14 ms·

I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. Most of HN lives in a tech bubble where

I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. Most of HN lives in a tech bubble where everyone is focused on building semi-useless software like you describe. However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. and some sort of fundamental reorganizing of society on non-market principles doesn’t change that someone needs to maintain our physical infrastructure and keep the lights on. The economy is not a zero-sum game. If I make more money there is not someone else losing. The more jobs there are, the more needs fulfilled, the more services provided the better it is for everyone as more money moves around. It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. If I desire it and a company provides it for a price, it doesn’t matter that the smart refrigerator is a waste in your vision. The market demands, and entrepreneurs provide.

petra 8y ago
>> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. That's true. >> If I desire it and a company provides it for a price, it doesn’t matter that the smart refrigerator is a waste in your vision. People are not good at knowing(or at least acting) on what will make them deeply happy, happier over the longer term, or even just happy. Psychological research tells us that. Add to that the power of advertising, so yes, people do want many things of little value.
- seibelj 8y ago
  I’d rather trust individuals to make their own purchasing decisions, and let the market experiment and figure out what is best, than reorganize society on non-market principles and let a committee determine what people should and should not want. Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges? Finding happiness and purpose? I don’t need an academic paper to tell me happiness is difficult to attain.
  - petra 8y ago
    >> Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges? Sure. But if people don't really know what makes them happy, maybe they'll buy a lot of useless stuff ?
  - drb91 8y ago
    > Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges? Finding happiness and purpose? If this involves things like burning absurd amounts of fossil fuels and shoving new phones down our throat every year, it is absolutely our shared problem that you are bad at allocating resources. Edit: my → our shared
- stickfigure 8y ago
  Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy? I mean yeah, there's a lot of tragic and unhappy people out there, but is it enough that we need to question the nature of our society? I, and most people I know, are pretty happy. Not every choice I make turns out well, but at least it's my choice and I accept the consequences. There are a few chemically depressed people in my social circle, but it's pretty clear to me that they would be depressed no matter how you reorganize society.
  - petra 8y ago
    >> Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy? Decision and experience: why don't we choose what makes us happy? ""Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among psychologists and other social scientists in subjective well-being and happiness. Here we review selected contributions to this development from the literature on behavioral-decision theory. In particular, we examine many, somewhat surprising, findings that show people systematically fail to predict or choose what maximizes their happiness, and we look at reasons why they fail to do so. These findings challenge a fundamental assumption that underlies popular support for consumer sovereignty and other forms of autonomy in decision-making (e.g. marriage choice), namely, the assumption that people are able to make choices in their own best interests. " http://mail.im.tku.edu.tw/~myday/teaching/1001/SMM/S/1001SMM_T4_Paper_20111021_Decision%20and%20experience.pdf http://mail.im.tku.edu.tw/~myday/teaching/1001/SMM/S/1001SMM... >> I mean yeah, there's a lot of tragic and unhappy people out there, but is it enough that we need to question the nature of our society? There's really a lot of unnecessary suffering, and also unrealized potential. And is the nature of our society so sacred that it's beyond questioning ? Because it's not a smart move, historically speaking.
    - stickfigure 8y ago
      Speaking historically, we seem to have a rather large number of examples where societies were reorganized to take away individual decisionmaking (ostensibly for their own good) and they've all gone rather horribly. BTW, that paper didn't have any numbers in it, and didn't really help answer the question "Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy?" The biases it enumerated are I am sure common, but do they dominate the lives of the majority of people? I am doubtful, especially if the proposal is "we will take away all your troubles, just let us make all your major life decisions for you (including, almost always, the ability to revoke the deal)".
- nine_k 8y ago
  I suppose that educating people, especially helping the understand themselves better, is key here. Letting, or expeting, someone else to make you deeply happy when you don't know what would be it yourself leads to the agency problem. That is, how that someone else knows what your best.interest is, and why observe it.
- hellot848 8y ago
  People have other motives than their own happiness.
astazangasta 8y ago
>The economy is not a zero-sum game. If I make more money there is not someone else losing. Depends on your accounting. As a % of GDP, the economy is absolutely zero sum. And some useless sectors (finance) have been taking a greater share of GDP.
- skybrian 8y ago
  That's entirely artificial. At the individual or company level, nobody knows or cares about their percentage of GDP.
  - astazangasta 8y ago
    The economy definitely behaves in ways that has to do with percent of GDP. Capital allocation is the most obvious factor. Individuals feel the weight of finance on the economy regardless of whether they know it or care.
    - skybrian 8y ago
