Tootfinder

The Atlanta Fed estimates delays faced by claimants in COBOL-based unemployment insurance systems cut US GDP by at least $40B between March 13 and year-end 2020 (Bryce Elder/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/7610a755-27e3-4792-a337-27d9b301000b

UPDATE: Pokrovsk, Ukraine.
Over 20% of Ukraine's GDP comes from the Pokrovsk region. There are 127 official mines in the region, providing the true incentive for Putin's push to steal it.
In the maze of mineshafts and tunnels, an invisible war is being waged in horrifying conditions.
The idea of US "peace" plan is absurdist fiction that fits in with the Kremlin lies of Russia controlling Pokrovsk.
Information wars are being waged in your face. Defend…

The debate about 'abundance' vs 'degrowth' often still seems to be about whether or not GDP should continue to grow. That's silly. A simple example to illustrate this:
What would you prefer:

A look at the system for distribution of direct media subsidies developed for the government of Denmark, which spends ~0.2% of its GDP on direct media subsidies (Rasmus Kleis Nielsen/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2…

As the U.S. starves its public media, Denmark wants to figure out a better way to subsidize private news publishers
"A foundation can pick winners on the basis of its own values and priorities and support them from private sources. But if the state does the same with public funds, we risk the appearance (or even worse, the reality) of politicians picking winners on the basis of their own ad hoc, pa…

World Bank lowers Ukraine's 2026 GDP growth forecast: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/08/world-bank-lowers-ukraines-gdp.html

Decoupling …… again
If you've been reading our material for long you'll have seen previous articles about the claim that GDP growth can happen without increasing greenhouse gas (chiefly carbon) pollution: the decoupling thesis. Early work focused on debunking claims that were made without evidence. Later on, evidence for some decoupling was provided and we reviewed its implications.  Briefly we questioned its scale, permanence, and the quality of the data underpinning…

Decoupling …… again
If you’ve been reading our material for long you’ll have seen previous articles about the claim that GDP growth can happen without increasing greenhouse gas (chiefly carbon) pollution: …

Harvard economist Jason Furman estimates that investments in data centers and information-processing software accounted for 92% of US GDP growth in H1 2025 (Nick Lichtenberg/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/data-centers-gdp-g…

Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025, Harvard economist says
Is a U.S. without data centers a country without GDP growth?

Decoupling …… again
If you've been reading our material for long you'll have seen previous articles about the claim that GDP growth can happen without increasing greenhouse gas (chiefly carbon) pollution: the decoupling thesis. Early work focused on debunking claims that were made without evidence. Later on, evidence for some decoupling was provided and we reviewed its implications.  Briefly we questioned its scale, permanence, and the quality of the data underpinning…

Decoupling …… again
If you’ve been reading our material for long you’ll have seen previous articles about the claim that GDP growth can happen without increasing greenhouse gas (chiefly carbon) pollution: …

"By 2100, unchecked climate change could slash global GDP per capita by up to 24%"
#Climate #ClimateChange
https://

By 2100, unchecked climate change could slash global GDP per capita by up to 24%
Nearly a quarter of the global GDP per capita could be lost by 2100 compared to a "no further warming" baseline, if climate change continues to escalate unchecked, according to a study published in PLOS Climate by Kamiar Mohaddes and Mehdi Raissi from the University of Cambridge climaTRACES Lab.

UK #GDP figures.
Growth is dead. Embrace it and find another way.
https://mstdn.social/@markhburton/115705775839092427

🧂 Cocaine trafficking in Colombia moves as much money as the construction industry
https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-09-19/cocaine-trafficking-in-colombia-moves-as-much-money-as-the-construc…

Cocaine trafficking in Colombia moves as much money as the construction industry
A new academic paper reveals that the drug trade generates annual revenues of $15.3 billion, equivalent to 4.2% of the country’s GDP

22% GDP – Russia is stifling its own economy! #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/11/06/gdp-russia-is-stifling-its.html

Just published 🚀: Private AI Investment is on a GDP-Scale
#musings

YouTube's creative ecosystem added over €7B to the EU's GDP in 2024 and supported 200K full-time equivalent jobs, according to advising firm Oxford Economics (David Wheeldon/YouTube Official Blog)
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/2025-youtube-europe-impact-…

New report explores YouTube's growing impact in Europe
YouTube’s creative ecosystem added over €7B to the EU’s GDP in 2024, while supporting over 200,000 jobs.

