Comment by afterburner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by afterburner | Hacker News Reader

> But the most boneheaded, bizarre mistake that the Sri Lankan government made was a disastrous plan to shift the entire country to organic agriculture. In April of 2021 the government banned the import and use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. This devastated Sri Lankan agriculture, since, as it turns out, fertilizer is really really important. Production of tea — Sri Lanka’s main cash crop — fell by 18% in a year. Production of rice — the main food crop — fell by even more.

From https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farmi... :

> By 2020, the total cost of fertilizer imports and subsidies was close to $500 million each year. With fertilizer prices rising, the tab was likely to increase further in 2021. Banning synthetic fertilizers seemingly allowed Rajapaksa to kill two birds with one stone: improving the nation’s foreign exchange situation while also cutting a massive expenditure on subsidies from the pandemic-hit public budget.

> But when it comes to agricultural practices and yields, there is no free lunch. Agricultural inputs—chemicals, nutrients, land, labor, and irrigation—bear a critical relationship to agricultural output. From the moment the plan was announced, agronomists in Sri Lanka and around the world warned that agricultural yields would fall substantially. The government claimed it would increase the production of manure and other organic fertilizers in place of imported synthetic fertilizers. But there was no conceivable way the nation could produce enough fertilizer domestically to make up for the shortfall.

You don't get anything "for free", and cutting supports like this will inevitably doom a sputtering economy, when the actual solution was almost certainly more government spending, not less.

The US is actually lucky to understand this at the deepest levels of policy and law making, with massive aid packages to prevent total collapse. Even Europe tried harsh austerity in the wake of 2008, and the fad lasted way too long there.

The Sri Lankan leader's hostile attitude towards the Sri Lankan population is what made protesters storm the leader's home.

> cutting supports like this will inevitably doom a sputtering economy, when the actual solution was almost certainly more government spending, not less.

In the US that might be a sensible policy decision but SL can't do that.

The concrete supports that are needed (fuel, fertilizer, food) are bought with dollars and yuan. The government ran out of those, because it was already spending unsustainably to prop up the economy.

The government slashed taxes, right when the government needed the money. They were not making an honest effort to support the economy, they were setting up to loot it.

> The US is actually lucky to understand this at the deepest levels of policy and law making, with massive aid packages to prevent total collapse.

The current inflation crisis suggests that even the US economy can reach its limit with endless money printing and stimulus.

With the cost of borrowing going up, the executive and congress are going to start feeling pressure to cut spending or dramatically raise taxes.

> With the cost of borrowing going up, the executive and congress are going to start feeling pressure to cut spending or dramatically raise taxes.

Hmm, not sure that's the case given recent headlines in Politico.

The current spike in inflation is a world-wide phenomena, effecting every country on Earth, and therefore it seems unlikely to have much to do with the USA's creation of new money. The USA printed trillions of dollars of new money after 2008 and yet inflation remained very low for the next decade. If, now, the USA's printing of money is having some new effect, you have to explain why Argentina, South Africa, India, Vietnam and China are suddenly vulnerable to USA monetary policy to a degree that they've never been vulnerable before.

The current spike did not happen by chance or out of the blue. This is the result of worldwide efforts to limit the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis. To the extent that it was possible a lot of the countries followed the US in enacting liberal low cost lending. US of course with the mighty dollar was able to print a far more and pump far more into their economy than other countries. But many other countries followed with similar efforts. Also the newly minted dollars don't just sit in the US. I would say a lot of inflation in India is driven also by cheap VC money that flooded the Indian market in the last decade. Turns out if you dump a super duper amount of money into the economy inflation goes up. Who knew!!? As for the delay of a decade for this to kick in, my theory is that the supply took that time to really hot the market because only a few uber rich made the most of this liberal printing frenzy and the bottleneck delayed the eventual overheating of the market.

> This is the result of worldwide efforts to limit the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis.

> overheating of the market.

Citations needed.

> This is the result of worldwide efforts to limit the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis.

This needs citation?

> overheating of the market.

I did say "My theory"

You gave a theory for why it took a decade. You stated the cause as fact.

Is there a single western country which didn’t print massive amounts of money following COVID and prior to that with 2008?

I remember seeing tons of economics articles talking about how the consequences of monetary expansion were historically being overrated by economists in the past and that countries have far more capacity than previously thought. But that was easily said during the good times when spending is high.

Blaming it all on a war in Eastern Europe seems to be convenient excuse but there’s a reason you don’t spend wildly during good times, so you have the capacity to spend during the bad times. This has consistent been a critique of modern monetarist and Keynes policy (although you could argue it’s far more monetarist since a Keynesian approach would be via things like infrastructure investments for working class jobs, instead of just endless spending on backchannel megacorporate dealing in thousand page bills).

