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How to Make Trillions of Dollars

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Re: How to Make Trillions of Dollars

#101

Post by anthonyb »

zeteo wrote: post #100
anthonyb wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, they were more prosperous on average , but the poor were much more worse off than the poor in rural areas. It's also impossible to say whether the prosperity was due to the free market and lack of regulations, the industrial revolution and development of steam power or the rise of the middle class and their increased free time/income. I suspect that mostly it was technology, similar to what's happening in devel…

"the poor were much more worse off than the poor in rural areas." Do you have any support for that assertion? The poor themselves decided en masse to move from village to city at the time, which seems to indicate the contrary. Yes, in the city they were also much more visible to literate observers who would write about their misery, but who knows what those same observers might have exposed if they had lived in a vil…

> The poor themselves decided en masse to move from village to city at the time, which seems to indicate the contrary.

You have the same mechanism at work today, in slums in India, South America and so on. The draw is the possibility of being better off and having more opportunity than you would in a rural area, but it doesn't always end up that way.

But we're getting off the point, which is that a free market doesn't give you "unprecedented human health and prosperity" - the best that you can argue is that it's one of the preconditions (but not the only one).

Re: How to Make Trillions of Dollars

#102

Post by lsc »

AnthonBerg wrote: post #66
joe_the_user wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article is correct but phrases the lifelong customer part wrong. The habits of a single life-long customer divorced from everyone else whose spending is absorbed by a single player might not be worth a million - EDIT: maybe 50k with interest (being very generous). BUT if a small player has "in hand" said habits, they could be worth much more sold to the larger players. The larger players can direct the co…

Wow, well put. There is of course no Intention of The Man to ingeniously swap margarine in for butter, but the gravity of profit margins will tend to pull reality that way. It usually does.

I'd bet you five bucks that whole foods has better margin on it's "whole" butter than the safeway where I shop has on it's cheap off-brand margarine.

Re: How to Make Trillions of Dollars

#103

Post by davidhollander »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #68

This was long-winded and flawed in many ways. To point just one flaw out: part of the argument is that the modern culture is designed by marketers to keep you unhealthy and consuming. That's confusing, yet again, correlation with causation. It's just as likely that modern marketers are just doing what people want. That the current system of distraction, consumption, and unhealthiness is evolutionary and not some mast…

>part of the argument is that the modern culture is designed by marketers to keep you unhealthy and consuming.

Welcome to the field of Applied Psychology and Cognitive Science. Once you have reverse engineered the mind, the only practical application is manipulating it.

>just as likely that modern marketers are just doing what people want

For a TRILLION dollars we are not talking about "marketers" in the Mad Men, I-made-a-website-and-wrote-a-book, or "social media expert" sense. We are at minimum talking about behavioral psychologist PhDs and global corporate parasites like Coca Cola, Philip Moris Tobacco, etc.

In reality, those are still on the billion dollar level and not on the top of the food chain. The only trillion dollar companies I'm aware of though are financial institutions, so that would be my criticism of the article. If you really want to make a trillion dollars, you'll need to be much closer to the monetary spigot. In other words, a bank.

Re: How to Make Trillions of Dollars

#104

Post by _delirium »

zeteo wrote: post #100
anthonyb wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, they were more prosperous on average , but the poor were much more worse off than the poor in rural areas. It's also impossible to say whether the prosperity was due to the free market and lack of regulations, the industrial revolution and development of steam power or the rise of the middle class and their increased free time/income. I suspect that mostly it was technology, similar to what's happening in devel…

"the poor were much more worse off than the poor in rural areas." Do you have any support for that assertion? The poor themselves decided en masse to move from village to city at the time, which seems to indicate the contrary. Yes, in the city they were also much more visible to literate observers who would write about their misery, but who knows what those same observers might have exposed if they had lived in a vil…

> The poor themselves decided en masse to move from village to city at the time

In many cases they hardly "decided"; they were en masse kicked off the land, so had no real choice. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts

Re: How to Make Trillions of Dollars

#105

Post by anthonyb »

zeteo wrote: post #100
anthonyb wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, they were more prosperous on average , but the poor were much more worse off than the poor in rural areas. It's also impossible to say whether the prosperity was due to the free market and lack of regulations, the industrial revolution and development of steam power or the rise of the middle class and their increased free time/income. I suspect that mostly it was technology, similar to what's happening in devel…

"the poor were much more worse off than the poor in rural areas." Do you have any support for that assertion? The poor themselves decided en masse to move from village to city at the time, which seems to indicate the contrary. Yes, in the city they were also much more visible to literate observers who would write about their misery, but who knows what those same observers might have exposed if they had lived in a vil…

> Do you have any support for that assertion?

How about an eyewitness account, from 1902:

http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/PeopleOfTheAbyss/

Re: How to Make Trillions of Dollars

#106

Post by radu_floricica »

davidhollander wrote: post #103
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #68

This was long-winded and flawed in many ways. To point just one flaw out: part of the argument is that the modern culture is designed by marketers to keep you unhealthy and consuming. That's confusing, yet again, correlation with causation. It's just as likely that modern marketers are just doing what people want. That the current system of distraction, consumption, and unhealthiness is evolutionary and not some mast…

> part of the argument is that the modern culture is designed by marketers to keep you unhealthy and consuming. Welcome to the field of Applied Psychology and Cognitive Science. Once you have reverse engineered the mind, the only practical application is manipulating it. > just as likely that modern marketers are just doing what people want For a TRILLION dollars we are not talking about "marketers" in the Mad Men, I…

> the only practical application is manipulating it

Or improve it?

