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The Demoralization is just Beginning

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Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#241

Post by andy_ppp »

Sure, but you know what you should do if you were trying to completely destroy the US? Side with Russia against our allies, put up huge trade barriers on our neighbours, torch the rules based order, look at the world as split into many hemispheres of influence, unpick all the institutions that protect the government and the US citizens from scams and replace them with the richest man in the world, stand down retaliatory measures against cyber threats, shake down European democracies you were protecting for mineral deals, undermine the very idea of truth itself and flood the zone with shit.

You can absolutely forget competing with China under these circumstances, their system is starting to look better than the US will after another 1416 days of this.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#242

Post by systemf_omega »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #211
systemf_omega wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been done before, and America comes out consistently on top. Even the median purchasing power parity (PPP) in the US is frequently ranked highest in the world. The majority of American households in the poorest US states are doing better than the majority of Europeans. This gets amplified if you're a highly sought after professional. Top senior engineers are getting paid $500k-$1M in the US. These are figure…

Have you lived in Denmark, Japan, China, Netherlands and some other countries in the past 10-15 years? I really don’t think you weigh in people’s personal preferences and general quality of life into your equations. There is a very big reason why there’s no more large swaths of immigrants from European and some Asian countries flocking into the US. Yes there is some, but the times when it was objectively much better…

Money buys you freedom to live you life anywhere you want, and do whatever you want. Do you think grinding away for low pay until your mid 60s, only to end up facing a collapsing pension system in your final years with little savings is the best way to spend your time on earth?

Also how can a person that hasn't experienced the economic freedom the US provides to top talent accurately judge if their country of choice is better? I would like to see the statistics on SWEs that got wealthy in America, that regret moving to the states and would prefer to revert all those years.

(I've lived in Europe for most of my life by the way. Lots of good places to retire, but mostly poor choices for spending my productive years there.)

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#243

Post by paganel »

ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

> there is more to an economy than manufacturing

And what would that be? "Services"? The author tried to explain how that is basically a scam.

And, getting back to our present, hobbes-ian world, services won't help you put tanks on the ground and airplanes in the air in the event of a grand war, you need a pretty solid manufacturing base to back it up, you need to be the "arsenal of democracy".

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#244

Post by ryani »

Barrin92 wrote: post #67
ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

>there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Not really. Most developed economies are basically 70% Baumol's cost disease[1]. The 20% of the American GDP that goes to healthcare, half of the military budget that goes into salaries, public services, the police isn't billed on productivity. Those are non-tradeable services whose compensation inflates with growth in the productivity gaining sectors of the economy. T…

How is "Baumol effect" different from supply and demand for any limited resource?

Let's say that some new use for copper is discovered, that drastically increases the demand for copper. The cost of existing items that use copper is going to go up, even if those items are no more productive than they used to be, because the new items are now in high demand.

You can see this effect in real life with GPUs; it's much more expensive to buy a gaming graphics card today than it was a decade ago, because GPUs are in high demand for other applications.

So, increasing the productivity of labor in some sector is going to do the same thing supply and demand does to anything else -- the cost of labor goes up, but not as much as the productivity in that sector, and the producers of labor will enjoy higher demand.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#245

Post by PeterStuer »

ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

It ain't necessarily gold, but a dollar 'IOU' in the end should give the holder something to concretely purchase besides military equipment.

You can argue dollars can also buy 'IP', but IP is virtual and only as good as the police and military enforcement of its regulation.

You can argue dollars buy oil, but once again only because of military enforcement of the imposed rules of not to trade in other currency.

In the end an empire based on massive consumption of the world's resources in return for not much else besides the threat of 'take this paper or we bomb you' will not hold.

