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What gets me is that people in this thread, some of which are possibly even geniuses, use mean reversion in their portfolio analysis, including an expectation of volatility for generally what I would expect to be no more than one revision per quarter, yet they don't apply mean reversion to volatility itself.
"In many countries in the world — most of Asia and Africa — one can buy all the opioids one wants from any local pharmacy, without a prescription. You might suppose then that opioid abuse as a mass epidemic would be a global phenomenon. Yet we don’t see opioid epidemics anywhere but America — especially not ones so vicious and widespread they shrink life expectancy."
This is an outright lie, as the rate of opioid abuse is actually higher in many countries. In Pakistan for example the rate is several times that of the US due to their proximity to the opium growing region, and a lot of countries have similar or greater rates than the US. It's an epidemic here because of the *increase* in use, but the absolute percentages of addicts aren't unusually high here. (I'm referring to addicts only, and not all people who are prescribed opiate painkillers).
In the very next paragraph the author claims that retirees going around the country in RVs are doing so out of desperation and seek seasonal work at Amazon etc. No, most of them live cheaply off of their Social Security and other forms of retirement income, and do not desperately seek low-paying seasonal work. If the author had ever actually met any of them, he would realize this.
No, you're just ignorant. Only in America can you have a successful industry at almost 0% interest rates and the lowest oil prices you'll ever see again in your lifetime, that loses money hand over fist.
You know nothing of your oil industry. Look at the decline rates. It doesn't matter. People on this forum don't read.
that's the dumbest thing you've post JObster. The article itself makes one very good distinction, THESE are private companies. there are million of private companies that invest and reinvest in activities that have made them zero dollars.
Richard branson has an entire business on having a commercial rocket route to either the moon or mars, can't remember which.
So basically we've got a lot of rich business men in Texas who think they'll eventually be able to recoup huge amounts of money on the Permian basin. It's called speculation. we've been doing that since the country was founded.
that's the dumbest thing you've post JObster. The article itself makes one very good distinction, THESE are private companies. there are million of private companies that invest and reinvest in activities that have made them zero dollars.
Richard branson has an entire business on having a commercial rocket route to either the moon or mars, can't remember which.
So basically we've got a lot of rich business men in Texas who think they'll eventually be able to recoup huge amounts of money on the Permian basin. It's called speculation. we've been doing that since the country was founded.
Who do you think does oil exploration for us? Why don't you look up how much Exxon has lost in exploration and production for the last several years?
The IOCs have an even higher breakeven rate on average. I suspect that IOCs, on leverage and due to sheer size, will purchase distressed tight oil producers and will capitalize on high oil prices in the near term future.
In all honesty, I think it would really benefit our government to invest more of its resources into research and development in terms with what consensus says about the future.
The US Government is not particularly good at investing in anything. Investing is a term of art where you generate an explicit ROI. That isn't, for the most part, what the US Government does. The US Government funds things. Moreover, the US Government is not particularly good at funding R&D because it invariably leads to crony capitalism. Governments are better at funding basic science.
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Originally Posted by Jobster
I don't have to read what you wrote. I read some, but not all.
a) why then are you responding?
b) I'll try to be brief for your benefit.
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Originally Posted by Jobster
You immediately said what the author spoke of had nothing to do with economics
Because the article has absolutely nothing to do with economics, and this is an economics forum.
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Originally Posted by Jobster
... but without the prospect of long-term employment, what do people in this country have to look forward to?
In a legal context, an attorney would object saying "assumes facts not in evidence."
Note: the article you referenced to begin this thread did not say anything long-term employment.
I said I'd try to be brief, but you introduced a brand-new topic (long-term employment). So the following passage isn't brief.
Back in 1900, about 118 years ago, a bit over 60% of the US population was directly involved with farming and ranching. Today, it is less than 4%.
Imagine that you could go back in time to 1900 & tell learned scholars, academics, politicians and farmers that in far-off 2018 less than 4% of the nation's population would be directly involved in agriculture. Then imagine you asked them, "what do you think all the other people will do for a living?" Many would say it would be a catastrophe to have so many future unemployed people.
