What is wrong in the Western Economies?

Only facts can be shown to be false (or true) You and I have very different interpretations of what these facts imply especially about future developments, but there is no point in trying to prove my POV wrong as you do. I will remain convenienced that the dollar is doomed, US (and EU) will sink into world´s worst depression and you think that is hogwash (or worse).

I note that very soon US will be celebrating "50K day" where just the on budget debt items (not including off budget item like future Social Security payments promised, which are much larger) prorated to each man, woman and child total $50,000 each is in debt. There is no way that can be paid off except in very devalued dollars. Especially considering:

" ... According to recent estimates, there are 58 million Americans between the ages of 50 and 64. The median retirement savings for this group is only $26,000 per person. To give you an idea of how scant that $26,000 will be when combined with Social Security and spread out over the rest of one's life, consider this: Almost half of these middle-class workers will be living on a food budget of $5 per day. ..." Quote from: http://www.fool.com/investing/gener...t-numbers-that-will-blow-yo.aspx#.UA3kcaA2dlJ

and fact that 1 in 7 is already on food stamps with that fraction rapidly growing.

 

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Worldviews can be shown to be bullshit, as well.

More to the point, certain worldviews don't command much audience when honestly described. Which is presumably why you flipped out and resorted to these tactics when I noted that you were trafficking in right-wing producerist cant.

No, the situation is not one of honest difference on a common, agreed-upon set of "facts." You consistently cherry-pick anecdotes that fit into your fixed worldview, and then spend a lot of energy inflating those and ignoring any other data. You are not pursuing a data-driven scientific analysis, wherein you follow the data wherever it leads. You are engaged in a propaganda exercise wherein you start with your fixed worldview, spend you days trawling for anecdotes that make it sound good, and then trumpetting those here.

We are emphatically not epistemic peers with some honest difference of scientific opinion over how to interpret legitimate, serious data. You are a crank who spends his days propagandizing a fixed agenda, by sexing up any anecdote that feeds it, and attempting to dismiss, minimize or simply ignore all the data to the contrary (not to mention, the inconsistencies in your worldview itself).

On the contrary: I can very much undermine your credibility, and so limit the damage you are able to do with your energetic propaganda campaign. While that of course includes highlighting the various errors and ommissions of fact which you exhibit, that is by no means the main thrust of the counterstrategy. It is more about exposing your bias and the various tricks you try to pull to exaggerate your credibility and avoid inconvenient truths. For example, I can point out that you are trumpetting rhetoric from a man who has been repeatedly convicted of fraud for deliberate lies in his internet newsletters, and also highlight that you are lapsing into right-wing populist producerism. I can also highlight your ongoing, energetic tactic of driving every thread off topic, and towards your fixed agenda. Or when you argue from self-serving supposition and cultural bigotry. Or show how you will gyrate your position wildly to avoid admitting any error, etc. At some point, a resonable reader is going to look at your behavior and conclude that you're exactly the crank I observe you to be.

All of which you understand on some level, clearly, or you wouldn't be getting your feathers in such a ruffle in response, attempting all of these cheap re-frames about mere "facts," trying to re-assert some confidence and parity by presenting the dispute as a scientific disagreement between epistemic peers, etc.

You provide absolutely nothing in support of your conclusion there. You just go from "50k debt" to "no way," without the slightest effort at substantiation. This highlights how little "fact" and "science" have to do with your approach - it's all hand-waving and scary-sounding anecdotes.

Let's note that if any significant portion of the world's financiers and investors believed that such a level of debt spelled total imminent doom for the dollar, demand for dollars would immediately fall off of a cliff, the uS budget deficit would become unfinanceable, and we'd thereby be immediately confronted with crisis. So your position is that all of these thousands and thousands of professionals with tons of real credentials, experience and skin in the game are all fools, but you - an anonymous internet crank who traffics in poorly-edited news commentary and has an obvious chip on his shoulder about the USA - have the real truth and insight and can see the oncoming apocalypse. The term for that is "Chicken Little," and it disrespects the reader to demand that he pretend you are anything other than the obvious.

Again you are simply shotgunning out scary-sounding anecdotes without any context, citation, or attempt at serious analysis. That is a standard propaganda technique.

