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> What's interesting is that it's the UK's former top financial regulator saying this. It's not a new idea, but it used to be the sort of thing you saw in Mothe

> What's interesting is that it's the UK's former top financial regulator saying this. It's not a new idea, but it used to be the sort of thing you saw in Mother Jones, and occasionally heard from Warren Buffett. I believe the canonical exploration of this idea belongs to he-who-shall-not-be-named. Rich people playing zero-sum games while the poor starve is the natural outcome of building an economy off of the notion that value creation is about doing what wealth-weighted-people want as opposed to what uniformly-weighted people want. Obviously the best answer lies between the extremes and is a function of an economic sector's structure, growth rate, etc, rather than a single universal solution. The real tragedy is that the school of thought which pursues this angle has been so thoroughly demonized and shunned that its principles have to be rediscovered and rebranded before they can enter the arena of public discourse. On an absolute scale the ideas are simple and fundamental enough that they really ought to be a starting point for discussion rather than a conclusion.

marcosdumay 9y ago
> Rich people playing zero-sum games while the poor starve is the natural outcome of building an economy off of the notion that value creation is about doing what wealth-weighted-people want as opposed to what uniformly-weighted people want. If so, the problem must go away with a sane wealth redistribution program. (What might be much more realistic than taxing marketing.)
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  Agreed, but even modest fungibility of wealth and power (which happens almost by definition) makes any such solution fragile. The technological approach is more interesting to me. If you can make distributed manufacturing efficient enough that a single person or group of people can own the capital needed to sustain themselves, you place a lower limit on the extent to which market-based social contract regression can harm a population. Alternatively, from the capitalist angle: companies that directly trade goods for labor are in a unique position to profit from a glut of labor that is not competitive on the global market. This isn't a new idea. We call them communes. They have a well deserved reputation for being a shitshow. Probably because what they're trying to do -- boil a globe-spanning sprawl of infrastructure and trade down to an acceptable MVP -- is really, really hard. Unlike the world economy, though, that difficulty is a function of technology, rather than politics. Technology improves over time. Politics does not. Which means there's probably going to be a crossing point. I haven't the faintest clue when. I do my (tiny) part by contributing to "industrial" open source projects (mechanical and electrical modeling and simulation), which sorely need any attention they can get, regardless the underlying philosophy.
  - eb3c90 9y ago
    I've been thinking about this a bit. I think we need to get better intelligence augmentation. We are limited in what we can produce, because we are limited in what we can manage. So we need to improve how much we can manage. I'm thinking about it in terms of improving autonomy http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1cm/autonomy_a_search_for_a_measure/ http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1cm/autonomy_a_search_for_a... I've been trying to find a community. But it seems pretty diffuse.
    - jjoonathan 9y ago
      How have I never heard of this before? (EDIT: oh, it's a really recent post.) That list of bullet points hits hard. Bookmarked. The name is excellent. It focuses on the work to be done, ties it to a traditional virtue, and jettisons the baggage that would otherwise come with references to earlier iterations on the theme. Ditto that about the community being diffuse, although my failure to find similarly minded company may in part be due to the fact that I haven't figured out how to boil this all down to an elevator pitch. The "Autonomy" post helps.
      - eb3c90 9y ago
        Cool. Glad you liked it. It was great to read your comments about similar ideas. I think my next step is to see if it'll take on HN, so I've just submitted it. If not try and repackage it and get it on an interesting blog/website. Where would you expect to see something like that?
      - eb3c90 9y ago
        I decided to put more effort into making a community, got a wordpress https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/ https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/ and a subreddit so far. https://www.reddit.com/r/improvingautonomy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/improvingautonomy/ Feedback and/or participation would be great
  - Retric 9y ago
    Communes need not be focused on producing anything. Suppose you take a group of 20 people making minimum wage, and rather than buying the cheapest internet possible 1Mbps x 20, they buy a 100Mbps connection and share them. Well there is added HW requirements, but for the cost of 1Mbps everyone is getting 5+Mbps except everyone is not using at the same time so it's closer to 20+Mbps. There is a lot of things you can buy in bulk and see similar savings. The most obvious being housing. The classic 15 collage students in a house can be a lot cheaper than a dorm room. But, it also applies say vacations with carpooling / car rentals and a beach house, or stables like bulk rice.
Animats 9y ago
Yes, there's an echo of Marx and Veblen here, but this becoming a big part of the economy is a recent phenomenon. It's a result of having vast manufacturing capacity. Basic fact: for thousands of years, the big problem was making (or growing, catching, or mining) enough stuff. In the 20th century, that problem started to be solved. By the second half of the 20th century, the leading industrial nations had it solved. Then Asia caught up - Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea, and finally China. China was the big one, being a huge country. Suddenly there was overcapacity in almost everything. Now, as I write occasionally, it just doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff. It's now possible to have a successful economy with a huge non-productive underclass. Economics and politics haven't caught up with this yet.
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  Oh no, you said his name, and like clockwork my precious upvotes have started to turn to downvotes :-) We agree, though. Capitalism is really, really good at growth and really, really bad at steady-state. We've never really come up with a good alternative for steady-state. I think Marx got the diagnosis right and the treatment wrong, which seems like a pretty modest hypothesis given the relative difficulty of the two. Regardless, we had better figure this out or things will get messy. Very messy. TBH I have higher hopes for a couple more industrial revolutions to push the meltdown out beyond my lifetime. Bio and space, maybe? :/
  - internaut 9y ago
    What makes you think we invent systems like capitalism at all? If you could point out that you can read this, that would be great.
- yuhong 9y ago
  And most of that happened after the US ditched the gold standard in 1971, and part of the reason for that was a budget deficit. And the other countries often had FX reserves, only fueling the overcapacity and reducing bond yields.
- ekianjo 9y ago

marcosdumay 9y ago

> Rich people playing zero-sum games while the poor starve is the natural outcome of building an economy off of the notion that value creation is about doing what wealth-weighted-people want as opposed to what uniformly-weighted people want. If so, the problem must go away with a sane wealth redistribution program. (What might be much more realistic than taxing marketing.)

