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The Demoralization is just Beginning

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Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#291

Post by jazzyjackson »

mullingitover wrote: post #221
kawaiikouhai wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I had this exact thought experiment of "What if America were no longer Hegemon". So, I looked at other historic examples. The British, Dutch, and Spanish. (You can add German/Austrian and the French, close contenders). They're all still very well-off!

If Britain were a US state it would be between Mississippi and Alabama in GDP per capita. Not sure I’d call the place well off. Granted, a lot of the reason they’re in this situation is because they put everything into stopping the Nazis and thus saving the world. The US kinda lucked into inheriting the UK’s wealth.

GDP is not a measure of wealth let alone well being, it just means Mississippi is more expensive than Cornwall.

Japan is even lower on the list, but personally I’d rather live in Osaka than Mobile.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#292

Post by dig1 »

giacomoforte wrote: post #240

He contradicts himself. Europe, in particular Spain, France and Germany are still manufacturing goods. And yet their economies are stagnant. Because those industries have seen no growth for decades already.

I cannot speak for Spain and France, but for Germany, stagnation was primarily due to long-standing internal political issues. Wolfgang Münchau discusses this in his book Kaput [1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Kaput-End-German-Miracle/dp/B...

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#293

Post by t-3 »

l0ng1nu5 wrote: post #268
amrocha wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of countries listening to MMT economists?

The US since the GFC is probably the most obvious one. As I understand it, pretty much every developed country employed mmt practice in response to covid. Now we have (even more) rampant inflation and wealth inequality with no sign of slowing down.

"Pretty much every country" couldn't possibly employ "mmt practice" - a significant number of countries don't have sovereign currencies. That's ignoring the fact that MMT is descriptive rather than prescriptive, it doesn't have practices, it is a theory used to describe how a modern economy with sovereign fiat currency works.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#294

Post by throwawaymaths »

throwawaythekey wrote: post #250
ikiris wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a debate if you reject the very principals of science. I realize we're getting there for a lot of people, but merely disbelieving in science is not a refutal of it. This ignores so called Austrian economists however, who are just flat out lying to either themselves or everyone else depending on the person.

Is there a fundamental repudiation to Austrian economics? All I know about them is that they don't like funny money, which to me as a systems thinker is perfectly reasonable. At worst you would expect it to be harmful, at best to obscure what is really going on.

if you go down the austrian rabbithole weird stuff around praxis starts showing up. which is like logically true but probably unuseful (IMO) and used by the community to shut down any ideas from outside Austrianism.

i think focusing on M0 is also incorrect. the debt money multiplier is a real phenomenon, and at least the psyche of a user of the banking system must be accounted for.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#295

Post by bigbacaloa »

systemf_omega wrote: post #118
lxgr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adjust for living expenses and the situation already looks very different. Then adjust for quality of life...

This has been done before, and America comes out consistently on top. Even the median purchasing power parity (PPP) in the US is frequently ranked highest in the world. The majority of American households in the poorest US states are doing better than the majority of Europeans. This gets amplified if you're a highly sought after professional. Top senior engineers are getting paid $500k-$1M in the US. These are figure…

[dead]

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#296

Post by TeMPOraL »

powerapple wrote: post #276
ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

What is a good economy and what's the purpose of economy?

Arguably, the economy just is. It has no purpose, other than what it does[0].

It's not like anyone designed it, or has any control over it. Some people are in position to make adjustments, nudge some aspect of it towards a desired goal or away from undesirable one, but there's only so much they can do - it's all strongly path-dependent.

Put another way, the shape of the economy is just an exercise of descending down the gradient. Any individual or group has very little control over this, and major changes to the economy basically only happen when war or technological inventions reshape the entire gradient.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#299

Post by shash »

tony69 wrote: post #264
Panzer04 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making an inelastic resource (gold) the unit of exchange in a growing economy is a recipe for deflation. You don't want the most economically sensible decision to be holding onto capital, since that results in precisely nothing useful being done.

Deflation is fairer and reduces moral hazard in finance. The weak point of gold is that it’s too slow to settle transactions (you have to move it), so a paper gold system on top of it inevitably arises. [0] “broken money” by Lyn Alden

Deflation (defined as, the value of the currency goes up with time) means that prices go down with time. This however tends to accumulate wealth and not have it move around in the economy (it being more remunerative to hold on to your currency because its value increases). This makes it harder to run an economy because eventually, with a fixed supply, all the currency gets hoarded and only a bare minimum circulates to buy essentials.

A little inflation means that your currency buys stuff _today_ that's worth more than hoarding it for _tomorrow_, so you spend, vitalizing the economy.

The reality is, it needs to be balanced. There needs to be enough money in circulation such that economic activity is not stymied, but not so much that it starts price wars.

Kinda like blood sugar!

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#300

Post by anticodon »

tmn wrote: post #73
zzzeek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seemed like a good article until he went into "back the dollar on gold" and revealed he was a total crackpot, sad

Care to elaborate? It’s thought provoking as a mechanism to reduce all of this zero sum (or even worse, parasitic) effort that dominates our system.

US is prosperous because it produces the world currency. Need to buy steel? Just print more dollars and buy it from any other country. Need to buy food? Ditto. Need to buy brains? Ditto.

No working is required, when you can print any amount of currency and can buy anything from any part of the world with it. Yes, printing speed up inflation a bit, but unlike in any other country of the world, when US is printing dollars, they spread the effects of inflation on all of the world: US becomes richer and all other countries a bit poorer.

This is why linking dollar to the gold would kill US prosperity. Also, one reason is why US is so heavily militarized and is fighting wars all over the world: you need to constantly threaten all the world so that they can't even think of choosing any other mean for world trade other than dollar.

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