8 ms·

Reading the economic and tech-fix discussion here, it strikes me again that we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing

Reading the economic and tech-fix discussion here, it strikes me again that we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems. Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. I don't know how we get from here to a place where these problems become solvable (or even what that place looks like) and from there to a world that is actually going to sustain us again. So its hard to have much confidence that we have much of a future beyond the later part of this century. My children will by my age then and I don't envy them.

Sambdala 6y ago
I agree, we invented this stuff, and we should be able to fix it when it 'breaks.' However, we see this constantly in any manmade system (system as defined by Systemics), where we can't control the emergent behavior of the system. It's worse than that because we're talking about systems where change is necessarily political, so in-group/out-group dynamics dominate the perceived discussion ("Democrats think this, but Republicans say that"). This is made worse when one is pleased with the emergent outcome of a system and so ex post facto makes up justifications, but wouldn't feel comfortable arguing directly for the outcome publicly (see "States rights"). It's a problem I think about a lot, and there just aren't any easy answers to either combat bad faith participants or to be convincing that systems thinking needs to be given more weight in discourse.
- curation 6y ago
  Our available methods for engaging with the economic are, perhaps functionally, not able to answer for any problems. Walters Streeck describes economic theory as race horses hitched to a plow: The complexity of the models developed do nothing to advance the work to be done. The work of economic analysis has to re-orient according to Streeck - > "I am hungry for facts, not for concepts; concepts I access through facts and through the questions they raise, including the need to organize them into a coherent picture."
hhjinks 6y ago
What makes you so sure that economics is entirely constructed? Things like supply and demand are clearly natural consequences of resource scarcity, and doesn't only apply to economics. While we do have certain frameworks that are man-made that prop up and support the economy, AN economy of some description just seems like a natural consequence of things being perceived as having value. We even see this in animals.
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  An economy is the net result of individual and collective (social) behaviours. You could, indeed, argue that other species such as other primates or even ants behave in a way that bears resemblance to an economy with a due stretch of imagination. Even so, you have to be mindful about projection bias when you make such assertions. The difference is that humans have this unique ability: self awareness. Humans are able to see themselves as a separate entity, as opposed to other humans. This also us to reflect on our own needs and desires, but also about the desires and needs of other individuals. It's this ability that has led to the emergence of language, culture and technology. A human economy is an extension of the behaviours you'd see in other species. It just so happens that humans are able to steer that behaviour. The trouble is that we aren't that good at gauging the extent to which we get to control individual as well as collective and emergent behaviour. So, reality is layered. On an abstract level, a human economy is seemingly based off a complex set of artificial social constructs used by humans to describe and handle that reality; but on a much lower level, a human economy is the net result of emergent individual and social behavioural patterns which, in themselves, have a clear overlap with other species. The fallacy then is to try and draw a clear border between those two levels.
  - kingkawn 6y ago
    I have yet to meet a human that exhibits this so called self-awareness
    - Folcon 6y ago
      Just to clarify, you don't believe anyone including yourself is self-aware? If you believe you are self-aware then I suspect that it's more a problem of recognition than self-awareness being absent. If you don't believe that you are self-aware, that's really interesting. Please elaborate!
humanrebar 6y ago
> I don't know how we get from here to a place where these problems become solvable (or even what that place looks like) and from there to a world that is actually going to sustain us again. Austrians argue that this is the inevitable force of nature. Basically that economic plans are inherently under-informed.
- godelzilla 6y ago
  Mises' fans "argue" without any empirical evidence that no plan is the best plan. Pseudo-science in action.
roenxi 6y ago
> Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. If you want a good guess; the economy is complicated, there is no consensus on how it works and the plurality position on how it works among the public is badly misaligned with reality.
- salawat 6y ago
  I find that that misalignment tends to stem not from any failing of the public, but from the institution of finance itself. I have encountered no vein of human endeavor so mired in jargon or completely disconnected from everyday experience such that most of the public stands little if any chance of properly understanding it than finance. The public has a relatively simple working model of the financial world. A)Keep money somewhere safe. B)Lend money only to those you trust. C)Save for a rainy day, because while things are good now, they won't be forever. D)debt above your means is undesirable. E)debt should be paid F)no one is going to bail you out so manage things carefully It takes a proper finance person to make the jump to: A) Debt is fungible B) when Credit is cheap, use it C) Better to bust with a limited liability corp or other legal fiction than to not try D) Money gets printed all the time. Don't worry about where it comes from or where it goes, it'll all come out in the wash (in theory, and in spite of the fact we know sometimes it doesn't) E)If you do go bust, don't sweat it, bankruptcy is there for you, and if you're big enough, the government will bail you out through the taxpayers via enough lobbyist pressure. Case and point: when the system has such stark separations between front and "back-office" concerns, and most of the "back-office" is never tackled as part of primary education, I find it a bit cheap to take potshots at the public for not knowing every intimate detail about how the sausage is made. The info may exist in the knowledge graph, but a successful query of the all the bits and pieces that result in something workable forming that stands the test of time is non-trivial.
