Comments by "Curious Crow" (@CuriousCrow-mp4cx) on "They are Lying to You - How Statistics Can be False or Misleading" video.
-
2
-
These are not on the books because they aren't the national debt. These are private debts. Someone's debt - including the government's - is someone else's savings. The important thing is who owns that debt. If it's your pension fund that owns that debt - and pension funds in the UK are the biggest purchasers of government debt by buying UK Gilts as a way to structure their long term liabilities to pay pensions - would you be happy for them to have less assets to pay your pension from? I would guess not. Indeed, workplace pensions tend to be the only asset almost every worker has, even when they have nothing else. So, don't let confirmation bias mislead you in your critique. The Economy is complicated, because it's made of of people making choices, and people are complicated. So, if your standard of living is going down, it's not because of the "National Debt", it's because of a number of factors that impact your purchasing power, and the national debt isn't one of them. Brexit unfortunately reduced our earning capacity, and depreciated the value of Stirling, as well. It's more expensive since Covid to import from further afield in the world, and we have imposed trade barriers on ourselves. By reducing our earning capacity, the cost of servicing our sovereign debt has increased, because investors view our economy to be more risky now than before Brexit. Plus being very reliant on financial services means we're very exposed to issues in the global financial system, and moving from wage growth to debt to fund living standards, has meant wealth inequality is now embedded, and our children are less well off than we were. And all these major issues create cascading problems on their own, but demography and misinvestment in speculative rather than productive assets that increase real economic growth, i.e. produce Capital, rather than hoarded wealth, means our growth is stagnant. Not only that, but we don't invest in the UK as much as in the US, because returns have been consistently better by doing so. So, UK living standards are unlikely to rise because of these and other issues. And I expect Trump is going to throw shade our way too. He's likely to put tarrifs on UK goods as well, simply because it plays well with his base.
2
-
There's no point saying everything is fiddled if you don't know what the definitions are for the stats so you can judge their validity. Moreover, economics itself is less concerned with distributional effects, being content with aggregate measures. But... Humans aren't purely objective in their thinking, and social media and news outlets have their biases too. So what to do? Well, look at your local economy. How well are your neighbours doing? How many people at your workplace are fighting for overtime every week or every month? Are your local shops full of diverse small businesses that are flourishing? Or is your high street full of only pawnshops, pounshops, charity shops, takeaways, corner shops, and betting shops? Your eyes can tell you a lot that statistics won't. Economics by walking about tells you a lot of things that the statistics don't. So, by all means be sceptical, but be grounded in your critique. And allow for uncertainty.
1