#Econ

Almost every trip the last six months, I’ve ended up discussing the same topic in almost every country: just how expensive everything has gotten. People are tightening belts, and seeing real reductions in their quality of life, and noticing price jumps in essentials.

Strangely though, I’m finding people raraly understand inflation or our current experience with it should have been more avoidable. While it’s not necessarily going to remove the helplessness a lot of people are feeling at the moment, I do find understanding a thing better normalizes it and leads to action. So, helping understand why something like rising interest rates are counter-intuitively used to try to induce price stability is worth knowing.

And the end of economic growth.

Thought his point about our inaction keeping on going until it hits our economies was interesting, as well as how the crises will occur. And how crisis is necessary for us to react. Great TED talk. A bit terrifying but also surprisingly hopeful.

Wow, Umair Haque does it again admonishing us to Create a Meaningful Life Through Meaningful Work and telling us to ask some of the really big questions about the stuff we’re doing day to day while reflecting on the tedious BS of the illustriati in Manhattan this week. I like his call to get lethally serious about stuff that matters.

So here’s a tiny hypothesis: maybe the real depression we’ve got to contend with isn’t merely one of how much economic output we’re generating — but what we’re putting out there, and why. Call it a depression of human potential, a tale of human significance being willfully squandered…

With the #occupy movements still going strong around the world, I’ve found a lot of the arguments have become dogma and philosophy and split people along the lines of their beliefs about work and reward versus society. It’s gotten so bad I’ve actually heard some Gordon Gecko-esque “Greed is good” comments and had one person forward me an old Milton Friedman TV interview by Donahue spruiking greed and power.

There is now a wide body of literature, however, that states unequivocally that large income inequalities hurt societies. Great TEDTalk on the subject.

Inflation adjusted housing prices. In the US. Since 1890. As… a rollercoaster (for reference, years running in lower right).

This is more than a little frightening for the vast majority of people whose dream is to own a home and those who believe its an investment vehicle. Check out the last 20 years and tell me there isn’t a very big problem. 2D graph at very end to put it all in perspective.

Wow, I missed the whole conservative backlash against Warren Buffet’s amazing NYT OpEd on stopping coddling the super rich ; you know… that it was time for the rich to pay their share in the US meltdown. Jon Stewart to the rescue. Props to both of them telling it like it is. Seriously, how does Fox News live with itself?

Oh yes, and there’s more… So, much more…

Great campaign ad from FalseEconomy.co.uk on how the British government’s severe austerity choices are liable to stall the economy and make the crash worse rather than deal with some of the real issues we could use it to deal with - and also how those measures will unfairly impact the poor and average earners rather than those who caused the financial crash. Great video.

via GetUp’s Oli .

Fascinating article on Germany , long derided as the sick man of Europe for its economy, got a lot of things right and is now the strongest economy in the world (well, second only to China, but hey, the DE only has 82M people vs. China’s 1B).

I do find it interesting as it brings together a couple of themes that I’ve seen recurring lately, the idea of the small, good businesses (mittelstand) which create real economic value even when they’re not trying to do billion dollar IPOs (most vehemently pushed by 37Signal’s DHH and JF) and a lot of what Umair Haque has been saying about America’s toxic economy full of value destroying, rather than creating, businesses being its problem. Too many people speculating, and shifting inflated value around rather than creating it themselves. And the focus on long term strategy for success, rather than short term tactics.

Even as a trained economist, I kind of keep wondering what the hell the Federal Reserve is doing in the States. Makes no sense though imagine they are trying to stave off a similar crisis that we’re seeing in Ireland and that is threatening to spread to the rest of Europe. Anyhow, if you’re confused by the whole thing, there’s nothing like cute cartoon animals to explain it to you. Bit long, but great.

This idea was floated by Third Way in the US, but totally love this idea for Canada as well (hell, even Aussies). Canadians rarely have a clue about where their tax dollars go to provide some of the excellent services they enjoy.

Corn syrup, milk chocolate, sugar, cocoa butter, coconut, almond, soy lecithin… any consumer can read these ingredients and their nutritional value on every package of a 75-cent Almond Joy. What is provided to a taxpayer with a $5,400 tax bill? Nothing. For many Americans, the amount they pay in taxes is larger than any purchase they make during the year, but studies show they know almost nothing about where that money goes to. This contributes to ridiculous beliefs, like the view that 20% of government spending goes to foreign aid, for example. An electorate unschooled in basic budget facts is a major obstacle to controlling the nation’s deficit, not to mention addressing a host of economic and social problems. We suggest that everyone who files a tax return receive a “taxpayer receipt.”