiency in this calculation is children. Raising children costs money, and families without enough income may not feel that they can afford to raise children, and they may therefore not have children. This means that their income looks better than it really ought to, and it also reduces the birth rate. And, while the US’s birth rate is not catastrophically low, it is below replacement. This may have so…

Americans are largely solving this problem by not having children, or only trying to have children when it’s financially easy but medically difficult.

Automation may actually be the answer to a declining birth rate, and we might stabilize at a much lower world wide population as a result (say 4 rather than 8 billion). People will complain less about Waymo stealing jobs when there are no uber drivers left, but we really aren’t there yet, we still have a surplus of labor.

Re: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

#570

Post by dataflow »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #386
luizfzs wrote: post #255

But is the majority of the population thriving? It is very misleading (at best) to say the economy is strong when a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck. A handful of companies are thriving, but barely any of its employees.

US Federal Reserve studies indicate that the percentage of US households with no excess income after necessary expenses (as distinct from "ordinary expenses" as a term of art) is on the order of 10-15%. This definition roughly matches most people's intuition of what "living paycheck-to-paycheck" means. That isn't nothing but it implies 85-90% of Americans are not actually living paycheck-to-paycheck. There is another…

> There is another 25-30% of households that spend all of their income on ordinary expenses beyond necessary expenses.

> This includes things like car payments on a new BMW or a mortgage

So you're not accounting at all for how much of your income goes toward e.g. interest on the loan vs. the principal? Isn't that kinda important?

Also, do car loans for cheaper cars somehow not fall in this picture? Why do you portray people as buying new BMWs when all cars in general have gotten so expensive?

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