3 ms·

We print money, send it around the world, and the world sends us goods. It was a great thing.

saulpw 9mo ago
For us individually. For us collectively it was a horrible thing. We lost the means and incentive to produce anything durable, including a healthy, educated, sustainable society.
- RealityVoid 9mo ago
  Yeah, I've heard this interpretation before that this is the US trying to wean itself off the resource curse bestowed by a strong dollar. I think it's a fun idea, but there is no reason or strategy to this, I'm afraid. Just stupid people doing what they do best, doing stupid things.
  - saulpw 9mo ago
    I agree, the whole thing is stupid. But, when you don't have a healthy, educated society, they wind up being easily conned into electing stupid greedy people. So it seems that the resource curse may lead inevitably to systemic failure. Good times make weak men.
- mullingitover 9mo ago
  People planning the post-WWII system wildly overestimated how how disciplined Americans could be. The whole point of the US transitioning to a service economy was that it would upskill the workforce into the world's Delta Force team of highly educated scientists, engineers, researchers, etc. The rest of the world would handle the boring stuff like actually manufacturing the beautiful inventions designed by the US. The problem is that a lot of the US populace is gung-ho patriotic and willing to die for their country, but absolutely refuses to learn math or generally do their homework for their country, which is what's actually required for this whole scheme to work. I'm paraphrasing the shockingly astute observations of this guy[1]. [1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DD-MPWAPoaT/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/reel/DD-MPWAPoaT/?hl=en
  - djeastm 9mo ago
    >People planning the post-WWII system wildly overestimated how how disciplined Americans could be. We had the post-WWII optimism and then the post-Cold War optimism clouding the judgment of an entire country. I kind of wish we'd been more curmudgeonly like the Europeans.
  - hakfoo 9mo ago
    It's fascinating how education has COMPLETELY fallen off the radar politically in the last 10-15 years. Even before we introduced a WWE manager for the Secretary of Education, we stopped discussing educational competitiveness. I can recall a couple decades ago every year or two the news having nervous handwringing stories about "(originally Japanese, then Korean, then Chinese) 6th graders have the math skills to design a full lunar rocket launch system, while American high-school graduates are incapable of filling out a Lotto playslip correctly". The only time anyone talks about schools now is "is one getting shot up" or "looking for an excuse to ban books or siphon the few remaining dollars the public school programs have left into private/charter/religious schools that aren't necessarily delivering better overall outcomes." Rather than fixing the affordability crisis in secondary education, we're seeing an awful lot of amplification on the "not everyone should go to college" narrative, which might be technically accurate but seems to undermine the Delta Force plan you mentioned even more. Nobody seems to make education a central campaign issue anymore (even before all issues were subsumed by "will there be a fair election next time?") The only way it makes sense is if we gave up on the idea of education as an economic driver. What is our economic vision for 2050? Feels like the current administration has maybe two ideas left: * Hope everyone else leaves the petrostate pool, either by supply collapse or market trend/long term economic vision shifts, and then we can be the world's leading supplier of goo, from a puppetized Venezuela and maybe by coaxing Alberta seperatism enough. * Bully economics, no longer even trying to compete on legitimate product merits and just saying "You'll buy 70,000 Dodge Darts if you don't want us to start shooting up your fishing boats."
- ActorNightly 9mo ago
  Yes... so lets vote someone in that does all the things towards creating a less healthy, less educated and less sustainable society. US was doing just fine btw. I know this because people like you blow the small issues way out of proportion, and the reason this haplens is that there is no real issues to worry about.
  - saulpw 9mo ago
    Whoa there. You're making quite some assumptions about me, it seems. I'm in no way advocating for the present administration, not in strategy nor in tactics nor in any other way. I do think that the US was not "doing just fine", clearly, because our society was not healthy or educated or sustainable enough to avoid our present fate. It's easy to blame 'them' for all our woes, when we collectively made 'them'. Obviously we can't prevent every idiot and psychopath from existing, but we've certainly failed some 30% of our population if they fall for this crap. And this is the price we pay.
legitster 9mo ago
Something that weirdly both Milton Friedman and Karl Marx would equally agree on. The point of an economy is not to make a profit or collect currency. The point of an economy is to provide ourselves with goods and services. Focusing all of our efforts on making things so that we can send them to other countries in exchange for pieces of paper is backwards.
imadierich 9mo ago
[dead]

For us individually. For us collectively it was a horrible thing. We lost the means and incentive to produce anything durable, including a healthy, educated, sustainable society.

