4 ms·

With what measurement, out of curiousity?

by corprew 16y ago

ugh 16y ago
Standard stuff. Child mortality for example or GDP, literacy, poverty and so on. There are some countries which are lagging behind and some which have gone backwards but the planet as a whole has progressed.
- Judson 16y ago
  I agree with all of that, except GDP. In an age of Fiat currency, GDP is nothing more than a proverbial phallus measuring contest. Paper is paper, is paper. Show me a real currency backed by something (Sorry, "faith" in the government doesn't count), and we can talk about progression on the GDP front. Beyond that, surely child mortality, literacy, and poverty are enough to prove your point, GDP doesn't really even fit!
  - btilly 16y ago
    Show me a real currency backed by something (Sorry, "faith" in the government doesn't count), and we can talk about progression on the GDP front. How about the fraction of disposable personal income spent on food? http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/cpifoodandexpenditures/data/Expenditures_tables/table7.htm http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/cpifoodandexpenditures/data... From 1929 to the present that has dropped from 23.4% to 9.5%. This despite what other evidence suggests is a considerable increase in the quantity and overall quality of said food. For instance today we eat far more meat per capita than people did 80 years ago, and meat is rather expensive.
    - pyre 16y ago
      > This despite what other evidence suggests is a considerable > increase in the quantity and overall quality of said food 1. What will our food production look like in the future after we have damaged the quality of our soil in much of the current areas that we are farming? Our normal solution is to 'just add fertilizer' to it, but that comes with its own cost, and it also has to come from somewhere. Currently -- iirc -- most fertilizers come from livestock feces. My personal views on whether or not we should be 'farming living beings' notwithstanding... You have to feed those livestock something in order for them to produce feces. The current practice is to grow food for them (or to feed them the ground out remains of other livestock animals). So you need to grow more food in order grow more food? That doesn't seem sustainable. This is not even getting to the issues we have with fertilizers running off into waterways and creating 'dead zones.' 2. The growth of 'comfort' or 'junk' foods I see as more of a regression than anything else. Their existence would be fine, if it weren't that some people don't know the meaning of moderation...
      - btilly 16y ago
        I'm not going to argue for the sustainability of our current technological society. I'm just saying that real wealth has increased quite markedly.
    - Judson 16y ago
      This is what I hate about HN. People who don't understand economics are inherently the people that are down-vote happy. Thats why I don't care one bit about karma. You have chosen to compare what I was talking about, GDP (Nominal in this case) and a percentage of dollars (since you quote the USDA, I was talking about worldwide btw, just like the op) to food. It's an apples to oranges comparison, and for the most part, reinforces my comment above, that someone down-voted. Yes, we spend less on food than we did in 1929. Do you have cows in your back yard btilly? Probably not. Why do I ask? Because comparing the farming industry in 1929 to the industry of 2010 is like comparing the age of slaughtering your own "home-raised" cow, to the age of mechanized cow raising, slaughtering, and delivery into the closest super market. Um, of course the price is lower. The real interesting part, though, is that the price could be even lower if the money supply wasn't artificially increased by trillions of dollars. Fun fact, if $1.00 would have purchased $1.00 worth of goods in 1929 (which it did), if you had instead, saved it until 2010, it would purchase ... wait for it ... $0.08 worth of goods. Does that not strike you as odd, that although productivity has boomed, e.g., we can make more things for less dollars, the value of the dollar has plummeted? But to the main point, it shows by your argument that you failed to grasp the full extent of what I was saying. Money is just paper. How do I know that? When a country can lend itself (by selling its paper for another countries paper, in the case of the US, China purchases the vast majority of US treasuries, though, no one even knows if China is printing money, or being disciplined with their monetary policy) trillions of dollars and put that into circulation, of course the GDP will rise, but has progress been made? NO. GDP is nominal, not absolute, and it does not reflect productivity, or even actual PHYSICAL output! It reflects prices. In a small country of 10 people, if all of those people have $1, and a barrel of oil is $1, the GDP is $10 or 10 barrels of oil. If the government prints up $10 more dollars and hands it out to those 10 people, now everyone has $20, but oil prices increase to $20 since MV = PQ. Ah, now the GDP is $20, but we can still only buy 10 barrels of oil. Now that is Your kind of progress. My point, to wrap it up, was that things like global literacy and hunger are things we have been improving. Improving global GDP has no measurable impact by just inflating the number. The number is just a number unless it is put in real terms, which is not how the original post read when it listed "improving global GDP" as some kind of accomplishment.
      - deleted 16y ago

With what measurement, out of curiousity?

by corprew 16y ago

With what measurement, out of curiousity?

ugh 16y ago

Standard stuff. Child mortality for example or GDP, literacy, poverty and so on. There are some countries which are lagging behind and some which have gone backwards but the planet as a whole has progressed.

