![]() Date: 2025-05-01 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028166 | |||||||||
COMMENTARY
THE COFFEE KLATCH ... MARCH 8TH 2025 with Robert-Reich and Michael-Lahanas-Calderon Has Trump's Dominance Reached its Ceiling? Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xihcmPAeWnY Peter Burgess COMMENTARY This edition of the weekly Coffee Klatch is a bit more 'upbeat' than in the past few episodes ... or perhaps it is that it is not quite so much of 'deep doom and gloom'. It was very interesting to hear some of the commentary around generational age with Robert Reich in his 70s and Michael Calderon in his 20s. It fits my own attempts to explain where I was physically and intellectually in my 20s and now 60 years later in my 80s. My take on difference in age is evolving. It needs to be a complex analysis while at the same time being easy to understand. Not an easy thing to achieve! Part of the driver of my interest in this goes back to my undergraduate days at Cambridge. The economist Joan Robinson who had worked with Keynes since the 1930s was a prominent economics personality during my student days. Both Keynes and Robinson were critical of the way economists had a focus on Gross National Product (or Gross Domestic Product) as a key metric to measure the health of the economy. I learned that GNP and/or GDP had been introduced many years before as a 'temporary' fix to help guide government decision makers during the war years. They were surprised that these metrics had not been refined and were still in use when I was an undergraduate! Fast forward anouth 60+ years and the same metrics are still being used and dominate a lot of the popular economics conversation. This is insane. There has to be a reason! There is ... and it is not a good reason. A more nuanced and widely used economic measure would invite a lot more pushback by common people ... all of us, including me .. against the policy options favored by those with wealth, privilege and power My knowledge of mathematics is not very sophisticated, but I understand numbers very well. Esepcially, I understand how 'numbers' related to measurement change over time, and have been interested all my life in what this actually means. This gets interesting when a number represents an amount of money but the value of this amount of money changes over time. The value of modern money seems to be a functionof 'I don't know what!' But things get much worse ... because the modern economy is huge, increasingly segrgated and gamed for the benefit of those with the power. Meanwhile the world goes on ... getting better for some and getting worse for others. The numerical tools for 'managing' change in a good way, an optimum way for all of society are conspicuous by their absense. This is what I have been trying to address with TVM ... TrueValueMetrics ... but my progress has been painfully slow. Hopefully, however, it will not stop completely anytime soon! This was a good Coffee Klatch with a lot more insights worthy of archiving and analysis! Peter Burgess | |||||||||
Has Trump's Dominance Reached its Ceiling?
Robert Reich 1.15M subscribers Premiered 3 hours ago The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich
Transcript
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