Comment by weitendorf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weitendorf | Hacker News Reader

> We're experiencing stagflation, and it may well just be getting started. If history is any guide, costs can continue to rise for quite some time as the purchasing power of wages erodes and asset bubbles deflate. As noted in a previous post, depending on financial fentanyl to keep everything glued together is risky, because we can't tell if the dose is fatal until it's too late.

This is giving me permabear vibes. The US is not experiencing stagflation. Real (inflation adjusted) gdp per capita is growing at 2%. Inflation over the last year was 2.7% and gdp growth and the economy grew substantially faster than that.

> That the purchasing power of my wages in the 1970s as an apprentice carpenter exceeded almost all the rest of my decades of labor should ring alarm bells.

There it is. For what it's worth this probably is true to an extent (eg for certain kinds of goods and services), just like the growth of economy, but that's because relative incomes and relative costs have changed substantially since then. Some jobs' wages (software engineer) grew faster than inflation, others (a lot of entry level blue collar ones) didn't. Some costs (rent, healthcare) rose faster than average inflation, others (eg televisions) didn't.

FWIW the nominal topic of burnout is intriguing to me but I think this kind of perma-recession/perma-bear pop-econ, "what happened in 1971" stuff is really overplayed and crackpotty. There is no "narrative control machinery". I think it's very human to extrapolate individual malaise to society as a whole, and you see it all the time on the Internet, but most people don't perceive society the same way a deeply depressed or burnt out person does.

> This is giving me permabear vibes.

I’ve been reading Charles High Smith for at least 15 years. He’s definitely a permabear. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

Permabears do sometimes make good points but being permanent bears they're almost always wrong in aggregate, because they only ever have the same economic perspective, which happens to be the opposite of how things have played out (at least in the US) for almost one hundred years now.

To square that circle usually they have to turn to conspiracy theories, or dabble in economics just deep enough to skew it as unsustainable but not so deep that they understand how it actually works (see quantitative easing, FRB, "petrodollar", etc.).

Maybe (definitely) I've just spent too much time on the Internet because to me the whole "secret recession" stuff is just tired and wrong at this point. It's been over 15 years since the GFC. This kind of perspective feels stuck in the 2012 "ugh I got a college degree and now I work in a restaurant" Internet, when there have actually been several employment/growth booms since then.

> There is no "narrative control machinery".

You've worked at Microsoft and Google, and still say this? /smh

I've worked at a much smaller multi-national, and during their growth from ~6000 to ~23000, the internal spin-doctoring skyrocketed. Lying internally had become so important that they created new leadership positions for it.

> I think it's very human to extrapolate individual malaise to society as a whole [...] most people don't perceive society the same way a deeply depressed or burnt out person does

You're just confirming what the article says: "Those who haven't burned out / been broken have no way to understand the experience".

Meaninglessness at work is rampant. (Have you seen r/antiwork? or read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs?) And society is wholly engineered to keep us busy, and to keep fleecing us, sheep.

The kind of job where you find enough meaning such that you deem society tolerable is the exception, not the norm.

Spin doctoring at a big corporate is very different from what the author is referring to, which sounds like a conspiracy theory that economists, their data, and influential business people are lying to us about the economy.

Even the biggest, richest companies that everybody wants to work for are clumsy and just generally awful at spin-doctoring. It's usually only a handful (like 5 or less) of people at the top doing it, it's usually obvious, and in the worst cases people generally reframe things and omit/hide data rather than tell blatant lies or commit actual fraud. You're right that I did see that up close, coming from real human beings.

That's why I find it laughably absurd to think that hundreds of rank-and-file economists and hundreds of thousands of analysts, government workers, investors, business owners, and politicians (on both sides) could deceptively pull off some smoke-and-mirrors charade for decades on the actual state of the economy. And even more absurd is that this scheme is unravelling because burnt out people are musing on the Internet about how much they hate their job and work in general, rather than actual economists/investors/analysts examining the numbers and finding a discrepancy.

I agree that unfulfilling work is rampant but this conspiratorial framing of "my job sucks" is just crazy. There is no secret puppetmaster engineering society to keep you working a bad job. Sometimes your job just sucks. And the people with influential positions in society are just trying to do their job (or the one they want next) and go home too, they're not hyper-competent double agents working night and day to make sure redditors don't get too close to uncovering it all.

I'm not completely certain where GP is coming from, but it's not lying if they believe their own bullshit.

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