4 ms·

>Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and

>Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse. It's good that you pointed out some of the examples that may not be wholly responsible, but have surely compounded over quite some time and may very well be worse on the ground than the most realistic statistics could ever measure very meaningfully. I wouldn't say the bullet points are hit or miss, more like some home-runs and some bunts. Good chart from the FED, but experience has shown that 2010 to 2012 was a noth.ing.burger compared to 1976 nor 1983. You ain't seen no "real" recession yet. And that's the most highly referenced statistic we have so it shows how widely skewed and unrealistic it can be to take things like this at face value when it comes to comparing data over time. Remember currency had huge changes in real value at different points while its face value stayed the same, and the purpose of these charts was to not let that seem like the dominating factor. Same as the purpose of inventing GDP in such a way there could never be valid comparison to traditional GNP. Edit: not my downvote, corrective upvote actually, that's the most accurate data there is so it's still better to have than nothing, and to gather what it means when you understand its undercurrents for over 50 full years first hand

stinkbeetle 8mo ago
Ah don't worry about the downvotes, my post was confrontational and a lot of people are not capable of coping with that. I was not trying to single you out though. I don't doubt you have experience and reasons for what you've said, problem is so does everybody, even "actual" economists never seem to agree on anything much.
- fuzzfactor 8mo ago
  I get the idea you like to question everything, which I really think people should do more of in so many ways :) I'm certainly nothing like an actual degreed economist. That was my college roommate for a while. He was a grad student in macroeconomics getting his dissertation ready, and wanted me to look at the final draft and help him type the equations on my IBM Selectric typewriter. These things were expensive and I was lucky to have it for a song after the business crash. People already knew I was the only kid typing my chemistry homework onto the handout sheets, and it did look pretty sharp if I do say so myself :) Well, I didn't like all his equations and we went over all the text in pretty good detail too, but got done making the equations on the strips exactly as he had drawn. Some drafting pens were also used for characters the IBM did not have. He would have to physically cut then paste each typed equation into the proper space between paragraphs that he had on his manually typewritten text. By then I was about as old as you could be before you're no longer a teenager, so I was a bit rusty and not up-to-date with the stock market or anything else financially, even though I had started financial analysis as a preteen and made some people some good money (as an actual teenager by then), it had been years since the crash. So we talked it over philosophically about the equations for a number of weeks and things became a lot clearer to both of us. He ended up throwing out the whole dissertation ! Anyway, he transferred to a different grad school, under a different PhD he earned his own PhD and ended up becoming a professor. At a place out west I had never heard of called Stanford. Thanks for reminding me :)

stinkbeetle 8mo ago

Ah don't worry about the downvotes, my post was confrontational and a lot of people are not capable of coping with that. I was not trying to single you out though. I don't doubt you have experience and reasons for what you've said, problem is so does everybody, even "actual" economists never seem to agree on anything much.

fuzzfactor 8mo ago
I get the idea you like to question everything, which I really think people should do more of in so many ways :) I'm certainly nothing like an actual degreed economist. That was my college roommate for a while. He was a grad student in macroeconomics getting his dissertation ready, and wanted me to look at the final draft and help him type the equations on my IBM Selectric typewriter. These things were expensive and I was lucky to have it for a song after the business crash. People already knew I was the only kid typing my chemistry homework onto the handout sheets, and it did look pretty sharp if I do say so myself :) Well, I didn't like all his equations and we went over all the text in pretty good detail too, but got done making the equations on the strips exactly as he had drawn. Some drafting pens were also used for characters the IBM did not have. He would have to physically cut then paste each typed equation into the proper space between paragraphs that he had on his manually typewritten text. By then I was about as old as you could be before you're no longer a teenager, so I was a bit rusty and not up-to-date with the stock market or anything else financially, even though I had started financial analysis as a preteen and made some people some good money (as an actual teenager by then), it had been years since the crash. So we talked it over philosophically about the equations for a number of weeks and things became a lot clearer to both of us. He ended up throwing out the whole dissertation ! Anyway, he transferred to a different grad school, under a different PhD he earned his own PhD and ended up becoming a professor. At a place out west I had never heard of called Stanford. Thanks for reminding me :)