(fact) a single market with a single language
(fact) geographically isolated
(fact) not much space
(fact) burned to the ground in WW2
and yet for a while it was an economic powerhouse on the world stage.
Taiwan, Hong Kong and S Korea, similar stories.
So what is the common thread? Free markets.
China is attempting to show that not even democracy is needed to be prosperous.
If you can start a store in a great market, with police, judicial system, little corruption, etc etc etc etc .. why wouldn't you?
Why are stores closing in SF and Chiraq?
All less developed free market economies have been free markets since relatively recently.
The wealthiest economies are generally those that adopted market based rules the earliest, e.g. the Anglosphere and North West Europe, which were free market based since the 19th century.
Example?
And you're right that democracy is not a requirement for free markets, though they usually go together.
I won't claim to know anything else about Japan. Would love to visit, but I'm not sure I'd love to be part of its economy as a salary man.
for some reason this motivates people. primordial need for land ownership. the call of the feudalism.
engine runs out of steam once the growing cabal of landlords eat the last marginal production in excess of rate of interest
america has more land relative to its population so takes longer to nimbify it all
Seems to me owning what you create is the key, instead of having it ripped from your hands.
Back to the philosophy playpen, John G.
Markets are great at finding how much something is worth. uhhhh
Want to give some examples?
We don't need simplistic randian objectivism - it fails to describe the nuance, the beauty, the depth, the wonder, the complexity and the truth of reality.
"paying with their own money" ... ack, not this simplistic nonsense again. People temporarily gain control over some measure of various economic resources. It's not their own money, beyond some temporary mutual agreement. Tomorrow, it may not be.
Also, people pay for things regardless of the creator or the morality of its creation. Their willingness to pay for something speaks to their relationship with the thing, not that of the thing's nominal "creator".
Sure, no human could produce anything modern on their own, without knowledge, training, support, materials, products, labor, etc. that comes from others. A child raised by wolves will never launch a new line of tennis shoes.
At the same time, no complex effort comes to be without someone’s motivation and effort to take the risk, coordinate the activity and see it through. It doesn’t have to be one primary person to do so, but it certainly can be. It is not difficult to look at the history of a given project and conclude who most acutely put it into motion. The choice to incentivize this acute influence has trade-offs, but many different societies across history have tried many variations of what / where to incentivize. Abstracted, that’s one of the main points being discussed here.
That doesn’t mean all stories about who started / created / produced something are told accurately. But to throw your hands up and say “everything comes from everyone” is completely useless when designing society with the goal of solving problems, providing for its members and improving the human condition.
I said "nothing comes one person".
Ergo, there is no "what you create", at least in the sense of being able to point at something and say "I did that, it is my creation".
Sure, we may use this a shorthand for situations where the proximal effort came from one person. But it's just a shorthand, and should not obscure the deeper truth.
I'm not discussing the general thrust of TFA or the overall comment thread, just another randian and their simplistic ideas about how the world works.
That's what you sound like. Different kind of religion.
By your logic you can’t even define what a definition is so your whole schtick goes poof.
Bad unfalsifiable philosophy like this is why people hate philosophy. You’re just deliberately confusing people and trying to make yourself seem clever by sucking people into this silly definitions game.
I made software that helps my clients. I sell it for $1000/mo. I get $1000/mo and pay taxes on it. I have created $1000/mo.
Please explain what's not fair about this? The intricate nuance I'm missing? LOL
Let's say I work with one other person and pay them $1/hr, which they accept. They make my idea. I end up paying them like 100 and I make 1000/mo forever
Where's the nuance there?
But the value of your software is utterly contingent on the full context of where you live. As many have noted, there are many highly paid jobs in (say) the USA that would simply have no value if you attempted to perform them in, say, Sudan (especially right now). So that $1000/mo is predicated on the work that others have done to create a context where your work actually has some value. Take that context away (or destroy it), and your work is close to worthless. So, where does the value in your work actually come from? No doubt some comes from you ... but how much is a lot harder to define.
2. I never said anything about fair.
3. I have no idea what your $1/hr example is intended to demonstrate.
2. Ok, so capitalism is fair, then? you get paid what you're worth and control that value privately ... uhh...?
3. Explain the nuance of ownership there, what am I missing that makes it unfair?
So does S. America, which has never been prosperous.
