5 ms·

> Allocating labor on the basis of whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term turns out to be an unintelligent way to strate

> Allocating labor on the basis of whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term turns out to be an unintelligent way to strategise an economy. And yet, this turns out to be the most succesful strategy civilization has used so far.

mordocai 10y ago
I don't know if the data is there to make that claim.
- merpnderp 10y ago
  Just the Chinese and Indian cases seem more than enough data to make this case. Both economies stagnate behind the world trend until they open up free markets, at which point their economies explode and a billion people are lifted out of abject poverty nearly overnight. There is an arguable case for strong welfare states, but true socialism has literal mountains of evidence against it.
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    China and India are heavily state-managed and in no sense are they genuine laissez-faire free markets. China still thinks of itself as Communist. True socialism - on the soft European model - has literally mountains of evidence for it. The basic problem is maximising productive - i.e. innovative and practical - activity, and not allowing the economy to financialise, which replaces actual activity with meaningless proxy casino activity. Capitalism on its own concentrates wealth and chokes off its own air supply. Government management on its own ossifies into bureaucracy and oligarchy. There's a sweet spot between the two where government provides stable markets, seeds R&D, and prevents excessive concentration of wealth and power, but talented and inventive individuals are still rewarded for talent and invention, and the cost of entry for new business ideas is as low as possible.
nostrademons 10y ago
Well, technically allocating them based on whether stock owners can profit in the long term is the most successful strategy civilization has used so far. It's just that to survive to the long term you have to get through the short and medium term, where a lot of froth and misallocation happens. (This is not unique to this point in history, BTW - during the Rennaissance-era Age of Exploration and Second Industrial Revolution, there were also massive speculative bubbles, ventures that didn't work out, misallocation of capital, and outright fraudulent schemes. Most of them were swept away in the periodic financial panics. One way of looking at the situation today is that you have governments who are determined to avoid a panic at all costs, but the process of panics & financial crises is what sweeps short-term-oriented people out of the market, so without them they can offload the costs of short-term thinking onto the taxpayers.)
- paavokoya 10y ago
  >you have governments who are determined to avoid a panic at all costs, but the process of panics & financial crises is what sweeps short-term-oriented people out of the market Exactly, which turns these "short term bubbles and money-grabbing schemes" into long term institutionalized parasitic organizations which slowly erode the foundation for small business. A healthy forest sees many small forest fires to clean out the dead brush. Without these small fires, a major fire event can wipe out a forest.
asimjalis 10y ago
This argument was true for every civilizational strategy until it was not successful. “Why build pyramids? Because it is the most successful civilizational strategy used so far.”
oconnore 10y ago
I think you are mis-attributing our current trajectory. Most of the scientific developments that are now powering the US knowledge economy came out of government (ARPA, etc.) funded labs. Allocating R&D funds based strictly on "whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term" is relatively new in the US (although you could argue it was the norm before we became a superpower). Our most exciting projects still come from outside that model -- crazy billionaires that want to go to Mars, meager NSF/NASA budgets, and things that mutually benefit Defense/DARPA and the economy.
- refurb 10y ago
  The OP was talking about labor allocation and you're talking about R&D allocation.
  - scottlocklin 10y ago
    What's the difference?
  - oconnore 10y ago
    I think that increasing R&D allocation increases labor demand, both within those projects, and from capital investments that are derived from them. I think that investors are yet to demonstrate that they are capable of valuing the sorts of large scale (historically government funded) R&D projects that have been fruitful in the past.
fucking_tragedy 10y ago
Colonizing, raping and pillaging worked pretty well for the Vikings. Hell, it worked out pretty well for a lot of other civilizations, too.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ahoy 10y ago
And until modern medicine came about, leeches were the most successful medical strategy.
jfoutz 10y ago
Well... we don't have a real long track record and past performance isn't indicative of future gains. I agree with you, but we are kind of speeding into the unknown. Which like any adventure is risky. Hunter gatherers were real stable for a long long time. One person, or even a fairly large group of people couldn't cause much trouble. We're moving much faster, which again i think is cool, but it's much riskier. An obvious one, there are enough nuclear weapons to wipe out humans in a few hours. I don't think nuclear war is coming any time soon, but we've only been at this 'high tech' stuff (i'm picking agriculture, neolithic revolution) for about 10,000 years. Wealth of nations is around 250 years old - traders are much older of course, but 10k seems like a good upper bound. Can we avoid nuking ourselves for 10k years? I sure hope so. Anyway, there are existential risks, and other, less dangerous things like world wars that have the potential to be much worse than a guy with a club. Also, there's not much incentive in the system to not wreck the system. For, example "The big short" is a fun movie. "Too Big To Fail" is a much more in depth look. I guess, my point is, That strategy is a powerful tool. It's not a pat answer to all the world's woes. It's wise to treat it like any other dangerous piece of equipment. Be aware, be alert. It's ok to take a little more time with power tools to avoid cutting off an arm.
- eric_h 10y ago
