The Bad Economics of Wtfhappenedin1971
singlelunch.com
singlelunch.com
There’s some massive trends that started around 1971, where healthcare, national debt, education costs, housing, etc all just start to skyrocket, outside of just inflation.
I think the 1971 author is certainly motivated in his reasoning to explain what’s going on through his lens, but the OP here seems equally motivated to decide that actually nothing is going on.
When a documentary tried to explain to me that it was so unsettling that ancient Egyptians were able to build the pyramids with heavy granite blocks that came from 900km away without even mentioning the Nile, I did not think it was worth continuing much further.
(Turns out only a little part was made of granite anyways, most of it was built with stone coming from right next the pyramid)
no, a ton of jobs outside the cities got outsourced or automated, leaving people with no choice. The number of people who left cities when remote work gave them the chance should make that obvious
The number of people who left cities is a remarkably small part of the US population and many of them just left high-cost cities for other lower-cost cities.
The steady increase in % of the US population who live in cities (83% in 2023 up from 70% in 2022) [https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/urba...] suggests that yes, Americans do in fact want to live in cities.
> Despite the increase in the urban population, urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population, down from 80.7% in 2010.
> This small decline was largely the result of changes to the criteria for defining urban areas implemented by the Census Bureau, including raising the minimum population threshold for qualification from 2,500 to 5,000.
Would people prefer rural areas if those areas had equal amounts of jobs? Maybe, maybe not. But since they don't, I think it's totally fair to say that the proportion of people who "want" to live in cities is increasing.
Look, i'm a country boy. I've learned how to kill and remove feathers from a chicken when i was 8 or 9. I know more about orchard than fields, but still i could drive old machines by 11 (then life happened). I know how to build a fence and/or a stone wall. We left for a "big" city (10k people). Life was so much better there, even when we had almost no money and had to eat boiled potatoes for months. I will never live in the countryside again, and i'm an introvert. My mother went back ~10 years ago, and already want to go back live in a small city, because driving at least half an hour to do anything, everyday, is really, really hard when you aren't retired yet (and especially in winter, however warm it is).
[edit] I've also lived in suburbia for 4 years, it's barely better than the countryside, so if your choice is between the two, chose countryside.
This is the exact point where the mean-spiritedness of the article surpassed my interest in continuing to read it.
The oil embargo is what happened and completely re-wrote the economic path. Everything else is secondary.
It's turtles all the way down. The economic base in the 1950s, 1960s were NOT backed by gold at all.
Still, I appreciate you bringing up your point.
Ah yes. Countries who also made it illegal to hold gold. There's a reason why James Bond villains always used gold, because gold-users were considered criminals in basically the entirety of the 1st world (ie: USA, Britain, etc. etc.)
When everyone's trading paper notes and pretending that Gold was a thing (when it wasn't, and hasn't been since the 1930s for *everyone* thanks to the world-wide Great Depression), its all just... fakery.
Today's system is way more honest about the fakery, that's all. And even then, the Gold Standard of the 1910s was built upon the ruins of the Silver+Gold standards of the 1800s (essentially stealing the wealth from the Silver Standard / Silver Dollars). Its all fakery all the way back to the US Continental Dollar (which was inflated into worthlessness, almost on purpose, to pay for the Revolutionary War).
As I said earlier: its turtles all the way down. Its fake, and always has been fake since the dawn of our country. The important thing seems to be to keep the units consistent (which we have been doing for decades).
> illegal for people to hold gold
Note that "hold gold" was defined by EO 6102 as more than $100 of gold.
So that's like, 1/10th of an ounce today would make you illegal by 1930s through 1970s standards.
Divorce exacerbated the problem by dividing families and requiring double the resources (two homes, cars, insurance plans, etc). Families had to start paying for daycare and housekeeping , both expensive and taxable . But that increased GDP .
A working class single-wage-earner could once support an entire 6-8 person family.
All the wealthiest Zips today e..g Berkeley , Palo Alto were once full of working class families.
Economic statistics are just indicators. It's important to pay attention to the real world.
Yes. Divorce rates inversely correlate with wealth and income measurements. Poor people divorce a lot more than rich people, which is just common sense for any serious person interested in these things. In my experience, Marxists are the only ones who reliably make these obvious connections. I think it's just because they are so concerned with the stranglehold that ecoonomics places on basic societal wellbeing. Almost nobody else seems to take these things seriously.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/divorce/divorce-statist...
It didn't have anything to do with gold, but with the fixed international exchange rates of national currencies. These were only allowed to be changed by an agreement from the commitee:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Fixed_exc...
To me it seems, that having a market driven currency exchange rate creates something like a double pendulum chaotic effect. With both the values of goods and services driven by a market that is also driving the values of the underlying currencies...
>"Let’s knock this one out of the way now: despite what people at the mises institute would have you think, not a lot of couples divorce because of bitter arguments on the convertibility of the dollar to gold."
I share a lot of libertarian views, but can't go all in as it's followers have such a black & white view on things that are inherently grey. I agree that the government is inefficient at best and corrupt/murderous at worst (i.e. innocents given the death penalty), but getting rid of everything (e.g. EPA, FDA, USDA...etc) isn't the best thing either as firms will pollute and take health shortcuts as much as possible absent any laws which prevent it. Mainstream economics points out that monopolies are bad because there is no competition, so you either break them up or regulate them. Libertarians frequently adhere to Austrian economics and you have folks like Milei saying a market failure cannot occur and there is nothing wrong with monopolies. There are valid concerns regarding ineffective regulators and those captured by industry too.
