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Working on Economics with Fable 5
- lwansbrough 25d ago[flagged]
- Wilsoniumite 25d agoIt's a liiiiiiittle more than that...
- firesteelrain 24d agoAre there other alternatives to UBI in solving this problem?
- bubbleRefuge 24d agoMMT job guarantee
- throwatdem12311 24d agoBoy I sure love my ditch digging job for the government! My friend also loves his ditch filling job too!
- schmidtleonard 24d agoAbout 100 years ago, American capitalists drunk-drove the US economy into a ditch and the government had to jump-start it by allocating capital itself. The jobs were in national parks, schools, housing, and rural electrification. If you've ever been to a national park, chances are decent you walked by/over a plaque or stamp commemorating it. It's reasonable to want most capital allocation to happen privately, thereby ensuring these decisions are made by people with a track record of success and skin-in-the-game. That's capitalism, it's good, and I'm a capitalist too. But the propaganda that the government is so inherently bad at this game that one should fight it even in an emergency is reductive, defeatist, and ahistorical.
- mcmcmc 24d agoYou say this, but if the US actually expanded nationwide fiber like we were supposed to there would have been a whole lot of ditches to dig up and refill. Public works projects don’t have to be wasteful.
- Tostino 24d agoYou may know this already, but we did lay the fiber already like we were supposed to have. Most of it just never got used until ~20 years later. Because corporations need to milk their profits.
- estearum 24d agoUBI is not a solution because it will drive up land rents and be eaten by landowners.
- skew-aberration 24d agoLand value tax / citizens dividend here is different to the UBIs sometimes proposed in contemporary US politics. The idea is that you tax and redistribute the profits on the scarce inputs to the economy, rather than the redistributing the outputs like manufactured grids and AI tokens.
- Wilsoniumite 23d agonot really, the unconditionality is kind-of a requirement. Pay people to not work and you skew in favor of not working, pay people to work and you skew in favor of working, pay them for any other condition and, well, it's skewed, or in economic terms, distortionary. You can still have conditional benefits on top, favor working or something else a bit more if you want, but the base needs to be unconditional.
- owenpayton 24d agothe paper abstract is generated by ai: https://www.pangram.com/history/c480c94f-2d19-4cc3-95e0-c4faa0936cdc?ucc=Bkykg1IArnm https://www.pangram.com/history/c480c94f-2d19-4cc3-95e0-c4fa...
- estearum 24d agoIt may well be, but also Pangram is ridiculously transparent pseudoscience. Let's not play pretend that it's authoritative, please. Edit: Just for fun I just defeated it with AI-generated text that it reported as 100% human-written. Great stuff. Truly genius scam.
- porridgeraisin 24d agoIt is not pseudoscience. Have you read about how it works?
- estearum 24d agoYes, quite a bit actually. It's directly analogous to e.g. "Red sky at night, sailors' delight", i.e. a pseudo-scientific approach that probably has a better-than-random success rate.
- robotresearcher 24d agoSo it’s a heuristic. Lots of very valuable heuristics exist.
- estearum 24d agoAs a Georgist I'm naturally very sympathetic to anything in this vein, but as you say: dense! What do you believe are the most important contributions here over standard Georgism or Ricardo's theory of rents?
- bethekidyouwant 24d agoI think the answer to the last question is obvious. That we are standing on the shoulders or something completely new.
- skew-aberration 24d agoThis is a topic I'm interested in, but the presentation and exposition on the website leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, it does make you sound like a crank. Almost all of the theory and predictions presented seems to be those of regular classical economics, per Smith, Riccardo, and particularly George. You can find them in Wealth of Nations, Progress and Poverty. This surprises people who have been failed by our education systems. There are still many people writing about this exact topic now - the author does mention e.g Stiglitz. The author seems to be overcome by the explanatory power of a 150-250 year-old well-established economic theory, of which fable has built a fairly general (novel? improved?) macro model for him, including the effects of certain tax policies. They present this as a new theory of economics rather than a new macro model. It's very off-putting as a reader - you can't distinguish at a glance between what the author claims to have contributed vs merely discovered by reading about Georgism. Established concepts are not referred to be their usual names, etc.
