Selflessness vs Selfishness | Hacker News Reader

Selflessness vs Selfishness

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"And we know that congress is susceptible to being lobbied successfully by people, institutions, cities, states, and corporations. So I'm quite worried that this $550bn is not going to get spent in the right ways because it's seen as a big pot of money to get your hands on."

There is no historical precedent that I know of for government ever redistributing large amounts of money in a way that was good for the economy. The "New Deal" helped extend the Great Depression for 10 years rather than a shorter term if the govenment had not taken such a heavy handed approach.

The idea that a few in government can actually accurately determine the needs of a vast quantity of people economically makes no sense. We're talking about trillions of transactions. Central control was tried by the Russian Soviets, and it failed miserably. Japan recently suffered a decade of decline after their attempt at a "New Deal" infrastructure spending plan. Why are not more people complaining about the foolishness of trying this again given the track record of abject failure in the past?

The issue here is that a lot of people, Fred Wilson being among them, refuse to acknowledge that their view of the world is untenable even when the evidence clearly points to it. In this very post he lays out every reason why this stimulus package will fail, says his own friends are planning to take as much advantage as they can, but then remains committed to it. It’s dogma over reason.

That’s how these plans continue to get implemented even with no record of success. Because "have the Government give people money" is such an appealing idea that they simply can’t bring themselves to acknowledge how ineffective it is.

The true irony is that the part he hates, the tax cuts, are probably the only piece of this money that will actually get to the people this plan is designed to help (though I agree even that will be ineffective because any tax cut to the lower tax brackets is just going to get stuffed in a bank and saved for an emergency in this economic climate)

I agree. One question though: Why shouldn't people save their tax-cut-money? Given that they will not put it under their pillows.

The "New Deal" helped extend the Great Depression for 10 years

More on this, here: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/History/New_Deal/new_d...

Why eight years of Roosevelt economic policy produced such disastrous economic recovery results, is the crucial question. The answer appears to be that the group of men who advised the President on economic and social policy during the peace years of the Depression, were focussed on a broad social agenda, one of using the depression crisis to shift the United States from a market economy, which they contemptuously termed "laissez-faire capitalism," towards a State-dominated economy of central planning.

I think that most people don't understand that money spent by the state is directly(taxes) or indirectly(inflation) taken from them. That might seem crazy, but I've often had political debates with people, who had absolutely no clue about basic economics.

WW2. Nearly all the prosperity of the last 60 years can be traced back to innovations done because of the war. You have: computers, encryption, microwaves, radar, jetplanes, sonar, foreign oil sources, rockets, synthetic rubber, silly putty, many plastics, nuclear power, and widespread use of penicillin. In many of these cases, the technology existed before the war but was not cost-effective or reliable enough for general use. The war spurred development on these fronts enough that it opened vast new consumer markets after the war.

The irony is that the government was not trying to help the economy with WW2 spending. It was try to blow shit up, and avoid getting blown up. It just so happened that many of the innovations that were good for blowing people up were also very good at improving their quality of life later. So once we were done killing people, we had 60-80 years of prosperity.

We just need another genocidal maniac, and a few tens of millions of people to die. Then it'll be all better.

(Irony aside, a similar effect happened after the civil war: many innovations like railroads, oil refining, trench warfare, steam engines, steel-hulled ships, etc. were commercialised because of the war, and then led to 60-80 years of prosperity afterwards.)

Without the war thinks might have been even better. Too bad WWI stopped the first age of globalisation.

Another big change: FDR stopped villifying and prosecuting business. If one studies investor surveys, the change in attitude and the corresponding measures of investor confidence are clear. That probably did at least as much if not more to bring the economy out of depression. The government may be big but it cannot match the spending power of several hundred million people.

Well it can, but it can't match the collective intelligence of them, and that's what ultimately matters. It's not how much you spend, it what you spend it on.

I would argue than universal healthcare is a good candidate. By this table one might expect a drop in healthcare costs from 15% of the GDP to 10%, which is 700 billion a year:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care#Economics

Most major innovations in life extending technology come from the US. I very highly doubt waste is completely responsible for the increased spending by % of GDP compared to other western countries.

Combined with the semi-evil precautionary principle in Europe, it is very important to keep this research alive.

So I'm very wary of changes in the current system that aren't centered around decreased regulation.

Could you explain more about what the 'semi-evil' precautionary principle means in practice? Many of the medical treatments I've been interested in, developed of late, have had as their proving ground Europe and South Korea. The American medical system seems a lot more conservative in some areas.

In my understanding, the growing trend is to distrust new technology until it can be proven to have no harm on, for example, the environment. That is a ridiculous standard. Of course, so is banning federal funding for stem cell research, so you're right about the American system being more conservative in areas.

Increased spending on medicine usually corresponds to measures that wouldn't be taken in more nationalized systems. Late stage treatment of diseases and proceeding with risky births are two examples.

It's this kind of spending at the edges that matters a lot for where money and research time is spent.

My big fear with a change that isn't deregulation is to remove this incentive. The accounting is obviously difficult. How much value to you assign to a technology that increases life expectancy for a certain kind of disease? If you're comparing %GDP, surely an increased survival rate has a positive affect on GDP. How can you possibly account for that?

