South Korea's program of higher wages and taxes – so far, it's not working

Which is about 3.5 walls and about 1/200th of the budget.

Other than that, I agree... NASA isn't getting enough funding. As are climate initiatives in the US. And the same goes for similar agencies and initiatives in the EU where I live.

I'm more skeptical about DARPA, but to their credit they're not just enablers of death; they're also working on some certifiably good stuff, like fighting human trafficking [1].

[1]: https://www.darpa.mil/program/memex

> commercial activities can be funded via issuing currency through fractional reserve banking

It's because the benefits of social activities cannot be captured and its value extracted. Commercial activity can - and therefore, there's motive for somebody to fund it to get richer.

https://www.zillow.com/ca/home-values/

2012 was the nadir of housing prices, and they've been rising rapidly since 2014.

Cost of living is a huge one, but a large part of urban California's cost of living has to do with consumer and [metropolitan] housing policy. It is exceedingly difficult to get anything built in major Californian cities, and once you do have it, the conditions for keeping it are onerous. The various committees and authorities in the state seem to regularly produce unjust outcomes (even from reasonable policies) and don't seem to care when they do.

I think people are broadly willing to pay higher state and local taxes *as long as the services they receive function well, and the outcomes are reasonable.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/the-conversatio...

Understanding "why" also requires looking at where people are migrating to and why. Quite possible that the destination affects the numbers, especially if it's consistently a common destination, more than the source.

You can change the external behavior of an economy by increasing/decreasing taxes. But this may not alter the fundamental system itself.

Consider #9: Length of delays relative to rate of system change.

This is precisely what the Agile and Lean movements wants (OODA and PDCA loops). By reducing the delay (compared to Waterfall and comparable approaches) between doing something and getting feedback, they can adjust their processes and systems to meet customer demands more reliably. This is much more impactful than parameter changes (#12) which is: hire 10 more people, or give the best devs a 25% bonus. Those may help to motivate people, but they don't alter the fundamental system (ok, mass hiring can alter the fundamental system, but often not in the desired way).

On the other hand, introducing delays can stabilize a system. So reducing delays isn't the right choice for every circumstance.

to shape beliefs and discourse in the direction of a particular perspective or worldview.

think socialism versus free-market capitalism versus libertarianism. two-party politics in the United States could be thought of as a paradigm.

these are the types of paradigms under evaluation. altering one of these at this layer has cascading effects on policies etc.

1. is basically the ability to create effective think-tanks to shape beliefs and discourse.

The purpose of the leverage points is to change the system at a fundamental level. Changing taxes doesn't (until you hit extremes) cause that. The system continues to behave in the same way but with increased or reduced constraints. Consider birth control policies. Eliminating birth control (making it illegal, so not really eliminating it) can cause an initial increase in children born until a new stable point is reached. Once you make birth control legal again, unless there has been a culture change in the interim, the birth rate will drop to the prior level.

Taxes and subsidies are the same. They don't change the system at a fundamental level (or don't do so easily), they only alter its external behavior. But once they're restored to their prior levels the system will probably return to its same behavior.

As a tax example: Perhaps we want to encourage people to save money for retirement, so we give them a tax break on their IRA contributions. This seems to help, people are saving more for retirement (as measured by IRA contributions increasing). We remove the tax break, do they continue to contribute (it's now a part of the culture) or do they stop contributing (they only did it for the tax benefit)?

If they continue, then you managed to create a substantive culture change. But most likely you'll get a drop of contributions.

[0] http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to...

Christianity -> Science is a notable example of a paradigm shift.

Hunter-gather -> Argiculture is another such shift.

It is woo. My translator says it means, "to invite me to do a TED talk, send a DM".

We had absolutely massive demographic shifts over the initial decades of the 20th century, and you're seriously going to pick income tax as the culprit of crime rising? Compared to 1900, 1920s America had a much different identity.

There's nothing just about people believing they "earned" those resources by their hard work alone, and not understanding that there were huge infrastructure costs that enabled them not just to do the work and earn money, but even to stay alive -- and that they have to pay to sustain it.

