There is a lot of rhetoric floating about in the usual Reddit/Blue Check crowd that these were the largest demonstrations in Russia of the Putin. This is not really even true – the Bolotnaya/Prospekt Sakharova “meetings” against electoral fraud in Moscow drew more people, though one may argue this is an unfair comparison since they were agreed upon with the Moscow Mayoralty. Long-forgotten protests against the monetization of benefits in 2005 also drew large numbers, though I don’t recall tallying numbers then being in trend.
But regardless, the fact cannot be stated enough – even the very highest (verging into absurdity) estimates of 40,000 turnout promoted by Reuters (Russia MFA: “Why not 4 million?” would only account for a grand total of 0.25% of the Moscow metropolitan area. The “White Counter” organization which counts crowds estimated peak turnout at 15,000 people. This, incidentally, happens to coincide exactly with my own prediction:
Probably the factors that increase turnout are somewhat stronger than those that decrease, so if I had to pick a number, I’d say 15,000 as opposed to 5,000 will turn up.
You cannot expect very high turnout in the context of Putin having an approval rating of 65%, and where only 15% of the population believes Navalny’s version of his poisoning. This is cardinally different from Belarus, which many people are now comparing Russia to. Although Belarus doesn’t allow opinion polls, there is convincing evidence that the elections were massively fraudulent, with Lukashenko getting no more than 35% of the vote. So of course this was a much greater impetus to large-scale protests.
Again, at least 100,000 turned up in Minsk, or 5% of its population. Half a million turned up in Kiev, or almost 20% of its population. Meanwhile, just 0.25% of Moscow turned up. These are not color revolution numbers!
The Russian police handled the protests very professionally, giving scant cause for outrage and an intensification of the protests. One woman in Saint-Petersburg was kicked in the stomach after approaching the OMON, but otherwise there was no unprovoked violence on their part. The Russian journalist Alexey Larkin, who was covering the event, wrote that “despite my ideological ACAB, I need to honestly note, that the police comported well… they were not aggressive during arrests, guided confused people to areas outside the protest area, some areas had officers who positively and politely communicated with people.” The protesters were also “largely peaceful” (to borrow a meme from the American partners), but there were a few exceptions:
- A Dagestani (who has since been doxed as an Islamist and recidivist) who entertained himself by pummeling armored OMON barehanded.
- Some aggressive person who clocked a traffic police officer out of the blue.
- They beat up a pro-Putin protester, showing how much they actually care about freedom of speech as a principle.
- An FSB car was trashed, with the driver inside apparently suffering an eye injury from the shards of glass.
All of these elements will presumably be quietly ID’ed and arrested in the coming days, and will spend the next few years in jail. However, the vast majority of people who behaved themselves were generally let go within 2 hours, which included Navalny’s wife.
This, again, is in marked contrast to what happened in both Belarus, as well as Yanukovych’s Ukraine. The brutal initial police responses stoked public anger and fueled the protests.
Consequently, having accurately predicted turnout in these protests, I will now make some further predictions.
(1) The protests will obviously continue. I expect turnout to remain steady for another 2 or 3 rounds, featuring much of the same people (oppositionist hardcore and Bioleninist contingent), and then to begin to steadily decline. This was the pattern in both Russia in 2011-12, and in Belarus last year.
(2) This reality may not be obvious to foreign observers, because the Western media will be going all out to make a mountain out of a molehill so far as they are concerned.
(3) In the background, I expect the “screws to be tightened”. I expect significant restrictions on Western social media within Russia by the end of this year. And Navalny will have to serve out at least the 3.5 years of his fraud sentence which was suspended and is now unsuspended.
(4) United Russia will win 40-45% of the vote in September. About 10% points of it due to fraud, as usual, but also as usual since 2012, the elections in Moscow will remain relatively clean because it is the most politically sensitive region.
However, the single biggest impact is that this shows that US-Russian relations are due to freeze over.
Not as if anybody was expecting miracles in that respect under President Biden. However, the sheer fact that you had renewed American convoys into Syria (how is that for foreign meddling) in the first two days of his Presidency, capping off with these protests on the third day. The US Embassy published the locations and time of the planned protests under the guise of protecting US citizens. US officials Tweeted their support for the protest and demanded Russia free Navalny, with a statement from the Biden administration that it will “stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our allies and partners in defense of human rights” in Russia.
Realistically, I am not sure that Navalny even appreciates such gestures, considering that the US seems set on doing the Kremlin’s work of painting him as a foreign agent for them.
Nonetheless, they can be read as a signal that the Biden administration will be working on “regime change” in Russia during the next four years. And since that has very little chances of succeeding for reasons already expounded upon, the priority will be to instead amplify, exaggerate, or entirely event abuses and human rights violations that can be ascribed to the “Putin regime” and can be used to load up on even more sanctions.
However, Russia is not Iran, and there are limits to how more sanctions the US can levy on Russia without beginning to crimp the world economy (the limits of that were already tested under the “Russophile” Trump administration, when the US Treasury removed sanctions on Rusal after turmoil in the global aluminium production chain). Kicking it out of SWIFT needs European consent. I suppose it can revive attempts to label Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Moreover, the Biden administration seems determined to continue ratcheting up the confrontation with China. This further limits what it can accomplish with Russia before things begin blowing up in its face.
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I wonder how the Indo-Russian relationship will work with increased Biden pressure?
Also, second first in a row don’t steal it KARLIN!!
I wonder how re-entering an Iran deal will affect this, and if that’s still even likely?
I don’t think Endia will move against Western SM, and they will definitely go after Hindu RW groups with same tactics of amplification.
Diwali firecrackers, cremation, etc.
There was a really long low-information clip on the “massive Navalny Protests” on the local euro-normie-news. They even showed a few people forlornly protesting in front of a local embassy. Generally clips of such duration are either about sports or the EU’s war on climate change via subsidies.
Makes you wonder whether there are detailed instructions mailed every morning on what to show or whether the editors just bluebellyfeel the important stuff.
Current Russia is culturally incompatible with the US and Western Europe so that was to be expected.
The country needs to move away from the West and integrate in Asia as fast as possible. To de-westernise its people more cultural exchanges with Asia are needed – tourism, scholarships, movies, etc. Autonomy in the IT and media/social media spheres and more cooperation on that with China. The economy – money flows, must be reoriented toward Asia too. That in addition to import substitution.
The only threat that the West poses to Russia is infecting it with its own bullshit. It is a zombie that is trying to infect others. Therefore, the country must stay away from it as much as possible, while increasing ties with the more conservative Asian cultures.
But things such as corruption and the low growth rate must be fixed, or at least improved. Why is it that China has public death penalty for corruption, and Russia does not? It makes a good prop. As for the lower growth rate, the country can afford to increase its low debt levels a bit with new infrastructure and R&D spending. That investment will be needed for the critical 2021 – 2024 period when the attack on Russia will be the strongest, after that the West will be declining and will be handled with more ease.
Media in UK was bigging up the riots in Vladivostok on saturday morning then dropping it like a stone as they realised there was nothing real to report.
Generally everyone has worked out that demo reporting mostly speaks about the station reporting the news.
Seems to me Navalny is being burnt by his paymasters, poisoned (or at least made ill) for the cause, sent back to prison, outed as a rich traveller, all for the sake of a rerun of the old Putin palace. His party presumably finishes now.
A fair reflection of how useful he remained.
On US troops in Syria – I suspect this is not White House lead, but just another attempt to establish a new status quo before Kamala is aware or able to do anything.
It is remarkable how the US keeps working to make its worst nightmares come true. The only explanation I can think of is that the elites degenerated to the point of believing their own lies. Just a couple of big examples:
Mad opposition to Nord Stream 2. NS2 is likely to become the last Russian effort to collaborate with the imperial vassals in Europe. If this project fails, it would damage Germany much more than Russia (German industrial leaders understand this, but Merkel and Co pretend not to). German industry would go downhill at the time when the Empire has very few industrially capable vassals. Germany, Japan, and South Korea come to mind. The latter flatly refused any “sanctions” against Russia, Japan is cheating, having adopted only token “sanctions”, while Germany stupidly followed imperial orders and suffers for it. It would make Russian turn to the East inevitable. Chinese already want new large gas pipeline from Russia, to secure their share of that resource. Besides, natural gas prices in Asia are already higher than in Europe, and two loaded new LNG tankers have already gone from Russia via North Sea Route w/o icebreakers to Asia. The US and EU are bringing nearer the day when Russia can tell Europeans that it does not have more natural gas for them. Considering that North Sea production is declining, and there is nothing comparable coming in (the amount of Azeri gas is no more than pocket change compared to NS2), this is more shortsighted than a bad chess player.
If this is not manifest stupidity, I don’t know what is. The key problem for the US is not that Biden is senile, but that his puppet masters are.
There is another point to consider. Say US goes full out on economic warfare and kicks Russia out of SWIFT and puts trade embargo on. That’s going to wake up much of the world in a way that empowers China. Not the Western world (they’ll read about the Putin regime crimes and agree with any measures taken) but South America, the Middle East and much of Asia. A US-led world where your country could at any time be isolated because of American geopolitical goals isn’t attractive.
Russia is most similar to Turan, Iran & Aryavarta.
Only issue is the ideologies of Christianity, Islam & Liberal Democracy stand in the way.
Short-sword everyone is ‘awake’ but the reality of a lack of power + lowest-cost option (least resistance) paraylzes leadership.
There’s no point leaving the US world order if you’re just going to be a Libtard.
The collapse of the Germano-Latins is a bigger trend that America is just part of||
https://akarlin.com/2009/09/struggle-europe-mankind/
A good summary. NS2 is a lifeline to the European industry – a gift of cheaper, reliable energy for the next generation so businesses can plan. If they blow it up, the consequences will be paid by regular Europeans in less competitive industry and higher energy prices.
Russia has signalled in giant neon letters for 15 years that it wants to stay friends with both China and the West, but nobody in the West seems to be smart enough to count pieces on the chessboard or to understand history. So that ship has sailed. S Koreans and Chinese make cars, machinery, and everything else that Russia would want to buy. Europe has at the peak in 2012 exported almost half billion dollars of goods and services to Russia. By 2019 it was down by almost a half. There is no reason it couldn’t drop more. Great thinking Fraulein Merkel and that deviant in France.
I have suspected for a few years that we are dealing with some extraordinary dumb people who are pulling the strings: career morons, nouvea riche parvenus, and decadent third or fourth generation offspring twits. They truly believe in what comes to their minds and what feels good, no amount of experience can change that. I am not very optimistic about this not ending in some cataclysm. One can deal with hostility, aggression, even hypocrisy, but what can one do with this level of stupidity and narcissism?
