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The Refragmentation

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Refragmentation

#141

Post by allendoerfer »

jacquesm wrote: post #90
tomjen3 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European, I doubt that unless you are thinking balkan scale wars on the edges of Europe in countries that are not normally considered Europe as the term in commonly used or possibly Turkey actually get of its ass and do something about ISIS. It is true that there are a lot of rivalries, but nobody wants another world war. We are all fat, rich (relatively compared to 1939) and entertained, but more importantly th…

On what time-scale are you looking? A decade out? Two? Three? Europe is in flux in a way that it hasn't been in a long time. And I mean that in a downward way, until the mid 00's we were converging, since then we have been diverging with the '08 crisis as one catalyst and the whole nationalist resurgence as another. Add a couple of million refugees as a convenient scapegoat and the stage is set. Between Le Pen, Wilde…

France and Germany will never again be at war.

The EU might seem fragile, but that is because the NATO and the EU expanded to fast. Remember some 20 years ago there was a wall through Berlin, now nearly everybody behind that wall has joined. Russia destabilized Ukraine to stop this movement.

Still the EU welcomed Croatia in 2013 and the Eurozone Estonia in 2011, so it is growing.

North-Western Europe already has a large coalition of countries that want and think the same things and have an excellent standard of living. The East will catch up economically and the South will get back on its feet. It will take some time, but I think they will join the group.

Some countries like the UK want their special treatment once in a while, but everybody knows, that London has to play along to some degree if it wants to stay the financial center of Europe.

Re: The Refragmentation

#142

Post by r0muald »

warrenmar wrote: post #112
roeme wrote: post #13

If this piqued your interest; or left you wondering, I'd recommend reading Piketty's "Capital in the twenty-first Century". As Graham's piece concludes; if we don't do something , we'll get into trouble. - « Terrific work causes us to think of additional questions. »

The Economist has a four paragraph summary of the book. http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/ec... Low growth causes more income to come from capital, which causes more inequality due to inheritance and the rich getting richer. The solution is a global progressive tax on capital.

There's a 20 minute summary by Piketty here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKsHhXwqDqM and even the short overview by Cory Doctorow is quite good: https://boingboing.net/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in...

After reading the first paragraphs in pg's essay I immediately went CMD + F Piketty and was somehow disappointed that he didn't choose to cite him since that's the crux of C21C. But, glad to see that others on HN resonated with the same ideas.

Re: The Refragmentation

#143

Post by venomsnake »

ericd wrote: post #108
venomsnake wrote: post #21

I think that the field in US in urgent need of refragmentation is the political systems. The two parties are oligopol that don't care about their customers and they don't deliver enough political product to the people. We need more smaller parties that could represent the increasing diversity of opinions.

Agreed, and some system of voting that allows people to express near-substitutes, to avoid a Gore-Nader situation. I don't know the name of it off-hand, but there was a system proposed where you could assign up to 10 points for candidate, so if I happened to like Nader, but also Gore slightly less, I could give Nader 10 points, Gore 9, and Bush 1, rather than give my one vote to Nader with the knowledge that I was pr…

Not only that but actual diversity of issues - if let's say I am pro/anti gun control right now - I also (involuntarily) make statement on access to abortion (which is topic that I just don't care about at all)

Re: The Refragmentation

#144

Post by WoodenChair »

> It would be insane to go to war just to induce more national unity.

It's probably out of the scope of this essay, but we have in fact been at war for 14 years. It's not at the scale of WW2, but it's war none the less. I think it has not induced national unity due to precisely what Graham describes - fragmentation in society.

Re: The Refragmentation

#145

Post by clarkmoody »

ericd wrote: post #108
venomsnake wrote: post #21

I think that the field in US in urgent need of refragmentation is the political systems. The two parties are oligopol that don't care about their customers and they don't deliver enough political product to the people. We need more smaller parties that could represent the increasing diversity of opinions.

Agreed, and some system of voting that allows people to express near-substitutes, to avoid a Gore-Nader situation. I don't know the name of it off-hand, but there was a system proposed where you could assign up to 10 points for candidate, so if I happened to like Nader, but also Gore slightly less, I could give Nader 10 points, Gore 9, and Bush 1, rather than give my one vote to Nader with the knowledge that I was pr…

Look into instant-runoff ballots, where you simply rank your candidates in order of preference. If your first choice does not reach 50% of the vote, your ballot is reverted to your second choice. This allows you to vote for a candidate who most accurately reflects your views with a second-choice of the next-most-accurate, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Re: The Refragmentation

#146

Post by Simorgh »

PG writes that the 20th Century was "a world in which it was socially acceptable to work for Henry Ford, but not to be Henry Ford".

I feel that this viewpoint is still common today. Success is often glamourised, far more than hard work.

Re: The Refragmentation

#148

Post by randcraw »

msvan wrote: post #39

I think this is one of the most interesting essays he's written in a while, and it echoes many of my own thoughts better than I could express them. PG seems to argue that the fragmentation of society is a question of efficiency. A natural effect of this is that the world will become more cut-throat. Efficient systems turn hyper-competitive, as seen in university admissions, startups, financial markets. It seems to me…

PG's perspective is quite US-centric. The aftermath effects of WWII in Europe or Asia was rather different. Among most nations' peoples there's long been little cohesion due to the lack of unifying forces like media or of ethnic homogeneity.

I agree that the economic dynamics of 20th century America won't repeat. But I'm not sure most countries will enjoy a stable predictable trajectory this century. Asia and China are far from being mature ecosystems (economically or politically), and the likely loss of jobs due to further globalization and automation, just as the promise of US-style consumerism is arising portends a bumpy ride, especially for totalitarian-ish societies like China, Saudi Arabia, and even Turkey.

Re: The Refragmentation

#149

Post by clarkmoody »

sce wrote: post #32

Regarding income inequality, I recommend listening to some of the speeches/debates with Bernie Sanders. E.g. he argues that the greatest receiver of welfare in the US is the wal-Mart family, because they get even richer paying their workers so little that the workers have to live on welfare. (In other words the welfare is "paying" the workers so that Wal-Mart don't have to.) He proposes to rise the minimum wage. http…

Walmart employees are not compelled to work for Walmart; the employment contract is agreed upon voluntarily by both parties. The employees know how much they will be paid and agree to accept the terms.

Walmart is operating within the legal employment framework set up by the government, including the welfare state and the minimum wage. That will not change by raising the minimum wage. Rather, Walmart will simply add automation and reduce its employment.

Minimum wage is arguably the worst idea when it comes to improving the lot of the poor. If someone cannot command more than the minimum wage when it comes to productivity, intelligence, etc, then raising that wage means that person will be unemployable. That is, their skills are not worth the minimum amount an employer is allowed to pay, so they will not be able to find a job. Ever. That person will be a permanent liability of the State.

Re: The Refragmentation

#150

Post by shawn-furyan »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #129
gotchange wrote: post #101

A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo warrior and that nothing can be done to remedy the problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy and more specifically in the US and that it's a "natural" product of the state of affairs in our world. A classical example of « the nat…

The last paragraph was the whole point: > I worry that if we don't acknowledge this, we're headed for trouble. If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we'll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we'll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its co…

> he most you can do is take from people at one end and give to people at the other end

But he argues before that point that tax rates and tax receipts are very weakly correlated. This would seem to be a limiting factor governing how effectively a government can flatten inequality through wealth redistribution.

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