> The government forced absentee landlords to sell all their land to the government. Farmers were allowed to own a small amount of farm land that they could rent out to others ( 2.5 acres or one hectare in most parts of Japan, and 10 acres or 4 hectares in Hokkaido), and had to sell any excess to the government. The government then sold this land, usually to the tenant who had been farming it. The result greatly improved the living conditions of farmers.
http://www.crosscurrents.hawaii.edu/content.aspx?lang=eng&si...
The point I was making was that the person I was replying to was claiming that Japan's economic prosperity was due to it have a "free market" which it does not (unless you count socialism for the companies as "freedom").
Protecting an economy is the same thing as economic sanctions. You can't claim that one results in prosperity while the other explains economic malaise.
> which it does not
It certainly does. It wasn't a perfect free market, though, as nothing human is perfect. But it was close enough to do the job.
BTW, I wrote that it was a free market.
Uh, no.
Hard no.
> BTW, I wrote that it was a free market.
Yes, I realised it after I posted, but did not care to update what other people can see for themselves.
Protectionism - hitting your own foot with a hammer
Somehow, that didn't work out for Cuba.
No country with a strong economy got there by being forcibly isolated from the world.
For instance subsidies for US EV véhicules in 2023 is protectionism and will probably benefit US company.
The US do that a lot for a free market proponent.
As opposed to sanction where it’s something that is imposed to you.
For instance : Biden subsidies on EV véhicules apply to US companies only. That’s protectionism.
EU subsidies for EV works with any brands. So the subsidies money are currently going to Chinese EV manufacturers.
The DPRK seems to be a basket case, with regular crop failures (we are told), but its relationship with China ensures that it continues to survive.
Capitalism in countries like the USA seems to work for part of their population, but not all, there are large swathes of poverty and homelessness, and the disparity between the haves and have nots is enormous.
The whole point of an economic system, whether it be Capitalism, Socialism, or the more common middle ground (almost every country has struck a balance between the two, with Welfare states, public housing, public health, etc), is to ensure that resources are managed such that they provide for the population.
Capitalism is great at a micro level, people get to decide for themselves how to spend their time, what they want to eat/drink/wear/grow on their farms, and so forth.
But, it's absolutely horrendous at a state/macro level - can you imagine roading being multiple companies competing by putting half a dozen roads between yourself and your work? Emergency services have tried that model (Fire engines used to be owned by one insurance company, or another, and you would have a label on your home letting the crews know which insurance company you were insured by, so if the wrong fire crew showed up they would just watch as your home burnt down)
It's super easy to say "Capitalism has incentivised innovation" but the Soviets were ahead of the USA in several engineering fields, without capitalism (their incentive was competition with the USA)
And bureaucracy becomes a major headache.
A very common refrain at the moment is businesses wanting to be "nimble like start ups" but are unable to do so due to a myriad of reasons.
Germany is home to approximately 83 million people. Japan 126 million. Japan is 40% bigger than Germany, not 60%.
US is roughly 334 million. Europe is rougly 748 million, of which the EU is roughly 447 million.
Germany is the most populous Western European country. The figures that you quote for the EU have nothing do with the comparison we're making in this thread.
I don't see how the figure for a percentage that you're quoting is compelling in any way:
126 / 1.6 = 78.75
126 / 1.4 = 90
1.6 * 83 = 132.8
1.4 * 83 = 116.2
Not when it comes to Japan.
During the post-war boom era the majority of its largest businesses were conglomerates with a minimal focus on profit and with interlocking ownership structures that prevented accountability to shareholders.
In addition to that a large amount of corporate investment was state-directed by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI).
It was an effective system (at least for a time) but not one that can be accurately described as driven by free markets.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato...
The remarkable thing is that Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have all successfully turned the corner to being functioning democracies that are still driving economic growth rather than devolving into corrupt dictatorships.
If those matter so much, Mexico should be much stronger than it is. Unblockable access to two oceans, big population, reasonable amount of resources.
What is lacking is rule of law...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...
If the US is simply better at it, isn't that relevant?
It's not like other (former) superpowers didn't do the exact same things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_involvement_in_regime_c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_involvement_in_regime_...
If we say that it's not a pretend virtue to care about democracy and freedom around the world, then wouldn't it would be a reasonable imperative to interact with the world?
Consider for contrast Canada, also a single language market, also geographically isolated, and sharing many of the inherent benefits of NA that America has. Canada though, not often considered a real economic dynamo in the same way as the USA.
