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If There Is Such a Thing as Economic ‘Good Times,’ These Are They

55 points by Four_Star 8y ago

draw_down 8y ago
Well, that's the problem, isn't it. These are supposed to be the "good times" but normal people can't afford to live on the wages all those new jobs afford them (and god help you if you get sick or need healthcare for whatever reason). They're going to be screwed even worse when it stops being the "good times". If this is what our economy has to offer in the "good times" then............. maybe something is fundamentally wrong with it.
- squirrelicus 8y ago
  In comparison to history when people actually just died when they got the flu, things are much better than you indicate. Health Care is scarce. There must be a mechanism for rationing. Some must be left behind. There is no other option.
  - fndrplayer13 8y ago
    Health care isn't scarce in most of the first world. Many first world societies offer health care to all of their citizens, and those visiting their country. Much as we view education as a fundamental human right in the United States and no longer treat it as scarce, most other societies view healthcare as a fundamental human right. As a society and political system the United States has actively made the choice to pursue a profit-based, insurance-centered care model that is purposefully scarce. Which is to say, I completely disagree that there is no other option.
    - Notorious_BLT 8y ago
      Many first world societies have unreasonably long waiting periods to receive specialist attention and care. For example, Canada's average wait from referral to specialist appointment was 10.2 weeks in 2017, up from 3.7 in 1993. The average wait period for treatment was 10.9, up from 5.6 in 1993. 4.1 weeks for a CT Scan, 10.8 for an MRI. Some types of treatment require almost a year of waiting. Hope you aren't in a hurry to get your health issues resolved. It IS scarce in the short term. Not everyone can get treatment right away, someone will have to wait. And the wait times seem to gradually trend upward, which would indicate (at first glance at least) that it cannot keep up. There's no magical solution to getting everyone timely care.
      - phil248 8y ago
        "Hope you aren't in a hurry to get your health issues resolved." You make it sound so scary, but you make no mention of health outcomes. I don't care if an appointment happens in 10 minutes or 10 weeks, so long as the outcomes are positive. Wait times alone are not a meaningful metric to me.
        passing_by_and 8y ago
        Well, the parent is illustrating a basic point of freshman economics. We ration scarcity with cost (money) or time. In this case Canada chose to be "fair" and ration scarcity of medical care with lines. Your comment belies a belief that peoples time or comfort are worth nothing. Should my children wait a year or more to have a specialist examine a chronic skin condition that thus far cannot be treated and causes severe itching? In Canada the answer is yes. Ever dealt with a toddler that can't sleep and you can't help? Acute care here is the same. People die waiting at emergency. 24 hour waits for patients not bleeding out on the floor happen (but usually we can keep it down to 12).
        phil248 8y ago
        "Your comment belies a belief that peoples time or comfort are worth nothing" You mention nothing about comfort, just wait times, which is essentially my point. Are people being left in extreme discomfort? If so, that is a problem. Health outcomes help paint that picture, and in most first world systems outcomes are good.
        glhaynes 8y ago
        Should my children wait a year or more to have a specialist examine a chronic skin condition that thus far cannot be treated and causes severe itching? That sucks for there to be long waits, but the alternative being evaluated (the USA's system) has lots of people not ever getting treatment.
    - zip1234 8y ago
      There are a limited number of health care practitioners, health care facilities, etc. The demand for health care is unlimited as people get older.
      - dv_dt 8y ago
        And yet in nations like Japan, where there are proportionately a greater number of elderly than in the US, their healthcare delivers at a much lower cost (by half!) as well as a higher life expectancy. This despite a decades long economic stagnation, as opposed to the curious economic "good times" in the US which seems to decrease our life expectancy and increase our health care costs.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    Comparisons to the older times would be more apt if people weren't today dying for example from diabetes not from lack of medical knowledge, but of price of the insulin. It is also relevant that insulin is not fundamentally expensive to produce, and that in other first world nations, this kind of death by healthcare driven financial cuts simply do not occur.
  - draw_down 8y ago
    For rich people that is probably true. Everyone else is like, going bankrupt from medical bills, starting Gofundmes to pay for their medication, and still dying anyway. Our life expectancy is going down. Having a kid is a much more expensive proposition here than elsewhere. Homelessness and opioids are huge problems and only getting worse. The list goes on. America resembles third-world countries more and more as time goes on. And we don't want to admit it.
- djrogers 8y ago
  > normal people can't afford to live on the wages all those new jobs afford them I don’t believe reality agrees with your assumption here. It’s true that an average wage worker can’t afford to live in any city of their choice, and there are some markets that are out of reach for most. It’s also true that an average wage earner today enjoys a higher standard of living than at any point in history - bigger house, more cars, tvs, and luxury items.
  - flukus 8y ago
    > It’s also true that an average wage earner today enjoys a higher standard of living than at any point in history - bigger house, more cars, tvs, and luxury items. I really disagree with that. I'm a 35 year old single man with no kids and a well payed software developer, better paid than 90% of the population. At this point in life my father had a stay at home wife, 2 kids and was working for near minimum wage as a cleaner. He had a huge 4 bedroom house, double garage, large backyard with a swimming pool, 2 cars etc and was close to paying off the house at my age. Meanwhile I'm looking forward to pay off a tiny studio apartment in a few years. Yes we've got bigger TV's and smart phones now, but they don't contribute to a high standard of living.
    - djrogers 8y ago
      And you chose to live in the most expensive area in the USA, while your father did not correct? If you are earning in the top 10% and can barely eke out a living, you either need to re-align your priorities, accept your lot, or move.
      - flukus 8y ago