  - JackFr 6y ago
    It takes a proper finance person to make the jump to: 1) There is a temporal mismatch between the need to consume economic value and the ability to produce economic value. The so called desirability of savings, and taking on debt within your capacity to reasonably repay are not first principals but rather results of this temporal mismatch. 2) Assets (as distinct from goods) are the best means to achieve the saving and borrowing in (1). A farmer cannot save food for retirement. Selling goods and services and lending the money to, or purchasing an equitable share in a productive enterprise is the best way to save.
setgree 6y ago
> we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems Generalization: most of those problems are political rather than technical, and unlike with technical problems, if you make a wrong guess about how to solve a political problem, the costs might be unboundedly catastrophic (e.g. world war). I personally believe that the best response to global warming is open borders, because it would mean that all the people who: * are living in the global south could relocate somewhere colder and further inland, if they wanted; * are subsistence farming, but who would be great engineers, scientists, etc. given the right opportunities, would be more likely to get those opportunities. Most people think that open borders would be bad, and I don't think I will be able to persuade them otherwise in my lifetime. In general, alternatives to persuasion in politics amount to seizing power and/or changing the rules of the game. Even if I thought I could do that, which I don't, I wouldn't, because all too often in history, the cure is worse than the disease. That's why I think these problems are hard -- and why I'm scared of people who propose grand solutions to them.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
  If you haven't seen it, you might like Open Borders by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith[1]. Comic-book form advocating for open borders, with pretty good reasoning. [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960 https://smile.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigra...
  - setgree 6y ago
    Ha, I originally provided a cite to this but took it out to make my comment shorter :) Glad you liked it!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bserge 6y ago
  My issue with open borders is that everyone seems to come to the most populated places. It seems kind of insane how everyone crams into the same old cities. Companies do it because the workers are there, workers do it because the companies are there, and every city just becomes a crowded, unaffordable hellscape. Is it not possible to build new towns and expand them anymore? There's plenty of land as far as I can tell...
gridlockd 6y ago
> Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. Because markets and financials systems behave like a force of nature. Nobody sat down and invented them, they emerged. The only thing you can invent is regulations. However, you can't arbitrarily regulate markets, or credit. If you do, black markets and informal credit systems emerge. You can't arbitrarily set prices, if you do, shortages and scalping are the result. There is a window where regulation doesn't fail, which is going to be fairly close to where the market wanted to go anyway - kind of like building a dam.
godelzilla 6y ago
>Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. The powers that develop and promote this ideology will profit from it even as the planet is destroyed.
credit_guy 6y ago
> to solve our pressing problems We will always have finite resources. Given finite resources not every human need/wish will ever be achievable, and various people have various needs and wishes. There will always be a boundary between the needs that are achievable with very little resource allocation and needs that are completely out of the realm of possibility. On that boundary, people will always have disagreements about what's more urgent or not. Some things will necessarily be deprioritized, and for a segment of the population it will look like pressing problems are not solved and the system is broken to the core. There is no way to get out of this, in any conceivable system with finite resources.
- grasshopperpurp 6y ago
  Separating needs and wishes would be a good start. Security and dignity would serve as nice starting points imo. Then, we could argue over the rest, but we're not there. Most people - in the US anyway - see everything as something to fight for, and if you fight for more than you need while others are unable to fight for what they need - or fight well enough to get what they need - it just means you're winning.
truculent 6y ago
> Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. This is well said, and I have been very frustrated by this in recent years, too. The simplest clue I have is to look at who benefits from this perspective, and what means they have to spread this idea in the public sphere and discourse.
- JackFr 6y ago
  > The simplest clue I have is to look at who benefits from this perspective Start with the billions of people lifted out of poverty. Never in history have so many people enjoyed such a high standard of living. The market isn't perfect and it isn't magic, and I don't mean to minimize climate change and other tragedies-of-the-commons, but in practice it's been very successful at improving peoples lives.
  - poiuytrewqa 6y ago
    This is the first time I've heard that the financial system has lifted "billions" of people out of poverty. I thought that the financial system was the consequences of wealth rather than the cause (otherwise this doesn't explain why none of the African stock exchange are fighting with NYSE for the most attractive stock market)
    - UK-Al05 6y ago
      Private property, law, and markets is what lifts people out of poverty. Wealth inequality is a side effect as some people do better than others.
  - ustolemyname 6y ago
    That could equally be a consequence of technological and scientific development than any particular economic structure.
    - 6y ago
refurb 6y ago
It’s clear that past attempts to “fix” the economic system (e.g. Nixon’s price controls, rent control) have often made things worse. So to a degree, a free market is “inevitable” to a degree. There is only so much control you can exert without mucking it up. The other alternative is place more of the economy under gov’t control and we’ve seen how well that works. And have no idea why you think the future will be worse. Think about living in 1930’s France. The world was far more unstable than it is now, yet prosperity and freedom are more broadly available than ever before. Not sure what the doom and gloom prediction is based on - we are NOT in unique times here.

