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After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

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Re: After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

#181

Post by vinceguidry »

iammisc wrote: post #145
vinceguidry wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an idea, capitalism, without the rent-seeking. When someone wants to do something everyone knows is wrong, we don't let them . Instead of making excuses, we hold people with power and affluence to higher standards. What a concept.

Can you give an example of the rent-seeking? > When someone wants to do something everyone knows is wrong, we don't let them. Yes. that's called enforcing criminal law, and most people would agree with it. Although, I dunno, maybe not in the past two years, it seems more people are okay with letting criminals go. EDIT: If your claim is that we don't put enough people in jail for breaking the law, I agree with you. I…

All of those things would be great. But if we, the most affluent people in the world and best positioned to make our voices heard, make excuses for Zuck, make excuses for Amazon, make excuses for all these businesses that extract wealth without supporting their communities, then we'll just keep building unholy unequal pyramids, where what's normal is completely, irreparably broken, replicating the teetering social structures of the Bronze Age. (I don't back up the points I make drawing from ancient history because HN comment section isn't a place to give history lessons)

We need to not leave it up to the Kalanicks of the world to change the social order, reinventing taxis for fun and profit.

It's more than a change in legal and ethical norms. We need to not fire people who speak their minds for the social good against the company, then further marginalize the already marginalized community they're speaking up for.

We need new social norms.

Re: After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

#182

Post by dbingham »

nradov wrote: post #178
dbingham wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many more options than feudalism, fascism, or communism. And my point is that the lack of awareness of them is part of the problem. For example, there's the form of Democratic Socialism I propose above: where we replace the current business structure with worker cooperatives funded by regulated loans or crowd sourcing that compete with each other in a free market. We know worker cooperatives work, because t…

There's nothing stopping workers from creating worker cooperatives today and getting business loans today. We don't need a new economic system for that. But lenders won't lend without a high expected ROI.

Yes, worker cooperatives have formed and functioned in the existing economy. Which is part of how we know using them as the foundation of our economy, rather than a niche aspect of it, could work.

> But lenders won't lend without a high expected ROI.

Exactly, that's what's stopping them. Worker cooperatives don't provide the return on investment that investor ownership grants. They don't allow those with capital (wealth) to demand a large portion of the returns from the business. That's what requires the new economy - removing the option for capital to demand ownership and control so that it has to make do with a reasonable, regulated return on its loans.

Re: After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

#183

Post by iammisc »

dbingham wrote: post #165
iammisc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That didn't seem like the point you were making, what you wrong seemed to imply some form of the current system has existed forever. My meaning was very plain. I said many people would be unconvinced that anything could be done to achieve equality. I then stated they could point to thousands of years of human life (which, as you correctly stated, contained many economic systems). If you put both points together, yo…

> My meaning was very plain. Your meaning was not plain, you wrote a few very broad sentences and in your clarifications it seems you were talking about a single problem - equality. The original post was outlining many problems, inequality being one of them and the systems being proposed potentially address many problems. But that's fine, such is the nature of dialog over text. > Studies show that family fortunes in…

> This is likely to be an outdated statistic at best. If you go back three or four genenerations, you will find yourself passing through a time when the US had very high inheritance taxes and a 90% top marginal tax rate. That period of time did likely prevent the formation of dynasties across it. However, those policies have since been repealed and current studies show very low social mobility and a significant increase in dynastic formation. [1, 2]

How is it possible that you can dismiss my claims for being too long ago, and then cite claims on dynastic formation made today? Surely, in order to make the latter claim, you would need to wait equally long into the future as my claims were into the past? Would you look at my family, which has risen exponentially from poverty and claim we're forming a dynasty? How could you possible know it's a dynasty until I'm dead and my children inherit?

I don't believe the tax policy argument is satisfying. The studies show that the wealth dissipates due to squandering, not taxation. Even with a 90% income tax, these heirs still get millions and millions (likely billions in todays dollars), and yet still lose it all.