        If I moved back not much would change, I'd maybe have a whole bedroom but the jobs pay less. Take fixed expenses like groceries and electricity I to account and it ends up about even.
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
> So while times are looking good, and there will inevitably be a certain momentum to that fact, there is no better time to contemplate what has always come next: not good times. I’d argue that the good times are not good to begin with. Americans don’t save. Everyone is heavily indebted and creditors keep lending without restriction. How can economy be healthy if people don’t buy capital goods and are indebted in order to buy consumer goods? It’s quite the opposite.
- squirrelicus 8y ago
  Leveraging one's credit to accelerate their standard of living growth doesn't make an economic culture bad implicitly. People who leverage themselves too far and fail to pay it back do. Some people are trusted with credit more than they should be (empirically speaking), while other more reasonable people are misled by systemic incentives (e.g. home appraisals). The system isn't perfect, but in historical context, nothing has ever been better. I find it unlikely that public figures whose day job is to complain without offering solutions are capable of improving anything. We stand on the shoulders of giants; ancestors that were more thoughtful then us. We shouldn't reject the foundation they laid so willingly.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  The USA economy is flush with cash savings, and anything where it's plausible to invest to (i.e buying capital goods) either has been invested or is being invested. It's just that it's not the general population who are doing this; the savings are held by corporations (as a proxy for the few ultra-rich individuals) and accumulating because there's not much to invest in.
  - tabtab 8y ago
    Re: "not much to invest in." - In the factory era, investing in new or better factories or stores was the usual use of excess cash. But most new industries are labor intensive, not asset-intensive. You can invest in start-ups, but many argue there are already too many questionable startups floating around, not unlike 1999.
tabtab 8y ago
We should be paying down the national debt during the upper-side of the business cycle so that we have stimulus funds for slumps. The tax-cuts are reverse Keynesian economics. They are "doing it wrong".
- squirrelicus 8y ago
  Not to mention failure to raise interest rates to bleed the artificially cheap money out of the economy after quantitative easing. But you can't find a political party these days that supports doing a Keynesian strategy. Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too, as it were.
  - optimuspaul 8y ago
    Maybe democracy isn't the ideal we should be looking towards
  - jayd16 8y ago
    This is pretty dismissive. The Obama admin was very cognizant of keeping ACA deficit neutral, for example. Far cry from the current spend and don't tax policies.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - squirrelicus 8y ago
      You are confusing fiscal policy with monetary policy.
      - jayd16 8y ago
        Ah. The comment you replied to was about tax cuts. I misunderstood your point.
  - yellowstuff 8y ago
    The US Fed is raising interest rates. Gradually, but arguably fairly aggressively considering inflation is so low.
sailfast 8y ago
Everyone knows this, but they also know that the market will remain irrational longer than they will remain solvent. Main question for me is how well do previous indicators of this kind of activity predict the CURRENT state of things. Which fundamental cascade effects have we missed? Most of the time the things that cause the crisis are not the contagion problems you predict (obviously). If I could see it, I'd be hedging :) If I had to guess, I'd say more like the Savings and Loan crisis than 2008, but I'm an optimist.
LarryDarrell 8y ago
I think the next downturn will prompt the investigation for new indicators to measure economic health. What does the number of food assistance enrollees measure if the government makes it much harder to receive assistance? What does the labor participation rate matter if you have millions of low-wage workers completely miserable (and from my experience, start abusing drugs because of that misery). I'm just blowing steam here, but it feels like the economy and it's measures has been decoupled from a large segment of society.
- mpax 8y ago
  They’ve always been decoupled, it’s just a lot more visible these days.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    To be fair, nobody outside of the government and financial media is claiming we are having “good times”. And it’s in both of their best interests to pretend we are in an economic boom.
    - merpnderp 8y ago
      There are lots of places in the US where jobs are booming and people are doing great. Like West Texas where 22 year olds are making six figures in the oil fields.
      - CynicalDio 8y ago
        Lots of places != Oil jobs in a handful of places
    - gwright 8y ago
      Consumer confidence is at an 18 year high. Obviously there are caveats but your characterization seems overly negative. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy/u-s-consumer-confidence-races-to-near-18-year-high-idUSKCN1LD201 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy/u-s-consumer-...
jayd16 8y ago
Not good times for wage growth.
- api 8y ago
  Hasn't been since the middle 1970s.
  - jimbokun 8y ago
    Except the late 1990s: https://www.epi.org/blog/real-hourly-wage-growth-last-generation/ https://www.epi.org/blog/real-hourly-wage-growth-last-genera...
- jimbokun 8y ago
  Interesting that "wages" does not appear once in the article. I guess "wages" are not a relevant metric is assessing economic "Good Times".
  - protonfish 8y ago
    I guess the people who rely on wages aren't really important.
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    As the article states, "Not for everyone and not equitably"; however, the intended meaning of "good times" in this isn't "wow, everyone's happy" but "this is as good as it's going to get". The current wage level and (limited) growth, even if not satisfactory, is still better compared to what was in the previous economic downturn, and better compared to what's going to come. For average wage earners, no matter how hard it is, this really is the good times, as good as they're ever going to be. It won't be better. It will be worse. Be prepared, winter is coming.
- pmiller2 8y ago
  They are if you’re a corporation.
- djrogers 8y ago
skywhopper 8y ago
The headline there is basically the entire content of this article. Just a statement of the positive indicators and a question "how long can this last?" No critical analysis or discussion of the contradicting indicators. Not really worth a post. What are we supposed to be discussing?
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
the lack of talking about the prez here is revealing

