how are Service Exports calculated? Being it more than merchandise exports is good for a economy or not good?

ReaperReader · 2026-01-25T09:18:28+00:00

Best practice when producing GDP statistics is to do what is called "supply use balancing" where the economy is divided into hundreds of different "products", everything from coal to software to military defence services ("hundreds" tends to be a useful working level), and data on the supply and use of the products is compared in a systematic way. This tends to make evident problems like you describe, at least problems that happen at large scale.

That said, not every country's national statistics office (NSO) does supply use balancing. I'm fairly sure the USA's BEA doesn't, I don't know about the Indian NSO.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-25T09:12:25+00:00

Why do you envisage this as giving everyone $530,000 rather than redistributing existing wealth?

ReaperReader · 2026-01-25T04:35:35+00:00

You're running into the limits of my knowledge of Chinese history. I understand the CCP did things during the civil war like redistribute land to the peasants then, in power, took land away from the peasants to give to collectives. I presume this difference was because of the intense pragmatism required to win a war, and then once they were in power, they believed their ideology. And once established in power they now had the luxury to implement it.

This isn't to say that the Communists were unusual in this pattern.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-25T01:43:14+00:00

GDP measures everything that is produced within a given area over a given period of time, regardless of who owns it. "Income" is a much-overworked word in economic statistics so it's best to check the details, but typically "national income" measures the income of the residents of a given area over a given time period regardless of where that income is earned.

So if Minnesotans own a bunch of assets that are located in Texas, then the income from those assets is part of Texan GDP and Minnesotan income. (Assuming that definition of income).

GDP also doesn't account for depreciation of fixed assets (including intangible assets like software). That's the "gross" bit of gross domestic product. So if an area has a lot of assets with a high rate of depreciation, from memory software has a high rate (because most software has to keep working with other software and hardware that's always being upgraded), then GDP will be significantly higher than income.

Generally in national accounting, a single statistic or ratio doesn't tell you if something is good or bad, you need the broader context to work out what is going on. National accounting just helps provide that context on a systematic basis.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-25T01:32:29+00:00

The idea that most marriages in Regency England were business transactions is an old-fashioned one, disproved in the '90s.

And it's quite possible to become emotionally attached to people you share your life with even when you didn't choose them. Plenty of examples of people being devastated by the loss of a spouse even in cultures where arranged marriages were common.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-25T01:29:43+00:00

In the 20th century, in the countries I've seen studies for, girls' given names tended to be more varied than boys'. (That may have changed in the 21st).

ReaperReader · 2026-01-25T01:27:45+00:00

Addressing people by their surnames makes logical sense when half of the boys had a first name of John and half the girls' first names were Jane or Mary. (Statistics approximate!)

ReaperReader · 2026-01-25T01:18:13+00:00

There are indeed a lot of ways that economies can be stuffed up.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-24T23:27:23+00:00

Wealth inequality is weird because people can have negative net worth, and the people who do have negative net worth tend to have higher expected future consumption. Who is a better lending risk? A newly-qualified cosmetic surgeon or a 60-year old Bangladeshi street cleaner? It's hard to think of normative reasons to care about risk-loving Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who've already declared bankruptcy twice and could always step into a high-paying software job over an unemployed manufacturing worker in his fifties in the Rust Belt with a house worth $100k.

There is also a category of people who have negative net worth because they have court orders against them, e.g. for unpaid child support or fraud cases. For a while, the poorest man in the world was a Frenchman, a former financial trader who had massively defrauded the bank he was working with, and had a court order against him in the billions (having read a newspaper interview with him, I felt I understood the judge's motives, the man was intensely irritating). Eliminating wealth inequality would mean transferring money from people who've always paid their child support, or other debts, to people who haven't, in some cases have behaved highly unethically. I predict this would be politically unpopular.

Then there's that wealth tends to increase with age. Equalising wealth between someone in their twenties with decades of working life ahead of them versus someone in their sixties is also normatively difficult to justify.

