Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success • Hacker News Board

Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success

#261

Post by lnsru » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #258

consp wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Renting for me generally sounds like a bad deal. It always is but not everyone has the option of buying. It takes investment and not everyone's parents are wealthy.

Renting is actually a better deal, financially, in Israel compared to purchasing. Rent is cheaper than the mortgage payment, by hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars a month, in a society where the average price of housing is more than 14x the average annual salary but most people are highly emotionally compelled to purchase housing as a symbol of stability and wealth creation - an emotional decision instead of…

We calculated when buying the house near Munich that we pay around 140000€ more than renting our flat forever with moderate rent increase. At the moment of signing we needed bigger apartment. Few years later we see, that despite heavy construction in the old house we will save at least 200000€ as buyers. Rents in German cities are out of control. Probably it’s different in regions with solid real estate supply. Here’s nothing.

Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success

#262

Post by Retric » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

epolanski wrote: post #239

Retric wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can buy "into a market" by investing in a ETF following the MSCI EM or SP500. Nope. A more accurate description is saying you’re buying into a specific subset of a Market by buying shares of specific companies. Hand waving them as if they are the same thing doesn’t actually make them the same thing. The MSCI EM, SP500, etc etc are simply a collection of public companies not the market of a given country. Which…

You keep being out of topic. This thread is about indexes and it started by a user stating that emerging markets indexes have been in line or outpaced global and even most of the advanced economies ones.

What these indexes are and how they behave is definitely on topic. Some of the indexes we can point to have in the past seen outsized returns, but many haven’t especially over specific timeframes. Currency fluctuations play a huge role, as does perception of risk etc.

Your previous statement about why in general they would have an advantage was inaccurate. As you have seemingly realized.

Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success

#263

Post by baxtr » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 5:34 PM UTC

lm28469 wrote: post #231

baxtr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes sorry, I forgot that Russia is super successful in Ukraine and Europe is on the brink of collapse because it ran out of energy!

That's not my point at all Do you think Spain would fair better than Russia against Ukraine ?

I get your point. Spain would fail miserably.

But you’re not taken into account how many men Russia is losing to maintain that level of aggression. It’s compensating its small GDP with humans.

Spain would never do that and thus fail.

Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success

#264

Post by NoGravitas » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

boxed wrote: post #166

guerrilla wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hardly a relevant response considering no society have used any of the ones I am speaking about in the way that you mean. The OECD, UN, IMF and others use many of them as secondary metrics though.

I just find the "what have the romans ever done for us?" argument to be scary. It leads very quickly and easily to struggle sessions and the terror. I'm all for trying things for sure, but it has to be done in very small scale and over significant time scales.

"THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success

#265

Post by huhkerrf » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

vanviegen wrote: post #196

BrenBarn wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 argum…

The problem with countering lived experience with data, is that whatever data you can provide, it's very unlikely to capture the exact sentiment you're addressing. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try, of course. But one should be very open to the possibility that things are happening outside of your specific data. The most infuriating example, to me, is the overuse of GDP. As if that should tell us everything.

No, it shouldn't tell us everything, but if someone makes a very data-oriented claim ("millenials will be the first generation poorer than their parents") and you return with data that shows the opposite, you can make a claim that the data is poorly gathered, etc.

But pivoting to the "but it's not my lived experience, bro" is weak.

If you made the claim that "millenials have it harder than their parent" then we're talking something where experience can be more useful.

Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success

#266

Post by Animats » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC

ErigmolCt wrote: post #212

Animats wrote: post #94

Protectionism is failing to revive manufacturing Yes. The rare earths situation is embarrassing. This has been a political football for years now, but the efforts to fix it aren't working very well. First, you need a mine site and a mine. The US has a big one at Mountain Pass, California, and it's producing. But in the past twenty years, it's gone bankrupt twice and has been through three owners, because there were a…

What you're describing looks less like "we tried protectionism and it failed" and more like "we don't have institutions that can reliably carry long-cycle industrial projects from idea to operation."

Exactly. This supply chain requires four quite different plants, none of which make money until the other three are running. US capitalism isn't good at setting that up from a cold start. Market forces may get there incrementally, but it takes a decade or two. It's high risk for any part of the chain to get ahead of the others.

China's industrial central planning has no problem doing this. Where there's been progress in the US, it's been because big customers, DoD and General Motors, pushed.

This is a nice example to look at closely. People in US politics have been screaming about rare earth problems for a decade now. It's not a resource problem. It's a capitalism problem.

Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success

#267

Post by p0pularopinion » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 7:24 PM UTC

gadders wrote: post #219

p0pularopinion wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP is not useful to measure how good an economy works. The core problem of GDP is that it does not account for usefulness of spending. GDP also ignores volunteer work and other non market transactions, completely dismisses externalities for health and the environment, and also has no indication of the distribution of said wealth.

If you had a Rawlsian veil pulled over your eyes and someone said to you "You won't know how rich you will be in that society, but would you rather live in a top ten GDP per Capita country or a bottom ten?" I think we all know what we would reply. Granted it might not be fine grained enough to distinguish between Number 4 and Number 5 on the list.

Might still be a useless indicator considering that many of the low GDP countries also rank badly in other indicators that are often taken into consideration more broadly, like quality of life indicies, corruption indices or just the Gini coefficient. Correlation does not mean causation

Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success

#268

Post by cal_dent » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC

MORPHOICES wrote: post #112

[dead]

This is a wider concern. And partly the issue where economies have become very reliant on monetary policy being the controlling mechanism rather than a better mix of monetary and fiscal policy.

The fear now comes in the rock and a hard place issue that is ongoing here, whereby interest rates/monetary policy are arguably still not in restrictive territory enough that if a downturn was to occur, our coping tool is to loosen policy further but that would likely stoke further asset inflation and potentially general inflation compounding other issues.

It's why you get more leaning to the view that it might be necessary to just let things fail as a resetting mechanism, which I'm personally not sure about.

Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success

#269

Post by coldtea » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

shlant wrote: post #235

coldtea wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> People forgot or simply don't realize how much better life was just 3-4 decades ago Are you just saying this thinking no one will ask you to back it up with data? Care to quantify what "so much better" actually means?

Better job prospects for more people, lower inflation, cheaper healthcare, cheaper housing (actually affordable housing), less obesity, better school programs, more distributed, less controled, and less corporate internet and web, higher fertility rates, less clouds of war and civil tension, more political legitimacy and better political climate, better nutricion (official stats show obesity at an all time high and rising - despite all the health influencer slop), less impacted rural areas and small towns, and many other stats besides. And a more stable global order too.

Most of those apply both here in Europe and the US.

And that's without even getting into more subjective QoL stuff, from cultural production to the widespread depression and the loneliness epidemic.

Re: Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success

#270

Post by Dylan16807 » Fri, Jan 09, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #155

Dylan16807 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But I don't own a fixed percentage of production, I own a fixed number of shares and the number of shares can change. If the number of shares doubles, then my investment is worth half as much. How is that related to currency changes? That can happen anyway regardless of the currency.

It can happen in other situations, but the fact that it always happens with currency fluctuations is what's important here. When the dollar loses value, everything I own that's anchored to dollars loses value too. "buying a share of productive capacity" implies a counteracting effect, but there isn't one, because the amount of productive capacity represented by each share shrinks too.