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Worth pointing out that something being bad for the economy, from this perspective, isn’t necessarily the same as being bad for the population. Median incomes a
by bigfudge 2y ago
Worth pointing out that something being bad for the economy, from this perspective, isn’t necessarily the same as being bad for the population. Median incomes are stagnant and quality of life is declining in the US. In part, I’d argue this is because hyper scaling and overoptimising are squeezing the humanity out of most economic life, and most people are not benefitting from these trends.
There are exception: we need big companies to make GPUs, probably. But it’s not clear to me that this logic applies universally. Some inefficiency is probably going to be good for public wellbeing.
- meiraleal 2y ago> we need big companies to make GPUs, probably. we definitely don't need trillion dollar companies selling ads.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoBut we do want them considering our hesitation at paying for things without ads, especially when a free gmail, google maps, google drive, etc is available.
- therealdrag0 2y agoA lot of those ads support startups and small businesses.
- kandesbunzler 2y ago>Median incomes are stagnant and quality of life is declining in the US You think it's better in Europe? Here in germany everything is going downhill fast
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jefftk 2y ago> Median incomes are stagnant But they're not? Adjusted for inflation, median US household income is 18% higher than fifteen years ago and 32% higher than it was thirty years ago: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N You could say it was stagnant from 1999 to 2015, though.
- albrewer 2y agoInflation from 15 years ago to now is 33%[0]. Inflation from 30 years to now is 107%[0]. So yeah, median incomes are dropping. [0]: According to this calculator - https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
- jefftk 2y agoYou're adjusting for inflation twice. The numbers I gave in my comment, and in the chart I linked, are after inflation adjustment. Here's the equivalent chart without inflation adjustment, which gives the (incorrect) impression of sharply rising incomes: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
- albrewer 2y agoYou're right, and that's 100% on me for not clicking your link.
- zarzavat 2y agoWhat about wages compared to house prices?
- jefftk 2y agoSome things in the "basket of goods" we use to compute inflation have gone up more than others, and housing is definitely one of them. You can compute exactly how much by dividing https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N by https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS Here's a sheet where I've done this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14NVqsKXnswG27TiwENpi7dE45hdeZuAVCJ2FNBDp4cQ/edit?gid=119141362#gid=119141362 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14NVqsKXnswG27TiwENpi... But note that some of the change here is people building and buying larger houses as we get richer, which inflation calculations account for and this division does not.
- emodendroket 2y agoIf we’re comparing ourselves to Europe we are certainly not worse off (or anyhow the portion of the population that is worse off is not evaluating whether they should work at FAANG or a startup). Any serious discussion has to start from acknowledging that we are richer.