5 ms·

> That takes planning, money vision and time. And a dictatorship. Democracy does not fit very well with long term plans, unless you either make huge efforts to

by pif 2y ago

> That takes planning, money vision and time. And a dictatorship. Democracy does not fit very well with long term plans, unless you either make huge efforts to ensure everyone gets their fair share (see Scandinavia) or you have a good plan for people being rich with not too much effort (see Switzerland and other tax havens). Concerning the USA, the divide between the extra rich and the general poor is nowadays too large to have a functioning country.

rsanek 2y ago
income inequality today is about the same as it was 100 years ago. https://ourworldindata.org/how-has-income-inequality-within-countries-evolved-over-the-past-century https://ourworldindata.org/how-has-income-inequality-within-...
- yakz 2y ago
  This says it improved significantly from 1940 until 1980, then made a turn for the worse. So it's about the same as 100 years ago, but for a big part of that 100 years, it was better.
- marxisttemp 2y ago
  What happened in 1929?
  - vermilingua 2y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_crash_of_1929 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_crash_of_1929
    - marxisttemp 2y ago
      That is correct.
      - fuzzfactor 2y ago
        It is so correct not to overlook it. Seemed almost like an elephant in the room for a minute there. But looking back, was it a market "correction" or maybe just a rug-pull? You probably had to be there. But we knew there was nothing like it until the 1970's. So many of the people who had lived through 1929 were still alive. Unless you were quite fortunate in the early 1970's, you would realize that 2008 was a non-event by comparison.
- chazhaz 2y ago
  ...and about twice what it was 50 years ago. How have Sweden, Japan, France, etc. managed to keep income inequality around postwar lows while America hasn't?
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    Not sure, but it seems in France the situation in degrading. The same 1% being richer while workers / students waiting in line for food charity stories were common. Part of it might be due to COVID, but I can't shake the feeling that business management (influenced by anglo-saxon/american culture) is harder than before and squeezes employees. Not only a feeling, I worked on precarious jobs that shouldn't exist, and we saw employees having materially impossible daily duties (due to bad software unable to organize things).
    - 6510 2y ago
      I suspect that people self-manage a lot more if the pay is right. If they stop doing that it seems like you need a more expensive manager, or perhaps you do.
      - agumonkey 2y ago
        well partly but my comment was more systemic, a lot of "new management" was about naive quantitative approaches. measure stupid traces / outputs and forcing people to hit target objectives without looking at the workflow, tooling and team dynamics people with enough skill and compatible mindsets need no management, they care, they will innovate, improve, repair if the structure is at odds with that, they will ask to compensate the pain by large salary bumps because pleasure is turned into pain
  - cvwright 2y ago
    > How have Sweden, Japan, France, etc. managed to keep income inequality around postwar lows while America hasn't? They didn’t import millions of poor people to do all the dirty or unpleasant jobs in their countries.
- regularization 2y ago
  And what was happening then? In 1916 a socialist got 6% of the vote for president (by 1920 he was in prison, but still got 3% of the vote). You had the green corn rebellion, 1919 bombings, Seattle general strike of 1919, Boston police strike, steel and coal strikes, Palmer raids, first red scare. Then the 1924 immigration act and creation of the US border patrol (echoes of today), cutting off most European immigration. Then up to 1932 and the Bonus Army and sut down strikes and New Deal overwhelmingly affirmed in the 1936 election. There was the same amount of inequality a century ago in the US, so what happened at that time.
southernplaces7 2y ago
>And a dictatorship. Democracy does not fit very well with long term plans Say again? If we're talking strictly about the United States as per the article that inspired this post, the U.S. is a case study of a prosperous, remarkably stable democracy steadily increasing its prosperity, wealth, influence and power while also for the vast majority of its history investing for the long term and in vital infrastructure. This process hasn't been constant or evenly incremental but it has been there for (now) literally centuries. The same could be said of Britain and many other developed countries on shorter but still reasonably long scales. On the other hand when you look at dictatorships in the wider scope of the modern era, the vast majority of them either invest explosively only to fail catastrophically at some point before reverting to some other variant of government, or countries that see their biggest failures happen during periods of dictatorship, and their major socioeconomic successes happen during periods of something at least approaching democracy and openness. There are exceptions to the above tendencies in favor of democracy, but China can't yet be called such. It has had only 80 years under its present dictatorship (preceded by decades of warlord rule, weakness and chaos) and of those only the last 40 have been ones of relatively stable growth, investment in major projects AND concurrent increases in prosperity. Under Mao it invested in certain major projects, but at nearly cataclysmic social, economic and human cost. Hardly a model, in those days, of dictatorship being applied to patient, wise planning. >Concerning the USA, the divide between the extra rich and the general poor is nowadays too large to have a functioning country. Really? Feel like sharing the mechanism by which these claims of overly severe wealth inequality will make the US collapse any time soon? Note also that as another comment above this mentions, the U.S has had more or less similar levels of said inequality for the last 100 years.... in which it functioned as a stable, relatively peaceful, democratic, increasingly prosperous society in which overall standards of living in absolute terms have gone up enormously.
