Economic Propaganda since WWII

Never heard of ngrams before, so I looked it up and did some reading. Very interesting. Thanks for the education..

 

Planned obsolescence has been a factor in the economy since the 1950s but most people, including economists, have not discussed it much until lately. Notice the rise in the PO line rising like Android smartphone.

I used Android smartphone because just using smartphone flattened everything. Increasing GDP on the basis of consumers being stupid for the last 70 years has been regarded as economic growth and considered smart. Yeah, Apple investors are smart on the basis Apple consumers being stupid.

 

You stopped because as I predicted and knew with absolute certainty, you are not willing to learn from having been proved objectively wrong.

Yes.

There are actually very few, and they can do that because being out from under the yoke and lash of private landowners has made China so miraculously prosperous that they can afford to waste that much labor and raw materials and still demolish capitalist competition in world markets.

Only because they believed your evil filth that landowning is the key to prosperity, and buying apartments was the closest most of them could get. Those with more money went overseas and bought land. They are absolutely single-minded about it. Like you.

No, you made that up. And it still does not in any way support your claim that China has not achieved the greatest miracle of economic prosperity in history without private landowning, as anyone who has been there (you haven't) can see with their own eyes.

Again, you simply made that up. Their construction system is to add most of that stuff later because they want to personalize it. I know, personally, a Chinese apartment developer, who explained how the system works. FTR, he doesn't like it and thinks the West's construction system is better, but your claims above merely prove you do not know what you are talking about. Sure, there are a few failed ventures, just as you find in capitalist countries (Trump had more than his share of them), though often on a larger scale; but the notion that ghost cities are the rule and not an exception in China is uninformed and absurd.

Again, it's a small portion, not a large one; very little of it is actually worthless; and the fact that they can afford to do it at all proves me right and you wrong.

Such a claim is hilariously uninformed. China is not collectivist. It was never communist, and has not been socialist for over 40 years. The CCP pays lip service to Marx and Mao, but is actually now more fascist.

Garbage. Anyone who has actually been to China (you haven't) has seen the prosperity for themselves, with their own eyes. Many areas are absolutely futuristic, and make American cities look like shanty towns.

 

Well sure, every failing authoritarian nightmare has its nice areas built on the backs of the masses of peasants required to be enslaved to make it happen. Have you considered moving there?

 

GARBAGE. The vast majority of Chinese people now live in those "nice areas."

You are merely demonstrating your utter ignorance of China. "Masses of peasants"? China's rural population has been crashing, and aging rapidly, as erstwhile peasants flock to the miraculous prosperity and opportunity absence of private landowning has created in the cities. "Enslaved"? The big problem now is that young Chinese are so spoiled by the miraculous prosperity absence of private landowning has given them that they aren't willing to work hard any more, or to take on the financial, physical, and emotional responsibilities of marriage and child-rearing.

Certainly. Unlike you, I actually know something about it, including through personal acquaintance with both Chinese and foreigners who have actually lived there for decades. In fact, I accepted a very nice university teaching job in Beijing several years ago, but it unfortunately fell through when the CCP reduced the age of eligibility for work visas. It's not for me any more because I'm too old to learn Chinese now, and I am not willing to keep my political views under wraps.

 

Well I hope you enjoy it...

 

If you watch that Commanding Heights video you will be introduced to Frederick Hayek. There are now videos on YouTube presented as Rap Battles between Keynes and Hayek. Hayek is used to justify Neoliberalism and rises in the graph along with Think Tanks.

 

Economics is a very peculiar subject. It is possible to hear a lot about it and still wonder if anyone understands it.

All warfare is based on deception. - Sun Tzu

We hear about GDP, Gross Domestic Product, constantly. Something like this is in most economics textbooks:



If you look in the index you may find NDP, NET Domestic Product. I have never seen a graphic to explain it however. It might look like this:


But the Laws of Physics do not care about economics and cannot tell the difference between a machine that is a capital good and machines that are consumer goods.

But the world started changing around 1900 and those changes accelerated after WWII. The Depression may have helped start WWII but the war helped to prove the validity of John Maynard Keynes' ideas. The concept of GNP/GDP is the result of the Keynes and the War. But the production of consumer products exploded after the war. Try finding an economist discussing planned obsolescence though. So the correct graphic should be:

 

I was going to wait until the 28th but decided that was just OCD.

So only one person commented on Ngrams but no comments on the significance of the graphs.

Here is a simpler issue than economics:


When I was a kid there was no explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs. From the graph you can see the rise in mentions of iridium layer and anomaly in 1977. A meteor collision was hypothesized as the cause but a crater had not been located. But when the location was determined near Chicxulub the event became Big News and the use of the name skyrocketed and anomaly went into decline.

So the use of words tells us what people are writing about which tells us either what people are thinking about or being indoctrinated about.

Why is "Invisible Hand" discussed more than "planned obsolescence". Is the economy a farce built on distorted information?

GDP is Grossly Distorted Propaganda!

 

The problem with this type of graph is that words can have more than one meaning. For example, "Chicxulub" might also be the name someone gives to a computer virus, which would greatly increase the number of occurrences.

 

I am astounded by your brilliant observation though I was more worried about multiple occurrences of "Adam Smith" than "Chicxulub".

 

Oh No!

There is "Keynes" software!

https://itconnect.uw.edu/tools-services-support/administrative-systems/keynes/

Probably designed to crash the economy.

 

There is even more:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/keynes/