7 ms·

Perhaps if we expand the meaning of Keyensian "Government investment in infrastructure" to include human infrastructure and provide stimulus, or at least a stab

Perhaps if we expand the meaning of Keyensian "Government investment in infrastructure" to include human infrastructure and provide stimulus, or at least a stable platform, for the actual nodes of demand (the people) we can get back to optimal growth faster. The idea that we can have a quarter of the people or more (the poor and working poor) in a state of playing zero sum or negative sum games -- exploitative economic relationships -- non-convex factors in what should, ideally, be a convex efficiency curve, and still reach market efficiency is silly. We just reach the state where the convex portions of our economy cannot compensate for those massive destructions or stagnations of value during times of contraction so it is easier to shake those results out of the aggregate. But that destruction of value happens even in times of relative prosperity and overall growth and it would be wise to whittle down the problem while is relatively painless. Take pain and death out of the equation for the people through direct stimulus. Create a market where everyone must be enticed with value-add to trade. Watch demand bubble up and create the strongest growth possible.

themartorana 11y ago
Direct stimulus in what form? Guaranteed minimum income? The next stimulus really needs to go directly to the people, not banks.
- clavalle 11y ago
  Guaranteed minimum income, reverse taxation, or merely a solid welfare program that provides solid housing, food, and medical care -- basically anything that someone would die or be in pain without...these are all possible solutions. I'd advocate for an experimental approach with smaller populations with different possible solutions, ratcheting them up as they are shown to be successful and sustainable.
  - at-fates-hands 11y ago
    >> Guaranteed minimum income, reverse taxation, or merely a solid welfare program that provides solid housing, food, and medical care The only problem with this is how this is impossible to scale to proper levels in the US. This works great in smaller economies (like you're advocating) like Scandinavian countries where you have a much smaller population and it's easy to support a few million people. You also have to take into account the Scandinavian cultural norms as well. When you have over 300 million? As we've seen in recent years, when you institute measures like this it actually creates more dependency and self reliance on the government - not something I would think you'd want to advocate on such a large scale.
    - geogra4 11y ago
      We are all dependent on government in at least some ways. Unless you don't drive on public roads, don't send your kids to public schools, and don't use US Mail.
      - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
        It would be nice if we could have ... global understanding of public goods.
      - xrange 11y ago
        Here's a great opportunity for a little informal HN poll. When was the last time you used the postal service to send a letter? Sure, I've got a box that gets junk mail every day, but the only time I send anything are one-off bills where they don't have an option for on-line payments.
        DanBC 11y ago
        I post mail about twice a week.
      - nationcrafting 11y ago
        So, if you're looking at .gov as a service provider, why give it a monopoly on providing those services if that makes its users dependent on it? Roads may be a little tricky, of course, but some services like US Mail could surely do with a few competitors to bring prices down and service up.
        AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        UPS and FedEx. They don't do individual letters, of course, but they compete with the US Mail on packages, and compete by offering better service, not on price.
    - clavalle 11y ago
      I tend to agree with you when it comes to Guaranteed Minimum Income. Reverse taxation is a bit more murky. And I absolutely think a solid welfare program is possible -- we are within a stone's throw of that as things stand now we'd just need to streamline things a bit. Also, your concern is why I'd advocate for a small pop to large pop experimental approach. I don't think government dependence is a prima facie bad thing. If we assume that people are mostly rational and can make decisions that are best for themselves the government dependence problem would work itself out. We have a problem with it, now, because it is in a persons best interest to step out of the zero sum and negative sum games that the poor are forced into for, sometimes, decades or lifetimes. But if we ensure people have just enough guaranteed assistance to not starve, go homeless, or die from lack of medical care we can ensure that the vast majority of transactions -- including trading one's time to create value for an employer -- are positive sum transactions. People will tend to make the most of that if we assume a basic level of self interest and rationality. Government assistance would be a steady state of mere survival while the market would offer positive growth and an improvement of one's condition.
  - jchrisa 11y ago
    The way I think about this, is that currency is a form of information. If we want an optimal economy, we want everyone to have table stakes at least, so we can get more information. I don't see how to get universal participation in the information flows without something like basic income. I like your concave / convex image, thanks for that.
    - Retra 11y ago
      Another way to think if it is that money is a measure of the ability to overcome barriers to cooperation. (That is, you don't need money at all if everyone were already cooperating with each other.) This would imply that our economic measurements are inaccurate if they don't account for the situations where people cooperate without exchanging money (for instance, raising a child.) Thus maximizing money flows in the current economy only maximizes cooperation where otherwise it would not happen, not cooperation in general, and you run the risk of optimizing for behaviors that people are actively against (and don't want to cooperate), while penalizing behaviors that people like (where they would cooperate for very little.) You can end up paying people to fight each other, while failing to pay them to help each other.
