This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, but please try to avoid hot-button political and social topics. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server – and also check out the SSC Podcast. Also:
1. The DC SSC meetup group is celebrating its second anniversary and wants to throw a party. It’s Saturday April 13 at 4 PM on 616 E Street NW, Washington DC. Anyone who reads this blog, even a little, is welcome to attend. Please see this link for very slightly more information.
2. Speaking of which, Claire helps arrange and guide a lot of meetups, and she would like meetup attendees to take a survey about their experiences.
3. New ad up for the Seattle Anxiety Specialists psychotherapy group. I was pretty impressed by their site and by talking to one of their therapists, so if you’re in their demographic (anxious people in Seattle), check them out.
4. Comment of the week is Simon Jester clearing up my confusion about to what degree “cultural Marxism” is vs. isn’t a real thing. And if that’s not enough Marxism for you, no_bear_so_low on the subreddit offers this guide to figuring out where communists are coming from.
It seems to me that it would be rather nice to see Edmund do a good deed, Lear die happy knowing that Cordelia lives and Cordelia look forward to a prosperous life at the end of the play.
Shakespeare was grimdark before 90s
comic booksgraphic novels writers, fantasy novelists and games designers even existed 🙂What is the status of the “Cyc” project?
What do AGI researchers think of Cyc?
From the comment on the last link:
I find this very revealing, and also a pretty striking (if somewhat unintentional) refutation of everything that came before it. I’m sure there’s variety among different hunter-gatherer cultures, but I remember hearing about this “teasing of successful hunters” thing before. I think this goes a long way toward explaining why hunter-gatherer cultures are so technologically stagnant and can go thousands of years without changing or innovating much. In an environment where any form of innovation or success is actively punished, well, of course no one’s going to accomplish much of anything beyond just surviving. (And sure they still have art, culture, music and all the hallmarks of humanity, but their output of this stuff is comparatively small as well.)
And it’s hard for me not to draw some parallels to certain modern leftist subcultures.
I don’t believe human nature is inherently hierarchical. I mean, for most of history we’ve been hunter-gatherers, which–if anything–suggests we have an innate tendency toward anti-hierarchy. It does seem like even in most modern cultures people have an innate tendency to resent successful people and to try to keep others’ status in check through things like gossip, shaming, etc. But I do think that “hierarchical” cultures (i.e. ones where success is not actively punished and may even be rewarded) tend to be more successful and innovative and become more powerful for obvious reasons. And so those are the ones that spread. Granted, “capitalism” doesn’t necessarily equal “cultures that reward innovation and success” but there seems to be a correlation. And the proposed alternative, it seems, is a cultural norm that involves actively and constantly beating down (and sometimes outright killing) anyone who tries to accomplish anything beyond the bare minimum.
Certainly such a cultural norm is possible; it’s existed before. But that sounds like a pretty awful world to me. Why would I want that? And it’s hard for me to imagine a communist world that doesn’t involve some variation of this “punish the successful” norm. I guess there’s some comfort in this if you’re an unsuccessful person (and yes, many people are unsuccessful for reasons that are not their fault), but even as a relatively low-status person myself this seems like a pretty grim and petty form of comfort. And while relatively non-complex, small scale societies like hunter-gatherers can at least survive this way, I suspect it would be pretty difficult to maintain a complex industrial society while discouraging any form of innovation.
If I were to provide a snarky definition of capitalism/libertarianism based on this, it would be, “The radical idea that we should stop murdering people for being too smart.”
I think both modes have failure states. Hyper egalitarianism shunts innovation but extreme competitiveness can undermine the interpersonal social structures that make a lot of the wealth accumulation possible.
I guess instead of “people naturally love hierarchies” or “people naturally hate hierarchies”, it is more like people have instincts that tell them that some hierarchies are okay and some are not; or that some people deserve higher status, but if they try to take too much, they need to be punished. Also that some kinds of achievements can translate to higher status, and some cannot.
(Now, these instincts may be miscalibrated for modern era. They may interfere with various other instincts, for example we want to support our allies, so our answer to “how much status a person deserves for doing X” may depend on whether we perceive the person as a friend or an enemy. Also, let’s avoid the naturalistic fallacy: understanding why we have instincts and how exactly they work, is a description of the natural state, not a recipe for a moral society.)
For example, I suppose that the hunter-gatherer society that teases their successful hunters, also has some kind of chieftain, and you probably wouldn’t tease the chieftain in the same way. Just because they don’t give high status to successful hunters specifically, doesn’t mean they don’t give higher status to anyone else. Perhaps successful hunters are the relative “nerds” of such tribes, and chieftains are the relative “jocks”.
My guess is that most (neurotypical) people have an instinct for how much status anyone “deserves”, which is correlated with “how much could such person hurt me (in the ancient evolutionary environment) if I wouldn’t treat them with sufficient respect”. If someone is treated more respectfully than they “deserve”, an average person fells an urge to slap them down, to prevent a greater conflict in the tribe: between its powerful members, and its respected but not quite powerful members. Because an unopposed respect would be perceived as a claim to power; and respecting people who don’t “deserve” it could be perceived as joining their (most likely losing) side.
For example, you respect your leaders, e. g. the people who demonstrated ability to gain followers, and who could simply tell those followers to kick your ass. (You may disrespect enemy leaders, but that’s because they are enemies anyway, and because you do not expect them to take an action against you specifically.) You respect physically strong people; or successful sportsmen, which is a proxy for physical strength. Less respect goes to skilled or smart-but-not-powerful people; they may be useful allies, but they are not very dangerous as enemies if you have the strong people on your side.
(The modern leftist subcultures definitely have their own hierarchies whom they respect. It’s not the smartest people; it’s the leaders, whether they happen to be teachers or students.)
In (hypothetical, pure) capitalism, a person is considered powerful if they have money, because that means they have the power to decide how that money will be used. In a hunter-gatherer / feudal / communist society, merely rich person would be low-status, because their property can be easily taken away by force. In a hunter-gatherer society, you need physical strength and a few strong loyal allies. In a feudal society, you need an army. In a communist society, you need power within the communist party. In crony capitalism, you need to have money and friends in the government.
I think I would argue that existentialism is the philosophical movement most nearly represented in Lear, and that its closest dramatic cousins are the works of Beckett. It’s speaking to the same things that Helen hears in Beethoven at the start of Howard’s End (“panic and emptiness”, etc.) It’s about the transience and precariousness of the human spark in a world where God is absent or uncaring and all authority is a sham. That said, I think it is marked out from other works in that thematic vein by the value and beauty Shakespeare finds in that spark before it goes out.
Dramatically, structurally, does it have problems? You bet. I’ve never seen a production that really overcame them, and I don’t think it is a match for the best of his other works (notably Othello and Macbeth) strictly as a play. But on the page, I think it’s the best of the lot (and the one I most want to direct, because obviously I’m a complete egomaniac).
I am a high school senior, and I have to choose where to go to college. I live in California, and applied only to California public schools, although I got rejected or waitlisted from all of the schools I really wanted to go to. So now I have to choose between:
* UC Merced, a fairly good school, but not one I’m enthused about
* Community College for 2 years, then transferring into a UC (it’s a lot easier to get in this way)
* Skipping college entirely and probably getting a job through Triplebyte
I don’t yet know exactly what I want to do with my life (although I’m 90% certain I’ll get a STEM career) so my main priority is aiming to get lots of opportunities. I think a large, prestigious school would be best for that, but I don’t know if spending 2 years in community college is worth it.
Anyways, advice is appreciated.
It should factor in your financial situation. Imo, the community college option is a good one as that will cut your expenses for those years and likely the quality of education will be similar. Make sure your courses transfer and meet requirements for the university you want your degree to be from.
If you already qualify for the job you want coding or whatever, that may be even better. Four years of experience won’t open all the same doors as a degree, but it is something.
Is that your bearded dragon, btw?
My parents can probably pay most of the cost of college, although it’s still good to save money.
The profile pic is of a Tuatara (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuatara), a type of reptile native to New Zealand which is taxonomically separate from lizards.
If UC Merced was the best place that would take you you’re probably decently capable, but not a star, based on what you have accomplished in life so far. That means you would do well to build skills and credibility before setting off into the working world. UC Merced, as an actual UC school, is probably a place good enough to do both, and you’ll emerge with the standard B.Sc. credential that most STEM employers are looking for in entry-level employees. Unless you really hate school or a four-year degree presents an overwhelming financial burden, I think your best bet is to go to UC Merced.
As you can see, I specialize in distinctly idiosyncratic career advice.
As for what to study, let me assume you are not headed for engineering school; you’re going to do this through Arts & Sciences, or whatever it’s called. Since you aren’t quite sure what you want to do, but probably STEM, I suggest you keep four doors open: mathematics, statistics (assuming it’s distinct from math), your favorite science, and computer science. Carefully consider the requirements, which should be heavily overlapping, and fulfill the freshman and sophomore requirements for all of them. Then at the start of junior year decide which one or two appeal to you most, and fulfill the major requirements for those. And if you decide against majoring in computer science, try to pick up at least a minor in it.
What part of California do you live in? If you live in an area with more internship or volunteer opportunities than Merced, then community college is the way to go.
Also, community college might expose you to new fields that you might never have considered. Merced would, too, but is it easy to transfer between schools at Merced (eg from Engineering to Natural Sciences, or vice versa)
Finally, community college = saving money on dorms. Talk to your parents; would they be willing to use that saved $ to pay for you to do some sort of volunteer work abroad that relates to your field of interest? That will boost both your CV and your transfer application, and of course will be an interesting experience in its own right. See eg https://www.projects-abroad.org/university-students/
I live in Los Angeles.
LAPC was pretty good 10 years ago.
You should apply to jobs through TripleByte, but be choosy; if you get a great offer take it, otherwise go to UC Merced.
Reasoning: now is a great time to get a tech job, and that might not be true in four years. You might luck into something awesome. Secondly, interviewing is educational and motivating (at least it was for me). A couple hours of talking with interviewers about their companies and their jobs may tell you as much about whether you want to be a software engineer as four years of CS classes will. Thirdly, interviewing takes practice. Having a few interviews under your belt will give you a significant leg up on your competition when you’re applying for internships or jobs later on.
Read “The Case Against Education”, and then make an honest assessment of your personality and scholastic talents, and then run through the decision algorithm he lays out in the back of the book.
Do not borrow money that you do no have a direct actionable implementable plan to be able to pay back, and to be able to pay back even if you do not finish school.
While going to school, make sure to also actually learn things.
No matter what you do: learn how to write, learn how to do a little coding, learn math up to algebra, and learn statistics. You can learn those from the library, from online classes, and Khan.
If you want to learn things in classrooms from professors and TAs, but do not want to pay for school, you can generally just sit in classes and take advantage of the library, without being actually enrolled. For most undergrad level classes, the professors don’t care if you audit their class without showing up on their enrollment sheet, and if you are actually engaged as an active learning student, they will be overjoyed. And you can get a university library card for free or cheap. (I wish Plumber had known that when he was that age.)
If you just want to go to school for the networking, social fun, and parties, you can do all that with the students of the school you want to hang out at without actually enrolling. You don’t even have to tell your peers that is what you are doing.
If you do want the diploma, and you want the “lecture in classroom” experience, knock out the first two years in the cheapest decent small regional college to you, and then transfer to a bigger university.
Consider the Western Governors University, if you want any of the degrees they offer. You can combine that with the social life of some other university (see above).
Consider a trade school. They are always looking for students, and employers are desperate for skilled trained certified tradesmen. There is nothing wrong with the skilled trades, and they can pay very very well. You can be a tradesman, AND be a well-read scholar.
Travel as much as you can afford the time. Travel is cheap if you let it be.
Write. A lot. Write about everything. Publish some of it. You get good at writing by writing, and no matter what you do with your career, you need to be good at writing. You don’t get good at writing from college writing classes.
Do not party hard. Do not smoke (both tobacco and cannabis), only drink in minute moderation (two standard drinks a week, tops), treat psychedelics with extreme care, and for gods sake don’t take “study aid” pills unless you actually have an honest Rx that you actually need.
My experiences are about 20 years out-of-date, but I went the Community College transfer route in California (Foothill College in Los Altos, transferring to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo as a junior), and it worked very well for me.
When I was in school, California community college were academically solid within their scope, and lower-division (freshmen/sophomore-level) classes are well within their scope. Probably better than comparable classes at a UC or CSU: UCs and CSUs tend to have lower-division classes taught either in a lecture-hall format (~100 students/class) or they’re taught by TAs (grad students with teaching responsibilities as part of their scholarship/fellowship package), while similar Community College courses are more often taught by full-time faculty (professors or lecturers) in a smaller-class (20-30 students) format.
Another benefit of community colleges is that they’re a softer intro to college life than going straight to a four-year college: the classes are run the same way as four-year college classes, which can be a significant transition from high school (less hand-holding and softer requirements around homework and attendance, so there’s less feedback when you’re on track to fail due to distraction and bad study habits), and it can be easier to make that transition if you aren’t simultaneously transitioning away from living directly under your parents’ care.
And then there’s the cost factor Randy M brought up: in-state tuition for UCs and CSUs is heavily subsidized, but the after-subsidy costs are a lot more than they used to be: a year’s worth of tuition and fees as a full-time student at UC Merced is currently $11,502, compared to $1,515 at Foothill College (and I think other California CCs would be very close to that). Living expenses may also be a lot lower: at Merced, you’d need to live in the dorms or rent off-campus housing, while at your local community college you might be able to still live at home. Add it all up, and you’ll be spending ~$5k/year at CC (tuition, books, and commuting costs) vs ~$35k/year at Merced.
The financial benefits are magnified if you’re still figuring out your major: if you start down one path and then change your mind, you might wind up adding half a year to a year to your college career since you’ll have spent some time taking courses that don’t count towards your new major. It’s a lot more cost-effective to do that extra year at a CC than a four-year school.
Whether you go to Merced or community college, if you go the college route you’ll probably need to declare a major up front. STEM covers a lot of ground, but the three main buckets are computer stuff (Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering), classic engineering (Mechanical Eng, Aerospace Eng, Civil Eng, Chemical Eng, etc), and science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc). I’d try to pick which of those buckets you’re most likely to want to pursue, then declare a major that’s relatively central to the cluster.
For computer stuff, I’d recommend Computer Engineering as a starting point, which has a big overlap with Computer Science and Software Engineering (both programming-based, with the latter sacrificing some theory and algorithm coursework to make room for a deeper treatment of software architecture and development processes), but also has a fair amount of coursework in embedded/real-time systems, chip layouts, and circuit design.
For classic engineering, I’d recommend Mechanical Engineering. It’s not the most technically rigorous of the classic engineering majors (that would be Aerospace), but it’s pretty far up the hierarchy, and it has both good employment prospects in its own right and a lot of overlap with other majors that should make switching easier if you change your mind.
Not sure about the best starting major for the science bucket. Maybe others can chime in.
One suggestion—try before you buy.
Audit a class or two at your local community college, if only for a couple of weeks, assuming they don’t object. Audit a class or two at UCLA. Try hanging around UCLA talking with students, and do the same, so far as you can, at the community college–presumably most students live at home, but there is probably socializing at lunchtime and such. That should give you some feel for both the academic and the social side of life in both places. Auditing at Merced would be better still, but it’s a fair ways from L.A.
Here’s my shoot-from-the-hip advice:
Make some mistakes. Be poor and hungry for a while. Meet lots of weird and dangerous people. (Although you live in LA, so maybe you’ve already done that one.) Experience life outside your home state. Make friends with types you don’t get a lot of in LA. Ride public transportation to work. Work a blue-collar job for at least 6 months. Stay off the internet as much as you can.
Do those things for a couple years — in other words, build up your character — before you go to college or start your career in earnest.
Well, I think by now we have given this high school senior every possible type of advice except for, “Join the navy. See the world.” We’re saving that one for bean, maybe?
Don’t join the navy.
Do see the world.
I think that old advice was up until the mid/late 20C, the *only* way that “average joe” was going to be able to travel far from their home country was to enlist in the navy, or the merchant marine service.
Today, travel is so much cheaper, no military service needed.
But then you don’t get the GI bill or veteran status.
Nor do you get half-jokingly dry-humped all the time, or made to slurp a grape or whatever out of some fat guy’s navel when you cross the equator, and those experiences surely build character.
Besides, I can’t imagine there’s any better time to join the Navy than right now.
If you’re desperate for the experience, there’s probably somebody outside the military that still does line-crossing ceremonies.
At one point even airlines did it (and I’ve got the certificate from Pan Am to prove it), but I doubt any do now.
Looks like some cruise ships do a form of the ceremony, though obviously milder, and limited to volunteers.
https://blog.onlinevacationcenter.com/2018/12/11/equator-crossing-rituals-on-cruise-ships/
If you ask the SSC peanut gallery for advice and they give you every kind of advice, are you still better off than if you’d just asked the Internet?
STUDENT: I asked for advice.
MASTER: Did you get any?
STUDENT: I got every imaginable type of advice! Most of them contradictory.
MASTER: What conclusion may we draw from this?
Honestly, you need to ask people who are currently doing what you want to do, or currently managing people who do what you want to do. I don’t know jack squat about software engineering.
If you want to get into accounting, skipping college is not a good option. And if you aren’t getting into a top-tier school, you have an uphill battle getting into a good job, which means you need to land good internships.
The ideal first step would be to figure out what job you want to do and check to see how heavily its industry is regulated. If it’s regulated pretty heavily (e.g. accounting, medicine, clinical psychology) then anticipate needing to get a degree at some point. Also have a clear idea of which industries (still) offer viable career paths without degrees (e.g. some software engineering, the arts if you’re extremely talented and driven, skilled trades, military, sales & retail, etc.)
Of course, as long as we’re talking ideal, the ideal thing would be to be 18 years old and have a realistic vision of what you want to do, instead of the unfocused, borderline satirical, hormone-drenched cartoon that I and I suspect most others had at that age.
That’s why I’m suggesting what I think we might need: a sort of Rumspringe for the English.
@Epistemic_Ian
You could apply for an apprenticeship instead.
1. Look at the career interests and see what kinds of majors they typically are looking for, as well as the skill sets. This can be as broad or as narrow as you see fit but i recommend focusing on a relatively broad range of career options that have overlapping skill sets with job growth prospects and decent entry level pay.
2. Do 2 years at the cheapest school that you can transfer credits to to get basic core credits out of the way
3. Transfer to a maybe not so cheap school that has a decent reputation for the program you need related to what you picked in #1
___________
Not the best approach necessarily but a good approach if you *must* take the uni route. The worst thing is to do tons of course work that you don’t need at a uni you can’t afford.
If you want a STEM career, go to UC Merced.
The path to graduate school begins with doing research with a professor during undergrad and getting a recommendation from them. This path will be closed off if you skip school or go to a community college.
The path to one of the big FAANG tech companies begins with a degree from a good school, like a UC.
A big part of life is getting the right credentials and knowing the right people so that you’ll even be able to try to do something. Big organizations are risk-averse and would rather let many good candidates pass by because they don’t have a degree from a good school, than risk hiring someone who would screw up and cause significant problems.
Find what you want to do and get really good at it. Then get the right credentials that prove to people that you are really good at it and not just good at debating it on the internet.
Take the minimum number of humanities courses. The main thing it broadens is the hole in your wallet. History, philosophy, etc. are best learned on your own from books. It’s relaxing to read that sort of thing anyway, so you don’t need the discipline of school to force you to do it.
Is that really true? Merced is the newest UC campus, and I don’t know that its reputation is yet very well established as a place that STEM employers want to hire out of. It is no accident that the original poster is reluctant to go there.
I think the poster’s plan is to attend community college for two years, then transfer to a four-year school. If he has decent grades in community college, he is almost certain to get into a better UC than UC Merced. Eg in 2017 Berkeley admitted 18% of freshman applicants, but 27% of transfer applicants. UCLA admitted 28% of transfer applicants, adn the transfer acceptance rates for the other UC campuses were in the 50s and 60s. http://www.dailycal.org/2017/07/06/uc-berkeley-releases-2017-18-admissions-data/ and
I taught high school seniors for many years, and in my experience, most don’t know enough about fields of study to really know what the best choice for them is. Eg: I have had 3-4 students tell me, “I like math, but also like politics. Which should I major in?” They had no clue that much poli sci is highly quantitative. So, a student who has only gotten into a low tier UC campus is probably better off going to a community college and taking a wide range of courses, including the humanities and social science (and sciences – I took a very interesting geophysics class in college, and a very interesting forestry class, as well. Had I taken them as a freshman, I might well have changed my major).
Taking the minimum number of humanities and taking a wide range of courses at a junior college aren’t mutually exclusive. Unless a lot has changed since I went to college in California, you are required to take a whole bunch of humanities to get a degree. I think that languages are the only humanities department I didn’t take a class from, and that was just because I sweet talked my way out of it by convincing the front office that C++ was a language.
I think that is true of the CSUs, but not so much the UCs. Here are the breadth requirements of UC Merced’s School of Social Studies, Humanities and Arts:
Lower Division General Education Requirements
CORE 1: The World at Home
WRI 10: College Reading and Composition
Two Natural Science / Engineering Introductory Courses with or without Laboratory, Field or Studio *
Mathematical / Quantitative Reasoning Course
Humanities, Arts or Foreign Language Course *
Social Science Course *
Upper Division General Education Requirements
Four Non-Major Upper Division General Education Courses *
Here are UC Merced’s School of Engineering requirements:
General Education Requirements [At Least 42 Units]
School of Engineering students are required to complete the following list of general education courses:
Lower Division General Education Requirements:
CORE 001: The World at Home [4 units]
WRI 010: College Reading and Composition [4 units]
MATH 021: Calculus I for Physical Sciences and Engineering [4 units]
PHYS 008: Introductory Physics I for Physical Sciences [4 units]
BIO 001: Contemporary Biology [4 units] or equivalent*
MATH 032: Probability and Statistics [4 units]
CSE 020: Introduction to Computing I [2 units] and
CSE 021: Introduction to Computing II [2 units] or
ME 021: Engineering Computing [4 units]
Additional General Education Requirements:
General Education Electives (selected from a list of acceptable courses; at least three units should be a recognized upper division writing course):
Humanities or Arts [4 units]
Social Sciences [4 units]
An upper division writing course [3 units]
Either 3 Service Learning units, or 3 additional Humanities or Arts or Social Sciences units; these units can be upper division or lower division [3 units]
No, that’s basically what I had to take as well. That’s 22 units of GE, which is like 20% of the units you’ll need to graduate.
At my alma mater, the Faculty of Mathematics requires you to take 5.0 units of non-math courses (out of 20.0 for the entire degree). Two of those have to be from a list of communications courses, which look like they were put in place because some people manage to get through high school with really terrible spoken English or weak written English. There is particular emphasis on helping immigrant students, with the faculty has lots of, although I think they’re mostly native-born at this point.
I don’t have a problem with the requirement. The business pages and the financial side of politics make a lot more sense with a couple of econ courses under my belt. And courses in English and history have big term papers that really level you up in writing and library research, both of which are really useful. I wish I’d taken a few more, actually.
Personally, I see little reason to go to UC Merced over a cheaper CSU, especially if you are going to go the computer science route (which I’m most familiar with). Yes, on paper, a UC is better than a CSU, but in reality, nobody is going to give you extra points for going to Merced. I do a lot of hiring, and that’s a school that wouldn’t even register on my radar.
I did the community college -> CSU route (getting CS and math degrees), and I’ve been asked about my university once in an interview over my 15 year career. I do think that have a college degree still helps, even in the tech sector (I’ve worked with companies that would pass over all resumes that didn’t list a degree), but unless you are getting into a top ten university, I don’t think where you get your degree from matters at all.
If you can get a good job right out of high school, you should take it, and also do night and online classes from your community college. After the first two years, you’ll have a good idea of how your career is looking, and whether or not you want to continue on to get your degree.
I haven’t seen many adaptations of it, I liked the Olivier one in the BBC adaptation of 1983.
Seeing it played you really understand why Edmund was driven to villainy; if every single time your dad met a stranger he introduced you with “Yeah, he’s my bastard, may as well get the dirty laundry out of the way first”, I don’t think it would conduce to filial respect 🙂
Quick question about copyright, IP, etc.
I have recently started watching Elementary and noticed that, while characters often refer to real-life websites (eBay, Instagram, etc) in dialogue, whenever we actually see a website onscreen it is a fictional one. For instance, rather than Facebook, there is a social network called Friendlounger.
Is this because of rules against showing trademarked material on screen, the fact that the websites haven’t paid for product placement (or laws against it in some countries), or something else?
Probably the former. See eg https://saperlaw.com/2007/06/13/film-clearance-basics/
All the big sites have a legal clearance process for being displayed in a movie or a TV show.
They are usually not onerous, but the production industry often will want to bypass the process entirely, because each one is different, and it’s just friction in their own production process.
There are now a small handful of webdev shops who’s entire gig is making such fake sites for TV shows and movies.
Game discussion: what’s a game (you could pick a computer/video game, or a tabletop game, or whatever) that you thought was really good, that nevertheless you would never play again?
For the former: Arcanum. Interesting setting, beautiful music, just generally a great feel to it. Also, bad combat system, really broken, long, buggy. Where would I find the time? Some things are best left in high school.
For the latter: The Fungi from Yuggoth/Day of the Beast campaign (the original name makes no sense, because the Fungi don’t show up in it as far as I recall, though they do in one chapter of the revised version) for Call of Cthulhu. It’s got some great bits, I had a blast running it, and everyone seemed to enjoy playing it. But, it’s fairly linear, and requires more than a bit of railroading or editing in some places.
I’ve played all the way through Arcanum three times, most recently about ten years back, and I have been tempted to do so again. The thing holding me back the most is the march of technology, not the game system.
All of those criticisms are also completely accurate, however, and I can understand not wanting to go back through all the problems it had.
But all of those problems can be solved by the simple application of Tempus Fugit and a horde of followers.
Replay value is hurt by the brokenness, though – as I recall, magic is waaay better than tech.
It is, but you can be powerful enough with either to be unstoppable, especially when you get Dog.
I played once as a good tech run not really knowing what I was doing, once as an evil magic run to try out the alternate storylines and one final time with all spoilers in a charismatic good magic run with maximum companions where I just busted the game wide open.
Arcanum was a great video game, except for the video and game parts. The graphics were poor and the color palette bland, and the combat system wonky to say the best.
But I played through it a lot because the character progression was engrossing and tied in wonderfully to the environmental interaction. If you were a tech character and a battle was too hard, head to the slums, scavenge material from the trash cans for molotov cocktails, and bam-bang there you go.
Magic was slightly less interesting, if only maybe because less novel.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Love it to bits, but the only time I’ll be able to enjoy it again is if I lose most of my memory. So much of the game is about the discovery, and if I remember where everything is it takes a good chunk of the fun away.
I feel like I still barely know where everything is, and I’ve been through almost all the game.
I’ve mostly lost interest in it, though I could pick it up again after it fades from memory. I don’t really enjoy the divine beast missions, so I probably wouldn’t start over from scratch either.
You could always do a randomizer run.
Oooh, do tell. Would that involve running it on CEMU? I could use an excuse to upgrade my rig.
First off, there’s some DLC out now, as well.
Secondly, I’m seeing conflicting information on if a randomizer is out for the game. These imply that there is one out:
https://twitter.com/zants/status/989641030365536256?lang=en
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En3VkH-uZqA
https://github.com/lepelog/botw-msrta-randomizer
https://www.twitchmetrics.net/c/172741635-specsnstats/streams
But most randomizers are based on patching an emulation ROM, and this list (updated last Saturday) doesn’t have one for BotW.
https://www.debigare.com/randomizers/
I played Twilight Struggle one time, am thankful for the experience, but never want to play it again. It does an amazingly good job of capturing the zeitgeist of the Cold War: everything is shit, most every option you have is shit, and you’re trying to prevent the world from exploding.
I didn’t like that, because of the requirement to use almost all your cards each turn, and some would always be very good for your enemy, it was difficult to plan a strategy. It became a game of crisis management. Everything is awful, how can you finagle the least awful outcome? Great job of presenting the experience of Cold War strategy and diplomacy! But not a fun game to play. I’ll stick with Star Wars: Rebellion, thank you. I like making and executing plans, not just handling grease fires.
As for video games, man, everybody loves Celeste, but I thought it was boring as hell. The graphics are meh, the sound’s okay, the story was predictable, and I get that it’s
a metaphorexplicitly about depression, but I can’t relate to that as I’ve never experienced depression. But what I saw in this seemed really, really on the nose. So I didn’t care about the girl, didn’t care about the story, and so the only good thing was the platforming itself. I was glad I got it for free one month as part of my Xbox Live Gold subscription. I rushed though it, said “well there it is” and have zero desire to play it ever again.Tangent: HOLY CRAP Salt and Sanctuary is SO GOOD. I know it’s a three year old game but I only got it last week when it went on sale on the Switch. It is basically 2D Dark Souls. And I don’t mean, “it’s hard, like Dark Souls!” I mean every game mechanic is cribbed from Dark Souls. Instead of collecting “souls” to level up at “bonfires” you collect “salt” to level up at “sanctuaries.” The skill tree is extremely, extremely large so you can basically design your own classes for infinite replayability. You dodgeroll, you block, you parry, you watch your stamina meter, all the enemies and bosses are punishing but fair. If you died there’s a simple fix: git gud.
I hurt my back and was laid up all weekend, so I did nothing but play Salt and Sanctuary. I’ve beaten it twice and am on my third playthrough. Cannot recommend this game highly enough. It’s available for all major platforms and is cheap (I got it for $14 on sale), and if you like Dark Souls and you like beautiful 2D games, buy this. 11/10 Honcho Points.
As someone who grew up with things like Chuckie Egg on the Spectrum, early Super Mario Brothers and Megaman games on the NES, Lemmings and Worms on the Amiga, Mario Kart on the N64 and most recently Braid* on Steam etc, it is kind of deeply alien to me that anyone should be bothered by whether a video game has a story at all. If the gameplay is engrossing enough, surely having to make the game have to also pretend to something akin to literature would only be a distraction from enjoying the game?
*Yes I am aware that Braid was a long time ago, and that it did kind of have a story. The story did in fact kind of detract from enjoying the game as an abstract playing experience. Also, get off of my lawn.
But Super Mario has a story: Bowser has kidnapped the princess and you need to save her. Mega Man has a story: Dr. Wily has created / reprogrammed robots to enslave people and you need to stop him.
Very few games have no story at all, so to call caring about the story “deeply alien”…does that mean you don’t like the vast, vast majority of games? And I agree, gameplay is paramount, but a good story is nice too. And if the story is really good, I can overlook shitty gameplay (Mass Effect 1 I’m looking at you). A lot of people praised Celeste because they were able to relate the protagonist’s struggle so well to their own struggles with depression, but as a person who does not suffer from depression, that all falls flat for me. I’m left with only the gameplay, which I thought was “okay.”
I think this was kind of the point of Celeste: it’s really just a well-designed, smooth platformer with a tiny bit of story thrown into it. It’s not really about the story in any meaningful way, but it provides a little window dressing for some of the mechanics.
The main character sort of mirrors the player’s strategy, as well. The only way to play Celeste is to just keep throwing yourself at the room until you figure out the perfect path, and that’s exactly what the main character does: just keeps pushing until she’s made it. The joy you feel when you finally perfectly transition a hard room is the main character’s joy at reaching the top of the mountain.
And a reminder that Celeste has B and C-sides which are much harder than the normal levels, so if you wanted more of that it’s there.
Yes, I know about the B and C sides but I did not want more.
Maybe it was the lack of combat that bothered me. I love platformers, but in basically every other platformer I both have to navigate the jumping puzzles and shoot/stab bad guys. In Celeste you’re just jumping, so it only seemed like half a game.
Well there is combat: both the slime-stuff in the hotel and the charging aliens in the ruins are basically fighting you. Maybe the blocks that get mad when you dash into them too. You just always lose!
Something like Mario is an action-platformer: combining the “platformer” genre with an action game. Celeste is more of a puzzle-platformer: its other half is just trying to figure out how to use the elements of a room to get to the end. Mario doesn’t really have that: sometimes you have to navigate around a few elements, but there’s much less of a “ok first I do this, then that gets me to this bit, which lets me jump over and hit this platform”.
Good review of Twilight Struggle! It’s one of my favorite games, but it’s because I explicitly enjoy that “your options are shit, now triage this crisis” gameplay. Even at work, I tend to thrive when someone else broke something, we’re losing money hand over fist, and I have to whip up something clever and fast to solve the problem- sure it’s stressful, but if I did it well it’s very satisfying.
After a few games of TS, by the way, you do get a lot better and figuring out what “grease fires” can be somewhat ignored, and that turns the game into a bit more of a plan-execution sort of game. Learning the rhythm of the different eras helps a lot too.
Twilight Struggle is definitely a game that requires repeat, especially if you are playing as the Americans. The game out-of-the-box leans pretty hard against the US, and the digital version has some tweaks and additional IP to help the US win. Even so, I got rocked probably 3 or 4 times before I could finally win as the US against the AI, and the AI ain’t even all the good.
Also, the game has many powerful cards (like Wargames) that a new player will have nooooooo idea about, and will entirely screw up your strategy once they hit.
I didn’t even know there was an electronic version. One of my coworkers is really into tabletop games so we play them over lunch sometimes. In case anyone was confused, I played the board game version.
I think it’s a mindset thing. I love Twilight Struggle, but it’s very divisive among my friends: I think some people are genuinely just defensively skewed, and that’s a trait that lends itself to enjoying that kind of game. I play the same way in other games, too – I’m psychotically defensive in chess, lock down sections systematically in Catan, and play football basically by aggressively marking whoever has the ball and then passing it away if I wind up with possession.
Even if you play well, you do spend a lot of your time putting out grease fires – I think that’s the nature of two-player zero sum games. The better player lights more fires, puts out enough, and knows when to abandon areas.
Worse than that, too many of the strategies you can plan, and must defend against, are based on “If I force the other guy to blow up the world, he takes the blame and I win”.
I’d probably be up for another replay, with the right players. But generally speaking, for those of us who actually remember the Cold War, they’ve got the card right there, explicitly labeled “Wargames”, so we all know what the only winning move is.
To quote Yahtzee: “I’m not sure how much of my absorption came from the game itself and how much came from it reminding me of my happy place but who gives a shit it’s Dark Souls with Symphony of the Night plugged into the gaps and I like both games so I’m having a blow job while snacking on fun sized Mars bars”.
What builds did you use? I ran a whip gish on my first playthrough because there clearly wasn’t enough Castlevania DNA in there already. I’ve seen people rush Iron Rampart IV to get through the harder sections, but that always seemed like it took the fun out of dying repeatedly.
Most video rpgs probably qualify after one or two play-throughs, at least the more story focused ones. If it’s an rpg with an open world or has a great resolution system, then it could be worth returning to periodically despite not getting much from the story sections. I played through chapter 1 of FFT last weekend, still a great game. But I didn’t finish my emulated Chrono Trigger run a couple years ago. The gameplay was good for the time, but now the only enjoyment I got was seeing it through my daughter’s eyes.
There’s plenty of really good games I probably won’t play again because I don’t have the hardware anymore, but I would play them if given the chance, so I think that’s beside the point.
As for board games, I might have a couple here–I don’t know if I will return or not. Doom town and Game of Thrones are both good games, but they aren’t being brought out for two reasons. One, I’m the only one who has them that I know about, so so there’s not a lot of excitement among my friends to put the time into learning them, and partly as a result of that, I don’t have much cardpool so the deck construction element doesn’t hold too much interest. Cards are pretty though.
There’s other games I own that I don’t have much interest in playing, but I’d call them “good games for their time” rather than really good games in general.
Grandia II
All Half-Life games
TES: Skyrim
For me this is most computer games I ever thought were good (Worms Armageddon, the original GTA that was entirely birds-eye-view, Myst, EA Sports NHL series, just to name a few). I liked the games themselves and enjoyed playing them when I was a yoot, but I have no interest in spending my time that way anymore. This applies to console games too.
With board and card games, all the ones I ever really liked (chess, Pente, Monopoly, poker, Scrabble, etc.) I would still play and very occasionally do if only I have the opportunity and people to play with.
I would play pente with you! That game is woefully obscure.
There’s an online chess.com-style site for it, or at least there was. I used to think I was really good because I’d always win against anyone I played IRL, but then I went on that site and found out I have no clue what I’m doing.
For computer games, I’d say Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It’s an outstanding horror game, one of the few that’s actually managed to scare me, but in actual play it basically breaks down to linear puzzle/exploration mechanics: if you know where to go and what to do, it’s trivial, and a lot of the horror payload comes from time and information constraints.
Similarly, Fallout: New Vegas. In gameplay terms it’s a mediocre shooter; the fun comes from exploring the setting and getting to know the characters. And now that I’ve hit every site on the map and spent some time playing with all the companions, there’s not much there for me. If I had a gun to my head I could probably stretch it with mods and character gimmicks (3 INT run? Luddite run? Explosives run?), but there’s no compelling reason to when I can do the same thing with more modern games.
Turok for N64 comes to mind. It was fun, but tedious, and the PVP was woeful compared to other shooters of its era. Beat it once, never felt like touching it again.
As mentioned an OT ago, Crusader Kings 2 and anything else by Paradox now falls into that category on the grounds that, first, played the way I like they become a time sink that I can’t really justify even with their high entertainment value and, second, played the way I like there is an unacceptably high chance that Paradox will force a game-breaking rule change onto me in the middle of a game.
Big long form RPGs, I just don’t have the time and inclination to sink in them the way I enjoyed them as a kid. My favorite two being Exile 3 and Planescape Torment.
I doubt I’m ever going to replay any of the Disgaea games I’ve finished. They’re just so… long.
I’m at a sloggy part in the middle of D5 right now, and just can’t be bothered to figure out which of the 1000 random slightly-useful abilities turns out to be game-breakingly useful.
How much would it cost to make a fully-automated machine that makes 10,000 Big Macs per day? Is doing so even possible today?
By fully-automated, I mean that humans are not part of the process of turning input components into finished products. They supply inputs (buns, patties, cardboard boxes, electricity, …) in bulk, they remove finished Big Macs, and they dispose of whatever waste stream is produced. They may also be needed to fix any breakdowns and to do inspections and preventative maintenance, but all of these are rare enough that no one is on duty for these purposes during regular operations. Let’s suppose the design target is 10 hours of scheduled downtime and 10 hours of unscheduled stoppages per year, not including any logistics problems with the supply of inputs or ability to remove outputs, including waste.
A burger making robot already exists.
Whatever it costs to scale that robot, I guess.
I don’t think this is possible. You’re talking about a machine that has 99.8% OEE. This type of machine would be considered world-class if it high the high 80s.
That seems only true if the machine can only produce one burger at a time. One could imagine a larger machine with several “lines” capable of creating many burgers at a time (unless you would define each line as a separate machine, but I’m not sure that would be consistent with other usages).
The limiting factor is probably cook time for some of the ingredients.
I think ADBG is pointing to the fact that the stated criteria (10 hr scheduled maintenance/yr, 10 hr unscheduled maintenance/yr) is completely bonkers for manufacturing. This isn’t a server farm, it’s a factory, and that kind of reliability for manufacturing equipment isn’t something the designers or operators would see in their wildest, drunkest dreams.
What would be high but plausible requirements for a piece of complex food-processing equipment?
Ah, yeah I kind of skimmed over (entirely missed) that part of the requirements.
…This has never happened before I swear.
@johan_larson
Are we to assume that this machine runs 24/7 outside of scheduled/unscheduled downtime?
I would guess you would need to increase total downtime by about 60-80x to feel comfortable. You can probably do better, but it will cost you.
Yes.
Well, the budget is a question, not a requirement.
Ran, by Kurusawa, is widely considered to be an excellent adaptation.
Kurosawa builds in a very strong live by the sword, die by the sword theme which is absent (or at least much more subtle) in the original. Which doesn’t necessarily make it worse, but that and some other lesser changes combine to make it quite different from the original.
the best adaptation of King Lear is Kosintsev’s 1971 version. Has an original score by Shostakovich. It can be found on YouTube easily; very hard to buy a legitimate copy.
Covers the last line of your comment too, in a very moving scene that doesn’t add any lines to Shakespeare’s text.
I haven’t read the play, but I did really enjoy a discussion of it by Stefan Molyneaux and an English professor that can be found on youtube.
Hello, and welcome to the twentieth instalment of my Biblical scholarship effortpost series, and the final one covering the Hebrew Bible. Last time we covered three short stories about Jewish women, one noncanonical to Jews. This time we’re going to look at the book of Daniel, a combination of stories and apocalyptic visions. In connection to that, I’ll talk a little about the apocalyptic genre.
The caveats: while I studied this in school, I’m not a real expert. I’m aiming for about a 100/200 level of coverage, but if people have more questions, I can try to answer them – with the caveat that I don’t currently have access to my books. The focus here is on secular scholarship, not on theology. I won’t be providing a significant summary due to space constraints.
The book of Daniel is divided by most scholars into two separate parts, with the general consensus theory being that the two halves were composed separately, at different times, and later edited together. I’m going to discuss them separately, because even if they were originally composed together, they’re very different in character – although they share one key feature; both are messages, in their way, of hope and faith.
The first six chapters concern young Jewish noblemen taken to Babylon and educated for court service there. The stories have a folksy, humourous side to them reminiscent of Esther, another tale set at the court of a foreign ruler. Primarily, they concern Daniel, who is wiser at interpreting dreams and so forth than the Babylonians but also a keenly observant Jew. He is a faithful part of the Babylonian system, but at the same time a Jew who has not abandoned his identity or practices, and who will not do things forbidden by the Jewish religion.
Based on historical inaccuracies in the text, the way it presents the Babylonian court, and its depiction of foreign rulers (as bumbling, foolish, or impulsive rather than evil, although possibly dangerous due to their bumbling, foolishness, or impulsivity), scholars think that it dates later – from the 4th to the 2nd century, during the Persian or Hellenistic periods. Its context is Jews in the diaspora who are simultaneously members of their immediate societies and loyal to their own people and religion. Daniel is an exemplary figure: he is loyal to his immediate master but also ultimately to God, who remains in authority over the world – including foreign rulers and their realms. The book’s message is a hopeful one: Jews can live and even thrive in the diaspora without having to compromise their religion. As noted, the stories have a folkloric character, and may originally have circulated orally.
Meanwhile, chapters 7 through 12 are apocalyptic visions narrated in the first person. Daniel is the only Jewish apocalyptic material to have survived in the Hebrew Bible; other Jewish apocalyptic material can be found in other canons, and of course, in the New Testament. We should take a moment to discuss the apocalyptic genre in general.
An apocalypse, from a Greek word meaning “revealing”, could have various meanings, and scholars argue over what exactly an apocalypse is. If you take a broad definition, you have two subcategories: one sort of apocalypse is full of the narrator being transported to otherwise unreachable realms, given visions of cosmological significance, and often shown some indication of life after death, including judgment. This sort of apocalyptic material provides information about the nature of reality.
Daniel’s apocalyptic material is the other sort: an angelic interpreter (not a uniform feature, but not unique to Daniel) explains a series of weird, symbolism-filled visions. The visions generally take a historic cast: they describe past or current events (scholars think that apocalyptic predictions are, like many prophetic predictions, a mix of actual predictions and “predictions” of past events to give legitimacy). The historical narrative in Daniel describes an understanding of history in which God is ultimately in control, but in which for the time being things are very unpleasant. Eventually, however, God will intrude into history and change the world for the better, not just by righting wrongs, but by really altering the nature of things.
Daniel also features the resurrection and judgment of the dead – while the exact nature (physical or spiritual) of this resurrection isn’t 100% clear, the text does present individual resurrection and individual judgment. It’s the clearest example of this in the Hebrew Bible, in that it is very unlikely to be metaphorical; we know beliefs like this were contemporary in Judaism and continued to exist as a school of thought.
If one focuses primarily on the more historically-themed apocalyptic materials, apocalypticism seems to be a different answer to the question answered in some of the prophetic books (similar, perhaps, to how Ecclesiastes and Job are different takes on the subject matter of Proverbs). Many prophetic works take the view that negative historical events are God’s judgment, and that if people get their act together, they will be judged in a positive way. The group needs to behave itself so it can be rewarded instead of punished.
Apocalypticism is a later development, and perhaps spawns from the history of continued disappointments and misfortunes. After the sack of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile, God’s people were restored, but as a Persian province. Later, they fell under the rule of other empires. The horrible, traumatic event came and went… and things didn’t get very much better, unlike what many thought would happen, and then there were more traumatic events, of one sort or another. Apocalypticism responds to this and posits a world where for whatever reason, in the here and now, the bad guys are winning. God’s favoured people suffer not because they are unruly, but because the world is evil, and possibly even because they are good in an evil world. With time, however, God will put everything right, and the world will be changed – not just to a place where bad things don’t happen, but to a place where they can’t happen.
Scholars think – more on this later – that Daniel dates from the rebellion against Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who seems (stating things conservatively) to have vigorously promoted Hellenization, and whose rule was (again, speaking conservatively) understood by rigorously observant Jews as serious aggression against them. The correspondence between real-world events and the symbolic “predictions” in Daniel seem fairly obvious (the actual predictions of the future are wrong). Daniel conveys the fairly typical apocalyptic message, showing how history fits into a narrative where current suffering will be reversed when God intervenes decisively in history.
The general consensus on dating Daniel is that by looking at where the “predictions” corresponding to historical events are most detailed, and where they cease to be accurate, the “current day” corresponds to around 11:40-45, around 164 BCE. It was probably written down from the start; if the book of Daniel as we have it dates to this period or after, then it’s the latest composition in the Hebrew Bible.
So, the scholarly consensus is that two separate books have been combined. There’s one major problem with the two-book theory, namely, there’s some material in the first six chapters that’s at least got a whiff of apocalypticism. The clearest example is the dream of the statue, symbolically mapping to four successive empires, with the final prediction that one day a kingdom of God will be in place instead. Apocalyptic elements (and the statue isn’t necessarily apocalyptic; understanding successive empires or ages of humanity as metals of declining value appears elsewhere in the ancient world) could be explained away as later changes, made to bring the first six chapters in line with the second half – but this isn’t exactly falsifiable.
Another factor that complicates theories about the book’s provenance is that it’s in two different languages, Hebrew and Aramaic (another Semitic language which had become a regional common language due to the history of empire). The linguistic division, furthermore, doesn’t follow the 1-6/7-12 division: up to the first half of 2:4, it’s in Hebrew, then in Aramaic until the beginning of chapter eight, where Hebrew picks up again for the rest of the book. Whether or not the book of Daniel is one document originally or two, either there originally was mixing of languages, or some translation has happened. There are theories about how the different parts of it were put together, and you can break it into more than two documents if you like.
So, in conclusion: the book of Daniel is made up, first, of stories about an exemplary figure who serves gentile rulers without compromising his loyalty to God, and second, apocalyptic visions. Scholars tend to think it was multiple documents originally, but the division in tone and genre is obvious even if it was written as one document. Both, however, share messages of hope: in the one case, that Jews can live a good life in the diaspora and that God remains in control, in the other case, that God would eventually change the world for the better.
Especially important is apocalypticism – because with Jewish apocalypticism begins the other major chunk of the Biblical canon, the New Testament. Once I’m back with my books, we’ll start looking at the New Testament – but before that, I’ll try to find some time to write something summing up a bit about the Hebrew Bible.
(As always, if I’ve made mistakes, let me know – hopefully within around 55 minutes so I can edit)
One note: this is the book of Daniel as it is in most current texts. In the Septuagint, and in the Catholic version, there are two more chapters (13 and 14 in Catholic numbering, but I think at the beginning in the Septuagint) that are stories about Daniel, rather than apocalyptic.
I should have mentioned these – I made some early cuts for space, and then ended up not needing the space, but by that point I was away from my books. I think you’re right with regard to the placement. There’s also some stuff inserted into one of the preexisting stories in Daniel.
The Song of the Three Young Men, IIRC, which Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego sing in the fiery furnace, closely echoing a Psalm?
Isaiah doesn’t qualify?
Isaiah is… complicated. I’m away from my books right now, but looking at the post, it’s complicated whether the relevant bits are considered apocalyptic or not. I think it’s the sort of thing scholars argue over. The stuff in Daniel is unquestionably apocalyptic.
I thought that Ezekiel qualified as ‘apocalyptic’, but I don’t remember thinking that Isaiah did.
To flesh out my thoughts:
A. Daniel is not the only prophet to report seeing a ‘vision’ of something that is revelatory.
Ranging from Isaiah’s vision of God surrounded by worshipping angels in the temple, to Ezekiel’s theophany, to Zechariah’s visions of craftsmen/horns/man-with-measuring-line, to Joel’s vision of an army of locusts, there are more than a few prophets who report revelation by ‘vision’.
B. Daniel isn’t the only prophet to report a special angelic messenger as part of the vision. He shares that with Ezekiel. Ezekiel’s vision is as unusual as Daniel’s, but the messenger has a different focus. And Ezekiel’s vision(s) with a special angelic messenger focus more on the present and future of the Temple in Jerusalem, than on an symbolic presentation of the broader sweep of history.
C. Thus, the prophecies of Daniel are in a special category as ‘apocalyptic’, especially if we use this description: …[Y]ou have two subcategories: one sort of apocalypse is full of the narrator being transported to otherwise unreachable realms, given visions of cosmological significance, and often shown some indication of life after death, including judgment….Daniel’s apocalyptic material is the other sort: an angelic interpreter (not a uniform feature, but not unique to Daniel) explains a series of weird, symbolism-filled visions.
It’s possible to squeeze parts of Ezekiel’s theophany into that first category, but Ezekiel doesn’t say much about life after death. Ezekiel also has a vision of the Temple detailed enough for him to provide measurements of every part of the structure…but that’s not in the category of transported to otherwise unreachable realms.
So I think I agree, Daniel is the only ‘apocalyptic’ prophet in the Judaic canon.
It should be clarified that in my post, I’m trying to provide a sort of bland consensus view of what apocalypticism is – but there’s disagreements and so forth. I’d bet there’s scholars out there saying Ezekiel isn’t just reminiscent of apocalypticism, but is apocalyptic itself.
My personal bias is towards apocalypticism centred around “God’s gonna come and fix this broken world, and then things will stop sucking so bad” but that’s because that’s the motif that is most strongly expressed in the canonical early Christian stuff.
Unfortunately for this post series, the really out-there “transported on a fabulous vision” stuff is outside our scope. Enoch is the one that jumps most readily to my head – but I might be misremembering; I haven’t even glanced at it in the best part of a decade. It might be worth a look but I don’t know if I have any books covering it.
The style of Isaiah is extremely different from that of Daniel. The former consists mostly of direct words of God, and the only clear theophany/vision in chapter 6 has a relatively straight-forward message of commissioning the prophet.
Daniel is full of cryptic allegorical visions about historical empires and events, which require angelic interpreters and wisdom to make any sense out of. Parts of Zechariah and Ezekiel are quite similar (which could point towards an earlier dating of Daniel) but Daniel is the apocalyptic book par excellence which kicked off a whole slew of copy-cat Jewish apocalyptic literature. The Book of Revelation is the only other canonical example (being inspired by God in my theology) but there are a bunch of other examples like 4th Esdras and Enoch that only scholars know about today. (Although, 4th Esdras was widely taken as canonical in the medieval Catholic church, before Luther and Trent).
Ecclesiastes is the bad cop to the rest of scripture’s good cop.
You think God is asking too much of you, do you? What else do you have going for you? Money? Power? Love? Food & drink? Meaningless! Vanity! You’ve got nothing.
Traditionally (I don’t recall dndrsn’s scholarly take on the subject) the same author wrote Ecclesiastes and (much of) proverbs, David’s son Solomon–as well as writing Song of Songs, which celebrates romantic love.
On the other hand, I didn’t mean to imply that it was written with that purpose. I suspect the author legitimately was going through some depression or a dark time philosophically. But it was regarded as wisdom for being honest about the human experience, which must be reconciled with any true religion.
That is, Christianity/Judaism is truer for having books like Ecclesiastes and Job that say “yeah, good people can get screwed over in life” even if it doesn’t give a satisfactory explanation than if it pretended everything is sunshine and roses for it’s adherents (like it can come off as sometimes).
Ecclesiastes is here and Proverbs here, Song of Songs here. Modern scholarship has largely discarded the traditional accreditation of those books.
I think Randy M is right about why it’s in the canon. The Hebrew Bible and the Christian canon both have room for multiple interpretations of why the world is the way it is, whether on a large scale (prophetic vs apocalyptic) or on a small scale (Proverbs vs Ecclesiastes).
Is Ecclesiastes a stand-alone work? In the broader sense, is anything a stand-alone work? Nothing stands entirely separately from the society in which it is produced.
Thanks!
Ecclesiastes is, yeah, “bad cop” is maybe a good way of putting it. It’s a response to the problem implicit in the message of Proverbs – the wise and good don’t always prosper, the wicked and foolish don’t always suffer, what’s up with that? And its response boils down in large part to “well, we don’t know, and we can’t know.”
What’s your take on the alleged parallel between Ancient of Days bestowing power upon the Messiah in Daniel 7 and El bestowing power upon Ba’al in Ugaritic texts?
I’m afraid this is out of my wheelhouse and I’m away from my books – bug me about this again when I start posting the New Testament stuff, and I’ll see what I can dig up. Off the top of my head, the influence of the general culture/religion of the region isn’t hard to find examples of. This is interesting, though, because Daniel is rather later than a lot of the stuff influence can be seen in.
A few thoughts:
The first section of the Book of Daniel appears to be composed from folk tales about Daniel-and-friends in the court of the Kings of Babylon. The opening chapter, and the framing narrative for chapter 2, are in Hebrew. The rest are in Aramaic: and the switch is after the first quote from the King of Babylon in Chapter 2.
If most of these folk tales were mostly remembered and transmitted in Aramaic, that might be a reason why the language switches to Aramaic in that section. That might be an indication that the stories were pulled from a larger pool of Aramaic stories about foreign exiles in the royal court of Babylon. But it’s a bit strange that the opening of chapter 2 is in Hebrew, and the story switches to Aramaic after that opening.
The first chapter of the apocalyptic section are also in Aramaic. The remainder of the visions are in Hebrew. This may mean that the tradition of apocalyptic visions was also linked with the legendary-or-historic character of Daniel seen in the earlier folk tales. It might also mean that most of these stories were remembered/transmitted in Hebrew, but at least one was remembered/transmitted in Aramaic.
There’s a reference, somewhere in the prophecies of Ezekiel, to a man named Daniel. Daniel is compared to Noah and Job as an example of righteous men who were distinctive in a world full of unrighteous people. Another piece of evidence that there was a legendary-or-historical figure who had a reputation of being a righteous man in an environment that was not conducive to such behavior.
Kind of like the earlier discussion about the historicity of Moses, the historicity of Daniel is an interesting challenge. I’d argue that some of the children-of-Exile, raised in the court of the Kings of Babylon, did distinguish themselves as faithful to their Jewish heritage. The biggest set of such stories centered around Daniel.
I was finishing a grant proposal so I’m sorry I couldn’t reply to this earlier.
But I’d like to mention (as usual) that Daniel can be dated considerably earlier if you believe that divinely inspired predictive prophecy is possible. (Josephus claims that the Book of Daniel existed in 332 BC when Alexander the Great came to Jerusalem, and was shown to him as a way of appeasing him.)
In particular, in chapters 8 and 11 the book clearly predicts the Selucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the villain of the Hanukkah story, as well as the archetype for the later Christian concept of an “antichrist”. This dude basically made Judaism (including circumcision and keeping kosher) illegal, sacrificed a pig in the Temple, and demanded worship as the manifestation (“epiphanes”) of Zeus, so that was a pretty big deal from the Jewish perspective. He was opposed by the guerilla forces of Judas Maccabees, whose (priestly) family later became the Hasmodean dynasty during a brief restoration of Israel’s sovereignty prior to their annexation by Rome.
The traditional Christian interpretation of the 4 kingdoms in chapters 2 and 7 (which are clearly intended to match with each other) are:
Gold Head / Lion with Eagle’s wings -> BABYLON (famous for its gold artifacts)
Silver Chest and Arms / Lopsided Bear -> MEDES and PERSIANS (dual kingdom with Persians dominant, famous for their silver artifacts).
Bronze Thighs / Leopord with 4 Wings -> GREEKS (famous for their bronze weapons, Alexander the Great’s kingdom was split between 4 of his generals after his death; the conflict between two of these [Ptolomies and Selucids] played a major historical role in the intertestamental period)
Iron(Clay) Legs(Feet) / Strange and Terrifying Beast -> ROMANS (famous for their iron weapons and clay statues, vastly more powerful and extensive than previous empires)
Stone that becomes eternal Mountain / “Son of Man” (i.e Human Being) who rules an eternal kingdom (GUESS WHO!)
This progression seems to fit the details of the visions considerably better than rival interpretations, but makes the predictions of the book extend past even the later scholarly date of composition. (The 69 sevens calculation also seems to work out to around the early first century, although the exact year depends on the details of how you do the calculation.)
What’s stopping someone from creating an online payment “adapter” site? IE I want to send my friend $50, but I only have PayPal and she only has Venmo, so I PayPal the adapter site $50 (plus some transaction fee), and it Venmos $50 to my friend.
Who would use it?
Someone who doesn’t want to set up multiple accounts and just have one rather than signing up for PayPal and Venmo.
The problem is that in order to use the “adapter” you have to…set up another account (for the adapter service). At that point, why not just go ahead and create the Venmo account and (literally) cut out the middle man?
Such a person might well exist (but as you say, xkcd 927). However, I doubt they’d be willing to pay any fees for the privilege.
Side note: PayPal owns Venmo.
Because you only have to create one more account, not 3 or 4 or 5 more.
I don’t think Paypal/Venmo would want to take your payments, and I don’t think you could force them to. If you could, running any kind of financial services company implies some pretty significant costs, regulatory and otherwise, and it may be that so far everyone who has been willing to pay those costs did so with dreams of outcompeting Paypal/Venmo/etc rather than working with them.
I will add that several cryptocurrencies are explicitly designed to solve this problem, which I think includes Stellar and Ripple. The former is a fork of the latter and it’s not clear to me which is better or more likely to gain traction.
Yeah, this. Lots of people have had this idea for competing services (why not one front end that polls both Uber and Lyft and sees which has the best price? Why not a common front end for all the various food deliver services?), and the individual vendors fight it tooth and nail because they understand that they have become disposable commodities if these aggregators succeed.
And they can fight it pretty effectively, it turns out, both legally and technically.
My understanding is that transaction fees would irk consumers too much for this to ultimately be very successful. Look at the fee a government charges you if you pay with a credit card instead of check. That is similar to what this service would charge. Seems to me people would not be happy paying $3.00 to transfer $150 . And I’m not even sure that covers profit for your app, that’s just what mastercard and visa charge.
from the perspective of one payment processor alone this would look a lot like money laundering, and might trip their fraud-detection systems, and would probably just generally be annoying to deal with; they would likely just ban the adapter from having an account. a lot of the value in payment systems is theoretically in network effects too so they have an additional business incentive to not allow this.
in your specific example, though, PayPal owns Venmo, so it’s kind of weird this doesn’t already work.
The main reason you don’t see a proliferation of services like this is because margins are too low. Sure, Stripe and Venmo exist. But, to give you an example, I know the largest second party billing company on Shopify. They process literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions and they’re still reliant on VC money/have a dozen people.
Think about the math. Let’s say the adapter site charges 1% (and they probably can’t get more because their fees are on top of PayPal/Venmo). They made $.50 on your transaction. How much money would they need to move to pay one developer’s salary? $15,000,000. Which is fine if you can get those numbers: most of your costs are fixed. But it’s a huge, gaping chasm between startup and that.
Anyway, nothing is stopping it if the companies allow it. Well, a huge red tape mess of regulation is stopping it. But if there was real money in it, it could be done. There isn’t, though. While over a trillion dollars move through the mobile payments space, the people facilitating it only get a total of about 30 billion dollars. Plus it’s a strong network effect market, leading to natural monopolies.
Are there any practical/acoustical reasons (so, not tradition or visual aesthetics) why acoustic violins, violas, and cellos are still made with peg tuners and a peg box rather than machine-head tuners and a solid electric guitar-style headstock?
Classical musicians are extremely conservative when it comes to instrument modifications. There’s a decent amount of woo involved along with tradition and just “doing what works.” But also, changing the mass and/or stiffness of the tuning mechanisms (or any part of the instrument, really) will change the vibration modes and damping of the system and effect the sound to some extent.
I grew up hearing that (one parent is a classical musician) but in recent years I’ve also seen it somewhat debunked as overblown at least.
You might think it’s overblown – but remember, these people can be quite high strung.
I see what you did there
Yeah, it would be interesting to see if people could really tell the difference in a blind test. But there is a lot that goes into mastering a an instrument – part of that is feel, weight and balance, etc. Something feeling weird or different could effect the person’s ability to play or even more likely, their perception of how they play/sound.
If everyone switched to better tuning mechanisms, the world might be a better place, but getting someone who’s spent 10,000+ hours on a $100,000+ instrument, who’s already successful, to change can be hard. I know for my instrument, which I played professionally in orchestras for some time, technological advances came along now and then but were not widely adopted. We had trained ourselves to compensate for the instrument’s limitations so well that not doing that thing seemed harder than just continuing to do it.
And a student might avoid the innovation because “nobody with a big orchestra job uses that,” so not using that is one piece of the huge, often subjective and unknowable mish-mash that differentiates success from failure.
Also, “if it ain’t broke…”
Doesn’t seem totally rational, but those the reasons as far as I can tell.
The quote is from Jack White, so not exactly a classical musician, but I think that idea or a version of it is present in the minds of a lot of musicians of any specialty/style whether consciously or unconsciously, and is a big part of music culture generally. The idea that it isn’t supposed to be easy and that working harder is somehow important, or that the more difficult something is or the more care that it takes to do it the more valuable it is.
*Note he isn’t talking about “technology” as anything electronic (obviously, the guy uses electric guitars and tons of effects), but “technology” that just makes things easier without any other benefit to the music making process (making new/unique sounds, making something impossible possible, etc.). Easier tuning gears would be a mild example of this.
Has anyone done a blind test of $10k violins vs $100k violins?
@Douglas Knight
There would two components to that…can the player tell a difference while playing it and can the listener tell a difference while listening.
My intuition:
Player: Top end players most likely yes. Very good players maybe.
Listener: Highly trained musicians maybe, average listeners almost certainly not.
Originally I was going to call for a moratorium on calls for blind tests until people better propagate the results of existing blind tests.
I don’t know if people can tell the difference between $10,000 violins and $100,000 violins, but it appears they cannot tell the difference between $100,000 violins and $1,000,000+ violins.