Russia has an economy the size of Mexico, and smaller the Canads, annual vehicle sales are the same amount as Canada, compared to the massive size of the Chinese market, sales to the Russian market just does not amount to that much, compared to China. Russia does prove to be a valuable energy supplier to Europe.
This is an old tired meme. Creative accounting is useful, but not when creative accountants and their paymasters actually believe their own lies. If this were true, Mexico and Canada would be mentioned in the US MSM as often as Russia.
Possibly not for long. EU is doing everything humanly possible to shoot itself in the foot. If it manages to kill NS2, it’s going to find that Russia no longer wants to supply morons with energy. It would switch to markets driven by market forces, rather than political stupidity. If someone’s ass gets frozen in winter as the result, tough luck.
It’s easy to forget, but protests in Moscow were even LESS in number than those in 2014 against reunifying Crimea. Consider how much of a non-issue the dispute over this is in Russia and then consider how bad the numbers for the Navalny protests are. Sure these protests are all over the country, but don’t they seriously test the police. I don’t even think this was bigger than 2017 protests in Russia over Medvedev’s ” corruption”
It’s also easy to forget that the same number as on 23rd, maybe even more people , in Moscow marched in protests/memory at this Nemtsov clown getting killed in 2015!
It’s also even easier to forget that actually in 2019 there were repeated protests over several weeks in Moscow and maybe other parts of the country ( that I , and everybody else, even liberasts, cant remember if there were any in Kazan or the rest of the country shows how inconsequential they were). The non-issue that time was afew liberast candidates , including mainly Sobol, deliberately not following the easy procedure for registration as candidate…….just so she and they could claim they were “banned from running for election”
Over an actual, relevant issue – the renovation projects of mainly Khrushchyovka appartments in Moscow – protesters were alot more than for the Navalny freakshow
If EU had good and stable relations with Russia then the ruble would be higher valued and Russia have significantly higher nominal GDP. Last I checked ruble was the most undervalued currency in the world. It will continue to be highly undervalued as long as it’s a US-led world and US is obsessed with destroying Russia.
It’s hard to analyse this freakshow – but if they actually wanted to kill NS2 then they would have shown just SOME interest in repairing Ukraines dilapidated Gas transit System.
At end of USSR, Ukraine’s GTS capacity for supplying Europe was about 2.5 times more than the maximum volumes of gas they were supplying before Euromaidan. Bizarrely, even though gas supply, russian contract and compensation are regular discussions in Banderastan – this issue of repairing and reaching ability to transmit more gas is a non-issue.
I’m sorry but the logic of “Russia has economy the size of Mexico hahaha and therefore can not be an important trade partner” is idiotic and i wish people stopped this illiterate nonsense.
First off in nominal USD terms Russia is more like Canada than Mexico.
Russia GDP 2019: $1.7T
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp
Mexico GDP 2019: $1.2T
https://tradingeconomics.com/mexico/gdp
Canada GDP 2019: $1.74T
https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/gdp
Russian nominal USD GDP was more like Mexico in 2016, but it grew like 40% in three years due to excellent central bank and budgetary policy and currency revaluation helped by oil price recovery.
But far more importantly, there is nothing wrong with being the size of Canada and Mexico and being a critical trade partner. As a matter of fact, it is exactly the case with the US.
Mexico is #1 trade partner to the US, and Canada is #2.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2020/02/05/its-official-mexico-is-no-1-us-trade-partner-for-first-time-despite-overall-us-trade-decline/?sh=7e223c563eab
While Chinese market is bigger, nobody will let you capture all of it or even a significant portion of it. Meanwhile, both Mexico and Canada do just fine trading with the US. There is absolutely no reason why Russia can’t do the same with EU or other countries/blocks or whatever.
First off – thank you for the update.
What was that Dagastani thinking – going to a Navalny event best joke of the day no wonder he has been doxed !!! He deserves it
Social media: are making it easy now for governments not just Russia to bring in laws to censor them. It is already useless for serious research as anything of interest is behind a paywall.
The manipulation of algorithms also means you get what big tech want to promote not a reflection of what’s actually of interest by the majority of people.
The statements by some EU countries and the USA about Navalny have less impact.
They have their own demonstrations for example in the Netherlands, France, Germany the USA – they just sound hypocritical and the populations in these countries can see the hypocrisy.
I have seen quite a few videos of the events and I agree that participation was not that great overall though in places it was violent.
It would be Interesting to break down who and why they participated
-free navalny obviously
-people who like demonstrating (like the socialist workers party in the UK turn up for everything)
-Liberals and communists/ looking for the opportunity to inject class struggle into things!
-teenagers looking for fun
-people looking for trouble like the Dagastani
– Anti Putin government
– blow off steam due to lock downs
– NGO working for USA as I noticed some adults supervising the crowd in some videos
Fortuna is back in the business in the Danish sector.
https://vz.ru/news/2021/1/24/1081702.html
On the whole Nord Stream 2 business, sometimes i wonder if there’s some 4D Putin chess going on. The more sanctions Americans push, the louder the Germans squeal. It’s not even about the pipeline anymore, it’s about German sovereignty. I mean, Germany is already an occupied territory. But to add an insult to an injury, they can’t even have their own energy and industrial policy. And they have the most expensive electricity in the world.
If you wanted to ruin German-American relations, this whole “will it? won’t it?” be finished? NS2 game is perfect for that.
Ain’t gonna happen. Even if this happens, nothing would come out of it. The USSR was capable of doing things, whereas the EU is not. It’s good at hypocrisy, hot air, and empty posturing, but when it comes to doing, it’s as impotent as a eunuch.
Well, German industry is fighting for its life. W/o NS2 it would have to pay the price of LNG (again, mostly Russian, as the US simply cannot produce enough). That would price German industrial goods right out of the market. German industrial areas would become a bunch of Detroits. The whole German nanny state would become impossible due to financial difficulties. German weight in the EU would plummet.
So, yes, if the American elites had any brains, the US would have never picked this fight. But their numerous actions show that they don’t have any.
Eh – Slav culture is really the same as rest of the Europe for all real purposes and not that much like Asia. The disagreements are still fairly inconsequential to the common people. Plus, Russian society is even less able to “engage” with China on a cultural level due to the extra layer of language barrier.
Russia is already Westernised anyway (because everyone is) – the seeds are established in China as well. Even control of media / social media of the type Anatoly describes won’t reverse this trend – elites the world over agree on the liberal fundamentals. The power of the modern extremes of liberalism is their memetic potential – once in they are self-fuelling.
It does seem that Russia has been stretching the NS2 business. They may be waiting for just the right time.
The Western position is incoherent (I mean the “Atlanticists“, not the more grounded earth-based people). If NS2 is not completed, at some point, possibly soon, the gas from Russia will diminish, most would be redirected to China-Korea-Japan. That would hurt European economies, in particular Germany. LNG gas is more expensive and Russia could also play the LNG game and make LNG exports to Europe less profitable for others. There is also the whole unpredictability factor since there will never be a pipeline under the Atlantic and Middle East is what it is.
If NS2 is completed and gas flows, Ukraine and Poland will get bypassed and will have to learn how to live with a constant threat of being cut off. Not good for industry. But why highlight this reality by making a circus around NS2? Wouldn’t it be better to simply quietly negotiate some compromise?
This is one area where Russia holds most of the cards. Why would anyone pick that area for a showdown? It goes against the most basic strategic thinking – pick your fights where you are the strongest and enemy is weakest. (Maybe these guys are all secretly working for Kremlin, there is 4D chess for you.)
The US Empire is not so deluded to think Putin, or more broadly the establishment, can be overthrown. What their moves are designed to do is to create conditions to “contain” Russia more in all spheres:
– information warfare (via overwhelming US control of mass media, social media platforms with huge budgets for propaganda/disinfo under the guise of “countering Disinfo”)
– economic (sanctions to try and strangle Russian exports across industries like oil, defense, nuclear, technology),
– financial (eg threatening to cut off from SWIFT/bank transfers to third parties not being approved as recently happened with Russian aid to Central America)
– diplomatic (more pressure via essentially NATO owned orgs like OPCW; diplomat expulsions)
– legal (eg the $50B Yukon fine now being appealed which can be used as pretext to seize Russian property abroad; extrajudicial detentions of Russian citizens)
– military (ramping up forces on Russia’s borders, Black Sea, Arctic; more aggressive confrontations in Syria, Africa)
– cyber (increase further attacks on Russia)
– sports (politicize sports more to demonize Russia(ns))
and so on.
The overall aim is to do a couple of things: one is steady destruction of the Russian economy/or at the least strangle growth, and demoralization of the Russian people leading to more discontent. Second is to show the impotence of the Russian authorities in the face of this onslaught and reduce them to just be focused on defenses against this onslaught, and staying in power.
For Russia, the metric for “winning” or even “not losing” is not whether Putin/the Kremlin remains in charge but whether Russia can circumvent these pressures to submit to the will of the Empire, to improve – economically and socially. Anti-imperial regimes can survive – eg Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea – but at a huge cost. Cuba is an example of a country that has resisted for 60 years but at a huge cost – the gap where Cuba could have been had the US left it alone vs now is huge.
China is perhaps the only example of a major country that never submitted to the Imperial will that has thrived to its potential. But it was lucky that its growth was largely supported by the US (as it helped the US’s own), till in recent times when it has become too late for the US to contain it and not to do much more than watch China inexorably surpass it in various areas.
So Russia has a huge uphill climb: not just to resist the Empire and surviving on a stagnant economy, but finding ways to thrive and achieve its potential despite US pressures. So whether Putin’s National programs to revitalize the Russian economy, society and build for the future (high tech) with foreign policy maneuvers to dedollarize, expand markets to the East and the Global South succeeds is to be seen.
Poland and Ukraine played themselves out of this game. Not smart. Then again, when did Poles or Ukrainians act smart?
Somewhat related: Romania has suffered repeated brownouts and blackouts. Despite the claim that it transitioned to majority-renewables (or probably due to that), winter is not like summer. Bucharest and Galati have also struggled with municipal heating. Gas at the stove looks better than in the nineties, but I still have feeling someone turned off the taps. Putin? Zelenski? Iohannis? Either way, although it seems great for the balance sheet, it looks like a tenser Romanian-Russian relationship.
