Sometimes I feel weird coding zip codes as strings but this is a great example why. If my program ever treats a zip code like a number I would like it to throw an error. At least in this case the error looks like an accident.
It's another social sciences paper but in this case a co-author has requested a retraction over his strong belief that the paper includes fabricated data. The retraction request has been denied. It differs from this paper in that the data anomalies look intentional.
My rule of thumb is that anything that’s not part of a calculation will be a string. Any chance I ever want to multiply a zip code? Doubtful. String, it is.
> If my program ever treats a zip code like a number I would like it to throw an error.
One interesting thing you can do though, is sort by zipcode. This sorts your mail from East to West in the US. You can use that as a rough estimate of shipping time.
I'm not sure if I'm understanding the map correctly:
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (literally the top of the list alphabetized by first name) spent $1.5 million on 9,576 ads, garnering 60 million impressions, mostly for fundraising, and it all started after she assumed office? And the ads are spread out across the country with California edging out her home state of New York?
What a weird coincidence - both Ocasio Cortez and Cory Booker placed more ads in California than their home states (New York and New Jersey), but Kamala Harris put more ads in New York than her home state California.
I don't know what this data means, I'm uncomfortable with Facebook getting heat when other tech companies aren't (because people think Facebook helped Trump), but this is a really interesting data set if you start to play around with it.
>> Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (literally the top of the list alphabetized by first name) spent $1.5 million on 9,576 ads, garnering 60 million impressions, mostly for fundraising, and it all started after she assumed office? And the ads are spread out across the country with California edging out her home state of New York?
These ads are probably for fundraising purposes. Congresspeople face re-election every two years and thus spend a lot of time fundraising. Also, if she raises extra money she can put it into a PAC and use it to support/oppose candidates in other races. This is a practice that was perfected by Lyndon Johnson who used campaign cash from his friends in the oil industry to bolster support for his policies amongst his peers.
>> What a weird coincidence - both Ocasio Cortez and Cory Booker placed more ads in California than their home states (New York and New Jersey), but Kamala Harris put more ads in New York than her home state California.
This is because they already built donor/supporter bases in their own states where their name ID is strongest. Rather than advertise at home where they are already household names it make sense to take out ads in other states which they want to win.
If you look at the author's published papers[0] just about every one involves highly sensitive political and social topics. That means they're likely to be quoted outside of the field where people will say things like "Look, it's scientific it was published in a peer-reviewed journal!"
Young adults have this guy as a professor and they believe that surely their professor knows what he's talking about.
This story is a few months old, the retraction request looks serious[1], and I'm left thinking that either Picket has gone off the rails or this entire field looks awful.
The paper in question has 78 citations and Stewart (the one accused of fabricating data) has 5,712 citations according to Google Scholar.
Very interesting. Here is a list of the 5 articles from that discussion:
· Johnson, Brian D., Eric A. Stewart, Justin Pickett, and Marc Gertz. (2011) Ethnic
threat and social control: Examining public support for judicial use of ethnicity in
punishment. Criminology, 49(2), 401-441.
· Stewart, Eric A., Ramiro Martinez, Jr., Eric P. Baumer, and Marc Gertz. (2015) The
social context of latino threat and punitive Latino sentiment. Social Problems, 62(1),
69-92.
· Mears, Daniel P., Eric A. Stewart, Patricia Y. Warren, Miltonette O. Craig, and Ashley
N. Arnio. (2019) A legacy of lynchings: Perceived black criminal threat among whites.
Law & Society Review, 53(2), 487-517.
· Stewart, Eric A., Brian D. Johnson, Patricia Y. Warren, Jordyn L. Rosario, and
Cresean Hughes. (2019) The social context of criminal threat, victim race, and punitive
black and latino sentiment. Social Problems, 66(2), 194-221.
· Stewart, Eric A., Daniel P. Mears, Patricia Y. Warren, Eric P. Baumer, and Ashley N.
Arnio. (2018) Lynchings, racial threat, and whites’ punitive views toward blacks.
Criminology, 56(3), 455-480.
All centre around racial issues in the criminal justice context.
From that post: "I do not have any solutions to the systemic problems here, but improvements should be easy. Criminology as a field has to improve in terms of making data available with full documentation and reproducible code. That would make errors detectable sooner."
Sadly this is a predominant trend in Academia. Some would argue it's always been there, but it does seem to be significantly more prevalent and unashamed in it's presentation these days.
