Thought you were posting a response to the figures I gave establishing that claims of 'cooked' CPI figures were total bunk.
The poor economic conditions are indicative of irreversible structural changes that are occurring in the global economy. The combination of globalization and automation (via software and robotics) means that low-skill western laborers (and yes that includes a bunch of our college grads with non-STEM educations) have essentially been priced out of the labor market. There is no recovery for that on the horizon.
Secular stagnation may happen one day, that's true. And we might be there right now... but people were convinced we were facing secular stagnation in the early 2000s, in the early 90s, in the late 70s... the term was coined to predict the future of the economic world as the world failed to recover from the Great Depression.
Declaring that "it's definitely here this time you guys" without any explanation of why this depression is any different is, well, a little uninteresting.
When you combine it with the inability to discharge student loan debt via bankruptcy or other means the result is that our recent grads are likely to be shackled to a lifetime of debt/wage slavery.
Once again, college loans from completed degrees are among the highest repaid loans. Failure to repay is only high among students who fail to graduate.
Arable land generates foodstuffs that can be sold = generates cashflow (in addition to guaranteeing your survival in the absence of money)
Skills in robotics = virtual guarantee of employment given the drive for more and more automation = generates cashflow
So by your own criteria those are both investments. And advising someone to pursue them would therefore be investment advice. -_-
If you want to play word games, then we can keep running down that rabbithole until we conclude that telling someone to take the bus is investment advice, because it's cheaper than a taxi and therefore leaves more cash in the pocket for which to acquire future economic benefits. But that'd be stupid, and would frustrate people who want actual, real economic advice for what they can invest in, without requiring extensive reading in
IT and moving the family to a country with cheap farming land.
Look, you really don't have to tilt at windmills over every single part of conventional economic wisdom. Come in with your own ideas and have a little healthy skepticism, but right now you're so off the reservation that all your own ideas and skepticism does is remove you from relevance.
College is a bubble because of the ginormous tuition and fees in the US. Which is the government's fault, because it throws money at students via loans with the mistaken theory that "everyone benefits from college!" and the universities just take all that loan money, ramp up tuition, and pay their bloated administrative faculties insane wages. The bitcoin network has value as a near-free method of payment processing, outside of centralized government control.
The first bubble is bad because it involves government, the second is good because it doesn't involve government. Ideology is setting your understanding of the facts, and not vice versa.
So before you claimed that the value of money *WOULDN'T* diminish over time, but now you state "well of course you'll lose money".
No, I didn't, and that's just a really weird response. It's weird in that you think anyone, anywhere would argue that non-interesting earning money wouldn't decline in real value over time, and probably even weirder that you think that's what is being debated.
What is actually being said is that anyone can earn a risk free return above inflation... banks pay above inflation on term deposits. The two reasons a sum of money won't achieve this is because it is a transaction account, or because the owner of the account is an idiot.
At the end of the day, the CPI in its myriad forms is just a model. I'd instead challenge everyone here to build YOUR personal basket of consumption goods and take look at how prices have changed.
Yeah, and it's a model that won't describe the exact specfics of everyone's personal basket of goods, but one that will get close enough. And while it is possible for people to go through and complete their own basket of goods and measure their own personal inflation... that rate would still be only suggestive, and likely to have little material difference to the overall rate.
Your implication that people's personal rates might be wildly different is highly fanciful, and really just an effort to backtrack on your earlier claim that the official rates were cooked.
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azazel the cat wrote:An economist with a million dollars in a chequing account is an apt a description of why you should give the advice of economists and the advice of magic 8-balls the same level of credibility.
There's plenty of really good economists out there. None who are perfect, but plenty who are right very often, and more importantly do a very good job of explaining their thinking so that you will be more capable of forming your own opinion.
Someone who understands the stupidity of doing that.
