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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Real growth has stalled for decades and is only propped up with rent-seeking and money printing credit - hence the results we see...

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Here's a chart of real growth over the past few decades:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1

That's only "real" in that it's inflation adjusted. It's still the same balooney that GDP is inherently.

What this "growth" is based on is the same rent-seeking and money printing credit I mentioned. And of course even people getting paid to dig and then fill in holes would increase the GDP.

My "dismal results" refers to actual state of labor market and quality of jobs, actual purchasing power, actual production, actual innovation, actual infrastructure, actual quality of life changes, etc. Not GDP or stock market or how rich the 0.00001% gets.

>My "dismal results" refers to actual state of labor market and quality of jobs, actual purchasing power, actual production, actual innovation, actual infrastructure, actual quality of life changes, etc. Not GDP or stock market or how rich the 0.00001% gets.

How convenient that your preferred metrics can't objectively be measured and basically give you free reign to define the results however you want! It's the "community adjusted EBITDA"[1] of economic metrics.

[1] https://qz.com/1685919/wework-ipo-community-adjusted-ebitda-...

>How convenient that your preferred metrics can't objectively be measured

"Would you believe your own lying eyes over the statistics based on a KPI widely understood to be a crap metric?"

Prices rise faster than inflation. You'd have to adjust for prices instead of adjusting for inflation. Try indexing it to median monthly non-imputed rent per square foot.

Yet the fairy tale that growth not only can continue indefinitely but continually accelerate has to be kept up. It's almost as though word “enough” has been banned from economy altogether.

  > It's almost as though word “enough” has been banned from economy altogether.

without growth people will start to notice all the wealth is accruing at the top; its hard to justify such a system if average people aren't getting better while working more and more

[flagged]

>You clearly don't understand what growth is and think it is just more of existing things. Or understand just how dysfunctional things would have to be for stasis to occur. Developing new drugs is growth.

And yet compared to a couple decades ago we have declining infant mortality and life expectancy, record low for life satisfaction metrics, demographic collapse, climate catastrophes piling up, enshittification, but yay! growth!

You know what else is called a "growth"?

> You clearly don't understand

Could you please stop being aggressive with other users in comments here? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and it's very much against the site rules. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Edit: this has unfortunately been a problem for quite a while:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44697685 (July 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955972 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24498260 (Sept 2020)

We ban accounts that keep doing this and won't stop when we ask them, so it would be really good if you'd fix this.

> Real growth has stalled for decades

The world economy is not bigger than a few decades ago? That’s self-evidently false.

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