> According to the World Health Organization, smoking kills three million people every year worldwide. This will rise to ten million annual deaths by 2020
We're up to 7 million according to the CDC, not 10:
> Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year[0].
Sagan predicted 7 million in growth and we only saw 4 million. That's a ~40% overstatement. And in the very next sentence from the CDC:
> If the pattern of smoking all over the globe doesn’t change, more than 8 million people a year will die from diseases related to tobacco use by 2030.
While we're on the subject of skepticism and 'baloney detection' whenever somebody says X will happen in Y years there's usually a bit of baloney in there. It's a well-meaning practice to present bad scenarios to create social change but it happens so often that when somebody says "The oceans will rise X feet in Y years!" I get skeptical. Then I get in trouble for being skeptical which just makes me more skeptical...
I feel you are not taking into account the importance of "unless something changes". I see the publication date of this as being 1997. That was around the time when globally it started to be conceivable that restaurants and public areas and even bars could be areas that were smoke-free. Changing the norm seems to have lowered the number of smokers and thus smoking deaths.
You scoff at these projections but I feel that turning your energy a bit and focusing it at how these projections indeed were used to good effect would get you closer to the truth than what appears to be your assumption that nothing was done and the projections were false. So much has changed in the intervening 22 years.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough because I'm seeing a lot of the same comment here.
At some point anybody who's producing statistics and projections has to decide what's more important between accurately predicting the future and changing the future. Is being truthful more or less important than being revolutionary? It's fine and noble to want a better future but it introduces a bias into projections and how they're reported.
Carl Sagan was more than smart enough to know that society was likely to learn the dangers of smoking and to act accordingly. I'm guessing he had his public prediction which he put in his book that deaths due to smoking will rise to ten million but if you asked him over coffee when he wasn't driving home a socio-political rant about Big Tobacco he would probably produce a lower number more in line with what has actually happened.
If this sort of convenient number selection happens in a lecture about baloney detection we should probably expect it to happen in other places, too.
You are missing something really important though. Those kind of claims usually start with the phrase, "If X continues at the current rate..."
Just in the last few years we (in the U.S. at least) reached the lowest rates of smoking ever recorded, which surely accounts for the lower rate of deaths at least in part.
The CDC in the 90's couldn't have known how effective the aggressive campaign against smoking would end up being over the next 20 years. They had to make a prediction based on the rates of smoking they had at the time, and that's really all you can ever do.
Are you suggesting that we shouldn't try to predict anything because what if we're wrong?
I have found one of the best ways to be a skeptic is to be clear what you are skeptical about. Example: are you skeptical that the oceans will rise at all or just that they won't rise to X level? Skepticism is often interpreted as dismissal which shuts down dialogue. I like to think the point of skepticism is to further dialogue not shut it down. The last thing charlatans want is dialogue. They thrive on monologue. That's the skeptic's power, to me at least.
Keeping with apples to apples comparison, the WHO says that more than 8 million a year die from smoking, for a growth of 5 million per year over 22 years, which is not that far below 7 million.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco
There’s always an implicit (or explicit) “if conditions X, Y, and Z hold” on these statements. That prediction wasn’t wrong, conditions just changed, largely because predictions like this managed to wake people up to the dangers.
Ignoring the unstated assumptions in these statements isn’t really skepticism.
>While we're on the subject of skepticism and 'baloney detection' whenever somebody says X will happen in Y years there's usually a bit of baloney in there.
Agreed.
One of the most popular New Year’s Day posts here was a popular tech personality with his 2019 predications that definitely had Trump removed from office.
I look forward to bringing that up next New Years, not because I’m a Trump fan, but because if all these Ms Cleo fortune tellers are so smart I wonder why they waste time with blogging.
Was it the one where he also assigns a probability rate to his prediction? i.e. "Trump will be removed from the presidency - 90%", and then at the end of the year he calculates all his predictions (which are True/False by nature) and weighs them based on how certain he was to determine a marker of how accurate he is.
I think he actually predicted that Trump would remain the president, but I've always found the predictions post as strange. It seems like he's making a bunch of safe bets and scoring them safely, and then declaring himself accurate as a result. "What everything thinks is most likely is probably most likely, so you should listen to what I have to say" would be the takeaway, which isn't that interesting.
> [Company] then used this cash to underprice competitors in [market], hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in [market].
