Economics

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1469056

Good video, from what I can tell.

Only 13 minutes or so.

Maybe watch in picture mode while doing other things.

Your thoughts?

The world’s debtor countries, if not the creditors, are finally coming to realize that many government debts can’t be paid – except by throwing their economies into depression and austerity. That might be in store for the US economy too if it tries to tax the economy to pay creditors instead of simply printing the money.

Obviously there needs to be an alternative. It needs to beyond merely the first step of declaring a debt moratorium. A longer-term restructuring of the international financial system is needed, because the present system has become dysfunctional.

archive https://archive.ph/dzpd1

Was listening to rev left radio and they had a guest who talked about this course! From their description:

Economics for Emancipation (E4E) is a seven-module introductory curriculum with interactive and participatory workshops. It offers a deep critical dive into the current political economic system, exploration of alternative economic systems, and dynamic tools to dream and build the economy that centers care, relationship, and liberation.

Theres lots of info, readings, takeaways. All around well made course. If anyone knows similar courses/adjacent stuff would love to hear about it!

We've all heard how Russian GDP is the size of Italy, that Russia is a gas station with nukes, and so on. When the war started, there were countless predictions regarding Russian economy collapsing, and Russia running out of ammunition.

It was a huge surprise for a lot of people in the west when none of these things happened, and it turned out that Russian economy was able to survive the economic war with the west while continuing to produce weapons and ammunition.

What's more is that now we see that it's the west that has find ways to ramp up industrial production to keep the war going.

This is a great illustration of why it's so misguided to use GDP as a general measure for the strength of the economy. What actually matters is productive activity of the country.

The notion of using GDP as a measure has been promoted by neoliberal ideologues who claim that the type of the economy doesn't matter. The reality is that majority of the GDP in western economies comes from ephemeral things such as law practice, service industry, lobby groups, and so on.

Some of the sectors of the economy are even explicitly harmful to society. A great example of that is the health insurance industry in US. On paper, this is increasing the GDP because it employs a ton of people working in this sector, but in practice it just makes people living in US more poor and lowers their quality of life.

So, what does the actual productive economy in US look like?

We can look at steel production volumes to get an idea of the size of the productive industry in US.

According to official data, US produced 6.8 million metric tons of steel in June this year https://www.trade.gov/data-visualization/us-steel-executive-summary

Meanwhile, Russia produced 5.8 million metric tons https://www.statista.com/statistics/1079878/russia-steel-production-volume/

All of a sudden we can see why the west has trouble keeping up. US is the most industrialized western economy, but turns out it's steel production is only slightly higher than in Russia. And it's important to keep in mind that Russia has a much smaller population, so per capita production is far higher than in US.

And then there's China where 90 million metric tons of steel is produced in a month https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/china-june-crude-steel-output-up-04-yy-stats-bureau-2023-07-17/

China's productive industry is a whole order of magnitude larger than US. This shows just how absurd the notion that US could ever have a direct conflict with China is.

Up the speed if you want to listen to him.

He talks about having some background on economics in college. And when talking vaguely in the past he got kinda based and anti establishment without veering off to the right.

But this video is cringe. He criticized socialism seemingly without knowing what it is. He incorporated the national inflation number into his annual downturn percentage calculation for Intel. I'm not an economist but I also don't see how those numbers apply. He repeated some eh about China.

He talks about markets like some type of libertarian. This guy has probably never read any socialist theory and it shows.

I've been really enjoying all his videos and they are useful and he has some pretty good takes and useful techniques and knowledge. This one disappointed me tho. Hope he levels up his politics. It's totally absent a whole perspective.

I’m not very experienced with complex nuances of Economic systems, recently I saw the news say that the US gov will raise interest rates to slow inflation. I don’t much about interest rates, but I’ve heard an argument from the left (not sure who) that inflation can be solved by dealing with unemployment or with interest rates and I think the person was arguing in favor of dealing with unemployment. But what happens when interest rates are raised or lowered? And what is the affect on inflation? What happens to wages and benefits? Sorry it’s probably a lot of questions but any help would mean a lot, I wanna understand the current economy from a Marxist perspective

Oops.