Can someone who’s good with economics explain to me, as you would a child, is “global GDP” a useful measure of human productivity, or of anything at all for that matter?
My understanding GDP is a measure of productivity (via total value goods/services), but it’s measured in dollars, which are a self-referential measure of people’s willingness to work or pay for a service. All of these goods and services also have differing values to consumers based on their circumstances. If I’m trying to conceptualize a “fundamental unit of productivity” I feel like no matter how I do it I end up in a recursion loop. What am I missing?
Secondarily, I was recently in a fast food place and realized what I thought was a police officer taking a break was actually a full-time security guard employed by the restaurant. This guard is presumably paid some amount X per year, which is rolled into the national GDP. If we compare to another country where low crime rates mean they don’t need a security guard at every McDonald’s, it seems in this instance that GDP has captured a societal drag on productivity and is treating it as a gain. True, the guard is producing a service, but the fact that the service is needed at all when in other countries it is not seems like there should also be some factor captured as a negative that is being missed. Are similar warping effects (e.g., make-work projects or services that are created to compensate for a societal failure) a major contributor to variations in GDP values? And if so, how useful can GDP be really?
bonsaii
22d ago
Then they successfully blamed Republicans and the profit motive for increasing the percentage of 29 hr/wk jobs with no healthcare, making all healthcare costs skyrocket, making doctors and nurses quit and new people not want to go into the field, and making Big Pharma rich.
I get the 29 hr/wk thing, assuming it's basically a variation on the minimum wage leads to less jobs argument.
Why does skyrocketing healthcare costs drive doctors and nurses to quit?
How does Big Pharma specifically benefit?
bonsaii
25d ago
Does anyone have good resources (textbooks, article collections, etc.) for understanding various supply chains (i.e., the interactions and dependencies of different economic sectors)? For example, if I wanted to trace the inputs required for chip manufacturing, where would I go to figure out the manufacturers of intermediate components all the way to which raw materials are needed/how are they extracted, as well as the associated transport, energy, and diplomatic needs?
bonsaii
30d ago
Does your position on the acceptability of braces/orthodontics for children differ from that for any of the following: eyelid surgery, nose job, lip filler, v-line jaw surgery? If so, why? (For purposes of this question assume that there are not medical indications for any of the above. I.e., consider only purely cosmetic cases, ignoring those in which braces may significantly improve chewing or where nose jobs may improve airflow, etc.
bonsaii
1mo ago
Even for something that happens every week at an average hospital, if you go from 10 residents to 40 you're going from residents who have trained on it 25 times to residents who may have only done it 6 times.
bonsaii
1mo ago
This may be true for some very common surgeries, but you still need the surgeons on staff to be trained in less common situations/surgeries as well. Otherwise, you have scenarios where you need a surgery but turns out the surgeon on shift has done that particular surgery once in his life and has to wing it.
bonsaii
1mo ago
But who would pay for necessary infrastructure and surgical supplies. Where are the patients going to get the MRI and CT scans necessary for pre-operative planning? The places that already have resources for those things have their own surgeons to train.
bonsaii
1mo ago
I think the problem here is that you often don't know what you're dealing with until you're already knee deep.
If we're keeping with the baseball analogy, the specialist is the guy you call when you already know you're up against the absolute best knuckleballers. The generalists are still out there dealing with most pitchers, who aren't the best at it but do mix in knuckleballs among fasts and curves. I guess the analogy I should have used is:
"If I'm betting my life on a baseball team, I want most of their batters to have at least gone up against a lot of knuckleballs in their life instead of a bunch of guys who've mostly only hit against fasts/curves and are going to be out there winging it for the first time if it turns out the opponent team has many solid knuckleball pitchers." (Sorry if this is bad baseball, I don't actually follow baseball)
bonsaii
1mo ago
Suppose surgery X is only needed by P patients per year per hospital, but surgical residents on average need to do at least C cases under supervision to reach competency. If residency is Y years long and you have R residency spots per hospital, then R is limited to C > Y P R.
bonsaii
1mo ago
Suppose surgery X is only needed by P patients per year per hospital, but surgical residents require C cases to reach competency. If residency is Y years long and you have R residency spots per hospital, then R is limited to C > Y P R.
