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America’s economy is once again reinventing itself
- chrismealy 14y agoThanks for reminding me why I stopped subscribing to The Economist. In addition to the usual simpleminded analysis that serves only to flatter its readers, we get an endorsement of fracking! Good lord!
- disbelief 14y agoI was a bit shocked by that. Not sure I would want Fracking to be the engine driving my economic growth — you're trading a financial crisis for a potentially massive environmental catastrophe.
- lcargill99 14y agoIsn't that the tradeoff? You either join the circle of people selling each other insurance, or you get a real job.
- msellout 14y agoDon't judge them too harshly. Fracking isn't clearly bad or good. As the article pointed out: coal is worse.
- Danieru 14y agoNatural gas is also much easier to store than coal and gas turbines have much shorter startup times. Thus Natural gas provides an excellent base power to complement renewable energy. So while I am sure many would prefer a direct to renewable energy situation, natural gas is fine too.
- ams6110 14y agoIn what way is natural gas easier to store than coal? Coal can just sit in huge piles on the ground.
- Danieru 14y agoTrue, but what happens once the coal is a pile? Unless said pile is being turned into a giant bonfire it will need further transportation. This means big machines and their operators. It means trucks, trains, barges, and yet more drivers. Gas needs storage tanks and pipelines. Ignoring maintenance the entire chain from well head to plant can be automated. A trans-continental coal conveyor belt would look nice on a popular mechanic's cover page but would never compare to what already exists for natural gas. Granted natural gas' infrastructure is capital intensive. Yet in exchange for this capital you get a transportation network that functions like a classic graph flow problem.
- jussij 14y agoAfter watching the film Gaslands, fracking should leave you scared. It paints fracking as a greed driven, accident waiting to happen. http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/ http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/
- laut 14y agoIt's a movie filled with lies and shouldn't be taken as a serious documentary. For instance when the guy sets fire to gas coming out of his tap it is assumed that it is caused by fracking, but the movie doesn't tell you that these things happen naturally also in areas without any gas drilling. Take a look at this video: http://www.fightgaslandcensorship.com/ http://www.fightgaslandcensorship.com/
- jussij 14y agoThere are lots of independent sources that back up the details presented in the film: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing_in_the_United_States#cite_note-96 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing_in_the_Uni... Also if the fracking process is so safe why did they have ask for and get special exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act?
- Karunamon 14y agoAt least they're upfront about their biases. More than you can say for much other "journalism".
- gwern 14y agoIt's hard to argue with hundreds of billions of dollars and oil-addict America becoming a net exporter.
- mwsherman 14y agoHere’s what’s happening with natural gas vs coal, I assume at least partly attributable to fracking: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-huge-shift-in-our-energy-system-thats-happening-right-now-in-1-chart/259823/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-hu...
- InclinedPlane 14y agoA facile prejudice against fracking has proven an excellent litmus test to identify dilletante pseudo-environmentalists. It's an indication they have no clue what they are talking about and also don't consider carbon emissions a serious problem. Many studies have been done on fracking, and there is every indication that with sound regulation and proper practices it is a perfectly safe technique for extracting natural gas. More so, using natural gas for energy instead of oil or especially coal is an enormous carbon emissions win. Far greater than any hybrid or even all electric vehicle technology can achieve. To write it off as an evil because you heard some anecdotal evidence somewhere just proves you don't take the fundamental problems of energy production and the environment seriously.
- dimitar 14y agoThere are many ways in which you can argue against fracking on an environmental basis. But one is really abouve all: natural gas is a fossil fuel and burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change. The costly investment on this harmful energy source is much more needed in renewables. Unfortunately climate change science has been distorted in the media.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoWe're not going to get to 100% carbon-free energy sources overnight. Continued use of fossil fuels in the near-term is a fact of life. Natural gas technology is well developed, highly capable, and already economically competitive with coal and oil. If carbon emissions are an existential threat to humanity, to any degree, we would be stupid not to take advantage of natural gas in the here and now. Switching from gas/diesel/kerosene to natural gas is a >20% reduction in carbon emissions per unit of energy. Switching from coal is a 60% reduction. And natural gas is also better for human health and overall environmental quality since the emissions are almost pure CO2 and H2O without a risk of acid rain, particulates, or radioactive fly ash. Being able to make such huge environmental gains in the short-term at very minimal economic cost is as much of a no brainer as these things get.
- ars 14y ago> natural gas is a fossil fuel and burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change. We are going to burn something. Better it be natural gas than oil or coal. I guess at some point in the future we'll have lots of nuclear power and won't need to burn anything, but right now we do. Natural gas is the cleanest energy source we have, in some ways even cleaner than nuclear.
- keithpeter 14y ago"Because the companies leading the process are so productive, they pay high wages but do not employ many people. They may thus do little to reduce unemployment, while aggravating inequality." That can't really carry on long term can it? Not much chance of infrastructure improvements without a tax base?
