this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
5 points (69.2% liked)
Neoliberal
62 readers
1 users here now
Free trade, open borders, taco trucks on every corner. Latest discussion thread: April 2024 **We in m/Neoliberal support:** - Free trade and competitive markets
- Immigration
- YIMBYism – ‘yes in my backyard’-ism
- Carbon taxes
- Internationalism and supranational governance – e.g. the EU, UN, NATO, IMF
- LGBTQ+ rights
- Democracy, human rights, civil liberties and due process Neoliberals can be found in many political parties and we are not dogmatic supporters of specific parties. But we tend to find ourselves agreeing more often with parties that espouse liberal values, internationalism and centrist economics, such as the Democrats in the US, Liberal Democrats in the UK, FDP in Germany, Renaissance/MoDem in France, the Liberal Party in Canada, and so on. **Further reading** - I’m a neoliberal. Maybe you are too.
- The neoliberal mind
- Neo-liberalism and its prospects
- Neoliberalism: the genesis of a political swear word **News sources** Here are some suggested news sources that we like and tend to find reliable. Please note that posts and threads are not at all limited to these sources! - The Economist https://www.economist.com/
- Financial Times https://www.ft.com/
- The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/
- New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/
- The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/world/
- The New European https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/
- Vox https://www.vox.com/
founded 2 years ago
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Author is heavily opinionated and Kinda uses stats as a weapon. Ignores that a lot of those jobs are part-time, non benefitted positions or that corporations are buying houses making it hard for the younger generations to buy one. Not to mention wage gaps and vanishing pensions, etc.
But certainly, tell me more about how I should be positive about end game capitalism.
These are measurable, objective things that people are getting wrong:
These are core facts about the US economy. I don't think it's okay to say 'they answered incorrectly because they're worried about other things that weren't being asked about'.
A functioning democracy is predicted on having a rational electorate. But the repeated evidence of the last several years is that huge numbers of American voters seem unable to grasp the objective facts and reality of the country and world that they live in. For a long time we've all focused on the right-wing extremist angle to this - climate change denial, anti-vaxxers, 6 January denial, and so on. But the next US election is going to be centred around the economy, yet it seems like a lot of voters (drawn from both left and right?) are being influenced by a subjective worldview of the US economy that differs from objective measurable reality. They're going up vibe themselves into a Trump presidency.
Inflation is "falling" in the sense that it's going up less fast than it was. It's still rising, but at a slower pace when compared to the same period last year. Americans are not wrong to think inflation is still a problem. It may be objectively "falling" but do not mistake this for deflation, which is not occurring.
This kinds of makes ops point. The us actually usually targets an inflation rate around 2-3%. The fact that we are close to those numbers means, at least if we trust the way it's measured, inflation has been largely brought under control.
You seem unsure here about the difference between inflation and prices. Inflation is the rate of change of prices.
Positive inflation means that prices are rising. Inflation is falling because prices are rising slower than they were a year ago. You seem to think that 'falling inflation' would lead to falling prices - it would not.
Falling prices would be a very bad thing. That's something called deflation and tends to be associated with economic crashes like the 1930s. If prices were falling, people would put off spending money on anything except essentials because they'd be able to buy things cheaper tomorrow, which tends to lead to a self-reinforcing economic depression and mass unemployment.
Deflation is necessary to revert to the correct mean of prices if they were not skewed by subsidies and other regulatory manipulation of the market. Deflation may be "bad" in the same sense that it's bad to break somebody's leg, but sometimes doctors have to do that to get the leg to heal correctly. We are in need of deflation to bring prices closer to the real mean and restore the ability of lower economic quintiles to actually live.
The layperson's meaning is prices going down. The above post is absolutely the correct view for everyone in the bottom 80% of income or wealth. Individual items deflate in price all the time and wanting prices to fall is a perfectly rational personal view.
If the price of one thing falls, that's isolated. If the price level - the price of all things - falls, then that's deflation and it's historically been one of the most destructive economic events that can happen to an economy and to ordinary people and their jobs and livelihoods.
Wanting the price level to fall is far from rational, and the fact that people might think otherwise in spite of the historic precedents is exactly the sort of mass irrationality I am worried about.