71–80 of 257 posts
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Honest question, because it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about: what is a “good” economy vs. a “bad” economy?
A good economy is an economy that benefits most of the population and not just a few percent at the top. I would argue it should be a political goal to keep income distribution relatively stable. A good economy is also relatively stable. Big booms with a crash following are very devastating to not-rich people. In a crash rich people lose a lot of paper money but not-rich people may have trouble affording shelter or f…
This penalizes economic dynamism and moves economic decision making from risk taking to whoever defies the baseline distribution.
> A good economy is also relatively stable. Big booms with a crash following are very devastating to not-rich people
Not necessarily–plenty of social systems let the market boom and bust without causing social distress. And again, smoothing out the business cycle penalizes risk taking.
The most compelling hypothesis I've heard for why Iran is bombing GC neighbors is in an attempt to pop the AI bubble. I obviously don't know if that's true, but that would be extremely clever and this article shows how effective it could be.
I found this video pretty interesting, it talks about why Iran is going after its neighbors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIS2eB-rGv0
e.g. credit card companies have excellent data on the amount that people are spending on. Is that not enough to determine if people are spending more or less than in the past?
I understand there are seasonal trend etc etc but even "how is spending on travel this year compared to last year around this time?" would probably have some large amount of statistical significance.
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What specifically has changed?
Probably referring to the "2 quarters of negative GDP" rule that was seemingly revoked under Biden.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bureau_of_Economic_Re...
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Realizing that GDP growth can be achieved while average joe on Main Street is struggling. The billionaires doing well masks everyone else struggling to afford groceries. In general, people are kind of calling BS on what the definition should be because we are all collectively feeling that things are doing poorly but no one is quite willing to recognize it due to the definitional stuff.
> Realizing that GDP growth can be achieved while average joe on Main Street is struggling This is most GDP growth across human history until the Industrial Revolution with the exception of maybe a half dozen civilisations.
There was a period of slightly more income equality in the 1930s-1960s as Piketty [0] and Zucman [1] show, but this was also at the expense of racial and gender equality.
The 1970s was probably the most equal period economically speaking as Zucman showed [1].
We should not strive to return to the 1950s - we should strive to be better than anytime previously.
[0] - http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014Fig...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What specifically has changed?
Realizing that GDP growth can be achieved while average joe on Main Street is struggling. The billionaires doing well masks everyone else struggling to afford groceries. In general, people are kind of calling BS on what the definition should be because we are all collectively feeling that things are doing poorly but no one is quite willing to recognize it due to the definitional stuff.
I'm always somewhat puzzled by debates around "are we in a recession?" b/c we have so many REAL TIME metrics around what people are actually doing. e.g. credit card companies have excellent data on the amount that people are spending on. Is that not enough to determine if people are spending more or less than in the past? I understand there are seasonal trend etc etc but even "how is spending on travel this year comp…
what's not obvious to most people - is how e.g other countries that are already struggling will get into deeper depths e.g UK where cost of energy was super high. UK is not bombing Iran, but their economy will cry more than the US
what's not obvious is how a few oil Barrons will make so much money in the next few weeks e.g those in Texas - their great grand-children will never need to work. Defense contractors will also make out like bandits & those politically connected. While everyone else in the US losses.
what's not obvious is the money pumped into A.I so far is about to go kaput (energy demands -- remember Qatar has started not honoring gas contracts - what's gas used to ? power turbines in power plants)
if you're in the US/Netherlands you will be okay in terms of food, if you're in the UK, Middle East, Australia (food is about to become more expensive & tricky)
if you're in Africa your government is about to con you through massive fuel prices at the pump