objectivistbrit

A gwern classic - the second sentence of this wall of text contains 112 words and 14 verbs. I think your tendency to include tons of parenthetical remarks, caveats and every example you can think of, confuses the reader and makes it hard to figure out your essential point.

'Capitalism' doesn't create jobs. Companies create jobs. Many companies are badly managed, and employ staff they don't need. This is true. (And only has one solution - people not taking jobs they think are pointless, and companies not hiring for those positions).

However, the OP is calling jobs "pointless" based on reference to his ideal planned economy where everyone works on a factory or farm for 15 hours a week. In this imaginary utopia, jobs which grease the wheels of capitalism - sales, marketing, finance - are superfluous.

Thing is, planned economies fail disastorously badly in practice. I assume HN knows why. The deeper issue is that many capitalistic service businesses do serve a vital purpose - finance is a hyper-efficient resource allocation engine, for example, marketing ensures customers find the best products for their needs, and so on. The managers and administrators the OP reviles are highly paid precisely because making large organisations efficient (e.g., not hiring for unneccessary jobs) is hard.

Instead of asking why someone chooses to pay for jobs in these areas, the OP simply assumes that they need to be abolished, by fiat, and like every intellectual since Plato starts planning how everyone should live their lives in his ideal republic.

Re-read my post. Laws are needed, government is needed, taxation and coercion are not needed.

The government is needed to enforce the laws. This does not mean the goverment needs to redistribute wealth, regulate business or manage the economy. A government which stuck to this role could be funded by tax rates of about 5-8%.

My ideal society would have said funds made by voluntary donations. This is a far-off ideal, but it is achievable - unless you think humans cannot form a society without coercion.

Since WW2 most basic research has been funded by governments, but prior to WW2, the industrial revolution happened without state funding. Varoufakis' argument is that since the state has been taxing the productive to fund research, that gives it a moral right to tax the productive some more.

Paris Hilton obviously didn't earn her money, but her parents chose to give it to her, and millions of people chose to stay at Hilton hotels. If you assume ordinary citizens have a right to the money they earn, you have to grant Paris the same right to her trust fund. (Which is going to be invested or spent anyway). There's no consistent way to assert the right to violate property rights, without abolishing property altogether.

> No human alive has the self-awareness to write about themselves objectively.

You and OP make way too much of this. Have you actually read any autobiographies? As with any piece of writing, you have to form your own judgements, but people can't completely fabricate their life stories or delude themselves about the reasons for their success.

Autobiographies I've read, and enjoyed, even though I think the writers are all in different ways dishonest, include Malcolm X (street gangster turned religious leader), Gandhi (moralistic prig with weird sexual perversions), Bertrand Russell (projects saintly calm but had weird bouts of rage) and 50 Cent (claimed he never smoked crack, and it only accidentally ended up in his bloodstream). Still, I believe all four are accurate when describing the reasons for their success.

(For more honest auto-biographies, I'd recommend Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, and Richard Feynman, off the top of my head).

Either way, no-one writes "I achieved X by doing Y and Z, it was simple", it's more like "I tried to achieve X by doing A, and that went disastrously, then I tried B, and made some progress, then I realised X was a waste of time and went after Y, and noticed most people who wanted Y did Z but that didn't work for them, so I tried doing C, then D, and then E, and that's when things began taking off".

People who seriously think a basic income future is desirable should invest the bulk of their research efforts in automation technology. How do you build a fully automated farm? How do you build a fully automated factory and logistics network? How do you build a fully automated hospital? How do you build robots capable of maintaining and fixing all these automated systems?

All these things are way beyond current technology. If they could be built, we'd effectively be in a Star Trek post-scarcity economy, and money would probably no longer be needed. That day is a long way off, though.

"Every day, innovative companies promise to make the world a better place. Are they succeeding?"

Companies promise to make money by offering valuable goods and services to customers. "Making the world a better place" is just Silicon Valley hype. Companies aren't non-profits.

The irrationality you are noticing is to do with the modern concept of rights. Since the New Deal and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 'right' has come to cover things like right to a job, right to healthcare, right to electricity, right to broadband, and so on. But these rights impose obligations on other people, to either work to provide these rights for you, or to stump up the cash to pay for them. That means you need an agency which violates property rights.

Since you can never raise enough taxes to pay for everyone's needs, there's no consistent way to implement the modern notion of rights, so it simply becomes a list of irrational demands.

The only consistent system of rights (of rights which can be granted to everyone equally), take the right to life as a fundamental, and derive other rights from that. The derivative rights in such a system are the Enlightenment-era rights, I.e, life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness.

Despite my username, I agree that the market will not fix discrimination. (Which I used to not believe was a problem, until I saw it first hand).

