Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#261

Post by JDiculous » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 7:45 PM UTC

chillacy wrote: post #260

JDiculous wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tests should be as objective and unbiased as possible. Yes one can never remove 100% of bias, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything at all. Remember, the whole point is to only have people qualified on a topic voting on said topic. So if you're voting on, say, the minimum wage, you should be familiar with the economic ramifications of it. You should be familiar with both the arguments and counter-arguments,…

> knowledge is universal But it isn't... take your example on economy. In the last hundred years people tried out all sorts of things with the guidance of experts, from market economies, planned ones like communism, globalism, and now economists are shifting their thinking on that too. The chances that we're right about all that today are pretty slim too. In 10, 20 years economic thought will have shifted elsewhere.…

Our representative democracy is failing because the people in charge aren't the ones most qualified to answer all these questions - because jack of all trade politicians are tasked with deciding on all matters instead of experts in their respective fields.

I'm simply arguing that we need to break out of the status quo, and throwing out suggestions on how to fix this. Direct democracy is one way to bring the power back to the people. A competency test to accompany it is a stricter one to alleviate the pitfalls of direct democracy.

Even if we never adopt a competency test, I'd still argue that direct democracy would be a massive improvement to what we have now - if only because it'd bring the focus of the debate on the policy issues rather than on the scandals of politicians. It would totally obsolete are ridiculous two-party system.

Like I said, the test would seek to be as objective as possible. Questions would not be of the subjective format: "Does increasing the minimum wage improve the economy?" Actually I don't even think there would be any questions specific to minimum wage. Better questions would pertain to indisputable fact-based questions (eg. what's going on in the middle east in regards to foreign policy questions about that topic). Or again we could just default to basic logic tests.

These are all just implementation details though and secondary to the main point - which is to improve our policy-making.

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#262

Post by chillacy » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 8:51 PM UTC

JDiculous wrote: post #261

chillacy wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> knowledge is universal But it isn't... take your example on economy. In the last hundred years people tried out all sorts of things with the guidance of experts, from market economies, planned ones like communism, globalism, and now economists are shifting their thinking on that too. The chances that we're right about all that today are pretty slim too. In 10, 20 years economic thought will have shifted elsewhere.…

Our representative democracy is failing because the people in charge aren't the ones most qualified to answer all these questions - because jack of all trade politicians are tasked with deciding on all matters instead of experts in their respective fields. I'm simply arguing that we need to break out of the status quo, and throwing out suggestions on how to fix this. Direct democracy is one way to bring the power bac…

> what's going on in the middle east in regards to foreign policy questions about that topic

Also not a great example of something we understand. I think realistically you would not be able to test on something so practical since most of these things are so poorly understood. Logic tests may be the safest thing you could test, though at that point you would just be cutting everyone off below a certain SAT score.

If I were in charge of coming up with a test, it wouldn't be a logic test, but some sort of test against hubris: to see how much they can admit that they don't know or can't know. In my opinion politicians play the "I know everything vote for me" game and load up on untested theories, leading to poor results (interventionist foreign policy leading to terrorism, stock market crashes, maybe even deep ocean drilling, etc).

But I also recognize that while I believe that excluding overconfident people (the ones who don't know what they don't know) from office would lead to better outcomes, I also suspect that this could turn out terribly.

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#263

Post by burfog » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 3:50 AM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #176

maverick_iceman wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and they should probably be handled by experts That experiment was tried in Soviet Union. How did that end?

A few things. First, shoe factories not having enough leather to make quota responding by making tiny shoes is one of the most cunning gaming of metrics i've ever heard of. I think that was brilliant. People in insane situations still have great ideas. Second, I reread my post a couple of times. I missed the collective ownership point. Could you quote the line where i said the workers should control the means of prod…

We shouldn't be so sure that "the US military is getting tanks they don't want". It might be true, but the words of people in a military chain of command are controlled from the top. Generals who contradict the president soon find themselves in trouble.

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#264

Post by burfog » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 4:11 AM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #242

blazespin wrote: post #144

It's because Germany and Japan is so successful with manufacturing. Donald is asking why the US cant compete with Germany and Japan.

We outproduce both Japan and Germany combined in manufacturing. Manufacturing is roughly 18% of GDP for each Japan and Germany, but only 12% of the USA. Germany GDP: ~$4 trillion. Japan GDP: ~$5 trillion. USA GDP: ~$17 trillion. 9 * 0.18 = 1.6 17 * 0.12 = 2.0 So, as usual, Mr. Trump's ignorance is causing him to ask the wrong questions.

Now lets divide by people. For people, it's 208 million and 321 million.

The USA is getting $6355/person from manufacturing.

Germany+Japan is getting $7792/person from manufacturing.

They beat us, earning an extra 22.6% per person from manufacturing.

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#265

Post by mywittyname » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 9:16 PM UTC

burfog wrote: post #264

mywittyname wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We outproduce both Japan and Germany combined in manufacturing. Manufacturing is roughly 18% of GDP for each Japan and Germany, but only 12% of the USA. Germany GDP: ~$4 trillion. Japan GDP: ~$5 trillion. USA GDP: ~$17 trillion. 9 * 0.18 = 1.6 17 * 0.12 = 2.0 So, as usual, Mr. Trump's ignorance is causing him to ask the wrong questions.

Now lets divide by people. For people, it's 208 million and 321 million. The USA is getting $6355/person from manufacturing. Germany+Japan is getting $7792/person from manufacturing. They beat us, earning an extra 22.6% per person from manufacturing.

I just saw this. Manufacturing is a much smaller segment of USA economy though, so per-capita is a bad metric.

Maybe it would be okay if you weighted it based on % of the economy, in which case the USA would be $6355 / 0.12 = $54,441 vs 7792 / 0.18 = $43,289.

So, weighted GPD per capita, the USA comes out way ahead. And actually, the weighted GDP/cap in manufacturing for the USA is higher than the average GPD/cap of the economy overall, which is just $53,041.