201–210 of 286 posts
French speakers, don't miss Jancovici's appearances on Thinkerview. Along with Bihouix, his talks are clear and enlightening.
And his recent (2019-11-07) interview on France Culture https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/linvite-des-matins/tr...
Somewhat tangentially related: I wrote this in a private note to a friend last year. I don't believe this 100%, but the idea is worth exploring in my opinion: 1. Corporations desperately pursue continuous growth, even when they're already profitable, and do so at the expense of the environment, employee welfare and sometimes, the rule of law. 2. Corporations pursue growth because investors demand it. 3. Investors dem…
I've long been of the opinion that the public trading of companies is directly responsible for much of the social injustice we see in the West. As soon as there's a fiduciary duty to maximise ROI, morals go out the window. If you as an officer resist, the collective of shareholders will replace you with someone who will make more money. There's a dissolution of responsibility that comes with the distributed nature of…
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> Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. pet theory: Inflation is way way more than zero almost everywhere (prices of services and rents reflect this), but high inflation is masked by increased supply chain efficiencies, cheapening (in some cases worsening) of products and other factors, which keep prices of physical products relatively stable.
Inflation is the opposite of cheapening, so I don’t see how that can be. What you may be feeling though, and what isn’t calculated in any numbers, are the increases in volatility, which is itself a cost. The volatility of not living in the few economically burgeoning regions, the volatility of having to keep moving up the ladder or else falling behind, increased years of education and loans for what may or may not be…
> volatility
Definitely worth having a discussion on this, although we need to define the reference period - volatility was high in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Arguably it was only low in the ""end of history"" period between the fall of the Berlin wall and the 2008 crisis.
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> 1. Corporations desperately pursue continuous growth, even when they're already profitable, and do so at the expense of the environment, employee welfare and sometimes, the rule of law. And sometimes its to the benefit of the environment, the employees and its in accordance with the rule of law. > 4. Investors need to invest money in instruments with a certain minimum ROI because if they don't, inflation will erode…
> And sometimes its to the benefit of the environment, the employees and its in accordance with the rule of law. Yes. Sometimes lottery is also the right investment: in the 1/10000000 of cases where you win...
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It's asset inflation, which is where most of the Fed's inflation (eg many trillions of dollars of overvaluation into the stock market) via artificially low rates has gone since the Clinton and Bush years when they helped to spark the stock market bubble (#1, #2 and now #3) and then the housing bubble that way. Then they openly admitted to intentionally reinflating the housing market with their various market interven…
> Warren Buffett likes to regularly point out that the Fed's rates act like gravity on stock valuations. The lower the rates, the less gravity. The same is largely true of how housing is affected by the Fed's rates. If you want to absolutely crush housing prices, push Fed rates back up to where mortgage rates are at 15-20% again. What that all really means is, the lower the rates, the more asset valuation inflation o…
The argument is based on looking a the world as a whole. In developed world energy intensity of GDP is decreasing even when you take into account imports. Post-industrial economies can grow while decreasing energy use. What the author is suggesting is that the developing world should stop growing. I can't agree with that. They need their electricity and washing machines. GDP per unit of energy use (constant 2011 PPP…
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I believe they may be referring to the idea that not everything is consumed in the year it’s produced. Infrastructure, for example, is useful years or even decades after it is built (and, presumably, counted in GDP).
To make it concrete, if there are two people in the economy: Alice and Bob. The only products that are exchanged is clothes and shoes. Every year, Alice sells 100 Galleons of shoes to Bob and Bob sells 100 Galleons of clothes to Alice. So the GDP of their economy is 200 Galleons. But assuming that shoes and clothes don't decay in one year, Alice and Bob will become wealthier and wealthier in apparel every year.
Kind of amusing that this idea is posted here on Hacker News, the center of people seeking jobs and companies that are the definition of growth. If you didn’t have growth, you’d all be waiting for your promotion at the power plant when someone dies and frees up a position for you.
I already am.
I've been at my job for 13 and a half years, I"ve moved up exactly 0 times. Someone has to quit/retire, get fired or die to free up positions and even then you only have 2 jumps until you're manager, from there you only move up to senior manager and then you're into corporate level positions. My senior manager has been here for the better part of 30 years and probably has another 15-20 in her at which time she'll almost certainly be replaced by someone from another office in another state as her boss's position was when she retired a few years ago (her direct reports were just given to someone already in a similar position in another state).
Somewhat tangentially related: I wrote this in a private note to a friend last year. I don't believe this 100%, but the idea is worth exploring in my opinion: 1. Corporations desperately pursue continuous growth, even when they're already profitable, and do so at the expense of the environment, employee welfare and sometimes, the rule of law. 2. Corporations pursue growth because investors demand it. 3. Investors dem…
> 6. The end result is a sort of "Red Queen" effect where everyone is forced to compete harder and harder just to maintain his/her existing standard of living. Nice pocket philosophy, if only the world was a zero sum game, but it's NOT. The past 300 years of growth in human prosperity should make that abundantly clear. Past 30 years the world has reduced extreme poverty by half. Not because we in the developed world…
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They need their electricity and washing machine, but do they need exotic vacations and long commutes in powerful cars? Do they need clothes that are made to be worn for a very short time? Do they need technology that's cheap to the point of it being wasted without an afterthought?
> [...] long commutes in powerful cars? People in developed countries don't need that either. Commuting being a hard requirement for modern life in an industrialised country is both a fallacy and perpetuated cargo cult. Most people working in offices today effectively wouldn't have to commute but they still do because employers require them to do so, basically because "that's the way it's always been". Doing away wit…
It is not just the employers — I’ve worked with many people that think nothing of commuting an hour to work ONE WAY (in their pickup trucks and SUVs no less), even when living closer to work is a perfectly valid option (this is particularly true in the large Texas cities that have a huge amount of suburban sprawl).