EDIT just checked his Bio. Nope, not young. Perhaps just in some sort of bubble. Thinktank perhaps. The whole tone is all very think-tanky.
Your "find me a wife" portrayal is the least charitable possible interpretation of that section of the article. Was your comment made in good faith?
I mean, even in this list.
To my mind, this list is very much like the "how to make more entrepreneurs (in the VC sense) more successful" articles that show up often.
History has always formed these loops of prosperity, then spirituality. I mean it's nice not to starve, but I think people would be happier being part of a tight knit tribe who support one another, even more than having air-conditioning and dating apps.
In fact it's only recent that the commoner could even aspire to wealth, regardless of whether that actually correlates to ability to achieve it.
Islam went through many cycles of this. Corrupt powerful pagan Quraish. Spiritual Muhammad and Rashidun caliphate. Corrupt Umayyad Caliphate. Spiritual Abbasid Caliphate. The Ottomans went through this as well. We're historically at a low point with regards to Islamic society.
Third world faces this - many of them have abundant natural resources, compared to say, Europe. But the wealth brings corruption, not prosperity.
I think the Rashidun Caliphate has a lot of good examples - caliphs turning down state gifts, distributing most of the wealth, selling off luxuries like silk, jewelry, and carpets for infrastructure, making sure that their families didn't profit from state funds.
Anything where an individual can benefit unfairly from the effort of an organisation is a form of corruption, as it involves abuse of power entrusted. This includes CEOs overpaying themselves, or government leaders with excessively high compensation. They're making use of their position to skim resources for personal benefit, and sadly, it's a culture now that this is what people should aspire to.
Things usually improve when people can draw a line where they have enough, and allocate excess resources to the rest of the organization. This is usually (not necessarily) triggered by spirituality because there's nobody else to keep the watchmen in check.
Once leaders do this, those down the command chain also do the same. There were plenty of situations where commoners were well off - in Egypt, Rome, China, Caliphates, and so on. I believe we actually have lower social mobility today than in some eras of the past, but it's far from terrible.
I could well be wrong, and encourage those with more understanding of history to correct and give counter examples.
Studies show it does, to a degree. Once you hit something like $70-80k the satisfaction levels off.
It's one of those hygiene things -- not having it will make you (or others) miserable, but having it doesn't mean you're good or happy.
For a society, I think the culture of making as much as possible has left everyone slightly worse off, instead of slightly better off as we were promised.
1. A recent study that found very high life expectancy "blue zones" were highly correlated with poor record keeping and pensions - the strong implication was that it was mostly fraud. Don't think Hong Kong was one of the areas studied, but I think skepticism is warranted. 2. A common thread I've seen in many longevity studies is that social connectedness is one of the strongest predictors of a long lifespan, and contrarily, "lonely people die young." I'd expect that a very close-knit urban area with relatively low migration (e.g. as opposed to NY or SF where there is so much moving in and moving out) would exhibit this social connectedness.
EDIT it's a lovely place too, Hong Kong (picturesque, pleasant climate, easy to get around). I'd say that would have a lot to do with it as well, once you can pay the rent ...
Misery is a very strong inverse correlate however. I'd be given to thinking that a lot of economic activity is driven by the need to escape [EDIT and stay out of] poverty on one end, and a cohort of super-competitive success-addicts on the other. Most other people are quite content in the middle, and want to stay there. It is the threat of penury we should be looking more at than the lure of riches.
Social capital is what gives people this sense of belonging - of being in a "tight knit tribe". I think that conservatives understand this a lot better than progressives, who tend to see everything about society in terms of either material conditions (wealth vs. poverty), or zero-sum power relations where one side 'wins' and the other side 'loses'. It's not clear that these matter all that much. Plenty of people throughout history had very little in the way of material resources, and were required to answer to people, institutional frameworks etc. exerting some sort of power on them - and yet, they still found lots of ways to smile and be happy at their life. We should understand how they managed to do that.
My favourite definition of a tribe is that it's a group where everyone gives what they can and takes as little as they need to. Everyone should be willing to give their last slice of bread and be offended at the idea of 'owing someone' for it.
This just doesn't scale well, but it happens in things like gaming groups, married couples, etc.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
Karl Marx.
If anything, conservatives and liberals, due to their devotion for capitalism, are united in fracturing people and communities. That's just the natural end goal of an economic philosophy that views everything via the lens of corporate profit.
In the real world, capitalism is an unstable system. The "winner" gets too close to the state and then tries to shape the rules so they fit the incumbent and discourages everyone else. Boeing and the FAA is a recent high profile example.
A lot of brainpower in the last century went into technological progress, but we have enough computing power, internet, cloud, data to work on this thing.
I guess part of it is that I look at some of these goals as being kind of naive, for lack of a better word? Measuring worker productivity is a good example -- if I were to try and sit down and think hard about why companies aren't moving quickly, I would say that the problems I see are related to unnecessary scaling, focusing on the wrong business goals, overcomplicating solutions and infrastructure, and an overemphasis on measurement to the point where Goodhart's Law can't possibly not come into play. I'm not sure worker productivity is a real problem that's worth prioritizing over more basic questions like, "how can businesses make sure they're building things that actually solve real-world problems?"
It's very hard to describe. I keep on seeing things that seem very very vaguely "off" to me -- sometimes that I think it's the wrong prioritization, or that there are actually already people working on the problem and the author doesn't seem to be aware of their work, or that the problem is actually more complicated than the author seems to believe it to be ("mechanisms for better matching" is a particularly strange simplification of what makes relationships work).
