The Ideal Economy | Hacker News Reader

The Ideal Economy

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The article promotes totalitarian government, caps on wealth, a social credit system and completely misses the point of cryptocurrencies. The right title would be “Let’s turn every country into China”. No thanks.

Do you like having aligarchs? Do you like having a lot of poor people? I wrote about cryptocurrencies - for today they make no sense. There is no such economy in China. There are no limits and states of accounts of all people and organizations there.

And your comment is clearly spam.

whenever there is money, there is a distribution. The poor are those with less, it cannot be avoided. There is nothing wrong with having oligarchs.

There is nothing wrong with having oligarchs, but it depends on what percentage of the total number of people in society. If it is 0.01% of all people, it is very bad. If it's 10%, it's good. That's what regulates the maximum.

Managed capitalism beats poverty. There will be no poor people.

And your comment is clearly spam too. You don't know what you're saying at all.

for me it would be a "yes please". see how different people and preferences are.

And this is why we should never forget that the brain is that organ which was developed to move (to pick your optimal direction and, directly or cunningly, go there).

How very lucky that the solution spaces are sparse and different. How very unlucky that they may not be numerous and optimal enough.

Put me in the top please

Maybe those who prefer a system like this should move to China instead of trying to bring the system to a country where most people are not in favor of such system.

That’s why we started the project https://intercoin.org

The open source code is at https://github.com/Intercoin

Documentation at https://community.intercoin.org

Interviews with economists and regulators at https://youtube.com/c/intercoin

Sound money, communities, similar to what this guy is talking about — but an autonomous and libertarian version of that.

Because if crypto doesn’t step up and become actually adopted and useful, then we are going to live in a world where megacorps like Amazon/Facebook, as well as your friendly Federal Government, issue the currency and know everything about you and centrally plan who can pay and who can be … shall we say gently excluded from the economy due to their rating.

This builds on my earlier work on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform to build an open source alternative to Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc.

EDIT: I am curious. For a decade, I do the work to prevent the otherwise inevitable outcome of centralized control, freely give away the code, document it publicly, make public interviews with standards bodies, regulators, economists to get it right, spend a ton of my own money and time to get it implemented (without raising any VC etc.) but then every time I would merely mention it on HN, would always get heavily downvoted by people who prefer not to say a single word as to why. I can understand if people give me feedback, but they prefer to silently downvote. OK, what's your better plan, what have you done to prevent this outcome? Why do you take actions to bury workable solutions to avert this situation?

It's because you're shilling your random coin on an article not specifically about cryptocurrency. Feels like spam to many.

Lol, why should I work day and night? Why should I build a company and hire people if nothing good will it bring me?

If I do not earn a great amount by giving up my personal free time and risk my entire life, i wouldn't do it. That's easy.

I'm not sure I understand, are you saying this is a good or a bad thing?

Maybe I've been living in Sweden too long and the emphasis on living your life is maybe a bit too high here but the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory.

> If I _don't_ break my back and give up my life then someone else will and I will lose out in the big picture!

We shouldn't live to work, we should work to live.

If you're not getting fulfilled in your work and/or you're giving your life to your job then you're not really living- you're a meat robot.

>the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory.

Yeah because it is a prisoners dilemma type situation. If everyone starts working harder but people don't start consuming harder there is less work to be done which consolidates work to the hardest working members without actually helping the overall economy.

The economy wants 10 cars (aggregate demand), 10 people build 10 cars, 5 decide to build them twice as fast which means 10 cars are being built which means the last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid and cannot afford the 5 extra cars which means aggregate demand is now 5 cars and some of the hard workers also get fired. If everyone built one car then nobody would be worse off.

https://youtu.be/EKd6WURBqOY

That example is too simplistic.

The root cause of working day and night is to maintain or increase your socioeconomic position so that you are able to obtain scarce (demand greater than supply) resources when you want to. This can apply on a tribal level (family all the way to country and alliances).

For example, large amounts of people around the world want avocados all the time all year round, but there are insufficient avocados to go around. How are the limited number of avocados allocated?

Wrong. It's not a football match. There's no upper limit. If some needs are fulfilled, new ones (that used to be unimportant) appear. No enough cars for everyone, you produce cars. If the demand is fulfilled, you produce personal planes, etc. ad infinitum. Wrist watches were once unaccessable and kind of unnecessary for the majority, too. Just like stockings and other things that were once considered luxurous. EVeryone will find their niche.

> last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid

The last 5, being uncompetitive in car building, ought to choose a different field for which they are competitive. If they don't work, they don't eat and thus drop out of "the game".

Look I think “work to live not live to work” is a great philosophy, and one that probably makes for a fulfilling life. But virtually everything you take for granted about modern civilization only exists because of work-obsessed lunatics.

At the very least if someone chooses to work day and night to build, society should be celebrating them— not discouraging them. It may be bad from their perspective, but civilization as a whole cannot advance without people like this. All of the rest of us are free-riding off people like this both past and present.

