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 No.31749

I don't care for politics, but I like watching videos about economics on youtube. Most recently I found these peter schiff videos make a lot of sense.

Who else here is interested in economics?

 No.31751

http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Our debt is almost 20 trillion and no one is solving anything to fix it. We are going to have hyperinflation to pay off the debts. Trump doesn't want to talk about it because he wants to be reelected.

 No.31764

File: 1480878614736.jpg (50.63 KB, 600x448, 75:56, cargo-cult.jpg) ImgOps iqdb

>>31749
I majored in economics at Pleb State U. It's an interesting subject but the whole academic discipline is a towering pile of bullshit and physics-envy. It's a cargo cult and a pseudoscience - the "quants" have lead us astray with their admittedly big brains and their dazzling math that has no relationship with the real world.

 No.31765

>libcucks getting btfo

 No.31766


 No.31777

>I don't care for politics

Too much of economics is politics… see every video posts in this thread.

People don't want to talk about marginal utility and boring old chars. So it just becomes arguing politics with numbers.

>"cucks btfo"


says it all about any intelligent economic discussion we're going to be having in this thread.

And its not about what position you hold in economics. Any position can be debated civilly and intelligently. More and more I'm coming to see the chan format as just bad for intelligent discussion. I thought Wizchan was kind of different, since we had that virgin thing going. But lately its been a lot more chan than wiz.

 No.31801

File: 1481027295977.jpg (154.17 KB, 953x923, 953:923, trolley.jpg) ImgOps iqdb

>>31777
The chan format is the only format for intelligent discussion. Yes, there will be nonsense, and insults, and thoughtless repetition of memes, and it's up to each reader to strain the worthwhile ideas out of the mess like a filter-feeder.

>People don't want to talk about marginal utility


I would love to talk about marginal utility with you, or at least utility in general. As far as I can see, the entire concept of "utility" as something that can be meaningfully expressed numerically, as if it were temperature or mass, is ludicrous. It's Enlightenment-inspired quantophrenia, and it was a misstep for the discipline of economics. Modern neoclassical economics has in fact come halfway to rejecting "utility" - they only use ordinal utility, never cardinal utility, because they agree that the idea of "2 utils worth of satisfaction" is absurd. They never compare utility values between two different agents for the same reason. These are good steps, but it's all still built on the same rotten foundation of pseudo-scientific, misleadingly quantitative philosophy.

>Too much of economics is politics

Tough. Economics is inherently a very political subject. What could be more political than deciding which monkeys should get more coconuts? The idea that economics is about bloodless technocrats using Science! to figure out how to optimally manage to coconuts to benefit all the monkeys is itself a political idea, and one which serves the interests of the powerful, academic, and technocratically-inclined monkeys. Economics constantly and correctly preaches that incentives matter; this applies to the study of economics itself just as much as any other area of life.

 No.31814

File: 1481054588396.png (192.32 KB, 290x263, 290:263, 1363244320913.png) ImgOps iqdb

>>31801
i've always considered economics voodoo because in most other disciplines you can identify consensus at it's most basic level. there are pillars of undisputed truth for the most part.

economics seems split by camps that can't agree on even the most basic fundamental of "how make economy work????" keynesianism, friedman & friends and then marxism (is that still a thing? i don't know) it seems like in the """real sciences""" people can at least agree that gravity is real or that chemistry behaves along these principles or that this is how you derive X or whatever. with economics you just pick the one you like or you're born with, and there's very little testable data. it takes 20 years to maybe draw a few shaky conclusions from some grand economic experiment and the control group doesn't exist unless you set up an enormous group of microstates just to test economic conclusions.

in the micro sense i'm sure it's contributed useful things to society, but i'm not confident you can use many of the conclusion(s) of various schools to improve an entire country's economy with any real hope of 1. it working and 2. knowing conclusively that it's working.

could be wrong tbh i'm not actually an economist or a scientist or a chemist or a mathematician.

 No.31815

>>31814
That's because economics isn't a natural science and will never, ever be like one, to the horror of anyone who actually got scammed by people who sell macroeconomics books.

 No.31833

>>31815
why is there an enormous machinery built up around to apply it's teachings in order to structure society, then?

 No.31837

>>31766
Is this book a good introduction for someone with no knowledge of economics? I read the first two chapters and the language seems disorganized to me, like it was transcribed from an extemporaneous lecture or something.

