gatesvp

You have killed off a lot of villains in the Dark Elf series

• Which ones do you wish you could bring back for another round?
• Do you have any that you would rather not write again?

(though technically Wish could probably bring any of them back :)

Question: Why are Economists so often "wrong"?

Over and over we see simple Economic predictions simply fall apart when exposed to the real world. What are the Economists of the world doing to fix this issue?

PS: have listened to everything since episode 1, thank you for the podcast :)

"...where the force of gravity is determined by how everyone feels when they wake up that day..."

Of course, even physics has these types of limitations, it definitely has its own "unknowables", plus, how certain are we about even gravity? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation#Anomalies_and_discrepancies)

Canadian living the SF Bay Area, you think you have a real estate bubble? :)

Actually, I really do wonder about this interest rate thing. Population growth in the "first world" is really small and 40% of our historic GDP growth is purely population growth. Places like Canada have slowing population growth... it's technically still growth, but it's definitely not like the boomer generation.

Base interest rates are going to be inherently limited by either real (GDP) growth or inflation rates.

Without a big bump in overall population, I don't know how the richest countries in the world could really ever maintain a 10% GDP growth that would justify a 10%+ interest rate.

Nobody wants really crazy inflation rates either as that would wipe out a lot of people and would make things like OAS and CPP basically useless for the current generation of people moving into retirement.

So you have an inflation target of 2%: http://www.bankofcanada.ca/core-functions/monetary-policy/inflation/

... and a pretty static GDP growth of around 2% and we don't have a bunch more people entering the workforce because we have lots of young people with small families.

I think you basically need a crisis of some type to change this pattern.