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The Demoralization is just Beginning

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Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#81

Post by bodegajed »

jfengel wrote: post #6

For his solutions: "Brain drain" is what we had been doing for the past 80 years or so. It worked great. We're specifically driving people away now. "Gold standard" is an idea every sane economist rejected decades ago.

When I think of macro economics, I always start with "We live in a society" 1. For the Brain Drain, alienation will cause discontent. Politically impossible. Mass-layofs created a weaker consumer demand. Who to create any value for? 2. Gold standard - but not from the current astronomical value of the US dollar.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#82

Post by roenxi »

Finnucane wrote: post #69
roenxi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the 19th century, the US had a more or less continual stream of panics and recessions. In 1932, everyone had to get off the gold standard because there was no mechanism to stop the deflationary death spiral otherwise. Disabling the feedback mechanisms isn't a win. When it had the feedback from continuous minor panics the US built an economy capable of taking on the entire word and winning by a massive margin in…

When gold was money, most people were poor. Gold was mainly good for the aristocracy.

Wealth generation has been growing exponentially for 200, 300 years. Maybe longer. Noting that people in the past had less wealth than today is hardly a point. Anything but the most jaw-droppingly stupid economic systems would have todays population being very wealthy compared to those of yesteryear. Even the experiments in authoritarianism and communism have managed that although they killed a lot of people along the way.

And I find it a bit of an eye roll that the minute the gold standard comes up all the "inequality is out of control now!" people fade into the background and the "back then, everyone was poor except the wealthy" arguments come to the fore. There is an inconsistency in the hive mind. This is a system where we print money and give it to the asset owners. It is visibly stupid.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#83

Post by lxgr »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #65
lxgr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you believe that that somehow makes Bitcoin immune to scams, I have a wallet address where you can send me some right now and I "promise to return you twice the amount to give back to the community"... Note that Bitcoin might have a monetary cap built in, but source code is not actually capable of preventing people from denominating IOUs in it.

I don't think they were rebutting that, it's just that Bitcoin supply is only capped if you consider it the one true currency, but there is no cap on the supply of forks that perform identical function, only difference being adoption. It's like you could take the entire gold supply and put it through a Star Trek replicator, but now you have the job of convincing the world that your vault is full of gold too

But even in a world of only Bitcoin and no way to make alternate coins, all kinds of bad things are still possible, as there is no mechanism to prevent people from starting fractional reserve banking all over. The only way to prevent that is to somehow completely eliminate all trust from all economic activity. Without trust, breach of trust becomes trivially impossible.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#84

Post by MattGaiser »

roenxi wrote: post #44
Finnucane wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the gold standard 'effective' at? In the 19th century, the US had a more or less continual stream of panics and recessions. In 1932, everyone had to get off the gold standard because there was no mechanism to stop the deflationary death spiral otherwise. 'Bretton-Woods' failed to control inflation, and it became possible to arbitrage gold across markets.

> In the 19th century, the US had a more or less continual stream of panics and recessions. In 1932, everyone had to get off the gold standard because there was no mechanism to stop the deflationary death spiral otherwise. Disabling the feedback mechanisms isn't a win. When it had the feedback from continuous minor panics the US built an economy capable of taking on the entire word and winning by a massive margin in…

> US citizens don't even feel particularly fat and comfortable in their own economy.

Do people ever? I know plenty of people who cry poverty, and being “crushed by taxes and inflation”, and about “being a “wage slave” from a boat.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#85

Post by hot_gril »

lxgr wrote: post #28

> Back the dollar by gold [...] The second will prevent a lot of the scams. Oh boy... Bitcoin in many ways is idealized gold (unlike the real one, its supply is actually limited), yet there is no shortage of scams around it. On the contrary, a gold standard would remove one of the most essential tools modern governments have: That of monetary policy. That sounds like a good idea if and only if there's an extreme shor…

The monetary policy we have coerces people into passive investing, creating bubbles. When rates are low, you see bogus "tech" plays like wifi water dispensers, that's the scam the author means. Also makes taxes weird, e.g. why capital gains aren't the same as income (today USD ≠ past USD). Gold standard is wasteful though; Fed could just keep a steady money supply instead.

But it's our scam. The Fed isn't only diluting Americans' money; USD is a world currency, and the US tries to keep it that way by whatever means. So we kinda benefit from that.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#86

Post by baerrie »

The real backing all economies across the world need, and look for in the US dollar, is trust. If we were capable of radical trust across every country in the world in tandem, then ideas of who manufactures more, salary, etc, would evaporate and it would be the timeless question of “how do we all survive and thrive together rather than against one another?”. Trust is a limitless resource that still has to be earned and that is why the US has been so successful, unfortunately we are destroying that trust.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#87

Post by lxgr »

rayiner wrote: post #42
Spartan-S63 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But solution point 1 — brain drain the rest of the world — is an absolutely first rate policy. The fact that the US requires newly-minted PhDs educated here to get a different visa or leave is absolutely self-defeating. We should be welcoming skilled immigration from everywhere. Even better, let them keep their visa and if they revoke their citizenship, we'll relocate their entire family if they come from a repress…

> Brain-draining the world is really the key to cementing American Hegemony in a post-Cold War world. Why should we want that instead of an orderly, well-governed democracy? Do you think people in Sweden or Denmark are upset their countries aren't hegemons? And what would that do to the country? Do you really think that, say, the top 5% of India and China (100 million people) would do better maintaining a democracy t…

My suspicion is that for a lot of people that grew up in and only know the US, there's a sense of impending doom if "American hegemony" ever were to be replaced by something else.

But since there's no real practical experience of how that would actually feel (or rather, how a very high quality of life and subjective happiness are possible without an US salary in many other countries), they instead project from something that does exist in the US: Downward social mobility. (And given how US society treats its less fortunate in many instances, that seems scary to me too.)

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#88

Post by YZF »

ViktorRay wrote: post #4

Steve Jobs told Obama something similar once. The idea was to provide worker visas to engineers who did well and graduated from good American universities. Basically give those workers a visa along with their diploma. Obama thought the idea was intriguing and mentioned it multiple times to his advisors. It never went anywhere though. Brain draining the rest of the world is one of the main reasons for America’s succes…

In Canada it's pretty much like this. If you graduate from a Canadian university you can get a work permit and a path to permanent residence and citizenship. Lots of software engineers around here that took that route.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#89

Post by andsoitis »

> The main product made by the US is the dollar, and it used those manufactured dollars to outsource everything. Most jobs in the US are now basically fake

These two hot takes at the top of the essay really undermines everything else the author might say in the article and brings into question how serious and critical their thinking is.

Several comments here against the article talk about the Chinese economy problems and this article in this morning’s BBC is a pretty good summary of the dynamics and the problems, notwithstanding manufacturing prowess, China is facing: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8x4vj8rj9wo

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#90

Post by erikerikson »

tmn wrote: post #73
zzzeek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seemed like a good article until he went into "back the dollar on gold" and revealed he was a total crackpot, sad

Care to elaborate? It’s thought provoking as a mechanism to reduce all of this zero sum (or even worse, parasitic) effort that dominates our system.

There's a history.

How does the rate we pull gold out of the ground relate to the rate of production and value growth?

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