Markets are made up of individuals, and if most of those individuals are irrational, irrational outcomes will result, whatever the incentives for rational action. The only real fix is free speech and free association: i.e., those who belong to discriminated-against groups swapping information on the best and worst places to work, and forming professional associations for mentorship, career planning and networking. (Forcing companies to make diversity hires can only be counter-productive).

This doesn't surprise me based on my own reading. Perception is a very hard problem to crack. Also, even a seemingly simple task like driving involves situations requiring "human-level" decision making and judgement.

Also interesting was this link from the article: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/robots-are-caring-for-elder... The obvious answer to the robots-taking-the-jobs argument is that the world population is aging and there's already a shortage of medical care and nursing home staff.

Many of the largest undertakings. (Here's one counter-example - the world's first transatlantic cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York,_Newfoundland_and_Lon...).

The mistake many libertarians make is to argue that government is inherently incompetent. This viewpoint contradicts reality. Government agencies which attract smart people can be as successful as any private company. Large private companies can be as bureaucratic as any government agency.

The fundamental difference is that there's no way to get rid of bloated and ineffective government organisations. NASA is a good example: in the 1960s it was the place where every bright young engineer and scientist wanted to work, but over the decades it stagnated into another bureaucracy dominated by non-technical folk chasing pork-barrel funding.

The EU is too large and diverse to be a viable country. Inevitably, it ends up ruled by a technocratic elite (because there's no way democracy can work with 500 million people and 28 cultures) and with recurring crises (because there's no economic policy that works for all countries, and no means to agree on any fixes).

You seem wilfully ignorant: you focus on my non-essential point about the flag, for example, and ignore the obvious issues with the EU (which a cursory Google search will help you find).

Stiglitz identified the fundamental crossroads: the only fix for the Eurozone's monetary problems is fiscal union. Thing is, if that happens, there'll be further crises and further demands for integration. None of this will make the Germans and Greeks resent each other less, and the endgame is a resurgence of nationalism.

I'm a capitalist, not a nationalist, and it's very obvious to me that the EU should have remained a trade union of independent countries.

"Or is the objection merely to some wholly imaginary threat to the purity of the anglo-saxon race and culture and an unthinking and instantaneous embracing of anything nationalist and right leaning?"

Yes. Yes it is. Everyone who disagrees with you is emotionally driven and intellectually dishonest.

The goal we object to was the attempt to build a giant country. The EEC should have stuck with the tariff free zone and free movement (of workers, not all citizens, as it was originally). Instead they grew into a 28-nation wannabe superpower with a currency, flag, central bank, law-making powers, etc. Now Juncker is pushing for an EU army. The whole project has departed from reality and is going to collapse in a few decades, sadly taking down the free trade zone with it.

Right, saying "we won't invest under these conditions" is extortion.

On a sane planet, one not following clown world logic, it would be obvious that the telcos are telling the government to stop extorting them.

US is big and sparsely populated. Also, telecoms there are heavily regulated. Contrary to common claims, there isn't a huge difference between the European and American models (both are free markets with heavy state involvement in pretty much all industries).

From the report:

"In this context we must highlight the danger of restrictive Net Neutrality rules, in the context of 5G technologies, business applications and beyond. 5G introduces the concept of “Network Slicing” to accommodate a wide-variety of industry verticals’ business models on a common platform, at scale and with services guarantees.

Automated driving, smart grid control, virtual reality and public safety services are examples of use- cases with distinguished characteristics which call for a flexible and elastic configuration of resources in networks and platforms, on a continuous basis, depending on demand, context and the nature of the service. According to the telecom industry, BEREC’s draft proposal of implementation rules is excessively prescriptive and could make telcos risk-averse thus hampering the exploitation of 5G, ignoring the fundamental agility and elastic nature of 5G Network Slicing to adapt in real time to changes in end-user / application and traffic demand. The 5G objective of creating new business opportunities and satisfying future end-user needs would be at risk, with a regulation not coherent with the market demand evolution.

It is paramount to ensure 5G monetisation to drive investments. Monetisation can take place across the entire value chain with end-users, service providers and industry verticals in order to ensure fair returns, speed up adoption by end-users and ensure consumers are not alone in picking up the bill for the innovation that will help the business cases of the service providers. Operators should also be free to mix and manage different technology generations, mobile or otherwise, that are enabling 5G mobile technology to serve their customers optimally."

It's a property rights issue. Specifically, should private organisations be allowed to own major pieces of infrastructure?

The European vision of capitalism is where you can own, say, a cafe or mobile app, and do what you want with it. However, something like a telecoms network or search engine is too important to be kept in the hands of ruthless big business, and the state needs to step in to control who said businesses deal with.

They talk about preventing monopoly, but even with infrastructure, technological shifts mean any purported monopoly constantly faces real competition. (Witness how IBM lost out to Microsoft, which lost out to the internet companies).