      It's just not capturing anything interesting about how growth in one industry should affect other people's decisions. Consider a factory town in the Midwest. The factory closing is not good for other businesses! Their loss is not a gain for you. Or if some bank decides to put its headquarters there, that is very good for the community. Generally speaking, being in a rich or growing area is a good location for business because your customers spend more. Similarly, a thriving economy is good for business, not bad. You aren't going to convince people that good things are actually bad by measuring things in percentages. You're just measuring it wrong. On the other hand, housing when there's no way to build more units is an example of something that can actually be zero sum. If you move in, that means one less place to live for anyone else.
      - astazangasta 8y ago
        You're talking as if all economic activity involves building things. That's not the real world. The main question we should be asking about growth is "what happens to productivity gains?" Do they accrue to everyone evenly? Or do they disproportionately accrue to a small number of people? It turns out that over the last four decades, the answer has overwhelmingly been "accrue to a small number of people", and most people have seen almost nothing in terms of gains. A big part of the reason why is that there are entire industries (finance) devoted to that accrual. As a result, the continually-growing pie doesn't matter, because every time the pie grows larger, a few people keep taking larger and larger slices of it.
UweSchmidt 8y ago
The economy that you describe, is the simplified econ 101 version. The market fixes everything, and the invisible hand steers everything to optimality. The human being you describe in your last paragraph is from the same economics textbook: A perfectly rational human being making rational decisions 24/7. Both are simplified models that help doing some undergrad economics...but are absolutely insufficient to explain the world correctly and prevent the solutions of a myriad of problems.
- seibelj 8y ago
  The alternative to letting the individual determine what they want is to let someone else choose for them. I’m arguing on fundamental principles because the parent commenter is advocating a reorganization of market-based economies. I don’t care how complex the system is. If you aren’t letting me, the individual, determine what is best for my life, then you are coming from a place of superiority and belief that you know better than others. And you don’t.
  - cheerlessbog 8y ago
    Often the choices made by "the individual" don't account for externalities that aren't built into the price. Viz landfills, climate change, effect on those with less economic resources.
    - seibelj 8y ago
      Are you suggesting it's better to ban individual choice because of the existence of landfills and climate change? The market could effectively and efficiently price those into products, if society would pass a law.
      - cheerlessbog 8y ago
        No. Did I say that? I like living in a predominantly capitalist society. I would like us to pay more attention to the consequences of consumption. One way to do that is to build it into prices (such as a carbon tax, or upstreaming disposal cost) or by regulation. Building cost into price is actually a very capitalist and arguably libertarian approach as it enables the market to reallocate resources to minimize what would otherwise be an externality.
coliveira 8y ago
>> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. Let me give you the news: companies have like..., forever, being in the business of telling others what they should want or not. This is called advertising. This is essentially what every company in the so called new economy, large or small, does to make money. In a modern capitalist economy, nobody cares about the needs of others. The goal is to advertise what you want others to do and, if the advertisement and product presentation is good enough, make loads of money. In the end, the need usually is born from the collective pressure of using the same products.
- jblow 8y ago
  Try running a company this way and we’ll see how long it lasts.
  - cortic 8y ago
    Doing okay so far -Bill Gates
  - coliveira 8y ago
    Google is not doing bad...
- TallGuyShort 8y ago
  >> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. >> This is called advertising. And because that's annoying we have ad-blockers and TiVo and premium streaming and no-soliciting signs. There are better ways to market that don't involve disingenuously telling someone what they want.
bluetomcat 8y ago
> However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. "Normal" is when you build schools, hospitals, community centers and affordable houses and you produce only several kinds of refrigerator for the whole world, streamlining their production and servicing. Not when you construct factories, warehouses, office skyscrapers and shopping areas where those same goods will be manufactured, stored, marketed and sold, by thousands of competing companies. That competition leads to a lot of wasted resources in exchange for product improvements of a questionable value, like, the availability of fridges in a variety of colours. > someone needs to maintain our physical infrastructure and keep the lights on Sure, but the strain on that infrastructure would be far less without the need for commuters to commute 2 hours to their job, in order to market the "best smart fridge" in an office. Everything is deeply interconnected, and we really need to reevaluate our goals and interests as a society.
- seibelj 8y ago
  You are coming from the socialist angle, which is a loaded word that will probably derail the conversation, but essentially you see the free market and competition as a waste of resources that harms society. The base argument is that we don’t need 80 brands of deodorant, and the fact we have so many is a colossal waste of resources, duplication, and moral failure of society. Whereas I see 80 brands of deodorant and think it’s a wonderful example of how hard entrepreneurs work to satisfy all manner of wants and needs, ultimately driving down the price of deodorant and giving me a range of options. A government bureaucrat managing the country’s only deodorant factory could never possibly match the range of options and preferences that the market has provided me. This is the fundamental difference in philosophy between real socialists (aka, not “keep the market but make healthcare free” milquetoast socialists but “make the private sector illegal” socialists) and free market advocates. I prefer a world that constantly competes to satisfy my needs, and all of the “waste” you see is just the process of satisfying everyone’s needs.
