The economy? You mean rich peoples investments?
GDP, a measure of all the goods and services produced
Yeah that’s what he said.
Yeah, goods and services, well known for having no utility beyond creating wealth for the elite.
Thing is GDP is a pretty useless measure of quality of life for most people in developed countries. Heck, it’s really not that good for a lot of developing countries either. There are plenty of ways to boost GDP that actually worsen people’s lives, and equally there are plenty of non GDP contributing activities that dramatically improve the quality of life of people.
I’m not trying to imply that GDP improves people’s lives inherently, but simply that it means much, much more than ‘rich peoples investments’. “The GDP has increased!” should be a call for “Now we must ensure that the gains are equitably redistributed”, not that it means nothing except a benefit for the elite. GDP largely represents actual improvements in production of goods and provision of services, and the capabilities to do so, both organizational and material.
Well and most people retirement plans too.
Can confirm. My plan to work into my seventies has grown into a plan to work into my eighties.
You paying attention to the climate? Ain’t gonna be no retirement lmao.
Meanwhile, tech companies continue to lay off tens of thousands. Great american economy.
I love looking for tech oriented jobs here in Seattle. /s
Don’t shit on my seattle! /s never been
It’s a shame that Aunt Teefa burned it down in the race riots of 2020. /s
Definitely come check it out if you can. Pike Place is actually fun to check out (ignore the ‘first’ Starbucks because it is just a coffee shop). Seattle Center, which you can get to by bus, scooter or monorail (it put us on the map!), has a decent amount of shit to do. Check out some of the neighborhoods outside of downtown like Queen Anne (Kerry Park), Capital Hill, Fremont, International District, etc. And if you want to venture out of the city, you can take a ferry to Vashon or Bainbridge or if mountains are more your style, head east to hit up a shit ton of them.
Screw all that. Come to Ballard and get drunk.
Absolutely. If you like beer at all, there are like two dozen breweries there. I just wish it did not take so goddamn long to get there. I say that as someone who lived there off and on for like five years. I miss going to the Sloop.
Hey, light rail in 2034, baby!
What is up with that? Any good reasons behind that?
Echoing what BudgieMania said, think of companies like Peloton and Zoom, or even Amazon. In the peak of the pandemic they grew like crazy, and they hired staff like there was no tomorrow. Tech firms of all kinds outpaced the rest of the economy because everything went digital almost overnight, and people stuck at home completely transformed their consumption patterns. Turns out there was a tomorrow, and after things settled down, life returned to normal, and folks started returning to offices, demand for some of those digital products fell back to Earth. Also what feels like the bottom dropping out to employees is actually a significant net uptick in job creation. That certainly doesn’t help the folks currently out of work (my partner is actually one of them), but it’s much more of a right-sizing than a down-sizing, all things considered.
In most cases, they hired and grew at an irresponsible rate in 2021-2022
Just compare the growth in employees in Microsoft in 2021-2022 compared to the 5 previous years or so
Of course, the employees are not to blame for that and should not pay for that, but that’s how they roll I guess…
Private equity is likely the case
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CEOs: Cool, so… More layoffs then?
Does that mean I’m getting a 3.3% raise?
GDP measures the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States (without double counting the intermediate goods and services used up to produce them). So, it doesn’t have a thing to do with your salary
Workers are the ones that produce the goods and services. We made the economy grow, yet we aren’t the ones that see the direct benefits of this growth. Do you think this is fair?
I think your first two sentences make a good point, but I also don’t think it’s fair to ask the question in your third when all the guy was doing was explaining the definition of GDP rather than making a value judgement about it.
Well yeah, I asked the question to find out their position. It doesn’t read as neutral to me, but I’m biased, so I want to make sure.
So basically it means nothing to the average person?
I mean, more or less. When discussing GDP, you’re discussing things at such a massive scale that only the details of the details filter down. Like the speed of the Earth - obviously it matters, but no one living here is going to notice on their daily walk that the Earth has sped up or slowed down by 100 mph. It’s a tool (ideally) for discerning growth and potential courses of action for large-scale decision-makers, like the government.
But doesn’t GDP also take into consideration real estate and military spending, two things America very much spends dickloads of money on? In an ideal scenario, it would be an accurate measure, but because housing prices are so high and military spending is basically going infinite at this point in the US, you could argue it’s a worthless metric because of how inflated it can be.
Military spending isn’t that much higher as a percentage of GDP than it has been in the past. To increase the GDP by 3.3% by itself, the military budget would have to have over doubled in the last year. As much as we spend on the military, it has not doubled in the past year.
Real estate is a larger part of the economy, but real estate price inflation still would only account for a small amount of that 3.3% increase in GDP. If we assumed 100% of the growth in the past year was pure greed and had no relation to actual supply and demand, it would still only account for under 1% of the 3.3% GDP increase. And as much as housing prices have increased due to greed, you would have to count me skeptical that it’s 100% corporate greed and 0% of the actual demands of the market.
If you’re not then you should be looking for another job. Nobody is going to just give you anything, you need to go get it.
Switching jobs can’t counter market power, whenever employers have it, which is probably the vast majority of cases. Unions can.
People too lazy to find a higher paying job when they’re being underpaid are also likely too lazy to actually organize.
