Man, the older I get, the more I think that second and third and fourth order effects are way more important than first order effects.
The separation between the cause and the effects are way less important than their polarity. High-order effects tend to be smaller, but they are also way more numerous, so things can cancel out or end-up resolved on either way.
since this would be very meaningful for my understanding and reasoning about many social fields such as business or politics, i‘d like to know whether you have source material that supports the premise? is this a grounded concept or more of an ad hoc observation
Although, I am all for a data driven world but somehow it is my opinion that we have ended up with the worse of both as combined with the goodhart's law, this measurable thing just ends up somehow getting manipulated for short term gains over real long term damages.
As is your case in the example, the business will ruin the river for everyone having severe damage both culturally and I think financially as well given downstream effects of all people depending upon that river.
But the business has externalized the losses to the people and the people have externalized the responsibility of the river to the government and the government believes in absolute free capitalism! (or sometimes the businesses give the government some money in the pocket ie. corruption. "Cost of doing business" they said.)
I am not against capitalism itself (that Adam smith proposed) but capitalism in its current form is definitely something... and surely some if not most of us might agree to the fact that system isn't working as intended (well not working if it was intended for us ie.)
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file/coase-...
Leaving aside the fact that the Economics prize isn't actually a Nobel Prize, topics which historically haven't been given enough attention are exactly where the highest impact research takes place.
If externalities had always received the attention they deserved, Coase would have never received his prize, because his work would not have been so important.
I think its safe to say that externalities are not, and were not, an ignored sector given more than a century of serious work, and the fact that it is covered in any intro level Econ course.
Inside of economics, they have more than 130 years of work, and are taught in any intro class.
If your argument is that we are bad at correcting for them, then yes. But that is different than not considering them.
Climate change has been discussed for well over a half century, yet one of the main priorities of the current administration has been to hamstring renewable energy and promote coal and oil. I think it's pretty fair to say the issue is being ignored.
The consideration of externalities that don't impact the bottom line is so alien to the real observation of the rites of capital that it might as well be written on the inside of a particularly boring rock in the oort cloud.
It turns out that for many purposes friction and externalities are small enough that they can be ignored for most purposes.
Physicists and Economists are very aware of the tradeoffs.
You could probably do some simulations to see this was almost always going to be a losing strategy. Detailing the N order effects is good accounting, but the picture likely gets murkier the more you try to extrapolate N+1.
It's all petty BS and I really do hope the electorate gets it together.
Like its easy to say in retrospect something is obvious, but it rarely is at the outset.
It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed, instead of the current system that essentially mandates unloading the container rapidly as soon as it shows up because an entire truck+driver is waiting for the unloading to complete.
For palletized loads it's easy to unload them into temporary space in the building they're delivered to, but not everything is palletized.
There are big forklifts for taking containers off trucks and stacking them. Some recipients buy in bulk, store for later use, and stack their own containers. But most distribution centers want to get the contents into pickable inventory and start selling it.
The US military does a lot of container stacking, because they want reserves, not a "just in time" supply chain. "Moving Mountains", by Gen. Gus Petronis, covers this. He handled logistics for the Gulf War.
If you want a used 20' container, they're under $1000 right now in the Fontana area. Probably much less in quantity.
I don't want to pretend gas isn't getting expensive but let's be real, Amazon pays almost 200k for entry level positions in Seattle. If you earn that much and still feel you are going broke, then you are not short on money. You are short on common sense spending and budgeting skills.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
idk what to do about it. every manager just gets a cheshire cat grin whenever i complain about it. i know i should boomerang but ugh.
They absolutely are
[1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/141-...
Otherwise they'd impeach Trump by now. Even if they make a 2 month ceasefire deal now, it will start again after that.
They are also incapable of forming a coalition. They pushed the Saudis and all the Gulf states, who hate Iran with a passion to the moderate "maybe starting a war was not such a good idea" camp. The latest noises about forcing them to make friends with Israel is exactly what you would do if you wanted to be absolutely sure that they will never help you. The noises about annexing Greenland and Canada made sure that nobody in Europe is going to be part of any coalition there willingly.
That's what happens when you take stupid decisions on your own because you're a big bully boy and allies are for chumps.
They don’t need missiles to keep the Gulf pretty much closed, they just need drones. They have what, 1000 km of coast line with convenient mountains nearby? The choke point is 30 km wide, you don’t need more than shaheeds to prevent enough ships from sailing through that the others either stop trying or pay.
And you won’t prevent rockets or drones from reaching that coast line unless you have absolute control over the interior. Look at how much trouble Israel has with getting rid of rockets in the Gaza Strip.
> Continue combat operations and destroy the rest.
Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate that it is much easier said than done.
> Escort ships trapped in the Gulf out.
That is going to be very impractical as long as they can just send marine, submarine, or aerial drones. Not unfeasible, but very difficult. The Huthis are still making trouble in the Red Sea, and there is an actual coalition to deal wit them there. Being locals with this kind of terrain is a massive advantage. There is a reason why anybody sane was saying that it was a stupid strategy.
> Maintain the blockade on Iranian ports to apply maximum economic pressure on the theocracy.
Which also applies maximum pressure on most of the world. That will become untenable quickly. Of course, the Russians are happy, though.
> I don't care about the internal politics of Iran.
You cannot solve a problem if you don’t understand it and the situation that caused it. Bush thought he could and he was wrong. Trump thinks he can and he is deluded.
> this may result in a collapse of the so called Islamic Republic
And I thought you guys were against regime change and forever wars. In the real world, it caused a rally-around-the-flat effect and a hardening of the government’s position and its grip on the country. I hope the Iranians can get out of this nightmare at some point, but it is not a given, and it is not the strategy most likely to lead to that outcome.
> so long as it does not interfere with global and in particular U.S. interests
lol. The US serve only the oligarch class’ interest. If you are serious about that, fix your government. It might not be as dire as the Islamic republic, but it is disintegrating.
The present US President is smart enough to realise that now. In this case he let himself be misled by Israelis & their supporters that Iranians would rise up and replace their own Government. That indeed might have happened if the US had intervened when the Iranians were actually protesting some months before the present crisis. Now the US administration is looking for a way out without putting boots on the ground and Iran is looking to haggle on the price and for the US. this very business like cutting of ones losses is almost certainly the right move.
Also, it is impossibly to cooperate and make agreements with current USA. That limits the coalition options.
If you're an engineer, you've experienced something similar. You come across some code and scratch your head thinking "why did they do it like this?", spend half a day getting rid of it and then find out why it was the way it was.
There are people who understand all these complex systems. We just insist on silencing them, even firing them and then listening to the dumbest people on the planet.
You see this in startups too, even very large ones. I've now spent years watching people in crypto discover why exactly the financial system works like it does while spewing banalities about "disruption". Sometimes new thinking can be good but more often than not it's somewhere between ignorance and a scam, particularly when so much money is involved.
Another classic example: orbital data centers.
It doesn't have to be that way. The Chinese Communist Party is, despite the name, technocratic [1]. Xi Jinping's undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering.
[1]: https://issues.org/perspective-the-benefits-of-technocracy-i...