Chances are none of 1900's scholars, politicians and farmers would guess that in far-off 2018, people would be employed as "network engineer," "web designer," "search engine optimization engineer," "industrial robot tech," "radiologist," "professional MMA fighter," "professional football player," "cinematographer," "sound engineer," "microprocessor architect," "telemarketer," "cloud support tech" and the like.
Today we are at or very near full-employment. Some very good economists are forecasting a UI rate of 3.5% by this summer -- the lowest unemployment rate since 1968.
So, your premise that there is a long-term employment problem is incorrect.
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Originally Posted by Jobster
These children today have very little to look forward with exception of only the very best.
Untrue. There is nothing to lead anyone to think that.
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Originally Posted by Jobster
... if you have any empathy at all, you must also realize that given the scarcity of resources, that the current lifestyle we broadly live in American society for the average citizen is unsustainable.
Empathy has nothing to do with this topic. You're introducing yet another topic altogether, but since this is an economcis forum, I will ignore it. Remember: Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources in a world of unlimited wants and desires.
Moreover, the US standard of living is higher than it has ever been. There is nothing unsustainable about it .
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Originally Posted by Jobster
Capitalism property theory and free market economic system are good in theory,
Actually, relatively free-markets and capitalism beats all other economic systems both in theory and in practice. Capitalism is the greatest invention for good ever devised by mankind.
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Originally Posted by Jobster
but it is dependent on the proponent of growth
False. Economic growth is a consequence of capitalism and population growth.
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Originally Posted by Jobster
which today is really predicated on greed
Greed is good. It is how capital and labor flow to the highest value-add sectors of the economy.
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Originally Posted by Jobster
given that low interest rates promote what will be seen by future generations as piracy.
That's silly. You are all over the map.
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Originally Posted by Jobster
In this case, low interest rates force people into equity which his highly volatile by its own nature, and even potentially more so depending on global developments, like who has control of resources for economic growth.
The above, along with most of your babble, lacks fundamental logic and cause-and-effect analysis. You're all over the map. Reading your post is like watching a glass-door front-load washing machine: whatever piece of clothing is randomly tossed up against the glass is what you say. It has nothing to do with anything. It is like baby talk, stringing together sounds as if they create a coherent message. They do not.
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Originally Posted by Jobster
There is no promise of trade agreements between nations, so it is imperative that the US defend its own resources.
There is no promise of anything in life except death and taxes. Your conclusion does not follow from your premise.
The rest of your post is similar stream-of-consciousness babble.
We have had, like the author said, 11 school shootings in 23 days.
Those are facts, and they are alarming.
That's sad, of course, but it has nothing to do with economics: the study of the allocation of scarce resources in a world of unlimited wants and desires.
What gets me is that people in this thread, some of which are possibly even geniuses, use mean reversion in their portfolio analysis, including an expectation of volatility for generally what I would expect to be no more than one revision per quarter, yet they don't apply mean reversion to volatility itself.
You are introducing yet another topic. Way to pivot from points you've lost to something else where you hope to win.
Why don't you post this in the Investment subforum and then we can have a good discussion.
It turns out it is exceedingly difficult to forecast the future with much accuracy. The author's view of the dystopian collapsed world reminds me of "The Paperless Office." Back in the 1980s, there were forecasts of how all offices would be paperless driven by the new miracle of Electronic Mail.
OVER THE PAST three decades, pundits and prognosticators have proclaimed the looming arrival of the paperless office. After many monumental technology advances, we’re not much closer to the paperless office than we were when Stevie Ray Vaughan was first laying down Texas Flood at Antone’s in Austin in the early 80’s...
Since the early years of computers, there’s been a tremendous amount of speculation about what the “office of the future” would look like... They envisioned a day when computers would create a work environment that was streamlined and paper-free.
