5 ms·

You are failing to analyze the system corectly. "Have enough" is a static steady state. "Produce enough" now and in the future is a dynamic constraint. The me

You are failing to analyze the system corectly. "Have enough" is a static steady state. "Produce enough" now and in the future is a dynamic constraint. The mechanism is economic surplus, to have the producers (productive people who produce needed goods and inputs to such) create more than they need. This generally requires increasing and maintaining productivity to have surplus. Once you have a surplus the absolute maximum priority is to maintain it. Plant, machinery, systems, irrigation, fertilizer production etc etc. The system is dynamic, surplus today is not surplus tommorow. In my country we have a means to ditribute this excess, and it may even go to those in need, but the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus. what i fail to understand is why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. this is entry level material for engineering, mathematics and physics. are they not teaching it in CS?

Telaneo 2mo ago
We are producing enough excess that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves, and we have for a number of years.
- nate_meurer 2mo ago
  No, we're not. It just seems like there's excess because the costs of running social programs are being paid with runaway debt. Those bills will eventually require settling, and it will become obvious how much excess there really is.
  - Telaneo 2mo ago
    There are truckloads of perfectly good food and clothes being incinerated every day since that's somehow cheaper for the owners of capital. The excess is there. It's just not ending up in the pockets of those who need it.
    - nate_meurer 2mo ago
      Food and clothing are actually an argument against you here. Sure we waste a lot of both, and yet food insecurity is rare in the First World, and lack of clothing is pretty much the least significant part of poverty. Plus, government-forced redistribution reliably increases prices overall due to the increased costs of logistics and administration. There is no free lunch. If you want to argue your point, you have to address the real fiscal burdens on modern societies, and the real drivers of debt across the West. The biggest components of government debt are medical care and pensions (including Social Security in the US). These are the things that are bankrupting us, not food and clothing.
      - Telaneo 2mo ago
        Pensions probably ought to be reduced/readjusted in accordance with life time expectancy, or some other maths that actually ends up in the green somehow while still allowing those who cannot take care of themselves to live a decent life. I've seen enough rich pensioners (my own grandmother among them...) to come to that conclusion. The US spends an inordinate amount on healthcare since the system is covered in leeches (17~% of GDP compared to 10~ in Europe).[1] If a significant part of US debt is caused by healthcare costs, then that sounds like a political own-goal. That's not to say the costs in Europe are insignificant. We can probably do better here too. [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2674671 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26746...
        aianus 2mo ago
        The US healthcare system is incredible compared to socialized systems if you can afford it. That's at least part of the reason it represents 17% of GDP. The same procedure I needed had a 2 day wait time in the US and a 10 month wait time in Canada.
        juvvel 2mo ago
        If you have the money, you can get excellent healthcare in almost any civilized country. You're free to pay for your treatment in Canada, too.
  - amanaplanacanal 2mo ago
    Debt is just accounting, and has nothing to do with whether or not a surplus exists and who gets to consume it. The surplus exists, it doesn't magically appear because of your accounting system.
    - nate_meurer 2mo ago
      My point is not that economic surpluses don't ever exist, but that the perceived surpluses that people invoke in order to defend the present welfare state are unsustainable, and that the system will inevitably collapse without a miraculous increase in economic productivity. Debt (both private and sovereign) is literally the thing that tells us whether a society is able to pay for the things it demands. That's not an accounting trick any more than plain arithmetic is.
      - amanaplanacanal 2mo ago
        You appear to only be looking at the debt, and not that those debts are held by other people as assets. Do you think it's still a net negative if you add that in too?
