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The history of the end of poverty has just begun

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Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#421

Post by dragonwriter »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #395
dragonwriter wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A significant portion of our economy is post-scarcity. No, it's not. The economy is the system of distribution of scarce resources. Anything that is actually post-scarcity isn't part of it. > Software, movies, tv, books, video games are all non-scarce goods forced to fit into a scarce framework through IP law. No, they aren't. They are goods based around something with a high initial fixed cost and a low marginal c…

By your definition "post-scarcity economy" is an oxymoron, and this whole discussion is moot and pointless. If intellectual goods aren't post-scarcity in the 21st century, then nothing in the 24th century is either.

> By your definition "post-scarcity economy" is an oxymoron, and this whole discussion is moot and pointless.

Both parts of that are true, but the second isn't because of the first (which is a terminological issue), but that “post-scarcity”, more than just being mutually exclusive with “economy”, appears to be fundamentally incompatible with human nature; there will always be something scarce, competition for it, and disutility driven by relative deprivation with respect to it.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#422

Post by nemothekid »

nec4b wrote: post #361
nemothekid wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> government is generally bad at using capital This is hardly true, and is only "common" wisdom due to an incredibly effective PR campaign by Ronald Reagan. In the 60s, when we were sending people to the moon, people didn't generally hold such contempt for government. Any large government is no more dysfunctional than a large private corporation - the inside of Google isn't all sunshine and roses. > that it can print…

Reagan was the government. Also in your opinion he represent a bad government and none the less you want more government?

>Also in your opinion he represent a bad government and none the less you want more government?

Reagan was bad, to me, because he massively cut social programs. So yes, Reagan was bad because he made "less government". If Reagan did "more government", then I would be happy. Do you not see the obvious contradiction in your comment?

If you need me to spell it out for you:

1. I am for more social spending, even if it has a "bad" ROI, because the ROI for social spending is hard to measure.

2. Regan was incredibly effective as painting government programs as woefully inefficient.

3. If Regan did more social spending, I would want more of that, but that is not who Regan was, so I do not like that.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#423

Post by DarylZero »

WalterBright wrote: post #407
coldtea wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a rich person with stuff in your company's name, or some kind of structured impersonal assets (and ultimately, relatives to take care of you, and friends to do you favors every time you bankrupt and default Trump-style) yes. Otherwise, there are repercusions from one that aren't there on the other - up to incoming a debt slave to your default's arrangement, not getting any credit anymore, and even ending up…

You're still getting something for nothing. And in a few years, your debt is expunged.

By your logic literally everything is free, since you can borrow cash and pay for it with cash and default on the debt.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#424

Post by Ericson2314 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #363
mellavora wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because every person had a huge chunk of land! Compare population density today in a rich suburb to a poor inner city.

A fairly well (but far from universally) accepted thesis is that war and violence was widespread in pre-civilized times, keeping the population density low more "efficiently" than cycles of over-expansion and famine..

Pre Holocene, there was just more climate variability too.

I mean maybe we could have spent more time hunting, gathering, and birthing, but I don't begrudge the ancestors for just kicking back instead!

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#425

Post by losvedir »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #424
bryanlarsen wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fairly well (but far from universally) accepted thesis is that war and violence was widespread in pre-civilized times, keeping the population density low more "efficiently" than cycles of over-expansion and famine..

Pre Holocene, there was just more climate variability too. I mean maybe we could have spent more time hunting, gathering, and birthing, but I don't begrudge the ancestors for just kicking back instead!

I don't get it. You're saying there were a bunch of happy, well fed people back then, just kicking back and relaxing.... and not having sex?

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#426

Post by Ericson2314 »

losvedir wrote: post #425
Ericson2314 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre Holocene, there was just more climate variability too. I mean maybe we could have spent more time hunting, gathering, and birthing, but I don't begrudge the ancestors for just kicking back instead!

I don't get it. You're saying there were a bunch of happy, well fed people back then, just kicking back and relaxing.... and not having sex?

I don't fully get it either. Certainly the agricultural revolution led to more babies and more calories (if not better nutrition in the early days), so it is possible to the calories / babies ratio stayed the same.

For the hunt gather nice times stuff to work out, I think theoretically there must also be some claims about the work being divided more evenly. Among other things, that could be some restrictions on how much pregnancy the nomadic band can deal with.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#427

Post by maerF0x0 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #202
maerF0x0 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we refuse to build more of it We also refuse to move to cheaper places. I still think from time to time, "what's stopping 10k smart young people from just moving into empty land?"

