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ShumaGorath wrote:I don't think it accounts for the difference alone, but my college was 80 square miles of well manicured grass and forest. That is not cheap. I was mentioning the landscaping more to point out the prioritization of the colleges I have experienced towards looking like better schools then they are.

Sure, there's certainly an element of looking all Ivy league by, like, having Ivy growing on buildings and having grass for students to sit on.

But really, the cost comes down to the wages bill, and that comes from having academic and professional staff who simply aren't doing as much as they should.


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ShumaGorath wrote:1. Automation has made the modern American factory worker irrelevant while foreign labor has made him noncompetitive. We can solve one of the two with tarrifs or other self destructive isolationist trade laws, but not the other. Virtually every simple manufacturing job that exists can be automated to a high degree and many technical jobs such as auto building or parts machining can be better done with purpose built machines then they can humans.

I'm puzzled by the way in which people come to see these things as a problem. If there was a menial task that a person used to have to do, that we can now do with a machine... good. If this means that there is less work for people than there used to be, and this results in someone being laid off of work, then it seems a very strange idea that the solution is to stop the robots. Why no consider shorter working weeks?

It honestly staggers me that people will not consider such as an option. Instead we all work longer weeks, engaging our new machines to produce more and more crap that we really don't need.

2: The stock market no longer serves it's intended purpose.

The stock market still works fine. The day traders are, for the most part, suckers that either lose money or invest countless hours for little overall pay, just to add liquidity to the system.

The problems in the financial sector are more in financing, and the increasing complexity of financial systems they employ, that makes it near impossible to properly gauge the risk undertaken by portfolios, and this functions with the extremely generous bonus common today to give account managers the incentive to build high risk portfolios and hide the risk, so they take a high bonus if the risk works, and walk away if the risk fails, leaving the investor with the loss. And it isn't just main street investors struggling to keep up with new level of complexity, much of the GFC came from the failure of companies themselves to understand the scope of the exposures they were taking on, given how complex derivatives had become.

3: Noncompetitive competition. There is no reason to pay workers in America when you can pay someone in cambodia a fourtieth as much and get the same quality of sock.

It doesn't cost that much to ship things around the world. The biggest issue here is that people need to stop trying to pretend you can have high wages and a textile industry. They need to read about comparative advantage, understand that while you complain about their low wages, they complain about the education in your workplace and the sophistication of your industries, and in the mean time the market goes about accounting for both and putting the incentives in place for you to build aircraft and the like, and for them to print t-shirts.

4: Peak oil. You know what it is. I know what it is. It's going to destroy us and no one is going to do anything about it until it's too late to make forty years worth of infrastructure changes in 10.

People keep keep claiming the great recession of peak oil is just around the corner, when oil doubles in price. Except oil did double in price from 2005 until 2011. And again from 1999 to 2005. It is certainly a restricting factor on growth and a serious argument towards investing in other energy sources, but it it certainly looks like the prophecies of doom are far fetched.

6: Americas budget problems. This is mostly healthcare. Obamacare is a loose bandaid and nothing has been done to fundamentally alter the issues with modern healthcare.

Pretty much. The US budget isn't that far from the rest of us, except we spend more on social services, and you spend more on tanks and jails. The real cause driving issues is the completely out of control level of health spending. I used to have a comment in my sig that the US has a budget deficit in the short term because it is in recession, and it has a long term budget problem because of healthcare costs, and that still sums it up.


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Phryxis wrote:I think, given what we've seen over the past 5-ish years, that it goes without saying that financial regulatory reform long overdue. I'm a generally conservative/libertarian/free market sort of person, but even I feel that more extensive and direct control is necessary.

Thing is, the stock market is the most heavily controlled market in the world. It has such tight controls over information release and the like precisely because it works better as a market with those controls in place. There's no reason such controls couldn't be applied to other markets, to make them function better as markets.

That said, I offer this unsubstantiated assertion: when we do get "financial regulatory reform" it will just be the same oligarchs further entrenching rules that benefit them, while people like Paul Krugman lie to us about how their political allies did something good. People like Paul Krugman are just trying to win the PR battle for their patron oligarchs (George Soros), even as conservatives try to win the PR battle for theirs (the Koch brothers).

