The paper does not cover "mid-tier dining." It covers fast food because that's where they had good data.
Moreover, real restaurant spending in total is up, so while your personal dining decisions are interesting they don't appear to reflect the aggregate data.
I'm also not sure why you are calling Goolsbee a "Friedmanite." He served in the Obama administration and advocated strong government intervention during the financial crisis. Do you think every UChicago economist is a Friedman disciple?
Lastly, where did you infer the economists are "lauding" the productivity increases? It appears nowhere in the paper. They only defined productivity increases and explained why they occurred. Was there some other reason you wanted them to be lauding it, other than to justify your anger with people whose policy beliefs you don't seem to be familiar with?
> I'm also not sure why you are calling Goolsbee a "Friedmanite."
The paper is from the Becker-Friedman Institute of Economics. It is literally the Chicago school. Do the authors need to call themselves disciples of Milton Friedman?
> I'm also not sure why you are calling Goolsbee a "Friedmanite." He served in the Obama administration and advocated strong government intervention during the financial crisis. Do you think every UChicago economist is a Friedman disciple?
Most orthodox economists at this point are. Sure maybe an ideologically pure free marketeer would have advocated against government intervention in 2008. But do you really think this guy is outside the neoliberal mainstream?
> where did you infer the economists are "lauding" the productivity increases?
Neoliberal economists believe that productivity is inherently good. I don't see anything in this paper about quality of life of employees or quality of service. Elevating one dimension above everything else implies a particularly importance of that dimension.
It feels like under whatever hood one looks or whichever layer of paint one looks behind - when it’s a relatively new change in society, one always finds the root cause to be neoliberalism.
Your comment reconfirms this especially pictorially with the last statement: productivity and it alone goes up and quality or service are not even part of the equation.
I get why people took issue with my parent comment, because it seems like I am just whining that economists are measuring the only things they can measure. But it's like the fish asking "what's water?".
why do we pay people to measure these things? why do they measure what they measure and not something else? why is this type of thinking dominant among the technocratic elite? Especially when the view from the ground floor only seems to be getting worse and worse.
Most of the profession of economics in the last several decades has been focused on figuring out how to measure difficult-to-measure truths about how people behave. That's what behavioral economics is about. The other name on the UChicago institute you don't like, Gary Becker, won a Nobel for finding ways to creatively study behaviorism: family structure, why people commit crime, studying societal benefits from education, and quantifying damage of discrimination.
You might argue that we shouldn't measure things at all -- that it is better to live in darkness and ignorance, and make vague gestures about the way things are with no evidence or rigorous thought. Measuring is how we find truth. Sometimes it is hard. But throwing away our measuring tools is not the path to enlightenment.
Many people choose to ex ante dislike economists, and dismiss anything any of them have to say without further study, because there is a risk that the results of quantifying the world might disagree with their preconceptions.
I understand the value of economics as a social science, and there are some policies that economists propose that I like. However, a lot of this stuff is either just justification for neoliberal policies, or just common sense.
For example, a neoliberal economist like Becker would say: "There's actually an economic disincentive for racial discrimination"
Sure, if your economic analysis does not take into account class conflict, which most orthodox economists do not. Discrimination is borne intentionally out of class conflict as a tool of dividing the working class.
Orthodox economics is like having a bunch of scientists devoted to a pre-heliocentric model of the solar system. They can describe isolated phenomena within the accepted framework, but they will never be able to accurately describe (in full) the world around them because their foundational world model is incorrect.
Moreover, real restaurant spending in total is up, so while your personal dining decisions are interesting they don't appear to reflect the aggregate data.
I'm also not sure why you are calling Goolsbee a "Friedmanite." He served in the Obama administration and advocated strong government intervention during the financial crisis. Do you think every UChicago economist is a Friedman disciple?
Lastly, where did you infer the economists are "lauding" the productivity increases? It appears nowhere in the paper. They only defined productivity increases and explained why they occurred. Was there some other reason you wanted them to be lauding it, other than to justify your anger with people whose policy beliefs you don't seem to be familiar with?