Unions don’t appear out of thin air. They require a ton of grassroots effort.
And I have never not gotten at least a 15% pay increase by switching jobs. It’s the most effective way to increase your pay today, even with unions.
And when you’re not in a high demand field its a thousand times harder.
If you don’t have the right skills, or the right sociability, its nowhere near as easy to just hop around to whatever job gets you enough to live off of.
You wanna tell that to my software developer friend who literally cannot find work right now? He worked for facebook and spotify and got laid off.
You might right about the first part. You’re wrong about the second. If you’re not in a high-demand field, you have no negotiating power to get that 15% increase since there’s another person who would work for less. Jumping jobs yields pay raises only in some fields in some markets, likely in the upper ends of the labor pay scale.
Pull those bootstraps!
Just because something is possible does not make it doable for the average person. Sometimes people don’t want maximizing their salary potential to be their entire lives. They just want enough to live comfortably without killing themselves 10-12 hours a day.
Having to constantly work to get the bare minimum acceptable is not okay. And hustle culture does not change that.
Has rent gotten substantially cheaper? No?
How about milk? No?
But I guess our fossil fuels cost less than they did a couple of years ago, so there’s that…
But do they? I’m still paying over $4. What’s the point of having a $700 billion military if i don’t get cheap goods. ;)
Cool, now someone hire me
Can you go a workday without punching anyone or taking off your pants?
Not if I have to poop.
Otherwise probably yes
You’ll punch someone in the face if you have to poop? Sounds like an irritable bowel disorder
That is a Cities: Skyline 2 screenshot.
Someone named their save U.S Economy and is now making headlines.
way to go, Joe
Right wing pundits and politicians:
“How can I frame this as a bad thing?”
since the day he took office, this country has been running like it’s supposed to
Remember to always replace ‘The Economy’ with ‘Rich People’s Yacht Money’.
Remember when the economy doing good didn’t just mean record billions for the already billionaires? Me neither…
It’s getting really late to move toward egalitarian de-growth
Sweet, when do I get my check?
throughout november and december 2023, and january 2024
if you had investments in the S&P500 that is
Ok
Economists are the enemies of the people.
Oh God
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The people are tired of experts, I see.
Experts at a made up system they like to pretend its a natural phenomenon and its used as an excuse to keep people poor.
An astrologist might be an expert on their field but you wouldnt argue that astrology isnt bullshit. Would you? Thats the same with economy, we made it up, its as true as we want it to be.
Capitalism is like a religion and economists are its priesthood.Economics isn’t capitalism, economics is just as present in socialist… ugh. I don’t know why I even feel compelled to bother. It just goes in one ear and out the other.
I over-simplyfied, apologies.
Doesnt change the fact that the economic theory we are sold over here is aligned with neoliberal/capitalist ideals. Nor that its all made up bullshit used to impose policies on people and justify their conditions and the only reason it works the way it does is because some assholes chose it to be that way a couple hundred years ago and those who most benefit from it havent allowed us to make any meaningfull change to it.
Funny you didnt felt “compelled” to argue against that part.
In one ear…
Experts at widening the wealth disparity
There’s not a cabal of economists who are sitting in a board room plotting to oppress the proletariat. Economists are largely academics, and like most experts, they are mostly ignored by the powerful in society.
Not a cabal but there’s ideological groups preaching different models that aren’t necessarily based on good empirical data, which are then used to create economic policies that affect people’s lives. When you have groups that offer polar opposite opinions on what would happen when say the interest rates lever is moved, and therefore how it should move. Moving the lever in one of the advised directions might cause the proletariat to lose their shirts vs the other. It may not have been intentional, evil-hands-rubbing advice, nevertheless the effect could still be the same. Heck we very well know that increasing interest rates is supposed to result in inflation reduction via a proportion of people losing their jobs and homes. You can probably see how Joe might see this as someone wanting to actively harm them. Especially when 2/3 of the inflation was driven by Joe’s boss, some economists’ advise that Joe’s expected to take even more hurt to compensate. If that advice was based on engineering-level rigor that’s proven to work beyond doubt, it would be easier to swallow. But it isn’t. It feels like the field has an outsized effect on people’s lives for its standards of rigor. And so there’s plenty of room for ideology or opinion in the gaps and that ideology can and does tilt towards favoring different people in the economy. I think this is what people see and given their state conclude economists bad.
BTW, I’m not even sure economics even can reach high predictive accuracy. The system might be too complex for that. 🤷 Or not.
Not a cabal but there’s ideological groups preaching different models that aren’t necessarily based on good empirical data, which are then used to create economic policies that affect people’s lives.
Ah, I see you’ve met the Austrian cult of ‘economics’
Everyone in a boardroom is typically a university educated economist. The CEO of Mcdonalds didnt go to a culinary school.
Everyone in a boardroom is typically a university educated economist.
What evidence do you have of this? It is absolutely not my experience that any board members have training in economics, let alone all of them. More often than not I see business administration, political science, or some other liberal arts degree.
The CEO of Mcdonalds didnt go to a culinary school.
He didn’t get an economics degree either. He has an MBA from Harvard.
Everyone in a boardroom typically has an MBA, which generally involves only marginal and niche courses in econ, which is largely an abstract discipline.
