"Sir, our youth unemployment rate is 25%! What should we do?"
"Easy, just stop reporting it. If we don't know what it is then it's not a problem we have to deal with"
Brilliant
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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I've participated in the unemployment tallying in the US. That's not how that works.
The only thing that I can possibly imagine you're alluding to is discouraged workers, who are people without jobs who stopped looking. They drop off because it's really hard to hire people who won't apply for any job, which is important to know about when you're trying to determine the number of people available to fill job vacancies.
We just change the calculation. If 25% are unemployed, what if we added a stipulation that they also received a survey from the last job they applied to on whether they were employable. See? We can drop unemployment by calling people unemployable and ignoring those that didn't apply for a job! Math!
Sir, our youth unemployment rate is 25%! What should we do?"
If iirc, unemployed chinese youth below 30 yo, were considered " Students " now. Don't know if that's still used though.
Your annual reminder for the past ten years that "China is about to collapse any day now"
Per the article:
Now, these problems have been fairly obvious for at least a decade. Why are they only becoming acute now? Well, international economists are fond of citing Dornbusch’s Law: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” What happened in China’s case was that the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble. In fact, China’s real estate sector became insanely large by international standards.
This is a well known feature of all complex systems. How they change is "not at all, and then suddenly".
Yet people always insist they must change slowly and steadily.
I don’t understand this take. Comments like this suggest collapse happens overnight. Which means if china didn’t catastrophically collapse in the last 24 hours it means it isn’t happening at all or never.
The reality is collapse happens very slowly. There is no question that the health of the economy both in china and the rest of the world is steadily getting worse year by year.
Collapse isn’t going to happen. It’s already happening. It’s just a steady and slow march to the bottom.
There was another comment claiming that collapse happens drastically once it starts. So what is it then
Both
An attempt to reconcile both views by comparing it to a structural collapse of, let's say, a bridge.
In the end, it collapses. Before that, the cracks begin to show. Before that, invisible micro-cracks form. Before that, pressure exceeds limits.
Now, at which point in this story does "collapse happen"? Some use this to refer to the actual collapse, after the cracks began to show.
But since collapse is inevitable after too many micro-cracks have formed (or maybe even earlier, since those are already symptoms of an underlying cause), some refer to this long, unspectacular build-up phase as "collapse happens".
I'm neither an economist nor a civil engineer. Bridges are complex, economies even more so. I still think these two views explain how the same term can refer to different things, or different phases of the same thing.
Collapse doesn’t happen drastically. It’s a slow boil. You’re just not paying attention. It’s slow enough that if you don’t pay attention to current events and the state of the economy it’s easy to miss and assume everything is OK.
Things are worse now than they were in 2008. It’s only getting worse. It’s going to become much much worse before it ever gets better.
Closely followed by, “Trump is in trouble this time” articles that we’ve been getting for the last 6 years.
Yeah, it's a believe it when you see it thing at this point. They might stagnate out economically or have internal supply issues, but there's a world of difference between that and actual regime instability.
Case in point: Zimbabwe is still run by largely the same group of guys that ordered the 100-trillion dollar bills made.
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Feels like I’ve been reading headlines like this for at least 3 years now. If it all finally comes crashing down, it’s gonna be a big one I guess.
That's because its GDP growth has been hit hard in that same time period. Lifting Covid restrictions didn't make it come back.
It may not crash, per se, but Japan went through an era of general malaise, and that might be what China gets.
I know the general gist of the situation. Low spending from domestic households, real estate bubble, excessive government influence on industry scaring investors, and so on.
My problem with it is that most headlines make it sound like it’s all gonna implode spectacularly tomorrow. The articles themselves usually paint a more reasonable picture of the situation, similar to your comment. But most people don’t read the article. They just see the headline over and over.
Economics and politics are not spectacles shock-jocks and media can ride and clickbait you on. It's numbers moving very slowly in one direction or another. (I mean actual politics, where people do things, debate and make laws, not where people tweet things. Despite the spectacle around politics, how many people watch legislative proceedings?)
I lived in Hungary, and it was like that with the "healthcare is going to collapse" thing. There was a loud cry that it was going to happen, and the government was always saying it doesn't, as it's still working. But year after year it got worse.
Hospitals look more and more dilapidated. In more and more places you have to bring some supplies like iodine and toilet paper because hospitals are running out. Wait times went up slowly, urgent surgeries might be scheduled so far out that you'll die by the time you get care. Unless you know people, or your case is treated as an actual urgent case, then you get in the "red notebook" that officially does not exist, and you get care earlier. Hospital infections are killing thousands. My GP went from having to wait 30 mins, to having to wait hours, to having to schedule days in advance to not picking up the phone for weeks.
