The joke goes that all those PhDs had to find work, and found well-paying jobs on Wall St, created exotic derivatives, and blew up the world. Then we paid hundreds of billions to solve the 2008 financial crisis.
Space-X and its ilk decades earlier? Might not have been too bad...
Except of course half of them might have gone to work for Russia (or those private actors) developing ICBMs and hypersonic missiles. So maybe we'd all be speaking Russian now, praising God-Emperor Putler. (ETA: or Elon or Jeff. But those, probably in English. Small mercies...)
They also paid a full year's bonus for working in December for Y2K, so yes, there is the money.
Even if you have a good PhD, opportunities in physics are very limited. And they don't pay all that well.
Get a job as a quant and it's not remotely hard to earn $500k a year.
A bunch of our brightest spent their energy trying to shove one more ad in your brain.
My country gets this crap all the time.
It’s funny because it’s true.
Another way to look at it is markets are very powerful local optimisers - so if you rely on them exclusively you end up trapped in a rut.
Everyone hooked on naturally produced molecules that activate opioid receptors via your dark reward patterns, or indeed on synthetically produced and injected versions is not necessarily a globally optimal solution.
The job of government is to make sure the external costs, that are not immediately felt by the markets, are applied.
So the cost of addiction is put back on the sources of it, or the costs of pollution makes it's way back to the polluters.
That's what in essence good regulation is.
Obviously centrally deciding what's best for everything is of course doomed to failure - it's a massive under utilisation of talent and too centralised control is far too easy to lead to corruption and stagnation.
The trick is to find the right balance - and the right balance is a pragmatic one - not a clean ideological one - but you have to embrace that complexity, not try to over simplify.
So "wasting" money - with multiple people working on the same thing, or things that fail - is actually essential for innovation - markets work.
But at the very same time, it is important to have the confidence to state the obvious and take centralised action.
So if you leave the dealing of climate change to short term capital markets alone - you are signing up to it being much much worse before it get's any better. Something that you can avoid with collective action.
At their best days, when everything goes right.
One of the tasks of a government is to keep markets that way. Current governments seem not very interested on that task, worldwide.
Curing cancer would be infinitely more profitable than yet another crypto exchange. But humans are greedy. They won't wait for the big payday when a metaphorical marshmallow is dangling in front of them. Even holding out for the rewards of a crypto exchange is more than most people can handle. Most people will indulge in the not-so-tasty treat in front of them as soon as someone offers them a mediocre job.
> Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments
That may be true of an authoritarian regime, but under democracy, as I imagine most of us here are, government does not regulate society. It regulates individuals who try go against society. Society defines expectations, government cleans up those who refuse to comply. If the general public interest turns one way government can step in to ensure that the remaining people are brought into line, but a (democratic) government will not lead the charge.
The problem is the NPV calculations - tying you money up from 15 years before you see a return in a high risk sector ( where most things fail ) - doesn't make mathematical sense.
What makes mathematical sense is to rely on optimists to try anyway and then buy them at the right time when you can get the most return on your investment.
This is what a company like Pfizer does - it goes around buying innovative companies - taking the products and sacking the people [1]. They are extremely successful - but if everybody behaved like that we'd be fcked.
( I over emphasise for effect - but broadly true )
Indeed, that is the likely scenario as humans are greedy. People generally don't have the will to hold out for the bigger rewards, they want instant gratification to quash the feelings of their greed in the moment. They don't have to choose instant gratification, but if they want to then I suppose investment helps ensure that they still work on something useful when instant results cannot be seen.
That is not what most of us want in a democracy otherwise we would never go forward. Our society expects the government to Lead and not simply comply with the current mood. That is the problem we have now when every action is calculated on short term election result and not long term benefit for the whole society. If a democratic government were supposed to only enforce the majority expectations we would never change those expectation and our view of what is right/wrong.
If that were the case we would let leaders rise up to take the lead instead of calling on representatives to carry our messages to the central meeting place. It may be your dream to be able to sit back to not have to speak with your representative frequently – and fair enough, democracy is unquestionably hard work! – but that sentiment is not at all reflected in the democratic societies that I'm familiar with. Most definitely not the USA, which HN is skewed towards. American society as a whole is quite clear about the importance of hiring public servants to represent the people, to not have rulers take over. There is no liberty held more dear. Indeed, there are always outliers who don't align with the rest of the society. Hence why we have government to clean them up. Unquestionably there are Americans who don't believe in, or at least don't wish to participate in, democracy, but the individual does not a society make.
There are societies that do expect leaders to take the lead. It is not an unheard of concept and you might even stay it is historically common. But those are not democratic societies.