I think it’s really great the European culture of la vita dolce. But the reality is virtually all new products and companies come from places with less cultural aversion to working nights and weekends than The Continent.

A fun point that I would also temper a bit by saying those work obsessed lunatics do what they do with lots of support from the plebs around them (friends, family, employees).

Work-obsessed lunatics are like that even without 'unreasonable' amounts of profits.

Greed-obsessed lunatics is a different subset ( with overlap ) but play a very different role in societies.

Your view of innovation on The Continent is likely 10% true and 90% PR. You just don't think about innovations as European because we don't put faces on companies.

But your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk… Your local pizza guy or startup founder, are those the people you call “meat robots”?

>Your local pizza guy or startup founder

Won't someone spare a thought for the minimum-wage, physically-risky lifestyle of the startup founder?! And you need your own car! You know, it's a more dangerous job than being a cop!

...oh, oh wait, that's pizza guy, sorry, I too get those "jobs" confused all the time!

The pizza guy and the startup founder does have some things in common though: they live outside the comfy Swedish 9-to-5 mainstream, and could both be seen as “meat robots” I guess, if you are so inclined.

>> You know, it's [amoré]

FTFY

> your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk

Citation needed for the above.

Maybe their standard of living largely comes from the high taxes imposed on the rich. Or maybe it comes from decades of free education, or maybe from the oil reserves of some scandinavian states.

Or maybe we just don't know; and that's ok too. I'm just saying that we shouldn't be so sure that the protestant work ethic is the necessary and sufficient thing for a good standard of living.

Soviet had all of those, but didn't allow risk taking founders. So far not a single country which doesn't enable risk taking founders to create big companies has succeeded in creating a good economy. So the data is really in the risk taking founders favor.

Virtually all improvements in living standards occur from the creation of new, more efficient products. Virtually all new products are created by risk-taking entrepreneurs, or very close equivalents inside larger corporations.

I'd say that a fair economy should always reward those who decide to work more than average.

However, those people should not be able to use their extra earned money against the rest of us, who made different life choices.

Define "against the rest of us". The whole point of earning "extra" money is to be able to lay claim to scarce resources. Inevitably, outbidding someone for something will be felt as using the extra earned money against them. If you cannot outbid someone, then the extra money is worth nothing, and hence there is no reason to work more than average.

If you take my comment as a basic premise of a fair economy, then "outbidding" does not make any sense. In fact, it makes more sense to share scarce resources.

There are still many non-scarce things you can spend your extra money on.

An example of what you can do: buying expensive cars.

An example of what you can't do: buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.

> non-scarce things you can spend your extra money on

if they are non-scarce, then you already have obtained your required amount, and thus no longer demand more.

> buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.

buying up assets, since assets would be scarce, allows you to demand payment for their use, and thus, ensure your future financial situation is secure.

It sucks for those who don't own assets, but this system resolves the conflict of how to assign assets amongst people. And it gives those who don't own assets the motivation to work harder. The resulting society will then have more aggregate wealth than before.

> It sucks for those who don't own assets, but this system resolves the conflict of how to assign assets amongst people.

It sounds like we can assign bandwidth to the highest bidder then. Who needs Net Neutrality?

Seriously, the problem with your thinking is that you're stuck with the idea that our current economy is the only and most fair way to divide resources.

The current economy already has marginal income/wealth taxes to divide resources in a more “fair” way. Obviously they can and should be tweaked as changing parameters call for it to be tweaked in order to achieve whatever goals society is working for (such as a floor on standard of living).

This is true, but one problem is that in our current system fairness is always secondary. Something we tweak for when things go askew. A more ideal economy would flip this around, to ensure we don't allow some people to spoil it for others. And certainly not a minority spoiling it for the majority, as is the case all too often. The law simply can't keep up with the evil business schemes cooked up by a rich and greedy minority.

No, the scarcest resource is human time. If person A works for 1 hour then he added 1 hour of human work time to the pool of resources. Therefore it makes sense that he can now extract 1 extra hour of human work time from the pool of resources. Him doing that trade doesn't reduce the number of human work hours available to others, instead he increased the value of the pool since now there is more diversity of jobs the pool is capable of performing.

Your assumption here is that you can trade human work hours for finite natural resources on some market, and that everyone has to pay for those resources on the market. There is nor reason why you should be able to do that, rather the natural system is to allocate all finite resources equally to each person and then you an pay for those with your work, but you working harder to pay a person to share his resources with you wouldn't affect anyone else in the economy unless they too wants to have extra of that resource.

> If person A works for 1 hour then he added 1 hour of human work time to the pool of resources. Therefore it makes sense that he can now extract 1 extra hour of human work time from the pool of resources.

What if no one wants that 1 hour of labor? What if more people want 1 hour of a certain type of labor that exceeds the supply of that certain type of labor?

> What if no one wants that 1 hour of labor?

Doesn't have to be hours, the hour was just to represent that it is a human working and not a finite resource. Different human work can be valued differently.

