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So you're saying it's improved. (If you're not, I think you have to explain why the expansion of between say, 6k YBP and 1950 was good expansion, and the growt
by flir 2mo ago
So you're saying it's improved.
(If you're not, I think you have to explain why the expansion of between say, 6k YBP and 1950 was good expansion, and the growth between 1950 and today was bad expansion. Otherwise it looks like you're picking an arbitrary point and saying it was "best")
- ETH_start 2mo agoI'm not making a normative claim. I'm saying that the narrative in the article — that the private sector has taken over functions of the government and the government has been in retreat — is exactly the opposite of what the statistics show.
- owisd 2mo agoThe article is claiming it's happened in the last 20-25 years but you seem to have used 1950 as your starting point, so you're not excluding the possibility it's been in reverse since 2000 but not yet fallen to 1950 levels.
- ETH_start 2mo agoIt's up since 20 years ago: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ
- flir 2mo agoFair enough. But why stats from 1950?
- ETH_start 2mo agoThe end of World War II to the present is a fairly stable regime, so it can be instructive to see what changed over the course of that era. In any case, no matter what two points of time you choose, you see the role of government in society increase, whether you want to look at government spending as a share of GDP or the compliance costs paid by corporations as a share of the revenue or the percentage of the workforce who specialize in navigating government-constructed regulations.