> The environmental degradation - in climate change - threatens to upend what gains there have been made in destitution and the current system is completely failing to respond appropriately to the threat. So the great likelihood is that if we stay with the same system on the same trendline, there's a cliff coming in our near future.

Even the worst models of climate change do not predict the catastrophic ends you are attempting to paint. You're just distracting from the issue at this point. In general, I find doomsday predictions unvaluable. Nevertheless, i'm not going to fall for this change in goalposts.

> Systems that haven't been tried in macro yet, but are working just fine in micro - for example the move to universal worker cooperatives funded by credit unions and crowd sourcing that I propose

So... a free market? There is nothing incompatible with the system we have and worker's cooperatives.

Although I will say credit unions have proven just as dangerous and capable of malfeasance as banks (Savings and Loans Crisis of the 80s, which everyone seems to forget for some reason).

> We can always do better.

Sure, we can improve some things in my hierarchy of needs by following down our current path, which, unlike your changes, is empirically shown to improve material conditions. This idea that because the current system hasn't made everyone's life better overnight, it must be replaced, is foolish. Some people have this constant drive to change things. Doing nothing is also a choice. And often a good one.

Re: After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

#184

Post by nightski »

dbingham wrote: post #113
qsort wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you expect a new country wise economic model to be purposed in this article? No, I didn't, but I'm frankly growing tired of cookie-cutter article like this one that just enumerate problems that have existed since the literal dawn of civilization. The entire "economy bad" brigade is, as parent comment puts it, "r/im14andthisisdeep". They see problems everyone else sees, but they don't have any actual insight, ju…

There are quite a number of solutions on offer - they just have a difficult time gaining traction in our media (and therefor in the public debate). Part of that has to do with the fact that a majority of those with economic and political power - those who have succeeded in the current system - still refuse to recognize that the problems are systematic. They refuse to recognize that the problems are intrinsically caus…

Why would anyone ever try a high risk innovation play to propel society forward if there was no reward? Most businesses fail. This would encourage people to just work at BigCo instead of trying to start new things.

I feel like innovative companies such as SpaceX or Moderna would never happen under that economic model for example.

Re: After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

#185

Post by dbingham »

iammisc wrote: post #180
dbingham wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the proposal I outlined for a free market made up of worker cooperatives limit overall wealth in our society?

It wouldn't. The free market and worker cooperatives are completely compatible. There is nothing that needs to change in the markets, only in society.

> The free market and worker cooperatives are completely compatible.

I agree.

But there is something that needs to change in order for worker cooperatives become the dominant business form. So long as capital can demand ownership, worker cooperatives will remain a relative niche. What needs to change in markets is we need to remove the ability for capital to demand ownership. That's essentially the core of my proposal for a new system.

Replace the LLC and Stock Corporation with the worker cooperative. Remove the investor stock owner relationship from the economy. Legally mandate that all businesses be formed as worker owned cooperatives. And then regulate the amount of interest that banks and financiers can charge on their loans to limit their power over those worker cooperatives.

What you get is a free market economy where all businesses are democratically run by their workers and the relationship between capital and labor is flipped. It would vastly increase equality, with out increasing destitution. And would likely have some small decrease on environmental degradation.

In some ways it's a very gentle refactor of our existing economy. In other ways, it's far reaching and drastic (stock markets go away entirely and traditional banks become a primary mechanism of savings).

Re: After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

#186

Post by iammisc »

vinceguidry wrote: post #181
iammisc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of the rent-seeking? > When someone wants to do something everyone knows is wrong, we don't let them. Yes. that's called enforcing criminal law, and most people would agree with it. Although, I dunno, maybe not in the past two years, it seems more people are okay with letting criminals go. EDIT: If your claim is that we don't put enough people in jail for breaking the law, I agree with you. I…

All of those things would be great. But if we, the most affluent people in the world and best positioned to make our voices heard, make excuses for Zuck, make excuses for Amazon, make excuses for all these businesses that extract wealth without supporting their communities, then we'll just keep building unholy unequal pyramids, where what's normal is completely, irreparably broken, replicating the teetering social st…

> We need to not leave it up to the Kalanicks of the world to change the social order, reinventing taxis for fun and profit.

