Sunday, October 27, 2013

Evolution of my recession theory

I knew about the dot com bust, I was part of it. When the current crash hit, I immediately assumed this was a standard Great Depression, the clash between infotech and transportation. The Dot Com bust was the preliminary, it was UPS vs the Internet; UPS wins. Since this clash was a repeating pattern, and the electrical entertwine between info and transportation is long and old; I assumed immediately we needed robots in the street. My view partially confirmed by the decaying malls and dramatic rise of on line shopping, and UPS is still winning by a smaller margin.

This was about a year before Google and the robo-car. Transportation developed according to theory. I would have expected a very quick, dramatic and wealthy recovery. But bureaucratic opposition appeared on the margins, driven by local politics in California and that led me to the thirty year drop in yields. California, boys and girls, is a short term multiplier less than one. Households and firms in California, hoard up almost the moment the bill is signed.

My priors are that humans have an inherent logistic function going on, as a result of their herding capability. If this function were fundamental, then we could use it to detect inefficiencies in government flow. We can, I did, and there is a very disturbing mismatch between what happens in California an what happens in any of the 30 small Hoover States.

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