Well one big difference is that Canada is a relatively small population spread thin over an enormously large area.
In Canada there's a natural and easy North/South transportation and trade links, but East/West nature of the country breaks that. I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.
It would be remarkably simpler for a Vancouver company to expand into Seattle and Portland for example, but keeping within the Canadian borders the next natural expansion point is all the way over in Calgary, dramatically far away and a (surprisingly) remarkably different politicial and cultural environment.
Some of these problems for Canada mitigated after NAFTA in the 1980s, but still one can see here how the USA is in a better position with its huge and spread out population.
In the US, the federal government supersedes the individual states. In Canada, the federal government is only an equal to the provinces and must stay in its lane.
Or, to put it another way, I would not be shocked if every US state trades more with China than it does with any other state.
No. No US state has trade with Canada at more than 15% of state GDP <https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_tra...>, and Canada is a bigger trade partner for the US than China.
And while Canada is a bigger trade partner in total than China, I'm willing to bet that China is more evenly distributed between the states as a trade partner.
As of 2017, international trade was 65% of Canadian GDP, compared to 40% of GDP for interprovincial trade. <https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA...>
Another way to think about this: <https://np.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_trad...>
I’m French but I’m living in the Us since a decade or so.
Cell phone prices are considerably cheaper in France ( €30 gets you unlimited everything on mobile and €80 is a combo for fiber + mobile plan )
But yet, that a heavily regulated market. If I’m correct there is 5 licences. All other companies have to buy and resell bandwidth thought those 5 licence. They tend to be French company.
Here I pay close to $200 total for the same service ( actually lesser service, I can’t have fiber where I live )
Maybe those expensive price are not due to that regulation? ( or maybe it is. I don’t know, but I wanted to give you a counter example )
Now I remember why I switched from cricket. From time to time, I need data in Europe. On my US phone. That being said I should just switch when appropriate.
Thanks for reminding that.
I took the opportunity to check what the prices are in France now.
€20/month, and €10/month if you bundle it with your internet connection. ( bringing to a total of €40 )
I just checked the operator that historically has the better price. ( free.fr )
Apparently Mint offers a US/Canada/Mexico plan for only a little more.
But when I travel internationally, I get a prepaid SIM when I land. It's cheap enough.
It seems likely that population density is playing a role not just regulations. Sure there’s gaps in every country, but companies need to do more than just cover major cities or what’s the point of having a cellphone?
Less and less, that’s true.
But regulation, borders, culture, habits, buying power, taste…
The first startup I worked for was wildly successful in France. We had dream of conquest of all Europe, of course.
Each new country was a headache, nothing to do with langage. ( language was the easy part )
People wanted different stuff. We were able to make it to Italy and the UK, got laughed out of the room in Germany. Never got more than mild traction in Spain and nobody talked to us in Portugal.
Randomly we got Chinese customers. Super hyped.
Then we realized that while doing all that … we had let our primary market down and that someone else was eating our lunch there.
Got bankrupt a year after.
It was poor execution. But I still think that expending from Nebraska to Missouri is easier :)
It is true you can do business in other states pretty easily.
I haven't been to Quebec for probably 20 years. If it was dramatically cheaper and easier to travel in this country maybe I wouldn't (even briefly) forget that millions of Canadians speak French as their first language.
But interesting point in that it underlines the problems that a Canadian company would have in diversifying across its own nation. A successful Ontarian company would induce significant cost in expanding to Quebec, a remarkably different jurisdiction with important language regulation that needs to be respected, while the same sort of company in Vermont would have less barriers expanding to all its surrounding states.
(Also for completeness sake, one should point out that there are areas of Canada where indigenous languages are significantly spoken (eg. Nunavut) but they are quite small in population)
- Canada is an English and French speaking country. - Most of Canada's population lives next to the Great Lakes region so it is somewhat dense there, but most of the country is empty
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8pmzd7/pop...
As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself. <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>
>I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.
Correct. Confederation was the biggest mistake in the Maritimes' history. From an economic or demographic perspective, the region since 1867 has been in constant decline. The single most-important reason is the region's loss of its traditional US markets; unsurprisingly, the rest of Canada has *never* compensated for this loss in terms of economic activity.
