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Even if those attribution studies are 100% correct that doesn’t mean this system optimally allocates resources. The ultimate issue with our social programs is

by jack_h 1y ago

Even if those attribution studies are 100% correct that doesn’t mean this system optimally allocates resources. The ultimate issue with our social programs is due to demographics. An aging population whose replacement rate is projected to go negative (more deaths than births) within the next few years is catastrophic for the way we fund those programs. We absolutely should try and reduce their operating costs though; I agree with that.

Retric 1y ago
Noting people do is 100% optimal, but productivity gains mean resource constraint problems are more solvable than they first appear. People are worried about automation driving people out of the workplace while others are worried about a lack of workers due to changing demographics. What’s going to happen is the result of a bunch of different forces, simplified projections are easy to make and unlikely to prove accurate.
- generativenoise 1y ago
  It is insane that people think we need a growing population to make this perfect population pyramid, to make things work easily in monetary terms with taxes. It really does ignore so many of the other forces as you mention. The picture looks radically different if you focus on real resources and allocation. In fact a growing population could make things very economically tenuous in real terms, depending on how a few key environmental factors play out over the coming centuries.
monknomo 1y ago
I mean, a relatively easy fix to a negative replacement rate (at least when you have a well-run, wealthy, attractive country) is immigration. Replacement rate isn't a problem when you let more folks in
- consumer451 1y ago
  I agree, but this only works if one is willing to accept a changing racial profile/culture. It appears that many people do not accept this idea. Not just in the USA, but look at Japan or South Korea, for example. To me, the really interesting question is how to stop what appears to have been inevitable for the last 40+ years: when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment. The reason that I find this important is that even though I personally have no problem with race/culture mixing, in-fact I love Korean BBQ tacos... eventually with the immigration solution, there is an end state where all societies and countries are economically advanced, and have negative birth rates. What then? As a Star Trek fan, I have ideas about post-scarcity.
  - exe34 1y ago
    > when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. heck maybe that's what trump's doing - tank the American economy and hope it brings the birth rate back up...
  - WeylandYutani 1y ago
    You know NYC is already minority white right?
    - consumer451 1y ago
      My most controversial take, even though it is 100% true: The entire planet is minority "white." I put that in scare quotes because even as the lightest skinned person in the land, I know that "white" is a made up in/out group term. As a Slav, I was not "white" according to US immigration law as recently as the 1950s. There is technically no such thing as being white, there is only passing for white. The definition of white entirety depends on the day, and who you ask. Slavs, Irish, Italians, Greeks, were not "white" until very recently. It's a silly word that really means nothing. If one wants to slow down "white" people becoming the minority more and more due to their economic advancement, clearly the solution is carpet bombing poor countries with e-readers preloaded with Wikipedia. That is the only moral way to even things out!
- nostrademons 1y ago
  Fertility rates are below replacement on every continent except Africa, and they're dropping quickly there. Immigration isn't going to save us, at least not long-term. I think what'll happen is that areas that still have a vibrant age pyramid will put up borders (either geographic or economic or both) with ones that don't, and say "Sorry, you're on your own" to the latter. They protect their children at the expense of their elders, basically. It won't be national borders either: the fertility issue cuts across most major nations, but there are certain regions where people still raise children.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    Stop trying to solve problems 100 years from now in other countries though. The US is an enormously attractive immigration target and can easily bring in enormous numbers of new workers if it wants to. It's so good at this that it actually has and those people pay taxes but don't get government benefits.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      There is no "other countries", it's a global economy. Mexico exports $450B worth of stuff to the US every year. When their fertility rate was 6 and then one or two of those kids immigrate to the US, that's fine for them. Now that their fertility rate is below the population replacement rate too, if their kids emigrate their country is screwed. Then there's nobody to make that $450B worth of stuff, because the kids who migrated are busy filling the existing jobs in the US. Meanwhile what do you expect to happen in countries with fertility rates below population replacement and net out-migration of the youth? Is it morally reasonable to willingly cause that to happen, even without considering the consequences to the US of that level of desperation spreading through the rest of the world? The alternative would be to get the fertility rate back to the population replacement rate.
      - Retric 1y ago
        Assuming current trends are unchanged we’re still talking about having billions of humans for hundreds of years. On that kind of timescale we might see significant life extension, artificial wombs, and hard core genetic engineering. Some countries like South Korea are going to face major challenges far sooner, but frankly having the most extreme examples collapse means the average stays higher.
- barry-cotter 1y ago
  This doesn’t fix your problem if the people you let in cost more than they contribute in taxes. See for example the Netherlands where non-Western immigrants are large net negative contributors and their children are no better. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.pdf https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.pdf Similar results apply in Denmark. https://docs.iza.org/dp8844.pdf https://docs.iza.org/dp8844.pdf EU style negatively selected immigration where easily a billion people are eligible for asylum and refugee status with easy family reunification means immigration is a large net negative fiscal contributor.
