American Economics Thread

[pipaster]

View attachment 121274
The US has twice the jobs per capita than China

But how many people are working two or more part time jobs?

Two full time jobs would be like 80 hours a week!

Another funding crisis coming for next Friday.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

 

[luminary]

Really captures the heart of the tech culture in Silicon Valley these days.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Tech acceleration is at the center of the entire Silicon Valley worldview. This dates back at least to 1993, when WIRED magazine declared in its opening pages that the digital revolution had put us on the cusp of “

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

”

From this central assumption, it follows that:

• The entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors who travel in Silicon Valley circles (regardless of their actual zip code) are the driving force of history. The decisions that will reverberate through the decades are made on Sand Hill Road, not Capitol Hill or Brussels.
• Existing institutions – businesses, media, government, etc – will all soon be disrupted. The old rules on longer apply. New rules are being created.
• You judge the success of a business based on its growth, not its profit. The future is in the process of being created. The companies that monopolize an emerging sector are the companies that will define that future.
• And, finally, the future will be abundant. Everyone will reap the benefits brought about by Silicon Valley. So it is really not worth worrying about inequality, or about the distribution of those social benefits.

Belief in the immutable nature of Moore’s Law is a matter of identity in Silicon Valley circles. But it is also a political project. Faith in Moore’s Law implies a distrust of government – government is too slow and cumbersome. Legislators and federal agencies cannot hope to keep pace with innovation, so we are better off demanding that they stay out of the way.

So I suppose it is unsurprising that, even as the pace of “internet time” seems to have stalled over the past decade or so, our tech titans and Silicon Valley evangelists have remained insistently committed to the idea of Moore’s Law. The digerati have been propping up the corpse of Moore’s Law, Weekend at Bernie’s-style, for years now.

Meanwhile, the only thing that has exponentially increased is wealth inequality. We now have centi-billionaires like Elon Musk, and a host of social problems that are the consequence of extreme wealth inequality. We ought to distrust the ideology that tells us this is nothing to worth worrying about.

Faith in Moore’s Law as an inevitable social force has remained strong within Silicon Valley circles, though. The victors of that era – the young entrepreneurs who made their first millions in the first dotcom boom – became the investors and thought-leaders of the decades that followed. There is a self-justifying logic to today’s Silicon Valley ideology: the early entrepreneurs must have been right all along; Their insights being the essential ingredient of their much-deserved success. It’s survivor bias, plus the influence that comes from decades of unchecked wealth accumulation.

 

[HighGround]

16-hour work day is the only way some people are getting by in US.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1720048358520500693

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

The San Francisco Standard

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

The Maritime Executive

447,000 people isn't a lot and if you use the data from that graph to instead look at % of people in the labor pool who work 2 full time jobs it's going to look very different, but I know I'm talking to a rather unwilling audience here. I mean I had to argue about the actual price of eggs here.

The reality is that the economy is actually doing well. Inflation is down and wages are up, outstripping inflation.




The primary danger to United States in terms of its economy, is lack of housing supply, and unsustainable national debt. Of course, it's not that the debt is "unsustainable", it's that American ambitions currently exceed its revenue stream.

 

[luminary]

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Harvard Magazine. US is going the way of Russia, and for much the same reasons: extreme neoliberalism at work. Male life expectancy dropped by 4 years

men are now estimated to die almost six years earlier than women.

The researchers suggest that men had a “higher burden of comorbidities,” sought medical care more reluctantly, and spent more time in environments where they were susceptible to disease (work, jail, and homeless shelters).

The researchers found that “deaths from despair”—alcoholism, overdose, and suicide—are another factor disproportionately affecting men.

 

[chlosy]

Reading news from both sides.. need help to clarify... is the USA doing well or poorly economy wise? Huge debt and looks like will get bigger, but low unemployment and growing economy...

 

[gelgoog]

The reality is that the economy is actually doing well. Inflation is down and wages are up, outstripping inflation.

Sure. But several US banks just collapsed this year.

The primary danger to United States in terms of its economy, is lack of housing supply, and unsustainable national debt. Of course, it's not that the debt is "unsustainable", it's that American ambitions currently exceed its revenue stream.

