Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress
undrr.org> broken perception of risk based on “optimism, underestimation and invincibility"
How about artificially low interest rates? An interest rate is exactly the coordination between risk and time, with a low interest rate you're subsidizing stupidity and wastefulness, and with its concommittant inflation you're forcing people into making those investments to stay afloat.
Maybe if we weren't goosing the interest rate lower for "growth" we wouldn't be destroying the environment.
But I guess it is hard to get someone who works for an organization like the UN, who is predisposed to meddle, to see that the problem is meddling, and not that the solution is more meddling.
Your last sentence seems to suggest that if we just let the free market do what it does, everything would be fixed and we wouldn't have any environmental problems.
Are you not aware of the concept of externalities? How do you, for example, explain the fact that leaded gasoline was only replaced with non-leaded gasoline when "meddling" made it illegal?
Are you of the opinion that letting the free market set interest rates is going to cause measurable levels of brain damage?
The official policy position is that the free market won't gamble enough if left alone and that it needs to be forced away from conservative plays. We must admit that this is, potentially, a contributing factor to the lack of responsible long term thinking in markets that are influenced by money (hedging in case there are aspects of life that aren't influenced by low interest rates, if someone spots any let me know).
Plus printing money and handing it out to rich people is outrageous. I'm confused at how anyone is can pretend that is a good idea. You didn't say that, I'm just throwing it out there Carthago delenda est style)
I was specifically talking about the last paragraph, that the solution is to not "meddle" in general. It's quite possible that the way interest rates are set is problematic, I'm not qualified to have an opinion on that. But clearly there are problems where meddling is necessary.
Humans have a strong universal bias towards additive solutions, even when subtractive solutions are clearly better. I doubt regulatory policymakers are immune.
That's a non-statement. Nothing about what I have said assumes that policymakers are immune to any form of bias.
> Humans have a strong universal bias towards additive solutions, even when subtractive solutions are clearly better.
That's a very profound statement, are you kidding me?
Bad response. Nowhere do I claim that no meddling is good. I simply claim that this one form of meddling is really fucking bad and it's hard to see that meddling can be the root cause when you are predisposed to meddle.
The irony is that you're falling victim to exactly this phenomenon: I claim that meddling in one form is bad and you pull out a knee-jerk argument with a buzzword (externalities) that injects a misinterpretation of the logic in the argument. When you are predisposed to meddle, you put up barriers to understanding my argument.
Anyways, my point is exactly that central banking makes blindness to externalities worse.
I don't know that I agree with the idea that the government should take no direct role in managing the economy, but that's a different argument than "the government shouldn't regulate externalities". I think there's a reasonable distinction between "protecting public health" and "manipulating the economy". Certainly regulating public health will have downstream economic impacts, but those impacts aren't the purpose.
Yes, externalities must indeed be settled. However, leaded petrol (same chap also invented freon (!) btw - talk about being unlucky :D) cannot really be handled by a market as it is in its nature a bodily harm and there is the criminal code for that.
Freon would be a much more interesting example as it hurts societies in the long-term and not individuals in the short.
Unfortunately governments can also fail in settling externalities. For example, making it hard to extract oil domestically only shifts production to other countries, which are often bad authoritarian states.
Better way is to tax consumption, but that has never been popular in US.
The US is a "low trust" society. We don't trust our government. Our entire system was in fact designed assuming the axiom that people in power cannot be trusted. People are not confident those tax dollars would be used to offset the externality, as opposed to a pet project. Sadly, our history would seem to make that lack of confidence rational. But, denying our government the power to govern isn't the solution, demanding (and getting) transparency and personal accountability that is meaningfully severe is.
Technically the US is a “high trust” society. Meaning we have institutions like rule of law, independent courts, and elections that are trusted by society to facilitate commercial and legal relations between people, rather than personal relationships and kinships.
Yes we complain a lot and criticize the government and don’t fully trust our polarized politicians, but a real “low trust” society is a far cry from what we have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...
This might have been true 10 years ago, but now (just from the wiki examples):
1. More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election – poll - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-bide...
2. US tax system is not voluntary, but extremely coercive - the IRS is legendary in its blood-houndness and the US is probably the only country in the world that taxes non-resident citizens.
3. Abortion-Rights Protest Targets Homes of Kavanaugh, Roberts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-08/abortion-...
I am not sure if the US could already be classified as a low-trust society (probably not yet), but a strong negative trend is definitely present.
The US can have lower levels of trust than it previously had while still having levels of trust that significantly exceed the median. This seems to be a popular misunderstanding in the last decade.
I'm not sure if this is the parent's intent, but there's a whole lot of sincere "the US is a third world country" sort of argumentation going around, predicated entirely on observations that the US falls short of certain utopian ideals). "The US should continue to improve" doesn't depend on pretense that the US lags the median for a given category, and I strongly suspect that this sort of rhetoric gives way to the sort of fatalism that prevents societies from progressing ("we can't progress, we're stuck in this miserable system, etc").
Is this getting downvotes because it doesn't speak to or support the question of the level of trust in the US government? Or is it getting downvotes because the politics of the poster are evident, and people are disagreeing with those politics? I am pretty sure the poster and I would disagree very strongly and on many things, but this post would seem to relate directly on the matter discussed. We do have a decreasing level of trust in our government, and it is beginning to have the sorts of impacts mentioned in the wiki article. Our relatively high standard of living compared to those other low trust countries hides them to some degree by making uprisings less inviting.
I can't actually tell what the parent's politics are. "40% of Americans don't believe Biden won the election" seems like a left-leaning talking point while "protests at Kavenaugh's house" seems like a right-leaning talking point. I think it's a good thing that he wasn't transparently political.
I downvoted because the apparent argument ("the US has these imperfections, thus it follows that it ranks low among countries") is a specific incarnation of the enumeration fallacy that is both obvious and frequently employed. If this isn't what the parent intended to communicate, then he can take my downvote as a cue to be clearer in the future. My downvotes are intended as (albeit very low-resolution) constructive criticism, not ill-will or petty disagreement.
I think the parent was abundantly clear here: > I am not sure if the US could already be classified as a low-trust society (probably not yet), but a strong negative trend is definitely present. I'm not sure where your interpretation is coming from, but if it was a misreading of parent's comment then I think your downvote could be happily reversed.
That quote demonstrates enumeration fallacy (using examples to argue that the US ranks lower without any context about the countries against which the US is ranked).
Moreover:
> [The US's classification as a high-trust society] might have been true 10 years ago, but now (just from the wiki examples): ...
This seems to unambiguously argue that the US is not a high-trust society. With the additional context of your quote "not sure if the US could be classified as a low trust society...", it's possible that the parent is contradicting himself or that he's arguing that the US is certainly not high-trust, but middling or lower. Thus the parent is either unclear (contradiction) or he's arguing by enumeration. Even if there is some alternative interpretation, this very debate suffices to prove unclarity.
Well. In all honesty, I should have written "definetly not yet" instead of "probably not yet". But I see it from my own perspective as someone who grew up in Bulgaria and spent his adult life in the Czech Republic. Neither country is considered an example for the world (understandably lol), but in both, current US state of affairs would be considered extremely worrying. For example in both countries we have a multi-party system, so the average Bulgarian/Czech doesn't hate half the supreme court justices as it is in the US, but 8/9. Yet I don't think that harrassing them at their homes would be an acceptable behavior no matter the case.
So, I made this statement based on low national self-esteem. Later on I compared in my head current US with places such as Lebanon and Venezuela and realised that it is still doing pretty well, even though the strong downwards trend simply cannot be denied. So yeah.
Fair enough. This clarification earned you an upvote. :)
Let's play my politics !!! I don't believe that anyone should be coerced into not having an abortion, but I don't believe anyone should be coerced into paying in someone else's abortion. Thus I agree with... wait for it... neither side in the current debate. Congratulations to the winners!!
I'd be willing to bet that its viewed as "low-effort" because quotes like these generally turn out to be misleading to the actual study (or the study itself has fatal structure), pretty much without fail:
> More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election – poll
Political polling is seen by some as more of a driver of opinion than an extraction of one.
Taxing consumption is inherently regressive. By its nature, it places a disproportionate amount of the burden on those least able to pay for it.
There are ways to address that. For example - exempting certain things like staple food items.
No, there really aren't. You can mitigate the regressive nature of consumption taxes, but you can't eliminate them.
Fundamentally, poor and middle-class people spend a higher percentage of their annual income on goods and services than rich people do. There just isn't enough stuff that one could ever want to buy (or services to partake in) for rich people to spend the same proportion annually.
The best you'd be able to manage is limiting your consumption taxes to things that only very wealthy people can afford in the first place, like superyachts. But at that point, a) you're not managing to bring in a huge amount of revenue with it, and b) you might as well just raise the higher income tax brackets, or add taxes on wealth over $X amount.
If you could replace income tax with a national sales tax, I'd be all for it. The problem is, everyone knows any consumption based taxes will be in addition to the current taxes on productivity (e.g., income tax).
In any case, what the govt doesn't take in taxes, it can just take via inflation.
Wealth confiscation via inflation is great! it doesn't require politicians to justify higher taxes to their constituents (and thus face the wrath of their voters), and it can be implemented by unaccountable and unelected officials at the Fed.
Yes, but it is as socially unfair as government services being charged on for-profit basis. Or even a bit more.
I am the most anti-socialist person I know and even to me, inflation is too cruel of a tax.
I my state, local sales taxes (which are a consumption tax) are hugely popular, especially in conservative areas. The reason is simple: voters know upfront what the taxes going to be used for (usually education related capital expenses and road improvements), when the tax will expire, and that it will only be used in the county instead of being shipped off somewhere else to be administered and a portion skimmed off. Each time they come up for renewal, they usually get passed by a large margin. So maybe the problem isn't that people don't like consumption taxes but that they don't like taxes disappearing into a black hole with dubious or non-existent benefits or even used to create negative value to the community.
> leaded petrol cannot really be handled by a market as it is in its nature a bodily harm and there is the criminal code for that.
This is the same fallacious thinking “libertarians” fall into when they think civil court will solve for most regulations/codes. The burden of proving harm is too high. Probably hundreds of millions were spent proving that leaded gasoline was unsafe. No criminal prosecution could have accomplished that. They simply don’t have the resources.
And who would they have prosecuted anyway? The gasoline companies weren’t actually the ones causing the harm. It was the billions of people driving around burning the stuff.
There’s a reason we end up with laws regulating specific things like this. It’s untenable for the courts to handle otherwise.
In case you are actually asking a question - most environmental guidelines in today's EU cities are the result of court cases. Both my hometown and the city I currently live in have been found guilty of neglecting air quality multiple times and ordered to take action. And yeah - in a libertarian (actually an-cap) world it wouldn't be a city, but a municipal services corporation with participatory ownership (a la UK Premier League).