Unfortunately, neither a full market based anarchy (i.e. government is there to basically only protect your property rights) or extreme regulations (immeasurable beauracracy)are the way to go IMO. What you want is something in between the two extremes. The question becomes where to draw the line (if this is familiar...it's the same argument as the Laffer curve for taxes). Progressives think it needs to shift one way and Conservatives the opposite. The true answer IMO is that some things need a lot more regulation and some things a lot less. A balanced view doesn't make for good sound bites though.
Monopolies happen when one company has enough money to buy out the competition, when one company has enough leverage to lock out the competition, or when it's a "natural monopoly" (and maybe some other situations). None of those requires government protection to create; all require government intervention to avoid and/or control.
Show me a "natural" monopoly that was not instituted by government regulation. The most common examples today are utilities which are all 100% government created monopolies.
Other examples are Standard Oil, or Bell Telephone, both where also highly protected by government regulations and other laws that prevented competition in those markets
Take natural gas. Let's say there's a first company that has laid pipes to all the houses in town. Currently, they're a monopoly, just because they were there first. No government involved. They may be pretty profitable, too, in the absence of competition. And they're remain a monopoly until some other company lays pipes to at least some of the houses in town. But no company will do so, because they know that if they do, the first company (who has years of profits to build up their financial reserves) will lower prices to the point that neither company makes money. The new company will go out of business, and the established company can then raise rates back to what they were.
It takes government intervention to stop this dynamic. And, with electricity and gas, it usually takes one of two forms - either a public service commission that prevents the monopoly from making too much money, or a requirement to allow competitors to use the existing pipes/wires. But neither of those created the monopoly. They just responded to the fact that natural monopolies are what naturally happen in things like electricity and gas.
Your claim was broader than natural monopolies. You said "All of that requires government". How does one company buying out their competitors require government (beyond having money and a legal system)? (And if the claim is "money and a legal system require having government", that's true, but it's true for all companies in general, not just monopolies, so that's pretty much not the topic under discussion.) How does one company using leverage to monopolize a market require government?
For a concrete example, when Microsoft was using Windows as leverage to try to monopolize the browser market, how did that take government? It took government (an antitrust court case) to stop them.
The idea that no company would consider running additional electric lines if granted the opportunity is non-sense.
Or abolish land as property as an evil state construct, I guess, but I haven't heard of any right-libertarians that want to do that (or seen anywhere with limited property rights that has an abundance of utilities to choose from...)
Well this is conversation is about libertarians, not "right-libertarians", I am more of Geo-Libertarian
>>Something's got to compel landowners to give unfettered access to their property to run wires and pipes to other properties
Yes it is called a voluntary agreement built into the title of the property (aka convents) normally when a subdivision of land is created, where by utility paths laid out by the developer. Subsequent purchasers of the land must agree to these convents, including utility easements, when they buy the property.
government is not required for that.
Oh, and covenants are entirely unenforceable without government anyway.
Once an entity like Apple becomes Apple, it can't really be competed with in the traditional sense. The whole European Union likely couldn't create a new Apple if they wanted to due to inertia and the insane capital costs. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that's more of a factor here.
I agree with the Libertarian view that a lot of firms don't want to compete, so they lobby for special protections that come out of the tax layers in a somewhat coercive manner. In some cases (national defense) I think it's acceptable, but probably not for all cases.
That is odd be cause I have never used, and never will use an Apple product and I have access to all the same things that an Apple user does?
Apple is in no way a monopoly
For one it's insanely US-centric. Granted I'm sure the original website was, too, but some of the explanations don't hold when you pan out a bit.
Example:
The “relentless 50 year decline in wages” should be labelled the “relentless 50 year increase in healthcare costs”.
Doesn't explain why the same incomes decline happened in the rest of the G7. Our insurance rates didn't go up as % of compensation or of corporate profitability. They did go up as a % of government spending, but that's in a different ledger.
I wouldn't be so quick to call government spending a different ledger. Governments borrow to spend, they tax to rein in devaluation of their currency, as per modern monetary theory. When they borrow they print money, and a significant chunk of international debt is denominated in USD, so such debt would see a real term devaluation as the federal reserve expands the money supply. This would show up as price inflation for goods and services purchased by the government, inelastic goods and services would plausably show an increase as a percentage of total spending.
> This is because US Healthcare costs have grown at a ridiculous rate. US Healthcare is paid through insurance. That insurance is tied to employment income because of an idiotic tax deduction.
I'm sure he hates "goldbugs" and by extension libertarians, but libertarians are really the only ones I've seen pointing to health insurance in the US as rooted in a weird historical consequence of WWII federal govt centralization and the subsequent enforcement of price controls on wages. Of course this "path dependence" explains why healthcare is so different from the rest of the world and directly implicates the US government instead of "greedy capitalism". Since there's this tax exemption and third party arrangement for healthcare expenses, healthcare insurance is anything but a "free market."
As I continue reading it's obvious this dude is married to a certain sarcastically negative viewpoint, funny enough at times getting so close to striking at the heart of economic dysfunction and the debasement of living standards that happens to every empire:
> It’s entirely possible that over 5 decades, the interest rate going down has increased housing prices in areas with a housing shortage.
You think? Interest rates and money are inextricably tied. And not only did "the interest rate go down" it was held to zero for almost a decade.
The result is that anything actually worth having in life has been inflated away and now is a major struggle for the middle class: housing, healthcare, education, food, energy...