I agree that the same old oligarchs will likely win the next round, with legislation either crafted to look like it does something, while it does nothing, or

But you've really got the wrong impression of Krugman. The guy simply isn't a cheerleader, and is just as critical of the Democrats for their policy failures. I really recommend you give him a chance, and read through his back catalogue.

Not that it's easy. Modern banking/finance has grown so abstract and internecine that even educated people can't fully grasp the big picture.

Yeah, absolutely. Even if you do know what's going on, it's near impossible to write legislation to stop, because there's always a work around. A principle based system is probably the better option, but that's hardly perfect either.

I don't think so... It doesn't really matter how rich people are, it matters much more how poor the rest of the people are...

It matters because it defines where the benefits are in the system. We've had a great last hundred years, because for the most part hard work and education paid off, and was rewarded. This encouraged people to get more skills, and work harder, which in turn grew productivity and made everyone richer. When you have that kind of economy, you see grow in income across most percentiles, and you see a high rate of social mobility.

But as the graph shows, in the last few decades most of the growth in income has been to the top 1%. A look elsewhere will show social mobility is poorer in the US than it is just about anywhere else in the developed world. This shapes less towards a meritocracy, and more towards an oligarchy.

The problem then becomes that the way to get ahead is to get connected, be part of the wealthy, powerful elite, or get to know them. Hard work and good skills are no longer as valuable. As a result, you remove the incentive towards hard work and education, and the economy begins to slow.

Honestly, this is why I hate Paul Krugman. He's focused on directing animosity at the wealthiest 1%. It's class warfare. It's him trying to find a message that wins votes for his political allies. It doesn't matter what the wealthiest 1% has. It matters that 100% have what they need, live as happy and rewarding lives as possible. Worrying about the wealthiest 1% is hating, it's not useful.

I think you need to read more from Krugman. That simply doesn't characterise his writing at all.

I DETEST these people who talk about the wealthy paying their "fair share." They already pay far more than their "fair share." It's not about "fairness" it's about "maximizing tax revenue." The wealthy SHOULD pay more taxes, not because it's "fair" but because it's "effective."

I agree entirely.

Yup. It's like fancy trading cards. I'm not sure how it could be regulated, but I'd like to see a system that requires dividend payments on all publicly traded stocks. If you're not sharing profits, it's not a stock, period.

Huh? So start up companies like Amazon would have been punished for developing new markets...

sebster wrote:
But really, the cost comes down to the wages bill, and that comes from having academic and professional staff who simply aren't doing as much as they should.

What's the average wage for a first year professor in Australia?

dogma wrote:What's the average wage for a first year professor in Australia?

I don't know the average across Australia, but where I work the base rate for permanent academic staff is $102k. But then there's performance bonuses, and retention bonuses on top of that, and industry allowances to make sure certain fields can compete against high paying industries like law and business.

But to get to that point there's normally been a fairly long slog through fairly poorly paid academia, with a high attrition rate. I don't begrudge anyone earning that cash, I just wish there were better systems for picking who got it, and who stayed.

I'm puzzled by the way in which people come to see these things as a problem. If there was a menial task that a person used to have to do, that we can now do with a machine... good. If this means that there is less work for people than there used to be, and this results in someone being laid off of work, then it seems a very strange idea that the solution is to stop the robots. Why no consider shorter working weeks?

It honestly staggers me that people will not consider such as an option. Instead we all work longer weeks, engaging our new machines to produce more and more crap that we really don't need.

I wouldn't expect that to change any time soon. The death of work and the birth of true automation won't come for another century at least, and by then we're going to have some severe social problems. Part of the problem with oligarchs is that they own the means of operation. While workers become outmoded they do not, and while we become poor the wealth is consolidated into those that 'own' the machines. A machine is just a worker that you don't have to pay.

The stock market still works fine. The day traders are, for the most part, suckers that either lose money or invest countless hours for little overall pay, just to add liquidity to the system.

The problems in the financial sector are more in financing, and the increasing complexity of financial systems they employ, that makes it near impossible to properly gauge the risk undertaken by portfolios, and this functions with the extremely generous bonus common today to give account managers the incentive to build high risk portfolios and hide the risk, so they take a high bonus if the risk works, and walk away if the risk fails, leaving the investor with the loss. And it isn't just main street investors struggling to keep up with new level of complexity, much of the GFC came from the failure of companies themselves to understand the scope of the exposures they were taking on, given how complex derivatives had become.