But then again I am not really an anarcho-capitalist, but an extremely mild minarchist (imagine Raegan without his naiveness or Thatcher without her inferiority complex). So even this doesn't represent my opinion.
You're right externalities are an issue. However, consider rating agencies in the 2008 housing crisis. By not downgrading junk they made the problem worse. If the market worked like a rational market, we'd be better off. Alas, human organizations are not rational sometimes.
That’s not how I read his post. Regardless you can mark me down as someone who doesn’t want the government trying to “goose” our economy through increasingly complex methods, like artificially low interest rates, corporate welfare, etc.
I do however fully support reasonable regulations (consequences for externalities), building infrastructure, universal aid and healthcare programs, etc.
Basically bad decisions like over borrowing, and bad lending, should be punished (not bailed out or you encourage bad decisions). Financial decisions that shift cost to others (externalities like dumping chemicals into a river) should also be punished. At the same time a safety net can be developed (cheap housing, food, or even UBI) to prevent the most devastating individual consequences (especially those you may not even be responsible for). That’s my ideal at least.
“everything would be fixed and we wouldn't have any environmental problems.”
Ah…age-old gaslight tactic. Using words like “everything” “all” “any” to encapsulate your opponents argument then using a non-sequitor counter-point (leaded gasoline) to argue a tangent point (a point not relating to interest rates).
"How would you deal with externalities such as cars polluting the air with lead?" is a perfectly valid question in response to the claim that "meddling" by governments into the free market is inherently bad. It's neither a non sequitur nor gaslighting.
The problem is that economic growth is extremely important to developing economies as well. It’s one thing to say we should limit growth, or deprioritize it, or whatever, but in practice this means forcing poor countries to accept lower standards of living. That’s the real trade-off here.
Growth can't continue indefinitely. In fact a lot of growth today is actually fudging the numbers to make them look good.
> Growth can't continue indefinitely.
no it can't continue indefinitely, but there's still a tonne of room left for humans to grow. I dont believe we are near the limit yet. And that's only this planet. There's at least a few more in the solar system, and hopefully, propulsion tech will improve at some point to allow other star systems to be taken over by humans.
>I dont believe we are near the limit yet.
On what basis? We are already objectively destroying this planet with absolutely no meaningful action being taken to change, much less reverse course. At this point we will be incredibly lucky if we even manage to sustain a technological civilization long enough to settle other planets.
innovation can?
Nope. One of the fudges is saying that a computer based on today's technology is more valuable than on from a couple years ago. I forget what this is called. But it's stupid and could be really abused to say a cellphone is a trillion dollar device, since that's what the processing power would have cost in 1980.
Maybe we should measure GDP via wages. Since all spending has to come from that anyway... not sure how to classify B2B transactions though, just thinking out loud.
An iPhone 12 uses less material than an iPhone 11 yet is more valuable than an iPhone 11.
A Tesla uses about 25 tons less fossil fuels than a gasoline car, even if its electricity is powered by a natgas generating station. The Tesla uses about the same amount of fossil fuels as the trucks transporting the fuel to the filling station.
Software of course, is special. New software is better than old software otherwise nobody would buy it. Yet the material usage is roughly equivalent at roughly $0.
These three types of progress can continue indefinitely.
You are referring to the hedonic quality adjustment factor that the BLS applies to CPI calculations. It's not at all stupid and it doesn't result in trillion dollar cellphones. You should really read up on the basics instead of making ignorant comments about things you don't understand.
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...
There were proposals for labor-backed currency, where the basic unit is one hourly work of the worker. So B2B transactions will be valued from the man-hours that went to it.
Of course this approach breaks when the gigantic corpocracies are able to bloat into larger and larger sizes. But it might be an interesting research topic.
There are a lot of reasons why this wouldn't work but fundamentally the LTV is an interesting toy but crap economics. Bottom line is utility to people does not depend on person hours involved in production.
Think about it this way: I can have somebody skilled or unskilled do a job. Assume that they make the same output but it takes unskilled 2x the time, let us say maybe producing some leathercraft. Their output is not worth 2x the skilled, it's the same thing. Now assume that they take the same time but the skilled produces an output of 2x quality, maybe they are cooking something and the skilled makes a dish 2x as good. Neither are they worth the same. It may actually be worth less because they produce it slower so consumer has to wait 2x as long.
It can even get worse. Fundamentally LTV is subject to a very dangerous question of "who gets to define what is labour"? Is sitting around playing video games labour? Well what if you're at a video games company? Is smearing feces on a canvas labour? What if it's a commissioned art piece? What if it's an uncomissioned art piece that the artist knows will fetch a price? What if the artist is a chimpanzee? Etc.
Labor hours fails because some jobs need more incentive to get into. Why would I study in school when I could make just as much doing basic unskilled labor, with careful savings the unskilled laborer can retire earlier since he starts sooner (also likely doesn't have to pay off student debt)
You'd have to implement a coeficient based on the average time needed to aquire said skill for a person with average IQ and EQ, performance, number of base skills required to learn said skill, so on. This formula would be a bit more complex than this but you get the jist of it.
It wouldn't be impossible to quantify it for all but edge cases.
>It wouldn't be impossible to quantify it for all but edge cases.
It would be impossible to quantify it because there's no objective measure of value. The current system allows value to be quantified by people's revealed preferences: the jobs people are willing to pay more for get paid higher. If there's no market for labor then there's no revealed preferences and it's impossible to know which jobs are creating more value for people (only what jobs are creating more value by some bureaucrats personal subjective measure of value).
Value is relative term. Even so it can be quantified by using "demand" of a final service/product. That can be used to increase the value of the hour for a certain vertical.
Even the same thing can be valued differently, depending on the location, circumstances, etc.
Tbh I'm not an economics specialist to account for all variables but I can't see how it would be any different from fiat in terms of complexity.
Except those edge cases would likely destroy the whole system. The value of an hour of labor isn’t based on the time it took to acquire the skill, it’s based on the value of the good or service produced to society. Whether it takes a normal person 4 years to acquire that skill, or a genius 4 days, the value is what it’s worth to other people.
That value not only has a very wide range, but also it’s constantly fluctuating. If you try to centrally dictate it, you’ll be constantly getting it wrong, distorting the labor market just as badly as artificially low interest rates distort other aspects of the economy.
>The value of an hour of labor isn’t based on the time it took to acquire the skill, it’s based on the value of the good or service produced to society
I'd think, the reason that a surgeon is paid more than a garbage disposal person is the ammount of time, brain power and skill it takes to learn/master.
In the grand scheme of things, number wise, if the garbage disposal guys are gone (or just refuse to work for 1 year), a lot more people will be sick and die. In todays world, we can't do without them. Why would a surgeon be paid more if he only saves 10000 lives during his lifetime when cleaners keep millions safe from disease, rat infestations, etc? How about those guys that work at water purification plants that keep cities running and that surgeon clean?
I'm not bashing surgeons here. I'm one of the guys that made it through a poped apedix thanks to a surgeon that realized what was going on and did the surgery within 1h of me collapsing.
I'm questioning the concept of rewarding labour based on "value to society". IMHO, that works only for basic needs and services. Food, shelter, security, etc. Anything above that... not so much or at best, debatable.
Things like this have been tried throughout history and constantly failed. It was pretty much the running theme of 1800s and 1900s. As the other poster said, the only objective measure of value is what people will pay for it. Nothing centrally planned can handle the variance and fluctuations in the value of things.
There are some supply and demand dynamics to it, for example surgeons are less replaceable than garbage men due to 8+ years of education required, so they will have less supply relative to demand, driving up the cost of their services.
And time is a factor as well - usually when people need a surgeon the problem is urgent and immediate, as you mention about your own experience, so they’re willing to pay more.
Also in your example, you have to compare on a 1-to-1 basis. How many lives does 1 garbage collector save, vs 1 surgeon. And if all the garbage men quit, how quickly could they be replaced, vs same with all the surgeons?
Central management/centralized control at that level is not something I'm really confortable with seeing. I can see the results of EU and how it shut down a huge chunk of small producers from the coutry side in Romania(my home country).
>"the only objective measure of value is what people will pay for it" - I think the ratio between demand/supply would be a more accurate one. I really don't know what systems have been proposed like this but "what people will pay for it" wouldn't be an option.
The whole chain - raw product to shelf would be (?mostly) quantified and you'll pay what is is out of your "produced/contributed hours".
In that regarding not much would change compared to today. Just the currency and formula used.
Production can be ramped up or down just like today, manufacturing lines closed, etc. Nothing special there.
The main difference is the currency used would be the same all over the place and that (ideally) labour h value for a particular skill would be rated the same everywhere in the world. A laboured in UK would have the same h coef. as one in China. This could also contribute to distribution of production centres more evenly around the world (ideally).
Don't get me wrong. It's just a discussion of sorts and no system is perfect. I just think something like this would help equalize things in some way and still motivate those that want to do more to do so. At the moment, all 'isms have their issues and I'm "hoping" a hybrid of sorts would be worth trying at this stage. I'm not pro any of them and agaist all of them... sort of.
I think a lot of the sibling comments here misunderstand the concept of labor-backed money (rather than debt-backed money, which we have in the United States today).
First - currency is the physical note, coin, IOU, etc. Money is the concept.
With debt-backed money like the US dollar, the money is created by a private bank (the Federal Reserve) in exchange for US Treasury bonds - debt.
The currency supply is controlled by the US Treasury, but the money supply is controlled by the Federal Reserve.
Labor-backed money as I understand it, would be created by the Treasury in exchange for labor. The Treasury would control the supply of both money and currency. Crucially, to create money, labor must be performed. Similar to debt-based money, where debt is created by the government as the basis of money - in this case, labor would be "created" by the price (in new money) offered for it.
There is no need to have some centrally-planned, mandated valuation of a certain tradesman's time vs another trade or profession - the government puts out lots of contracts for bid today with no such mechanism in place, and it wouldn't need to change.
why, because we ran out of habitable planets in the galaxy?
Depends what "poverty" means. A lot of poor people were subsistance farmers, able to hold property and carve a space for themselves and their families in the world. That's something that will be out of reach for many "rich" people in the upcoming decades.
Subsistence farming is a nightmare, I can all but guarantee that no living subsistence farmer would choose that life over renting an apartment and having disposable income.
It's not that bad, and a lot of people like to own their own land rather than never get to own anything.
Dude. Go move to my dad’s village in Bangladesh for a year, so what they do, then come back and post on HN.
Let’s assume all of us are curious about what we would learn doing that, but none of us are probably willing or able to actually do that. What would we learn if we did?