@Douglas Knight
Anecdotal experience suggests that the pricing of very expensive instruments is based on collectibility factors, not musical factors. In particular, documented proof of provenance and chain of ownership is much more valuable than how the instrument plays or sounds.
One of my friends is an accomplished violinist who made a lucky find of an amazing instrument. When he solicited value estimates from several dealers, he was shocked to learn that none were even interested in the quality of the instrument or hearing it played.
Something like this was illustrated in a cousin domain with the sale of Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi: huge price based on a great origin story, even though it is (was?) not well regarded artistically.
“If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it.” – Some famous pianist. And it matches my observations, too.
Someone without a lot of experience playing or listening to classical instruments probably would not be able to tell a $10k violin from a $100k violin, but someone with a lot of experience might be able to. Also, a performer might find the more expensive instrument easier to play (easier to get the sound quality they want, easier to play in tune, easier to project into a hall, etc.), but can sound just as good on the cheaper one with more (different) work than they want or are used to.
There are some YouTube videos where people compare very expensive and cheap musical instruments. I’ve seen flute, piano, violin. Of course it’s going to be harder to tell listening to a compressed, spat through speakers version than hearing in a concert hall. Some instruments sound kinda crappy up close but sound great from a distance in a big hall — better than some that sound great up close. Acoustics can get complicated and sound quality can be subjective (although there are broad points of agreement, some maybe biological, much definitely cultural, on “what sounds good.”)
Also, acymetric is right – part of the artistry of music making is the challenge and the amount of work put into it. I’m not sure this is a worthwhile mindset, or if it’s counterproductive, but that’s how it is for many.
That’s one of the things that has actually been tested in a blind test. Strads sound just as lousy far away.
I seem to recall there being different tuning systems, where the notes correspond to slightly different frequencies depending on which key you’re tuning against. Standard piano tuning uses an average of common keys, and string instruments have “standard” tuning systems probably developed along similar lines. But the key-specific tuning systems do exist, and while I don’t know how often they’re used, I’d expect classical stringed instruments to be one of the areas where it would come up the most.
With manual analogue tuning via pegboard, you can tune to any values you want (within the range of the string’s physical ability to support), but a machine-head tuning system would probably be build around a specific tuning system or a specified set of such.
This is definitely true, but I don’t think the type of tuners impacts ability to tune this way. I know it comes up a lot in smaller ensembles (I can’t remember specific examples because it was a long time ago, but things like “whoever has the 3rd on this chord needs to be just a little flat” based on what key/chord was involved.
Yep, the Major third needs to be flat relative to equal temperament found on pianos. Minor third sharp. Other intervals need different adjustments because “equal temperament” is a big compromise that sounds equally out of tune in all keys.
This is called Just Intonation and orchestral instruments use it when possible (winds and strings and tunable percussion) along with choirs (naturally). When playing in an orchestra with a piano or harp or guitar, you have to go along with that instrument since it can’t adjust in real-time.
I don’t see your point here. Machine heads can also be tuned to any value you want, and what’s more is they are easier to turn and they don’t slip.
To add to Well…’s comment, ‘machine head tuners’ just means geared tuning pegs with a worm gear like on pretty much all guitars (and indeed double basses), or planetary gear tuners like on a lot of modern banjos, which are all just as capable of a theoretically infinite degree of tuning freedom, and are not locked into any specific tuning system like, say, a piano or an organ is. Indeed, you can get more accuracy, since the gear leverage turns the movement of your clumsy hand into a smaller change in the tuning.
And in fact many violinists do in fact use a type of geared fine-tuner that attaches to the tailpiece, at least on the highest string. You tune to approximately the right note using the main tuning peg, then adjust the pitch to perfection by turning the screw on the fine tuner.
That said, you can now get geared planetary tuners for the violin family – they look just like traditional friction pegs, so presumably have no effect on the resonance of the instrument that any normal human could detect.
Got it. I wasn’t familiar with those style of tuners and was assuming it was some kind of automatic self-tuner.
If the main advantage of “machine head tuners” is mechanical advantage (so each turn is a smaller adjustment in tune), I can see why they haven’t been widely adopted for the violin family: when I played viola in grade school, my instrument and all my peers’ violins, violas, cellos, and basses all had fine tuners on the base of each string below the bridge.
Well, unless I really don’t understand how geared planetary tuners work, they have unlimited tuning range (well, it’s limited by the strings), while fine tuners have a limited tuning range based on the length of the screw. There’s also the fact that most instruments past the beginner level only have a fine tuner for the highest string (the viola I use as violist music minor only has a fine tuner on the A string, for instance), so if those things don’t have the reported tone issues with fine tuners, they would be better in general.
Plus, ergonomically, fine-tuners are sort of impractical. At least on the cello, where you have to do this bizarre reach-around-the-bow thing.
My electric cello solves this problem: it has no fine tuners, but instead has bass-guitar-style machine head tuners on a solid bass-guitar-style headstock! Ashamedly, that thing has mostly sat in my closet for like 4 years, but each time I take it out, it’s (basically) in tune! My old acoustic cello used to go out of tune from one part of the day to the next.
I need animal protein to hit my dietary goals. From an EA perspective, what is the most effective dollar-for-dollar way to reduce animal suffering and environmental impact? Yes, those two goals are often at odds. Density also matters, too: if I had infinite calories to eat a day, I could get all my protein from peanut butter. I am on a bulk so I have more leeway in calorie budget; if I’m ever going to do it, now is the time.
I read https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat-eaters/ and the comments point out greenhouse gas is much worse with beef. How much worse? Many people point out percentages, but those don’t mean anything to me, because I don’t know how much my food contributes to global warming. I have no idea of the scale. How does it compare to my total carbon output as a middle-class American? Is it like driving 10 miles? 100? Is there a better place to spend money to reduce my carbon output?
I see my options as these, and they may be incorrect:
0. Soy is out because is reduced testosterone, which would not have bothered me when younger but at my age I don’t want to lose what I have.
1. Replace chicken with beef. (See above for questions about trade-offs.)
2. Buy chicken livers when on clearance, which they seem to be often. (100 grams of protein for a dollar for what is essentially waste material is pretty good. I am learning how to cook them so I can stomach them, too.)
3. Milk (and therefore cheese and whey protein) is better than meat. It is cheap on a dollar-per-gram basis, and decent on the protein-density front. Whey protein powders are decent prices. Is getting grass-fed whey powder worth the drop from 34 grams/$ to 25 grams/$?
4. Grass-fed better than CAFO for cows, free-range better than factory-farmed for chicken. Possibly zero ethical cost in my view, if the a cow gets to live like a cow before becoming my food. Costs go up a lot, though.
5. Back off on eggs. (Scott suggests eggs are bad on a calorie-for-calorie basis, but his citation is now paywalled https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/want-to-kill-fewer-animals-give-up-eggs-not-meat/ ) However, the price differential on free-range eggs is pretty small. Again, if a chicken gets to live like a chicken — which I’m not sure is true, but if it is — this becomes ethically neutral for me.
6. I have no idea how other meats like pork fit in here.
7. For fish, wild caught are better than farm raised. Fish is still expensive and my wife doesn’t eat it at all so I have to respect her by not pouring too much of the family budget into my diet. I don’t think of fish as very smart but there is probably a lot of differences between species. Is one kind of fish especially dumb and not mind being in a farm?
8. Plant protein powders (pea protein, etc) are better, but can get expensive really fast. I don’t see them getting me more than 20 grams per dollar.
9. But I found wheat gluten at 93 grams of protein per dollar, which is almost too good to be true. What is the catch? Assuming I don’t have a gluten sensitivity.
I know this is all over the place, but I am looking at making marginal changes. Where should they be?
Any reason you have to take the plant proteins out of the plant first?
i.e. make dahl, falafel, beans etc. depending on what ethnic shops are nearby.
This number isn’t set in stone, but, roughly, I need to get about 1 gram of protein per 13 calories in a day. And with some no-protein fruits eating up part of my budget, that can push the ratio down to 12 or 11.
Chickpeas are great, one of the things that I wish I’d discovered 30 years ago, but the calorie:protein ratio is around 20. (Lower is better.) Kidney beans, which I don’t like as much (but can eat a bowl of, if I split them with something else) only get to around 16.
I don’t know how the protein measures up against fish, birds, or mammals, but you could look into mussels, clams, etc. which are primitive nuerologically and a good source of nutrients.
Also, depending on where you live, wild game may be an option.
Beware of a shellfish-heavy diet if you have any family history of gout. Gout is not fun.
Good to know–thanks for the correction.
My brother gets gout every time he visits certain parts of the world, so thanks for the warning.
I haven’t liked mussels and oysters the few times I’ve tried them, but that is something I could probably change with deliberate trying. I see shrimp count, and shrimp are pretty dumb, and I really like shrimp. There are issues with wild caught shrimp so I’d try to find farmed shrimp.
The paywalled Galef piece is presumably a reprint of this from 2 months earlier. It says that eggs are more efficient (per life) than chicken meat. When he says “one of the worst” he means by comparison to red meat, not to chicken. But you should also ask yourself why you care about chicken deaths, and not, say, days of chicken lives.
By comparison with chickens, pigs are identical to cows. They’re smaller, so per life they’re less efficient than cows. But they’re also smarter. A lot of people think that farming is torture and torture matters more for smarter animals, so they prefer beef over pork for that reason.
Thank you for that chart! It helps put some numbers to things.
But you should also ask yourself why you care about chicken deaths, and not, say, days of chicken lives
This is more my concern. 10 chickens raised and killed for one day each is about equal to 1 chicken raised and killed after 10 days, assuming suffering. The chart works off of “lives” but gives some numbers to get down to “animal-days” but of course some animals are less equal.
A dairy cow makes milk for 3 years. I’m not sure whether they live for 3 or 6, but that still makes it produce 8K-16K calories per cow day.
Slaughter cows live for ~2 years, which is 554 calories per cow-day.
Chicks, post-hatch, live for 42 days, which is 71 calories per chicken-day. Even if cows are twice as smart, beef is still better on the total-suffering front.
See also Tomasik’s editable table, aimed at meat/day of life. The first two columns are objective and presumably correct, but the rest depends on moral choices. Columns 4 and 6 don’t do much, because he doesn’t use a big range. But column 5 does matter. For a first pass, set column 5 to all 1, to get meat/day of life. Then bring back column 5.
It seems crazy to me that Tomasik puts only a 2x range on the sentience column, while he puts a 4x range on the suffering column. Whereas surveys put a 10x ratio for pig:chicken, where he put a 1.2x ratio. [Moral value is not the same as sentience, but the point of the link is that it is.]
About 8 years ago we bought a chest freezer and started buying our meat from a small farm ~45 min drive away. This resolved the bulk of our ethical concerns about eating meat, we can see many of the animals on visits and have toured the farm. The animals are clearly not suffering outside of the slaughter process where we are taking a little bit of a leap of faith. We also (for 3 years) have been raising most of our own eggs. I haven’t seen any argument that is close to dissuading me that well eating well raised animals is ethical, outside of the important note that male chicks have a pretty crap life when culled from future egg laying populations.
Wheat gluten is an incomplete protein and has a very low bioavailability.
I’m not planning to go vegan and will still get proteins from a variety of sources, so the incompleteness is not that high a concern. (I can’t imagine eating more than one serving of wheat gluten a day anyway.)
I don’t know much about bioavailability, and googling online I see people fighting about it back and forth, each insisting they are right, although not referencing actual studies. At worst, it seems to mean that I will only get 50% of the protein listed on the container, but at 90 grams per dollar I can afford to mark that down by a factor of 2.
I tried to read “seeing it like a communist” and I appreciated the author’s approach but I didn’t follow the logic past 1.6. The following example is given there:
“Suppose, for example, that you held that a family who has lived in a house for generations has a better claim to own it than the landlord.”
I have a _lot_ of issues with that.
First one — this example doesn’t seem any logically different from (more contrived) ‘suppose you held that you, an avid ferrari fan, have a better claim to your neighbour’s ferrari than your neighbour (who isnt a car buff)’. I don’t think that the approach to communism through the ferrari statement would be palatable to most, so is the tenant example just a nice dressing on a wrong idea?
Second one — suppose for some reason that we accept the tenant-landlord thing. We declare that starting next month all families that ‘lived in the house for geerations’ will own that house. What will happen? I’d imagine a lot of long-term tenant contracts being urgently interrupted and all landlords adding a rule that no single tenant can rent the same space for ‘generations’, even if the arrangement is otherwise perfectly fine for everyone involved. So accepting the premise in tenant example leads us exactly where we were only with a stupid rule added on top. Is communism just a bunch of stupid rules on top of everyday life then? (tracks my experience in 1980s Russia).
So what I would really like is for someone to help me find a better version of ‘tenant’ example, which does not devolve to the ‘ferrari’ example. My thinking is that a better version already exist and I just don’t know about it…
My understanding (and I am not a communist) is that communists discount the value of ownership over long-term usage.
There are essentially two ways to live in a house. One is to purchase the entire house, and hence have “free” future use forever. The other is to pay the owner a usage fee and live in it for a set time based on that usage fee. Monthly is traditional, but other timelines exist.
It is entirely possible to live in a house on a month-to-month basis for so long that you have paid more in rent than the value of the house, especially if your tenancy is very long term or the house relatively inexpensive.
In that case, it can seem unfair (I have paid $400,000 in lifetime rent to live in a $300,000 house!), and in fact there are rent-to-own contracts and other forms of lien ownership (the mortgage is the most common).
But there are substantial risks to ownership that don’t exist with long-term rental, and you are in fact paying for them. For example, the housing market may crater, in which case the renter can just find another cheaper rental or negotiate a lower rate. The owner has to eat the loss. In addition, the owner needs to upkeep the house, etc.
Now, it’s possible those aren’t perfectly priced because of market distortions, but the main communist thesis is “the guy who uses a thing should own the thing, not the guy who created/purchased the thing” versus the main capitalist thesis of “the guy who owns a thing should continue to own a thing regardless of usage.”
There are a lot of reasons this collapses when instituted in the real world.
This is only tangentially related (in that I don’t think it is related to communism, but that is only true if you see the house as an investment intended to pay out value, correct? So, if you treat a house primarily as a consumable good (like you would a rented residence, or, say, a car) and less like an investment the drop in value is less of a problem? Even a house which loses significant value has some value for the owner, whereas a rental never does (for the tenant).
Is it interesting that this does not apply as well to things like trademarks (and maybe other IP)?
No. Even if you are a homeowner and see it as entirely a consumable, you are getting a passive income in equity gain that you can consume to fund other consumption. This is a very common pattern in America, although I don’t know about Europe as much. Losing that passive income is a blow when the market crashes even if housing is entirely “consumption” on your part.
Depending on the “capitalist/communist” view, it certainly may. There are differing views on that, of course.
No, I understand how equity works and how it is used.
I am questioning whether treating a home purely as an asset/investment/income stream when comparing home-ownership to renting makes any sense at all. The housing market cratering is only a risk for home owners if they are leveraging the value of that house for other things (I understand this is common, I’m suggesting maybe it shouldn’t be as common). If the value of your house craters, and you aren’t leveraging it or relying on value of equity, you can just keep making your mortgage payments and will still eventually fully own a building that you can live in. Right?
To illustrate: I would suggest that someone who owns a home/pays a mortgage for 10 years and then defaults on the mortgage might well still be better off than someone who rents for 10 years and then gets evicted, or at least no worse off financially unless their finances were all predicated on the assumption that they would have a house and the house would retain or increase in value.
@acymetric
Yes, although you would be paying way too much for it. You would end up paying substantially more for housing over that period than the renter would, likely enough more to offset the benefit gained by ownership at the end, depending on the collapse.
It would depend on the underlying cost of the house.
If they had perfectly zero equity so that the default caused the repossession but no other effects (bankruptcy), then they would likely be exactly the same as a renter, perhaps slightly worse due to the credit hit.
But the reason they would be better off afterwards is almost certainly due to equity, rather than any underlying magic that ownership gives.
This seems like it would only be true under two conditions:
1) You live somewhere where housing prices are extremely high (big cities/nearby suburbs, mostly)
2) Rent never increases
Increase in rent over 10 years is likely going to exceed the increase in property taxes during that span, and of course (assuming you didn’t get a variable rate mortgage) the mortgage payment would stay the same. Ownership actually protects you from risk in that sense (the risk of ever rising housing costs).
No, what I mean is that say there are two men. Man 1 rents, man 2 buys a house in the same region.
For the first year, their payments are roughly comparable. Over time, man 1 pays gradually more than man 2 as rents rise if housing prices are going up. Man 2 has a great deal.
But if housing prices crash, the opposite happens. Man 2 is locked into his mortgage payment while Man 1 can renegotiate based on the lower rates or move out of the blighted area. This can be substantial if the event is severe, like 2008.
In an imaginary world where both pay $1000 a month for ten years before a 50% housing price loss, Man 2 is now tens of thousands of dollars behind Man 1 even when we are looking at buying houses, because of his negative equity if he tried to sell.
The author is not endorsing that claim (hence the “suppose”), they’re giving it as an example of a non-capitalist perspective. The intention isn’t to make you think about what would happen if we bolted the perspective onto a capitalist system, but rather convince you that capitalist definitions of property etc. are not necessarily correct — they just seem natural because they are the default in our current society.
It doesn’t work under 90% of communist frameworks either, you have rewrite it along the lines of “suppose your family had lived in a house for generations and done the vast majority of maintenance and upgrades on the house”. Under Marx a family of renters who lived in a house where someone else was preforming labor to keep the house those renters would be damn dirty capitalists stealing from the electrician/plumber/landscape architect and those people would have a higher claim to the house than the renters who were just consuming its shelter.
1.6 really stood out to me too: as the path to which communists internally justify ‘revolution’. Specifically, the author hints that that arrangement may not be ‘just’ because the property chain that led to the landlord owning the property might be tainted by some past act of injustice and the notion of property rights being arbitrary anyways. Combine that with the idea that capitalism doesn’t necessarily allocate resources to the needy, and you start to get a sense of “well, if they don’t rightfully own that, the rules of why they own that are arbitrary, and the proletariat need it, the proletariat should just take it”. I think, perhaps unwittingly, the author has highlighted why communism fails to create societies we would consider desirable: it’s based on a politics of envy that gives incentives to perpetuate further injustice (taking ‘property’ by force and the violence that will inevitably follow that course of action). I think this dovetails nicely their point about capitalism creating a sort of perverse meta-social incentive towards maximizing production/consumption by suggesting communism’s perverse meta-social optimization is maximizing taking from others based on collective perceived need (insert obligatory reference to ‘the greater good’).
I think the strongest area of argument for 1.6 is actually land ownership, because land is a finite resource that exists naturally, is generally unreasonably difficult to manufacture, and that is largely parceled up by arbitrary ideas of who got there first and or who took it by force/money sometime in the past. The current paradigms of state ownership, or continued ownership by whoever currently owns it can be easily shown to be unfair on some level. It’s also easy to take land arguments to absurd endpoints, such as a few wealthy landlords owning all land on earth and everybody else has to pay rent in the dystopian capitalist future, which could be argued by pointing to housing issues on the West coast as real life evidence of where we could be headed.
The current Israel/Palestine conflict also makes another good modern example since it has largely occurred in recent history such that a large volume of accurate historical evidence is available on the topic (a bunch of people decided to move to the middle east and kick out the people living their based on some notion of original cultural ownership), but is mature enough that the answer isn’t super obvious as to what a just solution is. Do the original (and now dead) Israelite’s have a valid claim to that land? Can their descendants claim that right for themselves? Did the Zionists have sufficient ground to claim they are valid descendants? What about the inhabitants that lived there before the original Israel? Does the Palestinian claim have more validity because it was more recent? If recency counts, what about the descendants of the Israelis currently living there? What about the Palestinians who’d like to kick Israel out but who never lived in Israel because they are descendants of the people who got kicked out by the Zionists. There isn’t really enough historical evidence to create a strong chain of who ‘owns’ that land, and the records of exchange are fraught with violence, so I don’t think anyone can claim to have an objective or neutral answer: your personal opinion is inevitably tainted by your biases. If you side with Israel, you are likely assuming the biblical Israel had a just claim to the land, you are assuming claiming past ownership is valid justification for current ownership generation removed, and that the Zionists that created the Modern Israel had sufficient cultural/genetic ties to the original Israel to justify creation of the new one. Alternatively, if you side with the Palestinians, you are likely basing it on recent ownership is a more valid claim than vague historic/cultural claims while ignoring the fact that most of the Israeli population is removed from the original Zionists that formed Israel and thus now has a stronger recency claim than the generationally removed Palestinians, and possibly some notion of debt incurred from injustice being an inheritable attribute. I don’t think there’s ever going to be an objectively correct answer to the problem which is why it tends to default to some variation on ‘might makes right’. Currently the Israelis have the might so they have right, and the Palestinians would like to have the might to make it their right instead. Likewise, capitalists have the might and thus the right in modern capitalist societies, and communists would like to have the might to make it their right instead.
Ultimately I think the author is right that there exists a large space of possible economic models that works like some sort of optimization problem, what I think they miss is that not all models are going to be stable, or that being non-capitalist is axiomatically a good thing (which they don’t state but seem to heavily imply). While I would agree that it’s not clear capitalism optimizes for human health/happiness, and certainly doesn’t optimize for making people identically equal, I think it lands at a pretty good spot of making everyone involved relatively materially wealthy to alternative systems while being stable (at least as far as the near-term historical record has shown, and certainly when compared to past instances of attempts to shift into a communist/socialist part of the function-space). It’s also not clear that communism would optimize for human health/happiness either though obviously proponents think it does. I think they also overstate their case that people can’t envision other economic modes, they invoke Soviet Russia as an example but gloss over the suffering and loss of human life as well as the ultimate collapse of that economy. “It takes a lot of death to get it, but it can rival capitalism in a few areas of accomplishment for a little while before it implodes” is hardly a resounding endorsement of alternative economic models let alone communism. As well, China is a glaring instance of some weird communist/capitalist/authoritarian economic state bastard child that seems to be stable for the moment and looms large in many Western minds as a rival power. I think it is however obvious to most Westerner’s that given a choice they would prefer our current system to what China has. Ditto on historical economies such as feudalism or hunter-gatherer (however egalitarian it might have been, people like their toilet paper and antibiotics).
This is not a fair reading; feudalism < capitalism < communism is a pretty standard communist view.
Fascism is the word for that economic state.
I don’t think that’s necessary. I certainly don’t feel it describes my views. I simply feel that both groups have a strong enough claim that they should be allowed to live there. In the same way that I for exemple think that both wanting to drive white Americans back to Europe or wanting to restrict Native Americans to the reservations would be wrong. As Israel is the side with the power to prevent the Palestinians from doing so I must either try to persuade them to relent (which seems hopeless to me) or support the Palestinians against them. If the power were to shift and the Palestinians chose to use that power to drive out the Jews in turn then I would have to persuade or oppose them instead.
Under whose ownership laws? If you use the Israelis’, then most Palestinians aren’t getting what they want (the “Right of Return” is the biggest sticking point in negotiations in almost all cases). If you use the Palestinians’, you are taking the real property of millions of Israelis.
This is only one of a HUGE number of issues with the idea that “they both can live there”.
My favored solution would be that the Palestinians are given housing in the general area they were driven from in exchange for giving up the claim to recover specific property. That wouldn’t give the Palestinians everything they want, but it would give them a lot and it would be the parts that I consider most important.
But that solution is suicidal for the Israelis…
Yes, but it’s not what you consider important that determines whether this solution turns into Holocaust v2.0
Your proposed solution results in about ten million Palestinians having the opportunity to live in poverty next to people who are and will remain conspicuously an order of magnitude richer than they are, when said Palestinians have been basically trained from birth to blame Israelis for everything bad about their life. That’s going to be pretty damn important to them in ways that don’t go away just because you point out that their street address is approximately what it “should” be.
You would also give the Palestinians the same subsidies and benefits given to Haredi Jews, obviously.
If you are destroying your economy to give free money to religious fanatics, other people will point out that that’s fine, as long as you do the same for their preferred group.
There are roughly an order of magnitude more Palestinians than there are Haredi, and the Haredi have a much better relationship with the people of Israel than “we have graciously agreed to stop trying to kill you all, so long as you keep giving us lots of money”.
So who is this “you” that is imagined to be giving the Palestinians these benefits, and how much is it going to cost them, and how much are you planning to kick in yourself?
That would be the price for having Palestinians peacefully living among their much richer neighbors.
This wouldn’t work, but then there is probably no peace solution that would work while keeping Israel as a Jewish state (as opposed to a country that just happens to have a very big jewish population), short of genocide.
I don’t find that a plausible outcome at all. Even when undergoing enormous suffering at Israeli hands support for that among the Palestinians is still strictly limited. And it would certainly decrease if they were treated better. The minority of the Arab population that was given equal rights by Israel, the best indicator of what the Palestinians might be like if treated well by Israel, almost unanomously support coexistance.
But I meant what was important in determining whether the Palestinian demand to be able to return to their homeland had been met. There are absolutely other factors that would be important in determing whether a peace agreement would work out. Ensuring social mobility, changing Palestinian culture, limiting the number allowed to return at any one time to give them time to integrate into Israeli society (and the other way around), and so on.
And it would certainly decrease if they were treated better.
Would it? What was the reaction when control of the Gaza Strip was returned to them, at great internal cost to Israel?
Did things move towards peace, or was it a new place to shoot rockets from?
Was Israel willing to let things move further towards peace? My impression was that Israel was mainly motivated by fear that the Palestinians would start pushing for a one state solution on the grounds that the majority of people directly ruled by Israel were Arabs. I never got any impression that the withdrawl from Gaza constituted any change in Israel’s attitudes towards the Palestinians but rather that it was a continuation of the policy that Israel has always had of forcibly confining the Palestinians to ghettos in the name of promoting Jewish ethnic supremacy.
Better version of “tenant” example would be peasant owing rent and services to a feudal lord.
I do not endorse handing over ownership of rented housing to tenants, economic consequences of that would be disastrous and would only increase inequality, as you have rightly observed. But my support for continuing existence of rental housing is based on purely consequentialist grounds. I do not believe that landlords have intrinsic moral right to real estate they own.
I did get to the peasant owing rent and services to the lord example myself. This is what I thought next: the lord is the lord because he or his progenitors conquered the land. Either by making it habitable (conquering the nature) or by literal conquering from some other holders. The first case looks very much like the ‘tenant’ argument — the peasant comes after the land is conquered and now he owes rent so it’s not interesting.
In the second case, the peasant pays rent to the lord because the alternative is for the lord to conquer again. He proved he can do it before, so presumably he can do it again. The rent is once again an arrangement that is preferable to both parties because it prevents them from expending the resources unnecessary.
Underpinning the property rights is violence, always. If you, as you write “do not believe that landlords have intrinsic moral right to real estate they own” you basically are calling for war. If you win this war, you will presumably have another way of allocating the property rights and you will have to defend it with violence. So why is your way superior?
@Wanderer2323
This is not my view. I evidently did not express my views well, sorry. I´ll try again.
My view is that laws establishing property rights are justified only on consequentialist grounds. That means insofar as they lead to better society than would exist without them. I realize that “better society” is in itself unclear concept but in this late hour (it is midnight here in Europe) I am not going to attempt to explain/invent my whole political philosophy. Certainly current society with its property arrangements is better than perpetual war.
I was not particularly convinced by the comment on cultural marxism. Among other things, the promoters of the idea of gramscian damage point out that the intermediate goal is to damage our society. Which means that intellectual movements which don’t directly promote marxism can still be an instance of cultural marxism as long as they support that goal. For instance, the critique of patriarchy which Simon Jester mentioned would still undermine existing cultural norms.
The comment looks to be working with either a straw man or weak man definition of cultural marxism. For whatever reason, when I look for definitions of the phrase, post-modernism is not included as an example. I didn’t look very hard, which is why I can’t rule out the weak man option.
Might make sense to start by proposing your steelman definition of cultural marxism?
Well, the link would be a start, but I’m not sure I can adequately steel man it myself. Nor am I required to in order to point out that the comment laid out a false description of it. The link does NOT use the phrase cultural marxism, but refers the efforts of soviets like Antonio Gramsci which Scott referenced in the initial post.
The following is an example the link provided.
“…in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.”
This is closer to what Simon presented as the second framing, but it’s outside of it. And it’s clearly outside what he was arguing against, but is a straight example of the sort of argument believers are actually making.
Er, you can hardly convince people that someone’s definition of a word is wrong without telling us what the right definition would be. Wikipedia addresses the matter here.
Funny, I thought modern art was a CIA plot.
It would be funny, and about what I’d expect from the Cold War, if the CIA and the KGB were both promoting it to screw with each other.
@Nornagest
You mean to foil each other. The object of the screwing there would be the American people, though.
Cultural marxism is marxist tools applied to culture.
Marx believed that economics was everything and that culture was the superstructure that the capitalist class built to continue their dominance over the working class. For example he believed religion was built by the capitalists to keep the masses believing that the hierarchy was created by God instead the capitalists to serve their class interests.. Thus it is impossible to understand religion without understanding class conflict. The same paradigm applies to literally everything. Class conflict was the decoder ring for all society, you had to have it to understand what was really going on. Marx was the ultimate conflict theory believer, everything was about the conflict between classes.
Cultural Marxism rejects that the conflict is about class and keeps everything else. So for a feminist cultural marxist societal rules are creating by men to keep women down, for a gay cultural marxist they are created by straight people to keep gays down, for a black cultural marxist they are created by white people to keep minorities down, and an intersectional cultural marxist would say that they are created by white ces straight males to keep everybody down. Thus they are just as convinced by the conflict theory, they just believe in a different conflict.
Thus a real marxist looks at cultural marxists and sees nothing in common. Who cares if a person is male or female, black or white, gay or straight, what matters is are they a capitalist or worker?
It’s the difference between ideology and meta-ideology, with ‘cultural Marxism’ being a claim that the meta-ideology is largely the same between Marxism and (parts of) Social Justice.
Yes, this is also how I see it.
Take Marxism, remove the first part (economic theories up to the conclusion that capitalists are oppressing the proletariat), and keep the second part (class fight, revolution, glorious new society). Now you can replace economical oppression with racism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, etc.
For a Marxist, removing the economical theory would ruin the entire thing, because the idea is that Marx was the Einstein of economics. But the college kids today are not economics nerds; they want to talk about revolution. And for the trust fund kids this is a wonderful opportunity to LARP fighting heroically against oppression.
By this logic, PETA are vegetarian Marxists, Rush Limbaugh is a small-government Marxist, etc. This just seems like a clever way to call your outgroup Marxists.
I think a lot of the memes your link cites are more associated with postmodernism than Marxism. As a rule of thumb, if ‘class’ isn’t mentioned, it’s not Marxist.
You’re correct that they both “damage our society,” given a certain definition of societal health. But basically any ideas that are both significant and wrong will do that. It doesn’t make them the same movement necessarily.
Nor does an adversary’s support for a movement necessarily make it wrong. In the USSR, the authorities could have said that individualism, capitalism, civil rights, democracy, free speech, etc. were ideas promoted by the US in order to weaken the USSR’s society, and it probably would have been true.
(As an aside, I’ve heard the claim that the CIA pushed nonrepresentational art. Dunno if it’s true, just funny that both sides are blaming the other for this. Now my new headcanon has Rothko pocketing checks from both the CIA and the KGB)
They may not represent orthodox Marxist beliefs, but they are exactly the sort of thing they care claiming the soviets pushed for us to believe. I don’t think the claim that AIDS originated as an anti-black race bomb would qualify as Marxist, but the KGB spread the idea anyways. I suppose Stalinism and Marxism aren’t quite the same thing, but that would turn into an argument that the label is just misleading, not that it’s not a real phenomena.
@ADifferentAnonymous
I thought “postmodernism” was a bunch of architects in the ’60’s and ’70’s who were saying “Hey, let’s start building things other than glass boxes again”, and that the “cultural marxism” mentioned upthread was a group of Weimer republic era German academics who wrote impenetrable world salad (and also that American Jazz music is bad for some reason) that may mean pretty much whatever the reader decides to infer (like the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky, except even more opaque because it has to be translated from German).
From Wikipedia both terms also seem related to deeply academic literary criticism and not much relevant to anyone not writing term papers.
So what about them?
An interesting article about postmodern architecture.
Pinning down an exact definition of postmodernism is tough, but Simon Jester seemed to think it covered a large swath of what people mean by “cultural Marxism”. So I’m going with my “I know it when I see it” definition… Sorry if it sounded like I had a better idea what I’m talking about.
As for the actual self-described ‘cultural Marxists”, the Frankfurt School, I suspect they have basically nothing to do with what the term evokes to most people today.
@ADifferentAnonymous
What does “cultural Marxistm evoke to most people?
As far as I can tell from context, it seems to be used to mean capitalist modernity, and social liberalism, which seems a strange use of the word “Marxism”, or to put it another way: I’m very doubtful that the Gillette and Nike corporations are advocating any ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, so a translation would be appreciated please.
Phlinn’s link has a pretty good set of examples (scroll til you see the bulleted list).
@ADifferentAnonymous
"Phlinn’s link has a pretty good set of examples (scroll til you see the bulleted list)"
So “Cultural Marxism” is a set of beliefs supposedly spread by Soviet agents long ago that leave the U.S.A. vulnerable to radical Islamist or the author otherwise doesn’t like?
I now declare that fans of new Doctor Who and Star Trek: Discovery are “Cultural Anti-free Televisionists” and that ‘movement’ must be opposed!
A mixture of:
a) Pretty much what the wikipedia article describes, the conspiracy theory that some/most/all of the progressive policy ideas (feminism, affirmative action, gay rights, etc) that have been ascendant in the last fifty years are not what they seem (the result of lots of people thinking those are good policies) but rather conspiracies led by (one or more of the usual right-wing bogeyman suspects). This seems to be a recurring idea that has waxed and waned in popularity over the last thirty years but never gotten really mainstream-popular; the specific conspirators vary over time (sometimes Jews, sometimes Russkies, etc) but the rest of it is pretty static.
b) It seems like some people who generally don’t like social justice activism see “cultural marxism” used to describe it, and think “Yeah, that’s a good term for that thing I don’t like!” and use it, just based on the meanings of those two words, without being aware of its conspiracy theory origins. I think this is what Aapje meant above when he said that cultural Marxism is, “a claim that the meta-ideology is largely the same between Marxism and (parts of) Social Justice.”
@dick
No, what I meant is that ideologies can be similar or dissimilar in methodology and similar or dissimilar in their object-level aims.
For example, a person who considers black people degenerates who need to be cast out of their whitish community is in one way 100% opposed to a person who considers white people degenerates who need to be cast out of their blackish community. However, the basic mechanisms between these ideologies can be nearly identical.
So then a claim that these people are 100% opposed makes sense, but a claim that they are similar also makes sense. It’s all about what you consider relevant. Do you consider it relevant who they oppose, in which case a person who is critical of black culture and advocates assimilating in white culture by blacks, including through intermarriage and mixed living, is closer to the white separatist than to the black separatist. Or do you focus on the meta-ideology: giving up a race as unsalvageable and seeking segregation. In that case, the white and black separatists are birds of a feather, with the pro-integration dude being less similar to each than they are to each other.
Aapje:
I think a lot of diametrically opposed political movements work this way–most famously, communism and fascism.
@Aapje – Perhaps I phrased it badly, but that’s what I meant: that you’re using the phrase to mean a similarity between SJ activism and marxists, as opposed to using it to mean the thing you would see described if you googled that phrase (a literal conspiracy to change culture, by people who are Marxists).
@dick
All ideologies are a conspiracy in that they cause people to coordinate behavior by interpreting the world in a certain way and seeing certain solutions as valid. Very often, both the interpretation and perceived efficacy of the solutions are (partly) not shown to be correct or are even (partially) shown to be incorrect by science. Rejecting an ideological interpretation or opposing the ideology-based solutions often results in what people perceive as sanctions, ranging from withholding approval to being shunned to violence.
Pointing out this subjectivity is an attack on those ideologies, as it will undermine their claims of objectivity, correctness, universality, etc.
Of course, pointing out the subjectivity selectively can itself be used as an rhetorical and ideological weapon.
However, the denial that one’s own ideology has subjective elements and results in coordinating that subjectivity is no less an rhetorical and ideological weapon.
The accusation of ‘conspiracy’ often primarily reflects the Overton Window of that person. Falsehoods that fall outside of the Overton Window and thus are considered a threat, are called a conspiracy. Falsehoods that fall within the Overton Window are honest mistakes by people who are not at all conspiracy thinkers.
It’s a double standard.
Pretty much all ideologies can be called a literal conspiracy to change culture. Christians want others to believe in God, start praying, etc. Feminists obviously want to change culture to change how women are treated. Etc, etc. It’s quite common for people with ideologies to explicitly discuss and coordinate how to change culture.
So the only interesting question is whether ‘Marxist’ is a good label. The difficulty there is that ideologies/culture can shift, but the labels can remain. The English of today have a very different culture from the English in Shakespeare’s time. Yet we label both the same.
The opposite also happens, where people try to get rid of a negative stigma by rebranding. See Blackwater, nay Xe Services, nay Academi.
The question of what labels are not (too) pejorative, but also not whitewashing, fairly describing the ideology and/or history and/or approach, etc is a complicated one. It is extra difficult when talking about meta-ideologies (or other kinds of similarities), because we don’t have a very good vocabulary to distinguish between similarities in methodology vs similarity of concerns vs similarity in ingroups/outgroups vs …
Aapje:
This is a really cool, interesting comment. I suppose ideologies evolve partly on whether they’re effective at enabling cooperation among people following the ideology–a kind of “green beard” effect, but also something a bit like having a shared language or a shared culture that makes it easy to figure out how to coordinate.
There’s a time for “X can be seen as a type of Y if you squint” semantic word games, and that time is not when you’re trying to disambiguate two meanings of the same phrase.
Imagine a group of self-proclaimed feminists that don’t actually believe in feminism. They’re going around talking about smashing the patriarchy and equal pay for equal work, but they’re not actually doing it to achieve those goals, they have some other secret goal in mind, e.g. destroying Western democracy to pave the way for Communism. Make sense?
That’s a literal conspiracy – a group of people plotting in secret to do something bad. And that is what “cultural marxism” used to mean before it got adopted as a sneer word against progressives generally – a literal, actual, conspiracy of people-who-are-Marxists claiming to be who pretend to be social justice activists but are actually fighting for something else. That is very much not the same thing as calling social just activists Marxists because they resemble Marxists in some way when you squint.
@dick
You are proving my point here.
It’s actually a fairly widespread belief that many mainstream feminists have real goals (like benevolent sexism) that are different from their purported goals (like gender equality). Christina Hoff Sommers believes that she actually favors real/proper (‘equity’) feminism. In her view, the majority of self-proclaimed feminists don’t actually believe in feminism.
What is real, honest feminism to you, may be seen as a conspiracy by others and vice versa.
Ultimately, “plotting in secret to do something bad” is as subjective a judgment as they come. What you see as bad, others see as good and vice versa. So where you will see a conspiracy to do bad, others see a conspiracy to do good & vice versa.
Although of course the bias extends to how things are framed. Plotting to do good (in the view of the beholder) is called activism or other positive words. Plotting do to bad (in the view of the beholder) is called a conspiracy or other negative words.
Key in moving past tribalism is recognizing this kind of manipulative framing, where very similar behaviors are judged very differently, depending on whether they are in service of a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ goal.
PS. Note that in a strict sense, very few people seem to actually be principled. Most people seem to let their intuitions override their principles.
I didn’t accuse anyone of “plotting in secret to do something bad”, that was just me telling you what “conspiracy” means. I didn’t claim that cultural marxism is a conspiracy, that is again just me reporting what the phrase means. I understand you disagree with that definition, that’s why I said there are two definitions of it.
I know English isn’t your first language, but I promise you, “conspiracy” implies secretiveness. An ideology is not a conspiracy, and two people disagreeing about what “feminist” means is not a conspiracy. A secret plot to destroy America is a conspiracy.
I have two very different thoughts on this comment. They both run parallel to yours.
Firstly, my question is not ‘what a person purports to believe’ but ‘what will she vote for’. If a ‘post-modernist critic of patriarchy’ as Simon_Jester puts is given a ballot, will she vote for socialist policies or against them? From what I’ve seen, it’s going to be 100% socialism. So then why should I care that she as a post-modernist is supposedly following an ideology that is a ‘reaction’ to marxism? Her action (voting socialist policies in) further marxist goals therefore she is a marxist QED.
The second thought is looking at the Scott’s question and Simon_Jester’s answer like this:
Scott: why anyone labeling {societal phenomenae} as ‘cultural marxism’ gets dismissed as conspiracy theorist crackpot?
Simon_Jester: because of lack of evidence for any connection to marxism and insufficient rigour in distinguishing between different leftist ideologies.
Fair enough. Now then.
Me: why then anyone labeling {different societal phenomenae} as ‘nazism’ does _not_ gets dismissed as conspiracy theorist crackpot? Nazi-labeling suffer from similar issues — no connection of accused to ‘nazi party’ and really no attempt to analyze whether the accused have anything to do with nazism politically speaking.
To summarize, the second thought is that Simon_Jester does not answer Scott’s question at all. The reasons he gives cannot explain most of the observable reality.
Your first thought argues that it’s okay to call someone a Marxist as long as they vote for the same candidate that a Marxist would vote for, and your second thought argues that it’s terrible to call someone a Nazi just because they voted for the same candidate that a Nazi would vote for.
If I am wrong by enterntaining both of these thoughts does that mean that Simon_Jester is also wrong for enterntaining both thoughts that are opposing to these?
I don’t think he did. You can still go reply to his comment, FYI…
@Wanderer2323
The few I’ve encountered who’ve called themselves “Marxists” mostly seem to me to fall into two broad groups:
Grey-haired (usually 70+ years old) and not much distinguishable from those who call themselves “progressives” in terms of near goals, they may be found occasionally protesting in front of Chase Bank branches in nicer neighborhoods, and except for the buttons they wear and bumper stickers on their cars they’re hard to tell from the senior citizens who organize church bake sales (and sometimes they are the same!), they are outnumbered by another group that calls themselves “Marxists”:
Both young and old (but mostly younger) who’s immediate goals are indistinguishable (to me) of those who usually call themselves “Anarchists”, they talk a lot about “the revolution”, “direct action”, and “consciousness raising” (by which they seem to mean start a protest or join a protest, break some windows, and when the cops come and put handcuffs on everyone near the broken windows, those who didn’t break the windows themselves will hate the cops and their “consciousness” will be raised).
This type hates “liberals” and “moderates” and describe as “fascist” almost everyone not in black hoodies with bandanas on their faces, often they came up through the “punk rock scene” (they’re the mirror reflection of right-wing”skinheads” in that). This type doesn’t vote and will say things like “If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal”. Often they’re white but have “dreadlock” hair, and seem to avoid soap (same as anarchists). Look to find them at “bookstores” near college campuses with posters of Lenin, Mao, and sometimes even Stalin.
Speaking of Stalin, here’s his words on “liberals”, “progressives”, and moderate “socialists”:
So pretty clear that most of “The Left” is “going up against the wall” “come the revolution” as well.
Anyone who thinks Avakian, Sanders, and Pelosi are the same really isn’t paying attention!
I should add that while, except for favoring red bandanas instead of black, “Revolutionary Communists” look and smell the same to me as the “Long Haul” anarchists, but their man Stalin had this to say:
I think a big “mosh pit” for the anarchists, RCP, and skinheads to schedule fights with each other and leave windows and gravestones alone may be helpful in terms of the rest of us being left in peace.
To be fair to Stalin (and there’s a phrase I thought I’d never say!), social democracy and fascism in Europe evolved around the same time and for some of the same reasons: they were both trying to stake out a viable alternative to Gilded Age-style capitalism (in either aristocratic or republican flavors, but they look pretty similar through Stalinist eyes) and Soviet-style communism, and they both took kind of a smorgasbord approach to policy. Especially for a guy as paranoid as Stalin was, it’s not too much of a stretch for an observer in the mid-Thirties to think they might end up in some of the same places.
As it happened, of course, fascism ended up sitting on top of a giant pile of skulls, and social democracy didn’t, but it wouldn’t have been obvious that would happen. At the time, everyone had a militant wing, and the only real example of fascist atrocity if you read books from the era was the “Abyssinians” (viz. the Second Italo-Ethopian War, now overshadowed first by the Spanish Civil War and then by WWII, but at the time quite a hot topic).
NPR piece on a proposed change in regulations on light bulbs. The whole article is written from the assumption that the right way to raise energy efficiency is to ban lower-efficiency technology. This misses a big point–when users get a choice, they can decide whether the energy efficiency is worth other tradeoffs–like having worse color resolution, or being more effectively dimmable. Nobody making a top-down decision about what to ban and what to allow knows enough to make those tradeoffs for all the individual users–which may include people who really, really need the spectrum they get from an incandescent (now halogen) bulb, or very dimmable bulbs, or just really like the appearance of the incandescent bulbs, or maybe some other thing I don’t even know about. (FWIW, I’ve switched over to LED bulbs pretty-much exclusively in my house. They’re just better IMO. But that’s a choice people should be able to make themselves.)
This is an interesting example of a blind spot–I suspect the reporter had never even thought of the issue in this way, so there was no awareness of that perspective in his article.
Well, clearly there’s a point at which it shouldn’t be the individual’s choice, correct? I mean, if someone wants to fuel their hummer with leaded gas and can find/afford it, I’m happy that they don’t have that choice to make.
It then turns into the tradeoff between individual user’s wants and the benefit to society for restricting those wants. Assuming that the quote from the article where an expert says “Now we’re going to have to generate about 25 large coal-burning power plants’ worth of extra electricity if this rollback goes through” is even remotely in the ballpark of being true, I’m totally fine continuing to ban the inefficient lightbulbs.
That’s “Think of the children” slippery slope. It’s equating real, measurable risks with the mere chance of harm. Which sounds reasonable, until you actually measure trade-offs and realize you’re usually killing somebody down the road.
The libertarian way of solving this is “I’m free to do anything that doesn’t harm somebody else”. Allowing you to drive drunk is out. Smoke in cafes, out. Use leaded gasoline, out. What they have in common is they’re clearly, statistically correlated to measurable deaths. You can pull out the number yourself, and in 20 minutes reach a reasonable estimate.
Consumption of electricity isn’t, not by a longshot. There are a number of maybes involved, unknowns (what’s the source of the electricity?), scale issues, taking people on their word etc. Regretfully, it’s very bad bayesian evidence.
Combine this with the knowledge that there are memeplexes that survive by promoting climate hysteria unrelated to actual evidence, and the updating value of “incandescent bulbs kill people” becomes effectively zero.
There is a lot of ambiguity between “real, measurable risks” vs “mere chance of harm”. Climate change is a real risk and banning incandescent light bulbs doesn’t harm anyone. Unfortunately for libertarians, most things you do affect others. We can’t just pretend otherwise.
Certainly it does. It harms those who prefer incandescent bulbs over the alternative.
Fortunately for libertarians, the price system transmits the overwhelming majority of such effects back to those who cause them.
My having someone cut my lawn is a cost to him, but I can only get him to do it by offering a price which at least balances that cost. If the price he charges is much more than enough to balance the cost, I can probably find someone else to do it at a lower price.
The system isn’t perfect, for a variety of reasons explored in the economic literature—I don’t have to pay for my neighbors not enjoying the sound of the lawn mower, or get paid for the fact that my neatly mowed lawn provides a benefit to the neighbors. But it covers most of the costs and benefits of our actions. So situations where someone takes an action which imposes net costs or fails to take an action which imposes benefits due to the existence of externalities are the exception, not the rule.
The alternative is to have decisions made through the political process. In that process, individual actors, voters, politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats, rarely bear most of the cost, or receive most of the benefits, of their action. Hence there is little reason to expect them to take those actions that produce net benefits, refrain from those that produce net costs. The same problem that is the exception on the private market is the rule on the political market.
Which suggests that shifting decisions to the political market is likely to increase, not decrease, the problem.
A more detailed version of the argument is here.
This reminds me of the whole plastic straw debacle. 99.999% virtue signaling, and 0.0001 actual result. And I’m pretty sure I left out a few 9s.
For an incandescent bulb ban to make a significant difference, you have to go through a number of gates:
– how much of climate change is due to electricity consumption
– how much is due to consumer consumption
– how much is due to lightning
– what is the difference between people buying more efficient bulbs because they’re, well, more efficient, and what a ban would achieve.
Each one is about 1-2 orders of magnitude.
Now, express what’s left in currency*, and subtract the cost of the ban: inconvenience, enforcement, cost of using much more expensive replacement where replacements are needed etc. Is the difference worth us having this conversation? I strongly doubt it.
*If you balk at the idea of expressing climate change in currency, I’d guess you’re using the sanctity/degradation moral foundation. I can’t debate you here, since we’d be debating one of your primary goals. If you’re aware of that, great, we all need primary goals. If you’re not, you might want to think a bit about it.
> Unfortunately for libertarians, most things you do affect others.
I describe myself as libertarian only very reluctantly, because it gives a lot of information in one label. But I’m really really not – I just think that 1. economics is mostly libertarian and 2. Chesterton’s fence (and URSS) says to avoid creating rules unless the need is very obvious, because you can never guess all the side effects.
That’s it. There are a lot of problems that are best solved by non-libertarian solutions, like technical inspections for cars (and I’d include here many things others here wouldn’t, like police, minimum pensions, minimum health care etc). Commons are generally solved too slowly or not at all with free markets.
I thought Chesterson’s fence was about not eliminating rules…I’m not sure it has much to say about creating new ones.
Whether or not you want to measure the badness of global warming in dollars, the cost of preventing it or mitigating it is mostly measured in dollars–you’ve got to retire that coal-fired power plant 20 years early and pay to replace it with a nuclear plant, and that costs a big pile of dollars.
If banning lightbulbs didn’t hurt anyone, then you wouldn’t need to ban them. The only reason to ban them is that some people want to continue using them, and those people are being hurt by your decision–at the very least, you’re taking away a choice they wanted to make. Some people find that LED bulbs don’t render colors right, and among them are (for example) artists and crafters who care a whole lot about getting their colors right. Dimmable LED bulbs also don’t dim as far down as incandescent bulbs–for most people, this isn’t very important, but there are surely people for whom this is a significant issue.
There’s nothing in the world easier than declaring that nobody really needs or wants (or should want) whatever you’re trying to ban. But it’s nonsense–if you propose banning something, you ought to at least be able to acknowledge that some people will be hurt by the ban. Maybe the ban is still worthwhile–some gun hobbyists are seriously inconvenienced by the restrictions on fully automatic weapons, but there’s a pretty good case for this ban being worth the inconvenienced people. But you have to make that case.
In the case of incandescent bulbs, that case is extremely weak.
Or alternatively, you could be a utilitarian who cares about reducing human suffering.
Currency, in such contexts, is an imperfect measure of utility. If someone says “the effect of three degrees of warming is equivalent to reducing world income by 3%,” what he means is that it has the same effect on utility as reducing world income by 3% would be expected to have. It isn’t a precise statement, since one can imagine different ways of reducing world income that would have different effects, but it is a statement about utility.
I suppose in the same way, I could say:
And you would not find this objectionable? Since really, I’m doing the same thing: “global warming of 3 degrees, would be the equivalent utility loss of losing x number of houses for poor people”.
I do think this sort of comparison can be a sleight of hand, though. Because what are the utility-consequences of more houses for poor people? Is it positive? Perhaps negative, if there are trade-offs involved? The same issue goes for measuring utility in dollars: its pretty easy to imagine a scenario where aggregate-dollars decreases, but aggregate-utility increases.
It’s the same old ground we’ve tread over in the past: the problems with aggregating utility using a standard quantifiable measure.
I’ve read your chapter on this by the way. My take is that there’s no reason to assume that Marshall Improvements will be evenly distributed, and every reason to suspect (based on the actually-existing distribution of property) that they won’t be.
As long as everyone benefits there is net gain to utility, even if most of the benefit goes to rich people. To avoid that you need some reason to think that the net benefit will be combined with a redistribution that leaves the poor people, or whoever has a high marginal utility for money, absolutely and not just relatively worse off.
I do think this is the case that poor people will regularly be made worse-off, even in net-positive Marshall Improvements. The reason is simple: due to the lopsided distribution of wealth, rich people can “win” Marshall Improvements over poor people at orders of magnitude more frequency than they lose.
When stepping back and talking-out the implications of your theory, removing away the abstraction, I doubt the average person would agree that Marshall Improvements are even a measure of utility. If we take Marshall Improvements as the guidelines for maximizing utility, then a rich person could pay $100 a day to kick a homeless man every day for the rest of his life, assuming the homeless man couldn’t raise sufficient funds to counter him. This isn’t merely an “imperfect measure” of utility- its a non-measure that grinds against all of our evolutionarily derived instincts of what constitutes human well-being.
It feels like a good time to reference your book on Price Theory, Chapter 15:
I’m glad you acknowledge that utility-logic Marshall Improvements would break when presented with the scenario of one rich man and one poor man. However, the explanation (Marshall’s explanation, but repeated approvingly by yourself) of this problem going away with a “large and diverse groups of people” doesn’t make sense. If its 1 rich man and 2 poor men, the problem still persists. If the wealth disparity is great enough (as in, our real-world), then you could easily imagine one billionaire vs. 10,000 near-penniless people in Africa, and the problem still remains.
Really, what you seem to be hinting at here (but not explicitly stated), is that only with significant wealth equality among the participants, can a net-gain of Marshall Improvements be taken as indicative as a net-utility gain. But since we don’t have that, and instead have the “one poor and one rich” disparity maximized over an entire population, I think objection remains far more convincing than the argument.
Smoking in cafes only harms those who voluntarily enter that cafe. The libertarian policy is to allow the cafe owner to decide whether to allow smoking. If people want to avoid second-hand smoke, there will be a lot of demand for non-smoking cafes, so there will be enough cafes that ban it.
When your mandate is to optimize for only one parameter, it’s easy to ignore the others. It’s obvious with light bulbs, when they were pushing for terrible compact fluorescents for years. You see it with clothes washing machines where they take much more time and also have mold issues — the regulators don’t have a mandate to preserve the cycle time, only water consumption. You see it with dishwashers, same thing, only apparently Whirlpool has said it can’t meet the proposed standards at any cycle time. Many probably remember the earlier mandated low-flow toilets you had to flush twice.
Re: Optimizing for one thing
I have LEDs all over my house, love them generally, but many of them are NOT designed to last the 50k hours claimed. Oh, I’m sure the light source will last that long, but I’ve already had a decorative bulb break off in my hand while cleaning it. An exposed bulb in a fixture is going to take more physical wear and tear over its lifetime and they are not building them beefy enough to do so. Right now my LED ‘fake filament’ for that light fixture is just hanging in open air instead of enclosed in a protective bulb.
While I agree that pricing in externalities is always far superior to banning something, what’s always bothered me about the incandescent light bulb ban in particular is that in many cases they aren’t wasteful.
In any climate in which you would already have the heating system turned on, an incandescent light bulb is no more wasteful than electric heat. All of the light bulb’s “waste” is simply heat energy. Said heat displaces the need for other heat generation from your heating system.
In cold weather, the inefficiency of an incandescent light bulb isn’t 95%, it’s zero (or at the most the delta between the efficiency of heating via non-electric sources and an electric one).
Interesting point, I’d never thought of that!
Sure, but in hot weather you need to spend even more energy to move the heat outside.
But lightbulbs are just as likely to be used in air-conditioned environments. In the aggregate, it’s still inefficient. Also, light bulbs are likely to be high up or on the ceiling, which is an inefficient way to heat a room (since heat rises).
However, maybe we let individual homeowners make that decision? If you’re living somewhere with electric heat but no air conditioning (as I am now), maybe you can just decide for yourself what makes sense.
Electric heat can include heat pumps.
If everything is from resistive heat, or you are cold that the marginal BTU of heat energy needs to come from resistive heat, then this objection to your objection goes away.
If you want people to use less of something, tax it more.
It is too bad the populace rejects this.
This is true-for most things, most of the time, on the margin–but it’s not entirely useful.
There are two cases where it fails: one is durable goods with low marginal costs (like light bulbs); the other is exclusive alternatives (long-haul trucks vs long-haul trains, for example).
The problem with durable goods is that the uncertainty over lifetime, and the relatively small costs, often makes a collectively reasonable decision (spend an extra $10,000/year on light bulbs, save $1000/month on electric bills) individually unreasonable (what if you spend the $100 that’s “your share” on light bulbs, but move out in 6 months, or get the ones where the bugs weren’t worked out and half of them quit working after 3 months?)
A breakpoint example is commuting methods:
I have a 4-mile commute to work, and it takes me 15-20 minutes to drive. Increasing the cost of gas by $2.50 a gallon wouldn’t get me to stop driving. Having a bus route that got me there in under 30 minutes would. But if everyone drives, there’s not enough demand for buses to have such a route-so everyone drives. There are a lot of things that work this way: there’s a breakpoint at which behaviors switch, and cost isn’t the key driver. For this kind of items, subsidies or regulations will get more of the desired behavior more cheaply than taxes will.
The trick isn’t that you tax the light bulbs. It’s that you tax the electricity. Then natural preferences and optimizations can kick in.
The problem never was (to my knowledge) about the waste generated from light bulbs. It was about the energy “wastage”. Given that, provide incentives for people to economize their energy usage.
The irritations caused by alternatives — high initial cost, high premature failure rate, low-quality light (color, flicker), poor performance in cold, delay before turning on, size/shape limitations, poor dimmability, etc — were not worth the energy savings. The government didn’t want people to pay the extra money to not deal with these problems, so they had to resort to a ban.
Which government are you referring to? Those are definitely problems with LEDs historically, but they seem to have gotten much better in the last couple years or possibly be solved, and I still see incandescents on the shelves.
@dick
Where is this? Last time I went shopping for bulbs it was LEDs. Which was really irritating, because I have a fixture way up at the top of a vaulted ceiling that I use for about five hours per year that had gone out. I wanted to replace it with, preferentially, an incandescent, but barring that a CFL, because I have to leave the bulb behind (per my lease) when I move out; I don’t want to leave an expensive LED bulb there if I can help it. The next lessor can do that shit if he wants.
Any hardware store in Oregon, amazon.com, lowes.com, etc. My local Home Depot has both, but waaay more selection on LEDs. Also they’re not THAT expensive, if you just buy an LED you’re wasting like 8 bucks. (And if your plans change and you stay longer, potentially not having to replace that annoying bulb again, since even cheap LEDs last a lot longer)
The United States government. For a long time there’s been an effective ban on incandescent bulbs (a watts/lumen limit that such bulbs cannot achieve) in standard sizes. You still find them because though Congress would not repeal the ban, they made another law refusing to allow spending of Federal money on enforcing the ban.
Around the time of the ban, GE made a big production about how they were coming up with some new-tech incandescent filament that would meet the new standards. Shortly thereafter they dropped all such research and outsourced their remaining lighting business (which they’re now trying to sell, apparently). I assume the new-tech filaments never existed and GE got some political favor for pretending they did. (Note how the treehugger blog is trying to pretend CFLs don’t have the problems they have; this was before LEDs were at all practical for most home lighting)
The limits were scheduled to apply to decorative bulbs, three-ways, and also to be tightened to the point where halogen reflectors wouldn’t qualify either; it appears that at least some of these measures have been suspended.
Even if currently everybody drives, an entrepreneur can estimate how many people would switch to taking the bus if it was available, and then, if enough people do so, start a bus line.
They do that with cigarettes in the US.
As others have pointed out, the effects of energy use aren’t limited to the end-user. So why would we want them to be the only ones who get to decide to use incandescent lightbulbs or not?
This is starting to verge on culture war, but: as others have pointed out, if the goal is to limit energy use, it makes more sense to raise energy prices than to ban random things you think use too much energy and hope it’ll all work out. When CAFE standards came online, people switched from station wagons to SUVs; when gas hit four bucks a gallon, people switched from SUVs to Priuses.
People are generally pretty good at conserving resources when being wasteful hits them in the pocketbook, but if you’re really concerned that users won’t be able to do the math, you can do things like put estimated yearly energy prices on the packaging.
And, again as others have pointed out, the goals isn’t to simply limit energy use, but to prevent wasteful energy use.
Incandescent lightbulbs were targeted because utility cost/benefit ratio for them was so off. Nothing random about it.
No one buys anything thinking that it’s wasteful. You can point at anything and say that the utility cost/benefit ratio is off, but that’s basically an aesthetic statement, not a substantive one.
What the buyer thinks is irrelevant to the question of whether society deems it waste.
Society isn’t an agent.
I mean, all utility, human goals, and normative statements are derived from from subjective feelings (aka “aesthetics”). I could also say that “banning lightbulbs is bad” is an empty aesthetic utterance.
A human is just a collective concentration of cells, it can’t actually “deem” anything.
Or alternatively, we could recognize that separate entities acting in concert (e.g. through democratic consent) have agent-like power.
Guy in TN:
So, how do you decide whether it’s wasteful for me to (say) keep incandescents in some room of my house where I really want to be able to dim the light from the switch down a lot lower than dimmable LEDs will go? I can see how you might be able to make that judgment on a case by case basis talking with me, but there’s no way a ban on incandescent bulbs can do so.
Raising electricity prices by enough to force me to internalize the externality forces me to adjust my choices based on the size of the externality. (In this case, coal-powered electricity should cost a whole lot more and nuclear-generated electricity whole lot less than what they cost in our world.)
Fine. We’re probably going to run into axiomatic differences sooner than later, and I’m not trying to say anything too radical here anyway.
Thing is, “society” does not often ban stuff just because it’s wasteful, and when it has (see CAFE example above), it’s ended up with perverse incentives more often than not. It does often ban stuff because it has clear negative externalities, but “uses too much electricity” is a lot more subjective than “interferes with eggshell formation in condors” or “all the neighbors are in the hospital with PCB poisoning”. I just don’t buy a compelling societal interest in obsoleting incandescent lightbulbs here. I can buy one for lowering total energy use, but the way you do that is by making energy use more expensive, i.e. taxing it: that captures stuff like setting your thermostat to 75 instead of 65 in the summer, which is going to make more difference than any number of light bulbs.
I mean, I totally agree that incandescents aren’t worth it for me — I use LED bulbs for most everything. I just don’t want to make that decision for everyone.
@albatross11
It’s the same sort of cost/benefit decision I might make in regards to lead in gasoline, nuclear power plants, or fluoride in the water, just on a more miniature scale.
Making such a judgement on a case-by-case basis would be superior if there were no costs associated with analyzing and voting on each individual action. But since the costs associated with this would be astronomical, instead we make blanket-decisions on such matters.
Externalities, which are defined in strictly monetary terms, are not the concern. Its the harms your action has on third parties which are the concern.