Why? Uber materially improved my access to taxis. Why does everyone diss on uber's business model (I understand the company itself is a bit meh), but the idea of hailing cab drivers with an app, and then encouraging people to drive (i.e., ridesharing) is a great one.

Ultimately, I'd rather leave it up to individuals to improve their and their community's conditions, then a bureaucrat.

> It's more than a change in legal and ethical norms. We need to not fire people who speak their minds for the social good against the company, then further marginalize the already marginalized community they're speaking up for.

Okay, so I assume you are against the firings of religious employees, standing up for their beliefs? How do you reconcile when a religious employee speaks out against spreading of gender dysphoria as social contagion on facebook, and then a trans employee speaks out against him?

Or is your economic system mainly meant to impose your beliefs on everyone else?

Re: After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

#187

Post by iammisc »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #179
vinceguidry wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an idea, capitalism, without the rent-seeking. When someone wants to do something everyone knows is wrong, we don't let them . Instead of making excuses, we hold people with power and affluence to higher standards. What a concept.

Yes, as long as you can agree on "everyone knows is wrong"/ What the fuck does that mean? The same people who would complain about HFT would also probably complain that a person in the 1800's who could run fast would be doing something 'wrong' after they found out a trade ship had returned. What is "wrong" with the fast exchange of information in that case?

Absolutely. This is an angle I didn't even mention in my post, because it had already gotten wrong. Generalized statements like 'everyone knows is wrong' are a dogwhistle for 'whatever I think is wrong'.

Re: After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

#188

Post by sleepysysadmin »

gjm11 wrote: post #94
sleepysysadmin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I concur, there's nothing "communistic" about the idea of full employment, if anything it strikes me as something rather capitalistic in its nature: Full employment would mean there's an oversupply of labor, which means labor would be dirt cheap and easily replaceable. There have been nobel prizes on labour participation rate and unemployment rates. The reality is that you have so much population, you have requireme…

I think almost everything you say about Japan is wrong. "99.9% of people accused of a crime ..." -- this is a reference to the fact that the Japanese criminal system's conviction rate is a startlingly high 99.9%. But what's going on here is that about 60% of criminal cases in Japan get suspended without going to court; prosecutors only proceed in cases where they are nearly certain of getting a conviction, so their 9…

>I think almost everything you say about Japan is wrong.

Tiny part of my comment, no offense or anything. Certainly hoping to learn where I am wrong.

>"99.9% of people accused of a crime ..." -- this is a reference to the fact that the Japanese criminal system's conviction rate is a startlingly high 99.9%

To be fair, it's hard to compare to English law systems. Perhaps it's totally fine, but when you connect the forced labour. I have questions that are unanswered.

>so their 99.9% figure isn't comparable to (say) the US's 93% (that's a figure from 2012; I couldn't readily find anything more recent).

Conviction rate in Canada is ~63%, even lower if you exclude plea deals. We could go into discussion about how for-profit prison system in the USA or illegitimate crimes being enforced. I'm pretty sure 93% is way too high and it's around ~70%.

>"... are forced to work in a gulag" -- so the claim here is that literally every person convicted of a crime in Japan then does forced labour. This is not true, for the simple reason that the great majority of people convicted of crimes in Japan (just like everywhere else) don't go to prison. Only about 15% do.

I think maybe we are comparing apples to oranges here.

>(It is true that most prison sentences in Japan are imprisonment-with-labour. I'm not sure whether it's all of them; I've seen explicit claims that it is and explicit claims that it isn't. I shall not try to adjudicate whether "in a gulag" is a reasonable description of the life of those prisoners. Incidentally, they are mostly paid for the work they do in prison.)