Before 1867 the Maritimes' economic ties were to New England and the rest of the US, not to Ontario and Quebec. Had Nova Scotians' wishes been followed by London in 1867 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Confederation_Party>, it would not have stayed with the other provinces in confederation. No railroad existed between the Maritimes and Ontario/Quebec until the 1870s <https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/intercolon...>! Well into the early 20th century, an ambitious young man or woman from the Maritimes went to Boston or New York in what locals called the "Boston States", not to Montreal or Quebec.
Such an outcome was exactly what Nova Scotia's fierce opponents of Confederation (and, usually, advocates of US annexation) feared <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_movements_of_Canada...>. There is no inherent reason why the region can't be as wealthy/populated as New England today. Northern Maine is empty because of a conscious decision to keep it for forestry; despite its northern two thirds being devoid of human life, Maine alone has two thirds of the population of the Maritimes. A PEI with full, untariffed access to its traditional US customers might have received more Italian, Irish, and Portuguese immigrants drawn to its fishing and potato industries. To put another way, an American PEI today could have 500,000 people with 100,000 people each from greater New York and Los Angeles, and 50,000 each from Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and Atlanta; i.e. unnoticeable decreases in those areas.
As for Newfoundland, that things have improved since 1949, and especially the recent oil boom, does not change the immense poverty for most of the island's history. Read the accounts of the British/Canadian/American officials and soldiers who came to the Rock during WW2; the "Newfie" pejorative arose among the Canadians because even they—much poorer than their American counterparts than now, relatively speaking—could not believe just how backwards things were.
All 350 million of them?
And if you mean 'some of them are ambitious', surely you will have to accept that there are people in other countries who also share that property?
Americans tend to be optimistic and positively inclined towards entrepreneurship. This is often refected in business practices and regulations.
That kind of arrangement works out very well for the former, but just because a king is doing well for himself doesn't mean that the serfs are 'positively culturally inclined towards autocracy.'
----
A country's regulations and politics aren't an average of its culture. They are an average of the culture of the politically powerful. All that you've demonstrated is that 'entrepreneurs' are a politically powerful group in America [1]. That says nothing about the average culture.
[1] Way less powerful than incumbents, but for some strange reason, it's not sexy to point at Comcast and Kaiser and Exxon-Mobil and Wells Fargo as examples of brilliant entrepreneurship.
> All that you've demonstrated is that 'entrepreneurs' are a politically powerful group in America [1]. That says nothing about the average culture.
I haven't demonstrated anything yet. I've only asserted things.
Why? Really. Maybe I’m in a midlife crises but I care about money less and less. I used to get a a lot of satisfaction from the simple fact of seeing the number on my bank account increase. Not so much in the past decade.
My computer, phone, speaker, camera and other tech toys are amazing and not that expensive. Great food and beverage are not that hard to come by. A good house is indeed expensive in most of the world, but after that, what does one need that requires “millions of dollars”?
Stop working?
There’s no money you can pay to get a donated organ faster in most decent countries. There are treatments too expensive for even the best health plans and are only available through government sponsored systems. You couldn’t buy yourself a vaccine ahead of anyone else for any price during the covid peak, etc.
Health is as much a collective issue as it is an individual one.
For your last example: https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/03/how-rich-and-privileged-...
And you’re right, Brazil’s is not even remotely comparable to the US. It’s universal, completely unrestricted and covers continental distances for over 200 million people. It’s not only free, but a fundamental right guaranteed by the country’s constitution.
If one has a serious disease like cancer and is not a millionaire, guess where there’s a greater chance of survival.
Also, when large scale sanitary solutions must be applied, like, you know, during a pandemic, wouldn’t it nice to have a way to reach millions of people other than improvising mass vaccination campaigns in stadiums and fairgrounds?
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/10/27/toll-bolsonaros-disastro...
Any half decent administration could have aced with Brazil’s capillarity of health infrastructure and pro vaccination culture.
He managed to create an antivax movement and embezzle vacine money.
This is a system that tells citizens they have a constitutional right to health and that providing it is the state's responsibility. Rights are incredibly expensive though. Giving people "rights" is amazing when you're up for election. When the time to actually pay up comes, though, politicians can't leave the room fast enough.