However looking from the outside, it does look like democracy is failing in the US.
The problem appears to be that it's money, not the people, who have the largest influence on who is elected.
The large amount of money swirling in the system, and the pretty much unregulated use of very powerful persuasive tools - has corroded the US democracy.
Today the technology allows you to surround each and every person in their own advertising bubble online - all data driven to get the outcome the payers want.
And then the effect of the candidates needing money to get elected - and them having to sign up to stuff just to get the money.
Take sensible gun reforms - something that poll after poll suggests there is broad support - is effectively blocked by the arms lobby.
Is it blocked or has society not needed to bring the outliers in line? (Democratic) government isn't there to lead. Government is there only to clean up after society recognizes that some are not falling into line. Society must lead. Saying "Yes, I support gun reforms" in a random poll isn't the same as action, of course. Also looking in from the outside, I don't see any real societal movement on this front.
Funnily enough, in my country where we do find clear societal movement that pushed to move away from guns in our history, and a government that stepped in to clean up the outliers who still tried to wield guns afterwards, it was rooted in society wanting to protect their money from the poor and aboriginals. If it is such that American society is driven by money above people, it is curious that there isn't the same kind of interest in protecting that money from people.
Perhaps money in the USA isn't as important as it appears to those of us only looking in?
Public servants carrying out messages? Really? Like a post office? Is the society which lives up to this noble standard aware of the more modern versions of these servants, such as, gee I don't know, TCP/IP?
Or maybe society doesn't want a constant referendum mode (fine by me, I'd expect it to be a spectacular disaster), and prefers servants to have a bit of built-in intelligence? But it causes behaviors which make them indistinguishable from leaders, e.g.: coming up with new ideas, influencing others, attempting to shape the future. I don't see anyone arguing for dumber representatives (I mean... not explicitly!), so seemingly the majority agrees.
> American society as a whole is quite clear about the importance of hiring public servants to represent the people, to not have rulers take over. There is no liberty held more dear.
False dilemma. The liberty held dear is the liberty to fire the representatives. A "leader" is not a synonym of "ruler". There is surely a lot of options between "servants" and "rulers taking over" (whatever the latter is supposed to mean).
Treating an illness is even more profitable than curing it though
If you could cure it, you could charge more than treatment - because it's more valuable to the person getting cured. If you had cancer with a 5 year expected survival rate, would you pick (arbitrary round numbers)
$10,000 per year in treatment to manage it but you've still got cancer.
$55,000 paid over 5 years, $5000 more than you would pay to just manage it, but you also don't have cancer any more.
Imagine you invent a way to cure cancer and it costs you 10000$ a treatment. How much do you charge the customer? Two times that? Ten? Twenty? At what point is someone going to stop in and force you to sell at a lower price? How long till public opinion turns against you? What if competition forces the price down? There are lot of variables that might lead to you ending up at 10000$ + a few percent profit margin.
Now imagine you have a medication that's 100$ a dosage. You sell it for 120$. That's 84 doses to cover the cost of a cancer treatment. Assuming the same markup on treatment that's 100 doses.
At this point it's the simple question what the company is more likely to get away with: Many small doses with a profit margin that add up? Or one large treatment with a big profit margin?
Right now reality shows that the small doses seem to work better. An example would be insulin. In the US it costs 30$ a dose upwards. Production costs are at less than 10$. [0] That's a 200% markup.
With numbers like these, why would you ever cure something?
[0]: https://marketrealist.com/healthcare/cost-to-manufacture-ins...
The lower bound is surely the same as long term treatment, right? No player here would choose more expensive treatment that doesn't cure the patient. Insurers get premiums for longer if you live, and governments rely on having a workforce.
If governments act beyond the bounds of negotiating as a large buyer and legislate, have they not already done that for the treatment already? Is there as much to lose as you think?
> With numbers like these, why would you ever cure something?
Because you can charge more. Being cured is better than not being cured. If being ill and getting partially treated cost $100/month, would you honestly not pay $100.01/month forever but be cured?
Your arguments about public opinion and pressure rely people stepping in because your business practices are immoral, but this is what you're already accusing them of without any actual repercussions.
> What if competition forces the price down
If someone has a cure cheaper than your non-cure, frankly you're already fucked as a business. This also means that anyone who isn't the current main supplier has a very obvious reason to release an actual cure because then they'll get all of the business.
Assuming free market, the cost of total cure will probably settle on at least 2-5x of an average life expectation times a treatment cost per year, minus some minor operational expenses.
Are you assuming multiple suppliers for that cure or a single supplier?