  > It's ok to take a little more time with power tools to avoid cutting off an arm. This is what I find interesting about the Amish. They are not, as I understand things, truly anti-technology, they are anti-adopting every new thing as soon as it's available. I wonder if they're the ones who are going to have the last laugh if/when this house of cards tumbles (although in all likelihood it'll probably be the Sentinelese).
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    I like to think of them as the trailing edge of the late-adopter curve. They consider the social and lifestyle impacts of technology. Which can be quite profound. There are also differences among Amish settlements, with the Swartzentruber Amish, of Michigan, the most conservative: http://amishamerica.com/who-are-the-swartzentruber-amish/ http://amishamerica.com/who-are-the-swartzentruber-amish/ (The site generally has a great deal of information on the Amish.)
karllager 10y ago
I always wonder, how people can associate effectiveness, success and other positive things with the current developments. The price of the progress, as we experience it today, is enormous. Exhaustion of natural resources, severe climate change, not to mention societal costs. We see a rapid rise in violence across continents and this seems to be just the beginning. I can easily see the western world turning into totalitarian cyber-police states within the next ten years, just to protect against all those humans who are left disillusioned, without jobs, perspectives or with bullshit jobs and basically a life, that some of them will happily trade away for some moments of meaning, when they detonate themselves in a crowded place. May I ask, is this what you call success?
- Bjartr 10y ago
  Can you provide more detail about the rapid rise in violence across continents you mentioned? Is that measuring it in absolute terms or proportional to the population it occurs in?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- dsylexicus 10y ago
  exhaustion of natural resources? hmm. natural resources are INFINITE by definition since the universe is infinite. what is limited are "reserves". panicking about reserves dwindling is what Tim Worstall calls the 'No breakfast fallacy' we dont look at our refrigerator which is running out of milk and worry that the world is running out of milk. we know that there is an entire ecosystem of farmers , truckers and supermarkets producing milk for us. the confusion between reserves an resources is common
  - FooHentai 10y ago
    The clear difference being that in your example, you don't need a large reserve of milk as fuel and materials to reach the next available milk supply. Natural resources which are accessible are being consumed at high rates, and access to further resources will likely require the use of existing reserves put toward that goal.
elihu 10y ago
The most successful strategy civilization has used thus far is to allow market forces to operate in that portion of the market where business can be profitable and healthy competition encourages good behavior, and to tax wealth and provide government jobs to do those things that need to be done, but either aren't profitable or the private sector would not be able to provide adequate quality of service for everyone that needs it. Many political arguments arise from disagreements over whether a given task is best handled by market or the government, but there are few who would prefer to live in either a pure government-run society or a pure unregulated free market with no government services.
astazangasta 10y ago
>And yet, this turns out to be the most succesful strategy civilization has used so far. The period in which the American economy was growing most was when it was also most organized. The post-war consensus was about scientific management of industry and the economy, not about free markets and profit maximization; that dogma only took hold in the 80s (both in business schools and in politics), and it has been a steady downhill since then from the relatively sunnier period of high-level management. The American economy was heavily planned through most of that period (mostly through the military), and the beleaguered stump remains in the form of public funds for research and development flowing into private industry (the Internet, biomedical research, semiconductors, defense, etc). What short-term profit mostly succeeded at doing was producing the largest and most rapid accumulation of private wealth and power the world has seen in a century. http://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/newshour/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Urban.WealthPercentiles1-1024x490.jpg http://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/newshour/wp-content/upl... Non-sequitur, I also found this, one of the coolest figures I've seen in a while: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/shirakawa/Global%20Wealth%209.jpg http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...
- reality_czech 10y ago
  A lot of people look back on the period from 1945 to 1970 as a golden age of growth under a more left-leaning economic regime than today. It sounds like you are one them, based on your "let's organize the economy" enthusiasm. The problem with that is that the post-WWII period was much different than today. Pretty much every other advanced economy besides the US had been economically devastated by a long and bloody war. The US didn't have to be competitive to compete against a Germany or a Japan where people were boiling shoes to eat the leather or catching rats for meat. They only had to be relatively competent. Also, both before and after WWII, scientists flocked to the US, fleeing from repressive and doomed regimes. US R&D got a huge boost from these people. Another question is just how "organized" the economy actually was back then. Most of the really complicated regulations like Sarbannes-Oxley were still far in the future in the 1940s. By the time the EPA was created in the 1970s, the US was already well on its way to stagflation and economic incontience. Tax rates looked high back then, but just like today, most truly wealthy people found ways around paying them. Of course the government has a role to play in funding research and moderating some of the excesses of capitalism. But to argue that some bureaucrat can just push a button and bring back the golden years of the 1950s is a leftist fantasy.

