Are bits like "they put you in jail for memes" intended to drive away people with a basic grasp of reality so that he can start a cult? Or has he already driven away everyone and his cult aren't able to point out the absurdity as they are all down the same rabbithole?
The Demoralization is just Beginning
631–640 of 812 posts
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#632Going back to a gold standard will limit the money supply. This means that there will be less capital for building $thing. A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation. This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome. The problem with the USA "empire" is that for a trading empire to work you need a plan, and stic…
> A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation. This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome. Kenyesian economics, through inflationism and fiscal policy, has been trying to solve this problem since the New Deal. When they actually make any progress on that front, why don't you let me know?
This is me letting you know that Keynesian economics solved deflation, making it less difficult to get out of market contractions (Note, the comment you refer to specified specifically deflation to be an issue, and did not claim that it solved bubbles and poppings completely nor reduced their frequency). The last time the US had faced significant deflation has been 100 years ago. We used to face deflation much more frequently before Keynesianism since our country’s founding.
Inflation sucks but deflation is a death spiral. There is some more nuance, but most economists would agree that deflation is a lot scarier in general than inflation due to its feedback loop.
Moreover, the reason why we keep getting rampant inflation is more due to neoliberalism and neoconservative economic/fiscal policy rather than modern monetary theory and Keynesian monetary policy. If anything, these monetary policies have massively reduced the amount of inflation we have been feeling for the past several years.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most chinese are storing wealth in real estate its the prime investment vehicle. People in china have been speculating on properties for decades. The chinese government realized a bubble was forming because house builders started using crazy leverage. The fact this crazy bubble formed has shown the regulators were in fact asleep.
Regulators caught on since early 2010s, they were just soft because hard messing with wealth. Before 3RL, RE bubble was being addressed since 2010s, TLDR is policies led to domestic construction slump in 2012-2017 - where indicators like floor space completion and construction employment peaked. ~2017 crack down on shadow banking which drove developers + local gov to increase presales, turning it into a financial ins…
Western coverage on this is just terrible.
I think a lot of folks who were dismayed by the 2008 bailouts during the GFC would have a lot of sympathy and respect for whats going on. China didn't bail out, they let them burn.
The deflationary conditions are the next challenge and I'm very interested to see how they are combatted. It's interesting that Xi has come out strongly against Abenomics, and direct cash transfers, arguing that they'd distort things and "breed laziness".
Obviously this is a very unconventional view point, but looking at the financial shenanigans that have happened in the West and Japan over the last couple decades it's hard to argue in favor of the conventional methods.
Big issue is neither approach really increases the velocity of money, and just leads to it ending up in savings and bloating balance sheets. You've got to get the cash moving.
E: I do ponder how much of the deflation actually is an "efficiency dividend" due to the mass adoption of renewables and electrification. Saul Griffith (one of the folks behind the inflation reduction act) is working on a macroeconomic analysis that suggests renewable energy is inherently deflationary. Solar panels cost less as time goes forward but oil always costs more (due to getting harder and harder to extract).
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation. This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome. Kenyesian economics, through inflationism and fiscal policy, has been trying to solve this problem since the New Deal. When they actually make any progress on that front, why don't you let me know?
This is me letting you know that Keynesian economics solved deflation, making it less difficult to get out of market contractions (Note, the comment you refer to specified specifically deflation to be an issue, and did not claim that it solved bubbles and poppings completely nor reduced their frequency). The last time the US had faced significant deflation has been 100 years ago. We used to face deflation much more f…
> Inflation sucks but deflation is a death spiral.
Do you actually have any evidence for this? Considering that we haven't experienced deflation in nearly 100 years, and all. The USA certainly wasn't "death spiraling" before we went off the gold standard, quite the contrary. But now it seems we are.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
...and about twice what it was 50 years ago. How have Sweden, Japan, France, etc. managed to keep income inequality around postwar lows while America hasn't?
Not sure, but it seems in France the situation in degrading. The same 1% being richer while workers / students waiting in line for food charity stories were common. Part of it might be due to COVID, but I can't shake the feeling that business management (influenced by anglo-saxon/american culture) is harder than before and squeezes employees. Not only a feeling, I worked on precarious jobs that shouldn't exist, and w…
I suspect that people self-manage a lot more if the pay is right. If they stop doing that it seems like you need a more expensive manager, or perhaps you do.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue with these contrarians, is that all they can do is scream loudly about how shitty everything is, without any real proposals on how to improve the world. We see this all the time: MAGA in the US, AFD in Germany...
I would say that AfD has a pretty clear idea of what they think would improve the situation in Germany.
Their ideas are to deport immigrants, end the "woke agenda", stop supporting Ukraine, leave the euro, end green policies, get rid of the political establishment. All of these are purely reactionary and do not adress the problems Germany is facing. They did manage to galvanize a large portion of the electorate, and the last election debates were ridiculous, in that immigration seemed to be the only issue Germany needs to talk about. Not the collapsing infrastructure, not the loss of competetivity of German brands, not foreign policy, not the housing crisis. They have no proposals to improve these issues, and it doesn't even matter, because it's so easy to blind people with "immigrant bad".
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say that AfD has a pretty clear idea of what they think would improve the situation in Germany.
Their ideas are to deport immigrants, end the "woke agenda", stop supporting Ukraine, leave the euro, end green policies, get rid of the political establishment. All of these are purely reactionary and do not adress the problems Germany is facing. They did manage to galvanize a large portion of the electorate, and the last election debates were ridiculous, in that immigration seemed to be the only issue Germany needs…
> and do not adress the problems Germany is facing
According to you. The solutions to your complaints come pretty easily from solving AfD's, at least in my view.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. Hmm > you’re better off reading Krugman It used to be kind of a meme to make fun on how wrong Krugman was but now it's kind of like beating a dead horse. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalizatio... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/10/paul-k... In particular, Krugman was the flag bearer of "co…
Krugman is also the guy who said that minting a $1 trillion dollar coin wouldn't be inflationary.
That was in response to the artificial debt ceiling. The coin was to be “deposited” and used a justification for why there didn’t need to be a vote to lift the debt ceiling for funds Congress has already allocated.
Conflating that with Keynesian principles is false. He didn’t propose that the trillion dollar coin would ever affect actual spending.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#639I 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…
> I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. Hmm > you’re better off reading Krugman It used to be kind of a meme to make fun on how wrong Krugman was but now it's kind of like beating a dead horse. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalizatio... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/10/paul-k... In particular, Krugman was the flag bearer of "co…
You’re describing Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), or really the parody of it that was popular in discussions online.
Krugman actually generally felt it went too far, and was not a proponent of it.
There is some similarity to his making fun of people worried about “bond vigilantes,” iirc. But I don’t think your characterization of his positions is accurate.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. Hmm > you’re better off reading Krugman It used to be kind of a meme to make fun on how wrong Krugman was but now it's kind of like beating a dead horse. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalizatio... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/10/paul-k... In particular, Krugman was the flag bearer of "co…
Also, his article on why the internet is going nowhere. Definitely missed a few things
Krugman discussing the Internet might be like geohot discussing economics.
Or are you referring to the fact that he said it didn’t show up as having caused growth in the underlying economic data? I think he was pointing out something quantitative at the time, and in recent years he speculated that the strong growth in US GDP was finally reflecting efficiency and productivity gains from IT and the Internet. (The US’s strong growth until very very recently was an outgrowth of strong and rare increases in worker productivity.)