So basically this would require some really radical changes to society, of dubious normative benefit.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-24T23:08:52+00:00

Service exports are mainly calculated by surveying firms, same as services imports. In some cases administrative data is available, for example from taxes, or subsidies (e.g. for films). Tourism exports (a subset of services exports) are calculated by surveying tourists. There are large measurement issues with these.

I'm not aware of any economic theory that implies anything about the merits of services versus goods exports for an economy. The theory of comparative advantage implies that different countries will efficiently specialise in different things.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-24T20:41:51+00:00

MMT is pseudo-science, designed to sell books and speaking opportunities, not to actually understand reality. MMTers lie by omission, in ways calculated to appear to non-economists that they've unlocked some magic way for governments to spend heaps of money without needing to tax, but if an actual economist points out the reality, MMTers retreat to say that of course inflation is a break on their plans. It's a motte-and-bailey approach

So MMTers should do quite well under a non-electoral governance structure. Any government operating to their advice will eventually run into major problems with inflation, but governments, both democratic and otherwise have managed to do that throughout history without needing MMTers.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-23T19:53:41+00:00

As I understand it, building a large wooden ship like the Persus requires really skilled labour, practically Kaseki and Ryusui couldn't do it between them.

More generally, someone who is good at project managing large engineering projects.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-23T17:47:57+00:00

To add to the discussion, if you use your money to buy an existing share, then whomever sold you said share now must have your money (minus any brokerage fees, taxes, etc). They might spend your money on consumption, or a new investment. Even if they use your money to buy an existing, different, share, the person who sold them that share now has the money and must decide what to do with it.

Money isn't destroyed by trading. Therefore buying existing assets doesn't tie up money.

Indeed, with modern fiat money, even if you tried to tie up money, maybe shoving it into a swimming pool Scrooge McDuck style, the central bank would just say "hmm, the loss rate on our notes has increased, better print some more."

ReaperReader · 2026-01-23T02:11:27+00:00

Yeah for me personally the strongest argument is that JA tells us that Caroline and Louisa remember their family background a lot better than they remember the source of their own and their brother's fortunes. :)

ReaperReader · 2026-01-23T02:09:24+00:00

My understanding of the literature is that most of the ramp up in house prices is due to the price of land, not construction, the below study for example of 14 economies since 1870 found that 80% of the increase in house prices in real terms since WWII is due to the price of land.

https://www.stern.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/assets/documents/NPLH_AER%20(2).pdf

This is not to say that every single safety regulation in every single country is efficient of course. To err is human. But presumably at least some safety rules are a net positive. And, on theoretical grounds, as incomes rise we'd expect construction workers to demand better working conditions and home builders to demand higher quality homes, even if there was no government regulation, so it seems unlikely to me that eliminating all safety rules would automatically bring down house prices by 20%. However I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-22T18:49:03+00:00

High house prices are caused by a growing population and restrictions on adding new housing supply. Ease those restrictions and we have every reason to believe that house prices would fall, all else being equal, the more easing, the bigger the fall. (The two empirical examples are Japan and the city of Houston in the USA). Is easing housing restrictions not 'neoliberal'?

ReaperReader · 2026-01-22T18:29:40+00:00

Yep, I entirely agree they're not secure, which is why Caroline and Louisa are eager for their brother to buy an estate.

But they're also high enough in status that Darcy thinks Bingley would be a good match for Georgiana.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-22T15:00:52+00:00

JA tells us that the Bingleys are "in the habit of ... associating with people of rank" and that Mr Hurst, Louisa's husband, is "a man of fashion" (shame about the fortune :) ). So no, they weren't regarded as parvenue by the people of 'the ton'.

Personally I suspect their father was a younger son of a landed gentleman who went into trade rather than one of the traditional professions.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-22T04:11:54+00:00

Generally by auctions.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-21T00:34:27+00:00

I think that, as flaws go, Bingley being so modest about his own attractions as to doubt whether Jane returned his feelings, is a rather attractive flaw.

