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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

In my grandpa's village everything was local production and commerce but they all lived way worse than me and my friends that get paid through remote companies and spend our money online. It's incredibly unclear to me why a super poor and undeveloped local economy is better than a specialized globalized one. In my country there was a dictatorship with protectionism and when we opened things got way better, not worse.

Regarding me not noticing crimes, I think we have police and regulations for that.

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> In my grandpa's village everything was local production and commerce but they all lived way worse than me and my friends that get paid through remote companies and spend our money online.

(1) That is because technology also takes away components of life that one can enjoy without being rich such as accesss to nature and local food production.

(2) The global economy is only so "good" because it takes advantage of the commons in poorer places. We simply should not have the capability to do that. You only benefit off the suffering of others.

On (1), I grew up behind the iron curtain in a pre-internet age next to a village (no TV, no organized entertainment). The typical non-working activity there was not to enjoy the beauty of nature (as farmers they were fed up with it) but to be bored, get drunk and start fights with anyone non local. When the economy opened up in late 1980s anyone who could ran out to cities.

I will take technology and some globalism any day. My 2c.

That's the thing that I see a lot of. I grew up in Africa, and was exposed to extreme poverty, since as far back as I can remember.

People living poor don't like it. They may have accepted it, and may have learned to deal with it, but they don't tend to like it. They want out, and generally jump at the chance to do so.

People in richer communities may have fantasies about "living closer to nature," but that doesn't usually involve things like shooing rats off your kids at night, or having your house collapse, when there's a 3.0 earthquake.

People in poorer communities may have unreasonable expectations of what having money will bring, and we often see poor people that get rich quick (think Lotto "winners"), having pretty miserable lives.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

I picked a place to live that's close to nature, right across my back fence from millions of acres of public forest. I love it here. Poverty is not required. I commute to work via Starlink and most nonperishables are delivered to my front porch by UPS, mostly from Amazon. It's green on both sides of my fence, and it's a choice that normal people, who can work remotely, can make if they value it. My house is far cheaper than one in a city and local costs are lower. Amazon deserves credit for making such a lifestyle easier, and if we can export more of it, that sounds like an advance.

I understand the joy of your choices. I live in an old mill town that has had multiple Renaissances. I consider myself lucky because I live at the edge of the town and have a 10,000-square-foot lot that is in the process of intentionally rewilding. My house wasn't necessarily cheaper than other houses. It's much more living space, fewer neighbors, and roughly the same cost per month as a three-bedroom apartment closer to where my partner works.

The downside is that she has a 1 1/2 hour commute. Not because of distance but because of congestion. She is willing to take public transit, except it takes roughly twice as long to take the train, then a bus, then another bus, then a third bus, and not be able to do errands during the day or on the way home.

life is all about trade-offs.

That is all well and good and a setup I totally understand. Now that I am in the US I like that my home is 15 steps away from a good-sized network of forest trails. Nature is good. But it is good because of technology: unlimited potable water, plenty of energy to keep my home warm, electricity and internet and cars to get me to the downtown or an airport when I feel like it.

But my opponent, to whom I responded, wants to "severely restrict technology". And this is what I have beef with. Those folks tend to be from rich countries and want to freeze things at their current, comfortable for them, level. They do not want to give up the running water, swear off vaccines and antibiotics or go through dental work without painkillers. Which is where a large part of the world would be stuck under this "technology restriction".

False dichotomy. Both situations are bad because both are predicated on lack of wisdom. A lack of wisdom in a poor place implies brawls and wanton violence. A lack of wisdom in a rich, technological age implies resource destruction and climate change.

Wisdom combined with restricted technology would be ideal, such as with the Amish. They have their problems but they show that a technologically restricted society is best. Note: I am not arguing for NO technology, but severely restricted technology.

Who is going to do this "severe restriction of technology"? The people themselves, as you write, do not want to do it.

And anytime a self-appointed elite start doing "what is best for the people" against their will, police repression and labor camps are also on the menu. Nah, I will take my freedom, including the freedom to make mistakes.

You assume the people always won't. There's a growing amount of skepticism towards technology and it's quite possible people will begin to hate it. I myself intend to spread the word about the dangers of technology to the best of my ability.

