{"id":55628,"date":"2020-11-14T18:55:07","date_gmt":"2020-11-14T23:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55628"},"modified":"2020-11-14T18:55:07","modified_gmt":"2020-11-14T23:55:07","slug":"prepare-for-winter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55628","title":{"rendered":"Prepare for Winter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prepare for Winter<\/a><\/h3>\n

Realism must precede optimism or the optimism will collapse as the tsunami of reality comes ashore.<\/i><\/p>\n

It’s time to prepare materially and psychologically for a winter unlike any other in our lifetimes.<\/b><\/p>\n

Here’s the view from 30,000 feet:<\/p>\n

1. The stock market and the general zeitgeist of optimism have soared based on expectations that the real-world economy and efforts to suppress Covid would also track a V-shaped recovery.<\/p>\n

While GDP did make a V-shaped recovery, GDP (gross domestic product) is a measure of\u00a0flows and consumption<\/i>, not a measure of the socio-economic “balance sheet.” GDP measures the money flowing through accounts but not the “assets” of a functioning society: functional institutions and infrastructure and the well-being and security of the citizenry.<\/p>\n

Thus GDP soars while the real-world economy and society are hollowed out by economic inequality, declining health, financial insecurity, rising prices for essentials, dysfunctional institutions and decaying infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Simply put, GDP doesn’t measure what’s important; it creates destructive incentives to squander resources and borrow staggering sums to support more consumption.<\/b>\u00a0This systemic flaw in what we measure has long been recognized by mainstream economists such as Joseph Stiglitz.\u00a0Measuring What Counts: The Global Movement for Well-Being<\/a>\u00a0(Joseph E. Stiglitz et al.)<\/p>\n

So the recovery of GDP doesn’t mean the real-world economy has been restored to pre-Covid settings.\u00a0GDP is a deceptive metric that’s masking a free-fall in our well-being, security and social cohesion.<\/b><\/p>\n

2. Just as GDP is a deceptive measure of the economy, counting Covid fatalities is equally deceptive:<\/b> a declining death count is good news, of course, but that ignores the other effects of Covid, particularly organ damage and “Long-Covid” debilitation, not just in people with pre-existing conditions and the elderly but in healthy middle-aged and even some young people.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prepare for Winter Realism must precede optimism or the optimism will collapse as the tsunami of reality comes ashore. It’s time to prepare materially and psychologically for a winter unlike any other in our lifetimes. Here’s the view from 30,000 feet: 1. The stock market and the general zeitgeist of optimism have soared based on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7],"tags":[127,1849,353,587,607,885],"class_list":["post-55628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-survival-2","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-financial-markets","tag-gdp","tag-of-two-minds","tag-pandemic","tag-winter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55628"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55629,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55628\/revisions\/55629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}