As for the brain-drain. This was/is still a huge thing. But it hinges on the desirability of attracting the right brains. If you abandon meritocracy as the US has been speed-running, why would a capable person want to go/stay there? Seems like the attraction incentives are there more for the subpar performer in the 'modern' US.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#246

Post by avgd »

lxgr wrote: post #62
roenxi wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part I don't like is it confuses the situation to make it harder to tell if goods and services are getting cheaper or more expensive in real terms. But I don't know if I'd say it was causal. I'm more just pointing out that there isn't much evidence that the gold standard failed and there isn't a reason to think that all the economists reject it. They're more probably neutral to it.

The gold standard didn't fail: Fiat money just completely obliterated it with its success. Being able to issue fiat money is a feature of high trust governments and societies, not a bug, and people yearning back to needing a gold standard scare me, because that inevitably implies dismantling that trust to get there.

>because that inevitably implies dismantling that trust to get there.

There is nothing to dismantle because it's already gone.

The society that elected Donald Trump on his current program is an exceedingly low trust society. The whole point backed by DOGE is that you can't trust government and must reduce it to the most basic, barebones function. A lot of the current silicon valley elite fell prey to the nonsense preached by people like Curtis Yarvin who preach forms of anarcho-capitalism and despise democracy.

The United States of America are no more.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#247

Post by paganel »

rvba wrote: post #235
csomar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ibn Khaldoun said that once a state economics start deteriorating, everyone becomes an expert. The way I see it, if the markets led by PhD and Noble laureates fails, people start looking for alternatives. Since the "establishment" has been proven useless, the door is open for "anyone" to chime in. The reality is that the economist at the top do not want to see the deficiencies because they have their salaries on the…

When were markets run by PHDs and Nobel laurates? They were always run by politicians, oligarchs, capitalists and interest groups.

Long-Term Capital Management [1] was run by PHDs and Nobel laureates. And as far I understood you basically need to be at least at the PhD level in order to be a quaint on Wall Street, and for better or for worse Wall Street runs West's very financialized economy, it's not the politicians (see for example how a recent British prime-minister who had to back up and then quickly resign when her decisions were not viewed under a good light by said financial markets)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#248

Post by t-3 »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #176
rayiner wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brain-draining the world is really the key to cementing American Hegemony in a post-Cold War world. Why should we want that instead of an orderly, well-governed democracy? Do you think people in Sweden or Denmark are upset their countries aren't hegemons? And what would that do to the country? Do you really think that, say, the top 5% of India and China (100 million people) would do better maintaining a democracy t…

> Do you think people in Sweden or Denmark are upset their countries aren't hegemons? Funny that you chose those two countries. Denmark is a founding member of NATO. Sweden is one of the two most recent admitted, almost a year ago. My point is that it's U.S. hegemony that has protected its own democracy and that of liberal democratic Europe to a large extent. Sweden and Denmark haven't been hegemons because they have…

U.S. hegemony has also destroyed and subverted democracies and propped up very illiberal dictatorships. Protecting democracy for white countries only isn't exactly what I think of when I think "world protector of liberal democracy".

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#249

Post by Aeolun »

janalsncm wrote: post #31
ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

> like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run That’s a pretty good analogy for what GDP is counting, actually. But I think the larger point is that manufacturing is grounded in something real. It’s a measure of how many tanks and fighter jets you can make, no matter how much they cost to make.

Having lots of money is great when you have people willing to sell you stuff. Not so much when you are trying to fight the ones you bought your raw materials from.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#250

Post by throwawaythekey »

ikiris wrote: post #78
jazzyjackson wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's deferring to experts, but whether economists are experts at anything is a hot debate.

It's only a debate if you reject the very principals of science. I realize we're getting there for a lot of people, but merely disbelieving in science is not a refutal of it. This ignores so called Austrian economists however, who are just flat out lying to either themselves or everyone else depending on the person.

Is there a fundamental repudiation to Austrian economics?

All I know about them is that they don't like funny money, which to me as a systems thinker is perfectly reasonable. At worst you would expect it to be harmful, at best to obscure what is really going on.

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