Being a subsistence farmer is really hard. When my dad was growing up, 1 out of 4 kids died before age 5. Getting in boats to go to school was a thing during monsoon season. Moreover, most people don’t own their land—they’re what Americans would call share croppers or what Europeans would call peasants.
There’s certain benefits, of course. The communities are tightly knit and there is a predictable social hierarchy. But it’s a rigid one, and the rigidity is driven by the realities of subsistence farming. It’s pretty great if you’re a landowner, but if you’re not born into one of those families then you can’t “work your way up.” Indeed, a lot of the things we think of as “more enlightened” attitudes in the modern west are really the product of us being free from the constraints of subsistence farming. You don’t get to be “child free” (or openly gay) in an economy where having lots of kids and hoping enough survive to take care of you in your old age is the only retirement plan.
Men’s dominance over women, likewise, arises naturally in an economy where people are at the edge of survival and doing extremely physically demanding work keeps the community alive. My mom grew up reading Russian literature and got a master’s degree in chemistry and edited a history of the Bangladeshi independence movement. Not because her father was enlightened, though he was, but because he was a wealthy landowner and didn’t need his daughters to be in the fields harvesting rice, or to get married off quickly so some other man could support them.
Yeah wow, I always cringe whenever I hear people unashamedly talking about "degrowth" in poor countries because hey they like it anyways! I mean they are alive so it can't be too bad? As if there's no reason why those subsistence farmers do everything they can to either get themselves out of that situation if they get the chance or at least sacrifice everything to make sure their kids don't have to live the same life. They should've just read about the virtues of minimalist living online and like, reconnect with nature bro.
This is one of the reason why i just can't get into most modern western environmentalist movements , it actually gets uncomfortable how they fetishise misery and stagnation knowing damn well that they themselves won't ever have to experience any major deprivation. Because let's be honest, even if western countries make concessions of course they will never sacrifice more than comforts/superfluous things. abject poverty farming for thee, and at the very very worse "degrowing" a few percentage of GDP for me.
Not really. China and India grew even during the 1990s when $ interest rates were not 0 and quite high. Single largest removal of poverty in the world.
Growth in both those countries was due to them opening up economies to internal and external entrepreneurialism and capital.
Let's say you have two possible projects: X is investment in growth, which will result in increase of your revenue in the short term, and Y is investment in reduction of risks which will increase the value of your assets in the long term. If interest rates are low, borrowing money for Y or for both projects becomes more tangible option. If interest rates are high and you are an optimist, you will choose to borrow money for X. Based on this logic, higher interest rates would expose the optimism of the investors better. Whether there is a causal link between them or not, that is an open question.
This hits the nail on the head. Also, all the money-printing creates extreme market distortions, inequality and injustice. It greatly increases the role of luck and social connections in financial success (due to Cantillon effects) and therefore those who end up at the top, blinded by their extreme survivor bias, tend to be overly optimistic about reality and so they are among the worse qualified to be making complex decisions on a global scale which affect the majority (who are non-outliers by definition)... I doubt anyone is qualified to be making those decisions, let alone extreme outliers who don't fully understand the magnitude of the problems.
I read it: 'UN wants to curtail their 5-years-plan 'agenda 2030' to be finished in 2025 , cos they are planning to impose you with their might (davos 05-22-2022 who want to overrule health, stripping sovereignty and if thats succsessful, forbidding nationalism world wide) to use the same _scare_tactics_ - as other western nations (media-driven experiment) before (-migration -covid-19 -war in ukraine for example), saying now - 'The UN welcomes you to 1,5 disaster per day beginnig in 2030!' (-; No... and while that wasn't about money, have you ever thought 'rising markets are an equivalent of increased productivity' ? ^^ Some days ago there was a headline: 'productivity is on an 75-year low.' But in terms of asking 'Is that a participation-thing?', i might enjoy what you wrote, sry, won't sound offending... (-:
One of the interesting parts of humanity is that we make artificial frameworks that become so familiar to us it feels “natural”
The entire concept of interest is a human-designed concept (one that some cultures actively reject). To say that interest rates are being “meddled” with is just basically saying “one group of humans is doing one thing that disagrees with how another group of humans do it”
I’d argue that humans in general are awful at understanding time values and interest is a very incomplete solution to that problem. Making that incomplete solution marginally better isn’t going to get us anywhere.
Shame is, I don’t have any better ideas.
This is one of the best comments on HN ever. Another problem of the current (non-commodity based) system is that monetary base doesn't map to the resources of the planet which have not increased almost 5-fold as did M2[0].
I think this is completely backwards. We are not risking enough and the progress has stalled as a result.
During the 1880-1950 we were causing massive disasters all around, literally nuking cities. But that period is also where we came up with virtually all of technology that makes the modern world: cars, planes, radio, computers, nuclear power, jet propulsion.
Since then (also ~70 years) we have maintained a little momentum here and there. Jet propulsion gave us space travel and satellites, we linked computer into networks, put them on the radio. Otherwise, it has been a time of stagnation.
This managerial approach to risk management is in no small part to blame in my opinion. We should be bolder. This may be worse for individual people affected but better for humanity in general as it gives us tools to address truly existential risks (like a stray asteroid).
We can't really make it up to the people affected in another managerial/coasian bargain. So in return, as healthy cultures did throughout the ages, we give our heroes glory.
I guess you missed the moment between 1950-2020s when our civilization transitioned from industrial to information society thanks to massive progress in IT. Super-optimistic approach to software design in that period of time has led us to the destructive mess of the social networks, cyberwarfare and buggy MCAS in Boeing 737 Max.
EDIT: I also forgot to mention globalization, where optimism resulted in the supply chain crisis of 2020-2021 and inability of the West to impose full oil and gas embargo on Russia.
I didn't miss the massive progress in IT. I mean, obviously I didn't, we're having this conversation on HN.
However, progress in IT, in bits, while fine and useful, is simply not as powerful as progress in more basic industries, in atoms. Having the means to (over)feed seven billion people (1940s tech spread around the world) is more important than having the means to (mis)inform seven billion people (1980s tech spread around the world).
Look at a smart phone. Just the physical parts like the battery, the cpu, display and power electronics are completely different to technology in 1990.
How do you get information or deal with payments? It's the smartphone. Many people in developing countries benefit immensely from this change. Or refugees or travelers. And on software services side, we have similar improvements - the smartphone would be useless without the services it's used with. How many hours of queuing have we eliminated since now you can do those things online? In my country almost nothing requires physical presence anymore. And also, millions of people can spend their time on something more productive than sitting behind a counter, serving customers for trivial things.
Although, ironically, these hacker news discussions could have content wise been had in the usenet already in the eighties. No similar upvoting / downvoting crowd moderation though, which did kill it as a discussion platform once the masses got access.
What other technologies look completely different? People laughed at wind and solar power. They were completely unviable as power sources.
Cars used leaded gasoline. Diesels were rolling smoke stacks. Air quality in cities was terrible. Now we have electric buses.
On the other hand, there have been regressions. Nuclear power was being built at a fast pace in the late seventies and early eighties. It's way slower now.
> On the other hand, there have been regressions. Nuclear power was being built at a fast pace in the late seventies and early eighties. It's way slower now.
Counterpoint but I think one of the reasons for this is that wind and solar are lower-capital alternatives to building nuclear powerplants. Not spending the capital to maintain existing powerplants does seem like a regression to me though, so we're on the same page there.
It is not just about informing people, but also automation of many things. It is certainly more powerful transformation than invention of steam engine. It has transformed industry and agriculture on a similar scale, enabling many things that were not possible before, but it also transformed our society, changing the ways we communicate, learn, entertain and find partners.
The difference between having a tractor and not having a tractor is much larger than between having a computer/gps-guided tractor and having an old school tractor. While it's certainly an improvement, it's a smaller improvement.
The difference between hailing a taxi via app and hailing a taxi by waving at it is much smaller than the difference between automobiles being available and not being available. Again, it's a great improvement but a smaller step than the original one.
Marriage rates are down so that abundance may be overrated.
EDIT: I don't know about steam engine but all these are certainly far behind an internal combustion engine.
These differences aren't the results of taking less risk. They're the results of the technology being low-hanging fruit.
The low-hanging fruit is gone now. There could be some revolution that comes - but physics is at a standstill and has been for decades. Most of the gains are coming as evolutions, not revolutions, focusing on optimization.
It depends on where to look for examples.
E.g. in agriculture there's a huge difference between a water pump (or a water wheel, both - incremental updates from a bucket with water) and computer-controlled watering system, which can deliver significant increase in yield or even save your crop during drought.
I can order a widget from literally the other side of the world or plan a party while taking a dump. Access to communications technology makes me a lot "richer" in a practical sense. Heads of state in the 1990s with tons of administrative labor at their disposal didn't have access to the same level of information and communication that normal people do today. The amount of man hours spent on "paper pushing and record keeping" type labor for a given end result has shrunk drastically making a level of "paper pushing and record keeping" that was formerly only the purview of states and large organizations available to the every-man.
Thanks to technological progress administrative paper pushing and clerical activity has become cheap enough for lots of people to have access to it the same way fresh produce became cheaply available over the 20th century.
The standard of living of heads of state in 1990s was pretty solid from modern perspective. Even if they couldn't get an earwax picker off AliExpress while taking a dump.
The 737 Max tragedy wss mainly caused by regulatory constrains on design.
I’m interested in a source for this.
Based on online news reports and a couple of documentaries on the topic I’ve watched (Frontline, Netflix), the regulatory constraints mainly entailed having new airplane designs go through more extensive scrutiny, which would mean greater expenditures for the company.
In order to avoid this (and therefore stay competitive with Airbus), Boeing reported the MCAS program as merely a minor upgrade of the existing system, and subsequently failed to train pilots in its use properly.
If this is what you’re referring to, I feel like “mainly caused by regulatory contraints on design” is a reductive and slightly misleading take. Or is there some other information to support your claim?
I agree with your facts. We differ on judgement and/or labelling.
Regulations made the sounds engineering solution very costly, in both time and money, so Boeing was forced to do a complex error prone hacky solution to stay within the regulatory constraints.
Don't really know what "reductive" means here, but it's probably not good :)
What I meant by reductive is, I feel like laying the blame solely at the feet of regulators oversimplifies the issue. Someone might argue that better enforcement or additional regulation (one that would prevent Boeing from circumventing the law) could have prevented the disaster.
If I recall correctly, the Netflix documentary tends to blame capitalism, the free market, and other assorted boogeymen for creating the perverse incentives the company was forced to respond to.
I suspect that neither of the two views at the opposite side of the spectrum captures the full picture.
I didn't watch the documentary, but I read a fair amount of the coverage at the time.
