Do not mistake economic indicators such as GDP or "growth" for meaningful measures of economic health.
GDP per person should be the measure. The UK managed to make GDP go up while making GDP per person go down.
Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success
181–190 of 297 posts
Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success
#182Populism is best understood as the general public asserting elites have “broken the deal” that legitimizes their rule — and the public withdrawing their assent from the regime. They are correct that the technocratic managerialists on the past century have failed — and failed in a way damaging to the state/nation. (For US and EU at least.) In so far as we’re all discussing that (and have been for several years), they’…
Agreed. I am not a supporter of Nigel Farage and his many different parties in the UK ('Reform' just being the latest incarnation), and I don't believe his policies offer any real answers. But what the rise of Reform does show us is the utter disillusionment with the mainstream parties of the UK, who have spent the last several decades afraid to make meaningful changes. They tell people they can't have what they want…
> People wonder where all the money is going and there's no particularly good answer.
That's because people don't want to open their eyes, it's mostly going in pensions and public services and is increasingly more paid with debt.
As for decades and decades politicians have avoided to become unpopular by raising pension ages (or did it way too slowly), those are the results.
Look at what happened in France under Macron when he raised pension age or tried to stop the bleeding in public financing: raise in national populism yet again, as if the far right in France (or the far left) had some magic wand (same for reform UK) to stop the bleeding.
Actually, if you look at the rightist populist across Europe (Poland, Hungary, Italy) they made the problems worse by actually jumping into very (historically) leftist measures such as throwing even more money at the public (benefits, pensions) at the expense of public debt.
Poland feels it slightly less because it has more growth (largely attributed to the nearly 2 millions of Ukrainians that settled there bringing with them their skills and tons of money).
Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
why go to the trouble of building and maintaining mines in your expensive western country if you can just take all the minerals from african mines, while also getting the profits of these mines. no worries about salaries, no one cares when workers die by the dozens, ...
Because Africa produces a very small percentage of rare earths in mines, and basically 0 in separation, refining, and production of rare-earth components.
i had diamond and cobalt in mind, i'm sure that this doesn't apply to every type of mine. but you can't deny that this isn't a current, imperialist strategy. soft colonialism.
Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if you convert it at a loss and are unable to wait for USD to recover. If (and it is, admittedly, a big assumption) we assume that USD and EUR are broadly stable currencies over the long term, then short term changes in the ratio don't matter for long term investors. You're buying a share of productive capacity, the currency it is listed in doesn't matter.
It's reasonable to assume they're broadly stable, but being broadly stable doesn't mean a drop will "recover". There's no specific ratio that the currencies are being pushed to. Permanent changes in the baseline can and do happen. > You're buying a share of productive capacity, the currency it is listed in doesn't matter. But I don't own a fixed percentage of production, I own a fixed number of shares and the number…
This is correct. A decent example would be comparing the CHF, EUR, USD over the last few decades. The CHF is to the EUR what the EUR is to the USD.
Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time... This is simply not true. At some point, we do need to rely on data other than "lived experience," which compares one's quality of life at 22 to someone's quality of life at 50. "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.23 for every $1 of wealth owned by Gen Xers at the same age." "Younger Americans…
That's mean wealth, not median wealth. Mean millenial wealth at 34[0] is $345,000 and median millenial wealth at 38[1] is $130,000. Given that inequality has been rising steadily in the US over the past 30 years, the mean and median wealth of Gen Xers and boomers were almost certainly closer to each other than for millenials. 0: your source has mean at 34 in 2025, https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-s…
Yeah, but how does millennial median wealth compare to boomer median wealth? That's the question.
I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.
Exactly - people have it backwards, when data diverges from lived experience you don't tell lived experience to shut up cuz' dataa you go back and check your models and your data collection. And you check and you check and you check. Einstein was famously wary of Quantum Mechanics rather than taking the findings at face value, and I guarantee that economic data is a hell of a lot less rigorous and more complicated th…
It's funny, I say the exact same thing about crime in NYC.
Statistically it's safer than rural Oklahoma... but your lived experience in taking the subway 45 minutes every day will not paint the same safety experience that can't be found in any statistic.
Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.
Exactly - people have it backwards, when data diverges from lived experience you don't tell lived experience to shut up cuz' dataa you go back and check your models and your data collection. And you check and you check and you check. Einstein was famously wary of Quantum Mechanics rather than taking the findings at face value, and I guarantee that economic data is a hell of a lot less rigorous and more complicated th…
That's silly. People have wrong impressions about a lot of things. Your "lived experience" (you can just say experience, okay?) can be wrong.
Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s not perfect but probably the best we have. People forgot or simply don’t realize how much worse life was just a couple of decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth).
It's utter trash, it was good when we had industry focused economies instead of service focused ones. Everybody mocked Russia for having the same gdp as Spain. As it turns out your economy is much stronger when it's focused on heavy industries, steel, mining, oil, &c. Than when it is focused on tourism and other services One produces value, the other generates money, when shits hit the fan you need energy, the drunk…
Right but the services sector is more than running strip clubs for tourists. Spain just doesn't export any services other than strip clubs apparently. The US doesn't have this problem. The Financial Services market is the largest in the world.
Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.
Exactly - people have it backwards, when data diverges from lived experience you don't tell lived experience to shut up cuz' dataa you go back and check your models and your data collection. And you check and you check and you check. Einstein was famously wary of Quantum Mechanics rather than taking the findings at face value, and I guarantee that economic data is a hell of a lot less rigorous and more complicated th…
The thing is that that's not a conflict between data and lived experience, it's just a conflict between different sets of data. If you measure wealth and then you measure wealth relative to housing costs, neither one of those is "lived experience". If you do a survey on people's sentiments about the economy, that's data too. I'm skeptical of the term "lived experience" precisely because people tend to use it in arguments of the form "let's disregard data in favor of my individual preferences". But when you aggregate the "lived experience" of many people, you get data, and that data can be just as valuable as more anodyne economic data.
Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s not perfect but probably the best we have. People forgot or simply don’t realize how much worse life was just a couple of decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth).
People forgot or simply don't realize how much better life was just 3-4 decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth, housing costs, tuition costs, healthcare costs, jobs). In advanced western countries that is. If you compare Nigeria from 2000 to Nigeria today, sure, maybe...
What? Access to knowledge was better 3-4 decades ago? You're telling me that people had better access to knowledge in 1986 than they do today?
Infant mortality was 10.4 per 1,000 live births in 1986 in the US. It was 5.5 I'm 2023.
Life expectancy was 74. Now it's 78.
The crime rate peaked in the US in 1991.
Life isn't perfect now. Housing needs to be a lot more affordable, for one. University costs in the US are insane, for another.
But to paint this as no progress? Come on.