Episode 389: Recession? 

Mission creep is real. The university I attended had a scholarship that was set up by a wealthy Jewish family back in the day. At the time Jews faced a lot of discrimination in the professional world, and the scholarship was specifically intended to benefit Jewish students who didn't have the financial means to attend university but were still academically worthy. By the time I attended (1980's) the scholarship was deemed racist and changed to benefit "underprivileged" (i.e. non-white) students only. The lesson? Don't set up scholarships.

The issue is most Americans don't exclude people who are not currently looking for a job when they think of unemployment numbers. Also, last time I checked the labor participation rate was lower than in 2019. The number of part-time and short-term jobs is also up. Also, all the commercial loans are coming due in 2025; with interest rates being what they are, this probably negatively affects ther economy. I also read a CNBC article where it talked about the pre-ppandemic rates are so low that banks are having problems staying profitable well servicing them. I am willing to bet this will lead to a solution that is bigger government or bigger mega-corperations or a combination which isn't good. I the what the average American is thinking is the economy is so messed up that the math no longer functions.

23:59 That's pretty interesting. I guess the high prices feel so long like how bad times sometimes feel so long during the moment.

I have been told that government spending is counted in the GDP numbers. Seeing that the government always spends more every year (at least in my lifetime) couldn't that point to a potentially inflated GDP? I would presume that when the government spends money its buying things politicians and bureaucrats want, and not what market forces want. As such I would call a large portion of that spending wasted. Would GDP be more accurate if government spending was excluded? and if so, does that substantially change the data on recession / depression / inflation?

Watch how government give them selves better benefits in the guise of mandated improved secret service protection. 😬

28:45 Yeah. They should just say it's the phenomenon they see, like let the numbers be what they are, just say it is painful. It's perfectly fine to groan about painful things. And even if it's true that third-world countries have it worse, that rebuttal's like parents talking about starving children in Africa when kids complain about food.

As a possible future topic - could you please review/comment on the published writings of economist Donald J(Jasper) Harris; father of Kamala Harris ? I don't want to poison-the-well, but my non-econo opinion is that all are well influenced by Marx, and have a sense of philosophy more than econ [which dovetails with a comment in a previous W&N podcast].

Inflation is supposedly based on a "market basket" of between 100 and 80,000 items depending on who you ask. The subjective feeling is that the "market basket" doesn't contain anything that I actually buy; Regardless the idea that the alphabet soup agencies in Washington would produce anything like honest numbers on economic matters is absurd, In this respect James is probably the least skeptical Libertarian on the planet. What is interesting is that here in the information age people have so much personal shopping data on their phones that it has become popular to pull up past on line orders and compare prices, I hear people routinely see 400% increases on Walmart orders from 2020 While it's the nature of economics to portray the free market as billions of pieces of data,what is really is ; is billions of human decisions, ultimately peoples feelings are what matters most