 No.31838

>>31833
Same as any other religion.

 No.32099

Every economist thinks that shrinking population is bad, but I think its a good thing for the long term because resources wont be depleted as much, just let the old people die off or maybe in the future automation will take their jobs.

 No.32106

>>32099
Shrinking population is bad because it makes your country weaker relative to others. If Japan's population drop to 50 million and China's jumps to 20 billion, Japan is going to be conquered and their culture and way of life will disappear. On the other hand, if we never had to worry about warfare or any kind of conflict, we would all be in hunter-gatherer societies. The H-G lifestyle is far superior to living in an agricultural or industrial society.

 No.32110

Economics is interesting. I read a good book, "The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law", which analyzed the law from basically an economic perspective.

 No.33542

>>32106
I think it has more to do with getting a higher average age and a decrease in GDP.
Of course an economist who thinks GDP is a measure of success rather than GDP/capita is dumb.

Even though what you said might be correct, I don't think that's why some economists find shrinking population bad.

 No.33544

>>32099
Most economists believe wholeheartedly in the capitalist mindset that infinite growth is both possible and desirable.

An old to paraphrase a quote I always liked describes it like this "There are two types of people in the world who believe in infinite exponential growth in a fixed finite world, madmen and economists"

 No.33631

>>31765
>trumpcucks btfo

 No.33636

>>33631
I'll take Trump over that Jew bastard any day.

 No.33774

Some marxian economics, if you want to see a different position, check his channel for the other parts of the series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wkO3qsZY_U&list=PL80E7B20E05FD7651

 No.35408

>>33544

More welfare is better even if the marginal utility of money decreases.
And to be precise most economists would probably say infinite growth is both possible and desirable on the assumption that growth comes from increased productivity if the world population is constant or growing.

>>31814

Have you taken any courses in economics? When it comes to microeconomics there aren't really any major disputes. In macro the whole Keynesian/Neoliberal divide mostly boils down to effects of short term
money supply, the former assume it has effect on aggregate production (and employment), while the latter assume it only affects inflation.
On a model level it's about whether the "a" in Y = Y_n + a(P-P^e) is zero or not.

When it comes to actual policy academics have a pretty good consensus about stuff such as rent control being a bad idea for what it's supposed to accomplish and lack of regulation to industries that produce negative externalities being harmful. But when it comes to policy lobbying groups are pretty good at constructing intellectually dishonest economic argumentation, which usually mean using models with unrealistic assumptions.

 No.35413

>>35408
It doesn't matter how you spin what economists believe, there is a cap on productivity from sheer limitation of resources.

 No.35752

>>35413
That's what I thought at first. Then I realized that with the digital economy you can shift infinite amounts of income around very quickly, the only problem comes in when you eventually use that money for resources/services.
I view money as a way to get a quick agreement among strangers about how much resources they are going to get in exchange for their resources. The problem is that the value of money itself changes quite rapidly in relation to other forms of currency based on the world situation and new technologies.
Automation is already in full swing, I think I read a stat somewhere that between 2010-2015 we lost a huge amount of the workforce but profits and productivity increased. It's unsustainable in the long term, as you need people working to buy products, and the problem is that other people need to have desires for services/products that other people make.
This whole system is independent of resources, so the natural and inevitable outcome is that physical resources prices will rise eventually, and digital resources will continue to remain at a nominal state.
We're going to be in a more mental economy than ever in the future, I think. People simply won't be able to afford resources, so they'll increase things like ridesharing. I've already read quite a few articles about kids that shun buying a car but instead are fine with using transportation services/uber instead, and I think this will only get worse as the cost of production of cars/physical goods eventually rises.
So the economy will eventually become based on how much you can improve on the next big thing people actually want, which will inevitably be entertainment based.
Infinite stock, low cost, lots of opportunity for market interaction. I imagine that's going to be the future once bitcoin gets accepted and we can charge much smaller amounts for content, so small that the average person won't even bother to psychologically weight the cost of seeing an online video.
The totally free internet, as a result, will have to die.

 No.35764

>>35413

I'm no economist, but I don't quite agree that there can ever be any definite human productivity cap of resources. Humans are so small, so fragile, and so insignificant in the universe. We've yet to even conquer another planet, much less harvest the moons or stars.