From the roads their cars (and they suppliers and customers cars) drive on, to the airports, to the government funded internet (from the research of ARPANET, to CERN (www), to the trillions spent subsidizing telcos), to the primary schools and high schools they went to, to the fire department that helps them to avoid burning when their houses catch fire, from the FDA and relevant law enforcement that helps them avoid dying from the first crook wanting to sell crap as food or medicine, to the contract laws and their enforcement that help them stay in business, to the criminal laws and their enforcement that protect them from being at the mercy of anyone who'd fancy killing them, from the military that prevents them from being the subjects or prisoners or sex slaves of some foreign power that wanted to expand, and on and on...

It would only be _just_ their "earned resources" if they made them in the jungle, hunting or growing their food alone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There was some concern about China being a large holder of U.S. treasuries a decade or so ago, but that concern has abated as China has unpegged their currency and unwound some of their treasury holdings, and because the debt is denominated in U.S. dollars and so the U.S. government could always inflate it away to nothing if China tried anything funky. The "bad consequences" of the U.S. <=> China current-account deficit have largely already come home to roost - that's what's fueling the rise in real estate prices bought by Chinese investors which is making homes unaffordable for Americans in west coast states.

The household analogy would be an adult child who pays rent to live in their parents' basement, which the parent may either spend on the child or plans to return to them via inheritance when the parent dies. Sure, you're spending money, and sure, it means that you have less money for spending on other things. However, it just means that other people closely associated with you spend that money instead, and if they don't, it comes back to you anyway.

Firstly, inflation stats don't track every price. In particular they don't track house prices (directly) or the prices of financial instruments like debt, stocks, etc. So money printing that pours into the stock market will cause a market bubble whilst inflation stats stay stubbornly low.

Secondly it's possible businesses have adapted to increased minimum wage laws by simply automating those jobs away. I see a lot of robotic airline checkin desks and McDonalds order takers these days.

As to growth, you're absolutely right that it's not as simple as wishing it. But the same is true for raising wages: sure, it's trivial to raise the statutory minimum, but for that to have the intended effect is a different story, unless the intended effect was more unemployment.

To easily demonstrate: imagine everyone stopped producing goods and services tomorrow in the US.

Everyone would still have the exact same amount of money, but you will not be able to use it to buy a fresh loaf of bread (since none are being baked) or have your car serviced.

The value of money will drop to zero. It won't matter at all if it changes hands; indeed, it won't, since there won't be anything to buy.

Thinking "money changing hands" powers the economy is thus mistaking effect for a cause.

I think there's more to it than that. There is no particular reason to think that money changing hands benefits the economy, or society, but there is at least one party that does benefit: the government. Every time money changes hands the government takes a share in the form of income and/or sales taxes. Ergo, there is reason for the idea that higher monetary velocity is better to be popular among both politicians and the economists who advise them.

"The government" is not a singular entity, it's a collection of tens of thousands of smaller entities, all of which operate mostly independent of one another and whose relative "efficiency" is based almost entirely on the people working there. One town may have a school or fire department which operates extremely well under a very tight budget, while the town over might poor money into a corrupt and expensive institution which fails to provide more than basic services.

In this respect, it's no different than any other business. Some Walmarts are clean, tidy, and well run, others are a mess. But you wouldn't go around claiming that "The retail" is inefficient because of this fact.

Also, not every government department should be efficient. The military is often held up as the hallmark of an inefficient bureaucracy, but the fact is, we don't want a military that's cost-effective, we want a military that's combat-effective, no matter the cost. But we also have a post office that can mail a letter to the middle of Alaska for less than a dollar.

Your comment about the market working better at "this" (whatever this is, anyway) is equally as lazy.

Let's say you want to build a road that connects 12 houses. You can do that without the government. You just need everyone to agree on who contributes what, who you hire to do the work, what happens if something goes wrong, who else is allowed to drive on the road, how maintenance happens, who polices the rules, and so on, and so forth.

This does occasionally work out in real life, but mostly people bitterly argue over the whole thing and it never happens. Having a government set some sort of policy and doing the planning is usually far more effective, even if it pays more than is necessary for the actual work that gets done. The government may pay more per mile of road, but the road has a higher odds of getting built.