YouTube's creative ecosystem added over €7B to the EU's GDP in 2024 and supported 200K full-time equivalent jobs, according to advising firm Oxford Economics (David Wheeldon/YouTube Official Blog)
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/2025-youtube-europe-impact-…

New report explores YouTube's growing impact in Europe
YouTube’s creative ecosystem added over €7B to the EU’s GDP in 2024, while supporting over 200,000 jobs.

Isto é porreiro, especialmente para calar a boca aos tipinhos do norte da Europa, que ainda andam com a cabeça cheia de porcos.
Mas sabem o que era mesmo, MESMO porreiro? Era que a malta sentisse alguma coisa dessa liderança.
Infelizmente, o que se sente é o inverso.
https://mastodon.mediafaro.o…

I’m sure this will end well for everyone 🤗
[tl;dr Financial Times article about how 40% of the US GDP is now "AI"]
https://archive.is/8Hyt8

Atomico: European startups are on track to raise $44B in 2025, up from $41B in 2024; tech now makes up 15% of Europe's GDP, up from 4% in 2016 (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/Sifted)
https://sifted.eu/articles/state-european-tech-report-2025/

Trump Cancels Release of Crucial Economic Report to Hide His Failures | The New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/post/203619/donald-trump-cancels-release-gdp-economic-report

"The AI investment ‘bubble’ (as measured as the stock price relative to the 'book value' of a company) is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy of 2000 — and four times the subprime mortgage bubble of 2007. The ratio of the US stock market’s value to GDP (aka the “Buffett Indicator") has moved up to a new record high at 217%, more than 2 standard deviations above the long-term trendline." [ the very definition of abnormal - MB ]

The AI bubble and the US economy
The US stock market continues to hit new record highs; the bitcoin price is also close to highs and the gold price has rocketed to all-time highs. Investors in financial assets (banks, insurance co…

"Swiss unemployment stands at a mere 2.8%, meaning the country is near full employment. And, its median salary of approximately over $90,000 per year, is about 50% higher than in the U.S. despite having a similar GDP per capita."
https://fortune.com…

Panel regression for the GDP of the Central and Eastern European countries using time-varying coefficients
Lesya Kolinets, Vygintas Gontis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04211 https…

Panel regression for the GDP of the Central and Eastern European countries using time-varying coefficients
The integration of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries into the European Economic Area serves as a valuable experiment for the regional economic development theory. The long-lasting convergence of these economies with more advanced Western Europe exhibits a few standard features and varying policies implemented. Even the Baltic countries, which started from very similar starting positions, demonstrate their unique trajectories of development. We employ a panel data regression model tha…

Government shutdown could lead to $14B in lost GDP, CBO reports (Jacob Wendler/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/10/29/congress/government-shutdown-2025-cbo-cost-estimates-00627727
http://www.memeorandum.com/251030/p7#a251030p7

While trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment,
I came across a sentence buried in a research paper:
“The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”
I read it again.
Three times the minimum food budget.
I felt sick.

Part 1: My Life Is a Lie
How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America

Intelligent Healthcare Ecosystems: Optimizing the Iron Triangle of Healthcare (Access, Cost, Quality)
Vivek Acharya
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03331 https://

Intelligent Healthcare Ecosystems: Optimizing the Iron Triangle of Healthcare (Access, Cost, Quality)
The United States spends nearly 17% of GDP on healthcare yet continues to face uneven access and outcomes. This well-known trade-off among cost, quality, and access - the "iron triangle" - motivates a system-level redesign. This paper proposes an Intelligent Healthcare Ecosystem (iHE): an integrated, data-driven framework that uses generative AI and large language models, federated learning, interoperability standards (FHIR, TEFCA), and digital twins to improve access and quality while lowering…

About 20 years ago, I was part of the Neighborhood Network - people concerned about good planning and good governance. The Mayor's office was pushing to allow more nmarket rate housing. When Jim Meko and I met with the then housing czar, he explained supply and demand. When I argued commodity vs luxury item and profit motive, he admitted that unrestricted building would reduce prices by maybe 3%. Very close to the current conclusion.