I don't mind rephrasing "forced" to "incentivized", or believing that Boeing independently did shady and/or criminal things. It usually takes more than one factor to cause a rare disaster.
"Risk" is incredibly broad.
The linked article seems quite focused on disaster risk, which in terms of its increase is mostly climate-related.
The perceived reduction in progress over decades may have more to do with societal changes in individual risk perception. For example, we were more comfortable with people dying in the name of progress in 1880-1950.
Communist regimes well past that period were quite willing to sacrifice large numbers of people in the name of "progress." But those losses are large enough to be regarded as statistics rather than tragedies...
I don't think it's about risk, I think it's about low-hanging fruits. It's also why some people could bring revolution to mathematics, physics, philosophy in just one life before, and these days it's not possible.
> During the 1880-1950 we were causing massive disasters all around, literally nuking cities. But that period is also where we came up with virtually all of technology that makes the modern world: cars, planes, radio, computers, nuclear power, jet propulsion.
What is your concrete suggestion for taking more risks? Surely not nuking more cities? Having more world wars? Shall we declare war on Russia and send troops to Ukraine? Would that create more "progress"?
> Otherwise, it has been a time of stagnation.
How so? To take one example: we had a killer virus come out of nowhere, but we were able to develop effective vaccines for the virus almost immediately. The "slow" part was just the safety testing, not the vaccine development. Would this have been possible during the 1880-1950 era? Science and technology continues rapidly; I'm quite puzzled by the stagnation comment.
In 2022, we all have computers in our pockets that are vastly more powerful than anything from 1950, and we can use these pocket computers to instantly communicate with anyone on the planet.
I'm not endorsing it, and I would rather that we didn't, but
> Having more world wars? Shall we declare war on Russia and send troops to Ukraine? Would that create more "progress"?
War driving technology forward is a pretty popular idea; it's plausible that if modern society survived WWIII it would create more progress... for the survivors.
> War driving technology forward is a pretty popular idea
I would say less morbidly that government investment often drives technology forward. Sadly, wartime seems to be the only time when many people are willing to invest in government.
> it's plausible that if modern society survived WWIII it would create more progress... for the survivors.
That's the problem with war driving technology forward. The military technology has been driven forward to the level where modern society surviving WWIII is questionable.
Did you even read the article?
I think a lot of folks here are missing the forest for the trees about this report. This is urging people to take a disaster studies inspired approach[1]. We need are in danger of over-optimizing; of accepting too many disruptions from foreseeable problems. There is nothing here about how many risks we should take - it's talking about the fact that we can model expected disruptions and that we are not using that knowledge to prepare for those disruptions which will, of course, make them worse.
Nearly all disasters are foreseeable and mitigable. We will do better if we prepare ahead of time. Investing a comparatively small amount of resources will have returns down the line - but you have to do the investment and plan accordingly. A laser focus on investing all resources in "progress" will end up forseeably disrupted.
[1] The work of Scott Gabriel Knowles is probably a good intro if people are not familiar.
The metaphor that comes to mind is "Pacific Rim": we're being attacked by invisible kaiju but we're not building giant robots to fight them because they're invisible. They're saying "let's use radar to locate the monsters and build robots to be ready to fight them".
But the "monsters" are things like floods, wildfires, tsunamis, etc.
> the Hazard Definition and Classification Review, ... outlined over 300 hazard types that can contribute to disasters (UNDRR, 2020a). They include common events such as storms and floods and also less-frequent events such as pandemics and chemical accidents.
https://www.undrr.org/publication/global-assessment-report-d...
And the giant robots are things like better communication, insurance, and paying a little attention.
Exactly - though I think I would go even further with the metaphor and say this report is pointing out that we can see the Kaiju on the radar right now but we are choosing not to build the robots! So it is warning that, given the Kaiju we can foresee, the projected output of our industry is going to dip into the negative.
"The GAR2022 blames these disasters on a broken perception of risk based on “optimism, underestimation and invincibility,” which leads to policy, finance and development decisions that exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and put people in danger."
Optimism? I'd say it's apathy. Doomsday reports, also very correct and alarming ones, have lost their effect. People have become numb, pessimistic and just assume or even accept that everything is going to shit. They feel powerless to do anything about it, or are too occupied with their own economic relevance.
Its like with accidental pregnancies or software complexity. People love the nice things "at the front" and prefer to ignore the tail of liabilities coming with it.
Another perspective: humanity's biggest problem is our inability to understand the exponential function [1].
As for climate change, the only way that ends is after massive death and destruction or due to economics (specifically: carbon emission sources get replaced because they're cheaper). It's too large, expensive and long-term for people to care otherwise. The pandemic should've dispelled any notions you may have had about humanity not being staggeringly selfish.
The social and political disasters are more solvable. The world powers (and the US in particular) need to stop screwing with the rest of the world purely for their material gain.
The US loves to sanction, incite a revolution or just outright invade any country that even talks about (let alone actually) nationalizes natural resources [2]. Cuba and Venezuela spring to mind. In Ecuador after Chevron caused massive environmental damage and the government secured a $9.5 billion judgement, the US reacted by empowering an oil law firm to criminally prosecute the US lawyer (Steven Donziger) for fraud in the US [3].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6E156F1A50BB7B72
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
[3]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/05/04/science/mcgovern-call...
Well, the US military might is reliant on a resource it does not actually produce locally (in sufficient quantities). If the govt. did not exert control over other sources, it would quickly lose access, rendering much of the heavy machinery useless. The Navy is the most vulnerable to an oil shortage.
The US is an energy exporter now.
All crude is not created equal. Jet fuel for instance is dominantly refined from light sweet crude, for which the Middle East is the best source. While one can refine shale oil into jet fuel, the process is more complicated and expensive. It is worth noting that US does refine most of its own jet fuel within the country, and it’s only raw crude that it needs to buy.
Are you suggesting that the only way to avoid anthropogenic climate change is a massive die off humans?
Isn't it obvious?
On 9/11 ~3500 people died. During the pandemic that many people were dying of Covid every day. In 2 years over 1 million Americans have died of Covid. 9/11 sparked 20 years of wars (that we lost) and trillions of dollars gone, not to mention the hundreds of thousands or millions we killed directly or indirectly in the process.
But the pandemic response? Slave muzzles [1] and an incredibly safe vaccine could've saved millions of people worldwide. Minor inconvenience, basically.
I mean look at how people are upset how gas is more expensive now. Do you really think people collectively will subject themselves to something similar long-term so decades from now the Earth might be slightly cooler than it's otherwise going to be? No shot.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-qanon-rode-pandem...
This is the new HN shrug - just go about your business and maybe the oligarchs will genocide all the non-rationlists
at least we'll go to Mars!
This is a plote headline for addressing the fact we don't have 2million dead bodies in britain. Stats for the whole and stats for the individual are dangerous things to mix up. i.e. There is a non-zero chance a plane will land on you during your commute (there are even videos on-line around the world showing this happening now, god-bless the wide adoption of tech) but this does _not_ mean that you should never leave your house.
Also, people need to understand the nature of the risk. Most risk profiles drawn up my mathematicians/statisticians are delibarately very boolean in their outcome. This is to remove potential biases and in order to understand if something will happen you need the following: A(chance something will happen) x B(chance that is bad) = P(death)
This in almost all situations means that P(A) is not the same as P(death) because P(A) will include everything from a stubbed toe or sneeze to death. Conversely P(B) is also no P(death) as it's derrived from the subset of people who pass the condition of P(A) happening which is by definition <=1.0...
And now that I've introduced something involving stats on the internet the trogledites will chery pick and straw man this into oblivion, but please, pick up a text book once in a while and stop clicking on the dailymail...
Don't worry. Economic activity primarily happens indoors so it isn't affected.
> The GAR2022 blames these disasters on a broken perception of risk based on “optimism, underestimation and invincibility,” which leads to policy, finance and development decisions that exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and put people in danger.
The most fatal expression I have heard is that "We need to push through".
In Digital Vegan I describe this mentality thus:
"I feel there is more hope that one can survive a car crash by
accelerating at a wall to more cleanly demolish it. Instead we must
learn the self-discipline and endure the pain of being able to
disconnect first, in order to build new connections." [2]
Surely I am an idiot, but I remain an optimist that human beings can pull ourselves out of a great collective delusion built on pride and greed.
For example; the GAR2022 statement perfectly describes the state of cybersecurity. I recall a point around 2019, before the pandemic when major breaches and incidents got to occurring once per day. I had a feeling that the world was finally taking notice and something could now be done. Then suddenly it vanished from the news cycle. When something is happening daily, it's no longer news. Covid-19 then eclipsed all threads of reflection and we plunged deeper into the very forms of cybernetic technofascism and blind dependency we needed to avoid.
It's now become impossible to research or teach anything but the most cartoon version of computer security - one that holds the established mythologies harmless and allows profitable abuses to continue. There is no permitted narrative that doesn't compound the errors we are already making [1] for the sake of those who have power. There is too much resting on not comprehending the big picture and finding human-centred solutions. A generation of smart young people who could help us are left frustrated.
I think similar things are happening in other areas of human intellectual endeavour now, climate, transport, health, education. We have not valued competencies, but instead put prideful appearance before reality. We have a bleak crisis of leadership. We cannot face the onslaught of challenges by reason alone as we are all fatigued already by tyranny, pestilence, looming poverty and war.
The first step is "When you're in a hole, stop digging".
We need to curb enthusiasm and withdraw support, even tacit, for many of the "sacred" norms. We must reject monotonism and the idea that progress is a "inevitable" scalar. That is not a rejection of technology, or neo-Luddism. Computer people should at least recognise that it is called "back-tracking".
[1] http://techrights.org/2021/11/29/teaching-cybersecurity/
> 'Surely I am an idiot, but I remain an optimist that human beings can pull ourselves out of a great collective delusion '
OT: But may i ask if you (reminding me on a fictive guy named "Baron von Münchhausen") do you mean 'optimistic' in terms of: 'You not only have to consume the advertising, feel invited to make our next ads better, write cheering feedback, get in touch with our company ! (without any surplus for you, sorry!)' Than...than ...yes than, i am sure -you became an "'I did it'-people" ?.... P-:
Maybe this account of optimism with regard to technology will help you [1]. I mainly subscribe to Cory's take here.
[1] https://pat-kane-xcjl.squarespace.com/dailyalternative/2021/...
I would say our risk perception is broken in an opposite way: we became too risk-averse thus making simple things insanely more complicated. Think nuclear power.
Coming from the UN, we already know what the answer will be.
More governance, more/better management of risk by the UN that is then delegated to its administrative regions (the US, EU, etc). This is because as long as we are talking about risk, this plays into the hands of a global governance structure. All risks should be planned for and managed - I mean the covid response was fantastic, right? What was wrong was not enough governance, of course.
