It’s Official: This Is Now the Longest Economic Expansion in US History

..the stuff it measured. Deltas in manufacturing volume. More steel = more GDP. More refrigerators = more GDP.

There were always ambiguities. More lawyer fees = more GDP? Questionable. But... The portion of simple more=more economic outputs has really shrunk relative to the ambiguous ones where more<>more or price=0 or whatnot.

And they've been economically dying for almost 30 years.

I'm sure someone has come up with a better analogy, but dollars are like electrons, they only do work when they move.

I was looking at some other HN thread a while back and there was someone talking about how a subscription model works much better for investors because the regularity of returns worked best with expectations from the investors. And it occurred to me at that time that this electric analogy might extend to impedance matching between investor and investee...with the best matched networks operating the most efficiently. (And of course, if you can develop an investment model that matches underserved opportunities you might find a way to make some money.)

By that same logic, you might also argue it's not possible to stifle success. The very formation of the central bank was (besides self enrichment) made to stabilize the economy. So in that sense you're quite wrong.

Right, the fix would be some form of govt regulation to break the bifurcation or maybe more social net support.

Huh? The homeless rate has been going down across the country over the past few years. Maybe you're just in one of the few states where it has been increasing, like New York, California, or Massachusetts.

https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/

Running out of money is what happens when a company goes bankrupt. Which happens more often during recessions.

Yes Japan is a perfect example. Having low rates for a long time has given rise to a lot of companies that are frankly non-competitive and would fail immediately if interest rates were raised. Consumers do not win because the quality of these companies are low.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Loose-lending-keeps-Japan-s-...

This is idiotic. We don't need a recession to clear detritus from the economy, that should be the result of routine investment. We get recessions because the economy as a whole overcommits to speculation because investors have too much money and too little sense. This is unnecessary, as thw Great Moderation shows. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation

The Labor Theory of Value is a fun toy model, but it isn't very accurate.

How does this explain the loss of value of money by inflation?

>>it is the accumulation of value of individual work

But it's not though is it? When money itself can do the work (investing) then this whole thing sort of falls apart. A battery can't create a larger battery by itself. Also plenty of people inherit their "batteries" or find them through random chance (lotteries, sweepstakes, etc.)

This all sounds good in theory but I don't think it really holds up when examined closely.

Modern money is more debt and promise rather than fruits of labor. Most money is created by loans which are 90% invented money (10% deposit to loan ratio, Federal Reserve "funding", etc). So 90% of all loan money is just a marker of debt and a promise to repay rather than the fruit of anyone's labor. But you pay massive amounts of compounded interest on that invention, and many/most people work most of their lives to pay off their mortgages. So we must churn out grain our entire lives for basic necessities because people have access to this marker, and they will price you out of a home if you won't get on the treadmill with them.

There is a social/historical commentary and a philosophical/political science discussion to be had here, but unfortunately I don't have the time right now...

That's not entirely it. Money is a generic and nigh-universally honored claim on future production.

It is the "pay it forward" method of splitting full barter trades into two time-separated half-trades. Instead of giving you a chicken for a bag of milled chicken feed, I can buy the feed for money now, and you can spend that money on a chicken later. Or on something else. It presumes that there will be a chicken to buy later, and that other people won't end up wanting the chicken more than you.

In order to accumulate value from individual work, that value has to be rolled into something durable, or it decays and is lost.

When labor produces a consumable good or service, the value exists only until the good or service is consumed. Why would anyone work on consumables? Because we live on consumables. We eat; we drink; we drive; we set thermostats; we end-user-license IP.

When labor produces a capital improvement, future labor output is multiplied. That's a permanent increase in value, provided that there is some useful purpose for that multiplied labor to work toward. The fisherman can trade fish for a net, or trolling motor, or ice-chest, and thus have more future fish to trade per unit of labor.

The stream of consumables is created by labor, multiplied by capital, and then annihilated by consumption shortly thereafter. That value can be stored for some amount of time in stockpiles and warehouses, but then entropy eats some of it, rather than making it to the consumers.

Money allows the holder to bid for some fraction of the stream of consumables. Divert a tiny stream toward your personal cup for a fraction of a second, and then drink it.

When you hold money, its value is the flow rate of the consumption stream, divided across the quantity of all money.

It's not a battery. It's a voucher for a quantity of grid power. As long as the grid operates reliably, it works the same in practice. But if you really want to store the value of your work, you need to buy goods that multiply the consumable output of your work, or stockpile consumables whose values decay more slowly over time than most.

So it's not quite that simple, especially when some people start issuing themselves claims on future production when they are not actually producing anything now, or planning on producing anything in the future.

And like forest fires, sometimes people suffer and even get killed dy downturns. We should try to avoid that instead of the fire itself.