  - throwaway473825 1y ago
    They might still create more value than they cost. For example, a bus driver enables many people to work, but has a low wage and hence pays little in taxes.
    - simianwords 1y ago
      On average you are paid according to your value so this doesn't track.
      - garfield_light 1y ago
        So a top TikTok influencer is more valuable than a surgeon?
        simianwords 1y ago
        Yes. They provide a scaled entertainment. You are forgetting the reach that this person has. Compared to a surgeon who's impact is more local, they might help a few patients in a week. Do you think a combat soldier is more important than a VP of Google?
        garfield_light 1y ago
        You have the delusion that true value is the same as a fungible one dimensional number, that externalities (negative or positive) don't exist, we have perfect information and local minima aren't real. The original example is that certain economic activities are force multipliers, the guy who actually does a good job in servicing the metro in my city (we avoid 10 minutes of delay) has more impact than most local CEO day to day. A good supply of bus drivers make certain services possible, which in turn boost productivity. The social influencer entertains like shitty cocaine, we don't have a lack of inane shit, their absurd payout exists because ZIRP happened. Bad entertainment has costs beyond the directly measured by dollars. Getting everybody addicted to nicotine is profitable but bad, correct? A hypothetical world were we "stagnated" on MySpace equivalents could've existed and surely the generated value would be higher.
tw04 1y ago
Have you ever actually worked with a Fortune 500 company? I’m assuming not or you’d know “inefficient allocation of resources” isn’t a government issue, it’s a large organization issue that’s as bad if not worse in the private sector.
- wskinner 1y ago
  There is a natural garbage collection mechanism for corporations that become too inefficient. Inefficient government agencies can last much longer.
  - linksnapzz 1y ago
    There was; now we have bailouts. "Too big to fail".
    - FredPret 1y ago
      While true, you overstate the problem. Look up the companies in the S&P 500 today, 10 years ago, 20, 30, 50. There are dramatic changes with only a handful of long term survivors.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - Retric 1y ago
        That overstates the difference as mergers hardly destroy the old companies in their entirety. Instead it’s the same kind of shakeups you regularly see in government agencies. Picking one small example, HERSA is a merger of the Health Services Administration (1973–1982) and Health Resources Administration (1973–1982). However currently one of its major functions is managing the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program that showed up in 1990.
        Robotbeat 1y ago
        There is a LOT more personnel churn in private sector than federal government.
jasonhong 1y ago
Optimal relative to what? And more seriously, name any large program, government or corporate, that is "optimal". Google, Duolingo, and DataBricks are three multibillion dollar tech companies based in part on NSF research. The return on investment from NSF-funded research spinning out into companies is enormous. While the system could use some tuning, it also works pretty well as is. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
CamperBob2 1y ago
that doesn’t mean this system optimally allocates resources. When's the last time someone in the Trump administration "optimally allocated resources" in a way that didn't "allocate" them to his or her own bank account?
linksnapzz 1y ago
As a purely practical matter, trying to fix federal budget outlays by cutting indirect funds attached to NSF/NIH/DOE etc. grants is like telling a guy who is morbidly obese by 350lbs that you can lose weight quickly by shaving your head and trimming your fingernails really, really close.
- didgetmaster 1y ago
  And yet that morbidly obese guy probably got that way by a thousand unhealthy snacks between meals. While just a few extra calories generally doesn't do much; a steady stream of them over time can do the trick. As DOGE is finding, that $36 trillion of government debt didn't come in one blow. When every agency has a bunch of bloated programs; it really adds up.
  - sapphicsnail 1y ago
    The point of the analogy is that cutting your hair does nothing to solve the actual issue of obesity. Some of the people in the comments are arguing that the money spent on research is very little and that it ends up bringing in more money for the government than the initial investment. It would be like looking at an investment someone made that had a great return and arguing that they could save money by not investing the money in the first place. They could be wasting money on other things but cutting a profitable investment is not going to save them money.
  - chewbacha 1y ago
    Doge is lying through its teeth. They are costing the government more than they are saving and the biggest savings have been contracts that never existed in the first place. They also keep revising down their saving projections. Now it’s down to 150 billion from 4 trillion. They are operating a coup and if you don’t see it you are lying to yourself.
    - noworriesnate 1y ago
      > They are operating a coup Did they fire Congress? Did they fire Trump or Vance? Which elected officials have they fired? If they haven't fired elected officials, this is the very first coup of its kind in recorded history, so the burden on you is to explain exactly how this situation is a coup.
patagurbon 1y ago
No system will optimally allocate resources. However projects are typically funded under competitive grants and that process is fairly good at moving slowly but methodically in the right direction. Even when it doesn’t, it is training researchers who can enter systems which have different incentives like private research and development. That is a massive positive externality.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Robotbeat 1y ago
The solution is a straightforward but painful increasing of the retirement age to like at least 70.