This template appears to be one of the author's deepest understandings of capitalism. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't look at his resume and realize he was Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst on the Senate Budget Committee from Dec 2014 – Dec 2016.
edit: also 2 years as a Senior Policy Advisor for a congressman
There's an intelligent conversation to be had for sure about how large firms like SoftBank are intentionally playing the market and unsavvy investors. This isn't it.
Interesting. I'm not sure I understand why one type of charlatan is more important than the other.
If you want WeWork/SoftBank to be regulated, which a lot of people do, it's kind of important that the people doing the regulating understand what they're doing.
(edit: If you think a comment is off-topic then just say so. There's no need to be so insulting.)
> Nunavut’s rate is 100 per 100,000, ten times higher than the rest of Canada and seven times higher than the US.
Ok, that's bad.
But we can connect that to the US: white males with no college, aged 45-54, have a suicide rate of 38.8 and a poisoning (overdose) rate of 58.0[0]. Put those together and that's pushing 100 per 100,000. That's enough to start asking some cultural questions.
However, "During 1999–2003, the suicide rate among Nunavut males aged 15 to 19 was estimated to exceed 800 per 100,000 population, compared to around 14 for the general Canadian male population in that age group."[1]
800 per 100,000? This statistic is staggering for a couple of reasons: its magnitude and the age range.
The graphs in [3] show just how young and male the suicides among the Inuit are. It's no surprise that it's primarily male, because it almost always is, but it is surprising to see an 8:1 ratio and that it's affecting the youth so heavily. For comparison, in the United States the 15-24 age range is near the bottom of the suicide statistics[4].
These are boys born in the 1980's. As bad as the crimes against the Inuits may have been in the 1950's it's a strange territory to wander into where an effect of an atrocity shows up 50 years late in a population that wasn't alive yet. From wikipedia[2]: "...to about 170 in 2002. Some of the reasons given include adverse childhood experiences involving emotional neglect and abuse, family violence and substance abuse, as well as social inequalities brought on by government intervention." (referencing [3]) I can see the argument the author is making here but I don't have the time to address it.
The article is giving the "white guilt" narrative and for whatever reason is dancing around the massive gender disparity in suicide rates. When I see articles like this I wonder how much the author cares about suicide and how much they see it as a platform to write about anti-colonialism.
Or you could serve a lot of people, it's probably easier.
Sell something for $10 that's worth $12 to the buyer and costs you $8 to make. Repeat a billion times. The people you did business with got an extra $2 billion, you got $2 billion, everybody's better off.
The main issue is that all of these companies these days are selling things for $7 that cost $8 to make. Repeated a billion times.
The people you did business with got an extra $5 Billion, you lose $1 Billion. All the companies trying to offer the service for $10 (or some other fair price) will be eradicated by your company, because a company cannot compete selling things at a fair ($10) price when you are selling it at $7.
To paraphrase what others said: that’s a great way to become a multimillionaire, but to get to a billion you have to step on a lot of toes. I think Bill Gates observed that your quality of life doesn’t really change after about 50 million. Even with inflation, by the time that’s a billion, billionaire won’t be what people target. Hell, 40 years ago people dreamed of being millionaires. Inflation adjusted that’s only 3 million now.
If you were really that philanthropic, why would you carve out a billion from that revenue stream instead of giving back, or investing it in better equipment or people?
You realize that a billionaire has almost nothing to do with their money but invest it in better equipment or people? That's what investing is and that's what billionaires do with their money.
So on the front end the billionaire had to give more than a billion dollars of value to society in order to get people to voluntarily do business with them. Then on the back end they have to turn around and invest most of that money back into society. In doing so they're shouldering the burdens of market research, diligence, and risk.
Society wins twice from this and in return the billionaire gets to spend a lot of money. Society wins there, too, because the economy benefits from their ridiculous spending.
Does this work perfectly? Absolutely not, but nobody has a better system that I've seen.
No it's not. Debt is measured in dollars. GDP is dollars per year.
Debt/GDP is $/($/yr)=yr
This ratio converts debt, a number it's hard to have intuition for, to years. It tells us how many years of productivity we owe. For those of us who don't manage $30 billion in assets years of productivity probably carries more meaning than big numbers with 12 zeros.