S.F. upzoning would lead to $75 to $125 decrease in monthly rent, city economist says
Citywide zoning changes would have modest effects on housing construction and affordability, but big boost to GDP

About 20 years ago, I was part of the Neighborhood Network - people concerned about good planning and good governance. The Mayor's office was pushing to allow more nmarket rate housing. When Jim Meko and I met with the then housing czar, he explained supply and demand. When I argued commodity vs luxury item and profit motive, he admitted that unrestricted building would reduce prices by maybe 3%. Very close to the current conclusion.

S.F. upzoning would lead to $75 to $125 decrease in monthly rent, city economist says
Citywide zoning changes would have modest effects on housing construction and affordability, but big boost to GDP

"...one notable policy initiative from the world body was not discussed by world leaders when it should have been. UN secretary-general António Guterres has put together a high-level group of specialists to propose new indicators for human and planetary prosperity that go ‘Beyond GDP’."
A #Nature journal editorial:
End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity

End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity
The obsession with economic output as a measure of human development puts sustainability on the back burner. Researchers can now help to devise better indicators.

oh stop whining about how #cryptocurrency is a #fraud, its #fake, its a #ponzi scheme. Ill have you know crypto is _perfectly_ safe and _com…

web3 is going just great (@web3isgreat@indieweb.social)
Attached: 1 image Paxos accidentally mints more than twice the global GDP in PayPal stablecoins October 15, 2025 https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=paxos-accidental-mint

Crosslisted article(s) found for physics.soc-ph. https://arxiv.org/list/physics.soc-ph/new
[1/1]:
- Panel regression for the GDP of the Central and Eastern European countries using time-varying coe...
Lesya Kolinets, Vygintas Gontis

Nowcasting and aggregation: Why small Euro area countries matter
Andrii Babii, Luca Barbaglia, Eric Ghysels, Jonas Striaukas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24780 https://

Nowcasting and aggregation: Why small Euro area countries matter
The paper studies the nowcasting of Euro area Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth using mixed data sampling machine learning panel data regressions with both standard macro releases and daily news data. Using a panel of 19 Euro area countries, we investigate whether directly nowcasting the Euro area aggregate is better than weighted individual country nowcasts. Our results highlight the importance of the information from small- and medium-sized countries, particularly when including the COVID-1…

Microsoft invested $13B in OpenAI.
SoftBank and Oracle threw in $600B earlier this year.
Now Nvidia drops another $100B.
Somewhere along the way someone decided the path to success costs more than the GDP of 175 sovereign nation states.

How Portugal is investing ~4.6% of its GDP around the port of Sines, seeking to transform it from a tourism-dependent economy to a tech and industrial hub (Sofia Horta e Costa/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

"Spending as a share of GDP is pretty well where it was at the end of the last government. This government had reversed the additional austerity the last government had pencilled in, but once you allow for trends in health spending and debt interest the substantial reduction in the level of public service provision that we saw under fourteen years of Tory rule has not and will not be significantly reversed."
mainly macro:

The Budget suggests the Chancellor is thinking too much about short term management and too little about long term legacy
  My posts come out on a Tuesday and Budgets are on a Wednesday. Not great timing, which is why in the past I’ve often done special posts on...

Business Cycles explained by Instability
Galiya Klinkova, Michael Grabinski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20000 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20000

Business Cycles explained by Instability
Business cycles (a periodic change of e.g. GDP over five to ten years) exist, but a proper explanation for it is still lacking. Here we extend the well-known NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) model, resulting in a set of differ-ential equations. However, the solution is marginal stable. Therefore we find a nat-ural sinusoidal oscillation of inflation and unemployment just as observed in busi-ness cycles. When speculation is present, the instability becomes more severe. So …

Taiwan raises its 2025 GDP growth forecast to 7.37%, up from 4.45% forecasted in August, the fastest in 15 years, as AI demand boosts its electronics exports (Kathrin Hille/Financial Times)

How the US' annualized 1.6% GDP growth in H1 was heavily dependent on AI-related investments, which might have accounted for as much as 50% of the growth (Konrad Putzier/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-the-u-s-ec