      - finance-geek 11y ago
        Very true, but how else would you do it? How would you pay them to help each other?
        Retra 11y ago
        I don't know if there is a good way to deal with this directly, but there are a couple ways to deal with it indirectly. Basic income is one such method, though you could also pay people for performing civic responsibilities or charitable work. (Some of this already exists, of course.)
      - jchrisa 11y ago
        Great way to sum up the problem with market-for-everything ideology. The valuable things that people do often aren't transactionalized but sometimes they are commemorated. I'm slowly working on an idea for an alternate cryptocurrency based on commemorating ordinary human moments (instead of CPU time as the source of scarcity). A couple of articles on the project: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cryptocurrency-world/ http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cry...
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    > I'd advocate for an experimental approach with smaller populations with different possible solutions, ratcheting them up as they are shown to be successful and sustainable. That sounds like exactly the kind of situation where different states try different things, then the Federal government does something after it sees which ones worked. This approach has been something of a pattern for trying new things in the US.
    - clavalle 11y ago
      Yes, and one of the secret ingredients to the success of the US. But as decades pass, people seem to want to skip those first steps and jump right to the Federal level and refuse to budge if they cannot get the entire nation to make some leap or another with them. That evolving 'Everybody or Nobody' attitude is killing one of the strengths of the US system.
- RobertoG 11y ago
  Some of the Modern Monetary Theory supporters propose a 'Job Guarantee': http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/job_guarantee/JobGuarantee.cfm http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/job_guarantee/JobGuarantee...
  - clavalle 11y ago
    The problem with a job guarantee is that you're forcing people to sell their time in order to live. This is nearly the definition of an exploitative economic relationship and borders on state run slavery.
    - RobertoG 11y ago
      Just wanted to point that the idea is to offer an alternative job, not to force nobody to do anything. Currently, in a lot of countries, unemployment payment just run for a while and only if you worked before. Then, if you can't find a job you have a serious problem. Job guarantee also "force" a minimum wage in the economy without need of big controls. It can be though as another automatic stabilizer. Anyway, maybe you are right. I haven't made up my mind about it yet.
  - rhololkeolke 11y ago
    The problem I've always had when "job guarantees" come up is what about those that can't work? Be it from disability, age, or something else. Would we also need a separate welfare system in place for these people? If so why not just have one system like basic income that provides for everyone. The other problem I have is that these are most likely to be busy work jobs. With something like basic income you could spend your time doing whatever you want. Anything from nothing, to art, to working for a company. I don't know if basic income has any major downsides (I'm not an economist by any means), but to me guaranteed jobs seem like a worse alternative.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
I think you're (not deliberately) beating around the bush. The problem is not that we're only now becoming clever or wise enough to implement demand-driving economic policies in a time of secular demand shortages, but that, for decades now, the very zero-sum and negative-sum games we so deplore (exploitation of the weak, exploitation of the public purse, freeriding on the public purse, rentiering of all kinds) have been treated as the intended goal of economic policy. Starting in the 1970s, Western societies' economic planners set out to hold inflation down, at all costs, including high unemployment. They did this because they were confronted with stagflation, oil crises, labor militancy, and a crisis of corporate profitability, and they naively believed that deflationary depressions were a solved problem. They succeeded, and today's economy is their program of governance gone horribly right.
- clavalle 11y ago
  Time to reevaluate the goals, then, eh?
  - laotzu 11y ago
    The explicit goals of our sociopolitical economy as stated in the 1913 Federal Reserve Act are (paraphrased) as follows: 1. Maximum employment 2. Stable prices 3. Moderate interest rates I'd say all of these should be reevaluated, most importantly #'s 1 and 2. Instead of "putting country X back to work" we should consider the current state of automative abundance and the basic economic principle of "too many cooks in the kitchen". So instead of maximum employment, maybe we should think about minimum employment? #2 should also be reconsidered in light of exponential growth of our technology and the resulting ephemeralization. We are producing goods and services better, faster, and cheaper at exponential rates. So prices should tend to reflect this reality, and diminish, not stay the same.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      "How can we provide the maximum quality of life to everyone with the minimum amount of jobs? And what level of resources can we commit to automating away the rest of jobs in this century?"
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
Is this even remotely doable? I have to be honest - I don't like the idea of government playing the role of national HR department.
- clavalle 11y ago
  National HR department?
jsprogrammer 11y ago
>optimal growth Please define.

