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Strategies & Market Trends : Heinz Blasnik- Views You Can Use -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GraceZ who wrote (3234)	7/25/2003 12:50:56 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4907

The benefit to the economy can be huge, nails are almost free, but because the profit is so low they consider the improvement almost worthless in modern economic measures which are all based on dollar amounts. no, the people at the Bureau of Lies and Statistics do make such adjustments through their subjective hedonic price deflator. and it is very dumb indeed. after all, the ability to produce an infinite amount of nails, or bandwidth, or flops, is meaningless on its own. you must look at the relations. remember what Kierkegaard said: the self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. what relations matter? how does the economy relate to itself? through MONEY... you pay MONEY to buy nails or gigaflops or petabytes or to pet a dog that bites. the market value of these things is related as MONEY. MONEY, not MP3s or Coca-Colas or whatever, is the consistent thread through history. it is the ultimate economic arbitrator throughout time. no matter how big your nail factory, you cannot pay for your rent or bed in nails, although you can rent your sheets by sleeping on a bed of nails. you must pay attention to the relations that have persisted and will persist, not the meaningless fantasies envisioned by Gilder in his hilarious purple prose.

To: GraceZ who wrote (3234)	7/25/2003 12:56:45 PM
From: LLCF	Respond to of 4907

< Now it's measured in dollars. How dumb is that?> Well actually what IS dumb is the fed using data and printing dollars based on something NOT measured in dollars. I think the whole point is the definition of productivity. I don't think it's stupid at all to measure it in dollars, that's what economics IS. I think we all agree with the nails point, it's wonderful. But if it's THAT wonderful, new skyscrapers [well, OK houses, it is 'nails' after all] will spring up all over the place with those cheap nails and THAT will show up in dollars. Or nails might be dumped in the lake to get rid of them :) IMO what you're talking about belongs in the realm of then evaluating the usefulness of economic numbers not unlike my GDP/Pollution example. Do don't change the GDP number to reflect pollution by product, but that doesn't mean it doesn't come into play when evalating them. DAK