5 ms·
> I don't want to go back to a world where financial transactions are conducted based on hand-scratched notes and shouting on trading floors. Seemed to work pr
by jff 9y ago
> I don't want to go back to a world where financial transactions are conducted based on hand-scratched notes and shouting on trading floors.
Seemed to work pretty well for a long time.
- maze-le 9y agodoesn't scale up...
- jpttsn 9y agoOur expectations have since increased. I wouldn't want to go back to the GDP I thought was fine ten years ago.
- jimktrains2 9y agoAdjusted for inflation, has it changed that much in 10years? Ditto for median wages.
- sien 9y agoDepends where you were in the world. In 2007, GWP was ~50Trn USD. In 2017, GWP is ~80Trn USD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
- Tuna-Fish 9y agoAbsolutely yes for both. The past decade was one of the most successful ones, if not the most successful one, in global wage increases and poverty reduction. Literally billions of people have been raised to standards of living they didn't dare to dream of a decade ago. Of course, these increases have been concentrated among the poorest people in the world, so you don't see them in the US.
- jimktrains2 9y agoOP said GDP, so I figured he was talking about the US (or another Western country).
- dredmorbius 9y agoAlmost all of that in two countries: China and India. And much of that in China. Which had a hell of a lot more to do with raising the floor than lifting the ceiling. Some of our international globalisation tools assisted in that -- shipping (Maersk included), finance, and realtime shelf-to-factory inventory control. But a lot of it didn't. As Gibson's noted, the future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed. You might also want to ask, from time to time, just which trends truly represent "the future".
- observation 9y agoI'm glad to see you're still here dredmorbius. The facts and statistics in history and economics appear to be 'politically incorrect' for every type of political belief system. Liberal, Left, Libertarian, Conservative, doesn't matter, there's some factor out there that hasn't been incorporated. I think the Google people say something like "unless you're God, bring data".
- dredmorbius 9y agoThanks. Yes, epistemology and ideology seem rather opposed.
- woodandsteel 9y agoThe question is not whether things are good, it is whether it depends on systems that could suddenly go very, very bad.
- gavinpc 9y agoTricky POV shift. Your expectations have increased. We are not reducible to a gross domestic product.
- observation 9y agoGDP, if you are an American, has not been related to wages for a very long time. The median American has not received a real wage increase in over four decades. If you're a libertarian, which some are here, this should worry you.
- Bartweiss 9y agoOne subtle question: how much of that is GDP change is growth, and how much is risk redistribution? Obviously communication efficiency has real advantages. Some of what has been gained is lasting improvement. But humans have a nasty tendency to enforce order on chaotic systems and mistake legibility for growth. Everywhere from forest fires to housing prices, we create systems that delay, but concentrate, risk. Annual brushfires are extinguished, leading to decadal infernos. Credit default swaps enable high default lending at low risk, right up until they don't. I'm darkly suspicious that many of the gains from communications technology, particularly in stock trading, fall into this category. They've allowed us to push concentrate and defer everyday risks, getting us growth over most time windows when the reality is that we've redistributed risk.
- shallot_router 9y agoPeople got by pretty well with sunlight and lamps to light their homes, too.
- qbrass 9y agoPeople still do.
- vkou 9y agoThey do, and candle and lamp-caused fires kill tens of thousands of people every year.
- observation 9y agoAnd they still can with heliostats and fibre optic cables :-)
- rosstex 9y agoHunting and gathering seemed to work pretty well too.
- Meegul 9y agoSimilarly, if it worked so well, why did we all make the switch?
- dredmorbius 9y agoThe rational actor school says it's because we're all rational actors and the alternative outcome was clearly preferable. There are other, and frequently far more convincing, models, which suggest that humans frequently make poor decisions out of near-term exigencies, coercion, underappreciated risk (pretty much just what we're talking about here), or any number of other reasons. See: Fallacy of composition, Logic of Collective Action, Tragedy of the Commons, Prisoners' Dilemma, Red Queen's Race, Complexity Trap, among others.
- cle 9y agoDefinition of "well" is where people will disagree. And good luck resolving that disagreement...
- Broken_Hippo 9y agoWell, sure it did. It was the best we had, after all, and folks were trained to do it. But compared to today's transactions, it is really a step backwards.