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Have I noticed all these things? You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want. Our space program is finally running at a more reasonable cost

Have I noticed all these things? You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want. Our space program is finally running at a more reasonable cost thanks to some private competition. What services are costing more now outside of healthcare? Most things are getting commoditized/cheaper. What enormous investments in infrastructure education etc? The problem right now is a lack of investment into fixing bridges- not that the money we're pouring in is wasted. And - the new laguardia terminal seems pretty great. Isn't that an example of an infra success? Are all the highly paid academics clueless and delusional? In the past few years we got CRISPR, an explosion in AI, the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, etc etc etc. All from academics. If every decision is made to maximize self interest - what about the near eradication of polio and Guinea worm disease by the gates and Carter foundations? Personally, I'm not that compelled by the "everything sucks because you know it just feels that way" arguments. You can make someone feel whatever way you want by picking your examples properly. Isnt America doing so great now? Spacex and CRISPR and a booming tech sector so on? And this is pretty clearly just meant to get you into the mood the author things will make you most likely to buy his book at the end.

xxpor 6y ago
>What services are costing more now outside of healthcare? Infrastructure. Our (USA) costs are COMPLETETLY OUTRAGIOUS compared to the global standard. We're talking multiples. Things like the gateway project in NJ/NYC cost 4x what they should for a crappier outcome.
- temp667 6y ago
  This - I've looked at a number of projects. There's some kind of tipping point with public / govt infra projects at which point they just go crazy in terms of cost, it's like the make work / interia / rent extractors just tip out the get things done folks at some point. NY / SF, even germany for a bit with Berlin's airport. I look at what they did in the past (huge railroad bridges in 100 days) and even now with private money (Tesla in germany is going up fast and sports stadiums go up like weeds despite their scale) the contrasts are remarkable. Space Launch System is $20B with not a single flight. SpaceX comes along, get's no $1B/year base, get's paid a fraction of the "big players" - and has done 80+ F9 launches. Also - success academies in NY seems to have some pretty amazing results relative to local schools. I realize some confounding factors, but if I was a parent in NY - that would be the choice if I lived in an area they served.
  - bumby 6y ago
    >Space Launch System is $20B with not a single flight. SpaceX comes along, get's no $1B/year base, get's paid a fraction of the "big players" - and has done 80+ F9 launches. You might be conflating Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy is a more applicable comparison to SLS. Falcon Heavy had one launch in '19 and two in '20. When it comes to infrastructure, I think there are a few confounding factors. 1) Our level of risk is lower. We no longer find it an acceptable risk to lose workers at the rates that were acceptable 100 years ago and 2) the systems are inherently more complex. Even so, we tend to oversimplify them when planning [1] [1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/project-management/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/project-management/
- michaelcampbell 6y ago
  Higher education also.
- bnralt 6y ago
  Indeed. Someone recently linked to an article that does a pretty good job of going over the massive infrastructure costs[1]. The U.S. also has relatively well funded education[2]. I think many of the comments here reflect one of the reasons we're in the situation we are in - the inability to consider that we might be able to do things better, even when there are plenty of examples from other countries to look at. To quote from the first article: > The answer, I believe, has to do with American incuriosity. Incuriosity is not merely ignorance. Ignorance is a universal trait, people just differ in what they are ignorant about. But Americans are unique in not caring to learn from other countries even when those countries do things better. I think there's a lot of truth in that; look at how almost all the discussions about healthcare ignore the successful systems in other countries. It goes beyond that, though. We shouldn't have to look at other countries to consider the possibility that we could be doing things better. But whenever it's suggested that we could make things better, there seems to be a lot of hostility to the idea and push back against it. [1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c... [2] https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    "But the other countries are smaller, so of course they're spending less in aggregate!" Is the one thing that seems to be enough to shut every discussion down for a certain political group.
