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An economy can be based around digging holes and moving the dirt between them, if that's what people wanted to happen. We literally pulled an entire nation out

An economy can be based around digging holes and moving the dirt between them, if that's what people wanted to happen. We literally pulled an entire nation out of a depression in order to go to war. Fighting a war has to be the least "productive" activity imaginable for humans to engage in, yet we did it and it managed to do the opposite of break the nation's back. The only criteria is that lots of people need it and are willing to pay for it. The second bit doesn't even have to be economic, a society could simply make it a matter of politics and allocate tax revenue towards it.

temp-dude-87844 10y ago
As an aside, fighting a war is actually one of the most productive things a society can do: it stimulates government spending and gambles that some of it will be offset by lasting post-war prosperity and the spoils of war. You can potentially eliminate unfavorable competition, acquire more land or resources open for exploitation, raid materiel and intellectual patents, all the while reducing the size of the working class and its proportion to the wealth-owning classes.
- wolf550e 10y ago
  Only in the country-vs-country zero-sum-game sense. In the grow-the-pie global-economy sense, war is a broken window fallacy.
tptacek 10y ago
If the holes are being put to productive use by the people demanding them, then sure. Given how little HN likely understands about agriculture, I'd be wary of trying to use "hole digging" as a kind of absurd example. But this also illustrates how dumb it is to single out elder care as somehow economically unproductive. We pay for elder care because we desperately want our elder family members to be comfortable. If there were labor shortages in this sector, we'd be taking on the work ourselves, at substantial opportunity cost. It's one of the great things about market economies that this work can instead be done by people who have chosen to specialize in it --- they do the work more effectively, at lower cost, and derive more personal satisfaction from doing it. There is a really weird undercurrent to this subthread that I find unsettling. The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".
- metaphorm 10y ago
  > The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy". that's not what I said and you're now arguing against a strawman. I said that retraining of displaced laborers to be elder-care service providers is moving in the direction of gerontracracy, and that if the trend is extrapolated enough (perhaps to the point of absurdity, but I was making a speculative point, not a comment about the current state of things) then it is easy to imagine funneling young people into that industry as alternative job opportunities are less and less available. that would be gerontocracy.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Wider availability of services for older people as a response to market pressures does not "move us in the direction of gerontocracy". The market "funnels people" towards elder care services by increasing the relative compensation for the field, and by making the jobs easier to obtain, which makes the jobs more attractive.

temp-dude-87844 10y ago

As an aside, fighting a war is actually one of the most productive things a society can do: it stimulates government spending and gambles that some of it will be offset by lasting post-war prosperity and the spoils of war. You can potentially eliminate unfavorable competition, acquire more land or resources open for exploitation, raid materiel and intellectual patents, all the while reducing the size of the working class and its proportion to the wealth-owning classes.

wolf550e 10y ago
Only in the country-vs-country zero-sum-game sense. In the grow-the-pie global-economy sense, war is a broken window fallacy.

tptacek 10y ago

If the holes are being put to productive use by the people demanding them, then sure. Given how little HN likely understands about agriculture, I'd be wary of trying to use "hole digging" as a kind of absurd example. But this also illustrates how dumb it is to single out elder care as somehow economically unproductive. We pay for elder care because we desperately want our elder family members to be comfortable. If there were labor shortages in this sector, we'd be taking on the work ourselves, at substantial opportunity cost. It's one of the great things about market economies that this work can instead be done by people who have chosen to specialize in it --- they do the work more effectively, at lower cost, and derive more personal satisfaction from doing it. There is a really weird undercurrent to this subthread that I find unsettling. The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".

metaphorm 10y ago
> The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy". that's not what I said and you're now arguing against a strawman. I said that retraining of displaced laborers to be elder-care service providers is moving in the direction of gerontracracy, and that if the trend is extrapolated enough (perhaps to the point of absurdity, but I was making a speculative point, not a comment about the current state of things) then it is easy to imagine funneling young people into that industry as alternative job opportunities are less and less available. that would be gerontocracy.
- tptacek 10y ago
  Wider availability of services for older people as a response to market pressures does not "move us in the direction of gerontocracy". The market "funnels people" towards elder care services by increasing the relative compensation for the field, and by making the jobs easier to obtain, which makes the jobs more attractive.