- flyinglizard 2y ago
  In the US of 50 years ago, democracy was protected by codes of conduct, honor, and most importantly, strong content moderation in the form of monopolistic legacy media. All of this went out the door with the rise of social networks and the demise of legacy media. I don't see how democracy has the tools to survive populists with direct connection to the voting public. Even if elections happen in 2028, there's a good chance the pendulum will swing the other way and instead of thinking about moving forward we'll be locked in left/right destructive cycles, with the resulting purging of institutions, dramatic shifts in policies and just chaos all around.
agumonkey 2y ago
And further than democracy, the universe doesn't guarantee long-term anything. Sensible regimes (being democracy or else) seems intrinsically more aligned with that. Except maybe clear catastrophes that require "homogeneous" actions / behaviors (like asia approach to the covid 19 pandemic)
- kamaal 2y ago
  Wrote this a while back on this forum. Long term winning has nothing to do with growth. It has more to do with stability. Just don't fight wars and have smooth transition of power. This more or less guarantees winning on the very longer run. You still have gradual decay, which can unfold over centuries, and that is ok, but that is cyclical and you rise back in a century or so. The real issues with the US/West is wars, too many of them. Even if the dollar standard guarantees a money printer. Its not exactly free. Triffin dilemma de-industrializes your country. Your politics has too much ego to stop fighting. In the meanwhile you lose industry, stability, time and just don't have focus for things that matter. Somebody who is more sane wins in the meanwhile. UK really needed to build more industries instead of fighting WW1/2. Its a shame that Churchill won above Chmaberlain/Halifax. You get the fake thrill of winning a war, you shouldn't have even gone into, destroyed yourself fighting, all for some fake sense of bravado which led to your disaster. If things go South for US from here. George Bush will likely have the same standing in history. tl;dr- If you are winning, keep it that way, and don't fight wars.
  - giva 2y ago
    There is a little issue: If 9 countries want peace and one wants war, you will have a war.
h2zizzle 2y ago
And even then. Little reported: Switzerland's largest private bank was forced by the government to take over its rival's assets. Why "forced"? Something something Archegos. The truth is that we don't know what UBS saw and didn't like in Credit Suisse's files, and we won't know for a long time, as the report for the investigation into what actually happened during the acquisition has been sealed for 50 years. Suffice it to say that the debacle presents circumstantial evidence that "rich with not too much effort" might encourage dangerously laissez faire behavior.
- cyanydeez 2y ago
  it's not hard to guess: https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2024-11-12/exclusive-us-scrutinizes-russia-accounts-ubs-took-over-from-credit-suisse-sources-say https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2024-11-12/... Just boring right wing poltics paid for by russian rubles.
greenhearth 2y ago
Plenty of authoritarian countries that have been economic disasters.
- feoren 2y ago
  Sure. They say the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship, while the worst form is a malevolent dictatorship. The problem is that the former almost always turns out to be the latter in disguise, or at least devolves into it rather quickly.
  - bad_user 2y ago
    Who is "they"? People that don't know any history?
    - tasuki 2y ago
      Have you even read the comment you're replying to?
      - bad_user 2y ago
        > They say the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship I asked who is "they" from this sentence.
    - feoren 2y ago
      > Who is "they"? Galadriel. She would be a great and terrible queen. All would love her, and despair. > People that don't know any history? For some reason, I find that people who accuse others of not knowing history tend to be the most ignorant of it themselves. History buffs don't seem to be walking around telling other people they "don't know any history". Just an observation. For an example of a benevolent dictator, look at King Leopold II of Belgium, the Builder King. Loved by his people. Created the Royal Trust, donating a most of his properties to the Belgian nation. Brought culture and prestige to Belgium. For an example of the atrocities of a malevolent dictator, look at King Leopold II of Belgium. The butcher of the Congo. Unbelievable exploitation and atrocities committed under his rule. Or look at Ashurbanipal, the last "Great King" of Assyria, who built one of the greatest libraries in history; a collection of human knowledge surpassed in the ancient world only by the Library of Alexandria. And a genocidal maniac who spent months not just pillaging and raping opposing cities long after they had been defeated, but destroying any trace of the people who lived there, salting the land, and seeding the ground with weeds so that it would be impossible to ever re-build. A wise builder-king with the power and drive to make the nation and world a better place for all its people would absolutely be the best government humanity has been able to achieve so far. Checks and balances are a necessity for a functioning government, but they do bog things down. My point, of course, is that this is completely counter to human nature, and has (almost?) never been achieved, even in those times that it appears that it has.