mordocai 10y ago

I don't know if the data is there to make that claim.

merpnderp 10y ago
Just the Chinese and Indian cases seem more than enough data to make this case. Both economies stagnate behind the world trend until they open up free markets, at which point their economies explode and a billion people are lifted out of abject poverty nearly overnight. There is an arguable case for strong welfare states, but true socialism has literal mountains of evidence against it.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  China and India are heavily state-managed and in no sense are they genuine laissez-faire free markets. China still thinks of itself as Communist. True socialism - on the soft European model - has literally mountains of evidence for it. The basic problem is maximising productive - i.e. innovative and practical - activity, and not allowing the economy to financialise, which replaces actual activity with meaningless proxy casino activity. Capitalism on its own concentrates wealth and chokes off its own air supply. Government management on its own ossifies into bureaucracy and oligarchy. There's a sweet spot between the two where government provides stable markets, seeds R&D, and prevents excessive concentration of wealth and power, but talented and inventive individuals are still rewarded for talent and invention, and the cost of entry for new business ideas is as low as possible.

nostrademons 10y ago

Well, technically allocating them based on whether stock owners can profit in the long term is the most successful strategy civilization has used so far. It's just that to survive to the long term you have to get through the short and medium term, where a lot of froth and misallocation happens. (This is not unique to this point in history, BTW - during the Rennaissance-era Age of Exploration and Second Industrial Revolution, there were also massive speculative bubbles, ventures that didn't work out, misallocation of capital, and outright fraudulent schemes. Most of them were swept away in the periodic financial panics. One way of looking at the situation today is that you have governments who are determined to avoid a panic at all costs, but the process of panics & financial crises is what sweeps short-term-oriented people out of the market, so without them they can offload the costs of short-term thinking onto the taxpayers.)

paavokoya 10y ago
>you have governments who are determined to avoid a panic at all costs, but the process of panics & financial crises is what sweeps short-term-oriented people out of the market Exactly, which turns these "short term bubbles and money-grabbing schemes" into long term institutionalized parasitic organizations which slowly erode the foundation for small business. A healthy forest sees many small forest fires to clean out the dead brush. Without these small fires, a major fire event can wipe out a forest.

asimjalis 10y ago

This argument was true for every civilizational strategy until it was not successful. “Why build pyramids? Because it is the most successful civilizational strategy used so far.”

oconnore 10y ago

I think you are mis-attributing our current trajectory. Most of the scientific developments that are now powering the US knowledge economy came out of government (ARPA, etc.) funded labs. Allocating R&D funds based strictly on "whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term" is relatively new in the US (although you could argue it was the norm before we became a superpower). Our most exciting projects still come from outside that model -- crazy billionaires that want to go to Mars, meager NSF/NASA budgets, and things that mutually benefit Defense/DARPA and the economy.

refurb 10y ago
The OP was talking about labor allocation and you're talking about R&D allocation.
- scottlocklin 10y ago
  What's the difference?
- oconnore 10y ago
  I think that increasing R&D allocation increases labor demand, both within those projects, and from capital investments that are derived from them. I think that investors are yet to demonstrate that they are capable of valuing the sorts of large scale (historically government funded) R&D projects that have been fruitful in the past.

fucking_tragedy 10y ago

Colonizing, raping and pillaging worked pretty well for the Vikings. Hell, it worked out pretty well for a lot of other civilizations, too.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ahoy 10y ago

And until modern medicine came about, leeches were the most successful medical strategy.

jfoutz 10y ago

Well... we don't have a real long track record and past performance isn't indicative of future gains. I agree with you, but we are kind of speeding into the unknown. Which like any adventure is risky. Hunter gatherers were real stable for a long long time. One person, or even a fairly large group of people couldn't cause much trouble. We're moving much faster, which again i think is cool, but it's much riskier. An obvious one, there are enough nuclear weapons to wipe out humans in a few hours. I don't think nuclear war is coming any time soon, but we've only been at this 'high tech' stuff (i'm picking agriculture, neolithic revolution) for about 10,000 years. Wealth of nations is around 250 years old - traders are much older of course, but 10k seems like a good upper bound. Can we avoid nuking ourselves for 10k years? I sure hope so. Anyway, there are existential risks, and other, less dangerous things like world wars that have the potential to be much worse than a guy with a club. Also, there's not much incentive in the system to not wreck the system. For, example "The big short" is a fun movie. "Too Big To Fail" is a much more in depth look. I guess, my point is, That strategy is a powerful tool. It's not a pat answer to all the world's woes. It's wise to treat it like any other dangerous piece of equipment. Be aware, be alert. It's ok to take a little more time with power tools to avoid cutting off an arm.