        nate_meurer 2mo ago
        Well yeah, it's still debt. It's still the unpaid balance of the cost of goods and services. The essential purpose of a market for IOUs is to allow us to issue a lot more IOUs. This is critical to the industrial and technological development that has allowed us to stop living in the dirt. But liquid debt markets can also be weapons of mass destruction by allowing misallocation to compound into ruinous financial crises. Sort of like, oh I don't know, bloated, inefficient government entitlement programs funded by massive debt that can only be dealt with by a.) confiscating the labor and assets of the population by force, or b.) monetizing the debt and inflating it away, which is itself a backdoor tax on the same population.
    - hogehoge51 2mo ago
      The accounting system is what ensures that we can ACCOUNT for if such a statement is true or not. It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc. There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn mowing and shopping services (such as disability welfare has created in my country) could easily be accompanied by a shortage in housing. In fact one could be caused by the other. The economy has capacity today and surplus from yesterday. Beyond that takes vigilance and accountability to maintain the system. The fundamental question is why exactly you think a system can have some fundamental governing and observation mechanism such as debt (or equity accounting) removed and it would still maintain the same system characteristics that produce said surplus? This is basic engineering and system architecture 101 and I would expect technologists to have more than a surface level expectation that systems do not operate magically nor label components as redundant without detailed reasoning.
  - _DeadFred_ 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - WarmWash 2mo ago
      Starving the beast and gorging the beast both accomplish the same thing.
  - one33seven 2mo ago
    We're producing enough to feed everyone and throw it away if it is not paid for. This cruel system has to end.
    - hogehoge51 2mo ago
      Anthropomorphising a system to give it attributes such as cruelty is silly. Entertaining a lump of monolithic production fallacy is also silly. There are any number of detailed and specific problems that need to be solved to solve the greater economic problem you describe. A system that promotes direct effort to solve specific problems is required. Your naivety only exacerbates the cruelty.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
mvc 2mo ago
> the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus. Is it? Or is it that an increasing proportion of total income ends up going to the people who find ways of hiding it such that it does not get distributed.
- jumpinjack710 2mo ago
  [dead]
- hogehoge51 2mo ago
  How do you hide something in a closed loop system such as an economy?
  - arbitrary_name 2mo ago
    offshore Swiss accounts. opaque and complex corporate ownership structures. land.
    - hogehoge51 2mo ago
      you failed to answer my question. either the activity and resource is part of an economy or not, an activity or resource that is still in the economy is not hoarded. either thise things are in the economic system or not. swiss banking is simply another economic system, eiher it is a separate closed loop system(and not accesible), or an integrated system with flows in and out. if the money is not part of the closed loop of the economy what value does it have? (it's addition and removal simply inflates or deflates the remaining closed loop system) normal banking and currency exchange already creates and destroys money in orders of mangitude larger than private wealth. land and hard resources are the only place i think you can hoard. it can be taken out of the economy and still maintain value, and depending on the relative holding you can influence value. but even that requires a holding cost. the holding cost is part of the broader closed loop economic system, an/or political system. you could say much of the fuedal economy was paying the holding cost for this hoarding, the advancement of the modern economic system was to build a massive integrated economy around it that made the holding cost higher and significant hoarding moslty unsustainable. (except by goverment)
dmitrygr 2mo ago
> why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. Cognitive dissonance, they understand but refuse to admit it because it conflicts with their world view.

