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Thought Bubbles from the Deep

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qldfrog said:
I do not see otherwise aka need for music entertainment etc but I see these as a zero game economically, a recycling of money, not creation of wealth, and so outside of productivity on an economic point of view.
I have to rush will extend tonight
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Here are two scenarios involving Alice, Ben and Ben's kid Charlie.

Scenario A: Alice receives some money from Ben. She hands it back to Ben immediately. Ben plays with it for a moment then puts it into his pocket. Money has been recycled and nothing else has happened. Nothing was created in this money shuffle.

Scenario B: Alice, a neurosurgeon, conducts a delicate operation to excise a tumour which had been discovered in Ben's brain. Ben, a concert pianist who is world-renown for his repertoire and deft touch, pays Alice for the surgery. After recovering, he returns home to care for his 6-yr old son, Charlie. After twelve months, Ben plays to a sell-out audience in the Sydney Opera house. In the audience is Alice, a fan of the classics and an accomplished amateur piano player since childhood. Over time Alice takes master-classes from Ben and the money paid for the surgery is returned to Ben as payment for attendances at concerts and for lessons.

Ben is alive. Charlie has a father. Alice derives satisfaction from becoming a more expert piano player. Not a single gram of iron ore was extracted.


Under your definition of production, there is no difference between Scenario A and Scenario B. No physical production occurred. Money was simply shuffled. All exchanges between Alice and Ben are somehow regarded as zero sum. They did not add to the wealth of a nation.

Naturally, you are free to define anything however you choose to. If you view the exchange of services between Alice and Ben as having produced no value at all, then that's fine.

I disagree with a perspective that no value was added. Whilst the official measures of GDP are not perfect, they have made a deliberate allowance for services provision which make up over 2/3rds of an economy like Australia's. These definitions are seen to be more relevant to economic management and wealth. I doubt you'll find too many people who regard the exchange between Alice and Ben to have been just an exercise in money recycling. Nonetheless, you are free to hold that view.

Given this exchange began with some mirth at Greece, whose productivity per worker has compared very poorly with the rest of the world in the last decade, it is worth considering what your viewpoint implies for productivity. As an economy moves from a resource extractor and industrial age economy, it becomes more like the Western economies in aggregate. If productivity is measured as production per unit labour input and production is physical only, then as our standards of living are clearly rising beyond the age of steam power with improved healthcare, long and healthier lives, superior education etc. productivity is dropping like a stone. The more advanced an economy we become, with Google, Apple, UBS, ASF...the less productive we are. In order to increase productivity, all service providers should sit still. GDP per capita would improve if they subsequently died. I wonder what the Harper review has to say about that?
 
DeepState said:
Here are two scenarios involving Alice, Ben and Ben's kid Charlie.
Click to expand...

reminds me of this tweet from Existential Comics:

Existential Comics ‏@existentialcoms Feb 20

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
"An honest, brave, compassionate human being."
"No…I mean, how do you want to sell your labor?"
Click to expand...
 
indeed: you increased some confort but probably decrease the overall wealth of the nation as the surgeon wil buy import goods, will be taxed to death and his/her taxes will be unefficiently used/serve as a leverage by the government to borrow more from overseas;
I am not arguing the utility and benefits/ confort factor of services, but in an extreme world, where do you think an economy would be if only based on services:
aka
no agriculture,
no windmill/solar panels/geo or hydro power
no export of services/manufactured products(added value on material goods),
no extraction of mineral
and no borrowing O/S this economy will see its citizens dead within a few months
however gifted the surgeons, maestros, teachers are .
Look at places like Egypt f.e., millions and millions of people surviving on debt and tourism only, both hand outs on an economic view from other nations , yet there are services a plenty, actually only services...
but you need to "create" the first $ bill which can then happily be passed around.
So yes our "productivity" in the west is dropping like a stone, and the GFC and the next one are the consequence of it.
Please take a step back, realise that i have nothing against services as i am a pure immaterial goods creator myself, and try to see that point, I doubt it is as stupid as it seems to you.
And how do you measure the "real productivity" aka as i see it?We can name it other way
that is the initial point i am trying to raise here.
GDP is too biaised and is at its highest with terminal cancer patients in an hospital yard..no thanks
Anyway these were my bubbling thoughts: an indicator of "real wealth creation", add export/import balance and get your "productivity" from there.
Sorry to have pushed you a bit here.have a great day
 

1. The argument that services are a form of production would apply in a closed economy which is free of government. The train of consequence outlined is rather a stretch. Increased service provision leads to increased government borrowing from offshore as an economic truism??

