Comment by throwaway34241 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway34241 | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's useful to explore historical perspectives, but there are many others. If I look at my parents' generation in the US, people were being forced against their will to fight overseas in a war that didn't achieve anything (and involved mass poisoning the crops of substance farmers). You had double-digit inflation, rationing gas by license plate, and, at points, literal price controls.

Before the baby boomers we had global war, before that the great depression and growing literal communism, before that prohibition and the mob. And of course prohibition was prompted by social problems around alcohol.

So I don't think "problems compound" is always true. For a long time, teen pregnancy and alcohol use were on the rise, but that trend didn't continue indefinitely, and both have relatively recently had dramatic declines.

If you look closely enough at any time period there are often multiple serious political, economic, and/or social problems, so much so that it seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

> Post-stalinist Soviet Union, while not manically murderous, eventually imploded under the weight of a myriad suboptimal policy choices

Even this I'm not so sure. Here is a graph of their GDP [1]. My understanding is it was a political collapse first (a failed coup), and the economic collapse followed. An example that I've read China has been very mindful of (apparently Xi talks about Russia much more in his books than he does the US).

> I do wonder how US/China rivalry will play out in the 2040s and beyond.

Me too, at that point they'll probably be a much larger economy than the US. Will that have a destabilizing effect (especially with a potential military conflict over Taiwan)? Or will (the US) having a shared rival be somewhat unifying? The UK did OK despite declining in (relative) importance, but I could imagine the US struggling with its domestic problems even without any great power rivalry...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_GDP_per_capi...

Life in the '80s in the Soviet Union space was marred by widespread food shortages. Here is a fairly accurate video of how the usual grocery shop looked like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8LtQhIQ2AE When the sporadic food supply truck would show up, people would line up for hours, many only to leave empty handed when the load would inevitably run out.

In 1989 Boris Yeltsin visited Texan grocery store and was positively shocked by the choice and availability. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...

This is the very tangible result of suboptimal choices.

But I agree, life in the '90s, post collapse, was even worse. I read it as a warning that embarking on a suboptimal choice course may be hard to steer back until reality forces a very harsh collapse.

> This is the very tangible result of suboptimal choices.

I agree - I've always liked that story about the grocery store.

I don't think bad policies are something that can be straightforwardly extrapolated into a course to the Soviet Union though. The US has had price controls in the past but backed off. Even large welfare states like Sweden eventually hit a point where they stopped or turned back the expansion of the public sector (reducing marginal rates, eliminating wealth taxes, spending as % of GDP leveling off, etc).

The Soviet Union even collapsed while it was heading in a more positive direction from where they were at (reducing state political and economic control).

So there doesn't seem to me to be a straightforward connection between incremental policy changes and collapse.

I don't see a clear connection between collapse and subsequent "steering back" either. Support for the market economy and multiparty democracy in Russia are both at record lows [1]. Venezuela has undergone an economic collapse but is still very dysfunctional. Neither seems on track to catch up with western countries any time soon.

It's interesting to contrast this with China, which had similar issues to the Soviet Union (of having an inefficient state-run economy) and had heavy debate about how to go about reforming it [2]. At least for their economic prospects the incremental path they chose seems to be working out better.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Escaped-Therapy-Routledge-Studies-Chi...

These are all good points. Perhaps it is time to inquire why did SU run an inefficient state-run economy for 40 years after the manic dictator was gone. Without going into too many details, the justification, even the imperative, for said policies was made in the moral dimension. As tragically exemplified by SU, there are policy systems that feed on failure. The more the policy fails to deliver the desired results, the more it's taken as evidence that the moral problem the policy purports to fix is actually deeper rooted and requires even more radical policies. Until you get to the point where the entire economic activity is controlled by the state because individuals, full of moral failings as they are, can't be trusted with charting their own course.

I have to say that my American friends have a much higher confidence in the pendulum theory. Coming of age near the end of a 40 (70?) year historical tailspin, I have a somewhat less optimistic view.

Sure, the US is certainly not immune to that dynamic. For example dysfunctional regulation restricts the housing supply (in certain areas), causing the prices to be high. Then left-wing politicians will point to the high prices as a failure of capitalism and oppose new development.