Telaneo 2mo ago

We are producing enough excess that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves, and we have for a number of years.

nate_meurer 2mo ago
No, we're not. It just seems like there's excess because the costs of running social programs are being paid with runaway debt. Those bills will eventually require settling, and it will become obvious how much excess there really is.
- Telaneo 2mo ago
  There are truckloads of perfectly good food and clothes being incinerated every day since that's somehow cheaper for the owners of capital. The excess is there. It's just not ending up in the pockets of those who need it.
  - nate_meurer 2mo ago
    Food and clothing are actually an argument against you here. Sure we waste a lot of both, and yet food insecurity is rare in the First World, and lack of clothing is pretty much the least significant part of poverty. Plus, government-forced redistribution reliably increases prices overall due to the increased costs of logistics and administration. There is no free lunch. If you want to argue your point, you have to address the real fiscal burdens on modern societies, and the real drivers of debt across the West. The biggest components of government debt are medical care and pensions (including Social Security in the US). These are the things that are bankrupting us, not food and clothing.
    - Telaneo 2mo ago
      Pensions probably ought to be reduced/readjusted in accordance with life time expectancy, or some other maths that actually ends up in the green somehow while still allowing those who cannot take care of themselves to live a decent life. I've seen enough rich pensioners (my own grandmother among them...) to come to that conclusion. The US spends an inordinate amount on healthcare since the system is covered in leeches (17~% of GDP compared to 10~ in Europe).[1] If a significant part of US debt is caused by healthcare costs, then that sounds like a political own-goal. That's not to say the costs in Europe are insignificant. We can probably do better here too. [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2674671 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26746...
      - aianus 2mo ago
        The US healthcare system is incredible compared to socialized systems if you can afford it. That's at least part of the reason it represents 17% of GDP. The same procedure I needed had a 2 day wait time in the US and a 10 month wait time in Canada.
        juvvel 2mo ago
        If you have the money, you can get excellent healthcare in almost any civilized country. You're free to pay for your treatment in Canada, too.
- amanaplanacanal 2mo ago
  Debt is just accounting, and has nothing to do with whether or not a surplus exists and who gets to consume it. The surplus exists, it doesn't magically appear because of your accounting system.
  - nate_meurer 2mo ago
    My point is not that economic surpluses don't ever exist, but that the perceived surpluses that people invoke in order to defend the present welfare state are unsustainable, and that the system will inevitably collapse without a miraculous increase in economic productivity. Debt (both private and sovereign) is literally the thing that tells us whether a society is able to pay for the things it demands. That's not an accounting trick any more than plain arithmetic is.
    - amanaplanacanal 2mo ago
      You appear to only be looking at the debt, and not that those debts are held by other people as assets. Do you think it's still a net negative if you add that in too?
      - nate_meurer 2mo ago
        Well yeah, it's still debt. It's still the unpaid balance of the cost of goods and services. The essential purpose of a market for IOUs is to allow us to issue a lot more IOUs. This is critical to the industrial and technological development that has allowed us to stop living in the dirt. But liquid debt markets can also be weapons of mass destruction by allowing misallocation to compound into ruinous financial crises. Sort of like, oh I don't know, bloated, inefficient government entitlement programs funded by massive debt that can only be dealt with by a.) confiscating the labor and assets of the population by force, or b.) monetizing the debt and inflating it away, which is itself a backdoor tax on the same population.
  - hogehoge51 2mo ago
    The accounting system is what ensures that we can ACCOUNT for if such a statement is true or not. It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc. There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn mowing and shopping services (such as disability welfare has created in my country) could easily be accompanied by a shortage in housing. In fact one could be caused by the other. The economy has capacity today and surplus from yesterday. Beyond that takes vigilance and accountability to maintain the system. The fundamental question is why exactly you think a system can have some fundamental governing and observation mechanism such as debt (or equity accounting) removed and it would still maintain the same system characteristics that produce said surplus? This is basic engineering and system architecture 101 and I would expect technologists to have more than a surface level expectation that systems do not operate magically nor label components as redundant without detailed reasoning.
- _DeadFred_ 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - WarmWash 2mo ago
    Starving the beast and gorging the beast both accomplish the same thing.
- one33seven 2mo ago
  We're producing enough to feed everyone and throw it away if it is not paid for. This cruel system has to end.
  - hogehoge51 2mo ago
    Anthropomorphising a system to give it attributes such as cruelty is silly. Entertaining a lump of monolithic production fallacy is also silly. There are any number of detailed and specific problems that need to be solved to solve the greater economic problem you describe. A system that promotes direct effort to solve specific problems is required. Your naivety only exacerbates the cruelty.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

mvc 2mo ago

> the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus. Is it? Or is it that an increasing proportion of total income ends up going to the people who find ways of hiding it such that it does not get distributed.

jumpinjack710 2mo ago
[dead]
hogehoge51 2mo ago
How do you hide something in a closed loop system such as an economy?
- arbitrary_name 2mo ago
  offshore Swiss accounts. opaque and complex corporate ownership structures. land.
  - hogehoge51 2mo ago
    you failed to answer my question. either the activity and resource is part of an economy or not, an activity or resource that is still in the economy is not hoarded. either thise things are in the economic system or not. swiss banking is simply another economic system, eiher it is a separate closed loop system(and not accesible), or an integrated system with flows in and out. if the money is not part of the closed loop of the economy what value does it have? (it's addition and removal simply inflates or deflates the remaining closed loop system) normal banking and currency exchange already creates and destroys money in orders of mangitude larger than private wealth. land and hard resources are the only place i think you can hoard. it can be taken out of the economy and still maintain value, and depending on the relative holding you can influence value. but even that requires a holding cost. the holding cost is part of the broader closed loop economic system, an/or political system. you could say much of the fuedal economy was paying the holding cost for this hoarding, the advancement of the modern economic system was to build a massive integrated economy around it that made the holding cost higher and significant hoarding moslty unsustainable. (except by goverment)

dmitrygr 2mo ago

> why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. Cognitive dissonance, they understand but refuse to admit it because it conflicts with their world view.