The book "Looting Greece" by progressive economist Jack Rasmus explains in technical detail the "twin deficit" strategy budget deficit is balanced by trade deficit, which hints at why USA has aircraft carriers stationed around the world, projecting power that tilts the free markets in its favor which is what makes this strategy work. Here is an excerpt: http://www.dustingetz.com/:rasmus-usa-twin-deficit/
I don't understand why US having military presence around the globe tilts the free markets in their favour. Realistically, no military outside of perhaps Russian could stand up against the US but I don't think US are outright forcing trade agreements at a gun point, or am I wrong?
The United States has a variety of techniques for making sure its business interests get what they want. Aircraft carriers are one (see Iraq, and possibly Iran if things go south), CIA-sponsored coups another (Guatemala, El Salvador), economic sanctions a third (Iran again, Russia, much of Latin America). Negotiation at gun point often takes the form of crippling sanctions until and unless a US-friendly regime is in power - there's no actual guns, but there's also no free elections.
Noam Chomsky is a great resource if you want to go deeper on this topic.
Why would a renowned linguist be a credible source of geopolitics? Especially when his wikipedia article starts off the section on political views by calling him a "dissident"?
> Chomsky is a prominent political dissident. His political views have changed little since his childhood, when he was influenced by the emphasis on political activism that was ingrained in Jewish working-class tradition.
If you want confirmation bias or arguments to feed your matching viewpoint, sure, but neutral, reasoned analysis? Not so much.
Can I make a small counterpoint? I would say Noam Chomsky has very little credibility as a social scientist. (As a linguist is another matter.) He's tied himself in knots over Venezuela. Before that he disgraced himself by denying genocide in Cambodia (http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/wma.html). His books are well-nigh unreadable rants, which substitute conspiratorial thinking for serious analysis.
If you want to read a serious progressive economist, go for Dani Rodrik. Or hell, read Marx. Marx was a real social scientist. Chomsky, no.
It's difficult to impose sanctions without having control of waterways. The US can enforce sanctions against Iran and Russia, but the reverse is not true. This puts the former is a position of advantage. True, aircraft carrier diplomacy is a bit more subtle than the the "sign this treaty or we'll blow up your harbor" gunboat diplomacy of old. But it's still the application of force to put the nation at a diplomatic and economic advantage.
First page: "Failure to meet our defense objectives will result in decreasing U.S. global influence, eroding cohesion among allies and partners, and reduced access to markets that will contribute to a decline in our prosperity and standard of living"
I'll leave it to the reader to decide if this supports the above argument, it's just USA propaganda but I found it certainly interesting to read with a cynical eye.
The Russian military is a shadow of what the Soviets brought to the table. Their main aircraft carrier has a habit of catching on fire. However their ability to spew propaganda, and to bribe businessmen with penchants for East European women, is unsurpassed.
The real counter to the US military is China, both in a direct military sense, as well as economically/softpower-y.
His proposed alternate metric, interest as a percentage of tax revenue is also deeply flawed- it misses the obligation to pay the principal, which has tripled since the low point in the early 2000s.
I like the finance wonks word for debt- leverage. Taking on debt is like going out further on a lever- the debter is more exposed to swings in the overall economy. While it's worked out fine so far, a high debt to gdp ratio exposes the US to higher risk on the downside.
But you never really have to do that. You can just keep rolling them. If we could keep the debt at the same absolute level inflation and productivity increases would drive it into insignificance.
Of course the idea of keeping it at the same level is a fantasy.
While the government will almost certainly never pay down it's debt completely, looking at the effort needed to pay off the debt is a useful way to ground the discussion of debt when future interest rates are unknown.
In the last 40 years, the 30 year treasury bond has gone for rates of less than 2% and more than 14%. The interest as a percent of tax revenue metric would have predicted the death of America in the 1980s, while oppositely making it look like things will be forever rosy today. Neither of those perspectives accurately characterizes the debt burden.
I wonder how people reconcile how it's OK to rely on progress to grow our way out of a debt burden but also incredibly irresponsible to expect progress to cope with our carbon problem. Both seem defensible to me but like they kind of need an adaptor to fit in the same worldview.
Historically, progress has resulted in more environmental damage and CO2 emissions. Relying on progress to fix these things is counting on a fundamental shift to happen. By comparison, progress historically has always increased GDP, so counting on progress to grow away our debt is just expecting the historical trend to continue.
The second actually involves the first, and this is the point we lose.