RealityVoid 9mo ago
Yeah, I've heard this interpretation before that this is the US trying to wean itself off the resource curse bestowed by a strong dollar. I think it's a fun idea, but there is no reason or strategy to this, I'm afraid. Just stupid people doing what they do best, doing stupid things.
- saulpw 9mo ago
  I agree, the whole thing is stupid. But, when you don't have a healthy, educated society, they wind up being easily conned into electing stupid greedy people. So it seems that the resource curse may lead inevitably to systemic failure. Good times make weak men.
mullingitover 9mo ago
People planning the post-WWII system wildly overestimated how how disciplined Americans could be. The whole point of the US transitioning to a service economy was that it would upskill the workforce into the world's Delta Force team of highly educated scientists, engineers, researchers, etc. The rest of the world would handle the boring stuff like actually manufacturing the beautiful inventions designed by the US. The problem is that a lot of the US populace is gung-ho patriotic and willing to die for their country, but absolutely refuses to learn math or generally do their homework for their country, which is what's actually required for this whole scheme to work. I'm paraphrasing the shockingly astute observations of this guy[1]. [1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DD-MPWAPoaT/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/reel/DD-MPWAPoaT/?hl=en
- djeastm 9mo ago
  >People planning the post-WWII system wildly overestimated how how disciplined Americans could be. We had the post-WWII optimism and then the post-Cold War optimism clouding the judgment of an entire country. I kind of wish we'd been more curmudgeonly like the Europeans.
- hakfoo 9mo ago
  It's fascinating how education has COMPLETELY fallen off the radar politically in the last 10-15 years. Even before we introduced a WWE manager for the Secretary of Education, we stopped discussing educational competitiveness. I can recall a couple decades ago every year or two the news having nervous handwringing stories about "(originally Japanese, then Korean, then Chinese) 6th graders have the math skills to design a full lunar rocket launch system, while American high-school graduates are incapable of filling out a Lotto playslip correctly". The only time anyone talks about schools now is "is one getting shot up" or "looking for an excuse to ban books or siphon the few remaining dollars the public school programs have left into private/charter/religious schools that aren't necessarily delivering better overall outcomes." Rather than fixing the affordability crisis in secondary education, we're seeing an awful lot of amplification on the "not everyone should go to college" narrative, which might be technically accurate but seems to undermine the Delta Force plan you mentioned even more. Nobody seems to make education a central campaign issue anymore (even before all issues were subsumed by "will there be a fair election next time?") The only way it makes sense is if we gave up on the idea of education as an economic driver. What is our economic vision for 2050? Feels like the current administration has maybe two ideas left: * Hope everyone else leaves the petrostate pool, either by supply collapse or market trend/long term economic vision shifts, and then we can be the world's leading supplier of goo, from a puppetized Venezuela and maybe by coaxing Alberta seperatism enough. * Bully economics, no longer even trying to compete on legitimate product merits and just saying "You'll buy 70,000 Dodge Darts if you don't want us to start shooting up your fishing boats."
ActorNightly 9mo ago
Yes... so lets vote someone in that does all the things towards creating a less healthy, less educated and less sustainable society. US was doing just fine btw. I know this because people like you blow the small issues way out of proportion, and the reason this haplens is that there is no real issues to worry about.
- saulpw 9mo ago
  Whoa there. You're making quite some assumptions about me, it seems. I'm in no way advocating for the present administration, not in strategy nor in tactics nor in any other way. I do think that the US was not "doing just fine", clearly, because our society was not healthy or educated or sustainable enough to avoid our present fate. It's easy to blame 'them' for all our woes, when we collectively made 'them'. Obviously we can't prevent every idiot and psychopath from existing, but we've certainly failed some 30% of our population if they fall for this crap. And this is the price we pay.

legitster 9mo ago

Something that weirdly both Milton Friedman and Karl Marx would equally agree on. The point of an economy is not to make a profit or collect currency. The point of an economy is to provide ourselves with goods and services. Focusing all of our efforts on making things so that we can send them to other countries in exchange for pieces of paper is backwards.

imadierich 9mo ago

[dead]