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How to Enter a City Like a King

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Re: How to Enter a City Like a King

#31

Post by card_zero »

quacked wrote: post #20
card_zero wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody knows what percentage. Besides, people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks. Undoubtedly they are often wrong and want ridiculous pointless things, but nobody knows exactly which things are the wrong things. That's why we have a diverse society of idiots, all trying different things. What intrigues me is that all of it is considered "economic activity", and counts toward GDP…

I agree, but surely with some strict definitions, you could get within 5%. I am intrigued by the same thing you are. How does it all count as economic activity? What percentage of the flower-arranging has to be done to ensure that the medicine-manufacturing can be done? It's such an endless chain--"I pay the credit card fee on my purchase of custom stationary to the credit card company and the credit card company rol…

I'm trying to imagine the chain in reverse order, and without reference to money but just to things people want. So Pfizer has this idea to organize people to make more medicines. But this is slightly risky, because it's not a shoe-in that people want more medicines. So they need permission, and lenders can grant that, but only if the lenders' other, um, projects have been successful recently, which equates to "consumer confidence", and that is due to millions of flower arrangers (or equivalently frivolous businesses) successfully pleasing flower-likers. It seems to amount to: if people are generally making one another happy in small silly ways, they have the courage and imagination necessary to try doing bigger stuff. If not, they're all like "I didn't even get to see any pretty flowers this week, I'm in survival mode now", which means they aren't throwing much permission to do stuff (money) around, and consequently there's no will to try anything, and that's a depression.

I note that Pfizer's new factory is a venture, and although it's medical it's debatably not necessary for survival: it's not part of homeostasis.

Re: How to Enter a City Like a King

#32

Post by FabHK »

quacked wrote: post #14

I often think about how much human labor there is available at any given moment, and how in any minute some percentage of "available labor" is bound up doing something. Back in the day, with billions fewer people, you could still bind up some percentage of available labor making beautiful gates for the coronation, or staging mock battles for the king as he passed. Today, I guess people make marketing copy for cat foo…

Somewhat related thought:

World power consumption is around 20 TW (of which around 3 TW electricity), that's very roughly 2 kW per person (obviously not equally distributed).

A human consumes around 8600 kJ of energy in their food per day, or roughly 100 W (search for "basal metabolic rate"). Most of that is needed just to keep the body running, but around a quarter or so can be converted to physical work: an average human can perform some 75 W of physical work over an 8h shift (75 W for 1/3 the time, so 25 W on average).

That means that everyone has (on average) around 80 "people" worth of energy working for them (2000 W of energy consumption per person / 25 W of average usable energy output per person).

Re: How to Enter a City Like a King

#33

Post by FabHK »

[deleted] wrote: post #30
dragonwriter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something like 30% of our GDP is advertising It peaked at under 2.5% of GDP in the late 1990s, and is significantly less now. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/oct/rise-digi...

[deleted]

Guess it depends on whether you consider Google, Facebook, Instagram, X, etc. to be tech or advertising.

Re: How to Enter a City Like a King

#34

Post by fellowniusmonk »

card_zero wrote: post #17
quacked wrote: post #14

I often think about how much human labor there is available at any given moment, and how in any minute some percentage of "available labor" is bound up doing something. Back in the day, with billions fewer people, you could still bind up some percentage of available labor making beautiful gates for the coronation, or staging mock battles for the king as he passed. Today, I guess people make marketing copy for cat foo…

Nobody knows what percentage. Besides, people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks. Undoubtedly they are often wrong and want ridiculous pointless things, but nobody knows exactly which things are the wrong things. That's why we have a diverse society of idiots, all trying different things. What intrigues me is that all of it is considered "economic activity", and counts toward GDP…

We can't ex ante compute what humans activity is critical for the forward preservation and growth of humanity.

We can do targeted resource allocation for what we deem promising threads.

We can identify simple failure states to avoid for known recurring issues (plant food now or starve next year.)

But for the vast majority of areas a new venture is required by new people creating new things.