I agree, but I would argue that it doesn't work fine for these exact reasons. The fact that the stock market dived 700 points in 5 hours because the HFT algorithms scared each other should tell you that something is very wrong.

It doesn't cost that much to ship things around the world. The biggest issue here is that people need to stop trying to pretend you can have high wages and a textile industry. They need to read about comparative advantage, understand that while you complain about their low wages, they complain about the education in your workplace and the sophistication of your industries, and in the mean time the market goes about accounting for both and putting the incentives in place for you to build aircraft and the like, and for them to print t-shirts.

This ties pretty heavily into the automation issue. There is simply far less industrial work for Americans to do. Not everyone wants a service sector job and those don't pay well. We're going to be entering an age of stratification where a college degree is the difference between being able to survive or not. Construction and manufacturing used to be the bridge, one is dead and the other is severely depressed. This is a societal change as much as it is economic and we're not preparing for it.

People keep keep claiming the great recession of peak oil is just around the corner, when oil doubles in price. Except oil did double in price from 2005 until 2011. And again from 1999 to 2005. It is certainly a restricting factor on growth and a serious argument towards investing in other energy sources, but it it certainly looks like the prophecies of doom are far fetched.

Project the averaged increase over the last 10 years in prices and continue it for the next 20 while accounting for fluctuations. The projected prices in 2030 are not pretty. Scarcity isn't an immediate problem. I should of listed it later with water and soil erosion as one of those very real boogeymen that people don't want to believe in because the change is slow.

ShumaGorath wrote:I wouldn't expect that to change any time soon. The death of work and the birth of true automation won't come for another century at least, and by then we're going to have some severe social problems.

Absolutely, and surely the best solution in the interim period would be for people to work reduced hours. But it isn't even considered, people are too concerned with owning more stuff to keep up with the neighbours, and don't seem to realise the neighbours are just doing the same.

I agree, but I would argue that it doesn't work fine for these exact reasons. The fact that the stock market dived 700 points in 5 hours because the HFT algorithms scared each other should tell you that something is very wrong.

It's funny that people only ever talk about the market going down when they talk about market failures. Really, I'd argue the biggest market failure in recent history is how overvalued it became before the GFC.

The machines running their numbers and dropping shares is really no different to when brokers used to do the same, both are the product of stocks being held simply because they're stocks to be held. It's a problem, sure, but it isn't a new problem.

This ties pretty heavily into the automation issue. There is simply far less industrial work for Americans to do. Not everyone wants a service sector job and those don't pay well. We're going to be entering an age of stratification where a college degree is the difference between being able to survive or not. Construction and manufacturing used to be the bridge, one is dead and the other is severely depressed. This is a societal change as much as it is economic and we're not preparing for it.

Funnily enough, the idea that the primary driver of growing inequality was a college education was what Krugman argued against in the article I linked to at the beginning. Instead, in the US the top 2 to 20% of income earners have about held even in their share of income, and all the inequality was funelled into the top 1%.

Manufacturing isn't dead, either. The US is still the biggest manufacturer in the world, it's just that manufacturing is focussing increasingly on high end stuff (to take advantage of the high skill levels) and moving away from low end stuff (because of the cost of US labour). Sure, the former sector is more capital intensive and less labour intensive, but I just can't see an alternative.

Project the averaged increase over the last 10 years in prices and continue it for the next 20 while accounting for fluctuations. The projected prices in 2030 are not pretty. Scarcity isn't an immediate problem. I should of listed it later with water and soil erosion as one of those very real boogeymen that people don't want to believe in because the change is slow.

They are all serious issues, I absolutely agree, but you were framing it in terms of economic collapse, and I just can't see that. What we'll see instead is steadily growing oil prices, that will slow economic growth. But it won't cause a sudden, dramatic collapse.

Absolutely, and surely the best solution in the interim period would be for people to work reduced hours. But it isn't even considered, people are too concerned with owning more stuff to keep up with the neighbours, and don't seem to realise the neighbours are just doing the same.

It doesn't help that worker compensation is not rising in key with the falling requirement for hours worked. Nor are prices falling. The worker must continue to work to maintain the previous standard of living, but there is less work and less pay to go around.

It's funny that people only ever talk about the market going down when they talk about market failures. Really, I'd argue the biggest market failure in recent history is how overvalued it became before the GFC.