    - twalla 6y ago
      Caring for a smaller, homogenous, less geographically distributed population is definitely different from a larger, heterogenous distributed population - and that's a valid criticism of attempting to wholesale copy other countries. I just wish that the criticism was used as a launching point for questions like "How can we overcome those challenges?" or "What parts of the system would potentially transfer well?" instead of the rhetorical blunt instrument it seems to have become.
      - 6y ago
- J0_k3r 6y ago
  main problem: if you are planning to open up a healthcare center in the united states you must prove that you will not compete with any others. thank government regulation
  - genericone 6y ago
    I've never heard this reasoning before, are you saying the reason competitive healthcare services/pricing doesn't exist is because competing healthcare providers within a region are disallowed?
    - rogerbinns 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need It has been law in many states starting in the 1960's. The original intention was to prevent too much competition which could skew incentives.
      - alistairSH 6y ago
        Yup. We basically built a worst-of-all-options* system in the US. It's not free market. And it's not fully socialized. * From the perspective of an average consumer. It's a brilliant system if you're in a position to profit off it. And it has resulted in the best health care in the world (for those who can afford it).
      - hyperdimension 6y ago
        I've heard of that requirement before (of course the artifical limiting of the numbers of doctors able to start practicing every year is somewhat a similar type of practice,) but I'd be curious to see what the original rationale for the Certificate of Need program was. Is '[too much] competition' not supposedly the bedrock of our Wonderful System of Market Capitalism?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- mrkstu 6y ago
  But that isn’t an American problem. Infrastructure buildout in AZ is done in an incredibly efficient and cost effective manner. Dallas is similar. Utah’s buildout for the Winter Olympics was amazing and inexpensive. Cali/NY/MA? Not so much.
  - spenczar5 6y ago
    I haven’t seen that claim before. Do you have cites? I looked up Utah’s Olympics build. It cost $2.1 billion, and was 24% over budget. I don’t really know whether that’s efficient or not?
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
      24% is a -low- number for overbudget. Talk to any civil engineer or look at city records, particularly in heavily regulated cities and famous NIMBY cities.
- defterGoose 6y ago
  Exactly. Things that affect everyone fairly equally are now just more expensive. Healthcare. Infrastructure. Housing. Higher education. It's great that our universities are capable of turning out transformative technologies like CRISPR, but it's arguably slowing down, and it's happening at a time when our basic assumptions about what education opportunities should be available to our children. And make no mistake, they're narrowing. Space travel may retrospectively look in a thousand years like an absolute necessity. But that will be from a perspective of inequality here on earth having exploded. And fewer people will be involved than our collectivity would like.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- srsQtho00 6y ago
  Of course it’s because we’ve increased administrative costs by privatizing it into numerous bubbles of ownership who all believe they’re somehow entitled a bigger piece of the pie to divvy up. These are mathematical truths as much as any other, all documented in our theories of economics, government transfer of capital, etc. Does the public cost on the books matter when we’ll socially bail out the failures and all be left with a desiccated environment? Who benefits from that belief and agency around such semantics? Normalizing the real logistics around these things would streamline costs. But of course the gerontocracy demands we continue LARPing the story they’re normalized to. Figurative sacrifice & death is too scary, let’s just drag our grandkids off the cliff. They shoveled high this fiat pile of dollars! You will honor that or no healthcare! Our society is a joke.
- imperfectcats 6y ago
  Costs go up when the process gets complicated, especially when the complications are increasingly tangential to the activity. YIMBYism, environmental impact, indigenous land rights, historical considerations (preserving sites with historical value) all play a part in increasing costs in the west in building physical things. That is not an argument AGAINST these things. It may be a valid trade-off that we all accept. Or it may be a power grab by some department or group. It is tough to know generally speaking. That is true in all areas where costs are rising wildly - medicine, education, cost of building real estate in pre-COVID bay area, cost of infrastructure. Whether you think the trade-offs are justified will depend on your mood affiliation as much as anything else.
