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The room the economy can't see

wilsoniumite.com

151–160 of 296 posts

Re: The room the economy can't see

#151
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.

> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Very strong LLM signal there. I don't mind people using LLM in their writing, but when there are LLMisms like that in the text, it takes away from the reading experience in multiple ways. Firstly, it screams out LLM use and changes the reader's focus from the content to the content creation. Secondly…

That’s not really an LLMism. It’s a phrase that ordinary writers use and was perfectly fine, but LLMs started overusing it, so now you see it as a “tell.” People who haven’t read enough LLM-generated writing to see the pattern won’t notice anything wrong.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#152

Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets. The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces a…

Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better.. It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and sp…

Economic hot take: That scale of saving is impossible. It can't happen. The ends don't meet, the numbers don't match up.

Think about what etiremnent savings means in the real economy. It means I have to store enough food to feed myself for 30 years. It means I have to store enough furniture too. And enough gasoline. And enough of everything else.

This is obviously not possible. So instead I store other things I hope I'll be able to exchange for gasoline and food. But no matter what form it takes, I have to store an absolutely enormous amount of stuff. Whether it's physical goods or abstract financial rights. There is no way for everyone to do this without creating massive economic distortion of some kind. Whatever people store is going to massively increase in value (house deeds! shares!) and crash later when they exchange it for food and gasoline.

But there's a simple alternative, we add a 20% tax and distribute it to people in the form of pensions. This is called a pay-as-you-go pension scheme. Optionally the scheme can keep some kind of weight value for each person based on how much tax they paid or any other metric. Since it doesn't store assets it doesn't distort the economy nearly as much. But, it's vulnerable to a future generation simply cutting it off. When the scheme turns on there's a generation who didn't contribute but still benefit and when the scheme turns off there's a generation who contributed and didn't benefit. This can't happen to people who store real assets because the assets are firmly owned by them, and the society can't easily just decide they aren't.

We can do an intermediate solution if we let people buy a share of future tax income as a financial asset. It doesn't distort the economy too much and your contributions are firmly your property. Treasury bonds are this.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#153
post #8

Markets are very good at a lot of important things, but the idea that’s taken hold in many places is market fundamentalism. It’s the idea that the market should run absolutely everything and if the market doesn’t do it, it has no value. It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it. Fundamentalist thin…

Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "nat…

>Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns).

Wha? Food production is a very regulated market for national security reasons in almost every nation. Otherwise one entity with a bunch of money can starve a smaller nation very easily and then take it over. Now on the higher end of food sales, what one can produce is generally less regulated.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#154
Looks like someone else recreated some of the premises that Marx discussed over 150 years ago.

He wrote 2 major treatises: failings of capitalism, AND Communism.

This falls squarely under failings of capitalism. And you don't have to be a Communist to acknowledge failings of capitalism. But we can still identify failings under the correct name.

Naming the problem allows us to start fixing the root causes.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#155
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better.. It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and sp…

>which is the central thesis here No, not exactly. We're dealing with a historical confluence of long term changes in humanity. Before 1900 or so and some people had a lot of kids survive and others had a lot of kids die. The population rate increased very slowly, and not from a lack of trying. Then around the time I stated people figured out germs were real, chlorine in water was good, and washing ones hands was a s…

[flagged]

Re: The room the economy can't see

#156
post #76
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors. I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.

What's an example where central planning outcompetes the market?

let's reverse the question. Where are markets expected to be optimal?

> definition of 'perfect competition' perfect competition, in which there are large numbers of identical suppliers and demanders of the same product, buyer and sellers can find one another at no cost, and no barriers prevent new suppliers from entering the market.

And that perfect competition provides the price signals that allow the market to be more competitive.

The less that holds true, the less efficient the market is going to be.

What is the price signal on education?

What is the price signal on public infrastructure?

What is the price signal on rule of law and the ability to enforce contracts?

Re: The room the economy can't see

#157

One fundamental challenge with basic income that gets overlooked is that if you’re a smart person and you’ve built a career where you make a lot of money, you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are ne…

UBI is in addition to whatever you can make from a wage and the B stands for not very high, just barely high enough to live.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#158
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wartime production mobilization, public health (vaccine procurement, disease eradication), natural monopolies like power grids. Public transport, water and sewage systems, infrastructure like roads and bridges are more of a hybrid model with a strong planning component, and private contractors (who consume a lot of public funds and often misuse them).

These are good examples and it’s even worth noting that the net impact of these can be a huge boost to the market. But it is a local and greedy optimizer. It doesn’t think “would having public transit improve the economy long term” it thinks “could I make enough on fares to justify the investment” (which is almost always no, at least relative to other investments). This is the nature of positive externalities. They a…

Yes, as you say the market is a local (both in space and time) and greedy optimizer.

Long-term payoffs that increase the value of all participants in society, such as education, healthcare, infrastructure (roads including public transportation, water, electricity, ...), are demonstrably better served by government than by business.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#159
post #86

In my experience, the key element is slack. For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually. Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and…

I live my life with no slack and no way to get any.

I am horrifically depressed and extremely radicalized, both as a direct result.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#160

The act of visiting grandma doesn't need to be legible to the economy, rather the time that might possibly be used to visit grandma needs to be illegible to the economy. Speaking from a US perspective, the straightforward solution to this was defining full time work as 40 hours per week, and then incentivizing companies to not go over this (by automatically increasing pay rates). In addition, the setup where men work…

Part-time jobs are available and they are often taken by people who work multiple jobs.
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