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Do we need economic powerhouses to live well?
by layer8 1y ago
Do we need economic powerhouses to live well?
- WalterBright 1y agoYes. Or would you prefer working dawn to dusk picking bugs off of your crops, with the constant spectre of crop failure and famine? Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses. Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)
- layer8 1y agoI think you’re presenting a false dichotomy, but we’re not going to solve that in this thread.
- ambicapter 1y agoGP consistently has some of the worst takes on HN.
- g8oz 1y agoGOP Club For Growth drivel.
- saubeidl 1y agoDo you think that was the lifestyle in Yugoslavia? And their heyday was half a century ago at this point. You're presenting a false dichotomy. Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.
- WalterBright 1y agoWhy did 20 million people over the last 4 years sneak into America? How many Americans left for Yugoslavia?
- saubeidl 1y agoHow many Yugoslavs left for America?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- carlosjobim 1y agoWere they allowed to leave? Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems of government and economy is when people get shot in the back by border guards if they try to escape.
- nradov 1y agoGenerally yes. Unlike Soviet occupied Eastern Europe, most regular people in Yugoslavia were able to obtain passports and travel internationally. There were some people barred from leaving or held as political prisoners.
- saubeidl 1y agoYes. The Yugoslav passport was the strongest in the world at the time - the only one you could freely travel both West and East with.
- selimthegrim 1y agoEver been to Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Chicago or Long Beach?
- WalterBright 1y agoGoogle says: "Between 1950 and 1989, approximately 73,000 people immigrated to the United States from Yugoslavia" I couldn't find any statistics of Americans leaving for Yugoslavia.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Ray20 1y ago>Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies. That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut. Workers can start running companies at any time, no one restricts them from running their companies. The only reason they don't do this is that this will be worse for workers. So you are being hypocritical. You don't want workers to run companies (they can do that now), you want workers to have no alternative.
- saubeidl 1y ago[flagged]
- nradov 1y agoWhen a "problem" has no solution then it's not actually a problem, just a fact to be accepted. Like gravity. There's nothing wrong with worker owned cooperatives, but for anything that requires significant capital you have to run things the way that capital owners want. And large-scale economic central planning where governments allocate capital has been an abject failure everywhere it has been tried, so don't insult our intelligence by suggesting that we give it another shot.
- saubeidl 1y agoWhat you're proposing, my friend, is called ideological blindness.
- nradov 1y agoWhat are you proposing? I mean in terms of stuff that's actually feasible in the real world of today, not empty fantasies.
- saubeidl 1y agoI believe that what is feasible in the real world changes over time, it is a matter of building momentum and challenging the status quo. Nobody would've thought the rise of MAGA in the US was gonna be feasible two decades ago. Maintaining ideological blinders for what is feasible is how entrenched interests prevent systemic change.
- ryandrake 1y agoThis is a false dichotomy: Either your country is an "economic powerhouse", or you're living in a mud hut, with nothing in between. A country can be a good, decent place to live, where people's basic needs are taken care of, with opportunities for modest life improvements for those who want them, without being an economic powerhouse (and all of the bad that comes with that).
- WalterBright 1y agoYugoslavia's economy doesn't sound so successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Federal_Republic_of_Yugoslavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder... High unemployment, billions in US foreign aid, etc.
- saubeidl 1y ago> Despite facing numerous challenges, including political instability and external pressures, the Yugoslav economy achieved significant growth and modernization during its existence, with a particularly strong emphasis on education, health care, and social welfare I'm not sure we're reading the same article then. Here's some archive footage from 60's Yugoslavia for your reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXr5aKZ8mps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXr5aKZ8mps Sure doesn't look like people living in squalor in their mud huts.
- WalterBright 1y agoYou need bricks to make a house. Where are you going to get the bricks from? You need lumber to build a stick frame house. How are you going to saw the lumber? Where are you getting the steel for the saws? Where are you getting the nails from? Those all come from economic powerhouses. The steps from mud huts to modern buildings came from economic powerhouses.
- saubeidl 1y agoAll of those were made in highly industrialized Yugoslavia. Maybe they are an economic powerhouse by your definition then?
- skeaker 1y agoYou responded to a rhetorical question with the wrong answer (you can obviously live well on only modest means as arguably the majority of people do, even in the US), and then proceeded to lay out maybe the most egregious false dichotomy I've ever seen right after. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you hold a definition of "economic powerhouse" that aligns more with "a first world country" rather than "a shareholder-maximized corporatocracy".
- trinix912 1y agoYou know Yugoslavia was heavily industrialized right? To the point they even made their own computers [1][2][3][4][5]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra_Delta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra_Delta [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskradata_1680 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskradata_1680 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ei_Ni%C5%A1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ei_Ni%C5%A1 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorenje_Dialog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorenje_Dialog [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_systems_from_Yugoslavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_systems_from_...
- WalterBright 1y agoI built my own 6802 computer in those days, too. I bought the chips and parts and drew schematics and put it all together. I skipped all the hard parts, like designing the chips and building a chip fab plant. Building a computer from parts out of a catalog is commonplace.
- trinix912 1y agoThe hard parts you skipped were the entire point.
- bumby 1y agoThere seems to be a false narrative here that increased economic production will always lead to higher quality of life. I would venture to guess you only have to look into your own life to disprove that narrative. I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”