• queermunist she/her
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    90
    ·
    2 months ago

    Are economists just stupid and truly not understand that inflation “cooling” is a worthless indicator? Prices don’t go down.

    • TheLepidopterists [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      80
      ·
      2 months ago

      It’s truly absurd. People who are actually getting consistent raises are often only getting 2-3% raises. Meanwhile rent is going up 5-20% a year and food prices are up (according to the sources I’m seeing when googling, honestly it feels worse than this to me) like 25% since 2020 which is an average of over 5% increase a year.

      With consistent raises my real income is consistently lower every year. I’d like an economist to explain why I should be happy about that.

    • Glasgow
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      Yes all economists are stupid and only the hexbears understand economics.

      • queermunist she/her
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        35
        ·
        2 months ago

        Imagine your house is on fire.

        The fire department tells you that the fire has stopped spreading and is now contained.

        An economist would tell you that this means the house is safe and you can go back inside.

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        33
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        It’s pretty safe to say that people who are continuously wrong about everything and fail to predict economic crashes that happen like clockwork might indeed be kind of stupid.

      • Flyberius [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        29
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        Well, we don’t deny the reality in front of our eyes. I’m sure for rich economists that get published in the news and in journals, things look dandy to them.

      • vovchik_ilich [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        26
        ·
        2 months ago

        It’s not so much “all economists are stupid”, but it is definitely “for the past half a century neoliberalism has been pushed as the only socially and academically acceptable form of understanding economics, it’s been the only framework of economics that gets taught in universities in the western world, and neoliberalism is a dogma cult whose most basic axioms are wrong, which is why it consistently fails to predict economic trends and in particular crises and to produce policy to adequately tackle them. People who go outside neoliberalism, such as Post-Keynesians or Marxian economists, aren’t taken seriously in academia or in media, aren’t given research or teaching positions, and the cycle perpetuates.”

        For examples of this, see empirical evidence of how rising minimum wage doesn’t produce inflation or reduce employment, how price limits don’t necessarily lead to shortages, how creation of money doesn’t generally create inflation, how government debt is a useless parameter to measure the well-being of an economy, or how the biggest countries in the EU have stagnated for 15+ years of austerity policy without recovering the GDP per capita of 2008 while China consistently breaks growth expectations despite its economy being predicted every two years to crash the following year.

      • miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        22
        ·
        2 months ago

        Richard Wolff made a great point when he said that capitalism has two college departments dedicated to teaching about it: One is called economics, whose purpose is to train people on how to cheerlead the system using purely hypothetical concepts. The other is called business school, and it exists because economics departments don’t actually teach somebody how to administrate capitalist enterprise, so they have to educate different people on how to actually make the system function.

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      47
      ·
      2 months ago

      One way of juking the stats is to stop classifying people as “looking for work.” So after five years goes by when someone is on disability, the number of people “unemployed” goes down. People who work multiple part-time jobs aren’t considered “looking for work,” even when they’d prefer or need a full-time job. People working in the gig economy who get unreliable employment also “aren’t looking.”

      Basically, over half the workforce who needs full-time employment, especially for health insurance, only works part-time or not at all. None of them are counted, so unemployment gets calculated as going down.

      It’s a good example of capitalists not relying on objective data and making shit up, taking action based on the shit they made up, then being surprised when those actions don’t fix anything.

  • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    2 months ago

    You can’t afford food or rent or healthcare, that’s a you problem. A few Epstein Island oligarchs have become even richer so actually the economy is doing great.

    The only reason why someone would claim something different is that they are paid Russian disinformatskaya troll bots.

  • dkr567 [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    “jobs surge” while mass layoffs are happening in majority of industries. I really fucking hate when I read garbage articles from politico/other ghoulish rags like it praising “muh number of jerbs are higher” and then remembering all the layoffs that occured before.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      29
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      In many cases, it’s actually creepier in this side of the world to address strangers by their first name, as if they were some personal acquaintance, some buddy nearby when they’re actually some billionaire vampire that doesn’t care if their workers live or die as long as he can squeeze money out of them.

    • anarcho_blinkenist [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      2 months ago

      Presumably it evolved from the honorific format of of ‘Mr./Ms./Mrs. Surname’, which itself presumably arose out of the societal and familial norms of inheritances and marriage and even profession (“Schumaker” family making shoes, “Baker” family in kitchen work and baking bread, etc.), which surnames historically served as connections and indicators of, while being less commonly shared between other families as first names. Which I would assume was an evolution from systems of tribal clan names into new material conditions.

      It’s not only a US thing, and not even only English it’s a wider west European thing from their particular historical developments and how languages reflected and were reflected in that. In french you have ‘Monsieur/mademoiselle surname’ too for instance, or Señor/Señora Surname in Spanish etc. etc. And due to surnames indicating profession/status/inheritance/marriage there are also honorifics that were used in that same format for royal and nobility and clergy titles indicating what noble or royal family. “Father Surname”/“Lord Surname”/“Monsignor Surname”/“Monseigneur Surname” etc.

    • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      2 months ago

      It’s very common in all or almost all indoeuropean languages, as in those there are way more different surnames than first names, so it’s harder to confuse people, especially in context.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      2 months ago

      I think it supposed to be a respect thing for people higher in a social hierarchy? So, people like presidents always get surnamed. I don’t think its that common in normal everyday life?