Very different. In the case of a single supplier - wouldn't it make sense to pay everything you own ( minus what else you need to live ) to survive?
In the case where there were multiple suppliers ( with no collusion between them ) - then the price could be driven down to the cost of production, rather than the value that it brings.
So for example food is essential to live - yet it's cheap.
That's assuming you get to negotiate with every customer. If it's one price for everyone then while what you say is true for each person's max (ignoring the complexity of people looking after others, the same logic applies of "everything you can afford") that's different for everyone so the optimal price can vary.
The solution there is to sell the same thing to different people at differences prices - lots of ways of doing this.
For example America pays lots more for it's pharma drugs than other countries.
You have to actually treat it though - if the patient dies, it isn't profitable either. I suppose (all morality aside), the optimal profitability would be in a cure that required an annual installment fee.
Everyone dies of something - you don't save lives, you delay death.
The older people are the more likely they will have multiple chronic things to be treated - diabetes, arthritis etc .
This is one of the challenges that society hasn't quite got to grips with yet - and it's why health care costs are climbing ever upwards.
I'm interested to know why you think this.
This is another retreat into passing the buck to a non-entity that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33982377 alludes to in talking about where "software" went wrong. Society doesn't exist in a practical sense, it's just a word that refers to a collection of individuals (and the culture/etc that those individuals share).
Individuals can do things like donate to free open source projects to keep incentives aligned with their users.
Tangentially...
> Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments, we currently reward data gathering so it is what we get.
I'd say governments exist to regulate specifically violence (e.g. punish citizens who use it in an unauthorized manner against each other). Other stuff like interstate highways are cool too, but they're easier to negotiate in a federated way than e.g. regulation of violence between states would be (short of just having states go to war with each other).
Towards the end of regulating violence, surveillance is super useful. And this is why we cannot leave tech decisions in the hands of government either, because they have incentives going to the very core essence of government to build a surveillance state.
So it is better for me if it is X Corp's stockholders who benefit money wise and I who pay, than some spyware company like Google paying.
The problem is that companies now seem to want to make me pay and still take money from Google et al. Like Samsung's TVs. Or Microsoft becoming like Google in their consumer products.
There probably need to be some regulation in the IoShit space to keep it from eating away all "dumb" spyware free devices.
Building stronger morals could also help.
Things like effective altruism seem to be an attempt at redirection, but they have their own problems. Until someone or something succeeds with redirection, having stronger morals will only make the problem worse.
We haven't seen any meaningful increase in real earnings in the last 50 years, despite massive increases in productivity. In America, go to any city and you'll see a massive number of homeless people, those individuals have not magically captured any of the productivity gains of the 21st century, in fact they're probably unemployed because the low skill job that would've existed now has been automated.
Trickle down economics is such a farcical scam made by those who benefit from it, it makes me unironically proud of my country's propaganda machine that people are drinking the neoliberal gospel so hard, it'll make the next few decades a lot funnier.
Who's "we"? The world as a whole has experienced rapidly growing real earnings throughout the last 50 years. Real earnings worldwide have doubled since 2001 alone! [1] Of course, most of the growth has happened in developing countries (where, honestly, it's most needed) rather than in rich countries where you and I live. But even in rich countries real earnings are rising, just more slowly. [2]
> In America, go to any city and you'll see a massive number of homeless people
Only in the rich cities, not in poor rural areas. And that's because homelessness is a result almost solely of high housing prices due to political building restrictions, not low incomes (or mental illness or drug use). [3] Increasing incomes won't actually decrease homelessness significantly - higher income just means housing prices will have to rise higher before poor-er people are forced out. The same number of people will be forced out either way, because a fixed number of housing units can accommodate a roughly fixed number of people, meaning that everyone additional person has to leave.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=c... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=c... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...
Real dollars and wages have not increased a lot... for the average citizen, but has increased tremendously for those with more skills. Nevertheless, the average citizen does have more purchasing power compared to their rough equivalent ~50 years back. The main culprits of rising costs is healthcare, housing, and education. Housing has performed it's worst effect on the average American over the last 2 years, but before that was quite steady in relative cost to the average income. Food, entertainment, clothing, transportation, and communication are now much more affordable, inflation over the last 2 years has also put a dent into the relative cost to the average income, but nevertheless still better now than previous.
What solutions are there for the average American? Take advantage of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease, learn new skills and drive forth competition. Stagnant industries will have to adapt or they will die.