- stcredzero 14y ago> That can't really carry on long term can it? Not much chance of infrastructure improvements without a tax base? This is a problem for large political units going back to at least the Roman Empire. The government should be doing everything it can to empower small businesses. It isn't because of two-party adversarial politics, however.
- HotKFreshSwag 14y agoNot so much two-party adversarial politics so much as big business and the 0.01% funding and controlling the two viable parties. The center-right party and the right party used to compromise. The system wasn't always this dysfunctional but one party has been hijacked by fringe groups who refuse to compromise.
- lcargill99 14y ago"Empower" how? Subsidies? If you enact subsidies, then you create an environment in which somebody has the incentive to aggregate the subsidy - in a large business. That's agricultural policy in the US for the last hundred years in a nutshell.
- stcredzero 14y agoPlease, let's not have one of those debates. I agree directly subsidizing businesses is foolish, in part for the reason you cite. I think there are lots of infrastructure-like things that could be provided, including healthcare. There is clearly something broken in US healthcare. It doesn't function as useful market for individuals and small businesses. There's clearly something screwy with the economics of it. You can have the last word. I have to go sell my car.
- johnohara 14y agoNothing says "buff and reinvented" like red, white and blue nipple tassels.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jasonwatkinspdx 14y agoThis is disappointing. I enjoy some of the articles in the Economist, but this is advocacy writing at its worst. It strings together a few examples as claims, each presented uncritically, then generalizes from this bullet list to make sweeping claims with emotional characterizations. It never shows you if each of these examples is actually net positive for our society and economy. It never shows you the scale or impact they're having. It's like saying "Kevin Durant's shooting percentage was up this year, so the Thunder are going to win the next 10 NBA Championships!" It's cheerleading. No surprise there's no author's name on it.
- runako 14y agoThe Economist typically omits bylines for all its writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist#Editorial_anonymity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist#Editorial_anonym...
- tokenadult 14y agoI enjoy some of the articles in the Economist, but this is advocacy writing at its worst. Your clue that this submitted article here comes from the "leader" section of editorials by the Economist editors comes from the "(see article)" link in the submission here. You're reading an editorial, and it is written like an editorial, with a point of view. The actual underlying article http://www.economist.com/node/21558591 http://www.economist.com/node/21558591 to be found by following that link is longer, more detailed, more in the style of objective journalistic reporting, and full of food for thought.
- jasonwatkinspdx 14y agoThanks. I didn't know that "Leader" meant "Editorial." The linked article is much more what I would expect.
- AgentConundrum 14y agoIt appears to be a British term[1], which makes sense for The Economist as it's based in London. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_article
- rrggrr 14y agoHousehold debt 114% of income is nothing to brag about. Apalling.
- pjscott 14y agoIt's a substantial improvement, and if you graph it over time, it's heading down after decades of going up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Household_Debt_Relative_to_Disposable_Income_and_GDP.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Household_Debt_Relati... That downward trend is the opposite of appalling.
- pessimizer 14y ago1. Could that be because disposable income is going down? and 2. Mass paying down of debt may not be the best thing to generate demand during a demand crisis.
- potatolicious 14y ago> "2. Mass paying down of debt may not be the best thing to generate demand during a demand crisis. " Yeah, but is it worse than continuing to build up household debt in order to alleviate the pains of a demand crisis?
- pjscott 14y ago1. Could that be because disposable income is going down? If disposable income goes down, then (all other things being equal) the ratio of household debt to disposable income would go up.
- pessimizer 14y agoYou're right. Brainfart.
- vital_sol 14y agoIt would be very helpful if the article would mention, 114% of what exactly is the household debt. 114% of annual income, perhaps? Anyway, it looks like we are looking at few more years of decreasing consumption, to get to the year 2000 level of household debt. And even that level is probably too high. So, mostly troubles ahead for US economy, no matter who the next president is going to be.
- jpike 14y agoI painfully disagree with this article.
- nodename 14y agoThe first paragraph shows we're not talking real world here: Obama a "left-wing president"?
- jarek 14y agoThat quote is presented as Mitt Romney's supposed view on "what would make things worse", not the Economist's.
- ams6110 14y agoHe's not?
- potatolicious 14y agoHe really isn't. Some aspects of his administration are centrist-liberal (see: healthcare reform), and maybe to the largely-very-right-wing mainstream political sphere of the USA he's a leftist, but on the global stage Obama is pretty firmly in the center.
- philwelch 14y agoObama's healthcare reform is almost exactly the same plan the Republicans advanced as the conservative alternative to Hillarycare in the 1990's. On the other hand, he did nationalize two car companies....
- potatolicious 14y agoHe's campaigned for more extensive reforms than what actually took place - I'd place his position further left than the current state of health care. That said, mainstream politics in the US has shifted dramatically to the right since the 90s. The conservatism of the 90s is the "liberalism" of today.
- saraid216 14y agoThis, basically. America as a whole is pretty far right. When you're left of that, it's not very left at all.
- known 14y agoHow can https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class cope with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Value economic/export/currency tricks, if every country follows them.