On a smaller scale, a large part of Africa and other wild resources remain untouched due to poor management by the locals. The full depths and wonders of the ocean remain unexplored, and all in the meantime human consumption continues to become more and more efficient.

Sure, as a result we've now have to sustain a larger population, but will those same people to continue coming up of new and innovative ways to manage resources? Absolutely. They have to if they wish to continue being alive, and if they don't, well, people die, but it's ok because there would still be a remaining population in accordance with what resources they have. And they'll continue on developing with the knowledge passed on.

The only cap of productivity is the mindset that innovation is limited. While in a material sense the planet may seem fixed, human ingenuity continues to excel time and time again. Just think what it would be like if we developed a means of energy that creates more than it can consume, a kind of holy grail, wherein we can enjoy absolutely clean energy indefinitely without laying a finger on the environment!

Suggesting such a dream can't be possible is as close-minded as someone sharing to people in the past that someday instead of horses, people would be regularly riding giant mechanical beetles of steel steered by a wheel, in possession of a small rectangular device capable of contacting another person on the other side of the world in an instant, with simultaneous access to all of the world's free information. And in the future, it's so common and unremarkable that nobody gives a shit about it.

>>35752

>Automation is already in full swing, I think I read a stat somewhere that between 2010-2015 we lost a huge amount of the workforce but profits and productivity increased. It's unsustainable in the long term, as you need people working to buy products, and the problem is that other people need to have desires for services/products that other people make.


I don't quite see what's so "unsustainable" about this. Thee seems to be this massive scare against automation because people fear of it taking their job overnight, but in a bigger picture, automation benefits everyone as goods are being developed quicker, cheaper, and more efficiently than ever. Personal inconvenience of job loss isn't a very strong point against something that benefits and progresses everybody as a whole if basically people get to enjoy a higher quality of living.

Especially the entire "as you need people working to buy products, and the problem is that other people need to have desires for services/products that other people make" bit, and I don't mean to pick on you personally, but why would that exactly be a bad thing?

Automation doesn't create things into the void with the goods disappearing into the ether – it's true that someone may purchase the goods supplied by automation, but they simply don't necessarily have to. They're just not forced to buy goods. A businesses creating things for the sake of it doesn't seem to be particularly competitive, and will go inevitably go bankrupt without customers if it just feels like pointlessly making unappealing things.

What this would mean then, is that automation will only serve for the people, not against them, because if people don't purchase a product then they will not be giving the business any money. They'll buy the cheapest and most practical good supplied by machines, and it will only get cheaper, while people focus on present human-only occupations until the machines can catch up. And it will be a long while before the bots actually do in more abstract jobs rather than "build X faster".

>outcome is that physical resources prices will rise eventually,


I'm sorry, but how would physical resource prices rise eventually?

It would seem that they can only get cheaper, because if business A is using automation to provide goods but doesn't lower their prices, business B might use the opportunity to undercut their competition as they can afford it with less overhead and staff costs provided by automation. The result? Business C, E, F, and G, might try to get on the boat if A and B don't lower their prices to compete to secure money better than their competitors. Overall, resources will get cheaper.

>People simply won't be able to afford resources


Well, that kind of begs the question though, is that more importantly how are businesses still getting enough customers to run itself if people aren't buying what they produce?

Profit doesn't come from the ether, if a business' first and foremost objective is to acquire more capital, they would need to make something attractive for people to buy if it wants to survive – and that means lowering prices if they have to.

>The totally free internet, as a result, will have to die.


Eh, you raised a lot of good points, but nothing can compete with free. Even if a website asked "You need to pay a penny to see this YouTube video or movie", in my opinion as a principle, people would be disappointed as the thinking would go along the lines of "Why do I still have to technically pay for something I could of gotten for free?". They'll go elsewhere that provides to their needs, and that website would slowly lose a customer base.

People hate paying for things, no matter how small, if the principle or reasoning to pay for it doesn't hold up. It's an interesting psychological phenomenon I think, that no matter how cheap the parking costs might be at an area, I find myself still driving around for an alternative if it means "I'm just not paying for parking" as long as I'm not pressed with time constraints. Or maybe personally I'm just a massive cheapskate, but if someone says "It now costs a quarter to use this elevator that used to be free for public use", I think a lot more people would end up using the stairs, or at the very least be dissatisfied with that building's management and may go elsewhere if they could.