Bucharest mayor explained that 19 Celsius (that is, 66 F) is “the right rooom temperature for many other European capitals”. It’s ironic that one thousand died in the anti-Ceausescu riots of 1989 because they thought 19 C is too low. This is to say, perception is king. If Russians can be convinced that Bidenist 19 Celsius are better than Putinist 19 Celsius, they will go for the former. As we learned lately, in this world of 140-character imbeciles, conviction is a function of repetition. There is nothing cultural about it, as it works the same in US, Germany, SK, or Taiwan. Putin is wrong to tolerate, even for debunking purposes, any Western propaganda. Kiselyov’s monologues will be derided just as Der schwarze Kanal or Tucker Carlson are, as long as any opposite message is tolerated.
I am sure the Chinese approach of 99.999% control is best, although you may think USSR in the eighties showed the opposite. In fact, the end of the eighties, with that glasnost bullshit, ended the USSR, not the censorship preceding it.
Similarly, I guess it will better for the current Russian government to “disappear” Navalnyi. A dead martyr can only do so much, as opposed to this living martyr. Unfortunately, it is a Russian tradition to live and let live, something that US/UK would never bother with.
In the long run, Putin is doomed, unless he changes focus again. Chechnya, Gruzia, Crimea were great in that sense. Can he pull it again?
You raised a lot of good points, but you missed one crucial factor: the Empire is on the path of accelerating self-destruction. So, this uphill climb becomes easier every day. If the imperial elites weren’t so degenerate, the Empire would have been slowly sliding down for the next 40-50 years, with he rest of the world, including Russia and China, working hard to make this slide smooth and slow. Instead, the imperial elites are doing everything to ruin the country faster from within (“diversity” and senile “president” are just two of the more obvious signs) and increase the temptation for others to crash it faster with its every stupid move.
Good post. All the US is doing is guaranteeing that whoever replaces Putin, will be 10x as anti US and hawkish
Russia has the same size economy as Germany or California and Texas combined. Its all on Wikipedia if you know how to use it
Russia needs to move away from the West and NOT integrate with Asia. Long term, China is a real threat. Russia should look after itself and not be anyone’s poodle, least of all China’s.
Maybe, if the West ever regains its sanity, we can be friends. But as things stand,Russia needs to go its own way.
Yes, Navalny is more an issue of geopolitics than Russian domestic politics. His fans like to mock those who call him a CIA asset. But when confronted with a quote by John Brennan, who says “Imagine prospects for world peace, prosperity, and security if Joe Biden were president of the United States and Alexei Navalny the president of Russia,” they don’t really have an answer.
I am talking about in market exchange rates.
If you look at some of Putin’s comments from presentations at Valdai, he seems to envision a point in time when China’s hegemonic ambitions will need to be contained and views Russia’s role in preserving Western culture as crucial. This longer term view perhaps explains why Russia is not more aggressive in confronting the West, despite its own overly aggressive stance. Russia needs the West to regain its sanity, yes, but also not collapse completely before that happens.
The newest conspiracy theory in Moscow is that Navalny is actually Putin‘s chosen successor and this is all a big charade to prevent the rise of any meaningful opposition, and guarantee Navalny a period of good will when he eventually takes over. That would at least explain the seemingly shockingly incompetent assassination attempt. Navalny is of course in favor of pushing Russia in a more anti Globohomo direction but appearing to be opposition to Putin will gain him Western goodwill and allow Russia to lock in some of their gains – such as keeping Crimea.
Doesn’t seem all that plausible but Putin convinced millions that he was opposed to Yeltsin and Chubais so who knows?
That conspiracy theory can only be considered “the newest” if you’ve been living in a cave for the past ten years. It was often pushed here by Anonymous Coward, which goes to show how much credence you can lend it.
While the Empire is increasingly fighting its own citizens, the Imperial elites running the show are still dangerous – and indeed more so – as anti-establishment dissent from both the right AND left is slowly being strangled and an authoritarianism fully backed by the deep state, big corporations and intelligentsia is being cemented. (Facebook for example shut down a lot of left-wing anti-war groups in the last couple of days, apart from tons of right-wing ones). So just as I don’t expect the Russian establishment to collapse anytime soon, I don’t expect it of the US one either: they have far more firepower and a much better and larger propaganda operation to bamboozle the masses. Their authority also doesn’t largely rest on one person.
So the anti-Russian pressure from Western elites will not only not let up but become more frenzied. (It’s also a great way to distract the populace).
This means that the energy that the Kremlin could have spent on constructive activities to benefit the Russians people will be taken up with for ever shoring up defenses and hanging on to power.
The latter is ultimately destructive as it becomes an exercise in itself (as for example it has in the West). One has to admire that China for all its authoritarianism and crony corruption has clearly delivered for its people (while also shoring up its defenses against the West). (The notion that China’s large population helps is belied by the example of equally-populous India, which despite a lot of goodwill from the West has fallen well behind China despite them being at the similar levels decades ago.)
For now it appears that many like Karlin seem to excuse the Kremlin’s corruption as a necessity to co-opt the Oligarchs and maintain its power. But corruption among the powerful can be excused only for so long. The other side of the equation has to be to use this power to make tangible improvements to a significant fraction of people’s lives. Otherwise it’s just Power for power’s sake (ie the state of affairs in the West) and discontent will grow.
Russia also has the problem that, unlike in China where the CCP is broadly popular rather than just a personality and – while Xi has consolidated power around him and developed a cult of personality – there is in general a well oiled system of growth and succession of people within the CCP without threatening its stranglehold on power, it is virtually only Putin who (currently) enjoys broad popularity without any obvious successor who can maintain such legitimacy.
So time is ticking: Putin can’t just wait the clock out for external events (eg collapse of the Empire) to work in Russia’s favor. While easier said than done, tangible improvements over time – as in the time between 2000-08 – have to be delivered.
Strongly disagree. Complete lack of dissent will lead to decay. As Karlin has written, a lesson from the Soviet collapse was state media power towards the end became worthless because of lack of credibility. Russia has taken the lesson to heart as I see relatively free media outlets like Vediomosti where dissent is possible. I wish China would emulate the Russian model of media management and allow similar freedoms (a maverick outlet called Southern Weekend in Guangdong was essentially shut down by 2013-14). A lot of lessons from the Soviet collapse are understood by China like keeping military spending relatively low but the failure of Soviet propaganda at home is not one of them.
The low turnout makes me feel like the massive view count on the Putin’s palace video is fake. United States really likes the strategy where they try to make the opposition in the countries they dislike appear as more popular than it is to incite protests and create unrest.
Well I can see a bright future as the Russia Russian Autonomous Region
Some of the people in the US academic/adminstration/politics are literally descendants of Trotskyists.
You either kill them, imprison them or exile them. Stalin did it. But the ones, who went into exile have switched “words of Communist revolution” for “words of Globohomo” and continue the insane drive with the protection of the US nuclear triad.
Of course many of them are Jews and if you critize them it will be their vindication that they are on the right course and Globohomo is needed – otherwise they will be removed.
This is a negative feedback loop. We all are stuck with this insanity.
I don’t think this is good advice. Empirically, larger public and/or private debt causes lower growth in horizons of 3 to 10 years, even from very low debt to GDP ratio.
You’ve obviously not heard of GDP PPP. Time you read some books on economics.
PPP is poor man’s parity.
The empire is getting desperado.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/6502804.html
On a PPP basis, the Russian economy is at least 10% larger than Germany’s. This is evidently true if you look at all the things Russia makes and does that Germany doesn’t/can’t: commercial and military aircraft and engines, a manned space program, a large modern military, construction of large (up 80,000 tons or so) ocean going ships, a large domestic and export nuclear power program, agricultural exports,…
Russia runs a trade surplus even if gas and oil are removed.
@Anatoly Karlin
What are your predictions for Russia post Putin? I don’t think globohomo will succeed in color revolutioning Putin from power but once he is gone and the oligarchs can re-enter politics Russia’s future certainly appears more uncertain. Given that there is no chance of any kind of thaw or good relations with the west I wish he would just pull a Stalin and start executing and otherwise terrorizing those members of the elite that would happily sell out Russia to globohomo in exchange for more wealth and genuine hatred of Russia. It’s not like doing so would upset anyone except Russia’s foreign enemies and Russia’s liberals who are already pretty unpopular domestically anyway.
How can a country with an economy smaller than Canada’s have the world’s second most powerful military? You are not thinking too much about it, don’t you? On PPP GDP Russia is almost as big as Germany, and it has a large gray economic sector too, which means that it has bigger PPP GDP than Germany.
It is one of the world’s largest food and electricity producers, for example.
The IMF uses a combination of MER gdp and PPP gdp to estimate the real country economic size.
Do you really think that India for example has smaller economy than the UK, as predicted by MER GDP? Not at all.
This is why China is the world’s leading trading partner and world’s top FDI destination, has the largest retail market, beating the US, even though this isn’t predicted by its way smaller MER GDP.
Because GDP MER alone does not give you a good picture for a countries economy.
The Global Trends Country Power index used by the US intelligence community also uses a combination of GDP MER and GDP PPP.
Aerospace is only 1.8% of the US GDP.
10 percent of the $2.2 trillion in factory output in the United States goes into the production of weapons
There will be attempts to derail stability in Russia in the 2021 – 2025 period over Putin’s possible succession and the economic crisis. Including, i suspect, attempts to have a coup among the elite. Social stability is important, even at the cost of some increase in debt. After that period the West will be getting weaker and easier to manage.
Its kinda a fake argument. Sure, you can look at it this way, but since vast majority of the population in the world is poor (even in the US a good portion of the population doesn’t even have $1,000 for emergencies), so GDP PPP is generally a better representation of the economy as experienced by a typical person.
Nominal GDP is great for valuing the market size for internationally traded goods such as TV’s but not so much for local services like haircuts.
And majority of global economy is haircuts, not TVs. US economy is 70% haircuts and 20% TV, and I’m being generous here.
For any country where service sector is more than 50% of the economy, PPP is likely to be a better indicator of economic activity vs nominal.
And that’s not even getting into the discussion about how in service based economy GDP econometrics and social health are frequently oppsed to each other. Imagine if everyone would get healthy in USA tomorrow. Well, US GDP in nominal USD would collapse 18% overnight and it would be an econometric disaster.
To promote GDP growth in a service based economy, you need everyone to smoke crack because it will increase hospital visits and healthcare corporate revenue, and those are your biggest GDP contributors. Service based economy is Broken Windows Fallacy coming to life.
I would like to suggest to Mr. Karlin, that for parity, whenever he mentions Putin-regime, even in quotes, or even as attributed speech to a third party, he also balances it, if there is opportunity, especially if US comes in play, with “X or Y regime” like Biden regime. Calling it administration lends it the patina of recognition it doesn’t deserve.