And in that case you are just outright wrong - the CBO estimates that food stamp enrollment and spending has pretty much peaked already and will remain flat for the next couple of years before beginning to decline. Moreover, much of the recent increase was due to a temporary relief/stimulus measure passed in response to the recession - which I have already informed you of the last time you brought this up - so it is dishonest and rude of you to assert that there is high growth and imply that this will persist long into the future (where it becomes some kind of driver of the deficit). This shows the futility of trying to engage you in some kind of serious scientific manner, as you pretend to be interested in.

 

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Although directed towards Americans, many of these troubles apply to Europeans too, but perhaps not so strongly in that older, less-dymanic,culture.

#3 Is particularly disturbing to me as the SAT test have been made more easy three times, so that average performance is still achieved on average without excessive "renormalization" each year.
#4 is amazing too when you take 8 hours for sleeping and 3 hours for eating and other necessary things out of the day, that is two full years of only video game playing! No wonder the US scores so low in math and sciences among the world´s advanced nations. (fact #10)

And I thought #40 was the only really bad thing my generation had done to the next.

A "sick joke" clarifying note on # 36: 46% were boys and 1% were very busy girls.OR #38 may imply the reverse: 46% were girls and 1% were very satisfied boys?

 

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Several of the statistics you quote there are outright wrong - can you find which ones?

Even the ones that are correct are entirely decontextualized, which is a telltale sign of scare statistics that intend to mislead. Note that there is no information given on the trends in these statistics (even the ones that are actually correct to begin with), for one thing. The one lonely statistics there that does include a comparison to a previous data, picks as its reference the peak of the previous business cycle - which is blatantly dishonest and misleading on its face. Likewise, most contain no comparison to other countries, leaving the reader no way to determine whether the numbers are high or low or normal or what - it's just scary-sounding statistics, totally removed from context and, so, meaning.

Moreover, the whole thing is a mess of socially conservative scold ideation, with no particular relevance to economics or business (all this stuff about porn and teen sex and video games and so on). And I note that you had nothing of substance to add to your quote - it seems that you happened across this article (clearly aimed at sociall conservative types who fret over the Destiny of American Values and Gumption), felt a rush of glee at its catering to your compatible outlook and prejudices, and rushed to reproduce it here without a second thought for fact-checking, relevance, topicality or substance. This is hardly the sort of standard of posting behavior that the moderator of the Business and Economics subforum ought to display.

 

I can agree that many perhaps even half don´t compare to either an earlier period or country, but so what? Especially for the "absolute ones" like 2 years playing video games by age 21 (#4) or 5 thru 9 are absolute data (perhaps wrong?)

I recall reading some text years ago (from Plato, I think) making similar complaints about the young of his age. I think part of the context is obvious - I.e. you do less studying, preparing for the future, if spend lots of time in games or watching "dirty sex" etc.

I mainly posted it as it seemed interesting and ironic that we expect this coming generation to pay much more than a 16 trillion debt during their earning years after they get out of college. Hell, most will work (if they can find a job) decades just to pay off their college debts!

 

So - as I already just said in the post you are replying to - that renders them meaningless. We have no way of determining if those statistics are high, or low, or normal, nor what direction the trend is (if any). We just get isolated statistics on "scary" issues, dressed up for maximum fright. It's dishonest and misleading: propaganda.

The fact that old curmudgeons have been complaining about "the youth" since - literally - antiquity, ought to give you some pause in endorsing this latest round of hand-wringing about masturbation and video games as representing a serious, reliable indicator of macroeconomic trends.

This is trash news-entertainment magazine stuff you'd find in a dentist's waiting room, not serious socioeconomic analysis.

None of your statistics shows that less time is spent on studying or preparing for the future. It doesn't even show that the time spent on other activities (porn or otherwise) has increased. This goes to my point that these decontextualized statistics about issues that scare crusty old voters are just that.

Not, by the way, that I'm accepting any of them at face value. Between the obvious misleading tactics and the several that are outright wrong, the rational presumption is that this is entirely bullshit and irrelevancy. The fact that it nakedly catered to your own personal hang-ups and prejudices seems to be the entirety of its relevance here.

 

So many of your posts give these psychological analysis comments that I am begining to expect a big bill - but think I can ignore it as you can´t even know for sure my sex much less my psychological states.