gambler 6y ago
> You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want. So, what makes your examples better than the author's?
- lhorie 6y ago
  I think the point is that there's so much variability that drawing a conclusion based on anecdotes is bound to be ignoring a lot of reality.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- vikramkr 6y ago
  They aren't- that's the point. My examples are equally bad since they're also incomplete. I'm not really arguing the opposite as much as I'm trying to illustrate why nuance and data are important. Some things are getting better, some are getting worse, but it helps the author sell their book if they can get you to ignore one aspect of it. You might even say that there's a lot of self interest in the way the argument is made
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  American cars is one thing, they are tons better when compared with cars from the 90s and previous. It's easy to get 200k-300k out of a car now with standard maintenance and upkeep.
core-questions 6y ago
> Have I noticed all these things? You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want. And you can also be deliberately avoidant of the things you don't want to think about. Yes, the space programs are doing okay, but the city streets are decaying and filled with crime. Yes, we know about the Higgs Boson, but we also have no savings, and an opioid epidemic. > If every decision is made to maximize self interest - what about the near eradication of polio and Guinea worm disease by the gates and Carter foundations? Good things can come from self-interested acts, nobody denies that, but you're thinking about this from within the paradigm of liberalism and so you're missing the critique, like someone who can't see the forest for the trees. In fact, that adage has never been more apt, because the issue with liberalism and with self-interest in general is that it boils down to a cult of the individual. Within the decaying liberal system, the individual is above all else. Only the experiences of individuals matter. "Communities" don't exist, except as categories; and the categories themselves only exist as ways of aggregating individuals for marketing purposes. We are all atomized, all recluses even when we are being social. > In the past few years we got CRISPR, an explosion in AI, the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, etc etc etc. All from academics. Each of those academics is motivated by many factors, some of them selfless, some of them pure curiosity, but ultimately in the case of every successful participant there is the selfish interest in being the person to publish the paper, getting that credit, getting a bit of career advancement, maybe even a bit of fame. Individuals. The result here is that the academics who do get some notoriety are those who are working on sexy projects, like the ones you named. CRISPR, very cool; funded with a lot of tax money; never likely to do a goddamned thing for 99.999% of the population who fronted the money for it, nor for their children, but hey, maybe 100 years from now we live in some gene-edited hellscape. Yay.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  The point of my post is that I'm also cherrypicking. The point im trying to convey is that if I decide to unmoor myself from nuance and rigor in incorporating data etc, I can make the world sound as good or as bad as I want.
  - ssdrccr 6y ago
leetcrew 6y ago
most things are going very well. a few things that matter a lot to ordinary people are not (healthcare, education, housing in some locales). some of the dysfunction is just baffling. the rent for the apartment I live in increases faster than my salary. this is in a city where the population has been decreasing YoY for at least a decade and in a neighborhood where I can see two large apartment complexes under construction out my window. how is this possible?
Retric 6y ago
What services are costing more outside of healthcare. Housing and Higher education are obvious standouts. Relative to other countries networking and cellphone service are absurdly overpriced, but so is tax prep, highway construction, and other government adjacent industries.
- bmh100 6y ago
  What is your definition of "government adjacent industries"?
  - Retric 6y ago
    Companies/industries that exist because of government outsourcing work to them. Defense contacting being the obvious example, but there are a wide range like education outsourcing text books and testing services. As a rule of thumb if the industry suffers when efficiency increases, things get worse.
- rogerbinns 6y ago
  > What services are costing more outside of healthcare This is a known effect in economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease "... the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth"
  - Retric 6y ago
    That doesn’t explain why collage tuition increases so much faster than the cost of a classical music performance which is part of the original 1960’s study. Baumol's cost disease is in effect a labor price floor, but says nothing about a sectors overall efficiency.