Point is that aside from being an energy exporter, Russia’s domestic market is minuscule for EU and American companies, Canada sells more cars in a year than the whole of Russia’s market. How many cars does Audi or VW sell in a year in China, vs. Russia? Or how many planes does Airbus or Boeing sell in a year in Russia vs. China. I mean Russia’s market is too small for Western companies to seriously lobby their home governments to improve relations with Russia in order to not hurt the bottom line of Western companies that do business in Russia, unlike the case of China where aircraft sales and car sales make up a substantial part of the revenues of companies like GM, Boeing, and VW, so they have an incentive to urge their governments to lower the diplomatic temperature with China in order to keep the revenue flowing. Like how many hotels does the Mariott group have in China vs. Russia? Russia is an important, but not that very large market for Western companies.
I mean the reason why Western companies supported opening up to China in the early 90s and integrating it into the global economy was because of its massive domestic market, in addition to its affordable workforce.
Now poor Romanians have to endure the presence of the US missiles targeting Russia on their soil. But I doubt that they will ever put 2 + 2 together. And if anyone will do that will be immediately accused of being pro Russian.
Plus, the incompetence of Romanian administrators is exceptional. No trans-national highway finalized, razing to the ground of the forest patrimony, loss of millions due to emigration, because everything was for grabs, and an immense trivialization and vulgarization of the cultural space.
China’s approach works because they also provide glitz and food. Glasnost focused on political liberalization. Now that didn’t make life better in any way. One cannot eat words, or get dressed with good intentions, or replace with words the brown scratchy toilet paper. Didn’t Napoleon said that the way to a soldier’s heart goes through his stomach, or the advise for any young married woman for that matter… This is why the Chinese worked like hell to replaced their halved pig herds decimated by the African swine flu… And now they are in fact seriously preparing for bacteriologic war and organizing their society accordingly. Precaution principle at play, plus, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. They did suffer bacteriological attacks from the US during the Korean War.
Russian state shouldn’t just close the door, but they should have a very, very, very tight control at the HR departments and hiring of individuals. And especially people hired in economic positions and educated in the US which should be discarded as carrying deadly viruses.
Nice take.
China has a 2000 years of meritocratic tradition. In fact they have invented and developed the administrative state. It is not too hard to come to the conclusion that politics, as deployed in liberal, democratic countries is a waste of time, because it only serves the entrenched elites, who have developed and tuned the system for their needs, starting with the English Revolution.
If you don’t have a democratic system like in Athens, you end up with a polity controlled by the Oligarchy (with or without a royal mantle). Presently, only Switzerland is close to a modicum of democracy. Everywhere else there are either oligarchies or autocracies/dictatorships. But in some oligarchies people get a better treatment than in others. The US is trying to create a coalition to make sure people get as little as possible.
Russia, with the amendments in the Constitution and Putin falling a bit back from the main stage, is trying to better develop its state structures to become more resilient and to not be that “individual” dependent. But it needs peace for that. It has the means to defend its space against any enemy, and it has presently the ability to provide enough goods to satisfy more than the basic needs of its population. There is nothing that the average Russian will need or want that the Chinese market cannot supply in abundance. Russia needs though to change its legislation pertaining to its central bank, because it is not fully sovereign in this respect. There are still threads that link its currency to BIS and the US dollar. And I am not talking here about the convertibility rate.
The US and UK will be the first Western countries to implode and balkanise, more likely the UK first I’d say. I find that I can’t even express patriotism for Britain/England and pride in its history without being called a racist, fascist, imperialist, bigot, Rothschild supporter, etc. Many people take real exception to British patriotism. I don’t see patriots of any other nationality get treated quite like British patriots do.
Increasingly white American patriots get treated in the same way, as racist, imperialist bigots, mainly because American nationalism is seen to be nothing but an offshoot of British nationalism, especially when engaged in by white people. Being British or American is becoming more of a liability than something to be proud of, and that’s when a country is likely to balkanise.
I have lived in all three countries, Canada, Russia, and Mexico. On the last two, I spent around a decade on each of them. When I read people commenting that Russia has a small economy the size of Italy, a place where I also lived, or that other countries such as Indonesia, a place that I also know very well, are more important, I realize that the person has never left her couch.
For all its problems, life in Russia is light years more comfortable than in Mexico or Indonesia. Most of these emerging market countries are places where, besides a few upper-class neighbourhoods, one does not want to be alone, and the environment is highly polluted. Between living in Toronto or Moscow, I choose the latter for all its comfort and diversity.
Like any big country, Russia has the problem of maintaining its standard of living and infrastructure across its geography, which is impossible. Otherwise, the country is significantly more developed than what outsiders assume, and the human capital is very high.
Yes, it is. But the likes of ‘zzzn‘ or “Mr.Hack” will never get it into their thick skulls. It would literally destroy their mental universe – so they prefer to live a lie.
There is a weird coalition of Russia-is-bad that consists of retarded or paid-for Westerners lacking any real experience or understanding, obsessive Eastern European emigres and their offspring who for existential reasons have to hate, and Third World losers who are trying to please the West by finding something to agree on. They often overdo it.
It will be a painful awakening once the reality will become too obvious. I suspect most current Russia-haters will not admit to their thoughts or will claim that they were ‘deceived‘ by the media. Of course, it takes two to lie – the propagandists and the willing audience. I am not sure who is worse.
Educating these people is about as promising as attempts to revive zombies. Let them rot in peace.
“ where only 15% of the population believes Navalny’s version of his poisoning”
What does it say that a large majority of Russians believe Putin’s enemies keep poisoning themselves to defame him?
And the biggest UK/EU customer for Russian gas until NS2 is built is the UK which badly needs a trade deal with the US (which doesn’t really do trade deals) and gas from Russia (which could offer a better trade deal than the US). Will Realekonomik apply here or amglo-imperial sentiment. The recent track on reality for the UK is not good.
Though I think it was the FSB, what does it say about you that you believe that the only alternative explanation is that Navalny poisoned himself?
And yet, the Warsaw Pact has moved to the EU and Russia trembles before defensive preparations in Estonia.
If you follow the story of Navalny poisoning, there is only one model lacking internal contradictions: he was poisoned by someone in his retinue on the orders of his and that person’s common paymasters. However, it would be stupid of me to dissuade you: I have a bridge to sell you.
Let me clarify: Russia trembles with laughter. Estonia is an impressive military power. It could have won the war with the Republic of Palau if it could transport its military bicycles that far.
Comparable percentages of Americans believe Corona was created in a Chinese lab, that Putler put his puppet Drumpf into power, and that they are ruled by a cabal of Satanist pedophiles. An even greater percentage, around 75%, believe that blacks are just as intelligent as whites on average.
Any of these strike me as considerably more absurd than skepticism over the FSB poisoning Navalny (even though I myself think that is most likely what happened).
Slightly less than 60,000 VWs of all brands are made in Russia. Mostly Skoda.
Geography matters. Russia is far from the US but close to the EU.
A market of 150 million consumers with mid-level incomes can’t be miniscule, you are way off. Russian car market is 60-70% as big as German – would any company worth its salt walk away from half of German market?
There is also future potential: next 10 years, Canada is flat, Russian market has been growing by double digits. A decade ago Chinese market was relatively small. You don’t seem to understand how business works.
Well, it appears Airbus sold 300 airliners to Russia vs 1700 to China. Which is not bad considering China has 10x more people. So if 300 airliners is “miniscule” then fine, so be it.
Far more importantly though, consumption is entirely a function of credit, and Russians simply haven’t quite discovered that yet, but they will in time. (Nobody actually buys airliners or automobiles anymore, people lease them from the banks that print money, either via leases or asset backed loans).
Russian inflation seems to be moving around their 4% target, once pandemic is over, banks can let money printers go brrrr. There’s lots of pent up demand over there, should generate a nice consumption led boom and GDP growth.
It is probably for the best if Western companies miss it, and all those profits will go to Russian corporates.
The annual production reached 200k in 2018. You can probably find more exact numbers elsewhere but that’s what I found on the official site.
https://vwgroup.ru/en/company/milestones/
Most likely someone in his entourage slipped him something. We can all speculate who was behind it, there could be layers of intermediaries.
If FSB did it, they would have to get a go-ahead from Putin. Putin’s behaviour, motivation and the fact that he ordered him flown to Germany, suggests that he either didn’t know or is a sociopath. An incompetent sociopath at that. Does that seem likely?
Given the circus the Brits were making about “novitchok”, one has to assume that would be the last thing anyone in Russia would use unless they wanted to point a finger at Putin. Is it really that hard to eliminate someone that an exotic and unworkable method would be chosen? It seems more likely that what happened was carefully scripted and was always supposed to lead to the outcome of Navalny in jail and his minions yelling in the streets. Do you really think that Putin would script it that way?
Your “most likely” seems unlikely.
Russia’s economy is growing at a trend rate of 1 to 2 percent per year? How much growth potential could there be?
China’s annual auto sales are more than 10 times for Russia’s is.
Tu quoque you say?
“ Comparable percentages of Americans believe Corona was created in a Chinese lab”
What’s a better theory? I think accidental Wuhan Institute escape is the most plausible theory, though I am not committed to it.
“ Putler put his puppet Drumpf into power”
That belief is limited mostly to highly partisan democrats, not the vast majority of Americans.
“ ruled by a cabal of Satanist pedophiles”
I’d estimate under 10% believe the Q/Spirit Cooking/Hillary Comet PingPong stuff.
“ An even greater percentage, around 75%, believe that blacks are just as intelligent as whites on average.”
Lol no. Maybe that’s how people will answer a survey.
Well I visited Beijing and Moscow in 2010, at that time China’s per capita GDP was still something like 60 percent of Russia’s, and Beijing in terms of its physical infrastructure like highways and number of skyscrapers and overpasses is more impressive than Moscow. As for Mexico vs Russia, crime is a lot worse in Mexico,but in terms of standard of living a lot of American retirees says Mexico is a lot cheaper than the US, and if you can live in a gated community it is not that bad.
Well, good luck selling to China. Russia’s consumer market has grown by double digits in the good years and anyone with a sense of what people need would forecast that will return. By the way, most economies, other than China, have been stagnating or growing 1-2%. This year Russia dropped by less than EU, Canada and US. My advise is not to spit on ones’ potential customers…
And Czechia and Hungary’s economy grew at a trend of 0% between 2008 and 2014.