Externalities are not strictly a money thing, but that’s less of an issue in context than this:
The harm does not come from using light bulbs. It comes from using electricity. So tax the electricity and let revealed preference sort out what people want to use their expensive electricity for.
But waste is harm. All resources are physically limited, so if you use a resource in a wasteful way, no one else can use that resource in a more useful manner.
Take gasoline. The goal of mandating mpg requirements isn’t just reduce the total amount of gasoline a person can use. That could have been achieved by either 1. capping how much gasoline a person could buy a year or 2. Raising the gasoline tax.
Reducing gasoline consumption wasn’t strictly the goal, because driving (and in effect, using gasoline) has benefits. But there’s only so much gasoline on the planet, and we want it to use it wisely. We want people to keep using gasoline, we just want them to do it in a less wasteful way.
Letting the “market decide” does not acheive this objective. Raising the gasoline tax, especially enough such that it would mirror the effects of an mpg mandate, would achieve this objective, but it has significant negative societal effects that mpg requirements do not. So, mpg mandate is the logical choice.
And its not like we’re pretending that mpg requirements are costless (they aren’t!) or that they are no unintended consequences (of course there are- that’s just life!). We’ve soberly taken all this into consideration and decided that, and mpg mandate is better than a high gasoline tax, because it reduces waste.
From my perspective this is almost 100% wrong. We don’t want people to keep using gasoline as such — the whole point of this exercise is to limit carbon emissions and other pollution, and that’s linear in gas. That doesn’t mean that we want to tax it into oblivion, because we also have a competing interest in people getting around and we don’t have any good alternatives, but we only care about “waste” — which, again, is a perniciously slippery concept anyway — insofar as it affects the amount of gasoline people are using.
It seems like you’re thinking about this as a moral issue — that burning gas or using electricity is virtuous as long as you only use as much as you need (as determined, apparently, by “society”). Maybe this is a common perspective, but it looks like an appallingly bad basis for policy to me.
There is almost no way that a MPG mandate is less socially damaging than an equivalent gasoline tax, and the ACTUAL MPG laws are far, far worse.
>Maybe this is a common perspective
Fossil Fuels are Unclean. Nuclear is Unclean. Incandescent is Unclean.
It’s Deuteronomy all over again.
Yes, its competing interests. We have the question: how can we minimize amount of gasoline we can use, but not create a decrease in the level of driving?
A high gasoline tax achieves the goal of reducing gasoline, but it fails the goal of maintaining the same level of driving. An mpg mandate, however, achieves both goals (and may even increase the amount of driving, as people are willing to travel more).
Likewise, we have the competing interests of: “how can we reduce amount of energy we use for lighting, without significantly raising the cost of your home energy bill?”
Its not clear an energy tax would achieve the second goal, since there is a minimum amount of lighting necessary for a home. Most likely, the tax would cause energy usage to decline, but energy bills would increase a lot. A lightbulb ban, however, achieves both goals: the amount you spend on lighting decreases, and your home electricity costs only go up by the cost of the new bulbs (minimal).
@Lambert
“Maximize economic value” is a normative goal. Don’t mock me for bringing morality into the picture: OP did the very moment he said the word “should”.
If you are upset at all about the lightbulb ban, or the mpg requirements, its ultimately because it offends your core moral objectives. So please, go on and attempt to explain why you think these policies are “wrong” without referencing your moral values.
Don’t feel like this conversation’s going anywhere, but I want to comment on this before I flounce:
…which, to the extent that it does, means it’s self-defeating. If Alice is limited by her gas budget, and so she drives half again as much in her 30 MPG Camry as she did in her now-illegal 20 MPG Explorer, then your MPG mandate has done exactly nothing w.r.t. Alice’s carbon emissions.
If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions, then holding miles driven constant as a criterion of policy makes no sense. We don’t want to cripple people’s ability to get from A to B, but a policy that nudges people into e.g. living closer to work is just as good as one that nudges them into buying more efficient vehicles — better, actually, since there’s fewer externalities involved. The biggest advantage of Pigovian taxes in this context is that they do that sort of encouragement in a very general, flexible way. They’re also inherently regressive, but that’s manageable if you aim for them to be revenue-neutral.
Again, reducing carbon emissions is not the only goal. Another goal is to reduce waste of resources. Viewing this through the lens of externalities/Pigovian taxes misses the point- the purpose of these regulations is not to maximize economic value.
I realize that e.g. the incandescent ban exists largely because its backers believe the bulbs to be wasteful. I just don’t think that can be justified on any grounds other than “well, society thinks it’s wasteful, so it must be bad”, which should be self-evidently stupid.
Even from the perspective of conserving resources, it makes more sense to tax the resource than to ban uses that you or “society” believe to be wasteful. If they really are wasteful, they’ll go away anyway. If they don’t go away despite getting substantially more expensive, then it’s very likely that they’re serving roles that you haven’t accounted for in your analysis. Allowing for this case is a feature, not a bug. And in the meantime you’ll discourage all sorts of marginal uses that you couldn’t enforce with heavy-handed bans and mandates or can’t make a convincing case for.
Again, there’s the competing goal that we do want the resource to continue to be used. We just want it to be used in a different fashion. A tax reduces the good kind of use and well as reducing the bad. A ban does not.
That such behaviors currently exist, should be evidence that they don’t actually go away. It’s like “if driving drunk was bad, people wouldn’t drive drunk”.
And what’s your alternative- “if I think its good, it must be good?”
My hot take is that democracy is not, in fact, stupid.
Conserving a resource means using it less. Not using it in an officially approved fashion, not using it virtuously, using it less. Discouraging “good” uses as well as “bad” ones is what we should want to do.
Democracy may or may not be stupid, but justifying a policy by saying that it is a policy definitely is.
I disagree that conserving resources is the primary goal. We could achieve such an outcome by simply banning the use of electricity, or gasoline.
That we don’t do this, and that hardly anyone is advocating for it, should be evidence that we have other goals as well.
I think the argument “its what most people want” is a more convincing one that “its what I want”, which appears to be your unspoken alternative.
Okay, if that’s what we’re down to, then I’m out.
Notice the asymmetry. If a property owner chose to dispose of a resource that he owned in a way you disagreed with, you aren’t asking for a justification behind his reasoning. You just assume he has his personal reasons for his weird behavior.
But if the government exercises its legal control over the resource, all of a sudden you need justifications. Reasons! Explanations! Rationales! “They just feel like it” isn’t enough anymore.
If your whole argument is that anything the government feels like doing is fully justified on its face, you could have said that a while ago and spared both of us a lot of trouble.
Albartoss’s OP argument wasn’t merely that the public came to wrong decision. It was that the public shouldn’t have input on this matter at all.
The debate here is one over process, not object-level outcomes. I’m not saying whatever the government does is “just”- the public consensus is often wrong, and needs to be updated. But the public can and should have a debate about this, whether we should deem it “waste” or not.
Humans can sort-of meet the criteria of having an ordered set of preferences over what’s possible which is most of what you need to model them as agents making decisions based upon some mix of morality and economics (your choice of morality and economics).
Governments are so far from meeting this criteria that it makes no sense to model them as an agent. You can kind of squint and gouge out an eye and imagine companies as agents if you think of them as replicators in some sort of evolutionary game, but companies are a lot smaller and die pretty often.
But governments die so rarely that doesn’t make sense either. You’re not even guaranteed to be mathematically able to create a scheme that orders the preferences of a group of people in a vaguely reasonable way. Thinking of large bodies of people especially governments as agents doesn’t even work in theory, much less in practice.
Governments may have “agent-like power” but in some sense so does a hurricane.
@Guy in TN
Mandating high MPG encourages people to live further from their work, which can also be considered a waste of resources.
Laws like this are illiberal in the sense that they very much dictate that a certain way of living is legitimate, while another way of living is illegitimate. Some externalities are OK to burden others with, while other externalities are not.
This doesn’t make these laws necessarily wrong or bad, but it does mean that you will make an enemy out of people with a different preferred lifestyle and/or culture. The more laws you make like these, the more you are enforcing and dependent upon cultural homogeneity.
@Aapje
Of course, there’s unexpected feedback effects, as with all laws. But there’s no economic rule that says the counter-effect much always outweigh the effect. The law does have the ability to change human behavior- people are not infinitely malleable such that they will necessarily revert to expending the same amount of resources as they did before.
Well, yes. I am not a liberal, and do not support liberalism, in the classic sense of the word. I think the claims of liberalism as “neutrality” is largely a myth. There’s no escaping using the law to shape human behavior at the content-level- even liberalism does thus, just under a different set of rules.
The old quote from Anatole France describes my thoughts on the matter well: “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.“
A principle that explains this is the following:
(*) If Alice has the right to do an action A, and an action B doesn’t make anyone worse off than action B, then she should have the right to do B instead.
(*) implies that if she has the right to dispose of her property in any one way that neither helps nor hurts anyone other than her, then she should have the right to dispense it in any other way that doesn’t hurt anyone else.
While few people say (*) explicitely, I think most libertarians would agree with it, and most others would agree with it at least in a limited form of
(**) If Alice has the right to do an action A, and an action B doesn’t make anyone worse off than action B, then she should have the right to do B instead, unless we have a good reason to not allow her.
Thus property owners doesn’t need justification for disposing of their property in any way that doesn’t hurt others, while government at least needs to justify restricting it.
Most people would have just responded to you with “because they are the property owner, duh, having the right to dispose of your property is part of what owning it means”. My post explains what I think implicitly underpins this conception of property (along with a few similar principles such that if you have the right to destroy something now, you should also have the right to destroy it later, without anyone taking it in the meantime, if this doesn’t leave anyone worse off than if you destroyed it now).
But these actions do effect other people, and perhaps make them worse off. There’s limited resources on the planet: a resource you use is a resource that I can’t.
If property ownership didn’t effect anyone else, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation- you could dispose of all the resources you want, and I wouldn’t even be made aware of it.
If this sounds crazy, let me flip it into a scenario you might agree with:
Let’s imagine that the United State goes full U.S.S.A., with the government now being the property owner of all land and resources.
The owner of this property, the government, decides that it wants to take all of the remaining oil reserves, and blast them into space so that they can never be used again. The now-prominent Libertarian Party, ahead in the polls for the next election, notes that they had future plans to re-privatize the oil sector of the economy, letting people drive cars and power factories again.
Would you say this action by the property owner (the government) did not make you, non-property owner, worse off?
Obviously if you consume some common resource, that may make people worse off than if you don’t consume it. However, it doesn’t affect other people whether you consume a resource in one way or another way (at least in that no one else can use that resource either way). Thus, (*) says that if you are allowed to consume it in one way, you should also be allowed to consume it in another way.
This doesn’t say anything about what resources you should be considered to “own”, i.e. what resources you should be allowed to consume at all; that’s another topic. However, pretty much all existing and proposed economic systems allow some people to consume resources in some ways in some cases, so if one agrees with (*) (or (**)), it is going to have far-reaching consequences about what other ways of consuming them should also be allowed (at least unless there is a good reason they shouldn’t).
In your USSA example, the government’s action doesn’t make me any worse off than if the government makes the oil reserves unavailable in some other way. Points of contention are whether the government should own all natural resources in the sense of having the right to destroy them, and whether it’s a good idea for the government to do so (even if it has the right to do so).
——
Actually, there is another relevant difference between the government and the individual (besides my argument in my previous post). We are discussing politics. What an individual should have the right to do is politics, but what he chooses to do (among the things he has the right to do) is not politics. What the government should have the right to do is politics, and what the government should do is also politics; thus the two are not clearly delineated. Some of us say that individuals have some natural rights, but few would say that the government has natural rights as an entity distinct from the people.
Let’s compare it to a corporation (in its conventional capitalist conception). We can talk about what a corporation should or shouldn’t have the right to do. ‘Rights’ here mean that someone who is not a shareholder of the company has a basis to complain if the company does something it doesn’t have the right to do, but not if the company has the right to do whatever it does. However, if we are the shareholders, we have a bases to talk about what the company should do, and it wouldn’t make sense to say that we can’t object to something it is doing because it has the right to do it. The company’s leaders are the representatives of the shareholders; the company has no rights separately from the shareholders. As a shareholder, the company’s rights only matter in that we (as a corporation) are not allowed to do something the company doesn’t have the right to do, not in the sense that we can’t complain about the company doing something because it has the right to do it.
In the government, every citizen is a “shareholder”. As such, it makes no sense to say that it’s OK for the government to do something because it has the right to do it. When talking about government policy, the “rights” of the government only matter in as much as if we believe in some form of natural rights, human rights, or constitutional limitations, then the government may not violate these. At the other extreme, in an individual, only the individual himself is a “shareholder”.
They could use the oil reserves to power the economy, instead of destroying it and sending us back to the bronze age. So of course the manner in which they “consume” it effects you. Your life may depend on it!
The idea that the manner in which a property owner uses resources effects non-property owners, is such a very common and simple phenomenon, that I’m kind of amazed its up for debate. Allow me to point to some other striaghtforward examples:
-A child’s well being depends on how a property owner (his mother) maintains her house
-A person with a chronic illness’s well-being depends on how another property owner (a pharmaceutical research company) allocates their resources
-A hunter’s well-being depends on how well his hunting buddy maintains his weapons
And on and on.
It seems like your common failure mode here is to analyze people as if they were isolated individuals, and not a part of society. Which is to say, not acknowledging that the way you live your life, and consume your resources, necessarily either helps or hurts others. Any thought-experiment that relies on something along the lines of “assume your life doesn’t effect other people…” should be non-applicable out of the starting gate.
Struggling to see how the second part of your post ties in to what we’re talking about.
I mean, its true that we’ve created a system where government decisions differ from private decisions in that they require some sort of democratic process, while decisions regarding private property are somewhat autocratic. I’m not sure how the question of harm relates to this though.
If the government that destroyed the oil was an absolute monarchy (i.e., with the authority of an unregulated property owner) instead of a democratic collective, that wouldn’t make the problem go away.
My admittedly snarky post to Nornagest, was to draw attention to his double standard treatment regarding rights: The legal right of the government to regulate light bulbs needed to be vigorously justified, but the legal right of the individual to use lightbulbs in the manner he sees fit was taken as default “given”.
It’s an obnoxious, but effective, rhetorical strategy given the crowd: Assume libertarianism, unless non-libertarianism can be proven after overcoming highly isolated demands for rigor.
I wasn’t precise enough in that sentence. What I intended was that the government’s action doesn’t make me any worse off than if the government makes the oil reserves unavailable in some other way that also doesn’t help anyone in any way.
Yes, the way people use their property often affects others. However, often you have a multitude of choices, each of which benefits or hurts other people to exactly the same extent. Then if one of them is legal, then the rest should be legal, too (according to (*)), as should any choice that leaves some people better off than these legal choices, and no one worse off.
In particular, in virtually any existing or proposed economic system, there will be many situations where you are allowed to obtain some resource by giving something (money, product, service etc.) in exchange, and then you are allowed to consume the resource (eat it, burn it, whatever) in some way that only benefits yourself and neither benefits nor hurts anyone else, other than to the extent you benefit someone by paying the aforementioned price. Then it should also be legal for you to consume it in any other way that hurts no one (and may or may not help someone). For example, to go back to the lightbulb topic, let’s say that I have the right to use a given amount of electricity for purposes that you consider non-wasteful, but which only benefit me, as long as I pay the bill. Then if I use part of that amount of electricity for incandescent lightbulbs, I use less for other purposes so I use the same in total, and I pay the same amount of money for it, then I don’t leave anyone worse off than in the former situation, so the latter should be allowed too.
——
To put the second part of my post in another way: Let’s say the government has the right to do X. The government is the representative of the people, so this translates to that we, the society as a collective, have the right to do X. Then we still have to decide whether we actually want to do it, based on whether we have a good reason to do X. We decide that, in large part, through various forms of policy discussion, such as this.
Now let’s say Alice has the right to do X. Then Alice has to decide whether she wants to do X, by considering whether she has a good reason to do it. How she decides that is her business.
So yes, a government policy takes justification beyond “the government has the right to do it”, while for letting Alice do something, it’s enough justification (for people other than Alice) if she has the right to do it.
This is one justification for the asymmetry. My other justification, the one I gave first, is separate from this, and assumes that Alice has some property that we would allow her to dispose of in some way that neither hurts nor benefits anyone else (again, such situations are common in most economic systems, assuming she has already paid for the property). Then Alice doesn’t hurt anyone (compared to the action we would allow her to do) by disposing it in another way that similarly doesn’t affect anyone, while the government makes her worse off if it prevents her from doing so than if it doesn’t.
But no two actions benefits or hurts people to the same extent. The choice of which lightbulb to use has all kinds of downstream effects, from how you participate in the economy, environmental impacts, to sleeping habits (re: light dimming) as others have pointed out.
Three objections:
1. At its most basic, the initial acquisition of the resource deprives someone else from having access to it (makes them worse off).
2. Once the resource is acquired, the ongoing maintenance of your property in resource necessarily requires the threat of violence (as do all laws) to maintain
3. Because we live in a society, there are inevitable downstream effects on others, based on the manner you consume your resource.
At every step along the way, from the initial acquisition, to the holding, to the consumption, you are conceptually treating the man as an island. But at every step along the way, his actions actually effect other people, in both positive and negative ways.
Perhaps it has some unpredictable, probably tiny downstream effects on others, just like allegedly a butterfly might cause a tornado. But that’s not a reason to prevent butterflies from flapping their wings unless we have a reason to think that they are more likely to cause a tornado than prevent one. Also, such downstream effects are largely through voluntary actions of myself or others. E.g. if I make choice A, it might make me participate in the economy in a way that makes someone else better off than if I make choice B, but as long as I would have the legal right to make choice A but participate in the economy as if I made choice B, I should also have the right to make choice B.
Light dimming is an effect on the one who uses the light bulb, not on others.
Yes, I meant that it doesn’t hurt anyone other than that. In other words, the process of consuming the resource doesn’t make anyone worse off than if it just disappeared into thin air. Anyway, I was talking about different ways of consuming the resource such that the choice between the different ways doesn’t affect others, because either choice only affects others through whatever I pay for the resource and, yes, through the fact that the resource disappears.
In any economic system, if I have the right to consume
a resource right now, and I consume it right now, that doesn’t require force to keep it, regardless of how I consume it. To be able to save that resource for later, without anyone taking it, that’s a different question, and yes, that requires force.
Yes, it looks like our attitude towards society is very different. For you, everything is interconnected, everything we do is the business of everyone else, and it’s fine for the collective to order around its constituent individuals in any way it pleases. We are cogs in a machine, and it’s the machine that matters.
My attitude is that while we unfortunately depend on society in some ways, we should prefer voluntary interactions when possible, and we should keep the obligations of an individual down to a small, well-defined, discrete set. We are individual agents negotiating and interacting in a variety of ways.
With the terminology of this recently linked blog post about an alternative political compass, you are a coupler and I’m a decoupler.
If you recognize that every action you take effects others, then the question changes to simply the scale of the net harms or benefits. Any axiomatic deduction that relies, at some point in the logical chain, on an action that effects only yourself, no longer holds.
Net-voluntarim doesn’t change from your proposed system to mine. In your theory: The property owner should be the decision-maker, and that non-property owners should be forcibly excluded from having any decision-making power. In my theory: The public should have decision-making power, and the property owner should be forcibly excluded from exercising his autocratic control.
Someone’s getting forcibly controlled, either way.
If you had said “this doesn’t effect others very much“, that would be a possibly true statement. I would probably try to persuade you by talking about utility-efficient resource allocation, or the importance of the law for setting social norms. But since we’d talking about scale instead of a binary, you would have ample room to maneuver- its a highly defensible rhetorical position. I don’t think we should be voting on all human behaviors after all: some things (such as choice of relationship), while they do effect others, are too highly personal for democratic input to be valuable.
This is in contrast to the position of “this doesn’t effect others at all“. Which, well, I’m going to be charitable and hope is not a standard tenant of “decoupled” ideology.
@Nornagest
How much do you have to raise the taxes on electricity before you stop using incandescents? The new equilibrium will be way worse for nearly everyone. Including the incandescent libertarian fetishist.
The best way to ban things is to ban them; imagine that. But we’d be banning them to save electricity, right? So the better question is how much you have to raise the taxes on electricity before the new usage levels are equivalent to those you’d get from banning incandescents. Which is a lot lower than you need to keep everyone from using incandescents, yet equivalent in terms of emissions and better in terms of overhead to banning them. Which is the point. I’m not sure how much clearer I can make this.
If your goal here isn’t to conserve electricity but rather to keep everyone from using things you don’t like, I concede that raising taxes on resources they incidentally use isn’t a good way to get there, but I also assert that it’s a bad goal and you should feel bad for proposing it.
@10240
Right. But you don’t have the legal right to use incandescent lightbulbs. That’s the point of this debate: what a person’s legal rights ought to be, not how a person ought to behave under a given regime of legal rights.
Falling back onto “well, my actions need no explanation” would be more reasonable if you actually had the legal right to the actions in the first place.
Yes, I meant more whether she should have to explain why she wants to do something, rather than whether she has to explain it. That is, when discussing whether to ban something, the burden is on those who want to ban it to justify why they want to ban it, rather than on those who want to do the thing others want to ban to explain why they want to do it, and thus don’t want it to be banned. Or if Alice has a property, she doesn’t have to justify consuming it, but if the government wants to consume it instead, preventing Alice from consuming it, that very much takes justification.
This discussion of rights gets confusing, because in many places we haven’t distinguished between different meanings of rights, such as legal rights or natural rights. Anyway, we could look at the situation at the time when incandescent light bulbs weren’t yet banned, and whether the law is good or bad didn’t suddenly change when it was enacted.
My house has dimmer switches and whatever non-halogen bulb I put in most recently gives a nasty flicker if you adjust thr switch.
LEDs in street lights, car lights and pocket lights (thjnk reading lights) I think are way too bright; the glare of the former is off very strong and hard on the eyes in the dark.
The latter make reading lights useless e.g. in bed if I don’t want to wake a baby or a spouse.
For the reading lights, you might want to try a bit of translucent tape over it to spread everything out.
Philosophers have a curious way of reinventing the concept of a spectrum…
I was just reading the SEP entry on vagueness
and came across this gem: “Twilight governs times that are borderline between day and night. But our uncertainty as to when twilight begins, shows there must be borderline cases of borderline cases of ‘day’. Consequently, ‘borderline case’ has borderline cases. This higher order vagueness seems to show that ‘vague’ is vague (Hu 2017).”
A scientist would approach the question of twilight by saying that there is a gradual and continuous decrease in the amount of light. He might also say that there is a definite time at which the sun disappears below the horizon, though he might have some clarifications to make about refraction of light in the atmosphere.
Many aspects of nature are best described by continuous scales. Language often finds it convenient to bin them into discrete categories. The boundaries of these categories are arbitrary and people won’t always agree on them. There’s no “hierarchy of vagueness”; there’s just the arbitrariness of binning continua into discrete categories. I feel as though I must be missing something, because the SEP entry on vagueness is quite long. Would anybody better versed in these matters care to explain why I’m being stupid?
I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Are you familiar with “A Human’s Guide to Words” from the sequences? https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb
Yes, I enjoyed that sequence. In fact I think it was reading that that made me want to read up more on the philosophy of language.
You might also enjoy reading about fuzzy logic, which is just boolean logic that allows truth values in between 0 and 1.
That does sound interesting. It also sounds like some weird compromise between classical logic and quantum logic…
I’m having a hard time figuring out what mistake you think philosophers are making here. Your first sentence suggests you think they don’t understand that brightness (and many other properties) comes in a spectrum. But I’m guessing/hoping you don’t actually believe this.
You’re last paragraph suggests that vagueness is obviously a matter of semantic indecision. At least, that’s how a philosopher would characterize your view. Here’s David Lewis:
The general idea that vagueness is in some way a linguistic issue stemming from the fact that for ordinary purposes no one needs to settle completely precise boundaries for concepts is easily the most popular view of vagueness in philosophy. So yes, philosophers are aware of that too.
But then you seem to claim this means that there is no hierarchy of vagueness, so that’s what philosophers are confused about. But why? As the article points out, just as people haven’t settled on a precise boundary for ‘day’, they also haven’t settled on a precise boundary for ‘twilight’, one of its borders. And similarly they haven’t decided on a precise boundary on when something is a borderline case of being twilight. That’s all that is required for there to be a hierarchy of vagueness, and it immediately falls out of your own view once it’s more carefully spelled out.
So where’s the confusion?
First I should say that my tongue was somewhat in my cheek. I’m aware that “the philosophers” isn’t an entity that exists, and I expect there are philosophers with whom I would share complete agreement on this.
However, I don’t think I agree with you that a hierarchy of vagueness falls out of my own view. Perhaps a hierarchy is consistent with my way of thinking, but I think it seems an unhelpful one that makes the issue seem more confusing than it is. The fact is that there’s a spectrum of light levels and humans use different words for different points in that spectrum. You could instead describe this as there being three categories (light, twilight, dark) with two boundaries (light/twilight, twilight/dark) each with two boundaries (light/(light/twilight), (light/twilight)/twilight, twilight(twilight/dark), (twilight/dark)/dark) and so on ad infinitum, but at the end of the day you’ve reinvented a spectrum in an infinitely confusing way.
In what sense are humans using words for points in that spectrum? Do you mean to tell me that day, night, and twilight refer to points in the cycle and not ranges?
Indeed. Ranges would have been a better word.
(Though we also have words to refer to points, such as “noon”.)
I think I see what’s going on here.
You’re thinking of the vagueness hierarchy as a theoretical posit designed as an alternative means of explaining the same data one could explain using spectra. But philosophers simply aren’t proposing it as an alternative to spectra. What they care about is figuring out the semantics and logic of natural language expressions.
One important feature of the semantics of most natural language predicates is that they are vague. This means there are borderline cases, things which (according to the most popular views) the predicate neither determinately applies to nor determinately fails to apply to because of semantic indecision.[1].
But there is semantic indecision not just about the border between what the predicate applies to and what it fails to apply to, but also about the border between what the predicate applies to and what it is borderline of, and so on. The hierarchy just falls out. The fact that for many purposes you can avoid thinking about this by using different predicates is irrelevant if what you care about in the first place is developing an accurate semantics and logic for natural languages.
[1] What exactly you think this semantic indecision comes from will depend on your metasemantics: your view of what facts make it the case that a word has its particular meaning.
Thanks for trying to explain. I still don’t quite get it.
It seems to me that you will get a hierarchy ‘falling out’ if and only if you are talking about something that is fundamentally a spectrum that is described as a series of ranges by a natural language. (Are there counter-examples to this?) If that’s the case then I just don’t see what insight the hierarchy way of thinking about it brings.
It’s not supposed to give an insight into the nature of spectra. It’s supposed to given an accurate semantics and logic for the natural language predicates that pick out ranges with imprecise borders. Philosophers and semanticists care about doing that kind of thing for its own sake.
(There are also a minority of philosophers who think there is “vagueness in the world”, not just in language, so they have metaphysical reasons to care about this matter as well).
Obviously if you’re doing some practical task that requires extreme precision, you will just switch to using more precise predicates rather than thinking about infinite hierarchies of vagueness.
Twilight has several definitions, used by astronomers and navigators for different scenarios. Civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight are all measured by the position of the apparent geometrical center of the Sun below the horizon, and all have a range of expected levels of light in the pre-sunrise or post-sunset scenarios. The visibility of celestial objects (of known magnitudes) is different during the three ranges of twilight. The visibility of the horizon (especially for sailors at sea) is different between nautical and astronomical twilight.
Sunset has a single clear definition, with beginning and end related to the position of the apparent geometrical center of the Sun in the sky.
I don’t mind using twilight (in the colloquial sense) as an example of vagueness. I do mind when educated people don’t appear to notice that there is a precise technical definition of twilight, for those who use twilight to define a period of time.
I’m not sure I understand your point. There aren’t many people who, when somebody says “what lovely twilight” would respond “actually according to the technical definition of twilight it doesn’t start for another one and a half minutes”. The fact that technical definitions exist does not mean that colloquial use isn’t vague.
Having said that, I suppose if one was faced with a situation in which vagueness was becoming a problem, that might be a good time to switch to technical definitions.
Maybe I’m being a pedant.
I do recognize that the colloquial, vague usage of twilight is connected to the time period between sunset and sky-dark-enough-to-see-stars (or, for sailors, sky-dark-enough-that-the-horizon-isn’t-visible).
The technical usage is a better way of describing that range of time.
This doesn’t argue against borderline cases, or borderline cases at the edge of each borderline case. It also doesn’t argue against the concept of ‘vague’ having some degree of vagueness.
Still, I find it surprising that twilight was used as an example.
I think a better example would be the words “several” or “many”, which are quantifiers of indeterminate size.
“several” and “many” are actually really interesting examples because they don’t refer to continuous variables but discrete ones (i.e. the number of something). Does this mean the hierarchy terminates at some finite point or does it still go on to infinity?
The problem is that twilight is the product of a single, well defined underlying physical cause which has an equally well defined beginning and end: A portion of the sky has passed into the shadow of the Earth and is no longer illuminated by the sun. Once the entire sky is no longer illuminated by the Sun, it is done.
(1) When the sun first touches the horizon, a portion of the sky has fallen into the penumbra (only illuminated by a portion of the sun’s disk) and consequently begins to scatter less light. (2) Once the upper limb of the sun passes below the horizon, part of the sky has passed into the umbra and is not illuminated by the sun at all. (3) After passing below the horizon by a certain amount, the entirety of the sky is in either the penumbra or umbra. (4) After passing below the horizon further, the entire sky is in the umbra and no scattering of sunlight by the atmosphere is visible from the viewing location. (Interplanetary dust continues to scatter light producing the zodiacal lights (“false dawn”). Another phenomenon, Gegenschein, is caused by the reflection of sunlight by interplanetary dust near the anti-solar point.)
Twilight runs from (2) to (4) and is the time between when the sky begins to be and is completely covered by the umbra of the Earth. (Astronomers seem to define the instant at (2) as “sunset,” while a looser definition is everything between (1) and (2), and an even looser definition is any cool non-blue color in the sky caused by scattered sunlight.)
For convenience, the time when (4) occurs is approximated by when the geometric center of the sun has passed 18 degrees below the horizon, using whatever idealized, roundish model of the Earth astronomers are using now.
The point remains: twilight is a bad example because it has a well defined phenomena with well defined discontinuities that mark its beginning and end. The fact that astronomers have a reasonably accurate approximate so that they can calculate the effect 10,000 years in the future is entirely beside the point. (And also everyone I know would give you a funny look for saying it is a beautiful twilight while the sun is still clearly visible but are not going to make a big deal about it; nobody but an astronomers is running a stop watch. Clouds or trees or something obscuring your view of the horizon are in all cases an adequate excuse for being mistaken.)
Bugger the philosophers.
It’s daytime till the sun goes down.
Civil Twilight till it’s 6 degrees under.
Nautical till it’s 12 under.
Astronomical till 18.
Then it’s night.
Something I have just been thinking of which I don’t think counts as culture war, since it is a general issue with examples from both sides.
A Question in Scientific Ethics
You are a researcher with a theory and a clever way of testing it. You do the test and it supports the idea. Unfortunately, you believe that publishing your results will have undesirable real world effects. Should you publish?
The first case I am thinking of is the Card-Krueger research on the minimum wage. Basic economic theory implies that raising the minimum wage will reduce employment opportunities for the relatively unskilled workers who receive the minimum wage—they are now more expensive, so employers hire fewer of them. Card and Krueger thought of an interesting possible exception to that conclusion, a reason why, under some circumstances, a small increase in the minimum wage might produce no reduction in such employment, might even produce a small increase. They tested that conjecture, taking advantage of a situation where one state had raised its minimum wage and an adjacent state had not, and found no reduction in employment.
Assume, what I suspect but am not certain is the case, that the authors saw their result as a special case, an exception to a general rule that in most cases held. Further assume, what is possible but might not be the case, that they believed that a large increase in the minimum wage would have unambiguously bad effects. Finally assume that they believed that the publication of their article, by undercutting the economic argument against increases in the minimum wage, would make large increases more likely—as pretty clearly turned out to be the case.
Should they publish?
Consider another example of the same question. A researcher believes that IQ is in large part heritable and has a substantial effect on life outcomes—higher IQ correlates with higher wages, less unemployment, more stable marriage, … . The logic of Darwinian evolution implies that populations that have evolved in different environments will have different distributions of heritable characteristics, a conclusion supported in the case of easily observed characteristics such as skin color. He concludes that races as conventionally defined may well differ in the distribution of IQ, thinks up some ingenious experiment to test this conjecture, performs it, and finds support for the conjecture.
Further assume that he believes publishing these results will have a bad effect. People who are racially prejudiced will jump from “the distribution of IQ is different in different races” to “all blacks are stupid,” act on that belief, making the world a worse place. Because differences in heritable characteristics provide a possible explanation for differences in outcomes by race, people will use his result as an excuse to ignore differences that are actually due to discrimination, past injustice, or some other causes, thus reducing the political pressure to do something about those problems.
Should he publish?
For a third example, consider a researcher in some issue related to climate who finds evidence suggesting either that climate change will be slower than currently believed or that its results will be less bad, perhaps evidence that a particular result will actually be good. Assume, however, that he still believes that climate change is a serious problem and we should be doing more than we are doing to prevent it. Publishing the result of his research will reduce the political pressure to do so.
Should he publish?
Obviously this isn’t a new issue, although the more familiar examples involve scientific research that can be used for military purposes.
My own conclusion is that all three should publish, but I thought I would put the question out for other people’s responses to the question before offering mine.
I would also say he should.
One of the things that I find as I interact with more people is that evidence changes very few minds. Humans are more rationalizing animals than rational. If people use his data to do something that he feels is bad, the odds are very good that they would’ve done the bad anyway and used something else.
It’s better to have the truth out there so someone else can find other important truths without repeating your effort than worry about it being misused.
I agree, and I’d like to add that the few people who understand and believe the paper, rather than using it to support a preconception, are likely to draw the same larger conclusions as the author.
Definitely not necessarily. Smart people can come to different conclusions with similar data, especially when discussing the policies that should be followed because of that data.
I think there are extreme circumstaces where the scientist should suppress the data, but they’re incredibly rare–like if you figure out how to make a civilization-destroying plague in your kitchen sink, you ought not to publish that because it’s very likely someone will destroy civilization with it. But in nearly all real-world cases, including the ones you mentioned, the scientist should publish:
a. In the long run it almost has to be better for us to know more about the world, rather than less. So it seems like we’re talking about a tradeoff here between a short-term social or political gain and a long-term gain in knowledge available in the world.
b. Nobody is smart enough to know all the ways that some new piece of information or idea will be used by others. The finding you think is mostly unimportant except for its tendency to help the wrong side politically may turn out to be the seed for something really useful that’s not at all related to your political concerns.
c. To the extent this is known to happen, it makes it easy to dismiss scientific findings as biased–everyone knows that climate scientists won’t publish papers questioning the impact of AGW, or that psychologists won’t publish papers demonstrating significant gender differences, so when people try to make an argument for what we should believe based on scientific consensus, that argument falls apart. Since science is one of the only really good ways we have of knowing how the world works, undermining it to win today’s political battles is a really awful idea.
More extreme versions of all these come up if you lie/make stuff up in your research in order to support the right causes.
What? Citation very much needed. This is such a far out conspiracy theory that I’d need a much more detailed explanation of what you imagine to be happening to be able to address this. The statement as written is obviously wrong, as a search for ‘gender differences’ on psycnet.apa.org will confirm.
This is not a conspiracy theory at all, and should not be described as such. Haven’t we been through this several times recently?
Not all collective behavior is conspiratorial. If I say “Rich white people avoid inner-city ethnic neighborhoods after dark”, that’s not a nefarious conspiracy of rich white people meeting in smoke-filled rooms and deciding to deny their patronage to nightclubs run by colorful poor people, that’s a few million individual human beings all looking at the same data and coming to the same conclusion – that there’s nothing in it for them worth the risk of getting beaten up over.
Such a claim may be factually incorrect, and I’d like to know how strong the aversion to publishing gender-difference results in psychiatric literature is, but it isn’t a conspiracy theory.
I think there is a decent amount of such studies that are published. But they are published in the niche journals instead of Nature/Science, and when they are published universities don’t issue blaring headlines and tidbits to journalists, like they do for “eating a pear and drinking a cup of coffee everyday leads to a 10% increase in sexual stamina” studies.
In gender differences there is a large body of work that is pretty overwhelming, its just that all the people who know about that work just kinda keep to themselves, teach an upper level grad course about it, etc. And the “consensus” in the media is totally divorced from their work, which indeed happens regularly.
Clutzy:
My outsider impression says that this is true of a lot of fields. The public image of the field has a lot to do with the very small subset of results/studies that get picked up by media outlets, and often is quite different from what most researchers actually understand about their field.
I think that is certainly true. I recall two such instances from the times I was working at places that published. When I was working on LVADs our testing protocol shifted because all of the sudden pig’s blood was trendy and cow’s blood was out of style. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t good reasons for using each one for different uses in models, but the fact is you couldn’t get cow’s blood studies published even if it was a simple side-by-side in vitro test of an industry standard LVAD and a new model.
A second time was when I was on the board of the law review, and a bunch of otherwise high profile entries kept falling to us at a T2 school. This was at a time when the Supreme Court and Obama Administration kept having spats, and the fact that these articles fell was almost certainly political, good for us in the short term, but its also a bummer to see good speculative work that is ultimately a theory adopted by all major courts to consider the issue not get more publicity up front.
What makes it a conspiracy theory is that it is easily disproven in under a minute.
If for you ‘conspiracy theory’ requires secret meetings in smoke filled rooms somewhere along the way, I’ll gladly concede that what I’m talking about is not what you understand by ‘conspiracy theory’.
Murray A. Straus, researcher in the field of gendered violence, wrote a paper late in his career about “methods that have been used to deny, conceal, and distort the evidence on gender symmetry.”
I think that the methods that he addresses in that paper are regularly used to suppress findings that go against dogma.
The worst other example that I can think of is rape, where the commonly used study methodology excludes the way in which women normally rape men. Then the fact that very few women penetrate men with their penis is used to conclude that rape of men by women almost never happens.
Of course, in both of these cases, it is actually gender symmetry in behavior, rather than asymmetry that violates the dogma about how men and women are socialized.
So the earlier claim is incorrect in that findings of gender differences are not suppressed across the board. Instead, it is typically the studies that either suggest that there is a biological basis to gender differences or studies that are inconsistent with a certain narrative (like that men are very strongly encultured to act in certain negative ways, while women are not).
“Things that can be disproven in under a minute” and “things that are conspiracy theories as the term is commonly used” are two different categories with surprisingly little overlap. Please don’t misappropriate terminology just because you think its emotional valence eliminates the need for you to actually argue your case. Which wouldn’t even be necessary if you really could argue your case conclusively in under a minute.
@Aapje
Invalid or corrupted file [the strauss pdf] does it have a title?
Weird, the link works for me. Try this (you don’t need to download, just scroll down and you should be able to read it).
brmic:
I’m specifically answering David’s comment. I’m saying that if scientists are known to routinely suppress findings whose political implications they dislike, then laymen will have a good reason for not trusting the scientific consensus in a lot of areas, because they’ll know there’s a big file drawer full of true but unpublished results that are never seen[1]. I am not claiming this is happening now in psychology, I’m saying it’s a consequence of a widespread commitment among scientists in some field to suppress politically uncomfortable results.
My guess is that there is some of this happening in most fields, for both CW type politics reasons and probably more often for smaller-scale academic/office politics. I suspect it happens more in some fields than others, and that this is one consequence of the extreme ideological imbalance in some fields. And I think we need less of it, not more.
[1] Honestly, the bigger practical problem is people fooling themselves in both directions by misusing statistical tools they don’t understand very well.
I’m sorry, no, you were making the claim, that ‘everyone knows’ this (specific thing) is happening. It’s neither happening nor does everyone ‘know’ this false thing to be true. Verify for yourself and update.
@albatross11
I think that this is part of a larger issue, where displeasing findings have far less chance to be published. Ideological biases are not the only biases that make certain findings displeasing.
A well known bias is to ‘significant’ findings, where studies that fail to show evidence for their hypothesis have much more trouble getting published.
Another is that fields often have hypes, where research on a certain topic and/or with a certain finding for a certain topic have way more chance to be published.
—
Researchers also aren’t immune to incentives, which means that they are often not going to accept that their research doesn’t result in a (more prominent) publication. So they will often frame their findings in a way that is more pleasing to others (sometimes even to the extent that their findings are opposite to their conclusions), do p-hacking or other tricks to get a more desirable ‘finding,’ or simply not do some research in the first place because they anticipate that it will harm their career.
brmic:
I’ve gone back and reread my comment, and I agree it’s unclear, though I think it’s not all that hard to figure out what I’m trying to say.
Anyway, to clarify, my claim is this:
IF it becomes widely known or believed that researchers in some field routinely suppress results whose political implications they dislike, THEN outsiders will rightly start discounting results from that field, because they will correctly see that some kinds of results won’t show up from that field regardless of whether there is evidence of them.
Similarly, IF it becomes widely known or believed that scientists in general routinely suppress results whose political implications they dislike, THEN the general public will correctly have less confidence in scientific consensus.
The question assumes an unrealistically optimistic view of science that renders it the equivalent of ‘surely you would eat a baby to save all of humanity’.
In each case we assume the scientist has correct information which is unlikely to be the case in the real world. In each case we also assume the options are merely to publish or not to publish, which is not true of the real world.
To make this more concrete, each researcher if troubled by the implications of their results could (a) enter into an adversarial collaboration or (b) work out the extent and limits of the effect they found before publication, i.e. provide effect size estimates, circumstances under which the effect exists/ceases etc. or (c) actually take the limitations section of their work seriously and describe exactly and in detail which prerequisite assumptions need to be true and what their falsity would do to the results.
If we get to assume such scientists and such states of theory and such states of experimentation and anlysis, then sure, publish. But under real world circumstances, where the whole edifice is held together by duct tape and motivated by publish-or-perish I’m leaning towards not publishing. Because if the scientist can’t be sure their statements are correct, they’re in essence supplying weak arguments for bad real world outcomes.
brmic:
ISTM that your answer breaks down as soon as someone else wants to build on your work.
Consider stereotype threat–the idea that test scores are depressed among groups that stereotypically do badly on them when they know about the stereotype, and that effect is strengthened when they are reminded of the stereotype. Lots of people were pretty invested in that idea. You can imagine some scientists not publishing evidence that showed it was wrong. But as best I can tell, it doesn’t hold up to replication, so it’s probably not a real effect.
What harm was done there? None, unless you think the performance gap in education is something worth addressing. But if you do, surely it should upset you that substantial resources were being expended on a nonsense theory, and the idea that there were maybe scientists who could have killed that nonsense theory earlier but didn’t for fear of empowering the muggle realists should upset you still more.
As a scientist as long as you don’t go on victory laps and play shit up in the media, I’m pretty sure you can rest safely knowing the odds anyone is going to make decisions based upon your paper are very, very low.
I feel like I’m reading accounts from some sort of parallel universe whenever people claim that what scientists write in scientific journals has serious repercussions on political outcomes. The scientific literature can be cherry picked to use as a bludgeon for almost any point of view you can think of. To an excellent approximation, no one outside the field and especially with respect to politics is going to go to all the boring work of reading the literature itself to figure out if you cherry picked all your evidence.
Some scientists getting filled with the righteousness of their cause or seeing an opportunity for more funding then wandering down a dead end way past the reasonable point seems like a more common failure and worse in aggregate.
Probably more damaging problems in aggregate are chasing fads or failing to document work as well as ideal. Although solutions to encourage people to behave a little better are either nonobvious or difficult to get going. I think documentation and replication is improving in some fields over time though. I’m trying to improve over time myself.
What is your view of my first example? My impression is that the paper by Card and Krueger significantly increased the chance for increases in minimum wage laws. Prior to that, proponents had to either bite the bullet and recognize that they were trading off higher wages for some poor people against unemployment for others, or simply ignore the pretty uniform view of the relevant scientific field—Krugman, for example, back when he was an academic economist rather than a public intellectual, said the same things about minimum wage as the rest of us.
But once the paper by Card and Krueger came out, a politician could take the position that this was simply an open question in the field, and he preferred to accept one side over the other.
Obviously, even before Card and Krueger, there were minimum wage laws, but I think they were lower than they would have been absent the negative view of economists.
I suspect that it had little influence in reality. It was just cherry-picked for convenience. Tons of cities have rent control, tons of countries have tariffs, etc. Almost all economists agree those are bad, but we get those anyways.
No idea how accurate this chart is but the inflation adjusted minimum wage looks like it had an initial spike and a hump in the middle long before Card and Krueger, while the unadjusted minimum wage looks a lot like if you carved an exponential function into steps which is vaguely what I would expect if the same real minimum wage was popular enough to keep becoming policy.
What is your view about the effect of Mann’s hockey stick article? Did it increase political pressure to do things related to global warming or would the same amount of those things have happened anyway?
Similar thoughts.
Very little serious action is taken with respect to global warming despite lots of talk. However, corn ethanol is (was?) subsidized. Of course, corn has been subsidized for a while in the U.S.
Maybe not Mann’s paper on its own but the field altogether probably had some effect on the exact distribution of subsidies. But I’m not sure the net difference is super significant if you aren’t one of the groups who managed some regulatory capture.
There hasn’t been a big effect in the U.S. yet–the push for converting corn into alcohol is probably the biggest and worst. But I gather that a lot of European countries are bearing large costs in order to do things justified has holding down CO2 production.
I had a professor in grad school with a colleague who set out to prove that the russian policy of collective punishment was an ineffective way of counteracting terrorism. He proved the opposite, and decided not to publish. I disagreed strongly with that decision. True knowledge should be treated as good unless proven otherwise, and knowing that an unconscionable method works is preferable to a false belief that it must not because it’s unconscionable, if only in that it will help in the devising of more conscionable methods.
I’d say publish – unless doing so is likely to result in poor outcomes for the researcher, personally. Not everyone wants to be a martyr for science, after all.
Let’s consider what declining to publish implies. Fundamentally, I can see two (not mutually exclusive) interpretations:
1. You don’t trust your science
In other words: you don’t think your research shows what you claim it shows. If that were the case, you should’ve decided not to publish long before the matter of politics came up.
But wait! There’s more!
If you’re declining to publish a result that you justifiably (by your research) believe is true, out of “consideration for the common good” you are presuming to be able to predict the effects of publishing your research on politics/society/etc. Now, I’m reasonably confident that such predictions aren’t based on any kind of research, let alone anything as rigorous as something that could reasonably considered a publishable paper, but instead the researcher’s personal hunch or commonly-held prejudices.
Declining to publish in such circumstances is much like saying: “I believe this to be true, but I guess that it would be bad if other people found out.”
In other words: you don’t trust your science.
2. You’re not doing science, but politics
Researchers are human, so it’s understandable that they’ll have human concerns. Politics happens to be a pretty powerful concern.
The conention that humans are rationalizing, rather than rational, comes up around these parts often enough. “The science is settled” is a powerful rationalization in this day and age – mostly because “God says so” just doesn’t have the grassroots support it used to. Naturally, “unsettling” settled science is exactly the wrong thing politicians (here: anyone interested in doing politics) want – and exactly the thing scientists should be doing.
If you aren’t rocking a boat that needs rocking (meaning: you aren’t publishing results that show something we believe true may be false) because you’re worried about the political issues, you’re not doing science, but politics.
Faza:
I don’t think your conclusion at the end of 1 is right. Consider the case where I know how to build a world-destroying bomb in your garage with an hour’s work and $100 worth of supplies. If I refrain from publishing that result, that doesn’t suggest a lack of confidence in my result or my field, it suggests a lack of confidence in the sanity and decency of the worst person on Earth who can come up with $100 and a garage.
A way to help you decide is to imagine you’re playing a Newcomb-like game: the way you go is the way many others will go as well, simply because you’re similar enough.
If you publish, you have a world where a lot of dangerous information (at least to this particular level of danger, and likely a bit more) is public.
If you don’t, you have a world where a lot of dangerous information (at least to this particular level of danger, and likely a bit less) is suppressed.
Which world you want to live in?
Note: neither world will have “make anthrax in your kitchen” recipes on the internet, or at least you can’t influence that. You’re deciding on roughly the level of danger you’re dealing with.
Thanks to everyone for comments.
My view that you should publish is in part based on the idea of the division of labor. David Card is an expert on labor economics, not on lots of other things relevant to whether minimum wages are a good thing. Similarly for the other two cases. Better to contribute accurate information about the part of the problem you are expert on and leave it to others to use that information and other information to decide what to do.
For my examples, I thought in the first case publishing did net damage, in the final case and probably the second choosing not to publish did net damage. But that depends on my particular view of that issue, and other reasonable people might see it differently. But in all cases, publishing at least improves the information other people have to work with, so I think the right general rule is to publish. And for my set of examples, in my view, everyone publishing is better than everyone not publishing.
There might, of course, be exceptions in sufficiently extreme cases–research demonstrating a way in which anyone who wants to can wipe out the human race with fifteen dollars worth of ingredients and half an hour mixing them in his basement.
So, here’s an interesting wrinkle on this question: how does this relate to what you decide to work on?
I don’t like the idea of scientists suppressing results of research because they don’t like the political implications. But I don’t object at all to scientists deciding not to work in areas where they think their work will make the world a worse place. There’s stuff in my field I won’t work on (key escrow and related stuff, say) because I don’t want to help bad things along in the world. I’m not sure this is entirely internally consistent….
Another wrinkle that’s interesting is *other people* trying to enforce suppression of results or not working in certain areas. We’ve discussed some of that before.
It occurs to me that there may be an important difference between working in an area in the sense of figuring out how to do things, essentially engineering, and in the sense of discovering what is true. I was thinking about the second category, but a lot of real world choices involved the first–should you work on developing a better atomic bomb, or biological warfare agent, or … .
Why does anyone buy negative earning bonds?
I get it that cash also yields negative if there is inflation, and that bonds are safer than stocks, but why bother exchanging a liquid negative yielding asset (cash) for a slightly less liquid one?
Personally, if I can’t access the stock market and interest rates become negative, I would start holding cash under the matress.
https://www.ft.com/content/312f0a8c-0094-11e6-ac98-3c15a1aa2e62
That has a negative return as well, if you price in the chance of theft or loss due to fire.
The negative return can easily be smaller than the negative return of a negative earning bond.
So the answer seems to be, negative rate bonds are bought because insurance companies and pension funds are forced to buy them because of dumb rules made back in the days when bonds where a highly liquid not money-losing enterprise.
And central banks don’t care about profit.
Well, not necessarily dumb rules. It’s obvious why we as a society want insurance companies to have very safe portfolios, but it’s not necessarily in the interest of the insurance company’s managers or stockholders to stick to very safe boring investments.
But why don’t they just keep it in cash? I get that they need liquidity, but why get negative interest bonds, unless there are rules that force you to?
You lose value with inflation, but with negative interest bonds you lose inflation+interest.
By cash do you mean literal stacks of pieces of paper? That’s negative yield too, as you have to pay to count, store, secure, and transport the stacks of bills. Also you probably also have to have a bunch of accounting controls to convince the tax authorities you’re not using your giant pile of cash to launder drug money or something.
I mean a bank account.
And while banks do charge fees for holding cash, brokers also charge fees for holding treasuries.
Right, the bank will charge you, so you’re effectively getting negative interest rates from them. Better to get them directly from the government without adding an extra layer of counterparty risk.
Also, institutional cash balances are not covered by deposit insurance (e.g. in the US the limit is $250K in most cases). So if you keep your cash at a bank, you are at risk if the bank defaults – and very few commercial banks have an AAA rating (most aim for AA or even A+ at best, because it’s not efficient for them to hold enough capital to earn an AAA rating), whereas plenty of corporate bonds do. So a negative-yielding bond may still be better when pricing in counterparty risk.
“If you put your money in a mattress, you have a >1% chance per year of losing the whole stash; an AAA bond at -1%/year interest is a better investment” is neither dumb nor a rule. Neither is “The cost of a vault and security system capable of securing $X against the sort of thieves a stash of $X cash money will attract is typically $0.05X; the -1%/year bond is a better investment if you expect the market to recover in less than five years”.
In some cases these objectively wise behaviors are reinforced by official rules, and some of those rules may be dumb. The underlying behavior is still wise in many cases.
The people that’re buying negative interest bonds don’t have a mattress that’s big enough.
That’s a flippant answer, but it’s basically the correct one. At a certain level, having a giant pile of cash lying around becomes a liability. If it’s physical cash, or gold or jewels or something, then it can get stolen or destroyed, and preventing that costs money. If it’s an account in a bank somewhere, then you’re exposed to that bank’s fortunes — if it’s a relatively small deposit, then you’re covered by FDIC or foreign equivalents, but in the US that only goes up to $250,000 (per account, with some awkward edge cases). Either way you’re exposed to inflation. So if you really need a hedge, and you don’t expect to be doing anything with the money for a while, and especially if it’s an awkwardly large amount of money, then it can make sense to park it in instruments with the full faith and credit of the government of wherever behind them, even if they’re predictably going to lose you (a small amount of) money.
OK, the point about the FDIC makes a lot of sense.
But owning bonds also costs money. Unless they have them in paper or something, they still need a brokerage to keep them. And they usually charge money for managing them. I have heard that most brokerages need to keep their client’s assets separate from their own for bankruptcy. Does that mean that assets held in a brokerage account are safe from the broker’s future (even if you will need to spend some time in litigation)?
I believe so. It’s not something I’ve ever needed to look into in detail, though.
In the worst case, it costs a lot less to buy a safe that can securely store a few dozen bond certificates than a vault that can hold a few million dollars in cash.
Does that mean that assets held in a brokerage account are safe from the broker’s future
Not a brokerage lawyer, or even a broker, but, in general, brokerages hold all their clients’ money in separate accounts from their own. When I have $2000 in the bank, I have a $2000 claim against the assets of the bank, where everything is all mixed together, and it might take years or decades to wind down all the various positions the bank holds to ultimately clear the books. When I have 2000 shares of GOOG at a brokerage, the brokerage holds those 2000 shares of GOOG, and they aren’t part of any bankruptcy of the brokerage.
US bonds are even easier to manage. Go to TreasuryDirect.gov and USG will manage them for you.
For (most) bonds, the common method is to hold them in “street name” at the brokerage. You ask to buy twenty of XYZcorp’s latest $500 bond issue and send the broker check for $10,020, some other customer wants to buy thirty, a third customer wants fifty, so the broker pools all your money and buys a hundred bonds in its own name. It then keeps those bonds in its own name, but also keeps a ledger of who bought how many. If you decide to sell or redeem the bonds, the brokerage picks twenty random bonds, sells/redeems those and sends you the money, and updates the ledger accordingly.
But if you like, and for an extra fee, you can have them put your name on twenty specific bonds and even send you twenty physical pieces of paper to put in your safe. Also, it doesn’t matter if your safe is robbed – what really matters is that XYZcorp’s ledger lists either “[your name], twenty bonds of such-and-such issue”, or “[brokerage name], 100 bonds”. If you sheepishly explain that you lost the paper, then for another fee and some annoyance they’ll send you replacements. If the guy who robbed your safe shows up and says “I have these bonds, gimme money”, they’ll respond that you or your broker were supposed to notify them of the transaction and he should sit in that chair while they call you, some lawyers, and maybe a policeman to sort all this out.
So long as XYZcorp’s ledger and (if you’re using the “street name” default) the brokerage’s ledger are intact and accurate, you’ll get either full value on the bonds or a seat ahead of all of XYZcorp’s stockholders when the company’s assets are liquidated in bankruptcy. And those ledgers aren’t physical books, but redundant databases with probably one copy in an office park in Switzerland and another in a former missile silo on Montana.
If XYZcorp is AAA or AA+ rated, this is going to be very safe, and using a reputable brokerage adds very little risk. The transaction costs are small, so using a broker for a simple buy-hold-sell of a known bond will have very low fees.
If I do a search and find my terms in the Google preview of a wordpress article, but then when I open the actual link I find out the owner deleted the blog, and there’s no archive of it either, then where is the preview being stored and is the full article still in existence somewhere that is possible to access?
The preview is stored at Google.
Google used to give access to their archived copy of the article, but the copyright-maximalists, courts, takedowners, and related thugs forced them to stop.
There may still be a copy at archive.org.
Sometimes (used to be always) on the Google search results there will be a menu indicator to the right of the URL, one of whose options will be “cached”. You can use that option—when it is available—to view the page as Google saw it (with an option to view text-only as well if needed).
In my experience this menu seems more a “Google deciding to give you this feature today” thing than a “this is available for certain links in particular” basis, but I may be wrong on that front.
Ah, that did it. Thanks.
Note that Google’s caches vanish eventually. If you want to save that blog post permanently, save the cache using archive.fo.
Yep. It’s a useful site.
If you think college admissions are messed up, here’s an article on Manhattan preschool admissions. Obviously you’ve got to get your little bundles of joy into the 92nd Street Y’s nursery school, because that gets them the best shot at attending Dalton, and from there, Harvard. Key quote:
This is, of course, completely bonkers. I’m quite critical of standardized testing and college admissions, but at least with transcripts and SAT/ACT scores (or SHSAT/ISEE for younger kids) there’s something to go on. How exactly are these “elite” preschools deciding which 1-year-olds make the cut? The article mentions there’s a lottery to decide who even can submit an application, which I guess makes sense, and demand outstripping supply means tuition is ridiculously high (because we’re a meritocracy!), but the whole thing strikes me as nonsensical.
Of course it’s really all about status games for the parents.
I thought the evidence suggests preschool doesn’t do anything–your kid’s either smart or not.
EDIT: Reading further, it’s credentialism for toddlers. Good lord…
As the friendly neighborhood g denialist, I’d phrase it as your kid’s either precocious or not. But it’s the same deal – a fancypants preschool isn’t going to make the difference whether or not they get into Hunter, and anyway Hunter is explicitly a “gifted and talented” school. I took an unscientific spot-check of some elite private school websites, and only one requires standardized tests for kindergarten applications.
…and now I’m wondering how they decide who gets into kindergarten at these schools. Is it just pure credentialism then?
How can you even have credentialism at this level?
I agree it’s some sort of status game, but I’m still mystified as to the mechanics of it.
The aristocratic primary school will have a strong preference for children from the aristocratic kindergarten. The aristocratic secondary school will have a strong preference for children from the aristocratic primary school. The local Ivy league college will have a strong preference for children from the aristocratic secondary school.
Aristocratic companies have strong preference for children from the aristocratic college.
So key is to get into this track and then not to get kicked out of it.
If that really worked, how does that fit with various regressions that find parental income is only a weak predictor of various forms of success? IIRC IQ does better for a lot of them.
I suppose if there was a rarefied strata at the top that operated this way, but everyone else had to compete you could imagine that outcome. But I kind of doubt that works for long? There’s an awful lot of regression to the mean. The Kennedys and the Bushes may be political dynasties. Rockefellers are still very rich (but much less so than their ancestor). But how many American dynasties of any form have lasted more than a generation or two?
Off the top of my head, income isn’t as good a predictor because:
Not all high-income people send their kids to these types of schools. Some are perfectly happy to have theirs go through the public school system, or a cheaper less “elite” private alternative.
Some lower-income people will make sending their kid to such a school a high priority, and devote significant resources to getting their kids in that track. There may also be scholarships/discounts available for some lower-income people, or a private benefactor, etc.
If we take those two points for granted (that there are low-status people attending high-status schools and vice versa) a weak correlation does not seem surprising.
Chetty finds otherwise, a very strong almost-linear reationship between parental income and child income at age 30.
(but Chetty has privileged access to the data and an agenda, which makes this suspect)
@The Nybbler"Chetty finds otherwise, ..."
Those charts were fascinating, thank you!
@Nybbler
There’s a hell of a lot of regression to the mean in that. And we can’t see the scatter because the graph is binned and meaned.
Even if I fully trusted him, I don’t think the graph doesn’t work with a much different story.
Have these people ever met babies? A one year old may be beginning to display personality traits, but to say they have “interests” is reaaaally stretching it.
Interests: nursing, sleeping, puking, Sartre.
Bad taste. He’ll never get into a good preschool unless he chews on some better philosopher.
“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/maurice-sendak-sent-beautifully-illustrated-letters-to-fans-so-beautiful-a-kid-ate-one.html
They are filtering the parents, not the kids. It goes something like this.
1. The richest and most powerful get their kids in easily.
2. Those people tend to be demanding.
3. The staff don’t want to have to deal with every parent being that demanding.
4. Create a system of hoops where all the parents of ‘marginal’ kids you accept have to do ridiculous things (and pay ridiculous prices) to get in.
5. Those people are now more compliant, and less likely to risk their spot with complaints.
When my son was eight months old we dropped him off one day at a “by-the-hour” daycare type place (essentially a babysitting company) so we could go take in dinner and a movie. The form had lines for “likes and dislikes” so I put “likes: bacon. Dislikes: racism.” How am I supposed to know? He doesn’t even move yet! But he could grow up to be a bacon-hating racist, and boy won’t I like foolish!
It’s just people trying to replicate an aristocracy while also believing that an aristocracy is wrong. So they have to add inefficiency until they have plausible deniability (not in the least to their own conscience).
I don’t think this is necessarily very complicated: on the one end, tuition buys lots of stuff: facilities, qualified staff, reserve staff to cover sickeness and leaves of absence, roating shifts that extend opening hours, materials. On the other end, the application process screens (a) parents who are willing to make an effort and (b) toddlers who more likely to benefit from the available resources. This is certainly a poor diagnostic instrument, but probably better than a lottery.
The consultant is a curiosity, but then again (a) so are lots of ‘life coach’ type occupations and (b) to the extent she keeps track of forms and deadlines it’s presumably just convenient for some people to outsource some of that work.
I’ll steelman this.
Daycare is expensive. The article says that some of these “elite” preschools cost $20K/year, but that doesn’t sound crazy to me; it’s about 1/3 more than a comparable daycare where I live, with a much lower COL, and it’s a bit more than half what it would cost to hire a nanny at minimum wage. (And legal nannies don’t work for minimum wage where I live, to say nothing of NYC). I’m not surprised some of the specific schools named cost more than that, 20K/year for full time childcare in Manhattan sounds like a fantastic deal.
On top of that, it’s competitive. Not in the “we only take the best babies” sense, just in the regular everyday sense that there are a lot of options and everyone wants the best ones. If you go look at 10 daycares, a couple of them will seem sketchy, a couple will be too far from your commute, a couple will have inconvenient hours, and a couple will seem overpriced, leaving you with one or two ideal options, and other people will be following the same calculus, and they only have room for so many kids. So the daycares can be picky – they can raise their prices, they can make the parents jump through hoops to discourage the un-committed, and they can reduce hours. All of these just make the best options (the ones that haven’t yet done those things) more desirable.
