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Comment by looping__lui | Hacker News Reader

Do you know how to grow vegetables, how to produce antibiotics, how to diagnose and treat diabetes, how to operate a farm, how to build up and run an electrical power grid, how to build a fridge, a TV, a car or a motorcycle?

No?

The “economy” allows you to trade something that YOU are capable of into an imaginary representation of currency which you can trade in return for things you need but are incapable of doing yourself.

And it does that so well and so effectively, that mankind has achieved a quality of life unseen in human history. Children don’t randomly starve to death during a winter, your mom doesn’t just randomly die from an infection any more and we have a pretty chilled live compared to our ancestors 10 thousand years ago I believe.

Yeah, I don’t know what the economy has given me in return either.

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I guess the issue regarding the OP is that there needs to be some kind of balance. It's great that we have all these things, but it's at the cost of ever-increasing productivity and time. Perhaps in the modern age this trade off no longer seems fair, at least at current proportions.

There is a balanace, the size of entertainment markets, like video games, shows that

I would describe that more as a distraction or a cope in response to something, not as a balance. With balance you wouldn't need excessive entertainment to begin with.

It'd be like saying we have cigarettes to deal with stress or mental health professions to deal with excessive expectations of society. They don't address the cause in the first place.

What is the balance referring to then, what is the stress

It’s bullshit that I’m not able to watch Netflix all day and write poetry. My ancestors worked hard. So many people are so rich. The government should tax billionaires and give it to me

What an incredibly toxic way to view dissatisfaction with modern day hustle culture. There's an incredible amount of activities that contribute to society but aren't valued with money - only with wellbeing.

No, I think the issue is a bit different.

You used to start out at an entry level job, and work your way up to something better. You could see how to get to "better" from where you were, and what it would take. When you got to "better", you were glad for the improvement. Yeah, the guy owning the factory had it a lot better than you. But as long as he gave you a route to a better life, that was good enough for almost everybody.

What changed? In my view, three things.

First, the route to "better" is a lot narrower these days. People are a lot less convinced that they can get there from where they are.

Second, people don't expect to have to work their way up. They expect to have it all on day 1. They expect instant success. When they don't get it, they get discouraged.

Third, people are finding that the promise is empty. A better job gets you a nicer apartment that feels just as empty as the previous one did. You're just as lonely there. Your job feels just as much like a soul-crushing grind as it did, maybe more so. In some fundamental way, the stuff you can buy with money isn't enough. People don't know where to find it, but they kind of expect that their job will give them what's missing. And it doesn't.

There was always a subsection of the population that didn't get to experience any of this opportunity. Now that slice is growing. The fact that your vapid consumerism doesn't give you pleasure makes sense since your position is more precarious today than it was yesterday. What is the point of such things when they are not permanent?

I recently read a book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabloona) about a "modern" (1930s) man who sought out the Eskimos to check out their way of life.

They have nothing you describe -- no agriculture, no antibiotics, no farming, no electricity. (The fridge, however, they got covered.) They are quite happy that way. Certainly happier than the people around me in NYC.

Perhaps quality of life is about more than just material goods.

> Perhaps quality of life is about more than just material goods.

With subsistence agriculture the US can support maybe 2-3% of it's current population. The EU is (far) worse on this front. And with the Eskimo's way of life it can support 0.01%. So what about that little problem? And this can't be fixed without changing that lifestyle ...

That this superior way of life is suffering and death for nearly everyone never seems to get discussed for some reason.

I read Kabloona by Gontran de Poncins a couple decades ago and it's stuck with me ever since. I don't think I've ever seen it mentioned online before. It's high on my list of books that should be top-rated classics, but as far as I can tell it's basically unknown. If you've never heard of it, seek it out, it's fabulous!

Edit: Since alecst has obviously already read Kabloona, I might as well give a few more that are on that "list": Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker, Goatwalking by Jim Corbett, and Hyssop by Kevin McIlvoy. Maybe you'd like one of them too.

There’s a difference between “knowing how to”, “been able to” and make financial sense to do it. What you’re describing is a “society”, ie everyone has a dedicated purpose, that’s similar to yours “knowing how to” and “been able to”. Do you really need a monetary systeem, ie economics, around this? I’m not making a case for North Korea/Soviet Union, but do we as a humanity really need a lever (money) to push the society forward

Currency as a way to trade value and skills is a beautiful invention, and that is to be credited for a lot of modern quality of life.

But everything else in the economy (extreme taxation, medical care, housing) has become increasingly predatory over the decades.

> how to diagnose and treat diabetes

Take this as an example. The "economy", as a machine, has learned to subsidize corn syrup, infiltrate every food with forms of sugar including what children eat at school (fuck chocolate milk, PB&J sandwiches, canned fruit in sugar syrup, none are healthy), then profit off of them when they get diabetes later in life. Insurance-scam them by making them pay premiums per month but still not cover their medical costs in full, make them pay for any preventative care they want to have because a doctor didn't "prescribe" it and it wouldn't be profitable to prevent disease. Make healthy food expensive, so that you can get as many people to get diabetes as possible. Lobby against having kitchens in schools so that they are forced to serve even more unhealthy shit. This is what capitalism as a machine has learned.

Diabetes shouldn't even be such a pervasive thing. It's highly preventable. It is in fact of the most preventable of common diseases. The economy machine, however, has realized that diabetes is profitable for the people who own and control the machine (Wall Street, insurance companies, banks).

