9 ms·

I understand your sentiment, and don't really disagree, but keep in mind that it's basically impossible to innovate or build wealth under unfavorable institutio

by simon_ 16y ago

I understand your sentiment, and don't really disagree, but keep in mind that it's basically impossible to innovate or build wealth under unfavorable institutions. So... some value probably "should" accrue to nations.

jamesaguilar 16y ago
Yes, for sure. Some of the benefits should return to the nation that provided the favorable conditions (and do, in the form of that person's taxes and also in the form of opportunity-seekers from around the globe flocking to the places where growth is possible). But I don't like the notion that people owe their successes to their country any more than I believe they are indebted to oxygen or gravity.
- lisper 16y ago
  Why not? Oxygen and gravity occur naturally. Nations with conditions favorable to technological innovation do not. They have to be built and maintained.
  - alex_c 16y ago
    Loyalty or gratitude to an institution makes little sense to me (I'm probably in the minority on this in the general population), simply because an institution is incapable of loyalty or gratitude towards me. I'm loyal or grateful to people, but rarely to abstract concepts. So setting aside questions of what occurs "naturally", who should I be loyal/grateful to? The few enlightened bureaucrats who make a system better than average? The taxpayers who fund it, willingly or not? The bureaucrats who, at best, are ineffective at ruining everything? The rebels who make things happen by bending or ignoring the rules?
    - forensic 16y ago
      If you can't be loyal to the institution, be loyal to the "favourable conditions" of the institution. Support those conditions. Because those conditions DO give back to you.
      - lsc 16y ago
        I wonder if the parent is objecting to the word "loyalty" - Loyalty implies a certain degree of unconditional support; while I think that when talking about countries, we're better off with conditional support. That said, if by loyalty you mean conditional support, I agree completely. Governments don't exist in a vacuum, and there is constant pressure from the those who directly benefit from a less-efficient government.
        alex_c 16y ago
        I am - and to be fair I don't think anyone else used the word "loyalty", so I could be swinging at strawmen, but that's what some of the discussion sounded like to me.
- noahth 16y ago
  You may not like the idea but that doesn't necessarily have any bearing on its truth. None of us does anything on our own - water, power, roads, schools, the list goes on and on (not all directly attributable to the country itself, but certainly national governments are high on the list of contributors to these projects in almost all cases, and I haven't even mentioned things like tax policy yet). I think the days of the nation-state are numbered but we can't ignore what those entities did for human progress. Maybe not in the form of a literal debt, but it's short-sighted and antisocial to pretend that the elites didn't have a hundred million helping hands on their way up.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Perhaps, but the elites have already paid for all of those helping hands many times over. The top 5% paid about 60% of the nation's taxes, for instance, and they almost certainly have not used 60% of the public services. http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html In spite of this, most of the services they paid for are not the public goods (e.g., roads, power, water, police) you describe. Of the top 5 biggest expenditures in the US, only the 4'th is a public good. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html And this completely ignores all the consumer surplus they have created (i.e., the happiness you get from using a macbook rather than having $1000). The elites have paid their debt. Let them leave if they want to. The US should not become a prison state.
    - Herring 16y ago