We’ve seen inflation in different areas for two lears - lumber (both supply side by mills shutting down from covid , and demand side from people doing construction projects due to covid), imports (shipping chaos from covid and the evergiven didn’t help), silicon chips and their knockons into things from cars to network switches due to china’s covid policies, to oil (demand evaporated due to covid, then when demand came back supply didn’t follow), then Russia caused more supply constriction in both oil and grain supplies.

Not true about India. We had a spike in inflation but its now going down. Our latest print was 7.1%.

India also didn’t print much money in the pandemic. The effect is clear now. We only had a short lived inflation spike after the economy reopened and its now getting back to normal.

Except Japan, Switzerland or Norway just to name the few. Meanwhile, it's rising in countries that followed Fed's playbook (notably the EU block and specifically Eurozone countries which fall under ECB's policy).

The US economy sets the tone for the rest of the world. It’s absolutely huge and a lot of the evonomic systems evolved around serving it.

Resources are more expensive because of interruptions due to war and disease.

Like in the 1970s. Crude oil prices went up 10X between 1972 and 1982. Is it surprising that the price of everything went up during that time, or economies everywhere experienced stress?

Fiscal and monetary policy isn't the whole explanation, no matter what certain recipients of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel would have you believe.

You would hope that someone wanting to switch to organic agriculture would encourage it … rather than just flip a switch…

Organic agriculture is where it belong. Mom and pop farms sold in stores where it costs 3x as much for no particular increase in nutritional value. Fertilizers are tangentially bad for the environment but not directly, only in that it causes algal blooms in water bodies. Pesticides are bad yes but the research should concentrate on finding pesticides that work well with the environment. We got close with glyphosate but we’re finding out that we didn’t.

The nutrients in soil are a non-renewable resource. You can’t grow on the same piece of land and expect a bumper crop every year if you don’t use fertilizers.

Plants grown in healthy soil that does not require short term synthetic inputs are more resistant to pests. The organic fertilizers and composts that build up suitable topsoil are literally the "pesticides that with well with the environment" that you are looking for.

No one is expecting bumper crops without any nutrient inputs. Synthetic fertilizers are not the only possible nutrient inputs.

>The nutrients in soil are a non-renewable resource.

I'm sorry but they actually are. Every time you do tillage you start from scratch. Hence you run out of nutrients much faster than if you used no till. Most of the fertilizer in tillage operations just gets washed away during rain which results in an over application of fertilizer and the runoff results in algae blooms.

No-till and avoiding the use of fungicide, along with proper rotation/leaving the land fallow is the way.

Carefully considered mixed planting can remove the need for pesticides too.

Shits not hard, but trading off the "big yield now" for "yields for longer" requires long term thinking that a lot of people are terrible at.

If you use fertilizers and expect a bumper crop every harvest, eventually the soil gets fucked to a point where amendments to make it viable are too expensive, getting to a point where the soil loses integrity and is unusable.

To keep land arable in the longer term, you need to do crop/usage rotation, no-till farming, etc.

Agriculture is fun.

> To keep land arable in the longer term, you need to do crop/usage rotation

It’s not like we’ve known this for 8,000 years

> only in that it causes algal blooms in water bodies

...which results in water that's so clogged it can't support fish, aquatic arthropods and so on.

Perhaps that doesn't matter, if the river rolling past your window is the Mississippi; but in this country, our longest rivers are only 100 miles or so.

Reminds me of governments who try to switch people to public transport by making driving harder, rather than making public transport better.

In my experience, the number one thing that makes driving harder is other drivers, not the government. Drivers full roads to over-capacity and then I sit in gridlock.

In Paris it is a deliberate attempt to create traffic jam to force people to stop driving. They only succeeded on the first part.

But Paris already has amazing public transit that is only getting expanded more (line E to Mantes through La Défense, Grand Paris Express, line 14, a bunch of trams, etc.). And the point of the road closures was to make walking and mostly cycling more enjoyable. You can see that it worked, because places like Rivoli, quais de Seine, bd Sébastopol are full with bikes. Making driving more of a pain thus inciting more use of public transit or bikes is just a bonus.

Nah, i really dislike Paris and wouldn't come back ever, but in fairness, those measure really had an impact on the pollution and the public transportation useage.

There is virtually no need to drive a private automobile in Paris if you are able bodied.

The same applies to Berlin, London, and many other places.

