One of the newsletters I get said something like "natural disasters are terrible for the economy but great for GDP." EDIT: Found it. Natural disasters are never good for the economy, but they can cause a temporary increase to GDP.Reader Craig Pierce of Corpus Christi kindly sent me a Morgan Stanley report on this topic. I thought its first sentence was unintentionally hilarious:
If ever there was an argument against capitalism...
Well, an argument against lying through statistics. It's like the unemployment rate: it's crazy low right now yet wages aren't moving. This is due to the fact that "unemployed", from a statistical, government-reporting sense, means "has not had a job of any kind for the past three weeks and is actively seeking employment of any kind within the past seven days." If you don't submit a resume this week, you aren't unemployed. If you chop wood for your neighbor for a dollar, you aren't unemployed. Those guys that stop sending out resumes because it's pointless? They aren't unemployed. They're "discouraged workers" and they count differently. But "discouraged workers" don't tie into the Phillips curve, which the Fed uses to adjust interest rates. The Phillips curve only gives a fuck about inflation and unemployment, as defined by Milton Fucking Friedman, the guy who said "if you fuckers actually valued the environment you'd pass more laws to make it harder for guys like me to fuck it over" (not an actual quote). So not so much an argument against capitalism as an argument against Chicago School economics.