271–280 of 297 posts
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You’re using top line numbers to make that assertion, but gains are not evenly distributed. There’s prolific ink spilled on the failures of technocratic managerialism over the past 40 years as gain become decoupled — and particularly over the past decade as the breakdown has reached critical mass.
Then post these scientific papers on the failures of technocratic managerialism.
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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.
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Pointing to Russia as a functioning economy is comical. Industry focused economies are going to continue to come under pressure due to automation. The US for example has a lot of industrial output, but shrinking industrial jobs. And that’s a good thing. Sending people into coal mines should never be a long term plan.
> Pointing to Russia as a functioning economy is comical. idk man, France's economy minister said he would bring "russia on its knees" economically, 3 years later it's still not anywhere close to being a reality, the minister isn't here anymore tho. Put half of the sanctions on spain and it would fold in a month
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GDP per capita has basically all the same problems.
I'm sure it has problems, but if I look at the top of this list (and exclude the tax havens) the answer to "Would I like to live there?" is Yes. Likewise for the bottom of the list it's an emphatic No. Is it a completely accurate indicator? Probably not. Is it directionally accurate? Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
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There is no 'cure' per se as a non-US investor currency risk is just something to accept (or swap return for a hedge but then it ends up being a wash mostly), for example if you invest in a World equities ETF, it's a bit pointless to be hedging exposure to all the currencies. Even if you decide to slant away from the US, it's likely a majority of non-US large caps have USD exposures. It's more a psychological thing,…
Is absolute USD return being lower than “actual return” (not sure what that is measured in) an issue if you stay in USD your whole life?
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There is no 'cure' per se as a non-US investor currency risk is just something to accept (or swap return for a hedge but then it ends up being a wash mostly), for example if you invest in a World equities ETF, it's a bit pointless to be hedging exposure to all the currencies. Even if you decide to slant away from the US, it's likely a majority of non-US large caps have USD exposures. It's more a psychological thing,…
Is absolute USD return being lower than “actual return” (not sure what that is measured in) an issue if you stay in USD your whole life?
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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…
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Everyone wants to park some money and have other people work hard to increase the real value of said parked money. Not everyone can win big. Storing value is actually pretty amazing thing and that it can be profitable is magic. Of course the environment and poorest pays some of the free lunch.
An investor friend once told me that the US needs to always be in debt because treasuries give investors a risk-free place to park their money between investments. The sense of entitlement was astounding.
Transitioning to another system would work (and seems inevitable at some point in the next hundred years??) but oof it would be chaotic.
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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…
Who exactly has the "lived experience" of being a member of two different generations?
Although anecdotally my father moved to the UK with my mother with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and by 27 my dad was able to afford his first property in London start a family, all without a uni degree and hadn't even yet finished his accountancy training. He did that without any family help and in fact was sending money home. This has always helped provide a bit of colour of how things have changed
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."
The Jones Act is arguably why China's Navy will soon dwarf the U.S.'s ancient fleet.