But what about the risk of a corrupt global governance structure? If you think "democracy" was bad (where you vote once every 4/5 years, for someone else to represent you for that time), how much worse will it be if global policies are rolled out to everyone with no vote at all? Where if you disagree on what stakeholders (corporations, government and NGOs) have in mind for you, you're on your own. Which is where we are already..
No to a global tyrannical system - thanks. Next.
I think the best way to manage risks is to roll back the mega governance structures, ignore or undo government diktats. Put power in hands of local people, and no I don't mean implementing the UN cookie-cut 'local sustainable development plan' templates that we are all getting. Can we discuss that? Of course not - imagine a government arguing for less government!!
I want less government in every way - let local people decide for themselves what they want to do. In fact, we could have that today, if people stopped listening to these ridiculous self-authorising "authorities".
> let local people decide for themselves what they want to do
- use leaded petrol
- build fridges using HCFCs
- burn trash
This stuff had to be forbidden by the government to make it stop. The UN might be some corrupt stuff, but the point of reducing government at all is nonsense. People on their own won't stop doing harmful things if they dont suffer the consequences themself.
So if let's say, Myanmar doesn't stop using CFCs. What's your solution? Send in some Blue Helmets to enforce global law? And what if they start shooting back? You want to send your son or daughter there?
And not to mention the politics of rich countries sending soldiers into poor countries to enforce rules. Colonialism 2.0. "It's the developed world's obligations to drag the uncivilized nations into the the 21st century"?
Sounds familiar.
A country emitting enough HCFCs to wipe the ozone layer within a decade is a threat to the security of every other nation on earth (due to increasing ionizing radiation). So yes. Economic sanctions and military intervention.
I don't have kids, but i am in military age ("Wehrfähiges Alter") myself.
Ok and do what? Destroy the countries economy? Station troops at factories? Seize all vehicles and remove CFCs? Take all their air conditioners?
The idea is ridiculous.
Occupy the country and enforce CFC-prohibiting legislature.
You mean like when the US occupied Vietnam and prohibited a revolution? Like that?
More like the occupation of Germany.
I would posit another opinion. Say the ozone opened up above your country. Crops are dying in mass. Heat has increased exponentially. It's unsafe for children to be outside.
You're god damn right I'd go to war.
> You want to send your son or daughter there?
That is why unmanned platforms are really important military development.
> So if let's say, Myanmar doesn't stop using CFCs. What's your solution? Send in some Blue Helmets to enforce global law?
But this is exactly why UN conspiracy theories are such a joke. The UN hardly ever enforces anything, because they can't. And the few times it does, it's typically US soldiers operating only nominally under the UN.
The UN is a bogeyman for ultranationalists, but it's mostly just issuing advisory guidelines with very little force behind them. It's not a global tyranny.
> Sounds familiar
Yeah, it sounds like the faulty science & religious justifications of Colonialism - but only matters if the current science is also faulty.
Is modern climate the same as Colonial race science? Or do we only act on what things superficially appear to be / sound like?
Residential schools in Canada were an effort to make sure the youth were formally educated as per Western standards (versus not even knowing how to read or write). That's not a faulty assumption, but it was terrible to use violence to force it on people using who never asked for it.
But it is pretty amazing how easily we can convince ourselves the oppression of others is for their own good, huh?
ok, premise: youth should be educated per Western standards
let's say that's a good premise.
Does that mean all implementations, whatever their details, are also good?
I don't think so. I don't think the logic follows.
> convince ourselves the oppression of others is for their own good, huh?
I' not sure I just did. You seem to have equated education to oppression by ignoring that not all education requires oppression. In fact, I think it's pretty telling that the crux of these matters (the oppression) is often a secret.
You're right - but also wrong.
Governments built the roads - other solutions are conceivable. Tax payers paid once for the roads to be built, and are now paying for roads to made unusable for cars (lane restrictions, pedestrianisation, etc). That's a waste.
Did you know that electric cars were very popular 100 years ago - but because of the oil industry + government, they were quashed?
Government waves through unacceptable, unenvironmental behaviour by corporations. However, it does want the consumer who bought the fridges, to foot the bill! Consumers are ignorant of course of the unenvironmental impact of the products they were being sold - that's what government was ostensibly there for - all those agencies were meant to assure that we were getting decent products.
It hasn't worked as we thought - but it has worked out as corporations planned.
A bigger governance system is not the answer.
> Did you know that electric cars were very popular 100 years ago - but because of the oil industry + government, they were quashed?
Er this is extremely simplistic. Electricity wasn't as common as now and battery tech was extremely shitty (requiring maintenance every few days, handling acids, &c.)
> > Did you know that electric cars were very popular 100 years ago - but because of the oil industry + government, they were quashed?
> Electricity wasn't as common as now and battery tech was extremely shitty (requiring maintenance every few days, handling acids, &c.)
When automobiles first appeared, gasoline was not as common as now and internal combustion technology was primitive, requiring almost constant maintenance, handling flammable liquids etc.
The modern IC automobile is unrecognisable from those of the Benz/Ford era. Had electrical vehicles been preferred for 100 years of government financial and policy support they'd be equal or superior to combustion technology, and vastly superior to Tesla and other EV's around now which are catching up on decades of lost development.
(but then neither of us have a time-machine to prove our post-facto fantasies about alternative histories)
> When automobiles first appeared, gasoline was not as common as now and internal combustion technology was primitive, requiring almost constant maintenance, handling flammable liquids etc.
Yeah and one ended up easier to develop than the other. Even when we started producing proper batteries they were not good enough for cars (80s, 90s, 2000s), it took a few decade to get good engines, it took a century for proper batteries
> one ended up easier to develop than the other.
Because many hundreds of millions in research money went into doing so. Science and technology are not blind pursuits whereby we stumble across answers handed down by the gods. We progress according to our motivations.
This is the difference between so-called "technological determinism" which is an ignorant quasi-religious shrugging abdication of reason, and "science as agency", which is instrumental reason. It has it's down-sides, but the latter is infinitely preferable to the former, which, perhaps to labour the car-analogy painfully, is like taking your hands off the steering wheel.
>Because many hundreds of millions in research money went into doing so.
Because that's where the progress was. They simply couldn't make progress on batteries at the time.
Making better engines is a question of manufacturing and metallurgy, stuff that is well within scope for the world as it existed 100yr ago. Making better batteries requires a much higher state of technological progress because you first need to understand chemistry at a much greater level and the fairly finicky chemistry involved has a lot of manufacturing progress as a prerequisite.
There's a reason we didn't get economically viable and high enough performance batteries for consumer electronics (say nothing of power tools and cars) until after we developed computer controlled industrial manufacturing processes.
Basically all the stuff you need to build good ICE cars you will need to develop on your way to developing good batteries. They built engines instead of batteries for the same reason the Romans built with stone instead of steel.
> Because that's where the progress was. They simply couldn't make progress on batteries at the time.
That's a descent into circular arguments and post-facto analysis.
The early twentieth century was a golden age of chemistry. We had the technology to do fractional distillation of petrochemicals and synthesise complex organics. To suppose that we could not have punched gigantic breakthroughs in ionic electro-chemistry is blinkered. Motor technology equally so. Sintering, rare-earth alloys, elaborate windings, and complex field analysis was well within the metallurgy and other technologies you describe, without computers.
But there can be no meaningful argument around it if you only hark back to "what was", instead of analysing the interplay between economic motives and progress. We're arguing at cross purposes if you're bringing up "facts" of history, and I'm talking about socio-economic dynamics.
And, more importantly, why?
So we can preserve a comfort that a 100 year journey into fossil fuels was not a colossal human mistake? Rationalising away the narrative that plausible alternative technological pathways existed achieves what exactly?
It's not like can change the past. So what is going on?
> There's a reason we didn't get economically viable and high enough performance batteries for consumer electronics
We didn't get anything. We didn't want them.
I appreciate this philosophy of technology stuff can be disorientating. It is scary stuff. Because if we admit that there are alternatives, that this is not a Panglossian universe and that we've made gigantic errors in the past, that opens up the terrifying possibility that we're making grave errors right now (which I believe we are). The myth of technology as a deterministically unfolding, monotonic mechanism is very comforting in that world.
Gasoline has an energy density of about 34.6 MJ/liter... the lithium-ion battery pack in a Chevy Volt has an energy density of about 0.4 MJ/liter.
One of those technologies is easier to develop than the other. Science doesn't need to be deterministic for some fruit to hang lower than others.
Zinc-air batteries were known for a long time, with double energy density of today's lithium batteries, and without expensive materials. But no one seriously tried to commercialize them for use in vehicles, they ended up in niche - hearing aids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...
"In 1828, the Hungarian priest and physicist Ányos Jedlik invented an early type of electric motor, and created a small model car powered by his new motor."
1828!!
"Rechargeable batteries that provided a viable means for storing electricity on board a vehicle did not come into being until 1859, with the invention of the lead–acid battery by French physicist Gaston Planté.[17][18] Camille Alphonse Faure, another French scientist, significantly improved the design of the battery in 1881; his improvements greatly increased the capacity of such batteries and led directly to their manufacture on an industrial scale."
"Electric battery-powered taxis became available at the end of the 19th century."
"To overcome the limited operating range of electric vehicles, and the lack of recharging infrastructure, an exchangeable battery service was first proposed as early as 1896.[41] The concept was first put into practice by Hartford Electric Light Company through the GeVeCo battery service and initially available for electric trucks."
It was viable technology!
> It was viable technology!
Both were viable, one was much more easily developed. We can talk viability all day long, sadly it's history and there isn't much to discuss.
Solar panels are also viable and cheap right now, yet we don't use them much. Something existing and working doesn't mean it scales as easily as the alternatives.
If electricity storage is still a problem in 2022 you can imagine that it would be extremely hard in 1922. You can store gas in a bucket if needs be
The viability was not properly assessed in regards to externalities of the targeted tech. Climate change, security related to oil, etc was not properly priced in.
I think everyone who had a vote in 1922 and thought “Climate change? That won’t affect me!” (and almost everyone who also said “or my children or grandchildren”) would have been correct.
What are we doing wrong today with that level of disregard for things that may affect our great-great-grandchildren, and why?
ICE vehicles are and were extremely shitty as well.
Electric vehicles weren't quashed, they were outcompeted by a more capable product. And to be honest, that's still pretty much the case even a century later. BEVs still don't have the range or the towing capacity of conventional vehicles, and charging one is still nowhere near the power transfer of a standard petrol bowser. That's not to say they don't work for a large chunk of the population -- I think it's pretty clear that they can and do -- but petrol cars are ubiquitous because they're capable of tremendous up-time, in any environment, require relatively little maintenance, and they'll perform for hundreds of thousands of kilometers even on an ordinary maintenance schedule.
