Live data from Hacker News

The Economy

blog.samaltman.com

71–80 of 270 posts

Re: The Economy

#71
post #24

I'm not clear on how any of this will lead to a recession. Why will high Debt-to-GDP or government spending send the economy into a recession? Q1 GDP numbers were clearly affected by dismal weather (although still bad), but labor markets are improving markedly, and there are reasons for optimism. I don't see this as a very convincing bear case. For the bull case, see this post, from a guy who's been right about every…

Two consecutive months of negative "growth" define a recession. The "dismal weather" argument has been used to death. We've had very cold winters before, it's nothing new. Labor markets are not improving as you might think. Most of the job growth is in low wage positions.

Regarding the link, the argument is that by 2020 (6 years from now) more people will be working. and more specifically, the paragraph below, is flat out wrong.

"But that is medium term - in the near term, the reasons for a pickup in economic growth are still intact:1) the housing recovery should continue, 2) household balance sheets are in much better shape. This means less deleveraging, and probably a little more borrowing, 3) State and local government austerity is over (in the aggregate),4) there will be less Federal austerity this year, 5) commercial real estate (CRE) investment will probably make a small positive contribution this year.

Re: The Economy

#72

"Entitlement" is a dog whistle that is used in place of "welfare". http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Entitlement_program

Arguing about terminology is a great way to avoid arguing about tough fiscal realities.

I think it's worth mentioning. Propagandistic terms such as "entitlements" frustrate discussion and make it even more difficult to communicate. It belittles and trivializes the opinion that poor people are entitled to things like healthcare or food, making people who hold that opinion unwilling to discuss it.

Re: The Economy

#73

Does anyone think we are heading towards an economic collapse?

Collapse, no. But I do think we're going to see, in our lifetimes, a mostly-global economy that is very different from anything that humans have had in the past, and that the transition to that is going to sometimes look disastrous.

I can't say much about the intricacies of how economies are managed, because I don't know much about that. But there are a few trends happening today that are unique in human history.

For one, we've entered an age where the economies of most of the countries in the world have become interconnected to some extent. Just 100 years ago, this wasn't the case. The mismanagement of an economy in one country can have serious repercussions in other countries now; I think it's inevitable that we'll see a world economic governing body develop. This sort of already de facto exists, but if it doesn't meet the needs of the lower and middle classes, it's going to become more political.

For another, we have begun to impose some serious limits on our resource demands. In the past, one way to combat a sluggish economy was to get bigger; if you had the money, you might try to establish a colony somewhere, grow your territory, or put more natural resources to work in the form of industry. But now, we've seen the effects of that on our natural environment and mostly collectively decided to limit our use of resources. Now, the name of the game is greater and greater efficiency, doing more with less, consuming less.

Meanwhile, a common trend around the world, and especially in the "west" (incl. Europe and Australia and the usual suspects), is that people want more leisure time. Workers are tired. The economy has been particularly hard on the lower socioeconomic classes, and they can get burnt out just like anybody else. They largely have crap jobs -- "bullshit jobs" as one economist puts it -- they can't expect loyalty from their company so they aren't loyal to it either, and they don't make enough money to get to enjoy the perks of life that, thanks to a massive global communications system, they get to see everyone else enjoying. You can't go to the store anymore without seeing a travel magazine with a beautiful front cover staring you in the face.

So, I don't think most people are looking to work more. In fact, I think that if it were possible for a lot of people, down to the poorest classes, to give up just a little bit more to be able to gain more real leisure time, they'd do it.

Simultaneously, production technology keeps getting better and better, so we can have more and more stuff for less and less money.

And, there's a massively adversarial relationship now between the worker classes and the wealthier classes. I think a lot of people intuitively recognize a lot of this, and they feel like the only thing keeping them from having the life they want is unfairly low wages mostly set by people who have a lot more money.

There's always political unrest somewhere in the world; I think a lot of it in the west is going to focus on economic issues. People are going to keep agitating to get their basic needs met, so that they're less reliant on jobs that they feel are both demeaning and fundamentally unfair. As hard as it may be to believe, especially if you rarely leave the Silicon Valley scene, I think we're going to see more of a movement towards spending less on material goods. I think the developing world is where almost all of the economic growth will be for a while, and I think the economies in the developed world are going to continue to be sluggish until there's a big breakthrough in either energy (e.g. fusion) or exploration (Mars).