Anecdotally, usually when I feel this way about an article or topic, I come back later and find that it hasn't aged well. I pay more attention to these feelings now than I used to.
We who live at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy wonder at his lack of focus on quality of life, but I believe if you asked most people in the world (people who are not American or European) what they most valued, they'd tell you access to food, clean water, cheap energy, healthcare, etc. Things that come from economic growth, which comes from building effective institutions and increasing the number of people who can be productive.
Since there are more poor people than rich people, it makes sense to focus on what most humans care about.
Things that come from actually building stuff. Purely economic growth, as represented by banks and brokerages and economics departments, doesn't put food in anyone's belly or a roof over their heads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen
>Nothing about increasing anyone's quality of life, solving environmental problems, advancing science
Tyler is all about those things, but his whole thesis is that they are directly linked to economic efficiency. That is not an unsupported idea.
Can't disagree with that. But we haven't been enriching the poor. We've been practicing trickle down economics instead.
Enriching the rich has marvelous side effects like a proliferation of low paying contract work (jobs!), ratcheting housing prices (wealth!) and increased production of luxury goods (utopia!).
But then you look at minimum wage, inflation and the consumer price index; and see that the poor have been hemorrhaging purchasing power since the 1970s.
So, yeah. Increasing wealth is great for humanity. But there's a wide gap between anticapitalism and the neoliberal/libertarian economic theories which brought today's plutocracy. The middle ground is classical capitalism.
Of course not. We've just been lifting many hundred millions of people out of poverty in China, India, South-East Asia and elsewhere, but what does this have to do with "enriching the poor"? Maybe you need to look beyond the literal "first world problems" in your privileged corner of the West.
I love this line of thinking because it always shows someone has put forth no effort into what the "poverty reduction" means. The International Poverty line has been $1.90/day. So, if you make the equivalent of $1.90 in your country or higher, then you are not in poverty. Now how about you go and do some work and see how nutritionally complete your diet will be on $1.90.
I somewhat disagree with zozbot and I agree with your material analysis (I'd add something about the rising Gini indices in the mentioned developing nations), but this sentence adds nothing to the conversation.
In Cambodia... I could easily feed myself on $1.90 a day, if I wasn't white and getting barang (foreigner) prices.
As much as I love Döner, half of one isn't nutritionally complete.
OK, half a kebab and a few beers. Many's the time I've woken up to empty beeer bottles and a half-eaten kebab and I haven't starved to death ;)
That said, I found him very insightful when he came on Eric Weinsteins podcast recently.
A real individualistic list would focus on the quality of life of the individual.
Of course money is important in that regard but studies have pretty consistently shown that community, meaning, and I’ll throw in health, are the key components of individual happiness.
It’s very leftist idea to try to solve that on society’s level.
The list is focusing on things we can improve on society’s level from an individualistic perspective.
It doesn't help that there is no sense of policy or what the goal of some of these things are, like there's no policy here to indicate if we're hoping for an outcome or not...
Reminds me of the manager who shows up and says "oh man look at this mess and all these terrible metrics" and after a few months just changes the metrics and doesn't understand that the metrics themselves create problems ;)
But his arguments also attract the wackos and are used as justifications by them. Therefore we have an urge or desire to just shut him down justified by "don't feed the trolls".
I do find the calls for institutional criticism to be a bit thin.
In particular, the most troubling "institutions" in our society use decentralization to avoid responsibility. In health care, for instance, everybody can point to somebody else as the source of the problem -- the real case the status quo has against single payer is that now the system can limit costs by denying claims in an unaccountable manner. In a single payer system patients will descend on Washington with their wheelchairs and crutches with their airfare and hotel paid for by "charities" run by the health care industry.
Similar complaints can be made about the media. One reason people don't trust "experts" is that they've never seen real experts, they've only seen the likes of Cokie Roberts and Larry Kudlow. In a world with accountability, people like that wouldn't get traction.
This line in particular rubs me the wrong way. Who are these "informed" people? Who says the street food is mediocre? Have you looked at other possibilities before pointing the finger at nebulous "culture"? The line of reasoning seems very subjective and unscientific.
This also match my personal experience (my girlfriend is from there). The other side of the coin is that they are on average much happier and social than other cultures. This is in line with schools of thought that see happiness as inversely proportional to perfectionism.
oof. Yikes, thanks for letting me know. I'm softblocking him right now. sorry but I saw a joke tweet of his and followed, didn't know that by being curious about research into highly effective people and institutions he was committing or advocating actual, physical harm to people.
It seems to take for granted that the domain of human affairs runs like clockwork, like a machine that merely "needs fixing". This smells libertarian and a quick google of the authors and their books confirms that suspicion. The "hint of violence" you're detecting is subtly judgemental smugness.
The blog owner (Cowan) runs the Mercatus Center at GMU, which exists entirely to explore free market alternatives. It's funded directly by the Koch family; one of the Koch brothers is on the board.[1]
That said, Tyler Cowen's food blog is pretty good, if you live in the Northern VA / Washington DC area.
[1] https://www.mercatus.org/about and https://www.mercatus.org/board
Another corporatist Koch shill at GMU that shouldn't be considered an economist if Brian Caplan. If you ever see any "insightful" articles by either one of these, run like hell.