  - cheerlessbog 8y ago
    > essentially you see the free market and competition as a waste of resources that harms society. GP made no general statement of this sort. Misrepresenting other perspectives is boring.
sametmax 8y ago
Since money represent human work and earth ressources, both finite, yes, when you make money, somebody becomes poorer. Because the total amount of human work and resources and the actual leverage they got on the world becomes diluted.
- YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
  It may be hard to believe but labor productivity has been increasing! For example (and bear with me, because this is incredibly hard to believe) it is more efficient in terms of amount of food collected per hour to use a farming machine over a field of wheat than it is to chase a guanaco or some other rabbit with a bow.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    But so have resources consumption and money concentration.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  Suppose I'm a plumber and you're an electrician. You need your pipes fixed, so you pay me $100. I need my wires fixed, so I pay you $100. At the end we both have the same amount of money we started with, but now your pipes are fixed and my wires are fixed. You come out ahead as long as the value of the thing you paid for is worth more to you than what you paid for it. And if it isn't then why did you pay that much for it, instead of just not doing it?
  - sametmax 8y ago
    This is the regular economy, which is not the topic of this thread. We are talking about wealthy people becoming rich without contributing. Renting has diminushing return for the society. Some things like automatic trading have none.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      But that's even better, right? If I pay you $500 for an iPhone, I get an iPhone. If you take that money and spend it, it's "the regular economy" again, and I have to provide whatever you bought. If you don't spend the money then I don't have to give you anything, but I still got an iPhone. The real problem with this is that then I have to borrow money to buy the iPhone but there is no way for me to ever pay it back, because you never spend the money I borrowed so there is no way for me to end up with it again, meanwhile I'm paying interest on it. So everybody's got a mortgage payment when they should already own their homes. But this isn't capitalism causing this, it's bad laws. Nobody wants to sell you an iPhone so that Apple will have more money -- they want dividends. Until you tell them that leaving the money inside the company (where it collects interest) results in no taxes but if it's given to the investor to spend or reinvest then the government will be having >40% of it up front. So they take their money as share price appreciation instead. Worse than dividends, but not 40% worse. That causes capital to accumulate inside corporations, which they then use to buy each other, because what else are they going to do with it? So we get megacorps, which then destroy small businesses and corrupt governments and do evil. Because we tax investing the profits of an existing corporation in a new one, when that's the thing that we need to happen to reduce wealth inequality.
grawprog 8y ago
Almost every job i've worked outside of tech is pretty much some non essential service or product. Right now I turn mountains into countertops and fireplaces using large, expensive machines so rich people can have stone inside their homes. I provide nothing that is essential, yet every day customers spend tens of thousands of dollars and my spends thousands so rich people can have nice shiny stone inside their homes. In order to get this stone, they literally dismantle mountains one block at a time, slice them into slabs and ship them all over the world. Again, all so rich people can have nice shiny stone in their kitchens.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sverige 8y ago
  Why aren't you arguing directly that we should all live in soviet-style housing blocks? Concrete is good enough, right? Then we'd all be equal.
  - grawprog 8y ago
    I'm not saying they're wrong to have them. I'm pointing out spending $20,000 on some piece of stone for you to prepare your food on is fairly non-essential. Though again, they remove mountains for this, the shop produces a bunch of toxic, fish killing dust and sediment every day that's slowly killing me and my coworkers and destroying the planet. But my main point was, the things I create every day are not essential. They are luxury items. Many of the other jobs i've had were also along the same line. Not that they don't make people happy or improve their lives I suppose,(though the people that got soapstone in their kitchen recently are in for a some trouble the first time they drop something on it or spill something acidic on it.) But, in the end, it's definitely not essential and detrimental to the world as a whole in many ways.
    - sverige 8y ago
      I understand, but from that perspective, pretty much everything in "developed" countries is non-essential, including personal computers (whether desktop, laptop, smartphone, or tablet) and forums like this one to discuss such things. Think of the toxic waste created by all those computers, and the greenhouse gases created by shipping them all over the place! And to what end?
orthecreedence 8y ago
> The economy is not a zero-sum game. Wealth is. I wrote an entire article articulating the point: https://killtheradio.net/economics/wealth-is-mostly-a-zero-sum-game/ https://killtheradio.net/economics/wealth-is-mostly-a-zero-s...
drb91 8y ago
> The more jobs there are, the more needs fulfilled, the more services provided the better it is for everyone as more money moves around. Only if you define cash flow as the goal of the economy and production. If instead it is to provide food, shelter, and services, there is no need to speculate on how effective the (non extant) invisible hand is because it is evidently failing.