by pif 2y ago

rsanek 2y ago

income inequality today is about the same as it was 100 years ago. https://ourworldindata.org/how-has-income-inequality-within-countries-evolved-over-the-past-century https://ourworldindata.org/how-has-income-inequality-within-...

yakz 2y ago
This says it improved significantly from 1940 until 1980, then made a turn for the worse. So it's about the same as 100 years ago, but for a big part of that 100 years, it was better.
marxisttemp 2y ago
What happened in 1929?
- vermilingua 2y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_crash_of_1929 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_crash_of_1929
  - marxisttemp 2y ago
    That is correct.
    - fuzzfactor 2y ago
      It is so correct not to overlook it. Seemed almost like an elephant in the room for a minute there. But looking back, was it a market "correction" or maybe just a rug-pull? You probably had to be there. But we knew there was nothing like it until the 1970's. So many of the people who had lived through 1929 were still alive. Unless you were quite fortunate in the early 1970's, you would realize that 2008 was a non-event by comparison.
chazhaz 2y ago
...and about twice what it was 50 years ago. How have Sweden, Japan, France, etc. managed to keep income inequality around postwar lows while America hasn't?
- agumonkey 2y ago
  Not sure, but it seems in France the situation in degrading. The same 1% being richer while workers / students waiting in line for food charity stories were common. Part of it might be due to COVID, but I can't shake the feeling that business management (influenced by anglo-saxon/american culture) is harder than before and squeezes employees. Not only a feeling, I worked on precarious jobs that shouldn't exist, and we saw employees having materially impossible daily duties (due to bad software unable to organize things).
  - 6510 2y ago
    I suspect that people self-manage a lot more if the pay is right. If they stop doing that it seems like you need a more expensive manager, or perhaps you do.
    - agumonkey 2y ago
      well partly but my comment was more systemic, a lot of "new management" was about naive quantitative approaches. measure stupid traces / outputs and forcing people to hit target objectives without looking at the workflow, tooling and team dynamics people with enough skill and compatible mindsets need no management, they care, they will innovate, improve, repair if the structure is at odds with that, they will ask to compensate the pain by large salary bumps because pleasure is turned into pain
- cvwright 2y ago
  > How have Sweden, Japan, France, etc. managed to keep income inequality around postwar lows while America hasn't? They didn’t import millions of poor people to do all the dirty or unpleasant jobs in their countries.
regularization 2y ago
And what was happening then? In 1916 a socialist got 6% of the vote for president (by 1920 he was in prison, but still got 3% of the vote). You had the green corn rebellion, 1919 bombings, Seattle general strike of 1919, Boston police strike, steel and coal strikes, Palmer raids, first red scare. Then the 1924 immigration act and creation of the US border patrol (echoes of today), cutting off most European immigration. Then up to 1932 and the Bonus Army and sut down strikes and New Deal overwhelmingly affirmed in the 1936 election. There was the same amount of inequality a century ago in the US, so what happened at that time.

southernplaces7 2y ago

>And a dictatorship. Democracy does not fit very well with long term plans Say again? If we're talking strictly about the United States as per the article that inspired this post, the U.S. is a case study of a prosperous, remarkably stable democracy steadily increasing its prosperity, wealth, influence and power while also for the vast majority of its history investing for the long term and in vital infrastructure. This process hasn't been constant or evenly incremental but it has been there for (now) literally centuries. The same could be said of Britain and many other developed countries on shorter but still reasonably long scales. On the other hand when you look at dictatorships in the wider scope of the modern era, the vast majority of them either invest explosively only to fail catastrophically at some point before reverting to some other variant of government, or countries that see their biggest failures happen during periods of dictatorship, and their major socioeconomic successes happen during periods of something at least approaching democracy and openness. There are exceptions to the above tendencies in favor of democracy, but China can't yet be called such. It has had only 80 years under its present dictatorship (preceded by decades of warlord rule, weakness and chaos) and of those only the last 40 have been ones of relatively stable growth, investment in major projects AND concurrent increases in prosperity. Under Mao it invested in certain major projects, but at nearly cataclysmic social, economic and human cost. Hardly a model, in those days, of dictatorship being applied to patient, wise planning. >Concerning the USA, the divide between the extra rich and the general poor is nowadays too large to have a functioning country. Really? Feel like sharing the mechanism by which these claims of overly severe wealth inequality will make the US collapse any time soon? Note also that as another comment above this mentions, the U.S has had more or less similar levels of said inequality for the last 100 years.... in which it functioned as a stable, relatively peaceful, democratic, increasingly prosperous society in which overall standards of living in absolute terms have gone up enormously.