Numbers like the %GDP spent on medicine and life expectancy takes the aggregate information in a dynamic system of 300M nodes and reduces it down to two numbers that don't mean much for any given individual. For me personally, I'd like to see more research into predicting ailments, individual funding of research to fight ailments that are likely, and much more out of pocket spending on day to day treatment. Unfortunately, the national dialogue consists of many people who have no trouble paying for medical care debating how much of other people's money they should spend on the mythical set of the uninsured.

Well, just one example: until last year, Red Bull was banned in France for health safety reasons.

"There is no historical precedent that I know of for government ever redistributing large amounts of money in a way that was good for the economy."

Totally. Just think where we'd be now if all that money hadn't been wasted on the interstate highway system.

Maybe we'd have a decent train system instead of having subsidized suburbia.

Or much cheaper private roads.

Yeah. Democracy. It sucks. It is worth considering Lessig's approach to changing Congress as a way to mitigate some of these problems:

http://change-congress.org/

Lots of worthwhile and related stuff on his blog: http://www.lessig.org/blog/

I would like to see lessig produce a wish list of hacker projects he needs done. I would sign up.

I think its misguided to say that greed got us into the current economic mess and that selflessness is the solution. It's a nice happy theory but it flies in the face of almost everything that we know about human nature.

The real interesting question is how we can tweak our economic system to better manage greed.

This article is advocating a economic plan made possible by taking money from people, and worrying the plan will fail because people will want to improve their own lives instead of further sacrificing their lives for the sake of the country.

Sifting out the right/wrong places to spend government money is not the responsibility of those asking for it. It's the government's job.

The problem is not vendors, it's the lobbying system.

The problem is that the government even has the ability to take our money and spend it as they wish. We need seperation of economy and state, for the same reasons we seperate church and state.

Or we should at least separate goals from implementation. I.e. use democratic processes to agree on specific goals and how much resources to devote to these goals. Like 'Reduce unemployment to at most 5%' using no more than 10^10 $. Or 'Raise the literacy rate of people over 10 years to at least 99% in our nation.' for at most 5*10^9 $.

Then the government puts the allocated funds into escrow and auctions off zero-coupon bonds that pay off when the goal has been reached. Of course the bond holders will do what they can to achieve the goal. Or do something that makes the goal easier to reach, thus the price of the bonds rises and the original holder can sell them at a profit.

(The above is a description of Social Policy Bonds.)

I disagree. That's just allowing people to vote other people's money away. The point of having rights is that my property is mine and the majority can't vote it away. In your system, where does it end? The US is a republic (nation of laws), not a democracy (nation of people) - democracy is a good mechanism for electing the government and, hopefully, keeping is relatively clean.

The bonds you describe may be a smart improvement to less-controlled taxation, but it's still having the state control the economy. Using the analogy to the church, that's like not outlawing other religions or atheism, but using state funds for one religion of preference - that's still a lot of control and weight the government shouldn't have.

I think of it this way: the government has the guns (and rightfully so), so everything they do is ultimately by force. Therefore, we need to severly limit what they can do, leaving the rest of us with freedom.

My proposal was meant as a practical interim step. Selecting ends democratically works better than selecting means. While people can agree in a democratic fashion that certain goals shall be reached, the market fares better at choosing the method to execute.

In the longer run though, I would like to fund public goods using dominant assurance contracts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contracts#Variants). They solve the free rider problem of voluntary funding. And they allow private provision of public goods --- for profit. (http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PrivateProvision.pdf)

Of course, dominant assurance contracts and social policy bonds complement each other.

Is money inefficiently spent domestically (next 4-8 years) better than money spent inefficiently internationally (last 8 years)?? I think so.

Do I smell chauvinism?

Ummm... you do realize the public spending on international projects is miniscule, ~5% at most. If you want to attack spending, go after SS, medicare, and medicade. These programs just by themselves eat up ~50% of the US federal budget and more on the state level. If you are talking about military spending overseas, then note the fact that just medicaid uses up as much money every year as the war in Iraq has used up in its entire duration.

That 50% is a big number. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport & the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment in the Netherlands spend 13.8% + 23.9% = 37.7% of the federal budget. Maybe SS+medicare+medicaid is more than the 37.7%, but I think that social services and healthcare is more extensive in the Netherlands than in the US. Why is there such a big difference in spending?

Government rationing. Difference in population. Differnce in perfornamce: If you want a hip-replacement, in the US, you can scheule the surgery on the same day, in the UK, you need to wait at least a week. The Chances of surviving cancer in the US are drastically higher than in the US. Most drug research is carried out here in the US. Our medical system may be expensive but by some counts, its worth it.

I do not include SS, medicare, medicaid because this is not new spending. These are old "debts". Yes, those programs are too expensive, but its a whole different problem category.

It's good to see someone who has seen as much of the business world and thereby human nature as Fred still maintain a sense of idealism and duty to do the right thing. Unfortunately, most people are not like him and the pigs will be lining up at the trough for their cut. It sucks but that is the world we live in.

How To Build a Successful Nation?

We need both Socialism and Capitalism to build and sustain a great nation.

(1) Prevent race to the bottom aka Socialism

Affirmative Action, Subsidy, Basic Income Guarantee, Stock Options to prevent Wage Slavery, Free Public Transportation, etc

(2) Promote race to the top aka Capitalism

Incentives,Free Markets,Extrinsic motivation,Appreciation,Awards, Rewards etc

Incidentially basic income guarantee has some libertarian arguments on its side.

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