Saturday, December 13, 2008

Funny but True, or Truly Funny

I love to laugh at what passes for "economic analysis" in the popular media. Here's an example that is caught out and excoriated by Steve Waldman in his blog Interfluidity:

One of the funniest words in the lexicon of business is "overcapacity".

Here's Bloomberg:

China’s economic slowdown is deepening, with overcapacity in almost all industries, and won’t bottom out until after the first quarter of next year, two senior officials said today.

Think about that: "overcapacity in almost all industries". Perhaps we exist in a more enlightened world than I ever imagined. I've always thought that human want for material goods was basically unlimited. Apparently not! We have enough, not just here in the once gluttonous U.S. of A., but everywhere. All of the nearly seven billion humans of planet Earth have no use for anything more than they already have. Subsistence farmers in Africa prefer to live as they do, because it plays charmingly in National Geographic. If you offered them 10 million Yuan and a shopping trip, they'd shyly refuse.

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