Some parents have more money than good daycare options, so they say, how can I spend more to get more? Capitalism to the rescue: daycares open to fill the void. But starting a “nice” daycare is hard. You need to find Manhattan real estate in which to put it that’s close to where parents want the daycare to be. You have to find US citizens, ideally with some credentials in early childhood development, and pay them enough to keep someone from hiring them as a nanny. You have to jump through a bunch of regulatory hoops. And even if the number of daycares doubles, parents will still go look at ten options, pick their best one or two, and try to get in to those.
And to make matters worse, there’s no accurate way to rate a daycare by quality. Is the ideal child-to-teacher ratio need to be under 5? 3? 1? Who knows? Is the Montessori approach better than Waldorf? No idea. So parents have to rely on intuition and gossip and superstition – “Did you hear about Little Feets? They play Vivaldi during naptimes!” and that only exacerbates the problem by artificially narrowing the field of desirable options.
Conclusion: for NYC to have selective and expensive daycares that are selective enough and expensive enough to write an article like this is totally unsurprising, and does not indicate weird or irrational behavior on the part of Manhattan parents.
At some preschools the price is significantly higher for something that isn’t full-day care.
But what I was really getting at is the notion that these preschools are “feeders” for top private K-12 schools, which in turn are feeders for top universities, so you have to start when they’re babies to have a chance. First of all, is that even true? And if it is, it’s unnerving that something so early in life, before the child has any real consciousness or control over anything, and so dependent on random chance has such a big impact later on.
If it actually doesn’t matter later on, then it’s just status games for the brunch crowd.
Yes. Much like on America’s Next Top Model, losers are required to immediately pack their things and move to the New Jersey prestige districts, where they take their chances with the public schools.
Source: live next to one such prestige district, see dejected NYers riding by in real estate agents’ cars all the time.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true, it means all those people think it’s true… which might make it true.
I think something like this works when you have a private school that also runs a preschool–when the preschool kids are looking to start kindergarten, they’re at the top of the list. For magnet schools/selective schools, they usually run on some combination of test, parental hoop-jumping, and (probably) connections.
As best I can tell, cherry-picking is *the* killer app of educational reforms. On one side, maybe you can improve instructional techniques in some tricky and demanding way that slightly boosts you kids’ learning and retention of the class material, and maybe instead of being at the 50th %ile your kids end up averaging in the 55th %ile.
On the other side, you set up your application process so only parents who really care about their kids education manage to get their kids into the system, and then you effectively give the kids an IQ test and only take the kids in the 5% of the distribution. Now, your kids average somewhere around 95th %ile on the standardized tests, and everyone talks about what a great school you are and everyone wants to get their kids into your school.
Selection is so powerful in terms of determining outcomes that it swamps any other kind of educational reform you can do. It’s like trying to discover the laws of physics in the presence of a bunch of Uri Geller type illusionists who keep bending spoons and making coins disappear.
Preschools are typically not “full-time” and therefore are not entirely substitutes for a nanny.
People are so funny. “The best daycare”. If your child doesn’t get stabbed or ingest poison, there’s not much more they can do. If you believe the educational quality of preschool matters, you deserve to be suckered out of tens of thousands of dollars.
Spoken like someone who’s never chosen a daycare.
Why do you think they matter? They’ve done a multitude of studies where they can’t discern any permanent increase in test scores comparing those who went vs those who didn’t. Is there some kind of magical properties that finger painting provides that isn’t showing up?
I suspect that the actual requirements on daycare are pretty minimal (clean, enough staff, staff not abusive, safe environment). But I’ve also chosen daycares and preschools as a parent, and it’s an emotionally fraught decision–you *know* you’re leaving your kid helpless in the clutches of some strangers so you can go to work, and you *know* you don’t have enough information to really know whether this is a good choice or not.
OTOH, my guess is that the super-competitive preschool thing is a status game played by rich people with a high dollar/sense ratio, perhaps with some more rational motives involving networking with other high-power parents.
A family member of mine lives in NYC and got his then-preschool-aged child into a prestigious preschool. I believe the process involved an application, then maybe something else, and then an interview with the family member and child together. The way I heard it, the interview was the decisive step.
I don’t know what exactly the school admins were looking for in the interview — it may have been some combination of the child’s personality and the family member’s personality.
Preschool can be excellent networking for the parents. For those purposes, the high cost of the preschool is an advantage as it keeps the riffraff out – if you can’t drop $35K/year on preschool then you’re not worth getting to know anyway.
This isn’t directly about the Marxism, but there was an argument in the guide to where communists are coming from that seemed very strange to me: when it says “You are not intrinsically smarter than a medieval scholar arguing that the great chain of being validates the divine right of kings.” It seems to be saying that what’s correct is so hard to check that what people say reflects more what’s in their interests than anything objective.
This seems completely wrong. We have two powerful methods for objectively testing what’s correct. No matter how strong your interests are, if the data doesn’t show some effect or if it doesn’t exist in every simple enough consistent math model you come up with, it’s really hard to keep on arguing for it.
I’ve been bothered this kind of epistemological nihilism a lot when talking to people not familiar with subjects whose arguments are grounded in this way, either in data or math. When you’re arguing about something like literature, it might be ok to say that you can’t be sure of anything so you should pay a lot of attention to who’s talking and what their interests are, but this should really not apply to most fields. We are a lot smarter about medieval scholars when talking about physics, so why can’t we also be smarter when talking about economics?
Am I being fair here—is economics actually closer to the physics side of things than the literature side? How important actually is this “everything you hear is what supports the powerful” thing to the entire argument?
Having studied both i’d say economics (outside of 101) is closer to politics than physics. Whenever economists try to make out that economics is a hard subject i immediately assume they are full of it. Economists ultimately answer to politicians, and are usually kept on payrolls to provide justification for an already decided course of action. supply and demand, great stuff. Try to put some numbers to it and you start making assumptions about the market you’re talking about, and whether people will find substitute goods or not, and whether the item in question is a luxury item or a staple, or what have you. The theory makes sense but the assumptions are where politics creep in.
In physics you have the luxury that many of the things you are using can be held constant while you change the part you want to measure. You just can’t do this with economics.
An example of this is that many people outside of the finance industry think the FED is very scientific when setting rates and that they analyse all of this data to come to the “right” decision. They do analyse tons of data but ultimately they are appointed and practically beholden to those who appointed them. It’s like a government sanctioned confidence trick where your job is to keep markets from panicking most of the time.
Was bailing out the banks the right decision? That’s a political debate more than a maths debate. The banks would have gone under, people would of lost their life savings etc, but it would have set an example that bad behaviour is punished instead of bailed out. What matters more to you, well that depends on your values. People will say “throw the bankers in jail!” and others will say if we hadn’t bailed them out the economy would never of recovered. Well we can’t run the opposite scenario to see so we don’t know what would of happened, maybe it would mean we have more responsible institutions now, but at what cost?
Hopefully you see where i’m coming from.
I guess economics is never going to be in even close to as good of a state as physics, but surely there have to be things from the subject where we can do way better with than a medieval scholar? Maybe I’m cheating by moving the bar too low, but I can think of few examples (sorry for the 101ness again though):
First, there’s this story I keep hearing about how beliefs about minimum wages changed. Powerful people definitely wanted low minimum wages. However, once economists figured out enough statistical techniques to mimic controlled experiments and collect good data about their impact, it turned out that the claimed negative effects weren’t really so strong. Economists then stopped arguing against modest minimum wage increases and these gained a lot more political support.
Second, even without data, math models can do a lot to check consistency of arguments. Playing around with supply and demand models quickly shows that when you tune some parameters right, increasing the price of a necessity can paradoxically make people buy more of it while taking an enormous hit to welfare. You should therefore know that if you hear an argument like “making rice more expensive isn’t too bad since people can buy other food instead,” the person making that argument needs to do a little more work.
Again, these are both econ 101 examples, so maybe anything relevant to the original topic is in a worse state. However, I hope that when professional economists are doing something like arguing against communism (or more generally giving any policy prescriptions), they are taking into account which parts of their field are more or less certain.
I do not believe that is the case. It was true for a long time that economic theory implied that the minimum wage reduced employment for low skilled workers–and it still does. The theory does not tell you how strong the effect is, since that depends on the elasticity of the demand for such labor.
Card and Krueger looked at the effect of an eighty cent increase in the minimum wage in one state, comparing what happened to fast food employment there and in adjacent state with no increase, and found no effect. That’s evidence against the theoretical prediction, but very weak evidence. It got a lot of attention because there were a lot of people who didn’t want to believe what conventional economic theory implied.
What “statistical techniques to mimic controlled experiments” were you thinking of other than the Card and Krueger piece? Are there studies giving good evidence of the relevant elasticity?
There is a 2006 interview with David Card, which contains the following:
The Card and Krueger study was the one I had in mind (as explained in a class I took, I definitely have not read the paper). I’m not qualified to judge the literature so I also checked IGM (is this the right place to go to?) and found the following that seemed to relate to modest minimum wage increases. The comments on the answers seem to be consistent with opinions being based on things like Card and Krueger and mostly in favor of the policy (question B) even though stereotypically powerful people would be against it. I could be misinterpreting terribly though.
I think everyone agrees that there’s a point at which increasing the minimum wage would make it more difficult for people to get jobs, people just disagree on where that point is.
Like, raising it to $60 an hour would mean employers would have to quickly find ways to drastically reduce their number of employees if they wanted to stay in business (I imagine many would automate the tasks previously done by humans). But raising it to $15 may or may not have a noticeable effect on hiring rates. Or whether it has an effect might depend on a lot of other conditions.
I’ve heard arguments that raising the minimum wage is ultimately good for companies because they become choosier about who they hire, so they hire higher quality, better qualified people, which helps their business. Which might be true. But in a world without a UBI that’s obviously not good for low-skilled workers.
That assumes that the people running the business don’t know their own interest, since without a minimum wage they could have chosen to be choosier and pay a higher wage. Not impossible, but not the way to bet.
Rather like assuming that some arbitrary imposition on you, say the requirement that you wake up at seven every morning, will benefit you. It could, but the odds are against it.
Pet peeve: If you just talk about “Economics” without even making a distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics, it’s almost impossible to have any real discussion.
My brief stance is…
1. Microeconomics is mostly hard science, and has given us many truly deep and valuable insights.
2. Macroeconomics may be impossible as a science since the only object of study – The Economy – is sentient, aware of macroeconomics, and adapts to change as new findings are published. On top of that it is deeply politicised. Much of the critique of “economics” assumes this is the only economics.
Your second point reminds me of Scott’s post about anti-inductive systems. I wonder if the study of any anti-inductive system (which arguably includes a lot of human interaction) can truly be called science. The scientific method requires inductive reasoning, so it seems like attempting to apply it to anti-inductive systems will inevitably fail.
This is a really interesting insight! It seems it should be possible to study an anti-inductive system, though, as long as you don’t actually interact with it? (Huzzah for unapplied truths!)
What other anti-inductive systems are there? People? What else?
Many (though not all) metagames. It’s usually possible to attack the “best” strategy, which means it will often cease to be the best.
You can’t expect economics to tell you how to value your tradeoffs anymore than you can expect physics or engineering to do so. What you can expect from economics, at best, is that it lets you know what your policy tradeoffs are. Economists aren’t going to be able to tell you whether to bail out your banks, but they should be able to inform you somewhat on what tradeoffs you’re accepting if you do/don’t bail out your banks.
It doesn’t matter. Same principle applies to physics also. No relativism or nihilism is needed here, just a simple observation that you are (necessarily) stuck in a particular paradigm.
Economics are concerned with society, and it’s impossible to experimentally derive a different paradigm without irreversibly altering said society. This means we should be careful, yes, but the current paradigm is full of holes and sooner or later a change is going to be necessary. That the current paradigm supports the currently powerful gives us an important clue about the direction this change should take.
This statement seems too strong, to me–it implies that we can know nothing about macroeconomics. I think a more defensible claim is that we should not put too much faith in the pronouncements of macroeconomic models.
I mean, someone confidently saying what the economy will do next year is full of shit (and probably knows it), regardless of their background. But we can make some pretty solid statements about macroeconomics. For example, hyperinflation is really, really bad and we should avoid it at just about all costs–that’s a macroeconomics claim, but I think it’s a very good guide to what policies we should and shouldn’t pursue. Deciding to make us all rich by running the printing presses full tilt and covering the world with $100 bills isn’t going to work out very well.
I’m not sure it is.
“Macroeconomics” sounds as though it is about big things, but the world wheat market is a problem in price theory, aka microeconomics. I think the natural division is not big vs small, it’s disequilibrium economics vs equilibrium economics.
Hyperinflation can be described in an equilibrium framework, along with many of its effects—it’s just a rapid decrease in the market value of money. Some other effects probably require an analysis of disequilibrium—which, unfortunately, we understand much less well.
I reported this comment by mistake.
I feel like you’re taking this argument in the wrong direction. Look at it again:
The argument ISN’T that we don’t have the capacity to discern truths that wouldn’t have been possible for the medieval scholar to comprehend. That’s clearly false, as you mention we’ve got a thousand years of advancements behind us that the scholar wouldn’t have had access to. The argument is instead making two points:
1. The fundamental capacity of you and that scholar are probably pretty equivelent. Both given the same education and access to information, you’d likely arrive at similiar conclusions, or at least be operating within the same framework.
2. Relying here on the sentence immidiately following the one you mentioned, history shines a harsh light on every time period. If at every point in the past humanity engaged in practices that we today find to be at best ridiculous and at worst horrendous, why would we think our current time period is any different? Just like we now think the scholar’s argument was innane, some core tennants of our current paradigm will likely be revealed to be crazy.
For technical/scientific progress, it’s clear that we’re really seeing progress. I mean, computers and rockets and antibiotics and cars work, we can build them, and nobody in the middle ages could.
For philosophical/religious/moral progress, it’s not clear that we’re really seeing progress or even what progress means. The arc of history bends toward our present moral consensus, regardless of what that consensus is or whether it is in any sense better than any older moral consensus. In some alternate universe where we still have slavery but stopped eating meat for moral reasons, the arc of history bends in that direction, too. We can see that meat eating became less and less acceptable before it was finally banned, whereas there were and are some weirdo activist groups campaigning against us taking up the white man’s burden and benevolently managing the lives of the lesser races in ways that just happens to get our cotton picked cheaply, but of course those silly activists never managed to get anywhere. And in some other timeline, the True Faith of Islam has taken over the whole world, and we can see the arc of history bending toward our current enlightened understandings of the Prophet’s teachings (PBUH) and the proper role of sharia law in society.
May I propose the name: “Anthropic Moral Principle”?
This is either trivially true and meaningless or false, depending on how you set the parameters. There are far more people and far more people who can afford to further intellectual pursuits, and its not about coming up with an idea, writing it down and showing it around. Its about if your idea can stand up against the other ideas that are out there being tried, the sheer volume difference is a qualitative difference in both the quality of the ideas being generated and the quality of the issues that need to be addressed.
Yeah. Maybe I am focusing too much on the diving kings example but the next sentence is:
“If those ideas favour one set of interests over another, the odds are that they will be powerful interests.” That section occurs after discussions about how “the dominant ideas will disproportionately reflect the interests of the powerful.”
IMO the author didn’t choose a medieval economic theory like mercantalism that has been discredited. Instead it was the political system. Regardless, he is not saying those ideas are correct because the powerful push them-he is saying they are “dominant.”
The idea IMO is that author feels the divine right of kings was a post-hoc rationalization for a world where the Church and feudal landowners were very powerful and wealthy. Important stakeholders pushed those ideas to legitimize a system where they were on top.
As others have pointed out its hard to argue we have moral progress or knowledge. This is a CW free thread but if we managed to get someone from one of the Gulf Monarchies or Saudi Arabia, states where powerful, influential, and rich sectors of the society have decided a form of monarchy was the best could we really disprove their system? Is there any data point you could cite to show that the House of Saud shouldn’t control, what, a trillion dollar fortune? And before we laugh at the Saudi citizens as the fargroup maybe its worth mentioning that IIRC the King of Spain wielded a huge amount of power in the late 70s and early 80s.
Now all that seems insane but the author of “seeing like a communist” would argue its because the dominant ideology being pushed by the powerful isn’t monarchism.
It’s true that there are beliefs many modern people have about society that will seem outdated and quaint in the future due to new information, so we should try not to take anything for granted even if it seems really obvious at face value. I don’t disagree with that, but I didn’t find that point very relevant to a critique of capitalism specifically, because that point could be made about literally anything.
I can just as easily imagine an Objectivist critique of altruism (or a neo-reactionary critique of democracy, or a feminist critique of patriarchy, or an MRA critique of feminism, etc. etc.) starting out with, “You are not intrinsically smarter than a medieval scholar arguing that the great chain of being validates the divine right of kings. Don’t think you can’t be duped by ideas that will one day seem laughable.”
And regardless of what they’re attached to, statements of that nature always strike me as pompous and not very useful in a philosophical debate. It gives the impression that the speaker believes that this notion–that human thought processes are flawed and tend to be influenced by time period and circumstances–is something that has never occurred to their intellectual opponents, and that once they realize that they might be wrong about some things, their minds will be totally blown.
Yes, thanks, I’ve already considered the idea that I might be wrong about some things. Believe it or not, that’s not very revolutionary.
I’m also struck by how, in this particular case, the author seems to assume that a critique of capitalism is automatically a defense of communism. And that seems to be the case for a lot of communist arguments in general. There’s a whole lot of talk about why capitalism is bad but very little talk about why communism is good or why it would work better. It’s as if those are the only two systems the person can imagine.
Maybe in the future society will evolve to a post-capitalist form and become something we can’t even imagine. Maybe automation will make work redundant, maybe we’ll all transcend our fleshy human forms and become part of an immortal internet, whatever. Such a future wouldn’t necessarily be “communist,” it would just be something other than capitalist, or the current incarnation of capitalism.
Indeed, the 2019 USA version of representative democracy + capitalism doesn’t even look much like the 1880 USA version of representative democracy + capitalism.
I’d draw another analogy: economics is rather like the art of war.
Of course it’s possible to be better or worse at war, or to gain knowledge about how to wage war. But all knowledge is relative to the material conditions under which war is waged. When those material conditions change, big chunks of the knowledge go obsolete. And we’re hard-pressed to predict in advance what’s going to change and what obsolescences it will cause.
Reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War really gave me a feeling for this. My experience reading the book was that it freely intermingled “timeless” remarks, suggestions based on durable social conditions which no longer apply, such as advice about how to divide plunder among the troops, and specific suggestions about, for example, the daily cost in silver about fielding an army of a specified number of chariots.
For the modern reader, there’s stuff that still applies, stuff that applied for a long time but has changed (often since the introduction of the modern national army and its theory of discipline, pay, supply, etc.), and stuff that was probably out of date within the decade or century of publication.
But from Sun Tzu’s perspective, all of these were facts! He doesn’t distinguish between them because he couldn’t. How could he have predicted the myriad social, political, and technological changes? How could he have modified a sentence like “do not attack an army uphill” with a clause like “without recourse to heavy artillery or close air support”?
I think economics is like this. The modern discipline of economics describes modern society. It does so well; it could do so better. But specific results in economics have a lot less to say about other societies. General principles may be relevant, but it can be hard to deduce which principles are general and which ones are not.
So when an economist says “here are some truths about how human societies can possibly be organized”, the communist says “your conclusions are based on observations of present capitalist societies. There’s no reason to assume that all or any of them apply to future societies with different material conditions and modes of production.”
Now, putting on my personal hat for a minute, I find the communist rebuttal pretty persuasive. The trick, of course, lies in making predictions and not just antipredictions about future economies, and that’s where Marx I think goes off the rails.
I don’t remember Sun Tzu, but I recently read Clausewitz, and he is very organized. He puts the timeless generalities first and the specifics last. Part of this is that he’s writing about how Napoleon changed war, which is a big reminder that some things aren’t timeless. But I think a lot of the organization was with analogy with other fields. Advice abstract enough to apply across fields is probably more lasting.
Except they are not. Going back to Adam Smith, economists have been interested in a wide variety of societies, including some in the distant past.
Economics starts with a set of logical arguments applicable to all human societies (and, arguably, other species as well), that suggest certain conclusions. Getting useful conclusions usually depends on some simplifying assumptions. We then tune the theory by trying to test those conclusions against real world evidence and modifying our conclusions, sometimes even revising the underlying theory, accordingly.
The result will be better tuned to the sorts of societies we know a lot about, but tuned to some degree to other societies–there are communes out there to be observed, we have historical and anthropological evidence on societies very different from ours, and there is recent, even contemporary, evidence on communist societies (in the conventional sense of “dictatorship of the proletariat” systems such as the Soviet Union).
Indeed, it seems to me that when we try to imagine what an entirely alien society might look like, economics and game theory are probably the best tools to work out what’s possible.
Does anyone have a good experience around ERP software? The company I work for has implemented it over the past year (in my role I don’t have to deal with it much, but from co-workers who do, I understand that this list of disadvantages from Wikipedia rings true) and when I’ve mentioned the roll-out while shooting the breeze with customers or suppliers, “condolences” has been a common response.
I understand that in theory it should make business processes more legible to the executives, but in practice the main effect seems to be slowing down order processing for things that never would have been an issue under the old, manual (and supposedly less-efficient) way of doing things.
The recent discussion about Inventing the Future crystallized some ideas around this for me. I’m very sceptical that complete automation is possible. Reality is fractally complex. Any map will have cases where it doesn’t fully capture the territory—but automation must always work from a map. Even a super-intelligent AI will have to work from an internal model that necessarily glosses over some external details (unless it expands to fill all of reality so that the map is the territory). In contrast, discrete actors are able to deal with edge cases (related to their normal roles, not generally) because it is possible to have a very accurate local map.
The struggles that seem to be common with ERP systems illustrate that individuals with metis for their local tasks can be more efficient than a centralized, generalized system. I’d like to assign The Fatal Conceit as remedial reading for C-suites across America.
Now imagine trying to manage a national economy or a planetary economy with an ERP/CRM system, and not just for a single business’s processes, but for every business unit everywhere all at once, and not just for business processes, but right down the household and personal level, on every household and on every person, everyone everywhere.
Even if this could work (and it can’t), and even if it could be implemented (and it can’t), and even if it could be imposed (and it can’t), why would anybody think it’s *desirable*?!
What group/person is supposed to be advocating this?
“Soviets with Computers”.
“Good” experiences? No, not really.
If I hear “increase visibility” one more time…(thankfully now I’m at a much smaller company with no desire/apparent need for ERP).
I wonder how much of the pain caused by an ERP system is the moving, rather than the using. Typically, an ERP system is adopted by a substantial company that already has its own ways of doing things. And rethinking how to do everything in a way amenable to computerization is pretty painful. Perhaps it would have been easier if the company had grown up with an ERP and at each stage of its growth, as it faced new challenges, it had preferentially adopted one of the ways of doing things that the ERP system already supported.
That is almost certainly a huge part of it, but another issue is that ERPs are a poor fit for businesses that do not have more or less “cookie cutter” transactions. In other words, never selling the same thing twice (a high degree of customization). This can be managed, but requires a much more flexible ERP (which costs more to implement/maintain and may be more prone to allowing human error at various stages).
Right, my exposure is definitely in the latter category. In the division of the company I’m in all of our projects are one-offs (custom designs being built in different locations).
No, a lot of ERPs require novel procedures to track stuff that no one has really thought about tracking before, which introduces all sorts of new complications. It also puts in hard rules on certain types of transactions, which makes correcting issues a lot less easy to do. For instance, as an accountant, I cannot journal materials to accounts, it must be performed via material transaction, which must be done by someone with correct user privileges, and if you are the only one that has them and I just asked you to do it for the last 3 months and you ignored me, you must come in on December 28th and perform the correct materials transactions so we can close out our books for the year.
That does kind of sound like what johan_larson was saying to me…ideally that material transaction should have been required to take place before whatever was done with the material actually happened…that is a process flow issue not an ERP issue (and having only one person with privileges to enter certain transactions is probably another issue).
Maybe it should be, but it isn’t.
So my father-in-law installed ERPs for decades at all sorts of firms. The typical firm that does not have ERP operates something like this, using a real example.
1. Company makes turnstiles and actually makes 80% of the turnstiles in the US (industry changed)
2. At the beginning of the week, decide how many turnstiles you want to make.
3. Make turnstiles using raw ingredients.
4. Finish making turnstiles at the end of the week.
5. Record total production and total consumptions.
6. Boom, that’s how much a turnstile costs.
This is completely unacceptable for any high-performing business. The only visibility they have at an extremely high level is the amount of stuff they consumed in an entire week for an entire week’s worth of business. They have no ability to schedule, they have little inventory control, if they have a quality defect they cannot trace it to a shift, and they can’t tell why they are losing money or if they even ARE losing money until the end of the week when they close out reports, and that’s only if they are actually doing cycle counts correctly.
That also means if they are developing new products, they cannot tell you how much the new product costs. Say I make a new turnstile that has 20% more material, is 6 inches shorter, and might actually take 10% less time to make. How much does this cost? you have no idea, because it is comingled with everything else. You might naively assume that you can make some assumptions, like, you increased your volume by 10% and your costs increased by 15%, so this product is actually more expensive than your existing portfolio, but that’s a moronic assumption, because it assumes all else is equal, but line performance can change dramatically, and, again, who the fuck knows what’s going on with your cycle counts that dramatically change inventory and require you to restate prior period financials.
Unfortunately, a lot of managers don’t have an idea of what’s going on, certainly not enough to really gauge why or how they are losing money, because you can’t just intuit detail to that level. High level executives will have absolutely no idea.
I’m…not sure how that ties in with my comment? I agree that is the problem solved by ERPs if they are used correctly, my comment was about ERPs that are not being used correctly (and stating that this is a usage problem, not an ERP problem).
@acymetric
I mean, ideally that’s the order in which things should happen, but they already didn’t happen that way, and now it’s a trial to fix it; with people enforcing a protocol, they have the flexibility to deviate from it, scrawl a note in the margins of whatever form, and initial it. A computer enforces it with no thought.
In its worst form, the lower level employees will populate the system with bullshit just to make it shut up so they can get on with their actual jobs (either putting it in “correctly” is a trial that eats up a bunch of time, or they just don’t have the information and have to put lies or they can’t move on to the next screen). Dr. Grumpy posts weird things he finds in medical records, and I’ve often wondered if those happen because the electronic records system provides a question that must be answered or it won’t let you save the page, so the doctor quickly just fills those in with the default by rote keyboard strokes and types the real answer into free text fields; the output then reads as conflicting nonsense because it turns the checkbox input into a full explanatory sentence.
Medicine is a great example of something I mentioned a little upthread (that some businesses/industries are too complicated to design an effective ERP that covers all cases without making it either massive in cost/scale or totally unusable, or both).
In the specific example I was responding to (which sounds more or less like simply issuing materials used for a project in the system), that sounds more like someone (or multiple someones) just didn’t do their job when they should have done it and then kept declining to do it after the fact until the last minute despite multiple requests/reminders, which is a usage issue.
There’s lots of “mandatory” in medical software, and the lower down you go the less flexibility anybody will give you. I’m in EMS. For cause of injury I have “Fall inside an occupied spacecraft” but no “fell from the bed of a pickup truck”. Guess which one I’m most likely to use …
Do you assign zero probability to the idea that a superintelligence might be able to read human minds from a distance, and/or observe everything that happens on Earth? In either case, it would have at least as accurate a local map of every human’s economic and work life, such as they may be, as those humans.
I think some futurists speculate that these things are plausible. Also, if it didn’t have such ability to invade human privacy, the efficiency with which a superintelligence would process the data it does have might allow it to form highly accurate and detailed theories about things it doesn’t directly observe.
Of course, plenty of other people are skeptical of how super- a superintelligent AI would be, or of the very notion. I’m just saying that there are people who would totally agree with you about the enduring importance of distributed knowledge in human society, but not if you bring superintelligence into the conversation.
Do you assign zero probability to the idea that a superintelligence might be able to read human minds from a distance, and/or observe everything that happens on Earth?
I do.
The only way that this is even remotely plausible is if we are living in a synthetic simulation, and that intelligence has full read access to the underlying sim state.
I agree with Mark Atwood, and I’d also add that to observe everything in real-time the superintelligence would have to be present everywhere. A map can be completely accurate if it’s co-extant with the territory but there would be a lot else to worry about in that scenario.
I do. Which one? Microsoft Dynamics got pretty good, I have seen projects even with zero configuration, just load the data and go work out well. That happens when opening a new subsidiary somewhere. But we are talking about like 4 user projects.
Something is telling me you must be working at a very large business, because from the small business perspective there is no such thing as not using ERP. If you have invoicing, inventory, accounting, purchasing in one software, that is ERP and why use different ones. So if you think there is such a thing possibly at all as not using ERP, that must be a very large company.
Which sounds like SAP. Is it? Unfortunately I don’t have much experience with large businesses. For me a large business has always been something sort of a perversion.
So when you are saying it makes business processes more legible to executives: more legible than what? What is the alternative to ERP? In my (rather extensive) experience with small business ERP it is more about saving work than about legibility.
Suppose the company is a shoes wholesaler to retailers, OK? So one day Uncle Joe who owns a shoe store in Podunk phones in and gives an order for 30 pairs of shoes. Someone takes the order and records the important data into a sales order: item number, quantity, price agreed, shipment date, payment date. Then presses a button and sends an order confirmation to the customer. Then presses another button and the boys in the warehouse get a picking list of what to ship. Presses another button and there is a delivery note. Presses another button and it is an invoice. Presses another button and the invoice is automatically booked into the accounts receivable, into the G/L, into whatever tax there is, sales or VAT, the stock level is reduced and the stock value is FIFO-ed out into a COGS account. This is what ERP from a small business perspective is. What is the alternative? Doing all this manually? No point.
As for legibility, sure there are reports. Boy I programmed so many of them. But I find them a little pointless in many cases. Like boss telling me something is wrong, we never have profits more than 20%, why does this product show 45% ? True it was an issue, don’t remember if bug or user. But if he knows that so accurately, why does he need the report? 🙂 OK OK I know, because little differences matter and because one needs to be sure. But on the whole managers know what is going on even without them.
So. Suppose the big business is using not ERP but say one program for invoicing and another for inventory, which is stupid, but whatever. It is not necessarily less legible. You see if for example all of them use an MS SQL database, it is trivial to write queries that combine data from multiple databases, even from multiple servers. So there is no such thing as “island software”. In SQL Management Studio stuff like linked servers, to query data from another server, work very well. The issue is often how you link them. For example if the item numbers or customer numbers are different in the two software, you have a problem. But even then you do not have a legibility problem. All the “executives” need is a bunch of interns, hopefully paid, who pore over reports from multiple sources and combine them in Excel, or what is a better idea, basically do data entry, fix the e.g. item or customer numbers in software so that they are the same in another software and then you can write those combined queries.
It isn’t really about fractal complexes. Not unless the business is so obscenely huge that things are buried in a thick layer of bullshit from performance evaluations to “best practices” and “reengineered processes”, so that the business owner cannot sit down with a programmer who says lookie here the report you want is this stuff in this table here combined with that table there, okay, that is what you wanted? So if the bullshit cannot be cut out.
Most of these things are very simple. Either very simple or not doable. Or not profitable. For example one day boss man came up with the idea that products should be barcode scanned at ever step of the process. The programmer was sweating. Luckily for him, it turned out, various outsourced warehouses, logistics companies would charge so much for scanning (and for unpacking before and packing back again) that it would eat 10% of the profit at which time the boss dropped the idea and the programmer feeled relieved.
The company I work for is large but not obscenely huge. Using different software for invoicing, inventory, etc might seem like more work but it also can make exceptions easier to deal with. A few examples that come to mind are:
– if a trusted customer has an urgent order, workflow steps can be done in parallel or out of sequence (e.g. ordering supplies to fulfill the order before payment has been processed) but in an ERP workflow sequence is more enforced
– something that is fabricated on-demand by a third party might not be in inventory; in an ERP it is difficult to prepare shipping labels or invoices without receiving it into inventory whereas with separate programs it would only need to be touched once
– if one non-essential component of something being fabricated is back-ordered, it might be better to ship it as-is and send a service tech to add the missing part when it becomes available but an ERP will complain if you try something like this.
I’m sure there could be technical fixes to each of these examples but my point is that exceptions to normal workflow come up fairly often. A more decentralized approach builds in more flexibility instead of trying to anticipate every exception and make a rule for it in advance.
The first is not necessarily true. It is just that managers want ERP set up so, because managers often don’t understand the full complexity of what their people are dealing with. I often have this request from managers that the software should enforce business rules and I try the hardest to fight them. For example, do not let people purchase more stuff if we have X million euros of outstanding purchases. I explain them that there will be special exceptions. Which the manager may approve. But how if he does not even use the software or is not in the office. So I tell them the correct solution is that every day he gets an automatic email on his phone saying the total outstanding purchase order value is X and if he finds it too high, he and not the software makes the decision that no more purchases without his approval and he and not the software must enforce it. The software should only inform decision. In fact I can also send another automated email, showing every purchase, so that he can see if some non-approved ones went out, but he and not the software will enforce decisions, the software only gives information. This is my principle and usually manage to convince them.
The second one is definitely true. The reason is the enforcement of accounting standards & correctness. An invoice without an outgoing stock movement should be called “prepayment invoice” or “proforma invoice”, different rules, all that. But for example to take the order confirmation report and write “invoice” on it so that you can kind of make a fake invoice is a few hours work at most, billed at a few hundred euros or dollars.
The third is true, again, can be worked around by a simple customization of a “fake” delivery note that does not move the stock therefore does not mind that the finished product is not yet on stock. Once the tech returned, you can close the production order, putting the finished item on stock, and then book the proper delivery note and invoice.
We do not anticipate these exceptions, we just make these customizations on the fly. Thing is, they all follow the same pattern. To do business, you need documents. Invoice, delivery note, purchase order, all that. Yes, these rules are tied to the creation and posting and printing of such documents. But once we make “fake” documents you can basically do anything.
This came up during my very first project. Boss, not owner, made a strong rule, no goods ever leave the warehouse without first the sales have issued a sales order confirmation, okaying it. Turns out, the owner has friends. And friends are above rules. They just waltz in the warehouse and say I want that thing there. And pays cash. Shrug. Gets a “fake” invoice and the real paperwork will be done later.
And seriously those “fake” documents could just as well be made in Excel. The simplest way to deal with the rigidity of ERP is to not even enter the transaction at all until all the prerequisite transactions are sorted out. The question is really how much you want to break the rules.
It’s a bit of an art to make a software system actually work. Things can go very very very badly if something goes wrong, and many things can go wrong. Starting with the incentive system of the developer/integrator – if you’re paying them by the hour or project, their skin in the game regarding your long term success is very low. Possibly negative – a perfect integration will give them no further work from you.
I’ve developed from scratch a couple of small-medium size ERPs. With experience you can get to pretty good results – mostly with a healthy dose of respect for the client’s independence. Like have everything exportable to _and_ importable from excel – this way a lot of “december issues” can be fixed creatively on the spot, with a note to the developer to make things prettier in the future. Have a permission system that allows the admin to do absolutely anything, and give him the responsibility to assign roles etc. Mostly have a healthy dose of humility regarding future change – and this includes never trying to fix future problems today.
This is only true if the business needs are static.
If the development is ‘agile,’ where small bits of business value are constantly being delivered and tested/used by the client, then the developer constantly has to produce value, assuming that the client can judge the business value being delivered.
Good point. That’s the best way of doing things. I didn’t have the occasion to observe it with bigger companies though, and I suspect it may be a bit difficult to pull off.
Plus, beginnings are a sensitive time – you still need a MVP to start with, and almost by definition you have to put it into production in one piece.
Half agree. There are a lot of customizations, developments to be done in one big first step just to make basic operations possible. Asking the customers to test it makes the consultant look stupid, because the consultant does not really consider it a special extra thing but something obvious, “we have always done it this way” (because someone wrote an Excel macro and then it was forgotten), especially if legal requirements are involved.
Basically an ERP is like a half ready car. You cannot just put in a steering wheel and ask them to test it. Every car has a steering wheel! Just give me a normal one already! “Yes but we are checking if it fits your height” “Don’t give that bullshit! Every car has an average height steering wheel fitting most people!”
You get accused of not understanding business processes they think are common, or try to scam them.
Once you have what they consider a basic functional car, of course you can go agile about pimping the living hell out of it.
It would be helpful of course if the vendor would ship the software really finished. But they don’t. Microsoft Dynamics has not even a standard setup, just a demo setup. They really expect the consulting partners to configure even the basic tax reports like VAT here. While the customer might buy 3 days for that, grudgingly, they do not see it value delivered. They are just like what is this shit software that does not do this out of the box when my old MUCH cheaper little local software did. Ultimately the consulting partner will have to build up their own standard solution eventually… But there is also the part where a lot of businesses are doing things their own way and think it is a common industry standard thing, when not. In my corner of Europe it is not uncommon to work 20 years at the same company in the same position. Little turnover means little information about what other businesses are doing.
Endorsed.
Hourly billing is an extremely high-trust situation. The reason it exists is twofolds. First, figuring it what a business needs is billable work. So technically, yes, one integrator could charge a fixed price for surveying all processes and writing a very detailed requirements specification, another could use that as an input and write a spec for a fixed price and even a third one could do the development strictly to the spec. But that means the customers ends up to pay a lot of money for writing papers and they don’t want that. They want real work, that is, most billable hours spent programming or training. This means the project has to be a bit open-ended. Works in a high-trust country like Britain. It is very bad in a low-trust country like Poland, constant arguments of what was part of the price and what is an extra.
The second reason is this. Consider the term “consultant”. It means advisor. E.g. Berater in German. The point is, at some past, probably forgotten era of IT history, only large businesses implemented ERP, large businesses who can afford an internal IT and developer team, and the external integrator really just gave them advice, the dirty work was done in-house. But later on also SMBs wanted ERP, who have no internal IT, and effectively see the consulting partner as a contractor delivering software. But the hourly billing and the outdated term “consultant” remained.
Once the SMB grows enough to get hire an internal ERP developer, the external ones will really just advise and that works perfectly on a hourly basis.
>I’ve developed from scratch a couple of small-medium size ERPs.
How can I politely doubt it without having to imply you lie? OK I believe it in one case: no stock. Because if you reinvented stock value FIFO on your own, no I won’t believe that. It is hideously complicated. It took Microsoft Dynamics something like 20 years to iron out the major bugs. Because there are a gazillion of special cases.
Without stock, ERP becomes easy, as it is basically just entering documents, i.e. forms with a header and line, saving them in transaction tables in a straightforward way, making the documents printable, have some checking for wrongly entered data, and sum up the transactions in reports. The issue is, while easy, it is still big. It is still 25 documents, 15 kinds of transactions, 50 reports. Maybe you did not write, but generate much of that, in Rails, generate scaffolding style, or you used some kind of 4GL environment also known as inversion of control, where you don’t have to write the basic CRUD, only the code for checking data and saving into transactions. Something akin to Microsoft Access, just better.
Maybe I will believe it if it was in a country where legal requirements are not strict. Like no such thing as invoice numbers must be strictly monotonously growing by date and no holes.
@nameless1
A few things:
You may be overestimating the complexity of small-scale ERPs.
Radu may be describing something that has some ERP-like features but is really more of an MRP.
It may not be necessary even if the ERP includes stock. You are looking too narrowly at scenarios and needs from your own experience. There are lots of others out there, I promise.
This is likely, I think you are overestimating the prevalence of this as a law (rather than simply good practice for better recordkeeping) based on your own experience.
It is also unclear to me why sequential numbering of invoices by date issued would be a particular challenge (particularly for smaller scale software).
> How can I politely doubt it without having to imply you lie? OK I believe it in one case: no stock.
You can call me out, no problem 🙂
I think it depends on what you’re calling an ERP. I’m currently maintaining two live projects: a decade old software for a FMCG company with about 1000 merchandisers, and my own http://www.couriermanager.eu with about a couple dozen clients. Second is more of a melange between a small ERP and a SaaS, but the first I think covers 90% of what that type of company wants, including very light stocks, HR (that one was fun), a couple of mobile apps etc.
Neither is document-based, btw.
Looking at the feature list Courier Manager, I think the best name for this kind of software would be “operations”. That is, focusing on running the daily job of the business. Operations isn’t really the best term for it but there isn’t any better. It is something you would demo to the COO, not the CFO.
My view of ERP – different from the very old MRP based view of @acymetric – is that everything grows out of accounting, which you don’t have here. That is, for example, if you have a Debtors account in the G/L, you also must have a detailed Accounts Receivable ledger where auditors can see actually who is owing how much money. This AR ledger is best created by booking invoices and payments. And at this point the accounting begins to approach operations. Better not to write invoices by hand, but click on a delivery note or sales order and create an invoice automatically. And so on. So it can reach very deep into operations, into daily work. But it all comes from having a G/L, having the other ledgers to support it, and then these ledgers created by the more operational functionality.
The accounting oriented-view might be partially because my attitude and experience but to a certain extent pans out historically. SunSystems has a SunAccount core and a later SunBusiness extension around it that handles things like order processing. Microsoft Dynamics was first called Navision Financials, basically the provided the accounting and others developed the operations and later the largest add-ons got integrated into it, making it a full ERP, that is, accounting + operations.
Just to make something clear. Basically I find developing operations functionality very easy because it is often just literally writing down into code what the customer wants. I find the accounting part super hard. When it is about two hours discussing whether the very special transnational VAT scenario they want the software to support is even allowed or not. Or how should the idea of returning damaged goods at half value even affect the stock value, is that even correct to do under the same item number or do it under a different one, because it might be wrong that the total value of the same item number will be based on both good and damaged stocks and maybe the auditor will not like that. Or maybe the whole idea is completely bogus, the auditor will rightly ask, why exactly half, what evidence proves that it worths half as much damaged as good, and not only a little less or maybe almost nothing? This is what I find the hard part, this is why I think accounting is an important part of ERP…
@nameless1
You may be right. You’re definitely right about CourierManager being demoed to the COO. The other software is more well rounded, including a financial-only module that took a bit over a year to get into production. Operations are easy compared to that. HR was also pretty bad, but yeah, financial wins.
>Like have everything exportable to _and_ importable from excel –
No wonder from-scratch ERP developers love Delphi, that has stuff like that out of the box in the dev environment.
>Have a permission system that allows the admin to do absolutely anything, and give him the responsibility to assign roles etc
Roles suck. In my experience not even the direct manager knows _exactly_ what work an employee does and there is the case of substitutions for illness. And then even if the role is internally assigned, the developer has to figure out exactly what tables belong the role because being an order processor in this company may be different than that one.
No, the only permission system that does not drive people crazy is the negative one, which is sadly usually not supported out of the box: you tell only what certain people are NOT allowed to do. You focus on key data, most important tables, and ignore the gazillion secondary lookup tables. You decide for example that the warehouse dudes have no business in modifying G/L accounts or posting G/L entries, you forbid that, and leave the other 900 tables accessible. And even this is not really necessary because they do not know how to do that anyway. Security through obscurity? More like security through being a lazy dumbass who did not even listen to the training about how to do the things in the system he actually needs to do.
Your approach to roles based on tables is what makes this such a challenge. Better implementation of roles (done in a client-friendly way) requires a bit more work from the developer but is definitely doable.
Eh, roles for dashboards (i.e. “what do you see without having to dig”) are still pretty handy.
What’s the argument in favor of moving to Silicon Valley to start a new technology startup?
I understand the argument for:
– Moving there as an employee: salaries are higher, even when accounting for cost-of-living differences.
– Not moving an existing company out of there: you’re not going to be able to pay less even if people follow you to the new office, because wages are sticky. And the disruption of moving is not worth it once you’re past a dozen people.
– Starting a new business in SV if you already live there: Convenience, ability to support the business with on-the-side consulting revenue, your professional network is local already.
But I keep getting suggestions that my next startup (whenever it happens) should definitely be established in Silicon Valley, and that this is beneficial to the business (and not just me personally enjoying California weather instead of living in the frozen wasteland that is Canada). I don’t get it and it’s usually just asserted, not explained. This place tends to do good steelmanning, so I suspect I’ll get a better explanation by asking here: What am I not accounting for?
For context my default behavior would be to start the next business in Waterloo again, simply because of its low cost of living (= much longer runway), and good access to hire co-op program students (basically junior devs that fire themselves automatically after 4 months, which is great when you’re still in exploratory mode) as well as the overall talent pool. Toronto has a similar value proposition, but it more expensive. Vancouver seems worse on both fronts. Silicon Valley has the biggest talent pool, but it seems like that’s only because it has the highest salaries (that is, a Toronto-based company offering similarly high salaries would be drowning in applications from qualified candidates, which is why they universally offer much less). It’d also require me to navigate the visa bureaucracy (E-2 visa most probably).
I’ve never lived in Toronto, so I’m not sure. But I spoke recently with some Waterloo founders who moved to SF to start their company, and they were all like, “The network here is unparalleled. Sure, you can hire people where ever, but you’ll get more people who are higher quality here who are enthused about working for a start-up, who bring experience with other start-ups, and who understand some of the general constraints of start-ups. You’ll get better advice from better investors, you’ll have better access to an ecosystem of service companies that mostly cater to start-ups, and you’ll be able to network with many, many, many more founders who can give you useful advice.”
Is that true? I dunno. They seemed to think so.
There are a lot of highly tech competent people in Vancouver and in BC in general, who would love to work for a CA based company instead remote to a US based company. Why there hasn’t been a tech boom in Vancouver is confusing to me.
My advice is if you don’t want/need Sand Hill Road (and you don’t) and don’t want/need hottest buzzword compliance trendy tech workers (and you probably don’t), stay out of the SF Bay Area.
If you really really need a couple of *specific* such tech workers, pay them to relocate to the midwest and while keep paying them SF rates. Once they get a taste of what their salary can buy there, they may never want to go back to SF again.
I know of a bunch of low-key you-use-their-tech-every-day-but-never-heard-of-the-company slow-steady-growth tech companies that happily are based in low-pop “flyover regions”, several of them 100% remote workers. The real estate costs are 10% of the bay, salary costs are half the bay, the employee lifestyle at that salary is positively cushy, you have much more loyal employees, and the founders become deca-millionaires, the key employees become millionaires, and there are no Sand Hill Road -types crushing down on the founders and selling out the customers to the the cesspits of ad-tech for yet another swing at a billion dollar Event.
My impression is that if you are aiming to start a tech company that will grow to be very large, it really helps to be in Silicon Valley, for four reasons. First, it’s one of the few places where you can hire large numbers (hundreds) of good software engineers quickly. Second, it is one of only a few places where you can hire the very best software engineers, should you need them. Third, it’s where the investors are, and if you want to raise venture capital it really helps to be local and part of the scene so you know who to ask for money, they get to know you by reputation, and they know they can stop by your nascent business without getting on a plane. Fourth, the Bay area has a lot of futuristic oddballs who decided to try to live in the future when it hasn’t arrived yet, which is useful for finding very novel ideas before all that many people have noticed them and tried to monetize them.
If none of these points are essential to what you have in mind, then you are probably better off staying outside Silicon Valley, because it’s easier and a whole lot cheaper.
I’m a software engineer, not an entrepreneur. I’m also Canadian.
I’m came to Silicon Valley because I was sick of needing to move to another area every time my employer and I parted ways. In many ways, I wished I’d stayed in Canada, but the city I was in had only 2 or 3 big tech employers, and not enough small ones – if any of the 3 had layoffs, every software person in the city was stuck where they were for a year or two, which might be on the bench. Add to this the prospect of a big raise for taking a contract job in New Jersey, and I became nomadic for a decade. (Have job offer, will travel…)
I can’t answer your questions, but I find I *want* you to stay in Canada, and contribute to there being more opportunities back home, so some other person like me won’t wind up here – in spite of the money, the climate, and the community of fellow techies.
That doesn’t mean it’s a good decision for you. But note that if you do the same as everyone else, your results will be the same. Not worse, but not better either. And “go to Silicon Valley” is the standard wisdom.
and not enough small ones
That’s the other thing I’ve noticed about Canada, and I completely lack the knowledge to form any theories as to why that is the case, but… there is a curious lack of medium-small to small-medium tech companies in Canada. A bunch of very very small mayfly shops, and a few larger-ish (and frankly, boring) tech companies. Almost nothing in the middle, and nothing in the very large.
The story I heard is that successful small-to-medium tech companies often receive acquisition offers from bigger players. Apparently Canadian executives are particularly prone to accepting such offers if they are at all reasonable rather than fighting on alone. We’re so very reasonable up here, you see. I sure wish I had some data on this, though.
Michael: My father made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Kay: What was that?
Michael: He assured him that he would steer the company faithfully and offered him fair market value.
Kay: Gasps.
Michael: That’s my father’s world Kay, not mine.
I think you’ve hit on a lot of the arguments for/against. One point no one has mentioned in the “for” column would be the Silicon Valley culture where, often, high quality programmers (etc) are willing to accept lower wages at startups and accept stock instead. And in many cases these people are already quite rich because they took that same deal at Google or Twitter, and they just see you as a flier as opposed to needing a steady salary.
The pro arguments are all true, but they’re becoming less so as the cost of living here reaches even more truly absurd levels.
One emerging pattern is the young company with a front office in Silicon Valley, but the back office somewhere else, even overseas. It just doesn’t make sense to pay SV rates for anything you can get elsewhere.
Actually, outsourcing is already starting to slow down and even stop. The reason is because a lot of the grunt work that used to be outsourced is being automated by the public cloud and AI.
For example, you could hire people in India to set up database and a storage systems for you. Or you could just use an Amazon Web Services service to do it. The latter is going to be less risky and more scalable. You could hire a bunch of IT consultants in India, or you could just use Microsoft’s cloud. And so on.
The only SV companies I’ve seen trying to set up back offices “somewhere else” are companies in a death spiral who are trying to cut costs. I’ve never seen it work, though. If you can’t pay for good engineers, you’re better off just selling your IP for whatever you can get and then shutting down.
For a long time, the conclusion for going to college was “it’s always worth it.” That was at the end of a long logic chain.
Eventually people took the conclusion for a starting axiom, and the natural result was that colleges went insane in price.
I don’t know if or when SV will hit that point, but the necessary preconditions are there.
It hasn’t already?
It may have, but people don’t seem to have noticed.
I think it likely has, but knowing for sure is difficult. If the real estate bubble pops, it will be extremely obvious in retrospect, and everyone will say how it was totally obvious to them at the time. Real estate prices could keep going up for a generation, though.
A few years back GE wanted to start up a new office focused on the internet of things, and they chose the San Francisco suburb of Dublin, CA. The reason I was given for that was that there were more software engineers living in that town than anywhere else in the world, and since they needed to hire a ton of engineers, they just went where the supply was. I suspect that is the #1 reason people move their tech companies to the Bay Area.
I’d like to share an anecdote about something that may, I’m told, be more common than generally assumed:
Vitamin B12 is saving my life.
I’m 34. For the past couple of years, my mood has been getting progressively worse. I was dealing with that, managing the symptoms as they cropped up; I even managed to, despite a severe depression in 2017, force myself to switch jobs in the winter of 2017/2018 (winter is my “up” season, not my “down” season, so I knew it had to be that winter or not for another year).
The severe depression scared me for reasons other than mood – my short term memory got kicked in the teeth by it and essentially died (to the point where I’d forget the nature of a decision I’d felled five seconds ago – I’d recall I made a decision, but not what), my ability to pay attention shrank to nearly none, and I became painfully sensitive to sound (the slightest squeak and I’d wake up in the middle of the night, unable to continue sleeping).
My mood improved after I switched jobs, but… my memory, attention and sleep problems persisted, only slightly dampened. For a while, I thought it was just me growing old, though I found this so striking an effect that I was basically shocked no one had told me growing old was this bad, this soon.
When my mood felt decently normal, with the blessing and encouragement of my GP, I sought out a neurologist, wanting to tackle the aforementioned problems. The transferal I had from my GP said “sleep problems”, because I suppose no one ever took the other issues seriously. Seeking a neurologist was a difficult ordeal, in that all neurologists I called told me they were accepting no more patients. I outsourced the problem to my health insurance. They called me back one morning and told me they’d not found anyone, and that I should go back to my GP and get an urgent transferal. I didn’t think my state warranted this (in hindsight, fuck me), so I put it off.
Around Christmas time, I got lucky – one of the neurologist offices I’d called got back to me. You see, after hearing I had sleep problems (and cutting me off and not wanting to hear the rest), they’d put me on the waiting list for the psychologist in their office. They called me on a day off and said “Good news, we have an appointment for you. Bad news, it’s in a few hours. Got time?”. Fortunately, I did have time. (Due to further shenanigans and good fortune, this transformed into an appointment with the neurologist, not the psychologist that I was actually originally on the waiting list for.)
The neurologist listened to me talk, looked down her nose at me, told me to get a psychologist because I clearly had deep-seated issues of some sort, told me she didn’t want to talk about my audio sensitivity because that had no bearing on anything and I was there because of my sleep problems. Toward the end of the session she assured me that I wasn’t showing the first signs of dementia or anything like that, squinted at me in a kind of “I’m having second thoughts” way and told me go to my GP and get a general check-up, including vitamin B12, vitamin D and folic acid.
Without wanting to bore any of you with any more details leading up to this: Two weeks ago, I got my results of the general check-up. All my values were quite excellent, except my complete lack of vitamin D (as in, the sheet with the results puts it within bounds of their measuring error) and less than half the minimum value of vitamin B12.
My GP told me to take supplements, and also to eat more meat. I made a very surprised face – I’m not vegetarian (although I tried a few times, each time for a few months, noticed in hard to grasp ways that it made me feel worse, and stopped). We think I might have vitamin B12 absorption issues, although another check-up in two-ish months will show how well I’m absorbing the supplements.
I didn’t think this would make a difference. I read up on vitamin B12 problems, noticed the grim verdict that I might never be able to recover from the neural damage, wept myself to sleep a few nights, but dutifully took my medicine.
And then spooky shit started happening.
The other day I was pondering a problem at work, brought my hand up to my head to scratch at my scalp, and had to pause because I was so completely baffled at how soft my hair was. Make no mistake, I don’t think for a second anything changed about my hair – but I do think something happened to my sense of touch.
My subjective eyesight improved. What on Earth is “subjective eyesight”, you might ask? Well, I haven’t been able to figure out any objective difference in my perception whenever I do an actual comparison, but things seem sharper, more focused. I don’t understand this. I wasn’t expecting it, but it’s oddly striking. I assume (but don’t know) that my visual cortex is functioning better now – I still have eyesight issues, still need my glasses, but the stimuli that hit my retina are converted to information more readily. (Late edit: Contrast may have gone up, actually, since a few days ago I was in the bathroom, commented to my German boyfriend whether he changed anything about the lights, since I could have sworn it got brighter – nothing had changed, though.)
A few days ago, while two colleagues were discussing something near me, my ears ‘popped’ without the corresponding physical sensation. I nearly jumped. The whole quality of my hearing very abruptly shifted. I wouldn’t say it got better or worse, but it changed drastically in an instant. I don’t understand this either.
For a few days, my entire body hurt. I didn’t understand that, either, but I decided it might be a good sign – nerves working again, firing at random as they healed? I have no idea. I have no illusion that I know what’s going on.
But the most striking change is that my attention and audio filtering issues have nearly disappeared. Where previously I couldn’t hold a thought while someone else was talking (on TV, or a conversation next to me), I am no longer bothered by that. I can read a book while people next to me are chatting – absolutely unthinkable even just two weeks ago. Are my thoughts isolating themselves from each other? Vitamin B12 is important for insulating nerves, from preventing cross-talk between them. It doesn’t seem far-fetched, although if you’d told me of these magical effects beforehand, I would have looked at you funny.
Whatever the cause, exactly, I’m seeing my neurologist in two weeks. I’m sure she’ll be pleased her footnote hunch at least appears to have been correct. I feel like I’ve gotten ten years younger; after three years of trying various ways to help myself out of my increasing misery and neurological deterioration, this is like some bizarre miracle cure.
I don’t know how much of the damage is permanent, but I’m still improving, and I hope that I can get at least some of my intelligence from a few years ago back. One’s own intelligence is, like with many things, most sorely missed when it’s disappeared. I’ve been miserable at my own inability to focus, remember or imagine things. I can, in fact, imagine things again – I hadn’t consciously realised I’d lost that until it came back.
I’ve already gained a lot of vitality back. I used to feel like even in times of sadness, there was a joy in me, a kind of baseline happiness – and I can feel it coming back. It’s like my personality is healing from a grave wound. Some of that will also be from the vitamin D supplements that I’m also taking, of course – but so much of it is because my brain is gradually working again.
Anyway, I know I’m more lurker than poster, but I just wanted to share my joy here – and perhaps this account can help someone who is fighting with similar symptoms. (There doesn’t seem to be much risk in taking B12 supplements, if you just want to try it for a week or two.)
Stay awesome, everyone, and thanks for letting me read your comments. 🙂
Wow; I’m so glad your problems had such a simple solution.
I’m fortunate enough not to have any horrible symptoms like you do, but I’d still like to test for vitamin levels. (Among other reasons, I’m getting almost no sunlight.) How do you get that general blood(?) test for vitamins? As in, if I go to my GP and ask for it, will he know what I’m talking about and be able to do it? About how much does it cost?
I live in Germany, and the test was just what you’d consider a ‘general check-up’, plus explicitly requested folic acid, vitamin D and vitamin B12 – which is covered by insurance once you’re 35 (the irony of which has not escaped my notice!) and supposedly costs about 50-ish EURs before then. (I haven’t received my bill yet – my GP said something about that those are handled quarterly, so I’m anticipating getting the exact quote sometime next month.)
As for how to get it, asking your GP for it should be enough, yep! If it’s not, your GP should absolutely know enough about it to tell you what else is needed.
Also worth noting, once your general check-up is covered by insurance (i.e. you are 35+), if you want non-standard things tested (it seems as though many vitamins, including B12, are unfortunately non-standard), you may need an explicit lab transferal (“Laborüberweisung”), judging by some to-and-fro discussion I was involved in that I left out of my already far too long narrative above. But this isn’t relevant if you’re paying out of your own pocket.
Hope that helps! <3
This is interesting!
I’ve observed that ever since we got started planning for our baby, my wife hasn’t had a severe depressive episode (though still has some “lows” and, occasionally, hypomania). There are, of course, many impossible-to-separate changes that coincided with this:
– As an overall lifestyle change from a little over a year ago, we live in a smaller, tidier, cleaner house, without roommates.
– We have a baby on the way (I noticed differences in her behavior long before we conceived, but the baby-on-the-way thoughts might have been helping since it was confirmed).
– Her doctor recommended that she switch from Sertraline (bn: Zoloft) to Fluoxetine (bn: Prozac).
– She misses/forgets her medication way less frequently. (Her short-term memory in general is just better. It’s possible Fluoxetine has less of a negative effect on her memory than Sertraline did, or maybe one of the other factors influenced her ability to keep to the schedule in some way, but either way it seems to be a virtuous cycle.)
– We have a cat now. The cat is slowly killing me (I’m allergic, I have my own issues with remembering to take medications on a schedule, and I’m its sole caretaker for the foreseeable future due to concerns about toxoplasma), but having it around seems to make her happier.
– She started taking Pre-Natal Vitamins as soon as we started talking about having a baby, a little before we even talked to a doctor about it (so, also before we swapped out the Sertraline for the Fluoxetine), and well over a full month before we even started trying. This anecdotally matches up really well with the beginning of the time interval when her depressive days got a lot less frequent and less severe.
Definitely not conclusive. Because it’s definitely, definitely, not something we actually wanted to run a Very Scientific Controlled Experiment on, even if we could make lots of clones of my wife and put them in isolated chambers, some of which were/weren’t given certain medications or supplements, some of which were/weren’t living with clones of me in messy/clean shared/private living spaces. But it’s an interesting anecdote…. and is reason enough for me to be keeping an eye out for further indications that certain vitamins might be super important in cases like this.
That’s definitely interesting, thanks for sharing!
For what it’s worth, I’m de-facto addicted to online freeform roleplay and recently aggressively dove back into that (after talking to the neurologist back in December, her “you have issues” comments making me decide that maybe I should do something against the four year cold-turkey dry-spell :P). That change caused a noticeable uptick in mood, but the nature of that uptick feels quite distinct from the kind of uptick I’m experiencing since I’m taking the supplements.
I’m wondering if the happiness about the kitty might be in the same category for her as freeform roleplay is for me – it improved my mood, but without the vitamins, I know I would still feel constantly assaulted by reality.
As for cloning experiments, I suppose you’ve got half a clone in the making. 😉
Regardless what the cause may be, I hope the good moods last and you both have a great time!
You can’t to a proper controlled experiment but you can have blood tests for lots of things that you wife might be low in, assuming you haven’t already done so for all plausible candidates.
Fascinating story.
As I recently mentioned, I’ve recently been looking into work by two different people who argue that nutrition is much more of a problem for people like us than we usually assume. One of them, the one I entirely trust (both because I know him and because he is a very prominent scientist in the relevant field), believes that recommended vitamin D levels are far too low–on his advice I am taking 5000 IU. The other claims to be able to not merely slow but reverse age related cognitive decline. I am less sure if he can be trusted, but not sure that he can’t.
Do keep us posted.
Here is the article I mentioned. Only the abstract is available for free–I’m not sure how hard it is to get access to the full article.
Not hard if you reject citizens being shielded from scientific findings.
Hmm, seeing as one of the effects of aging seems to be a poorer uptake in vitamins, it at least doesn’t sound entirely farfetched that fixing the vitamin uptake would show anti-aging effects (i.e. the aging effects may be due to reduced vitamins). I’ll check out your previous comments about that at next opportunity, I hadn’t run across them yet (my comment reading, while enjoyable each time, is unfortunately very sporadic and I miss a lot!).
In either case, thanks very much for the information! 🙂 Curious to see how it pans out.
(P.S. Love your work. Your footnote recommendation of the book Passions Within Reason in one of your books let me trip over one of the most delightful non-fiction finds I’ve made. Thanks for that – and your very educational sense of humour. :D)
My symptoms were not nearly as severe, but I was also told to take Vitamin D and Vitamin B-12 to help with exhaustion and memory problems, after a blood test revealed that I was deficient. It was kind of amazing how much they helped, specifically with the exhaustion. Going from “I can barely function after 2 pm” to “I have enough energy to get through both of my jobs” was great.
I had to stop taking the B-12 after six months since it was giving me some really weird and unwanted side effects. Granted, I was taking 4000% of the recommended daily value (which was the only option available at the time due to my specific circumstances). I doubt the side effects would have been so severe with a smaller dose.