That wasn't at all clear (and you seemed to me to be suggesting exactly the opposite) in your comment upthread.

That motivation to work harder breaks down the moment it becomes common belief that the amount of additional hard work required to secure such assets is unrealistic for the average person.

> An example of what you can do: buying expensive cars.

The fact that it is expensive is what defines it as scare (i.e. lots of demand relative to little supply).

How about using a less fuel efficient vehicle? Is that “against others” as it uses up the non polluted portion of the environment?

> An example of what you can't do: buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.

Land is not the same everywhere. Low humidity, Mediterranean climate, coast California views are extremely scarce and in high demand. How are you going to fit 8B people onto the world’s desirable land?

> Land is not the same everywhere. Low humidity, Mediterranean climate, coast California views are extremely scarce and in high demand. How are you going to fit 8B people onto the worlds desirable land?

If you want better than median living conditions then you work for it. There is no reason why it should be free to live in the best parts of the world if not everyone can, otherwise the privilege of living there would be a source of injustice.

Who decides what is median living conditions and how is that decided?

The conditions that are left when those above median have chosen theirs. If you want better you work for it. If you don't want better then you share the work those who worked for theirs produced. So you work just as much as you want, and others working more means those who don't have more.

It is true that if you want a luxury resource, like a very attractive location to live in, then others working more for that position means you also would have to work harder if you want to have it. But I don't consider people competing for luxury resources a problem, no that is a feature and is what makes the economy tick. If you don't want that rat race you have to live in median conditions.

>There are still many non-scarce things you can spend your extra money on.

>An example of what you can do: buying expensive cars.

Why are expensive cars not scarce? They're ultimately built using scarce resources (eg. steel, rubber, plastic, labor).

Expensive cars are just as much a scarce resource as everything else is.

What would reward be useful for if not to trade it for scarce goods? Literally there are only so many miles of coastline, so many front-row tickets to the Super Bowl, so many square feet of land within a 5 minute walk of any given place on Earth, etc.

At some point, that reward is going to be traded for something else that's in demand and where the demand exceeds the supply. If you interpret that as "use their extra earned money against the rest of us", then it seems that you are going to have to disallow the notion of rewarding those who decide to work more than average.

Although it's working an unhealthy amount and it pulls everyone else to do the same, perhaps not ?

/deleted

> But who influences regulation and legislation?

The voters do. People vote for corrupt politicians since they care about other things. They would do that even if you didn't have capitalism. The problem is therefore the implementation of your democracy and not capitalism. Removing capitalism while keeping the flawed democracy would just result in another Soviet scenario or even worse.

So the problem isn't capitalism, it is corrupt democracy. A corrupt democracy will try to do whatever it can to enrich its politicians, like taking bribes from companies etc. A healthy democracy doesn't take those bribes. You can find many countries where politicians works mostly for the people and not for companies, that is how it should be.

> So the problem isn't capitalism, it is corrupt democracy.

Keep going down the rabbit hole and the problem is corrupt humans. Transparency to enable everyone to keep everyone else in check is the only solution I can see.

Scandinavian countries have quite a lot of transparency and it works fairly well. I agree that humans are pretty corrupt but it can be mitigated in a lot of ways. I live in Scandinavia and yes, our politicians are corrupt as well but the systems and how people vote incentivise them to do the right thing most of the time.

Success.

Mots people work hard because they want to succeed, not because they want to get rich.

You never become a great athlete for the money, you become a great athlete because you want to win. You never start a business for the money, you go $BIG_CORP if you want money, you start a business because what you want is success.

In 90 years the western world has never been as inegalitarian as today, do you think people in the sixties didn't create anything?

If capital gains rates were a lot higher than they are now, we would never have such innovative companies as Apple and Microsoft.

I thought most of the innovations those companies use were done by others, and what these companies are really good at is packaging things to make them appealing to the consumer?

What happened to the Microsoft hate that used to be on this forum?

Calling Microsoft innovative is a little... off, right?

Poe's law strikes again.

Your criticism is too simplistic. The fact that you stop working once you reach the cap is actually the point of the cap.

The article somehow misses many different points, perhaps deliberately, as a satire of sorts.

The point of money creation and subsequent inflation is funding for infrastructure, real estate and public projects. There will be outsized returns to road building, city sewers systems and such. However, good luck collecting funding for them without banks issuing money. Good luck fundung any project which has large upfront costs and time to return investment of more than a decade.

The system currently exists is in place party because we historically knew how to capture positive spillover effects of such projects. Naive systems which does not even consider credit against future spillover effects will be very much like ours, but will develop slower and eventually collapse.

Credit is good. Banks printing money with credit is a feature. Opaqueness of banks is a feature.

Money creation is surely and simply to keep up with the volume of goods and services in the economy? If we didn't create money we'd have deflation (prices would drop year on year).

The interesting side of things is really about the different ways money is created and where it goes. Money created through lending is paid back, it's ultimately backed by consumption or investment. Money created through QE is more onerous and can lead to financial repression instead of deleveraging of an overleveraged economy.