You'd have to do this exercise for every type of surgery that a competent surgeon should know. Gallbladder is one of the most common (hence, one of the first to come off the top of my head), but you still need your local surgeon to be able to do the less known things as well. If I'm betting my life on a baseball player hitting a home run off a knuckleball pitcher, I want him to have at least gone up against a lot of knuckleballs in his life instead of a guy who's mostly only hit against fastball and curveballs and is going to be out there winging it for the first time.
bonsaii
1mo ago
I have many friends in medicine with whom I talk about these issues fairly often. My understanding based on these conversations is that you can't just go out and increase residency positions because the whole point of residency is to get sufficient exposure to cases. A surgical resident needs to do X gallbladder surgeries, Y appendix surgeries, etc. to reach competence and be able to perform independently. There are only so many patients who actually need those surgeries per year. Also, there are only so many teaching surgeons willing to supervise residents (teaching is almost universally a pay cut in medicine). Freeing the cap on residencies would mean a lot of doctors-in-training who waste time sitting on their hands and come out underprepared.
bonsaii
1mo ago
Do you think most C-suite executives are over, under, or appropriately paid relative to the market value of their labor?
Japan had a 20 year modernization head-start over South Korea, which in turn had a 20 year head-start over mainland China. Korea only very recently entered mainstream Western consciousness (only 2 decades ago Hank Hill's "so are you Chinese or Japanese?" was a pretty accurate depiction of the median American conception of East Asia) and mainland China is widely considered an authoritarian enemy-state.
Japan's hold is largely a function of it having been the first, and for a long period of time only, "developed" but "non-Western" place in the world. So it planted its flag as the premiere "exotic" destination that still had all of the first world comforts.
I'd agree that today Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and certain parts of mainland China all have comparable tourist options to offer Western visitors with incredible safety, transportation, and other conveniences to boot. I often work with videos like this in the background on a second screen and it makes me want to quit my job and spend a year or two just traveling China in particular. But the power of having been the first is a lot to overcome, so I doubt we'll see a "place, China" effect take anywhere as deep of a root.
It's commonly believed that music tastes crystallize around age 13-18. Whatever music you listened to then determines what you'll like for the rest of your life. "Not old" can mean a lot of things, but unless you were born after around 2005 your experience tracks with my own and many others.
Side note: I still have that teenager somewhere in me who wants to act too cool for anything made by a pop artist, but Anti-Hero (both original and its variants) is one I can't help but find genuinely enjoyable.
bonsaii
1mo ago
Google summary is the most hallucinatory AI I've ever used. For topics on which I have any familiarity, it seems wrong more often than it is right. It sets off sanity check alarms way too often. I'm frankly shocked they thought it was in a state to put front and center on their primary product.
bonsaii
1mo ago
Somewhere out there is an Obama-Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter and I genuinely want to know what guided that person's voting pattern.
bonsaii
1mo ago
As someone who has watched their youtube uploads since their start, I mostly just look forward to Saagar/Ryan shows these days. Both seem like genuine political obsessives who read a ton and frequently draw connections to political/historical context. Krystal just seems to react without any research as far as I can tell. Of the four, she's the only one where I feel like I can already predict her take on a segment before she speaks. I'm hoping they start having some Saagar/Ryan debates, since the Saagar/Krystal debates feel rather unproductive.
bonsaii
1mo ago
as the whole point of them is for the children of uber-elites to network with other children of uber-elites
I've heard this phrased as something like "merit laundering". Harvard et al. reserve part of the class for their primary clientele (uber-elites) and part of the class for the actual best students (IMO medalists, etc.) to maintain their legitimacy. They grade inflate and then everyone's resume line looks roughly the same coming out.
In this context, their aversion to non-holistic admissions makes sense. The intelligent, motivated, but not particularly exceptional kid with perfect SAT/GPA and a list of strategically selected, exaggerated extracurriculars who goes to Harvard only to eventually settle down as a private practice dermatologist in the suburbs contributes minimally to their true goal.
Then doesn't this turn into what is essentially an effective consumption tax, which is generally considered one of the most regressive forms of taxation, since percentage of income that goes to consumption is negatively correlated with income? Even worse, imported goods are more likely to be the kinds of goods that the average family spends most of their money on: appliances, groceries, cars, electronics, etc. The excess consumption of the wealthy is largely in the form of luxury services (personal cleaners, drivers, chefs, accountants, lawyers, etc.) or housing, which would be far less affected by tariffs, if at all.
My other concern is that the floor due to higher American wages may in fact be higher that the ceiling you talk about, where most people are just unwilling/unable to buy that good any more.
I don't think this is something you can execute via homeschooling alone unless either parent or a closely involved grandparent is multilingual, but I think there's a lot of value in having early exposure bilingualism in children, particularly with two distant languages like English and Mandarin (in comparison, I don't think there's a whole lot of perspective to be gained from a kid knowing both Spanish and Portuguese). I know well-educated, reasonably intelligent adults who still think translating between languages is largely a 1:1 mapping or never thought about the ways that differing language structures make it so certain ideas can't be expressed with the same set of connotations. I suspect the experience of being bilingual itself can be an early lesson in distinguishing map from territory.
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