I mean, I'd like to see the world move away from fossil fuels as well, but acting like BEVs are somehow universally better than ICEVs without acknowledging the tremendous ability and success of regular cars, and the shortcomings of BEVs, doesn't really help the cause, because in certain regions, applications, and for certain individuals, BEVs really are the wrong choice. There needs to be more acknowledgement of this, and acceptance of the fact that maybe a one-size-fits-all solution won't be the future of automobile propulsion.
Ok, but how removing the goverment will change that we have massive industries? Small groups of consumers will held accounrable companies?
You say remove - I say rollback.
The sentiment should be that we have less government - we should empower individuals, not monolithic state apparatus.
It would ideally be rolled back slowly, keeping a steady focus where governmental power is continuously eroded. However, I also think that things are so wildly out of kilter now, that it is far more likely that things could become even more tumultuous.
I even think the tumult is planned for - we are in a somewhat artificial and managed crisis - the co-ordinated global response to the virus, was calculate to devastate Western economies.
The plan - as I understand it - is for us to be brought to our knees so that we accept/want even global governance as an end to our suffering. At that point, when the deal is done, the crises will disappear as the global technocratic goals will have been achieved.
I understand your distrust towards "Big Corporations" aimed at maximizing profit.. But I wouldn't trust individuals with many things govmnts regulate. We may be talking in different contexts, but as it was mentioned above, almost all aspects need a governing body that has the overview of the general state of things in order to properly "reduce damage". Same thing with speed limits - some people claim there should be no speed limits at night. If assigned to individuals to decide on this, well, there will be no speed limits. I understand your frustration with dysfunctional govmnts, but it is important to remember that we live in a non-perfect world and most "individuals" are not trustworthy either. And if we have to chose between two evils - the govmnts and "individuals" - it is reasonable to chose the least evil, which is the govmnt. At least in present times, what will be in the future - I don't know. However I am in no way a politician or sociologist so I have no actual knowledge in this, I am just writing my opinion here and it is not my intention to change your mind.
> And if we have to chose between two evils - the govmnts and "individuals" - it is reasonable to chose the least evil, which is the govmnt.
Although that may appear to be the choice it isn't in reality. If you believe that government is a real thing the answer is always more government. However, the reality is that you are an individual. Government is an idea we can believe, a means whereby the individual can pretend to hand over their personal authority, as a child does with its parents. In fact, as an adult, you are autonomous. You don't have to do what other entities tell you to do, unless you agree. Well, you might have to do it on account of the use of force (actual or implied), but if you think it is wrong it cannot become right. Implied use of force is what government does!
So, if some group writes a bunch or laws, and calls them 'the Law' and says it is 'good', and even appears to be subject themselves to it, if you think the law is wrong you do not have to follow it. You are in fact an individual, and only have to answer to yourself and your conscience.
'Government' has no interest in helping you become a fully fledged individual, hence we are all indoctrinated from day 0. They have us believing that the infrastructure they provide is good, the best we can do, etc - even if they couch it as 'government is a terrible system except for all the others'. Anarchy has such a bad name - why? Because it actively holds 'no leaders' as its central tenet.
Ultimately, we are individuals living in a moral world. We have been miseducated and misled into authorising others to do things on our behalf - this is government acting in a self-serving way, that ensures it gains ever increasing amount of power at individual's expense. And then I say the 'government acting in a self-serving way' I really mean those individuals that manage and benefit from the parasitic governance system.
Morality itself, comes down to the golden rule, which I think is best stated as:
Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated.
This basically says, everything you want to do is fine - as long as you are not harming others. And it is fine to protect others who are being harmed.
For fun, here is a story that attempts to imagine an alternative reality:
https://www.corbettreport.com/mp3/andthentherewerenone.mp3
(Its great if you can get past the wierd narration, which I think works..)
> we should empower individuals
Does that mean that I now have to spend my time in the evening doing the "monolithic state apparatus'" job instead of going for a meal with my partner?
> Does that mean that I now have to spend my time in the evening doing the "monolithic state apparatus'" job instead of going for a meal with my partner?
Yes. Because we are all responsible. But guess what, you'd be sharing the job with 7 billion other people, so the total workload would be like 5 minutes on a Thursday morning every other month. Could you spare that?
Please read a book called "Leviathan" [1] by Thomas Hobbes and maybe a little of Jean Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract" [2] to balance it up.
The state is not your enemy, but also it is not your nanny, there to wipe your bottom and hold your feeding bottle because you "pay taxes".
There's plenty of time for dining out and being a responsible, participating citizen.
> Please read a book called "Leviathan" [1] by Thomas Hobbes and maybe a little of Jean Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract" [2] to balance it up.
The fact that you can bring up two books to support your opinion doesn't mean I agree with it. They are pretty much classics and anybody who was interested in philosophy would have already been familiar with it.
> Yes. Because we are all responsible. But guess what, you'd be sharing the job with 7 billion other people, so the total workload would be like 5 minutes on a Thursday morning every other month. Could you spare that?
You can't do serious politics spending 5 minutes on Thursday morning every other month. It takes me more time to plan my night commute back home on a Friday night.
> The fact that you can bring up two books to support your opinion doesn't mean I agree with it.
Of course. Besides, they are faulted books (and thinkers). It's not really my "opinion" I'm trying to get across so much as the "Western Ideal" (the thing we're all assumed to believe in and accept as a foundation of life). A pillar of that is shared responsibility through the proxy of the State.
Namely that the "State" is there to serve us because it is us. The ideas of a General Will, Social Contract etcetera are the reason we give legitimacy to parliaments, congress, politicians, local councils and even monarchs. They are servants.
Otherwise they're just "people in power to be fought". The only alternatives, understood since Aristotle, are undesirable forms of tyranny where armed revolution is the latent objective of all free men. The deal/contract is that we are also those servants ourselves )we share power and responsibility* to a proxy or figurehead in which we invest loyally/trust and some temporary decision making powers. That's the sense in which the state takes away the burden of daily politics, freeing us for work and living.
> You can't do serious politics spending 5 minutes on Thursday morning every other month.
Not literally. I was joking a little. That's a metaphor for the small effort required by all people to maintain a democratic government of the people.
If anything, internet communication has saddled us with the worry of global affairs and economics that the social contract was supposed to unburden us of. You spend far more time concerned with the affairs of monolithic governance than enjoying nice dinners out - just by reading the "news", and a give it much more mind than a peasant from 300 years ago ever would have.
Another problem is that people are told they have ever more responsibility (through markets) and are stripped of ever more power. Our governments shrug while we are helpless to change things.
In that sense the "Social Contract" is broken. In order to fix it we ought to to know at least what it is (because we've forgotten), hence I make the effort to explain that where I can.
Don't dodge the topic. Propose how leaded gasoline would have been phased out earlier if only governments didn't make them illegal. Answer the same question for HCFCs.
Are you going to actually answer the question of how corporations would've phased out leaded gas versus the government declaring it illegal due to the harms it posed?
You can't address the rollback of government without addressing the corresponding power increase in corporations.
Government bad! Here's an example of businesses using their power over the government to do bad things. Let's deregulate businesses further so they don't need to use the government to do bad things because they can do them themselves.
Did I miss anything?
Not really - but I think its a message that bears repeating.
Most people have been through the governmental education process and have been taught that the government is the only fair/legal/possible answer to all our ills. That 10+ formative years of propaganda to counter. Even more if you go to university and licensed to do your job - you are now vested in an exploitative system, that initiates harm against others.
Understandably people will want to stick with the devil they know until a/ they have worked through the alternatives and b/ understood that the problems commonly blamed on people are actually the natural outcomes of government policies.
You're making an excellent argument why centralised power is bad. You're not addressing how those same power dynamics won't be recreated with "smaller government" if large businesses are already so powerful they can influence governments. It sounds like you're arguing the problem isn't the amount of power being centralised but who gets to control it and your solution is to replace any semblance of equal democratic control with unevenly distributed capital. So in other words, feudalism with extra steps, but instead of the divine right of kings we have a supposed meritocracy built on generational wealth.
Now, I'm with you that representative systems are undemocratic and centralised power leads to corruption and is a bad idea. Where we apparently differ is that my answer would also dissolve corporations by eliminating the concept of private property and use the minimalist government structures to provide social services and infrastructure rather than to protect private property.
One thing at a time! I don't even think that most people are even on board with the idea that big government might not be the answer to all of our problems - most people like the way government is acting!
Things that I think should be mandatory is a lot more freedom of information. I'm absolutely not a fan of gatekeepers of information (eg the media) nor of any policies to manage 'misinformation'. At the present we don't even know what we don't know..
Given government is purportedly working for us, surely it should be the case that the info that is collected and gathered should be freely available to all of us, that would be great start. Eg with the covid info, why is this not available in real time to us all? What information does the government use to base their decisions on?
I think it is a small and simple step to take (provide information immediately) so we can see wtf is even going on. Let's also stop this 'misinformation' mud slinging, but level ourselves up to try to make sense of whatever info there is.
Re the point about private property. I love the way indigenous American tribes did not even have that concept. But, if we were to implement that, all that would happen is that no one would care. I'm totally fine with people owning property that they use.
I would approach this problem differently. If I were king (and obv. I'm not!) I would make all ownership fully traceable back to the specific individuals. Because, in fact, individuals are all that matters! Corporations/Trusts/Offshore arrangement/etc are just bits of legal paper, concepts. If we knew who owned what, I suspect that this would illuminating. Again, this would be just an information gathering exercise. I'm sure there would be lots of issues with that! but again, in the first place, all I'd want to do is have the information.
In general, I'm most interested in a calculated rollback away from monolithic institutions towards the individual. The general direction of travel is entirely the opposite though - and accelerating!
> let local people decide for themselves what they want to do.
How do we solve big, global problems like climate change, pollution, ecosystem collapse, pandemic prevention, food/water precarity, etc if everywhere is just local people deciding for themselves?
Have you heard of the Collective Action Problem [1]? Its basically why we have governments. Now think about about the scale of the problems we face right now: what systems do we need to address them?
> I want less government in every way - let local people decide for themselves what they want to do.
Have you considered that local people might decide to form tribes, arm themselves with weapons, kill a bunch of people, and impose their own new government by force?
This is what often, perhaps inevitably, happens when there's a power vacuum.
The United Nations was formed in the aftermath of World War II, during which local people decided what they wanted to do was invade other countries and commit mass murder.
"If government just gets out of the way, then everyone will play together nicely and peacefully" is never how it works.