I don't see why you tie this to infrastructure projects. Infrastructure projects are funded by government because it's government who can reap taxes to pay for them. It's government who can coordinate huge projects on a state scale, compulsory purchase land, and regulate and ensure fair access, etc etc. The alternative of thousands of miles of private roads and tolls would be hell.

Monetary vs fiscal intervention is definitely important. If the government wants to go spend $1T on research and development or infrastrucmture for the next 100 years, fine. But a lot of what's been happening over the last 13 years is just robbing savers (lower savings and pension annuity rates) and driving inequality (the rich leveraging up)

>If we didn't create money we'd have deflation (prices would drop year on year).

Calling deflation a drop in prices is misleading in my opinion. What really is happening is that money gets more expensive. People then start speculating on money the same way they speculate on stocks, real estate or Bitcoin.

Nominal prices falling is the widely held definition of deflation.

Life would be somewhat easier if we could all had magic glasses that converted prices on menus in to [hours you worked to earn this purchase], but for now we all deal with fiat.

> Money creation is surely and simply to keep up with the volume of goods and services in the economy? If we didn't create money we'd have deflation (prices would drop year on year).

Then why the guy from the FBI showed up the last time I tried to create more money to save the world from deflation?

This is a pretty rosy picture you are painting. So where do the tomahawk missiles and multi decamillion dollar police budgets for military gear, and the funding to run Iran Contra schemes get accounted for?

We put a VERY small percentage of government spending into infrastructure so making that out to be the entire point of the system is just misleading IMO

Well-funded military is remarkably similar to well-maintainad roads if we look at consequences.

Putting questions about what is the optimum amount to spend to each. Both promote trade and large-scale division of labour. Both directly (road-pavers specialize at that, infantry specialize at application of force) and indirectly, by promoting people and goods movement.

Trade creates wealthy merchants, banks, and eventually further division of labour, manufacturing, large-scale specialized manufacturing and agriculture.

In a sence, it is military who we should thank for silicon integrated circuits.

We could agree or disagree about certain parts of military spending, but current global world would be unthinkable if huge armed forces didn't ensure peace for everyone.

New slogan: "Missile Systems are Infrastructure"?

Banks don't print money. A double ledger accounting system does not create new dollars.

> I am not an economist, but in light of current events with cryptocurrencies and the economy in general, I would like to share my thoughts on some kind of ideal economy, around which everything is happening now.

OMG sorry, i haven't read the article. i can't believe someone wrote that paragraph and pressed "publish". OK, well let's read on. cant wait!

False premise: "In general, buying and selling services and goods is all that interests modern society."

Everything that follows from this is merely a thought experiment disconnected from reality and, as such, is unsafe.

https://lethain.com/how-to-safely-think-in-systems/

Any economic theory that doesn't account for gifting as the root of human behavior is going to start off skewed.

To me the ideal economy has multiple choices for regulations so that there is regulatory competition.

Decentralized regulators, and if things are open and transparent, people can pick what works best for them.

What do you do when the choices of two people conflict? What if you want to throw me in jail for stealing your house, but in my regulatory framework houses aren't owned but merely occupied?

You can't have "personal choice" as the foundation of government.

I’m thinking more about consumers and businesses.

Think about a food truck.

As the owner I can pick a high standard regulator that has a higher cost of compliance but more customers are interested in the cleanest standard food service.

Or I can go for low cost regulations and maybe exceed them on my own and pocket the difference in regulations.

However, I think the US states originally was intended to more like what you say before the federal government overreach began.

> To me the ideal economy has multiple choices for regulations so that there is regulatory competition.

That's called free market. And voluntary certification (by independent standards committees) for the "regulatory part".

Independent regulators tend to grow in power become gatekeepers to the industry and harm innovation.

I think having competing regulation/certifications is different than the status quo and offers benefits.

As a consumer and business operator, I want to be able to choose.

Yes, a free market, something that doesn’t largely exist!

>For the convenience of calculating, the sum of money was made not 100 rubles, but 0 rubles. To do this, from the state of the account of all participants was subtracted, half of all money. Instead of 0 rubles, it is now -50 (minus fifty). 0 means 50 rubles in the account, and 50 means 100 rubles in the account. With each transaction between residents, the one who paid got minus to his account, and the one who sold plus. > Thus, regardless of the amount of money, the sum did not change, and money was created at the time of the transaction and there was exactly as much as was needed.

What a revolutionary idea. Why haven't governments adopted this system? Oh wait. They did. Add up all debt and all credit and you end up with exactly 0 dollars left over.

>The first thing that matters in it - is it possible to steal? is who releases the money. The government does that.

>They estimate the rate of inflation and try to affect it by releasing money.