Private investment and private innovation is the best way to build infrastructure, and if the state wants to control how the infrastructure is used (and prevents the owners from cutting special deals with their largest potential customers), investment money stays away.

This has happened with pharmaceuticals - one reason there's been so much investment in viagra and plastic surgery is that more useful medical patents tend to be seized by government. It's also happening in the case of European telecoms: the net neutrality rules provide a disincentive to invest in 5G.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/10/12139700/telecom-companies...

(That article is negatively slanted, but gives a decent overview). Here's the actual report by the telcos:

http://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/document.cfm?action=display...

    Yes, I would rather have decisions made by people in Brussels that understand what they're doing.

Every generation rediscovers Plato's republic.

I see from your comment history you know finance, so - um, what? There are different definitions of "profit".

    We're several years too late to stop it, and we still have half of our government (in the US) utterly denying the problem even exists.

I suggest looking up what people on the opposite side of the debate actually believe, rather than lumping them all together as "denying the problem even exists".

C02 levels are rising (currently 0.04%, will be 0.05% by 2060) and cause a greenhouse effect. We don't know how strong this effect is, but we do know the effect is logarithmic (every additional unit of C02 causes less warming). Many predictions of knock-on effects of climate change are highly speculative (e.g., gulf stream shutdown) or products of distorted incentives (much more money is allocated for climate science research than for other environmental studies, incentivising researchers to exaggerate links between climate change and other environmental issues).

Every indication is that we're facing changes which we can adapt to or mitigate with technology. What's also clear is that cutting emissions by more than 80% (as is often advocated) would cripple energy production, which would cripple industrial civilisation. We're talking people going back to living in tiny smoke-filled cottages (no AC or central heating), in small villages (no commuting), mostly working on farms (no diesel-powered farm equipment).

Fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro power are currently the only viable options to keep modern civilisation running. Hopefully we eventually find an alternative, but it's insane to risk mass suicide to avoid a manageable change in the climate, on the utopian hope that wind/solar will somehow leap forwards in efficiency.

Anyway, that's what I (and many other rational anti-environmentalists) believe.

    there's a whole segment of the population that still believes in fairy tales spun by the oil and gas industry.

If you're implying people are in hock to propaganda, the amount spent by the fossil fuel industry on advocacy is dwarfed by the amount spent on pro-environmentalist advocacy by governments, liberal foundations and the big environmentalist NGOs.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/01/02/dark-mone...

    The human mind is just terrible at grasping problems on the scale and timeline of global climate change, and it's plausible that it'll be the end of life as we know it in another few decades.

Nice combination of speculation about why people disagree (their minds just can't "grasp" it) followed by ungrounded catastrophism. Even the IPCC thinks we're facing a sea level rise of between 20 and 60 centimetres by 2100. That is not "the end of life as we know it".

Those policies were both very expensive and caused a slowdown in economic growth. Sweden has rolled many of them back recently.

https://mises.org/library/how-modern-sweden-profits-success-...

> And from the late-1800s till the mid-1900s, there were huge government investments made in building new and innovative infrastructure in the US--railroads, the phone network, state universities and K-12 public education, electricity generation and distribution, highways, airports.

Excluding the world wars, US government spending was much lower during that period than it is today. It increased greatly with the New Deal in the 30s, and has continued to increase until the present day.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ccxOaz-W_p0/UsgZkuJp-jI/AAAAAAAAAR...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was huge private investment in infrastructure and basic research (e.g., Edison's research lab).

"The SEDA, or Sustainable Economic Development Assessment ranks more than 160 countries across 10 areas including economic stability, health, governance and environment."

A country's SEDA score could easily go up or down drastically based on the weighting of those 10 different areas.

The purpose of GDP is to give a precise measure of our intuitive notion of "prosperity". This is an inherently flawed goal. GDP roughly corresponds with what we want to measure -- countries with higher GDP usually match those we intuitively regard as more prosperous. But, having citizens buy foreign holidays and plasma screen TVs with credit card debt boosts GDP. New technology which cuts the cost of some good can lower GDP. It's a flawed measure.

As with "Gross National Happiness", SEDA strikes me as an attempt to find an alternative to GDP which measures "what we really want to get at". The thing is, "happiness" is both personal and complicated.

I'm sure the society depicted in Brave New World would have both a high GDP and high SEDA score but it's not what I'd regard as bolstering "well-being". Conversely, I'd be pretty happy living in an Anathem-type society (monasteries filled with scientists and philosophers), even though they lived in material poverty.

Denmark also has a less regulated financial system than the US. The idea of the US, when compared to Europe as representing extreme laissez-faire capitalism, is not an accurate reflection of reality. They're all variants of state-regulated semi-free markets.

