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Re:What a World Without Oil Looks Like by Zigurd on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @05:47PM (#11030503)
It's not so useless. It's one exercise in why broad indices can be misleading.

Creating value in energy production is good, up to a point, and that point depends on whether you are an exporter or not. But if energy becomes a too-large part of the economy it does so at the expense of the rest of the economy.

The same can be said about health care: Health is good. So spending on health care is good. Until it exceeds what other nations pay to get the same health. Similarly, a healthy financial sector is good, unless it drifts into excessive financialization.

Illustrating how one economic sector becomes a vampire is useful because it illustrates how raw GDP can hide vampires that suck the blood out of quality of life.

Re:What a World Without Oil Looks Like by ArkyBeagle on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @08:53PM (#11031449)
Who gets to say what "too big" is? I'd rather see a healthy energy sector than the continued eclipsing of everything else by finance.

Health care will eat everything now anyway. Medicaid is going to be the real estate purchaser of last resort - if you live long enough to outrun Medicare, the State (not the Federal gov't ) will get your house. No amount of estate planning will prevent it.

High energy prices could be quite useful right now - we'd seen actual drops in measures proportional to carbon being added to the atmosphere. I'd rather see that done in the market than by government fiat. It is just that government fiat takes a couple-three generations to get calibrated.

And I have a really funny feeling about your "at the expense of the rest of the economy". I didn't buy that in the 1980s and I don't buy it now. We're not exactly seeing an explosion on consumer spending.

Re:What a World Without Oil Looks Like by Zigurd on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @09:21PM (#11031550)
It is even more arbitrary to do it the way gdp is added up now: if plenty is good, more must always be better, and always counts toward a larger gdp.

What's too much? That's why people study statistics, so they can spot the outliers. 5x other similarly industrial nations is probably too much health care spending. Draw the line at some mathematically defensible place.

Re:What a World Without Oil Looks Like by Naga on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @10:26PM (#11031796)
It's definitely a good article (as most articles from Bloomberg are). It just has a terrible title which implies an entirely different article.