While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Masada]

Ya'll suck at this economics business, except for Scarlet_King and to a lesser extent CD (even if missed an absolute howler) and Luckymoose.

Population while highly correlative with production, capital, or market, is not the sole driver for these forces- and haven't been since the beginning of the industrial colonial age. So simple answer: Yes. Simply because there are other factors beyond population that drive production and consumption.

The second part is accurate, the claim that "population... is highly correlative with production, capital or markets" however is flat-out wrong.

Somebody around here can probably explain it better.

Seems fine to me.

ChiefDesigner your opinion would be valued. Please make use of sentences.

Growth in money =/ economic growth.

Yeah sure dude, I know that, but is tech always going to give us a perpetually increasing return on investment until the heat death of the universe?

You shouldn't use words you don't understand.

 

[Crezth]

Yeah sure dude, I know that, but is tech always going to give us a perpetually increasing return on investment until the heat death of the universe?

Uh. Hard to say. Though that uncertainty is kind of the point of funding research.

 

[Masada]

ROI = (Net profit/ investment) * 100.

Now think for a second people about what “perpetually increasing returns on investment” would mean using that formula.

Hint: it would require us to believe that ROI has been perpetually increasing i.e. the net profit received is increasing relative to the investment going in. After a while with even the most modest growth rates, things start getting really stupid (i.e. exponential growth in ROI).

 

[Nuka-sama]

Masada you put profile where it should read profit in that equation

 

[Masada]

I'm an economics genius, not an English major.

 

[Nuka-sama]

It's k bro, I got your back ;D

 

[Amon Savag]

Actually, I'm certain it's not, given that the person I was responding to there is so bitter and defensive about losing an argument that they've resorted to ineffectual sniping of other people's points, but I'm not going to let that stop me!

'lolwut' is in fact shorthand for "Amon, you are regurgitating an argument that is, frankly, both racist and repugnant at its core; you're implying that the root cause of the 2009 economic crisis was all the loans and mortgages banks gave to unworthy [and for 'unworthy', you should read 'poor, dumb, and black, but I repeat myself'], not derivatives and shadow banking"

(You're from the UK, daft; I assume you don't understand just how much racism underlies everyday political conversation in America. That said, it's everywhere.)

But you know what? This response took me fifteen minutes to compose, Amon's going to swear up and down that he's a not a racist, despite privately thinking that Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown totally had it coming because they were thugs, and this is in no way worth my time to engage.



As for your post, I'm sorry to say that it's so far off the mark that it's not even wrong. There are cogent critiques about quantitative easing and the role of central banks in the inequality rate; real economists make these claims, some of which post here frequently. What you're saying, though, isn't one of those; it's not even an argument. It's a rhetorical device to encourage us a las barricadas.

And you know what? I'm unlikely to persuade anyone, so why bother spending the time to write long, thoughtful replies? 'lolwhut' takes me thirty seconds, expresses my dissatisfaction with an argument, and will have exactly the same amount of influence on other people's thought processes as this post.

So... yeah.

Wow. You got all that from me saying that America's banks were loaning record amounts so that should mean that we should have had record growth according to the economic theory provided by a college course someone else had? Race baiting when there is no hint of racism at all is extremely unwarranted.

Reported.

Moderator Action: Stating that you reported a post is technically trolling. Just report the post and let a moderator deal with it from that point on.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Snitches get stitches.

Moderator Action: Direct threats of other posters will not be tolerated.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Shadowbound]

I'm very sad KaijuNES died, because I found my notes on Jim Jericho and among them is a speech on how society is like a giant turtle.

Also, economics. What's important for everyone to remember is the whole point of industrialization is that economic growth was decoupled from population growth, allowing real gains in the standard of living. This was a big friggin deal.

 

[Angst]

'lolwhut' takes me thirty seconds

dang you type slowly

all in good fun all in good fun!

 

[Crezth]

Race baiting when there is no hint of racism at all is extremely unwarranted.

"Race baiting" so you don't think racism is a real, persistent, systemic problem in our society?

 

[Luckymoose]

"Race baiting" so you don't think racism is a real, persistent, systemic problem in our society?

He probably lives in 99% white upstate New York, or something. Well, his location says threw the swamp, so I have no idea where that could be on a map.

 

[Immaculate]

Shadow: You mean land.

 

[Masada]

You got all that from me saying that America's banks were loaning record amounts

This would be true for the majority of the last hundred years.

Shadow: You mean land.

No he doesn't.

 

[Thlayli]

I admit that I don't know much about economics. Thanks for clarifying that population growth isn't the main driver of economic growth in modern times.

I just thought that higher economic growth levels in developing countries and lower economic growth levels in fully developed countries were also connected to their demographics. But maybe I'm off base there.

Absent a massive oil boom, it seems difficult for countries like Japan and Russia with shrinking populations to increase their economic growth, even though technology is still advancing. I guess there are other factors at play here?

 

[BSmith1068]

"Race baiting" so you don't think racism is a real, persistent, systemic problem in our society?

He probably lives in 99% white upstate New York, or something. Well, his location says threw the swamp, so I have no idea where that could be on a map.

Moderator Action: Cool it guys. Amon is not the one that brought race into this. You are doing nothing more than baiting him for a negative reaction at this point.

 

[Luckymoose]

Absent a massive oil boom, it seems difficult for countries like Japan and Russia with shrinking populations to increase their economic growth, even though technology is still advancing. I guess there are other factors at play here?

The issues with Russia are entirely based on the backlash of the failed Soviet economic system. They are still working up, and doing so fairly successfully when you exclude things like the Ukraine crisis. Japan, on the other hand, was subject to a ridiculously huge economic boom based almost entirely around technology.

 

[Shadowbound]

Japan's demographic issues and its economic ones are not the same. They're related, yes, the former doesn't help the later, but Japan's financial system is screwing with it just as much.

The reason you see a ton of growth in less developed countries is because there's a ton of unused capacity. When productivity is incredibly low, then introducing only slightly more advanced processes will see major gains. But when you have already incredibly high productivity, like Japan, you need to develop new, even more advanced techniques rather than just adapting what the Americans are doing. A country like Vietnam can get huge gains in productivity through urbanization and basic industrialization, but the US and Japan have already done these things. This is part of why China's growth has started to slow.

Finally, land. Specifically, fertile land. That's a revolution that's occurred in several stages, as various agricultural revolutions (the most recent of which may be occurring presently, with GMOs, but there's also the Green Revolution) which allowed larger and larger populations to be supported by less arable land. But this is still just a boost in productivity, just applied to agriculture, and population growth didn't simply translate into economic growth. It helped, but that was as much by allowing populations to urbanize, and needed other changes in lifestyle and production to break out of the Malthusian Trap.

 

[Azale]

Lord Iggy, I made the mistake of reading facebook and I saw someone post this:

"Politics aside, the reality is that we don't understand our climate at a microscopic level. I'm assuming human activity, including fossil fuels, has an effect but we just plain don't know how negatively feed-backed our biosphere is. We live right now in the quaternary glaciation and we are currently in the middle of a minor interglacial and we've been warming for 20,000 years. We could slip into a deep glaciation in 10,000 to 50,000 years....and so long as we have big land masses at to near the poles like Antarctica and Greenland the world will remain glaciated. We need to set politics aside on this matter and truly let science work. Geology does not work on 10 year scales and an increase of co2 from 0.032% to 0.037% is likely meaningful but not catastrophic.....and yes I get the whole club of Rome Kissinger finding a new common enemy thing....but the reality is that there are plenty of real monsters in the world to deal with....without manufacturing make believe hypnotic ones.

No that doesn't align with political correctness but by gosh...CONVINCE ME WITH SCIENCE NOT RHETORIC! I'm not stupid so please stop assuming I am (not to the poster nor the article but to the worlds scientists). I'm literate, convince me....I'll listen and read and understand but understand that I'm scientifically literate and so are the majority of petroleum engineers.

It's basic science."

What do you think is a proper reply to this gentleman? I ask you because 1. you have the most expertise 2. you're the most polite

I don't want the guy to think he's actually smart, but I don't want to be snarky either. But I'm not intelligent enough on this issue to be thorough

 

[Crezth]

Just a friendly reminder that the term "politically correct" is a conservative smear, comrades!

e:

Gotta make an important distinction between the free market and crony capitalism. Under the free market, corps get no subsidies. There is no mortgage interest deduction. Big banks are allowed to fail. Crony capitalism is really a partial merger of state and corporate power, something that Mussolini called fascism. And fascism is national socialism, not the free market. We are heading in the direction of this merger between state and corporate power in the US, one little piece of legislation and bail-out at a time. But none of this should be confused with the free market.

THIS IS WHAT LIBERTARIANS ACTUALLY BELIEVE