Ok, let's restrict the technology. What's the end goal?

Because 1 billion years from now, even if humanity is back to before the wheel technology plants will have disappeared and the oceans evaporated due to the sun.

If we want Earth originated life to have a chance to go over this bump something will have to go forward.

I find myself falling into this line of thought a lot: why should we make tradeoffs that favor the earth instead of hyper-accelerating progress to get off of it in preparation for its inevitable demise?

But isn’t the entire universe also going to meet its end as well, in an anticlimactic heat death? To overcome that, a civilization would have to reach universe-level Kardashev-like energy utilization capability, which would necessarily consume every particle in the universe, including themselves. It seems infeasible and unwise.

Maybe it would lead to the next big bang… but that still is a death and rebirth.

I think ultimately folks that support post-earth transhumanism operate on a notion that they themselves or their direct descendants that they will know and love in their own lifetimes will benefit from this space-colonial survivalist utopia. But IMO the reality is that if it is even possible, it would only happen long, long after they and everyone they could know or imagine are dead. It would likelier be accomplished by a society and civilization that they would hate and believe should be exterminated, due to the tradeoffs that would have to be made to accomplish it.

It’s essentially an individual’s desire to live forever and avoid death, projected onto the human race. I’m not convinced it would actually be nice to live forever. Better to focus on how to make the short time we have be as good as possible. IMO the idea of eternal life leads to all sorts of perversions of the now in exchange for an assumed eternal afterward.

> I find myself falling into this line of thought a lot: why should we make tradeoffs that favor the earth instead of hyper-accelerating progress to get off of it in preparation for its inevitable demise?

Get off and go where? Anywhere we could go is a million times worse for human habitation than post-demise Earth.

I think the idea is: assume sufficient technological advancement to be able to reach or even create countless other essentially exact replicas of earth? Barring that, plenty of ideas have been floated along the lines of extraterrestrial colonization and/or intergenerational spaceships.

If you are advanced enough to do that, you’re advanced enough to clean up Earth and make it a paradise.

I’m not arguing strongly in favor of “getting off it” so I’m not going to make much effort defending the position.

But I can imagine scenarios where we have to leave earth with intergenerational ships and only then acquire the ability to terraform, harness a star’s energy or travel at light speed.

(2) They where literally describing a poor area being better off with global trade.

Economies of scale and local advantages make the world better off. There’s no advantage to growing bananas in greenhouses in Iowa when you can grow wheat and trade with Panama.

Off the top of my head, the advantage in having bananas grown near you verses imported from Panama is that they are possibly fresher. This is assuming they can grow in your area and are in season of course. Produce is a special case in this regard locally sourced can potentially be healthier.

That is to say everything isn't objectively always 100% better with globalization and specialization at least not until come up with faster methods of shipping.

> assuming they can grow in your area

You can grow bananas in Alaska, but you can’t simply plant them outside. Thus my example assumes greenhouses built to a large enough scale to handle trees which is a major economic and environmental cost.

Comparative advantage applies to a huge range of things not just bananas. You could mine cobalt basically anywhere at extreme expense, but everyone is better off when that happens in locations that naturally have extremely high concentrations of cobalt.

That local trade involves taking advantage of the commons (putting CO2 in the atmosphere) to make it work. In my opinion, we do not have the right to take that advantage.

More CO2 is produced manufacturing and maintaining those greenhouses than shipping fruit from tropical locations.

So no, in this case local production is simply worse for the commons. More broadly things that cost dramatically more are generally worse for the environment in subtle ways.

In the case of bananas, then don't have bananas. Only locally sustainable goods or imports occasionally, not all the time.

Locally sustainable goods becomes really limited very quickly. You don’t just lose foods but technology as most of the periodic table becomes unavailable, even low tech items like salt needs to be imported into most areas.

On the other hand even occasional imports supports global trade and a dramatically higher standard living. The option to decarbonize global trade is exists, ‘local’ is more feel good nonsense than an actual path forward.

Few people would be able to afford much in your local economy.

Well for one, lots of my local economy would just involve trade and helping community members for free, creating local community gardens, etc. Quite a lot can be possible with very little.

>my local economy would just involve trade and helping community members for free, creating local community gardens, etc. Quite a lot can be possible with very little.

