171–180 of 332 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure there's an advanced "free market" bealthcare system in the world we can use to even make that comparison.
The free market produces goods and services at less cost for everything else, why would health care be any different?
Degrowth is basically Communism, but in reverse. The idea that you can centrally plan a strategic "shrinking" of an economy, and it will somehow end up better than the times humans have tried to centrally plan the "growth" of an economy (Eg. USSR, Cuba, North Korea, etc) is very amusing to me. Humans are animals, and when you create scarcity, you increase the rewards to exploitation and violence. We will quickly begi…
Japan is a living case study of degrowth: GDP has been essentially flat for the past 20 years. The scale below exaggerates small shifts, but it was $4968B in 2000 and $4937B in 2020. https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp On the ground, this has translated into flat or deflating prices (until very recently) and an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-fo…
Is that a necessary result, or just a matter of how the economy was organized and money distributed? In other words, does politics and culture come into play in the result?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure there's an advanced "free market" bealthcare system in the world we can use to even make that comparison.
The free market produces goods and services at less cost for everything else, why would health care be any different?
Japan is a living case study of degrowth: GDP has been essentially flat for the past 20 years. The scale below exaggerates small shifts, but it was $4968B in 2000 and $4937B in 2020. https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp On the ground, this has translated into flat or deflating prices (until very recently) and an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-fo…
There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia. No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.
Because the US was created as a ragtag coalition of immigrants from all kinds of countries. Their whole shtick is based on being a melting pot. Japan is a much more ethnically homogenous nation.
Besides, this coming of immigrants didn't work so well for the natives in the US (the native Americans that is).
>No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.
Well, if they thought like that for my country, I wouldn't like them either.
"Not liking" people coming over is not the same as being racist, any more than a tribe in the Amazon not liking tourists or Americans/Europeans coming over to live with them would be "racist". They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them.
Besides, cultures which had seggregation up until the 60s, have a huge majority of blacks in jail even today, and routinely have cops kill them unarmed, shouldn't throw stones.
> by slowly and reluctantly altering the traditional society, like the Chinese?’ No need to have some kind of "cultural revolution"? >Endless growth – green or not These arguments are all the same. They take the current rate of growth, plug in a time period longer than has elapsed since the death of vitalism as a theory of life (an idea which, today, is laughable to consider), and conclude that we need to stop growin…
So why now? Would it have been better to stop growing in Roman or medial times, for example? Or stop only in a 100 years? Degrowth seems to me like a vision of the future that assumes that humans should remain slaves of their environment and not become masters of it. If humans are to become the dominant species in the universe, degrowth will not help.
Japan is a living case study of degrowth: GDP has been essentially flat for the past 20 years. The scale below exaggerates small shifts, but it was $4968B in 2000 and $4937B in 2020. https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp On the ground, this has translated into flat or deflating prices (until very recently) and an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-fo…
There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia. No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.
Not lately. The immigration system is a mess full of perverse incentives, and was deliberately engineered that way in the mid-90s to maximize dysfunction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Immigration was compared to "colonial appropriation" which doesn't exactly sound voluntary. In contrast, it would be a terrible thing to forcibly lock people into their birth countries to stop brain drain.
It’s not voluntary to the drained countries
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We see a similar effect in Europe, people live longer, and a large group is on pension, while retaining voting rights. This incentivize conservation of the status quo as we now have majority ownership of the societal future in the hands of a “rent-seeking owner class” that is not there to experience it. Controversial as it may be, I’m thinking that voting should somehow be coupled to taxable contribution to the socie…
> Pensioners, children and other unemployed must be protected by laws instead of direct political influence. Of course then nothing stops those that have the vote because they work to disenfranchise those pensioners and other unemployed (the children will be theirs as well so are likely going to be protected). Laws are indirectly made by those who vote!