Judson 16y ago
I agree with all of that, except GDP. In an age of Fiat currency, GDP is nothing more than a proverbial phallus measuring contest. Paper is paper, is paper. Show me a real currency backed by something (Sorry, "faith" in the government doesn't count), and we can talk about progression on the GDP front. Beyond that, surely child mortality, literacy, and poverty are enough to prove your point, GDP doesn't really even fit!
- btilly 16y ago
  Show me a real currency backed by something (Sorry, "faith" in the government doesn't count), and we can talk about progression on the GDP front. How about the fraction of disposable personal income spent on food? http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/cpifoodandexpenditures/data/Expenditures_tables/table7.htm http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/cpifoodandexpenditures/data... From 1929 to the present that has dropped from 23.4% to 9.5%. This despite what other evidence suggests is a considerable increase in the quantity and overall quality of said food. For instance today we eat far more meat per capita than people did 80 years ago, and meat is rather expensive.
  - pyre 16y ago
    > This despite what other evidence suggests is a considerable > increase in the quantity and overall quality of said food 1. What will our food production look like in the future after we have damaged the quality of our soil in much of the current areas that we are farming? Our normal solution is to 'just add fertilizer' to it, but that comes with its own cost, and it also has to come from somewhere. Currently -- iirc -- most fertilizers come from livestock feces. My personal views on whether or not we should be 'farming living beings' notwithstanding... You have to feed those livestock something in order for them to produce feces. The current practice is to grow food for them (or to feed them the ground out remains of other livestock animals). So you need to grow more food in order grow more food? That doesn't seem sustainable. This is not even getting to the issues we have with fertilizers running off into waterways and creating 'dead zones.' 2. The growth of 'comfort' or 'junk' foods I see as more of a regression than anything else. Their existence would be fine, if it weren't that some people don't know the meaning of moderation...
    - btilly 16y ago
      I'm not going to argue for the sustainability of our current technological society. I'm just saying that real wealth has increased quite markedly.
  - Judson 16y ago
    This is what I hate about HN. People who don't understand economics are inherently the people that are down-vote happy. Thats why I don't care one bit about karma. You have chosen to compare what I was talking about, GDP (Nominal in this case) and a percentage of dollars (since you quote the USDA, I was talking about worldwide btw, just like the op) to food. It's an apples to oranges comparison, and for the most part, reinforces my comment above, that someone down-voted. Yes, we spend less on food than we did in 1929. Do you have cows in your back yard btilly? Probably not. Why do I ask? Because comparing the farming industry in 1929 to the industry of 2010 is like comparing the age of slaughtering your own "home-raised" cow, to the age of mechanized cow raising, slaughtering, and delivery into the closest super market. Um, of course the price is lower. The real interesting part, though, is that the price could be even lower if the money supply wasn't artificially increased by trillions of dollars. Fun fact, if $1.00 would have purchased $1.00 worth of goods in 1929 (which it did), if you had instead, saved it until 2010, it would purchase ... wait for it ... $0.08 worth of goods. Does that not strike you as odd, that although productivity has boomed, e.g., we can make more things for less dollars, the value of the dollar has plummeted? But to the main point, it shows by your argument that you failed to grasp the full extent of what I was saying. Money is just paper. How do I know that? When a country can lend itself (by selling its paper for another countries paper, in the case of the US, China purchases the vast majority of US treasuries, though, no one even knows if China is printing money, or being disciplined with their monetary policy) trillions of dollars and put that into circulation, of course the GDP will rise, but has progress been made? NO. GDP is nominal, not absolute, and it does not reflect productivity, or even actual PHYSICAL output! It reflects prices. In a small country of 10 people, if all of those people have $1, and a barrel of oil is $1, the GDP is $10 or 10 barrels of oil. If the government prints up $10 more dollars and hands it out to those 10 people, now everyone has $20, but oil prices increase to $20 since MV = PQ. Ah, now the GDP is $20, but we can still only buy 10 barrels of oil. Now that is Your kind of progress. My point, to wrap it up, was that things like global literacy and hunger are things we have been improving. Improving global GDP has no measurable impact by just inflating the number. The number is just a number unless it is put in real terms, which is not how the original post read when it listed "improving global GDP" as some kind of accomplishment.
    - deleted 16y ago