{"id":3679,"date":"2011-07-29T11:29:53","date_gmt":"2011-07-29T15:29:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=3679"},"modified":"2011-08-02T10:39:37","modified_gmt":"2011-08-02T14:39:37","slug":"i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-the-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=3679","title":{"rendered":"I have a bad feeling about the economy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not to go all Star Wars on you, ((<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Drkh0YLF8rI\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"240\" height=\"195\"><\/iframe>)) but the combination of the GDP revision downward for Q1 and the debt-ceiling mess is putting a real damper on my Friday. Our economy is stagnant, politicians are engaging in the contraction-is-expansion fantasy, and the consequences for the next decade are unpleasant. For the next year, for hundreds of thousands, it&#8217;ll be dire.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike Paul Krugman, however, I can&#8217;t express too much outrage since we are far from unique. ((Krugman&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com\/2011\/07\/29\/stagnation-nation-2\/\">comment on the GDP revision is correct<\/a>\u00a0as far as I can judge, and since he has far more readers, his outrage has a much greater chance of budging things than mine would.))\u00a0Europe is engaged in its own craziness, and if there&#8217;s one thing an historian should not be surprised at, it&#8217;s mass irrationality or hysteria in times of disruption. Macroeconomics is sometimes counterintuitive, neo-Keynesian models moreso, and the punditocracy is often infected with the latest fantasies of Very Serious People, such as the confusion of centrism with moderation. ((E.J. Dionne deserves a Pulitzer Prize for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/yes-to-moderation-no-to-centrism\/2011\/07\/27\/gIQAR7JfdI_story.html\">Wednesday&#8217;s column<\/a> on that point, but the same people who award Pulitzer Prizes are infected by that fantasy, so he won&#8217;t get it.))<\/p>\n<p>I suppose the rational response is to fight for better policy and also plan for disaster&#8211;in this case, a mild recession in the next year and long-term stagnation. That&#8217;s pretty far from George Lucasian heroics, but that&#8217;s where I am at the moment. ((Yes, I <strong>am<\/strong>\u00a0enjoying the new WP-Footnote plugin I just installed on my blog, thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dancohen.org\/2011\/07\/28\/using-wordpress-as-a-book-writing-platform\/\">Dan Cohen&#8217;s suggestions on WordPress<\/a>. So I can take some small pleasures as well.))<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong> (7\/30): <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/ezra-klein\/post\/why-any-debt-ceiling-deal-will-squeeze-the-states\/2011\/07\/30\/gIQArZYjjI_blog.html\">Suzy Khimm has more<\/a> at Ezra Klein&#8217;s blog.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Second update<\/strong> (8\/2): <a href=\"http:\/\/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com\/2011\/08\/02\/macroeconomic-folly\/\">Paul Krugman has declared<\/a> an &#8220;inverse miracle of intellectual failure.&#8221; Can&#8217;t say I disagree, but that&#8217;s maybe just to show that just because you&#8217;re in a position of power or punditry that you have any more knowledge than the rest of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not to go all Star Wars on you, (()) but the combination of the GDP revision downward for Q1 and the debt-ceiling mess is putting a real damper on my Friday. Our economy is stagnant, politicians are engaging in the contraction-is-expansion fantasy, and the consequences for the next decade are unpleasant. For the next year, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-out-of-left-field-friday","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-Xl","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3679"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3692,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3679\/revisions\/3692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}