The body can store some B-12, so you could try to take the supplements once or twice a week.
If it’s not uncomfortable for you to say (and I absolutely understand if it is), what kind of side-effects did it result in? This is the first I’ve read about B12 ‘overdose’ having a negative effect, so I’m curious what I should maybe be looking out for. 🙂
That’s great news. Read your posts before although I can’t remember about what.
I take vitamin D supplements since I tested low for that. I had moderate depression at the time that’s mostly cleared up. I wonder how much variation there is in vitamin uptake needs and how many people are effectively deficient.
I mostly just complained occasionally (though I tried to be respectful about it when I did), so you’re not missing much when you don’t remember my comments. 🙂
I’m really happy to hear your depression’s almost bested at this point. Good luck for the last mile of it!
To the person who asked about what information from the meetups survey will be released – good point, thanks for asking!
Data will not be released publicly because it would be too easy to identify individuals and I neglected to include a question about releasing people’s answers, but I am planning to share aggregate statistics and lessons learned publicly. I will also probably reach out to individual meetup organizers if there’s significant data on what people want to see from their groups.
I’ve added the above statement to the beginning of the survey and also included it in my announcement of the survey on LessWrong. Hopefully this addresses your question fully; let me know if not.
Can anyone recommend a book and/or other resource(s) on good scientific research methodology? I am looking at the graduate student / academic level. My Google searches usually turn up things for science projects and whatnot. Thanks.
Are you thinking statistics methodology, experiment design, or pychology of it?
For statistics I like Andrew Gelmans blog. Feynman has some decent advice in essays about the idea of how to do good science and how to think about things. But a lot of things are field specific.
All of them, but at least something on experiment design would be good.
I know that it is mostly field specific, which is part of the challenge I am having. Mainly, I have realized that when talking about ‘good science,’ I have very little to refer to.
Gelman’s blog is good, but it’s much more stats and philosophy than experiment design (although stats is important to informing experimental design). I’ve mostly worked in fields with more powerful models and much stronger applicable prior knowledge than the fields that Gelman has specialized in though.
I’m having a hard time thinking of something good on general themes in experimental design. Or even on specifics. I learned things mostly by mucking around in graduate school. I think I’m roughly an average experimenter; my strengths are more in absorbing and evaluating the literature and deciding on a model. I did experiment because I hated not having data and I get a bit twitchy at a desk, not because I was particularly skilled at execution which tends to require a bit more of a engineering/hands-on bent and either a big team or a hell of lot of endurance.
The biggest thing that strikes me is that the economics of experiments tends to be neglected in philosophical or general discussions but is extremely important in practice.
I read SSC across 4 different browsers. This makes keeping up on the “has read” comments somewhat annoying.
Before I start the work to hack something together myself, has anyone else written a TamperMoney script for SSC to keep the read cookie in sync across multiple instances?
While i haven’t written any such a script, i do read SSC comments on different browsers. What i do is is alter the time and date on the bar that shows up on the upper right to whenever i was last on. It works well enough.
Rationalists, I have $225,000 of my own money to invest, and I’m a conservative (har har) investor.
Is the most rational way to invest it in late March 2019 something like “buy the S&P 500 fund with the lowest management fee”?
Are you buying and holding forever (ie 30+ years?)
Open several onling brokerage accounts, especially any with “free X trades with Y thousand dollars deposited”, then buy shares of as many S&P 500 companies as you have free trades for.
Edit: Just making it clear that I am joking.
That’s high-effort compared to buying an index fund. Not just today, but ongoing — one benefit of an index fund is that when individual companies drop out of the index for whatever reason, your holdings automatically update for you.
baconbits9 is right if you are going to ignore or not be affected by market swings in the meantime, and won’t need the money for 10+ years.
If you happen to know that a 2008-style crash would give you ulcers, mixing an S&P index fund with some sort of bond fund is not entirely irrational, nor is buying in gradually over the course of 6-12 months. But even adjusting for the high CAPE right now, for long-term investors your best bet is dumping it all in a low-cost equity index fund, yes.
No I’m not, I was kidding around. These funds are actively managed as stocks drop out of and climb into the 500. You will miss out on the next amazon/apple/google if you do it this way unless you actively manage it yourself.
Write a daemon to crawl a definition of the S&P 500, log itself in to your brokerage accounts, and make the appropriate trades automatically. Then absolutely nothing can go wrong.
I won’t necessarily need the money for decades. I own a house outright.
I want to have the presence of mind to be able to shrug at a 2008-style crash.
Prior to 2008 lots of people had ‘conservative’ portfolios that didn’t allow them to shrug off the crash. This was because the 2008 crash was large and unique. People had 30%+ equity in their homes, 401k plans worth more than the remainder of their mortgage, and no financial planner had ever said to them “what happens if you lose your job, health insurance and half your 401k while you home value drops in half all at the same time?”.
If you want to be sure that you can shrug off a 2008 collapse then you basically need to look at a worst case scenario for yourself to begin with. What three bad things all happening together could make you desperate to sell your investments.
A 50-50 plan lost 23% of its value in the 2007-2009 crash.[1] Losing money isn’t good, but if you can look at yourself and realize you are okay with losing 23%, that’s good.
You can get more conservative, not necessarily by buying more bonds (this does reduce risk some, but also exposes you to interest-rate risk, at with a fed rate around 2.5% there’s a lot of room for interest-rate risk). You can diversify across a wider part of the economy, across international economies, add in commodities[2].
Look at baconbits9’s recommendation of worst-case scenario. You (and a spouse?) lose your jobs and health insurance at the same time: how much money do you need to buy essentials for a year? You can make CD ladders that release 1/4 of that money every 3 months, and keep 3 months liquid in a savings account.
[1] This isn’t the best citation, but it’s one I could find: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2015/04/a-historical-look-at-a-5050-portfolio/
[2] Commodities suck for long-term growth. But they are very good risk-mitigators if you worry about needing to eat cat food. They let you lock in prices for the things you consume.
No financial expertise but I’ve been very slowly reading through a newer edition* of ‘The Intelligent Investor.’
Based on that, it seems like the smartest thing to do would be to divide your investment between a stock index and US treasury bonds at a ratio which reflects your risk tolerance. If your stocks make more money, which is likely, buy bonds until you’re back at your original ratio; if your stocks aren’t doing as well, buy more stocks using the money from your bonds. Set aside a small amount of money for speculating on exciting companies, and treat it like money you bring into a casino: you can keep spending it until it’s all gone but once you’ve spent it all, you’re done.
People with actual financial experience should feel free to roast me if this isn’t a good plan.
*The edition is new enough that the notes mention the Dot Com bubble but old enough to predate the Great Recession. That actually made me more confident because it seems like following the advice in the book would have left you in decent shape after 2008 without foreknowledge.
My only problem is that I don’t know how to define my risk tolerance. I like the stock market, but I’m not going to risk money on the next Amazon.
If you’re decades away from spending the money as you indicated in another branch of the thread, a conservative investment mix is something like 70% stock, 30% bond, and an aggressive mix would be <=10% bond.
In the long run, 100% stock is very likely to have the highest expected returns, but only if you have the stomach to ride out a 2008-style crash or a 1970s-style protracted bear market without panic-selling near the bottom. A moderate bond mix can help with this both by diluting the losses and by allowing you the satisfaction of being able to buy more stock when it's "on sale" by rebalancing your portfolio back to your target allocation. For example, if your target mix is 80/20, and you're at your target the day before a 50% drop in the stock market, your total losses for that crash would "only" be 40% and your post-crash allocation would be 67/33. Rebalancing back to your target allocation would allow you to sell the now-excess 13% of your portfolio from bonds and buy stocks at the post-crash prices.
I’d suggest looking at a total bond market fund (e.g. Vanguard’s VBMFX) or even an investment-grade corporate bond fund. It’s a pretty big yield spread (taking Vanguard’s intermediate term funds as an example, current yields are 3.8% for corporate, 3.1% for total bond market, and 2.3% for treasuries), more than enough to compensate for the historical 0.2% default rate for investment-grade corporate bonds.
The yield spread is probably driven largely by US financial regulations: banks, insurance companies, and other parts of the financial industry face reserve requirements or similar regulations, which generally place a large premium on AAA-rated bonds (mostly treasury and agency bonds) relative to A-rated or AA-rated bonds (most investment-grade corporate bonds) in terms of how much of the market value of the bonds can be counted towards your reserve requirements.
Standard advice is, first pay off any outstanding high-interest debt you have. Then, if you’re expecting a major purchase (car, down payment on a house) in the next couple of years, hang onto enough cash to cover that. Otherwise, divide between well-diversified stocks (standard advice is to use low-fee index funds for this), bonds (US Treasuries are traditional, but there are several good bond indices out there now), and other assets according to your age and risk tolerance. Older or more risk-averse => more bonds in the mix, but you shouldn’t be approaching 50% until you’re close to retirement. Stocks and at least some bonds is almost always better than stocks alone in the long term, but the exact optimal mix is going to vary: I use roughly 80/20 as a youngish mid-career adult. Sink it into tax-advantaged accounts (HSAs, IRAs [you probably want Roth if you already have a big pile of cash lying around, and you definitely do if you have a traditional 401K], etc.) first if you can.
Bear in mind that the traditional advice re: stocks and bonds assumes that bonds are generally going to go up when stocks go down and vice versa. This has not always been true in recent years, but it’s going to be hard to find a store of value that isn’t at least somewhat exposed to systemic risk. Real estate’s a common asset class to play with in this context, but I’d stay away from it (aside from a primary residence) unless you already have several hundred thousand dollars invested. And in this crowd, I should probably note that crypto is not an uncorrelated asset.
I own my house and car outright. My outside-the-box investment idea was to use ally.com to buy safe-ish dividend stocks like AT&T, utilities, residential and health care REITs, etc and reinvest the dividends whenever I’m employed, taking them as FU cash to pay my bills if I’d rather not be. Otherwise it seemed rational to put it all in Vanguard 500 or some alternative that’s skimmed less, or 80 500/20 bonds.
Owning real estate other than your primary residence in Portland would be a terrible idea.
Well, it wouldn’t have to be in Portland. I have a coworker here in $LARGE_WEST_COAST_CITY who owns a couple of houses in Utah. Still don’t recommend it though.
An REIT isn’t a bad choice if you want to dip your toes into real estate, but almost any personally managed set of funds is going to be riskier than just putting your money into VFINX or VTSMX, and even that I wouldn’t describe as conservative. By all means sock some away for personal investing if you feel like it, but don’t make it your mainstay. On the other hand, putting it all into bonds is way over-conservative, especially in this market. With $200K to play with, you can diversify without getting hit with higher fees for having too low a balance, so there’s no good reason not to.
I’d stay away from the Retirement 20whatever funds that most brokers offer. The fees are high enough to matter, and the only real value-add over VTSMX + bonds is that they’ll rebalance as you get older, which you can easily do yourself if you’re halfway conscientious about your money.
In my opinion, most people who own a home are already over-invested in real estate compared to the rest of their portfolio.
In my case, since I have a mortgage, I’m probably not over-invested in real estate, but it is the only portion of my portfolio that’s effectively leveraged.
What’s a good rate of return these days? I have access to a savings account that gives 4% apr for a certain amount, and after some cursory research it seems I should be trying to get the maximum in there I can before looking elsewhere (other than company matched 401k obviously).
4% APR is outstanding for a savings account, and it’s probably better than anything you’re going to get on bonds in the near future, so I’d treat it as funging against that part of your portfolio. Stocks have historically averaged around 7% but are much more volatile.
> buy the S&P 500 fund with the lowest management fee
Would be the standard answer found on e.g. personalfinance or investing subreddits. I personally have my (small, <$100k) nestegg entirely in VTSAX, I am at the beginning of my career and am risk tolerant. However nobody should ever call 100% stocks conservative, perhaps a 50-50 mix of total-bond-market/total-stock-market funds would fit the bill. See boglehead wiki for a good introduction.
On the subject, I have seen it suggested that this folk-wisdom of “time-diversification” is fallacious, AFAIK economists don’t actually have anything like a consensus on whether it is real or not. Also there is a parable among professional investors that when your cab driver has a stock tip, it is time to sell. I wonder if a sort of index-fund bubble might not be happening (basically, broad asset overvaluation).
10 years of the best bull market in history may be causing people to forget themselves. The idea that you can just hold stocks for 30 years and it will “average out” to the historic mean could be a catastrophically wrong belief. Risk is real.
It all depends on your goals. What are your goals?
Have enough money to pay all my bills without touching the principal when I don’t work… like everyone else, right? As I replied to Nornagest, I have a house and car with no mortgage or car payment, and want to put my liquid assets away, either on the standard “for over 60” plan or for dividends.
Well, $225,000 dollars will become about 1.7 million dollars (real dollars, it will be more in nominal terms due to inflation) if you match the stock market for thirty years. At that point, even drawing on the interest aggressively, you’re going to get about $70,000 in real dollars. You could, of course, supplement that by guessing that you (at 80) are not going to live another thirty years and taking out 1/30th of the principal or something like that. That’s what your bog standard retiree does and is pretty safe. Basically, buy index funds, shift to bonds and such as you get older.
You can add about another million, and get to roughly $110,000, by socking away another ten thousand dollars for thirty years.
The traditional rule-of-thumb is that the long-term safe withdrawal rate is 4% of your initial balance (as of when you start withdrawing), adjusted for inflation. Historically, that’s had something like a 99% success rate over a 30-year window (success defined as the balance never hits zero during the window) and a >90% success rate at capital preservation (your balance at the end of 30 years >= your inflation-adjusted starting balance).
If you want to be ultra-conservative, use a 3% or 3.5% withdrawal rate instead.
Since nobody’s mentioned it, one classic rule of thumb is “your age in bonds”. That is, your age is the percentage of your portfolio that should be invested in bonds, with the remainder in stock indices. This results in a gradual shift to safer assets as the day you’ll need them draws nearer.
Note: I am not an investment professional, the below is not advice.
How purely is this money a crash-hedge? If you could trade this money for a genie-wish to protect against black swan events, would you take it? (That is to say, do you have enough expected income without this money to cover expenses?)
The way I see it, you have two kinds of concern to cover; the base, prosaic concern of not having enough money in the usual case, and the crash-fear. Money spent in the S&P 500 fund will grow absent black swan events. You can set aside a portion of this money and invest it in bond funds, and you’ll be protected against 2008 come again (but not necessarily all other catastrophes).
If you have a 100% certainty that you’ll have Enough in the non-black-swan case, the rational thing to do is to put this money in bonds and money markets and other super-secure investments, and to set aside a portion of it for specific things like ultra-portable wealth in case of the vantablack-swan events. If not, then invest in proportion to those two concerns.
If you want it to be done rationally, then it’s just a math problem; put in the expected rates of return for the money in a stock fund vs. a bond fund vs. a slightly more complicated under the mattress deal, and look at the failure to get the stock returns as the price you pay for security.
Vanguard has several target date retirement funds (others do, too, but Vanguard tends to have low fees). They automatically shift the allocation of your money toward more conservative mixtures as you get closer to the target date.
Eg, the Target 2060 fund has this mixture:
1 Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Investor Shares 54.1%
2 Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund Investor Shares 35.9%
3 Vanguard Total Bond Market II Index Fund Investor Shares** 7.1%
4 Vanguard Total International Bond Index Fund 2.9%
While the Target 2030 fund has this mixture:
1 Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Investor Shares 42.1%
2 Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund Investor Shares 27.7%
3 Vanguard Total Bond Market II Index Fund Investor Shares** 21.4%
4 Vanguard Total International Bond Index Fund 8.8%
This depends on a lot of factors. Some things to consider.
Do you have children? If so how to do you want to handle sending them to college?
When would you need the money?
What other assets/liabilites do you have?
What level of income would of like in retirement?
How old are you? When do you want to retire?
What is your current income?
Are you married? Does your wife work?
When you say conservative do you mean Cash funds only conservative or Venture capital funds are fine i just don’t want to lose money conservative?
Just to name a few questions. You’d probably want to be more diversified than just the S&P 500 though.
I’m going to go against the consensus here. I think the really optimal thing to do with the equity portion of your portfolio is likely to buy a good smart-beta (also called active beta) fund or ETF now that they’ve gotten so cheap. The evidence that exposure to momentum, value, and other factors can help a portfolio outperform is of comparable quality to the evidence in favor of the equity premium itself.
Unfortunately this takes a bit more sophistication than the standard “buy an index fund” approach since I think it’s harder to recognize quality. I haven’t done the research myself (my income is moderately correlated with smart beta performance, I don’t need more exposure to it), but Goldman Sachs has a decently well-regarded and very low-fee ETF, and the firm AQR has an excellent reputation. Vanguard has some too but I know nothing about those other than that I generally trust Vanguard.
All that said, buying an index fund is a close second best. And probably the most important thing is to invest sooner rather than later; if you take two months to pick a slightly better investment, the loss of value from not being in the market for two months is likely to dominate the performance improvement.
Well, obviously, pay off any high-interest debt you have. I assume you’ve already done that.
Consider taking out a mortgage on an additional house and using that one as your primary residence. You can then rent out the previous one.
This gives you two things that are very hard to get otherwise: free money from the government, and leverage. The free money is the tax credit you get for paying mortgage interest each year. The leverage is the massive amount of money you can borrow from the bank for a mortgage. The rate is quite reasonable too (that is also subsidized by the government).
Without leverage, you’re stuck just increasing your money a few percent each year at best. That keeps you in the middle income bracket where you’re too wealthy to get helped much by the government, but not rich enough to really have financial independence. It’s better to make a riskier bet, because if you lose, you’ll get bailed out by the safety net, and if you win, you get to keep the winnings. Once you get enough money you can hire people who know the cheat codes for the tax system– in the middle class, you get screwed.
There is no tax credit for mortgage interest; it is a tax deduction. You get back $YOUR_MARGINAL_RATE*(mortgage interest paid). If you can reliably make more money than (1-$YMR)*(mortgage interest paid) by investing the borrowed amount, it makes sense to do it, but otherwise not.
The safety net requires you lose everything. And isn’t guaranteed anyway, though IIRC LMC isn’t a single man so a little better odds than for many of us.
Re the mortgage interest deduction, even “(marginal rate)*(interest paid) might overstate the real amount of the deduction. The federal standard deduction for a single person is now $12,000. If you currently have total itemized deductions totaling $10,000, then your real mortgage interest deduction is (marginal rate)*((interest paid) – 2000).
PS: As my aunt used to say, people get rich by getting interest, not by paying interest. So, borrowing money to buy real estate makes little sense, unless you can rent the property out at a profit. Even buying property in the hope of selling at a profit in the future might not work too well. Even in the midst of today’s boom, the real price of residential housing has merely doubled since 1974.https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QUSR628BIS That is an increase of about 1.5% over inflation, which is not a great return. You could do as well with inflation protected bonds or with lots of other investments.
Not for this OP’s goals, but you ignore one advantage of real estate investing — you usually borrow much of the capital. Generally you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) borrow to get starting capital.
Certainly home ownership can be a bad investment, but its a rare investment where your down payment of, say, $100,000, and be getting that 1.5% over inflation on capital of $2,000,000.
Maybe I’m missing something, but aren’t you forgetting about the cost of borrowing? A handy online calculator tells me that if I take out a $1.9 million mortgage at 3.92% for 30 years (not that I will get that low a rate for such a big loan), I end up paying $3.2 million over the course of the loan. Plus, I am paying 20K per year in property taxes for 30 years – that is another $600,000. Property values would have to increase by a lot more than 1.5% over inflation to make up for that.
So, it is only a good investment if I can rent it for a decent price.
That comment corresponds very poorly to my understanding of the “cultural Marxism” claims. I don’t actually think it’s a very useful descriptor, but it’s more reasonable than it’s getting credit for.
Marxism tends to collapse a lot of complex economic relationships into a simple clash between two major groups determined by wealth (apologies for the oversimplification comrades). Currently we’re seeing elements of the Left collapse a lot of complex social relationships into a clash between two major groups determined by individual identity/culture. They are both, to some extent, seeking to accomplish similar goals like eradicating traditional/”family” values, and justify short-term extreme action while seeking an eventual vision of equality. There’s a great deal of fretting over who gets classified as the powerful vs the oppressed classes. I’m sure you could perform a similar exercise drawing parallels between most theories, but Marxism seems to fit particularly well.
I’m not sure it’s very charitable, or even correct, to describe it as a vast conspiracy theory (as the comment does). It might just be difficult to point at a successful march through the institutions in a way that doesn’t sound like a conspiracy.
there needs to be a word for people acting in their own self interest in a way that seems like conspiracy but without actual coordination, e.g. various civil engineering societies releasing reports that talk about how many more civil engineering projects we should be starting. The people involved are sincere, no one is coordinating them, but the results are identical to what you’d get if you had a great secret cabal dedicated to milking money out of the rest of the country on behalf of the engineers for purely selfish reasons.
Convergent motives?
Kenji Kamiyama, a Japanese anime director, did in fact coin a term for this: Stand Alone Complex. The complex refers to a collective behaviour towards a particular common goal, and it stands alone because it arises dynamically without any coordination or organizing force behind it
In the eponymous anime the salient example of a stand alone complex involves around half a dozen people deciding to conduct a simultaneous assassination attempt on the Japanese Prime Minister at the same event while claiming to be the same famous criminal. The level of apparent coordination is such that the police initially suspect large scale brain hacking (it’s a cyberpunk setting), and are baffled as they slowly come to the conclusion that not only is every single of them is acting of their own free will, but they did so individually and with no awareness of the others.
This is of course all rather far fetched, it’s a sci-fi anime after all. However, the more mundane example of multiple organizations with similar interests acting without coordination towards the same goal is itself an example of a stand alone complex.
“Tacit collusion” is very close to what you are talking about, though I think it implies more self-awareness on the part of the colluders.
This is the no culture war thread.
In which Scott linked two very CW-inspiring comments/essays. Though the hidden OTs seem largely automatic right now, and though I know he often recommends “comment of the week” in the non-hidden OTs, if he wants to keep CW discussion limited to the hidden OTs, he should probably recommend CW-related links in those, or else link threads, assuming those are CW-safe.
Yes, but I think it was very unsporting of Scott to link to a culture war topic in the no-culture war thread so we can’t discuss it. I think Simon_Jester’s comment is completely wrong. The first response from Ambi underneath it is correct.
I’ve got some armchair thoughts on “Cultural Marxism”.
The uniting theme that I see going through various ideologies called this is belief that entitlement is defined by need. If you need something hard enough, you are entitled to get it, if those who can give it to you won’t, or only do it conditionally, they are oppressing you. For example, if you are a woman and need man’s resources or favour, and man would only if you put out, you are oppressed. Or you are trying to get into a better country than your home, but natives don’t want you unless you assimilate. Or if you need money to pay for your healthcare.
Of course such an attitude can’t exist in free-for-all form. There needs to be a hierarchy of whose well-being is more important. For example, you can’t simultaneously claim that women are oppressed by men who would only share resources with exclusive partners and men are oppressed by women who take their resources but won’t put out. Women’s need tend to have priority, so men are expected to do them favours and satisfy their needs as part of “basic decency”. LGBT folks or ethnic minorities need “representation” to feel better about themselves, so you owe them roles, but they don’t owe white heterosexual males a slot in their culture. That kind of thing. It started with social democracy kind of a deal, with material entitlement but grew into cultural and emotional area.
This runs the opposite to more “capitalist” mindset where you have no entitlement at all and must exchange what you have for what others have and more of “conquer” mindset where you simply victimize others with their victimization is alone proof of your superiority that entitles you to things. This mindset also lacks a true shared front, devolving into squabble over the place in hierarchy of needs.
I wouldn’t call it Marxism though, because OG Marxism was advocating destruction of (what it perceived as) parasites, while Social Democracy was a reaction to it with parasites saying “You don’t have to destroy us, you can too become a parasites”
The other two examples you gave are fine enough, but this one seems very distasteful. You seem to present a scenario where men are interacting with women mainly as prostitutes, nothing more, and then blame the *women* for being dissatisfied with this arrangement. Sure, women shouldn’t feel entitled to someone else’s resources and favor without providing anything in return, but maybe the situation would be better resolved by the men accepting something other than sex in exchange? Would you not feel, if not “oppressed”, incredibly used and disrespected if the people you interacted with regularly demanded that you let them fuck you (in a way that is not guaranteed to be pleasant) in exchange? Not a great example of “entitlement”.
Very few people would request that I fuck them in lieu of some other form of exchange. I think you’re looking at this from the wrong side — offering sex for value is an option available to attractive young women, but hardly anyone else.
This assumes that there is no retaliation if someone asks you for sex and you decline, which is… not always the case.
Sure, but is it more likely than retaliation if someone demands money from me and doesn’t get it?
Eh. We’re discussing too broad a range of scenarios for the question to be meaningful, probably, as with virtually all discussions of entire genders.
Well, in online games, the common response to “I’m a girl 🙂 Can I have some free gold ? :-)” is usually, “tits or GTFO”. The idea being is, if you are asking for free stuff just for being female, then you need to a). actually prove it, and b). provide something in exchange. Furthermore, since you do not appear to have any marketable skills and are actively invoking your sex/gender instead, your best option is to provide something that is uniquely marketable with regards to your biology.
@stillnotking as well
If we are literally talking about “I’m a girl, can I have some free gold?”, then sure, that’s entitled. And you can probably generalize this further to “hot young women use their looks to get free drinks, etc”.
But I don’t think I’ve ever seen *anyone* suggest that women are oppressed because they asked for a free drink and didn’t get it. The complaint seems more likely to be the reverse — “A man gave me a free drink unprompted and now demands that I pay him back with sex”.
The situation that ARabbiAndAFrog described, where the woman *needs* a man’s resources but the man is only willing to accept sex in exchange, sounds more to me like a landlord demanding a woman sleep with him if she doesn’t want to get evicted than a chick at the bar batting her eyelashes for free drinks.
It was mostly a description of marriage, as dysphemistic as possible.
Even in marriage, I’d hope your wife has more to offer you than just sex. For a cynical and transactional view of marriage that sounds much less sexual-assault-y, you could at least have the man requesting childcare and housekeeping in exchange for paying bills.
Well, sex is what sets your wife apart from a maid or a nanny, doesn’t it?
Although originally, beside marriage, I was setting a broad spectrum of conceivable relations where man would give his resources to his sexual partners and withhold it from the women who would refuse to be his sexual partner. Which feminists (Adherent to mentality I outline) tend to condemn, whenever it traditional marriage, trying to woo someone with favours and breaking up with them upon realization of being friendzoned, or prostitution (It was weird how many feminists I saw opposing prostitution, but after formulating this description it makes much more sense – they dislike any norm where a woman is not supposed to accept payment if she isn’t willing to put out).
In the modern understanding of the word, possibly that is it. Marriage may also involve a permanent combining of financial interests (which makes certain financial arrangements, like jointly purchasing a house, much more reasonably) and the likelihood of sharing moral and legal responsibility for children–no one comes after the nanny for things the children do after she clocks out, contra the parents.
I think we are getting off-course with discussion of this specific wording and how rapey it is. What I was getting at, is that women tend to have extra needs and are sometimes worse in earning their keep, particularly during and after the pregnancy and many of them would have to rely to man, or men to plug a hole in their ability to support themselves during that period. Traditionally it’s supposed to be covered in marriage, but marriage is denounced as oppressive to women because it forces obligations on them in exchange to receiving the resources they need. The empowering of women, enabling them to divorce their husbands, or live promiscuous life in general for most would require a system of extracting resources from men, either through child support or welfare tax.
This forcible distribution makes women more free, while unwillingness to pay for it is villified, trying to set any kind of conditions, like, say being only willing to support one’s exclusive partner and one’s own children is denounced.
Giving resources to sexual partner(s) and withholding them from non-sexual partners isn’t quite what you described, since this wording implies that the man is initiating the offer of resources. If you take a girl on a fancy date and then she decides she’s not interested, that sucks but it’s the kind of risk that’s inevitable when looking for a partner. If you feel like you’re putting a bunch of time, effort, and resources into a relationship that isn’t being reciprocated, then it’s fair to be upset, but if the only reciprocation you’re interested in is sex, then you want a prostitute, not a girlfriend. If you’re happy with the rest of the relationship but just wish she’d put out a little more, then it’s not entitled of her to say no, it’s just a relationship incompatibility and you can either look for ways to increase her desire as a couple, or decide to call it off.
On the other hand, if the situation is closer to “Women is willing to obtain some resource / service the usual way, by paying for it, but the man refuses to accept anything other than sex in exchange”, then yeah, that’s gross and exploitative if it happens once, and oppressive if it happens regularly.
(I actually only just noticed ARAAF’s reply at 3:26pm)
I think “marriage is inherently oppressive to women” is a much more niche and radical position than any of the others that you listed, so much so that I didn’t even recognize that as the position being criticized. (I got that it was probably implying marriage, but the most charitable reading of your wording imo was still “wives are basically long-term prostitutes”.)
Actually the position being criticized is “Women deserve their ex’s money even if they no longer service them in any way” alongside more generic welfare consumption.
This is an example of “Entitlement comes from need, trying to leverage this need is oppressive” mindset I am trying to describe – your ex-wife or baby-momma or even some random woman need your money, so state will extract them from you on your behalf, if you complain about not getting anything out of it, you are entitled and evil oppressor.
In the same vein, “Women have certain power over male behaviour because they control which behaviour is rewarded with sex and companionship and which is punished by loneliness and celibacy” is absolutely trivially obvious for anyone of “capitalist” mindset, because of course they do, how can they not, but for feminists it seems to pretty upsetting, because in their mindset, it’s painting them as the real oppressors.
Please move the CW discussion to a CW-allowed thread.
@mdet
I don’t see any claim that this is all there is to the relationship. It seems to me to be a completely normal complaint that a certain aspect of a relationship is unfair. For example, if a friend doesn’t have a car and always depends on you to drive places and to pay for the gas to get there, this is a valid thing to be upset about and want to see redressed. Such a redress can be fair without being equal (like the other person paying for gas half of the time and then also doing something else to make up for you having to chauffeur).
Such a complaint doesn’t mean that your relationship is solely about driving places. It merely means that there is an issue of (un)fairness in this part of the relationship that you want addressed.
Attacking such a complaint as treating people merely as X seems to usually be an covert attack on the validity of the needs of the other person. The problem I have with such attacks is that they diminish the needs of others based on a false accusation (that this one important aspect is all one cares about) & that they never seem to be applied fairly.
For example, you can similarly (unfairly) attack the common female complaint that men should do more in the household by accusing women of ‘interacting with men mainly as housekeepers, nothing more, and then blame the *men* for being dissatisfied with this arrangement.’
Yet I’ve never seen the people who attack some men for supposedly seeing women as prostitutes also attack some women for supposedly seeing men as housekeepers.
Note that this example actually seems quite valid:
– women desire cleaner houses and men desire more sex, so in both cases there is a mismatch in desire
– many relationships have a quid-pro-quo where men do more outdoor/large chores and/or put more effort in earning income, while women do more housework
– many people feel like the other person is obliged to adapt to their own standards of cleanliness, rather than recognizing that one standard is not automatically better than the other, just like many people feel that the other person is obliged to adapt to their sex drive.
Sex is one of the strongest desires for many people and a certain level may be required for the well-being of a person. Imagine that a man would say: I don’t want to spend a lot of time with you, but I’ll give you lots of money instead. I think that many women would not consider that acceptable below a certain level of time spent together, as they need that contact and it is not really replaceable with something else.
Even to the extent that a woman could provide other things, the value of sex may be so high that those alternatives would have to be very impressive and costly. Now, obviously some women are highly offended by how highly men tend to value sex compared to other aspects of a relationship (like companionship), but many men are also offended at how much value women tend to place on their earning ability, their stoicism, etc.
As far as I can see, there are only two options here. Either we respect that men and women have different needs & thus that some unequal-but-fair quid-pro-quo’s are needed to provide a similar level of satisfaction of needs, or we call the needs of one gender ‘normal’ and then vilify the other for having different desires.
The latter seems quite popular now.
Not if they made similarly burdensome sacrifices for me in return. Note that civilization, government, work and relationships all require burdensome sacrifices.
If you merely want (or even refuse to recognize) that others make sacrifices for your benefit, but refuse to make sacrifices for their benefit, then you are not fighting against oppression, but for it.
ARabbiAndAFrog, this is the “no culture war” open thread.
Question for SSC generally: I was aware that this was a No-CW thread when I replied, but thought that “Don’t make statements / use wording that implies that women should generally be treated as prostitutes” had enough consensus behind it and was an important enough norm to police that I could push back against it without necessarily contributing to a mindkilling culture war. Did I overstep with my initial reply? With my subsequent replies? Are there certain norms that are still worth replying to enforce, even in a No-CW thread? (Say, if someone starts advocating murdering political opponents, it’s not necessarily succumbing to mindkill to say “Hey don’t murder people”)
At first I was going to say you engaged in a way that would foreseeable lead to culture warring. But then I reread your posts and they do sound like you weren’t expecting culture war.
So I guess I’d say you mispredicted what kind of interaction you were setting up. Honest mistake. (Also a chance to refine your predictions going forward).
I wouldn’t say “mistake”, I think the conversation went about as I expected / hoped — I think we settled that what ARAAF intended to get across was not the meaning that I read in their words, and they ended up restating themselves in a way that acknowledged and avoided my objections. But I guess that was luck, since if they had doubled-down on the meaning I had read then my replies would’ve been throwing fuel on a CW fire. So point still taken to avoid these type of replies in the future.
Replying to CW topics is discussing CW. If we were to adopt a rule that pushing against CW claims is fine so long as there is broad consensus behind you, that is tantamount to declaring that CW restrictions only apply to unpopular opinions. Moreover, if someone were to find your reading of ARabbiAndAFrog’s post to be inaccurate and uncharitable, they would be inclined to raise some argument about it, and argument about CW subjects violates the no-CW rule.
In short, the correct response to CW in the non-CW thread is not, “Surely everyone agrees with my objection to this.” The correct response is, “Please no CW in the no-CW thread.”
I couldn’t have put it better. All my +1 on this one.
I think you’re picking up the negative vs. positive rights distinction. This is a real and important thing.
I don’t think it’s a good definition of the belief cluster Cultural Marxism is trying to gesture at, though. A lot of the people you’d call Cultural Marxists put a lot of effort into arguing that victim groups are victims of negative rights violations.
If I had to pin it down, I’d say it’s more a matter of skepticism of any line of reasoning whose conclusion benefits those currently in power. c.f. the “Method and social epistemology” section of the Marxplainer Scott linked. Social justice types and Marxists have different ideas of who exactly “those currently in power” are, but I think that section is something both groups would agree on.
If a country like the UK declared all rented accomodations to legally be signed over to their occupants would this cause a recession, or could you get away with it?
I think aspects of capitalism, particularly those to do with land and housing need to be reset now and then to pull them closer to a distributist ideal of property, but how do you do so without destroying the economy and sending everyone spiralling into poverty? Is there any way to enact this plan gradually enough that it doesn’t tank the housing market and then send the banks under, or do we need to sort out how dependent the banking system and national GDP is on housing prices to begin with first? Then the question is how might we do that?
I frequently have this same thought about New York. And I always wonder what the relative differences would be if:
All Buildings become coops owned by a corporation itself run jointly by the inhabitants of each apartment.
vs.
All apartments become independent condos and the shared amenities of the building are dealt with some other way, perhaps as bundled assets for management companies purchased by resident/owners.
How would those who became co-owners of a split-up brownstone compare to those who now co-own a hi-rise?
Just imagining the resulting maelstrom I find fascinating. The mad scramble as people try and reconsolidate their holdings. The general economic chaos. I don’t have an answer for you, just pleasantly surprised someone’s had the exact same thought.
I can’t edit the main post, but I just realized this might be too culture war although I was asking an economics question. In my defense the OT comment of the week was about communism.
You’d bankrupt millions of people. And how do you decide ownership shares? If I own a 2 bedroom apartment and am renting out the guest bedroom, how much of my apartment would my tenant be entitled to? Does it make a difference if they’ve been renting for a day or a 10 years?
IMO, you wouldn’t need to force that the accomodations were to be sold to the renter, just make the practice of renting itself illegal. Give everyone a fairly long time to get ready for this change, but fully outlaw the practice of paying money on a monthly basis in exchange for letting someone occupy a space. Then make a second law that says existing mortgages on houses previously being used as rentals would cap at a certain % of the final sale price of the property that would scale by how much of the loan was already paid off.
Speaking as a landlord, here is what I can guess would happen:
1. The only reason I can afford to own property is that the rent I’m paid, by and large, covers the mortgage I have on the house. If I didn’t have someone in the place paying me, I couldn’t afford to keep the property. Therefore I would be motivated to sell.
2. Yes, every other landlord in America would be in my same boat, so likely housing prices would plummit. While there would also be substantial demand increase (all the rentors now need to buy) I’m pretty certain that prices would level out to well below where they are at now, at least in areas previously saturated with rental properties.
3. The second aspect of the law would ensure I made at least some of my money from the house back, so I’d be less-well-off, but financially fine. I guess the bank is taking it in the shorts here, but that could be offset by the fact that the people who used to pay me a rent are not paying the bank a mortgage.
While there would be certain classes of people who are wiped out by this change (i’m thinking large-scale real estate investors) I also don’t really care about them. Overall I’m surprisingly in favor of this new law. Hand me a petition and I’d sign it.
This would be a huge difference, and lead to much worse outcomes for the country.
For example, take my situation six years ago when I was moving cross-country and didn’t know how long I’d be staying in the Seattle area. As it was, I signed a lease and decided if I didn’t like things – whether the individual apartment or the area – I could reevaluate after several months. If renting were illegal, I’d need to buy a house, which would be a much larger financial investment, require much more time to research in advance, and put much more money at risk if I decided to leave the Seattle area a year later.
Or, take someone I know who’s about to be on a short-term work assignment for a few months. As it is, she’s renting an apartment month-to-month. If renting were illegal… what would you recommend? Should she invest tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars in buying a house or condo when she knows perfectly well she’ll only be living in it for a couple months?
Forward Synthesis advocates a one-time reset and then allows people to lease out homes going forwards. I’m not sure how good that scheme is on balance, but it’s got advantages. Your scheme, in contrast, would act as a continued barrier against people who have reasons to look for temporary accommodations.
This. I’ve always rented, because until recently, I wasn’t sure I’d be in the area long enough for buying to make any sense. My last apartment had water in it five times in the 10 months I lived there. If it had been my property, I’d have had to fix the problem when it occurred, and it might have made it hard to sell. Instead, I just didn’t renew my lease and moved to a house that was better-located and had more space.
I’m sure that there would be workarounds to any “renting is forbidden” law. Maybe I “buy” it, but with a complicated contract that gives me the right to sell it back to the company that previously owned it after a specific time, and they also offer me to loan me the money at a specific rate, which is slightly higher than what rent used to be, because of all the new overhead.
To add to this, what about hotels? Is that a one-night rental, and hence illegal?
Long-term hotels (week/month long). Are those the substitute for renting? If so, renting would continue in exactly the same way as it did before, just with a minor adjustment as everyone got hotel licensed.
So, instead people pay daily or weekly, which changes nothing excepts add transaction cost. Or you make that illegal, in which case you’ve just outlawed hotels and all their variants, and nobody can travel unless they have friends in whatever place they are traveling to.
Also, nobody can move out of their parents’ home until they have at least $20K or so of cash or credit, and that only if they are willing to live almost dirt-poor. Where do college dormitories fit into this scheme? And if your parents just throw you out of the house at 18 or whatever, you’re sleeping on the streets or you’re forced to do business with a loan shark. If you lose the house you have now and don’t have the cash, ditto. If you want to live someplace less than crappy and figure sharing the costs with a roommate is the way to do that, then better hope that relationship doesn’t go south or that you’ve got the better lawyer, or again you’re sleeping on the streets.
Probably the workaround that most people would wind up with is that employers would buy blocks of flats and offer them as a benefit of employment, unless you make that illegal as well. Roughly equivalent to now except that employers now have their employees clustered together where they can be watched off-duty and can’t quit without extensive financial preparation.
“If we screw over a bunch of people I don’t like just once, we can give everyone their own flat free and clear” is a nice fantasy, but even if we handwave away all the difficulties involved in setting it up, it won’t last.
@Aftagley
I can see the good side of rent though, which is why I’d rather transfer ownership in that specific common form of rented accomodation than abolish rent as a legal concept. The issue is that too many people have occupied a home for years and are struggling to pay rent to maintain that existence. It’s truly their home, that they have been living in for years, and yet they can be turfed out at a moments notice, and once homeless find themselves in an abyss.
People renting out summer houses, or land being leased to businesses, are quite different in terms of the bulk of people affected and what the scope for harm actually is.
Other than that, I think we can tweak your plan to apply in either case.
That’s the part I’m most concerned about though. There needs to be a plan for getting banks to be less reliant on the housing market, because mortgages are their own problem.
@cassander
This is a good point and another reason why I don’t think rent should be abolished across the board. We should think about how the policy would work carefully, and not do so from a revolutionary abolitionist mindset. This kind of rent where an individual rents out a room isn’t the form of rent that the majority of people are experiencing, which is instead apartment based, where there is a seperation between landlord/corporation and occupant/s. Someone part renting out some of their house could easily just not apply. They have stake in that home as a co-occupant that is quite different from the more abstracted and more common form of rent that is causing suffering and existential anxiety for millions of people.
Rents are indirect ways for the tenants to pay for the property that is being rented. So are mortgages. So of course you’re going to get mortgages if you don’t allow rents.
I meant more the way in which our entire banking and economic system seems to rotate around mortgages and housing prices in such a way that powerful interests prevent any sanity in how much houses cost. Of course mortgages would still exist… and so would rent if you didn’t actually abolish it. It’s the dynamics around these things that matter.
Banks take it on the chin whenever housing prices fall, and the mortgage crisis in the US happened with the highest rate of home ownership in history. The insanity of housing prices is more easily tied to governments trying to get more people into homes than the banking system.
You’re right. I was only thinking about long-term renting, not about renting out a room or a summer house.
Maybe make a time-horizon for renting to own – like, as you rent a property you start building equity in it? As your total rent paid passes certain thresholds of the property’s value you get increasing rights over the property? You’d need some kind of protections to ensure people don’t just get evicted as they approach those thresholds, but it could be doable.
Good feedback everyone – my initial enthusiasm for this idea was too strong.
I still think my idea might solve the problem of “wants to buy a house, but a strong rental market has driven local property prices too high for that to be an option” problem of renting but it fails abysmally at solving the “isn’t going to be in the area long enough for buy a house to be an appropriate option” benefit of renting.
So, this is off-topic, but I can’t resist. This continually baffles me: how is it possible that there are still places where this is possible? I can’t see it anywhere around me, and if I think about it, it seems to me that indeed it shouldn’t be possible – because it means pretty much that you can just get a house for free (yes, there is a bit of risk involved, so it’s not entirely free, but it still seems way too close).
In Spain, mortgages can be 30% cheaper than rent, at least in cities that are not Madrid or Barcelona.
But then they won’t give you a mortgage with less than 40% or so saved up.
Because people have different time horizons, different credit-worthiness and different risk-exposure desires.
If I intend to live in a place for twenty years, buying makes obvious sense, but maybe I can’t get a mortgage at the kind of rates someone with stellar credit can that make up that margin. Or perhaps I am living there for 9 months.
Sure, that explains why people rent instead of buying a house to live in. But in a world where people still buy and let houses in areas where the rent is a fraction of the morgage payment, why don’t all those people instead get “free” houses in other areas and thereby drive up the prices so they’re no longer free?
We bought a rental property ~ 10 years ago for ~ $110,000, and have averaged ~$12,000 a year in rent over that span. With property taxes, interest on the capital (we borrowed, but cash up front would have a similar opportunity cost), insurance and repairs it will take 30 years or so for us to get our “free house”.
So basically the reason people don’t do this is patience, or having better investment opportunities.
How much down payment?
1.5%
I don’t see how “having better investment opportunities” plays into it, because if you wanted to invest in anything else, your bank wouldn’t give you a loan on the same terms, and anyway hardly any private person takes out a loan to make investments other than in real estate. And you say your downpayment was 1.5%, which is nothing. So what exactly is the opportunity cost?
Few countries other than the US allow non-recourse defaulting on loans, so for countries outside the US, if things go badly, and the rents plummet, you are still on the hook.
In the US, I guess defaulting on your loan would ruin your credit.
Its either opportunity cost or its an interest rate. We put 1.5% down but payed 4.5% (now less) interest on the $108,000 loan. That is a cost of ownership, if we had put up $110,000 on the house in cash we would have forgone the interest but also forgone other opportunities (we did not have that amount of cash anyway, but you are either buying with cash or with a loan).
Defaulting on our loan would cost us our house given our specific circumstances.
In general I don’t think this matters that much, it does increase risk but you have to default really early for it to be a big deal in most circumstances as the sale of the property should cover the majority of any loan. Bad purchases, bad luck and bad management do happen (the guy who sold us our house ended up in jail for acquiring our house after all) but further recourse shouldn’t be a huge deal without lots of other conditions.
How many different things are you not doing right now that would pay off at a similar rate over the next 30 years? There are a ton of sidelines/gigs/hobbies that you could work to pay $2-5k a year which over 30 years will be of similar value to my rental house. How many do you think exist that you haven’t bothered to find out about? (not a shot at you, a comment on all the possible opportunities that exist that everyone passes up).
You would significantly restrict people’s ability to move to new locations.
Most people rent for a while, when they move to a new place, or move temporarily. Most universities would be forced to switch to online models, while their students continued living at home, I guess. I certainly could not have attended graduate school in Atlanta if a condition of that attendance had been that I must buy a house/apartment. And during undergrad I guess I would have been forced to stay at home.
Then, after school, it would have been very difficult to take this job in yet another state if I couldn’t rent an apartment for a while to build up a down payment and get to know the city to make a good decision about where/what to buy.
My mother-in-law owns her home outright and needs to sell it and move into a facility that is a smaller burden on her, as she finds herself less able to manage a house and yard. This policy would pretty much require that she move in with us OR into an old folks home. My father-in-law and his wife just sold there home for similar reasons and moved into an apartment they can manage better. Guess that option would be off the table for them.
Or we would just switch to rent-by-another-name somehow.
I hope Forward Synthesis’s only advocating a one-time reset. If he isn’t, I’d agree with you.
I don’t think “just this once” can be credibly committed to.
@Evan Þ
Yes, that’s correct. I don’t want rent to be abolished.
But rent would be abolished, because what kind of moron would agree to rent property to anyone when the government is highly likely to confiscate and redistribute it with the stroke of a pen?
(ETA: Of course, the economic demand for rentals wouldn’t go away, so what would likely happen is that landlords and tenants would find some way to engage in rental contracts without calling them that, much like people get around usury laws. This would accomplish nothing but to impose additional burdens and friction on the market, plus other potential negatives of driving it underground, e.g. organized crime.)
Yeah, I get the concern, but in practice it depends on how much they trust the government. How trustworthy is the government on this point? If the government is explicitly elected with a mandate to this policy on a once and done ideological basis, then people have a means to measure the government’s trustworthiness before adjusting their behavior.
The general public do not react to the government in the same reflexive way as hardcore internet libertarians, otherwise societies all over the world that take hardline actions all the time would instantly freeze up with slippery slope anxiety about the government giving your toothbrush to your neighbor.
Dude, this is not a niche concern of “internet libertarians”. It’s completely mainstream economics! There is a reason that first-world countries don’t arbitrarily expropriate stuff without compensating the owners.
Even modern socialist countries understand this problem.
Then you adjust the policy so that there is compensation. Freeze evictions while compensating landlords monetarily, and then tranfer.
So this proposal differs from your last one by the small matter of requiring an up-front payment of £7.3 trillion for the UK version or $32 trillion for the US version.
Good luck with that.
Its Ok John Schilling, just tax that homeowners to pay for it.
Okay. That’s too expensive. I concede there’s no way around it then.
There’s no harm in asking, if you’re willing to accept an honest but unpleasant answer.
The takeaway of this should be, that the current system of mortgages, commercial loans, and property rent allows most people to tap into a market providing residential housing of vastly greater quality and value than they could plausibly aspire to if the rule were, “work hard and save as much as you can, and when you have enough you can buy a flat”. UK residents collectively enjoy £7.3 trillion worth of housing, without ever having held more than a tiny fraction of that in hard money.
If there are people around the edges being left out – and there clearly are – then the solution needs to be a modest one targeted at the edges, not one that guts the center.
“Recession” is much too mild a word. The shock of the government being able to arbitrarily expropriate real estate without compensation would send the entire market into an unrecoverable tailspin, since any investment would look very dubious at that point. Who knows what the next target will be? If your goal is to transition the UK into a country where everyone’s wealth is hoarded under their mattress in Krugerrands, this is an excellent policy. Otherwise, not so much.
Announcing “we will be expropriating all rental properties on date X” would have the same effect, since their market price would immediately drop to zero, and no more rental contracts could be offered by rational prospective landlords.
TBQH, this is the kind of talk that inflames my suspicions of the economic illiteracy and inability to predict obvious consequences of the left in general.
Hello, I am “on the left” and I totally think this is really bad idea.
Yeah, on reflection that was a silly and uncharitable thing to say; I retract it with full apologies.
@stillnotking
Apology accepted, I wasn´t actually offended
I wouldn’t draw these kind of conclusions from my “proposal”. You can see that I’m well aware of the economic problems this would cause. I recognize it as a radical solution and want help pairing it down until it reaches the point where it addresses the problem without causing unacceptable levels of economic turmoil.
The problem is that “the rent is too damn high”, but more importantly that to be able to own a home is the basis for everything else in our capitalist system. You need an address to do practically anything and so you need a home, and yet a home is not some sort of free baseline upon which everything else rests. I’m not saying it should be, but a society in which people are struggling to even keep a roof over their head is not in my view a healthy one.
I don’t actually like socialism, that is; socializing property, most likely under the control of the government (or “the people” for all the difference that makes), but this is exactly the environment that fosters it. Private property is vital for a healthy and functional society, but if property itself starts to give way before the market to the extent that the very baseline of everything else – the home – is threatened, then you will have to do something, even if that something is not so radical.
I’m simply starting with my ideal, which is a society of people who own their own homes. I want the result of widely owned private property (not in fact a leftist goal, but more of a Chestertonian one), because I strongly believe that we are most socially healthy when we have that kind of distribution. Every now and then the monopolistic tendency of existence has to be fought back against and we have to pull things back a little.
So, yes, I’ll start with “what if the occupants were the owners” because that’s the ideal case, and from there I’ll look at the problems that arise and adjust towards the real case. Of course the anxiety such a mass transferal would create would have dire consequences! Of course the price might drop out the housing market, which would destroy the banks which would destroy the economy! The point is find ways around those problems, because if we don’t then pretty soon a bunch of people with no roofs above their heads are going to march on parliament with torches and pitchforks!*
*not an endorsement
You can’t find ways around these problems, because the goal of the plan is equivalent to mass transferral. All that’s changing is whether you do it quickly or slowly, and whether you want to call it mass transferral or something else.
OK, you’re just spitballing and that’s fine, but you still need to have some basic sense of the limits of the possible, so you’re not in “What if C-A-T spelled ‘DOG’?” territory. IOW, figure out some way to accomplish universal housing that respects existing property claims.
The problem is that you’re singling out one particular form of wealth, which multiplies the collateral damage you inflict for a given size of redistributive effect. This is why economists are always saying “broaden the base and lower the rate”. The gradual, workable way of doing what you want is the one that’s already being done: fairly high but non-confiscatory taxes on people who have money from whatever source derived, with some of the proceeds given away to people who haven’t got money.
Existing property claims are not 100% time immemorial sacrosanct in our existing society, so it’s really about finding that acceptable margin. We’re in no way in “what if C-A-T spelled ‘DOG’?” territory. The property structure of society can change, and all of those changes even now do not take place due to pure market interactions absent any outside intervention. You need to beat radicalism on the anvil until it hardens into pragmatism.
EDIT:
I pretty much agree… until that’s exhausted and the problems are still persisting and people are resorting to radical solutions. Sometimes you have a problem with the structure itself, and even if you funnel money down to the people who need it, it just gets eaten up by the structure in a way that leaves no real benefit. You give people more money? Rents get raised. It doesn’t help that new building is so legally restricted, but the fact that our society is so addicted to high housing prices from homeonwers themselves who want to gain passively from the value, up to the financial wheeler dealers who gain from mortgage backed securities until the government has to bail them out… strongly suggests something needs to change about the structure itself, as our society itself doesn’t seem so “broad based” but is quickly turning into an inverted pyramid apt to topple. We need to be pragmatic, but we need to aim that pragmatism at structural change.
I think that in the next ten years, socialism could become a major force again. If the alternative to socializing property/abolishing it is redistributing it, then that’s what I would choose.
It would probably not cause a recession, but it would of course destroy rental housing market and that means more people would depend on their families or employers for housing provision.
On its own it would certainly cause a recession.
Think 2008 when defaults on mortgages which were in the 5% range with recoveries in the 60-90% range caused a major, deep and long lasting recession.
Now take every loan that was used to buy or build a property with rental income- default rates are now hitting 100% and recovery rates are close to 0%. Only loans secured against other lines of income will have any value. Long story short every bank with any exposure to these loans will be bankrupt over night.
@baconbits9
Ok, I stand corrected. It would cause massive financial crisis.
So in order for this to work (given how dependent the current banking system is on housing related loans), you’d need the government to also compensate for the value of all those loans, essentially bailing out the banks for the value lost?
That is just point one of many, where I couldn’t even tell you all the points.
For example every person employed in the banks divisions that specialize in these types of loans is out of a job (with or without compensation, their skills are no longer necessary), a bunch of realtors are out of a job, a bunch of construction companies totally on hold plus more knock off effects. Somewhere in the tens to hundreds of thousands of jobs lost overnight, but not in the “Amazon puts other book sellers out of business” way where Amazon is hiring tens of thousands of workers near simultaneously, just people losing jobs with no new job creation being caused.
Beyond that there is no way go guess at what is going to happen to overall housing prices which could easily bankrupt the industry on its own, or what happens to local government revenue or all kinds of things.
Right. I see now this is just unworkable and there’s no way to really lessen the impact. I guess I’ve just got to hope things get better.
It was interesting to see a humanistic impulse getting strangulated by liberal ideology in real time.
I am at least glad that more people are recognizing the unamenability of Capitalism.
Any system will fail when you mess with a core prerequisite.
Also, “humanistic impulses” can easily result in outcomes very hostile to human well-being.
@Forward Synthesis
I do not think that “hope things get better” is only alternative. You could get part of desired results by passing law which prevents evictions of renters without just cause (as dick pointed out above).
More broadly, Britain is imho a country which could use a lot of broad based wealth redistribution, e.g. via progressive taxes on real estate and other measures.
@AlesZiegler
British law not only doesn’t help redistribute land, but they actually help accumulation.
When they introduced the inheritance tax, they made a big deal about farming families getting evicted from their land (since farmers are asset rich but have poor cash flow). So they made agricultural land free of inheritance tax. As a result, land is owned by big trusts and rented to farmers. This causes many issues.
I would say that instead of re-distributing homes from homeowners, they should start by removing the exception to the IHT to any farm assets above 1,000,000 GBP or something like that. And stop this trust nonsense.
The fact that big charities like the Church or the National Trust own loads of land can also have a lot of problems for the people who live there.
Why not get rid of the inheritance tax?
Sure, that will solve part of the problem. The issue is also with big charities who also distort the market, so that only solves the matter in part.
But getting rid of the exception to IHT is probably more politically plausible than getting rid of the IHT. Personally, I mostly object to the distortion in land ownership this causes, but a lot of people dislike rich people inheriting.
I see many, many problems here. While “family who has lived in a house for generations (or at least years and years) but is in constant danger of being turned out if they can’t make rent/the landlord decides he’d rather use the lot to expand his money pit” is good for tugging at the hearstrings, I don’t think it describes reality well.
First, what about renters who haven’t been somewhere very long? I’ve been in my current place 9 months. How much of a claim does this really give me, particularly because I plan to be there for another 6 months before moving again? OK, so we limit it to people who have been in their current place for 20 years. This makes two groups mad. First, those who are at 19 years, and are going to get kicked out before they make 20, or who won’t be included in the one-time grant, and second, those who have been renting for 30 years, but who moved 5 years ago.
Second, if you go with “now own their place free and clear”, it’s going to be monstrously unfair to homeowners, who presumably aren’t going to have their mortgages forgiven in the same way.
About half of people I know are like this.
I’m glad you have the financial luxury of being able to move elsewhere. My family have been rooted to the same area for generations.
How mad? Literally any proposal you could craft is going to please some groups and upset others. The point isn’t to upset no one but to craft the policy in such a way that it doesn’t cause mass immiseration. You’re in the minority. The bulk of poor society is not jetting around renting one place for a few months and then renting another the next few. I want to help my street. I want to help my family. I want to help my entire economically deprived town and all the lost souls trapped within it.
The stake in occupancy could be time dependent, but not too time dependent for the reasons you mention, but I think landlords should pause at considering evicting the poor conveniently in response, as a huge mass suddenly homeless would engender far worse consequences for them.
There are turmoil minimization strategies here with which to amend the policy. We could over a year’s time pay some compensation to landlords/housing agencies to sign over ownership (give), while freezing evictions in preparation (take).
That’s another problem in its own right, but then you have to do something to the banking system to make it less dependent on mortgages. Any ideas?
So, why not just do this? Portland, OR just passed a law requiring any no-cause eviction (which includes >10% rent hike and simply declining to renew a lease) to be accompanied by relocation assistance about equal to first+last+deposit of a median apartment. Maybe we could see how that pans out before we up-end the entire financial structure of the world?
I wasn’t aware of that. Sounds interesting. I will see how that pans out.
That law is some weird form of redistribution combined with pseudo-insurance since the landlord is going to pass at least some of the cost on to tenants. Some costs they can’t pass on will will be compensated by landlords being more selective about tenants which combined with increasing rents will push some people downscale or even out of the rental market. Some landlords will move down the quality scale since they won’t be able to fill the same supply at the same quality while charging higher prices. Others may exit entirely.
I can’t remember who said it, but government policies with respect to housing are too often “restrict supply, subsidize demand”.
I suspect that you’re doing something fairly common here, namely proposing a very general solution to a very specific problem in your area. Admittedly, the problems are normally those of the Bay Area and NYC, but North Yorkshire also seems to have a very specific set of problems that aren’t common elsewhere. Actually, based on what I know, the situation there makes the US Rust Belt look like a boom town. But post-industrial areas are a hard problem, and I don’t think that a weird redistribution scheme is going to help.
Several groups seem to have studied this. According to the Census Bureau’s study (Table 5 on page 4 — note that the Figure 3 graph of purportedly the same data appears to be mislabeled), the median renter has lived in their current dwelling unit for 2.1 years. A little over 10% of renters appear to have lived in their current house/apartment/room/whatever for 10 years or more.
That’s far from an insignificant population, but it’s more consistent with your (and my) experience than with that of Forward Synthesis.
I wonder if there’s a potential keyhole solution here along the lines of importing Britain’s system of “leasehold tenure” as a kind of middle ground between owning and renting, which would preserve the central case of renting as a short-to-medium-term living arrangement while still allowing a form of tenure short of full freehold/fee-simple ownership for long-term tenants.
As I understand it, a leasehold tenant in the UK has an ultra-long-term lease (typically decade or even centuries) which can be sold, inherited, etc. The tenant has most of the rights of an owner over renovation of the property, and most of the responsibility for maintainence. The leaseholder does, however, owe the freehold owner of the property “grounds rent” according to a schedule specified in the lease (typically a fixed percentage increase every X years). The leasehold can be extended by mutual agreement, but cannot be terminated early by the freehold owner except in case of default.
The problem with this is that you’re trying to save people against their will. Of course renters would like to get the apartments they live in, because that’s just something for free. But they CAN buy – they just chose not to. By doing something like that you effectively take this choice away from the next generation. You’ll force people to live according to your ideal, not improve anything. And that’s before economic consequences kick in.
That’s the actual important part, and the reason I don’t support such a thing in practice (YET).
but…
I really don’t believe this. I personally rent, and I would go for this in a heartbeat if it wouldn’t destroy the economy, so that’s one potential theoretical vote at least. No, I can’t just buy, because I don’t have the money too. Poor people exist in society, and in fact we are the majority. Also, having a home is not merely an ideal. You need an address to do pretty much anything. A home is the very baseline of everything else, just short of food and water, but those alone only keep you alive, and don’t provide a staging ground for advancement. Not everything is just wistful choice floating around in the air.
I don’t know what country you’re in, but most first-world countries the poor are not even close to a majority.
In the United States, for example, we have 13.5% living in poverty (poor). That’s certainly a substantial minority, but nowhere near a majority.
And right now you can get an address for less than a thousand dollars in most places. You propose a regime that will give free(ish) perpetual addresses to some people – but only ones who have already crossed that bar because look, they have apartments – at the expense of raising the barrier to probably ten times that much for anyone who missed out on your one-time giveaway because either they were either the homeless people of the day who really needed it or because they weren’t adults yet. Because Aragorn is right, people are going to be really reluctant to offer cheap rental apartments if this is done even once.
I live in the North of England, and I would describe 95% of people I know as being poor, and living on the edge financially, but this might be just be standard readjustment. I can’t help but feel something is going on when people are around me are talking about themselves as a “precariat” and are talking about guillotines.
Perhaps you have a significant minority which a much larger group are willing to fight for.
I live in the North of England, and I would describe 95% of people I know as being poor
Then either something is seriously badly wrong with North of England, or something is seriously badly wrong with your bubble.
I’m completely willing to believe the first: I know three different people from there, and two of them describe their relationship with the area as “thank god I escaped”, and the 3rd one talks about it almost none at all.
@Mark Atwood
Look at a UK roadmap at some time, and look at how much the road density thins out at North Yorkshire. It’s a clue.
What percent of the population of England lives in areas like this?
It should be a clue that the population density is thinning out because there’s not much reason for anyone to live there. If in fact there are lots of people living there, then as Mark says something is seriously badly wrong.
It could of course be wrong somewhere other than the North of England, with people in those other places all agreeing to arrange that their seriously badly wrong problem cases should all go live in the North.
As I was reading this thread I had a suspicion you were from the UK. If you pointed that out sooner and I didn’t notice, I apologize. (and if you didn’t point it out sooner, you probably should have.)
Why? Because in the US in a major city I bought a home while working ~20hrs/week in a call center (front-line) and my wife ~30/week in a coffee shop (assistant manager). Not even a bad home, a nice one (although likely in a bad school district, thank goodness I don’t care). Before I bought it seemed like I was moving every couple of years and the people I know who rent do so.
