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Business news summarized a MarketWatch article thusly: "One reason growth is not faster is because technology is helping customers more than companies." As a technocrat, I thought that was the whole idea.
"Two roads diverged," Robert Frost wrote in what is perhaps the most popular poem of all time, "The Road Not Taken." Frost's opening words keep playing in my head every time an economic indicator is released, a global macro forecast is revised, or financial markets take a tumble. In all cases, the bulls and the bears find enough ammunition to support their diametrically opposed views on the U.S. economy.
Rarely have two roads diverged so dramatically for so long. It took six years for mainstream economists to come around to the notion that no, this is not your grandfather's economy; and no, real economic growth isn't going to accelerate to 3% next year, the perennial forecast. Trend economic growth of 3% or 4% is a thing of the past, constrained as it is right now by anemic productivity and labor-force growth.
Even the 2.1% average growth [in] real gross domestic product since the Great Recession ended in June 2009 is a source of controversy. The economic bulls maintain that the price of information technology is being overstated, which means real GDP and productivity growth are being understated. For this group, the low level of both jobless claims and the unemployment rate is telling the true story of a robust economy that isn't being captured by the statisticians.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01 2016, @08:57AM
Right. Look to technically advanced countries like Portugal or Spain, with up to 50% young people unemployed [tradingeconomics.com] and global unemployment rate almost 30% but where nobody gets hungry. And even then on the top of the list of the safest places of the known world [worldatlas.com].
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Sunday May 01 2016, @09:53AM
I guess how people are raised to treat other people matters..
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday May 02 2016, @01:08AM
Both those countries are PIIGS, meaning they are already dead men walking, surviving for a moment on the charity of the rest of the world. Unless they manage to quickly turn their economy around they are going to wake up one fine day and discover they are living in the zombie apocalypse. Nobody can say when it happens, none can say what event will be the trigger for the collapse but tick tock.
And yea, the rest of the world is about to have the same problems, perhaps at the same time the PIIGS collapse and put pressure on everyone else... fear of which is why the world keeps dumping money into them to avert the crisis another day. Things are going to reboot into a more sane configuration and it ain't going to be fun living through the transition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2016, @04:42AM
[...]surviving for a moment on the charity of the rest of the world.
Please, explain. Last time I checked at least Spain wasn't bailed out [wikipedia.org] by anyone's charity but only the banks at the expense of their own citizens.