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Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

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Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#571

Post by Eisenstein »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #569
Eisenstein wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have done nothing to demonstrate any of those claims, though. Make your case without the appeal to history to make it valid.

It's an empirical fact that in all the years from the founding to the passage of the 17th Amendment the US federal government was much smaller than it quickly became in the years following its passage, so all of the available evidence is consistent with the theory. Moreover, the mechanism of operation makes logical sense. Senators want to keep their seats and state legislators don't want to have their own regulations…

> It's an empirical fact that in all the years from the founding to the passage of the 17th Amendment the US federal government was much smaller than it quickly became in the years following its passage, so all of the available evidence is consistent with the theory.

This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago.

> Moreover, the mechanism of operation makes logical sense. Senators want to keep their seats and state legislators don't want to have their own regulations preempted by federal laws unnecessarily and don't want excessive federal spending because money collected in federal taxes can't be collected in state taxes and taxpayers have a threshold level of total taxation they're willing to put up with

You are assuming a whole lot in that logic.

1. That state legislators wouldn't collude with the executive due to party affiliation

2. That spending more money at the federal level would require them to raise taxes

There is no logic or evidence when you get rid of the history and the wrong assumptions.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#572

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Eisenstein wrote: post #571
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an empirical fact that in all the years from the founding to the passage of the 17th Amendment the US federal government was much smaller than it quickly became in the years following its passage, so all of the available evidence is consistent with the theory. Moreover, the mechanism of operation makes logical sense. Senators want to keep their seats and state legislators don't want to have their own regulations…

> It's an empirical fact that in all the years from the founding to the passage of the 17th Amendment the US federal government was much smaller than it quickly became in the years following its passage, so all of the available evidence is consistent with the theory. This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago. > Moreover, the mech…

> This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago.

We currently have evidence of what happened both before and after, but the before was ~100 (not 300) years ago. If you want evidence from modern day you would have to actually repeal it. Shall we give it a go?

> That state legislators wouldn't collude with the executive due to party affiliation

The required incentive is present even if the federal officials are in the same party as the state ones.

Suppose the banks are up to some shenanigans and the position of the party in power is to regulate them. Do the state-level officials want the federal government to do that, preempting them from doing it at the state level and letting the federal officials take the credit? No, they want to do it and get the credit themselves.

> That spending more money at the federal level would require them to raise taxes

In order to spend more money without raising taxes, they would have to borrow more or print more money.

The amount of money they print is essentially set by the Fed according to their inflation and economic targets and that isn't likely to change.

They already borrow about as much as they can get away with without causing major immediate problems; if they could borrow more instead of taxing more they would be doing it already. And borrowing isn't free money. It puts the taxpayers on the hook for both the principal and the interest, and the state legislators wouldn't want either of those coming from their taxpayers. Not only that, federal bonds compete with state government bonds for investment capital, so state legislators wouldn't want more federal debt either because it would make it harder for them to issue state debt.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#573

Post by aiven »

rangestransform wrote: post #37
cs702 wrote: post #21

Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…

- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b? - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? - Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all? There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades l…

* assuming that we actually need all these technological advancements

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#574

Post by watwut »

tjs8rj wrote: post #548
snowwrestler wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall national wealth and power shrink under monopoly super corporations, that is the reason it is a matter of public policy in the first place. If you go back and review the major antitrust actions of the 20th century, each one was followed by an explosion of market-creating innovation: Standard Oil, Bell Telephone, even Microsoft. Look even further back, and many national economies were organized around a few sta…

Really? 20 mid sized Googles is better for US power than 1 mega Google dominating the planet? Repeat for any corporation. Breaking these megacorps benefits little guys like you and me, but I doubt it benefits state power on the global stage

> 20 mid sized Googles is better for US power than 1 mega Google dominating the planet?

Considering google search became complete crap under monopoly conditions, absolutely yes.

