Hacker News Reader

Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these complaints are not about an industry, but about late stage capitalism. About a failing society that privileges profits over social progress and material productivity because oligarchs and aristocracy own the institutions and are running this thing into the ground on base class instinct.

All these cool "save the world" school projects exist because the current people running the world are deciding what is and isn't a priority and haven't fixed the problem in question; When these students grow up and go on to work for those same people, we are shocked, shocked that it isn't to do more unprofitable school engineering projects.

Instead: Finance industry stuff. What we really need, and by we I mean the people in charge who are obsessively keeping score of imaginary numbers in an account.

View on HN

Government spending is 45% of GDP.

And private spending is something like 200%. GDP is a measure of added value, not total spending/revenue.

Putting more layers of privatisation between the government and the service it provides will decrease the quality and increase the costs. Sewage is now in our rivers and we pay more for water. Trains are obscenely expensive compared to Europe. Energy is expensive. All of these things cost boatloads because we sold them off and drag the rest of the economy down with them. We wouldn't be spending so much today if we'd invested more in the past.

Capitalism is not the problem so much as policies that promote trade imbalances and outsourcing of jobs. If there are people somewhere willing to work for much less than you are, there are far fewer opportunities to do anything. It is not normal to get a ton of cheap imports forever, and a reversion to the mean is not a sign that capitalism is failing.

Unless the whole world was to demand the same standard of living (which is impossible), or global trade is limited, there will be nations where the wealth of the average person is on the decline.

What we are seeing is a great levelling out of living standards across the world. Poor countries are unquestionably getting richer, while rich countries are stagnating and decaying. It's a period of readjustment, but self-limiting.

There's no need for the West to stagnate like this. We could let the rest of the world develop itself while we continue to be self-sufficient. That requires tough decisions like choosing to limit imports of foreign goods and labor. But that is unfortunately not how it's going. Some people have been selling out their own countries for decades to make a quick buck, or perhaps to defend some economic theory that the plan with the highest cost efficiency is always the best.

Yeah, yeah, the meme copy-paste problem diagnosis, but what’s the solution?

Rebuild into socialism?

Rebuild into communism?

Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)?

How do you know that those systems won’t also have their own late stage failure? Case in point, the NHS right now.

(Edit, posting too fast: To the person below who suggested 90% tax rates; the US never had those rates. On paper they did, but they had more and larger exceptions than now, to the point the effective rate never exceeded 45% anyway. This is also why the massive cut was politically palatable - it was cutting the rates to closer reflect the reality. At no point did the US ever have anything close, or even half close, to 90% effective rates.)

Cracking down on monopolies and rentierism would be a good start. Followed by tying pension rises to worker's salaries. None of that is actually going to happen because of who votes combined with a government that's scared of its own shadow.

Combined with the fact that those solutions just listed are short term and a surefire way to ensure nobody gets a pension.

You also can’t act against monopolies when China happily won’t act against their own state owned monopolies, which are in an arm’s race trying to surpass us. Falling behind to China is a great way to cause a tech investment collapse.

Well everytime somebody wants to build high density housing or really anything to alleviate the housing crisis we get the usual NIMBY screaming similar to OP about evil corporations coming to destroy the character of their local neighborhood.

OP is a YIMBY for the record.

Returning by right development to the UK is very possibly the single largest policy measure that might enable a way forward, not because it's so intimately tied to the financialization of the economy, but because it's such an enormous capital concentration that its limitations overshadow a lot of other issues.

It may be hard to see it from where we're standing, but the current housing situation is one extreme of a catastrophic ongoing crisis.

Affordable high density housing used to comprise about half of all housing built in the UK. Then almost all constuction of it was halted.

The private sector never built any of it. NIMBYs didnt stop this construction. Ideologues whinging about the % of GDP spent by the public sector did.

NIMBYs are just a side effect of the world neoliberals created.

If we're talking about the UK, then London is already as dense as it can reasonably be. It went all-in on public transit almost 200 years ago.

And of course, it made it all worse. Now you HAVE to work in London if you want a high salary.

The only real way to fix the housing is to promote remote work and decentralized companies.

Yeah.. no. Have you been to Asian cities? It's rows and rows of 100 floor apartments, it's urban centers consolidated into high density malls and commercial centers. We're talking about dozens of high rises where every floor contains restaurants and shops. I daresay there is more to eat and shop in the 1km Radius around Ikebukuro Station then entire borough of Westminster!

Nobody wants to work in some backwater in the middle of nowhere either, especially if you are young and want to meet new people.

"Reasonably" is doing a lot of work there. It sounds an awful like you're defining the boundaries of reasonability at "Exactly what is built right now and using the exact borders of current municipalities", which is a tautology. Even if we limit ourselves to the current municipal boundaries of London, population density is ~6000 people per square kilometer. Kowloon Walled City survived with 3,000,000 people per square kilometer, Manhattan has 75,000, Dhaka 23,000, San Francisco 19,000.