2. The topic under discussion is whether services are production. It is not whether services could constitute 100% of production (which it could). This argument is also not about whether all services created are wealth generating. Sitting at your desk drawing circles is a service. If no-one buys it, it is not production.

3. The GFC came about because there was excessive leverage being applied to...the production of houses. Excess physical stock. It wasn't due to the excess supply of services for the most part.

4. Yes, it is clear you do not regard anything other than the production of physical items as production. You are welcome to that perspective. That definition was roughly what mattered most to policy makers in more primitive economies. So it is not entirely silly at all. However, times have moved on for most who apply these stats. Perhaps you are a traditionalist.

5. Let's not get into international trade when the building blocks are not firm. The argument in relation to services as production would apply if you measured GDP in a closed economy. It would also apply if you measured GDP on a global basis. The trade argument is not relevant for the issue to hand, which is defining services as production.

6. It's all good.
 
US Employment Stats just out.

Increasingly, an improving labour market is allowing workers to tell their bosses to take this job and shove it.

 
DeepState said:
US Employment Stats just out.

Increasingly, an improving labour market is allowing workers to tell their bosses to take this job and shove it.
Click to expand...

The quits is interesting hadn't seen that before, thanks.

I didn't really think anyone still takes initial claims seriously though, considering the >9 million people kicked out of the workforce by BLS because they were unemployed for too long.


still at the highest level in decades


U6 unemployment, 1 in 10 unemployed.


and of course, saving the worst till last, the actual "employment" figure, with participation back to 1970s levels. If you drill into this number, the implications are really much worse. The decline in this number has been driven by the exodus of 16-55 cohort from the workforce, and would look worse if it wasn't for the >55 cohort rejoining the workforce in droves as their retirement plans went out the window (thanks to low 401k returns and negative real returns on savings thanks to ZIRP/QE).
 
DeepState said:
US Employment Stats just out.

Increasingly, an improving labour market is allowing workers to tell their bosses to take this job and shove it.

View attachment 64834
Click to expand...

OR

Is it the ability to find a job which is more appealing having settled
for less than Ideal for so long.

OR

Is it that companies are expanding and now looking/head hunting better people (Mind you the time to head hunt is in bad times).

We rarely have people telling us where to shove it.
That is of course because the duck is such a nice guy.

 
DeepState said:
Increasingly, an improving labour market is allowing workers to tell their bosses to take this job and shove it.
Click to expand...

Nah they probably just realised that their service jobs making people more comfortable and happy didn't produce anything so quit to hopefully get a job at the steel mill.

sinner said:
The quits is interesting hadn't seen that before, thanks.

I didn't really think anyone still takes initial claims seriously though, considering the >9 million people kicked out of the workforce by BLS because they were unemployed for too long.
Click to expand...

True but its a big ship and takes a bit of turning to shift it around to another direction. And don't underestimate the confidence boost to people (small biz, main street and muppet CEO's) who are headline readers only.
 

It's an indicator that people are exercising the choice to leave a job. It could be for many reasons. Generally, though, it rises when conditions are improving and those who are in work feel confident or are headhunted into leaving one job for another. In addition to other indicators of labour market conditions, namely wages. job adverts and hours worked, it is seen to be useful to help figure out what's going on.

I imagine that, as labour market conditions improve, bosses are more keen to hang on to their staff as they are more readily tempted by greener pastures. It's not a "shove it" index, but rather a quits index. There would undoubtedly be a component of quits that were accompanied with "shove it", but I don't think it is being officially surveyed as yet.
 
View attachment 64840
Trembling Hand said:
Nah they probably just realised that their service jobs making people more comfortable and happy didn't produce anything so quit to hopefully get a job at the steel mill.
Click to expand...

And it's GOLD for TH. Except, employment in steel is declining....quite literally as a result of increasing currency exchange rates in anticipation of lift-off.

The higher currency is constituting a headwind to the trade situation (which contributed to the latest GDP print being sort of low). Lift off is anticipated because the labour market is improving, which is also seeing pricing tension as demand returns. The growth in employment is away from many industries like oil production and steel production. It is barely picking up in domestic construction. Labour is growing fastest in services industries, particularly personal services like healthcare and aged services. All of this is seeing less support required by government whose balance is far better than it had been because it is receiving more taxes and paying less unemployment benefits.