No, the central bank tries to find the interest rate that balances individual demand for labor with the individual supply for labor. People borrow money themselves. Businesses who borrow to invest drive inflation just as much as consumers and governments. In fact, my opinion is that the Fed is unable to introduce additional money into the economy beyond what actors in the economy borrow. QE does absolutely nothing if people don't borrow. If anything the Fed should be thought of as a brake to the economy. If you are going downhill too fast the Fed will slam the brakes. Low interest rates don't stimulate anything, they merely stop enforcing reckless driving(=borrowing). The idea that governments "release" money through fiscal policy is actually a modern idea called MMT.

>So they print a billion, but how do they pass it on to the people?

They do not print a billion. They borrow a billion by creating both $1 billion as an asset and $1 billion as a liability.

>it was decided to introduce a maximum of money. A store could not earn more than a certain amount of money. The money that the store made more than the maximum went to charity.

Just force the store to spend all its money eventually. There is no meaningful difference between letting the store spend money itself and letting a charity spend the money. Capping income has the obvious downside that every industry needs a different cap (e.g. semiconductors need tens of billions just for a single fab). The idea of setting a maximum size to prevent monopolies does make sense but it would have to be flexible. This is probably something that could be solved with good old progressive taxation by taxing corporate income as personal income.

> Add up all debt and all credit and you end up with exactly 0 dollars left over.

Congratulations, you are are a part of lucky 10000 today. Please read about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

Try really thinking about it and I think you'll see that even with fractional reserve banking, if you add up all the debt and credit, you'll still end up with exactly zero dollars.

> In order to fight monopoly, it was decided to introduce a maximum of money. A store could not earn more than a certain amount of money. The money that the store made more than the maximum went to charity.

When you can't earn more by working fairly then people start to work unfairly, meaning they start taking bribes or perform other corrupt acts. Current capitalism has problems but at least the system doesn't encourage corruption. Some people will still be corrupt, of course, and some companies will work like a communist state and limit income for its workers encouraging those workers to become corrupt, but corruption will always be way worse when you put national caps on income like this.

> at least the system doesn't encourage corruption

Corporations literally buy laws via lobbyists. Capitalism doesn't have to encourage corruption: it's already corrupted.

It is less corrupted. Without capitalism personal connections is the only source of power, so the only ones with power would be politicians and their friends. With capitalism we create another bastion of power, the capital class. Communists are politicians who don't want to share power with the capital class and instead hog it all for themselves. We all know what happens when politicians has no group to oppose them, everything goes to shit.

Maybe you could think of some other system where personal connections isn't the only source of power, but so far democratic capitalism is the only thing we have.

Edit: As for your scenario with capital paying money to influence politicians. The alternative is that the politician already have all the power (and money), nobody has to pay them. To me it is better that there is some corruption with money going to politicians rather than politicians just having all the money from the start.

> Corporations literally buy laws via lobbyists.

Both elected and unelected officials are so corrupted that they take money from the corporations to choke the competition on the free market. To fix this issue, let's give them even more power. That will show them and they'll stop being corrupted.

Why not outlaw professional lobbyists and private funding of politicians' campaigns? Once all bribery is illegal it could be easier to enforce consistently.

Can you name a country where lobbying is illegal? It's a core function of democracy.

> It's a core function of democracy.

Lobbying is not democratic. Corporations have far more money than individuals and therefore far bigger lobbying power. As a result, laws and policies will reflect what the small elite wants rather than what the people want or need.

Because of lobbying, the copyright monopolists have systematically robbed of our public domain rights. Because of lobbying, we might as well not have the right to reverse engineer anything.

Lobbying is literally billion dollar industries asking the government to help protect their interests. Hard to think of anything less democratic than that.

The economy which caps maximum income at some small value removes incentive to perform. When combined with helping the poor it would encourage parasitism.

Parasitism is a very convenient life style once you adopt to it, and very hard to abandon even if you wish to.

I wonder if previous eras (before the massive space taken by economic principles) had a different view on incentives and performance.

The current system doesn't reward performance in general, just a few instances here and there, the rest is actually backward (good employees are ignored, sometimes hated, sometimes fired even).

> The current system doesn't reward performance in general

The current system rewards performance more than any other system in history. You can go from living in poverty to earning hundreds of thousands of dollars just by doing well at enough tests. Things are stacked against you, true, but that path is still possible today. Is the system worse today than 30-40 years ago? Maybe, it is hard to tell, it is the same system though so you can't blame the system, it is other factors.

Could it reward performance more? Yes! But we have already came extremely far.

Wrong, tests are not the bottleneck, you'll have to present well, play along politics, fake. You could be the best person on earth, if someone doesn't feel you, you're out.

You don't have to do any of that to get a software engineer job. Just do well on tests in school, do well enough that you get accepted into college with a free ride, do well enough in college tests to get an interview, do well enough on the algorithm tests in the interview to get a job. That is all you need. It isn't easy, having money etc helps, but ultimately all you need to do is pass a bunch of tests to get a lot of money.

I did all of these multiple times and got rejected. You're view on life lacks data I'm sorry. The harder I worked, the more I adapted to peoples need, the less I got. A simple friend in the field gets me a job without effort. Society doesn't reward excellency that often, the social structure comes first.