...and have a taste for tunnels stinking piss, overcrowded trains, very long and sordid corridors (Chatelet).

Don't know about Chatelet but the last time I was to London (which is not more than a year ago), the tunnels and trains seemed fine. Yes, it gets crowded during the morning peak hours in some of the busy routes but apart from that, they seem to be really good. Makes me sad that most other cities do not provide that kind of easily accessible public transport.

Sorry I was talking about Paris. London is a much more pleasant experience, despite the tube being so much older, the tunnels narrower and the temperature very hot in the summer. I avoid taking the metro in Paris, I have no problem taking the tube in London. Not the least because the brits have preserved a form of courtesy without which there would be deads every day in the tube (if people were pushing on overcrowded platforms like they do in Paris).

London's transport system is extremely well run, despite the national governments political hostility towards it.

TfL (Transport for London) do a lot of interesting things to manage traffic (rerouting people on foot through stations in interesting ways) to manage traffic/congestion.

Its also rather heavily surveilled and policed by the British Transport Police (a fully fledged police force specifically for the UK public transport networks).

Tbf, I didn't mind that too much. The metro could use some improvements, for sure.

A lot of people feel the need to force others to do what they think is right. Regardless of consequences

A good chunk of people feel the need to force others, no matter what right or wrong looks like objectively. The exercise of power is the entire point.

The US is very lucky as a significant amount of people have been taught that government aid/handouts are wrong, as in generally. I'm even impressed Trump spent a few trillion and still didn't get blasted for it by most people. The only two serious politicians who spoke up about it was Ben Sasse who in a conference call with constituents said "he spends like a drunken sailor" and Ted Cruise who at the end with the last aid package voted against it.

What will happen to this country if the next president actually stops spending in order to do what his voters want?

What's funny is the deepest red counties in the reddest states are also the largest recipients of US domestic agriculture subsidies and benefit programs.

Then you have other things like Walmart and similar McJobs where the government is indirectly subsidizing the companies, by various child food aid, healthcare and benefits to employees because the company doesn't pay enough for its employees to live without aid.

That's why subsidies bad and subsidies good are a false dilemma. "Spending money well" might seem like an obvious solution but it runs up against the problem of corrupt politicians, of which there are many. Hence, we have (worldwide) politicians handing out money to places they are (probably) needed (in your example, the agriculture subsidies) and places they are not (Walmart and similar McJobs), and it's possible that the latter receive more than the former.

It's also possible that it's impossible to get subsidies spent in a way that isn't rife with such corruption. I would say that the only way it may be possible is small government. Not because subsidies are bad, but the only way to watch government closely enough to keep corruption low is to make it small enough to watch in entirety.

Like a computer program, if it has less lines and less features, or less overall complexity, it should be easier to spot bugs and egregious mistakes. That's not the same as not wanting features at all. Or, it can become a political version of Zawinski's law where people want more from government and the resulting size and complexity is such that a group of corrupt developers can spread their corruption across so many branches and parts of the project that no one can watch it all (after all, isn't that how the 3 letter agencies undermine security software?)

> would say that the only way it may be possible is small government. Not because subsidies are bad, but the only way to watch government closely enough to keep corruption low is to make it small enough to watch in entirety

Well said, this sort of thinking needs to both be better understood on the right (all gov spending, taxation, and intervention isn’t immediately bad) and on the left (every critique of government doesn’t mean the only alternative people want is some radical anarcho-capitalist zero government fantasy world).

Instead it’s smaller and more effective government but still strongly supporting it where it makes sense ie subsidized education, healthcare, and other places with uncontrolled externalities that markets can’t properly serve.

More about being cheerleaders for what works, not just lazily pushing a government spending free for all nor a “stop everything” approach where only soft targets get reduced like teachers salaries instead of subsidies to billion dollar companies.

It’s harder and nuanced, but still worth fighting for.

The Democrats don't believe in subsidies for everything all the time, nor do they ever campaign on that. Some republicans simply say "stop government handouts" they don't say "Some government handouts are good but we need to control it"

Were you meant to reply to me? I didn't mention either party and I'm not an American. It may be a serendipitous mistake though, as it has uncovered an obvious bias that you should address.

That’s not how benefits work. Giving free things to the employees makes them richer, which increases their negotiation power, which increases their wages. They would be getting paid less without it, not more.

What can cause this is welfare cliffs and systems with asset tests like SSI.

Bernie does like to say this because it sounds good, but he knows it’s false.

Then why does anyone get paid government-mandated minimum wage?