An increase in services employment and production (shall we agree on delivery, if not production) is thus leading to increased exchange rates, lower trade surplus, lower government debt being financed domestically and offshore. Wealth, as measured by private household balance sheets, has been sharply increasing. All of this is somewhat in contrast to recent postulates about the influence of increased services (healthcare, being the case in point).
 
Trembling Hand said:
Nah they probably just realised that their service jobs making people more comfortable and happy didn't produce anything so quit to hopefully get a job at the steel mill.
Click to expand...
a bit low
but you will talk to the burger flippers and hairdressers that they are so much better off now that their job at GM or in the farm have disappeared and they are all on part time minimum wages in services and retail.
.
I have a feeling that the west is living a .com phase whereas services are supposed to create that much wealth, we do not produce anything but this is a new paradigm,everything is different, China can produce the added values,German and Japanese factories can have the robotised production lines, but we will have social media entrepreneurs and beauty therapists and we create so much more wealth this way...
Anyway, it seems it is such an absurd idea that you need to produce physical goods to initiate the transfer chain.All this in one of the only country which has only been spared the GFC by going to the most basic of wealth creation: digging soil. I give up on this one, time will tell.
 
DeepState said:
Wealth, as measured by private household balance sheets, has been sharply increasing. All of this is somewhat in contrast to recent postulates about the influence of increased services (healthcare, being the case in point).
Click to expand...
Could it be that at last some of the trillions of vapour money created in QE is ultimately reaching some of the people in the street after lining up the pockets of the top 1% in a cascade downward; a golden shower of its own type
if we consider that printing $ is increasing wealth, thanks god it manages to trickle down a bit to the commoners.
Would be interesting to know if there is a link/balance between this increase of wealth and the QE events, expected with a delay
Anyway, have all a great week end, I will carry on increasing my wealth by piling up goods andworking the paddocks
 
qldfrog said:
but you will talk to the burger flippers and hairdressers that they are so much better off now that their job at GM or in the farm have disappeared and they are all on part time minimum wages in services and retail.
Click to expand...

You ever find you're a little too pessimistic for logic? Wages are higher in the service sector than manufacturing so the world has voted that far more valuable.


No it is not low at all. What you are advocating is frankly depressing as all hell! If the only way to measure progress is to work inside a factory (which I have) on a machine-line so we can drive home on bigger highways to park a bigger car made with a greater amount of steel parked in a bigger garage attached to a bigger house with more exotic materials in it to hold up the bigger TV screens we are all F@$<ed.

The endless march to more production is beyond stupidity. We have become a society of extreme specialist and that has enabled us the most wonderful amount of health, safety and spare time. Time and time again its been shown that's what is most satisfying to people's lives is family, friends and experiences. I've already had my fair share of material stuff and frankly it is worthless. I don't get together with my friends and talk about the stuff we bought or produced. We get together laugh, remember and add to experiences. I think that is the same the world over once basic housing, health and food are taken care of.

As the world become more efficient and rich it takes less to produce physical stuff - I'll do the world a favour and keep my consumption the same and spread the spare $ I have from the efficiency gains to buy services that consume less and produce more health and satisfaction.
 


1. This helicopter money lining the pockets of the rich populist fallacy is terribly misguided. The QE printed by the Fed never really left the Fed. The great bulk of 'print' remains within the Fed today as excess reserves.

Nonetheless, it did have wealth effects via other channels as was intended. The general population benefited relative to the counter-factual, but inequality rose. I would point out the counter-factual to QE would have completely smashed the poor if this line were to be pursued.

2. Of course it links. It raises the prices of assets. It raises the activity in the economy. As intended. Is it false? Monetary policy has always affected asset prices. Is the Fed move in cash rates any less real than the Fed rolling maturing mortgage backed securities?

3. Enjoy your weekend too. Some of your physical goods produce, if you choose to interact with the rest of the economy, will be purchased by a vapourware service worker using the same dollars as you use to purchase materials required to generate your produce. They buy your goods with vapour. You do 'real work' to produce it. They produce nothing, but get your goods. Which seems more silly?
 
