• queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    Are economists just stupid and truly not understand that inflation “cooling” is a worthless indicator? Prices don’t go down.

    • TheLepidopterists [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      It’s truly absurd. People who are actually getting consistent raises are often only getting 2-3% raises. Meanwhile rent is going up 5-20% a year and food prices are up (according to the sources I’m seeing when googling, honestly it feels worse than this to me) like 25% since 2020 which is an average of over 5% increase a year.

      With consistent raises my real income is consistently lower every year. I’d like an economist to explain why I should be happy about that.

    • Glasgow@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      Yes all economists are stupid and only the hexbears understand economics.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Imagine your house is on fire.

        The fire department tells you that the fire has stopped spreading and is now contained.

        An economist would tell you that this means the house is safe and you can go back inside.

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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        2 days ago

        It’s pretty safe to say that people who are continuously wrong about everything and fail to predict economic crashes that happen like clockwork might indeed be kind of stupid.

      • vovchik_ilich [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        It’s not so much “all economists are stupid”, but it is definitely “for the past half a century neoliberalism has been pushed as the only socially and academically acceptable form of understanding economics, it’s been the only framework of economics that gets taught in universities in the western world, and neoliberalism is a dogma cult whose most basic axioms are wrong, which is why it consistently fails to predict economic trends and in particular crises and to produce policy to adequately tackle them. People who go outside neoliberalism, such as Post-Keynesians or Marxian economists, aren’t taken seriously in academia or in media, aren’t given research or teaching positions, and the cycle perpetuates.”

        For examples of this, see empirical evidence of how rising minimum wage doesn’t produce inflation or reduce employment, how price limits don’t necessarily lead to shortages, how creation of money doesn’t generally create inflation, how government debt is a useless parameter to measure the well-being of an economy, or how the biggest countries in the EU have stagnated for 15+ years of austerity policy without recovering the GDP per capita of 2008 while China consistently breaks growth expectations despite its economy being predicted every two years to crash the following year.

      • PolandIsAStateOfMind
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        2 days ago

        “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
        ― Upton Sinclair

      • Flyberius [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        Well, we don’t deny the reality in front of our eyes. I’m sure for rich economists that get published in the news and in journals, things look dandy to them.

      • miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        Richard Wolff made a great point when he said that capitalism has two college departments dedicated to teaching about it: One is called economics, whose purpose is to train people on how to cheerlead the system using purely hypothetical concepts. The other is called business school, and it exists because economics departments don’t actually teach somebody how to administrate capitalist enterprise, so they have to educate different people on how to actually make the system function.

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      One way of juking the stats is to stop classifying people as “looking for work.” So after five years goes by when someone is on disability, the number of people “unemployed” goes down. People who work multiple part-time jobs aren’t considered “looking for work,” even when they’d prefer or need a full-time job. People working in the gig economy who get unreliable employment also “aren’t looking.”

      Basically, over half the workforce who needs full-time employment, especially for health insurance, only works part-time or not at all. None of them are counted, so unemployment gets calculated as going down.

      It’s a good example of capitalists not relying on objective data and making shit up, taking action based on the shit they made up, then being surprised when those actions don’t fix anything.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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      2 days ago

      lol yeah they just had a downward adjustment of like 800k jobs from their last numbers 😂

  • dkr567 [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    “jobs surge” while mass layoffs are happening in majority of industries. I really fucking hate when I read garbage articles from politico/other ghoulish rags like it praising “muh number of jerbs are higher” and then remembering all the layoffs that occured before.

      • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        It’s fine, they can go work one or more of those new jobs! I’m sure a boeing technician will be making the same salary between Amazon warehouse fulfillment and driving for Uber on their days off!

    • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      It’s not wrong though. The US bourgeoisie have been trying to engineer a recession for the past two years. That’s why the Feds hiked interest rate - to curb inflation by creating unemployment which will lead into a recession.

      But what the central bankers didn’t understand was that the US treasury bond is so huge that raising interest rate simply ended up having the federal government creating a huge deficit (~$1 trillion paid out in interest in 2023 alone) that through the “trickling down” of such a huge mass of money, still managed to keep the economy barely afloat.

      If you think about how capitalism actually works, it makes sense: the bourgeoisie want austerity, but since monetary austerity (raising interest rate) is not working as they had anticipated, they’re doing the industrial austerity (laying off workers) themselves.

      The end goal is to create unemployment, make people lose their savings, healthcare and becoming more indebted, induce a recession and then rehire them at lower wages. Its function is to discipline labor.

      The goal of a recession is also in line with the military industrial complex and the national security state since the US military has been having a lot of trouble recruiting people into the military - a recession and mass employment would generate a surge in military enlistment needed to rectify their current predicament.

  • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    You can’t afford food or rent or healthcare, that’s a you problem. A few Epstein Island oligarchs have become even richer so actually the economy is doing great.

    The only reason why someone would claim something different is that they are paid Russian disinformatskaya troll bots.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      In many cases, it’s actually creepier in this side of the world to address strangers by their first name, as if they were some personal acquaintance, some buddy nearby when they’re actually some billionaire vampire that doesn’t care if their workers live or die as long as he can squeeze money out of them.

    • anarcho_blinkenist [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      Presumably it evolved from the honorific format of of ‘Mr./Ms./Mrs. Surname’, which itself presumably arose out of the societal and familial norms of inheritances and marriage and even profession (“Schumaker” family making shoes, “Baker” family in kitchen work and baking bread, etc.), which surnames historically served as connections and indicators of, while being less commonly shared between other families as first names. Which I would assume was an evolution from systems of tribal clan names into new material conditions.

      It’s not only a US thing, and not even only English it’s a wider west European thing from their particular historical developments and how languages reflected and were reflected in that. In french you have ‘Monsieur/mademoiselle surname’ too for instance, or Señor/Señora Surname in Spanish etc. etc. And due to surnames indicating profession/status/inheritance/marriage there are also honorifics that were used in that same format for royal and nobility and clergy titles indicating what noble or royal family. “Father Surname”/“Lord Surname”/“Monsignor Surname”/“Monseigneur Surname” etc.

    • PolandIsAStateOfMind
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      3 days ago

      It’s very common in all or almost all indoeuropean languages, as in those there are way more different surnames than first names, so it’s harder to confuse people, especially in context.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@lemmy.today
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      3 days ago

      I think it supposed to be a respect thing for people higher in a social hierarchy? So, people like presidents always get surnamed. I don’t think its that common in normal everyday life?