 No.35765

I don't understand Economics. Its one of those subjects I just can't get my head around. Or maybe I'm just too lazy and unfocused to get involved in such a complex subject, its the same with Philosophy and Political History, I just can't be bothered sadly and I'm probably missing out on a much more informed worldview as a result.

I'm poor so I figure it doesn't matter what I know about Economics, I'm at the mercy of all powerful Jews whatever happens. I know nothing of financial matters, how housing etc effects the markets etc. That is the domain of sociopathic Chad WASPs and Jew elites. They get filthy rich whilst the rest die in filth

 No.36040

>>35765

Khan Academy has video courses on youtube for 101, micro and macro I think. The intro course is basically about learning the key terms, while micro is about the math behind how the models work and macro is about national accounting and stuff associated with it. If you have some basic understanding of the terms, econtalk podcasts are pretty interesting to listen to.

 No.36087

Opportunity cost is the only thing unique to Economics. Everything else can be recategorized into game theory or group psycohology.

 No.36681

I'm interested in it, but I think it's pretty hard to learn because a lot of experts have different opinions. For example, economists don't agree on what caused the Great Recession. Some economists think it happened because Wall Street bankers invested a lot of money in risky assets like derivatives. However, many conservative economists think that it originated in the housing market, because the government forced mortgage brokers to give mortgages to people with poor credit scores to help more people get housing. This devalued mortgage-backed securities, which in turn caused the Great Recession.

Lately I've been watching some MIT microeconomics lectures on Youtube, and I think they're really informative and I think I'm actually starting to understand economics better.

 No.37930

>>36681

There's a lot to it. On one hand you have a case of moral hazard that goes back to bailing out Continental Illinois back in 1980's, which gave large banks a precedent for "too big to fail" bailouts, which encouraged the financial sector to take more risks. On top of that there is the fact that home ownership is publicly subsidized through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and subprime loans were initially endorsed because they seemed to expand the housing market to people who previously couldn't afford a house. Then you have the institutional role of credit rating companies, whose ratings large large institutional investors are usually obliged to take in consideration when picking their portfolio. They gave the best ratings to asset types that in truth, were much more volatile.

The thing is that the fundamentals in microeconomics haven't really changed that much in the last century or so. But macroeconomics is basically religion when it comes to explaining what caused what.

 No.38235

File: 1501433528545.jpg (49.65 KB, 540x694, 270:347, Adam_Smith_The_Muir_portra….jpg) ImgOps iqdb

Friendly reminder that Adam Smith was a wizard.

>Not much is known about Smith's personal views beyond what can be deduced from his published articles. His personal papers were destroyed after his death at his request.[49] He never married,[51] and seems to have maintained a close relationship with his mother, with whom he lived after his return from France and who died six years before his own death.[52]


>He was known to talk to himself,[47] a habit that began during his childhood when he would smile in rapt conversation with invisible companions.[54] He also had occasional spells of imaginary illness,[47] and he is reported to have had books and papers placed in tall stacks in his study.[54]


>According to one story, Smith took Charles Townshend on a tour of a tanning factory, and while discussing free trade, Smith walked into a huge tanning pit from which he needed help to escape.[55] He is also said to have put bread and butter into a teapot, drunk the concoction, and declared it to be the worst cup of tea he ever had. According to another account, Smith distractedly went out walking in his nightgown and ended up 15 miles (24 km) outside of town, before nearby church bells brought him back to reality.


>Smith, who is reported to have been an odd-looking fellow, has been described as someone who "had a large nose, bulging eyes, a protruding lower lip, a nervous twitch, and a speech impediment".[14] Smith is said to have acknowledged his looks at one point, saying, "I am a beau in nothing but my books."[14] Smith rarely sat for portraits,[57] so almost all depictions of him created during his lifetime were drawn from memory.


>and while discussing free trade, Smith walked into a huge tanning pit from which he needed help to escape

 No.38276

>>38235
It's like fifty per cent of all great philosophers or political/economic scientists are.

 No.38283

>>38276
Well, they aren't focused on succubus and societal expectations so they can actually focus and get shit done.

 No.38307

>>38283
And half the time they end like total wrecks because they don't understand society, see Tesla.

But damn if they aren't inspiring. We can fucking change the world. Why does /dep/ even exist.
Don't answer that.