Infrastructure, jobs, coordination, state and local regulations, capital. The list goes on. Your comment is a particularly egregious example of, "I could do that in a weekend." Internet commenters tend to blithely assume hard things are easy.

I definitely couldnt do it in a weekend. But I have been wondering how new cities are born, like not a suburb beside an existing city, but the ones that are in the middle of "no where". And what would stop a few thousand people from having a mutual interest to start something in the middle of no where?

Most of the jobs could be remote save for the ones that support the citizens themselves.

maybe this would fail for the same reason those preplanned cities in china failed? IDK. I'm definitely not implying it's dead easy, just that maybe it's easier than fitting 1M more people in a city that is already dense and full of NIMBYs?

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#428

Post by seanmcdirmid »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #268
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tokyo has dirt cheap rent compared to the states You can rent small two and a half tatami sized apartments in Tokyo that wouldn’t even be legal to let in most of the west. Is that what they mean by reducing zoning rules? Also, by basically mandating that all housing be rebuilt every 20-30 years, Tokyo effectively prevents speculation on residential real estate (housing depreciates as it gets older, negating land ap…

I’m talking about comparing 1br’s to 1br’s. Japan tearing down building after 20-30 years is, as far as I’ve seen, greatly exaggerated. You see apartment complexes all over the place obviously older than that.

Here is a nice video explaining housing affordability in Tokyo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w

Notes:

* No one thinks of residential housing as an investment, so there is no speculation.

* Building codes are such that residential can be built almost anywhere. Japan has zoning, it is just really simplified.

* There is no resistance to rebuilding, so it is done a lot (why houses last only 30 years, the market demands new housing).

* Housing can be built on really small lots, only 2 meters of clearance is required.

* A $300k low end house is around 6-700 SQF, which might not make sense from an American context.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#429

Post by post_from_work »

coldtea wrote: post #307
post_from_work wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>if I had to be a medieval king or a poor person in Cleveland, it is such a no-brainer I can't even understand how the question is being asked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_I_of_England#Death The King of England died from a disease caused by getting shit particles in your food. Diarrheal disease deaths are barely on the radar of US fatalities. https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/despite-reductions-i...

> The King of England died from a disease caused by getting shit particles in your food. So? Many people die from even baser diceases today too. Including homeless and poor people in the US. And they toil their whole lives before that, and are made to feel insignificant, and have no power or servants, unlike the kings.

Did you read the healthcare link I provided? Death from those sorts of diseases are a tiny fraction of fatalities in the US. They're so small that it is disingenuous to extrapolate them as indicative of the plight of "the poor in Cleveland" writ large.

But just for English kings who died of natural causes, dysentery killed 2 and food poisoning 1, out of 60 total (dead from natural causes, not 60 total monarchs....a 5% fatality rate for the most powerful people in the land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monarchs_of_the_Britis...

"made to feel insignificant" "have no power"....I'd really like to see how you are quantifying these, and why you would weight them so heavily in a quality-of-life assessment to even mention them in the same breadth as dying of preventable food sanitation diseases.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#430

Post by post_from_work »

notahacker wrote: post #336
post_from_work wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>At first, I was confused reading your assertions of what poor people of the US can do, things that obviously demand money - cash or credit - that a person in poverty don't have. A homeless, flat-broke prostitute can turn 4 tricks in a day. Let's call them $50 each, for $200 cash-in-hand. Then they can take that $200 to Wal-Mart, buy an Android phone for $50, a SIM card for $50, and one of those loadable debit card…

I don't imagine many people would trade sitting on a throne in a grand hall enjoying a feast whilst watching the era's leading performers personally dedicate performances to them for the possibility of selling their body to download a superhero movie and buy a burrito and packet of cigarettes. There are some tradeoffs where the average person doing a boring middle class job really does have better opportunity and gre…

>>>I don't imagine many people would trade sitting on a throne in a grand hall enjoying a feast whilst watching the era's leading performers personally dedicate performances to them for the possibility of selling their body to download a superhero movie and buy a burrito and packet of cigarettes.

That "grand hall" had worse climate control than a Motel-6, and the food was dirty. We can debate the subjective utility of skilled medieval musicians vs a low-end local rock/metal concert with supporting audiovisual systems (a ticket to that can fit within the budget of a few tricks), I would charitably call that a break-even. And a $50 trick buys a LOT more than a burrito and a pack of cigs. You can get a steak dinner at Texas Roadhouse to with your pack of Newport 100s.

The "ick factor" of selling their body was just to demonstrate that even the most down-on-their-luck, homeless, destitute American has a path to access the commodity goods of our age. I don't think it's an absurd reduction to point that out.

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