371–380 of 386 posts
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This is religious thinking.
> maybe there isn’t hard data, but it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, so I would say this is something that need to be disproven, not proven This is not religious thinking? You’re arguing based on faith and claiming the rest of us have to prove there is no tea pot floating in orbit on the other side of the sun
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Abusive monopolies without the imposition of violence (either by the government or the company) lasting for a long time horizon? Yes, that would seem implausible in a free market. For example, if someone controlled the water pipes and charged a $1000 for a cup of water, then someone would find a way to bring in water for less and would start contracting to build their own pipes, maybe locking in long term contracts w…
> Abusive monopolies without the imposition of violence (either by the government or the company) lasting for a long time horizon? Example: Google. It happened all by itself in an essentially unregulated area, without any real government action. > Compare the 1920 economic downturn (hands-off government, rebounds quickly) to the 1929-1940s economic depression The 1920 downturn was _stopped_ by the government interven…
I am unaware of what government intervention you are talking about in 1920. I have heard explicitly that the government did nothing by historians and I asked ChatGPT and it had nothing [1]. In that same conversation I also asked it compare Europe versus US in 2008 from an Austrian perspective. The main thesis Austrians have for busts is that of misallocated resources based on false price information whose remedy is reallocation, often through bankruptcy and repurposing of capital goods. It seems that the US was able to have a better reallocation of resources. I am not sure entirely of the mechanism, but at least some of it was allowing some things to fail and some of it might have been the government going in and manually realigning these things (taking over in the short term). It sounded like Europe did not allow for that, either direct intervention or simply allowing things to fail -- the bad businesses limped along as zombies. Europe kind of did the worst of both worlds.
As for the US, it also suggests that the Austrians, and I have heard this, cite our extreme debt, and it keeps growing, as a sign of a reckoning to come. Kind of like one can keep pumping sugar in to deal with sugar lows after a high, but eventually the bill comes due. Keynesians and others seem to view the economy as a short-term adjustable kind of thing, a chemical reaction with just the right reagents producing something wonderful. Austrians view it as a lumbering ecology, with things adapting and to the extent adaptation based on truth is present, it gets better. To the extent that distortions and violence happen, not so good. We shall, unfortunately, probably see soon enough unless AI can make a productivity miracle happen.
1: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e3ce42-6e78-8012-8a9c-1d7cff2d6f...
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Small price changes don’t necessarily lead to small results. There’s a reason companies advertise 19.99 not 20 which has been experimentally verified many times. People simply act irrationally, which is a fundamental issue when trying to treat economics as math.
Matter is not continuous and yet we don’t need atoms to predict how a metal sheet will bend. There are a lot of sound theories about how to deal with discontinuity, and how the problem solves itself when numbers get large enough. Or think of it like weather and climate: we cannot predict that there will be a thunderstorm on a given day 2 months from now, but we can be fairly confident that in x years, the average glo…
The logical house of cards is built upon several tenuous or flat out outrageous assumptions that do not resemble reality.
I can’t take the author seriously.
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Loughia says >"If Trump follows through on eliminating ED..." That would be a hard act to follow.
What?
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This is just partisan conspirational nonsense. Modern Economics took the useful things from Marx and left the rest in the dustbin of history like it should. Nor do Economists advocate for "trickle-down" theory, the answer has more to do with where one is on the laffer curve. Economists clash frequently with other fields like social sciences because such fields continue to use unfalsifiable and highly flawed epistemic…
Economic theory in western nations is so hilariously skewed towards free market capitalist think that obvious models are just straight up missed, or sometimes obviously wrong conclusions are drawn. Most economics start with the understanding that the answer or cause is something about free market forces, and then work backwards. For example, when talking about the economics of healthcare (or anything else, but lets s…
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The sources of university funding and spending on administration has been broken for a long time. What does a graduate math program need? A building with some offices and classrooms, wifi, email service, maybe a couple of secretaries and janitors, office supplies, and salaries for students and researchers/instructors. What need does a math program have for any but the most basic administration? That's where all the m…
"You could cut university admin costs by 75% and lose nothing." People say that, but could you really? I'd love to see a breakdown on how you pull this off.
There are extreme downsides - for many colleges athletics is a money-maker. So is administering IP. There's is also lots of real estate, which appreciates value, but needs maintenance.
The big reason for all the extras is that it makes the school known, in a very big and important way. They host conferences, have archives that receive donations, give out awards.
Donors give all sorts of weird tasks - and funding to achieve them.
Modern colleges are so many different things.
There is a subset of colleges that adopt the "keep it simple" approach, but they often run into lots of trouble. The big problem is without doing tons of stuff, people forget they exist.
It's a bit like drug companies advertising at the super bowl. They hate doing it, but don't have a choice.
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I agree with you about the excesses of university luxury, but the fact that it's just teachers and students is what makes it expensive in fact. As technology and labor-saving devices make everything more productive, human labor gets relatively more expensive over time. It's more expensive than it was 30 years ago, much more than 60 years ago. Any business that relies on specifically human labor that can't be automate…
The excesses of luxury at universities are for the purposes of attracting sources of revenue - undergraduate students.
I don't think it's actually the luxuries that cause the high price though, I think it's the increased relative expense of human labor, as above. Is my hypothesis anyway.
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No, it's not a scary thought that physicists and chemists don't care whether a Republican or Democrat is in office.
It’s scary that: 1. Our top researchers are wasting their time and energy promoting projects for grants. 2. Any attempt by the public to oversee or guide these grants is thwarted by smart people. 3. If you try to learn more about where the money is going or what’s being counted as science people on HN will call it “anti-intellectual propoganda”.
You can trust professionals to do their jobs as they see fit and write them a check, or you can make them "waste" time proving to you they're doing the job you want them to do. You can't have low-trust and low-effort grant administration.
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You have no idea what you are talking about, and yes you are buying into (or actively promoting) anti-intellectualism. >1. Our top researchers are wasting their time and energy promoting projects for grants. There are all kinds of scientists, some do the research, some do the writing, some do the grantsmanship. Getting money to fund an idea is not lesser than, it is often the hardest part. It takes understanding an c…
> Please. PLEASE. I am begging you. Learn about a subject before forming an opinion about it. I actually lived it, so thanks for your understanding and consideration. > Getting money to fund an idea is not lesser than, it is often the hardest part. Difficulty is not value. Extremely talented people are doing arbitrary waste work! And you’re right - promotors aren’t lesser. They are greater - more valued in academic j…
All oversight is a hoop to jump through in a low-trust principal-agent system. Adding oversight bureaucracy partially helps in aligning the scientists to the public interests (after all, if they're working on something totally disconnected from funding goals, they won't get funded) but can never really increase public trust in the scientists or the grant-agency bureaucrats.