Wasted

I suppose an appropriate analogy would be to get a hooker, who tells you you may pay $20 for 15 minutes or $35 for 1/2 hour. Trying to save some dough you go for the 15 minutes, but your 15 minutes comes and goes before you do. So now you've spent $20 and gotten zero satisfaction, whereas you could've spent $35 and made sure you got your nut off. One way you're fucked, and the other one you're fucked and happy. - XMASTIME

Matt Yglesias on real waste vs. pretend waste:

China is about as close to having a billion residents as the United States is to having eleven residents. Consequently, when you try to implement a very large scale government stimulus package in such a large scale country, you end up with, yes, a lot of waste. Hence the stories of ghost suburbs and so forth that you see in the press. That said, the question of waste ought to be in part a question of what is it that’s being wasted. Is China running out of concrete? Running out of steel? Running out of glass? No. It’s a waste in the sense that, in theory, that manpower and material that went into building it could have been used to build something else.


Compare that to the United States where we’ve done much less in the way of expansionary policy. The result has been much less waste. Instead, we’ve had years of mass unemployment. But that, too, is a waste. It’s millions of people sitting around feeling depressed and demoralized watching their job skills slowly but surely erode. It helps economize on concrete, but at the expense of wasting human potential. I don’t think we came away with the better deal.