The key is to maintain a healthy balance between government and personal freedom. It's a difficult balance to maintain, but the alternatives — authoritarianism or anarchy — are always worse.
> during which local people decided what they wanted to do was invade other countries and commit mass murder.
Perhaps my schooling overlooked some detail of this era, but I had been under the impression that there was at least one megalomaniac fascist dictator involved in the instigation of that process.
One does not simply become a fascist dictator without a large number of fascist followers and sympathizers.
It's not like Hitler invented racism. He was charismatic, and thereby became a leader of the movement, but he wasn't a magical pied piper. He told people what they wanted to hear.
Anyway, I'm not sure what the argument is supposed to be, because there's always someone instigating.
The Hitler example just reinforces the point about power vacuums and weak governments. Hitler only served 8 months in prison for a coup attempt (the Beer Hall Putsch) against the Weimar Republic, an extremely weak response that did almost nothing to stop his rise to power.
The previous poster said "I want less government in every way - let local people decide for themselves what they want to do." You replied that "local people decided what they wanted to do was invade other countries and commit mass murder." I pointed out that there was quite a lot of government involved in this decision, referring to the well-known history of certain WWII fascist dictatorships in which the entire society was effectively subjugated under the authority of a single person. Your response is... to... agree? I'm not sure how your argument counters the original poster's plea for less government.
> I pointed out that there was quite a lot of government involved in this decision, referring to the well-known history of certain WWII fascist dictatorships in which the entire society was effectively subjugated under the authority of a single person.
You're completely ignoring how the dictatorship came to be. Hitler didn't just step off a spaceship from another planet and immediately become leader of Germany. There was a democratic government for many years before he came to power, and the Nazi party spent many years gaining political support during that time. In 1932, they won 37% of the vote, becoming the largest political party in the country. The people who voted for them were going down that path voluntarily. You seem to be taking the existence of a dictatorship for granted, a fact without any need of historical or causal explanation, as if nothing that happened before 1933 mattered.
The Nazi party was explicitly racist, explicitly antisemitic, explicitly anti-immigrant. And they were popular! So yes, this was local people getting together and deciding to form a tribe based on hatred of others.
How do we want to fight global warming, if we have rather big industries and local incentives pushing in favor of fossil fuels..?
I dont think these libertarians care about global warming just getting Ruch using their short lives
The opinions on this thread...
I personally see a global tyranical system (quoting the GP) as a far bigger threat than climate change doom scenarios. At least during our lifetimes.
Only time will tell.
Climate change will be an exacerbating factor for the rise of tyranny. if the claims of climate change come true that will mean a lot of people needing to fight for basic resources leading to strongmen and tyranny.
Assuming a democratically elected government, isn't "less government" a way to take away power from voters to make decisions and manage commonly held resources?
Why is that a good thing? Who gets the power when voters lose it? Who gets to say what happens, when we can't all decide together?
You can think of the U.S. Bill of Rights as taking "power from voters to make decisions and manage commonly held resources". You might think of the above claim as simplistic, but it's no less so than is "yay democracy".
Who said "yay democracy", please?
OK, sorry, I take back "yay democracy".
The point remains that restrictions on even democratic government are not a novel idea in liberal politics; it goes back to the beginning of written political theory. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty is excellent on history and background and explores some ideas on modern issues.
I agree with you but I'm easily swayed by liberal propaganda.
What's your opinion on unions?
I see unions as one part of a 'bigger state' dialectic. The idea here is not that state supports corporations, but that the state supports the workers. Its all still about the government.
In fact, that 'argument' is already resolved - we are moving forward with what I think is fascism - government + corporations working together.
A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." - Nietzsche.
I prefer this as:
The governance structure, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, government, am the people."
we essentially have global anarchy in much of the world, where governments control very little. more of this is a recipe for more destruction.
We do not in fact have global anarchy in any significant part of the world. That's not what anarchy means. You're thinking of rampant cleptocracies and oligarchies. Anarchy is the absence of hierarchies, not just "the government is dysfunctional or extremely corrupt".
I stopped respecting the UN when they said they criticized Elon Musk for not giving them 6 billion dollars so that they could "solve world hunger". That's about as much as the state of Sweden donates to poverty every single year, and that is just Sweden alone. The total amount of charity donations worldwide is in the trillions of dollars yet there's always just more required. Bureaucrats with humanities degrees at the UN don't solve problems, if they were solved, their jobs would be purposeless.
And yea, I know they releasased a "plan" showing how they would split the 6 billion to different areas and stop world hunger 2022. Amazing work!
If one time donation of 6 billion would be enough to solve the hunger I think the nations with hungry in them could easily lend this much money and solve it once and for all. That would certainly have net positive ROI in long run for them.
> I stopped respecting the UN when they said they criticized Elon Musk
The UN isn't perfect but it sure as hell better than no communication between countries at all.
Elon Musk is insignificant compared to that, "I stopped respecting the biggest world forum when they criticised an egomaniac entrepreneur" jeez...
> Bureaucrats with humanities degrees at the UN don't solve problems, if they were solved, their jobs would be purposeless.
Does it occurs to you that some problems can't be solved but only mitigated ? it's like saying covid lockdowns and vaccines were useless because "hey look, not so many people died in the end". The UN have done more to the world than Musk or any other single individual will ever do. It's not perfect, it's inefficient, it's expensive, it's still the best we can do. What do you imagine ? The UN work for 15 years, solve all of the world problems and retire ? The world is constantly evolving, it's not so hard to grasp
>The UN isn't perfect but it sure as hell better than no communication between countries at all.
False equivalence, a typical error to defend something bad that it is in fact better than null, like we wouldnt have intercommunication without such a bureaucratic money sink
>Elon Musk is insignificant compared to that,
He writes, in a thread where the UN asks Elon for more money
>egomaniac entrepreneur"
Jealousy is such a pathethic feeling - Tolstoy
>Does it occurs to you that some problems can't be solved but only mitigated ?
Wrong again, world hunger can and will be solved, but not by the UN.
> it's like saying covid lockdowns
No proven effect to date
Amazing you managed to squeeze this many errors into one post.
>The UN have done more to the world than Musk or any other single individual will ever do
What has the UN done beside spending money ineffectively? Musk, and other does and practicioners as opposed to bureaucrats, has done far more for mankind than the UN.
>What do you imagine ? The UN work for 15 years, solve all of the world problems and retire ?
I would imagine that they would be more proffessional than claiming they could solve world hunger with 6 billion extra in a world of trillions for charity.
> like we wouldnt have intercommunication without such a bureaucratic money sink
I talk facts you talks hypothetical non existent scenarios, but go ahead and explain why ~200 countries are in a 80 years old organisation if alternatives are so good. It's like saying a company can function without any managers or meetings, sure you'll still have communication but nothing as serious/organised/efficient
> What has the UN done beside spending money ineffectively?
Open an history book, there have been hundreds of missions, if you put a bit of good faith in it it really isn't that hard
> world hunger can and will be solved, but not by the UN.
By who then ? Musk ? Bezos ? Some hypothetical person/organization that only exists in your mind and that might make it happen at some point in an equally hypothetical future ?
> Jealousy is such a pathethic feeling - Tolstoy
How's that an argument ? The dude works 95% of his awake time, can't even take care of his own kids, it's the rich guy I'm the least jealous of, and on top of that I absolutely disagree with his ideas.
> He writes, in a thread where the UN asks Elon for more money
? It was a PR stunt from Musk, like 90% of what he does, if you can't see through his bullshit I feel sad for you, jealousy is bad but worshipping people like him is equally dumb.
By the way The UN <> Musk discussion didn't go the way you're trying to portray it. The UN never asked Musk anything and never talked about ending world hunger for 6B, on top of that Musk bailed out of the discussion, so really there is nothing going his way on this topic, at least get your basic facts straight
Have you considered solving problems is hard and ends the gravy train, and if you get an opportunity to personally benefit, most people given the chance take the easy personal profits rather than to go down fighting the system?
Of course it is hard and of course people will take personal profit, it's the human natures. What's your point ? You can apply the same thing to the US government or the EU institutions, what's your alternative ?
> "solve world hunger"
I think the idea WFP promised to "solve world hunger" for $6bn originated with Musk or his fans, not with WFP. WFP's original claim was that they'd be able to prevent 42 million people from starving (a much more achievable goal). I'm struggling to find the original interview rather than dramatized reports of it, though.
Disclosure: I've done contract work for WFP.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1454808104256737289
That's the original tweet where Elon Musk first appeared in the conversation, as you can see the article he's replying to is where the misinformation comes in. Basically the WFP said "we can stop 42m starving for a year with $6b, which isn't a lot for someone like Elon Musk" -> CNN Business reports it as solving world hunger in general -> Elon Musk says he'll give them $6b if they openly show how they can solve world hunger. Which they obviously never claimed they could do, so when they eventually replied about how the $6b would be spent it was just ignored because it didn't solve world hunger, just temporary starvation.
Charity highlights taxation doesnt work.
They were incredibly disingenuous about the Elon Musk thing.
He said he'd sell $6bn of Tesla stock and donate it if they could provide an open source plan to completely solve world hunger.
They said they'd written a private plan to reduce world hunger then criticised him for not making the donation.
Whatever you think of Elon, I don't think he acted in bad faith here.
No, Elon responded saying that if they could describe exactly how world hunger could be solved "on this Twitter thread" he would donate $6bn. Nothing to do with "open source", everything to do with making the request undeliverable (UN staff did of course tweet links to already-too-long-for-Twitter UN documents at him)
Considering the "plan" is a table with a list of countries and corresponding numbers that could easily fit on one image (who could have known it was this easy!), its actually very possible to fit into a twitter thread: https://www.wfp.org/stories/wfps-plan-support-42-million-peo...
In fact, a high schooler could have done the same job of multiplying x_starving_ppl_in_country * y_cost_of_food_one_year_per_person, so its quite suprising that it took them all this time to counter with their genius, open source plan
Definitely not. Musk did not ask for anything outrageous in return for the money. It was a PR disaster from the UN's point of view. Perhaps their perception of the risk of calling Elon Musk out like that was broken?
While I was less than impressed by what I saw, I think calling it “a PR disaster” overstates the impact. I observed people reading into both parties what I already know they wanted to believe about each of Musk and the UN.
Don't get me wrong; I normally don't like Musk's antics. However, we _know_ we can't end world hunger with 6 billion USD. At best, we can solve some urgent crisis, but an actual long-term solution requires more than billionaires flinging money at the problem.
Beasley knew this when he opened his mouth.
"Global progress" is a very debatable phrase. It all depends on what you are optimizing for, I guess.
It's just a distributed market problem, right?
