Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

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What MBAs and Financists destroyed so far:

- Western Industry.

- The blue-collar middle class

- The Middle Class

- Our health care system

- Our education

- Western Economic Leadership.

- Social Mobility

Now they are busy destroying western technology, science and innovation on their never-ending selfish wealth-extraction quest.

They convinced us that our homes are investments, so they can fleece us with their usurary schemes. So, what next? our organs?

They convinced us to exchange our pensions for the privilege of being the mark on a market where the sharks like them do whatever the fuck they want, from blatant insider trading, to pump and dump schemes, to outright fraud, having for all practical purposes bought the SEC a long time ago.

What they will kill next?

How long are we going to transfer wealth to those slimmy sweet talking ignorant greedy bean counters?

Our daily work is like being in a mad house because almost everything is subordinated to the the most sacred goal of cooking the next quarter numbers to ensure we maximize executive bonuses, and fuck the long run! crazy projects started, spin offs, merges, projects cancelled, company killing layoffs, fuck long term value generation! they want more and more, and more, and they fucking want it right now! the fucking bonus gollums.

Everything is fucked in our society but executive compensation. Xerox, HP, IBM, Boeing... How many other proud symbols of our economy and civilization are we going to let them destroy?

You should know that in business school and after everything you just described would be called "optimized". There is some short discussion about ethics, usually involving not stealing from investors, but otherwise the world is seen as one giant place where people are the same as nuts and bolts or ingredients in a chocolate bar to be optimized. This goes for customers and employees.

Optimization is one of the more useful terms for it, but I think a big part of the problem is foundational. It's easier to trade in measurable values than unmeasurable ones, so the trades with something measurable on both sides get prioritized, which subtly increases the demand and market value of measurable values over unmeasurable.

So we end up gradually converting our productivity to the measurable outputs because we can more safely trade them. But then unmeasurable values get shafted.

The non-fungible values get shafted even harder. For example, it's inherently impossible to trade for true human relationships because the bidirectional flow is where the value comes from and that flow must be built. But that means two people must simultaneously choose to take a mostly unknown level of risk on building a relationship that could fail or even be a net negative. Our relationship drive is pretty strong. The people making AI chatbot friends and SOs, not even to mention dating apps and relationship-commodifiers like Meetup or old Facebook, are doing their best to commodify relationships, though. The sheer level of social toxicity caused by online mass social media has been correspondingly enormous.

My undergrad is in finance. IMO the problem is that we don't really teach what wealth is as Adam Smith defined it. A wealthy nation is not the one with the greatest stockpile of gold, but the one with the most quality goods and services easily available to its average citizens (I'm paraphrasing a bit, but you understand). Smith really stresses that profit is a measurement of the good provided to society by an activity. But in my studies, there was no concern for this quality of profit. The attitude was that any way net income (profit) could be increased was strictly to be understood as a net positive for society.

I had professors explain that war is profitable because people are employed building tanks etc. and they use their wages to stimulate the economy. When I asked 'what if instead of sending a few million dollars of steel and circuitry to the desert to get exploded, those workers used the same resources on a hospital?' I recieved the answer that if the NPV of the tank is higher than the hospital, it must be the better use of the resources.

You had finance professors who were unfamiliar with Bastiat’s parable of the broken window? Or unable to apply it to the military-industrial complex?

Our universities may be in worse shape than I thought.

>Bastiat’s parable of the broken window

Never heard of it. Admittedly it wasn't a highly ranked university.

Edit: Having familiarized myself, thank you for the introduction. This is not the first time my education has disappointed me.

War is profitable in capitalism, because the dogma is that capital is productive and must net a positive return.

In the underutilized capital scenario, idle capital incurs costs, but no benefits. It must be destroyed. The easiest way to maintain the facade is to send the capital to war. If you acquire new land, congratulations, the "investment" paid off. If it doesn't, then the destruction of capital at least maintains the profitability of domestic capital.

War is really that simple. If you had a war for any other reason, everyone involved would see the stupidity after the first few skirmishes.

War is good for business. It's the 34th rule of acquisition.

https://youtu.be/pgUA1tluVmE?si=H_XON7YHc7peHSs7

Ahistorical Marxist "analysis" on HN?

War has existed since the dawn of humanity, thousands of years prior to the advent of capitalism, and has been fought by societies with every kind of socioeconomic and political configuration. War is a human institution and not contingent upon a particular economic arrangement.

