America’s Economic Recovery Narrative

George Rebane

The Dems are trying to bolster their Big Lie about Trump’s disastrous economy by pointing out that growth measures are slowing down.  (For you techies this is appealing to earliest derivative of a function that makes your case; in this case it’s the second derivative of, say, job creation or GDP, since the first derivative is still positive.)  For the nation’s innumerates, citing such data may well make a cynical impact that serves to detract from Trump’s luster, because most such folks have no means to understand what’s happening or scope out the real nature of the Big Lie.

The anti-Trumpers are communicating that since the cited growth metric is slowing down, the economic recovery is not going to happen, and therefore it illustrates another failure of the Trump administration.  What the masses miss is that we are witnessing a natural progression that describes countless dynamic processes native to our universe, economic recoveries being among them.

All complex processes that transit from one level to another higher (or lower) one start their journey slowly, then pick up speed until they reach about the mid-point of their destination level.  After that they start slowing down and decreasing their growth rate until the metric levels off and the recovery is over.  When plotted, such a process traces out a curve (function) called a ‘sigmoid’ which I’ve drawn in Figure 1 below.

In the figure we see a typical sigmoid representing the growth of some metric like employment or consumer confidence during a recovery.  It starts off slowly, reaches its maximum growth rate around time t_A at level A which is about half way to its destination level B.  At t_A the growth curve starts bending down (the second derivative turns negative) while still growing, until it flares out at level B.  This traces out a typical sigmoid of natural growth.  A similar sigmoid may represent a decreasing metric - say, unemployment rate (here) – that starts out high and then decreases while picking up speed, and again flaring out at the bottom near an unemployment rate that results at what is known as the ‘full employment’ level.  

For those wanting a closer look at sigmoids and their role in describing Covid pandemic processes, I refer you to my post on the topic, ‘Sigfor: A Data Driven Pandemic Response Policy Evaluation Tool’.

The alternative to the sigmoid that comprises the Dems’ Big Lie here is that they are telling their constituent naïfs that a recovery looks like what is shown in Figure 2 above.  Here we see the recovery rate curving ever upwards and increasing its pace until it hits its destination ‘recovered’ level and slams to a halt right then and there (technically a ‘hard limit’).  No real process behaves like that.  They all slow down before reaching their ‘saturation level’.  But a factual explanation like that does not serve the Left’s national narrative, so the Big Lie continues to be broadcast day in and day out during these weeks before the election.

Another of the many ways the Dems are misleading the American public is lying to them that we know how C19 behaves, and therefore we know how to respond correctly to the pandemic – a response about which they remain silent.  The truth is, as witnessed by the president’s C19 diagnosis and treatment now transferred to the Walter Reed Medical Center, that we are still learning.  The president is at Walter Reed because he is the nation’s high value patient and his response to the disease is still unknown.  Therefore, he needs to be within minutes of the treatments that the nation’s best clinicians can administer as they are already giving him drugs that have yet to clear Phase 2 testing.  The risk related probabilities dictate that he should be given this treatment before it even enters Phase 3 trials in order to provide him with the most effective response known to date.

The dastardly Democrats deny this truth, and continue to tell their dimwit constituents a story about Covid response possibilities that is pure fantasy and fiction.  They do not care about how many additional lives such perfidy will eventually cost, nor the impact it will have on our economic recovery and the livelihoods of millions of Americans.  The Democrats’ bet is that they and their lamestream lackeys will be able to successfully blame it all on President Trump.  That is the choice that we face in November.

Comments

[The Estonian Fox]

George, you are the eternal optimist. Publishing data that differs, and refutes, what the Liberals have been spouting - shame on you!

You can try to teach them, but you can't understand it for them. That basket was taken off the table a long time ago.

We still have a long way to go to get back to economic normal. Printing a year's worth of GDP-money from air doesn't fit into any capitalist market theory that I am aware of. Does any economist, politician, entrepreneur, know where it ends up?

[George Rebane]

Eesti Rebane 229pm - Agreed, of course. And I do take some comfort in that you, whom I consider an astute reader, see some optimism in my anti-collectivist screeds. And BTW, I harbor no hope of reaching our liberal brethren. Wiser heads than mine (e.g. see my conversation with Victor Davis Hansen) have also sought in vain for any middle ground that could serve to launch a profitable conversation. We are terminally divided.