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What?
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Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
471–480 of 528 posts
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh knock it off. By your logic you can’t even define what a definition is so your whole schtick goes poof. Bad unfalsifiable philosophy like this is why people hate philosophy. You’re just deliberately confusing people and trying to make yourself seem clever by sucking people into this silly definitions game.
This sounds like you're in favor of giving weight to religious arguments in economics. But I doubt that you'd agree with that idea. The fact is that some things cannot be determined with sufficient precision and inclination to be dismissive of this fact creates its own problems.
Please give examples!
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re mixing different levels of abstraction and equivocating across them. Sure, no human could produce anything modern on their own, without knowledge, training, support, materials, products, labor, etc. that comes from others. A child raised by wolves will never launch a new line of tennis shoes. At the same time, no complex effort comes to be without someone’s motivation and effort to take the risk, coordinate th…
I didn't say "everything comes from everyone". I said "nothing comes one person". Ergo, there is no "what you create", at least in the sense of being able to point at something and say "I did that, it is my creation". Sure, we may use this a shorthand for situations where the proximal effort came from one person. But it's just a shorthand, and should not obscure the deeper truth. I'm not discussing the general thrust…
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Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#474”Average incomes have grown much faster than in western Europe or Japan. Also adjusted for purchasing power, they exceed $50,000 in Mississippi, America’s poorest state—higher than in France.” The article casually dismisses the counterpoint that the US trades high income for a lower social safety net. The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9, on par with Lithuania. Even Vietnam…
> The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9, on par with Lithuania. That's a great bunch of cherries you picked there. If you are comparing Europe to the US, comparing France and Mississippi is disingenuous. Compare best-to-best or worst-to-worst [1][2]. The worst European countries are Azerbaijan (66.9), Moldova (70.2), Ukraine (71.2). The worst US states are W Virginia (74.8),…
Norway isn't in the EU, nor is Switzerland, nor is Iceland. It says quite a lot actually that the richest/highest life expectancy countries in Europe are not in the EU.
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thomas Sowell once pointed out that billionaires are correlated with millionaires, and millionaires are correlated with a middle class. Most countries without billionaires are not great places to live and work. Governments without rich people to tax do not accomplish much in the way of welfare. Take a look at a map of countries with billionaires.[0] I would argue those with billionaires are much better at providing s…
Unrelated but why does Germany have much more billionaires than the rest of the EU?
Germany is the world's #4 economy...largest economy in Europe. They would be expected to have the largest # of billionaires no?
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, yeah? Markets are great at finding how much something is worth. uhhhh Want to give some examples?
No examples needed. You can't adequately define "what you create", because nobody can. Where does your contribution begin, and end? Where does the contribution of your parents, your neighbors, your friends, your society begin, and end? To what extent did you create anything, or was it just a remix? Is everything a remix? Who are you? You have a unified, continuous sense of self, but most contemporary psychology finds…
Ok no examples _needed_ but please provide some.
I made software that helps my clients. I sell it for $1000/mo. I get $1000/mo and pay taxes on it. I have created $1000/mo.
Please explain what's not fair about this? The intricate nuance I'm missing? LOL
Let's say I work with one other person and pay them $1/hr, which they accept. They make my idea. I end up paying them like 100 and I make 1000/mo forever
Where's the nuance there?
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Well, being the only country left with any manufacturing after a catastrophic world war is one major reason. This is not the reason. Post WW II Europe was able to rebuild and for a long time they had some of the biggest companies and for a long time EU as a whole was a bigger economy than the US. It's only in the last 2 decades where the US is significantly outpacing the EU. And there are no signs of slow down. WW…
> for a long time EU as a whole was a bigger economy than the US. It's only in the last 2 decades where the US is significantly outpacing the EU. Interesting. I couldn't find a good graph showing this. Do you by any chance have a graph or a source?
I don't know when it was larger. However in the 1960s it was of equal size.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-domestic-product?ta...
Starting in the 1980s US GDP inflected and EU did not. The gap appeared then and has got wider ever since. What happened in the 80s? Probably tech?
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that a serious question?
Look I know hacker news is biased towards thinking the solution to everything is "do a startup, become a billionaire, use your money to solve it" but there are legitimately other ways of getting things done, for example engaging with the civic process to get things solved through democracy.
I couldn't agree more. Where I think we disagree is the idea that working for the Dept. of Education will have one "opening schools" in the same (meaningful) way as the parent comment intends.
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
mortgage slavery is the common thread for some reason this motivates people. primordial need for land ownership. the call of the feudalism. engine runs out of steam once the growing cabal of landlords eat the last marginal production in excess of rate of interest america has more land relative to its population so takes longer to nimbify it all
> more land So does S. America, which has never been prosperous.
argentina and venezuela have gone through periods of prosperity. Rule of law is too unstable for the system to get off the ground. Also political intervention by foreign actors, resource curse.
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#480It’s a land of freedom, bravery, respect, kindness, love, law, and innovation. Of course great minds will abound and innovate faster in those places. America is amazing. The land of innovation. A land of huge scale and growing rapidly still. Just wait and see how much more growth ahead once they resume QE now that the money supply is tight enough again that inflation is under control. Time for brand new mega cities a…
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> This may come as a shock, but _the world_ sees America as the greatest threat to global peace, stability and democracy.
That goes very much against the fact that the US has the highest number of foreign-born residents aka immigrants in the world[0]. And not by just some negligible number, it is 47mil against 15mil for the next top entry (Germany). Every fifth immigrant in the entire world lives in the US.
How do you reconcile "the world sees America as the greatest threat to global peace, stability, and democracy" with those numbers? The only explanation I can foresee is a claim that somehow people are more interested in moving to those types of countries. But that doesn't sound convincing at all to me.
0. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/05/18/5-facts-abo...