It's a slow boil, and even now, when you can hardly get care for a traffic accident, and most semi-respectable big companies offer private healthcare subscriptions as a benefit, and the government is telling people that they should budget some money away for medical expenses (tax you pay specifically for this is 11% of your income by the way), even now people are saying that "see? Healthcare didn't implode!". I guess the hospitals didn't burn down yet. I don't know what they expect to happen.
If it makes you feel better, that's about the tax than I pay in America for health insurance that I don't get. I still pay $500USD per month on top of the taxes for private insurance too.
Yeah I got G E K O L O N I S E E R D in the meantime, so I'm doing fine. Did you know that the Netherlands has privatized healthcare like the US? Except ours is tightly regulated, so I pay a 100 EUR premium and no additional costs at all, no copays, no maximums, nothing out of scope, and I get quality healthcare.
Japan calls it the lost decade or something similar.
This and the better battery are always a headline away
Better batteries do happen. Every headline you've read is only a part of the solution. Battery research advances by trying ten things, but only one of them pans out.
Cure for male pattern baldness has joined the chat.
Okay, can someone explain THIS giant load of seeming bullshit to me?
In 2023, the U.S. economy vastly outperformed expectations. A widely predicted recession never happened. Many economists (though not me) argued that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment; instead, we’ve experienced immaculate disinflation, rapidly falling inflation at no visible cost.
By every marker that matters to the POPULACE (costs of food, shelter, energy for shelter, cars, gas for cars, and medical insurance (required)) inflation has gone WAY THE HELL UP, shows no signs of abating, and jobs (in the tech sector at least) are taking a dive. Wages are not keeping pace with costs of living, and people I knew who were on the low end of "rich" are now starting to be as scared as the upper middle class.
Everyone keeps saying the economy is fricking awesome, but rent is astronomical, groceries are bonkers, gas prices are still at "I DID THIS" sticker stupidity levels, few people can get a home, used cars are going for 5 to 10 times what they're worth, and everyone I know around the country is running a much tighter ship than they were during COVID LOCKDOWN.
All of these "new jobs" we keep hearing about are just a small percentage of positions vacated by layoffs. Companies let tons of people go in one fell swoop and hire new people for 1/10th to 1/5th of the positions at lower wages with worse "total compensation" packages.
The recruiters have COMPLETELY stopped hitting up myself and my employed friends. Not a single fricking "you look like a great blahblahblah" for almost a month when it was previously multiple hits a day.
As far as I can tell, we're IN a recession, we're just calling it a recovery for some reason.
Okay, can someone explain THIS giant load of seeming bullshit to me?
They are talking macroeconomics, you're talking household economics.
Household economics are both micro AND macro.
The handwaving that typically occurs when people try to throw a layer of obfuscation into economic conversations is both disingenuous and counterproductive to actual fruitful discussion about the current state of things.
You might as well just say "money is wealth" or "what's good for the goose".
The reality is we've been chasing a short run fallacy for a really, really long time now and there's more and more in the way of misrepresented statistics in order to keep everyone from examining all of the indirect consequences.
gas prices are still at "I DID THIS" sticker stupidity levels
Gas fell below $3 again…
Sounds like you just don't live in a hot place anymore....
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Nothing good in the history of mankind has ever come from conservatism. Nothing.
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Same problem as anywhere else. Instead of the money getting back into the economy by giving it to people at the bottom, it leaves the economy by ending up in the hands of a few rich.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Democratic nations like the United States rarely politicize their economic statistics — although ask me again if Donald Trump returns to office — but authoritarian regimes often do.
President Xi Jinping is starting to look like a poor economic manager, whose propensity for arbitrary interventions — which is something autocrats tend to do — has stifled private initiative.
Well, international economists are fond of citing Dornbusch’s Law: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” What happened in China’s case was that the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble.
To outside observers, what China must do seems straightforward: end financial repression and allow more of the economy’s income to flow through to households, and strengthen the social safety net so that consumers don’t feel the need to hoard cash.
And when it comes to strengthening the safety net, the leader of this supposedly communist regime sounds a bit like the governor of Mississippi, denouncing “welfarism” that creates “lazy people.”
Will it try to prop up its economy with an export surge that will run headlong into Western efforts to promote green technologies?
The original article contains 877 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So basically they are saying China should become capitalist and it will fix their problems 🤣
Um, no, that's not at all what it's saying. It is saying China should ease off the cronie capitalism and try a little socialism for ordinary people.
When they suggest "freeing the market" they mean neoliberal capitalism. There aint a universe where opening markets means "more socialism".
Also crony capitalism isnt a thing, its just regular capitalism.
I'm actually going to go a step further and say regulated, non-crony capitalism would also be better than what they have. The party has no incentive to bring either in as they are the cronies, though.
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