While the google had to compete, they produced good things and innovated. Now they just focus on milking maximum from the monopoly

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#575

Post by CGMthrowaway »

chaseadam17 wrote: post #176

Great post. One lesser known factor that's contributing to this problem is bank consolidation in the US. * Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans. * Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not con…

Have you read Richard Werner?

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#576

Post by pas »

huijzer wrote: post #202
cs702 wrote: post #21

Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…

> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. They seem to do the opposite now because small businesses can expect little support from the government (and surely no big subsidies like the large players are getting in for example the Stargate joint venture). Especially COVID was seen by many small business owners are extremely to…

small businesses get a lot of exemptions from various regulations, and small business owners/proprietors tend to be very vocal and effective politically

of course big systemic things are usually not great for them (such as technological change helping bigger businesses to be run more efficiently, thus eroding their edge)

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#577

Post by pas »

derefr wrote: post #195
cs702 wrote: post #21

Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…

I would point out that, regardless of the US federal government's stance on monopolies, any legislation or civil action toward that end would be far less applicable today, because of globalization. If your country prevents any domestic tech companies from becoming trillion-dollar behemoths, but such things are still permitted in at least one other country with a similarly-sized economy to yours, then that just means…

there are two possibilities, either the big behemoth provides something for cheap (let's say because there's competition or because the buyers form an efficient price negotiation bloc), in which case the buyers benefit from buying from the behemoth (trade! comparative advantage!), or the big behemoth is bad, in which case it makes sense to try to start a company that has similar offerings.

and if domestic companies cannot outcompete the behemoth then it means whatever the behemoth is selling hard to replicate (which is really really .... reeeeaallly rare in software tech, and only non-software companies like ASML/TSMC come to mind, which are more like joint companies funded by and providing to a whole industry) in which case there's unfortunately not much to do anyway - the behemoth's offer might be "unfair", but then by definition it's not competing with domestic companies, it's offering completely different.

(sure, transactions costs matter, subscribers are sticky, etc.)

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#578

Post by pas »

thaawyy33432434 wrote: post #519
cs702 wrote: post #21

Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…

Recently I realized that US are very close to a centrally planned economy. Meta wasted 50B on metaverse, which like how much Texas spends on healthcare. Now the "AI" investments seems dubious. You could fund 1000+ projects with this kinds of money. This is not an effective capital allocation.

how would you pick those 1000 projects? this is the problem with NIH grants too, for example - lots of appeal to authority, lot of noise, not a lot of signal.

AI might be a bubble, but at least there are people (who value their reputation) who decided on the investments, and in the end if (when?) things don't work out with these insane bets they will be the ones looking stupid, not some faceless committee.

and sometimes we feel that feedback cycles are too short (managers only think in quarters) but here we have a pretty long cycle for this moonshot, and yes, this leads to bonkers numbers (and real systemic risks, which need to be managed - and alas neither laws and regulations nor the lawmakers and the regulators are even remotely capable and ready for managing this)

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#579

Post by pas »

artk42 wrote: post #521
cs702 wrote: post #21

Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…

Thanks, this is an amazing historical note! Will learn in detail. My intuition advises that efficient antimonopoly is the battle we are losing..

also note that having arbitrary lines on maps led to very inefficient banking and healthcare (and telecom) markets

it's protectionism, and led to ~50 monopolies (or oligopolies) instead

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#580

Post by Eisenstein »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #572
Eisenstein wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an empirical fact that in all the years from the founding to the passage of the 17th Amendment the US federal government was much smaller than it quickly became in the years following its passage, so all of the available evidence is consistent with the theory. This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago. > Moreover, the mech…

> This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago. We currently have evidence of what happened both before and after, but the before was ~100 (not 300) years ago. If you want evidence from modern day you would have to actually repeal it. Shall we give it a go? > That state legislators wouldn't collude with the executive due to party af…

None of your arguments are as logical or self-evident as you assume they are, and anyone who walks through them will figure that out. But baking them in as implicit through a historical example can get them through a lot of defenses and that is what I was warning about. That was my point.
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