So, every other subthread is someone talking #capitalism this and #socialism that with very poor commonality of definitions. So here's one to try on for size:
Capitalism: a system of economics in which the state determines through threat of violence a special group of people who have exclusive say in how capital goods are used.
That covers for example both the USA, and USSR pretty well. any other capitalist countries we'd like to discuss?
@dlakelan@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Those are good questions. I think those questions are better left to a vote of the workers. But nobody knows what form each Commons Capitalism Entity (CCE) will take. The best we can do, today, is provide CCEs with the tools necessary to successfully answer those questions and implement the worker's requests.
@dlakelan@GhostOnTheHalfShell
The breadth and depth of the US economy is just staggering. I'm trying to promote an economic system that can replace traditional capitalism. Even then, it would take 75-100 years.
"I can’t stress this enough, if a mathematical proof shows that logically your measure is unable to provide useful information about a process and you continue to quote it in the newspaper and use it as fundamental to your “science” then your “science” is not a science."
This article describes a day in the life of an average first world person just swatting rent seekers out of the way wholesale while trying to do the very basic everyday stuff... It hits home hard. I boosted the post where i first saw it as well
I can't emphasis enough the point that exp(t)/(exp(t) + exp((1-epsilon)t)) ~ 1 for large t and any positive epsilon.
This may seem obscure but it's the problem with "capitalism" as we know it. Even in an infinite world where wealth grows exponentially forever, eventually the person with the epsilon larger growth rate than everyone else owns everything.
Add in political power and finite resources and it just happens faster.
For the non math nerds, you can imagine two groups, one billionaire has wealth growing like exp(t) and the rest of society has growth growing at a just marginally slightly lower rate exp((1-epsilon) t). Then after a while, the billionaire will own essentially 100% of everything.
For the math nerds out there, multiply by 1 in the form of exp(-t) / exp(-t) you get
Extreme wealth concentration is an inherent property of a capitalistic system.
The wealthier participant in a transaction has an inherent advantage in risk-tolerance and greater ability to hold out for a better deal.
Absent sufficiently progressive taxation to counteract it, the inherent advantage of the wealthier participant in every transaction leads to a positive feedback loop of wealth accumulation and concentration with mathematical inevitability.
I take issue with some of his claims but this is literally the first piece of writing which addresses the concerns I have about our economy in a plausible way going back to about WWII. The real problem is that no one is talking about the problem.
also relevant to @anoneuoid interests... Discusses the Eurocurrency market how deficit spending and trade imbalances drove money production and inflation of business assets and real estate in the US through 2000-2008. It was written a while back, but you can continue the line through the quantitative easing and then COVID era.
A thing I think he doesn't give enough attention to is the role the Fed DOES play. The Fed indirectly controls bank lending rate through a couple mechanisms. The first is whatever rules it has for declaring a bank solvent. They've eliminated reserve requirements but now it's something like a stress test or whatever. A bank can't keep lending
Indefinitely because it needs to remain legally solvent. So if it experiences a bunch of outbound payments it may need to borrow reserves or sell assets. If it has some borrowers go bankrupt then it may need to cover things from its investment assets, etc. The Fed basically determines the market price of Bonds held by the bank and hence whether the bank is more or less solvent. If it raises interest rates bonds held by the banks go down in value
So it's an indirect effect for sure. And if The Fed steps in and says "haha psych we'll buy bonds at par value!" like they did around SVB failure... then it's kinda all bets off.
So I'm probably going to be nerd sniped into developing a Jupyter notebook to examine the question of how well are mid income families 2 adults and 2 kids doing relative to how well their parents were doing 30 years earlier. I'm going to use a dirichlet prior over the weights on a 5 item CPI based expense index. The missing part is paired nominal earnings of people and their parents... Anyone know a dataset #statistics#data#economics@economics@a.gup.pe
This NBER paper used anonymized tax records and actually matched children to their actual parents... For kids born in the 80s to parents who had median incomes, MORE THAN HALF of them had LOWER incomes than their parents CPI all-items adjusted
If you take the population and divide by the rate of housing starts per year, you get a quantity in dimensions of time and units of years. This quantity roughly speaking is related to the "longevity of a dwelling" you need to have in order for the housing per person that's available not to decline. So if real longevity of houses is more or less a constant, then when this graph is high housing availability is declining, and when it's low it's growing... There's a reason millennials feel cheated
Roughly we can say that we need required longevity to be equal to typical longevity of real buildings, and the assumption should be that the steady state that was about right... somewhere in the 150 year range on this graph.
Dagnab it, I am constantly wishing I had more text in my messages and forgetting to tag stuff in my first post. This message is just to tag @economics@a.gup.pe and some hash tags #economics#housing#data#statistics
This discussion is about housing longevity and the adequate production rate of housing starts to keep housing from becoming scarce. There's a graph in the first post that shows very interesting dynamics.
Gelman's blog asked the question "is it really just the economy stupid?"... A long discussion occurred. One economist I respect (Dale Lehman) argued from official statistics that the "real income" of the bottom 10% of nominal income has gone up in recent years. I argued based on a fixed uniform weighted CPI that it had gone down. Further discussion ensued. 1/ #economics@economics@a.gup.pe
Read a thread about hiring processes and corporations etc. It make me think about how incredibly much smaller the ideal company size is than the companies we work for today. Has anyone ever noticed how incredibly productive Anarchist groups of open source software developers are compared to... Google/Facebook/IBM/Microsoft/Whatever? Like, the Slashdot software was written by a couple of guys, Mastodon by a couple of guys, Git was created by Linus Torvalds and passed off to a few tens of people?
Minecraft built by a few people... But then you look at Meta + Metaverse, and they spent like tens of billions of dollars and got 6 users all of whom were in the testing department at Meta.
In tech, Instead of enormous companies employing 300,000 people, we need like 10,000 companies employing 30 people each. Most tech is public goods that we try to pretend are "property". Most of it should be funded by grants and donations and then be open-source and Free.
Is there like an open-data peer to peer weather sensor network and an app that I can hook up to it to get local weather conditions? And if not, why the heck not? #weather#opendata#peertopeer#fediverse
The Road The Serfdom, The Road to Freedom, both seem to get it wrong. The reason for fascism is The State. The whole purpose of The State is to put powerful people in charge of everyone else. What kind of economic system you adopt within The State is relevant, but only basically to the taste of the boot.