You need to read books on economics as well. I’m sure Mr Karlin, a political economy graduate, would be able to recommend some.
I can guarantee you that nobody is afraid of Estonia, LMAO.
And Russia’s seem to have no prospect of improving from its 1 to 2 percent trend growth in the foreseeable future. Or are there any new sources of growth that can boost its growth rate to 4 to 5 percent?
Econometrics is not what you think it is.
I’m not sure you understood Bastiat’s essay either. It has nothing to do with whether people choose to buy goods or services, both equally useful per se.
There are some good criticisms of the GDP metric but your health services one is pointless. Everybody wants to be healthy and it could be argued that it is difficult to spend your tax or income dollars on anything more important than health.
In wealthy countries people definitely demand an increasing amount of good quality, capital-intensive health services. Why on earth would you want to ignore the output generated by this demand?
Violent crime seems to be relatively high in Russia by both Chinese and European standards, slightly worse than the US per capita.
Not sure why, I doubt it’s a Slavic thing per se because most Slavic countries have low violent crime rates. I’ve noticed a lot of Russian cities seem to be quite ethnically mixed, like it’s quite common for a city to be say 40% Russian, 60% non-Slavic ethnicity of some sort. Is there an ethnic tension thing going on in some of these places that would account for high violent crime rates?
Is 128 and Znzn both your accounts?
Basically just alcoholism at this point. Considering the homicide spike in United States last year Russia is going to have lower homicide rate in 2020 and it’s going to stay that way. Without any catastrophe happening Russia’s homicide rate is going to be EU-level by the end of this decade (but probably on the higher side).
The prospects in general are not very good for most of the world, with US economy, and also EU among the laggards. US (and Uk-EU-Japan) economy is very unreal, virtual, full of activities that are hard to justify (or even understand). China, Russia, Korea and a few others are more grounded – the economic activities are more real, more needed. That gives them better prospects. E.g. it is relatively easy to create a massive “virtual” economy with financing, real estate transactions, consulting etc…US already has it, so the growth will be harder.
One example are financial services: 15% of US economy are pure financial transactions: issuing debt, rents on assets, buying and selling. It has some value, but most of it is non-essential, busy work that our ancestors would simply not understand.
In Russia, finance is less then 3%, they can easily grow it and make everyone feel richer, like a government regulated casino. I am not sure why they haven’t done yet, maybe because too many Russians seem to think that Wall Street is “magic”, that there is something unique about America. Similarly Germany has a much smaller % of economy in finance.
There are many other examples, when there is will and self-confidence, you can grow economy quite a bit. The problem for US (and also UK, EU, Japan) is that they have done most of the potential growth and the resulting structure is very wobbly. In Russia there is long way to go before the unhealthy levels are reached.
Of course there are. How to explain that the meme ”Navalny’s return is like Lenin’s return in the sealed train” was peddled instantly of various platforms?
Have you been to Russia? No city outside some ethnic enclaves such as in the Caucuses would be like this.
You know that the Chinese economy is inflated by debt right, without that its GDP growth would be 2 to 3 percent, but then it would be a more solid 2 to 3 percent. OK maybe not that bad, but 6 percent is definitely overinflated by debt, so maybe the debt-free rate is 5 percent? 4 percent?
There is serious issue with this meme: Lenin was shameless and smart, Navalny is shameless and dumb.
If people stopped going to the hospital and needing medical attention, payment flows to the healthcare corporate sector would stop. This would cause a Depression like event to occur and no, people wouldn’t spend those “savings” on something else because healthcare works at corporate group plan level and there is no way in hell corporate bosses would give those savings to their wage workers in a middle of a Depression, they would much rather pocket it for themselves, which would choke demand. I know it’s not what textbook economics says but it’s the reality of the situation.
Broken Windows Fallacy says that redistribution of wealth does not create wealth, which is true. I was comparing service economy to that. In a haircut based economy, how do you create wealth and drive GDP growth? Can you store haircuts? Can you resell them? You can make a very expensive, elaborate haircut, but what is its value after 2 weeks?
What I’m trying to say is that service economy is more of a distribution of wealth operation (similar to broken windows that must be fixed) rather than wealth generating operation. Modern finance is an obvious example.
This is clearly not the case in the US. US health problems are mostly caused by lifestyle choices, health doesn’t appear to be a priority for a significant portion of the population. And whatever the money is doing its not buying results as general population health outcomes are rather suboptimal. Not only that, but population can’t afford those services to begin with – healthcare is the major cause of bankruptcy and debt in the country. Basically, it’s a big net negative life draining $4Trillion racket, except we are breaking lives here rather than windows.
Because nobody ever says “yay my chemotherapy went up in price to $500k!”. Even if they are not the ones paying for it, they are captive to the racket without much choice. At least when people buy $500k cars it makes them feel good.
Healthcare is a classic cost shifting wealth redistributing broken windows sector. And is it one of the major components of US economy at 17-18% GDP.
For larger cities there is Kazan and Ufa which are both supposedly under 50% Russian.
Of course there is – credit.
It is exactly the same thing that powers US economy, EU economy, Japanese economy, Chinese economy, etc. The only thing that matters.
Russia is underserved with credit. Once lending starts up, Russian economy will have accelerated growth rate. And considering how starved Russia is for credit, not even poor demographics will slow the boom down.
Major exceptions to the rule, nearly all of the ‘ethnic’ republics of Russia have outright Russian majorities outside the Caucasus.
Lol now do US or EU or whatever.
Without countless $trillions in debt US wouldn’t have much of an economy at all. We don’t print USD like its going out of style because we want to, we do it because we have to. Its where the money to buy and build stuff comes from.
US budget deficit (aka free money) is the only thing driving GDP growth since the late 70’s or something. In 2019, supposedly a good year (and it was, all things considered), nominal USD budget deficit was larger than nominal USD GDP growth. Private sector did nothing but hemorrhage away.
I mean, in a stagnation situation, it is usually polite to have your nominal GDP growth to equal to Government defict plus inflation. We couldn’t even do that, in a good year. So much for the glorious “private sector”, it does nothing anymore.
We are all in the same boat. If we don’t print, we collapse. Complaining about Chinese printing is a bit silly in this context.
Kazan is Russia’s fifth largest city and Ufa is Russia’s 11th largest city. Both are in national Republics rather than Russia proper. And both are exceptions. Cities #1-#4 are about 90% Russian.
Your statement “it’s quite common for a city to be say 40% Russian, 60% non-Slavic ethnicity of some sort” is simply wildly inaccurate. Even the two cities you named are about 48% Russian, not 40%.
Russia’s low growth rate is mostly the result of extremely strict monetary and budgetary policies designed to cushion its economy from exogenous shocks, i.e. sanctions and speculative attacks. As a result, it underperforms during global expansionary phases, but outperforms during recessions. This is why its economy wasn’t hit as hard by covid. It is difficult to imagine a geopolitical easing of tensions at this point in time, but the potential to significantly increase nominal GDP growth certainly exists simply with the slack available in credit expansion alone.
I said this in another blogpost. Even if Navalny were given the tools and support to pull a 1917, he would still fail on account of being incompetent.
Perhaps Putin hoped that after allowing Navalny to be flown to Germany, he would never have returned to Russia after an attempt on his life by the state. As an exile, he would not have had much chance to exert much influence within Russia. He would have remained a favorite of Western media, a “dissident”, but that’s all. He waited with allowing him to be flown out until the poison has disappeared from his system according to Russian experts. Unfortunately, the Germans had better methods to detect it (or, let’s suppose they faked the results). It seems that Putin didn’t expect that Navalny would return to Russia, seemingly willing to become a martyr of his cause. After all, it wouldn’t be hard to have him Epsteined in prison. Or have him killed by a disgruntled Muslim cellmate etc.
Putin may be a sociopath (would not be suprising, many business leaders are too), he is not incompetent himself at all, but those on the lower levels of the Russian state / security services seem quite incompetent, see the FSB graduation parade with those G Mercs or one of them telling everything on phone to Navalny (if that wasn’t staged).
And those who could imagine that Navalny’s return could trigger a revolution are dumber.
It wasn’t me that wrote that. And the non-Russians in Kazan and Ufa are Russified/assimilated anyway, the situation there is not comparable to Caucasus cities.
You are correct – sorry.
There is hardly any difference between Tatar and Bashkir city dwellers and their Russian neighbors. In the country side it is different. Some Tatar villagers are quite the Islamic fundamentalists. But it is of course a minority of the Tatar population. And I think that the Bashkirs are even less religious than their Tatar neighbors. The problem of Turkic nationalism on the other hand is real among both the Tatar and the Bashkir (possibly more present among the Bashkirs) and might get out of hand if overall political stability is lost on the federal level.
RT drops the bomb.
https://russian.rt.com/opinion/825520-popova-ssha-baiden-zapad-liberalizm-ideologiya
In English
https://www.stalkerzone.org/civilisational-fracture/
Official state media saying that!
Russia had a very nice decade in the 00s and an underwhelming decade during the 10s, due largely to factors beyond its control (end of the commodities supercycle in 2014 and monetary + fiscal constriction, as JL said and I have at times blogged about). These things usually smooth out over the long term, so I suspect Russia will have a nice 20s decade.
As others have pointed out, alcohol abuse, which however has been declining rapidly since the mid-2000s along with the homicide rate.
Russian cities are actually reasonably safer – certainly vastly more so than the “ghettos”. The typical Russian murder are a bunch of 40 year old men knifing each other to death during a zapoi.
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/russia-homicides/
Whatever else Putin is, he has brains. He wouldn’t put his plans in Navalny’s hands and Navalny’s decision whether to return or not. Strategy 101.
Similarly, if Navalny really believed there was an “attempt on his life by the state“, he would not return. He is a narcissist (they all are), he is not a willing martyr.
Therefore one of the points below is likely true:
– what happened to Navalny was something other than poisoning by state; Navalny clearly doesn’t fear the state
– there is a script that Navalny is forced to follow that makes his behaviour look odd
– there is more to come that will make what has happened make more sense.
The demos and the corruption video are not an attempt to overthrow Putin or help Navalny out of jail. I leave it up to you to figure out why are they encouraged.
You were right, then.
As to incompetence, there are two kinds: 1) lack of experience; 2) stupidity. Navalny’s incompetence is of the second kind. The first can be cured by experience, the second cannot be cured by anything.
As Russian joke puts it, “if someone is dead, that’s for a long time; if someone is stupid, that’s forever”.
I guess?