I will concede this. "In a gulag" was improper. The japanese prisons are not political prisoners like communism. As you say, most prison sentences are forced labour. There's the problem I have with Japan.

>The Japanese debt-to-annual-GDP ratio hovered around 50% or so until about 1993 and then started rising rapidly, reaching its present level (the figure I've seen is 225%, not 266%, but in any case it's rather high) around 2012

266.20% in 2020. Covid made it jump almost 30%

>But they had a policy of prison labour before their debt was large; e.g., here's http://www.jca.apc.org/cpr/kaido.html someone complaining about it in 1997 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 70%) using prison labour figures from 1994 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 60%).

Fair, I was saying that the only reason Japan hasnt collapsed to about 30% poverty like Greece is because of the forced labour.

>About 50k people are in prison in Japan. The population of Japan is about 125M. That 0.04% of the population would have to be incredibly productive for their labour to be "the only thing holding Japan together".

Japan is suspiciously low. Kind of impossibly low. Which in the context of the allegation that people are slaves. In a country with many yakuza orgs, sex trafficing, and some pretty strict rules around many other things(porn for example) it seems to me these numbers are impossible.

One day we will find out what the real numbers are. It also seems to me that clearance rates are impossible. Japan clears arson at >70%? The hell? impossible.

Re: After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

#189

Post by qsort »

dbingham wrote: post #173
qsort wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not one single line of what you wrote is a concrete and actionable thing you would do. It's frankly a whole bunch of rethoric. I'll pick the bits that seem like they mean something real: > legally structured businesses as institutions democratically run by those working in them This already exists, they are called cooperatives, many of them actually work pretty great. Try to guess what happens when they grow and they…

> This already exists, they are called cooperatives, many of them actually work pretty great. Try to guess what happens when they grow and they need to hire employees... They continue to operate. Mondragon has 80,000 worker owners. And yes, it has a challenge in recent years where the worker owners have created a class of non-owner employee. But it got pretty big before that started happening, and there's no reason t…

> My proposal is essentially that we make this the requirement

So basically we are abolishing the ability for any business to hire employees? This would be terrible, especially for the poor. Owner and employee are different risk profiles, it's neither useful nor beneficial to impose by law that nobody can be an employee any longer, especially for those who can't afford the risk.

It's also very easy to route around that obstacle if it were made law: just fire everyone and hire them back as contractors, oh, no, sorry, democratically run worker cooperative employing one worker.

You are completely throwing away many layers of protections that are afforded to workers in a system of regulated employment relations.

> Like I said, this is a thought experiment.

It's a thought experiment predicated on paying an enormous social cost that nobody is willing to pay, to get to a point where nobody wants to be. If the first step of your plan directly implies getting rid of all credit, then I frankly don't think it's really a good plan.

Re: After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)

#190

Post by iammisc »

dbingham wrote: post #182
nradov wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing stopping workers from creating worker cooperatives today and getting business loans today. We don't need a new economic system for that. But lenders won't lend without a high expected ROI.

Yes, worker cooperatives have formed and functioned in the existing economy. Which is part of how we know using them as the foundation of our economy, rather than a niche aspect of it, could work. > But lenders won't lend without a high expected ROI. Exactly, that's what's stopping them. Worker cooperatives don't provide the return on investment that investor ownership grants. They don't allow those with capital (wea…

> Which is part of how we know using them as the foundation of our economy, rather than a niche aspect of it, could work.

We don't use worker cooperatives in the same way we don't use corporations. There is no overarching entity that uses any of these things.

If worker cooperatives are so great, they should be outpacing corporations. Some do. For example, companies like Winco and Mondragon exceed productivity of their corporate counterparts. That's fine. More power to them. Their story should encourage others to start worker cooperatives.

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