The US is spending more in defense than it did in the late Cold War when Reagan was in power. And they keep funding eternal wars all over the globe. So I would not expect that debt to vanish any time soon.

Reagan did the exact opposite. He put the US in next to no conflicts and spent the defense money on building actual military hardware. Even in Afghanistan they only sent them small arms not heavy military equipment. Right now with all the spending the US is doing, you don't see proper renewal of the US arsenal. It is a double failure, since all the funding is just wasted and provides the US with no meaningful long term military edge.

Still the US economy is quite large, the US still has a large and growing population, and they have lots of energy resources. With proper management they shouldn't have any major issues. But I have little faith in the current leadership, or their possible replacements.

 

[GodRektsNoobs]

Reading news from both sides.. need help to clarify... is the USA doing well or poorly economy wise? Huge debt and looks like will get bigger, but low unemployment and growing economy...

Basically, it depends on what you choose to look at. If you take a glance at pure economic numbers, US is doing really well. However, if you actually ask the average American about the state of the economy, you'll get completely different results. And it shows on social media. This discrepancy is understandable when you dig deeper into those numbers, as US GDP growth is heavily based on government debt and not normal operations of a healthy economy. Most, if not all of the economic growth occurred in services sector, not manufacturing. And of course, here is a small glimpse into what accounts for US GDP growth:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

And I can't deny. That's a lot of GDP growth being created.

 

[Maikeru]

Basically, it depends on what you choose to look at. If you take a glance at pure economic numbers, US is doing really well. However, if you actually ask the average American about the state of the economy, you'll get completely different results. And it shows on social media. This discrepancy is understandable when you dig deeper into those numbers, as US GDP growth is heavily based on government debt and not normal operations of a healthy economy. Most, if not all of the economic growth occurred in services sector, not manufacturing. And of course, here is a small glimpse into what accounts for US GDP growth:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

And I can't deny. That's a lot of GDP growth being created.

If I decided to max out my credit cards and spend spend spend then I too could appear very rich, at least for a while. That's what USA is doing, in effect.

 

[siegecrossbow]

It’s Wumaoing time.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

 

[HighGround]

However, if you actually ask the average American about the state of the economy, you'll get completely different results. And it shows on social media. This discrepancy is understandable when you dig deeper into those numbers, as US GDP growth is heavily based on government debt and not normal operations of a healthy economy. Most, if not all of the economic growth occurred in services sector, not manufacturing. And of course, here is a small glimpse into what accounts for US GDP growth:

The average American makes really poor decisions. You really wanna take their opinion on their home economy seriously?

Sure. But several US banks just collapsed this year.

In March. At the time I warned that this could spread, so far, it hasn't.

The US is spending more in defense than it did in the late Cold War when Reagan was in power. And they keep funding eternal wars all over the globe. So I would not expect that debt to vanish any time soon.

Reagan did the exact opposite. He put the US in next to no conflicts and spent the defense money on building actual military hardware. Even in Afghanistan they only sent them small arms not heavy military equipment. Right now with all the spending the US is doing, you don't see proper renewal of the US arsenal. It is a double failure, since all the funding is just wasted and provides the US with no meaningful long term military edge.

Still the US economy is quite large, the US still has a large and growing population, and they have lots of energy resources. With proper management they shouldn't have any major issues. But I have little faith in the current leadership, or their possible replacements.

Yes, fully agreed.

United States has a very powerful economy and can easily solve major issues like debt, healthcare, homelessness, and so on. The problem here is that United States prioritizes its hegemonic status over its economic fundamentals, and thsoe economic fundamentals simply aren't strong enough to support its hegemonic ambitions.

There is no leadership alternative that will solve this issue. Democrat leadership is all in on being a global, "liberal" empire, and the Republican leadership is simply inept. Every GOP leader and major candidate has been economically illiterate and propopsed policies that would only worsen the US economy. Not to mention the stupid wars they wasted so much money on.

Arugably, the best thing that could happen for the average American, is a thorough defeat in a Pacific conflict that would force United States to leave Asia and focus on domestic economic matters rather than foreign adventures.