WTF Happened in 1971? (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#131

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

bwb wrote: post #67

bryanlarsen wrote: post #25

The author obviously wants you to believe that it was the abandonment of the gold standard, but there are several other theories that have more credence with mainstream economists. The early 70's was the start of a horrible period of stagflation: stagnation coupled with inflation. Some do blame the loss of the gold standard, but the leading theory is the OPEC oil crisis. Others blame market regulations, the EPA was p…

hmmm... dropping energy isn't going to help with the big costs families face in terms of health insurance and costs, day care, college costs, or housing. Am i wrong :)?

[deleted]

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#132

Post by Exmoor » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

xyst wrote: post #86

ZacharyPitts wrote: post #10

Amazed that the site does not call out Nixon completely abandoning the gold standard in 1971. Financial investments thusly did not need to be backed by actual assets anymore, to the point of today where the whole of money is loans against loans against loans.

Random thought: since the US dollar hasn't been backed by a physical asset in decades, does it really make sense to prosecute a person(s) for "stealing money." Stealing implies you have taken something of value and requisitioned it for ones self, but since money has no actual value was it really stolen? Especially in the digital age, the numbers you see in your bank account are just 0s and 1s sitting dormant in some…

> but since money has no actual value was it really stolen?

I assume you wouldn't mind sending me your bank account details via email to prove your belief that "money has no value?"

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#133

Post by sleepysysadmin » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

Many graphs don't adjust for inflation or really show the pattern at 1971. Some show 50-60s and other 80s. It also doesn't account for the momentum of human markets. If you make a change that's bad, it can take decades for the consequences to really hit.

We know what happened, the problem is in social science. The biggest subject is whether or not there's an actual problem here. I don't think there's a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_force_in_the_United_Stat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Employment_Opportunity_A...

The overall participation rate is still more or less 60% and as women other other minority earned the right to join the workforce. This has been fantastic for our society. Every egalitarian society has benefitted greatly.

But now there's 20% less men working. What are they doing? Worse yet, this is a competition. So as talented women joined the workforce, they displaced less talented men. That's great for the economy. Worse yet, supply vs demand occurs. Supply of labour went up, demand more or less stayed the same. This means wages stagnate or lower. Minimum wage is increased but this only sets wages to stagnate while increasing unemployment.

In terms of society, this is fantastic. We have gained much more talent from minority groups. We don't have discrimination any more relatively speaking. Overall this is great news.

However there's a human cost. From the page, 72% of black women having kids outside marriage. Is it because the father is not there or involved or is it because marriage is not a consideration? Marriage is at historic lows. So is birth in general.

Now lets say there's a problem as per OP's assertion. What's the fix? Remove civil rights? Hell no. That's not the fix.

What if the problem is deeper than this? John Keynes said like 100 years ago that we will be down to a 10 hour work week about right now. Yet here we are working 40+ hours.

One of the last graphs on that page hits on this. Doctors barely increased whereas "administrators" has greatly increased. Moreso occurring in the 1990s but it's telling of the problem. We have people working too much and we have left no room for everyone else. Civil rights increased supply but the same amount of jobs are needed because of productivity increased. So now we have >50% of our society pretending to work. They have a job that does nothing.

We need to reduce the supply of labour. We need to go down to like 10-20 hour weeks.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#134

Post by swalsh » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

backtoyoujim wrote: post #96

treeman79 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always underestimate the cost of regulations. Even when good, the cost is big. Health care is a good example. Keeping patient data private is a good thing. However it’s also absolutely crushing in its impact in the industry. Tiny projects can take months or years. HIPPA terrifies so many IT people. Driving away top developers.

I'm OK with the "Move Fast & Break Shit" crowd staying far from my medical history thankyouverymuch.

Move fast and break things is a really unfortunate name. In my experience, the process of continous deployment, and the automation and defintion of processes to do it well bring more stability than the "move slow and keep things stable" environments. When you deploy once a month (or less!) you view deployment as a one off thing. When you deploy every day or every week. You view releases as a regular part of development. That change in mentality is critical to stable releases.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#135

Post by JackFr » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #22

Some of these graphs are laughable and are candidates for "Spurious Correlations" [1]. Childhood obesity is not due to the US getting rid of the gold standard. [1] http://archive.is/9VFmh

Indeed.

And another good trick used is showing exponential growth on a linear scale and managing the time domain to make 1971 look like an inflection point.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#136

Post by brundolf » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

treeman79 wrote: post #80

bryanlarsen wrote: post #25

The author obviously wants you to believe that it was the abandonment of the gold standard, but there are several other theories that have more credence with mainstream economists. The early 70's was the start of a horrible period of stagflation: stagnation coupled with inflation. Some do blame the loss of the gold standard, but the leading theory is the OPEC oil crisis. Others blame market regulations, the EPA was p…

People always underestimate the cost of regulations. Even when good, the cost is big. Health care is a good example. Keeping patient data private is a good thing. However it’s also absolutely crushing in its impact in the industry. Tiny projects can take months or years. HIPPA terrifies so many IT people. Driving away top developers.

Something that surprises me is that nobody ever talks about efficiency, as a trait of a particular piece of regulation.

The goal of a regulation, like a project constraint, is to enforce some outcome. This is often a good thing. However, not all implementations of the "code" of that regulation are going to be equal. There's a huge gap between the desired outcome and the way it's articulated as law; there's a ton of wiggle-room there. And that can make a huge difference in how burdensome a regulation is to actually adhere to. And that can have a huge economic impact.

The left talks about how important regulations are, and the right talks about how inefficient they are, and both of these things can be true at the same time.

What would it look like to ask ourselves how regulations could be "refactored" to achieve the same goal in a more efficient way? Maybe the assumption is that too much political capitol would be required to actually put such changes into action. Though, we should at least be asking ourselves this question when drafting new law.

Why isn't there a whole field around "regulation engineering" (not actually suggesting this name, but it gets my point across), including best-practices, case-studies, etc?

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#137

Post by fumblebee » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

Graphs like these serve to suggest to people that there's a single, operative reason at their core instead of it being a complex, multivariate issue.

They also tend to cause people to over-attribute the effects of the story told in the graph(s) to the majority of the population instead of a minority with disproportionate impact.

Regardless, taken together the graphs are compelling. The real cause will likely remain forever elusive, but here's a few hypotheses. * The rise of globalisation and the outsourcing of low skilled jobs to other countries. * The abandonment of the gold standard. * The oil crisis. * The disarmament of labor union power. * The concentration of a highly educated 'creative class' in fewer urban areas. * Women entering the work force en masse.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#138

Post by qsort » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

ohyes wrote: post #109

This is clearly because 1970 is the Unix epoch when this version of the simulation began. It took about a year for things to get sufficiently out of whack so that stuff started to diverge in a noticeable way. I hope our implementors are proud of me for making reference to the simulation that we're all in.

unironically still a better theory than the op.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#139

Post by pnathan » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

wffurr wrote: post #38

It's more like WTF happened between 1945 and 1971. I think that was an ahistorical period of low income inequality, and now we're back to "normal" such as it is.

That's also a great point. The 70s have a lot of divergence vs the prior 20 years, but what if we run the clock back to, say, 1875?

(I don't know. But it has to be asked)

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#140

Post by ehnto » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

ohyes wrote: post #109

This is clearly because 1970 is the Unix epoch when this version of the simulation began. It took about a year for things to get sufficiently out of whack so that stuff started to diverge in a noticeable way. I hope our implementors are proud of me for making reference to the simulation that we're all in.

The simulation the implementers are in doesn't allow for nested references.