 No.38317

>>38307
Dont believe the meme. Tesla was a lunatic failure.

 No.38318

>>38317
t. Edison

 No.38319

>>38318
Edison was not a the thief 9gag told you about. Tesla memed around for years doing nothing

 No.38320

tesla is the most overrated piece of shit on the planet

 No.38321

File: 1501593596623.jpg (70.04 KB, 960x540, 16:9, image.jpg) ImgOps iqdb

Tesla is OK as far his scientific contributions go, but he is definitely overrated and worshipped by normans

pic related, the ubernorman that stole Tesla from us and ruined his name forever

 No.38322

>>38321
elon musk has achieved much more than tesla, though

 No.38323

>>38322
only time will tell if musk is as relevant as people claim he is. right now he is a celebrity businessman and entrepreneur, and that's cool and all, but his hype is just as overplayed

 No.38324

>>38321
Just because normans like it doesn't mean it's bad.

I mean, most of the time it is.

 No.38325

>>38324
and what if this was one of those times?

 No.38326

>>38325
then it is

 No.38392

File: 1501904180423.pdf (111.38 KB, qb14q1prereleasemoneycreat….pdf)

I like Post-Keynesians
Interestingly they seem to have had some luck in the mainstream in recent years. The bank of England has basically said their view of how money is created is correct (pdf related.)

More controversially I like Steve Keen's focus on the impact of private debt levels. I don't think he's too popular for his strongly heterodox positions, but even if the basic grounding of what he says wasn't entirely accurate the idea of a sort of fire-alarm view of private debt is handy. (i.e. a fire alarm doesn't tell you that there's a fire - it identifies smoke and heat, which are signs of a fire. similarly rocketing private debt may not always indicate impending disaster, but you should at least go and check what's set the alarm off.)

 No.39220

i dont like the meta or the theoretical side of economics much. the only thing i am intersted in is how i can exploit something to make a profit.

i guess that has more in common with psychology and mob rule than with economics. what do you think?

 No.39223

>>39220
I think you sound like a Jew.

 No.39224

>>39223
who cares. i need money and i dont want to bust my ass working at McFail for $8 per hour.

who gives a shit about anything if you cannot or will not apply it in the real world? obviously you don't need to validate things in this way but the amount of resources you can gather doing a certain thing directly correlates with its usefulness.
if you do not or cannot earn money with something it is obvious that that thing is just something you do for fun and that you have enough money to continue doing it for fun

 No.39231

>>39224
banknote slave

 No.39241

I wonder if it is possible to be a accountant without additional schooling. Most of the math needed seems highschool level. Plus unlike school you can automate much of the job using computers. With a computer anyone with basic math and data entry could do it.
Or am I totally wrong?

 No.39251

>>39241
You can self-teach yourself almost anything, but you must make sure to do not neglect the essential skills you must have in order to be a competent professional.

 No.39309

It is baffling to me that equifax shat the bed so hard yet its stock prices have gone down only 14% with a lot of people and analysts currently considering it a buy opportunity.

 No.39312

I tried to understand Modern Monetary Theory but even reading through wikipedia seems like it's a joke.

"Monetarily sovereign government is the monopoly supplier of its currency and can issue currency of any denomination in physical or non-physical forms. As such the government has an unlimited capacity to pay for the things it wishes to purchase and to fulfill promised future payments, and has an unlimited ability to provide funds to the other sectors"

If this is the paradigm under which modern governments operate, then learning economics is just a waste of time.

 No.39315

>>39312
they don't even try to hide that the government can just print itself infinite money like cheating in a video game anymore. Schools are so shit that the economically illiterate people will look at "unlimited capacity" and "unlimited ability" to print cash out the wazoo and think "sounds good to me, what could go wrong"

ugh, makes me sick to my stomach

 No.39316

>>39312
>>39315
I'm no expert on economics and finance but I'd suggest reading a few paragraphs more before disregarding it as drivel.

 No.39623

>>39220

Economics as a science is the knowledge of incentives, the ability to see chances of arbitrage is something else entirely.

 No.39624

>>39220
that is the difference between the study of business (how can I make money?) and economics (how does money work?)

 No.39625

>>39623
yeah I think he was more interested in business than economies. Both related and intertwined, absolutely, but very clear differences



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