The result is of course scarcity. There isn't enough for everyone. How do you manage scarcity in a supposedly universal system? Rationing, triaging. The system is forced to decide who's eligible for medical resources. People show up at the "basic health unit" at 3 in the morning and stand in massive lines so they can try to get a consult. There's often a literal quota of how many exams doctors can order per period of time, even cheap blood tests. The amount of bureaucracy you need to go through to get something like a CT scan or even an ultrasound is truly incredible. It can literally take years just to get a consult with a specialist who will actually fill out the paperwork you need. When faced with all this, most people just give up. Some seek the private sector. Others seek the justice system which just pens out an order for the city to pay up, screwing over literally everything and everyone else. They do that with the private sector too, making it increasingly unprofitable.
So we have a population that demands the best from doctors even though they have few resources with which to provide care. There are places in this country where doctors don't even have a sink they can use to wash their hands and yet they are are expected to attend to patients and solve all their problems in ten minutes each. That's how poorly developed this country is. If you're a doctor in these parts, defensive documentation is a vital skill: you have to literally write down stuff like "I wanted to do X but couldn't because X wasn't available" lest they accuse you of criminal negligence. This is especially true in emergency care, there are places here where you're essentially practicing war medicine. Emergency care basically turned into a dead end job that only doctors fresh out of medical school accept so they can make some money while they prepre for residency. Anyone with options would rather work elsewhere where they can practice medicine with a minimum of quality.
So people expect you to do more with less, sometimes with nothing. Do they value your work more for it? No. Doctor salaries are decreasing, autonomy is decreasing, insatisfaction is increasing. Doctors themselves don't get even paid on time: government being like 3 months late on payments is very common today. Another common practice: some small town mayor offers ridiculously high salaries to attract doctors and then just stops paying them when the money runs out. Sometimes a judge will even prevent doctors from leaving due to lack of payment because apparently the people have a constitutional right to their slave labor. Result: doctors wised up and now these regions just don't get any medical assistance at all because you'd have to be stupid to accept a job there. As a result, Lula wants to import doctors from Cuba and put them to work there.
This is also a huge theme here. Government just blames it all on doctors. Doctors don't want to go work for free in some shitty undeveloped region or the literal Amazon jungle? It's because they're mercenaries who care only about money. Their solution isn't less corruption and actual development of the nation but turning the medical profession into cheap labor. Lula is literally quoted saying "we need to create a new generation of leftist doctors who accept working for less". His solution to all this is to flood the job market with doctors by importing them from Cuba, increasing the number of medical schools, you name it. Low quality medical schools created just to pocket the sweet government student loans, often without even so much as a hospital for students to practice in. Quality of doctors is declining. Doctors screwing up classic myocardial infarction cases are making national news. Government couldn't care less, politicians don't get treated at such places, they go to Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital.
https://mhanational.org/issues/2022/mental-health-america-ac...
But the problem is, after a while, you get addicted to working. Some kind of Stockholm syndrome in the wheels of capitalism.
Status seeking is independent of economic system.
I find “capitalism” has become a placeholder word for “emergent systems we don’t like”. After all, ≈50% of GDP is government spending which is closer to socialism than we might like to admit.
The single biggest drive that seems to grease the wheels is our natural desire for status. For the middle class this often is shown by our property purchases - bidding against others until we can only just afford the repayments for a house in a nice neighbourhood. We then spend many working years trying to pay off the mortgage, and we often upgrade if we get more income.
It appears most obvious when we look at other cultures, where the drive for status shows up in other ways. For example a truck owner in Northern Pakistan spending equivalent of 7 months of wages adding custom bling to his truck: https://youtu.be/1quNm7Ctd-Q?t=21m58s although he justifies it “such decorations are good for business: shows the client I am doing well”.
For instance, my estimate is that with the minimum number of millions ($2M) one can support a family while unemployed in the USA and pretty much the rest of the world. With 4% SWR such family will have $80K per year, which is more than the median household income. They will pay little taxes and will qualify for a subsidized ACA health plan.
If you are talking about less than a million, you won't be able to support a family in US. It is possible in a 3rd world countries, but it is not always an option for a lot of people.
Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge.
I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to his holdings. He owns farms and factories, and runs all of them personally. (it baffles me that he has enough time) I know another man who's relatively broke (owns his house, not much else) and says he is too old to try any new ventures. I suspect a large reason for their wealth disparity is their attitude disparity.
Money is also more than the ability to acquire toys. Money is power, and money is freedom. Money is time. Money can pay other people to save you time. You can save thousands of hours over the course of your life paying other people to mow your lawn, wash your car, paint your house, repair your engine, and re-tile your bathroom.
Money can buy you citizenship anywhere you want, and if war comes, you can just pay to fly away.