The machines running their numbers and dropping shares is really no different to when brokers used to do the same, both are the product of stocks being held simply because they're stocks to be held. It's a problem, sure, but it isn't a new problem.

Its a house that started being built in the 80s. At what point does a house that's being built stop being constructed and starts being a new house? It's semantics regardless, market volatility and the quick turnaround minded nature of modern corporate capitalism are new in the sense that they lie starkly different then what was experienced in the sixties. The day of the corporate career, where allegiance to a company was your day and where your healthcare needs and future stability were almost taken for granted are gone. The labor market is vastly more fluid now, while the traditional mechanisms for retraining (college/apprenticing) or absorbing those cut out from it (manufacturing or well paying service jobs) are diminishing daily. The stock market is a much fiercer and more convoluted place, and I would argue that it's role in capital investment for businesses is tarnished by it's role as a money engine for major banks and career traders (a hedge funds only purpose is to aggregate wealth, and they do it on the backs of mom and pop investors).

Funnily enough, the idea that the primary driver of growing inequality was a college education was what Krugman argued against in the article I linked to at the beginning. Instead, in the US the top 2 to 20% of income earners have about held even in their share of income, and all the inequality was funelled into the top 1%.

It's not the primary driver, but it's an observable trend. The availability of jobs to those without college degrees has been shrinking for decades. It's hit a head with this recession. It's a shifting at the bottom, not a shifting at the top. While the top 20% aren't sharing the bottom 20% is still restructuring what scraps are available.

Manufacturing isn't dead, either.

Untrained manufacturing work might as well be. That whole automation business and whatnot. The market is dying for more CNC operators, but people that worked paper mills for 20 years can't do that.

The US is still the biggest manufacturer in the world, it's just that manufacturing is focussing increasingly on high end stuff (to take advantage of the high skill levels) and moving away from low end stuff (because of the cost of US labour). Sure, the former sector is more capital intensive and less labour intensive, but I just can't see an alternative.

An alternative for maintaining profitability or an alternative for the workers? No one blames the robots any more, that sentiment went away in the 90s. This still leaves millions in the lurch as they search for similarly paying jobs requiring unskilled labor. They don't really exist any more. The day of the 16 dollar an hour man pulling a lever is dead, but those people aren't. Germany has done a brilliant job with state sponsored retraining schools. America has floundered for a decade, promising people that the jobs are coming back if we can just pin down china.

They are all serious issues, I absolutely agree, but you were framing it in terms of economic collapse, and I just can't see that. What we'll see instead is steadily growing oil prices, that will slow economic growth. But it won't cause a sudden, dramatic collapse.

There is little difference between a severe restructuring and a collapse. Automation, food/water shortages, and energy scarcity are going to lead to some interesting and hard times in the western world. That these will all come to a head simultaneously is going to be an issue. I could certainly be off on my prediction, I'm not a soothesayer. I'm just calling it like I see it.

sebster wrote:
I don't know the average across Australia, but where I work the base rate for permanent academic staff is $102k. But then there's performance bonuses, and retention bonuses on top of that, and industry allowances to make sure certain fields can compete against high paying industries like law and business.

But to get to that point there's normally been a fairly long slog through fairly poorly paid academia, with a high attrition rate. I don't begrudge anyone earning that cash, I just wish there were better systems for picking who got it, and who stayed.

Interesting, that's actually about the same as it is here (Illinois) when adjusted for exchange rates (unless you already did that). I suppose the additional cost might be in departmental support (basically graduate assistants). Ours make something like 45k on average, including benefits, with the higher paid ones bringing in over 60k.

I wonder what they do with all that money...

I mean they don't reinvest it, or start up new businesses or do anything really to make new jobs.

Maybe they swim in it?

Gind it up and snort it off the bums of million dollar hookers maybe?

Ma55ter_fett wrote:Gind it up and snort it off the bums of million dollar hookers maybe?

I'd rather have a million one dollar hookers.

ShumaGorath wrote:It doesn't help that worker compensation is not rising in key with the falling requirement for hours worked. Nor are prices falling. The worker must continue to work to maintain the previous standard of living, but there is less work and less pay to go around.

And how crazy is that, that we have automation improving productivity every day, but the average worker is no better off? So the answer is to work longer and longer hours in less and less valuable positions, to keep up with the standards of the neighbour.

