The US Economic Growth Is Over. (2014) [pdf]
brookings.edu
brookings.edu
But the biggest indicator of economic health is demographics - and the US wins in this category hands down compared to other developed countries.
While Japan, Germany and other countries are rapidly aging - the united states continues to be culturally very open and meritocratic.
Britain tried being "open" but it backfired in a big way.
The United States will continue to dominate - its biggest rivals are of'course China and India. China is facing a huge demographic cliff while India even though it has the demographic advantage does not have the energy reserves nor is able to fully get rid of structural corruption ( US too has corruption but everything is relative )
At the end of the day - growth is just an anomaly - the longest state of the universe is decay.
The people who first came to the new world had no wealth or income - they built it themselves.
It's not something that is static, it can be created anywhere. There is nothing special about american soil.
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDPC1
Edit: To elaborate, the rantings of one economist who has been wrong many times over does not make for a compelling work.
This means there's more consumer surplus but it's harder to measure.
In the natural world we see ecosystems that exist in balanced cycles of equilibrium because the ecosystems that consume unsustainably have destroyed themselves. Natural selection selects that which is stable over that which is fit.
Modern civilization is an unsustainable ecosystem. It will not last and it will eventually be selected for self termination.
What will be left in the end are societies that do not grow but remain in equilibrium with the natural world. Keep in mind that we as modern humans living in a modern civilization are use to continuos compounding economic growth. The reality of the world is that growth is actually a temporary and very unnatural anomaly. The true state of the world is one of zero growth and total equilibrium.
The final question is, are we living in a sustainable society today? Or at least will the society we live in today be able to transform itself into a sustainable civilization before it inevitably self terminates as a result of uncontrollable growth?
Equilibrium and steady state are two very different things. Strictly, the path we eventually want to tread is not even steady state, since internal variables can change dramatically (e.g. switching from fossil fuels to nuclear/solar/wind). Only the large-scale metrics need to be steady state.
To give an analogy, the earth's climate is far from equilibrium (same temperature everywhere), but it is fairly close to steady state (same average temperature over long periods of time).
And then we overmeasure the wrong things and make it worse.
The US is going to be stuck in stagnation unless it can solve its structural problems and the solution to that will take decades plus political sanity. Political sanity is something we are very much lacking. :/
You got Trump going for president though!
http://www.paddypower.com/bet/politics/other-politics/us-pol...
How does this differ from the consensus view?
I don't know about the rest of us, but do we matter for this?
The only redeeming thing about this whole Trump fiasco is that his apparent popularity is highly misleading, since he's merely the frontrunner of a completely awful field.
He's just a phenomenal salesman.
I am especially loath to call some of the simply tone-deaf things he says "racism". After all, it might be technique at play, modulating your willing suspension of disbelief.
If he is any racist at all, it's probably that annoying residual racism that comes from being older but is hard to characterize.
What I think rather is that this is just another reality show for him. He loves being in the spotlight. In his biography, he said as a kid he admired Broadway musicals and wanted to grow up to be a producer. This is a man who loves show and spectacle. Remember, he was in the WWE (the phony wrestling organization) for a time. No billionaire needs to do that. He did it just because he wanted to be part of the show.
He doesn't really care about becoming president or fixing the country, either. It would be nice for him, a bonus, but it wouldn't be his life's crowning achievement like it would for the other politicians in the race. It's more about the process for him.
So to answer your questions, 1. No, he doesn't believe it, but 2. No, he's not just doing what it takes to get elected; he's doing what it takes to _stay in the spotlight_. That's more important to him than being elected.
Improving GDP is largely about removing barriers to trade, improving infrastructure, and improving human capital.
Paul Ryan is in favor of 0 of those things.
Perhaps more than basic financial math is required to understand the economy?
the difference is trillions.
I mean, would any business make decisions about financing based on what the costs would be in of those decisions in past decades rather than what the costs are reasonably expected to be in the conditions that actually exist?
Because we are talking about determinants of the health of the economy, not determinants of the health of government finance.
> There is not a lot of room for the federal government to increase revenue as total taxes (incl state and local, sales, payroll, property, etc) are not low by any means in the US
That's not particularly true; the US is pretty close to the bottom of total tax revenue to GDP ratio among OECD countries; there is plenty of room to increase tax revenue.
http://www.oecd.org/ctp/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-ratio-...
Care to elaborate?
> the united states continues to be culturally very open and meritocratic.
Hmm... tell that to Trump, the frontrunner for one of your two parties.
Trump's politics are reactionary, and play on a fear that the demographics and culture of the US are becoming too open and "meritocratic." His success is actually a sign that this phenomenon exists, and that people are terrified of it.
As a big business New Yorker, I suspect he'd be a lot more of a centralist on many issues than anyone else in the race right now, possibly on either side of the aisle.
His politics are actually reactionary, yes.
> I am not sure I have a good sense of what his actual policies would be.
Whether his actual policies would be reactionary is a different question from whether his actual politics are reactionary.