jjoonathan 9y ago
Agreed, but even modest fungibility of wealth and power (which happens almost by definition) makes any such solution fragile. The technological approach is more interesting to me. If you can make distributed manufacturing efficient enough that a single person or group of people can own the capital needed to sustain themselves, you place a lower limit on the extent to which market-based social contract regression can harm a population. Alternatively, from the capitalist angle: companies that directly trade goods for labor are in a unique position to profit from a glut of labor that is not competitive on the global market. This isn't a new idea. We call them communes. They have a well deserved reputation for being a shitshow. Probably because what they're trying to do -- boil a globe-spanning sprawl of infrastructure and trade down to an acceptable MVP -- is really, really hard. Unlike the world economy, though, that difficulty is a function of technology, rather than politics. Technology improves over time. Politics does not. Which means there's probably going to be a crossing point. I haven't the faintest clue when. I do my (tiny) part by contributing to "industrial" open source projects (mechanical and electrical modeling and simulation), which sorely need any attention they can get, regardless the underlying philosophy.
- eb3c90 9y ago
  I've been thinking about this a bit. I think we need to get better intelligence augmentation. We are limited in what we can produce, because we are limited in what we can manage. So we need to improve how much we can manage. I'm thinking about it in terms of improving autonomy http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1cm/autonomy_a_search_for_a_measure/ http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1cm/autonomy_a_search_for_a... I've been trying to find a community. But it seems pretty diffuse.
  - jjoonathan 9y ago
    How have I never heard of this before? (EDIT: oh, it's a really recent post.) That list of bullet points hits hard. Bookmarked. The name is excellent. It focuses on the work to be done, ties it to a traditional virtue, and jettisons the baggage that would otherwise come with references to earlier iterations on the theme. Ditto that about the community being diffuse, although my failure to find similarly minded company may in part be due to the fact that I haven't figured out how to boil this all down to an elevator pitch. The "Autonomy" post helps.
    - eb3c90 9y ago
      Cool. Glad you liked it. It was great to read your comments about similar ideas. I think my next step is to see if it'll take on HN, so I've just submitted it. If not try and repackage it and get it on an interesting blog/website. Where would you expect to see something like that?
    - eb3c90 9y ago
      I decided to put more effort into making a community, got a wordpress https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/ https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/ and a subreddit so far. https://www.reddit.com/r/improvingautonomy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/improvingautonomy/ Feedback and/or participation would be great
- Retric 9y ago
  Communes need not be focused on producing anything. Suppose you take a group of 20 people making minimum wage, and rather than buying the cheapest internet possible 1Mbps x 20, they buy a 100Mbps connection and share them. Well there is added HW requirements, but for the cost of 1Mbps everyone is getting 5+Mbps except everyone is not using at the same time so it's closer to 20+Mbps. There is a lot of things you can buy in bulk and see similar savings. The most obvious being housing. The classic 15 collage students in a house can be a lot cheaper than a dorm room. But, it also applies say vacations with carpooling / car rentals and a beach house, or stables like bulk rice.

Animats 9y ago

Yes, there's an echo of Marx and Veblen here, but this becoming a big part of the economy is a recent phenomenon. It's a result of having vast manufacturing capacity. Basic fact: for thousands of years, the big problem was making (or growing, catching, or mining) enough stuff. In the 20th century, that problem started to be solved. By the second half of the 20th century, the leading industrial nations had it solved. Then Asia caught up - Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea, and finally China. China was the big one, being a huge country. Suddenly there was overcapacity in almost everything. Now, as I write occasionally, it just doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff. It's now possible to have a successful economy with a huge non-productive underclass. Economics and politics haven't caught up with this yet.

jjoonathan 9y ago
Oh no, you said his name, and like clockwork my precious upvotes have started to turn to downvotes :-) We agree, though. Capitalism is really, really good at growth and really, really bad at steady-state. We've never really come up with a good alternative for steady-state. I think Marx got the diagnosis right and the treatment wrong, which seems like a pretty modest hypothesis given the relative difficulty of the two. Regardless, we had better figure this out or things will get messy. Very messy. TBH I have higher hopes for a couple more industrial revolutions to push the meltdown out beyond my lifetime. Bio and space, maybe? :/
- internaut 9y ago
  What makes you think we invent systems like capitalism at all? If you could point out that you can read this, that would be great.
yuhong 9y ago
And most of that happened after the US ditched the gold standard in 1971, and part of the reason for that was a budget deficit. And the other countries often had FX reserves, only fueling the overcapacity and reducing bond yields.
ekianjo 9y ago