Money can establish schools, medical research orgs, and human rights charities. Money can buy media and reshape politics, or it can pay for scientific instruments that have no other funding, and it can secure the future for people (or other things) you care about. Paul Allen built a telescope array, the world's largest airplane, the living computer museum, a cell research institute and a brain research institute, and a ton of other fantastic stuff that would otherwise have no funding.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute is still one of the wealthiest charities in the world, he's been dead for 50 years and we are all still benefiting. That wouldn't be the case if he spent it all on yachts and mansions.
Money can keep an old-growth forest from turning into an apartment complex.
Money also makes all kinds of new things possible, and allows you to do things "The Right Way", i.e. to overengineer for the sake of beauty and reliability, cost be damned. Money can replace a cinderblock and plywood hovel with marble and oak. Money can build you a house that can ignore tornadoes and earthquakes. Money can pay engineers and machinists to create things that would never be commercially produced.
Money means I can work on what I want to work on: difficult and time-consuming things.
Money means I can buy the local schools all of the equipment I think the kids should have, and more importantly, I could pay for staff to make that equipment useful and not just sit in storage because none of the teachers understand telescopes or computers or 3D printers.
I could pay for our town to have a planetarium. On that note, if I were rich enough, I could embarass Zeiss and build the most ridiculous optical planetarium projector ever known.
Like it or not, money is also respect, awe even. I want to be the husband most wives could only dream of, in terms of success.
I want to buy my children education they can't get at school, by doing things with them the school cannot afford to do.
Money means you can participate in expensive hobbies that introduce you to people that you'd otherwise never meet. Those people are often interesting.
I want to set an example for my fellow citizen, and show them that it doesn't matter that we live in a shitty town in the middle of nowhere, if you just refuse to concede that our disadvantages cripple us, you can still win. We're human beings after all.
I don't even own a house yet, but I started another company 6 months ago, and this time I have no business partners to blame and no outside investors. It's all me. Moving to a small town in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the world just makes it more fun, it's life on a higher difficulty setting. I relish the challenge.
I could probably rant about this for hours, it's not that we need the money, it's that without it, so much less is possible.
We (humans) just achieved fusion, and that machine cost billions. It wasn't a toy. Money is the power to build the future.
Why should we assume that every invention, every technology, everything we call "progress" is actually advancing in a good direction?
There's a balance to everything. We wouldn't be human without the ability to invent, to use tools, or to contemplate the future. We need to respect that power though, not lean into the shiny objects and power we can buy with a currency that itself is an entirely man-made system designed to feed a system of taxes and perpetual "growth".
Money is an instrument of labor also; it's possible to be rich, carbon negative, and without using up any depletable resources.
In fact, more efficiency (less resources used to produce a good) means more profit, doesn't it?
Money is the only reason a lot of endangered species are still alive. Here, rats eat ground-nesting bird eggs. Only money to build fences and island sanctuaries and establish breeding programs saved them.
Arguably it's currently only possible to do so if you're rich, but as more and more rich people do so the marginal cost of living such a lifestyle decreases.
Meanwhile, progress (aka people trying to make the world better) will continue whether you like it or not, bringing benefits to practically everyone forever. Pessimists may temporarily stifle progress, but the genie has been out of the bottle for the last 400 years or so. Good luck trying to stop people from wanting better for themselves aka solving problems.
I said nothing of pessimism or pessimists, or that progress shouldn't be made. I strongly question how you could possibly know that anything we do with the intent of making the world better could possibly bring benefits to practically everyone forever.
Everything has side effects and more often then not we can't predict them. What we do today with the best of intentions can be a huge mistake that we only realize years, decades, or centuries later. That doesn't mean we should hide in a cave and do nothing, but it does mean we need to be extremely careful with where we lean in and change things and where we don't.
Nobody really believes that. You're not living in a mud-hut. You've decided the balance should be less than whatever that guy said, but it's all relative. You are ridiculously wealthy and having such an incredibly outsized impact compared to any non-human animal that the relative difference between you and the GP is effectively nil.
We don't often weigh those decisions, we do first and figure out the consequences later. That happens less now with environmental issues than it used to, but we do things just because we can, we fill the night sky with satellites and we build AI without pausing for even a moment to consider if we should. We may regret some of this later. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won't, but we won't stop to figure that out in advance, we'll find out the hard way.