If we could have runaway climate change somehow not disrupt global economy, we could eventually tech our way out of it. But the game over point is when the economy stops, and humanity no longer has capability to slow down and mitigate the effects of warming. At that point there isn't much left of humanity anyway.
I wondered if this was part of the great extraterrestrial life filter: that there were so many "only in this window" chances that a civilization gets.
E.g. how easy would it be for us to bootstrap back to space capabilities after a catastrophic war wiped out a large portion of world economic capability?
If something pulled the plug on our economy, all the technology we have today would disappear in few years to decades. Devices wearing out with no way of repairing them or producing new ones. We'd regress to medieval times, because that would be the most advanced things available energy sources would support.
The industrial revolution happened because we had easy access to high-density energy source in the form of coal. Maybe, given enough time, some survivors would figure out how to do a new industrial revolution without it, though I'm not having high hopes. So whatever is left of humanity would have to wait until the Earth recycles enough living matter to create new deposits of high-energy something.
There may not be much difference. Extinction of the human race is an exaggerated prediction, but more importantly, what do you expect the consequences of global economic disruption (to the level of taking the US down) to be? Take a look at history if you may.
Only if you can find people or institutions willing to buy the new bonds.
_if_ those cannot be found, the ‘easy’ (easy because all it’s debts are in US dollars) way out for the USA is to print money, but a country that has to print money because nobody wants to lend it money will find it hard to buy stuff from other countries.
But so long as the debt rollover remains straightforward, the principal never has to be repaid. Large parts of the economy probably couldn't survive repayment of all outstanding treasury bonds, they're too useful. They behave more like huge denomination bills with a tiny coupon.
No single number will tell the whole story about a country's debt. GDP today is not a perfect proxy for GDP in 10 years (Japan's will probably be about the same, the US's will probably grow a bit, China's has a decent chance of growing a lot.) GDP today is not a perfect measure of economic activity today (Ireland has a really high GDP because companies are incorporated there but don't really pay much in taxes or do much to benefit Ireland. Actual Individual Consumption may be a better measure of a country's wealth. https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2017/04/consumption-vs-gd... ) So Debt/GDP isn't nonsense, but it also could be potentially misleading.
Current interest rates can give a somewhat distorted picture for the US. Banks buy US debt because they have to due to regulation, other countries buy US debt as part of their economic policy, the net effect is that the US government is able to borrow money more cheaply that it should based purely on credit risk. Even so, the US is able to borrow money at historically cheap rates.
My understanding is that if current trends is health care costs and economic growth continue then in the long run the US will be unable to service its debt and maintain its current spending programs without raising taxes. Most spending is on the military, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, so there will be some difficult political decisions. However, that doesn't mean the US is close to a debt crisis today.
”No single number will tell the whole story about a country's debt.”
I don’t think anybody is making that claim. Problem is: if you can only rank values that have a total order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order), so if you want to rank countries, you have to simplify.
For the judgment of “how deep is a country in debt” it also seems desirable to have the property that splitting a country into equal parts yields smaller countries that are equally deep in debt.
If you want that, “debt” on its own doesn’t cut it. Debt/population and debt/GDP are two metrics that have that property. They also are simple, so do not seem doctored, which correcting for modeled/guessed at/hoped for future growth or correcting for the age distribution of the population, average fertility, etc. easily could.
”GDP today is not a perfect proxy for GDP in 10 years”
Again: I don’t think anybody is claiming ‘perfect’.
The problem is, state debt is not like personal or corparate debt. If you cut your spending to pay of a loan, it is usually not a problem. If the state cut its spending to pay back a loan, it means people have to spent more money on another spot to make up for the budget cuts.
We see this currently in Germany, the German government is proud of their budget but at the same time the infrastructure is crumbling, trains are delayed, bridges are in need for repair or even replacement, broadband doesn't reach all places and I don't want to talk about climate change and the structural issue to which it will lead.
There is also one more thing about state debt, many people invest in state debt because it is a secure investment for the retirement and when a country no longer takes debt, this possibility is gone.
The ideology to have little or no state debt is hurting the economy and will do so in the future. And I'm not even talking about a recession or a depression which will come sooner or later.
German infrastructure is top-class, trains work quite well and bridges are not collapsing. May I ask where you got this from?
EDIT
Please don't turn this into a flame war. I am slightly worried about the effects of mainstream media, as I've seen these kind of posts on Reddit also.