I also think there's a possibility this could all lead to an amazing modern Renaissance. Never before in history have so many people been so close to having as much free time as they desire to create, build, or learn about anything they want; we truly have no idea what kind of art, engineering, or science might come from that.

Unfortunately, until a new social contract is developed between the economic classes, the poor are going to have a very hard time of it.

Re: The Economy

#74
post #20

I have gradually become convinced by mountains of evidence from many quarters that the Keynesians are right-- we are in a demand constrained economy. One of the problems I think is that economists and politicos tend to always be fighting the last war. In the late 1970s to early 1980s -- the last time the economy seemed this systemically bleak -- the problem was insufficient capital available for investment combined w…

A large component of 70's stagflation was just supply shocks for oil. Why this never gets brought up, or is just brushed aside casually is beyond me. > do modern industrial economies actually tend to oscillate between demand constrained and supply constrained failure modes This is probably a pretty good way to look at it. The solution is something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_finance The meat: 1. The…

>A large component of 70's stagflation was just supply shocks for oil. Why this never gets brought up, or is just brushed aside casually is beyond me.

It's politically expedient to forget it - just as it's politically expedient to forget that the people causing the oil shocks and the people who benefited from them politically seemed (and continue to seem) to have some interesting relationships.

Keynes is in danger of being written out of history, in the same way that dissidents like Henry George were.

I'm not sure how many people realise the extent to which anti-Keynesian narratives were deliberately promoted and funded after WWII, especially in Chicago.

The fact that Keynes is no longer considered an orthodox policy source is not an accident.

Re: The Economy

#75
post #24

I'm not clear on how any of this will lead to a recession. Why will high Debt-to-GDP or government spending send the economy into a recession? Q1 GDP numbers were clearly affected by dismal weather (although still bad), but labor markets are improving markedly, and there are reasons for optimism. I don't see this as a very convincing bear case. For the bull case, see this post, from a guy who's been right about every…

I think the responses you're getting are ignoring the key question: How will high debt-to-GDP or government spending send the economy into a recession?

Many have been forecasting complete collapse and hyperinflation for these reasons, and it hasn't materialized. It seems there is something flawed with the models people are trying to use to make their economic forecasts, or their reasoning doesn't apply to this situation.

One reason government spending would be bad is that it is crowding out private investment by driving up rates. But he indirectly recognizes this isn't the case due to rates being low enough that they should be encouraging investment.

He doesn't say how government debt should be reduced, and where government spending should be cut. He also glosses over the point that we're at a zero bound. The post is basically a bunch of graphs while expressing concern about government spending and debt. He doesn't really connect these to the GDP and go into detail about the reasons for that quarter. I could go on.

Re: The Economy

#76
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oops, i accidentally published an earlier draft. i added a bit more of my thinking here--my sense is that it would probably lead to less waste than current systems. i'm also not sure it's the right approach, but i haven't heard any better ideas yet.

> any better ideas yet Progressive tax on incomes >$1,000,000. This won't slow anyone down except the ultra-wealthy. As of 2009, it's 236,883 people. That's less than 1 in a thousand. With more income in a single year than most people in the U.S. earn in a lifetime , they'll certainly still be much more than quite comfortable.

Unfortunately, the article isn't very clear about what the problem statement is for which basic income is the proposed solution. But assuming it is something like "people are having trouble participating in the economy, which is a drag on our society's standard of living", I don't see how "increased federal income" is a solution. What do you propose the government do with its newfound wealth to solve these problems? "Tax the rich" might be a decent tactic, but it certainly isn't a good strategy.

Re: The Economy

#77
post #24

I'm not clear on how any of this will lead to a recession. Why will high Debt-to-GDP or government spending send the economy into a recession? Q1 GDP numbers were clearly affected by dismal weather (although still bad), but labor markets are improving markedly, and there are reasons for optimism. I don't see this as a very convincing bear case. For the bull case, see this post, from a guy who's been right about every…

I don't think the writer ever said that a high Debt-to-GDP / government spending will send the economy into a recession. it means the government's ability to fight a recession if one comes will be extremely constrained; furthermore, having high debt prior to a recession makes the pains of having the high debt extremely painful as revenues will decline significantly.