    - eindiran 6y ago
      Because of the 1992 Higher Education Amendments to the 1965 Higher Education Act and the 1993 Student Loan Reform Act, colleges have no incentive to compete on price: anyone who can't pay for tuition out-of-pocket can get government money to do so. FAFSA is basically a perfect price discrimination system for colleges: why wouldn't they attempt to extract the maximum amount possible from each student? An additional factor to consider is that higher education has increased the number of roles in their org-chart where Baumol's original proposition applies: the number of administrators in higher education just keeps rising. I'm not super familiar with the economics of orchestras, but I would be very surprised if the San Francisco Symphony is staffed with 4x the number of administrators that it was in 1978, even though the number of chairs in the orchestra remains the same.
phkahler 6y ago
>> Most things are getting commoditized/cheaper. How about the price of food. Only Ramen and maybe fresh produce have stayed low. Also any kind of internet connectivity, housing.
cryptica 6y ago
>> Have I noticed all these things? You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want. The problem with the position that "everything is fine" is that it doesn't resonate at all with the observable reality experienced by 99% of people (outside of HN). Maybe it's hard for you to believe but for most people, the premise of the article could not be more obvious. It's like trying to convince homeless people who are sleeping outside the gates of a mansion that they are actually wealthy because they own a sleeping bag...
- vikramkr 6y ago
  My position isn't that everything is fine. My position is that everything is nuanced, and that its easy to use anecdotes and emotion to convey an unnuanced worldview to sell a book
mdorazio 6y ago
> The problem right now is a lack of investment into fixing bridges- not that the money we're pouring in is wasted. I can't really agree with this. If you look closely, ridiculous budgets for infrastructure disappearing into black holes are rampant in the US. A great example is the southern California High Speed Rail project. As other commenters have also stated, US infrastructure development costs are out of proportion with the rest of the developing world and seem to be absurdly expensive simply because they can be [1]. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-07-12_infrastructure_costs_v2.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-07...
- whatsmyusername 6y ago
  That’s a terrible example since that’s a moonshot project. Moonshot projects are always a money pit, you’re trying to figure something out no one else is doing.
  - tomjakubowski 6y ago
    Is it really a moonshot? What's the innovation in building a high speed rail connecting two major cities ~400 miles apart? I guess no one has done this in California before.
  - Nihilartikel 6y ago
    Was it a moon shot when China or any other country with comparably sized high speed rail systems did it? A quick google shows China's existing high speed rail system at 23,600 mi, in comparison to the total of 800 miles planned for CA. I don't disagree that it was a moon shot, but it was not a moon shot for reasons of technical difficulty or novelty, but for the reason that it is now so systemically difficult to competently implement any large scale infrastructure in America, and California particularly. I won't comment on what the reasons for that might be. My interpretation is that this kind of decay in capability is that the author is driving at.
    - whatsmyusername 6y ago
vikramkr 6y ago
To clarify some of the confusion- my point is not that the world is great. My point is that if I free myself from intellectual rigor and data/evidence based claims, and allow myself to focus on emotion, vague statements, and anecdote, I can paint whatever picture I want. lots of good examples in replies about how dome of the wishy washy statements don't really hold up - thats the point - I only mentioned spacex while leaving out the money pit that is SLS for example. Ultimately the irony here is that the article itself is a pretty good example of self interest - its a bunch of the type of arguments they go after academics for making, and then uses it to try and sell their book.
- scott-smith_us 6y ago
  > if I free myself from intellectual rigor and data/evidence based claims, and allow myself to focus on emotion, vague statements, and anecdote, I can paint whatever picture I want Well said. This needs to be carved in granite somewhere
xyzzyz 6y ago
What services are costing more now outside of healthcare? All services when the buyer is the government.
birksherty 6y ago
Well things that you cared about are mostly for rich, already well off. Rich will see what they cared about. On the other side it's worse, health care, education loan, minimum wage not a living wage, affordable housing homeless etc. Things are are important for not everyone not just a few at top.

