• TheLepidopterists [he/him]
      ·
      1 month ago

      It's truly absurd. People who are actually getting consistent raises are often only getting 2-3% raises. Meanwhile rent is going up 5-20% a year and food prices are up (according to the sources I'm seeing when googling, honestly it feels worse than this to me) like 25% since 2020 which is an average of over 5% increase a year.

      With consistent raises my real income is consistently lower every year. I'd like an economist to explain why I should be happy about that.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
        ·
        1 month ago

        Imagine your house is on fire.

        The fire department tells you that the fire has stopped spreading and is now contained.

        An economist would tell you that this means the house is safe and you can go back inside.

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.ml
        hexagon
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        It's pretty safe to say that people who are continuously wrong about everything and fail to predict economic crashes that happen like clockwork might indeed be kind of stupid.

      • Flyberius [comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        Well, we don't deny the reality in front of our eyes. I'm sure for rich economists that get published in the news and in journals, things look dandy to them.

      • Tom742 [they/them, any]
        ·
        1 month ago

        Yes all economists are stupid and only the hexbears understand economics.

        New site tagline

      • vovchik_ilich [he/him]
        ·
        1 month ago

        It's not so much "all economists are stupid", but it is definitely "for the past half a century neoliberalism has been pushed as the only socially and academically acceptable form of understanding economics, it's been the only framework of economics that gets taught in universities in the western world, and neoliberalism is a dogma cult whose most basic axioms are wrong, which is why it consistently fails to predict economic trends and in particular crises and to produce policy to adequately tackle them. People who go outside neoliberalism, such as Post-Keynesians or Marxian economists, aren't taken seriously in academia or in media, aren't given research or teaching positions, and the cycle perpetuates."

        For examples of this, see empirical evidence of how rising minimum wage doesn't produce inflation or reduce employment, how price limits don't necessarily lead to shortages, how creation of money doesn't generally create inflation, how government debt is a useless parameter to measure the well-being of an economy, or how the biggest countries in the EU have stagnated for 15+ years of austerity policy without recovering the GDP per capita of 2008 while China consistently breaks growth expectations despite its economy being predicted every two years to crash the following year.

      • miz [any, any]
        ·
        1 month ago

        Richard Wolff made a great point when he said that capitalism has two college departments dedicated to teaching about it: One is called economics, whose purpose is to train people on how to cheerlead the system using purely hypothetical concepts. The other is called business school, and it exists because economics departments don't actually teach somebody how to administrate capitalist enterprise, so they have to educate different people on how to actually make the system function.