Because given the choice a minimum-wage-paying employer would pay even less. That's not inconsistent with state benefits making employees richer, it's just not making them rich enough to negotiate above that level.

You saw this play out across the pandemic: business owners complained that the increased level of state aid was damaging their ability to employ at the minimum wage level.

Also it's got to be said: some people aren't good at negotiating and/or don't know their value. In aggregate the effect you see is employee supply drying up as the total number willing to work at that level decreases, but in specific there will be individuals who haven't made that choice yet.

You can get paid more or less on the minimum wage by e.g. having more or less working hours given to you. And some people don't use their negotiating power for increased wages, but rather for other preferences (like getting a formal job instead of an informal one, better working conditions, time with their children, etc.)

Of course there's a lot more to it than that.

Ok, but how do expect money to keep circulating? Negative interest rates?

People in the US are only against handouts to other people who aren't them. I wonder how many people would opt out Medicare or SSI if they could?

My mother in-law complained about letting refugees into the country and says we shouldn't allow due to the cost yet she is a war refugee herself. When asked about her situation, she says she deserved it.

Also how many companies opted out of PPP loans.

> People in the US are only against handouts to other people who aren't them. I wonder how many people would opt out Medicare or SSI if they could?

> Also how many companies opted out of PPP loans.

This is exactly what I was going to highlight, people who use the narrative that some how a $1200 stimulus check sent nearly years ago is what is keeping people from taking low paying, dead-end jobs are the first to overlook the fact that PPP was the biggest welfare handout to the business class in some time, compounded on top of lower tax obligations. And 75% of the PPP [0] was never actually used for payroll!

It's insulting to working class people to see this narrative be as persuasive as it is, even amongst their own, but if I've learned anything about US culture is that was it 'trashy' for the lower class, is some how 'classy' for the rich. It's a pathetic attempt to divide people into already highly contentious tribes in order to maintain the illusion of business as usual.

0: https://finance.yahoo.com/video/report-shows-most-paycheck-p...

You get a recession, like every other time the state has reduced spending below taxation whilst running a trade deficit.

>You don't get anything "for free", and cutting supports like this will inevitably doom a sputtering economy, when the actual solution was almost certainly more government spending, not less.

Government spending isn't free magic money either. You increase the amount of money in circulation, hoping that people will produce more goods. Instead, you increase the size of the bullshit economy - low-effort activities that only exist under the abundance of money. So more and more stuff gets imported from China because nobody in the right mind will take a $1/hour factory job if you can be a wellness youtuber for a multiple of that. The amount of useless bureaucracy grows, the number of people willing to take responsibility dwindles, but everyone is happy because, well, Mother Government takes care of us all.

Occasionally you notice that the wages don't grow and the housing is unaffordable because the workers don't really have any leverage anymore, but you brush off those thoughts because there are far too many distractions anyway.

Then BOOM, that fragile supply line involving slave labor in China and natural resources from Putin's friends gets broken, and suddenly, we have a shortage of everything, can't manufacture our own stuff, and that freshly minted dollar can buy you many shitcoins, but won't get you any baby formula.

I think, we are about to find out that excessive spending was nothing more than borrowing from our future prosperity, and the time for that debt to mature is coming fast.

That’s when it goes bad, but borrowing against the future to kickstart today is also the principal behind innumerable success stories.

May I humbly ask for an example? In my personal experience, trying to rush a short-term solution while ignoring the long-term implications always makes situation worse. Like eating planting stock to address immediate hunger would cause a devastating famine next season.

Japan, Taiwan and South Korea all taxed the crap out of their people while poor to subsidise industry by controlling foreign exchange. It still would have been impossible without massive amounts of foreign investment. They had to borrow the money abroad to invest in industrial infrastructure. Same for the US in the 1800s. Britain had the capital. The US had the exciting investment opportunities.

The UK took so long to get to the Industrial Revolution because it had to save the money itself. Everyone since then has been able to rely on capital other people in order countries have saved to jumpstart their economic growth.

Yes. But his point is that what we have been doing is more like taking on credit card debt to spend on booze than taking a bank loan to buy machinery. And assuming that being the case, your statement completely misses the mark.

You don't borrow and eat the planting stock, you borrow the left over products that nobody else bought.

Let’s say you have land but don’t have any planting stock or enough money to buy it. So, you borrow some from a guy who has extra, promising to give him twice as much back next year. You grow food, and collect enough planting stock to pay back the lender and plant next year’s harvest.

And example of "borrowing against the future to kickstart today"? Pretty much all businesses borrow to grow. All governments borrow, especially in times of need. Pretty much all people borrow to buy a home.

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