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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

#921

Post by immibis »

pas wrote: post #630
immibis wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a measure of price level. If I pay $100 for a doctor's visit that's $100 to GDP. If it costs $1000 that's $1000 to GDP. If it "costs" $1000 but that's just to get $100 from insurers who only pay 10% and I only have to pay 10% too? Still $1000 to GDP - I think.

GDP is C + G + ... and the C is personal consumption, so I guess if you pay 100 USD that's what gets added, and the premiums (and whatever your employer pays for you)

Taking a loan for $1000, buying something for $1000, paying back $100 and then declaring bankruptcy also increases GDP by $1000. The intention is to measure the total value of services exchanged, which is $1000 in both cases.

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

#922

Post by mvdtnz »

hunglee2 wrote: post #590

GDP is a measure of the marketisation of society. If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. If I hire a care assistant for $800 per day to do so, that's $800 to national GDP. The encroachment of the market into society correlates with record levels of mental and physical health crisis. US life expectancy has declined over the past three years, even as 'the economy' has surged ah…

Are you implying that GDP has only been measured for the last 3 years? Because I think it has been much longer, over a period where physical health has improved greatly.

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

#923

Post by Tiktaalik »

rich_sasha wrote: post #48

One thing this article doesn't touch on is the soaring government debt, which is now really quite big: 120%, and IIRC if you add municipal debt, it's more like 140%. That is high. It also seems like much of the recent growth has been fueled by this debt. It's unclear how this is going to unwind. America can afford, apparently, to run their deficit hot, but not forever and without limit. So at some point they have to…

I find this part funny to because in Canada we want to have it both ways. We endlessly compare ourselves to the USA and wring our hands about whether our taxes are too high or our productivity isn't good enough, because we can't match what the USA has, but at the same time we also wring our hands about deficit and debt and are incredibly hawkish compared to everyone else.

You can't have it both ways!

Somehow it is never raised that the USA is doing absolutely incredible amounts of deficit spending that Canada dares not match, not even under this relatively more inclined to deficit spend current government.

Never raised that maybe some of their good metrics stems from the incredible amounts of deficit spending that is verboten.

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

#924

Post by bustadjustme »

Pigalowda wrote: post #902
matthewdgreen wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying the economy is good. But according to polling, many folks who said the economy was "poor" before the November election now believe it's doing great. All in a very partisan fashion, of course: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/blog_mi...

Polls were very wrong - again. Their methodology is clearly flawed. I owe my friend an expensive steak dinner because I believed the polls. In the crisis era of non-reproducible science and bad data collection is it any surprise the polls are wrong too?

But the polls weren't wrong [1]. This was a normal polling error. If we expect polls to give us pinpoint accuracy, it's our expectations that are wrong.

[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-model-exactly-predicted-the...

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

#925

Post by KaiserPro »

naming_the_user wrote: post #148
spiderfarmer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is number one in quality of life and that’s all that matters to me. If we work just hard enough to maintain and maybe even improve it, other countries can do their pissing contest.

This feels like a huge generalization to me. The US, UK, EU and realistically most developed countries I would say have fairly similar quality of life within margin of error. I've travelled a fair amount and everywhere is basically the same. For an individual it's really going to come down to lifestyle and what you prefer. Some people like urban living and walkability, if that's you then you probably want Japan or ol…

> UK [..] realistically most developed countries

Its also really uneven. It contained in 2016 6 of the lowest GDP per captia regions of the entire EU.

However we should of course treat GDP as a suspect measure of living standards. Whilst those people living in those areas will tend to have curtail life chances, they did at the time have access to _good_ healthcare and housing (in certain circumstances)

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

#926

Post by whateveracct »

_1tem wrote: post #588

If you go to the doctor with a problem and get a blood test and they say that everything looks fine, but you don’t feel fine, then you don’t say: “well the numbers are right, I should feel fine”. Rather you try to find what the numbers aren’t capturing, because you know something is wrong. Same with the economy. The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election, and perc…

political propaganda via the skinner boxes in everyone's pockets is probably the reason for the disconnect

let's not act like people's feelings inherently reflect the truth

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

#927

Post by inerte »

DanielHB wrote: post #650
KennyBlanken wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just income. Corporate America has turned "prey upon the poor" into a science. Nobody really cares about protecting the poor from that sort of thing. So they'll have to deal with BS like, say, getting paid via a debit card, whose bank charges fees for nearly anything. Then there are the astronomical credit card rates/fees. There are no limits on credit card APRs. Even government has been highly optimized for…

The "prey upon the poor" is just as bad, if not worse, in Brazil. Growing up there you don't really realize, but after living abroad for a while it is painfully obvious. Just a small example, stores that sell anything >30 USD don't put the real price of goods when they advertise them. They always put " x12 {REAL_PRICE/12} " (show the price of the installment, while putting how many installments really small) I had a…

The mostly state owned largest bank (Banco do Brasil) did a "Black Friday" last week.

A bank. State owned. Doing Black Friday. In Brazil.

Plus all the raffles / lottery stuff that's just normal business. I agree with 100% preying is on another level.

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

#928

Post by tshaddox »

commandlinefan wrote: post #877
matthewdgreen wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying the economy is good. But according to polling, many folks who said the economy was "poor" before the November election now believe it's doing great. All in a very partisan fashion, of course: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/blog_mi...

Not to put words in your mouth, but this comment seems to imply that politicians successfully painted a negative picture of the economy that didn't reflect reality and used that to win the last election. While I wouldn't put that past them, why was it successful this time and not every time? Nobody even tried to pretend the economy was bad when Clinton, Bush or Obama were up for re-election, because it obviously wasn…

> why was it successful this time and not every time?

Isn't there a pervasive belief that Republican administrations are better for the economy than Democratic administrations, despite the economy performing better under Democratic administrations for the vast majority of postwar history?

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

#929

Post by whateveracct »

the funny thing to me about the "Well, I'm not doing good in this economy" anecdata rebuttals to the reportedly good US economy is that..people have always lived paycheck to paycheck in the US economy. Eliminating that shouldn't be the benchmark for "good." Literally everyone can't be a winner all the time.

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

#930

Post by tshaddox »

_1tem wrote: post #588

If you go to the doctor with a problem and get a blood test and they say that everything looks fine, but you don’t feel fine, then you don’t say: “well the numbers are right, I should feel fine”. Rather you try to find what the numbers aren’t capturing, because you know something is wrong. Same with the economy. The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election, and perc…

Are you suggesting that it's impossible to have mistaken feelings about the economy or about one's own health? I'm pretty sure it's possible for people to deliberately deceive other people about the state of the economy or even the state of their own health.
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