621–630 of 1001 posts
Let's not build the Alien Dreadnought, though - we wasted two assembly lines chasing that dream and ended up having to put up a tent in a parking lot to meet 80% of production goals 3 years later, and we ended up _behind_ our peers in automation. Measure twice, cut once, respect our forebears.
> I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you. What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks. For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't…
Honest, no snark question -- what exactly US government did in last 30 years that should warrant providing more money to it? Is there any guarantee that another trillion dollars will be used more efficiently than blowing up another Middle East country?
OK, fair enough. If we have to build and do all those things, what is it that we should STOP doing, buying, investing in? There is only so much time, capital, skill, energy (both literal energy and human willpower). What can we sacrifice? Commuting to work in droves? MacMansions? Travel for pleasure? Sporting events, concerts, and mega payments to celebrities? Buying new car every 5 years? Luxury cars? Infrastructure…
Wealth isn't a zero-sum game. People in the first half of the 20th century didn't give up anything to develop electricity, automobiles, air travel, etc. But if our current regulations and institutions existed back then, we'd have missed out on many technologies. Heck if aspirin were invented today, it's unlikely it would be approved by the FDA. Even if it was, it would be prescription-only. And if caffeine were inven…
The biggest argument for tax paid, public sector health care and education, is that it should be much cheaper for the customer when the institutions are made efficiently and not for-profit. A quality education does not have to cost more than $10-20k to produce (per student). So why are current prices in the $100-200k range?
US spending on public education at the K-12 level is close to 15k per year. Your assertion that removing the profit from the system will lead to significantly lower costs is not supported by the data. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
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Nobody want's a new McDonald's destroying their old status quo in their country. People don't want one-world-gov. They want disparate nations, that have charm and local uniqueness. Except that goes directly towards harmonizing international (trade) laws. If you want a lesson, check out how Lidl did in Norway when they challenged local chain stores.
The failure of Lidl in Norway due to vested interests is an argument for one world government. Maybe if we had one government we’d finally be able to settle on one electrical plug, which side of the road to drive on etc. etc. Imagine if every country developed its own indigenous WiFi standard? How lovely, until you want to read your email. Charm and uniqueness is great on a postcard, but not when you want to actually…
Part of the brilliance of the internet is the way things are layered; you can have all kinds of different solutions for different layers while keeping things interoperable. If Australia has a different wifi standard than America, it doesn’t mean they can’t connect.
While I understand the impulse to have some central body moderate unproductive standards wars, if you enforce overly strict standards by law you stagnate industries whether you’re trying to capture them.
Just imagine how much time and effort would be wasted trying to get every software engineer to use the same programming language. Arguably it would lead to way less duplicated effort, but you’re never going to get everyone to agree on all aspects of the language. And that’s as it should be; people should have the freedom to chose what works best for them.
If we’re smart and focus more on building base, opt in, very generic/low level infrastructure that can federate responsibility and adapt to differing higher level standards rather than getting everyone on the same set of high level standards, I think we’re better off.
I’m not sure exactly what the regulatory equivalent of a tcp/ip layer would be, but some sort of very basic, fill in the blanks kind of regulatory template would be better than enforcing various discrete world standards.
He's right about a lot of things. But, as far as education goes, if everyone got a degree, then what's the point? it would have no value at all. The whole point of awarding degrees is to separate those who have them from those that don't. How are employers supposed to know who to higher, if everyone has a degree?
Almost everyone has a high school diploma, that doesn't make high school useless. I learned things in high school that I used in college and continue to use every day.
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Yep. Markets build in response to incentives. Most American production choices are determined by markets, including the choices of investors allocating capital. Public institutions build and manage in response to electoral incentives. If we're not prepared, it's because the incentives are wrong. On the market front, once incentives and maybe even insights become opaque at the level of the abstraction of return on inv…
> Markets build in response to incentives. Most American production choices are determined by markets, including the choices of investors allocating capital. This leaves out the most important problem though: regulatory capture and bureaucratic gridlock. Markets would love to build more housing. But they're prevented from doing so by the regulatory state. Markets would love to build nuclear power plants, but they're…
I don’t like it when people anthropomorphize concepts like economic markets, but I _especially_ don’t like it when they do this to make it seem like the anthropomorphization should be a sympathetic character to the reader.
Like one of the GPs said, above: the market is something that responds to incentives.
Regulation and bureaucracy shape those incentives, sometimes in the ways that you’re describing, but the market is just as “happy” to capitalize on bad housing regulation as it is to capitalize on a lack of any housing regulation at all.
The problem of constructing just the right amount of regulatory apparatus is very difficult, though.
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Cheaper healthcare cannot be achieved because of the amount of regulation that is in the healthcare system.
The amount? Do all the other OECD states have a smaller "amount" of regulation on their healthcare systems?