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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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Meade's paper seems reasonable, in terms of an academic squabble. What I struggle more with is turning it into a coherent critique at the current moment, especially trying to reconcile it with your other statements and your other link. For example, you focused on quality adjustments, which as I mentioned, I understand there are some difficulties there... but Meade basically didn't talk about those at all. American Compass seemed to embrace something like real value added with their first two "grounding factors", while their third seems to me to be irrelevant. It also sort of randomly shifted to focusing solely on output, but included some bollocks claims like, "...BEA significantly overstates the growth of the computer sector (NIACS 334) because it assumes that when a computer doubles in speed due to Moore’s law that actual production doubled..." when their citations for this claim do absolutely no such thing. I'm just really struggling to scrap together a specific, coherent complaint that I can just go look at and see, "Yes, right here is where the actually-claimed numbers actually go bollocks, and now I can see that I should be interpreting this entirely differently."