Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

The headline is very, very misleading.

What's being discussed here is not what a world without oil would look like, but "what would the economy look like if we pretend the energy sector doesn't exist, but we're still somehow getting oil from magical fairies".

If you were looking at the performance of the US economy lately and going "huh, it keeps going up and down, but some of that is 'cause of oil prices changing, what would it look like if they hadn't?" then this is the article for you.

If you were thinking about literally any other question (and especially the question of what the world might look like without oil) then this will be a puzzling waste of time; the payoff is just a graph of US industrial production over time excluding the energy sector.

(Spoiler: Recent fall in oil prices has not been good for the energy sector, but has been good for the rest of the economy, so if you pretend that the energy sector doesn't exist, then the "economy" looks better. Also, if you pretend that the unemployed don't exist, the unemployment rate is amazing. On the other hand, if you pretend Canada doesn't exist, it raises some very troubling concerns about maple syrup supplies. In other words, this is pretty fucking pointless.)

On the other hand, if you're actually interested in what the world might look like without oil, check out the archives of the collaborative World Without Oil project.

http://worldwithoutoil.org/default.aspx?showall=true#end

Over the course of 32 weeks, 1,500 participants created blog posts, vidoes, images, and audio recordings as a simulation of the crisis as it progressed. This page highlights some of the best submissions for each week. Unfortunately you'll need to make use of the Wayback Machine for some of the links.

I get 401

Strange, I don't.

It's not so useless. It's one exercise in why broad indices can be misleading.

Creating value in energy production is good, up to a point, and that point depends on whether you are an exporter or not. But if energy becomes a too-large part of the economy it does so at the expense of the rest of the economy.

The same can be said about health care: Health is good. So spending on health care is good. Until it exceeds what other nations pay to get the same health. Similarly, a healthy financial sector is good, unless it drifts into excessive financialization.

Illustrating how one economic sector becomes a vampire is useful because it illustrates how raw GDP can hide vampires that suck the blood out of quality of life.

Who gets to say what "too big" is? I'd rather see a healthy energy sector than the continued eclipsing of everything else by finance.

Health care will eat everything now anyway. Medicaid is going to be the real estate purchaser of last resort - if you live long enough to outrun Medicare, the State (not the Federal gov't ) will get your house. No amount of estate planning will prevent it.

High energy prices could be quite useful right now - we'd seen actual drops in measures proportional to carbon being added to the atmosphere. I'd rather see that done in the market than by government fiat. It is just that government fiat takes a couple-three generations to get calibrated.

And I have a really funny feeling about your "at the expense of the rest of the economy". I didn't buy that in the 1980s and I don't buy it now. We're not exactly seeing an explosion on consumer spending.

It is even more arbitrary to do it the way gdp is added up now: if plenty is good, more must always be better, and always counts toward a larger gdp.

What's too much? That's why people study statistics, so they can spot the outliers. 5x other similarly industrial nations is probably too much health care spending. Draw the line at some mathematically defensible place.

It's definitely a good article (as most articles from Bloomberg are). It just has a terrible title which implies an entirely different article.

Bloomberg is turning into the Wired of financial reporting.

It's not that clear that the fall in energy prices has been all that good for the rest of the economy.

What's ... tension inducing is that in 2008, the event that triggered Fed tightening was an uptick in oil prices. Some will disagree, but this was the thing more than anything else that helped us have the recession by many stories - the financial crisis itself didn't last that long.

And to those who would pretend the energy sector doesn't exist, you could get your wish.

Thanks for the heads up. This is exactly the reason why I read the comments first before moving on to the article. :)

Hilarious! This reminds me of "Kill all the poor"..

https://youtu.be/owI7DOeO_yg

Not good for those who leveraged trillions of dollars of valuation in non-petrol investments. The stock market hasn't been having problems just because of China. There's still trillions of unwinding to go, and what's in progress is a huge wealth non-transfer: the assets and expected profits in petrol coming from consumers won't actually be transferred.

Not that I'm complaining... Except fuel taxes are now way too low.

Rarely do HN comments make me laugh - this did. Thank you.

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