eric_h 10y ago
> It's ok to take a little more time with power tools to avoid cutting off an arm. This is what I find interesting about the Amish. They are not, as I understand things, truly anti-technology, they are anti-adopting every new thing as soon as it's available. I wonder if they're the ones who are going to have the last laugh if/when this house of cards tumbles (although in all likelihood it'll probably be the Sentinelese).
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I like to think of them as the trailing edge of the late-adopter curve. They consider the social and lifestyle impacts of technology. Which can be quite profound. There are also differences among Amish settlements, with the Swartzentruber Amish, of Michigan, the most conservative: http://amishamerica.com/who-are-the-swartzentruber-amish/ http://amishamerica.com/who-are-the-swartzentruber-amish/ (The site generally has a great deal of information on the Amish.)

karllager 10y ago

I always wonder, how people can associate effectiveness, success and other positive things with the current developments. The price of the progress, as we experience it today, is enormous. Exhaustion of natural resources, severe climate change, not to mention societal costs. We see a rapid rise in violence across continents and this seems to be just the beginning. I can easily see the western world turning into totalitarian cyber-police states within the next ten years, just to protect against all those humans who are left disillusioned, without jobs, perspectives or with bullshit jobs and basically a life, that some of them will happily trade away for some moments of meaning, when they detonate themselves in a crowded place. May I ask, is this what you call success?

Bjartr 10y ago
Can you provide more detail about the rapid rise in violence across continents you mentioned? Is that measuring it in absolute terms or proportional to the population it occurs in?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
dsylexicus 10y ago
exhaustion of natural resources? hmm. natural resources are INFINITE by definition since the universe is infinite. what is limited are "reserves". panicking about reserves dwindling is what Tim Worstall calls the 'No breakfast fallacy' we dont look at our refrigerator which is running out of milk and worry that the world is running out of milk. we know that there is an entire ecosystem of farmers , truckers and supermarkets producing milk for us. the confusion between reserves an resources is common
- FooHentai 10y ago
  The clear difference being that in your example, you don't need a large reserve of milk as fuel and materials to reach the next available milk supply. Natural resources which are accessible are being consumed at high rates, and access to further resources will likely require the use of existing reserves put toward that goal.

elihu 10y ago

The most successful strategy civilization has used thus far is to allow market forces to operate in that portion of the market where business can be profitable and healthy competition encourages good behavior, and to tax wealth and provide government jobs to do those things that need to be done, but either aren't profitable or the private sector would not be able to provide adequate quality of service for everyone that needs it. Many political arguments arise from disagreements over whether a given task is best handled by market or the government, but there are few who would prefer to live in either a pure government-run society or a pure unregulated free market with no government services.

astazangasta 10y ago

>And yet, this turns out to be the most succesful strategy civilization has used so far. The period in which the American economy was growing most was when it was also most organized. The post-war consensus was about scientific management of industry and the economy, not about free markets and profit maximization; that dogma only took hold in the 80s (both in business schools and in politics), and it has been a steady downhill since then from the relatively sunnier period of high-level management. The American economy was heavily planned through most of that period (mostly through the military), and the beleaguered stump remains in the form of public funds for research and development flowing into private industry (the Internet, biomedical research, semiconductors, defense, etc). What short-term profit mostly succeeded at doing was producing the largest and most rapid accumulation of private wealth and power the world has seen in a century. http://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/newshour/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Urban.WealthPercentiles1-1024x490.jpg http://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/newshour/wp-content/upl... Non-sequitur, I also found this, one of the coolest figures I've seen in a while: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/shirakawa/Global%20Wealth%209.jpg http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...

reality_czech 10y ago
A lot of people look back on the period from 1945 to 1970 as a golden age of growth under a more left-leaning economic regime than today. It sounds like you are one them, based on your "let's organize the economy" enthusiasm. The problem with that is that the post-WWII period was much different than today. Pretty much every other advanced economy besides the US had been economically devastated by a long and bloody war. The US didn't have to be competitive to compete against a Germany or a Japan where people were boiling shoes to eat the leather or catching rats for meat. They only had to be relatively competent. Also, both before and after WWII, scientists flocked to the US, fleeing from repressive and doomed regimes. US R&D got a huge boost from these people. Another question is just how "organized" the economy actually was back then. Most of the really complicated regulations like Sarbannes-Oxley were still far in the future in the 1940s. By the time the EPA was created in the 1970s, the US was already well on its way to stagflation and economic incontience. Tax rates looked high back then, but just like today, most truly wealthy people found ways around paying them. Of course the government has a role to play in funding research and moderating some of the excesses of capitalism. But to argue that some bureaucrat can just push a button and bring back the golden years of the 1950s is a leftist fantasy.