Getting rejected from multiple interviews isn't a particularly big roadblock, you just need to do more. Or you have to improve. If you have a degree and aren't completely incompetent you will get a job sooner or later as long as you don't stop applying.

"But I got rejected once, it is proof that hard work and performance doesn't pay off!"

No, hard work includes trying multiple times. Over multiple tries the probability of you being unlucky in the interview goes to 0. It might take hundreds of tries, but if you can do the work you will get accepted at some point. Life being unfair doesn't mean that performance or hard work doesn't pay off, just that they maybe don't pay off as much as they ought to.

The argument was not about interviews but tests and skills. Which I did.

The "luck/unfair" argument is exactly what I was talking about. You shouldn't need luck to get hired in a system after 7+ years of hard work.

Add to that that I've seen a lot of incompetent people (both in skills, dedication or even diligence) in the field. This renders the excellence argument moot.

The system is filled with low efficiency bits at every scale, HR only call you if they match a tag or a fancy school, the tech interviewer might very well be a young dude knowing moot but not willing to annoy his superior with bad hires. It's mostly tribalism and politics driving the machine. Not objective qualities.

At first I thought you were one of those who spent years not getting their first job, but no you worked in the industry for 7 whole years! Did you get paid much more than McDonalds wage during those years? Then you got rewarded for your performance! You are therefore a perfect example of someone getting rewarded for performance. Rewards aren't perfectly correlated with performance, no, but that doesn't mean that performance doesn't get rewarded.

Sure, it is hard to earn more than you earn now. But you are still earning way more than most, and all that required was to pass a few tests. How can you call that not rewarding performance?

7 years of study.

Also we're not on the same page about reward/excellency. Having a high salary after graduation doesn't mean you're doing good / excellent work. You can, and I've heard a lot of people saying it, coast along being paid for not a lot.

Every company I worked at had terrible software, there was no excellency in them (which backfires toward all society). Another proof to me that the system is not optimizing excellency. It's short term gain spread over a wide network of ignorance (your customer can never assess of your work quality, he has no clue about the domain).

Furthermore, there are many other paths to wealth. Not that any of them are easy, but they allow a variety of different types of people to succeed.

For anyone who thinks it is harder now: Name the specific time period where performance was rewarded more and let the HN commenters pick apart your choice.

The fault is within a decadent culture that has stopped striving for excellence as an ideal and demanding quality as an underlying mental tenet.

The "performance indicators" are often calibrated permissively towards a "very pessimistic perspective taken as realism" which lets ample pools of bestiality in. When this becomes "locally" systemic, it will be a chocker for the individual potential, systemically misfit.

I don't blame the culture in itself. It's a byproduct of itself.. when you live with nothing, excellency == survival and better life, but when capital/marketing makes people live "softer" by doing nothing.. the incentive is removed. At least on the surface.. I don't think people are that happy binging on netflix.

That said I'm curious about how to revive this, before the potential climate collapse especially :)

I don't get it. If you cap income then some people stop working and other people start working. There is no need for parasites. The idea of an income cap is wrong because absolute income does not determine willingness to spend. It is unspent money that should be capped via taxes.

It would be very cool if money would need to be invested in the real sector at the end. we would be sending people to Mars already.

Right now they just fuel blowing bubbles.

> The economy which caps maximum income at some small value removes incentive to perform.

And yet there is no shortage of t-shirts, shoes and cheap clothing. And parasites do thrive off of the worker's back.

This is because poor people have to make them or starve.

If those countries had safety nets, no more t-shirts for you, since producing these, not to mention cotton farming, is not exciting at all. You just do it for money.

Why would you think that the economy would be limited to some small value? The value of the maximum limit can be very large. Other than that, the maximum is personal to each resident. It is to reduce the size of giant enterprises, such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Imagine that these companies would have competitors in the form of ordinary start-ups. The startups would have plenty of money to do that. Maximum restrictions will not reduce the incentive to work in any way. On the contrary, there will be even more incentive to work, because you can make a lot more money and buy a lot more things with that money. The maximum can be from 0 to infinity. No parasitism will occur. Businesses will plan their budgets properly.

I think this article is out of your hands. You didn't even realize that the discussion should be in a Telegram group. You read and do not understand what is written. I recommend you reread the article many times before commenting.

How does that worldview jive with the notion that I'd do my job even if I wasn't so handsomely paid?

There will always be differentiators.

I don't work with garbage or have to break my back, this is worth "performing" for.

This is because you have culture which encourages performance.

Once you enable parasitism other cultures also arise, which discourage performance, and the people of those cultures just don't have that notion.

They may even look attractive. Think hippies. They surely look better and have greater outlook than wage slaves, housewives or salesmen.

And that trend is notoriously hard to reverse. Even in EU they have massive problems with even getting some minorities to attend school.

>Even in EU they have massive problems with even getting some minorities to attend school.

I think you're reaching a conclusion that the evidence doesn't completely support here.

