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The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

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Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#31

Post by Retric »

slibhb wrote: post #23
midasuni wrote: post #5

All “growth” in gdp seems to go to rich people. Normal people have seen stagnant wages and increased costs from the owners. Why should I care if gdp isn’t increasing when I don’t see any gains whether it does or not?

The economy doubling in size helps most people even if the resulting wealth is unevenly distributed. Goods, services, technologies, jobs, etc are good.

Hardly, 99% of the population can be worse off with a sufficiently uneven distribution despite 2x GDP growth. Read up on countries hit by the “resource curse” where dictators suddenly don’t care about the productivity of most of their citizens.

Also, extremely uneven economic distributions tend to be bad for large segments of the population due to inherently limited resources like desirable beach front property as well as artificially limited resources like city apartments.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#32

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

midasuni wrote: post #5

All “growth” in gdp seems to go to rich people. Normal people have seen stagnant wages and increased costs from the owners. Why should I care if gdp isn’t increasing when I don’t see any gains whether it does or not?

What about:

- Your access to mRNA vaccines

- Your access to cleaner air due to electric car adoption

- Ditto for energy security and renewable sources of electricity

- Your chance of dying in a car going down due to new safety features

- Your access to crazy advanced cancer treatments that are making progress at almost miraculous paces

- Your much improved ability to work from home, cutting out ~2 hours of commuting each day

By every metric, the world is DRAMATICALLY better today for virtually everyone than it was in 1960, and the same from 1960 to 1900, and so on.

The pace things are improving is exponential.

If you think we're all worse off, maybe you're depressed. Or maybe you actually are worse off - but most people aren't...

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#34

Post by notfromhere »

slibhb wrote: post #23
midasuni wrote: post #5

All “growth” in gdp seems to go to rich people. Normal people have seen stagnant wages and increased costs from the owners. Why should I care if gdp isn’t increasing when I don’t see any gains whether it does or not?

The economy doubling in size helps most people even if the resulting wealth is unevenly distributed. Goods, services, technologies, jobs, etc are good.

No it doesn't. Growth in the economy has to increase real wages, and real wages need to keep pace with housing, food, healthcare, etc increases in order to be meaningful.

More jobs are only good if they actually provide a living wage.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#35

Post by badpun »

monero-xmr wrote: post #28
fvdessen wrote: post #15

And yet with all that money you can’t buy European quality of life in the USA

My sister in law is from Spain, had a guaranteed government job at a state run hospital (or some affiliated org) for life, and could retire in her 50s. She chose to bail and come to the US. She hated her boss (who could never be fired), the work was boring, the take home pay was awful, and she lived in a village where she grew up in a tiny apartment. Sure she had enough to eat and wasn’t going to be homeless. But she…

The stats look much better if you compare the number of hours worked. When accounting for that, US is at the level of Scandinavian countries. Obviously, Spain is still seriously lagging.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#36

Post by mechagodzilla »

sefrost wrote: post #25
JOnAgain wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they actually not control for U.K.? They just subtracted the 6th biggest economy and ran a sensational headline?

The UK was never in the Eurozone.

This is about the European Union, of which the UK was a part, not the Eurozone (where they use the Euro as currency).

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#37

Post by Sterm »

slibhb wrote: post #23
midasuni wrote: post #5

All “growth” in gdp seems to go to rich people. Normal people have seen stagnant wages and increased costs from the owners. Why should I care if gdp isn’t increasing when I don’t see any gains whether it does or not?

The economy doubling in size helps most people even if the resulting wealth is unevenly distributed. Goods, services, technologies, jobs, etc are good.

If it did US life expectancy wouldn't lower today than it was in 2008.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#38

Post by Aperocky »

nforgerit wrote: post #30

German here. Austerity? Over-regulation? An oligopoly of tech-incompetent local enterprises? Just guessing here. As a student in 2007, I started being an avid follower of what Big Tech was doing and was flabbergasted that local tech enterprises didn't seem to notice or change anything. In CS at university they didn't teach programming (only as an aside) but all the funny theoretical OOP fluff that the community right…

> In CS at university they didn't teach programming

That's quite alarming.

Re: The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

#40

Post by kryptiskt »

The economic engine of the Eurozone, Germany, keeps stepping on the brakes because they are so obsessed with their competitiveness and running huge trade surpluses. If the German consumers would finally be allowed to a bigger share of all the gains from their productivity it would be good for the whole of Europe as the biggest problem is weak demand. But no, we can't have that because then their trade surplus would shrink. Never mind that all the other EU countries are supposed to absorb a big part of that trade surplus while being scolded for not being as frugal as Germany.
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