iheartpotatoes 8y ago
"If I make more money there is not someone else losing." Actually, that's exactly how it works: we can't both own the same dollar. Duh.
- SubiculumCode 8y ago
  No. But if both persons are productive then the Fed is more likely to inject another dollar or two into circulation.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    When the money supply increases, the pie isn't growing: There are just more, smaller slices available.
    - SubiculumCode 8y ago
      Nope. I'm pretty sure the world is more wealthy by almost every economic measure than it was two centuries ago.
    - antonvs 8y ago
      That's not how it works at all. The point of growing the money supply is to match the growth of wealth in the society. The reason central banks have target levels for inflation is it's one way to ensure they're doing that correctly.
- ls612 8y ago
  Yet somehow there are more (real) dollars worth of stuff in the economy today than 20, 50, or 100 years ago.
- deburo 8y ago
  Exchanging a dollar for a product means that I value the product more than the dollar. I didn't lose in this trade. Now, if I think the product is overpriced, in the current market I'd wait for it or a competitor's product to lower its price since prices tend to vary overtime. If the product comes from a monopoly, then you're doomed. Anyhow, the zero-sum game does not apply to the free market.
kurthr 8y ago
Having travelled a fair bit, I have to say that this sort of klepto-capitalism is much more common in western countries (esp Britain, Italy, US, even Mexico) than in still growing eastern countries (e.g. Korea, Japan, China, or even Germany and the Nordics) which seem to still care about their local populations. The key seems to me is that the political-economic elite (and every society/country has them) in some of the more wealthy, but stagnant economies has decided that extracting money from the rest of their countrymen (including externalized costs) is more profitable (or higher utility) than trying to make productive economic growth. Basically, beggaring your neighbor pays better than a rising tide lifting all boats. As a result, you still have countries/cultures that invest in education, infrastructure, manufacturing versus those who create influencers, renovate houses, and serve ads. I don't actually put most software/services (even search) in the second boat, because they actually help increase productivity. But don't argue that ad based social media, ad based reality TV, or MLM Yoga (and debt based post secondary educational child care) are more healthy for society than the lower profit businesses they replaced. Also, don't argue "picking winners and losers", because corrupt government officials (and captive regulators) are doing that in every country, but some of them seem to do a much better job of actually making things (and their people better off) for the last 30 years. It seems to me to be a social thing... and maybe it just comes in waves as large groups of people become complacent and the elite just figure, "I've got mine". The poor and the workers pay for it, and eventually there's likely to be some fairly expensive social upheaval in the reckoning. Off shoring your workers, exporting your IP for quarterly results, and keeping the kids ignorant consumers may make you a little money or keep costs low, and labor cheap, but only for a few decades. Eventually, you'll need to compete with those who have been investing.
tomc1985 8y ago
> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. If I desire it and a company provides it for a price, it doesn’t matter that the smart refrigerator is a waste in your vision. The market demands, and entrepreneurs provide. There needs to be a middle ground between; "the market demands and enterpreneurs provide" means that things society needs don't get done, because there is only incentive to focus on what people want. Some of us would like to live in a world with less crap ideas and products flooding our minds, with more problem-solving with an eye towards social and societal good
- jacobwilliamroy 8y ago
  I think the hardest part of doing democratic socialism is measuring labor. I think that time is a fine unit of measure but I have no data to back that thought up. Everything else about democratic socialism is much easier now in the 21st century. Chile had a computer planned economy in the 1970s that was literally just a bunch of telex machines in factories around the nation talking to a central mainframe in the capital. Also, I think democratic socialism can work on levels other than the national one. Like, neighborhood or town scale. To be embedded in the U.S., such a community would need a to produce some kind of surplus which could entice the neighbors to integrate into the democratic socialist system.
- ci5er 8y ago
  If that's what people (that are not you) wanted, then it would happen. You could, of course, use political means to force people to fund your preferences, but that kind of a sucky move, don't you think?
jfk13 8y ago
> the better it is for everyone as more money moves around It's not obvious (to me, at least) that more money moving around is inherently a good thing. Money may be moving around in relation to activities that make the world a worse place overall.
kadendogthing 8y ago
>I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. No one in the comment section is going to address this?
- prepend 8y ago
  It’s a bit exaggerated, but reasonable. Having a nihilistic view that everything is zero sum certainly seems correlated to depression [0]. I’m sure that there are lots of folks who think this way and don’t have clinical depression. [0] https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/23/3/369/475828 https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/23/3/369/475828 (although about therapeutic nihilism and not market nihilism)
  - kadendogthing 8y ago
    >It’s a bit exaggerated, but reasonable. Yeah labeling someone as having a mood disorder because of their economic perspectives -- which are perfectly and reasonably formulated -- is weirdly... cult like. It's not reasonable at all. >Having a nihilistic There is absolutely nothing nihilistic about that view point. Not even close? Perhaps choose a different label.