55 points by Four_Star 8y ago

Well, that's the problem, isn't it. These are supposed to be the "good times" but normal people can't afford to live on the wages all those new jobs afford them (and god help you if you get sick or need healthcare for whatever reason). They're going to be screwed even worse when it stops being the "good times". If this is what our economy has to offer in the "good times" then............. maybe something is fundamentally wrong with it.

squirrelicus 8y ago
In comparison to history when people actually just died when they got the flu, things are much better than you indicate. Health Care is scarce. There must be a mechanism for rationing. Some must be left behind. There is no other option.
- fndrplayer13 8y ago
  Health care isn't scarce in most of the first world. Many first world societies offer health care to all of their citizens, and those visiting their country. Much as we view education as a fundamental human right in the United States and no longer treat it as scarce, most other societies view healthcare as a fundamental human right. As a society and political system the United States has actively made the choice to pursue a profit-based, insurance-centered care model that is purposefully scarce. Which is to say, I completely disagree that there is no other option.
  - Notorious_BLT 8y ago
    Many first world societies have unreasonably long waiting periods to receive specialist attention and care. For example, Canada's average wait from referral to specialist appointment was 10.2 weeks in 2017, up from 3.7 in 1993. The average wait period for treatment was 10.9, up from 5.6 in 1993. 4.1 weeks for a CT Scan, 10.8 for an MRI. Some types of treatment require almost a year of waiting. Hope you aren't in a hurry to get your health issues resolved. It IS scarce in the short term. Not everyone can get treatment right away, someone will have to wait. And the wait times seem to gradually trend upward, which would indicate (at first glance at least) that it cannot keep up. There's no magical solution to getting everyone timely care.
    - phil248 8y ago
      "Hope you aren't in a hurry to get your health issues resolved." You make it sound so scary, but you make no mention of health outcomes. I don't care if an appointment happens in 10 minutes or 10 weeks, so long as the outcomes are positive. Wait times alone are not a meaningful metric to me.
      - passing_by_and 8y ago
        Well, the parent is illustrating a basic point of freshman economics. We ration scarcity with cost (money) or time. In this case Canada chose to be "fair" and ration scarcity of medical care with lines. Your comment belies a belief that peoples time or comfort are worth nothing. Should my children wait a year or more to have a specialist examine a chronic skin condition that thus far cannot be treated and causes severe itching? In Canada the answer is yes. Ever dealt with a toddler that can't sleep and you can't help? Acute care here is the same. People die waiting at emergency. 24 hour waits for patients not bleeding out on the floor happen (but usually we can keep it down to 12).
        phil248 8y ago
        "Your comment belies a belief that peoples time or comfort are worth nothing" You mention nothing about comfort, just wait times, which is essentially my point. Are people being left in extreme discomfort? If so, that is a problem. Health outcomes help paint that picture, and in most first world systems outcomes are good.
        glhaynes 8y ago
        Should my children wait a year or more to have a specialist examine a chronic skin condition that thus far cannot be treated and causes severe itching? That sucks for there to be long waits, but the alternative being evaluated (the USA's system) has lots of people not ever getting treatment.
  - zip1234 8y ago
    There are a limited number of health care practitioners, health care facilities, etc. The demand for health care is unlimited as people get older.
    - dv_dt 8y ago
      And yet in nations like Japan, where there are proportionately a greater number of elderly than in the US, their healthcare delivers at a much lower cost (by half!) as well as a higher life expectancy. This despite a decades long economic stagnation, as opposed to the curious economic "good times" in the US which seems to decrease our life expectancy and increase our health care costs.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  Comparisons to the older times would be more apt if people weren't today dying for example from diabetes not from lack of medical knowledge, but of price of the insulin. It is also relevant that insulin is not fundamentally expensive to produce, and that in other first world nations, this kind of death by healthcare driven financial cuts simply do not occur.