I live in the EU and I was one of the people who didn't want to attend school, because school is glorified daycare and in impoverished areas it quite literally feels like prison.

I don't really know if you're right, my mum and I grew up living on income support and while it was awful I do cherish the fact that I got to spend time with her.

She now works for the government, I work in tech, we've both "done more" but the money she earns now isn't the reason for that, it's because:

1) It's BORING to sit on your arse and do nothing

2) People identify with their purpose (hippies identified with anti-war, and even hippies have had productive impacts on society with social movements, music and art)

3) When free to do anything: you do the thing you love

This last point means you can't keep treating service workers like shit, which is why it's unpopular.

> When free to do anything: you do the thing you love

The thing is, what you love is not what others need. Do you love tinkering with my sewage system? Clean my house? Wash my toilet?

Clean your own house and wash your own toilet. You, not me, are the one who has to live there, anyway.

No it just removes one incentive to work, enriching yourself beyond what is needed shouldnt be necessary as an "incentive"

It he only incentive to do stuff money?

Asking because I find myself building a lot of stuff despite not really making money off it.

For some stuff, the only incentive is money. Nobody's going to haul your garbage away because that's what fulfills them.

> Nobody's going to haul your garbage away because that's what fulfills them.

Maybe not directly as individuals but a number of companies makes money from trash ;-)

If nobody wants to do that, that seems like a real big incentive to find a better solution to the problem.

The idea that the only, or even primary, incentive to do stuff is money is an invention of 20th century economics. It was then tragically taught to most educated people, especially business leaders. That made it a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, along with the shareholder value myth (the idea that companies should be (may even be required to be) entirely short term profit motivated out of a duty to shareholders. These are among the most harmful ideas from the 20th century. To answer your original question, no money is not the only incentive to do stuff. But in Econ 101 that assumption is made to make the math easy.

The incentive to do work is to gain power. The power to feed and house your kids, the power to not be tortured or killed if you are a slave, the power to obtain other things you want. Money is a proxy for power. Has a better alternative proxy to power been demonstrated to exist?

Do all people want power? Seems like Nietzsche would probably agree, but Damocles would voice objections.

Seems like what most people want is something more akin to self-determination. It isn't quite power, and it isn't quite freedom, but somewhere in the middle.

What is self determination? Having the freedom to do what you want to do is the same as having the power to do what you want to do.

Having the power to attract your desired mate is also a power, and it involves showing you have power.

The nuance is in the contrast between freedom from compulsion and the ability to compel. Most care about the former but power only grants the latter.

Do you want to enslave your partner? Compel them to live with you against their will?

The power to be free from compulsion is also power. I understand the distinction you are trying to make, but it is all on one spectrum.

Do I want to enslave my partner or compel them to live with me against their will? No. I am sure others in history have wanted that and still do today. But the important thing is you need power to not be enslaved by others, even if that just means living within the borders of a tribe of people who act against slavery.

Since money is a proxy for power, and since resources are finite and we do not live in this world without effecting others, I would say the distinction of having the power to be free from compulsion and the power to compel others is very, very murky.

For example, I am not using my power to directly compel someone with violence like a slave owner, but I know that living the quality of life that people in the top 10% to 20% of the US do is for sure compelling others to live with more pollution and/or fewer resources due to me consuming so many resources. I am pretty sure this claim could be made for anyone living in a detached single family house, or even people with more than 2 kids. Or maybe even 1 kid.

If we go back to the original claim:

> The idea that the only, or even primary, incentive to do stuff is money is an invention of 20th century economics.

Yes, people like doing things for their community or helping others here and there, but functionally no one is going to change bed pans in a nursing home without getting something in return.

It is questionable whether these two ever actually met, but the moral of the story is relevant so I'll repeat the tale.

Alexander the Great, the embodiment of power, approached notorious hobo philosopher Diogenes the Cynic and asked if there was anything he can do for him. Sunbathing Diogenes asks Alexander if he wouldn't mind stepping to the side a bit, as he is blocking the light.

Alexander is able to compel armies and lay countries to ruin, but Diogenes is resistant to all compulsion but is without land, possessions, rank, title, nobility, reputation, and so on. There is nothing you can take away from him he hasn't already given up, no hardship you can impose on him that he does not willingly endure. Even the times he is de facto enslaved, he is still free, because he willingly subjects himself to any punishment.

It would be an absurd conclusion that the reason Diogenes is able to make a mockery of this request is because this homeless man is more powerful than Alexander the Great.

> It would be an absurd conclusion that the reason Diogenes is able to make a mockery of this request is because this homeless man is more powerful than Alexander the Great.

The only moral of this story I understood is that it is nonsensical to compare two different metrics. I do not know how one would come to the above conclusion, comparing Alexander’s power over many others to Diogenes’ power over himself and presumably pain receptors.

Alexander being able to kill Diogenes more easily than Diogenes being able to kill Alexander would be a proper comparison, or Alexander being able to compel more people than Diogenes, but even then, I fail to see the utility for this discussion.