      This debt metaphor is really unproductive. Fact is it's easier to make money when you already have money. So the assumption here is a nation would be better off if it subsidized the money making process, same as it subsidizes education.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      and they almost certainly have not used 60% of the public services. They've probably used more than 60%. Almost all of the money is a means to keep poor people "content" in this country. It's a small price that rich people pay. To put it another way, rich people could certainly cut off pretty much all education, pension, health care expenditures if they wanted to. But there's a reason they don't, and its not because they're nice people. But its in their best interest. It's their public good.
- qq66 16y ago
  We ARE indebted to oxygen and gravity. While it's hard for us to destroy gravity we are rapidly destroying oxygen generation capacity on this planet and it's not going to go very well for us if we continue.
  - anamax 16y ago
    > we are rapidly destroying oxygen generation capacity on this planet Citation needed. (Increasing CO2 actually helps plants produce O2. Even the most dire warmist predictions have increased plant life.)
    - qq66 16y ago
      deforestation
      - anamax 16y ago
        mature forests are carbon neutral. Chopping down trees, storing the wood, and growing new trees is a carbon sink.
- wazoox 16y ago
  There is a very telling story in the great book "Bad samaritans" ( http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596913991 http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitali... ). Among other things -- the author explains how in the 1850s, American travellers in Japan were surprised by the Japanese laziness and inefficiency, so much to make it almost proverbial. Doesn't it sound funny? In the 1850s, Japan was terribly underdeveloped, and in an underdeveloped environment you simply cannot do much to innovate, undertake new projects. So people everywhere in underdeveloped countries just seems lazy to people from the industrialized world, that was true of Japan in the 1850s, Korea in the 1950s, and many African countries nowadays. The impetus later came from the central government, and in 1905 Japan was not a negligible country anymore. The moral of the story is that free-market bullshit and Ayn Rand books are just make-believe stories without any solid backing.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
This might be a good time to take a look at history. Lots of examples of institutions destroying innovation. By contrast, not as many examples of them creating it. Or, to put another way, we did just fine innovating and inventing and such on our own -- in caves, on the Savannah, on trade routes, as part of tribes or guilds. Innovation and entrepreneurship is as natural a part of life as breathing. If this weren't true, we'd still be hanging around in trees waiting for the big cats to leave their prey. Of course, you can argue that institutions accelerate this natural ability, but there's a lot of room for doubt over exactly what magic sauce makes people super productive. At the very least we can agree that different folks have different answers to that question. (If there were some "proven" answer, we'd just all copy that and the world would be full of Thomas Edisons) I understand there are a lot of works of fiction and nonfiction that claim to explain why so much innovation happened in such and such a place, but it's easy to say or write something like that. In reality, lots of really smart folks have went at this problem and haven't gotten very far in terms of reproducible results. I find this line repeated over and over again -- that somehow if there is a lot of innovation in situation X that it naturally follows that we know all about X and why all this innovation happened. I think that's stretching logic a bit too much for my tastes.
- locopati 16y ago
  You're so right, good thing the internet (created by a people at a government institution) exists for us to have this discussion.
  - johngalt 16y ago
    That's like saying the government is responsible for all business because they printed the money. The "internet" that the government created would be nothing without the private organizations that actually built it. When did the government start Cisco? Google? USR? Even the early iterations of the internet were built by private companies. It's more that the government was the first buyer of this type of technology. Edit: The idea that the government can take responsibility for the internet is gigantic hubris. In fact it's governments that are continuing to destroy what the internet has become.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