- skew-aberration 24d ago'classical economics doesn't know how technology affects the wage' - ridiculous, classical economists were addressing exactly how technology was changing society and economic relationships. they didn't have accurate/useful models but they described the relationships in great detail. Sentences like this make me question the author's ability to evaluate their own paper.
- oefrha 24d agoYes, crack open an intro to macroeconomics textbook and it has to discuss total factor productivity (technological progress) in the Cobb-Douglas production function, and its short run and long run effects on wages, or it's quite easy to connect the dots if it doesn't discuss that relationship directly. You'll get medium run too if you go a little beyond classical. It's funny someone claims to be writing economics papers but refuses to spend 100 hours, maybe less, to learn the fundamentals of macroeconomics as understood by everyone working in a related field. > I simply could not have written this piece. I myself have no formal economics background No shit, me neither, I read a couple macroeconomics textbooks at the age of 30 and now I wouldn't make arrogant and obviously wrong claims like the above. And I don't have the hubris to publish a paper.
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- delichon 24d ago> And the intuitive idea for this is that the wage is set by technology and access to physically scarce things (land as an example, but tbh you can add other things you think are scarce), and then it’s scaled by how efficiently machines can make machines and how much labor you need to make machines. That’s it. There is no term for human value here, and it is values that set prices. Scarcity is not itself a value. A particular snowflake or UUID being unique adds no demand. Wages are set in the context of every possible opportunity that the employer can imagine, as ordered by values. So a wage-predicting equation needs arguments that measure all of those value-weighted opportunities against paying a given wage, but this one doesn't. And "That's it" seems to declare them not relevant.
- tomrod 24d agoHuman values ideally start deeper, in the creation of preferences, where economics simply takes as a primitive/preexisting part of the environment. Marketing theory is the one that focuses on manipulating human value.
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- impossiblefork 24d agoPreferences come from selection pressures and needs. Taking them as a foundation leads to excessive focus on trade and obscures the fact that humans in almost all cases need essentially the same things.
- tomrod 23d ago> need essentially the same things Eh. Bacon futures disagree with this hypothesis.
- 0x70run 24d ago[dead]
- Stevvo 24d agoMy high-school economics teacher taught us Georgism is the optimal form of taxation. He gave us a bunch of dense math to back up that claim, but I can remember none of it.
- s1artibartfast 24d agoThere is no optimal form of taxation, only trade-offs. There is shifting burdens from good to good or person to person. I find it no surprise that so many of the loudest proponents for georgism are highly compensated tech workers with low physical consumption - exactly the demographic that would be favored most under that system.
- wat10000 24d agoWe tend to own property in places where land is expensive, we'd be paying hefty taxes in a Georgist system.
- reverius42 24d agoIt would also help incentivize real improved use of expensive property, and less speculative investment without improvement, perhaps leading to lower prices (thus lower land value, and lower taxes), perhaps reaching some kind of equilibrium with better improved land use in expensive areas, less speculation resulting in the expensive areas being less expensive, and more equitable taxation than our current system.
- estearum 24d agoYes basically you should expect to see significant densification with significant competition in how appealing to the market you can make that level of density (since you as the developer keep all the upside).
- s1artibartfast 23d agoI would actually expect to see a reduction in densification if a LVT is more expensive than current property taxes. While it obviously encourages putting high value land to greater use, it also encourages avoiding high value land itself. If the tax burden of your San Francisco house or office doubles, you may look into relocating to where land is cheaper. It obviously depends on the rates.
- larsiusprime 24d agoRE sovereign wealth funds, You might find it interesting that the Norwegian approach to natural resource management is also based on the classical principles of Ricardo and George: https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/book-review-the-natural-dividend https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/book-review-the-natural-div...
- dash2 24d agoGuys you realise you can just read the Journal of Economic Perspectives for free? Its articles are written for the ordinary reader, by experts who have spent big chunks of their lives studying their specialty. They don't try to sound like a teenage girl, they don't boast about being able to do High School algebra, and they contain ideas that are less than one hundred and fifty years old. Some of them might even be new! Sheesh.
- kid64 24d agohttps://www.bgnes.com/technology/chatgpt-convinced-canadian-man-he-was-a-math-genius https://www.bgnes.com/technology/chatgpt-convinced-canadian-...
- lhk931122 24d ago[flagged]