Their system is a much better one than we tend to have in the US, but "All-in on public transit" looks more like Trantor than London. A majority of the TFL system was constructed more than a century ago.

Nope. London is reasonably full already. The problem is that it's already 9 million people, and the high-paying jobs are focused in a fairly small area.

So if you increase the population density, the transit to that focused area will have to carry more people. And it's already at capacity.

If you want to increase the density, then London will have to create new business areas outside of Canary Wharf, City, and Westminster. At which point, the question becomes "why even bother with London?"

you can also become more polycentric like the tokyo metropolitan area

The government is the biggest rentier and monopolist of all. It's the elephant in the room.

In the case of the UK the solution in effect since the mid 2010s is increase taxation, replace the natives completely with someone more desperate, and suppress wages.

The NHS is not dying an entirely natural death. Murder most foul.

Your question is coupling a matter of our policy preference, our tactical planning to arrive at that preference, and a hypothetical predictive model. If like some supervillain I had come up with a satisfactory answer to all those questions I would have enacted it twenty minutes ago.

> The NHS is not dying an entirely natural death. Murder most foul.

I'm ignorant on this topic; do you mind elaborating?

> but what’s the solution?

I strongly suspect it's a variant on capitalism that:

1. Recognises that some industries (utilities, healthcare, etc) are not well suited to market provision and are state funded. i.e. the sort social provisions that many of the nordic countries have.

2. Recognises that extreme wealth inequalities invalidate the key principle that capitalist economics is premised on (that the market value of a good or service closely approximates it's societal value) and therefore imposes much stronger progressive taxes on very high earners to effective cap how much wealth a single individual can control.

> early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)

High tax rates (90% in some cases) and all

The 'Laffer Curve' concept is treated at first glance as some kind of complex model created by experts that Explains A Lot, at second glance as something a bunch of drunk political operatives scrawled on a cocktail napkin in 1974 that doesn't necessarily have any relation to reality, and at third glance as a tautology whose dishonest core is the labelling of the x axis.

Academic attempts to identify the optimal maxima of tax receipts, which conservative political operatives will always implicitly assume is "half whatever the current rate is", suggest something on the order of 60%.

> In economics, the Laffer curve illustrates a theoretical relationship between rates of taxation and the resulting levels of the government's tax revenue.

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

I would dispute the premise of the Laffer Curve: that the goal of setting a (high) taxation rate is to maximise government revenue. I think that reducing wealth inequality is a good in and of itself. And especially under a capitalist system that depends on it's citizens having vaguely equal purchasing power to function efficiently.

Assuming that our starting point is our current situation where wealth is very unequally distributed, that is. I would agree with the suggestion that things being too equal, and there being no reward for hard work and/or ingenuity also leads to problems.

Optimisation that tries to balance that trade-off would interest me greatly.

Point 1 tends to fall apart when the government can't control its own coffers and after a few decades of mismanagement decides that privatisation is the main way to reduce their debt burden. So I think this one ebbs and flows over time generally.

See South Africa for an example. Power production is slowly opening up to market forces as an alleviation to the extreme mismanagement and corruption of the last 2-3 decades.

On the other hand, there are also some alternatives, like "devolution" of state services to the provincial or municipal level. The local Cape Town government is busy trying to gain control over the city's train lines from the government org that owns them, to provide better service.

There's no substitute for competence and integrity, but private entities are just as capable of being inept and corrupt. Look at companies like Enron or Comcast.

>Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)?

I think this wouldn't be bad.

Socialism isn't the solution, it's the problem. People deserve to be paid for work and the better the work that they do, the more they deserve to be paid, even though that can be much more than the average person earns.

That's a very marxist view on wages, actually...

Capitalism seeks rent from having capital, so the obvious optimization is to squash the ability to demand higher wages (original Marxist argument about "ownership of means of production" was how big capitalist controlled access to machines you needed to the work, thus being able to depress the wages)

I don't think you understand socialism and capitalism.

Suppression of wages is very much a feature of capitalism (the company's mission is to acquire capital for shareholders; technology that lowers costs by reducing the need for labor, or reducing the payment for labor, is a goal); whereas socialism holds that those who do the work should benefit from their labor (workers should own the means of production).

A "socialist" company in the U.S. would be an employee-owned company or a co-op (like REI) though they would never call themselves that because Americans don't understand what socialism is (and have been taught that it's "evil").

You've essentially summarised a key Marxist critique of Capitalism.

What you've described - the need for people to have autonomy, value, and ownership over the work they do - is the core tenet of Marxism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com