As an agent in the market, if you correctly model tail risk you will still be out-competed by someone who does not model tail risk, since they can allocate resources somewhere other than tail risk mitigation. Given non-catastrophic events, this ends up being okay for the market system. After all, society doesn't care if Google is the search engine or Bing so long as they provide similar functionality.
For catastrophic events, though, we'd like to keep things operational rather than have someone else pop in. But that's okay. I think the right model is that the state steps in for true catastrophes and mitigates the effects (like we did in the pandemic).
And, to be honest, I don't see climate change as an extinction level risk. A few hundred million will die in the top end of what we expect, but that's acceptable. And this is clearly the position of most people, so I'm comfortably in the majority here.
> A few hundred million will die in the top end of what we expect, but that's acceptable. And this is clearly the position of most people, so I'm comfortably in the majority here.
Citation, please? I'd love to see the polls saying that several hundred million deaths are ok with most people.
From what I've seen, increased government action on climate change polls very well among the public, e.g., https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...
Oh, I’m sorry. I misspoke. I meant to say “I care very much, like hundreds of millions of people, that the government act on climate change”.
By the way, I’ll vote you out if gas becomes expensive, but make sure you do something about the climate change. I won’t vote you out over Climate Change or anything. But it is very important. Gas prices, in comparison, are not at all important. I’ll vote you out over them, but they’re not important.
Just make sure you get the climate change thing right. Won’t win you my vote or anything but it is the most important thing in the world. Nothing is more important.
1) Do you have any evidence that the price of gas affects who people vote for? (And what about the prices of other things that are vastly more expensive, like health care, education, and housing?)
2) Do you actually believe that in a privately financed duopoly, elected politicians are responsive to voter preferences as opposed to donor preferences? For example, voters overwhelming favor campaign finance reform. Whereas campaign donors and elected politicians overwhelmingly disfavor campaign finance reform.
3) Does most of the public actually understand and believe in the consequences of climate change, in the stark terms that you've stated? Whether the public favors a particular course of action at the present, and whether the public favors the ultimate consequences of that course of action, are two entirely separate questions. The fact that you, by your own admission, are perfectly willing to participate in killing hundreds of millions of people, with foreknowledge and eyes wide open, doesn't imply that everyone else feels the same way.
1. Fair enough. No evidence. Just conventional wisdom that inflation is bad for votes. But no evidence.
2. What voters “favor” is rather irrelevant, isn’t it? When the total linear combination of their preferences is laid out, these things end up being low-coefficient terms. After all, what’s the evidence that they actually favour campaign finance reform? It’s one thing to say it. It’s another to act in a sense where it’s a priority.
3. Ah, my mistake, I have now forgotten this part. I am now absolved of the situation through my ignorance. Now that I think about it, I can’t recall the evidence for climate change being bad. Davon haben wir nichts gewusst.
> Just conventional wisdom that inflation is bad for votes.
This was my point in mentioning the prices of health care, education, and housing. You switched the argument from gas inflation to general inflation. High gas prices are annoying to anyone who buys gas, but there's no reason to think that gas prices in particular drive votes, or that voters would prioritize gas prices over global warming.
> what’s the evidence that they actually favour campaign finance reform? It’s one thing to say it. It’s another to act in a sense where it’s a priority.
If the only options are vanilla and sherbet, how do I express my preference for chocolate? Voters don't get to vote on policies, they only get to vote on individual politicians, on one day every 2 to 4 years. It's not much of choice, very hard to express your individual policy preferences that way. A politician is a collection of a number of different policy positions, although the connection between what the politician says and what the politician does is tenuous at best. In general, politicians of both parties are held in very low esteem by voters. Voters often plug their noses and reluctantly choose the lesser of evils, rarely getting exactly what they want.
I didn't say that campaign finance reform is a higher priority to voters than "bread and butter" issues. All I'm saying is that it's very widely favored among voters, and very widely disfavored among wealthy campaign donors, because of course the latter greatly benefit from the system of legalized bribery. The only reason not to pass campaign finance reform is if you benefit from this system of bribery.
What are the "revealed preferences" of people who don't vote? How can you tell whether (1) they don't care, (2) they feel powerless and disillusioned by politics, or (3) some other reason. That's actually not revealed in the mere (in)action.
> Now that I think about it, I can’t recall the evidence for climate change being bad.
Please don't pretend that consequences of climate change aren't a matter of great public controversy, with literally millions of people claiming it's not a problem or no big deal. Maybe you and I accept what most scientists say, but not everyone does. And it's taken decades of scientists trying to hammer their points home to have a significant effect on the non-scientific public. It's always difficult to try to peer into the future and evaluate possible consequences of current actions.
> This was my point in mentioning the prices of health care, education, and housing...
I'll ignore the rest of what you're saying to that because that sentence by me was intended to concede the point. No need to argue.
> In general, politicians of both parties are held in very low esteem by voters. Voters often plug their noses and reluctantly choose the lesser of evils, rarely getting exactly what they want.
Ah! This I have evidence against. Senators have high approval ratings! https://morningconsult.com/senator-rankings/
As for the rest, inaction is action to not act. Keine Antwort ist auch eine Antwort. Everyone is free to believe they want and be powerless or whatever, but I don't have to believe that they're innocent for inaction.
Besides, it's okay, I have a risk-free path to moral outcomes now. All I have to do is avoid finding out about moral situations and I am automatically doing the right thing. Hear screams? Airpods in. It could have been screams of laughter and now that I am unable to find out more, I am automatically moral.
> Ah! This I have evidence against. Senators have high approval ratings! https://morningconsult.com/senator-rankings/
Your evidence seems to show the opposite of your conclusion. According to this data, only 14 out of 100 senators have an approval rating of higher than 50%. Mostly small state senators.
It looks like the data is 2 years old, but I doubt that voters are much more approving now.
> All I have to do is avoid finding out about moral situations and I am automatically doing the right thing.
We're not talking about morality here, we're talking about whether voting is an accurate reflection of a person's "values" - moral values, immoral values, self-interested values, whatever they happen to be. I'm arguing that voting is a very poor, opaque indicator of that, given the constraints of voting.
I'd also mention that big moneyed interests have spent big money on propaganda against the science of climate change. It's not simply a matter of a person learning what is uncontroversial, like math; there's a war of ideas occurring in public, and sides must be chosen. Often friends and family are on the opposite side of the debate, which is never easy to live with. Who do you trust, anonymous scientists or... your parents who love you and raised you?
Haha! Fair enough on the senators! It didn't always read that way!
> World could undo social and economic advances and face 1.5 disasters a day by 2030, according to UN’s flagship Global Assessment Report.
Now is a good time to talk about incentives. If you are the 'UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction' you have to find disasters or disband.
It's not a matter of broken risk perception but a matter of thirst for power by some who tried to push the accelerator and optimism feeling invincible to bend the society to their desire.
I call that the classic fallacy of the building contractor who think it's mix of quick actions and tolerance in the tech can do anything and scale to any level. The opposite effect of analyze-paralyze.
Beside that, the recent autarkic drive fueled much by the neoliberals need of overturn the table to remain in power against emerging powers that in the end use the same techniques in slightly different sauces BUT do have industries and/or natural resources the west have lost, is not a reversal of globalization is just the need for another cyclic world war to reset an unsustainable system avoid being rightly annihilated by a mass of angry people, the need for resource and the global exchange system is still the same. For anybody.
'risk perception' sounds like another name for fear.
Maybe we ve proven to be good at preventing the wrong things. People expected a climate disaster but it was a pandemic instead
Right now, we have a host of problems, almost all of them manmade, but no, they're not related to the state of nature or even mankind's influence on nature.
We are on the brink of world war three and the UN's only reason for existing is to prevent that from happening again, but instead of doing its job it's playing propaganda games with the word 'disaster' to make you think a global carbon tax is the solution to all of your problems (even though deaths from natural disasters are at all-time lows: https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters).
We've got major inflationary pressures triggered from man-made economic policy decisions compounded by the incredibly disastrous decision to attempt to shut down whole economies in the vain attempt to prevent human beings from breathing in the same air space as each other. That was a disaster. We are still living with the chain reaction of that stupidity, and China is still running with it in Shanghai, maybe because power is kinda addictive, even when it's horribly disastrous, I don't know.
The last thing we need is more centralization of power vis-a-vis the UN.
> We are on the brink of world war three and the UN's only reason for existing is to prevent that from happening again, but instead of doing its job
What do you think the UN is supposed to do when one of the permanent members of the Security Council with veto power decides to go to war?
The foundation of the UN depended crucially on the temporary alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union during World War II. This alliance quickly fell apart though, leading to the long "Cold War", which arguably still exists, apart from a short lull in the 1990s. When the US and Russia are at odds, it's almost impossible for the UN to perform its function. The veto power of the permanent Security Council members ensures that the UN has no enforcement mechanism over those individual nations. This was by design of the founding nations: the United States and Soviet Union never gave the United Nations the power to constrain the United States and Soviet Union.
Having said that, World War III not inevitable. There were only 20 years between WW1 and WW2, while we've gone more than 75 years since WW2, so maybe the UN has done its job?
China is running it all across China, it's just that Shanghai fucked up implementation (central government set guidelines, provinces then implemented them adjusted to local situation).
Unfortunately reality of exponential growth of easily transmitable virus like COVID-19 (recorded cases where infection happened due to sharing common sewage main) is that if you don't keep it contained early on, you're fucked.
we definitely need a global carbon tax and more centralization , ie a world government
Also do remember WHO played political game on the side of China at the beginning of the pandemic. That’s one of the reasons we got in this new SARS.
Wuhan had its first cases on Dec-17th , on Jan-14th the sequence was out and shipped across the globe.
If you think that delay is bad wait and see if a pandemic develops in Yemen or in Sub-Saharan Africa...those countries would need 8-9 months to notice an outbreak not to mention sequencing.
We have an example with HIV. It made the leap somewhere in Africa between 1945 and 1952. The world noticed it when it arrived to developed countries in the 1980s...
Hatred against China is cheap talk, when it's time to discuss the quality of life haircut that a complete decoupling would cause all of a sudden each and every person (be it a professor, a dude at the bar or anybody else) is only looking for an off-ramp to get off the conversation and blame Davos/Schwab/the illuminati. This is true in NYC as well as Shanghai
Are you really suggesting that the first case of COVID was actually documented medically? Or that Dec 17th was the first case that was documented? It seems highly unlikely anyone actually ID'd patient zero.
Yes. China with a level 4 biolab should be compared to Yemen or Sub-Saharan Africa. LOL.
There are two BSL4 labs in Sub-Saharan Africa. One in Gabon, one in South Africa.
Then he should name specific countries, not just the region.
And remember that western leaders and elites went along with Chinese leaders!
Not all of them.