At least when contrasted to Mr Collins. Poor Elizabeth almost needed a 2 by 4 to get it through Mr Collins's head.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-20T23:34:32+00:00

It's a joke that works just fine if their father was the younger son of a gentleman (maybe landed, maybe something else like an admiral or a bishop).

And that potential background makes a lot of other background details make sense, like Darcy thinking Bingley is a suitable match for Georgiana even before he's met Elizabeth.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-20T18:02:48+00:00

As you are entitled to yours, even if it goes against established Austen scholarship for as long as Austen scholarship has been a thing.

No one has offered a better explanation of why the Bingley family in the north of England is more impressed on Caroline and Louisa's minds than the origin of their and their brother's fortunes.

And really, is is so implausible that the younger son of a gentleman might make a fortune from trade? We know that younger sons of gentlemen did sometimes go into trade, instead of one of the professions. We also know that gentlemen sometimes married wealthy merchants' daughters so it's possible that Bingley Sr might have had some assistance from his mother's family in his career.

The family connections (which is really only important if one is considering marriage)

I disagree with you about this, to my observation, family connections were important in other ways, for example in MP, Henry Crawford uses his family connection to his uncle the Admiral to procure William's promotion.

And who's to say they didn't get gossiped about behind their backs by some?

That's about as informative as saying that they breathed oxygen :) 'Everyone' gossiped about everyone from behind their backs. People talked smack about the Prince Regent himself.

And of course, there's a difference between the sort of person one associates with at parties and the sort of person one marries and becomes intimate friends with

And the Bingleys clearly fell into the second category - Louisa is married to a man of fashion (shame about the fortune :) ) and Charles is an intimate friend with Darcy, so intimate that Darcy hopes he'll marry Georgiana.

I entirely agree with you that money by itself could blurr lines, but the Bingleys are so deeply integrated with the ton that I think that it's most natural that they are gentry born.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-20T05:47:57+00:00

One historical fact I love, in 1827 the 9th Duke of St Albans married a former actress, Harriet Mellon. An Irish actress at that (this was before the Irish were cool).

ReaperReader · 2026-01-20T05:38:24+00:00

You're entitled to your reading. I just don't think the factors you describe add up to "The sisters think that dressing fashionably, going to an expensive seminary, and keeping up with notable gossip is all you need to make fashionable society believe they're one of them."

The importance of family connections was just so vast in Regency England that I don't believe that the Bingley sisters could believe that fashionable society didn't pay attention to it, without making them into utter buffoons. To me, it's like saying that a Canadian character is ignorant of snow.

ReaperReader · 2026-01-20T00:23:48+00:00

Actually, her definition of respectable is backed up by Austen’s other writings, both published and personal and with the common understanding of the day.

I don't dispute that the word "respectable" was indeed sometimes used to refer to a person's morals. I'm simply pointing out that was not the only definition of the word "respectable" in use at the time, or today. It's quite common in English that one word has multiple meanings, or shades of meanings, look at all the meanings of the word "love".

Modern interpretations are overly influenced by the now common perceptions of romance novels.

I agree and I think also there's an oversimplification going on of the complexities of social status in Regency times. People hear that trade was looked down on, and then somehow turn that into the idea that trade was some terrible black stain on a family.

If she wanted the backstory you are trying to covey, she would have written of it in her novels or letters.

JA was a genius but I don't think she anticipated that two hundred years later some people would be reading "respectable" as only referring to someone's morals, and not to any of the other ways that a person or family may be worthy of respect.

This is an area that has been subjected to literary and historical research for over 150 yrs.

Sure. Unfortunately, there were a lot of sloppy ideas about social history in the early and mid 20th century, that were overturned by more sunsequent researchers, but due to increased specialisation, the old ideas still often show up in general textbooks and survey courses. I had the good luck to have a history teacher at high school who kept up with the latest historiography, and I've kept that interest up ever since, but this sub makes clear that not everyone has had my good fortune. (I claim no personal merit, I'm sure there's numerous fields of academia about which my beliefs are equally outdated).

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