I do believe that people from the USA are extremely more likely to view war as profitable and not a huge money sinc. And I have to wonder is there a connection to WW2, where USA exported about $32.5 billion worth of goods through Lend-Lease, indebting a number of nations in the process, while having almost zero repair damage (yes, Perl Harbor, of course a tragedy, but it was a small town, and Europe had cities that were bombed for years, and that had to be rebuild almost from scratch)

The process of repairing Europe costed a lot. Not to mention paying back the land-lease!

So yeah huge money sink for everyone who are on a continent the war is on. And profitable for leasers because everyone actively at war is kinda forced to take the deal.

No one really “let them” destroy things. This is one of the key dangers of majoritarian government. The moment that people can vote for representatives the representatives will be purchased, and later, the votes will purchased. Once this happens, money will be destroyed to allow the purchasing class to rob the wealth of the civilization, and this leads to financialization of economics. This pattern has been repeated over and over again. In the USA, this process started almost immediately after the formation of the country, but it didn’t become truly corrupt until the McKinley campaign. The financialization process started in 1913, saw its first bust boom/bust less than a decade later, and then purposeful inflation began in 1971. The entire economy was financialized by the late 1990s which culminated in 2008. The banks are now so bankrupt that the Fed has begun providing overnight repossessions to member banks…

> This is one of the key dangers of majoritarian government. The moment that people can vote for representatives the representatives will be purchased

What better alternatives are you thinking of? An intelligent, compassionate, eco-friendly and forward-thinking dictator would be great I guess, but historically that's not the ones emerging on top.

> but historically that's not the ones emerging on top.

the only one that has so far been "good" has been the singaporean authoritarian regime (yes, they are "authoritarean").

But even if they're good and benevolent so far, there's zero guarantee that the next leader, or the next generation of them, will remain true.

That's why even though majoritarian gov't are bad, they're the least worst. Not to mention that if the elected gov't is bad, it's becaue the people doing the electing didn't put in enough civic responsibility as a collective.

The current system is not that bad, a radical shift towards government transparency would help a lot. Make it hard to hide bribery, corruption, and plain evilness, pay well but make it hard to sell favours in the dark. Make it easy for public officers to pay for blatant crimes. Make it hard for a single political group to revert transparency.

Politicians would have more shit to throw around, yes, but hopefully the worst of them will look elsewhere for the easy money if it can't be had that easily in public office.

If you think 1913 was the first boom/bust in United States financial history you're either trying to push an agenda or just totally ignorant

No, that’s just when the economy began financialization.

I assume you're saying because of the fed, but wouldn't it be more appropriate to mark JP Morgan's efforts to create monopolies throughout the economy a better start point?

Well, this is why I pointed out McKinley and also stated the process did start shortly after the founding. True financialization only after Morgan and his friends met and formed the Fed tho, which was 1913. Once the Fed was in place, they could vastly expand the amount of available credit, bribe and purchase without restraint, and start the type of economy to which we are all now accustomed. Importantly, this pattern is a direct inversion of “capitalism.” In capitalism, the present is leveraged for the future. In “financialism,” the future is leveraged for the present.

Where have you learned about this? I’ve been casually spelunking into the US economic past, mostly via Wikipedia, but I’d love to know if there are other better sources to check out. Especially around where you drew that conclusion of “capitalism” vs “financialism”

Regarding capitalism vs financialism, that’s my own observation of the present vs reading about the past, and having studied economics. Today, there is no saving, and most of the wealthiest people are also the most indebted. This transition occurred as a byproduct of constant inflation. Even “low” inflation rates will push people from saving into investment (even if passive). If you sit on money you lose year over year. You’ll be forced to invest. Price inflation is therefore seen first in stocks, bonds, some derivatives markets, then in property and every other asset. As interest rates go down, they eventually fall below the inflation rate. This essentially makes money free if a person knows that he/she will make a return that exceeds the inflation rate. Eventually, with the collection and accumulation of debt obligations, those debt obligations themselves become a goods to be traded. Liabilities become assets. Future funds are used not only to fund the present, but they are then leveraged to create more credit and expand the pool of debt obligations and increase the inflation rate. This is financialism as a distinct economic system; the entire economy is built upon financial products and not upon physical wealth. Further, it is built upon future claims on production instead of on sacrifices made in the present. Financialism is then the temporal opposite of capitalism.

It goes beyond voting, people actually empower their abusers by buying the cheapest option regardless of its context. People dislike monopolies, but will happily grow one if it costs less than local or more responsible alternatives. That monopoly eventually gains the power to change the game rules.

We are mostly ignorant, and we vote, consume, act and live that way. We choose to be that way, and so good things won't last long in our collective hands.

1971, you say?

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Good charting. But yeah, the dollar has lost over 90% of its value since then, and the disparity between the rich and the poor has widened.