But the political coalitions here (and even the economics) are somewhat complicated. For example, California recently passed several bills to de-regulate housing, which were initiatives of (a sub-faction of) the left-leaning party that controls the state. And the right-leaning party is not a technocratic one like Singapore - an important sub-faction of the right-leaning party goes against advice by economists themselves, on macro issues and increasingly on trade also.

The non-economic factions are more poised to benefit from dysfunction, and in my view, also more likely to cause dysfunction, and so enable each other. So my view is also more similar to a tailspin than a pendulum. Just that it is not as simple as trying as hard as possible to displace the establishment, because the people best positioned to replace them are often worse.

There is another, darker, argument, which I've seen presented by some fairly well-informed people. It goes something like this: the industrial revolution, with its huge inequality, financial crash, and the eventual fall to authoritarianism around the world, is, in fact, the natural order of things. And this has been papered over by massive economic distortions by governments starting with WWII, along with perpetually increasing debt levels as interest rates decline (which since debt and savings are two sides of the same coin, allows overall savings to increase and makes things less zero-sum).

With this premise, there is no natural politically-stable state to return to, and the path for managing outcomes that maintain public support for capitalism becomes even more narrow. I'm still thinking about it, but (unfortunately) I've found the arguments pretty compelling (from billionaire capitalist Ray Dalio [1], among others).

[1] https://economicprinciples.org/

Liberal market based societies / economies have many failings, and would be a very interesting conversation to explore some of these.

To refocus on the UC situation, and at the risk of putting words in your mouth, the general idea is that UC is exploring a set of policies, which may or maynot work for them, worst case they fail and some of the other XXX universities in this country will raise to the occasion and take their place. What's the big deal?

The SU slow moving disaster is relevant insomuch there are moral systems out there that have a mind of their own and are impervious to feedback, if not downright feeding on failure. They are so self evidently righteous that no cost is too high and no institution can afford to not implement them. With no control group left to highlight failures and moderate excesses, the whole society tailspins and the only hope becomes, tragically, total collapse.

The extent to which SU story is relevant to current UC / US situation, anybody's guess. My only job here is to be a witness for past errors.

> Liberal market based societies / economies have many failings, and would be a very interesting conversation to explore some of these.

On an absolute basis maybe, but on a relative basis I'd say they've been very effective. But as you said that's a different conversation (which if you want to have off HN, my email is in my profile!).

> worst case they fail and some of the other XXX universities in this country will raise to the occasion and take their place. What's the big deal?

> They are so self evidently righteous that no cost is too high

> the only hope becomes, tragically, total collapse.

Well, I didn't mean to minimize it exactly, just that mass de-industrialization and 3rd world status is probably going too far.

One of the hallmarks of extremism is the view you refer to that "no cost is too high". Sometimes this is about boosting the general welfare, but more often it is about a (perceived or real) threat. If every win by the right is a slippery slope to fascism, deplatforming becomes easily justified. And if every win by the left is a slippery slope to communism, it becomes easier to tolerate public undermining of the traditional checks on power, that depend on public support to be effective, like elections / the courts / legislature / (even the same side) media, etc.

The problem is as extremism increases, the threat to the other party becomes, increasingly, real. And the case for further authoritarian measures or undermining the existing system becomes more logical.

I have two issues with this accelerationist scenario. One is that the escalation is inevitably bi-directional in the end, and it is difficult to predict which faction (if any) will win, only that they are more likely to be authoritarian.

The second is that I don't see crisis as something that necessarily leads eventually to positive reforms. I think it is fully possible to have a crisis, then have things be poorly functioning for quite some time. Crisis aided the Soviet Union's fall but it also aided its rise.

In the US, the process of escalation seems to be well on its way, and to me seems more likely to lead to crisis in the medium term than incremental reforms (in any direction).

Deep sigh. WW2 was prefaced by the Spanish civil war, which gave us Guernica and George Orwell. Stumbled recently upon a fragment of an account of the era. A society fractured along familiar fault lines, each side demonizing the other at levels difficult to comprehend, but becoming more and more plausible. We have to lower the temperature somehow.

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