The era of reduced expectations

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Farmers in clean clothes and cows and horses that didn't shit? No mud?

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

AXES???? AXES???? Ahem. Way back in high school, some decades go, the axes were quantity and price. Then supply and demand are curves drawn on those coordinates.

Even if that was a misspeak, it reveals a serious confusion of the very basics of economics.

?-)

There are supply and demand curves as well.

(just as a clarification )

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Les Cargill

But if it's that simple, why don't people do that?

You also have expectations based on things like inflation that cause people to make errors in figuring consumption patterns:

"The inference that is grim" is that birth rates fall dramatically. That reduces economic growth.

Why? Because the cost barrier to household formation is beyond their means. If you have to be in the top 20% to get anything going, then there's always going to be a long lag for people.

My wife watches those darned Property shows; a dump apartment in New Jersey goes for $250k and up.

If you're not going to get married and have kids, you might as well live on Mom's basement. And they do.

Again, I'm not whining about how hard life is - I am projecting that this will be a long gray period economically because of this.

Income doesn't really respond to hard work. That's the problem. It's unusual for it to, anyway. What income responds to is being able to subsume risk. That can involve hard work but it's not

*just* that.

"The poor" are not a monolithic mass - some people will have jobs for long enough to gain such things.

I'd agree there. I think that's overall a good thing. But it puts a lot of people in that muddle where they don't feel they have any control over their own destiny. At least that's what Charles Murray thinks in "Coming Apart".

Yeah! :)

a lot of the improvement in quality of life comes from clever substitutions.

--
Les Cargill

[snip] [snip]

Birth rates are dramatically down in the US... at least in the "truly working classes".

Is that the _cause_ of the decline in economic growth, or the _effect_?

I think the latter. ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Instant gratification and living as a leech is even simpler. The rules for staying out of poverty are trivial, should you care to.

Nonsense. What does the difference of 2% inflation and 10% make on whether people make reasonable decisions.

You're really stretching, or have completely change the subject.

No, the difference is instant vs. delayed gratification. Some learn to delay gratification early in life, some never do.

So? Don't live there if you don't want to live in a dump. I paid $210K for my 3600 ft^2 (+2000 ft^2 unfinished basement) five-bedroom

3-1/2 bath house on 1.5 acres. ...and don't live where the government taxes you to death. You're actually making my point. Life is all about choices. The right ones aren't a lot harder than the bad ones.

Sure they do. People rob banks, too, but it doesn't make it better for society.

No, you're confusing the symptom of the disease with the disease itself. The solutions are *quite* different.

Bullshit! If one job doesn't pay enough, get another. Get an education or learn a trade. The problem is they're sitting in mommy's basement whining instead of fixing *their* problem. ...and you're condoning it ("poor baby").

GMAFB, welfare will pay for such things.

THAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH STATISM. It puts the state in charge of people, rather than the other way 'round.

Certainly. It doesn't come from sitting in mommy's basement feeling sorry for yourself.

Agree. Les has the horse and cart reversed in much of his philosophy.

Agreed. What the cause is, nobody seems to agree on.

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Les Cargill

Population decline will also reduce economic growth, but it's also caused by economic decline. It's a spiral.

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Les Cargill

You're way out of touch with reality. US median household income-- many people raising families--is only $10k more than that.

I've lived most of my life on a fraction of that, and saved the rest.

It's easy to live well on minimum wage. Easy. I basically have(*). And I've got 'scopes, millions of parts in inventory (for protos), mini machine shop, etc.

(*) except for a dalliance on a beachside flat. (Apart from the pad, nothing else changed though. Still cooked curry, still baked bread.)

Where I live now, you could easily raise a family and buy a modest house and raise a family on $30k. (That's partially why I moved--to access a place where workers could thrive on a reasonably expected manufacturing wage.)

"Economy is the art of making the most of life." --George Bernard Shaw

--
Cheers, 
James Arthur

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Gubmint most certainly does NOT make its own food. It literally makes absolutely nothing.

It sounds like you're confusing money with stuff. Money is an artifice, a go-between. Money is so you can trade 'x' hours of your work with someone who doesn't need what you do.

People make stuff. Gov't mostly regulates and impedes them, then takes it.

James Arthur

If you prefer, yes. No practical difference.

The cycle of revolutions he's referring to started with the French Revolution, right after ours (1789), over a financial collapse(*), then followed by a series of bloody purges, strongmen, failed socialist experiments, failed republics, and revolutions right up to Bastiat's time. The index at the link below catalogs them.

(*) wiki blames gov't spending "At a governmental level the sequence of events leading to the revolution was sparked by France's effective bankruptcy due to the enormous cost of previous wars." I blame George W. Bush

Bastiat wrote in the midst of France's failed 2nd Republic, when they were doing all the things our leaders want to do today, and failing for all the reasons I've set forth. Bastiat was both an economist and a legislator--he lived it from within, and without.

Republic

Bastiat died from TB--contracted as he was traveling, trying to sound the clarion call--roughly the same time as things boiled over again into Napoleon III's coup.

James Arthur

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f t .

I agree with that assessment regarding lack of planning, problem- solving, and basic house-making. These things used to be taught in school, and also passed from mother to daughter.

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People need skills they're not getting in school. More stuff to burn is just more fuel on the fire.

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Again, frugality was once celebrated, prodigality was ridiculed. Today that's reversed. But, median household income's down about 10%, and scarcity has a way of focusing the mind.

Best, James Arthur

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Because they don't have to. Society supports them.

James Arthur

I knew it was a story. Same as the "Roadrunner" cartoons, "Star Trek", and "Monkey".

--
?? 100% natural

Not everyone does. You should see how berserk some women get over those damned soap operas.

'Fraid not. I have two twenty-something kids, both of who have degrees ( and no student debt) and are not exactly living in the lap of luxury. They're both pretty frugal, too. Lotta garbanzos...

No grandkids.

No, that's why I picked that figure. At $3k a month, you're not exactly going to be thriving anywhere. $1k rent, $1k food, bills, savings and the like. Not bad (again) if you're single, but raising kids would be much more interesting.

Unless there happen to be $50,000 properties available, I don't see anyone in that income band buying a house.

Minimum wage is seven bucks an hour. That's $14k. Unless you own property outright and have very low property taxes....

Never could make bread work economically - besides, it's $5.00 a week tops. Not a lot of margin to squeeze out of it.

I've done the same as per places with low cost of living.

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Les Cargill

Not sure I can parse that the way you intended, but population decline is not caused by economic decline, rather the opposite.

Yep - starting with John Law...

LOL! The story I hold is that they basically went out of balance from the John Law debacle ( the Mississippi bubble ) and never really recovered. Er, I'm not sure how that all ended, anyway - France became an empire after that.

I'm a big Bastiat fan, although I'm not very up on the Second Republic.

--
Les Cargill