Its a house that started being built in the 80s. At what point does a house that's being built stop being constructed and starts being a new house? It's semantics regardless, market volatility and the quick turnaround minded nature of modern corporate capitalism are new in the sense that they lie starkly different then what was experienced in the sixties. The day of the corporate career, where allegiance to a company was your day and where your healthcare needs and future stability were almost taken for granted are gone. The labor market is vastly more fluid now, while the traditional mechanisms for retraining (college/apprenticing) or absorbing those cut out from it (manufacturing or well paying service jobs) are diminishing daily. The stock market is a much fiercer and more convoluted place, and I would argue that it's role in capital investment for businesses is tarnished by it's role as a money engine for major banks and career traders (a hedge funds only purpose is to aggregate wealth, and they do it on the backs of mom and pop investors).

I agree that corporate mentality has changed, and much of the old standards of governance are gone. But I'd argue the stock market merely reflects that.

It's not the primary driver, but it's an observable trend. The availability of jobs to those without college degrees has been shrinking for decades. It's hit a head with this recession. It's a shifting at the bottom, not a shifting at the top. While the top 20% aren't sharing the bottom 20% is still restructuring what scraps are available.

Absolutely. Thing is, if the top 20% were moving away from the bottom 20% as a group, then it'd be a problem with a known solution - improve the skills of those beneath the top 20%, let them compete that way. Unfortunately, there's a whole other problem going on, with the extremely well connected drawing more and more of the wealth creation, leaving the rest either treading water or falling further back.

Untrained manufacturing work might as well be. That whole automation business and whatnot. The market is dying for more CNC operators, but people that worked paper mills for 20 years can't do that.

Sure, and the point is that the US with it's high skill base just should be doing untrained manufacturing.

An alternative for maintaining profitability or an alternative for the workers?

An alternative that maintains the high median wage and has people working unskilled, low value-added jobs. You either have to give up, and drop wages to compete with China, or you have to try and keep your workforce one step ahead, doing stuff unskilled labour cannot do.

Germany has done a brilliant job with state sponsored retraining schools. America has floundered for a decade, promising people that the jobs are coming back if we can just pin down china.

Yeah, it does take committed, long term government efforts to maintain a high skill level across the workforce. Germany has done it very well, and still there's countless champions of the free market calling for them to shut down all their pricey training institutions. It takes political fortitude and a long term vision to maintain those kinds of programs.

There is little difference between a severe restructuring and a collapse.

There is a basica difference between the sluggish growth of the early and mid-00s, and the GFC.


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dogma wrote:Interesting, that's actually about the same as it is here (Illinois) when adjusted for exchange rates (unless you already did that). I suppose the additional cost might be in departmental support (basically graduate assistants). Ours make something like 45k on average, including benefits, with the higher paid ones bringing in over 60k.

I think it might be in the number of professional staff supporting the academics, but more likely it's in the level of outputs. So how many academics are primarily focussed on teaching classes with half a dozen or even fewer students, and how many academics just aren't pulling in the research dollars they ought to be.


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Ma55ter_fett wrote:I wonder what they do with all that money...

I mean they don't reinvest it, or start up new businesses or do anything really to make new jobs.

Maybe they swim in it?

Gind it up and snort it off the bums of million dollar hookers maybe?

Read the fething thread.

The issue isn't that there's rich people. We all know that, and no-one is freaking out about that.

The issue is that in the last three decades almost all the new income generated in the US has gone to the richest of the rich. This has serious effects on productivity, because people have been motivated primarily by getting useful skills and working hard (ie being useful) and this has driven the economic growth and prosperity of the US for a couple of centuries. But when more and more of the wealth is held by very few, the primary incentive isn't to be useful, but to be well connected, at which point why bother working hard when you're better off just schmoozing with the right people.

Go look at Saudi Arabia. See how despite the existance of an immense level of wealth at the top tier of the country, industry and development is practically dead?

Do you get it now?

I agree that corporate mentality has changed, and much of the old standards of governance are gone. But I'd argue the stock market merely reflects that.

I suppose it's unhelpful to measure the stock market through a lens of sixty years ago. In which case I ask, is it needed? Does it perform a function in modern society outside of aggregating wealth for those with means? It's role as an evaluation of business worth has been questionable for at least a decade. The stock market doesn't seem to evaluate the assets within the stock market evenly or logically very often.

