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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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That can't explain why the US has had such a good recovery from the pandemic while Canada hasn't. Big tech is the only industry that has had mass layoffs while the rest of the US economy has been booming since the pandemic. The increase in wages has mostly gone to low skilled workers.

We didn’t do nearly as much as other places did which makes it far easier to get back to normal functioning.

Why would that mean the GDP growth rate would be higher? I would expect the opposite: if you shut down more of your economy, you get more growth when you start things up again.

Because it still takes some time to get things back up and running. You don’t store materials on hand to ramp back up immediately, and therefore you need to order them, but that company may have shut down as well and has nothing to sell until their suppliers mine the raw materials to use. The problem of shutting down a just-in-time logistics system is that there’s no slack in the system to hold reserves of unsold goods. If I can’t sell it, I won’t make it, and if the guy supply the inputs can’t sell them he won’t have any on hand, and so on. Starting back up takes longer.

Isn’t that just baumol costs disease? Highly paid professionals can afford a lot of service sector people therefore bidding up their price?

I would say there are other factors going on too but big tech rents flow into the US and has been a huge change since 2012.

Commodities also have been mostly down since 2018 which would have a disproportionate effect on Canada.

Canadá likely has higher IQ than the US which actually makes them at 72% of US income even more impressive. Though our top .5% are likely far smarter than their top .5% the overall average likely favors Canada.

Isn’t that just baumol costs disease? Highly paid professionals can afford a lot of service sector people therefore bidding up their price?

That's not what Baumol cost disease is, but in any case, no, service sector workers' wages have gone up while professionals' salaries have not.

Commodities also have been mostly down since 2018 which would have a disproportionate effect on Canada.

That could have something to do with it. The last time our economy really did well was during the 2000s commodity boom.

Big tech profits are still up even if employee wages are less. The money is flowing somewhere.

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