themartorana 11y ago

Direct stimulus in what form? Guaranteed minimum income? The next stimulus really needs to go directly to the people, not banks.

clavalle 11y ago
Guaranteed minimum income, reverse taxation, or merely a solid welfare program that provides solid housing, food, and medical care -- basically anything that someone would die or be in pain without...these are all possible solutions. I'd advocate for an experimental approach with smaller populations with different possible solutions, ratcheting them up as they are shown to be successful and sustainable.
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  >> Guaranteed minimum income, reverse taxation, or merely a solid welfare program that provides solid housing, food, and medical care The only problem with this is how this is impossible to scale to proper levels in the US. This works great in smaller economies (like you're advocating) like Scandinavian countries where you have a much smaller population and it's easy to support a few million people. You also have to take into account the Scandinavian cultural norms as well. When you have over 300 million? As we've seen in recent years, when you institute measures like this it actually creates more dependency and self reliance on the government - not something I would think you'd want to advocate on such a large scale.
  - geogra4 11y ago
    We are all dependent on government in at least some ways. Unless you don't drive on public roads, don't send your kids to public schools, and don't use US Mail.
    - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      It would be nice if we could have ... global understanding of public goods.
    - xrange 11y ago
      Here's a great opportunity for a little informal HN poll. When was the last time you used the postal service to send a letter? Sure, I've got a box that gets junk mail every day, but the only time I send anything are one-off bills where they don't have an option for on-line payments.
      - DanBC 11y ago
        I post mail about twice a week.
    - nationcrafting 11y ago
      So, if you're looking at .gov as a service provider, why give it a monopoly on providing those services if that makes its users dependent on it? Roads may be a little tricky, of course, but some services like US Mail could surely do with a few competitors to bring prices down and service up.
      - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        UPS and FedEx. They don't do individual letters, of course, but they compete with the US Mail on packages, and compete by offering better service, not on price.
  - clavalle 11y ago
    I tend to agree with you when it comes to Guaranteed Minimum Income. Reverse taxation is a bit more murky. And I absolutely think a solid welfare program is possible -- we are within a stone's throw of that as things stand now we'd just need to streamline things a bit. Also, your concern is why I'd advocate for a small pop to large pop experimental approach. I don't think government dependence is a prima facie bad thing. If we assume that people are mostly rational and can make decisions that are best for themselves the government dependence problem would work itself out. We have a problem with it, now, because it is in a persons best interest to step out of the zero sum and negative sum games that the poor are forced into for, sometimes, decades or lifetimes. But if we ensure people have just enough guaranteed assistance to not starve, go homeless, or die from lack of medical care we can ensure that the vast majority of transactions -- including trading one's time to create value for an employer -- are positive sum transactions. People will tend to make the most of that if we assume a basic level of self interest and rationality. Government assistance would be a steady state of mere survival while the market would offer positive growth and an improvement of one's condition.
- jchrisa 11y ago
  The way I think about this, is that currency is a form of information. If we want an optimal economy, we want everyone to have table stakes at least, so we can get more information. I don't see how to get universal participation in the information flows without something like basic income. I like your concave / convex image, thanks for that.
  - Retra 11y ago
    Another way to think if it is that money is a measure of the ability to overcome barriers to cooperation. (That is, you don't need money at all if everyone were already cooperating with each other.) This would imply that our economic measurements are inaccurate if they don't account for the situations where people cooperate without exchanging money (for instance, raising a child.) Thus maximizing money flows in the current economy only maximizes cooperation where otherwise it would not happen, not cooperation in general, and you run the risk of optimizing for behaviors that people are actively against (and don't want to cooperate), while penalizing behaviors that people like (where they would cooperate for very little.) You can end up paying people to fight each other, while failing to pay them to help each other.
    - finance-geek 11y ago
      Very true, but how else would you do it? How would you pay them to help each other?
      - Retra 11y ago
        I don't know if there is a good way to deal with this directly, but there are a couple ways to deal with it indirectly. Basic income is one such method, though you could also pay people for performing civic responsibilities or charitable work. (Some of this already exists, of course.)
    - jchrisa 11y ago
      Great way to sum up the problem with market-for-everything ideology. The valuable things that people do often aren't transactionalized but sometimes they are commemorated. I'm slowly working on an idea for an alternate cryptocurrency based on commemorating ordinary human moments (instead of CPU time as the source of scarcity). A couple of articles on the project: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cryptocurrency-world/ http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cry...
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  > I'd advocate for an experimental approach with smaller populations with different possible solutions, ratcheting them up as they are shown to be successful and sustainable. That sounds like exactly the kind of situation where different states try different things, then the Federal government does something after it sees which ones worked. This approach has been something of a pattern for trying new things in the US.
  - clavalle 11y ago
    Yes, and one of the secret ingredients to the success of the US. But as decades pass, people seem to want to skip those first steps and jump right to the Federal level and refuse to budge if they cannot get the entire nation to make some leap or another with them. That evolving 'Everybody or Nobody' attitude is killing one of the strengths of the US system.
RobertoG 11y ago
Some of the Modern Monetary Theory supporters propose a 'Job Guarantee': http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/job_guarantee/JobGuarantee.cfm http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/job_guarantee/JobGuarantee...
- clavalle 11y ago
  The problem with a job guarantee is that you're forcing people to sell their time in order to live. This is nearly the definition of an exploitative economic relationship and borders on state run slavery.
  - RobertoG 11y ago
    Just wanted to point that the idea is to offer an alternative job, not to force nobody to do anything. Currently, in a lot of countries, unemployment payment just run for a while and only if you worked before. Then, if you can't find a job you have a serious problem. Job guarantee also "force" a minimum wage in the economy without need of big controls. It can be though as another automatic stabilizer. Anyway, maybe you are right. I haven't made up my mind about it yet.
- rhololkeolke 11y ago
  The problem I've always had when "job guarantees" come up is what about those that can't work? Be it from disability, age, or something else. Would we also need a separate welfare system in place for these people? If so why not just have one system like basic income that provides for everyone. The other problem I have is that these are most likely to be busy work jobs. With something like basic income you could spend your time doing whatever you want. Anything from nothing, to art, to working for a company. I don't know if basic income has any major downsides (I'm not an economist by any means), but to me guaranteed jobs seem like a worse alternative.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