There is a basica difference between the sluggish growth of the early and mid-00s, and the GFC.

But very little difference in america pre and post collapse and japans lost decade. Once the sound and fury is done it signifies the same thing in the end. Mind you I actually am predicting a rolling collapse as businesses become unprofitable however. We'll just have to wait and see!

All I got to say is really, you're just now noticing this?

This is why I have zero faith in politics and refuse to discuss it seriously with anyone. People are completely blind to what America is and has been for the past 150+ years.

Amaya wrote:All I got to say is really, you're just now noticing this?

This is why I have zero faith in politics and refuse to discuss it seriously with anyone. People are completely blind to what America is and has been for the past 150+ years.

Don't you dare bring the 1860s into this!

ShumaGorath wrote:I suppose it's unhelpful to measure the stock market through a lens of sixty years ago. In which case I ask, is it needed? Does it perform a function in modern society outside of aggregating wealth for those with means? It's role as an evaluation of business worth has been questionable for at least a decade. The stock market doesn't seem to evaluate the assets within the stock market evenly or logically very often.

The market is the primary source of capital for large companies. It may not always perfectly assess asset values, but it's better than anything else, by a long way.

It's a key part of our economies.

But very little difference in america pre and post collapse and japans lost decade. Once the sound and fury is done it signifies the same thing in the end. Mind you I actually am predicting a rolling collapse as businesses become unprofitable however. We'll just have to wait and see!

I think there's a big difference between the two. Nations will struggle through a period of flat growth, like Japan struggled through it's lost decade, but will suffer far more when GDP is actually contracting.

The market is the primary source of capital for large companies. It may not always perfectly assess asset values, but it's better than anything else, by a long way.

It's a key part of our economies.

It's also been the key part of our last two recessions, market bubbles, and the current drama over food prices. It's destabilizing effect on world economies is growing and it's a primary contributor (one could say the primary contributor) to the eurozone crisis. I well and truly understand the fact that it's a key part to the current global economy, but is it still worth it? Do you honestly see global markets becoming less complex or the money making schemes on them becoming less convoluted? Following trends I can only see it having a more deleterious effect on main street as it becomes more unstable in the future.

I think there's a big difference between the two. Nations will struggle through a period of flat growth, like Japan struggled through it's lost decade, but will suffer far more when GDP is actually contracting.

Well that depends on how long each lasts. If America had 7 years of growth and a crash that sets it all back to the start over the next three is it better or worse then simply having no growth at all over that period? (not that this has anything to do with the original point any more)

Phryxis wrote:From the top, does having a billion dollars really mean anything? And do these people really even have a billion dollars?

That's a case of someone asking the wrong question, I think; a better one is "why have their incomes increased so drastically while everyone else's is stagnating, not even matching inflation?"


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sebster wrote:Why no consider shorter working weeks?

They do, I think, but both the worker and the company don't like it.

Japan is well into its second lost decade and there are few signs of recovery.

The government is useless and only really exists as an oligarchy trying to perpetuate the current power system of the civil service and industrial power blocs maintained by concessions to rural districts whose votes are vastly overvalued because voting district boundaries haven't been adjusted for decades.

The way the government keeps going is by relying on the massive household savings of the Japanese public in the pseudo-independent Japan Post Office bank. Once that runs out, a hard rain is going to fall.

ShumaGorath wrote:It's also been the key part of our last two recessions, market bubbles, and the current drama over food prices. It's destabilizing effect on world economies is growing and it's a primary contributor (one could say the primary contributor) to the eurozone crisis. I well and truly understand the fact that it's a key part to the current global economy, but is it still worth it? Do you honestly see global markets becoming less complex or the money making schemes on them becoming less convoluted? Following trends I can only see it having a more deleterious effect on main street as it becomes more unstable in the future.

I see marketsset ups becoming more complex, as derivatives become increasingly sophisticated. The problem with the complexity of the derivatives is the amount of unknowns they introduce, so the answer is not to remove the largest public markets in the world.

We need more openness, greater levels of public information, not less.

Well that depends on how long each lasts. If America had 7 years of growth and a crash that sets it all back to the start over the next three is it better or worse then simply having no growth at all over that period? (not that this has anything to do with the original point any more)

Sustained, steady economic activity is far less likely to produce waste, than wild swings in economic activity.