Exactly. I feel like Andrew Yang gets a bad rep, but it’s not like he didn’t say stuff that everyone should know. I liked his idea of expanding the “American Scorecard” as he called it. Basically we currently use GDP, and stock prices to determine how well we’re doing as a country. That’s insane. Sure, the economy is up, but you know what else is up? Homelessness, unemployment, suicide, divorce, drug addiction, and many others. But we don’t include those metrics to grade our performance. Just once I’d like the President to do a PowerPoint at the State of the Union Address. With a bunch of slides and graphs and charts.
Some of this is a bit soft. Like, the 50% / 0% employment split says something about business’s ability to command labor. If we had an amazing economy with 50% unemployment, this would imply a large population that businesses either didn’t want or couldn’t access. And the former says something very different than the latter.
In that same vein, the ability to grow the economy is heavily predicated on how individual workers within the economy operate. A bunch of precarious workers with tentative access to capital, poor education, and dismal living conditions don’t generate the kind of surplus value found in countries with ready access to new capital, high end education, and comfortable low-stress environments.
From a raw numbers perspective, you can try and transition your economy to an entirely financialized scorecard. But then you just end up with two engineers optimizing the rate at which a dollar can be traded back and forth.
Although, this might already technically describe the London economy.
Either way, you’re divorcing the means by which we measure new value in the economy from the actual measures of economic utility through layer after layer of abstraction. Yes, this can fool people while economic utility is increasing (or even while its increasing for a subset of the right kind of people). But eventually - at the 50% unemployment and large migrant caravans of jobless vagrants trawling across the country - you run into some very basic domestic policy problems that outshine the focus on GDP Go Up.
“The economy is doing fine.”
I saw this a few years ago and it has stuck with me.
“The economy isn’t talking about me and you, it’s referring to corporations and executives and shareholders and such.”
The economy could be doing amazing and we have 50% unemployment.
The economy could also be doing terrible and we have 0% unemployment.
The economy could also be doing amazing and the workers don’t make enough to survive.
It isn’t measuring what many people seem to think it is. It isn’t a measure of “how well the average person is doing” at all.
Exactly. I feel like Andrew Yang gets a bad rep, but it’s not like he didn’t say stuff that everyone should know. I liked his idea of expanding the “American Scorecard” as he called it. Basically we currently use GDP, and stock prices to determine how well we’re doing as a country. That’s insane. Sure, the economy is up, but you know what else is up? Homelessness, unemployment, suicide, divorce, drug addiction, and many others. But we don’t include those metrics to grade our performance. Just once I’d like the President to do a PowerPoint at the State of the Union Address. With a bunch of slides and graphs and charts.
Some of this is a bit soft. Like, the 50% / 0% employment split says something about business’s ability to command labor. If we had an amazing economy with 50% unemployment, this would imply a large population that businesses either didn’t want or couldn’t access. And the former says something very different than the latter.
In that same vein, the ability to grow the economy is heavily predicated on how individual workers within the economy operate. A bunch of precarious workers with tentative access to capital, poor education, and dismal living conditions don’t generate the kind of surplus value found in countries with ready access to new capital, high end education, and comfortable low-stress environments.
From a raw numbers perspective, you can try and transition your economy to an entirely financialized scorecard. But then you just end up with two engineers optimizing the rate at which a dollar can be traded back and forth.
Although, this might already technically describe the London economy.
Either way, you’re divorcing the means by which we measure new value in the economy from the actual measures of economic utility through layer after layer of abstraction. Yes, this can fool people while economic utility is increasing (or even while its increasing for a subset of the right kind of people). But eventually - at the 50% unemployment and large migrant caravans of jobless vagrants trawling across the country - you run into some very basic domestic policy problems that outshine the focus on GDP Go Up.