DeepState said:
1.They buy your goods with vapour. You do 'real work' to produce it. They produce nothing, but get your goods. Which seems more silly?
Click to expand...
This is amazing that as a relatively greeny guy, who decided to voluntarily work only a few days a week to enjoy life and has not worked as a salary man for more than 15years->
i have to be on that side of the debate but i genuinely believe you do not see the point i try to raise;
my english is not that good (not native) so that does not help

we have a finite world, an expanding population.money is being passed on in loops and that is fine, but i am deeply convinced that if created by debt which is the situation we are in and have been for a few decades, money is not worth the paper it is printed on [actually it is just worth that] unless there is what I call real production to underpin it;
And services unless traded with another country playing the same fake game, are mostly useless there,

I agree with you wholefully:
someopne cutting a tree, getting some oil out of the ground and selling it against $ which are magically created by the Fed or anyone else playing the debt game is a fool.
Some not so fool exchange their dollars against land titles, goods, gold and other PM.
Sometimes at the level of states..see the chinese government

I would add someone working 50h a week to gather extra figures on a retirement plan which is a set of numbers stored in a database is probably as much a fool. Ask Cyprus pensionners...

how long does it take for that fools game to end?
TH is right: after housing food and basic health the material basics are done, but I would like to see an economic distinction between that and the so call service industry.

Until Brenwood (sp?) at least there was this material link between currency and physical gold (could be seashells, salt would be the same) but the day you sever this, you enter into a "fake" economy build on pretends and I see "service wealth" and talk about a service economy as similar IMHO to these talks before the .com crash about owning .net "real estate", basing valuation on pipe dreams,
Reality has a tendency to hit hard when it readjusts.
I do not advocate extra goods/stuff not at all, the west is buried under a mountain of useless material junk,but a GDP growth of 0 is not to be seen as evil. the point is let's separate GDP/productivity/wealth into the actual creation/generation of initial "wealth trigger??" to the shuffling around happening after. let's use happiness factor, well being index for the rest but let's not try to mix them.
IMHO, you need the first one to have the second, this is the basic input, ideally just sun growing plants if we want a sustainable world.
Extra population must see an extra input created/fed into the system
Seeing a gdp growth after an earthquake destruction is an abomination in my mind, yet i agree the tradies will do a killing and whole departments of red tapes public servants will be generated.
Ahh well, too backward or advanced: the "Back to the roots" is not present in economic sciences yet or ever
An interesting discussion as i had no idea anyone could even see it otherwise..Really, not that i discuss this matter much/ever with anyone in day to day life.Have all a nice week end

TH: salary in services higher than manufacturing??? not so sure,
38h pw at ford vs 8h pm at mac do is often the trade.......but that is not the debate
 
qldfrog said:
TH: salary in services higher than manufacturing??? not so sure,
38h pw at ford vs 8h pm at mac do is often the trade.......but that is not the debate
Click to expand...

You are just cheery picking a silly example. For starters there is no relationship between decrease in Ford jobs = increase in Macca's job. (if anything my bet is ford workers are the customers of Macca's ) They are two very different demographics who always fill different jobs.

If you look at industry wide avg wages manufacturing is mid to low wage, Service sector is at the high end. And burger flippers are in the hospitality industry, generally not considered service sector, and are generally low skilled and young and that is reflected in their lower wage.

And you cannot talk about funny money and .com or .net then say you want to make cars in Australia. That has been the biggest funny money scam for 30 or more years. Only surviving, and badly, through import tariffs and tax payers money handed over to OS corporations. Surely that is not what you are advocating? Welfare jobs at the cost of industries that have flourished without help?
 

Your language is good enough and, in the opposing, vastly better than my French.

I happen to do this stuff for a living and am exposed to a spectrum of thought which encompasses the all that matters is tangible assets school. No fractional banking. No fiat money. Hard assets in the vault. Gold, guns, seed and land. And water purifiers. On it goes. Cave man, bunker, economics.

For one Cyprus where largely Russian laundered money depositors received a haircut, there was the rest of Europe and the US whose deposits were protected as the GFC unfolded. Have even Greek depositors taken a haircut?

How about a hard currency like gold? Please remind me what Executive Order 6102 meant for holders of monetary gold? Something imposed on them by their own elected officials. The stuff that can't be printed to oblivion? How did that compare to the capital levy on the Bank of Cyprus you see fit to raise?

Credit and money could collapse. It happens most often in war. In times of war, your land and productive machinery can also get confiscated or destroyed. Your horde of gold can be claimed as a trophy of war. There is no safe haven. The Bretton Woods Agreement was put in place for a reason, only part of which was related to economics. If you looked more deeply into it, you'd find it was an abomination of the gold standard and was ultimately dismantled when the joke become too large to unwind. The world did not collapse. Services continued to be provided.

What matters for money is not hard assets. It is a system of institutions that protect what it means and its function. Money serves the populace. It serves the political economy to meet its needs. The political economy was not created from the form of money or fractional reserve banking.

