Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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For these particular services I think

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

is more like it. That is, a Raspberry Pi is a much more powerful computer than the IBM 360/75 that planned the moon mission and costs orders of magnitude less but there has been no productivity improvement for baseball players.

Movies are an entirely business than they were back in the day. I remember Ghostbusters being in the theater for more than a year, and back then there were not just the first-run theaters that charged full price but many second-run theaters that had cut-rate double features (I remember seeing one of Gremlins and The Dark Crystal)

Today home video "competes" with theaters in some sense, a month of Netflix costs less than one movie ticket but the consequence isn't downward price pressures on theaters but exactly the opposite because home video demolished the second-run theaters leaving the first-run theaters to go on their own trajectory.

(And as for TV sets and things to plug into TV sets... Today's TV offers better quality than was imaginable in the 1960s and is cheap in comparison. It's astonishing what people spent for old game consoles like the Atari 2600, what a VCR and tapes cost in 1980, ...)

Problem with such theories is people are making the choices as to what laws and interpretation of them are, not magic.

The people in charge have gotten much richer than average people.

That’s not magic or unexplainable. It’s explainable in very easy terms; humans are taking advantage of other humans.

Sorry; the magical thinking must stop. It’s people intentionally designing policy to empower them at others expense: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...

Economic theories are just another form of “god spoke to me, and said for every 10 widgets you produce, I own 9 to exploit for myself”.

It’s just people being biased and manipulative for their own gain.

Edit: asset valuations are often self reported and inflated to fake wealth. Fake social media accounts influence millions in spend, faking public interest. What economists are measuring is illusory.

It's usually hard to say if people are better or worse off. Back in the 19th century Europeans weren't all that sure if they were better off or worse of than the Romans.

Today's cars are better than cars were in the 1960s in every way. People live in bigger and better houses. Post-Starbucks you can find a good independent espresso bar even in small towns in the flyover states.

I remember the demagogue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche

talking about the decline and fall of the US in terms of the decline in the number of hospital beds. But the truth is it's a good thing and not a bad thing: back in the day you would spend weeks in the hospital after getting heart surgery, now they know you're better off going home and being moderately active as soon as you can.

The marxist argument that capitalism is a scam because somebody other than the worker makes a profit doesn't ring true with me because I've had jobs where I didn't produce enough value to earn my pay and it was always an enormously stressful situation that ended in tears.

Kings of old could not go buy Wagyu at the super market.

We don’t need the patronizing and pontificating of the past to see some people do real work producing stuff and services and some use a pen to claim a portion for themselves.

Ye olde English gibberish to make sense of that is unnecessary. Physical reality does not operate on human philosophy.

"Pen to claim a portion for themselves" ignores capital risk, entrepreneurial thinking, connections, and other value those pen-bearers brought to the table. There would be no "real work" or stuff to produce if not for those creating well-defined and stable roles for the rest of us.

There are many arguments you can make about how the pen-bearers have an unfair advantage from the start, or how their risk is at times unnecessarily subsidized, but deciding their entire existence is evil is silly.

All the risk is distributed among the population; failure on the part of the corporation means the real resources and energy used prior to failure are lost to others, and plenty of instances of a business failure being given another shot with extensive capital infusions is common.

Physical laws don’t care about human philosophy.

I don’t actually care what you think is “silly”. I never used evil, you inferred.

There’s no greater good, no higher purpose; what’s happening is unchecked exhaustion of resources. Call it good, evil, silly; personally I see such arguments as a thought ending cop out. At best, acquiescence you have no power to change things so you toss your hands up and call it some adverb.

> That’s not magic or unexplainable. It’s explainable in very easy terms; humans are taking advantage of other humans.

I'd argue that the average employer is less exploitative today, and regardless, exploitation can't account for what happened pre-1970. Did a switch flip somewhere among all employers to make exploitation really strong starting in 1971? That isn't magic thinking?

> Economic theories are just another form of “god spoke to me, and said for every 10 widgets you produce, I own 9 to exploit for myself”.

Sorry, this is nonsense. Someone can have loads of valid complaints about economic theory, but "god spoke to me" is not one of them.

I have a theory: the policy changes since the early 70s have all been about shifting downside risk from a credentialed elite to the masses. When upside risk is decoupled from downside risk, and one group of people get to shift their downside risk to everyone else, then we should expect to see wages uncorrelated with productivity, an increase in inequality and less likelihood of upper middle-class and above to fall into poverty. We have observed all three. This tracks with an increase in the regulatory administrative state (especially decoupled from political accountability), the increase in university credentials as a sorting mechanism (and de facto insurance policy[0]) and the number of practicing attorneys[1].

None of this explanation comes "from god," but rather from data.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/education/study-shows-col...

[1]https://associatesmind.com/2013/08/19/historical-growth-rate...

Human agency gives rise to economic observation, not the opposite. But their observation after the fact has been leveraged by lawmakers to dictate agency valuable to politicians.

The public has neither authority or intelligence to falsify it; so yeah it’s essentially the same “believe us cause you have no choice” thinking.

So we end up with specialized collective agency capture based upon the obvious; humans do things. May as well convince them there’s a very specific reason (nation state pride and success) built upon outdated philosophy.

Economists get the order of operations of their math right. They’re just not saying anything that’s mathematically interesting. It’s daily life logistics.

Fake social media accounts are linked to instigating the Zack Snyder JL cut, fraudulent asset value statements come up all the time when it comes to Trump and friends. The valuations economists rely on are made up. May as we’ll be magic.

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