- draw_down 8y ago
  For rich people that is probably true. Everyone else is like, going bankrupt from medical bills, starting Gofundmes to pay for their medication, and still dying anyway. Our life expectancy is going down. Having a kid is a much more expensive proposition here than elsewhere. Homelessness and opioids are huge problems and only getting worse. The list goes on. America resembles third-world countries more and more as time goes on. And we don't want to admit it.
djrogers 8y ago
> normal people can't afford to live on the wages all those new jobs afford them I don’t believe reality agrees with your assumption here. It’s true that an average wage worker can’t afford to live in any city of their choice, and there are some markets that are out of reach for most. It’s also true that an average wage earner today enjoys a higher standard of living than at any point in history - bigger house, more cars, tvs, and luxury items.
- flukus 8y ago
  > It’s also true that an average wage earner today enjoys a higher standard of living than at any point in history - bigger house, more cars, tvs, and luxury items. I really disagree with that. I'm a 35 year old single man with no kids and a well payed software developer, better paid than 90% of the population. At this point in life my father had a stay at home wife, 2 kids and was working for near minimum wage as a cleaner. He had a huge 4 bedroom house, double garage, large backyard with a swimming pool, 2 cars etc and was close to paying off the house at my age. Meanwhile I'm looking forward to pay off a tiny studio apartment in a few years. Yes we've got bigger TV's and smart phones now, but they don't contribute to a high standard of living.
  - djrogers 8y ago
    And you chose to live in the most expensive area in the USA, while your father did not correct? If you are earning in the top 10% and can barely eke out a living, you either need to re-align your priorities, accept your lot, or move.
    - flukus 8y ago
      If I moved back not much would change, I'd maybe have a whole bedroom but the jobs pay less. Take fixed expenses like groceries and electricity I to account and it ends up about even.

0x8BADF00D 8y ago

> So while times are looking good, and there will inevitably be a certain momentum to that fact, there is no better time to contemplate what has always come next: not good times. I’d argue that the good times are not good to begin with. Americans don’t save. Everyone is heavily indebted and creditors keep lending without restriction. How can economy be healthy if people don’t buy capital goods and are indebted in order to buy consumer goods? It’s quite the opposite.

squirrelicus 8y ago
Leveraging one's credit to accelerate their standard of living growth doesn't make an economic culture bad implicitly. People who leverage themselves too far and fail to pay it back do. Some people are trusted with credit more than they should be (empirically speaking), while other more reasonable people are misled by systemic incentives (e.g. home appraisals). The system isn't perfect, but in historical context, nothing has ever been better. I find it unlikely that public figures whose day job is to complain without offering solutions are capable of improving anything. We stand on the shoulders of giants; ancestors that were more thoughtful then us. We shouldn't reject the foundation they laid so willingly.
PeterisP 8y ago
The USA economy is flush with cash savings, and anything where it's plausible to invest to (i.e buying capital goods) either has been invested or is being invested. It's just that it's not the general population who are doing this; the savings are held by corporations (as a proxy for the few ultra-rich individuals) and accumulating because there's not much to invest in.
- tabtab 8y ago
  Re: "not much to invest in." - In the factory era, investing in new or better factories or stores was the usual use of excess cash. But most new industries are labor intensive, not asset-intensive. You can invest in start-ups, but many argue there are already too many questionable startups floating around, not unlike 1999.