It wasn't always this way. Milton Friedman introduced the idea in the 1970s that businesses could ignore their workers and communities because if they focused on profit, that would benefit everyone. Shareholder Theory elevates the stockholders above all others and leads to stock buybacks and optimizing for wealth extraction.

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

> that would benefit everyone.

no, it would benefit the shareholders. The regulations imposed by the gov't (which is meant to be representitive) would reign in the excess externalization. Everyone would benefit from competition, when it does happen.

I do not understand the statement "Everyone would benefit from competition".

How is that not an oxymoron?

Surely those that do not win in a competition are losers. How is that a benefit to them?

"Everyone" meaning "everyone as a whole", not absolutely every individual.

If there's more than one grocery store, I probably get better prices. (Or, negatively, if there's only one then I probably get worse prices.) And so with every other aspect of the economy.

So, if competition is supposed to fix other aspects of the economy, why is healthcare disproportionately high compared to other things?

There are several hospitals around me. Endless amount of doctor offices. There are several health insurance companies I can choose from. There is competition. Yet, prices are not affordable for most.

It's not fair competition, healthcare is full of players competing with each other in a highly regulated marketplace. The system has been set up in a way (generally with good intentions, you want doctors to have expensive malpractice insurance for example) that no matter who is providing the services, the costs to the end user are going to be high.

So, maybe something's can't be solved by free market capitalism?

> healthcare disproportionately high compared to other things?

it's because the number you're comparing to is from other countries, where they subsidize their own citizen's healthcare.

The US's healthcare system has become a convoluted mess, and the competition you mention is not sufficient.

Oh, so there are other means or systems that are good or even better, i.e. more sufficient to fix or improve society than just blind competition. Got it!

Fair competition drives out inefficient players, and generally can keep costs down for consumers. That's what it means, it doesn't literally mean every single person will profit, but competition makes for healthier markets than lack thereof.

So, competition benefits consumers, which are a subset of society. Say that instead.

I did.

Okay.

> So, what next? our organs?

Not even kidding. There are villages around where I grew up, a good number of adults have one kidney only.

Now if they manage to kidnap and kill a person, now they got two kidneys, a heart, a liver and other stuff.

>There are villages around where I grew up, a good number of adults have one kidney only.

Moldova?

What country are you in?

Whoa cool how come?

It’s puzzle for us all to figure out.

> What MBAs and Financists destroyed so far:

You can add governance for as long as lobbyists have been writing law.

You can add accountability for whenever MBAs and investors come in contact with news orgs.

> So, what next? our organs?

Yep, they started with our eye balls. In exchange, we are getting "relevant ads".

Also our frontal lobe. In exchange, we get depressive dopamine releases.

> So, what next? our organs?

I’m almost certain I’ve seen a study that tried to prove opening up the organ trade would help the economy and hinder the black market.

I see your organ trade study and raise you a billion dollar VC to turn kidneys into penis enlargement powder, buying at a rate that prices out the majority of dialysis patients.

You have a study for this or are you just getting off on imagined scenarios? I agree VC is largely terrible, but being hyperbolic won't help us arrive at a better solution.

You mention health care and education. Have you considered government’s role in this? https://kottke.org/19/02/cheap-tvs-and-exorbitant-education-...

- Social cohesion and homogeneity and all the draw backs of destroying it.

The idea that you should mass import as many people as possible to increase GDP is absolutely one of the worst things that has happened in modern time.

If you want to import this many people then it takes a lot of hard work. Singapore is a good example.

> what next? our organs?

already happening, look at the american food industry

But think about all the shareholder value they created

From the Tom Toro The New Yorker comic:

* https://www.npr.org/2015/01/25/379787274/howd-a-cartoonist-s...

> They convinced us that our homes are investments, so they can fleece us with their usurary schemes. So, what next? our organs?

It's an extortionist scheme. Every additional industry or vertical is not only proof that capitalism continues to provide "value" and move society forward, but it makes more millionaires and inflates our GDP. Currency wants everything to be traded with currency. Healthcare, water, land, sex, breathable air.

Also, this ultimately benefits the Fed and other massive financial institutions. If they get together and decide policy, they can do almost whatever they want. Then that small cabal of people can scheme with the government or military to exert control. This is mostly extra-democratic.

We'd have to switch out our entire government with un-bribable ethically driven heroes in order to even put a dent in this system.

In truth we are playing pretend with democracy. Like a little game for the peasants to play pretend. While economic and military policy is decided outside of that system.

Every inch financiers can gain, is another system under the control of economic fascists.

And to claim that it is dictated in some way by profit or merit is laughable. It is only dictated by those things when they want it to be. Another game.

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