xxpor 6y ago

>What services are costing more now outside of healthcare? Infrastructure. Our (USA) costs are COMPLETETLY OUTRAGIOUS compared to the global standard. We're talking multiples. Things like the gateway project in NJ/NYC cost 4x what they should for a crappier outcome.

temp667 6y ago
This - I've looked at a number of projects. There's some kind of tipping point with public / govt infra projects at which point they just go crazy in terms of cost, it's like the make work / interia / rent extractors just tip out the get things done folks at some point. NY / SF, even germany for a bit with Berlin's airport. I look at what they did in the past (huge railroad bridges in 100 days) and even now with private money (Tesla in germany is going up fast and sports stadiums go up like weeds despite their scale) the contrasts are remarkable. Space Launch System is $20B with not a single flight. SpaceX comes along, get's no $1B/year base, get's paid a fraction of the "big players" - and has done 80+ F9 launches. Also - success academies in NY seems to have some pretty amazing results relative to local schools. I realize some confounding factors, but if I was a parent in NY - that would be the choice if I lived in an area they served.
- bumby 6y ago
  >Space Launch System is $20B with not a single flight. SpaceX comes along, get's no $1B/year base, get's paid a fraction of the "big players" - and has done 80+ F9 launches. You might be conflating Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy is a more applicable comparison to SLS. Falcon Heavy had one launch in '19 and two in '20. When it comes to infrastructure, I think there are a few confounding factors. 1) Our level of risk is lower. We no longer find it an acceptable risk to lose workers at the rates that were acceptable 100 years ago and 2) the systems are inherently more complex. Even so, we tend to oversimplify them when planning [1] [1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/project-management/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/project-management/
michaelcampbell 6y ago
Higher education also.
bnralt 6y ago
Indeed. Someone recently linked to an article that does a pretty good job of going over the massive infrastructure costs[1]. The U.S. also has relatively well funded education[2]. I think many of the comments here reflect one of the reasons we're in the situation we are in - the inability to consider that we might be able to do things better, even when there are plenty of examples from other countries to look at. To quote from the first article: > The answer, I believe, has to do with American incuriosity. Incuriosity is not merely ignorance. Ignorance is a universal trait, people just differ in what they are ignorant about. But Americans are unique in not caring to learn from other countries even when those countries do things better. I think there's a lot of truth in that; look at how almost all the discussions about healthcare ignore the successful systems in other countries. It goes beyond that, though. We shouldn't have to look at other countries to consider the possibility that we could be doing things better. But whenever it's suggested that we could make things better, there seems to be a lot of hostility to the idea and push back against it. [1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c... [2] https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm
- solarkraft 6y ago
  "But the other countries are smaller, so of course they're spending less in aggregate!" Is the one thing that seems to be enough to shut every discussion down for a certain political group.
  - twalla 6y ago
    Caring for a smaller, homogenous, less geographically distributed population is definitely different from a larger, heterogenous distributed population - and that's a valid criticism of attempting to wholesale copy other countries. I just wish that the criticism was used as a launching point for questions like "How can we overcome those challenges?" or "What parts of the system would potentially transfer well?" instead of the rhetorical blunt instrument it seems to have become.
    - 6y ago
J0_k3r 6y ago
main problem: if you are planning to open up a healthcare center in the united states you must prove that you will not compete with any others. thank government regulation
- genericone 6y ago
  I've never heard this reasoning before, are you saying the reason competitive healthcare services/pricing doesn't exist is because competing healthcare providers within a region are disallowed?
  - rogerbinns 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need It has been law in many states starting in the 1960's. The original intention was to prevent too much competition which could skew incentives.
    - alistairSH 6y ago
      Yup. We basically built a worst-of-all-options* system in the US. It's not free market. And it's not fully socialized. * From the perspective of an average consumer. It's a brilliant system if you're in a position to profit off it. And it has resulted in the best health care in the world (for those who can afford it).
    - hyperdimension 6y ago
      I've heard of that requirement before (of course the artifical limiting of the numbers of doctors able to start practicing every year is somewhat a similar type of practice,) but I'd be curious to see what the original rationale for the Certificate of Need program was. Is '[too much] competition' not supposedly the bedrock of our Wonderful System of Market Capitalism?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
mrkstu 6y ago
But that isn’t an American problem. Infrastructure buildout in AZ is done in an incredibly efficient and cost effective manner. Dallas is similar. Utah’s buildout for the Winter Olympics was amazing and inexpensive. Cali/NY/MA? Not so much.
- spenczar5 6y ago
  I haven’t seen that claim before. Do you have cites? I looked up Utah’s Olympics build. It cost $2.1 billion, and was 24% over budget. I don’t really know whether that’s efficient or not?
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    24% is a -low- number for overbudget. Talk to any civil engineer or look at city records, particularly in heavily regulated cities and famous NIMBY cities.
defterGoose 6y ago
Exactly. Things that affect everyone fairly equally are now just more expensive. Healthcare. Infrastructure. Housing. Higher education. It's great that our universities are capable of turning out transformative technologies like CRISPR, but it's arguably slowing down, and it's happening at a time when our basic assumptions about what education opportunities should be available to our children. And make no mistake, they're narrowing. Space travel may retrospectively look in a thousand years like an absolute necessity. But that will be from a perspective of inequality here on earth having exploded. And fewer people will be involved than our collectivity would like.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
srsQtho00 6y ago
Of course it’s because we’ve increased administrative costs by privatizing it into numerous bubbles of ownership who all believe they’re somehow entitled a bigger piece of the pie to divvy up. These are mathematical truths as much as any other, all documented in our theories of economics, government transfer of capital, etc. Does the public cost on the books matter when we’ll socially bail out the failures and all be left with a desiccated environment? Who benefits from that belief and agency around such semantics? Normalizing the real logistics around these things would streamline costs. But of course the gerontocracy demands we continue LARPing the story they’re normalized to. Figurative sacrifice & death is too scary, let’s just drag our grandkids off the cliff. They shoveled high this fiat pile of dollars! You will honor that or no healthcare! Our society is a joke.
imperfectcats 6y ago
Costs go up when the process gets complicated, especially when the complications are increasingly tangential to the activity. YIMBYism, environmental impact, indigenous land rights, historical considerations (preserving sites with historical value) all play a part in increasing costs in the west in building physical things. That is not an argument AGAINST these things. It may be a valid trade-off that we all accept. Or it may be a power grab by some department or group. It is tough to know generally speaking. That is true in all areas where costs are rising wildly - medicine, education, cost of building real estate in pre-COVID bay area, cost of infrastructure. Whether you think the trade-offs are justified will depend on your mood affiliation as much as anything else.

