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The Refragmentation

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Refragmentation

#271

Post by ArkyBeagle »

quadrangle wrote: post #219
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no real reason/mechanism for the exclusions to have made anything work better. Compared to the US being the Arsenal of Democracy, the economic effect of liberalization was very small, ignoring long-term government debt. The New Left in the 1960s mostly just failed outright. Any change then was due to judicial or executive action.

Partially devil's advocate: Women not working en masse means single-income households as a norm, which means all the real economic value of someone staying at home to take care of home issues and a general supply-and-demand situation where workers needed to be paid enough to make things work on a single income. Flood the market with twice as many workers, wages go down and the expectation becomes two-incomes, and thu…

IMO, this was principally expressed in raised real estate price/value.

Some of this is hedonic in nature; if you watch "Fargo" second season, you see in pretty good detail how people lived 35 years ago. I'm pretty sure this would be considered something much more like poverty now. Of course, I'd be ignoring any inflation in price of the homes shown, by design.

Re: The Refragmentation

#272

Post by bobthechef »

lkrubner wrote: post #138
zackmorris wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and will ride your coattails for a moment by pointing out that if economics is darwinian, then a possible way out of this situation might be human planning. It doesn't have to be central, it can be a way of living that amplifies the changes you'd like to see in the world. So for example, say a person acquires a certain amount of wealth and wants to make his or her home solar…

"if economics is darwinian" How can economics be Darwinian? The outcome of economic interactions is not a zero sum, whereas a lion who kills and eats an antelope is engaged in a zero-sum interaction. The antelope gets nothing out of it. As a point of contrast, if you buy a car from Toyota, you have not harmed Toyota, nor has Toyota harmed you (hopefully). It is theoretically possible, when humans engage in trade, for…

Since when is "Darwinian" synonymous with "zero sum"? Even social Darwinism, a corruption of Darwinism, isn't zero sum.

Re: The Refragmentation

#273

Post by erikpukinskis »

wyager wrote: post #116
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 appeal to nature fallacy us to claim that something is right because it's "natural". It's not necessarily wrong to say that something can't (practically) be changed because it's natural. In this sense, natural means "an (emergent) property of nature". For example, as much as we may dislike it, people will continue to fall to their death in the near future, as gravity and its associated risks are natural. I believ…

It's a useless way of thinking because many things seem natural until they're proven not to be. We though being tied to terrestrial transportation was natural for a very long time, but it turns out there's no natural law preventing human bodies from taking flight after all.

Re: The Refragmentation

#274

Post by incompatible »

Retric wrote: post #239
incompatible wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And at the other end? The popular opinion seems to be that we just need to force companies to pay higher wages, i.e., put up the minimum wage. Now those low paying jobs are illegal and people end up unemployed instead, especially when the economy is bad. I'd be willing to try abolishing minimum wages and letting the government pay a subsidy to anyone making a genuine effort to work, so that they have a reasonable sta…

Guaranteed minimum income has a lot going for it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income U.S. politics has gotten strange, people complained about welfare mothers not working when that's shat the system was designed to do. IMO, hand out a small fixed amount every month, then flat tax everything last that point and get the government out of micromanaging the economy. Upside, no tax breaks makes ever…

Yeah, but I expect that to be rather expensive, requiring high tax rates with limited chance for evasion with everybody who bothers to work. The fact that it never seems to have been implemented on any large scale also makes me think it's unpopular, perhaps due to people not wanting to subsidise people who choose not to work.

Re: The Refragmentation

#275

Post by gnaritas »

zanny wrote: post #254
gnaritas wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> success = ability * motivation * opportunity success = (ability * motivation * opportunity)^hugeDoseOfLuck There is no guaranteed formula for success, it is heavily luck dependent. Those who think otherwise are suffering from survivor-ship bias and/or the just world fallacy.

The opportunity is the luck though, since its out of your control, if you take it that the constituent parts of personal behavior that present you with opportunities come from your own motivation.

Luck is far more than just opportunity though; luck is also all the things that didn't happen that could have, things that caused others who followed the exact same path to fail. Sudden disease, unexpected deaths and disasters, all of which are invisible luck for those who haven't been affected by them.

Re: The Refragmentation

#276

Post by TeMPOraL »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #233
swombat wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Political speech is jot forbidden as a whole, just political speech that appears directly related to an ongoing election. For example, right now, you should be allowed to make a movie about how Reagan sucked, but not one about how Hillary Clinton will suck if she gets elected.

So in your ideal world, Paul Krugman is banned from writing editorials? John Stewart can no longer discuss contemporary politics? And if a citizen notices that all the politicians are lying, he needs to just shut up about it?

> And if a citizen notices that all the politicians are lying, he needs to just shut up about it?

Honestly, does it even matter? Everybody knows all politicians are liars. It's common knowledge; it's beyond being a trope and basically a synonym. But then somehow a large part of the population still cares about what politicians have to say. They know that the politician they oppose is full of shit, and yet they feel obliged to engage with said politician's arguments. And they support another politician, conveniently forgetting that... he is a politician too, so he won't make good on their promises.

Basically, everyone got the memo. Those who were to heed it have already done so.

This is something that confuses me about humanity. The amount of denial and cognitive dissonance going on in general population's interaction with politics is so great you could fuel a power plant with it.

Re: The Refragmentation

#277

Post by echochar »

A phrase used repeatedly throughout is "creating wealth". This is contrasted with "zero-sum game" to get rich. Does anyone have a precise definition of "creating wealth"?

Re: The Refragmentation

#279

Post by orthoganol »

If people enjoy reading history like this, I highly recommend Jeffrey Frieden's "Global Capitalism: It's Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century."

Overall, I think a dimension perhaps lacking in PG's otherwise fantastic writeup is that this 'fragmentation' opens up a space of freedom. I mean, our society basically interpolates individuals (younger generations at least) as existential subjects - no set path on what we should do with our lives, no God, no religion, we have to make our own meaning. Painful and difficult, but a source of freedom either way. Today I can travel as a digital nomad, found a startup, work for a rocketship, work for a stable, high paying company, freelance, or switch careers altogether. I get to choose who I associate with and date and marry (and it's even acceptable to not marry), while choosing from a much larger, more open pool, and for the most part, I get to choose who I am. Not everyone has access to this freedom, but it's still the point in human history when the largest number of people have ever had access to this freedom.

Re: The Refragmentation

#280

Post by ArkyBeagle »

wpietri wrote: post #83
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no real reason/mechanism for the exclusions to have made anything work better. Compared to the US being the Arsenal of Democracy, the economic effect of liberalization was very small, ignoring long-term government debt. The New Left in the 1960s mostly just failed outright. Any change then was due to judicial or executive action.

Exclusions certainly make things work better from the point of view of the excluders. Slavery, for example, worked wonderfully for the slavers. When we abolished slavery but kept former slaves from full participation in society, they mostly ended up as underpaid servants and laborers. Women restricted from earning a living on their own still had to survive somehow. Which in the 50s often meant attaching themselves to…

Nope. The economy is bigger than you are, and it's keenly in your enlightened self-interest to have each other person in your economy producing at maximum.

The "excluders" in the antebellum South lived under a rather delusional post-hoc rationalization of slavery. John C. Clahoun wrote of this belief system at length. This was minimally modified in the Reconstruction South and after.

My maternal grandmother raised 9 kids during the Depression without the assistance of any men after divorcing her husband. She worked very hard; so did the kids.

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