Brett Victor mentioned Apple experimenting with many futuristic interfaces, but not developing them further after realising they didn't work from a UI pov.

I suspect they may have similar feelings about AI. Many 'clever' systems which aim to predict what the user wants can be frustrating in practice. People prefer tool-like UIs where they can learn the mapping between their actions and the software's behaviour.

Personally, I think there should be more focus on AI augmenting human capabilities, and maybe Apple is working on something like that.

smt88 is entirely correct. In fact, his arguments in this thread are excellent, and there's nothing I want to add. Rights are a political concept, and the right to free speech is entirely an issue of government censorship. A private company witholding a service from you cannot infringe your rights.

Within that context, I want to point out that an action can be within your rights, but still be morally wrong. Influential private companies can create an anti-free-speech culture. This doesn't directly infringe on people's rights, but it paves the way for anti-free-speech legislation.

My other disagreement is whether your internet provider could shut off your internet, and not be infringing your rights. I say 'yes': you and your ISP have a right to sign whatever contract you want, and they can set whatever limitations they want on your use of their property (as can newspapers and online services). The rational way for consumers to deal with is not to get the state to step in, but to push for 'no censorship' contracts.

Thanks for the correction. I was researching the different political parties of Eurozone countries yesterday and it's difficult keeping track of whether a particular 'People's Party' is on the left or right.

I overstated that point but there certainly seems to be a strong left-wing base in every centre-left coalition in Southern Europe. And the centre-right coalitions follow a pragmatic mix of nationalism, traditionalism and capitalism. I.e., neither side has a strong will to cut state spending. Liberalism seems to be more a Protestant northern Europe thing.

I should have been clearer: every country in the EU has a welfare state, and since the more fiscally responsible countries bankroll the less responsible, they're indirectly supporting welfare recipients in those countries. Plus direct support via the EU's many handout programmes (CAP, etc).

In absolute terms, the amounts involved aren't huge right now, but this is a problem that will grow worse with time as a) most European countries have aging populations and face a pensions timebomb and b ) cutting welfare spending is politically very difficult.

Some voices in the EU have been pushing for a welfare and pensions union. It's impossible to predict if this will actually happen, but it shows that many people want to head in that direction.

The EU is indeed more pro-market than many member nations. This is where the left/right axis just confuses the debate. 'Market-friendly social democracy' is the most accurate term for the system promoted by the EU (and the linked NYT article, and most educated elites): a system with 1) free enterprise 2) state regulation of industry 3) state management of the economy and currency and 4) a welfare state.

It's a compromise system which appears capitalistic (and is denounced as neoliberal) but the underlying theory is socialist (a descendant of the gradualist theories promoted by most anti-communist socialists of past generations). History will tell whether it's sustainable.

Downvote wasn't mine. I upvoted you to cancel it out. But thanks for dishonestly implying I'm racist (thereby proving my point), when my entire comment was on economic issues.

By integration I mean political integration. I think very large states have scale problems, large democracies in particular. (Look at India or the US). You either end up with populist parties who need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of hundreds of millions of people, or technocratic elites who ignore the people. The EU has 500 million citizens from 27 ancient nations, with wildly different cultures and economies. There's no way you can fuse them into one giant country, and the inevitable outcome is fuelling nationalism and populism centred around anti-EU resentment.

I'm pro-economic liberty and voted for Brexit. Every analysis like this has tunnel vision: yes, the free trade opened up by the EU brought prosperity to an entire continent. Had we been voting for the 1970s era EEC, I'd have gladly voted Remain.

But in 40 years the EEC has evolved into the EU, with a constitution, a parliament, a president, a national anthem, a flag, supreme law-making powers and a currency.

Maybe the Merckel anti-integration faction will remain dominant and they'll stop there. Given the Juncker faction pushes further integration as the solution to every crisis, and given the EU is in constant crisis, the next 10 years should be interesting.

The EU is a world-historical experiment in social democracy - free markets + state regulation + the welfare state. The consensus is that this system represents the current pinnacle of political evolution. (Both 'progressive' Scandinavia and 'capitalist' America implement variants of it). An alternative perspective is that it's simply a compromise system which emerged after WWII and is already showing severe cracks.

Maybe the EU will create prosperity by such actions as forcing Google to break up, throwing state money at impoverished regions, etc. Maybe the populations of France, Spain, Italy et al will accept that they can't fund welfare states by borrowing in perpetuity and stop voting in radical left-wing governments. Maybe they'll find an alternative solution to the ever growing debt-burden, over Piketty's proposal for seizing 15% of all bank accounts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_long-term_solutions...

I have no idea. I would like to see pro-EU articles which actually address these issues, and not simply assume that the only reason to be against the EU is that you're an ignorant racist, deluded by propaganda and lies.