petra 8y ago

>> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. That's true. >> If I desire it and a company provides it for a price, it doesn’t matter that the smart refrigerator is a waste in your vision. People are not good at knowing(or at least acting) on what will make them deeply happy, happier over the longer term, or even just happy. Psychological research tells us that. Add to that the power of advertising, so yes, people do want many things of little value.

seibelj 8y ago
I’d rather trust individuals to make their own purchasing decisions, and let the market experiment and figure out what is best, than reorganize society on non-market principles and let a committee determine what people should and should not want. Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges? Finding happiness and purpose? I don’t need an academic paper to tell me happiness is difficult to attain.
- petra 8y ago
  >> Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges? Sure. But if people don't really know what makes them happy, maybe they'll buy a lot of useless stuff ?
- drb91 8y ago
  > Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges? Finding happiness and purpose? If this involves things like burning absurd amounts of fossil fuels and shoving new phones down our throat every year, it is absolutely our shared problem that you are bad at allocating resources. Edit: my → our shared
stickfigure 8y ago
Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy? I mean yeah, there's a lot of tragic and unhappy people out there, but is it enough that we need to question the nature of our society? I, and most people I know, are pretty happy. Not every choice I make turns out well, but at least it's my choice and I accept the consequences. There are a few chemically depressed people in my social circle, but it's pretty clear to me that they would be depressed no matter how you reorganize society.
- petra 8y ago
  >> Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy? Decision and experience: why don't we choose what makes us happy? ""Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among psychologists and other social scientists in subjective well-being and happiness. Here we review selected contributions to this development from the literature on behavioral-decision theory. In particular, we examine many, somewhat surprising, findings that show people systematically fail to predict or choose what maximizes their happiness, and we look at reasons why they fail to do so. These findings challenge a fundamental assumption that underlies popular support for consumer sovereignty and other forms of autonomy in decision-making (e.g. marriage choice), namely, the assumption that people are able to make choices in their own best interests. " http://mail.im.tku.edu.tw/~myday/teaching/1001/SMM/S/1001SMM_T4_Paper_20111021_Decision%20and%20experience.pdf http://mail.im.tku.edu.tw/~myday/teaching/1001/SMM/S/1001SMM... >> I mean yeah, there's a lot of tragic and unhappy people out there, but is it enough that we need to question the nature of our society? There's really a lot of unnecessary suffering, and also unrealized potential. And is the nature of our society so sacred that it's beyond questioning ? Because it's not a smart move, historically speaking.
  - stickfigure 8y ago
    Speaking historically, we seem to have a rather large number of examples where societies were reorganized to take away individual decisionmaking (ostensibly for their own good) and they've all gone rather horribly. BTW, that paper didn't have any numbers in it, and didn't really help answer the question "Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy?" The biases it enumerated are I am sure common, but do they dominate the lives of the majority of people? I am doubtful, especially if the proposal is "we will take away all your troubles, just let us make all your major life decisions for you (including, almost always, the ability to revoke the deal)".
nine_k 8y ago
I suppose that educating people, especially helping the understand themselves better, is key here. Letting, or expeting, someone else to make you deeply happy when you don't know what would be it yourself leads to the agency problem. That is, how that someone else knows what your best.interest is, and why observe it.
hellot848 8y ago
People have other motives than their own happiness.

astazangasta 8y ago

>The economy is not a zero-sum game. If I make more money there is not someone else losing. Depends on your accounting. As a % of GDP, the economy is absolutely zero sum. And some useless sectors (finance) have been taking a greater share of GDP.

skybrian 8y ago
That's entirely artificial. At the individual or company level, nobody knows or cares about their percentage of GDP.
- astazangasta 8y ago
  The economy definitely behaves in ways that has to do with percent of GDP. Capital allocation is the most obvious factor. Individuals feel the weight of finance on the economy regardless of whether they know it or care.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    It's just not capturing anything interesting about how growth in one industry should affect other people's decisions. Consider a factory town in the Midwest. The factory closing is not good for other businesses! Their loss is not a gain for you. Or if some bank decides to put its headquarters there, that is very good for the community. Generally speaking, being in a rich or growing area is a good location for business because your customers spend more. Similarly, a thriving economy is good for business, not bad. You aren't going to convince people that good things are actually bad by measuring things in percentages. You're just measuring it wrong. On the other hand, housing when there's no way to build more units is an example of something that can actually be zero sum. If you move in, that means one less place to live for anyone else.
    - astazangasta 8y ago
      You're talking as if all economic activity involves building things. That's not the real world. The main question we should be asking about growth is "what happens to productivity gains?" Do they accrue to everyone evenly? Or do they disproportionately accrue to a small number of people? It turns out that over the last four decades, the answer has overwhelmingly been "accrue to a small number of people", and most people have seen almost nothing in terms of gains. A big part of the reason why is that there are entire industries (finance) devoted to that accrual. As a result, the continually-growing pie doesn't matter, because every time the pie grows larger, a few people keep taking larger and larger slices of it.