Fine by me. A nation that does not have either strong (and not hindered by law) unions or a minimum wage to support the most vulnerable (your mention of which in the context of your comment comes across as libertarian concern trolling) does not deserve to "grow".

>Raising minimum wage increases the cost of labor, which will reduce hiring and trigger layoffs.

My solution to this is simple - abolish the wage. But I'm interested to hear to what extent this is true where minimum wages have increased so far, and whether it must necessarily happen. Taking the argument to its extreme, we ought not to pay anyone at all, since any amount >0 is a rising cost of labour and since growth is important, we out to minimize the cost of labour to zero or even lower.

I'm thankful for the fact that the eight hour work day and humane conditions, thanks to the socialists and social democrats of the 19th and 20th c. have prevailed over your "voluntary free market forces".

Public labs are nice for society because they're extraordinary cheap relative to their corporate counter-parts (grad student = 30k/yr with no benefits, research scientist = 200+k/yr with full benefits)

Innovative companies don't rise and fall by 10% tax increase or decrease. They often make no money at all until the make a lot. The only people who are concerned about taxes are those who already have money. If you want to lower barriers you need to fix education, costs of living and security. You can't have every incentive saying to stay the course at a traditional job and expect new things to happen. These days everyone expects a large sum of money for themselves to fund their own company. That isn't something you get or can allocate for new things, especially not at scale. Because they are by nature new. So almost every industry started scrappy. Provide an advanced scrappy society and innovation will happen.

People often say "But if this is such a good idea why aren't people in those kinds of countries innovating?". They are. It is just that it is marginal in the beginning and then it gets too large to notice. People think it came out of nowhere, which it sort of did. Even in the US a lot of the innovation, if not most, is related to the relative safety of the university system and subsequent industries. A lot of the famous entrepreneurs from the earlier days of the tech industry are people who were relatively well off if not rich, at least in terms of education or family, who I guess weren't that excited about their prospects and therefor also didn't have much to lose. In a good way. They could go work in a garage startup for a few year and still get the normal job later. They didn't have to, or didn't know to, worry about a mortgage. At least not yet.

You always want to start something new from a position of, if not strength, at least abundance. The zero to hero idea is flawed. If you don't have unrealized potential either in yourself, your idea or the market there isn't something that can succeed. So you want to have more opportunities than you can realize. You want to have more motivation, time or skill than you need. Otherwise you are just going to do what needs to be done, which usually isn't innovation.

Then on top of that you can do all kinds of things. But without the underlying foundation innovation at scale isn't going to happen. Even doing targeted research, you always need more people and better education than you think. For every success there is a hundred average efforts. Which is okay. That is how everything, from science to music scenes, is built. Cities often wonder why their initiatives isn't working, but if you aren't prepared to take on ten thousand new people in a year your industry isn't going to happen. It is going to plateau before you even notices it exists.

At the end of the day, innovation is made by people. You optimize for people and you get new industries. That is every successful city for decades if not centuries. I guess most people wouldn't say that about the Bay Area today, but at one point it was far better than the alternative for a lot of people. Which is why they ended up there.

It is if you wish to avoid runaway inflation. Even countries which have cast off the fetters of the gold standard (or equivalent) have found that there are still limits to the rate at which they can issue currency. Moreover, once the implications sink in people just index prices (including wages and interest rates) to the expected rate of inflation and you're right back where you started.

Production and consumption are both necessary. If you don't save and invest then production capacity will decline and there will be less available to consume in the future; but on the other hand if you don't consume then all that production capacity goes to waste and you derive no benefit from saving and investing. The balance is the critical aspect. Both policies which promote over-consumption at the expense of saving and policies which encourage over-investment at the expense of consumption miss the mark and destroy value by moving the economy away from the optimum balance.

It's not that consumption is bad -- consumption is merely the flip side of production. It's what is being consumed that matters. But even frivolous-looking consumption isn't entirely bad, else we'd never consumed arts, would we? But you'll find that humans want some entertainment, down time, etc.

Of course, there is such a thing as bad consumption, demand for wasteful goods and services, and malinvestment. But consumption is no more inherently bad than is production.