gambler 6y ago

> You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want. So, what makes your examples better than the author's?

lhorie 6y ago
I think the point is that there's so much variability that drawing a conclusion based on anecdotes is bound to be ignoring a lot of reality.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
vikramkr 6y ago
They aren't- that's the point. My examples are equally bad since they're also incomplete. I'm not really arguing the opposite as much as I'm trying to illustrate why nuance and data are important. Some things are getting better, some are getting worse, but it helps the author sell their book if they can get you to ignore one aspect of it. You might even say that there's a lot of self interest in the way the argument is made
stjohnswarts 6y ago
American cars is one thing, they are tons better when compared with cars from the 90s and previous. It's easy to get 200k-300k out of a car now with standard maintenance and upkeep.

core-questions 6y ago

> Have I noticed all these things? You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want. And you can also be deliberately avoidant of the things you don't want to think about. Yes, the space programs are doing okay, but the city streets are decaying and filled with crime. Yes, we know about the Higgs Boson, but we also have no savings, and an opioid epidemic. > If every decision is made to maximize self interest - what about the near eradication of polio and Guinea worm disease by the gates and Carter foundations? Good things can come from self-interested acts, nobody denies that, but you're thinking about this from within the paradigm of liberalism and so you're missing the critique, like someone who can't see the forest for the trees. In fact, that adage has never been more apt, because the issue with liberalism and with self-interest in general is that it boils down to a cult of the individual. Within the decaying liberal system, the individual is above all else. Only the experiences of individuals matter. "Communities" don't exist, except as categories; and the categories themselves only exist as ways of aggregating individuals for marketing purposes. We are all atomized, all recluses even when we are being social. > In the past few years we got CRISPR, an explosion in AI, the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, etc etc etc. All from academics. Each of those academics is motivated by many factors, some of them selfless, some of them pure curiosity, but ultimately in the case of every successful participant there is the selfish interest in being the person to publish the paper, getting that credit, getting a bit of career advancement, maybe even a bit of fame. Individuals. The result here is that the academics who do get some notoriety are those who are working on sexy projects, like the ones you named. CRISPR, very cool; funded with a lot of tax money; never likely to do a goddamned thing for 99.999% of the population who fronted the money for it, nor for their children, but hey, maybe 100 years from now we live in some gene-edited hellscape. Yay.

vikramkr 6y ago
The point of my post is that I'm also cherrypicking. The point im trying to convey is that if I decide to unmoor myself from nuance and rigor in incorporating data etc, I can make the world sound as good or as bad as I want.
- ssdrccr 6y ago

leetcrew 6y ago

most things are going very well. a few things that matter a lot to ordinary people are not (healthcare, education, housing in some locales). some of the dysfunction is just baffling. the rent for the apartment I live in increases faster than my salary. this is in a city where the population has been decreasing YoY for at least a decade and in a neighborhood where I can see two large apartment complexes under construction out my window. how is this possible?