UweSchmidt 8y ago

The economy that you describe, is the simplified econ 101 version. The market fixes everything, and the invisible hand steers everything to optimality. The human being you describe in your last paragraph is from the same economics textbook: A perfectly rational human being making rational decisions 24/7. Both are simplified models that help doing some undergrad economics...but are absolutely insufficient to explain the world correctly and prevent the solutions of a myriad of problems.

seibelj 8y ago
The alternative to letting the individual determine what they want is to let someone else choose for them. I’m arguing on fundamental principles because the parent commenter is advocating a reorganization of market-based economies. I don’t care how complex the system is. If you aren’t letting me, the individual, determine what is best for my life, then you are coming from a place of superiority and belief that you know better than others. And you don’t.
- cheerlessbog 8y ago
  Often the choices made by "the individual" don't account for externalities that aren't built into the price. Viz landfills, climate change, effect on those with less economic resources.
  - seibelj 8y ago
    Are you suggesting it's better to ban individual choice because of the existence of landfills and climate change? The market could effectively and efficiently price those into products, if society would pass a law.
    - cheerlessbog 8y ago
      No. Did I say that? I like living in a predominantly capitalist society. I would like us to pay more attention to the consequences of consumption. One way to do that is to build it into prices (such as a carbon tax, or upstreaming disposal cost) or by regulation. Building cost into price is actually a very capitalist and arguably libertarian approach as it enables the market to reallocate resources to minimize what would otherwise be an externality.

coliveira 8y ago

>> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. Let me give you the news: companies have like..., forever, being in the business of telling others what they should want or not. This is called advertising. This is essentially what every company in the so called new economy, large or small, does to make money. In a modern capitalist economy, nobody cares about the needs of others. The goal is to advertise what you want others to do and, if the advertisement and product presentation is good enough, make loads of money. In the end, the need usually is born from the collective pressure of using the same products.

jblow 8y ago
Try running a company this way and we’ll see how long it lasts.
- cortic 8y ago
  Doing okay so far -Bill Gates
- coliveira 8y ago
  Google is not doing bad...
TallGuyShort 8y ago
>> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. >> This is called advertising. And because that's annoying we have ad-blockers and TiVo and premium streaming and no-soliciting signs. There are better ways to market that don't involve disingenuously telling someone what they want.

bluetomcat 8y ago

> However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. "Normal" is when you build schools, hospitals, community centers and affordable houses and you produce only several kinds of refrigerator for the whole world, streamlining their production and servicing. Not when you construct factories, warehouses, office skyscrapers and shopping areas where those same goods will be manufactured, stored, marketed and sold, by thousands of competing companies. That competition leads to a lot of wasted resources in exchange for product improvements of a questionable value, like, the availability of fridges in a variety of colours. > someone needs to maintain our physical infrastructure and keep the lights on Sure, but the strain on that infrastructure would be far less without the need for commuters to commute 2 hours to their job, in order to market the "best smart fridge" in an office. Everything is deeply interconnected, and we really need to reevaluate our goals and interests as a society.

seibelj 8y ago
You are coming from the socialist angle, which is a loaded word that will probably derail the conversation, but essentially you see the free market and competition as a waste of resources that harms society. The base argument is that we don’t need 80 brands of deodorant, and the fact we have so many is a colossal waste of resources, duplication, and moral failure of society. Whereas I see 80 brands of deodorant and think it’s a wonderful example of how hard entrepreneurs work to satisfy all manner of wants and needs, ultimately driving down the price of deodorant and giving me a range of options. A government bureaucrat managing the country’s only deodorant factory could never possibly match the range of options and preferences that the market has provided me. This is the fundamental difference in philosophy between real socialists (aka, not “keep the market but make healthcare free” milquetoast socialists but “make the private sector illegal” socialists) and free market advocates. I prefer a world that constantly competes to satisfy my needs, and all of the “waste” you see is just the process of satisfying everyone’s needs.
- cheerlessbog 8y ago
  > essentially you see the free market and competition as a waste of resources that harms society. GP made no general statement of this sort. Misrepresenting other perspectives is boring.

sametmax 8y ago

Since money represent human work and earth ressources, both finite, yes, when you make money, somebody becomes poorer. Because the total amount of human work and resources and the actual leverage they got on the world becomes diluted.

YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
It may be hard to believe but labor productivity has been increasing! For example (and bear with me, because this is incredibly hard to believe) it is more efficient in terms of amount of food collected per hour to use a farming machine over a field of wheat than it is to chase a guanaco or some other rabbit with a bow.
- sametmax 8y ago
  But so have resources consumption and money concentration.
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
Suppose I'm a plumber and you're an electrician. You need your pipes fixed, so you pay me $100. I need my wires fixed, so I pay you $100. At the end we both have the same amount of money we started with, but now your pipes are fixed and my wires are fixed. You come out ahead as long as the value of the thing you paid for is worth more to you than what you paid for it. And if it isn't then why did you pay that much for it, instead of just not doing it?
- sametmax 8y ago
  This is the regular economy, which is not the topic of this thread. We are talking about wealthy people becoming rich without contributing. Renting has diminushing return for the society. Some things like automatic trading have none.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    But that's even better, right? If I pay you $500 for an iPhone, I get an iPhone. If you take that money and spend it, it's "the regular economy" again, and I have to provide whatever you bought. If you don't spend the money then I don't have to give you anything, but I still got an iPhone. The real problem with this is that then I have to borrow money to buy the iPhone but there is no way for me to ever pay it back, because you never spend the money I borrowed so there is no way for me to end up with it again, meanwhile I'm paying interest on it. So everybody's got a mortgage payment when they should already own their homes. But this isn't capitalism causing this, it's bad laws. Nobody wants to sell you an iPhone so that Apple will have more money -- they want dividends. Until you tell them that leaving the money inside the company (where it collects interest) results in no taxes but if it's given to the investor to spend or reinvest then the government will be having >40% of it up front. So they take their money as share price appreciation instead. Worse than dividends, but not 40% worse. That causes capital to accumulate inside corporations, which they then use to buy each other, because what else are they going to do with it? So we get megacorps, which then destroy small businesses and corrupt governments and do evil. Because we tax investing the profits of an existing corporation in a new one, when that's the thing that we need to happen to reduce wealth inequality.

grawprog 8y ago

Almost every job i've worked outside of tech is pretty much some non essential service or product. Right now I turn mountains into countertops and fireplaces using large, expensive machines so rich people can have stone inside their homes. I provide nothing that is essential, yet every day customers spend tens of thousands of dollars and my spends thousands so rich people can have nice shiny stone inside their homes. In order to get this stone, they literally dismantle mountains one block at a time, slice them into slabs and ship them all over the world. Again, all so rich people can have nice shiny stone in their kitchens.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sverige 8y ago
Why aren't you arguing directly that we should all live in soviet-style housing blocks? Concrete is good enough, right? Then we'd all be equal.
- grawprog 8y ago
  I'm not saying they're wrong to have them. I'm pointing out spending $20,000 on some piece of stone for you to prepare your food on is fairly non-essential. Though again, they remove mountains for this, the shop produces a bunch of toxic, fish killing dust and sediment every day that's slowly killing me and my coworkers and destroying the planet. But my main point was, the things I create every day are not essential. They are luxury items. Many of the other jobs i've had were also along the same line. Not that they don't make people happy or improve their lives I suppose,(though the people that got soapstone in their kitchen recently are in for a some trouble the first time they drop something on it or spill something acidic on it.) But, in the end, it's definitely not essential and detrimental to the world as a whole in many ways.
  - sverige 8y ago
    I understand, but from that perspective, pretty much everything in "developed" countries is non-essential, including personal computers (whether desktop, laptop, smartphone, or tablet) and forums like this one to discuss such things. Think of the toxic waste created by all those computers, and the greenhouse gases created by shipping them all over the place! And to what end?

orthecreedence 8y ago

> The economy is not a zero-sum game. Wealth is. I wrote an entire article articulating the point: https://killtheradio.net/economics/wealth-is-mostly-a-zero-sum-game/ https://killtheradio.net/economics/wealth-is-mostly-a-zero-s...

drb91 8y ago

> The more jobs there are, the more needs fulfilled, the more services provided the better it is for everyone as more money moves around. Only if you define cash flow as the goal of the economy and production. If instead it is to provide food, shelter, and services, there is no need to speculate on how effective the (non extant) invisible hand is because it is evidently failing.

iheartpotatoes 8y ago

"If I make more money there is not someone else losing." Actually, that's exactly how it works: we can't both own the same dollar. Duh.