Whereas the stories I hear about the UK are always these dreadful ones about incredible property costs, whether that comes from rural northern England or from people just trying to make ends meet in London.
If you are up for sharing, I’d be interested to know more about the property market, the problems with it, and some of the reasons why that is in the UK. I’d imagine it has something to do with living on an island, and something to do with a thick layer of regulation, but those are just guesses and I honestly don’t know. And whatever solution is needed is likely particular to the UK situation, not the US one.
I don’t really have these answers. I just know that the area I live in is completely deprived with seasonal jobs dominating, and that a good chunk of people’s money goes on rent.
@Forward Synthesis
Sorry to hear that. Have you considered moving? Maybe even moving en masse? I’ve known whole extended families leaving Appalacia in the US. It may not be so much a homeownership problem as a “there’s no industry/jobs/point to people being here other than tradition and social networks” problem. In which case the transfer of homes only fixes the problem until people need new/more homes. Or some other necessity that has not been made incredibly cheap or government funded.
You mention seasonal jobs and high cost of homes/rent. Is it a tourist destination?
the area I live in is completely deprived with seasonal jobs dominating, and that a good chunk of people’s money goes on rent
Move.
The entire EU is open to you (for now, still, for a while).
@etheric42
Yes, it’s a tourist destination. That’s what much of the North East has left, particularly all the towns along the coast.
@Forward Synthesis
FWIW, I completely understand how frustrating it is. I grew up in a mining town, and love the area and all of my family is still there (my parents are retired and can easily afford to live there due to the low cost of living, but my sister is struggling). However, there’s just. No. Work. I joined the Army, and eventually ended up with a job I like in a city. I despise almost everything about living in this city, from the politics of the area to the costs of housing to being jammed in with other people. The only exception to this is the job–though liking what you do for 1/3 of your life counts for a lot!
But the networks that sustained the place I grew up have been shattered. Even if the mine were to reopen tomorrow, it won’t bring the place back. The elementary and high school I went to–the same one my father graduated from–is more or less dead despite the good education I got, which means that people with kids would commute from other areas to work at the mine, which means you won’t have new people move in, which means the school won’t improve to where it was when I graduated.
When the town was first founded, people pretty much had to live right near the headframe because they had to walk to work, and by the time cars came around the town had a good school, shops, bars, etc., so the town could be a going concern. But you couldn’t force the founding of the town now because improved transport means that people don’t have to live right near the mine, so they mostly won’t. This is leaving aside the fact that the mine could never compete economically with steel produced overseas these days.
This is a long winded way of saying that while I understand why you don’t want to move, there really isn’t a way to bring the town back to its heyday.
@Forward Synthesis
I have family that lives in Hawaii. Land is expensive (and even if you own your home, a number of people don’t own the land under the home). Goods (including food) is expensive. Jobs do not pay significantly more (or any more in many situations). Part of that is due to island life and Jones act so it doesn’t directly compare, but the idea is there.
My family describes it as paying a “living on vacation” tax. You are paying increased prices/decreased wages as a cost to live in an area where other people want to go, whether or not you enjoy or take advantage of the amenities. I imagine a lot of tourist destinations function basically the same way. If housing+cost of living were cheap, people who loved vacationing there would just move there. If just housing were cheap then people would buy vacation homes (or businesses to cater to the tourists). There is competition to be there and just because you grew up there does not give you many/any incumbent advantages (especially compared to someone who made their money elsewhere).
This is why even though my family would love to have me nearby and there is a business in my line of work on the island, I would never move there until my children were grown. While I think humans a a resource for growth generally, in these kind of situations they just continue to add to the demand for space (making things cost more) and the supply for jobs (making wages lower), particularly low-skill jobs that they would need when first starting out. I don’t want to have to tell my kids “well, you’re 18 now, the best thing you could do is find a job/college somewhere far away and only think about coming home for holidays when you can afford it.” I mean, sure, I wanted to get away from home when I got old enough, but that was my choice, and I ended up moving back to the city I grew up in after college anyway.
So yeah, when a bunch of people I was friends with wanted to settle down, we pretty much all bought homes in the same neighborhood semi-intentionally. If you have a social network there, consider discussing moving with a group. It would make it easier to share costs in the beginning or at least be able to transplant your social safety net. If you want to just improve the situation for the locals there, you could always try starting a business to make more jobs, but you will always feel that competition from the tourists (who are also your current largest industry).
As far as government solution, I can’t really see any to save tourist towns for the locals other than quotas (to limit the tourists, or to limit the birthrate of the locals), and that does not sound very pleasant.
@etheric42"As I was reading this thread I had a suspicion you were from the UK. If you pointed that out sooner and I didn’t notice, I apologize. (and if you didn’t point it out sooner, you probably should have.)
Why? Because in the US in a major city I bought a home while working ~20hrs/week in a call center (front-line) and my wife ~30/week in a coffee shop (assistant manager). Not even a bad home, a nice one (although likely in a bad school district, thank goodness I don’t care). Before I bought it seemed like I was moving every couple of years and the people I know who rent do so.
Whereas the stories I hear about the UK are always these dreadful ones about incredible property costs, whether that comes from rural northern England or from people just trying to make ends meet in London.
If you are up for sharing, I’d be interested to know more about the property market, the problems with it, and some of the reasons why that is in the UK. I’d imagine it has something to do with living on an island, and something to do with a thick layer of regulation, but those are just guesses and I honestly don’t know. And whatever solution is needed is likely particular to the UK situation, not the US one"
I work in a major city in the U.S.A. (San Francisco) and live 15 miles from there, and conditions here are so very much far closer to what @Forward Synthesis describes than to what you detail, I know of no where within a hundred miles that it possible to for two to buy a home working part time as a “coffee shop manager” and at a “call center”.
If others hadn’t said “California is different” before I wouldn’t believe you.
Where is the magical realm you reside which doesn’t match the U.S.A. that I know?
@Plumber
Austin, Texas. And it’s expensive here compared to a lot of the state and many parts of the country. There’s a reason Californians are coming here in droves, selling their homes in SF/LA, and buying 2 or 3 here.
In fact I’m going to probably get my resident license revoked for even suggesting to a Californian that Austin is an okay place to live.
When we bought prices were lower, so you’d probably have to go further out than us (there’s a 2/2 1k sqft 10 miles from downtown for 150k right now) or else dealhunt like mad (or go to San Antonio/Houston, etc.).
Or go to Houston, a lot of even cheaper homes there and you are still part of a large city.
@etheric42
How did you learn that wages could go so far there?
How did you save enough to move?
How did you find jobs there?
Basically – how easy was it, and if it’s easy, why hasn’t the whole Nation moved there and wages and living expenses balance with California?
I don’t understand the economics of this, if it’s easy why hasn’t this been done enough that it isn’t easy anymore?
How is it possible for Texas living expenses to be so low relative to wages?
@Plumber
I think my comment was eaten, thankfully I had the good mind to copy-paste it into notepad first. It was probably too long. I’ll split it up.
As far as why, that’s a big question, and different people are going to have different answers, but the one that I’ve always assumed is true is we’re buying less stuff with the price of our home. Less inspections. Less bureaucratic approval. Less symphonies and museums. Less attractions. And Austin has inflated prices compared to the rest of Texas because we have more attractions what with being an hip city, having a big university, and being a lesser tech hub.
Possibly also after a certain demand for land, the wages of the lower skilled jobs don’t rise in comparison with the the costs that the high-skilled workers impose. (Best homes go to all your high-paid tech staff and then what remains is a long way away or in very bad condition.) Maybe.
Anyway, I grew up here and went to college some place cheaper. My wife grew up in a small Texas town, went to college here and didn’t leave. So we were already here and paying rent. This gave us a leg up because we could shop for exactly the home we wanted and had a good lay of the land for undervalued areas. If we didn’t live here we’d have to find a good realtor to shop long distance (hard and difficult) or find a cheap place to rent / rent with a bunch of friends while we figured things out (what my wife did).
We also needed to be frugal. I rode the bus and my wife had a cheap beater car that was paid off. We did not eat out much and we enjoyed hobbies that allowed us to spend very little. We also did not drink (much). I was very cheap in my college and escaped with a very minor debt (under 5k). My wife lucked into Texas Tomorrow Fund and did not need to pay for tuition at all, just living expenses, but she left the coffee shop job (which she got in college) to be a stay-at-home mom, and I was promoted in the call center, so the degrees haven’t been useful for us in a money-making way yet.
I found a job by traditional job-hunting for months while in the early renting/living with parents phase. This I can see as a huge barrier for people, unless they have a nest-egg or can job-hunt from wherever they currently are before leaving their job. My wife found a job by being friendly at coffee shops on campus and using her social network. (Just to clarify, we weren’t together when she moved to Austin or when we both got these jobs.)
EDIT: She actually got her first Austin job before she even moved to Austin (she had a couple of high-school jobs back home before), by actively seeking jobs online. It was a really bad job, but she only worked it 9 months or so before she lined up a slightly better job, and then the coffee shop job shortly after that.
Second half:
I’m not saying it is easy. I’m not saying I didn’t have an advantage by already being a local (although my wife definitely didn’t, if anything having to go to college classes was a burden during her move and not a benefit). It was made easier by social safety nets (family for me, people from her hometown that moved to Austin around the same time for her), but it’s better than living some place where the cost of housing eats such a large percentage of your paycheck and not having a clear way out.
If I were to need to do it again today for whatever reason, I would use a lot of the same methods. Search for a city that people I know have already moved to and say they can hack it, look at job postings on Indeed versus the cost of houses on Zillow, apply to places before I moved, even if I think the job won’t be the best, try to convince others to move at the same time, be incredibly frugal, look at news articles/surveys of places where people are happy (Austin ranks high) and are good for families (Austin is also high).
I think a lot of people already do this accidentally. They are born someplace, which means their parents hadn’t already emigrated form someplace bad. If they go to college out of town, they are less likely to go back if where they go is better than where they are from. If they have friends someplace they visit, and might stay. If their employer is expanding, they see job opportunities elsewhere (there’s a large contingent of people from New Mexico here that followed Blizzard jobs). If they get desperate enough they just GO. This accidental process doesn’t work for everyone and a lot of people suffer for a long time until they go, so there’s probably a better way of doing it.
Change is scary, change is difficult, there’s no guarantee you won’t get out of the frying pan and into the fire, and you may be carrying with you the biggest thing holding you back (excess spending, large debt, poor skills/personality, etc), but we’ve got a lot of American cultural touchstones of people packing it up and moving to the big city, and living a hard life for awhile, but generally making it, or at least being okay after awhile. But maybe those people shouldn’t be moving to NY/LA.
I probably would look at a small city or a large town, one whose industry isn’t driven by tourism. A place where not everything is already claimed, but there are still jobs to be had.
@Plumber
As far as why, that’s a big question, and different people are going to have different answers, but the one that I’ve always assumed is true is we’re buying less stuff with the price of our home. Less inspections. Less bureaucratic approval. Less symphonies and museums. Less attractions. And Austin has inflated prices compared to the rest of Texas because we have more attractions what with being an hip city, having a big university, and being a lesser tech hub.
Possibly also after a certain demand for land, the wages of the lower skilled jobs don’t rise in comparison with the the costs that the high-skilled workers impose. (Best homes go to all your high-paid tech staff and then what remains is a long way away or in very bad condition.) Maybe.
Anyway, I grew up here and went to college some place cheaper. My wife went to college here and didn’t leave. So we were already here and paying rent. This gave us a leg up because we could shop for exactly the home we wanted and had a good lay of the land for undervalued areas. If we didn’t live here we’d have to find a good realtor to shop long distance (hard and difficult) or find a cheap place to rent / rent with a bunch of friends while we figured things out (what my wife did).
We also needed to be frugal. I rode the bus and my wife had a cheap beater car that was paid off. We did not eat out much and we enjoyed hobbies that allowed us to spend very little. We also did not drink (much). I was very cheap in my college and escaped with a very minor debt (under 5k). My wife lucked into Texas Tomorrow Fund and did not need to pay for tuition at all, just living expenses, but she left the coffee shop job (which she got in college) to be a stay-at-home mom, and I was promoted in the call center, so the degrees haven’t been useful for us in a money-making way yet.
I found a job by traditional job-hunting for months while in the early renting/living with parents phase. This I can see as a huge barrier for people, unless they have a nest-egg or can job-hunt from wherever they currently are before leaving their job. My wife found a job by being friendly at coffee shops on campus and using her social network. (Just to clarify, we weren’t together when she moved to Austin or when we both got these jobs.)
Math time. I was making between 13 and 14/hour I think. So at 20 hours that’s about 14k/year. She was making between 12 and 13, so at 13 hours around 19. 33k between us (although I remember some years the tax filings being lower… maybe I’m just remembering the AGI). Income tax doesn’t take much, payroll taxes about 2.5k, insurance is either partially employer covered, ACA subsidised, or I just went without for awhile before buying and figured bankruptcy would take care of me. Payments on the 110k home were under $800/month (rent was about the same prior), add utilities and I’m going to say 950. transportation was about 1.5k/year for repairs/insurance/bus/occasional taxi. That left us with about 17.5k/year to live on, or about 340/week. 340. A bit under $50/day for the two of us. She got lunch free at work. I worked so little eating lunch at work didn’t make sense. If there was a tight month, either one of us could pick up a bit extra hours without the employer worrying too much about overtime.
Sometimes we went into debt. Sometimes we didn’t put anything into the nest egg that month. Sometimes she worked 40 hours and I worked 30. But for the most part we were fine and chose to have hours of our lives back instead of money. Eventually I was promoted to full time administration and then management. We decided to have kids and we valued homeschooling and spending time with them (and my wife wasn’t happy with her job anyway, so she volunteered to quit and raise kids).
When we bought the house we basically said we were just going to move into one of the guest bedrooms. Then over the course of the next 3 years we slowly rehabilitated the rest of the house. There was not anything majorly wrong with the house, just lots of allergen-filled carpets, dirty walls and run down fixtures. We replaced the carpet with cheap laminate, cleaned and repainted the walls, opened up the bathroom, replaced the fixtures and doors. We shopped at Habitat for Humanity Re-store. We drove to San Antonio when we found a great deal on cheap laminate. We did basically all the labor ourselves (watching youtube videos) or with help from our social network. Which we could afford to do because we did not work much. As we rehabbed each part of the house, our quality of living went up. Eventually our home was large enough we could have roommates (friends of ours) to help with costs and to give them a chance to explore Austin and decide where they wanted to live (a couple of them even ended up just buying the home across the street from us because they wanted to stay part of the family).
We haven’t gone on trips to Europe or Asia like our friends did in their twenties. We didn’t live the party life like some of our friends or have active dating lives. We aren’t in high-paying power careers. We aren’t even artists enjoying the scene like some of our friends are. Maybe we’re just some kind of neo-puritans (although we drink more now and I have a crippling board game addiction). Not everything is perfect, I’ve been hoping to get a new job for awhile. We hit a expenditure streak when we had some bad vet bills (and I feel if you are willing to pay vet bills for pets you are likely in a very comfortable place in the history of this world) hit at the same time as we were remodeling the garage recently. But we are very, very happy.
@etheric42,
Thanks for the specifics.
My first thought was “That sounds more like 1965’s U.S.A. than today’s” but on reading further (the remodeling, et cetera) I see that some struggle was involved, but also how you made use of the information from the internet, which wasn’t possible when I was young (and still often doesn’t occur to me, my wife had to remind me that we may look up stuff online now instead of going to the library and the county records office like we used to).
Certain anti-poverty policy ideas and how the Blue/Red divide evolved spring to mind.
If there’s more space to develop in (either because there’s just more available land or because there’s less NIMBY pushback on trying to build), then it’s pretty natural that the cost of housing is going to be lower–as prices go up, it makes sense to buy up some more farmland on the edge of town and build houses to sell, which keeps the prices from going too high.
Also, there’s a lot of friction to moving–people don’t like to move away from jobs and schools and friends and family. And, the Bay Area has a lot of very high-paying jobs/industries that bring people into the area–those folks have plenty to spend on houses, which bids the house prices up. Other places have less of that, and so have less upward pressure on prices.
By what definition of poor?
By the standards of any human society that has ever existed, the poor in a modern developed society are a small minority.
@Forward Synthesis
My comment may have seemed a bit snappy, especially with people piling on to say you’re wrong, but I was trying to get to something else: I think you should reconsider your premises a bit. Not on economic terms, but just try and see a larger perspective.
People have said here that “the poor aren’t that many” (true) and you obviously live in a poor area from which people are migrating – also true, and believe me, I get it – I’m Romanian typing this from a small town.
BUT. First, poverty is temporary. In a western society, wealth is by far correlated with age the most. Young people are poor because they don’t have the experience, skill set, time to compound wealth etc etc. In most cases, it goes away in 20 years without doing anything special – at most by avoiding very early pregnancies.
> A home is the very baseline of everything else
That’s a subjective opinion. I happen to agree with you, btw, but just because you and I like to have a home and prioritize this above other criteria, really doesn’t mean we should strive for a society where people don’t have other options.
> and don’t provide a staging ground for advancement
Neither is a home. Reading the rest of the thread it looks to me that in your case a home would be the worst possible thing. You live in an economically dead area – why put most of your wealth into being tied to that place?
Again – time matters. I just bought an apartment in the town I grew up, in a country getting emptier by the minute. Why? Because it makes sense from my point of view in this stage of my life (I make money online, and I value a quiet and social life over heavy traffic and pollution of a capital). 20 years ago I made the opposite choice – and both were correct. This is why by far the most valuable resource in a society is freedom to chose.
And in the end, I’m not sure if anybody touched this yet in this thread, but home prices ARE TOO DAMN HIGH in most of the world. They don’t have to be – I paid peanuts for my (extremely well placed) apartment. It’s not a matter of building costs, but of commons and/or (political) market failure. I have Ideas on how to begin to fix this, and so do most people here. That’s the right way to go.
Well, to look at what would happen, you can look at a country that has given tenants apartments for free or a symbolic prize. This actually happened in Russia (they were state-owned, though, not private).
But the result is, from my observations, that people don’t appreciate the privileges and responsibilities of private property. Maintaining a multiple storey apartment building is very expensive. My parents paid upwards of 50,000 euro over the last 10 years for building maintenance, and payments frequently come as a lump-sum (so suddenly you have to fork 20000 euros).
In Russia, people just don’t maintain their buildings, and think the government has to do it. They will say so, too. They can’t afford it, even though it’s their private property, so why would they?
There are many, many other issues with private property and poverty in Russia. But I still think that poor people would be unable to suddenly pay unexpected $$$$$$ for fixing their buildings, maintainance, adapting stuff to code (this is a very regular expense that happens every 10-20 years).
So in the end, you will get a lot of housing that requires very expensive maintainance in around 30 years.
Another issue with this is that this means no new housing will be built, and this gives a one-off advantage to those who are already there, and forgets about those who come later. After all, that’s what Thatcher did with council housing, and the end result is that councils don’t have those rental houses anymore, and rich people live in formerly council rental property.
EDIT: To give you an idea of how horrible desrepair some of the housing in Russia is, you can look at these photos: 1, 2, 3, 4. All text is in Russian, but you can just look at the photos. It is pretty horrifying that people actually live there.
Same thing happened in Romania, but it’s not what OP proposes. First, the homes were actually “ours”. It was just a switch from a shared ownership to a private one, which was very much needed. Second, if this hadn’t happened, the government would have been 100% responsible for the upkeep of those buildings. Third, I don’t think you can put the blame on this change of ownership – it’s just a matter of commons, which comes up everywhere. There are plenty of areas all over the world that were private from the beginning and are still crap.
It could very well be that ex-communist countries are less capable than average to solve commons problems (ironically, since they were… communist).
But (also just an observation) people who buy houses and invest in housing are much more willing to fork money on maintenance, because they see those homes as their property.
And once they were privatised, appartment homes stopped being commons. After all, the solution many economists suggest for stuff like fisheries is to give everybody involved a piece. This is what happened, and it didn’t work.
Yes, if they were property of the government, they would have to be maintained by the government. But the government could also charge rent, unilaterally decide to re-develop 5 floor apartment buildings into skyscrapers, and other things.
I truly don’t think that people who don’t have a good enough job to save for a mortgage downpayment (which are much lower in the UK than in Spain) can handle owning their homes, with all the sudden expenses associated with it. After all, I constantly see articles on how people could not handle a sudden 200 $ expense. And fixing stuff in houses is much more expensive.
I mostly agree with what you’re saying – I think it’s matter of degree.
But commons are real, and not so easy to solve. Let me check the title…yes, that’s an unfinished book on my kindle about that. There are a number of conditions to successfully solve commons, and shared ownership is just one of them – there are problems with the management structure and so on. Part of why I personally think ex-communist countries are worse at this is they don’t like paying for management. Even now, in romania the building managers are senior citizens doing math with pen and paper. The modern, specialized companies have only limited success.
Edit: There are _a lot_ of commons in apartment buildings btw. Everything outside the door, plumbing, electrical, roofing etc.
In Spain, many HOA don’t hire professional managers and do fine.
But then in Spain the HOA can place a lien on the house, and they can get the owner to pay for it. So he can’t sell without paying the debt.
Having working enforcement mechanisms is a very important way to solve the commons problem.
In Sweden, I even once saw an apartment that didn’t hire professional cleaners. There were fifty apartments in the building, so every week, one apartment cleaned (this way, they saved money). Of course, labor is much more expensive in Sweden.
But this shows you don’t need professionals to manage a building. People can do just fine.
The solution is not just to give them to someone, it is to have the market figure out who should own it. Its a two part solution, and decades without a functioning real estate market prevents the second part from existing quickly/easily.
HOA liens are a thing in the US, too.
I grew up in a condo complex where we didn’t have a professional manager; we had a number of retired university professors who liked doing the job themselves and (according to my parents who paid attention) were pretty good at it. If you’ve got competent people willing to put in the time and effort, it works; if not, you need to recognize that and follow my current condo complex in paying someone else to do that. The same thing holds with a whole lot of other things in life.
Sure, but then there are many issues in the short term when many poor people get to own houses and don’t repair them properly.
In Spain, in coastal towns, housing prices is frequently based in a very big part on how far they are from the beach. Being directly facing the beach increases prices a lot.
But in Valencia, there is a zone that would be very desirable, right in front of the beach, but is full of people who were given their houses for free. And the issue is, to redevelop that place, you would need to redevelop the whole block.
I don’t know how long it will take the markets to sort it out, but developers have been trying for decades, without much effect.
And I am afraid that, as insecure as property is in Russia, it will take at least a couple of generations for people to get used to the responsibility private ownership brings.
I suspect that there are a lot of social norms and cultural things that support maintaining commons / keeping up property values, and that those things can be destroyed by (say) many decades of a communist dictatorship running things.
But suddenly taking away people’s property and giving it to those who cannot afford it or its maintenance could have the same effect.
If somebody can suddenly take away your property, why maintain it?
And it’s not just the buildings themselves that are badly maintained. A lot of the non-common property is also badly maintained.
Paint is quite cheap, but people don’t paint their houses. Or fix floors. Or get new windows.
I never understood that. Paint is dirt cheap, and labor is not expensive. I understNd a hospital having a lack of expensive equipament, but rusty beds and peeling walls?! How?! Why?!
One result is that nobody again would buy or build a building in order to rent it out.
Is this a reference to rent control? Because many governments many times have seized lots of property without causing an immediate recession [or most of the other effects predicted above].
If true, I wonder how they did this, in detail. Perhaps it’s because they nationalized their banking system first so there was no knock on financial collapse?
Probably when rent control was introduced the landlords weren’t very leveraged, so they weren’t underwater despite a large loss of property. And, closely related to this, the landlords weren’t speculating on short term appreciation of property, but trying to create a steady income stream. By merely freezing the income stream, rent control didn’t have any immediate effect. (Also, rent control was asserted to be temporary. How you get the markets to believe such assertions, I don’t know.)
Yeah, but “lots” has been incredibly short of “all”, which is closer to the proposal at hand. I doubt any government has seized 10% of the existing stock without severe repercussions. Maybe if you pay the existing owners well you can avoid repercussions, but then that would be crazy expensive.
I don’t know of any instances of rent control that satisfied all of the following
1. Seized property without compensation (freezing rents is only a partial seizure and much less destructive).
2. Seized a large amount of property compared to the area normally used for measuring recessions (ie NYC rent control measures effected a large dollar value of property, but not particularly large for the entire US).
3. Isn’t associated with some pretty bad economic outcomes.
If you’re patient enough: a X% tax (where X is low) on all real-estate is used to fund a first-time-homebuying subsidy of up to $AMOUNT.
This is still a bad idea (it really screws over people who have no intention/ability to own a home, even accounting for the subsidy), but it’s less immediately destructive. It also preserves the flexibility of the current system where people can choose to up/down-size as they transition from renting to owning, instead of rewarding renting the most expensive place possible in order to maximize the eventual payout.
Better still, a tax on non-owner-occupied real estate, or a tax on rental income, so as not to penalize people who own their own home.
That, I think, is a mistake. The explicit goal is to make it easier for people who would rent to eventually own their places (instead of being tenants forever), not to specifically punish people for making rental units available.
There’s still likely a N year period where people save up to afford a house. Discouraging potential landlords from making properties available for rental makes rents go up, which works against the stated goal.
Taxing properties on their dollar value and subsidizing them on a per-unit count (which is effectively what the first-purchase subsidy is) encourages building more and smaller units. Which is an important consideration anywhere that rent/house prices are “too high”.
Think of a retired couple living in London in a slightly-too-large flat. Penalizing them if they decide to move to Lisbon and rent out their flat instead of staying put makes no sense. A tax on the value of the property encourages them to downsize or move somewhere cheaper, which is also a good mechanism for making room.
A version of this was the case in the former USSR. You couldn’t rent apartments, only trade. So there would be classifieds in newspapers. There’s plenty of comedy around this in movies and books, there was probably ample illegal brokerage activity, etc. Except for the privileged, many people lived cramped, a family to a room, and went to crazy lengths to get a room in a desirable city (e.g. Moscow), and spent years on waiting lists to her apartments they were legally entitled to. If you really Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, you’ll recognize the reference in there somewhere to the “apartment question”.
Taxation is usually better than confiscation.
I’d put a superlinear tax on property – that is, if Alice owns two houses, she pays more tax on them than she and Bob would together if she sold one of them to him.
Property is a special kind of good. If lots of people decide that they want widgets instead of gizmos, manufacturers will put more resources into making widgets and fewer into gizmos, and the market will sort itself out. But if more people decide they want property, it’s much harder to increase supply to match.
I think that that makes taxing it separately from other kinds of wealth, in a way that encourages rich people not to own too much of it without making it more expensive for poor people to own a little, a sensible policy.
Assuming that owning 3 apartments/houses would also result in a higher tax than having 2, you’d get many more small shitty landlords, as quality landlords are limited in how successful they can be.
I don’t think that follows – you’d see a drop in the number of big landlords, but you’d also see a drop in the number of total landlords as an increase in the number of resident owners, and if you accept that business success as a landlord is strongly correlated with what tenants want in a landlord – which strikes me as plausible, but also plausibly the kind of thing where the real world may differ from econ 101 – the worst landlords would be most likely to be forced out of business first.
In a depressed area everyone is trying to move out of, landlords should be desperate to hold onto tenants with a decades long emotional connection to the location. Why aren’t they cutting rents in half or more to avoid the risk of a costly eviction, followed by an empty vandal-prone property or an untrustworthy replacement tenant? (Not meant as a rhetorical question, genuinely interested.)
At a guess, “some combination of status quo bias, lack of foresight, and lack of profit margin”.
The last one is straightforward enough: buildings need maintenance. Having no one in them hurts from that perspective, yes, but if the rent income isn’t going to cover it anyway you might as well sell (or demolish) the place now and let someone else have a go.
For the other two: fools exist. Some of them are landlords. Eventually less will be, but the process is not instantaneous.
As Skivverus says buildings have carrying costs. Holding something at an indefinite loss will eventually be worse than just walking away. A good amount of rust belt decline is often in the form of areas that were once nice but with high taxes and high maintenance costs that basically exceed the income you get from converting into lower income housing with all the other costs that come with that. I spent the night in Syracuse last summer (dry rot not rust, but some idea) and driving through it there were many once beautiful houses that were falling apart. Buying one and just replacing all the windows to be a modern standard of not drafty would be tens of thousands of dollars.
To anyone who knows a lot about both the Accounting job field and the future of computer automation (traditional, machine learning, neural nets, etc.):
What impact do you think automation will have on the accounting field and the number of job positions in that field in the next 20 years?
I cant hope to predict that, but I would like to point out:
Bob Cratchet’s fulltime family-supporting paid job in “A Christmas Carol” was nothing more than writing entries, in ink, into the (physical bound) ledger books for Eb’s multiple businesses, and then doing basic tabular addition of the columns in those books, and writing the resulting sums into those books. That entire profession has been replaced with a 20 year old copy of QuickBooks. Every single business and enterprise on the planet in 1843 had a Bob Cratchet, either closely supervised employees, trusted family members, or the owner themselves own time. Now today, to a first approximation, that job is as non-existent as carriage horses.
Today, nearly all accounting is just some mix of strategy, or autopsy, or audits. The first one is went through a round of automation in the 70s and 80s with the invention of VisiCalc. The other two are a long way from full automation, because their very purpose is to provide human investigation and oversight into the automation.
Cratchet’s job is data entry. Automation as it exists today means less data entry, but doesn’t eliminate it.
His job was also calculation. Being able to accurately and quickly do columnar addition, by hand, in ink, with a steel dip pen, legibly, in standardized business handwriting, was a valuable skill in 1843.
The more that one digs into that story, the less sense it makes, and that more you realize that it’s overly simplified message fiction written by someone full of outrage but not much insight.
Bob would be making above-median salary, and if Eb fired him, his businesses could very likely have failed before he found, hired, and trained an acceptable replacement.
Being an “count-ing clerk” was the well-paid upwardly-mobile white-collar techbro job of the era.
If ACC was translated to today, Crachet would be a tech worker making $150,000/yr but living in a shitty house because he was trying to afford a large family in the SF bay area, working for some barely post-economic failed-VC who had money only because he worked for a successful tech company with a genuinely nice founder, that had wound down decades before when the founder died.
Cratchit may have been a very low-paid clerk. Scrooge paid him thruppence an hour for 60 hours/week to make 15 shillings/week, or 39 pounds/year. (Presumably in or around 1843, the date of the story.)
I can’t find a good average clerk’s wage, but for a data point Anthony Trollope took a job as a junior Post Office clerk in 1834 at 90 pounds/year, and by 1843 was making 140 pounds/year. (Another page suggests that the typical wage of a junior clerk in the City of London would be 100/year, though it doesn’t give a cite.)
Scrooge paid … 39 pounds/year … typical wage of a junior clerk in the City of London would be 100/year …
As I said, “The more that one digs into that story, the less sense it makes,”.
A story about someone slipping into destitution because he was being paid less than half of prevailing wage, well, that’s on them, not on their boss.
@LHN
If the story has the old-timey equivalent of a computer programmer being paid a pittance, while he could just walk out and get a job that paid way above the median, then the story seems rather unrealistic.
Of course, it is intended as a morality play, not a social commentary, so from that perspective the setting doesn’t have to be realistic.
Negligible unless we get something that you can at least plausibly argue is AGI.
Traditional accounting automation has already been done. The remaining problems do not map particularly well to things that machine learning is good at. There will be some nibbling around the edges — I’ve got an app that does OCR on receipts and files my expense reports somewhat for me, and that’s cool — but you aren’t going to have any plausible “like today but a little more sophisticated” computer system setting up your accounting system for you and deciding how to represent specific business activities in your books.
It so happens that I do both – that is: I am an accountant (at a public practice) and concurrently a developer working on automating workflows in the field, so this question is right up my alley.
As others have already noted, the counting part of the job has been automated out decades ago. When I was at college in the 90s, we were still taught double-entry by hand on proper (=paper) worksheets, but even then it was obvious to everyone that we would be using software out in the real world (so we were taught a bit o’ that as well).
Data entry is the focus of most of the automation efforts I’m currently involved with, because – frankly – it just takes too much time. From a job perspective, data entry was (and possibly still is, in places) a good… ahem… entry-level position in the business, but that will soon be mostly gone. The biggest obstacle right now is the lack of standard data interchange protocols (currently being implemented round my neck of the woods on a national level, but still insufficient uptake) and the prevalance of older practices (e.g. handwritten invoices) because a lot of small businesses are run by older folks who don’t work with computers very well. This too will pass.
Beyond that, as sandoratthezoo says, it’s pretty much AGI or nuffin’ and even then only maybe.
In my experience, the role of the accountant is two-fold:
1. To take responsibility,
2. To help make sense of the numbers and options.
You can’t really automate either.
What does the ideal US health-care system look like?
Imagine you’re the speaker of the house, you have the votes in the house and the senate, the president is on board, and all 50 governors and state legislatures are on board as well. What kind of bill or bill package do you introduce to the floor?
This is a low-value opinion, but how about this:
It is illegal to sell health insurance with a deductible below $1,000/year. Below that, everything is out-of-pocket. If your household income is less than $AMOUNT, you can get some subsidies on your out-of-pocket expenses, but they’re like percentile reductions, so you still pay substantial-for-you costs.
When the lifetime cost of a single medical condition goes above $50,000, the government steps in and fully covers all further costs of that condition.
In between, you can buy insurance. This works like normal insurance, not risk-pooling. You’re charged your actuarial cost, plus/minus a small profit or payment for the privilege of holding your float.
The idea being that there are three fairly distinct kinds of medical care:
Routine care, which is fairly low value and should be subjected to price pressure through the open market.
Catastrophic care, like you get into a car accident or get a disease that runs a course in a few weeks or months, but then is done and you’re over it. Which works well for a standard insurance model, just like auto or house insurance.
Chronic care, like you get cancer or lupus or end-of-life care or other horrible things, where the costs are very high and ongoing and don’t work well for a normal insurance model, which is where subsidized systems shine.
I look forward to you all telling me why I’m wrong and stupid.
This maps pretty closely to my instincts, so I won’t be the one calling you wrong and stupid.
In general, I think the right way to solve the US medical care mess is to focus on the things that are making everything so irrationally expensive and fixing it, and not on finding new ways to pay for it.
Seems reasonable to me although I expect no miracles. Like maybe things gets a couple percent better and a couple percent cheaper if all goes well. One time. Not continuing reductions.
It may make more transparent how much of American medical costs are because more wealth leads to more spending on chronic care for more and more difficult cases for more and more marginal gains.
What you call chronic care is the part of the Canadian health care system that I hear the most satisfaction with from people I know. FWIW.
Right, this is where you really want a subsidized, national system. It breaks insurance models because the costs are so high to unlucky patients (and so we end up with risk pooling and then trying desperately to get young, healthy, financially solvent people to pay for insurance they don’t need). Out of pocket is obviously ridiculous — that’s just “okay, well, enjoy dying in the street.”
What does the ideal US health-care system look like to you. The answer will probably say more about the authors than about the problem.
I’d want to touch 3 things:
– have free market competition lower the prices
– have an insurance-like model to cover unpredictable problems
– have a system in place for commons. free market usually covers commons a bit slower than you’d want.
An idea I really liked was to separate “public care” – routine, high-modernism, extremely scalable, relatively low cost, from “expert care” – cutting edge, expensive, hard to scale.
Up to here I’m reasonably sure I’m being non-stupid. How to actually implement this would take a bit of creativity and trial-end-error, but one way would be to have a state-built public health system for public care, with inconveniences built in to protect from abuse – waiting times, small fees etc. It should be centralized and focused on optimizing things very macro – something like QALY/capita.
For everything that’s expert care, it should use private care and work insurance-like, including limits.
I’ve never heard of this approach before, but I’m shocked by how much sense it makes. I know 0 about the medical proffession, but is it possible to cleave the routine care side of medicine from the “you’re dying, but maybe a few million dollars worth of resources can postone actual death” side of the industry?
I don’t think healthcare separates at all that nicely in two groups.
Nothing separates nicely into two groups, but the insight is that there is a lot in health care that is very much not scalable or amenable to top-down management (everything that involves 3+ people in an operating theater, for example), and some that is very much scalable and top-down-manageable – most of what a regular GP would be doing.
Try to imagine public policies that would affect one positively: most likely the other would be negatively affected. One is thriving on freedom and development, the other on cold numbers and rules. One is expensive, the other is probably cash positive for society. Really, other than being about health they don’t even have much in common.
Source.
A surgeon has a way more routine job than a GP. The latter has to be a jack of all trades and has to ‘debug’ an extremely diverse group of patients, figuring out what they have. They need to make fairly substantial decisions with limited analysis tools. They regularly have to deal with rare cases, where they cannot get the amount of experience to make it a routine job (unlike specialists).
In contrast, surgeons get told exactly what the (supposed) problem is and the basic steps they need to perform during the operation are often clear before they meet the patient. During surgeries, protocols are usually very important.
Neither the job of surgeon or GP scales. They both treat one patient at a time.
I don’t think so, or at least it would be a complicated calculation with a whole lot of operations in either side depending on context. When I broke a bone, it was one-time routine care. If my grandmother breaks a bone, it’s much more severe, would land her in the hospital for (expensive) weeks, and would probably put her life at risk because of the general state of her health. It’s the same way with a lot of things.
Also, there needs to be a third side: “You might be dying, but maybe a few million dollars could save your life.” Into this you’d put premature babies, my two friends who’re now cancer-free after extensive chemo, and many others.
I don’t think these cleave naturally.
I have a fondness for some aspects of Singapore’s system and dislike the absurdity of the current FDA approval process.
Replace social security, medicare and medicaid with a required savings plan to cover medicine housing and retirement a la the Central Provident Fund. The government will also provide a low-cost, no-frills medical insurance plan akin to Medishield for people whose mandatory savings are still too low to cover the cost of health insurance.
I would also drastically reduce the number and length of FDA trials, focusing on safety first and foremost while leaving the question of determining efficacy to doctors and biomedical scientists. Rolling Phase II and III clinical trials together in this way would save several years and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per drug or medical device, encouraging investment and thus increasing competition. I would also relax restrictions on drug advertising, again focusing primarily on claims about safety and side effects rather than on claims of efficacy.
Other than that and the VA program, the federal government would stay out of medicine entirely. Private companies and state or local governments are welcome to provide any kind of plans they want.
What does the ideal US health-care system look like?
1) As a condition of keeping their medical licenses, all doctors must publish lists of all of the healthcare services they provide, along with the cash prices they charge for each. The government and doctors would work together to gradually create a massive list of all existing healthcare services. The information on services and prices would have to the published on a single database, freely accessible to the public over the internet. Doctors would be able to easily upload their data by selected standardized descriptions of medical services from a drop-down menu series.
2) Doctors must be required to honor all customers who pay them to perform medical procedures they’ve stated they do on the database, and who have a medical need for those procedures. Doctors can’t turn down patients who “aren’t in their network” or whatever, and they can’t charge different patients different prices for the same thing.
3) Create an individual mandate for all adults to contribute to personal health savings accounts. It would work exactly like the Payroll Tax, and would be an automatic deduction of some % of your wages from each of your paychecks. The money would go into a personal bank account whose funds you could only spend on medical procedures, medicines, and medical supplies for yourself or your first-degree relatives. There would not be an individual mandate to buy “health insurance” as we know it.
4) Whenever a person dies, the balance left in his personal health savings account would be redistributed: Half would go to that person’s surviving first-degree relatives (or other people specified in their will), and half would be taken by the government and used as startup cash to fund the personal health savings accounts of babies who were just born.
5) Every time a U.S. citizen is born, a personal health savings account will be automatically created for them by the government, and some money deposited into it. The baby’s parents would be allowed to use it for the former’s medical expenses until age 18.
6) Medical problems that are not a person’s fault–like E.R. bills resulting from a hit-and-run car accident caused by someone else–would be paid for by the government. The afflicted person would not have to pay using their own health savings account money. The government would pay market rates for whatever medical procedures the person needed, and the market rates would be set by the millions of private, cash-based medical transactions going on each day.
7) The government would not be required to pay for anything other than palliative care for health expenses caused by a person’s bad personal choices. Smokers would be on their own paying for their lung cancer treatments, and obese people with Type 2 diabetes would have to pay for their own insulin.
I quickly see two problems with this scheme.
Firstly, what happens when a health savings account is exhausted?
Secondly and more seriously, what counts as “health expenses caused by a person’s bad personal choices”? When I broke my collarbone in a bike accident, does that count because I chose to go biking? If I get heart disease after eating a cheeseburger every day, does that count? What if I ate a couple cheeseburgers twenty years ago – that might’ve started the initial damage which eventually tipped me over the line? I think the vagueness there would probably swallow up your scheme.
Firstly, what happens when a health savings account is exhausted?
Then you would switch to paying money out of your normal funds, like your checking account. You could also ask first-degree relatives to donate money to you from their own health savings accounts. Finally, you could borrow money to pay for your expenses by taking out loans. I forgot to mention that another part of my ideal healthcare system would be low-interest loans.
Secondly and more seriously, what counts as “health expenses caused by a person’s bad personal choices”?
I admit, I’ve thought about this for a long time and don’t have a good answer. I think this is one part of the system that would be, for better or worse, left to a democratic vote based around social mores and values. My expectation is that a small number of medical interventions caused by “bad personal choices” would be deemed the individual’s sole responsibility, such lung cancer and emphysema treatments for people who have smoked for over 20 years.
To compensate, taxes on cigarettes would probably be raised in order to pay for some kind of health care fund for smokers who get smoking-related diseases. I think forcing them to internalize those costs is quite fair.
How would I draw the line between injuries resulting from normal activities vs. abnormally risky ones (e.g. – hurt because of bike accident in my neighborhood vs. hurt because of bike accident while going down a rocky cliff in some kind of failed wingsuit stunt)? I don’t have a hard-and-fast rule, and would leave it to a mix of democratic rule-setting and court ruling precedents.
Are these loans non-dischargeable (in which case we will now have a non-trivial number of people with insurmountable medical debt they can never get rid of)? If not, we’re in the same spot we were before, we’re just calling it a loan instead of a bill.
Fault can be extremely ambiguous for many medical conditions.
If you smoked before there was definitive research on it’s carcinogenic effect, are you covered? What about if you became addicted, and so continued after it was known bad? Substitute other vices–for example, what about diet? How much deviation from official medical advice is allowed before anything related to your circulatory, GI, renal systems are your own fault? What if the advice changes?
What about STDs? What about STDs if you use condoms but otherwise engage in riskier than normal sexual practices? What about paying for condoms or bc itself? Are you going to determine that based on keeping costs down elsewhere and treat it as a preventative measure, or as a hobby that the individual needs to self fund?
What about pregnancy? How much of childbirth is intentional? What if you want a cheaper alternative to hospital births? What if there are complications that arise from pursuing a cheaper alternative to hospital births?
What about your child’s genetic defects? Medication for a disorder that could have been detected by amniocentesis? Medication for such a disorder that was detected but the parents didn’t want to abort for religious reasons?
Accidents seem obvious, but what if you are talking on your phone when you get hit by a car? What if you were walking your dog? Can we spell out the specific level of attention required to be paid to routine actions? Or maybe only cover people if they have viewed the requisite safety lectures during the previous 12 months.
I like your thoughts, but I’m pointing out why it’s going to be difficult to find a consensus on what is equitable coverage, and in a democratic system is not going to be decided by benevolent objective technocrats.
I don’t understand 6 and 7 in relation to 3. If you have an HSA, then why wouldn’t you just pay for all your expenses? What is the benefit in not letting you use for HSA to pay for lung cancer treatment if you are a smoker? For 6, if something is not your fault, are you specifying “is the fault of another human being who you are unable to identify and bring a tort against”? Or are you including “just getting sick” as a cause for the government to pick up the tab.
Also, where does insurance fit into this equation? Is it illegal? An HSA for a 20-something might take a 5k hit or two, but what about a 50k hit? Publishing prices should help with costs, but a stroke of bad luck could hit someone hard. If you could pair that HSA with a HDHP like you can now, that helps to fix that problem, but then you have distortion in prices again.
I don’t understand 6 and 7 in relation to 3. If you have an HSA, then why wouldn’t you just pay for all your expenses? What is the benefit in not letting you use for HSA to pay for lung cancer treatment if you are a smoker? For 6, if something is not your fault, are you specifying “is the fault of another human being who you are unable to identify and bring a tort against”? Or are you including “just getting sick” as a cause for the government to pick up the tab.
#6 acknowledges that misfortunes randomly befall people through no fault of their own, and it’s our duty as a society to help those people. It’s not your fault if you are struck by lightning or attacked by a bear, so why should you have to pay the medical bills for it?
I think you misunderstand #7. The principle behind it is that people are responsible for paying for the ill health consequences of their own bad choices. Society has no obligation to pay for medical care when the health problem was preventable and was brought on by a person’s own actions, particularly in instances where the person had to repeat the same action on a daily basis for many years to create the health problem. In the example of the smoker who gets lung cancer, the sick person would be responsible for paying all of the resulting medical bills. Presumably, it would be paid out of his HSA, and if that were depleted, he would switch to paying out of his personal bank accounts. If those were also depleted, he could try to take out a loan. The government would not pick up the tab for his lung cancer-related expenses, and would only pay for palliative care (e.g. – painkillers and a bed in a hospice at the very end).
The issue that you run into in making these divisions is illustrated by the very examples you’re using: in many cases it could very well be “your fault” that you got struck by lightning or mauled by a bear, depending on the details of the incident and what’s considered “best practices” to avoid these events. In many incidents where these things occur, it’s often easy to identify things the victim could have done to greatly reduce the risk (in extremis, not walking in an area where bears roam, taking care to stay indoors when lightning is a risk or having proper lightning shelters nearby). I mean, you could say that getting mauled by a bear is a small risk for the otherwise pleasurable activity of hiking, but then you could also say that for lung cancer and smoking. At that point, you’re just picking what your tribe considers the “right” risks for the amount of pleasure.
Okay, so then to restate what you are saying, everyone would have an HSA which pays for health care as a consequence of bad choices. Smoke and get lung cancer, that’s what the HSA is for.
Everything else is covered by government payments. (Not my fault I got hit by lightning. Not my fault I caught the flu after getting a flu shot that year. Not my fault I developed prostate cancer at the age of 70.)
At which point why bother with the public pricing? The public would not worry about much healthcare from the standpoint of pricing. You might get cost-competitive lung cancer treatment, but most people would not need to even look at the price for most issues.
At this point there generally would not be insurance, except this is effectively medicaid for all, with a carve-out for certain things that are considered to be people’s own fault.
While others are talking about health insurance here, two other issues involving the provision of healthcare I’d like to see addressed:
1) Unneeded credential requirements for doctors. As it stands, you need to get an undergraduate degree in order to get into medical school. What the degree is in doesn’t matter – philosophy is apparently very popular. This does require a number of specific courses to be taken at the undergraduate level, such as chemistry and biology. I would suggest that the current approach of 4 years undergraduate + 4 years medical school + residency be converted into a 6-ish year undergraduate program + residency which contains all of the currently-required material plus the actual medical school. This way doctors have 2 fewer years of education and interest they have to pay for, they can start working sooner, and can have 2 additional years in their working career.
2) Eliminating the requirements for a uniform “standard of care”. As it stands right now, you pretty much cannot go to a low-quality doctor. When buying eg. steak, the floor the meat needs to achieve is pretty low. Basically ensuring that it isn’t diseased or contaminated. But there’s a big difference between barely-legal chuck steak and top-grade Kobe fillet or whatever. With medicine, the floor is much, much higher. It’s also the expensive part – the human skill involved. Instead, allow for a much greater variation (disclosed up-front) of the standard of care to exist. And allow whatever insurance exists to select and advertise in advance what it is that it will be cover. This allows people to select a much greater range of options.
This is the system in the UK. I think it works reasonably well.
The biggest problems with healthcare are the result of government distortions of the market, so I would eliminate all government interference in the market. The things I can think of off the top of my head are: 1) No government licensing of doctors; anyone can put out a shingle and start practicing medicine or build a school to start teaching. 2) No restrictions on building new hospitals. 3) Eliminate all references to healthcare in the tax code. No HSAs, no deducting medical costs, no special income tax exception for employer-provided healthcare. 4) Abolish the FDA and DEA and prescriptions. 5) Insurance is still allowed, but the government stays out of deciding what it is, beyond contract-enforcement. 6) Force upfront pricing on all but emergency medicine.
Set up a system for each state copied from a different random developed country (maybe repeating some in order to cover all the states).
If the constraint is that there be some form of universal-ish coverage, then:
1. Everyone by default gets Medicaid with some deductible. Your deductible is X% of the portion of your income above the poverty line, where X is somewhere between 15 and 40. Kids get their parents’ insurance so their services get rolled into their parents’ deductible.
2. There is a fixed budget constraint limiting the percentage of GDP spent on Medicaid coverage. The constraint is satisfied by stack ranking medical interventions by QALYs saved per dollar and only covering the highest ROI ones that fit in the budget constraint. Oregon did something like this with its Medicaid program in the 90s.
3. Preventive services can be exempted from the deductible if the balance of the evidence says they probably save money long term.
4. If you want insurance that covers things not covered by Medicaid or you want a lower deductible, go buy it on the private market. Private insurers get to make their own coverage and pricing decisions.
5. If you want you can opt out of even this coverage for yourself (though not for your kids) and take a tax credit instead, subject to the usual informed consent and timing restrictions.
6. And do the usual moderate-libertarian regulatory loosening.
Everybody in this system gets some level of protection against catastrophe: by construction, no one is reduced to poverty by the cost of covered interventions. Yet most people remain individually responsible for most of their expenses and the private market remains freer than it is today– and there are no complicated cross subsidies, mandates, or forced savings vehicles.
By far the most important point is that it should be free at point of use and funded from general taxation, as virtually everywhere else in the first world.
Among those systems, the NHS here in the UK appears to deliver slightly better cost-efficiency than the nationally-funded insurance systems most other countries use; some of them get slightly better outcomes than we do, but I suspect we could duplicate that if we spent as high a proportion of GDP on the NHS as they do on healthcare.
Not really. For example, Norway has a deductible, Finland has copays, and the German system is funded by mandatory employer/employee payments to non-profit funds.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/13/what-liberals-get-wrong-about-single-payer/ by Ezra Klein
@Barry
In November 2018 the CDC reported U.S. life expectancy was an average lifespan of 78 years and 7 months, compared to:
Monaco, which boasts the highest life expectancy, with citizens living an average of 89.4 years
Japan, with an average life expectancy of 85.3 years,
Singapore, average life expectancy: 85.2 years,
Macau, average life expectancy: 84.6 years,
San Marino, average life expectancy: 83.3 years,
Iceland, average life expectancy: 83.1 years,
Hong Kong, average life expectancy: 82.5 years,
Andorra, average life expectancy: 82.9 years,
Guernsey and Switzerland, average life expectancy: 82.6 years,
Israel and South Korea, average life expectancy: 82.5 years,
Luxembourg, average life expectancy: 82.3 years,
Australia and Italy, average life expectancy: 82.3 years,
Sweden, average life expectancy: 82.1 years,
Canada, France, Liechtenstein, and Norway, average life expectancy: 81.9 years,
other nations where they on average live longer than Americans:
Austria, Belgium, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Slovenia, and The United Kingdom; so probably one of their medical systems is more ideal.
But if I thought that I could actually get legislation passed I’d have the States and/or local governments get paid based on how well their residents are kept alive and not crippled (going by the labor participation rate) then let the “laboratories of democracy” come up with something, the important part is results.
If some are paid for b.s. jobs to hide how many are crippled so be it
Measuring health results are difficult. Just as the first confounder, what if you break out life expectancy by race?
You probably cannot raise life expectancy by even a single year simply by changing the US health care system.
You can, in theory, lower costs by quite a bit, since other countries run capable systems on smaller budgets. (This has many complications I’ve brought up before, and in some other contexts I would point out that it’s extremely rare for any country to ever lower costs without some disaster like Greece’s economy imploding. But it is something actually in-scope for health care reform.)
Yeah, there are massive confounders there w.r.t. genetics, environment, crime rate, rate of driving, etc.
It would be interesting to see how it splits out across very similar populations.
I can’t remember where I found it now, but I found a dataset once that broke down causes of death by nationality. The US was about average among first-world countries for most of the common ones; the big exceptions were correlates of obesity, which aren’t surprising, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a correlate of smoking, which is. We aren’t heavy smokers compared to Europe or a lot of Asian countries, but maybe there’s something about the American pattern of smoking that’s more lethal.
@Nornagest:
The US apparent had high rates of smoking until fairly recently, and it is older folk, who smoked a lot in the pasr, who are now dying early. I cant copy the link, but google “WHY HAS U.S. LIFE EXPECTANCY FALLEN
BELOW OTHER COUNTRIES?” It says: “While the U.S. now has one of the lowest smoking rates of high-income countries for both men and women, it was not the case for much of the 20 th century (see Figure 4 on the next page). Historically, Americans consumed more cigarettes per capita than any other country, and the smoking epidemic started earlier and reached a higher peak in the United States, especially for women.” But, it does mostly blame smoking.
I’ve seen one attempt to normalize against violent deaths (murders and car accidents) and their conclusion was that the US comes out with a higher life expectancy than all but 2 (iirc) countries if you don’t die from one of those two causes.
That seems implausible. There are (numbers from memory but should be about right) about 15,000 homicides and 40,000 car accident deaths yearly in the US. Zero murders and half as many car accidents gets you a diff of 35,000, which is only enough to explain about half a year’s worth of life expectancy if I’m doing my math right.
You might be able to get there if you added in deaths by opiate overdose, which are now up to about 60,000 a year.
Are you accounting for the fact that traffic fatalities and murder disproportionately affect young people? About half of traffic fatality and murder victims are under the age of 30.
A 20 year old being murdered affects the population’s life expectancy a lot more than a 75 year old dying of cancer does.
As others have noted, life expectancy is a poor measure of health care quality. In addition to what others have noted about obesity and smoking, the US has high rates of traffic fatalities, gun deaths, and drug deaths. https://www.academyhealth.org/node/1891
Also, Huspanic life expectancy in the US is 82.8 – almost 4 yrs longer than that of whites. That would be unlikely, were health care quality a major determinant of life expectancy.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/life-expectancy-by-re/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B“colId”:”Location”,”sort”:”asc”%7D
And note that Asian-American life expectancy is 86.5 – longer than Japan’s.
I’ve just started a series on my blog that some people here may find of interest. It’s a description of research projects that I at some point abandoned and hope someone else might want to pick up. The first is on the question of why governments spend money.
Islam is very much against Usury. They believe it immoral to charge or earn intrest. What will happen to the European economy if a third of its citizens stop participating in an economy dependent on earning and paying interest?
There are alternatives forms of banking in which Muslims participate. If you’re worried about some kind of crisis, it’s not as though a third of Europe’s citizens would stop participating in usurious practices all at once; rather, proportionately less would participate in it over the course of decades as more of the population is Muslim.
Existing Islamic societies appear, like past Islamic, Catholic, and Jewish societies, to have developed ways of evading the rule against paying interest.
As best I recall the explanation I got from a Saudi Student, when you borrow money from a bank to buy a car, the bank buys the car then sells it to you at a higher price.
In all but the strictest interpretations, you may be charged for the privilege of receiving a thing now and paying in installments. So, for example, it is forbidden to give someone a loan of $30,000 at 10% interest over five years for a car (which would total $38,245). However, you can charge someone $30,000 for the car and allow them to chop it up into sixty monthly payments, and you can charge them $8,245 dollars for the privilege of not paying at once (which you can also chop up into sixty monthly payments). This is not a workaround: Muhammad did this and it is attested in fairly well-regarded surah.
So in the Saudi case, what happens is that the bank buys the car. It then sells it to you for basically the same amount, plus a fee for receiving the car without paying the full amount up front, which it then subdivides into payments.
The important point is twofold: firstly, there is no automatic ability to repossess. If a debtor fails to pay, their punishment is supposed to be determined by the court. It varies, but the court is supposed to allow you to keep things that you rely on for basic necessities and to understand why you couldn’t pay. Failing to pay and being unwilling to pay are separate crimes and the latter is punished much more harshly. Also, the court can impose other penalties that are supposed to be less permanently debilitating than, say, kicking you out of your house and taking your car. (Before you think this is a completely superior system, it’s been known for the court to let you keep your house but subject people to lashings, branding, forced labor etc. And in some cases it’s effectively equivalent: the court just fines you one car and gives it back to the bank.)
Secondly, interest penalties are basically not allowed, nor can you give a bonus for early payment. The logic here is basically one of stability. Both the debtor and banker are supposed to have total knowledge of exactly how much they have to pay/will be paid and when when the agreement is made.
Interestingly, Islamic law tends to presume the banker (presuming they follow Islamic dictates) is the more moral of the two parties. The basic argument is that the banker’s interest is in getting paid back while the borrower’s interest is to keep the money while paying back as little as possible. Borrowing isn’t a moral defect and both could be righteous people, but if neither is, on the whole the banker is going to wish the borrower does well (and so has enough money to pay the loan) while the borrower is going to want the banker to do poorly (so they don’t have to pay). This, combined with what is a frankly lopsided power structure in many Muslim countries, makes not paying debts a bad idea.
If you mean folks find ways to do business despite the rule, sure. But I would think the intention with Islamic banking (as with Catholic alternatives to usurious loans*) is to avoid the injustice that usury so conceived involves, rather than just practice usury by another name.
*Brandon at Siris has an interesting post on one of these alternatives, the medieval montes pietatis. Also a post on riba.
Complex financial instruments which circumvent the letter of the law while being practically equivalent.
I don’t think it’s the same thing. There’s no 18% credit cards in Islam. They’ve basically banned compounding interest on debts.
As much I strongly dislike many aspects of Islam, in the reading I’ve done about Sharia banking I think it’s superior to western banking in this regard.
I would love to see a discussion of sharia or Catholic banking on here; we’ve touched on it a bit here but not in any depth. Probably it would require me or someone else to put forward concrete proposals, though, so I’d have to wait until after Lent. 🙁
@Joe
They live in rented houses, rather than buying houses?
Plenty of Muslims in Europe start a business, so it is clearly not preventing business from being started.
an economy dependent on earning and paying interest
You packed a lot in there. It’s like asking what will happen if some subculture of Americans that doesn’t buy useless shit grows a lot, so what happens to an economy dependent upon people buying shit they don’t need?
Consumption spending is just part of the economy. And if people stop buying useless shit they don’t need, they will transition to pushing their money towards other things, and the economy will adapt to those things. Consumption is 70% or so of the American economy, but that is a measure, not a prescription. If people transition towards more savings and investment, they will do so, and the measure will change.
If Muslims don’t want or use credit (see other replies on how this may not really happen), the economy will adapt. It may be that in 2 generations the Muslims end up owning most of the stuff, and while I’m not immune to hysteria about “muslim takeover,” if they do it by having avoiding the bad habits of everyone else, well, I can’t really say they don’t deserve it.
I recently bought some books. They’re “useless shit I don’t need”; I could survive perfectly fine without the books, and they’re probably not going to gain me any tangible benefit.
Yet you probably don’t mean to include books in “useless shit they don’t need”. What exactly do you mean, then, aside from “things that are not necessary for survival and are low status”?
I was (mostly) speaking in the voice of the people who advocate minimalist lifestyles, how they phrase things, and wouldn’t it be doom if it takes off?
I mean, it’s a cheap answer, but, I’d imagine a lot of the Muslims entering the countries now won’t be that ardent within a generation, and probably won’t be religious at all within three, the way current trends are going. So the answer is that they use the currently existing substitutes for interest today, but eventually buckle once they realize that they’re not as committed to the inconvenience as they were before.
Yeah. Christendom was really anti-usury between the First Council of NIcea to sometime after Shakespeare.
They are against riba, which is often translated as usury but really means something closer to ‘unjust gain’. For example, let’s say I have an apple and you have a banana. I swear my apple is the same quality as your banana and we trade. However, my apple is rotten. That is riba because I have gained something by injustice (in this case deception).
While Islamizing all banking would change the economy in many ways, it wouldn’t lead to a collapse, the death of loans/credit, or an inability for banks to earn money.
So…used car salesmen are in trouble.
On the next Cobra Kai, Johnny learns that Muslims agree that Daniel is the bad guy.
Speaking of which, new episodes are slated for Youtube pretty soon now.
@Erusian
Yep, the Koran makes a similar mistake as Marx in not counting opportunity costs.
So getting interest merely for providing capital is seen as exploiting workers and thus haram.
This connection is no surprise for those who know how Marx really dressed.
That is the weirdest santa outfit ever.
This is the interpretation of certain Socialist Islamists. The more mainstream opinion says that you can charge for access to capital, but it must be a charge rather than interest. In general, Islam forbids anything that is an open-ended commitment to owe unknown amounts of money but mostly approves of set amounts of money. For example, it would forbid a variable rate mortgage but could effectively recreate a fixed rate mortgage very easily.
So, Catholics and Christians just in general were also very much against banking, interest and usury up until they weren’t any more. Does anyone have any idea why christians by and large have dropped this once-important aspect of the faith, or why Muslims by and large haven’t?
I think it is or could be a number of things:
1. Usury was always prohibited in Christianity, but never so strongly or categorically as in Islam.
2. Determining what is and isn’t usury becomes more difficult (practically impossible for the common person) as business practices change. I’d wager they’ve been changing more, and more quickly, in the last two or three hundred years than in times before that. And given all that we’ve learned about economics in that span of time, it takes a lot more expertise to discuss the topic competently.
3. This is perhaps confusing effect with cause, but witness all the American Catholic intellectuals who argue (wrongly) that the Catholic Church’s teaching on usury has been abandoned or reversed.
I read, I believe it was Zippy Catholic on usury. He pointed out a distinction which I don’t recall now, but usury wasn’t defined specifically by the amount, but the purpose perhaps. Can you give a definition or should I go digging for specifics?
Yeah, Zippy’s definition is usury as interest (qua profit) on a mutuum (or full-recourse) loan. It does indeed have nothing to do with the amount; low interest on a mutuum loan is still unjust, and high interest for other reasons can in certain circumstances be just. Interest is, conveniently for the banker, the vaguest term ever; it’s used to charge money for about fifteen million different reasons. Brandon in the post I linked above lists a few (called titles of interest):
Zippy also alludes to these in FAQ 13. As you can see, Zippy has very particular opinions on lucrum cessans, but setting aside whether he’s right or wrong, it’s commonly accepted that there are some reasons for charging fees even on a mutuum loan. Anyway, no matter how many of these you accept, they don’t permit you to profit from the loans but only to, in various senses, break even. Even with lucrum cessans you are at best breaking even for the money you would have had.
Christians got less serious about a lot of things in the late 18th/early 19th centuries in response to the propaganda campaign waged by the philosophes. Look at the works of any conservative thinker of that era and they talk about how to prevent it.