Re: The Economy

#78

In this context, I hope at some point sama has a chance (if he hasn't already) to read the post "Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot" by Mencius Moldbug: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-alt... The basic problem with our society is a disconnect between consensus reality and actual reality. We actually have no shortage of natural leaders. But they cannot actually lead us anywhere. They are ope…

It's also critically wrong in understanding technology:

"one run of a time machine, with a printout of Wikipedia, would be pretty much all the real 1950 needed. Send the technology back to 1945, and you'll have iPads by '55 at the latest. Those guys got things done."

That kind of thinking betrays a common misunderstanding. The limiting factor on what we can build at any given time is very rarely ideas. In 1950, people already knew enough physics to build an iPad. The idea of integrated circuits had already been proposed. The first one was demonstrated in 1958 -- only three years later than Moldbug's alternate history.

And yet no iPads in 1960. Because there's a vast global capital structure that needed to evolve first. Technology is not an external factor. It makes no sense to argue whether society is better after factoring out technology, because technology cannot be factored out. It's all part of the same web of interrelationships.

Edit to add:

I had to add this, because it's so wrong it's perverse: "At the base of the pyramid are air, water and food. How does 2013 do at supplying oxygen, hydration and nutrition? How did 1950 do? Just fine. Gentlemen, a draw."

Only if you limit yourself to the wealthiest 10% of human beings. Out here in reality, global food security for everybody else is dramatically better than it was in 1950. Much of the developing world is starting to worry more about obesity than starvation. Moldbug is simply ignoring the biggest economic story of the last 40 years, presumably because it didn't happen in The West.

Re: The Economy

#79
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oops, i accidentally published an earlier draft. i added a bit more of my thinking here--my sense is that it would probably lead to less waste than current systems. i'm also not sure it's the right approach, but i haven't heard any better ideas yet.

> any better ideas yet Progressive tax on incomes >$1,000,000. This won't slow anyone down except the ultra-wealthy. As of 2009, it's 236,883 people. That's less than 1 in a thousand. With more income in a single year than most people in the U.S. earn in a lifetime , they'll certainly still be much more than quite comfortable.

>>> Progressive tax on incomes >$1,000,000. This won't slow anyone down except the ultra-wealthy.

What do you think happens to anybody, let alone people who are really rich when you continually increase their taxes? They stop spending, they start hiding their money, they it send it to foreign countries, they will find ways around the taxes you're trying to levy against them.

It doesn't matter who you tax, they're going to try and avoid paying taxes regardless. People have this notion that since they're super wealthy, they have money to burn - which is hardly the case. Most people making over $1 million per year live a lifestyle that's congruent to the money they're making. You think those people are thinking , "Aye, it's only 10K more to the governmnet, no big deal?", right?. Hardly. They want to hold onto their money just as much as the next guy.

Re: The Economy

#80
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oops, i accidentally published an earlier draft. i added a bit more of my thinking here--my sense is that it would probably lead to less waste than current systems. i'm also not sure it's the right approach, but i haven't heard any better ideas yet.

> any better ideas yet Progressive tax on incomes >$1,000,000. This won't slow anyone down except the ultra-wealthy. As of 2009, it's 236,883 people. That's less than 1 in a thousand. With more income in a single year than most people in the U.S. earn in a lifetime , they'll certainly still be much more than quite comfortable.

Most of the people in this class are able to hire accountants and re-classify much of their income in such a way as to avoid the taxes.

Part of the problem when you start talking about massive tax bills is that the higher the tax, the higher the return on investment from avoiding it. So if you can pay an accountant $500,000 to set up a bunch of shell corporations and trusts as legal tax shelters that will save you $5,000,000, you'll do it in a heartbeat.

Add in Citizens United to the mix and you can see where this is going. If it's suddenly a great return on investment to lobby Congress to introduce a tax loophole, people will do it. The entire premise of modern corporate finance is that if you don't like what a company is doing with your investment, you are free to cash out your investment and invest in something else. That doesn't work with governments; but it doesn't prevent people from trying to apply the same attitudes.

Post reply on HN