#economists

[mysharona1987]

[economicsresearch]

page 595 - part 10 of 10

If video review is wrong is that, game is wrong?

Game is good. One team wins, one team loses and someone is always upset and that is good and healthy and normal. I am ignoring draws of course, because those are gross. It is life to be mad at unjust decisions but you will be okay if you know life is hard, sports are hard, and sometimes you die in war or old or because there were no antibiotics. If you participate in the disappointment of existence in the small way maybe you don't go home and murder family. It prepares you for your mother's death.

Video review is people losing their stamina for disappointment. Video review will set all to right and keep you safe. Dispose of your resilience because you are safe here. Exhaust yourself for capitalism because its rules are good and must be enforced. Police CCTV will make sure!

Thank you for talking, friend.

[isaacsapphire]

Not really sure exactly where I am going with this, but the bald psychopathy of economics and economists is… interesting. Perhaps it’s a reflection of the indifference of nature and the constraints of physical reality, and maybe it’s not only those factors. Perhaps you can’t see the world from such a high perch and not lose emotional connection with the reality of what you are looking at; “a million is a statistic” and economists are in the business of statistics.

And at the end of the day, economics is in large part about physical constraints. It’s lifeboat games writ on a global scale. But economists are as a group prone to assuming that everyone in the world sees with the same blinkered perspective as economists/bankers/stock traders… and there’s been multiple major geopolitical events that the economists swore beforehand couldn’t possibly happen because of course national leaders would Think of The Economy! But the national leaders don’t always do what economists consider rational, so economists are pretty obviously wont to predict the future without the ability to perceive some known important factors.

[itsmythang]

What Justice KBJ just explained to her right-wing colleagues on SCOTUS should never have to be explained in the first place.

[unitedfrontvarietyhour]

Ya don't say...

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Noreena Hertz

Author and economist Noreena Hertz was born in London in 1967. Hertz rose to prominence with her 2002 book The Silent Takeover, which focused on the threat of corporate power to democracy. In 2005, she published IOU: The Debt Threat, in which she foresaw the 2008 financial crisis. Hertz has developed a reputation as one of the world's most influential economists. She has written multiple bestsellers, and her books have been published in over 20 countries and translated into 17 languages. Hertz has taught at several academic institutions and sits on multiple corporate boards.

[wat3rm370n]

Donald Trump has repeatedly wrong economic advisor Kevin Hassett working on bird flu.

Kevin Hassett is an economist with a history of being way wrong.

At a press briefing, the Trump administration spokesperson Karoline Leavitt explicitly blamed the egg prices on the Biden administration's Department of Agriculture quote "directing the mass killing of 100 million chickens." Of course this was because of avian influenza and the threat posed by keeping flu infected chickens alive, exposing farm workers, exposing more birds, having the avian influenza spread, and selling infected eggs and chicken to humans. Karoline Leavitt said this was why she thought the confirmation of the nominee for the Dept of Agriculture was a pressing matter – so they can move on stopping the egg shortage. How?

We know that MAGA Republicans often see the mitigation of disease as more of a problem than the disease that's causing the problem – demonstrated again and again with covid. And now we have some of the same players from early in the botched covid pandemic – back in the saddle to do it wrong all over again.

Leavitt specifically mentions that the nominee for the Dept of Agriculture is already working with the White House ECONOMIC TEAM. Not doctors, not anybody in the CDC, not infectious disease experts or agricultural experts – she specifically mentions Kevin Hassett by name, leader of the White House economic team.

Kevin Hassett predicted that stocks were undervalued in a book from 1999 right before the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Paul Krugman said the book had basic math mistakes in it, and Nate Silver practically called Hassett an irrationally exuberant charlatan. In April 2020 Kevin Hassett was clamouring for reopening and predicted covid deaths would peak in the middle of April 2020 according to his faulty amateur infectious disease model, and said publicly that everything would be back to normal by mid-May 2020. He apparently had no experience with infectious disease modeling — with or without arithmetic errors.

In the confirmation hearing RFKJr said: "I want to work with our farmers and food producers to remove burdensome regulations and unleash American ingenuity" and he said "if I'm privileged to be confirmed I'm not regulating farms that's under USDA but but I want to partner with all of my decisions with USDA." The CDC has been working with farms, and this sounds like RFKJr won't be having that?

It's possible to just dismiss RFKJr's comments as blathering from someone who has no idea what he's going to do in the job leading HHS if he gets confirmed. However, I don't expect that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt would lie or be mistaken about who's working on bird flu. She's a young but experienced media point person who interned at Fox News and the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, was an assistant press secretary under Kayleigh McEnany, then after the first Trump administration ended, she went to work as communications director for Elise Stefanik, and then became the national press secretary for the Trump campaign in January 2024. I don't see that she has any experience in public health, so it seems entirely plausible that she thought she was reassuring somebody out there about something by mentioning the economic team and dropping the name of Kevin Hassett.

It may be time to become a vegetarian, a vegan, or at least a pescatarian for now, because the poultry, beef, and dairy supply may become a lot less safe, or maybe unavailable in America quite soon.

My letter to reps:

I feel it may be necessary to stop buying poultry and eggs because I don't trust food safety since the White House Press Secretary said that Kevin Hassett, the repeatedly wrong economist, is the one who's going to be working on the avian influenza infectious disease threat. Kevin Hassett, got the dot-com bubble wrong in 1999 and got covid wrong in 2020. RFKJr said at his confirmation hearing that he would be hands off the farms and remove regulations, and apparently let H5N1 fester and spread everywhere and contaminate the food supply. What are you going to do to stop this impending threat? Probably not going to be great for the economy if we have more pandemics and wreck poultry farms and sicken more workers who work with the chickens, and maybe have customers getting sick. I'm worried about my health and safety, but I realize many politicians only care about businesses, and I gotta say, I'm pretty sure bird flu won't be good for business.

Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.

Video clips:

WH Press Secretary: NOTHING BAD THAT HAPPENS IS TRUMP'S FAULT! Jesse Dollemore Jan 29, 2025

Brian Tyler Cohen: RFK Jr. confirmation hearing for Health & Human Services Secretary, Jan 29, 2025

[avandelay20]

Paraphrased transcript (towards the end):

January 2024: Interest rates will eventually come down and asset prices will increase massively.

That's what we saw after 2008 and I think that's what we're going to see in the next year or two in the UK and the rest of the world.

In my opinion, increasing asset prices / house prices will be bad for 90% of society. Some people might be surprised to hear that.

Families that own their own property may feel like they're winning when house prices go up, but the truth is that the only way to actually benefit from rising house prices is to sell your home. And then where do you live?

In reality, when house prices go up two things happen:

1) it impoverishes 80-90% of society while enriching 10-20% of current homeowners 2) it worsens economic inequality which creates political division and instability

Rising property prices (that are not in line with wage increases) only impoverish future generations and is the cause of our economic inequality.

Overall, I think the economy will stay terrible. I think we'll see worsening living standards while asset prices and house prices are increasing.

You need to convince your parents and grandparents that rising asset prices is not society getting richer -- it represents society getting poorer. Living standards for the masses will get worse as a consequence of this growing inequality.

The only way to stop this is to tax rich people more aggressively so that ordinary people can have a fairer share of what we produce in our societies.

Gary Stevenson: ‘Economists have been all wrong about almost everything for 15 years now’

After growing up in poverty he became a millionaire as a highly successful trader at Citibank, then quit at 26, feeling exhausted. These day

HOUSING IS FOR PEOPLE.

NOT INVESTMENT.

TAX THE RICH. REDUCE INEQUALITY. RAISE WAGES.