People keep hearing about the low/inexistent economic growth of countries like Germany or Japan and start thinking that these countries are a deep mess. The reality is quite far from it.
I wish it were top-class, but it isn't. many bridges have structural issues and in need to be replaced or repaired and due to the fact that the DB Netz who runs the railway network has to pay for small repairs but the state pays for big ones, you can see how it is not well maintained.
"neglecting our infrastructure for at least a decade now" honestly struck my American funny bone. But I can understand that being frustrating from a German perspective, and I mean that respectfully. :)
It's interesting how much design tolerances and overbuilding factor into this.
Assuming linear failure to fault (e.g. rust or structural weakening), an overbuilt bridge makes a big difference if one is skimping on maintenance costs.
Ideologies are not dangerous, they are just the eyes through which we see things. Sometimes you have to be able to see more because your ideology doesn't help you. But you will never really escape that bias.
The difference is actually very simple. Persons and corporations are not closed systems. If you safe money, the impact is very small. Even when a big corporation safes money it doesn't really matter. But the state is huge and spends a lot of money. And many companies depend on state contracts.
I give you a simple example. The German state is subsidising public transport, if the state cuts theses costs, the company providing this service has only a few choices, such as cutting service or increasing prices. These will leads the consumer to have higher costs. If the company cuts lay off people to compensate, those will lose their income and the state must even pay them unemployment benefits.
So the state budget is not really a question if something is be paid but rather by whom and at what point. It is essentially a closed system.
P.S. Very export depended countries can essentially export this partially to other countries. There is this argument that Germany did that with Greece. While Germany consolidated its budget, the debt of Greece increased.
The counterargument to the point you're making would be that taxes are essentially "closing the loop" between private and public services.
Either the state taxes and provides public services, or the state taxes less and private services are provided.
I think the bigger point is about the state's role as a consumer- and lender- of last resort.
Through its ability to deficit spend (enabled by its supposed future ability to tax) or its ability to print currency (through its central bank), there are functions the only states have access to. Which become incredibly valuable when everyone else is economically terrified.
It does, but the author's point, I think, is that dividing by GDP isn't particularly meaningful. They argue that the cost of additional borrowing is a better measure - will people loan you more or are they getting nervous they won't get their money back?
You could divide by other numbers - an example the author gives is hard assets- and come up with a different percentage.
>It tells us how many years of productivity we owe.
That's not accurate though. We can pay off the debt tomorrow and skip the years of productivity. It really is an apples to oranges comparison. The debt isn't denominated in productivity. It's denominated in dollars that the government can create for "free". Of course there are knock on effects of creating enough dollars to zero out the debt, but it's not equivalent to the entire country working for years.
> It's denominated in dollars that the government can create for "free".
The government cannot create wealth "for free". It can print more dollars, but in doing so it makes each dollar worth less. No wealth is actually gained.
> there are knock on effects of creating enough dollars to zero out the debt
Doing that is impossible, though. Reducing the value of a dollar means that you'll need even more dollars to repay that debt than you would have needed otherwise. There is no net gain here.
>The government cannot create wealth "for free". It can print more dollars, but in doing so it makes each dollar worth less. No wealth is actually gained.
That's the point. The government isn't on the hook for wealth. They are on the hook for dollars. And dollars, to the US government, are "free".
>Doing that is impossible, though. Reducing the value of a dollar means that you'll need even more dollars to repay that debt than you would have needed otherwise. There is no net gain here.
The amount of debt doesn't go up if the value of the dollar goes down.
> The amount of debt doesn't go up if the value of the dollar goes down.
The interest rate goes up almost instantly when the government prints money. That's not exactly equivalent to increasing the debt value, but it's more than enough to make the "just inflate it away" strategy fail 100% of the times some country tries it.
Imagine we have a company with 100 shares total. I have 1 share. Now you print 100 more shares and keep them. Sure, company is still the same but the wealth is redistributed, I have 2 times less of it.
Same with US dollars. Half of them might be held by non-US persons. Another quarter by US population. Printing dollars is a wealth redistribution excersice and a very effective one.
One of the very smart things the U.S. has done is take a good portion of those printed dollars and invest in weapons which allow us to force the world to accept the same printed dollars. That's what really allows our government to be in that globally unique position. Resistance to this by other nations has various consequences. If you're a country that doesn't have a certain level of military deterrent you become victim of "regime change". If you are a country that meets that deterrent threshold you become victim of the foreign boogeyman FUD.