It didn't work out that way. The average U.S. office worker prints over 10,000 pages per year, and global paper products consumption has tripled over the past three decades. http://cua6.urban.csuohio.edu/~sanda...EN%20FACTS.pdf
Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses...there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures could be produced for any great city of the time.
The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day... In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. (See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]).
In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.
The problem did indeed seem intractable. The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.
Obviously, it didn't work out that way.
In the 1930s, —about a decade before the baby boom began— there were many serious forecasts that the populations of most Western countries were about to enter a terminal decline.
Obviously, it didn't work out that way.
You may have read one nineteenth-century editor’s much-ridiculed forecast that by 1950 every town in America would have a telephone.
He was off by a fair bit.
Do you remember Bill Gates’s forecast in the 1980s that 64 kilobytes of RAM is enough for any PC and any person? How about his forecast in 2004:
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"Two years from now, spam will be solved." -- Bill Gates
Obviously, it didn't work out that way.
Or Thomas Watson's forecast "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Watson, of course, was President of IBM, and said this back in 1943.
Obviously, it didn't work out that way.
Darryl Zanuck's 1946 prediction: "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
Obviously, it didn't work out that way.
"Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within ten years," said Alex Lewyt, president of Lewyt vacuum company back in 1955.
Obviously, it didn't work out that way.
Are you old enough to remember Ken Olsen's famous "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home"? Olsen was the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation.
Obviously, it didn't work out that way.
How about Bob Metcalfe's famous "Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." Bob Metcalfe, of course, is the author of Metcalfe's Law and founder of 3Com, and he said this in 1995. I knew Bob, and he's one helluva bright guy. He's one of the many co-inventors of Ethernet.
Obviously, the internet did not go supernova.
Famed polymath Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO and current CEO of Intellectual Ventures, is among the smartest people I've ever met. He famously said "Apple is already dead" in 1997. Nathan fits into that camp of incredibly bright and farsighted people who do, indeed, see to the horizon; he's had only two real bosses: Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates. I never managed to beat Nathan at chess; I think he fits into the same category as Gordon Moore, who can rapidly determine your level of sophistication and communicate with you about incredibly complex things at the level just at the top of your head.
And, of course, Apple is one of the most successful companies on the planet.
Yes, all of these incredibly bright people made forecasts, most all of which turned out to be wrong. It turns out it is just really, really hard to forecast the future.
The fundamental problem with most predictions of the dystopian kind is that they make a critical, and as it turns out incorrect assumption: that things will go on as they are. This assumption in turn comes from overlooking one of the basic insights of economics: that people respond to incentives. In a system of exchange, people receive all kinds of economic signals that lead them to solve problems such as the hypothetical problem of a dystopian world created by the hypothetical Collapse of the USA. The prophets of doom come to their despondent conclusions because in their world, nobody has any kind of creativity or independence of thought—except for themselves of course.
We commonly read or hear reports to the effect that “If trend X continues, the result will be disaster.” The subject can be almost anything, but the pattern of these stories is identical. These reports take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future as the basis for their gloomy prognostications. The conclusion is, to quote a character from a famous British sitcom, “We’re doomed, I tell you. We’re doomed!”
Last edited by SportyandMisty; 01-28-2018 at 11:22 AM..
I love how eloquently your posts reflect so much of what we are talking about here. Like the other poster said, you are engaging in character assassination, calling the author a drama queen- and then you tell us you DIDN'T EVEN READ IT ALL.
I suspect he is a Mille-blican, mainly due to feeling everything is good & rosy and for citing the lack of online followers for the author .
The author is blowing it out of proportion but not exaggerating , not backing it with numbers, but we cannot completely disregard it as nonsense.
really its such silly drama queen stuff that its obvious the author has no credibility. there is no point in giving that article more than the few seconds it takes to see it is written by a dummy.
not anything i am going to read. he is some kind of "thinker." i guess that is a like a modern day philosopher or bull**** artist.
You have no argument, no credibility, and nothing factual to support your commentary. And you accuse the author of being a drama queen? Please.
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