Louis de Bonald, a French MP during the Restoration, wrote that “usury” could be defined as charging interest rates on money equal or higher than the return on land (predicting that if owners of money invested in land, what we call “Red tribe” culture would never wither away in France). Joseph de Maistre, Louis XVIII’s ambassador to Russia when Napoleon ruled, believed in the power of savants who write Great Books, and wanted to create a Christian counterculture that would draw intellectuals away from “a new tribe” of godless intellectuals that had grown up in the 18th century, so fewer future Great Books would be written that support atheism and more that support the Church.
John Calvin. He classified OT laws against usury as “political” ie: only applicable to the ancient state of Israel. I’ve seen people who attribute the rise of Capitalism and western economic dominance largely to him, often building off Weber’s original “Protestant Work Ethic” thesis. I seem to recall some research showing otherwise similar areas diverging economically on the basis of whether they went Catholic or (Calvinistic) Protestant, but I don’t have a link handy.
This figure comes from where?
The future
It occurred to me that there might be another good way to determine which posts are really the core SSC posts (other than the suggested Top Posts): Scott often links to his own posts when referencing a previously discussed idea. Which of his own posts does he link back to most often?
I scraped all 1252 SSC posts to find out.
Here are the Top Posts viewed in this way:
1. Meditations on Moloch (referenced from 24 other posts)
2. I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (19)
3. In Favor of Niceness Community and Civilization (15)
3. The Toxoplasma of Rage (15)
5. Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism (14)
5. The Control Group Is Out of Control (14)
5. SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted to Know (14)
8. Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty (13)
Or, using a rate statistic that doesn’t advantage older posts (but probably advantages newer posts too much):
1. Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty (8.43 references per year since being posted, 13 total)
2. Book Review: Inadequate Equilibria (6.12, 8)
3. Meditations on Moloch (5.17, 24)
4. Against Murderism (4.57, 8)
5. I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (4.25, 19)
6. Guided by the Beauty of Our Weapons (4.01, 8)
7. The Toxoplasma of Rage (3.52, 15)
8. Book Review: Seeing Like a State (3.47, 7)
9. Considerations on Cost Disease (3.31, 7)
10. SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted to Know (2.97, 14)
11. In Favor of Niceness Community and Civilization (2.96, 15)
12. Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism (2.92, 14)
13. The Control Group Is Out of Control (2.86, 14)
Methodological notes: I dropped open threads and the adversarial collaborations, but not links posts, and I didn’t look for other guest posts. I counted number of other posts that reference a post, not number of links. (In other words, I ignored multiple links to the same post from within in one post.) But this made very little difference. I imposed an arbitrary minimum of 6 references for inclusion on the second list (in order to keep it from being dominated by, for example, very recent posts that were immediately referenced a couple of times in follow-up posts but that seem unlikely to be referenced very often in future).
Code and data here: https://github.com/dillonplunkett/ssc_internal_links/
I just want to say thanks for doing that work.
Charles Heberle, a former Pentagon officer responsible for education, and founder of The Citizenship Project, talks about the relations between the United States and Russia circa 2015. and about a unique system of education he has initiated in Russian schools in this video, currently on 308 views… 308:
it strikes me as underattended even if it’s about larping or whatever.
As for what one should think about it… see for yourself.
Very interesting, thanks!
My very wrong first impression was “oh, no, 28 minutes of some guy talking, this is going to be crushingly boring”.
Yes, that was excellent and well worth watching.
It’s difficult to summarize, but to tempt others to watch it, the thrust is that the Russians wanted to teach democracy in their school system, and brought in Heberle to do it. His mandate was “we want you to build us a program that teaches our people — meaning the entire Russian population — what your people learned between 1620 and 1775 that made your revolution successful where others failed.”
It’s mostly just one guy talking, but makes for a fascinating 30 minutes.
Biweekly Naval Gazing links post:
Weather at Sea: What sort of conditions do you need to build a warship to face? How do they affect ships in action, and how bad can things get at sea?
After the US completed its first treaty battleships, the North Carolina class, the designers went back to their drawing boards and thought they could do better. Through the use of new engineering technology and some radical thinking about armor schemes, they did, producing the superb South Dakota class.
I’ve previously discussed many of the roles of auxiliary ships in various posts, but to conclude that series, I’ve looked at modern auxiliaries in all their diversity. Everything from the basics, like surveying ships, to the really exotic, like a nuclear-powered wheeled minisubmarine and a vessel designed to track satellites.
In 1943, the Germans introduced the world’s first guided bombs. Their initial use went well, but the Allies soon fought back, developing countermeasures and eventually making it too dangerous to even use the bombs.
My long-running series on commercial aviation has finally come to an end, with a look at the ways in which airlines work together.
Ohio is the home of the US Air Force Museum, which is the single best military museum I’ve ever visited. If you’re at all interested in military aviation, go.
Lastly, it’s our regular Open Thread. Talk about anything that isn’t culture war.
I tried to comment on the Falklands article about a week ago, but the captcha wasn’t working. Just now I noticed that everything seems fine in from one of the links in your post, however.
After some experimenting, I discovered that if I follow a link from here to your site, the captcha works. However, if I navigate directly to navalgazing.obormot.net and click links there, the captcha doesn’t load. I’ve been able to replicate this on every link you posted above.
I figured that you (or Said Achmiz) would want to know about the issue.
The .obormot.net domain is old and should not be used.
Lambert is correct. navalgazing.net usually shows the captcha, unless it’s on strike again. (We’re not sure why it does that.) navalgazing.obormot.net doesn’t.
Long time lurker here, just wanted to say that I really enjoy your blog. The Weather At Sea post was especially relevant to my interests as I was a weather forecaster in the Navy for years and my first professional software engineering job after getting out was on AREPS, a program to predict the effects of atmospheric propagation that you mentioned.
Anyway: good blog, do like.
A Navy Weatherman, huh? I know your kind. 🙂
But seriously, thank you for your kind words.
Your task is to draft an Article on Referendums for the Constitution of a nation in the 15-30 million population range. The makeup of the nation is otherwise unknown but it’s educated. There’s a reasonably diverse economy and enough republican traditions and institutions that they’re not going to elect Napoleon III for their First referendum at least.
How do you limit and structure the referendum process such that:
The masses can’t violate human rights.
They can’t elect Napoleon III to be their Democratic Caesar even if they wanted to and even if he has a knack for city planning
They can’t pass Prop 13
But they could maybe pass Brexit?
Can do lots of fun meaningful things that make it so people keep wanting to hold referendums, and politicians are reasonably fearful of referendums but without destroying the State or empowering it unto tyranny.
Can a referendum that’s to a certain extent toothless still be effective direct democracy and reflect the “will of the nation” insofar as that exists? Do the same structures that moderate an indirect democracy apply on the scale of large scale referendums? Can anyone recommend any reading on this subject?
Why can’t they pass Prop 13?
I understand the rest, but is this a bit of West Coast culture war I’m not getting?
Prop 13 is disastrously bad tax policy. It failed in its purpose of keeping taxes low, the state just switched to more volatile forms of revenue like sales and income taxes, and it distorts how much people pay in taxes based on when they bought their houses in a way that is ludicrously unfair and massively economically inefficient. Even if you wish taxes in california were much lower (and you can count me in that group) it’s a terrible policy that never should have been passed.
How do you know that it didn’t result in overall taxes being lower than they would otherwise have been? It isn’t obvious that it did, but we don’t have a parallel universe in which the proposition failed to pass to compare to—or if there is one, we don’t have access to it.
I can’t rule it out for certain but given that california has some of the highest tax burdens of any state, it seems unlikely that it functioned as much of a break. And even if it did, the boom/bust cycle of california taxes that has ensued has almost certainly done more harm than the alternative, since heavy reliance on income taxes means that spending can quickly ramp up in the good years, and never goes down as quickly in bad years.
To add a bit more detail, prop 13 did three things:
1. Lower property tax rates significantly.
2. Make it much more difficult to raise property tax rates, by requiring voter approval with a super-majority threshold.
3. Change how property is assessed for tax purposes. Previously it was reassessed periodically, now it is only reassessed when it is sold.
Parts 1 and 2 gave some previously sound public institutions that were funded through property taxes, notably California public schools, a heck of a whack. California schools used to be pretty good, but they slid badly. Part 3 means that long-term residents tend to pay much lower property taxes than recent arrivals. It also strongly encourages holding on to whatever plot you own, meaning that fewer properties are available for sale, aggravating what’s already a serious housing shortage in some areas.
the issue prop 13 was trying to solve wasn’t property tax rates, it’s that the same rate was resulting in much higher bills because values were rising so fast. The way to fix that isn’t to cap rates, it’s to cap revenues. That is, every year you set a certain amount of revenue to be collected, and the rate is whatever makes the math come out right for that figure. The revenue figure can be set by a formula, or having the legislature vote on it.
While school spending is local and funded by property taxes in most states, that stopped being true in California shortly before Prop 13. School spending is topped up to a level set by the state with only a handful of municipalities raising enough property taxes to spend more, although I believe that is technically illegal. I don’t understand why the rest spend any money on schools.
@Douglas Knight
That’s not true any more. Every state I’m aware of either allocates most education dollars centrally or tops up local districts.
Maybe most states have top-ups, but how many have most districts below the quota, let alone 90%?
@Douglas Knight
I can’t speak for every state, and every state does their budgeting differently which makes direct comparisons time consuming, but everyone I’ve looked at has brought funding into pretty narrow gaps (+/- 10%) with the exception of large urban districts which are invariably much better funded than the rest of the system.
Also the low Prop 13 raw rates may be passed on to your heirs!
My sons will be aristocrats!
Ehhhh, Prop 13 being stupid isn’t a good reason to limit referendums. Part of having choice is having the right to make stupid decisions.
Maybe referendum shouldn’t have the ability to affect this KIND of decision, but it being stupid in and of itself isn’t a good argument against it, IMO.
So?
Any system that allows the people to vote will allow them to make really bone-headed decisions. Preventing this isn’t possible, since any technocrat with the right to say “this is a really bone-headed decision, so you can’t vote on it” is your de-facto ruler.
The only part of it I find mildly objectionable is that they changed the rules for revoking it.
I’d be fine with a system where you can vote anything through in referenda, but you can’t change the bar to repeal it in another referendum.
But “voters did something stupid” is both a matter of perspective and impossible to prevent.
Do you mean the 1978 California one (the first one that pops up on Google for me) or some other one?
You run a proportional power system. Direct election of a head of state whose job is to introduce legislation to the legislature, you work out a system where the number of votes needed to pass the legislation is inversely proportional to the % of the popular vote that he received, so a HoS who gets 75% of the popular vote has an easier time passing legislation than one who gets 45% of the popular vote.
The #2 vote getter takes the position of head of the legislature. Their primary power is that they can call for a new election at any time. In this structure you don’t just gain by ousting a HoS but can reduce their power should their popularity fall during their reign. Any combination of other vote getters (3rd through Xth place) get ceremonial positions where they can band together and if they combine for a certain % of total votes then they can call for a new election. This threshold decreases for ever year since the last election took place- so if the threshold is 10% the first year after the election the 2nd year it might be 9%, then 8% etc.
The legislature is made up of representatives and every represented unit gets 2, the top two vote getters and their votes are worth the proportion of the vote that they received. If you get 90% of the vote then you 0.9 votes and the number 2 gets 0.1 or less.
Referenda are purely negative. That is, they can strike down executive action/regulation/legislation, but not initiate new things. That one rule cures the vast majority of the abuses you normally get with referenda while allowing for a broad democratic check.
The Romans did that, IIRC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trrqslUpfdw&vl=en
One thing I would try is saying any referendum is only binding once it’s been passed in two separate elections. This would at least make things like Brexit a lot less likely, but still possible, and allow for a lot of signalling to the legislature through protest votes- “It’s a bad idea and I’ll vote no on the second round but we need to make those politicians pay attention.”
Protecting human rights seems relatively easy: make referenda bound by the constitution. Possibly allow amendments by referendum with a suitable supermajority depending on how you gauge the risks.
To answer this, I think the answer is a Constitution that specifies broadly what the rights of the people and limitations of the legislature and executive are, establishes an independent judiciary appointed by the executive, confirmed by the legislature and retained by majority vote every odd-numbered year.
Referenda can change any non-Constitutional issue (taxes, regulation, etc) by majority vote every even numbered year, which is also when legislative seats are voted on. Executive is voted on every other electoral year (4 year terms) and can only serve two terms.
Referenda can also change the Constitution in any way by a super-majority (66%) vote. This is the only way to change the Constitution.
Thank you everyone for you input! I enjoy these sort of constitutional construction questions and may ask more again in the future. I apologize if referencing Prop 13 was culture war-y, I just wanted to impress the notion of arbitrarily restricting referenda from doing one thing (Prop 13/tax policy) while allowing something potentially even larger (Brexit/foreign policy), and how one might structure the institution in certain ways while maintaining the “legitimacy” of the referendum.
I’d add a concept of “citizen legislation” and set the priority order to go: 1. Constitution, 2. Citizen Legislation, 3. Normal Legislation
We use referendums to pass “Citizen Legislation.” Constitutional amendments would be a separate, and significantly harder process. This protects human rights since “citizen legislation” can’t overrule constitutional protections any more than normal legislation can. It also means that constitutions don’t get cluttered up with a bunch of policy-details.
From there, I’d make it a constitutional rule that “citizen legislation” automatically comes up for renewal every 10 years, and expires unless it’s re-authorized by a majority of voters.
This ensures that citizens have a way to override legislators, but also ensures that we can’t have too many “citizen laws” at any given time. The natural check is that, if you had too many of them, the ballot would start to look like a phone-book, and voters would be naturally inclined to skip it, causing the less-important topics to revert back to normal legislative control.
Voter initiatives may be overturned by subsequent voter initiatives with a majority vote, and the legislature my overturn the laws they pass with a majority vote, but California-style citizen initiatives may be overruled by a vote by the legislators if the vote proportion is equal or greater than the proportion of eligible voters and vice versa, so if 65% of eligible voters pass an initiative, if 65% or more of legislators vote to repeal it, it is repealed.
Since that there are no so many ballot measures every year to vote on it is now annoying, everytime more than five measures make it to the ballot, the next year the number of signatures plus fees (each dolar in fees cancelled by a million signatures) increases until it is less than five again, and lowered when it is less than three.
I don’t think it’s possible to get “lots of fun meaningful things” but also “can’t do Prop 13” and “can’t violate human rights”. Cassander’s idea of making referenda purely negative has legs, but it would need to have some limits — a cleverly used line-item veto is almost as powerful as regular legislation. And you’d need some way of getting more powerful referenda onto the ballot if you want to do Brexit.
I think a good compromise might look something like this: a ballot referendum, if limited in scope to striking down sections of the legal or regulatory code or recent legislative actions, can be introduced through the petition of X% of the electorate, where X is a small number. Alternatively, a ballot referendum equivalent in scope to an act of the legislature can be introduced by a simple majority vote of that legislature. In either case, simple majority of voters wins. Anything passed by referendum is still subject to constitutional review, but items passed by referendum can’t be reintroduced or struck down by the legislature for at least one legislative term after they take effect, and referenda can’t touch the constitution.
BUS 207 (Surviving and Thriving in a Bureaucracy) teaches how to navigate a bureaucracy, a vital skill in today’s workplace and indeed within broader society. Because of the importance of its subject, BUS 207 is a required course for all majors at State U. But BUS 207 doesn’t just lecture students on bureaucratic infighting skills. The course itself is a hands-on exercise designed cultivate those skills.
You are invited to describe how this is done.
For example, perhaps the course has prerequisites that are no longer offered at the university.
Every assignment needs to be presented in triplicate, stamped by three offices that only open for an hour once per month, all at the same time.
All classes are designed to coincide with other classses of compulsory attendance, and attendance is compulsory.
Somehow, the voluntary extra assignments are always required.
Grading is given a year after the course ends, but you only have a week to appeal. And everybody fails, and everybody needs to appeal.
Grading is published on some obscure document nobody reads.
Phone calls to a robo-line are required, and you need to dictate stuff to a robot that doesn’t understand your accent.
All asignments need to be either mailed, or faxed.
The course website only works on Windows and Internet Explorer, and it has an invalid security certificate.
Ahhh, I see you also have your property taxes assessed by Cook County. But an addendum: First you appeal, then your first appeal is denied for no reason, and you have 1 day to re-appeal. Your re-appeal must be mailed and RECEIVED within 1 business day. That is, unless you retained a politically connected lawyer at the university, in which case, your grade is changed to passing on the first time, with the exact grade determined by how politically connected your lawyer friend is.
The course automatically drops everyone, puts them on a waitlist, and sends them an email. The spaces in the course thus go to the students who deal with their emails the fastest.
It’s not actually offered by the requisite department and the contact people listed are under instructions to direct students elsewhere. You have to follow a bread crumb trail to get everything done.
Instructors/TAs are encouraged to ignore things they’ve said previously in oral communication. Students must get in the habit of doing everything in written media and confirming everything done orally in writing.
The instructor only communicates by fax, not email.
Not getting receipt of assignments is an automatic F on the assignment.
The course isn’t always called BUS 207. Because of a take-no-prisoners turf war between the departments of business, psychology, and sociology, the course is also sometimes known as PSY 203 or SOC 150. It’s not cross-listed; the course changes name and home department every year. One year it was in film studies, for some reason.
If any section of the class does not have at least one black, at least one latino(a), at least one gay person, and at least one disabled person, the relevant campus lobby group will file a grievance against the course for violating the university’s inclusivity guidelines. This means everyone, including the students, are subject to formal disciplinary proceedings. Historically, this has happened to four out of five sections.
Ah, so we’ll be watching Brazil!
johan_larson, you are in violation of the current (as of this date and time) diversity initiative regulations, to wit, usage of the sexist, gendered, binary gender reinforcing, non-inclusive term “latino(a)” where it has been established that the only correct and permissible term is “Latinx” (please see exemplar of correct use here).
Please report to the usual department for the usual disciplinary procedures and completely voluntary sensitivity training day for which you must pay out of your own personal budget and for which you will not be eligible to claim reimbursement from the committee’s funds (failure to attend the completely voluntary sensitivity training day will result in the usual penalties).
Come on, D. This is the no CW thread.
If we’re going to teach how to navigate bureaucracy, Aapje, we need to include arbitrary pointless rules that you think you can safely ignore because come on, nobody takes that seriously right?
And then you find out there is a particular person whose job is to take it seriously because out in the wild there are people who will pick up and complain about anything, and “but this has to be a joke, you’re not really going to make a case out of this?” isn’t anything nearly enough to save your skin. Cover Your Backside is a very necessary skill.
EDIT: Back when dinosaurs walked the earth and I got my First Real Job, a minor sort of hanger-on in the departmental bureaucracy left a very sniffy note about not being too friendly with the bosses in our pigeon holes, because we all had to remember that They Were The Bosses and we were Only The Workers, and behave appropriately. I thought this was a joke and responded in kind.
It was not a joke. I got hauled in front of my team head to be read the riot act, and “But this was a joke, surely?” did not cut the mustard. Since then, I’ve learned the hard lesson that there are self-important human toothaches out there who will niggle over the tiniest thing, and that will get you into trouble if you don’t “yes sir no sir three bags full sir” to all the crap that comes down the line.
Please stop. There will be plenty of opportunity to insult your outgroup next OT.
Of course you can’t just sign up for BUS 207. Even if you get the prerequisites, you’ll be waitlisted (the slots in the class are filled by no-show students who are plausibly friends or relatives of the administrators). You’ll need special permission to over-enroll. Attempting to find out from whom will result in a runaround. Actually getting permission will require providing some sort of favor — but you run the risk of providing the favor and either getting strung along for another, or being betrayed completely. The listed text (required by the start of the first class) will be out of print, unavailable used, and quite possibly nonexistent. Hints of the real text may be discovered through the rumor mill of students who have gone through it, but again error and deception is a possibility, and different sections use different texts.
Assuming you do sign up and get a textbook, the class location will be a room that does not exist. You will need to figure out the slightly-plausible error which leads to the correct room. When you get to class, you’re not going to be listed on the attendance roll, so hopefully you have a copy of that paper you got giving you permission to oversubscribe.
One might think that there would be no syllabus, but that would be too kindly.
There are, in point of fact, 4 syllabuses. The professor maintains one, the TA’s, collectively, maintain a pair, and the tech who maintains the website has another.
All are valid when unopposed (that is, if any of them gives an assignment, that assignment is real), but in the case of collisions the resolution is handled case by case. TA’s have final say in weekly assignments, the prof in quizzes, etc.
The meta syllabus, which gives guidance on which syllabus to trust in any given instance, can be purchased from the college bursar on the first day of class, and never again. They take only exact change in the amount of $29.24, and do not advertise this fact on their website.
Assessed work is only accepted if you can prove it was undertaken by someone else on your behalf. Additional credit if you can get the professor responsible for the course to complete it.
Also there is inexplicably four additional members of faculty who turn up to lectures and sit behind the lecturer. No contact details or explanation of their purpose is provided.
Not just attendance is mandatory. You have to make your whereabouts known to BUS 207 at all times. If you want to leave the city you have to apply for LOA. This application is routinely denied “because of ongoing processes”.
Three month before starting BUS 207 you are assigned a personal interview in which your pre-course course work is discussed. When you show up for that interview it turns out there is nobody there. The interview is rescheduled 2 weeks AFTER the start of BUS 207, this time it actually happens and you find out that you should have done two assignments per week …
If foreign students want to take BUS 207 they have to send in a birth certificate, but only if they come from countries whose bureaucracy is so dodgy as to not issue birth certificates. To replace the non-existing birth certificate, you have to make a notarial appointment in your birth city. The resulting certificate has to be officially stamped, signed and countersigned in the bureaucracy of the birth city, the bureaucracy of your birth province and the bureaucracy of the capital. Then it has to be officially translated and send to BUS 207.
(I haven’t made any of these up.)
The textbooks for the course are ridiculously expensive. Fortunately, each student is allotted a pool of Text Credits which may be used in lieu of cash to purchase the books. Unfortunately, the pool starts out empty and must be funded by converting regular currency to Text Credits. Fortunately, the university provides financial aid to any student for the purpose of funding their Text Credit Account–just apply for the aid along with receipts showing the amount that you have transferred into the account, and you will be reimbursed.
(This was how doing laundry worked at Infosys’s campus 11 years ago, I assume they’ve added a few iterations by this point).
BUS 207 is taught by a rotating series of
bureaucratsprofessors giving guest lectures.Every week, the homework assignments are randomly assigned from one professor to one student. A given student may receive assignments from multiple professors. These assignments often have nothing to do with that week’s lecture. If a student is asked to do contradictory things by different professors, the student is responsible for explaining the contradiction to both of them and making the professors get in a room and work out what the course of action should be. The student is penalized if the assignment is late; no extensions are ever granted. The BUS 207 guidelines state that due dates are assigned by assuming that the assignment immediately becomes the student’s top priority.
You must hand in assignments in person, but you must also email the professors a photo of you adding your completed assignment to the stack with a picture of a clock with the date and time next to it. (You must bring your own clock or watch to take this photo)
It is a BUS207 guideline (but not a hard rule) that students should follow up with the professors that have given them homework assignments in person to verify that their homework assignment instructions are correct. Sometimes it is difficult to convey things in writing, after all. Even if the work perfectly follows the letter of the assignment, if the student failed to have this conversation, professors reserve the right to mark down work for quote-unquote “not meeting expectations”, which usually means not including something that was not specified in the text of the assignment. Students who point this fact out are marked down further for insubordination.
The course itself is a hands-on exercise designed cultivate those skills.
First, they have to fill out the forms themselves applying for a student grant (or whatever other benefits the university provides) with a strict deadline that if the form is not completed and returned with all relevant requested documentation by the cut-off time, they will lose their place on the course.
Then after they’ve run around in a screaming panic for three weeks because none of them have the foggiest about how to fill in a form, the next class is going through each form individually and showing where they screwed up: from “Susan, you put your name on the address line” to “Yes, Tom, you do really need to provide a payslip from your part-time job as proof of means. You don’t have a payslip and have no idea how to get one? Okay, next week’s class: Remedial What The Fudge To Do When You Start Working”.
(You may perhaps get a hint of the frustration from a bureaucratic minion’s experiences of “what do you mean fill in this whole entire form plus you want other paperwork with it as well?” and dealing with payroll for kids in their first real job who are hugely surprised (a) what do you mean I get taxed on income? (b) sure I’ve only been here three weeks but surely I am owed holiday pay?).
The course automatically drops everyone, puts them on a waitlist, and sends them an email. The spaces in the course thus go to the students who deal with their emails the fastest.
dndnrsn, that is beautiful and I swear to God I’d implement it in real life 🙂 From the other side of the fence, you guys have little idea the frustration involved with “I sent you the relevant form plus information that really really really cross our hearts and hope to die we need this filled in three weeks ago; I sent you follow-up reminders; I dealt with your “um, ah, where do I fill in my name?” questions personally and at length; I sent you another follow-up reminder by email, text and voicemail the week before the deadline; the deadline came and went with no sign of your completed paperwork; a week after that you handed it in half-filled, no supplementary information, and threw a tantrum for half an hour over it being too late to accept it now, because six weeks ago when you first received the form you buggered off on your fortnight’s sun and booze holiday and forgot all about it and ignored all the follow-up reminders, and somehow all that is my personal fault and I’m only rejecting the form because I’m personally prejudiced against you”.
I have a conspiracy theory — OpenAI’s GPT-2 was not released not for ethical reasons. It’s because of strong pressure from Google, for which model like GPT-2 is an existential threat. It would make it impossible to automatically detect generated content, and would make search ranking useless, because anyone would be able to create lots of credible inbound links.
How plausible is this?
It is certainly plausible that GPT-2 would make spamming easier.
It is hard for me to say how strong would be the difference.
Spamming is certainly problem for Google, though note that that more sophisticated spam may be good for them if Google can detect and combat it while competition is unable to do it.
I think that it would be less “search ranking is useless” and more “search ranking requires tweak and more manual interventions” – maybe relying more on metadata indicators of spam and manual checks.
OpenAI wrote a blog post about their concerns. They listed 4:
So, yes, they are concerned about spam. This is not a secret. Do you really need to invoke more details?
The problem with this conspiracy theory is that gpt-2 will likely be replicated within the year. Maybe even open source. If this was the case they wouldn’t have published anything about it at all.
A better theory is that they want to make money with it. They rescinded the non-profit part of the mission basically two weeks later.
Look at https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/. Never again will cretins like Jacob Wohl have to steal pictures of innocent people off of Google Images to build their fake LinkedIn profiles. Now multiply that by everything.
Can’t they train another instance to detect when it’s bot-generated? Then have them fight.
ETA: Thinking about this has led me to believe we don’t need to fear a super-human AI; they’ll kill us well before achieving human-level intelligence.
That is in fact how Generative Adversarial Networks, such as GPT-2 and thispersondoesnotexist, work: basically you have one AI whose task is to detect fakes, and another AI whose task is to sneak fakes past the first one. And then you let them evolve together by trying to outsmart each other.
GPT-2 isn’t a GAN.
Ah you’re right, sorry.
Implausible. Google could just train a classifier to distinguish GPT-2-generated text from human-generated text, and this is likely an easier problem than generating plausible text, so they would win any arms race on it. Moreover, there are non-textual features that can be used to detect fake sites (e.g. link graph topology, page age distribution, page change history, domain names and ip addresses).
My best guess is that OpenAI just wanted to create buzz prior to the announcement of their transformation to a for-profit company. They wanted to make potential investors think they have got some secret super-powered technology.
The European Parliament Elections are going to be in May, and it is going to be very, very fun in Spain.
The court case about the Catalan independence declaration is ongoing (no verdict yet). All the jailed politicians are in the lists for either the European or the national parliament.
MEPs, it seems, are inmune. So, if the member state they belong to wants to jail them, they need to ask the EU Parliament; the Comission looks at the case, and makes a recommendation, after which a majority in the EU Parliament is going to be necessary to strip the MEP of their inmunity. In any case, they retain their seat.
There are several possible outcomes, all bad:
a) The verdict is declared before the elections (unlikely unless they rush it).
b) The verdict is declared after the elections, but before the MEPs are sworn in; it is unclear to me whether inmunity applies here.
c) The jailed politicians are not allowed to be sworn in, even though they have not been declared guilty yet (happened with the Catalan Parliament).
d) They are allowed to be sworn in, the verdict is declared after that, and the EU Parliament votes on the issue.
The crime these politicians are accused of are clearly political crimes; they are not ordinary politician crimes, such as bribery or corruption. Considering how many EU countries have governments with slightly authoritarian tendencies, I don’t think it would be a good precedent to let a government jail MEP members for political crimes.
All Spanish media say completely different things depending on their politics. Is there any easily readable source where I can get a less biased opinion? I have read the article concerning the inmunity, but it is not clear to me when is this inmunity granted (when they are elected, sworn in, sit in?).
These are the relevant laws:
This doesn’t seem to be full immunity unless the national politicians of that country also have full immunity.
As for the unwillingness for the EU to see political crimes persecuted, I see few trepidations when it comes to going after politicians whose politics are deemed to violate democratic norms.
So the issue is really if the EU is going to consider the actions by the separatists to be a violation of democratic norms.
Not full immunity, but something close
(would application of this law to Spanish MEPs mean that the European Parliament would have to vote to allow them to be prosecuted?)
Yeah, I already edited the claim that Spain lacks full immunity out of my comment before I saw yours.
Yeah, I think that’s how it works. This case seems to say that according to the French consitution members of the French parliament can only be prosecuted with the agreement of the parliament, and therefore the French government can only prosecute an MEP with the agreement of the European Parliament. The provisions of the Spanish constitution seem similar, it talks about “authorization of their respective House.”
I don’t claim any familiarity with the relevant laws, but wouldn’t it be kinda hard to make a case for someone violating democratic norms by having an election that was forbidden by the central government?
Not if the implied aim of that election was to legitimize a revolt against the legitimate democratic government.
Imagine if I bring a group of extremists together and plan to hold a vote on the legitimacy of committing terrorist acts. If the government then intervenes, they will use my plans to hold that vote as evidence that I am willing to commit terrorist attacks.
I believe that MEPs only have the same immunity from prosecution by their own national government as members of their country’s Parliament- plus, as an absolute minimum, immunity from prosecution for actions in their capacity as an MEP. So, for instance, British MEPs (while they still exist) don’t have any immunity beyond this minimum, as British MPs only have Parliamentary Privilege- they cannot face legal consequences for what they say in Parliament, even if it directly breaches a court order.
So if Spain lifted or restricted the immunity of all members of its Parliament (which I think would require an amendment to the Constitution), then it could freely prosecute its MEPs. Though they would have to set foot in Spain to be arrested- MEPs cannot be detained by the authorities of a European country other than their own for any reason unless actually caught committing a crime.
Otherwise, from reading the other rules (in English, I don’t know if the version in Spanish or any other language is clearer*) members seem to take office when the first sitting of Parliament following the elections is opened. In particular, the act of 20 September 1976 says
.
*It is a common practice for European courts to look at all of the (equally valid) versions of a European law in different languages to resolve an ambiguity. The standard example of this is a case where the English version of a law referred to the transport of “animal carcasses or waste not intended for human consumption” and it wasn’t clear whether this also included animal carcasses that were intended for human consumption. The Dutch version made it clear that it didn’t.
This is the inmunity granted to Spanish senators:
So the EU Parliament would need to give permission for them to be prosecuted. Or not. I find this utterly confusing, and some Spanish sources say they would, and some say the wouldn’t.
But then, a lot of the juridical scholars say the rebellion charge do not apply to the type of crime that was commited. This is a very politically divisive issue in Spain.
They also have the right to be judged by the Supreme Court and not a lesser court, but they are being judged by the Supreme Court anyway.
@ana53294
I´ve deleted previous comment, which was based on a misunderstanding born of not actually reading Spanish constitution. Sorry for confusion.
Assuming that English translation of Spanish constitution provided by Spanish goverment is correct, Section 71 says:
So Spanish prosecutors have to not only “seek” authorisation from parliamentary body in which legislator is seated, but actually obtain it, and “final authority” of Spanish Supreme Court means only that if parliamentary body allows it, Supreme Court will take this case instead of lower courts.
So this is not unambiguous, but probably if prosecution or trial would be initiated after they would be elected, authorization from EP would be necessary. However if EP would refuse authorization, they might be prosecuted after their term is over.
It’s pretty clear to me that if they were currently MEPs, this wouldn’t be possible without EU Parliament’s decision.
However, they are not yet MEPs, although they will be elected. The fun part comes with whether they are allowed to be sworn in and seated, and whether this happens before/after the verdict.
So the ambiguity comes from “During their term of office”.
It’s very confusing, and it’s going to be bad whatever happens.
@ana53294
“Term of office” of MEP is defined by Act concerning the election of the members of the European Parliament by direct universal suffrage (aka Electoral Act), Article 5 as beginning with first session of EP after elections. Conditions of electability are up to member states, except that EU nationals residing in member state have to be eligible to the same extent as nationals of given member state (Article 20 of Treaty on functioning ot the EU).
Article 13 of Electoral Act also provides that member state could have legal provisions for withdrawal of the mandate of MEP.
The directorate general for internal policies published this in-depth analysis of the immunity law.
Is the National Debt a real thing? Ive heard people call it just an accounting trick. The only people that seem at all concerned about it are aging conservative boomers. Who exactly does the nation owe all this money? What could the consequences be if we never even attempt to pay it off.
Those who give the federal government money to spend.
There is no inherent need to pay off all the debt, just like there is no inherent need for a company to pay off all their debt or a house owner to pay off the entire mortgage*. As long as the assets are thought to be sufficient, those who hold bonds in a country, company or house tend to be happy, as long as the interest is being paid.
If the interest stops being paid or the ability to pay back the loan is thought to be insufficient, people with money very quickly become unwilling to give that money to the government.
* Although there is the complication that people have a fairly limited lifespan and thus cannot hold debt forever. This is not a problem for governments and companies, though.
Note that it ignores problem of what happens with assets that disappeared – in most countries it means that “Your retirement money, money in back account, insurance coverage and several more things just disappeared suddenly.”. And probably company where you work has major problems.
If it would be USA bankrupting – it would have even more “interesting” effects.
And “who give the federal government money to spend” is often indirect, for examples see insurance companies and banks.
Makes me wonder if any system of government in the past has tried a kind of ‘dead-man switch’ where if national debt exceeds X% of GDP (or similar feudal metric) per year for Y years, government is instantly dissolved. Seems like something the Romans would do.
That kind of thing tends to happen by itself once there’s not enough money to pay the armed forces.
“Is the National Debt a real thing?”
Yes.
“Who exactly does the nation owe all this money?”
Depends on a country. Usually citizens and companies of a country, sometimes also foreign governments, companies and citizens.
“What could the consequences be if we never even attempt to pay it off.”
First of all it means it will not be paid off. It means that private pension funds, public pension funds, insurance companies, holders of U.S. savings bonds, owners of other U.S. Treasury that thought that they have money no longer have it.
For start you may assume that most of retirement money is gone. Also, most of companies will collapse or have serious trouble.
What was owned by foreign governments and companies also will turn to be worthless with its consequences.
In case of USA it would mean that about 22,000,000,000,000.00 $ of property would disappear (21,516,058,183,180.23 on 2018-09-30). Effects on economy and indirect death toll would be devastating.
Country will need pay to more to borrow in future as people will consider it more risky.
Note that as usual, typing “national debt” into Wikipedia (or googling “national debt” and following first Wikipedia link) gives decent introduction to the topic.
Errrr, it’s not exactly an accounting trick. There is a distinction between “Gross Debt” and “Public Debt.” Gross debt is the total obligations of the Treasury, but many of these are intra-governmental holdings: the government effectively owes itself money. That does not mean the US government does not have to pay itself, unless you think the US government is just going to let Social Security go kaput, or just not pay its retired employees (including military) anything.
After the Fed, I believe the majority of public debt holdings are international, specifically Japan and China, who invest their extra money in US bonds. After that, there are various private investors like pension funds and mutual funds and the like who want to hold something risk-free on their balance sheets.
Defaulting isn’t really a good option on any of these people, but defaulting on intra-government debts is the easiest (just cut SS spending), followed by defaulting or effectively taxing on domestic obligations, and lastly on foreign obligations. Or at least that’s been the perception on debt crises for less developed nations in the past, especially because a lot of bonds are under New York state law.
Popular debate on the debt is one of three kinds:
1. We’re all about to die because the debt is so high.
2. Who cares, we are nowhere near the effective debt ceiling, don’t panic.
3. The debt doesn’t matter because
supply side economicsthe singularitycommunismMMT.I’m not panicked about the debt in the near term, but that doesn’t mean we should just rack up giant deficits to fund the Green New Deal or giant tax cuts. It means if we have another recession, I hope that we spend some money trying to counteract it.
Wouldn’t invading and conquering China and Japan, seizing all of their assets including US debt instruments as war prizes, and convincing the rest of the world to shut up and take it because “We’re America, Bitch”, be easier than cutting Social Security to any significant degree?
Historically, we call Social Security benefit cuts “raising the retirement age”. (Currently 66 and a bit to get “full benefits” and scheduled to top out at 67, when average retiree age is about 60 and the average age for starting to take benefits is 62.)
But while that’s demonstrably more possible than openly saying “we’re cutting benefits”, there are clearly political limits to how far that can be taken.
Social Security payments are ~ 5% of GDP, dropping 1 point worth of GDP annually off obligations means a 20% reduction in benefits, but raising the retirement age only effects a portion of beneficiaries, so you are going to have to raise the retirement age 5+ years to have a large impact.
Means-testing Social Security and Medicare would be the next logical step, but it’s difficult to pick a threshold such that:
1. The people getting screwed over (or near enough the line that they’d be at risk from threshold adjustments/inflation) are a small enough group not to destroy the party implementing it in elections for multiple cycles.
2. The amount saved is significant.
Don’t give them ideas….
Well, first off China would nuke us. If we somehow prevented that, the rest of the world would worry that they’re next and unite against us.
Yes, I understand that. But China doesn’t vote, the rest of the world doesn’t vote (in US elections), and nuclear weapons aimed US-wards can be spun into positive votes for the POTUS who Stood Up Against The Dastardly Chinese and the congressmen who stood by him.
I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but compared to cutting Social Security?
If our cities become smoking craters we’ll probably lose social security anyway.
A national debt is indeed just an accounting trick due to being valuated in money, which is itself just an accounting trick. In particular, a sovereign nation with debts in its national currency formally never has to worry about paying them off, because it has a full control over its money and can create any amount it needs at will.
Of course there’s a broader issue of the state’s continued existence requiring people’s trust, which includes fulfilling one’s obligations and signaling stability, and governments need to be concerned about their debts in this sense. Just not about some particular abstract numerical value.
The National Debt is a real thing, but it’s significance is frequently overstated by comparing the US government to things that operate very differently.
The National Debt is for some reason is almost never compared to the National Assets which is the value of all the stuff the US government owns which is significantly larger by any reasonable accounting standard. There are issues with liquidity of those assets, so it would be difficult to pay off the National Debt by selling off the US Navy and the National Forests. Parts of the National Debt are owed by one part of the government to other parts of the government, i.e. the Social Security Trust fund owns lots and lots and lots of government bonds.
A large chunk of the rest is owned by US citizens and companies, so it’s not owed to external actors.
The US Government debt is owed in US dollars which the US government has the ability to create an infinite amount of at will. Obviously, there would be significant economic and political consequences to doing so, but the US government doesn’t ever have to default if it doesn’t want to.
Finally, the existence of US debt provides a valuable commodity of low-risk assets whose existence is very important to the financial markets.
The end result of all this is the headline US debt number looks a lot scarier than it actually is. It’s not the equivalent of being underwater on your mortgage and facing personal bankruptcy. The main issue with it is that if it gets too big relative to the economy it can absorb too large of a fraction of available savings and “crowd out” investment in other more productive activities.
As to not paying it off, it depends on what you mean. If you mean if we don’t try to get the balance to 0, but keep it stable relative to the size of the US economy, nothing much happens. That’s basically how we’ve been operating since WWII.
If you mean we default on our debt by stop paying interest or paying off bonds at their maturity date, then the answer is economic apocalypse. One of the pillars of the modern financial system disappears. A core component of the balance sheet of every major financial institution on the planet has to be written to 0 causing a cascading wave of failures of financial institutions. The credit markets completely freeze up preventing businesses from operating meeting short term obligations, which causes another cascading wave of panic as workers and suppliers don’t know if they will get paid. It’s hard to know where it would end up, but at the very least it would be the worst financial crash in history.
The national debt far exceeds the market value of government assets.
Is there somebody who has estimated the value of those things? Most of the valuable things the US government owns are probably illegal to sell, not just illiquid.
But how much would the IP owned by the US military be worth?
There is also loads of very valuable real Estate that cannot be sold, like Congress, or the White House.
And also, do we count only what the federal government owns?
US defense spending as a % of GDP over the last 30 years have averaged under 4%, and US federal debt is > 100% of GDP. Even if 100% of defense spending over those years was ‘investment’ you would need 3-5% annual returns for the value of military capital to be worth 100% of GDP. So unless 30+ year old tech has been generating high returns its just not feasible that the fraction of military spending that is going towards capital has become worth a massive fraction of US GDP. The
Yes, the treasury department. When you properly account for both assets and liabilities, we’re deep, deep in the red.
Not according to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_United_States
That isn’t the US government, that is the US population.
I’m looking at the article and that’s not what it says. “Estimated financial position, Q1 2014” says:
Federal Net Worth: -11,498.2
You’re right, I didn’t consider that distinction. But isn’t it valid to say that the US federal debt is also owned by the US population? So isn’t comparing the debt to both public and private wealth the right way to view this?
No. The federal gov is a distinct entity.
It correctly notes that the federal debt could be paid by taxing US citizens and does not absolutely require e.g. a Greek-style financial bailout.
It is not correct to simply wave a fiscal magic wand in the direction of “the American people owe this money to themelves and as a class have net positive worth” and then ignore the part where the government actually writes the checks. And it is not possible for the government to write and clear those checks without levying taxes to turn that private wealth into cash money in the federal government’s bank accounts. Taxes substantially greater than those currently in place.
Judging by those numbers, a one-time no-exceptions 10% wealth tax would about do it, except for the slight detail that lots of Americans would have to sell lots of valuable property to raise tax-paying cash, and they’ll have a hard time doing that when every other American is trying to sell not buy for the same reason. So, basically, selling 10% of everything in the United States to the Chinese etc, in exchange for their making the debt problem vanish?
For about a microsecond, then we’ll start spending our way into debt again, only faster. How long until we have to sell off the next 10% of the United States?
@john schilling
A millisecond is about right, given that the net present value of US government liabilities (not counting outstanding bonds) runs to -50 trillion, and the payoff currently being discussed resolves precisely none of that. Also, those numbers are all around 2010, and the outstanding federal debt has about doubled since then, while assets definitely have not.
That covers financial assets. The US government controls nearly a trillion dollars of gold, an estimated $150 trillion dollars in oil and gas rights, 23% of the real estate of the United States, and the rights to tax the US economy from now until forever.
I don’t know… it seems like it covers SOME non-financial assets. Like, it links here which is an overview of the property owned by the government, but there’s no way that’s a comprehensive list.
This is obviously the most valuable asset that the US government has, but to John Schilling’s point, you have to actually raise taxes on people to pay this. It’s one thing to say “The US government is fiscally sound,” it’s totally a different thing to say “The US government is fiscally sound because I plan to double your taxes“
@DocKaon
Where are you getting that value for the gold stock? According to the treasury, they had 261,498,926.241 troy oz on hand as of 1/31, which works out to about $346bb; that’s not nothing, obviously, but it might as well be compared to what would be required to make a dent in the debt.
ETA: Also, I know way less about oil & gas holdings, but that also sounds really high. How was $150 trillion calculated? That sounds more like the value of the resources in the ground at the current market value which is radically under what the US Government could sell them at, because a buyer has to pay a significant fraction of the market value to actually get it out of the ground and to world markets.
1. Overestimate on the gold.
2. 23% of the total acreage but not 23% of the total value, most of it is pretty low value which is why the US government owns it.
3. $150 trillion (or whatever the estimate is) is typically the estimated value of the oil/gas after it is extracted, much of it can’t be profitably extracted with todays prices and methods, what could be mostly needs massive infrastructure investments. Actual value is way, way, way less than quoted numbers.
This is ALREADY taken into account. The US government has tax revenue coming it, but its obligations are > than the tax revenue which is how come there is a deficit and a national debt.
The US has estimated technically recoverable reserves equivalent to 234 billion barrels of oil and 2,462 trillion cubic feet of natural gas; at current market prices that would come to 13.7 trillion dollars. Except…
1. The United States Government doesn’t own all of that; some of it belongs to US private citizens and corporations, and
2. The United States Government doesn’t even know where most of that is, and you can’t get full price for an asset about which “…I’m pretty sure I have that lying around somewhere, OBTW obey all the no trespassing signs when you go looking for it”, and
3. You also don’t get full market price for stuff that’s buried a thousand feet underground in some desolate wilderness and you expect the buyer to recover it, and
4. About eighty percent of that is “technically recoverable” rather than “proven”, which usually means we’ve already determined it would cost more to recover than it would be worth at the market, and
5. Anyone proposing to sell that much oil all at once would expect to crash the market in the process, and will deprecate their purchase price accordingly, or
6. Anyone proposing to hold onto that oil and trickle it out over time so as not to crash the market, will deprecate their up-front purchase price per the net present value of expected future returns.
So, 13.7 trillion dollars, minus a bunch of stuff that will amount to about thirteen trillion dollars give or take. So, yeah, I’d like a source for that 150 trillion figure.
The US Government debt is owed in US dollars which the US government has the ability to create an infinite amount of at will.
But don’t the dollars ultimately have to be backed up by something to give them more value than merely pieces of coloured paper? I know we’re long past the days when a pound note was a promissory note for “exchange this at a bank for a literal pound of gold”, but the currency gets its value from somewhere. I mean, the government could pass a bill in the morning saying “from today on, every dollar bill is now called a New Dollar, and a New Dollar is worth one million in old dollars, so if you want to buy that Hollywood mansion no problem, just rock up with your five New Dollar bill!” but I don’t think that would work out well in practice:
If the mint churns out bushels of dollars, then what’s the difference there between the dollar and monopoly money?
Not if there’s a small enough number of them. See, e.g. bitcoin
the same place everything gets its value from, other people’s demand for it. And the simplest way to wreck that demand is to flood the market.
None whatsoever.
There never was such a time.
The term pound goes back to the Carolingian monetary reform in the eighth century, when it represented a pound of silver pennies. That was roughly contemporary with the first use of paper money—in China. I’m not sure how much silver the pound note was worth when first issued, about eight hundred years later, but I doubt it was close to a pound.
It looks like the pound note was first issued in 1797 and was what would later be termed a “greenback” note (i.e. legal tender at face value but not currently redeemable for specie) until 1821, when it became redeemable for a gold sovereign. About 4.6 sovereigns would have a total gold content of 1 troy ounce.
Taxes constitute one big difference from monopoly money; as long as the government insists that people must give it some dollars, there will be demand for dollars to pay the government. There’s no institution that demands you give them monopoly money and will lock you up if you don’t.
I’m in the “refusing to pay the government debt triggers apocalypse” camp.
1) We very nearly had a financial markets collapse when it turned out the value of the riskier mortgage backed securities was much less than previously estimated.
2) US government debt is a much more important part of the financial system. It’s considered one of the safest posssible investments (encouraged, of course, by US government regulations), so everyone looking for a safe investment for themselves or the people they are holding money for uses US debt as a major component of their investments, and the safer you want your investments to be, the more US debt you hold.
3) So if the US government suddenly said “we elect not to make any more payments on our debt and you can’t make us,” I would imagine something like every bank would collapse simultaneously, most retirement accounts would be crushed, there would be a massive run on the financial institutions, etc.
As I understand it, the “debt doesn’t matter” crowd has a different argument, which is usually some combination of:
1) If the economy grows fast enough, we can easily pay the debt by taxing the new, larger asset and income base. (Response: That’s a big if.)
2) Since short term US bond rates are very low, we can theoretically borrow money for any public investment that increases growth by more than that very low rate and come out ahead. (Response: you don’t have any idea which investments will do that, and finding positive value investments is harder than you think, especially with other people’s money.)
3) Since we seem to have the ability to increase the money supply by the amounts we’ve tried so far without increasing inflation, there’s no reason to think there are any limits on our ability to print new money in order to pay off the debt within the range that we might want to do so. (Response: Come on!)
As others have noted, the (US) national debt is a real thing owed to real people and institutions, or at least as real as anything involving the concept of “money” has been in the past half-century or so.
We can keep rolling over the loans forever and never pay down the principal – in principle. But if we don’t at least keep making the interest payments, two classes of bad things will happen.
First, people and institutions who were counting on that money will start going broke. Depending on exactly who we stiff, that could mean your grandparents moving in with you because they can no longer afford their retirement home, or it could mean your employer going out of business and you being laid off, or it could “just” mean foreign governments getting mad at us they way they got mad at Argentina in 2001. This did not go well for the people of Argentina.
Second, if the US government stops making interest payments on any significant part of its debt, approximately nobody will ever loan money to the US government again unless they are forced to do so and in that case they’ll view it as a tax. If this were to happen today, the US government would be faced with some combination of the following choices:
1. Immediately cut all government spending by ~20% in real terms. Note that you can’t take that out of “fraud, waste, and abuse” and you particularly can’t take it all out of administrative overhead because you’ll need the administrators working overtime to manage the transition, so e.g. your grandparents’ social security checks will be cut by more than 20% and if you work for the government or one of its contractors you have a >20% chance of losing your job (unless you’re an administrator)
2. Immediately raise taxes across the board by ~25% in real terms, and then more than that when we see what the 25% tax hike does to productivity and revenue. No, you can’t do this by just taxing “the rich”; the rich don’t have that kind of money or at least not in any form you can tap into for the long term without killing the golden-egg-laying goose.
3. Print money, or engage in any of the schemes that are accounting tricks equivalent to printing money. This is inherently inflationary, and if you insist that the recipients of government spending shall always receive the same real value (e.g. social-security payments are indexed to inflation so your grandparents can always afford their retirement home), it is exponentially inflationary. That ends in hyperinflation and economic ruin.
4. Have the government start paying its bills in IOUs that will never be paid or checks that will ultimately bounce, and see how long that lasts until e.g. police officers decide to supplement their income the way underpaid police officers traditionally do in low-trust societies. This is the default if the government insists on completely ignoring the issue.
Probably the least-bad option is a bit of short-term #3 to buy time for, and to some extent camouflage, a transition to #1 and #2. That would look an awful lot like Greece 2008. If we can’t manage that or the brute-austerity equivalent, the alternatives look an awful lot like Venezuela 2019.
The interest on the national debt is increasing, and increasing faster than our ability to pay it, so we will have to deal with it sooner or later. Later will hurt more than sooner. And we won’t do it sooner. Enjoy.
Greece didn’t have #3 as an option since it is on the Euro.
I think basically we can get away with monetizing debt for an unknown amount of debt before the value of the dollar starts to drop and inflation starts to increase. Eventually it will happen.
greece did 3 for a while, basically lying about how much debt they were taking on through accounting tricks. Eventually they got caught and it made the resulting adjustment much more painful.
Eventually, we will notice that it happened five years ago and only just now transitioned to the “happening irreversibly and really fast” mode.
Japan has been monetizing its debt for decades now without a whiff of inflation.
If you look at historical events of hyperinflation they typically have two causes. 1. The destruction of productivity. 2. The printing of money to cover for that loss. Zimbabwe had the redistribution of productive land, Venezuela had the destruction of the oil industry, Germany had WW1+Versailles Treaty.
Printing alone seems to induce stagnation, not necessarily collapse into hyper inflation.
Japan has a monstrously high savings rate and doesn’t have a 1/3 of its debt held abroad. People holding yen have nowhere to go, lots of people holding dollars do.
Japan has always faithfully made the interest payments on its existing debt; I have been discussing the situation when a government stops doing so.
As cassander notes and I will now expand: Because Japan hasn’t (yet) defaulted on any significant part of its debt, it has the option of paying some of that interest by A: “printing money”, B: very briefly giving that money to Japanese citizens, C: saying “It is now your Very Strong Social Obligation not to be a wastrel and spend this extra money right now, but to save it for a rainy day in the indefinite future”, and D: adding “…and as your trusted government that always pays its debts, we’ll hold on to it until then, so why don’t you just hand that money right back to (tame banks that will hand it right back to) us”. This is, for obvious reasons, not inflationary while it lasts.
Any government that hasn’t yet defaulted on its debts can do this to some extent. That’s basically how e.g. “war bonds” work. No government can do this to an infinite extent, even in wartime. For cultural reasons that aren’t going to change any time soon, Japan can do more of it than can the United States.
Possibly we should watch Japan, and when they find where their cliff is, set our threshold at about half their level. Sucks to be us if we’re already at 60% of their level when that happens. Possibly we could declare a quick war or two to raise our standard of Very Strong Social Obligation, Patriotic Variant, but it’s disturbing to keep finding how convenient wars are as a way of
resolvingpostponing debt crises.Japan has been paying its interest because the BoJ has been buying large chunks of the bonds to keep interest rates down to the point where they can pay it. They are effectively monetizing the debt, which is supposedly inflationary but without the actual inflation, which goes directly against your point #3 above.
With what money, and why?
With newly minted money (in the electronic sense).
There’s a fallacy of composition lurking in this topic. The obligation to pay back the borrowed money at maturity, and pay interest in the meantime, inheres in the individual bonds, notes, and bills: John Schilling, elsewhere in the subthread, outlines the very real and dire consequences of failing to honor it. But it does not at all follow that the national debt as a whole has to be paid off at once.
In the particular case of the US, the government couldn’t pay off the national debt all at once even if it wanted to: Treasury debt isn’t callable.ETA: This distinction is probably what some of the people who say the national debt isn’t real are referring to. Some others, of course, are just cranks.
The Federal government could purchase all treasuries on the market which would effectively pay off the national debt.
with what money?
I’m responding to a specific point about the retirement of debt being technically feasible or not.
@cassander
Best way to think of money and the national debt is that money is demand deposits and the national debt is time deposits. Both are accounting entries with certain legal definitions. Central banks can legally create demand deposits in exchange for time deposits, and does so. This is what quantitative easy was all about.
Good point, though the premium they’d have to offer might run to some serious money, given how many people’s financial plans depend on holding government debt. I can imagine that, for example, the Vanguard Intermediate-Term Treasury fund might require some coaxing.
One point worth noting is that interest rates are very low at the moment. If they go back up to what they have been in the past, payment of interest on the debt becomes much more expensive. If the US starts seriously inflating, interest rates will rise accordingly, since lenders know they will be paid back in much less valuable money.
This is a common statement, but its a misconception to a degree. Investment options are better seen through an opportunity cost lens, investors can only demand higher interest rates if the have another option to drop their money into that will increase in performance with inflation.
@Joe — Here’s something I wrote to explain the national debt as simply as possible. It’s rather long, but that’s because I tried to make it easy to understand.
The Socrates Show, with guest Pete Peterson
Spoilers ahead for Nier: Automata.
I finished Nier: Automata a couple of weeks ago, after having bought and first played it shortly after release, and making several attempts at playing it through that didn’t stick, mostly because of obnoxious sidequests.
But when I finally did finish it, I found myself a bit let down, and on some levels a bit confused. The story seems to be an unfocused mess — full of good ideas and interesting characters, but failing to develop them in a satisfactory fashion and lacking in connective tissue to bring everything together. In the end, I could follow the story’s events and how everything ended up the way it did, and I could clearly see the themes and how each major element of the story reflected them…and yet I couldn’t seem to tell what the point of the story actually was.
Now, a couple of caveats before I get into the meat of things.
One: Because this is a Japanese story, it’s very difficult for me to be sure that I’m analyzing it correctly. I have some awareness of how Japanese story structure differs from its Western counterparts (kishotenketsu, a focus on juxtaposition over conflict), and even according to those N:A’s story seems lacking — but literary standards are bound to differ across cultures in hard-to-detect ways that will probably throw my criticisms off. That said, I’m not going to abstain from offering thoughts because of this — I don’t think a situation like this should serve to shield a work from critique.
Two: I went into much of Nier: Automata with awareness of spoilers, which may have confounded my experience somewhat. I was aware of humanity’s extinction before I started playing (though anyone who played the first game would be, too), and some distance into Route A I learned the basics of the “2E” revelation. I did not, however, know the details of YorHA’s purpose or the source of the logic virus before they were revealed in-game.
Three: I’m not going to go into as much detail as I could. My main objective here is to spark up a discussion so I can see what SSCitizens who have played this game think of it, and an overly-large text wall probably won’t be conducive to that goal. I’ll elaborate further in replies if people want me to.
But back to the main topic. On reflection, I think there are two main problems with the game’s story — specifically, its ending. One has to do with the characters, and one’s related to the plot and backstory.
First the characters. For me, at least, the delivery of the revelation regarding 2B’s true identity and her repeated murders of 9S didn’t have much impact. How could it? By the time we learn the truth, YoRHa is destroyed, 2B is dead, and 9S has completely lost his mind. And besides that, 9S apparently already knew, and didn’t care! Why would you reveal something so significant to the protagonists at a point where it has no consequences?
More broadly, I think that the main characters in general were underdeveloped. Not that they’re undeveloped — just that fleshing them, and their relationships, out more fully would have benefited the story greatly. The relationship between 2B and 9S, in particular — we see them slowly warming up to each other a bit over the course of routes A/B, but their relationship never really feels like it’s progressed past the preliminary stage. They never actually work out their issues together — it’s all cut short by 2B’s death, and then the story just never addresses it again except by implication.
Second is the plot and backstory. I’m a lot less sure about this one — there’s a much better chance here that I’m missing some of the intent — but I’ll do my best to explain. I think that the aliens and machine lifeforms, as written, are a giant distraction in the middle of the story that basically serve no purpose, have no meaningful payoff, and probably shouldn’t be there.
The main arc of the story — the one containing all the characters we care about — is all about YoRHa and despair and purpose and love. It goes like this: YoRHa was created to propagate the myth of mankind’s survival, because without a god the androids had no purpose. But a particular scanner unit was by nature bright and curious and always found the truth, so an executioner was assigned to him. And then they fell in love.
The point of this arc, the punchline, is that YoRHa is a lie told to stave off the existential despair that comes with being the product of a dead race. Its purpose is to provide purpose, to overcome nihilism, and in the end it fails — but 2B and 9S and A2 succeed, because their purpose came from caring about each other. That’s the point. That’s the story.
Only the actual purpose of YoRHa, in-universe, is to help fight off the aggressive mechanical invaders created by a monolithic hostile alien race with no personality. Sure, they’re actually meant to do it by spreading rumors about a false god so that the androids have something to fight for, not by engaging in direct combat, but that barely matters. It’s still the case that the impetus for this entire series of events was this random out-of-nowhere alien invasion, not an absence of purpose.
I think the whole thing would have worked better if the machines had been a product of the androids in some sense — either created intentionally as an enemy to give the androids purpose, or as a result of androids falling into despair and regressing into simpler forms. Those ideas aren’t exactly original, granted, but they’re a lot more thematically coherent. The threat, the original villain of this story, ought to be despair. Not ill-defined aliens.
I do understand the parallels, of course — the machines are in the same boat as the androids, because they were created by a long-dead people and no longer have any reason to exist. I just don’t think it’s worth splitting the story’s attention and confusing the causality just so we can have two examples instead of one.
And the story spends a lot of time on the machines. It’s obvious as early as Adam’s introduction — if not the desert — that the machines are imitating humans, but the game beats it into our heads over and over again all throughout routes A and B. And it never goes anywhere! At the end we get a half-assed explanation about how the network came across information from the Gestalt Project or something and became obsessed with humans, and then the Terminals decide to fuck off to space on account of seeing how nice the androids are, and that’s it. That’s the extent of the payoff. I think the point was meant to be that the soul of humanity is so infectious that it can influence even machine weapons built by aliens, but that’s…just not nearly interesting enough to be worth it.
The game has all these fascinating elements, and an inimitable sense of style, but it just never manages to bring everything together. And I think it’s a terrible shame.
So I haven’t played it, but I’ve read a number of things about it. Everyone mentions that you’re supposed to play through multiple times to get the whole story – I think something like a minimum of 5? It can change in some way on different playthroughs. From your post, it’s not apparent that you have.
That being said, I have no idea if it’s really worth doing so, although various people seem to think it was.
Oh, no, I got all the endings. A note about that — the fact that there are five endings is a little misleading. You play the game through once and get ending A. Then you play through the same events (mostly) a second time, with a different character, and get ending B. Then when you keep playing from there, the story continues forward with new events after the previous endings, leading to a choice between endings C and D. Once you’ve gotten one of those, you can get the other really quickly — there’s a chapter select feature. When you’ve gotten both C and D, you can then proceed to ending E.
So there are five endings, but it’s not five full playthroughs — more like two and a half.
Got it. Then I have nothing further to add, obviously, not having played it :).
I only skimmed your comment, because Nier:Automata is the first game on my to play list once I can afford a PS4, but I wanted to ask if you have played many other Japanese video games, especially by squareenix, or watched much anime? If you are an avid fan, you can ignore the rest of this comment. Personally, I find that there is a large learning curve with adjusting to the narrative structure that you are describing. It honestly took years of consuming Japanese media to really come close to understanding some of the weirder stories, and all of my friends told me that Nier: Automata was next level convoluted. However, there is a large audience that really enjoys convoluted Japanese stories.
If you are new to the genre, I recommend starting with less confusing Japanese games, and working your way up. Anything by Nintendo has mass appeal, and I would say the most recent FF12 remake is a good entry point for square enix’s style. You could also play the kingdom hearts series if you like the action style gameplay, but please start with the remake of the first game, because if you start with the latest entry you will be more confused than with Nier. You can also just watch anime or read Murakami, but if you are a gamer you might as well stick to games.
Oh, yeah, I have quite a bit of experience with anime and manga. Not a whole lot with Japanese games specifically; I’ve only played a few.
Honestly what surprises me is how comprehensible the stories of anime and manga tend to be. Like, much is made of how different the storytelling methods of Eastern writers are, but when you watch a good anime it doesn’t feel like the structure is that different from a good Western story. (Now, the smaller-scale stuff is another matter — the flow of the dialogue in anime has a very specific feel to it that’s quite different from what you find over here, especially if you’re watching subs.)
Of course it’s possible there’s a selection effect happening — that the Japanese media considered high-quality by Westerners is the stuff that fits Western tastes the best, and the more Japanese stories are either disregarded as poor-quality or viewed as “weird Japanese shit”: Evangelion, Paprika, etc.