flyinglizard 2y ago
In the US of 50 years ago, democracy was protected by codes of conduct, honor, and most importantly, strong content moderation in the form of monopolistic legacy media. All of this went out the door with the rise of social networks and the demise of legacy media. I don't see how democracy has the tools to survive populists with direct connection to the voting public. Even if elections happen in 2028, there's a good chance the pendulum will swing the other way and instead of thinking about moving forward we'll be locked in left/right destructive cycles, with the resulting purging of institutions, dramatic shifts in policies and just chaos all around.

agumonkey 2y ago

And further than democracy, the universe doesn't guarantee long-term anything. Sensible regimes (being democracy or else) seems intrinsically more aligned with that. Except maybe clear catastrophes that require "homogeneous" actions / behaviors (like asia approach to the covid 19 pandemic)

kamaal 2y ago
Wrote this a while back on this forum. Long term winning has nothing to do with growth. It has more to do with stability. Just don't fight wars and have smooth transition of power. This more or less guarantees winning on the very longer run. You still have gradual decay, which can unfold over centuries, and that is ok, but that is cyclical and you rise back in a century or so. The real issues with the US/West is wars, too many of them. Even if the dollar standard guarantees a money printer. Its not exactly free. Triffin dilemma de-industrializes your country. Your politics has too much ego to stop fighting. In the meanwhile you lose industry, stability, time and just don't have focus for things that matter. Somebody who is more sane wins in the meanwhile. UK really needed to build more industries instead of fighting WW1/2. Its a shame that Churchill won above Chmaberlain/Halifax. You get the fake thrill of winning a war, you shouldn't have even gone into, destroyed yourself fighting, all for some fake sense of bravado which led to your disaster. If things go South for US from here. George Bush will likely have the same standing in history. tl;dr- If you are winning, keep it that way, and don't fight wars.
- giva 2y ago
  There is a little issue: If 9 countries want peace and one wants war, you will have a war.

h2zizzle 2y ago

And even then. Little reported: Switzerland's largest private bank was forced by the government to take over its rival's assets. Why "forced"? Something something Archegos. The truth is that we don't know what UBS saw and didn't like in Credit Suisse's files, and we won't know for a long time, as the report for the investigation into what actually happened during the acquisition has been sealed for 50 years. Suffice it to say that the debacle presents circumstantial evidence that "rich with not too much effort" might encourage dangerously laissez faire behavior.

cyanydeez 2y ago
it's not hard to guess: https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2024-11-12/exclusive-us-scrutinizes-russia-accounts-ubs-took-over-from-credit-suisse-sources-say https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2024-11-12/... Just boring right wing poltics paid for by russian rubles.

greenhearth 2y ago

Plenty of authoritarian countries that have been economic disasters.

feoren 2y ago
Sure. They say the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship, while the worst form is a malevolent dictatorship. The problem is that the former almost always turns out to be the latter in disguise, or at least devolves into it rather quickly.
- bad_user 2y ago
  Who is "they"? People that don't know any history?
  - tasuki 2y ago
    Have you even read the comment you're replying to?
    - bad_user 2y ago
      > They say the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship I asked who is "they" from this sentence.
  - feoren 2y ago
    > Who is "they"? Galadriel. She would be a great and terrible queen. All would love her, and despair. > People that don't know any history? For some reason, I find that people who accuse others of not knowing history tend to be the most ignorant of it themselves. History buffs don't seem to be walking around telling other people they "don't know any history". Just an observation. For an example of a benevolent dictator, look at King Leopold II of Belgium, the Builder King. Loved by his people. Created the Royal Trust, donating a most of his properties to the Belgian nation. Brought culture and prestige to Belgium. For an example of the atrocities of a malevolent dictator, look at King Leopold II of Belgium. The butcher of the Congo. Unbelievable exploitation and atrocities committed under his rule. Or look at Ashurbanipal, the last "Great King" of Assyria, who built one of the greatest libraries in history; a collection of human knowledge surpassed in the ancient world only by the Library of Alexandria. And a genocidal maniac who spent months not just pillaging and raping opposing cities long after they had been defeated, but destroying any trace of the people who lived there, salting the land, and seeding the ground with weeds so that it would be impossible to ever re-build. A wise builder-king with the power and drive to make the nation and world a better place for all its people would absolutely be the best government humanity has been able to achieve so far. Checks and balances are a necessity for a functioning government, but they do bog things down. My point, of course, is that this is completely counter to human nature, and has (almost?) never been achieved, even in those times that it appears that it has.