Humans don't simply find, but generate meaning (some that coheres only in imagination, some that coheres to facts in the larger world, some that do both over time.) human meaning generation is a kind of random walk where each human is the write head for a path, the causal chain is too complex for any given discovery or "economically" useful thing to be easily predicted.

Destroy art and maybe people will become too depressed to do anything, or will lack enough noise/inspiration in their thinking to have an insight.

Many of these things are impossible to unwind.

Re: How to Enter a City Like a King

#35

Post by xenonite »

quacked wrote: post #14

I often think about how much human labor there is available at any given moment, and how in any minute some percentage of "available labor" is bound up doing something. Back in the day, with billions fewer people, you could still bind up some percentage of available labor making beautiful gates for the coronation, or staging mock battles for the king as he passed. Today, I guess people make marketing copy for cat foo…

Specifically w.r.t to advertising: In socialist contries there is often only one single brand of a certain product. This removes the need for advertising. But without competition, productivity goes south with time.

Re: How to Enter a City Like a King

#36

Post by jerlam »

card_zero wrote: post #17
quacked wrote: post #14

I often think about how much human labor there is available at any given moment, and how in any minute some percentage of "available labor" is bound up doing something. Back in the day, with billions fewer people, you could still bind up some percentage of available labor making beautiful gates for the coronation, or staging mock battles for the king as he passed. Today, I guess people make marketing copy for cat foo…

Nobody knows what percentage. Besides, people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks. Undoubtedly they are often wrong and want ridiculous pointless things, but nobody knows exactly which things are the wrong things. That's why we have a diverse society of idiots, all trying different things. What intrigues me is that all of it is considered "economic activity", and counts toward GDP…

In a very broad sense, essentials like health care and transportation also dramatically increase GDP. In the US, going to the doctor costs a lot more money and dozens of people get paid for coding, insurance, billing, and payments which all do not directly improve the patient's health. People are required to buy cars, fill them with gas, pay for storage, pay tolls, and pay to fix them are also contributing to economic activity.

But these costs are basically taxes in a different form.

There is a slight truth to the conspiracy theory that "doctors keep people sick because it's good for business", in the same way that building appliances that last forever isn't a good business strategy.

Re: How to Enter a City Like a King

#37

Post by spencerflem »

FabHK wrote: post #33
[deleted] wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Guess it depends on whether you consider Google, Facebook, Instagram, X, etc. to be tech or advertising.

Yeah realized that was a pretty bad source. I know I had one I liked somewhere I’m trying to find. I think the 30% number might have been from Graeber’s bullshit jobs.

Definitely remember reading a number and being shocked at how high it was though

Re: How to Enter a City Like a King

#38

Post by Nifty3929 »

quacked wrote: post #14

I often think about how much human labor there is available at any given moment, and how in any minute some percentage of "available labor" is bound up doing something. Back in the day, with billions fewer people, you could still bind up some percentage of available labor making beautiful gates for the coronation, or staging mock battles for the king as he passed. Today, I guess people make marketing copy for cat foo…

Indeed - I often feel like the vast majority of the internet is effectively our pyramids.

How many very smart, motivated folks do we have working on essentially ads and related indirect monetization strategies for the very small amount of the internet is the "good stuff"

Re: How to Enter a City Like a King

#39

Post by rurban »

bombcar wrote: post #8
xandrius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which guy?

It's a reference to Jesus entering Jerusalem (Palm Sunday).

But Jesus was executed because he came armed with swords, after spending 2 years in the north building up his group in Lebanon, wanting to overthrow the local priestship.

A pretty deviance of his previous pieceful principles.

Re: How to Enter a City Like a King

#40

Post by WalterBright »

quacked wrote: post #14

I often think about how much human labor there is available at any given moment, and how in any minute some percentage of "available labor" is bound up doing something. Back in the day, with billions fewer people, you could still bind up some percentage of available labor making beautiful gates for the coronation, or staging mock battles for the king as he passed. Today, I guess people make marketing copy for cat foo…

The most productive societies are ones where the people are free to do what they want. The more people are regimented and taxed, the less productive they are.
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