Re: How to Make Trillions of Dollars

#107

Post by jacoblyles »

anthonyb wrote: post #86
jacoblyles wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Now, it has long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. Bullshit. A society based on the principles of the free market will create unprecedented human health and prosperity[1]. Anti-capitalists are anti-human. I wonder if the billion or so people that climbed out of poverty over the last decade thanks to global capitalism would change Chomsky's mind a…

There was a society based on the principles of the free market - Victorian England. It wasn't so great for most of the population there - pitiful wages, child labour, pollution, poor houses, squalour and misery. Free market? Sure, it's a great idea, but minimum wage laws, workplace safety, pollution control and so forth have all done just as much for our health and prosperity.

You couldn't pass a minimum wage law in Victorian Britain that would raise the Victorians' living standards to that of today. Labor simply wasn't productive enough to sustain living standards like ours. People were poor because society as a whole was poor.

All a minimum wage law does is allow a society to shift its chosen point on an unemployment/wage tradeoff curve. However, increases in labor productivity shift that curve outward (this is usually because of technological progress and capital investment). It is because capitalism has shifted the curve outwards over time that we are so much more wealthy, not because minimum wage laws have slightly shifted our position along the curve.

If labor productivity weren't near as high as it is, then you could pass all the laws and regulations in the world and it wouldn't make us as rich as we are now. Anti-capitalists fundamentally misunderstand the process of wealth creation.

I suggest you also look up my comments on the ill-argued anti-libertarian "Victorian England" blogpost that I am assuming you are referencing from when it was submitted here.

Re: How to Make Trillions of Dollars

#108

Post by InclinedPlane »

"...create a nation of people who typically: [....] have learned, through the media’s culture of blame-mongering, that the key to solving public and private issues is to find the right people to hate"

It's funny that someone could write that as part of a scathing critique of consumerist culture and yet not see the irony of it.

There are things that are a lot worse than materialistic, shallow, consumerist culture. Specifically a moralistic, prudish, puritanical culture which is at every point so very concerned with what is the best for everyone else. At least consumerist culture is easy enough to escape and ignore.

Re: How to Make Trillions of Dollars

#109

Post by InclinedPlane »

redemade wrote: post #23

reminds me of a Carl Sagan monologue from Cosmos: "Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical…

Idiocracy is an entertaining movie, but it's not a very accurate critique of society: http://xkcd.com/603/

Also, don't be disheartened by the continual persistence of stupidity and triviality. There are amazing things happening all around us, never forget that. For two generations human civilization has had the unprecedented capability to cause the near extinction of mankind, and yet that hasn't occurred. Measure that in the context of history, it's fairly remarkable. Meanwhile, war is becoming less common (honestly, check the data), more and more people are getting lifted out of poverty every day, amazing innovations are occurring continually, and we continue to reach for the stars. There will always be setbacks from time to time, but you shouldn't let that dishearten you.

Within the next 30 years there is every reason to believe that there will be more developed nations, fewer people in abject poverty, yet more communication between peoples around the world, and perhaps even hundreds of people living and working in orbit and off-Earth.

Re: How to Make Trillions of Dollars

#110

Post by _delirium »

jacoblyles wrote: post #107
anthonyb wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a society based on the principles of the free market - Victorian England. It wasn't so great for most of the population there - pitiful wages, child labour, pollution, poor houses, squalour and misery. Free market? Sure, it's a great idea, but minimum wage laws, workplace safety, pollution control and so forth have all done just as much for our health and prosperity.

You couldn't pass a minimum wage law in Victorian Britain that would raise the Victorians' living standards to that of today. Labor simply wasn't productive enough to sustain living standards like ours. People were poor because society as a whole was poor. All a minimum wage law does is allow a society to shift its chosen point on an unemployment/wage tradeoff curve. However, increases in labor productivity shift tha…

All a minimum wage law does is allow a society to shift its chosen point on an unemployment/wage tradeoff curve.

That's not the only thing it does, depending on the elasticity of various prices and wages. Another thing it does in some situations is increase the total share of money going to laborers while decreasing profit margins of their employers. This may or may not lead to the employer laying them off, depending on what the profit margins were to begin with; if they were very high, such that the post-increase margins are still nice (just not as nice), it's still rational to continue to employ the newly more expensive labor.

Consensus among economists these days on minimum wages is a lot more nuanced than it might've been 50 years ago, anyway. A majority of economists still think that they're on the whole a bad idea, but most would want to know what kind of economy you're talking about before giving specific predictions about their effects. The fundamental shift driving the "well, generally X, but it depends" view is a realization that economies can be quite far from classical equilibria, for quite long periods of time, in which case policies don't necessarily have the effects classical economics would predict.

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