That's not really accurate either. Switzerland and Japan aren't out there regime changing countries but their currencies are valued. The dollar is valued because the US is the largest economy and has a history of sound monetary policy.
Not only that, but the Nixon administration cut a deal with the Saudis to ensure that all OPEC oil would be sold in US dollars. This creates a demand for US dollars.
How long do we expect roads to last? Or the investments that have to be made over someone's lifetime to enable them to retire? Even the big "high tech" weapons and aircraft investments which consume a big chunk of spending have 30-50 year project lifetime. The B-52 fleet is 55 years old, not counting the design time. Is it not reasonable to spread payment for that over the lifetime of the asset?
The financing of long-term Public Goods has to be one of the best arguments for government debt there is.
I'm not against debt[0] so much as I like interesting units and metrics. If you want to compare debt levels of different countries across history getting the local currency to cancel out means no converting 1870 dollars to 2019 dollars, no converting 1920 Yen to 1995 Azerbaijani Manats, etc.
The fact that Debt-to-GDP reduces to years, even if it's unclear what that means, lets us make years-to-years comparisons and makes charts like this possible[1].
It's more nuanced than that. The debt/GDP number is talking about future dollars above the divider, and present dollars below the divider. FutureUS$ / (PresentUS$ / yr) is meaningless.
The government could choose to reduce the productivity value of the debt by reducing the value of the dollar (quantitative easing), or numerous other monetary policy levers it can pull. How many years of "productivity we owe" isn't a sensible metric when it's not to be paid now, and we can manipulate the number between now and maturity.
I'll add that debt is the integral (well sum) of deficits. deficit/GDP, or deficit/revenue ($4T/$3T = 33%? is that right?) is far more worrying than just the debt/GDP.
However, I will concede that GDP as a measure of productivity is hard to measure, easy to manipulate, and less effective than other measures of productivity.
you say that like it's a bad thing. if people are starving and some person has excess food that they can't even eat, it's good to steal that person's food.
Investors and lenders play an important role in the economy. If theft makes what they do impossible it will cause a drop in the total productivity of the country as a whole. Which is to say stealing from them, especially at scale, is likely to cause far more starvation than it will solve.
Your idea has been tried: the peasants were hungry, it was the Kulaks with the excess food and money and the process of taking it from them was called dekulakization. Between 500,000 and 5,000,000 people died. This also led to the Holodomor with its estimated 7.5 million dead.
This all started with the observation that there were rich people and poor people right next to each other, and that taking from the rich to give to the poor must be a good thing. But it turned out to be one of the worst events in human history.
that's pretty hilarious if it's actually the way you think. according to you, having progressive taxation is exactly the same thing as millions of people dying due to a natural disaster. how am i even supposed to have a conversation with such an irrational position.
That is actually well established by legal and moral doctrine with necessity as a defense and lesser harms. Just as nobody would be charged with vandalism if they cut open a drain cover to rescue a trapped child - someone dying of starvation is a far greater harm than petty theft. The reason why mugging can be responded to with lethal force but not shoplifting for instance is because the previous includes a threat to another's life and there is no hard guarantee that compliance will save the victim.
There are plenty of aspects of nuance with it of course including 'stealing to save yourself from starvation and causing someone else to starve' isn't morally right along with 'stealing when there were other viable alternatives without harm' is wrong.
And of course messy matters of scale when things get really messed up like the Great Depression where farmers may have had plenty of food but were fiscally precarious - and many of the hungry couldn't afford it - one person shoplifting bread may be a lesser harm but if farms were robbed enmasse could cause them to go under.
I think you are on a interesting topic, but seems like you are comparing some quite different things.
In your example cutting open a drain cover is not directly away from anyone, where as stealing food is.
The thing you seem to be missing in your case, is that you are not taking into account the time factor and only looking at a single action.
I agree that cutting open a drain cover (vandalism) is less bad when saving a trapped child. However, I do not agree that there should be nothing bad happening to the cutter. Imagine if instead of a drain cover it was someone's house.
Would breaking a window and then being absolved of all responsibility be okay? Should there not be a middle ground where nobody is solely at a loss.
Perhaps the breaker could pay for part of the new window? Perhaps the city could pay for the window as appreciation for the effort of saving one of their citizens?
Perhaps here instead of stealing, the bread could be loaned, or sold at a cheaper price to those in need.
