Are kids these days still watching Duck Tales?
They probably would have not done the rate hike if things went the other way. This right here makes it very unlikely we avoid it. GDP happens to be one of my least favorite economic metrics it’s just fundamentally flawed in several ways.
I also hate how we calculate CPI and inflation fwiw.
EDIT: Oh and for the record my almost degree is in econ and my criticisms of these metrics are actually pretty mainstream among economists who aren’t being paid by conservative leaning think tanks to tell us everything is actually fine™.
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Played poker with a finance guy yesterday and was talking to him a bit and he insisted there’s still a ton of cash on the sidelines in savings, he thinks the spending isn’t going to slow down whatsoever.
I think it’s more like the quality of service has gone into the shitter so badly and consumers have been forced to accept it that corporations think they can get away with being permanently understaffed and shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Nobody wants to work! Don’t you watch Fox News? The lazy Millennials/Zoomers/immigrants/etc don’t want to work they just want to mooch off your Social Security!”
Then people will grumble about it to them a bit, accept the shitty service/long waits, and be in a white hot seething rage against the group they hate the most off that list.
What are the boomers gonna do? They got all the wealth and most probably have only decade until they’re dead or in a home. Their kids disowned them because of Trump. YOLO
None of this has anything to do with a good GDP report
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Something I’ve been talking about for a couple years that is really scary when you think about it.
“Baby boomers’ biggest category of assets is Equities & Mutual Funds, where they own 56% of the national total. Millennials, on the other hand, represent just 2%.”
What do you think happens to the stock market when the boomers need to start selling their assets to pay for retirement?
I’ll happily admit the gdp isn’t a perfect economic stat, but it going up is a good thing and shouldn’t be met with whatever yall are doing here
It’s actually really bad when a flawed stat that policymakers use to make decisions returns a false positive result.
My 4 year old son was hooked on it for a while.
It is one data point that is used, not the only one.
It’s also bad because it’s going to make Democrats double down even harder on “Bidenomics”, when the economy is one of the last things they should be campaigning on right now.
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Unfortunately there are similarly dire issues with most of the data points in use. Once you understand how arbitrarily these metrics were designed you can never see them the same way again. Every single one has a major blind spot where the bottom 60% of the population is supposed to be.
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If there were some policy intervention designed to help folks in that category what measure(s) would you propose be used to decide if it worked?
I would stop trying to have all encompassing econometrics and get a lot more granular. I can’t really say what exact metrics I would use because designing metrics for use in a context like this is a complicated task.
One thing I can say for certain is that inflation would be calculated largely based only on essentials that crowd out other kinds of spending. It doesn’t change anyone’s life when the price of optional anything goes up 10%. If the price of rent goes up 10% more than a million people probably end up homeless. If that expense is mandatory it matters more than expenses that aren’t. Inflation in luxuries idgaf about at all inflate away and may the free market ever be in your favor. I care quite a bit about how much spending power is left in the hands of the median family after covering all essentials. That’s the real thing I’m trying to track. The basket of extra shit they buy with that money is almost beside the point.
In a world where I’m not allowed to just entirely rewrite all the formulas I would swap the labor force participation rate among working age adults for the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate itself is a deceptive name for what it actually measures.
One thing I absolutely believe on a fundamental level is that you’ll usually be a success in the metrics you create for your dashboard. Many a failed organization thought everything was fine up until the final days after they had already hit an iceberg their metrics entirely missed.
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A good GDP report in context of other things is an indicator of things being broken.
The best stats would be about life near the borderline between poor and OK. That’s where the changes make a difference.
I just found a whole new neighborhood near me. My city banned RVs and lots of old RVs moved to an industrial / business park area without many workers. Measure stuff like:
- % of workers who can rent an apartment.
- % of children who got needed medical / dental care.
- % of people without access to a grocery store.
Actual economists would pick good metrics. The “basket of goods” is different at the borderline. The economy can get pretty terrible without changing my life so leave me out of the equations. Measure at the border, people there are human canaries.
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Unfortunately the stats are working exactly as designed, and as a result any further changes will only widen the gap between reality for most people and the reality portrayed by the stats.
Frankly I think that the law that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders only, and thus not to their workers, customers, users, or to the environment, was the greatest scam ever pulled.
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A well-run company understands that treating workers and customers/users well will benefit them in the long run because they’ll have more loyal customers and more experienced and talented staff, which will benefit the shareholders ultimately. The environment is more complicated and requires regulation and laws to force them to comply.
But the real scam is the decision makers being incredibly incentivized by short-term stock prices.
You realize this is bullshit, right? Companies know that paying higher wages is diametrically opposed to shareholder value, and workers have been losing since the 80s. Check out the recent enshittification article on degrading user and customer experiences, once again in service of shareholders.