Yeah that tracks for Chicago School economics.
Moreover, real restaurant spending in total is up, so while your personal dining decisions are interesting they don't appear to reflect the aggregate data.
I'm also not sure why you are calling Goolsbee a "Friedmanite." He served in the Obama administration and advocated strong government intervention during the financial crisis. Do you think every UChicago economist is a Friedman disciple?
Lastly, where did you infer the economists are "lauding" the productivity increases? It appears nowhere in the paper. They only defined productivity increases and explained why they occurred. Was there some other reason you wanted them to be lauding it, other than to justify your anger with people whose policy beliefs you don't seem to be familiar with?
The paper is from the Becker-Friedman Institute of Economics. It is literally the Chicago school. Do the authors need to call themselves disciples of Milton Friedman?
> I'm also not sure why you are calling Goolsbee a "Friedmanite." He served in the Obama administration and advocated strong government intervention during the financial crisis. Do you think every UChicago economist is a Friedman disciple?
Most orthodox economists at this point are. Sure maybe an ideologically pure free marketeer would have advocated against government intervention in 2008. But do you really think this guy is outside the neoliberal mainstream?
> where did you infer the economists are "lauding" the productivity increases?
Neoliberal economists believe that productivity is inherently good. I don't see anything in this paper about quality of life of employees or quality of service. Elevating one dimension above everything else implies a particularly importance of that dimension.
It may be, but don't expect organizations to remain true to their names over time. There are very few Friedman-minded economists out there nowadays.
Your comment reconfirms this especially pictorially with the last statement: productivity and it alone goes up and quality or service are not even part of the equation.
why do we pay people to measure these things? why do they measure what they measure and not something else? why is this type of thinking dominant among the technocratic elite? Especially when the view from the ground floor only seems to be getting worse and worse.
You might argue that we shouldn't measure things at all -- that it is better to live in darkness and ignorance, and make vague gestures about the way things are with no evidence or rigorous thought. Measuring is how we find truth. Sometimes it is hard. But throwing away our measuring tools is not the path to enlightenment.
Many people choose to ex ante dislike economists, and dismiss anything any of them have to say without further study, because there is a risk that the results of quantifying the world might disagree with their preconceptions.
For example, a neoliberal economist like Becker would say: "There's actually an economic disincentive for racial discrimination"
Sure, if your economic analysis does not take into account class conflict, which most orthodox economists do not. Discrimination is borne intentionally out of class conflict as a tool of dividing the working class.
Orthodox economics is like having a bunch of scientists devoted to a pre-heliocentric model of the solar system. They can describe isolated phenomena within the accepted framework, but they will never be able to accurately describe (in full) the world around them because their foundational world model is incorrect.
Unironically yes. There are dimensions other than raw profitability that determine the health of a sector. The work that chicago school economists do flattens everything onto just a financial axis, which is harmful in my opinion. What do I care about the "productivity" of the restaurant sector when all the food tastes like shit?