by jack_h 1y ago

Retric 1y ago

Noting people do is 100% optimal, but productivity gains mean resource constraint problems are more solvable than they first appear. People are worried about automation driving people out of the workplace while others are worried about a lack of workers due to changing demographics. What’s going to happen is the result of a bunch of different forces, simplified projections are easy to make and unlikely to prove accurate.

generativenoise 1y ago
It is insane that people think we need a growing population to make this perfect population pyramid, to make things work easily in monetary terms with taxes. It really does ignore so many of the other forces as you mention. The picture looks radically different if you focus on real resources and allocation. In fact a growing population could make things very economically tenuous in real terms, depending on how a few key environmental factors play out over the coming centuries.

monknomo 1y ago

I mean, a relatively easy fix to a negative replacement rate (at least when you have a well-run, wealthy, attractive country) is immigration. Replacement rate isn't a problem when you let more folks in

consumer451 1y ago
I agree, but this only works if one is willing to accept a changing racial profile/culture. It appears that many people do not accept this idea. Not just in the USA, but look at Japan or South Korea, for example. To me, the really interesting question is how to stop what appears to have been inevitable for the last 40+ years: when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment. The reason that I find this important is that even though I personally have no problem with race/culture mixing, in-fact I love Korean BBQ tacos... eventually with the immigration solution, there is an end state where all societies and countries are economically advanced, and have negative birth rates. What then? As a Star Trek fan, I have ideas about post-scarcity.
- exe34 1y ago
  > when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. heck maybe that's what trump's doing - tank the American economy and hope it brings the birth rate back up...
- WeylandYutani 1y ago
  You know NYC is already minority white right?
  - consumer451 1y ago
    My most controversial take, even though it is 100% true: The entire planet is minority "white." I put that in scare quotes because even as the lightest skinned person in the land, I know that "white" is a made up in/out group term. As a Slav, I was not "white" according to US immigration law as recently as the 1950s. There is technically no such thing as being white, there is only passing for white. The definition of white entirety depends on the day, and who you ask. Slavs, Irish, Italians, Greeks, were not "white" until very recently. It's a silly word that really means nothing. If one wants to slow down "white" people becoming the minority more and more due to their economic advancement, clearly the solution is carpet bombing poor countries with e-readers preloaded with Wikipedia. That is the only moral way to even things out!
nostrademons 1y ago
Fertility rates are below replacement on every continent except Africa, and they're dropping quickly there. Immigration isn't going to save us, at least not long-term. I think what'll happen is that areas that still have a vibrant age pyramid will put up borders (either geographic or economic or both) with ones that don't, and say "Sorry, you're on your own" to the latter. They protect their children at the expense of their elders, basically. It won't be national borders either: the fertility issue cuts across most major nations, but there are certain regions where people still raise children.
- XorNot 1y ago
  Stop trying to solve problems 100 years from now in other countries though. The US is an enormously attractive immigration target and can easily bring in enormous numbers of new workers if it wants to. It's so good at this that it actually has and those people pay taxes but don't get government benefits.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    There is no "other countries", it's a global economy. Mexico exports $450B worth of stuff to the US every year. When their fertility rate was 6 and then one or two of those kids immigrate to the US, that's fine for them. Now that their fertility rate is below the population replacement rate too, if their kids emigrate their country is screwed. Then there's nobody to make that $450B worth of stuff, because the kids who migrated are busy filling the existing jobs in the US. Meanwhile what do you expect to happen in countries with fertility rates below population replacement and net out-migration of the youth? Is it morally reasonable to willingly cause that to happen, even without considering the consequences to the US of that level of desperation spreading through the rest of the world? The alternative would be to get the fertility rate back to the population replacement rate.
    - Retric 1y ago
      Assuming current trends are unchanged we’re still talking about having billions of humans for hundreds of years. On that kind of timescale we might see significant life extension, artificial wombs, and hard core genetic engineering. Some countries like South Korea are going to face major challenges far sooner, but frankly having the most extreme examples collapse means the average stays higher.
barry-cotter 1y ago
This doesn’t fix your problem if the people you let in cost more than they contribute in taxes. See for example the Netherlands where non-Western immigrants are large net negative contributors and their children are no better. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.pdf https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.pdf Similar results apply in Denmark. https://docs.iza.org/dp8844.pdf https://docs.iza.org/dp8844.pdf EU style negatively selected immigration where easily a billion people are eligible for asylum and refugee status with easy family reunification means immigration is a large net negative fiscal contributor.
- throwaway473825 1y ago
  They might still create more value than they cost. For example, a bus driver enables many people to work, but has a low wage and hence pays little in taxes.
  - simianwords 1y ago
    On average you are paid according to your value so this doesn't track.
    - garfield_light 1y ago
      So a top TikTok influencer is more valuable than a surgeon?
      - simianwords 1y ago
        Yes. They provide a scaled entertainment. You are forgetting the reach that this person has. Compared to a surgeon who's impact is more local, they might help a few patients in a week. Do you think a combat soldier is more important than a VP of Google?
        garfield_light 1y ago
        You have the delusion that true value is the same as a fungible one dimensional number, that externalities (negative or positive) don't exist, we have perfect information and local minima aren't real. The original example is that certain economic activities are force multipliers, the guy who actually does a good job in servicing the metro in my city (we avoid 10 minutes of delay) has more impact than most local CEO day to day. A good supply of bus drivers make certain services possible, which in turn boost productivity. The social influencer entertains like shitty cocaine, we don't have a lack of inane shit, their absurd payout exists because ZIRP happened. Bad entertainment has costs beyond the directly measured by dollars. Getting everybody addicted to nicotine is profitable but bad, correct? A hypothetical world were we "stagnated" on MySpace equivalents could've existed and surely the generated value would be higher.