This is just one example, but the entire system has become predatory.

>extreme taxation

Can you provide an example of this?

1. In my career so far, I have paid enough taxes to buy 3 houses in cash but I still can't afford 1 house in cash. The machine says "you can buy a house with debt" which is yet another way to create a way to extract money from me when I should have just been able to buy 1 house in the first place. Most of the population has been brainwashed to think "I must pay my taxes, I must go into debt" and hasn't opened their eyes that the system is broken in the first place.

2. The company is taxed when they pay me, I pay taxes on that money again, and then I pay taxes yet again when I buy stuff with it (most of that money is being used to pay someone else's taxes), and then in some cases yet again just for owning it. It's frankly bonkers. 80%+ of money I make for the machine goes to paying taxes of sorts. I see very little of it.

Yeah, the country needs money to support infrastructure, you say. Fine. For what the US provides its citizens, it really doesn't need that much. There are countries that tax at similar rates to the US. They have well-developed railway systems, almost free healthcare, free university, they control crime effectively, they're delivering actual value to the citizens. If you dig into it, the US is a massive money laundering scheme -- the economy has learned to tax the fuck out of citizens without actually returning that value to the citizens themselves.

I apologize not including your full quote.

"has become increasingly predatory over the decades."

Can you show this for taxation?

Also this isn't true "80%+ of money I make for the machine goes to paying taxes of sorts"

I'll take a shot.

~40% of every dollar produced in the US gets collected to federal, state, or local taxes. It is entirely possible that this could be 80% for some people.

Tax as a percent of the economy has gone through the roof, both as a percent of GDP, and as inflation adjusted dollars.

If you compare to a benchmark like the 1940s, tax% of GDP has more than doubled, and GDP has increased ~4.5x. This means someone today pays about 10X the taxes (controlling for for inflation!). State and local taxes have grown even faster than federal taxes.

Is the typical taxpayer getting 10 time more back from the government? Do we have 10X the schooling? 10X the police and safety? 10X the roads?

>~40% of every dollar produced in the US gets collected to federal, state, or local taxes..It is entirely possible that this could be 80% for some people.

How?

>This means someone today pays about 10X the taxes (controlling for for inflation!)....Is the typical taxpayer getting 10 time more back from the government

So the amount increased 10x , what does that have to do with getting 10x your money back?

Or are you saying that since it's 10x more there should be 10x greater quality?

Ok... the interstate system, the military, etc

yes, I would expect the quality or quantity to be vastly greater. Ultimately, 10x the utility in one form or another.

I dont think the changes in military or interstate justify a 1,000% higher taxes on an ongoing basis.

with respect to 40+%, property tax would be an easy way to eat up an arbitrarily large portion of income. Similarly, fixed fees and fines can eat up a lot for low earners.

property tax is not 40%. The highest seems to be 20% but that's based on income as well. 10% or lower is more common

> I dont think the changes in military or interstate justify a 1,000% higher taxes on an ongoing basis.

It's not 1000% higher.

>If you compare to a benchmark like the 1940s, tax% of GDP has more than doubled, and GDP has increased ~4.5x. This means someone today pays about 10X the taxes (controlling for for inflation!). State and local taxes have grown even faster than federal taxes.

That's cherrypicking. Income tax as % of GDP basically has stayed the same at around 8% since after ww2. Most people wouldn't think of the entire time period past ww2 as "over the decades".

I picked 1940 intentionally because that was before the shift. [1]

I think the more interesting part is that the expenses grow with GDP, more than the % itself changing.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ockN

How's that surprising? The duties of the state isn't fixed. It can grow with time, hence greater spending in absolute terms. Not to mention stuff like cost disease causing prices to go up even for the same stuff.

I think it is interesting because similar % GDP seems to be treated steady state function of government, not one that inherently expansive.

For those of us that have been around for a while, it seems shocking that real, inflation controlled government taxes and spending per capitia is >2x that of the 80's, because experientially, many of the services seems no different, if not in decline.

I also think it is interesting to think about what government duties become more and less difficult to maintain with growth, and the implications for what types of objectives the government is well and poorly suited to achieve.

I think the Baumol effect is a helpful lens for exploring this, so I think you.

Why is it interesting? Why would expenses be tied to GDP. For example wars are extremely expensive and occur independent of the GDP

You misunderstand. Your taxes are not for infrastructure. It's for a ships and planes, guns and ammo, and interest to pay our debt. It's to cripple our enemies and intimidate our allies. It's also to keep the masses of desperate people from starvation so they do not take to the streets, but you needn't worry about that soon.

You will sacrifice more for this system you see little benefit from. You may be called to fight for it, and you may even die for it, and the people who benefit the most from all of this killing and waste will eventually lose their hold on power due to the putrid state of the system itself.

Occam’s razor has a simpler explanation that this conspiracy.

In most countries it is not.

In the country with the highest GDP per capita it may appear to be prevalent more because people seem to make VOLUNTARY choices with respect to their diet and exercise regime that do not tend to go well with their health.

Capitalism is not equal to “the economy”. “Currency” on its own doesn’t increase the wealth of a society. It is correct that unconstrained capitalism is unstable. Most countries in the world understand that.

Seems like you’re struggling

Most of the population is struggling because the economy has become predatory. That's my point.

If you're not struggling, congratulations.

Everyone I know who has chronic medical conditions is certainly financially struggling, no matter how good their job is.

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