Your base case scenario of end of the world, bankruptcy galore, hair on fire, was faced in the GFC. The US and European financial systems were technically bankrupt. To your perspective, the world should have gone back to sharpening spears with rocks. It didn't. In a world of credit, there will be credit events. In the world of gold, you get a whole lot of other problems, before gold banks start getting fractional all over again like clockwork.

In the world of primary and secondary production and no central banks, you had life expectancy in the 40s if you survived past childhood and peri-natal mortality maybe 50x what it is today....no healthcare services you see. At least the monetary system was on solid ground. To you, these were the only ones with real wealth, free of that silly services stuff. I beg to differ.

When it comes to money, there are much stronger and relevant assets than corn farms, plant and machinery. If you are not able to see the value of services as a form of wealth creation, then you are certainly not going to see the value of national and global institutions and collective interests. I may not see what you do because your arguments don't accord with what is actually happening or is otherwise from a novel school of economic thought which is too complex for me and otherwise not encumbered by live data. We must be looking at different planets. Given this, there really is no value in pursuing a detailed response to the remaining propositions.

Thanks for the exchange.
 

What about Freegold (which is none of the above)?

http://fofoa.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/freegold-foundations.html

If you looked more deeply into it, you'd find it was an abomination of the gold standard and was ultimately dismantled when the joke become too large to unwind. The world did not collapse. Services continued to be provided.
Click to expand...

If one has looked deeply into it, surely one has read of and understood the Triffin dilemma and its implications. Did you know Mr Triffin later helped form the European Monetary System?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Triffin

Dismantled is a strange way to put it, I would say the US strategically defaulted on obligations to prevent the incessant draining of Treasury gold by US trade creditors and raise the local price of oil in hopes of making local fields more viable. I challenge different interpretations! (can also see the Yamani quote in Flow Addendum link at the bottom of this post).

An examination of the Balance of Payments historical data reveals that the world did not collapse largely because the European and Gulf blocs of Central Banks (marginal net creditors) allowed the US to export inflation via building up huge piles of bonds. The BoJ also joined in around this time and has never really stopped. Objectively, this is structural support for the USD to stop an otherwise large shockwave from disrupting the economy.

And so it was for ~30y until 1999 when the Euro was officially launched. Lucky for the USD, just as the European CB bloc was winding down structural support of the USD, the Chinese stepped up to the plate and were acting as the marginal structural support until the GFC.

Since then the US private sector (one assumes a large portion of which accounted by the Fed) has been forced to take up the slack. The resulting expansion of the monetary base (which just so happens to be the reference point for the entire global USD system) is apparent for all to observe.

http://fofoa.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/reference-point-revolution.html


When you say "what matters for money...", if you are referring to "easy money" then I'd 100% agree with the above. Easy (credit) money is one of the greatest human inventions of all time! It would be utterly foolish (and likely impossible) of us to regress back to a hard money system.

But the use of easy money as the global reserve asset leads to Triffins dilemma. Hmm...if only there was a monetary system that was created on a basis of understanding this principle

http://fofoa.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/dilemma.html
http://fofoa.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/dilemma-2-homeless-dollars.html

Acknowledging that that the flow of monetised metal (for the purpose of reserve asset) does in fact matter goes a long way in understanding historical events as far back in time as Roman invasion of Arabia over the flow of spices causing a drain on Empire gold in 24AD, European (mostly British) invasion of China over the flow of silk and tea causing a drain on Empire silver in the 17th and 18th Century causing the First Opium War, the "Nixon Shock" in the early 1970s, the launch of the Euro and many others

http://fofoa.blogspot.com.au/2010/10/its-flow-stupid.html
http://fofoa.blogspot.com.au/2010/10/flow-addendum.html
 
DeepState said:
Given this, there really is no value in pursuing a detailed response to the remaining propositions.

Thanks for the exchange.
Click to expand...
yeap, in any case, i am aware of the world we live in, and have to deal with reality so i play the game too.let's close the subject there indeed,
And please carry on with your input and thought i found them quite instructive and this helps me to 'play the game"
 
Where did I ever suggest that Australia should keep car manufacturing?
As to hospitality not being service? this is the essential service industry for me, that and retail: "the girl in the shop " are what service is in number, not the surgeon or QC.
i worked in a foundry, a factory line, at the bottom of UG coal mine, as well as top of towers of corporate headquarter, i know very well what is the easiest won money.
But let's close this one which started or what productivity definition we should use.
 
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