Well let's go back to the statement you made a few comments ago

> Money is a proxy for power. Has a better alternative proxy to power been demonstrated to exist?

Here the a man with no possessions suddenly has power, and the richest most powerful man in the world struggles to exert power.

I disagree with characterizing Person A not wanting something from Person B as person B struggling to exert power.

Aristotle's virtue ethics is a helpful lens to view the power dynamic within this story. Virtue is defined as a purpose or reason for being: Alexander is good where he fits his purpose, like how you would judge a tool to use. As a great ruler, he should be able to demonstrate not just his ability to kill and threaten, but positive qualities like providing for his subjects.

When Diogenes asks Alexander to move aside, it demonstrates the limits of this power, and therefore Alexander's virtue as a ruler: someone who doesn't want anything gets exactly as much benefit from this king as from anyone else. If the only thing Alexander can contribute is threats, that would simply make him unvirtuous - and equivalent in power to any armed madman.

> When Diogenes asks Alexander to move aside, it demonstrates the limits of this power, and therefore Alexander's virtue as a ruler: someone who doesn't want anything gets exactly as much benefit from this king as from anyone else.

This seems like a trivial fact to me, or I am missing what is notable about this “virtue”.

> If the only thing Alexander can contribute is threats, that would simply make him unvirtuous - and equivalent in power to any armed madman.

I guess so in this specific interaction, but it would be ridiculous to say a person that commands armies is equivalent in power to any armed madman in the big picture. My responses are in the context of societies using money as a tool to incentivize people, to which I am not aware of there being a better known alternative.

> along with the shareholder value myth (the idea that companies should be (may even be required to be) entirely short term profit motivated out of a duty to shareholders

The only myth here is you thinking that "shareholder value" = "short term profits". Amazon (in the past) and uber are counterexamples of that.

That's essentially modernism (or at least, its economic side); there's a reason postmodernism is hot right now, and it's because modernism is both wrong and rubbish.

The author thinks so. Money isn't the only way to be compensated, but it's a measure of value.

I wonder if the author would cap all value transfers, or just monetary. What about limiting in-kind compensation by transfers of land, securities, food, or reputation?

Money isn’t the only incentive to do anything, but there are plenty of things for which money is the only incentive, a lot of which are pretty critical for functioning societies.

Are you building hobby things for your entertainment (which I do as well) or building things which make society advance and which others benefit from?

It’s the loss of incentives for the latter that concern me.

Well, both. I'm building and running this: https://search.marginalia.nu/

Paid the server out of pocket, built the code all by myself.

I do take donations that currently just about cover the running costs, but at this surplus it will take me something like 30 years to get back the hardware investment (assuming no hardware fails in the interim and running costs don't increase).

Don't take this as complaining, it's just a statement of facts. I'm incredibly grateful that so many people are supporting it.

building what ? I'm curious

I've built and operate a search engine.

Define 'perform.'

If I am to be working without monetary incentive, as many here suggest, I would still do something. But I will mostly focus on things which amuse me, and not on anything in real demand by society. Even then I will only do the most exciting part while leaving a trail of technical debt.

Would you expect anything else? People fixing obscure bugs in legacy products for you instead of reinventing the wheel, poorly?

Someone from 1800 or earlier would call us parasites.

We work so little and own so much!

Time to go back to owning nothing and working all day every day under threat of actual violence and starvation.

Now that's performance!

(I'm afraid some rich assholes actually believe that today, of course they'd be the leaders of such a society)

There's still room for QoL improvement, and income isn't the only incentive.

> Parasitism is a very convenient life style once you adopt to it, and very hard to abandon even if you wish to.

100% agree, look no further than current communist, and ex-communist countries.

Even ones which succesfully "decommunized" still have that ex-party member class which still lives off fraud, and economic crimes 30 years after.

I think you're forgetting (or deliberately ignoring) all the great political and economic frauds that have happened in capitalist systems too.

I don't think any political/economical/social system can ever be immune to fraud and sociopaths.

It’s true that fraud and corruption will always exist but it’s also true that it’s less prevalent in a capitalist system because it’s more (not completely) transparent than any other system that has been tried by humans so far.

You actually think the political class is not full of thieves anywhere else?

It's a career path that attracts this kind of people, like flies to shit.

I am calling countries in which communists are no longer the political class, but even when turned into a social underlayer class, these fellows, and their offspring, or even their grandchildren cannot vean themselves off economic parasitism, and economic crime.

They are becoming a multigenerational class living off economic crime.

I can't help but laugh because your last line perfectly describes inheritance, a practice whose abolishment was demanded in The Communist Manifesto.

Yeah, I often hate doctors myself. Doesn't mean the majority are bad.

An ideal economy would limit the aggregation of power, hit compounding with a logarithm to make it harder to amass more political and economic power.

How would you limit political power? Would you assign a person to ensure nobody else has too much political power? Congratulations, you just invented dictatorship!

Term limits for all positions, ranked choice voting and more direct democracy.

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