The “transitory” disphit-ass fucknuggests were wrong at the time, wrong when they declared victory, wrong now, and will continue to be wrong in the future.
Transitory it was not. It was so annoying when Team Transitory was declaring victory when inflation was still 40% above the US historical norm. And it still is. Just shows that to most people, facts and reality do not matter even a little bit. Being on the right team does.
Assuming 2.5% inflation per year, in 2026 dollars that’s $340,000. Doesn’t seem quite as onerous then.
And if you paid an extra $400 per month on the mortgage reliably, it’d be $285,000 interest in 2026 dollars. People like to “do the math” but don’t actually do the math.
Spent 20 hours on a technical test just to be ghosted by a recruiter.
General rule of thumb: Any test relating to a role that takes longer than an hour or so to complete is intended to steal your work and use it somewhere, not to give you a job.
Always push back or outright refuse.
The Third Worldification of the First World.
That is going to be very, very bad.
That’s what should happen. But it won’t.
It’s AI. My company has canceled at least one hire due to no longer needing the role since AI is doing 100% of the job.
And that’s how it’ll happen. Despite flashy layoffs (Oracle, Microsoft), most of the results of AI will be people who are not hired: junior and even mid-level people in various tech fields just aren’t obligatory to bring on board any longer. And that is only going to get worse.
So, in other words, the problem is not and won’t be firing. It’ll be lack of hiring.
And yes, this will soon happen to other fields1, as it always does. As usual, tech just gets hit first.
I think there’s something to this. Hell, my dad would’ve probably fixed every lawn mower in a 50 mile radius if someone would’ve paid him enough to do it. He just liked that sort of thing, and was incredibly good at it.
But certainly, a lot less art gets produced of quality now becuase housing prices are too high everywhere to be able to survive on part-time waitress and grocery stocker.
If economics were a more honest profession, we could do a lot more to shelter people and the economy from the now-inevitable negative effects of AI. But it’s not so we won’t.
It’s happening. And as I mentioned below economists will lie to you about that it will happen, lie to you while it’s occurring, and then for good measure lie to you after it’s done tossing you and everyone you know into the street.
It’s what they do because it’s exactly what they are paid to do.
As usual, the economists are all lying about AI job loss. They assert that it won’t occur. The reality is that it’s already occurring but it is going to get so much worse.
Remember, these are the same econs who claimed NAFTA and MFN for China would have no negative effects, and then gaslit us for more than two decades that the “equivalent” job someone found as a Wal-Mart greeter was just as good as the unionized $40-an-hour factory role. That is, of those who found any job and just didn’t kill themselves with alcohol and opiates.
The heartland was eviscerated and we were told it did not happen, and if it did, it was good thing.
The same thing is occurring again but what will be eliminated this time are millions of white collar jobs. And contrary to econ fairy tales, nothing will replace them. It’s inevitable at this point.
The Grand Illusion: The U.S.-Europe Growth Gap.
So claim Ackerman and Baker.
But this contention is wrong. It is a bad paper and a flawed piece. First, since the GFC, a lot of people who got it right then seem to have gone absolutely nuts since. Ian Welsh, Dean Baker, Paul Krugman, to some extent Barry Ritholtz, and others. They just diverged from any sort of wisdom or probity. Not sure why but they have but it’s a real phenomenon.
This piece and the associated paper is a good example.
The primary mistake the Baker piece and the paper make is that it confuses level comparisons with growth comparisons and then frames that as an issue. However, current-PPP is for comparing countries in the same year, while constant/chained is for comparing real output across countries over time. You can’t just mix them up like that. I mean, you can I guess, if you want to look like a dumbass.
In other words, current-price series use each year’s prices, while constant-price series are used to measure true volume growth. That’s not any sort of contradiction, as the paper that Baker is discussing claims. That’s how they fucking work. FUCK.
There are numerous other bits of clownery like that, but the basic mistake dooms the paper from the get-go.
Now that I’ve toasted that POS paper, I’ll work on the not-quite-as-moronic Krugman claim.
So, Krugie, you mean to tell me that very large states with a high concentration of tech have higher productivity growth? OMG SO SHOCKING.
BLS says that California represents 14% of national output and ~20% of US productivity growth. Meanwhile, Washington state actually had the highest productivity growth 2007-2024, not California. It’s just a lot smaller.
The other problem with the Krugman boo-shit is conceptual. Composition effects are real economic effects, and are not artificial, nor are they a measurement issue. If the US has more highly productive digital clusters, that is part of US performance in toto and can’t just be broken off as some “fake area.” It’s all one country, baby, no matter if Dog Turd, Mississippi, isn’t benefiting much quite yet from what is happening in California (or Washington).
So much failure and clownery from people who should be smarter.
They probably aren’t going to get hired. Not only do people not realize what is about to happen, they deny it’s already happening.
Correct. Basically everything is set up either to directly benefit Boomers or to not inconvenience them. And it is somehow getting worse, even as they age and die off, and not better.
The Strait of Hormuz being closed is not nothing, but not really the big deal that people are making it out to be. It would’ve been 40 years ago, but the world is different now.
Mostly, it’ll impact China and a few other Asian economies. Not so much anyone else.
ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did.
The comment in the screenshot is about my take on what AI will actually do to jobs and the economy; nothing else makes any sort of sense, regardless of economists’ lying about it all.