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Comment by xvedejas | Hacker News Reader

But when we're measuring the "world economy" it's not like we're measuring the heights of the stacks of gold behind scrooge mcduck's coffers, right? These numbers represent things like society's ability to make products people want, and peoples' willingness to spend their savings on things that are useful (instead of stuffing it in their mattress). The effects on labor are terrible, and your furlough reflects that. I personally was recently laid off, and likewise many individuals are hit much harder than 3%. But it's not like we should wish that other parts of the economy were hit as badly. None of it is good.

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> spend their savings on things that are useful (instead of stuffing it in their mattress)

People are literally spending all their money on food and rent, not stuffing it in their mattress. The only ones doing that are the ones on top, hoarding wealth and exploiting their underlings.

> ability to make products people want

Wealthy investors have decided this isn't important, all that's important is cutting costs so they can hoard more wealth, which usually means exporting production out of the country so they can exploit laborers in other countries where they don't have protection through the law. This is why we currently don't have enough masks and rely on foreign countries to produce them for us.

The "world economy" only seems to measure things that make rich people richer, and how effective these things are at doing so.

They are not actually hoarding “wealth”. No one is sitting on a pile of apartments, or ventilators, or college spots, or food distribution capacity. There is fixed amount of that stuff out there right now.

If it was possible to produce apartments for you for half the price, or deliver food, or an fda approved ventilator, and still have a profit investors would be jumping over themselves to do so.

Businesses are hoarding cash because they predict a drop in revenue and want to save as much as they can so they can continue operations and realign for the new economy.

> No one is sitting on a pile of apartments, or ventilators, or college spots, or food distribution capacity.

The large number of empty apartments being rented 3-4 nights a month on AirBnb in most large cities seems to indicate otherwise.

The CPAP machine "jailbreak" posted here yesterday seems to indicate otherwise.

The large quantity of food going to the trash every day seems to indicate otherwise.

I agree that there is a "fixed" amount of stuff out there, but it's far from allocated efficiently. I think it's time we recognized that.

> The large quantity of food going to the trash every day seems to indicate otherwise.

These are all kind of bad examples, but I'll go with this one. Food takes time to grow or produce, so you have to accurately predict months out how much food you can sell. So, who is to blame for imperfect predictions of future demand? We could donate all this food instead of just binning it, so then who's to blame for not building the mass infrastructure required to coordinate such distribution, and then running it all for free? And then if such an individual did do this, why didn't they spend their considerable resources instead on a project that could have benefited humanity way more?

I mean, you realize this is a catch-22 argument right?

We don't want the government doing anything in our lives, so we don't expect any sort of mass infrastructure to be built to support for food distribution. We expect the wealthy and corporations to be philanthropists.

But being a philanthropist costs money. So instead we have a bunch of farms and food producers instead tossing out food because it's cheaper to throw it away than it is to donate it.

So how can you claim it's a bad example when people would rather throw food away for profit?

Your expectation is that farms should operate at a loss such that no food goes to waste? Businesses that don't make money very quickly will get shut down. Or they could just always underproduce what the market needs in order to ensure that there is no waste.

Nice try, but when states and municipalities have made anti-food-waste laws, this hasn't happened.

In fact, with a little tweaking, most food businesses can profit from throwing away less food: garbage disposal isn't free, and food donations are a tax writeoff.

Someone I knew in Philadelphia used to trash pick food from the Trader Joe's dumpster. But they caught him on camera and then put up signs, and eventually put a lock on the dumpster. They literally spent money to buy signs and a lock, and pay people to put up the signs and lock the dumpster every night.

Oh, for sure, if the government is fronting the cost of donations via tax incentives, then we just need to keep on increasing those incentives until it's worth it for the farms to implement this for whatever we consider a "required" percentage of their waste. Farms are already heavily incentivized to minimize their waste in the first place, since that's a ton of labor costs going down the drain, in a business with relatively low margins, but missing out on the sale is still more important for staying in business.

Then maybe we need to re-evaluate the idea that farms need to be making profit over distributing food. I mean, farms already receive massive subsidies from the government in order to operate. We just had a round of farm bailouts because they couldn’t sell their food to international markets. Now they are throwing food away because they can’t sell it locally. Meanwhile there are lines stretching miles long with people waiting for food. Perhaps for-profit food production should not be a goal for a society.

> The large number of empty apartments being rented 3-4 nights a month on AirBnb in most large cities seems to indicate otherwise.

High rent for shitty apartments has been part of SF and NYC life for 30 years before Airbnb. This is more of a NIMBY problem. It’s politically easier to blame Airbnb then to build high rises with affordable rent and change the “culture” of the neighborhood /barf

How is a CPAP machine hack an indication that there are excess ventilators? I don’t think you thought that through.

> but it's far from allocated efficiently. I think it's time we recognized that.

Who hasn’t recognized there can be inefficiency in the current system? The argument is that a central planning committee is going to do much worse.

The gist of the article was that a CPAP machine was basically a ventilator with some features disabled in software. Given that there are many of these around, with a 3G internet connection and OTA updates, and that the manufacturer could easily turn a CPAP machine into a ventilator by "flicking a switch", yeah, I consider that an indication that they're "sitting on it". They'd rather sell you a new machine at over-inflated prices than enable existing machines to be repurposed.

> No one is sitting on a pile of apartments

They most certainly are. Vast amounts of private real estate in the most prime locations are sitting empty. See the Royal Family's property in Mayfair London for example.

They are not actually hoarding “wealth”. No one is sitting on a pile of apartments...

They literally are actually. Buying expensive houses and leaving them empty is an incredibly common way of hoarding wealth. https://londonist.com/london/housing/how-many-vacant-empty-h...

It's actually quite profitable to hoard apartments [1] and ventilators [2].

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/upshot/when-the-empty-apa...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...

> No one is sitting on a pile of apartments, or ventilators, or college spots, or food distribution capacity. There is fixed amount of that stuff out there right now.

Well actually, at least two of your examples are clearly wrong. In NYC, one of the most competitive housing markets in the world, one in four luxury apartments is vacant[1] while the homeless freeze to death outside each winter. Any shortage of food is hard to argue when we're turning corn into fuel instead of food[2]. The only reason people aren't sitting on piles of ventilators yet is that the high demand is new enough that a way of making money by letting people die of suffocation hasn't yet emerged.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/realestate/new-developmen...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2016/04/25/why-a...

Shutting down to save money isn’t hoarding wealth, it’s trying to save a business FFS. Paying employees for 4 weeks of doing nothing and bankrupting the business over it is much worse in the long term.

I think you're crossing separate points. Ordinary people are doing worse than a 3 percent drop, so this "world economy" is about something very different from how ordinary people are doing, and this is a problem.

Getting laid off isn't wealth hoarding, but does that mean there isn't wealth hoarding?

Indeed. I don't want anybody's money to just vanish. And while as others have pointed out, the numbers are a measure of productivity for somebody, the ability of workers to capture their own productivity in wages is not guaranteed.

The ability of workers to capture their own productivity gains is a lower than it's been in a century. This crisis will push the second derivative lower.

But we don't like talking about M2V[0] anymore because it didn't jibe with the daily propaganda for years that all is well

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V

People, especially the press, don't talk about M2V because they don't understand it. No one does outside finance or econ classrooms, and most of them don't either. BTW, jibe, not jive.

Maybe productivity gains are vastly overstated? Or more specifically, productivity numbers are distorted by a few industries that have had extreme productivity gains, while most have stagnated.

You are offering an explanation for a situation in which everything is fine. Unfortunately we already know that this is not the case.

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