> "elon is wrong about {X}"
People are (very) slowly waking up. The number of X-es is large to say the least.
Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
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Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#22Elon Musk is wrong about a lot of things. I'm not sure why people keep asking him questions outside his area of expertise...
What is his actual area of expertise ?
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#23GDP counts government dollars at face value. But is a government dollar really as productive as a private sector dollar? $1b billion for the local school district. Compare that to $1 billion spent by a private operator? Standard GDP might overstate. Maybe you need a 50% haircut on government spending in the calculation.
> Standard GDP might overstate. Maybe you need a 50% haircut on government spending in the calculation
Well you have to also see the counter point which is sometimes companies spend a $1B and go bankrupt like pets.com.
And sometimes the government spends money to backstop the financial system like in 2008 and literally save the entire US financial system and on top of that the government makes money off the bail out.
In this case the government spending was infinitely more valuable than the private spending.
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#24I've talked to a few economists about this and non agree with Elon on this. The biggest issue one person raised is how do you separate out government spending form GDP? If a US town has a big military base, does that mean the entire towns' GDP is just government spending so ignore it? The government essentially pays for everyone's salary in the town. Where do you draw the line at what is government spending and priva…
I don't know why people are entertaining this. The Gross Domestic Product by definition measures every expenditure, income or production of a specific territory. If you exclude government effects in the economy, you get into so many troubles.
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#25> "elon is wrong about {X}" People are (very) slowly waking up. The number of X-es is large to say the least.
yeah this can be simplified to just elon is wrong and that covers the majority
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#26> "elon is wrong about {X}" People are (very) slowly waking up. The number of X-es is large to say the least.
As one of Elon's ex-fan's (or at least had a generally positive opinion of him) like I suspect many of us here once were, it is astonishing how consistently wrong and ignorant he has been, and it has gotten worse year over year. I think there is a legitimate possibility he fried/is frying his brain on Ketamine.
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#27GDP counts government dollars at face value. But is a government dollar really as productive as a private sector dollar? $1b billion for the local school district. Compare that to $1 billion spent by a private operator? Standard GDP might overstate. Maybe you need a 50% haircut on government spending in the calculation.
Productivity in what sense? Education is literally a long term investment. As you stated, a local school district which may mean Pre-K through 12th grade (in the US) means that the children won’t be participating “productively” in the economy for potentially decades.
I cannot even fathom how hard the economy would crash if large swaths of the workforce were illiterate.
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#28GDP counts government dollars at face value. But is a government dollar really as productive as a private sector dollar? $1b billion for the local school district. Compare that to $1 billion spent by a private operator? Standard GDP might overstate. Maybe you need a 50% haircut on government spending in the calculation.
If you want to start arguing about a more abstract worth of that $1 then you should do it for everything, and then you are certainly doomed.
Is a gazillion dollars spent on an NFT "productive" in the way that spending money on building a house is productive? What multiple should you be using. Is a dollar spent on medical treatment for somebody on medicaid worth less than a dollar somebody spends on some fireworks to blow up on the 4th? These calculations become impossible.
"I dunno, I bet government spending is only worth half of what they pay so I'll just pick 50%" is not a reasonable approach here.
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the problem is that it's called Gross Domestic Product but we're talking about spending. Spending isn't producing. Sometimes spending promotes production, but may times it doesn't, and a lot of the stuff that gets counted as GDP is just moving dollars from one entity to another.
> Spending isn't producing. Now you've ruled out lots of other stuff though. Is loaning money "production?" Is spending for services (like, software development!) "production"? Is investing in assets like real estate "production"? All those activities create wealth! Now you've got a definition where only primary production, like farms and construction and mining, have any value. And that's silly too. No, all economic…
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