Harvard Economist Blames Twitter For Recession

Excerpt gaebler.com Harvard Economist Blames Twitter for Down Economy

"We see the rapid rise of Twitter usage in 2008 correlating very strongly with a tremendous decrease in American productivity," said Schmeldon. "Our regression analysis on the data suggests a causal relationship that may actually be larger than the impact of the much-touted subprime collateral debt refinancing triggers."

Let me just say this about that.  

Oh for Pete's Sake.

I took business classes to help understand how to run my businesses and I'm a little tired therefore of hearing that productivity is about how much one person can produce.  It isn't measured by a worker's output in goods, but about how much profit can be made by the total workforce divided by the number of workers.  That's why during the Bush administration I warned people when news was warbling about "increased productivity" that it actually meant that jobs were going overseas to locations with lower wages.  That's the reason that good productivity didn't benefit American workers.

One thing hidden by the ridiculously low labor costs offshore were the extreme wages and benefits given to the top executives in our corporations and some of middle management were seriously overpaid as well.

Now what do we know about the shocks that our economy has faced since 2008.

Well first we had an incredible run up in fuel prices starting in early 2008 that experts seriously told us would never be seriously reversed.  I'm so glad I didn't listen to mainstream financial and business experts, aren't you glad you ignored them (f you did)?  Imagine if we'd dumped millions into oil like a lot of retirement funds did.  

But beyond the incredibly lousy investment advice (because writers saw benefit to boosting Big Oil in mainstream print and other news reports) we got last year, you should see big costs to all segments of our economy based so much on "just in time" shipment of goods across the wide planet.

Then the as the economy started contracting businesses started laying off workers.  There might have been middle managers in those layoffs and the occasional top executive, but these firings were much smaller than the production level workers in the US and outside of it.

So, wait a minute, that means they fired and dropped the services of the people who work and produce goods cheaply, which can be sold for a higher price while retaining the most overpaid executives that have ever been in charge of businesses in our history and they blame "Twitter" for the reduction of the money they can make per dollars used?????

Of course, they do.

Just like they could pass the erroneous "oil prices will always go up" idiocy last year, the business-financial sector figures they can get mainstream to push for a Twitter moratorium which would fulfill mean-spirited fantasies of top industry executives and keep people from looking at excessive executive pay (and bonuses) as a factor in productivity decline.

tags: twitter  productivity  economy  recession  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit