Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2019 May 8

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May 8

How can the long term rate of increase in major stock indexes like the S&P 500 outpace economic growth by a large margin

If you had invested $30,000 in S&P 500 index funds in 1988 then your investment would be worth about $510,000 today. However, the US economy has not grown by a factor of 17 since 1988. How can we account for the difference? Count Iblis (talk) 05:49, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Those are nominal dollars and the ratio is much lower if you adjust for inflation. Also there has been a transfer of wealth from other parts of the economy to the owners of those index funds. This study[1] has a lot of data about rates of return of different asset classes from 1870 to 2015. I haven't read much of it but it looks interesting. 67.164.113.165 (talk) 07:20, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Also the S&P 500 is not the US economy. The US economy is made of millions of companies. The S&P 500 is made of 500 companies only. Why would they hand out dividends to their shareholders at the same rate? And so, why would they grow at the same rate? --Lgriot (talk) 10:49, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

The US economy is made of millions of people. The growth in the U.S. economy has been largely absorbed by the upper income brackets in the U.S.; the 17x growth noted by the OP is almost entirely borne by the upper income brackets; for most of the US, net worth has plateaued or declined over the time period noted; the slower growth of the whole economy compared to that of the stock market indexes can be explained by the slower or nonexistent growth in personal net worth of the vast bulk of the U.S. population; growth has been concentrated among the upper income bracket almost exclusively over the time period the OP is interested in (1988-present). See this chart published in the Financial Times based on data from the US Government (grey line). So, when you note that the stock market outpaces the overall economy, that is true, because the stock market is not the overall economy. It is (mostly) the part of the economy that the top income brackets (the economy based on earnings from investments) are part of. The rest of the economy (the economy based on earning a paycheck) has been flat for decades. --Jayron32 12:32, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Note that the 1988 starting date is deliberately chosen to correspond to a particular low value of the index, due to the fallout from Black Monday (1987), in order to arrive at a more striking result. It's a well-know trick for those who want to make a given statistic appear more spectacular; I'm surprised we don't have an article on "selective endpoints." --Xuxl (talk) 12:38, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

We have data dredging, about a more general class of such methods. 67.164.113.165 (talk) 20:23, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

There are a lot of good responses here, but the point needs to be made: stock markets are not economies, so there is no valid reason why one should perform the same as the other. DOR (HK) (talk) 17:57, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

And the S&P 500 is not the stock market. It is a subset of the stock market.--Lgriot (talk) 18:42, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Provinces of the Caliphate

I've been doing some work on a few articles on the classical and middle ages Mediterranean, and was trying to add some information on the structure of the Umayyad Caliphate. Specifically, does anyone have any good sources on the provinces of the Caliphate as mentioned at Umayyad Caliphate#Provinces? We have a few articles on some of them. For example Ifriqiya has some information on the history of the province, and even has a list of governors, while Al-Andalus has a pretty good section on its history as a province of the Caliphate. However, it's really spotty and I'm trying to expand a few articles or build some sources. I can't find a decent list of provinces at any specific points in history. Does anyone have any good sources I could use to build even a List of provinces of the Umayyad Caliphate or something like that? Thanks! --Jayron32 20:46, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

We have Template:Districts of Bilad al-Sham... -- AnonMoos (talk) 00:26, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

That's the districts of one province. I was sort of looking for some off-site refs I can use to build a comprehensive list for a new Wikipedia article. I didn't know if anyone here had some insight; my Google-Fu is failing me on this one. --Jayron32 13:21, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Would this book be useful? It lists five provinces (Syria, Jazira, Egypt, Kufa and Basra) on page 34 (The lands conquered by the Arabs and now ruled by the Umayyads were divided into provinces, each under a governor, usually at this period called the amir...) and beginning on page 38 lists the subdivisions of each of them (For military and administrative purposes, Syria was at first divided into four districts or ajnad...). 70.67.193.176 (talk) 15:01, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Quite possibly. Thanks! --Jayron32 15:13, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

70.67.193.176 -- That would seem to go together with the fact that during much of the Caliphal period, the caliphate was administered through 4 or 5 major cities: Medina, Damascus, Kufa (later replaced by Baghdad when the Abbasids came in), Fustat (later replaced by Cairo when the Fatimids came in), and Kairouan (after the conquest of central north Africa). The Abbasid rebellion against the Umayyads, was partly a struggle between Kufa in Iraq and Damascus in Syria. I'm not sure how Basra fits into the scheme... AnonMoos (talk) 18:51, 9 May 2019 (UTC)