On the other hand, AFAIK the anime that are most popular in Japan are also really popular here — IIRC the “big three” shonen series over there are One Piece, Bleach, and Naruto, and they’re all well-liked here too. And then you’ve got Shingeki no Kyojin, which was a huge hit in both areas. It’s also a really good example of what I was talking about — in some ways it’s an incredibly Japanese story, but the structure doesn’t really feel unfamiliar to me.
Maybe I’ll write a post on SnK sometime. God, I love that manga. It’s so good. I just hope Isayama sticks the landing…
I have never hated a game more that Near A Tomato. I’m going to try and respond to your overall topic, but I’ll apologize in advance if this meanders into incoherent complaining. I have trouble supressing my negative emotions around this game.
I agree with your critique of the plot; the entire thing is one good idea – 9S and 2Bs relationship – with a what feels like an infinite number of important-feeling digressions that come up and then fade away in rapid succession. Aliens exist, oh wait, they’re all dead. The machines are forming new super-men, oh no, they’re dead now. The number of times that game made it seem like the world was ending just to then confront me with something I solved in 10 minutes was downright insulting. It’s impossible to care about the human struggles of these characters when I keep getting diverted to smack down some evil clown or weird baby king. This is in between a stupidly high number of times when the game arbitrarily decides to slow you down to a crawl and slowly drag yourself to the other-side of it’s sprawling map.
Then we get to the overarching plot hook: 2B and 9S’s relationship. It start’s making sense and getting developed… just in time for 2B to die. Ok, so maybe we get to see the effect of this on 9S? Nope! He goes insane and his personality pretty much gets overwritten. So, both characters we maybe cared about are effectively thrown out the window. Maybe we’re supposed to care about A2…? If so, I hope you watched the only-available in japan Idol Yorha Stage Show that explains A2’s backstory, because otherwhise she makes pretty much no sense in the plot.
My theory on the story is that they started at realizing they wanted to break their story into a bunch of very-discreet chunks for the sake of the “multiple endings” concession, and then just held to that idea past the point of it making any sense. When the game “ends” but then a message pops up saying “wink wink, it might not secretly be over, try starting up your save file again” it’s not a surprise. I’ve only played for around 5 hours at this point. Of course the game isn’t over. Then we start up and play the entire game again, same levels, same bosses and same cutscenes. It ends up feeling less transgressive of the video game medium and more padded.
Even the combat is terrible. You can either spam quick attack or spam heavy attack. There are a few extras on top, but it’s always less effective than just spamming your attacks.
Overall this is a game that feels like it desperately wanted to mean something, but had no clue how to do so. It filled it’s plot with people named after important philsophers, had everyone act moody and bitter, but couldn’t find anything actually interesting to talk about. It’s the gaming equivelent of the philosophy minor your run into at the cafe near the coffee shop; important-sounding ideas muffled by a pretentious dousche who fell asleep halfway through the class.
God I hate that game.
Funny story, i also kind of hate Nier: Automata, except i never even got as far as actually playing it. The reason being that i find the enemy’s character designs incredibly displeasing aesthetically. They’re not just ugly but offensively ugly, i hate them, i can’t stand to look at them. So even though everyone i know who has played the game loves it, hell even if the story were the most perfect and profound story ever written, i won’t ever play it. There’s simply no way i’m going to spend so many hours of my time looking at the world’s ugliest robots, and the fact that i’m spending that time brutally slaughtering them is no relief, i still have to look at them to kill them!
oh god, I didn’t even get to the visuals. Everything you said is spot on, with a side-helping of every single android in the game is overdesigned to the point of fetishization.
The visuals are…odd. You’ve got the androids, with the elaborate elegant gothic outfits (which, personally, I quite like — those character designs were actually what caught my eye about the game originally). Then you’ve got the machines, who look unbelievably simple in a way that clashes horribly with the androids. I assume that was intentional, because I’m not sure how it could have happened otherwise.
Then there are the environments, which are just generally low-fidelity. On the one hand I’m sort of inclined to applaud anything that isn’t the total pursuit of photorealism, but the mismatch in detail between character models and environments looks pretty bad — probably worse than consistent low quality.
And on top of that there’s a bunch of other weird graphical stuff. The bloom and lighting effects don’t quite work properly, and there are ugly filters over everything that makes it look kind of off — like there’s some kind of haze in the air constantly.
I’ve seen people defend the filters as an artistic choice — mumble mumble androids are disconnected from reality, mumble mumble — but…I don’t buy it. The black and white sections? Sure. That’s obviously going for something specific. But desaturating the whole game like that, when it’s full of all these lush environments? No, I’m sorry, that’s just bad art direction.
Yeah, I’ve seen a few people with that reaction. I’m not a huge fan of the machines either, though fortunately I’m not outright disgusted by them.
They’re designed to look like wind-up toys, presumably to fit in with the themes — that they’re devices still enacting the agenda of their creators, who are dead now but set them in motion long ago. I don’t think that tidbit is worth having the game’s main enemies be so ugly, though.
Well, I certainly don’t hate the game — and to the extent I do, it’s because of the obnoxious mechanics (repetitive farming, annoying camera-grabbing, that fucking race) — but on the object level, yeah, I pretty much agree.
One of the reasons I’m a little reluctant to be too harsh is that from what I’ve seen of Yoko Taro I really like the man — he’s sort of the kind of person I aspire to be, really. (A batshit insane boundary-pushing weirdo writer with a cult following, that is.) And I love what the game was trying to do, I love the ideas behind it…and Taro seems to be a competent thinker and writer, so how did it end up like this? That’s what confuses me so much.
I mean, the game’s story would benefit from a major restructuring…but at the very least, you could fix the most serious problems just by changing the final scene in the Tower. All you’d really have to do is bring back 2B, somehow (either in person or in cyberspace) so that she and 9S can have a confrontation/reconciliation. Because, I mean…that’s what the story’s about, right? That would give things an actual resolution, and it would make a huge amount of the other stuff forgivable.
Oh, and if you have more thoughts I’d love to hear them.
I think the strongest point of the game is the attention to detail: all the backstories of the minor characters and small pieces of lore that you find in the side quests, all fitting together in a tale of decadence and existential nihilism, against the backdrop of an eternal, deliberately unwinnable war between two races of robots without purpose, both trying to imitate the long-extinct human race.
Perhaps you could think of it as a metaphor for the modern Japanese salarymen who go on living “robotic” lives whose purpose they struggle to understand while clinging on the myths of a glorious past (symbolized by the Samurai swords that the androids wield).
It’s a game designed to be played over and over, the reveal changes the perspective on their interactions over the first routes (e.g. 2B refuses to call 9S by his nickname Nines, except when she slips in the middle of a battle and before she dies, initially you would think she’s just an an “Aloof White-Haired Girl”, after the reveal you realize she’s actually used to calling him Nines but represses it because she’s traumatized from becoming attached to him and then having to kill him over and over again).
Indeed the aliens felt like a quite unparsimonious narrative device, I sort of expected a twist about them but no, they were just a random deus ex that set off the plot. Still, the androids have no real purpose in trying to hold Earth against the aliens or the machine lifeforms.
The interesting point is that at the beginning you view the story from the androids’ POV: they see themselves as superior to the machine lifeforms whom they consider mindless monsters while they see themselves as people almost equal to humans (which they try to copy in shape and details such as clothing). Then you learn that the machine lifeforms aren’t mindless, and the androids really only barely understand humans, in the end it’s revealed that the YoRHa, supposedly elite androids, actually have machine cores, and the machines are intentionally holding back because they want to make the war last forever. The androids and the machines are perfect foils of each other: apparently different but fundamentally the same.
I will begin a one-year data science masters at a high quality university later this year. I expect the program to be challenging; I have an applied stats background from undergrad, experience with R, and am picking up Python, but not a great deal of data science exposure otherwise.
I’m wondering if anyone has advice – best would be advice that relates specifically to post-grad data science or similar.
I’m also wondering if anyone has recommendations for good resources on introductions to machine learning, AI, etc., for someone with a good applied and reasonable theoretical background in stats.
I keep wanting to learn more on machine learning, but never actually force myself to do it. And I’m not a data scientist, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But…
There’s a pretty comprehensive, and from what I understand pretty good, set of videos here, which are meant as a course to go along with one of the standard texts in the field (also freely available at that link).
As far as I know the main tools people use are R and Python, so you’re well on the right track, as well as possibly some form of database software such as SQL. I haven’t used SQL in years, but when I did the w3schools pages were very helpful.
Have a look at this MIT grad course on machine learning:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-867-machine-learning-fall-2006/index.htm
I’m in an adjacent field. My advice would be double down on your strength. Although stats should be the main pillar of data science in general the people labeling themselves data scientists are not very strong in it. Combine that with mediocre programming skills and it doesn’t make for a compelling profile. If you wanted to instead be an outlier on the programming strength side, you probably aren’t in the right kind of course. Hence my advice to double down on the stats expertise. That said, you should at least get to competent with python, pandas, etc.
In terms of ML resources, Ng’s course is good for theory and fast.ai is good for getting your hands dirty and understanding what’s possible.
I disagree.
1. You quickly hit the point of diminishing returns to stats skills in data science. If you have a stats degree, you’re long past it. Postgraduate level stats are virtually never seen in the industry. The exception being those very few people inventing novel ML at Deep Mind or Open AI etc. If you’re one of them, then you can safely ignore my advice. On the other hand every additional skill point you spend software skills *will* help you on the job whether it’s going from 0 to 1 or 79 to 80. (though at some point you become so useful as an engineer that you may be tempted to do that full time instead of data science).
2. Being strong in stats is not that special in data science. While most applicants are very weak in stats, most applicants are very weak in everything. But there are plenty of very smart people with science PhDs quitting academia and going into data science. They aren’t all statisticians but most are relatively strong in all things quantitative. There are few if any smart software engineers rebranding as data scientists this way. Because if you’re a smart engineer you’re already plenty busy and successful and you don’t need it (the two best data scientists I know, by a wide margin are not even data scientists, they’re extremely competent engineers (one with a maths PhD) who do ML when needed but don’t consider it their day job).
If your advice is don’t become a data scientist become a software engineer instead, I won’t exactly disagree that it’s good advice. I’m just not sure it answers the question asked.
IME data scientists write code every day and explicitly use freshmen level statistics once a year. More advanced stats than this I haven’t seen anyone use on the job ever. That’s just my personal anecdata from a handful of companies in London in the last 6 years, YMMV. Do with that information what you will.
What is often useful on the job is not so much advanced statistical knowledge as a very solid, intuitive grasp of the basics. Here are 5 statistics puzzles I collected to illustrate what I’m talking about http://nadbordrozd.github.io/blog/2017/07/18/so-you-think-you-can-stats/
1. Make sure that you’re proficient with the boring, software engineering side of things. Many people coming to data science from the more theoretical fields neglect this and suffer unnecessarily. Getting to a level of an at least entry level software engineer is really not hard and it will make your life so much easier, open so many doors. I cannot stress this one enough.
2. Familiarize yourself with the principles of machine learning and a few basic algorithms. Duh. All that will surely be covered in your coursework but if it wasn’t there are plenty of resources on the web. Andrew Ng’s Coursera course is a great introduction. I highly recommend that you go for breadth rather than depth at first.
3. Points 1. and 2. are about acquiring a toolkit. But what do you actually do with it? IMO the easiest way to learn about how data science is used in the wild is by reading blogs. You will find thousands of articles ‘How [cool startup] uses [machine learning technique] to [business objective] ‘. Once you’ve seen a hundred of those, when you see a data science problem at work or in a job interview, you will know at least the basic approaches you can take.
Of course nothing beats learning by actually doing the thing, so I’m not even making it a distinct item. You learn software skills by writing software, you learn machine learning by applying the techniques (for example on Kaggle datasets) and once you learn about something cool on a blog it also pays to at least try to implement it.
You may also want to look into resources on data science job interview questions. This will let you find the level of ML/stats/software/business skills expected in your market and how you stack up. There are lots of those around including on my blog (google ‘nadbor drozd interviews’).
Ah, one thing I forgot to mention, which it doesn’t look like anyone else has brought up either. From what I’ve heard from people actually in the field, what a large proportion of so-called data science jobs actually consist of is being able to use Microsoft Office, especially Excel pivot tables. I realize that this is appalling and almost certainly exactly the kind of thing you want to avoid, but it’s really what a lot of employers are looking for. So keep in mind that you should have a decent handle on shitty products as well as the actually cool stuff.
Excel may have its quirks, but it is far from a shitty product. Did you mean “normie”?
Fair. To be honest I used to use it a lot, but I’m an appalling snob about it now. I still use it just to quickly navigate raw data, when I need to do so. But pivot tables make me fly into a rage.
To me, Excel pivot tables are for giving normies the power to do self-service reports for relatively uncomplicated questions. If your normies aren’t too dysfunctional this can be a great help to everyone.
Excel is shitty for a spreadsheet and spreadsheets are not even the right tool for the job of pivot tables.
what spreadsheet is better?
This is coming from the perspective of someone who works for a company that also has a data science team, and sees some of their output.
The most differentiating thing you can have is not good statistical knowledge (that’s common) or good programming skills (that’s table stakes). You need those, but everyone in your field and adjacent fields has them. What will make you high-value is the ability to understand what business questions people are trying to answer, and providing answers based on data science tools in a form that they find helpful to answering those questions.
> good statistical knowledge (that’s common) or good programming skills (that’s table stakes).
I guess it depends on what we mean when we say “good”, but IME this is a highly debatable point.
You may very well be right–I’m an actuary, not a data scientist or statistician or programmer. I can do all three to some extent, but I’m not close to professional-so my ability to see notice those as a cause of failure is weak.
But where I see data scientists failing, it’s almost always “interesting work, but what does it have to do with the question I asked” or “I wanted a recommendation and support, not 937 incomprehensible graphs”; I’ve never seen “great work, answers the question, but why did you use linear regression?”
Right, stats failures are illegible, so only a chump would invest in stats skills.
@Douglas Knight
You are understanding me to be saying something rather different from what I intend.
I’m taking for granted that ANY data scientist will be in the >80th percentile of people who regularly work with statistics, and in the >80th percentile of effective programming among people who do at least some programming for pay. Given that (critical) assumption, the distinguishing factor isn’t “is 90th percentile at stats”; that matters only rarely, and in general “ask an expert” is an acceptable answer. (In general, a company with data scientists will have a few PhD statisticians around somewhere.)
What is always a critical factor is “did your analysis on an appropriate data set,” which requires “knows the business well enough to understand what an appropriate data set is.” What is frequently a critical factor is “answered the question being asked”, which again requires some knowledge of the business. And what often makes the difference between “gets promoted” and “struggles to stay employed” is often “when explaining the work done, provides clear explanations and actionable answers, not page after page of data tables mixed with graphs that no one can make sense of.”
Right, the key is actionable answers. Correctness is irrelevant.
@Douglas Knight
One more time: that is NOT what I’m saying.
If you analyze the wrong data, your answer will be useless, and only right by complete accident.
If no one can figure out what your analysis tells them about anything they find important, it might as well be wrong–it’s useless either way.
And very rarely does refining the statistical analysis make a substantial difference once you already good at statistics. If you’re asking “what does a random person need to know to be a data scientist”, “statistics” would be near the top of my list.
That seems like a pretty unreasonable assumption. Why are your making it?
@brad
That’s a good question–it’s more a guess than an estimate, and my sample size is small.
Here’s some of what I was thinking:
Most data scientists seem to have a fairly substantial undergraduate background in statistics or adjacent fields. A lot of people who work with statistics regularly just do one sort of analysis, largely by rote, and have just one course with any statistical content. I’d expect a data scientist to have more background than that–to at least be familiar with linear and logistic regression, dummy variables, and autocorrelation concerns.
Similarly for programming: people who do some programming as part of their paid job include people who write automation macros in VBA a few hours a week while mostly doing other things with spreadsheets (like me). I think most data scientists have had at least some formal training in programming, and spent a year or so in either a job or a course of study where they did significant amounts of programming regularly.
But as I said, my sample for data scientists, and for people who work with stats or programming for pay, is fairly small.
I’ve never seen a degree or training program that had substantial requirements in all three of computer science, statistics, and business. Programs exist for any two of the three, and some of them throw in the odd programming or stats course for the third part. But all three, in any kind of depth? Not that I know.
Could be an opportunity.
My school recently added a data science major, which looks to be substantially CS and statistics (see pp. 213-7). Interestingly, it does require specialization in another field, e.g., communications, entrepreneurship, and political science, but business is not one of them. I guess entrepreneurship is the closest you can get: the required courses for that specialization are “Creativity, Innovation, and Development,” “Introduction to Entrepreneurship,” “Social Entrepreneurship,” “Accounting & Finance for Entrepreneurs,” and “Entrepreneurial Marketing & Sales.”
If I take the B.CS. (Data Science) degree from my alma mater, I get lots of computer science and quite a bit of stats. How much business can I squeeze in?
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/current/programs/require/2018-2019/bcs_data.html
Looks like I have 11 slots and business courses are competing with required breadth courses.
2 slots go to communication courses, leaving 9.
1 goes to pure science, not helpful. 8 left.
2 go to humanities, probably writing-heavy English, somewhat useful. 6 left.
2 go to social science, probably Economics, somewhat useful. 4 left.
That leaves me with 4 slots I could use for business courses, one of which also satisfies the required course in pure and applied sciences, assuming that’s how business courses are classified. Not a lot.
For mine, our core curriculum required a course in [sociology, political science, econ] so you could get an Econ 101 out of that. And there’s definitely room after this major and the core to take a few more econ classes. The real question to my mind is how intensive “Accounting & Finance for Entrepreneurs” and “Entrepreneurial Marketing & Sales” are.
Everybody says that about every technical field, but the fact is that if you have the business skills, you don’t need any technical skills at all.
Since you have the technical background, my advice is to find a handful of fun, insightful blogs and podcasts to keep the ‘spark’ alive. Some of these are dormant but I really like:
Matt Asher’s blog – he has a knack for talking about probability in ways that yield sudden insight. Posts all his R code too.
Not So Standard Deviations podcast – has a fair bit of bay-area lefty cringe but Roger Peng literally wrote the book on R and Hillary is a talented DS with lots of good experience.
And of course anything by Andrew Gellman is likely to be a goldmine.
What’s your favorite style of pizza, and what toppings and ingredients do you like with it?
I personally like neapolitan white with some sort of sausage, red onion and basil. For more standard pizza, the spiciest pepperoni and sauce I can find (I’m so bummed there’s no Roundtable out here, west coast is so lucky).
I like lots of kinds, but my preferred toppings are always sausage + mushroom.
Most vegetables bring excess water, which ruins the pizza. Adding a second meat makes it too salty.
There’s a style called New York Neapolitan, it’s closer to Neapolitan than a classic New York slice, but it isn’t quite what you’d get if you flew to Italy.
I like a margherita, but spicy salami can make a good alternative. In season I order anything and everything I see that has truffles on it.
Thin crust pizza. I once had whole weat crust and it was sublime, but I can’t find it anywhere again.
Toppings:
– blue cheese and dry ham/bacon
– goat cheese and honey
– kebab slices and alpine cheese
If you have any interest in making it, I have a very good whole wheat pizza crust recipe. It’s not thin crust; I’m going to guess you could make less of it/roll it out wider to get thin crust, but I’ve never done it so I don’t know. There are probably also recipes online, though I can’t vouch for them.
Making the pizza itself is remarkably easy, though – it shocked me the first time I did it. The hard part is the toppings – it takes forever if you want to make an Everything Pizza, especially with different people getting different toppings – but yours sound a lot more straightforward.
Chicago style deep dish pizza. Specifically sausage and onion, with the sausage being one big patty/layer across the entire pizza.
Thin crust pepperoni pizza. Papa John’s makes a good one.
I like both St Louis style thin crust pizza and Chicago style deep-dish pizza. These are members of the same species in much the same way that Dachshunds and Great Danes are members of the same species.
For the pure sensory pleasure of the eating, Chicago deep dish with pepperoni and sausage, moderately spicy sauce.
As modified by concern for my health and appearance, Neapolitan with pepperoni and onions, again moderately spicy sauce.
Thin crust, pesto and alfredo sauces, spinach and artichoke, either mozzarella OR a sprinkle of gorgonzola
Not sure if this is ok to say in a visible open thread, but Hawaiian pizza is my favorite by far.
For those unfamiliar, that means ham and pineapple. For some reason it’s usually more expensive than other two-topping pizzas.
Listen here you little shit.
+1
I support holy war against the pineapple infidel.
Burn the witch!
There is an actual discussion about communism going on and you’ve managed to be the most culture war thing in this thread.
Heathen.
This extra fee is charged to compensate for the pain and suffering of the people forced to prepare this abomination, and offset loss of other customers who walk out of the restaurant in protest upon seeing that travesty of a pizza brought out of the kitchen.
This comment is why we have two report buttons.
Never understood the angst about Hawaiian pizza. It’s a nice palate cleanser between slices of sausage + veggie pizza.
As someone who’s only bite ever of a Hawaiian pizza literally made me gag, it’s the weird sweetness that pinapple introduces into the mix. Pizza is supposed to be savory and salty; weird bites of sweet randomly spread throughout the pie just ruin it in my opinion.
I live in the original country of pizza, and every single Italian I’ve asked here finds the thought of putting pineapple on pizza to be absolutely disgusting, one of several ways the US has crapped all over a proud symbol of the cuisine of their country.
Allegedly, it’s a Canadian invention, but looking at the Wikipedia article, it might also be German.
Now hold on a second—wherever it’s “from”, is it invented by Italian immigrants or not? Because if it is, this is the pot calling the kettle black.
Looks like the Canadian who claims invention of Hawaiian pizza was Greek. The German was (wait for it) German.
One poll I saw shows this result for pineapple on pizza:
Approve: 47%
Disapprove: 32%
No opinion/not sure: 20%
I find this poll spurious because despite have an “other” option, it still doesn’t add up to 100%.
Another poll with binary yes/no choices got similar results, but it appears pretty much all of the “no opinions” side with the “No” side when not given the option to ride the fence:
Approve: 46%
Disapprove: 54%
What would the poll results say once you screened out drunk and stoned people?
@Nick: To me the crucial thing is not who originally invented a particular American tradition but the fact that the tradition has or hasn’t caught on with a much wider part of American culture. I’m sure there are groups of immigrant in the US inventing things all the time that we don’t hear about because they never reach the mainstream.
@Well…
My intuition loosely based on personal experience is that those people are disproportionately opposed to pineapple, and so the approval rate would increase if they were moved.
Hawaiian pizza is not stoner food…possible explanation is that it is the most exciting form of social rebellion that otherwise straight-laced people can muster.*
*Tongue planted firmly in cheek…please no follow up comments outraged at my characterization of non-drinkers/smokers.
@Well…: You’re cutting out a big chunk of the pizza-buying population that way.
I used to lament the fact that Middle-Eastern food (by which I mean felafel, hummus, kabob, shewarma, etc.) hadn’t caught on more in the US. Then I thought about what we’ve done to pizza (e.g. the Hawaiian, the Cheeseburger Pizza, or the Buffalo Chicken pizza) and Mexican food (Taco Bell) and realized I’m glad it’s still a niche ethnic cuisine you can only really find in larger cities with Arab and Israeli immigrant communities.
Can you imagine what the Taco Bell-ization of Middle-Eastern food would be like? “Introducing the new Alibaba Open Sesame Crunch-Wrap Supreme, featuring Stacy’s Parmesan Garlic and Ranch pita chips! Get yours today with a side of Fritos Honey Twists!”
You haven’t heard of donair? Although that’s technically Greek, I suppose. The thought of a sweet sauce with gyro/doener meat grosses me out – ham couples well with sweet stuff, but it’s cured.
There are several multistate fast casual chains on the Chipotle model that do “Mediterranean” food (Roti, Naf Naf Grill, doubtless others I’m not thinking of.) So I’d guess it’s just a matter of time till we see a similar blurring of lines. (Which I don’t necessarily consider to be a bad thing.)
There are multiple shawarma / gyro / falafel shops in every 4th tier and up city in the US, and it’s not a surprise to find them in the small towns when doing a cross country drive.
Every Albertsons and Kroger chain grocery store in the US stocks hummus in multiple flavors, and stocks pita right next to the loaf bread and the tortillas.
Come to chicago where we have Pita Inn. Not quite Taco Bell-ization, but definitely Americanizing Middle Eastern food.
Honestly, I’m going to put it on the table. When I saw this, pineapple was up there. The sweet-savoury combination is good.
Hawaiian is a bit gross but I love pineapple with pepperoni and jalapeno.
Yeah, pineapple shines when paired with sharper, spicier flavors instead of the fairly bland savoriness of ham and/or Canadian bacon.
+1
Hawaiian gets a bad rep because the pineapple juices don’t play well with a solid bed of mozzarella, and the flavor doesn’t mix well with a regular tomato sauce.
But if you thin out the cheese a bit, and use a more spice-driven flavor profile of the sauce, and it’s not so different from a BBQ sweet-savory taste, which is good stuff.
For that matter, Jamaican Jerk pizzas tend to also have pineapple, and those are good. Mexicans created al pastor by sticking a pineapple on a gyro/shawarma spit, and I’m surprised those haven’t been popularized on pizza yet.
So it’s not merely the pineapple alone. It’s the half-assed sad nature that most places make a Hawaiian, throwing some half-assed canned pineapple and some half-assed Canadian bacon on a half-assed cheese pizza. A good Hawaiian just takes more effort than the other standard basic pizzas.
My problem (besides the bad taste pairing) is that pineapple is too juicy for pizza. I just don’t enjoy blasts of hot pineapple juice as a part of my pizza experience.
I will mix pineapple with cottage cheese all day every day though (I do not actually do it all day every day). Nothing against that tasty fruit in general, there is just a time and a place and it ain’t pizza.
If it’s cut into small enough pieces, it dries out a little – still a little wet, but no more so than tomatoes.
Don’t really want tomatoes on my pizza either, I already have tomato sauce (assuming a standard pizza, of course there are pizzas that use other sauce bases). At least tomatoes are just a texture issue, pineapple still has a flavor problem regardless of the excessive juiciness.
How do you feel about straight grilled pineapple? They serve it at the Brazillian BBQ places and it is amazing.
Hot peppers on Hawaiian pizza give it a nice kick. Or just a little hot sauce.
Mmmm…now just take those pineapples off and we’re talking business! 😉
So I am the pickiest fucking pizza eater in the universe, like I will straight up not eat lukewarm pizza from most chains, and somehow I’m a Hawaiian pizza apologist. It’s ok.
Same.
I’ve never been terribly clear on why the meat on a Hawaiian pizza is often called “Canadian bacon”, but I eat it anyway.
Canadian bacon and ham are two different cuts (that look very similar).
Ham: Leg/thigh/rump
Canadian bacon: Loin
Bacon: Pork belly
I would be hard pressed to differentiate between Canadian bacon and ham, but I think Canadian bacon is maybe a little bit more tender.
Supposedly the term “Canadian bacon” was coined in the UK during one of the world wars (something about a shortage of pork and importing less common cuts of pork from other countries and a need to differentiate them from more typical ham/bacon cuts) but I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that.
This is a confusing issue. “Canadian bacon” is what people outside of Canada call back bacon, not to be confused with “side bacon”, better known as bacon. In Canada, it’s also known as “peameal bacon” – you can get it rolled in cornmeal (originally peameal) so that the edges have a little bit of a crust. What gets called “Canadian bacon” in the US is actually slightly different, though.
I’ve never seen actual back bacon on pizza.
Really? I have trouble keeping track, are you in the US? It would be harder for me to think of a pizza place that doesn’t offer it as a topping than to think of one that does.
I am Canadian. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen back bacon on pizza. Just to clarify – we are talking about this stuff, right?
The go-to fairly-mediocre Canadian pizza chain, Pizza Pizza (tip: if you must eat Pizza Pizza, order it well-done; they habitually undercook their pizza to get it out of the door faster, and it’s actually OK if you request it well-done). They offer strip bacon and bacon crumble; most pizza places offer at least bacon crumble.
Hawaiian pizza here has sliced ham on it, usually in little flat squares.
Yep, that’s what we’re talking about.
At least most of the chains around here (Dominos, Papa Johns, Pizza Hut, etc.) offer ham, Canadian bacon (back bacon), and regular bacon as distinct toppings. Smaller/more local spots may have less diversity in their pig-based toppings. I think regular ham is more common than Canadian bacon for Hawaiian pizzas but I can’t be sure of that.
American pizza places pretty routinely offer back/Canadian bacon on pizza, yes.
I can think of a reason why it isn’t as common in Canada. There really just isn’t that big a difference between ham and back-bacon, and it was basically a marketing gimmick to charge for a “premium” topping of Canadian bacon, which sounds much more “premium” than “ham”. That gimmick probably doesn’t work as well in a country where people actually understand what what it is because it has a name that is actually descriptive (back-bacon).
The more ham-like American-style “Canadian bacon”, though, right? The thought of the less-ham-like back bacon as served in Canada or the UK as a breakfast food, chopped up on pizza, seems odd – it’s basically a lightly cured centre-cut pork chop, cut thin.
Really, outside of eating it at home, I’ve never seen it served other than a breakfast/brunch food. Full-on ham can be served whenever.
@dndnrsn
I have to believe that is just a difference in preparation, it is the same cut of meat (yes, the same as a pork chop).
Does approval of Hawaiian Pizza count as a High Level Generator of Disagreement or a Fundamental Value Difference?
It isn’t. Talk about putting pineapple on pizza is culture war.
I wonder how many people who said “Chicago deep dish” actually meant “Detroit-style deep dish”, because the two are sometimes confused even though Detroit-style deep dish is far superior.
Chicago-style pizza is really a casserole with a bready crust, and if you have any damn sense you eat it with a fork. Detroit-style has that crispy, greasy crust with toppings going right to the edge. You can still pick it up like pizza, but you’ll need to unhinge your jaw like a python to fit your mouth around it.
The ideal Detroit-style pizza is saucy, cheesy, and is covered in sausage, peppers, onions, and black olives.
If you’re in a healthy mood, then the other pizza that’s really good is thin crust with a white or pesto sauce, covered in fresh mozzarella, basil, black olives, artichokes, onions, and whole cloves of roasted garlic.
I prefer to eat Chicago style pizza, because it mandates a fork which is what civilized people use to eat food. Not like those barbarians in other parts of the country.
I think 75% of the food I eat is finger food.
I eat Chicago pizza with hands, unless it’s a work function, because then people look at you funny.
So we’re back to the food lexiconic/topographical discussion, but I really don’t think Chicago style is pizza. It’s a casserole.
Detroit style is pizza.
The purpose of olives is to make olive oil.
They’re also for martinis.
Nah, martinis should have a twist.
I’ll concede that olives are the least important of those pizza toppings I mentioned, but I will not concede that they aren’t totally delicious as a food.
I don’t know if they sell it up where you live, David, but down in west LA where all the Persian Jews are (Pico/La Cienega area), they sell this brand of olives called Sadaf and they are just fantastic.
I was fully anti-olive for most of my life through my mid-twenties. I am now willing to eat them by the handful.
I can’t explain the change, but they are tasty.
You became salty?
@Aapje
Uncomfortably apt 😉
One of my most missed things having moved from the Midwest to Florida is that I can no longer find brick cheese to make Detroit style pizza. Nothing else works properly.
If it’s from somewhere good, a four-cheese pizza can be nice. Bacon, mushrooms, ground beef, onions is a good combination. Hawaiian is good.
White clam pie from Frank Pepe’s.
There is one specific bakery in the Santa Rosa de Lima neighborhood of Caracas called Pasteleria Danubio, according to Google Maps it’s still there. Many years ago i would sometimes eat there when i was visiting relatives in the area, and as far as my tastes are concerned they made the best pizza in the world. The pizza looked rather unremarkable, produced on large rectangular metal trays, cooked in a simple gas oven, then cut into rectangles and served on paper plates. They had two varieties: straightforward pepperoni and vegetarian (cheese pizza with green and red peppers), and i would customarily grab one of each, though the vegetarian was the clear superior of the two.
So what made the pizza so good? Well the crust mainly. It was very soft and doughy, not too thin, not too thick, and you could roll up the whole pizza slice and eat it like a burrito. Also there was no crust edge so i never had to specifically ask for slices from the middle of the pan. Overall great taste and amazing texture the likes of which i’ve never been able to find anywhere else.
Quibble: If the crust is such that you would want to request a slice that doesn’t have it, it can’t be the best pizza.
Why on earth would someone want pizza from the middle anyway? One reason pizza crust is nice is that it means I don’t get sauce all over my hands. With middle slices, I’ve got to be careful to pick it up and bunch it up so I am only handling the crust, which is not ideal. Also, bunching it up can cause toppings to be crowded off the slice, making even more of a mess.
The Danubio’s pizza was incredibly unmessy. The sauce had a thick creamy consistency so neither it nor the cheese would run off, and the toppings sank into the melted cheese, adhering them as well. Pretty sure you could have held a slice upside down without anything falling off. It was even less mess if you rolled up your slices like i did.
Also, i found pictures! Turns out i was wrong, it wasn’t pepperoni it was ham! That makes much more sense, i never liked pepperoni very much. The three varieties were ham and cheese, plain cheese, and vegetarian, with my always getting one ham and one vegetarian.
Ah, that makes sense.
First choice: tomato pie
Second choice: New York style with olives and either sausage or mushrooms, not from a large chain.
Crispy but not thin crust, not too greasy, with either
1 – buffalo chicken (and a thin layer of buffalo sauce) and a little mozzarella with just a tiny bit of bleu cheese
Or
2 – red sauce with mozzarella, parmesan, mushrooms, jalapeños, and banana peppers with oregano. Tomatoes and onions are nice but not needed if the sauce is good.
I have never in my life encountered anyone else with these preferences.
It really depends on what kind of pizza I’m going to eat, and I really can’t say that there is one style I prefer. I’d be sad to lose any of them. I’m assuming cheese and red sauce on all of these, unless otherwise noted.
New York style: Mushrooms, as long as they are sliced paper thin. I hate big chunks of half cooked mushroom on a pizza.
“Normal” American style pizza (e.g. Dominos): Sausage, mushrooms, and banana peppers.
Chicago style: Sausage, mushroom, spinach, and ricota.
Napolese style: Just the cheese and sauce.
Focaccia: Just sauce.
Detroit style: Peperoni.
Artichoke hearts + garlic + jalepeno
To address just a few of the biggest booboos in the communist apologia:
1. (Regarding the acquisition of property) “It’s war, theft and the state all the way down.” – except in capitalist societies. That’s kind of the point.
2. “human nature is not just passively egalitarian, but actively anti-hierarchical.” – this is simply counterfactual nonsense, noble savage mythology. But even the “savages” form hierarchies of social status, if not of material inequality (there’s little to unequally distribute in their societies – if there was, they’d stratify on that too, QED everywhere it happened).
3. “you’d think that societies not dominated by markets couldn’t exist, but didn’t some exist just thirty years ago?” – I lived in one. Believe me, they were all plenty dominated by markets. Just not visible, institutional or regulated ones. Since the logic of markets is foundational, abolishing markets merely yields black markets. This is not a bad thing – black markets (and stealing in the workplace) were the only reason life in the Eastern Bloc was ever at least slightly tolerable.
4. “The space of possible ways an economy can be designed is large, and models quite different to our own can work quite well” [Citation needed]
5. “It would always prefer societies to work more and consume more, rather than use additional productive power for leisure. Why? Because capital owners would prefer for their capital to be employed for as large a portion of the day as possible, so as to maximise profits ” – brute-forcing returns on capital by making people work longer and harder is probably the stupidest way of all, and nobody’s first choice. The businesses where that works are by definition bad investments. ‘Yield smarter, not harder’. Indeed, the busywork and performative overtime overwhelmment in modern corporations serve different purposes than profit, and are usually – as in the case of administrative busywork – actively detrimental to returns. Something else is at play. Social signalling perhaps, or “population control” by keeping everyone busy, even at a financial cost. But the reason there’s little leisure is absolutely not capital chasing returns.
6. “No one planned capitalism out of feudalism, but struggle and dreaming helped get us there.” – a relatively extensive misspelling of “steam engine, several religious wars and the printing press helped get us there”. This is not an idle pedantic point, because, as one would expect a communist to know, almost the sole driver of historical progress (however defined) is a change in the technological and material conditions. If you want to change the world, go invent. “Struggle and dreaming” are usually BS that takes credit for something that was actually enabled by someone tinkering somewhere.
7. LARPing about proletarians with no stake in the system is nonsense. For one, there is now a grand total of about forty people in the western hemisphere who meet the traditional definition of the working class. Second, the working class never wanted a revolution, but a good life. They now mostly have that – indeed, on balance of input provided and benefit obtained, the working classes are the beneficiaries of modern capitalism.
8. “Why do people assume communism means the state gets powerful” – perhaps because the state, or something functionally identical with the state, is the only way to implement and enforce communism, which constitutes collective robbery that attempts to legitimize itself by saying all previous ownership was robbery too anyway (which it wasn’t).
Where are the communists coming from? Apparently a collection of self-serving biases, romantic mythemes, and a habit of getting things exactly backwards.
Err this is the CW/controversy-free thread, I’d save this for the next Open Thread on Wednesday-ish.
I assume generic discussion of political/economical modes is not really CW? Unless, of course, we digress into discussion of current, or recent incarnations of said models.
On top of that, if we are discussing a past post, or a link on the very post of the Open Thread, maybe that is excused from the CW rules? particularly the later, why shouldn’t we discuss here the link the Open Thread itself links to. The former is probably more tenuous.
We recently had a load of argument about those models, and it wasn’t all in the best faith.
Bringing up communism now will just start a flame war.
Is arguing theology CW? (Okay, I think I just answered my own question there).
But I have to take exception to the glib ” You are not intrinsically smarter than a medieval scholar arguing that the great chain of being validates the divine right of kings” (though I do appreciate the “no chronological snobbery please”).
The divine right of kings is not mediaeval, it’s early Renaissance/early modern period (depending how you want to slice your eras). It’s an idea developed during and after the Wars of Religion, where the state and the prince had displaced the church and the pope as the ultimate civil (as well as spiritual) authority. It’s guys like Henry VIII making themself Supreme Governor of the Church, and establishing state churches tied very firmly to the political secular state, and establishing the king as head of the pyramid of authority under God while displacing the hierarchy.
If you want to see the mediaeval view of who the boss is in the struggle between the church and the state, the king is not a divine right of ultimate authority, it’s Henry at Canossa or (a different) Henry versus Thomas à Becket and the aftermath of that where Henry was forced by public (and international) opinion to do penance.
Andrew Willard Jones has a recent book about the medieval relationship between spiritual and temporal powers, Before Church and State. First Things review here.
I feel to write a quick line about the first two points only, because we should steer away from the controversy. This is only about good arguing.
You’re not addressing the point. The article isn’t saying (yet, or explicitly) that capitalist societies are “war, theft and the state”, but that’s what came before. So capitalism does have this “original sin” where at some point whomever had power (obtained with war, theft and state) decided that “Things had changed and now they are civil and cannot be toppled. Of course, there won’t be any redistribution, and how convenient that I have stuff and you don’t. Sucks to be you, I guess.”
Whether this is fair or not, whether it should have happened differently or not, is the subject for another thread. But what you said doesn’t address this original sin problem, which was the actual point, not the straw man.
I think that one core tenet of rationalism is to “beware of one-liner takedowns”. Are you really confident that you can take down an entire field of anthropology actually working hard to collect and look at data by saying it’s all “nonsense, noble savage mythology”? This is usually a red flag for something you don’t really want to look into.
>beware of one-liner takedowns
Not sure how much I agree with OP, but I do agree with him on this. Even if we take for granted the idea that humans in their natural habitat didn’t have hierarchical structures (which I don’t have evidence for one way or the other) what I do know is that the carrying capacity of those societies was lower than even a modest agricultural society, and every culture to ever develop into a civilization eventually had some kind of hierarchy. Making the connection between those and communism, and then saying it can be applied to modern civilization, is a recipe for disaster, because it fails to take into account the fact that those societies were operating with different constraints.
And yet, our society is less hierarchical than those preceeding it.
I am not saying that there is a meaningful pattern here necessarily, but the idea that levels of hierarchy are constant throughout history due to human nature is untenable.
And yet, our society is less hierarchical than those preceeding it.
Entirely because of cheaper comms tech and cheaper travel tech. Corporations, organizations, and governments are going flatter because really cheap comms lets a manager massively increase their span of directing, and because the computerization and automation that we have been able to implement mean that the jobs that have been replaced by IT no longer need direct managerial supervision.
I am just barely old enough to remember the almost instantaneous state transition that corps and orgs went through with the sudden widespread deployment of email. What working in a corp was like before email was a qualitatively different context. (I find it odd that there has been so little specific research or even folk memory of that transition.)
As I look back through history, the sudden deployment of the cheap-enough telephone, telegraph, postal mail, each themselves caused a qualitative change in span of control, each one allowing a hierarchy to trade depth for width, and trade intense supervision for lighter oversight. The companies that rolled with those changes outcompeted the ones that refused to do so, until the stranglers themselves changed or died.
The most oppressively hierarchical organizations seem to have been at their most deeply and controllingly hierarchical when the only comms was face-to-face and trusted-messenger.
See above re “change in the technological and material conditions. If you want to change the world, go invent”.
That’s food for thought, but by “history” I didn’t mean “the last two hundred years”.
For me, “history” means “from 50,000 years ago, up to and including this morning.”
As an example of “tech making hierarchy go flat”, the process of using 10,000 labor slaves to “dig a ditch in a day” would require at least 3 levels of direct overseer hierarchy, and plus the cost, management, and hierarchy of the (not cheap) guard labor. And more than a little bit of lash, blood, cruelty, and agony.
Now today, just one guy does it with D9 in an afternoon while sitting in a padded chair, working down a tasking checklist he picked up from the shift supervisor that morning, and then goes home to his wife and kids that night.
Less hierarchy and less cruelty, brought to you by corporate capitalism.
“Some societies are more hierarchical than others” =/= “Society can function without any hierarchy whatsoever”.
Hey, is discussing Marx, communism etc. considered CW (hot-button political and social topics) or not? Clarification needed.
While this might get flagged CW, I think this part needs emphasis.
Growing the state such that it falls away simply doesn’t make sense given that we are dealing with humans. I am not an anarcho-Capitalist, but that strategy makes sense: You diminish the state until people realize it wasn’t doing much anyways and disband it. Growing it such that it eventually disbands doesn’t make sense to me, so I always need that explained. Its never been done in a way that makes sense, as long as we still have humans.
A body equivalent to a state is also necessary to implement the level of coordination required to run an economy at this scale via democratic means.
I’ve seen some of the resident Marxists commenters describe the Communist society as a series of workers collectives (Soviets), where the Toothbrush Workers Soviet will meet and vote to determine how much to work and what to produce, and producing a new type of toothbrush requires voting among the Soviet as to how many hours and who will produce it. That’s fine as far as it goes, at least for toothbrushes.
Now, imagine you’re one of the worker leaders at a Ball-bearing Workers Soviet; you’re elected by the workers and have the workers best interests in mind. How do you determine how many ball-bearings and of what sizes do you produce for the next year, so you can set schedules and arrange for materials and do what else you need to produce them (or rather, draft it up for a vote)?
You need to know how many ball-bearings the economy needs. For this you need to know how many engines the Engine Workers Soviet (and all other Soviets that need ball bearings) will want to produce, and how much steel you can get from the Steel Workers Soviet. And then you realize that the Engine Workers Soviet’s numbers depend on how many ball-bearings they can get, and how much steel they can get. And the Engine Workers Soviet’s numbers also depend on how many trucks the Truck Manufacturer’s Soviet will need, which depends on how many trucks the Farmers Soviet will need to carry the crops. And on top of that, you need to figure out what happens if you don’t get all the steel you need from the Steel Workers Soviet, or the steel isn’t up to par, or the truck to take the ball-bearings to the Engine Worker’s Soviet doesn’t arrive. And everyone else needs to know what happens if you don’t produce enough ball-bearings… how much food will rot because the trucks didn’t pick it up because they were waiting on a bearing for a replacement engine.
So to sort this all out, all the Soviets send a representative to a central (or, let’s say, Supreme) Soviet where someone will determine that you need X number of trucks, which will require X*Y number of truck ball-bearings, and that each of the n Ball-Bearing Workers Soviets will be responsible for X*Y/n truck ball-bearings, and, somehow, the only vote that will get taken is the one at the Supreme Soviet, because it’s democratic (or Democratic Republican, at least), and who are some workers to go against the will of the People as manifest by the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet?
The Supreme Soviet serves another purpose. For all the talk of not needing property rights, people tend to get attached to personal items and don’t like it when someone steals their heirloom toothbrush rather than gets one from the collective toothbrush stockpile. So there’s a need to declare that despite Communism being against property rights, there’s almost always an exception for personal property, and what classifies as personal property is defined by laws. Further, despite everything being communal property, some people still insist on hoarding more than they need, which there are also laws to prevent. So you still need a central authority to define and enforce the law.
1. Specifically including capitalist societies. That’s kind of the point.
2. The “actively anti-hierarchical” part is dubious, but you’re clearly overcompensating in the opposite direction.
3. This is simply counterfactual nonsense. (I lived in one too, so don’t bother making things up.) That, or you’re trying to redefine all social activity as markets.
4. How is that statement not self-evident?
5. I’m with you on this one (as long as you don’t deny the obvious truth of the first sentence you quoted). Which brings us to the fact that present day capitalism seems to be crucially different from its XIX-century counterpart. Which brings us back to #4.
6. This one, too, at least until the point you try to pinpoint specific reasons yourself.
7. Proletarians currently have a stake in continued existence of helpful services the government provides. They have no stake in [billionaire’s name] property rights, and could very well get the former without the latter. To pretend the former are intrinsically linked to capitalism is facetious, and to pretend they’re a result of capitalism (rather than of a struggle against it) would be insane. And yes, as long as robots don’t take over, it’s the workers who actually produce things.
8. Let me ask you again – why do people assume that [abolition of state] means the state gets powerful? The only viable explanations I see are ignorance and dishonesty. And no, you don’t need the state, “or something functionally identical”, to stop enforcing property rights. You need it to enforce them in the first place.
Helpful government services being a result of capitalism rather than of a struggle against it is insane? I’ve heard very many not insane people argue that and their arguments have been very persuasive.
I also disagree they have no interest in the property rights of billionaires. Billionaires as a class invest most of their money increasing the productivity and wages of workers and donate a large share of their wealth to charitable purposes. The loss to workers from getting rid of billionaires would far, far exceed any benefit from reducing their consumption.
Definitely false. Property rights are enforced in many places without the assistance of government. Also, the default without property rights would be what, open warfare? I mean if you really want to get rid of property rights then there’s no trespassing laws, no law against theft. Do you have property rights in your own body? So presumably the government would have to get involved in that somehow, either by intervening on one side or the other, or just dealing with the collateral damage.
Keep in mind OP qualified that communism would need something “functionally identical” to the state in order to function. So the symmetry is all still there:
Capitalism requires either
1. A state that enforces individual property rights, or
2. An entity that has a monopoly over the legitimate use of force over a geographic region, but is not called a “state” (ancaps use the term “property owner” to describe this person, but this is very different from what ownership means in the normal legal sense)
Likewise, communism requires either
1. A state that enforces collective property rights, or
2. An entity that has a monopoly over the legitimate use of force over a given region (e.g. some sort of democratic council that is the final arbiter of disputes over resource use), but is not called a “state” for some reason
I don’t know how you are defining “capitalism.” If you are using it in the same sense anarcho-capitalists do, then you are mistaken. There are real world examples of decentralized systems for the private enforcement of rights in which no entity has a monopoly over the legitimate use of force over a geographical area.
You can find descriptions both of the general logic of such systems and of some examples in my Legal Systems Very Different from Ours book. If you don’t feel like buying it, there is still a late draft webbed. Most of the relevant material is in Chapters 10-14.
Alternatively, I describe kindergarten version of such a system in a draft of one of the additional chapters for the third edition of my first book.
If you have a different definition I may not be able to offer any real world examples, but I think the logic of the system still works.
I’m using the word “monopoly” in the sense of Max Weber here. As in, other entities may use legitimate force under the authority state (e.g. private security, self-defense), but such use of force still must be sanctioned by the higher authority (who is the only entity with the ability to sanction it).
Looking over your link:
You seem to be describing democratic use of force, used to resolve property disputes here (or at least, a “strongest group wins” situation). Either way, the result is that the winning group retains the ability to determine when and how the use of force is sanctioned (i.e. a “monopoly on legitimate use of force”).
I mean, the system you are describing is pretty far away from the central concept of “capitalism”. And I would argue, even far away from “anarcho-capitalism” as it is commonly advanced for by the general public.
If I were to propose a system along the lines of (and apologies if this isn’t the most charitable description of your proposed system, but I don’t think it is inaccurate):
“So, you own things. But if enough people decide they don’t like you, or if they just feel like it, they can gang up and use mob violence to take your stuff. So you don’t really “own” it in any legally binding sense.”
I don’t think “capitalism”, or even “anarcho-capitalism” would the top words used to describe such a system.
I don’t think you are very accurately reading what I described in the kindergarten version of A-C, which I assume is the one you read. There is nobody with a monopoly over the legitimate use of force in that system. Everyone can use force–as in any system, including ours. Whether it is seen as legitimate depends on whether he uses it in a way that others see as legitimate. In the simple system I described, that is determined in a decentralized manner–there is no single person or organization that gets to decide.
Do you find the idea of coordination without central control puzzling? It happens all the time in ordinary markets.
It might help if you follow my other link–or perhaps not.
This applies to every state too, though- the very concept of “legitimacy” implies a general collective of people who respect its authority. The fact that all “legitimacy” is derived in a decentralized manner (via society’s view of it) isn’t in dispute here. The question at hand is whether there will be an entity that gets the be the ultimate top-level entity in regards to using violence to enforce its will.
From your chapter “Feud Law”:
So in one of the societies you describe in your book, and presumably a system your endorse, this top-level entity appears to be the masses in the form of mob violence.
Am I misreading you? I’m not pointing this out to morally condemn your position, or as a boo light. But rather, to show that even your system has such a top-level entity uses force to get its way.
In your system: Its the masses, or the mob.
In Rothbardian anarcho-captialism: Its the property owner.
For (mostly) everyone else: Its the state.
Some entity is going to have the top-level authority to enforce its will (i.e. “state-like” power). There’s no escape.
No.
Some result will occur–that doesn’t mean that there is an entity that controls the result.
Consider an ordinary competitive market, say for wheat, in a society with lots of small farmers. Something determines the price of wheat. But there is no entity, no decision maker, that does so.
If it was the farmers as a group, they would all reduce output in order to raise the price–standard cartel behavior. But they have no way of coordinating to do that, so the actual result of their actions is not the result that they as individuals would desire. There is still a result, but it makes no sense to say that there is an entity with the top level authority to enforce its will with regard to the price of wheat.
Similarly in my cases. Iceland has a population, not a mob. If you act in certain ways, the result is that you can use violent force and get away with it. If you act in other ways, the result is that you can’t. But there is no entity up there making the decision, no actor who chooses who can get away with it or not. It’s a decentralized market mechanism, although a different one than the wheat market.
Or consider the case of social norms. Some patterns of behavior result in people thinking less of you, with negative effects, so you don’t do those things. But there isn’t any entity up there deciding what the norms will be. They are the unplanned outcome of lots of individual decisions.
Finally, consider Darwinian evolution. Your position is equivalent to saying that there has to be a god up there designing organisms–because, after all, we observe that organisms are designed, not random assemblages of parts. Darwin shows how the result of design can occur with no designer.
You’re missing the necessary clause of “over a given region“. In anarcho-capitalism, the farmer has top level authority over his geographic area, but lacks this authority in areas outside his geographic area. Not even an absolute monarch gets to “control results” of things that happen due to factors outside of his geographic domain, so to use this as evidence that the property owner isn’t state-like isn’t persuasive.
Who is ensuring that you can’t “get away with it”? You’re stripping agency out of your language here. In the original quote, you made it pretty clear that it is your “neighbors” who will use violence to ensure they get the outcome they desire.
Like, do they have to vote on this? Can it just be random loners with a grudge?
I feel like that was the most interesting/important sentence in all of these chapters. Its the only one that attempts to explain where the authority that drives your system is coming from.
The defining features of the state are not how they come into existence, but how they operate. That your system emerges out of many small, decentralized acts of violence makes no difference in this regard. If I have to obey the will of the mob (or, “neighbors”), then they are the top-level force-using authority.
Again, I also want to also point out that your system is unrecognizable as “capitalism” as it is usually understood.
If my neighbors are allowed to coordinate violence against me to enforce their will, whatever it may be, then the legal right to private property does not exist. My “ownership” is contingent not upsetting other people, or alternatively being powerful enough use violence against them myself.
The property norms that emerge from such a system could be anything. Its a strongest-man-wins scenario. And there’s no assurance the strongest man will care at all about private ownership or free markets.
You can find my analysis of what property norms would emerge from a (modern, higher division of labor) version of such a system in my Machinery of Freedom. The analysis is sketched in part III, which is included in the free (second edition) on my website, expanded in the third edition.
@DavidFriedman:
I might have said this before, but, in general, I get the same impression from reading your book as the one I get from reading communist alternatives: your proposed system is elegant, efficient, and it would totally work… in some alternate world, populated by people other than ourselves.
In our current world, it took us quite a while to get away from “might makes right”. Yes, I do agree that if people were less selfish and more forward-looking and totally rational, they’d all immediately see that ganging up on their neighbor to take his stuff (or perhaps just to bust up his stupid face) is a terrible long-term strategy; but we humans are not such people.
From chapter titled “The Stability Problem”:
Two thoughts on this:
1. Why would people not want a government? I would pay money to the most government-like agency, personally.
2. There probably are 10,000 “agencies” (aka people willing to be hired guns) in the Untied States. Yet, people would rather pay their taxes to the big defense agency in Washington than take their chances hiring one of these guys to fight off the IRS.
As I’ve said before, the thing you are describing as not going to happen, is already happening.
@Guy in TN / DavidFriedman:
Additionally, there used to be a lot of telecom/media companies in the US, and yet now there are only 2..3 of them. They keep merging in order to exploit regional monopolies and economies of scale. Why should security companies be any different ?
@Bugmaster:
The size of a firm ultimately depends on the balance between economies of scale and diseconomies of scale, both of which exist. In some industries at some times concentration increases, in other industries at other times it decreases. The impression that it is generally increasing is an illusion due to the fact that large firms are more visible than small, so one notices the cases of increasing concentration more than those of decreasing concentration.
One steel company, U.S. steel, in 1902 made 67% of all the steel in the U.S. As of 2001 it was about 8%.
Part of the first sentence is obvious: in order to get the necessities of survival, people need to work. What’s true about the rest of it?
In fact, the other logic is completely wrong. There will always be people in society that consume more than they produce: children, most obviously, but also the elderly, sick and disabled. In order for some people to consume more than they produce, other people must produce more than they consume, and society needs to encourage people to produce more than they consume. Societies that can’t guarantee an excess of production will always need to make difficult choices about who to abandon. There will also be disasters that destroy production, such as fires, droughts, and war.
So if I produce more than I consume, what happens to the excess production? Some of it will go to those that can’t produce enough. But, if we’re smart, and produce excess enough to cover ourselves in case of disaster, there will be excess production that has to go somewhere, and the options are excess consumption or future production. Everyone in society has an incentive for everyone else to put their excess production towards the long term production while consuming their own excess production in the short term. To incentivize choosing long term production, we reward those that put their production towards production in the short term with the promise of it being repaid by consumption in the long term, especially when they are old, sick, or disabled. And part of the reward is that in the event of disaster, we will be far more likely to be able to have enough for everyone to consume.
Some people in society will never produce significantly more than they consume, both necessary consumption and in what they consume through their own choices, and it’s not possible to divide the line between the two when we start talking about needs up the hierarchy (like leisure). We want people to be able to decide for themselves what to produce, and reward those that choose to produce for society rather than their own individual needs by reimbursing them later on. We have no problem with people picking leisure over additional production as long as we are sure that their consumption needs are covered, both now and when they are old enough not to be able to produce, especially if that leisure doesn’t consume someone else’s production.
Regarding point 5
Think at the level of the entire market not firms. Capital and labor are complements. So under normal circumstances owners of capital want more labor to exist in the market as that drives down hourly wages. Hence in America they seem to generally push for looser immigration laws and it would make since for them to try to shape cultural norms so that people worked longer hours. Now they have a giant collective action problem. The impact of any one owner of large amount of capital on the labor market through shaping cultural norms about work life balence is very small. They can shape their particular industry to a greater extent though and that might be enough to overcome the collective action problem if there are a small number of firms in an industry that has its own culture. But they would have to be monopolists in their industry or else other capitalists could swoop in to join the field that has artificially low wages. So this claims in plausible in narrow circumstances.
Just for completeness’s sake, here’s the line you’re complaining about in point 6 placed back in context of the piece:
Within this paragraph, it’s clear that the author is saying that the current system we call capitalsim didn’t spring whole-cloth from someone’s head – it’s a messy collection of countless individuals each trying to move away from something awful (feudalism) to something hopefully better (capitalism). If we’d waited for a perfect system to be fully designed before trying to leave feudalism, we’d likely likely still all be serfs.
Yes, capitalism was enabled by technology, but it seems like you’re arguing that capitalism is the unavoidable result of technology, which is bannannas.
Regarding your sixth point, this is a vulgarisation of Marxism. While the society is determined by the relations of production, the motor of social change is class struggle and not technology as such. Developing, adopting and mastering a technology is a social process that can be retarded by class interests that are endangered by the rise of this technology, such is the realtion between great landowners and industrial development.
The seventh point finds its counterpoint in Marxism in Maoist movements that consider workers of the First-World to not be a part of the World Proletariat, receiving wages that exceed the value of their labor, in exchange for loyality to the Capitalist system which exploits the Third-World. Still, going by the traditional definition of the Proletariat, which is the class which survives by selling its own labor power in exchange for wages, the majority population of the Western nations are still subsumed under this definition.
Taking myself as an example, as a highly educated professional on the European periphery, I enjoy various privileges that manual laborers of my country, let alone those of 19th century England, can afford. As such it is of course ridiculous for me to talk about back-breaking toil and adultered bread and so on. But at the same time, it is clear that if I were to suffer a disability that would prevent me from performing labor, I would soon find myself in penury unlike those that can subsist on the labor of others
I’ve also seen the criminal structures that constitute our bourgeoise, whose establishment through theft, war and state is still a part of living memory; allied with foreign capital, trample both the common interest and private rights of people like me.
Regarding no_bear_so_low’s communism lesson (see appendix): were hunter-gatherer societies hierarchical or anti-hierarchical?
The present tense can be used here, as a small number of hunter-gatherer societies still exist, I think entirely in jungles. They tend to be organised on group lines, which is to say that the divisions are between different bands, not different levels of a hierarchy. For what it’s worth my understanding is that groups have leaders/top warriors (intra-group relations are not friendly much of the time) but no hierarchical divisions, and attempts to monopolise limited resources (be it food, wives or status objects) will lead to conflict.
One thing to note though. Anti-hierachalism is based on observed behaviour of these groups, a small number of examples living in marginal areas. Clearly where more resources existed hierarchies were established, since the various non-hunter-gatherer populations have developed these. Communists claiming mankind is anti-hierachal miss the key fact that the societies in which they live prove that in certain situations hierarchy would be allowed to develop. And they can’t argue coercion here, because as the anti-hierachal examples they cleve to show, you can’t force hierarchy upon a subsistence society. So cooperation must be involved: others have to support the initial hierarch to some extent.
I find it unfathomable that a human society of any size could not be hierarchical when it comes to mating (for one), and I wonder if these anthropologists would capable of observing that in the field. If they were observing high school kids using their methods for instance, would they see that as anti-hierarchical because everyone gets enough food, and has the same number of books, and gets the same education?
This depends entirely on which group of hunter-gatherers you are talking about when it comes to societies that exist now or existed recently enough to be studied by anthropologists and it’s very possible that this was true for hunter-gatherers in the remote past. no_bear_so_low’s appendix is more accurate in stating that hierarchical and anti-hierarchical seem to be competing tendencies in humans. The key point they make which is borne out by the literature is that egalitarian societies often have to actively enforce this equality by various means ranging from the relatively benign to the extremely violent (just as societies based on hierarchies enforce their structure).
There is one significant pattern that does come out of the literature. The anthropologist James Woodburn who did his fieldwork among the Hadza of Tanzania coined the term “immediate return” hunter-gatherers to describe them and similar groups. These groups acquire food as and when they need it and make no attempt to store it for the future, tend to have fewer and simpler possessions, and are less hierarchical in comparison to delayed return hunter-gatherers. So, for example, with immediate return hunter-gatherers any member of society is able to contact spirits through shamanistic trances and a very large proportion will do so. Delayed return hunter-gatherers tend to have a designated shaman who has achieved that position through particular skill. In North Asia, comaprisons of hunter-gatherers (of the delayed return variety) and pastoralists suggest that while the shamans and political leaders of hunter-gatherers are chosen largely on the basis of aptitude, among pastoralists these positions are predominantly hereditary.
These facts tend to suggest a move from a hunter-gatherer existence that is egalitarian (or anti-hierarchical) to an increasingly hierarchical ordered society as property and complexity increase. The only trouble with this is that the anthropological and archaeological record is strewn with so many counter examples it’s hard to tell whether the counter examples are random noise or the pattern that some seem to discern in the record is actually a projection of noble savage/primitive communism mythologies onto the evidence.
From what I’ve read, I think the best way to think about it is that forager culture is kind of like high school. There is such a thing as status (viz. more and less important individuals), it’s extremely important in day-to-day life, and having high-status kin (not necessarily just parents; kinship systems in forager cultures are often very elaborate) does carry over to some extent into your personal status. But there are no titles (you might get more talented people leading hunting or war parties on a temporary basis, but generally speaking there is no such thing as a forager chief), no formal social classes, and distinctions in terms of material culture (clothes, tools, that sort of thing) are pretty minor.
Chiefdoms, formal hereditary status, and substantial differences in material culture generally show up with cultures that manage semi-permanent resources, like horticulture, herds, or fisheries. This often coincides with cultures that’re more sedentary.
Every so often, I run into a website that I want to submit as a candidate for one of the SSC linksposts. This week it was Index Diachronica, apparently a solo project by someone to catalog all known (or theorized) sound changes in the evolution of languages.
Oh God. There goes all my spare time!
Thanks for this. Off to play with my favourite phonemes.
Oh wow, as an amateur historical linguist this is something I’ve been wishing I had for a long time.