Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 528 posts

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#361

Post by badpun »

omginternets wrote: post #255
klipt wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to build schools, why not get a job at the department of education?

Is that a serious question?

If one invests the ambition into rising into a position of power in the department of education, their impact on educating the youth will be many times bigger than that of the rich guy's who just throws some money at school building, but otherwise has no clue and no impact. This is often why ambitious people choose the public servant career path - they want to have a real impact.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#362

Post by epolanski »

refurb wrote: post #330
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, Americans are definitely NOT ambitious to a fault. The vast majority believe that a 9 to 5 is a great accomplishment worthy of applause. Have a job that affords you a roof over your head? Hero. Have a job where you need public assistance because your employer won't pay you enough to make ends meet? Villain. American rhetoric is ambitious. Americans in practice are just as lazy as everybody else. Americans will p…

Definitely not my experience working overseas in a few countries. There are certainly lazy Americans, but I’ve worked in multi-national offices where youd get fired in the US for the type of slacking i saw.

That's simply because firing people is easier in the US thus, maybe, people slack off less on average.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#363

Post by localplume »

nrp wrote: post #254
WalterBright wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider Japan: (fact) a single market with a single language (fact) geographically isolated (fact) not much space (fact) burned to the ground in WW2 and yet for a while it was an economic powerhouse on the world stage. Taiwan, Hong Kong and S Korea, similar stories. So what is the common thread? Free markets.

Interestingly, among the Asian Tiger economies, their massive growth first unlocked during a period where they were not meaningfully democracies and their governments intervened heavily to pick winners. The proximate success of their economies was export oriented industry, but the industries and the companies within them were more or less hand picked by the ruling regimes. The remarkable thing is that Korea, Taiwan,…

[dead]

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#364

Post by _v7gu »

WalterBright wrote: post #279
pigsty wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because every powerful economy of the past 6 centuries got there due to strong trade, which the US has gone out of its way to prevent Cuba from doing. No country with a strong economy got there by being forcibly isolated from the world.

And yet the same people say that protectionism is good for the economy.

But protectionism is often good and necessary for a country's economy. If country A cannot produce a good x, then another country B can stifle A's technology growth for producing x by selling x outright at a cost A can not produce the good at (yet). If you ban the import/restrict of x from country B, you will have to pay some fixed costs to get the production of x up to speed; but you will end up with cheaper unit costs in the end. The catch is, you can not ban all imports outright because importing the technology to produce x will probably save you years on R&D and related costs. Like everything in economics, doing things are good and bad at the same time.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#365

Post by throwawaymaths »

pasabagi wrote: post #342
PostOnce wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me answer you honestly and in depth: Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge. I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to…

Rich people become rich by paying other people less than the value of their labour. Sometimes, that's to the net benefit of the community, since the value of the labour involved is increased by a superior process. Often, that is to the net detriment of the community: for example, a landlord. The reality is, the impact of a wealthy person is almost always small, and usually negative-on-net. That's why, in the thousand…

> Rich people become rich by paying other people less than the value of their labour

This is actually completely wrong. Believe it or not, many of the richest people get rich because they pay their employees more than they think they are worth.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#366

Post by diordiderot »

alex_sf wrote: post #356
diordiderot wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to know who's best when you don't play fair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...

Is the US somehow unique in history for this? If the US is simply better at it, isn't that relevant? It's not like other (former) superpowers didn't do the exact same things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_involvement_in_regime_c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_involvement_in_regime_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Third_World_relations

Touché. I suppose inwardly focused benevolent systems wouldn't spread because they wouldn't want overthrow other systems

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#367

Post by throwawaymaths »

PostOnce wrote: post #319
_heimdall wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing so many things wrong with humans as a species, or at least modern humans. We shouldn't change things just because we can. We shouldn't assume that if we're able to extract natural resources its also our right to use them without question until they're completely depleted. Why should we assume that every invention, every technology, everything we call "progress" is actually advancing in a good direct…

I disagree to some extent that we should not change things just because we can: we grow beautiful ornamental gardens and weave silk and make cheese because these things please us and not necessarily because we need them; nature would never produce such order. We are the masters of our world. Nature, too, has merit, but nature makes flood and famine and disease -- we can engineer against those things. Money is an inst…

> it's possible to be rich, carbon negative, and without using up any depletable resources

Arguably it's currently only possible to do so if you're rich, but as more and more rich people do so the marginal cost of living such a lifestyle decreases.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#368

Post by HWR_14 »

PostOnce wrote: post #166

My 2 cents, some of the reasons America succeeds: (fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entiti…

I have never seen any evidence that Americans are more ambitious than people from other nationalities. No studies, nothing. Not have I even ever heard a theoretical reasoning why this would be the case. I assume it's just the general "my group is the best" baseless bragging.

Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record

#370

Post by janalsncm »

refurb wrote: post #330
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, Americans are definitely NOT ambitious to a fault. The vast majority believe that a 9 to 5 is a great accomplishment worthy of applause. Have a job that affords you a roof over your head? Hero. Have a job where you need public assistance because your employer won't pay you enough to make ends meet? Villain. American rhetoric is ambitious. Americans in practice are just as lazy as everybody else. Americans will p…

Definitely not my experience working overseas in a few countries. There are certainly lazy Americans, but I’ve worked in multi-national offices where youd get fired in the US for the type of slacking i saw.

As with anything, it varies. Software engineers in China routinely put in 72 hour weeks (996), and are required to make up holidays using weekends if the holiday falls on a week day. Even “labor day” is made up on a weekend, ironically.

The workers’ rights Americans are accustomed to might be viewed as lazy or unambitious in places where working more is the norm. And across the other pond, where many Europeans have generous PTO and leave allowances, they view Americans as very hard working while some Americans might view Europeans as lazy or entitled. It’s all relative.

Post reply on HN