IMF January 2021 Update
https://www.imf.org/-/media/Images/IMF/Publications/WEO/2021/January/English/WEO-Chart-JAN-21.png
With all due respect, a lot of people here do not have as much knowledge of economics and finance as they think they do, not that I am claiming to have a PHD in Economics or Finance. I did mention a couple of times that Russia could afford to do some amount of deficit spending.
Ok I mean some people, not a lot.
You definitely failed to understand the broken window fallacy.
Like all the rest of Bastiat’s book, that chapter was dedicated to explaining how in economics that which is not seen is as important as that which is seen.
If somehow everybody miraculously achieved perfect health you are only able to see that people, companies and the government would stop spending money in healthcare. But you are not able to see that this unspent money that was previously circulating in the economy would necessarily now be spent, saved or invested in other areas: Bastiat’s very lesson in the broken window fallacy! Besides, I would imagine that a perfectly healthy population would now be much more productive.
Healthcare in the US is less efficient and consumer-friendly than in most other First-World and even some Second-World countries but this doesn’t have much to do with the importance of accounting for healthcare services as an increasingly important part of modern economies. This is actually a very good thing. When people get cancer or other illnesses they definitely want to receive the best possible treatment that they and their insurance can afford, which luckily nowadays is more than before and pushes prices up.
Understanding the correct usage of the term econometric is just a couple of clicks away from you but you’re also failing to make that little effort.
Have you a link?
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2011/12/basics.htm
Econometrcis is a statistical and mathematical discipline used to validate economic models. Speaking of “econometric disaster” is like speaking of a “psychometric disaster” or a “hydrometric disaster”.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fallacy.asp#:~:text=The%20broken%20window%20fallacy%20is,economic%20consequences%20for%20many%20others.
Come on man! 🙂 Fixing your destroyed liver doesn’t make you wealthier or healthier, it merely brings you up to where you used to be and should have been in the first place. Now, if we grew and implanted a dozen livers at a time, that would be a different story, but thats not what current healthcare does.
Like I said, we don’t live in a textbook. I’m not arguing with Bastiat anyway. It is very important to understand free market economics as basic principles because that’s how money tends to flow naturally. But we don’t live in a free market economy. Especially not sectors like healthcare. Imagine money is like a river flow. Free market economics will tell you this river will flow undisturbed, but in reality, that river is filled with dams and diverters and boats and all of that has massive implications for the actual water flow. First principles are important but they are not the full story.
That money would be pumped into asset prices just like vast majority of the money we currently print. The “unseen” is very obvious, we see it every day in the stock market. It would not make it to wage labor. Same would happen with productivity gains, just like it has been for the past decades. It’s is rather blatant.
But that’s not what we need right now. We need to pump up consumption to bring corporate earnings in line with overvalued assets, and we need inflation to drive debt to GDP ratio down by growing nominal GDP fast. To do this we need to pump money into peons, and the rich are too dumb to do it themselves. Asset price gains only materially benefit top 10% of the population at most, it is not enough.
You have stories of people literally fighting away medics because they are terrified of costs and bankruptcy. Again, we don’t live in a textbook.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/1-in-4-americans-have-to-refuse-medical-care-because-they-cant-afford-it-2017-06-06
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrics#:~:text=Econometrics%20is%20the%20application%20of,by%20appropriate%20methods%20of%20inference%22.
People get healthy, nominal GDP drops. You can perform quantitative analysis of this phenomenon and determine how much.
In the real world, double digit GDP drop would be declared a disaster by the financial press.
On my planet if you manage to fix your destroyed liver you certainly become much healthier.
As long as you fail to understand these basic facts of life (nothing to do with economics really) you will be spreading crackpot economics thread after thread.
No.
When people get healthy the money they used to spend on healthcare does not disappear from their bank accounts. It just becomes free for them to use it on something else. Likewise, the money their insurance companies or the government (depending on what type of healthcare system they live under) used to spend on them now becomes free to be used somewhere else. It doesn’t vanish and there is no GDP decrease or depression or any of your fantasies.
Again, none of this is economic theory but just common sense. But you would benefit a lot from reading and understanding Bastiat’s short book, which is not an economic faculty textbook.
You’re correct that Russia’s economic outlook has been mainly controlled by the commodity cycle (with upswings in oil being the turbocharger).
But it looks like even in recent times up and down phase of commodity cycle is somewhat longer than 10 years .
If we guessed just from looking at a diagram of recent years, the upward swing of the commodity cycle might be sometime before 2030?
https://i.imgur.com/tOXOPmm.jpg
Well- who they are?
Personally, I don’t believe that US is run by some elite- influenced yes, run-no.
But, if yes- who are these guys & to what purpose?
I think it’s more because of a lack of a serious quarantine in Russia for the second wave, and a less strict quarantine in non working period in the first wave.
GDP tautologically collapses during a lockdown, and in Russia there has been far less lockdown overall compared to most of Europe (excluding Sweden), so like with Sweden we should expect such a smaller collapse of GDP in 2020.
Btw I don’t think this is correct prioritization. Old people build the country, and the health on which enjoying years of their pension depends, deserves to be prioritized during the unusual event of a pandemic as part of the social contract.
This is the most serious pandemic for a century. Assuming the last century is representative, then pandemics are uncommon events. Collapsing the GDP for an autumn/winter of lockdown, doesn’t seem such a sacrifice considering pandemics being rare enough that only a few people alive today can remember the last serious one.
We are not supposed to know who, but a few names pop up: Soros, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and their ilk. My guess is, there are 200-300 of them. They are not a monolithic block, there must be contradictions between them: after all, they are feeding from the same trough (US budget, i.e., your and my taxes plus borrowing), so they compete.
Their purpose evades me, if we assume that they are rational. It appears that they made the worst mistake any elite can make: started believing their own lies designed for the sheeple. They are running the US into the ground at accelerating speed (mindless borrowing, “diversity”, support for BLM and Antifa thugs, ham-handed election fraud, etc.). It looks like they are making the same mistake as Ukrainian oligarchs: they do not understand that the only thing that prevents other thieves from stealing their loot is a strong country behind them.
Some commenters on this site suggested that their purpose is not just wealth, but control. Makes no sense, either: if the Empire crashes and burns, they would lose both.
Countries that are less integrated into the world economy are less affected by global recessions. Fewer supply chain problems to deal with.
Thats an interesting claim, I often wonder how much elites believe in their own bullshit? Its clear that someone like Lyndon B Johnson or Nixon used civil rights movement and vocabulary just as a political weapon and didnt themselves personally believe that negroes were on the level of the white men, but maybe after couple generations of indoctrination and brainwashing, even creme de la creme of the society now believes in all the lies created in the 60s and 70s, even though their grandpas just cynically employed those lies for political gain. Extremely ironic I must say. How often selfish men forget that such thing as collateral damage exists, especially when you make civilizational decisions based on lies and subterfuge.
NS-2 does not yet exist and German industry and nanny state have been doing just fine for many decades without it.
Your exaggerations don’t do any favors to your cause.
Besides, Western Europe is not particularly invested in cheap energy. They are purposefully making their generation of energy ever more expensive because of the climate scare, with Germany leading the effort.
Not exactly my good friend, not over any meaningful time horizon.
Imagine you lost a liver on month 2 and got another one for $100. What is your state on month 1? You have one liver. What is your state on month 3? It’s the same, you still have one liver. You are $100 poorer, but you are exactly the same health as before. Your “liver GDP” growth rate is zero.
Imagine you paid $1,000,000 for a haircut on month 2. What is the value of your haircut at month 3? It’s zero (your hair grew back). There is no difference in your state between month 1 and month 3. It is immaterial if you paid $million, $trillion, or $1 for the haircut, it all deflates the same to the same number, practically instantaneously. You simply become poorer by whatever amount in the process.
Imagine you paid $158 million to Jeffrey Epstein to be you tax advisor. What is your “tax advisor GDP”? It’s zero, because you shouldn’t pay creepy dudes to get money from the government that is lawfully yours. What is the value of 3 year old tax return? It zero, it was your money to begin with and now nobody cares, it’s only use is maybe auditing purposes or whatever.
Well, you can look up debt growth data, budget deficit, etc, all by yourself if you don’t believe me, it’s all public. I agree that it sounds crazy, but thats how our modern real world operates. Welcome to the future.
I already told you I know exactly where that money goes. And yes, there will be a Depression if we don’t address this problem soon. I know where this “somewhere else” is and we don’t want it there.
There is nothing common sense about modern economics. That’s your number one problem. Guys like you will give us negative oil futures prices again, ugh.
Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. Fairly sure they would appreciate it if they got a break with cheap natural gas.
You sound deeply confused.
On my planet people come with all sorts of problems: sicknesses, aging, dental issues,… so they spend a part of their income trying to fix those real problems that they have and it would be irrational not to account for the real services that are provided to them for this reason when calculating the national production of goods and services.
A part of the reason why Germany is wealthier than Burundi is because in Burundi they are not able to give their citizens the same amount and level of health services as in Germany.
End of the story.
But feel free to keep living on a different planet if it makes you happier.
“Eh – Slav culture is really the same as rest of the Europe”
You honestly mean that the culture in Serbia is the same as France? Or Montenegro is the same as Portugal?
Russia’s Orthodox church is given lots of say now by Putin and they are warning of drawing to close to decadent aspects of European culture.
You conveniently forgot that NS1 already exists, and Germany is the main beneficiary of it. Even with that the budget is now strained.
As far as green policies go, natural gas yields energy with the smallest carbon footprint, only nuclear beats it. In fact, the European elites might successfully deceive the gullible, but real carbon footprint (including production and disposal of equipment) of wind and solar is greater that carbon footprint of natural gas.
You are welcome to believe otherwise, though. Big Brother would approve.
Can’t speak of minor Slavic nations, like Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, etc. Russian culture is quite different from both Western European and Asian (e.g., Chinese). One can say that it’s 75-80% European and 20-25% Asian, but it’s not a simple mix. It’s actually distinct from both, fully autochthon.
How on earth could Russia be China’s poodle??? That doesn’t make any sense… They see each other as equals – which is why they are able to work with each other. In fact even small nations get treated that way by China – just as long as they don’t join the anti China coalition. So yes today – tiny New Zealand just enhanced its free trade with China and will have basically all tariffs on its good removed into China by 2024. Contrariwise – Australia sought to follow Trump and so now is facing large problems with its biggest trade partner.
Russia is much bigger and much stronger than New Zealand… So claiming Russia would be China’s poodle makes no sense. They collaborated jointly on forming SCO and BRICS – and it’s bank the NDB. key word is collaborated.
Nope. But I think you are. Lets try Bastiat again shall we.