I don't think reality is quite so dire. There's not a lot that can convince me, I'm well aware of wage stagnation, I'm well aware of inflation YoY, I'm well aware that the average American is hurting quite a bit over the last 2 years. But in the long run, the average American is doing OK, and will be doing OK. Hopefully, OK turns into GOOD and thriving. Happy to be proven wrong though.
Assuming you are US based, you will notice that the nationalized health services are slowly going bankrupt or worse, losing all their doctors. Even still, the per capita expenditure on health care in Western countries is an exponential. Giving credit to the nationalized systems, they managed to constrain it to perhaps n^1.6 instead of n^2, but it's still not a problem with "capitalism" directly, as it affects health systems with no meaningful concept of private business.
How does progressive thought deal with people wanting to spend enormous amounts of money on increasingly more advanced Healthcare as they age, and those costs being hidden such that nobody realizes how much money that is?
It appears that the American system has replicated the failures of communist planning - nobody know how much anything should cost!
Perhaps the nationalized systems were able to perform better, for a time due to having very smart people trying their best to work it out - but this even is starting to become unglued.
A proper progressive answer to this cannot be to nationalize more Healthcare, as that is failing the metric used to criticize the private system. More slowly, admittedly - but still failing.
If all talk about the way capital markets improve the world is the "neoliberal gospel", there needs to be an answer for these problems that don't rely on sovereign wealth funds or extremely creative central bank manipulation.
It's funny how this is so widely recognized, yet at the same time we like to claim that college, which also started gaining in popularity 50 years ago, will increase your earnings...
There's an expansive gulf of misery before you hit the Christian Children's Fund commercial, 5yo w/rickets starvation. I assure you that you have absolutely no clue what it looks like and what you've seen hasn't told you what you think it has.
Sure, drug addiction is a giant problem in the US, but you were correct to second guess your take. Reducing the most dire portion of the US's housing crisis to drug addiction is flabbergastingly reductive. You should start by trusting information from people who have meaningfully studied housing in the United States.
> Instead of finished fentanyl being shipped directly to the United States, most smuggling now takes place via Mexico.
> Mexican criminal groups source fentanyl precursors — and increasingly pre-precursors — from China, and then traffic finished fentanyl from Mexico to the United States.
it's hard to even get (direct) fentanyl precursors from China .. but those that have the knowledge in both India and Mexico can start further down the chain and get "pre - precursors" to produce fentanyl to smuggle into the US.
(2022) [1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/china-and-synthetic-drugs...
(2020) [2] https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
Software is just a technology, which can be used for good and bad, like most things.
But then what makes software special is that you can also encode "techniques" in it.
Thus the exercise of trying to understand a program is also "technology"? :-)
that would be true if you had no understanding surplus value. i highly recommend you at least try and read the first few chapters of Marx's Capital, which was quoted directly in the article.
notice profits are skyrocketing while wages are dead? "rising tide raises all ships" economics is dead.
While the rising tide is not raising all ships you at least have a chance to fight to jump to another ship and not being forced to navigate the ocean using rafts.
That said I think it's a utopia and as such (just like many other anarchistic strains) in line with some of 'utopia's defintions it is impractical/impossible bs.
The nature of the reward matters, not everything is about wealth and money. Many geniuses are still willingly working in public labs for a fraction of what they'd earn in a corporate or startup.
how do you "redistribute" wikipedia, creative commons, public domain, F/LOSS software? are all these domains a "race to the bottom of effort?"
you don't need to, it's already collectively publicly owned.
your perspective is terribly closed-minded. spend more time imagining something else other than assuming the predominant ideology is all that will ever exist and appealing to some fake "natural" order.
Kinda the same implementation though if you don't count boring social democrats to the block. It is probably fundamentally a really really bad idea with authoritarian rule and a central planning system, which is not self correcting and where the authoritarian regime won't admit errors or faults.
I wonder why coop corporations are not more common. They are essentially "socialist" on a micro scale. There have to be some big drawback.
I think agile has alot of these problems. In most environment it fails due to about the same reasons as it is a authoritarian ideology in practice.
This makes a lot of sense. If we want better software (less dark patterns, less loot boxes, etc.) we need to change society rewards. If the companies that earn more profits are the ones that exploit human weaknesses then the world resources will be dedicated to them. If we want better software, or even less software and more other things, society needs to reward those activities. If it pays more to work for a crypto exchange or the next data-stalking start-up than to cure cancer then most of the knowledge people will work on them. Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments, we currently reward data gathering so it is what we get.
I can imagine a future were more resources are dedicated to extract value from people and less to produce products and services. And it is a red queen race. More resources call for more resources to be used, like an arms race it has no end unless there is a society will to end it.