Sambdala 6y ago

I agree, we invented this stuff, and we should be able to fix it when it 'breaks.' However, we see this constantly in any manmade system (system as defined by Systemics), where we can't control the emergent behavior of the system. It's worse than that because we're talking about systems where change is necessarily political, so in-group/out-group dynamics dominate the perceived discussion ("Democrats think this, but Republicans say that"). This is made worse when one is pleased with the emergent outcome of a system and so ex post facto makes up justifications, but wouldn't feel comfortable arguing directly for the outcome publicly (see "States rights"). It's a problem I think about a lot, and there just aren't any easy answers to either combat bad faith participants or to be convincing that systems thinking needs to be given more weight in discourse.

curation 6y ago
Our available methods for engaging with the economic are, perhaps functionally, not able to answer for any problems. Walters Streeck describes economic theory as race horses hitched to a plow: The complexity of the models developed do nothing to advance the work to be done. The work of economic analysis has to re-orient according to Streeck - > "I am hungry for facts, not for concepts; concepts I access through facts and through the questions they raise, including the need to organize them into a coherent picture."

hhjinks 6y ago

What makes you so sure that economics is entirely constructed? Things like supply and demand are clearly natural consequences of resource scarcity, and doesn't only apply to economics. While we do have certain frameworks that are man-made that prop up and support the economy, AN economy of some description just seems like a natural consequence of things being perceived as having value. We even see this in animals.