tw04 1y ago

Have you ever actually worked with a Fortune 500 company? I’m assuming not or you’d know “inefficient allocation of resources” isn’t a government issue, it’s a large organization issue that’s as bad if not worse in the private sector.

wskinner 1y ago
There is a natural garbage collection mechanism for corporations that become too inefficient. Inefficient government agencies can last much longer.
- linksnapzz 1y ago
  There was; now we have bailouts. "Too big to fail".
  - FredPret 1y ago
    While true, you overstate the problem. Look up the companies in the S&P 500 today, 10 years ago, 20, 30, 50. There are dramatic changes with only a handful of long term survivors.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 1y ago
      That overstates the difference as mergers hardly destroy the old companies in their entirety. Instead it’s the same kind of shakeups you regularly see in government agencies. Picking one small example, HERSA is a merger of the Health Services Administration (1973–1982) and Health Resources Administration (1973–1982). However currently one of its major functions is managing the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program that showed up in 1990.
      - Robotbeat 1y ago
        There is a LOT more personnel churn in private sector than federal government.

jasonhong 1y ago

Optimal relative to what? And more seriously, name any large program, government or corporate, that is "optimal". Google, Duolingo, and DataBricks are three multibillion dollar tech companies based in part on NSF research. The return on investment from NSF-funded research spinning out into companies is enormous. While the system could use some tuning, it also works pretty well as is. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

CamperBob2 1y ago

that doesn’t mean this system optimally allocates resources. When's the last time someone in the Trump administration "optimally allocated resources" in a way that didn't "allocate" them to his or her own bank account?

linksnapzz 1y ago

As a purely practical matter, trying to fix federal budget outlays by cutting indirect funds attached to NSF/NIH/DOE etc. grants is like telling a guy who is morbidly obese by 350lbs that you can lose weight quickly by shaving your head and trimming your fingernails really, really close.

didgetmaster 1y ago
And yet that morbidly obese guy probably got that way by a thousand unhealthy snacks between meals. While just a few extra calories generally doesn't do much; a steady stream of them over time can do the trick. As DOGE is finding, that $36 trillion of government debt didn't come in one blow. When every agency has a bunch of bloated programs; it really adds up.
- sapphicsnail 1y ago
  The point of the analogy is that cutting your hair does nothing to solve the actual issue of obesity. Some of the people in the comments are arguing that the money spent on research is very little and that it ends up bringing in more money for the government than the initial investment. It would be like looking at an investment someone made that had a great return and arguing that they could save money by not investing the money in the first place. They could be wasting money on other things but cutting a profitable investment is not going to save them money.
- chewbacha 1y ago
  Doge is lying through its teeth. They are costing the government more than they are saving and the biggest savings have been contracts that never existed in the first place. They also keep revising down their saving projections. Now it’s down to 150 billion from 4 trillion. They are operating a coup and if you don’t see it you are lying to yourself.
  - noworriesnate 1y ago
    > They are operating a coup Did they fire Congress? Did they fire Trump or Vance? Which elected officials have they fired? If they haven't fired elected officials, this is the very first coup of its kind in recorded history, so the burden on you is to explain exactly how this situation is a coup.

patagurbon 1y ago

No system will optimally allocate resources. However projects are typically funded under competitive grants and that process is fairly good at moving slowly but methodically in the right direction. Even when it doesn’t, it is training researchers who can enter systems which have different incentives like private research and development. That is a massive positive externality.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Robotbeat 1y ago

The solution is a straightforward but painful increasing of the retirement age to like at least 70.