> Saying things that he's said about immigration might appear reactionary, but I'm not sure it's not as much a play to Peoria, where the lower and middle class whites that still make up the majority of the electorate are feeling the pain of globalization and the erosion of their traditional economy.
Sure, its populist; that doesn't stop it from also being reactionary. (Sanders, likewise, is populist, but rather the opposite of reactionary.)
I don't think he's dishonest about it. There's just in general copious amounts of what they used to call "free-floating anxiety" and somebody's gotta exploit it. I think he's sincerely trying to help. I would hate to be him if he ever figures out this won't work.
The problem is media in general, and media in general is not incented to report widely on the problems of media in general. I suppose it would be considered too frivolous, but I think teaching some entry-level media criticism skill to, say, junior high kids would go a long way towards making this less of a thing.
I at least tried to make sure my kids knew this and had basic algebra skills with an eye towards being able to enforce some degree of rigor. I'm happy with the results, but it really confused them while I was telling them this.
At one point, I'd have said Canada does not have this problem but since then, it's started.
When you see that Trump is polling at 31% or whatever, keep in mind that 31% of early Republican primary voters is a pretty small number of people. With a more normal candidate you might take that as being in some way representative of the wider population, but Trump is probably not going to gain much more support than he already has, since he's so extremely polarizing.
Ahh yes, glad to see there is still civil discussion on ycombinator.
I think Trump (and to a lesser extent Sanders) is only a preview. We'll see a full-blown fascist or hard-line socialist candidate eventually if this doesn't reverse.
I also wasn't meaning to badmouth blue collar folks. On the contrary, I was trying to communicate just how much anger there is out there outside of BubbleLand. Sometimes you have to be hyperbolic to get your point across and get people to wake up and see what's happening. The middle of America has been in a depression since 2000... that's going on 15 years.
I doubt that's true; that 31% is with the conservative establishment pouring an order of magnitude more money into the campaign of establishment candidates (particular Jeb Bush) that are getting no traction despite the vast spending; there's already signs that significant parts of the establishment are coming around to Trump of the least-bad viable candidate (and others parts of the conservative establishment going to Cruz, who is similarly situated with regard to the establishment, and likewise seeing success despite the vastly greater spending and conservative establishment support for other candidates that are not gaining traction).
When the flood of conservative establishment resources that has been deployed against Trump/Cruz begins being split by Trump and Cruz -- and most of it finally lines up behind one of them if, as seems likely, they secure the party nomination -- they'll do much better than they do with those resources opposing them.
Also, consider the shitstorm over Syrian refugees. Just a few years of dealing with the kind of illegal immigration Americans have faced for decades, and Europeans got really racist really fast.
When I was in Berlin in 2009, I regularly encountered opinions from Berliners regarding mostly Turkish immigrants that wouldn't be unlikely to hear from a good-ole boy in Appalachia talking 'bout them damn Mexicans... But then there were also people drunks I encountered on May Day that were dancing and chanting Obama. Weird contrast.
I do believe it's going to get a little ugly dumping that many immigrants into such homogeneous populations.
The only people it really benefits are wall street and other politically well connected entities (solyndra et. al.)
The government is basically sucking up all of the value from advances in technology ,and redirecting it to the political class who then profit from the carry trade of investing it in the stock market and the like.
Ironically, of course, none of the mainstream candidates for president will fight this, though many of them are trying to get elected on the backs of the outrage over "income inequality"... and this comment is likely to be buried because it points out a crime committed under both Bush and Obama and nobody wants to admit their guy is a bad guy.
People with net dollar-denominated asset balance (e.g., net holders of financial capital denominated in dollars) lose value with inflation (people with net dollar-denominated liability balance -- net debtors -- are the winners with inflation.)
> The government is basically sucking up all of the value from advances in technology ,and redirecting it to the political class who then profit from the carry trade of investing it in the stock market and the like.
To the extent that's true at all, that's a product of fiscal policy (particularly, the favorable tax treatment of capital gains compared to "vanilla" income, and the additional taxation in the form of payroll tax on top of income tax levied on labor income compared to "vanilla" income) rather than monetary policy.
Which, rather than being a distinct problem from "income inequality", is actually the same problem as income inequality.
Aside from extraneous years of course where it hit high teens.
So, yea, if there is a break on the US economy, it doesn't appear to be stemming from inflation.
The United States has an extremely diversified economy, plenty of natural resources, an abundance of talent, a relatively low population, incredible military strength, technological dominance in many areas, a healthy population (unlike, as pointed out, some countries which are declining in population, or about to hit cliffs where the majority of the population is above the working age), and huge geographical buffers.
Some economists say the dollar might be too strong for short term gains for the American worker, and the Fed is having trouble hitting inflation targets between 1-3%.
The private sector benefits primarily from government funding of research.
So I'm just not sure where you're basing your analysis from?
[0] - http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-in...
However, the point is moot because there has not been significant monetary inflation. Only asset prices have really risen in response to quantitative easing (perhaps this is why you said it only helps wall street); this is a somewhat intuitively obvious result since the fed is buying assets, not printing money.