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Arguably much of those services are to try to recover a portion of value that we lose by default due to bad decisions beyond our control. You pay for an Uber,

Arguably much of those services are to try to recover a portion of value that we lose by default due to bad decisions beyond our control. You pay for an Uber, or you pay for a car and all of its associated costs, and pay with your time sitting in soul-crushing traffic either way, because your municipality responded to population growth by building incredible sprawl and dangerous roads with no alternatives instead of a development and transit infrastructure that scales. Or you pay premiums and copays and various fees as tribute to the insane byzantine healthcare system that the U.S. has because there is no simple public option or sane way for providers to communicate information to each other. Or you pay 4x the cost for 1/4 the speed for Internet because $TELCO_GIANT has a monopoly and lobbied the municipality not to compete. We have incredible, jaw-dropping amounts of misallocated value, with expensive services willing to sell you back a fraction of that value at an outrageous price. I don't think I would call that economically productive.

ethanbond 4y ago
Yeah totally agreed with all of this. It’s just a question of what you want to consider the context and what you want to consider the more mutable “subject” of your inquiry. A more expansive view of context will give you more ideal options, but will also get harder and harder to manipulate.
- actionablefiber 4y ago
  The context of the person you replied to was: > Our currency loses value because too much of the economy is constituted by unproductive jobs where people just attend to each other instead of creating any value. Which is a broad enough context for my point. The incredible inefficiency of the U.S. economy means that it is not providing the quality of life to its people that our per-capita economic activity suggests that it should be. In the aggregate, there's a lot of people paying a lot of money and getting a crappy life in return. That manifests itself in, among others, physical/mental health problems, constant economic precarity, overconsumption of natural resources, degradation of public services, profligate time-wasting, frustration with each other and one's self, and unachieved potential. And those things put the U.S. on the path to long-term decline. After you account for externalities, and the fact that much of American economic activity would not exist if it simply had a better-structured society to begin with, the amount of value it actually creates starts to look a lot lower.

ethanbond 4y ago

Yeah totally agreed with all of this. It’s just a question of what you want to consider the context and what you want to consider the more mutable “subject” of your inquiry. A more expansive view of context will give you more ideal options, but will also get harder and harder to manipulate.

actionablefiber 4y ago
The context of the person you replied to was: > Our currency loses value because too much of the economy is constituted by unproductive jobs where people just attend to each other instead of creating any value. Which is a broad enough context for my point. The incredible inefficiency of the U.S. economy means that it is not providing the quality of life to its people that our per-capita economic activity suggests that it should be. In the aggregate, there's a lot of people paying a lot of money and getting a crappy life in return. That manifests itself in, among others, physical/mental health problems, constant economic precarity, overconsumption of natural resources, degradation of public services, profligate time-wasting, frustration with each other and one's self, and unachieved potential. And those things put the U.S. on the path to long-term decline. After you account for externalities, and the fact that much of American economic activity would not exist if it simply had a better-structured society to begin with, the amount of value it actually creates starts to look a lot lower.