Now lets try some simple arithmetic. How many healthy livers did you have before failure? You had one healthy liver. How many healthy livers did you end up with after performing a service on your liver after it failed? You ended up with one healthy liver. One liver at the end of the time period minus one liver at the start of the period equals zero liver gain. Restoring yourself does just that and no more , you gain no extra health, or livers in this case. Per Bastiat, it is best to avoid damaging your liver in the first place as repairs do not lead to the economic gain. Which is to say, it is best that service component of GDP is always equal to zero (no livers ever need replacing, your hair is always perfect etc). And indeed, I have shown a few examples how service GDP can deflate to zero rather rapidly. And this is a big part of the reason why all the developed economies, which is to say, service led economies, struggle to achieve their GDP growth targets. Per Bastiat above, economic gain (real GDP growth rate) is tricky to achieve in the service sector. And with service sector at 60-70% GDP, well, that’s part of the reason why money printers must go brrrr.
I’m sure they do and that’s great, but that is also why GDP growth rates have been disappointing in the developed world.
Sure. And this is also why Burundi generally had 3-4% GDP growth rate and Germany was lucky to 2% over the past decade. Low base? Sure. But Burundi doesn’t have Central Banks pumping in $trillions of dollars and Euro and Yen to keep them alive and more or less functional either.
On the contrary, future is just getting started. 🙂
True – but there are certain things Germany is not “allowed” to build – by the rest of NATO. I mean does anyone doubt the Germans wouldn’t have the talent to have a fully modern and self sustained military and a space program and nuclear…?? I mean I think it’s good for Germany because their resources can go to other things… But Germany doesn’t lack the talent….
I have to agree with Mike, you do sound confused. For one thing, your use of the term “GDP” is….odd.
“Econometric disaster” is when you calculated that GDP declined by 5% last year but it actually grew by 10%. Or vice versa.
When was the last time US has a good relationship with Russia? WW2?
It is really not that complicated. Why is it so hard to understand that when you fix something you don’t really gain anything new, only restore previous function?
It shouldn’t be that difficult of a concept to grasp. Bastiat grasped it.
What does that even mean?
Or he thinks that now after all that there won’t be a second attempt on his life. He is willing to take risks because he thinks there might be rewards. Whatever. You have argued before that we cannot peek into other people’s minds. It’s certainly such a case. I’m pretty sure that you don’t have to be a willing martyr to go back to Russia after an attempt on your life by the state.
I mean its 6 percent growth rate is fuelled by debt. Can’t you use search engines or read graphs?
Why do we get a lot of pandemics coming from China, but not from India which is a lot dirtier?
Are the things it created real or not?
Surely you must be paid to write drivel like that. I am Kiwi and I think we should follow Australia’s lead. Free trade with any Asian country is a fool’s errand. How often do we have to be suckered before we wise up? China doesn’t see anyone as its equal. A sense of ethnic and cultural superiority is ingrained in them.
He is willing to return because the risks are quite limited thanks to the protection he receives from the Russian state.
Have you forgetten what the UK did to NZ in the 70s. It killed NZ economically for a decade.
UK in the EU: We dont need to trade with New Zealand anymore we have Europe.
UK post Brexit: We need to trade with our traditional friends.
When the UK joined the European Economic Community, it meant abandoning its Commonwealth partner to favour European neighbours. In the decades before, New Zealand was known as “Britain’s farmyard,” was thriving as it sent more than half of its goods to Britain.
What followed was two decades of anaemic growth. Real GDP per capita gains averaged just a fraction of the years before. New Zealand was forced to embark on a painful restructuring program, slashing subsidies and privatising many state assets, including energy companies, airports and even forests.
For New Zealand, 1973 represented a bumpy start to a new era, as it pivoted toward the dynamic economies of its Asian neighbours. This is a process known as economic regionalisation, where nearby countries closely integrate their economies, the same process that linked the European economies through the Common Market.
Fast-forward 45 years and the Kiwi economy has been transformed. Free trade agreements with Australia, China (in 2008) and other Asian Countries have been critical. These relationships have been valuable for New Zealand, filling the vacuum left by Britain. In 2018, the country exported more to South Korea than to the UK, while China made up a quarter of its total exports.
Were you living in Aotearoa in the 1970s?
If you weren’t ask your old man, ask him how much it hurt Kiwis? That history shouldn’t be forgotten by the younger generation.
You do realize that you are a tiny island in China’s sphere of influence, you just need to learn to accept it.
Realization will come with time.
The primary thing that happened was Rogernomics which forced NZ’s gini coefficient from 0.25 in the early 80s to 0.37, the loss of the auto industry and much of the heavy industry built up during the Muldoon years due to free-market neoliberal reforms of the 80s and early 90s, over-tourism from foreign tourists, polluted waterways from dairy farming, and Chinese buyers so that a one story bungalow in Auckland costs 1 million dollars, with new housing not even a drop in the bucket of annual 100000 population growth, the vast majority due to Asian immigration, in a country with a population of 5 million. Europeans in New Zealand are projected to become a minority in New Zealand due to post-80s mass Asian immigration, and Maori’s are also expected to only become the 2nd-largest ethnic group due to immigration. Basically it is an open question whether the economic reforms of the 80s were a good deal or not.
House prices in Auckland were actually is relatively affordable until the early 90s, when the population was still 3.5 million, vs. 5 million now. Australia and Canada also suffers from the same problem of inflated housing prices brought on by wealthy Asian buyers, principally Chinese. Although in Vancouver the initial phase of wealthy buyers inflating housing prices were Hong Kongers before the 1997 handover.
From Wikipedia:
A 2015 Treasury report said that inequality in New Zealand increased in the 1980s and 1990s but has been stable for the last 20 years[9] although another 2015 article said that New Zealand’s rate of rise of inequality had been the highest in the OECD, and that New Zealand’s inequality had previously been low by OECD standards.[10] The 1991 budget had profound social effects, child poverty rose from 15% in 1990 to 29% in 1994 while violent crime peaked between 1990 and 1997.[11][12] Income inequality also accelerated, New Zealand’s GINI index rose from 0.30 in 1990 to 0.33 in 1996 and thereafter 0.34 at the turn of the century.[13] Poorer New Zealanders saw their standard of living fall from their 1984 level.[14] Unemployment also remained high for much of the decade, from 11% in 1991 to 6% in 1996 and then up again to 8% following the Asian Financial Crisis.[15]
China’s sphere of influence ends 25 miles from the coast of Taiwan.
It would have been poetic justice if the elites went down by themselves. I’d say good riddance. Unfortunately, they are dragging the country down with them.
LOL
Do you know the Total fertility rate of Asians, Whites, Māori and Pacific Islander’s in NZ? Obviously not! New Zealand will turn into Polynesian Paradise, Composed of Māori, Samoan’s, Tongan’s and other Islanders long before “Asians” take over. Just look at the racial composition of the under 5 age cohort in New Zealand!
It looks like this!
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS0cCywfsNsP8ePA50yLUd-GxRHNIXtL1xQHA&usqp.jpg
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT4jKpoRbr7sQW3DstvvPciRCCqDnAWPmq0lQ&usqp.jpg
Right. It has been given by Gods. We should be happy that divinity rules on these matters so precisely and that they use “miles”. They must know what is good for them.
Well, Im extremely happy that they are destroying America.
What are you going to do? Send them back to Taiwan? New Zealand is literally a South Pacific Islander/ Polynesian Triangle Country!
That suggests that he knows the risks are lower than they appear and he was assured by someone about the rewards. The rewards are unlikely that he becomes a President of Russia, more likely something in the West (his daughter studies at Stanford – very likely for free). We can’t see into his mind, I am simply deducing from what he does and what happened.
There is a strange protection offered to him inside Russia that could be because a promise was made to someone in the West (Merkel?), or something completely else. Maybe a doppelganger in the West who matters to Russia as a guarantee, that has been done at least since the Roman times.
As it is, something major is missing from the storyline. The fact that Navalny is not afraid is obvious, that he is not a willing martyr is – as West likes to say – very likely.
The demos are not going to overthrow the government, their PR value at this point is also questionable. It could be something that just happened: accumulated human frustration, bureaucratic inertia among the sponsors and script writers. Or a distraction. Let’s see what happens next: do they let him go on “probation” again or they go medieval. Or NS2 is allowed to complete. The story should make more sense. Right now it doesn’t.
What about my economics? The 80s and 90s economic reforms made NZ worse off, actually debt rose instead of falling in the 80s due to the tax cuts.
Immigration moratorium and deport? Build a wall? Figuratively speaking. Are you going to argue that the US cannot do anything about Mexican immigration because US is situated right next to Mexico, so unfortunately you can not stop illegals? You sound like Jeb Bush there. Or that Russia can not halt Central Asian Immigration because the stan countries are located next to Russia? The house price increases are being driven by Chinese buyers, if the situation in Canada is any guide Indians do not play a large role, and Asian immigrants outnumber Pacific immigrants. But the most of the ones who have the money to bid up housing prices are Chinese. I do not know why anyone who actually knows anything at all is seriously disputing this. Probably some minor tax cuts or cutting of state fat was needed but not the wholesale reforms of the 80s and 90s.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/692815/asian-immigrant-stock-of-new-zealand-by-country-of-origin/
You could argue that the 80s and 90s reforms to the New Zealand economy changed it from a pastoral and agricultural economy into a FIRE and some agricultural economy. And saying you can not halt Samoan immigration or deport Samoan immigrants because Samao is located next door to NZ really does sound like Jeb Bush with regards to Mexicans.
https://www.bwb.co.nz/books/the-fire-economy/
You keep trying to assign GDP meanings that it doesn’t have. GDP is simply the total monetary value of all final goods produced within a territory. It matters not at all whether or not something is being fixed.
If you pay a doctor to fix your liver, it’s counted in GDP. If you pay some quack for snake oil that does absolutely nothing for your liver, it’s counted in GDP. If you pay drug dealer to kill your liver, it’s still counted in GDP (well, the black market part anyway.)
If you pay trillion dollars for a haircut it will be counted in GDP. It doesn’t matter if you hair grows back the next day. If you paid trillion dollars for haircut every day in the past year, then the economy would have added $366 T.
Note this word “final” above. It’s very important. When the doctor who treated your liver purchased medical equipment it was NOT counted in GDP, as it is not a final good. Because the cost of that equipment is contained in your medical fee.
See what happens here? Medical equipment manufacturing is manufacturing but it’s reflected in GDP as service (medical care.) There are many such examples. E.g. airplanes produced by Boeing – unless sold abroad they are ultimately counted as “service”. This is something to keep in mind when you read that such and such economy is “75% service.”
