In one show they talked about how good it is that the government says everything is fine. in another it says entitlements are great and the guest shrugs off the existential crisis of government debt with a dismissive "it's a political problem, we can figure it out", and "entitlements are fine, America economy big!"
No wonder my predictions got so much better after I stopped listening to them. Imagine how disgraceful it is that these alleged economics reporters are likely to die in the gutter penniless because they don't seem to know fuck all about the markets or the economy.
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@sj_zero Heinlein's book "For Us The Living" really altered my view of economics. He was writing from a future perspective about the problems with 20th century economics, and he was right. He clearly explained what causes inflation, for example.
I think economists are people paid to lie to the public on behalf of bankers. The fact there are multiple schools of economics that give exactly opposite remedies proves that economics is still in the blood letting and leeches stage.
@sj_zero What we really need - and this is doable now - is a discrete event simulation of an economy, down to the level of individual purchasing and investment decisions, with a few million sims. Humans are irrational but the cognitive biases are predictable.
With that you could adjust until it reproduces real-world economic behavior, and then experiment with all the proposed alt-money systems until you find out which one works.
Econ is backwards due to the lack of controlled experiments.
I want to read some good books, I think I will try that one out.
@sj_zero Heinlein was a follower of the "social credit" theory. In summary, you make something for $10 and want to sell it for $15. But making it put $10 into the economy, so to sell it someone has to have or borrow the other $5.
Loans similarly don't create the interest. The money is never there when it's needed. So either the money supply (debt) continuously increases, or someone cannot pay.
The fix was short term zero interest loans and various subsidies. This is what we need a sim to test.
@sj_zero He also predicted a lot of stuff. This was written in 1939 and he predicted Hitler's suicide. Plus the protagonist's girlfriend in the future was a streaming video star. And there were computers to solve economic problems.
Let me know what you think if you read it.
@sj_zero I've been noticing for a while a pattern where something obviously bad will be happening, and someone will say "no actually this is counterintuitive but this is good" and people will just nod and agree. "It's counterintuitive" seems to be enough of an incantation to get people to ignore their own observations and logic.
At this point I have trained myself to just ignore that argument, and anything that sort of "expert" says. Economists are some of the worst about it, too.
And those type of headlines are so dang annoying. There's two ways I look at this: Option 1 is they have some insight on the situation beyond what I know, such as variables I hadn't factored in including a bit of "confidence tricks" to keep people from panicking. Option 2 is they are mostly relying on confidence tricks and the economy operates like an egregore (think Warhammer chaos god) whose strength is derived from peoples trust and belief. While option 2 is tongue in cheek, it's not so inaccurate since market forces are efficient and operate regardless of our concern. There's actually a bit of both of these I see from time to time, with things like the most significant market growth occuring when consumer confidence is way down with main street feeling like it's dying.