I think you're (not deliberately) beating around the bush. The problem is not that we're only now becoming clever or wise enough to implement demand-driving economic policies in a time of secular demand shortages, but that, for decades now, the very zero-sum and negative-sum games we so deplore (exploitation of the weak, exploitation of the public purse, freeriding on the public purse, rentiering of all kinds) have been treated as the intended goal of economic policy. Starting in the 1970s, Western societies' economic planners set out to hold inflation down, at all costs, including high unemployment. They did this because they were confronted with stagflation, oil crises, labor militancy, and a crisis of corporate profitability, and they naively believed that deflationary depressions were a solved problem. They succeeded, and today's economy is their program of governance gone horribly right.

clavalle 11y ago
Time to reevaluate the goals, then, eh?
- laotzu 11y ago
  The explicit goals of our sociopolitical economy as stated in the 1913 Federal Reserve Act are (paraphrased) as follows: 1. Maximum employment 2. Stable prices 3. Moderate interest rates I'd say all of these should be reevaluated, most importantly #'s 1 and 2. Instead of "putting country X back to work" we should consider the current state of automative abundance and the basic economic principle of "too many cooks in the kitchen". So instead of maximum employment, maybe we should think about minimum employment? #2 should also be reconsidered in light of exponential growth of our technology and the resulting ephemeralization. We are producing goods and services better, faster, and cheaper at exponential rates. So prices should tend to reflect this reality, and diminish, not stay the same.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    "How can we provide the maximum quality of life to everyone with the minimum amount of jobs? And what level of resources can we commit to automating away the rest of jobs in this century?"

ArkyBeagle 11y ago

Is this even remotely doable? I have to be honest - I don't like the idea of government playing the role of national HR department.

clavalle 11y ago
National HR department?

jsprogrammer 11y ago

>optimal growth Please define.