Some people are impervious to sarcasm, or even to plain arguments.
Just like Russia deserves better than traitorous Gorby or Yeltsin, America deserves better than its degenerate elites. The majority of the people are sane and decent. That’s why massive fraud was needed to make elites’ senile puppet “president”. Personally, I have high regard for the normal American people, even though most “deplorables” are woefully uninformed and some are intellectually inferior.
The Dawn Raids failed in the 1970s and 80s and will fail again if tried today. You have a better chance of deporting all the Irish in England back to their homeland, than you have of removing the Polynesians from New Zealand.
“Some people are impervious to sarcasm” – You must when you deal with teenage girls.
I haven’t transitioned yet. How about you? Still chasing the goats in the hills? Or has ‘rona put a damper on it?
The only good thing I am able to see about this discussion is that you are being forced to explain what kind of economic thinking sustains your feverish crusade in favor of monetary expansionism:
The services of heart surgeons do not have any economic value. However producing cluster munitions or video consoles is economically valuable because… they are material things or something. Therefore governments must promote more of the latter and less of the former…… by printing unlimited amounts of money…. brrrrr
Thanks.
Jeb Bush is that you? Illegal Mexicans are immigrating out of love? So do tadjiks?
You should visit New Zealand, you’d like it!
https://youtu.be/pi1ro2ACiGE
https://youtu.be/tSHqAY-FsnI
I’m aware of all that and this is not what this discussion is all about. You are missing the point.
This discussion started is about service economy and why service economy (pretty much all developed world) has subpar GDP growth rate, and how GDP does not necessarily correlate to socially positive outcomes.
I’m well aware that paying a million dollars for a hair will register in the GDP. My argument is that it will make you poorer without changing your final state. The more this goes on, the poorer you will end up and the less your ability to pay any more millions for future haircuts. Haircuts do not produce economic gains, just like fixing broken windows in Bastiat’s fable does not produce economic gains. You merely return to the state you were at before. Fixing windows in Bastiat’s fable would also register in GDP, impoverish the people, and lower their future economic activity. It would be socially best if windows didn’t get broken at all, which is to say, service to fix them wouldn’t be needed at all.
And if there is no service to fix the windows at all, that means the contribution of the service to economic activity (or GDP) is zero. So I generalize from that and say that for socially positive outcomes and economic gains (future real GDP growth), service economy should be trending lower and be closer to zero rather than constitute 60-70% GDP.
Hence my comment “Service economy is Broken Windows Fallacy coming to life”.
And it intuitively makes sense. People like buying cars, people hate repairing broken transmissions, even though both register in GDP. Why the difference? One is acquiring a good that changes your state and makes you wealthier and better off, another is a service that makes you poorer and worse off. You do not gain an extra new transmission when you perform a service to repair the broken one, you just lose money and future GDP. No rational person would pick a car that broke down every day, even though those repairs would register as GDP activity. People would much rather pick a car that was reliable and contributed zero to the service economy.
This is the core of Bastiat’s argument, and my generalization of it.
No, it doesn’t say any such thing, but I guess you know that already.
It’s not really my crusade, it’s the reality we find ourselves it. My name is not Janet Yellen or Jerome Powell, unfortunately. Monetary expansionism is the policy of the day and i attempt to explain some of the reasons why, and why we are failing to hit our real GDP growth targets.
Heart surgeons are nice and their services are must have, but economically, they engage in negative sum game, unlike console manufacturers. As Bastiat correctly pointed out, and people know intuitively. People like game consoles and hate heart surgery. People buy game consoles on their free will and happy, and heart surgery is a desperate last minute decision literally under threat of death. Heart surgery is North Korea of economics.
How many people do you know who buy heart surgery just for fun and happiness? I know a lot of people who buy game consoles like this.
Anyway, because heart surgeons are negative sum game, North Korea style, and game consoles are positive sum game, if you have too much North Korea in your GDP mix, you will experience subpar GDP growth rates. Because heart surgery only makes you poorer, you must compensate for this with money printers going brrrr… Hence our current reality.
If the elites ever do destroy America, you realize they are going to immediately decamp somewhere else and begin devouring that nation. Having more than one passport is becoming a status symbol. If the U.S. does go down, where will the international Jew go? Europe? Russia? China? That is the interesting question. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, while Ashkenazi Jews have low fertility, the U.S. has a fast growing Orthodox Jewish population. By the time the U.S. collapses, a large generation of parasites will be unleashed upon the world. So don’t get too excited.
No, it is not.
Wouldn’t you mind just ignoring poor Bastiat instead of deforming his great insights beyond any recognition?
Game consoles don’t make anybody happy unless they are loaded with games software, which is part of… your hated service economy 🙂
Likewise, the services of heart surgeons would be of little value were it not for the material infrastructure and multiple instruments and substances that they must use.
In your grotesque understanding of Bastiat’s teachings you would like to live in a world of lots of game consoles with no games inside and lots of heart surgery equipment with no heart surgeons.
You really need to stop and revisit everything you think you know about economics, my dear friend.
I think you are right about this and it is a serious problem because of the number of different propaganda stories and myths that are now widely believed in in a much more straightforward and sincere way than originally intended. The elites, even though they know they are not exactly true, may just have to go along with them, even cultivate them, to ride the tiger and keep their base country governable. Probably they are so rich and powerful that they have a level of isolation from the potential impact that most others don’t.
One of the downsides of mass politics is the temptation for politicians to fabricate and disseminate emotive, idealistic narratives to leverage political power.
Well Elon plans to colonize Mars, so that is the next meal ticket.
I live in NZ. You are mostly wrong.
1). Polynesian areas are not paradise. Visit Porirua.
2). The under-5s are much browner than they were, but are still mainly white. It makes sense for financial reasons to identify as Maori even if you are 31/32 white.
3). Maori are moving to Australia in large numbers. They are known as Mozzies.
Foreign ownership of real estate was prohibited two years ago.
That’s just a scam, like everything Elon Musk does.
These are the actual figures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_New_Zealand
The second language round here isn’t Chinese; it’s Afrikaans.
Please stop.
And try to think clearly.
I don’t have anything personal against you so I’m going to try to help you stop embarrassing yourself but I don’t know how much more patience I have left:
A world where human beings are forever healthy is a rainbow unicorn fantasy where people wouldn’t need to eat either or protect themselves from the elements and would probably be happy playing with stones and wouldn’t need console games. Basically, a world where no production of what you call “good” or “bad” services or any material goods would be necessary.
In the real world where we live economic demand is driven by the needs and wishes of real, not rainbow unicorn humans. Real people very much wish to cure or prevent disease and prolong their lives so they are very happy to pay for health services. Much more than for game consoles.
You are just moving goal posts now.
I have clearly stated which goods and services people want and which ones they want to minimize if they at all can. It has nothing to do with unicorns or rainbows, just rational economic thinking. Negative sum services are not bad, they just don’t generate economic gain for people, hence they are not desired under normal circumstances. It’s just the reality we live in. But when those negative sum services begin to dominate the economy, economy stagnates because those services don’t grow and improve people’s lives, they simply return them back to some point in their past. When you spend resources to return to the past, you are not spending resources to grow in the future. So you stagnate. Instead of buying new windows with pretty designs you spend time and resources repairing broken ones. This is our current situation.
Without debt no modern economy can even exist. What is your point?
Karl Kraus said something to the effect that wars happen when politicians lie to journalists, and then believe what they read in the papers.
In sum- it’s money oligarchy. OK. But, except greed, they have almost nothing in common. They, as far as I can see, are very diverse in their world-views & ambitions (or lack of it, in the case of Larry Ellison).
I don’t see any ideology binding them.
I would say it is a mistake to try to diagnose symptoms of the current decadence as stemming from a plan. BLM, Woke “ideology”, ultra-feminism, antifa punks … are just a visible culmination of decades of Western cultural downward spiral; they did not come out of blue; they were not invented by a group of like minded persons.
They just show spinelessness of Western affluent nations now. It is like, say, kidney stones – you may have them, but without symptoms for a very long time. But, when they begin to hurt ….
As long as America stands, so will the corrupt gulf monarchies, Saudis are not specially loved among the Muslim masses, and their heretical interpretation of Islam is behind of majority of problems in the Islamic community. Americas strength is their strength.
As long as America stands its corruptive and degenerative influence is projected on Europe. Its true that Europeans have promoted various radical ideologies through their history, but even the communism was not so damaging in regards of the long term survival of European nations as all this intersectionality, blm, importation of rabble etc, etc bullshit is.
Americas strength is globohomos strength!
And no other civilization has given so much power to the enemies to Christ, not even Soviet Union, as we well know…
America is unparalleled in its decaying effect on the rest of the world, no matter if common Americans are good in your opinion which is based on your self interest, they are the enemy which fuels and breeds the greatest monster and death of civilization that humanity has ever encountered. If America collapses, then whole Europe and Islamic world are free again to walk their own paths, naturally, without the evil influence of Americas masters. For a short term there will be tears, but in the long term mankind shall heal.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/98/10/89/981089fbbee15b2a34fa57c3228b3b9c.jpg
America, its peoples are mlecchas and dasyus, its masters are emanations of demons, influenced by evil spirits gyalpos born from attachment and self grasping. Only the heavenly fire can purify such filth and transfigure it to something better and nobler.
Around us is the Dasyu, riteless, void of sense, inhuman, keeping alien laws.
Smasher of Vrtra(the great serpent), splitter of fortresses, Indra razed the Dasa with their dark wombs.
Based.
“When people get cancer or other illnesses they definitely want to receive the best possible treatment that they and their insurance can afford, which luckily nowadays is more than before and pushes prices up.”
Yes but the entire US healthcare system is HYPER INFLATED and is actually a drag on the actual consumers. Only now because of Covid are household savings in the US even close to being on a right path… I think Germans look at the US stock market and US healthcare and say “ahhh – we’ll take our more modest growth”. I didn’t use Russia – because judging my metrics their healthcare system isn’t as good (though they are also wise to avoid the stock market folly). Germans (or Japanese) get top class healthcare for much more affordable prices than Americans. It’s so unbalanced it’s obscene.
So I gave you substantive factual occurrences and you gave me an opinion based on what you feel… But if that’s how you feel – being that China has historically been the power in Asia – then maybe you don’t belong in Asia…?? See if the UK will take you back as a citizen.
The guy who owns Chelsea Football Club… Is he one of those oligarchs that is now an “enemy” of Russia?