Absolutely true. If you grow your own food, knit your own clothes, repair your own car, generate your own electricity - the consequence is that you contribute almost nothing to GDP, and if everybody did the same GDP would be very low. If you do nothing for yourself and pay others to do everything for you, GDP is higher. The traditional example (used in elementary economics lectures) is that if I pay you to do my laundry, then you pay me to do your laundry, both transactions raise GDP; if we each do our own laundry, GDP is that much lower. What this boils down to is that economics is not a precise science. Pretty good figures may be accurate to the nearest 1%, but fractions of a per cent are not a reliable guide to anything.
Very well said, I particularly like your laundry example which I have not heard before , I have obviously never attended elementary economics lectures. It is also I think an excellent example of how meaningless statistics can be.
Statistics are not meaningless, but they do need to be treated with caution. It helps if you understand what is being measured, how the figures are collated, and how they compare with other figures. The fact that journalists with an axe to grind often distort and misrepresent statistics is not the fault of the stats.
And therein lies the rub: Once upon a time,self-sufficiency/thrift/living within your means/saving for a rainy day/etc,was considered virtuous,and people who lived their lives that way were respected. Now you're a cash cow,who only exists to flog yourself to death trying to finance the purchase of the the latest model...Bigger/Better/Faster/More!... And I don't believe knowing a country's GDP benefits the average citizen in any whatsoever,nor does knowing Tesco's latest share price.I don't know when it became normal to bore the viewer to death every morning with this shite,but I suspect it's some sort of puff to make the other-peoples-money-shufflers in the City of London look important.... Just more meaningless bollocks,spoon-fed to confused Emmerdale watchers....
I think that over and above the "axe to grind" the real reason that stats are so poorly understood is that they are (very) rarely explained or analysed by journalists. This is why I have given up reading newspapers - there is little in them to aid understanding. On a regular basis, accident stats are trotted out - entirely meaningless. They don't say the amount of accidents per miles travelled, or cars on the road, or the long term trend or anything at all of any use. Just to know that accidents have fallen by 5% over last year tells me precisely bugger all of any use. And so it goes on with every statistic. I find real stats fascinating - they can tell you what is really going on, but for that, you have to see a whole series of stats and then apply the techniques to the series that eliminate the "noise". When did the media last do that? I can't think of one single instance. And the reason that papers don't do this? Because they are lazy but more to the point, their readers are lazy and don't really want information that is useful. What they want is easily consumable entertainment. Papers cater for the market. We the readership are the market. I'm just atypical of it.
Yeah, if we overstated our profits by £250,000,000 just think how much more money we could borrow and spend. That would be good for the economy.
That seems to be what Mr Cameron would like. If he could he says he'd keep interest rates low "forever". So an eternity of "cheap" debt and no income for savers and no incentive to save. You'd think we'd tested to destruction in this country the theory that you can buy prosperity by spending money you haven't got, but apparently Cameron and boy George think otherwise.
I was dismayed to hear that he has apparently said that he'd like to see ultra low rates forever. How can he have graduated in Economics (I assume that is meant to be a third of PPE!) and apparently been an outstanding student, yet fail to see that low interest rates do NOT help home buyers if they create and sustain unrealistically high prices? It would be interesting to know whether this could be an area where he and George (and Mark Carney?) do not see eye to eye. We do seem to live in an era where all politicians will say whatever pleases the most people, regardless of the truth - I rather doubt that we will hear any other politicians disagreeing with Cameron on this.
Yes, PPE obviously. Cameron's politics tutor (Vernon Bogdanor) has expressed praise for him as a student but dismay at his lack of grasp in government as far as the politics part of PPE is concerned. I wonder what his economics tutor thinks?
Never in a million years would I have thought you a socialist. Thatcher was right to sell off council houses, where she was wrong was stopping councils building new stock. IMHO anyway.
Fraid so 749. Just not rabid. There's something inherently wrong to sell the council houses to those other than have lived in them for 20+ yrs. That I can understand to a degree. But to someone who has been in it 5 mins, buys it and flogs it for profit that sickens me. Especially as you rightly pointed out, we never replaced them. I'm all for taxing the rich. How can someone justify paying £25M for a Ferrari when kids are hungry? Fair enough having enough so you don't need to work, have a modest nice house and a reasonable float in the current acct. But how much money must you have to spend £25M on a fucking car? Theres a point where it just gets nuts. I have no issues with people having a reasonable amount. But how can you justify keeping anything other than say more than £5M? You may as well just give it away, or build hospitals or whatever. I don't get the mind set of the super rich. If you've got the means to make a difference then make the fucking difference. There should be no such things as billionaires in a world where people are hungry. People before money. Not money before people. Its not rocket science.
That's the spirit, that'll solve everything. As someone who's worked very hard for everything I've got, and have a nice home with "too many" rooms, that seems very fair actually. F**king motorbikes too, absolute unnecessary luxury. I'd tax motorbike riders 10 x more on fuel. Motorcycle equipment should carry 1000% VAT and any car driver who kills a motorcyclist should receive 1 years free fuel and a blowjob from Cheryl Cole.
Socialism? Conservatism? Liberalism? Communism?..meaningless,lazy,catch-all titles for philosophies that exist only in the imagination...usually of those whose wealth or position insulates them from the results of the philosophies being foisted on the average citizen. In fact I doubt many people have principles that they will stick to in the event it affects them negatively,e.g,those who promote travellers rights rarely live in places where said-Travellers pitch up...a bloke on average wages who grafted to buy his own three bedroom house might say he's in favour of forcible downsizing,until the dreamers try to winkle him out of it.. Want to give more money to the poor? Cut public spending.(The UK taxpayer doesn't need a bloody supercomputer to tell what the weather is going to be like in a weeks time...there you go,£97 million to give to the poor!) Have a bowl of this then,(there are 50+ Constabularies,this is just one of them) Chief Constable £134,440 Deputy Chief Constable £110,880 £12.2 million per annum,give or take And still more needed? Department of Health evidence submitted to a pay review body shows that almost 400 senior NHS staff at such quangos now earn an average of about £123,000. The average hospital chief executive is paid a salary of £164,000 a year – considerably more than the Prime Minister’s £142,50 Highlighting the above doesn't make me a Tory,a Socialist,or a UKip supporter. It just shows that the country is awash with taxpayers money,but being spent on the wrong things
Another bloody expensive job creation scheme...I was told ours is now under investigation for something or other,still on full pay of course...