tabtab 8y ago

We should be paying down the national debt during the upper-side of the business cycle so that we have stimulus funds for slumps. The tax-cuts are reverse Keynesian economics. They are "doing it wrong".

squirrelicus 8y ago
Not to mention failure to raise interest rates to bleed the artificially cheap money out of the economy after quantitative easing. But you can't find a political party these days that supports doing a Keynesian strategy. Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too, as it were.
- optimuspaul 8y ago
  Maybe democracy isn't the ideal we should be looking towards
- jayd16 8y ago
  This is pretty dismissive. The Obama admin was very cognizant of keeping ACA deficit neutral, for example. Far cry from the current spend and don't tax policies.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - squirrelicus 8y ago
    You are confusing fiscal policy with monetary policy.
    - jayd16 8y ago
      Ah. The comment you replied to was about tax cuts. I misunderstood your point.
- yellowstuff 8y ago
  The US Fed is raising interest rates. Gradually, but arguably fairly aggressively considering inflation is so low.

sailfast 8y ago

Everyone knows this, but they also know that the market will remain irrational longer than they will remain solvent. Main question for me is how well do previous indicators of this kind of activity predict the CURRENT state of things. Which fundamental cascade effects have we missed? Most of the time the things that cause the crisis are not the contagion problems you predict (obviously). If I could see it, I'd be hedging :) If I had to guess, I'd say more like the Savings and Loan crisis than 2008, but I'm an optimist.

LarryDarrell 8y ago

I think the next downturn will prompt the investigation for new indicators to measure economic health. What does the number of food assistance enrollees measure if the government makes it much harder to receive assistance? What does the labor participation rate matter if you have millions of low-wage workers completely miserable (and from my experience, start abusing drugs because of that misery). I'm just blowing steam here, but it feels like the economy and it's measures has been decoupled from a large segment of society.

mpax 8y ago
They’ve always been decoupled, it’s just a lot more visible these days.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  To be fair, nobody outside of the government and financial media is claiming we are having “good times”. And it’s in both of their best interests to pretend we are in an economic boom.
  - merpnderp 8y ago
    There are lots of places in the US where jobs are booming and people are doing great. Like West Texas where 22 year olds are making six figures in the oil fields.
    - CynicalDio 8y ago
      Lots of places != Oil jobs in a handful of places
  - gwright 8y ago
    Consumer confidence is at an 18 year high. Obviously there are caveats but your characterization seems overly negative. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy/u-s-consumer-confidence-races-to-near-18-year-high-idUSKCN1LD201 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy/u-s-consumer-...

jayd16 8y ago

Not good times for wage growth.

api 8y ago
Hasn't been since the middle 1970s.
- jimbokun 8y ago
  Except the late 1990s: https://www.epi.org/blog/real-hourly-wage-growth-last-generation/ https://www.epi.org/blog/real-hourly-wage-growth-last-genera...
jimbokun 8y ago
Interesting that "wages" does not appear once in the article. I guess "wages" are not a relevant metric is assessing economic "Good Times".
- protonfish 8y ago
  I guess the people who rely on wages aren't really important.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  As the article states, "Not for everyone and not equitably"; however, the intended meaning of "good times" in this isn't "wow, everyone's happy" but "this is as good as it's going to get". The current wage level and (limited) growth, even if not satisfactory, is still better compared to what was in the previous economic downturn, and better compared to what's going to come. For average wage earners, no matter how hard it is, this really is the good times, as good as they're ever going to be. It won't be better. It will be worse. Be prepared, winter is coming.
pmiller2 8y ago
They are if you’re a corporation.
djrogers 8y ago

skywhopper 8y ago

The headline there is basically the entire content of this article. Just a statement of the positive indicators and a question "how long can this last?" No critical analysis or discussion of the contradicting indicators. Not really worth a post. What are we supposed to be discussing?

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

the lack of talking about the prez here is revealing