by simon_ 16y ago

jamesaguilar 16y ago

Yes, for sure. Some of the benefits should return to the nation that provided the favorable conditions (and do, in the form of that person's taxes and also in the form of opportunity-seekers from around the globe flocking to the places where growth is possible). But I don't like the notion that people owe their successes to their country any more than I believe they are indebted to oxygen or gravity.

lisper 16y ago
Why not? Oxygen and gravity occur naturally. Nations with conditions favorable to technological innovation do not. They have to be built and maintained.
- alex_c 16y ago
  Loyalty or gratitude to an institution makes little sense to me (I'm probably in the minority on this in the general population), simply because an institution is incapable of loyalty or gratitude towards me. I'm loyal or grateful to people, but rarely to abstract concepts. So setting aside questions of what occurs "naturally", who should I be loyal/grateful to? The few enlightened bureaucrats who make a system better than average? The taxpayers who fund it, willingly or not? The bureaucrats who, at best, are ineffective at ruining everything? The rebels who make things happen by bending or ignoring the rules?
  - forensic 16y ago
    If you can't be loyal to the institution, be loyal to the "favourable conditions" of the institution. Support those conditions. Because those conditions DO give back to you.
    - lsc 16y ago
      I wonder if the parent is objecting to the word "loyalty" - Loyalty implies a certain degree of unconditional support; while I think that when talking about countries, we're better off with conditional support. That said, if by loyalty you mean conditional support, I agree completely. Governments don't exist in a vacuum, and there is constant pressure from the those who directly benefit from a less-efficient government.
      - alex_c 16y ago
        I am - and to be fair I don't think anyone else used the word "loyalty", so I could be swinging at strawmen, but that's what some of the discussion sounded like to me.
noahth 16y ago
You may not like the idea but that doesn't necessarily have any bearing on its truth. None of us does anything on our own - water, power, roads, schools, the list goes on and on (not all directly attributable to the country itself, but certainly national governments are high on the list of contributors to these projects in almost all cases, and I haven't even mentioned things like tax policy yet). I think the days of the nation-state are numbered but we can't ignore what those entities did for human progress. Maybe not in the form of a literal debt, but it's short-sighted and antisocial to pretend that the elites didn't have a hundred million helping hands on their way up.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Perhaps, but the elites have already paid for all of those helping hands many times over. The top 5% paid about 60% of the nation's taxes, for instance, and they almost certainly have not used 60% of the public services. http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html In spite of this, most of the services they paid for are not the public goods (e.g., roads, power, water, police) you describe. Of the top 5 biggest expenditures in the US, only the 4'th is a public good. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html And this completely ignores all the consumer surplus they have created (i.e., the happiness you get from using a macbook rather than having $1000). The elites have paid their debt. Let them leave if they want to. The US should not become a prison state.
  - Herring 16y ago
    This debt metaphor is really unproductive. Fact is it's easier to make money when you already have money. So the assumption here is a nation would be better off if it subsidized the money making process, same as it subsidizes education.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    and they almost certainly have not used 60% of the public services. They've probably used more than 60%. Almost all of the money is a means to keep poor people "content" in this country. It's a small price that rich people pay. To put it another way, rich people could certainly cut off pretty much all education, pension, health care expenditures if they wanted to. But there's a reason they don't, and its not because they're nice people. But its in their best interest. It's their public good.
qq66 16y ago
We ARE indebted to oxygen and gravity. While it's hard for us to destroy gravity we are rapidly destroying oxygen generation capacity on this planet and it's not going to go very well for us if we continue.
- anamax 16y ago
  > we are rapidly destroying oxygen generation capacity on this planet Citation needed. (Increasing CO2 actually helps plants produce O2. Even the most dire warmist predictions have increased plant life.)
  - qq66 16y ago
    deforestation
    - anamax 16y ago
      mature forests are carbon neutral. Chopping down trees, storing the wood, and growing new trees is a carbon sink.
wazoox 16y ago
There is a very telling story in the great book "Bad samaritans" ( http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596913991 http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitali... ). Among other things -- the author explains how in the 1850s, American travellers in Japan were surprised by the Japanese laziness and inefficiency, so much to make it almost proverbial. Doesn't it sound funny? In the 1850s, Japan was terribly underdeveloped, and in an underdeveloped environment you simply cannot do much to innovate, undertake new projects. So people everywhere in underdeveloped countries just seems lazy to people from the industrialized world, that was true of Japan in the 1850s, Korea in the 1950s, and many African countries nowadays. The impetus later came from the central government, and in 1905 Japan was not a negligible country anymore. The moral of the story is that free-market bullshit and Ayn Rand books are just make-believe stories without any solid backing.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

This might be a good time to take a look at history. Lots of examples of institutions destroying innovation. By contrast, not as many examples of them creating it. Or, to put another way, we did just fine innovating and inventing and such on our own -- in caves, on the Savannah, on trade routes, as part of tribes or guilds. Innovation and entrepreneurship is as natural a part of life as breathing. If this weren't true, we'd still be hanging around in trees waiting for the big cats to leave their prey. Of course, you can argue that institutions accelerate this natural ability, but there's a lot of room for doubt over exactly what magic sauce makes people super productive. At the very least we can agree that different folks have different answers to that question. (If there were some "proven" answer, we'd just all copy that and the world would be full of Thomas Edisons) I understand there are a lot of works of fiction and nonfiction that claim to explain why so much innovation happened in such and such a place, but it's easy to say or write something like that. In reality, lots of really smart folks have went at this problem and haven't gotten very far in terms of reproducible results. I find this line repeated over and over again -- that somehow if there is a lot of innovation in situation X that it naturally follows that we know all about X and why all this innovation happened. I think that's stretching logic a bit too much for my tastes.

locopati 16y ago
You're so right, good thing the internet (created by a people at a government institution) exists for us to have this discussion.
- johngalt 16y ago
  That's like saying the government is responsible for all business because they printed the money. The "internet" that the government created would be nothing without the private organizations that actually built it. When did the government start Cisco? Google? USR? Even the early iterations of the internet were built by private companies. It's more that the government was the first buyer of this type of technology. Edit: The idea that the government can take responsibility for the internet is gigantic hubris. In fact it's governments that are continuing to destroy what the internet has become.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]