SubiculumCode 8y ago
No. But if both persons are productive then the Fed is more likely to inject another dollar or two into circulation.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  When the money supply increases, the pie isn't growing: There are just more, smaller slices available.
  - SubiculumCode 8y ago
    Nope. I'm pretty sure the world is more wealthy by almost every economic measure than it was two centuries ago.
  - antonvs 8y ago
    That's not how it works at all. The point of growing the money supply is to match the growth of wealth in the society. The reason central banks have target levels for inflation is it's one way to ensure they're doing that correctly.
ls612 8y ago
Yet somehow there are more (real) dollars worth of stuff in the economy today than 20, 50, or 100 years ago.
deburo 8y ago
Exchanging a dollar for a product means that I value the product more than the dollar. I didn't lose in this trade. Now, if I think the product is overpriced, in the current market I'd wait for it or a competitor's product to lower its price since prices tend to vary overtime. If the product comes from a monopoly, then you're doomed. Anyhow, the zero-sum game does not apply to the free market.

kurthr 8y ago

Having travelled a fair bit, I have to say that this sort of klepto-capitalism is much more common in western countries (esp Britain, Italy, US, even Mexico) than in still growing eastern countries (e.g. Korea, Japan, China, or even Germany and the Nordics) which seem to still care about their local populations. The key seems to me is that the political-economic elite (and every society/country has them) in some of the more wealthy, but stagnant economies has decided that extracting money from the rest of their countrymen (including externalized costs) is more profitable (or higher utility) than trying to make productive economic growth. Basically, beggaring your neighbor pays better than a rising tide lifting all boats. As a result, you still have countries/cultures that invest in education, infrastructure, manufacturing versus those who create influencers, renovate houses, and serve ads. I don't actually put most software/services (even search) in the second boat, because they actually help increase productivity. But don't argue that ad based social media, ad based reality TV, or MLM Yoga (and debt based post secondary educational child care) are more healthy for society than the lower profit businesses they replaced. Also, don't argue "picking winners and losers", because corrupt government officials (and captive regulators) are doing that in every country, but some of them seem to do a much better job of actually making things (and their people better off) for the last 30 years. It seems to me to be a social thing... and maybe it just comes in waves as large groups of people become complacent and the elite just figure, "I've got mine". The poor and the workers pay for it, and eventually there's likely to be some fairly expensive social upheaval in the reckoning. Off shoring your workers, exporting your IP for quarterly results, and keeping the kids ignorant consumers may make you a little money or keep costs low, and labor cheap, but only for a few decades. Eventually, you'll need to compete with those who have been investing.

tomc1985 8y ago

> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. If I desire it and a company provides it for a price, it doesn’t matter that the smart refrigerator is a waste in your vision. The market demands, and entrepreneurs provide. There needs to be a middle ground between; "the market demands and enterpreneurs provide" means that things society needs don't get done, because there is only incentive to focus on what people want. Some of us would like to live in a world with less crap ideas and products flooding our minds, with more problem-solving with an eye towards social and societal good

jacobwilliamroy 8y ago
I think the hardest part of doing democratic socialism is measuring labor. I think that time is a fine unit of measure but I have no data to back that thought up. Everything else about democratic socialism is much easier now in the 21st century. Chile had a computer planned economy in the 1970s that was literally just a bunch of telex machines in factories around the nation talking to a central mainframe in the capital. Also, I think democratic socialism can work on levels other than the national one. Like, neighborhood or town scale. To be embedded in the U.S., such a community would need a to produce some kind of surplus which could entice the neighbors to integrate into the democratic socialist system.
ci5er 8y ago
If that's what people (that are not you) wanted, then it would happen. You could, of course, use political means to force people to fund your preferences, but that kind of a sucky move, don't you think?

jfk13 8y ago

> the better it is for everyone as more money moves around It's not obvious (to me, at least) that more money moving around is inherently a good thing. Money may be moving around in relation to activities that make the world a worse place overall.

kadendogthing 8y ago

>I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. No one in the comment section is going to address this?

prepend 8y ago
It’s a bit exaggerated, but reasonable. Having a nihilistic view that everything is zero sum certainly seems correlated to depression [0]. I’m sure that there are lots of folks who think this way and don’t have clinical depression. [0] https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/23/3/369/475828 https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/23/3/369/475828 (although about therapeutic nihilism and not market nihilism)
- kadendogthing 8y ago
  >It’s a bit exaggerated, but reasonable. Yeah labeling someone as having a mood disorder because of their economic perspectives -- which are perfectly and reasonably formulated -- is weirdly... cult like. It's not reasonable at all. >Having a nihilistic There is absolutely nothing nihilistic about that view point. Not even close? Perhaps choose a different label.