I really enjoyed reading this. it jives very well with my sentiment. When you go to a grocery store and see the stacks of sodas and chips while our country has an obesity epidemic, you need to wonder if the sale of these products should count towards or against our economic wellbeing. If products can have positive value, surely products can have negative value as well.
In an absurd way, if you were obese and bought a 12 pack of soda and a bag of chips, rationally it would be more valuable for you to throw the products away instead of consuming them. similarly an alcoholic that buys alcohol is doing a negative purchase.
gambling has zero silver lining — its straight up negative value.
And then there’s the leverage per dollar aspect of our economy. If the average american is convinced they need an enormous car, gigabit internet, and streaming services, then yes our economy will be growing, but with things that aren’t fundamentally changing our well being.
Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time, not a gambling addiction, larger screens and diabetes.
Surprisingly I tried to look at economic indicators that tried to quantify growth aligned with some subjective societal wellbeing metric and couldn’t find anything serious
The example he gave of GDP metrics going up when banks underpay interest on savings was wild. “Wow, these customers are effectively paying billions to the banks by accepting low interest rates, they must be receiving so much value in return!!”
So many economic indicators are perverse - economically it would often be better for a family to get divorced, split into two homes, and then pay each other child support. Heck, economically it would be advantageous to divorce your stay-at-home wife and turn around and hire her to take care of the kids. You could even pay her more and charge her for room and board! You could charge the kids! Financialize everything!
We need metrics that are actually tied to human happiness, not human suffering.
> By contrast, everyone who matters has agreed we should ignore whether monopolies contribute to prices, even though plenty of economic models treat tariffs and monopolies similarly.
Who? Obviously they are ignoring monopolies but I thought that was more of a quiet corruption thing.
> There’s a lot to say about the politics of the Fed, but a contact of mine in Trump-world told me the way these guys understand political success or failure is pretty simple. Are the wages of middle class Americans increasing? That’s it.
Not very far in and this seems like a propaganda piece already. I’m not even gonna claim they don’t care about middle class wages going up, but they have way too many side quests to claim that’s all they care about.
Propaganda for whom? “The current government is intently focused on increasing middle-class wages” doesn’t seem like an aggressively partisan statement.
In an absurd way, if you were obese and bought a 12 pack of soda and a bag of chips, rationally it would be more valuable for you to throw the products away instead of consuming them. similarly an alcoholic that buys alcohol is doing a negative purchase.
gambling has zero silver lining — its straight up negative value.
And then there’s the leverage per dollar aspect of our economy. If the average american is convinced they need an enormous car, gigabit internet, and streaming services, then yes our economy will be growing, but with things that aren’t fundamentally changing our well being.
Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time, not a gambling addiction, larger screens and diabetes.
Surprisingly I tried to look at economic indicators that tried to quantify growth aligned with some subjective societal wellbeing metric and couldn’t find anything serious
We need metrics that are actually tied to human happiness, not human suffering.
But this doesn't change that richer countries really are better off than poorer countries, and GDP is a reasonable measure of that.
"Growth" is based on GDP. Look who captured the lion's share by looking at the "growth" in income inequality.
It's not hard to see why people are mad, the rich get way richer, we get higher prices and tariffs
Generally I found this a good read
https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
Which was new to me, but puts some numbers behind the non-discretionary discretionary spending concept raised by this article.
Who? Obviously they are ignoring monopolies but I thought that was more of a quiet corruption thing.
Not very far in and this seems like a propaganda piece already. I’m not even gonna claim they don’t care about middle class wages going up, but they have way too many side quests to claim that’s all they care about.