Isn't this basically collectivization, which empirically has been shown to a massive failure? Without a monetary incentive, it's hard to get people to actually do stuff rather than lying on their couch and watching tiktok.

Historically, that doesn’t work. It failed in China, North Korea, and in Cuba. It’s a fantasy.

The first point is true, but most people do not choose it.

I do not think your second point stands. Almost the entire world is financially better off than it was in the past. Lots of third world economies are visibly richer than they were a few decades ago. Whose suffering are they benefitting from?

> The first point is true, but most people do not choose it.

Because they lack wisdom and human beings en masse operate on instinct, not wisdom.

> Almost the entire world is financially better off than it was in the past. Lots of third world economies are visibly richer than they were a few decades ago. Whose suffering are they benefitting from?

The classic reply of the economist. It's because the industrial world measures better off with variables like "life expectancy" and "money".

But a longer life does not a better life make, nor does money always equate to better off.

For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city. How does the prevailing evaluative mechanism account for that?

>The classic reply of the economist. It's because the industrial world measures better off with variables like "life expectancy" and "money".

I'd take arguments with objective metrics over handwavy arguments involving vibes, because with the latter you can make whatever argument you want with them and it's impossible to refute.

>For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city. How does the prevailing evaluative mechanism account for that?

You can ask for how much people are willing to pay for access to such a scenery and put a dollar value on it, or try to infer it based on housing price patterns (eg. house next to national park vs equally rural house next to corn fields).

> I'd take arguments with objective metrics over handwavy arguments involving vibes, because with the latter you can make whatever argument you want with them and it's impossible to refute.

You can define other concrete metrics. Distance to wild nature for example. That's concrete.

I did specify financially.

Also, there has been a visible improvement in living standards in third world countries. More money does not mean people have a better life in a rich country because there are diminishing returns on having more money. In a country where most people are a lot poorer and desperately need more money, more money does mean better off.

I am pretty sure people who can afford a proper house instead of a slum stack, or have a proper toilet, etc. are better off. As I said, there are visible improvements in the lives of the very poor.

"For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city."

That is your preference. Many people prefer living in a big city.

Also, what about how good your conditions of life are next to the beautiful national park? A nice house in a big city with good food and leisure time vs a shack in the beautiful place, hard work to grow a barely adequate amount of food?

The prevailing evaluative mechanism would note that you could take that million dollars, invest it in a 4% annuity, and move next to the national park of your choice with $40,000 in your pocket every year for the rest of your life. Indeed, there's a whole movement called FIRE of people who do things like this.

But there's also people like me, who say that sounds great but don't really mean it, because it's cringe to admit that you care about money.

The last 40 years have seen enormous economic growth outside the G7 to the point that North America and Western Europe no longer dominate the global economy.

Vice president Vance marrying a woman from India was a look into the future. The rich elite know what's happening.

Rishi Sunak's wife is a better example: the one in the couple with the money is the Indian heiress not the British former hedge fund manager!

That is the other extreme that is also bad. In economies like that protectionism supports inefficient local production - favouring some people at the cost of others. It is designed to funnel money away from some people to others.

The dominance of the economy by a few big companies also has the same effect - elimination of competition.

Where were the police and regulations when Boeing's products killed hundreds of people? Last time I checked, nobody among top management went to prison for that.

That's what "too big to fail" corporations can get you: failed products, anti-competitive environment, regulatory capture, no responsibility.

Getting fined for a few (hundred) million dollars is not responsibility, it's chump change for multi-trillion dollar corporations.

You can have "global business" that aren't "too big to fail". If anything, if you're pro-competition, blindly buying local has the same anti-competitive effects, because you're protecting the local firm from competition from elsewhere.

I agree with you: let's just buy our next 747's from the nearest mom-and-pop aviation shop!

We have police and regulations but they only apply to the country you are in.

Most of the cheap stuff we buy is from other countries, they don't have the same regulations and protections that we have, hence part(not all) of the reason they are cheap.

Take a look at the cheap chargers on Amazon for example, marked as UL listed but you open them up and you see a circuit that is liable to start a fire. Someone reports it, the vendor vanishes and then there are 5 more listings under different names. See also the lead paint on toys scandal and poison pet food/treat scandals.

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