Retric 6y ago

What services are costing more outside of healthcare. Housing and Higher education are obvious standouts. Relative to other countries networking and cellphone service are absurdly overpriced, but so is tax prep, highway construction, and other government adjacent industries.

bmh100 6y ago
What is your definition of "government adjacent industries"?
- Retric 6y ago
  Companies/industries that exist because of government outsourcing work to them. Defense contacting being the obvious example, but there are a wide range like education outsourcing text books and testing services. As a rule of thumb if the industry suffers when efficiency increases, things get worse.
rogerbinns 6y ago
> What services are costing more outside of healthcare This is a known effect in economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease "... the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth"
- Retric 6y ago
  That doesn’t explain why collage tuition increases so much faster than the cost of a classical music performance which is part of the original 1960’s study. Baumol's cost disease is in effect a labor price floor, but says nothing about a sectors overall efficiency.
  - eindiran 6y ago
    Because of the 1992 Higher Education Amendments to the 1965 Higher Education Act and the 1993 Student Loan Reform Act, colleges have no incentive to compete on price: anyone who can't pay for tuition out-of-pocket can get government money to do so. FAFSA is basically a perfect price discrimination system for colleges: why wouldn't they attempt to extract the maximum amount possible from each student? An additional factor to consider is that higher education has increased the number of roles in their org-chart where Baumol's original proposition applies: the number of administrators in higher education just keeps rising. I'm not super familiar with the economics of orchestras, but I would be very surprised if the San Francisco Symphony is staffed with 4x the number of administrators that it was in 1978, even though the number of chairs in the orchestra remains the same.

phkahler 6y ago

>> Most things are getting commoditized/cheaper. How about the price of food. Only Ramen and maybe fresh produce have stayed low. Also any kind of internet connectivity, housing.

cryptica 6y ago

>> Have I noticed all these things? You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want. The problem with the position that "everything is fine" is that it doesn't resonate at all with the observable reality experienced by 99% of people (outside of HN). Maybe it's hard for you to believe but for most people, the premise of the article could not be more obvious. It's like trying to convince homeless people who are sleeping outside the gates of a mansion that they are actually wealthy because they own a sleeping bag...

vikramkr 6y ago
My position isn't that everything is fine. My position is that everything is nuanced, and that its easy to use anecdotes and emotion to convey an unnuanced worldview to sell a book

mdorazio 6y ago

> The problem right now is a lack of investment into fixing bridges- not that the money we're pouring in is wasted. I can't really agree with this. If you look closely, ridiculous budgets for infrastructure disappearing into black holes are rampant in the US. A great example is the southern California High Speed Rail project. As other commenters have also stated, US infrastructure development costs are out of proportion with the rest of the developing world and seem to be absurdly expensive simply because they can be [1]. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-07-12_infrastructure_costs_v2.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-07...

whatsmyusername 6y ago
That’s a terrible example since that’s a moonshot project. Moonshot projects are always a money pit, you’re trying to figure something out no one else is doing.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  Is it really a moonshot? What's the innovation in building a high speed rail connecting two major cities ~400 miles apart? I guess no one has done this in California before.
- Nihilartikel 6y ago
  Was it a moon shot when China or any other country with comparably sized high speed rail systems did it? A quick google shows China's existing high speed rail system at 23,600 mi, in comparison to the total of 800 miles planned for CA. I don't disagree that it was a moon shot, but it was not a moon shot for reasons of technical difficulty or novelty, but for the reason that it is now so systemically difficult to competently implement any large scale infrastructure in America, and California particularly. I won't comment on what the reasons for that might be. My interpretation is that this kind of decay in capability is that the author is driving at.
  - whatsmyusername 6y ago

vikramkr 6y ago

To clarify some of the confusion- my point is not that the world is great. My point is that if I free myself from intellectual rigor and data/evidence based claims, and allow myself to focus on emotion, vague statements, and anecdote, I can paint whatever picture I want. lots of good examples in replies about how dome of the wishy washy statements don't really hold up - thats the point - I only mentioned spacex while leaving out the money pit that is SLS for example. Ultimately the irony here is that the article itself is a pretty good example of self interest - its a bunch of the type of arguments they go after academics for making, and then uses it to try and sell their book.

scott-smith_us 6y ago
> if I free myself from intellectual rigor and data/evidence based claims, and allow myself to focus on emotion, vague statements, and anecdote, I can paint whatever picture I want Well said. This needs to be carved in granite somewhere

xyzzyz 6y ago

What services are costing more now outside of healthcare? All services when the buyer is the government.

birksherty 6y ago

Well things that you cared about are mostly for rich, already well off. Rich will see what they cared about. On the other side it's worse, health care, education loan, minimum wage not a living wage, affordable housing homeless etc. Things are are important for not everyone not just a few at top.