CaptArmchair 6y ago
An economy is the net result of individual and collective (social) behaviours. You could, indeed, argue that other species such as other primates or even ants behave in a way that bears resemblance to an economy with a due stretch of imagination. Even so, you have to be mindful about projection bias when you make such assertions. The difference is that humans have this unique ability: self awareness. Humans are able to see themselves as a separate entity, as opposed to other humans. This also us to reflect on our own needs and desires, but also about the desires and needs of other individuals. It's this ability that has led to the emergence of language, culture and technology. A human economy is an extension of the behaviours you'd see in other species. It just so happens that humans are able to steer that behaviour. The trouble is that we aren't that good at gauging the extent to which we get to control individual as well as collective and emergent behaviour. So, reality is layered. On an abstract level, a human economy is seemingly based off a complex set of artificial social constructs used by humans to describe and handle that reality; but on a much lower level, a human economy is the net result of emergent individual and social behavioural patterns which, in themselves, have a clear overlap with other species. The fallacy then is to try and draw a clear border between those two levels.
- kingkawn 6y ago
  I have yet to meet a human that exhibits this so called self-awareness
  - Folcon 6y ago
    Just to clarify, you don't believe anyone including yourself is self-aware? If you believe you are self-aware then I suspect that it's more a problem of recognition than self-awareness being absent. If you don't believe that you are self-aware, that's really interesting. Please elaborate!

humanrebar 6y ago

> I don't know how we get from here to a place where these problems become solvable (or even what that place looks like) and from there to a world that is actually going to sustain us again. Austrians argue that this is the inevitable force of nature. Basically that economic plans are inherently under-informed.

godelzilla 6y ago
Mises' fans "argue" without any empirical evidence that no plan is the best plan. Pseudo-science in action.

roenxi 6y ago

> Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. If you want a good guess; the economy is complicated, there is no consensus on how it works and the plurality position on how it works among the public is badly misaligned with reality.

salawat 6y ago
I find that that misalignment tends to stem not from any failing of the public, but from the institution of finance itself. I have encountered no vein of human endeavor so mired in jargon or completely disconnected from everyday experience such that most of the public stands little if any chance of properly understanding it than finance. The public has a relatively simple working model of the financial world. A)Keep money somewhere safe. B)Lend money only to those you trust. C)Save for a rainy day, because while things are good now, they won't be forever. D)debt above your means is undesirable. E)debt should be paid F)no one is going to bail you out so manage things carefully It takes a proper finance person to make the jump to: A) Debt is fungible B) when Credit is cheap, use it C) Better to bust with a limited liability corp or other legal fiction than to not try D) Money gets printed all the time. Don't worry about where it comes from or where it goes, it'll all come out in the wash (in theory, and in spite of the fact we know sometimes it doesn't) E)If you do go bust, don't sweat it, bankruptcy is there for you, and if you're big enough, the government will bail you out through the taxpayers via enough lobbyist pressure. Case and point: when the system has such stark separations between front and "back-office" concerns, and most of the "back-office" is never tackled as part of primary education, I find it a bit cheap to take potshots at the public for not knowing every intimate detail about how the sausage is made. The info may exist in the knowledge graph, but a successful query of the all the bits and pieces that result in something workable forming that stands the test of time is non-trivial.
- JackFr 6y ago
  It takes a proper finance person to make the jump to: 1) There is a temporal mismatch between the need to consume economic value and the ability to produce economic value. The so called desirability of savings, and taking on debt within your capacity to reasonably repay are not first principals but rather results of this temporal mismatch. 2) Assets (as distinct from goods) are the best means to achieve the saving and borrowing in (1). A farmer cannot save food for retirement. Selling goods and services and lending the money to, or purchasing an equitable share in a productive enterprise is the best way to save.

setgree 6y ago

> we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems Generalization: most of those problems are political rather than technical, and unlike with technical problems, if you make a wrong guess about how to solve a political problem, the costs might be unboundedly catastrophic (e.g. world war). I personally believe that the best response to global warming is open borders, because it would mean that all the people who: * are living in the global south could relocate somewhere colder and further inland, if they wanted; * are subsistence farming, but who would be great engineers, scientists, etc. given the right opportunities, would be more likely to get those opportunities. Most people think that open borders would be bad, and I don't think I will be able to persuade them otherwise in my lifetime. In general, alternatives to persuasion in politics amount to seizing power and/or changing the rules of the game. Even if I thought I could do that, which I don't, I wouldn't, because all too often in history, the cure is worse than the disease. That's why I think these problems are hard -- and why I'm scared of people who propose grand solutions to them.

SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
If you haven't seen it, you might like Open Borders by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith[1]. Comic-book form advocating for open borders, with pretty good reasoning. [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960 https://smile.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigra...
- setgree 6y ago
  Ha, I originally provided a cite to this but took it out to make my comment shorter :) Glad you liked it!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bserge 6y ago
My issue with open borders is that everyone seems to come to the most populated places. It seems kind of insane how everyone crams into the same old cities. Companies do it because the workers are there, workers do it because the companies are there, and every city just becomes a crowded, unaffordable hellscape. Is it not possible to build new towns and expand them anymore? There's plenty of land as far as I can tell...

gridlockd 6y ago

> Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. Because markets and financials systems behave like a force of nature. Nobody sat down and invented them, they emerged. The only thing you can invent is regulations. However, you can't arbitrarily regulate markets, or credit. If you do, black markets and informal credit systems emerge. You can't arbitrarily set prices, if you do, shortages and scalping are the result. There is a window where regulation doesn't fail, which is going to be fairly close to where the market wanted to go anyway - kind of like building a dam.

godelzilla 6y ago

credit_guy 6y ago

> to solve our pressing problems We will always have finite resources. Given finite resources not every human need/wish will ever be achievable, and various people have various needs and wishes. There will always be a boundary between the needs that are achievable with very little resource allocation and needs that are completely out of the realm of possibility. On that boundary, people will always have disagreements about what's more urgent or not. Some things will necessarily be deprioritized, and for a segment of the population it will look like pressing problems are not solved and the system is broken to the core. There is no way to get out of this, in any conceivable system with finite resources.

grasshopperpurp 6y ago
Separating needs and wishes would be a good start. Security and dignity would serve as nice starting points imo. Then, we could argue over the rest, but we're not there. Most people - in the US anyway - see everything as something to fight for, and if you fight for more than you need while others are unable to fight for what they need - or fight well enough to get what they need - it just means you're winning.

truculent 6y ago

> Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. This is well said, and I have been very frustrated by this in recent years, too. The simplest clue I have is to look at who benefits from this perspective, and what means they have to spread this idea in the public sphere and discourse.

JackFr 6y ago
> The simplest clue I have is to look at who benefits from this perspective Start with the billions of people lifted out of poverty. Never in history have so many people enjoyed such a high standard of living. The market isn't perfect and it isn't magic, and I don't mean to minimize climate change and other tragedies-of-the-commons, but in practice it's been very successful at improving peoples lives.
- poiuytrewqa 6y ago
  This is the first time I've heard that the financial system has lifted "billions" of people out of poverty. I thought that the financial system was the consequences of wealth rather than the cause (otherwise this doesn't explain why none of the African stock exchange are fighting with NYSE for the most attractive stock market)
  - UK-Al05 6y ago
    Private property, law, and markets is what lifts people out of poverty. Wealth inequality is a side effect as some people do better than others.
- ustolemyname 6y ago
  That could equally be a consequence of technological and scientific development than any particular economic structure.
  - 6y ago

refurb 6y ago

It’s clear that past attempts to “fix” the economic system (e.g. Nixon’s price controls, rent control) have often made things worse. So to a degree, a free market is “inevitable” to a degree. There is only so much control you can exert without mucking it up. The other alternative is place more of the economy under gov’t control and we’ve seen how well that works. And have no idea why you think the future will be worse. Think about living in 1930’s France. The world was far more unstable than it is now, yet prosperity and freedom are more broadly available than ever before. Not sure what the doom and gloom prediction is based on - we are NOT in unique times here.