Hacker News Reader

HN desperately wants to discuss economics but will not take a single second to read up about macro beyond some crank Austrian stuff. It's an entire field of study! There are people who devote their entire lives to investigating just one corner of it! These threads are always packed with software engineers who are absolutely full of it and want to talk confidently about a subject they have absolutely no background in.

View on HN

I studied economics and I cannot claim to understand what is currently going on or how it will end. The fact that there are so many conflicting opinions (from experts, not just HN posters) tells me that I’m not the only one. We are in uncharted waters AND sailing in the dark. When the end comes it’ll be obvious in hindsight, but it’s currently anything but.

That is the correct answer :)

I'm a computer programmer that has started reading Schumpeter's "History of economic analysis", but I think not even a guy like Schumpeter could have explained why at some point in 2019 more than $17 trillion were returning negative rates (and I don't think that sum has decreased by all that much).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com