Still though, we eradicated smallpox, hedged famine in most countries, closed the ozone hole, build networks that allow instant global communication by wire instead of by ship.
It may all yet work out, we'll see.
The reality is, the impact of a wealthy person is almost always small, and usually negative-on-net. That's why, in the thousands of historical examples of titanic changes brought about by new ideas or state-level policies, we have so few examples of wealthy people changing things for the better.
People can make money through success in positive sum games, which wouldn’t require exploiting other people.
There are poor people who make money through rent seeking too, by playing zero sum games. These zero summers should be targeted rather than the entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and musicians who play positive sum games.
It’s similar to how we benefit from cheap manufacturing labor in other countries, performed by people we don’t know. Who did we underpay to get our luxurious lifestyles? The fact that we can’t name them is part of the sleight of hand that allows us to ignore the exploitation, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
This is actually completely wrong. Believe it or not, many of the richest people get rich because they pay their employees more than they think they are worth.
That's why I said worth not value. You can define what a person thinks they are worth by asking them.
Or perhaps energy disparity? The guy who serially starts companies and works from 3am in the morning is probably in the 99th percentile in terms of raw energy available to him.
There’s no sense in which that statement is true.
We’ve been doing fusion for 80 years. What was recently achieved was a small increase in efficiency of fusion. We’re really not all that much closer to being able to use it to generate useful power than the first fusion reactor 65 years ago. We’re still not even close to being able to produce more energy than we used to drive the reactor, and there’s a high probability that this won’t change in another 65 years.
> and that machine cost billions. It wasn't a toy. Money is the power to build the future.
Not if it’s wasted on impractical ideas like commercial fusion power, or colonizing Mars. Money without intelligence behind it wastes resources and destroys the planet.
> you can still win
The true cost of this alleged “winning” isn’t measured in money.
If you're looking for wives that are impressed by monetary success I think you're in for a lot of disappointment, but to each their own.
https://sciencebusiness.net/news-byte/scientists-leave-uk-ch...
I don't think many non-Chinese foreigners are learning Chinese to move to China and chase the "Chinese dream" the way people do in America.
Ow, I never heard of this?
> They also have no access to capital, essentially.
This is like the most foundamentally important issue and you have in tucked away in a minor point
Raise invesment in US, you get $million for a minor stake in the company
Raise investment in UK, you get $100 K for a minor stake
Raise investment in Czech republic, you get $50K for 51%
Raise investment in Russia, they break your legs if you don't pay back. They don't understand thw difference between investment and debt.
And if you die they will pursue your family for your debts.
Raise investment in Zimbabwe.. I don't even know.
This is in jest, but the overall point is roughly this:
Non-westerners cringe when they hear 'Don't take China's money for Belt and road, it's a trap'. In 2nd/3rd world, securing capital for non-elites is impossible even if you just came up with a working fusion reactor.
The relevant amount of money isn't just with strings attached, it can be dangerous to life and limb.
> Americans are ambitious to a fault
Plenty of ambitious people in Russia, the problem is their activity is usually something detrimental to society.
Consider the dominance hierarchy
The top of American society is a billionaire entrepreneur, not sure where to place politicians, maybe a distant third. Civil servants are basicallt nobodys, they are treated worse than people working in the private sector, called lazy, etc.
Top of a society in Russia is FSB/ Security services. Second is politicians. Third is civil servants. Fourth is organised crime bosses. What do all these people have in common? They have the powet to ruin your life. And they use it.
Entrepreneurs are like 6th person down the food chain, and they are preyed upon by the layers above.
https://www.rferl.org/a/newspaper-says-russian-businessman-r...
This is also what the right wing does not understand, when life gets harsh, life of crime becomes more attractive. The world becomes god-eat dog, a man who didn't take advantage of a situation to enrich himself, is not an uostanding citizen. He is a loose who failed to peovide for his family.
My heart swells at this part and I want to cheer.
My 2c.
It resonates with me because it describes me. It’s not uniquely American, but it still describes me & the (American immigrant) culture I grew up in.
Where the h. is this?
> (fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault...9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.
So you state this as a fact about Americans in general, but then use yourself as the only proof. Isn’t 9 to 5 in the suburbs basically the end goal that most Americans dream of?
I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.
> (opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower
The idea of losing access to health care, going bankrupt and still being unable to rid oneself of crippling student loan debt sounds terrifying to me, and if I were living in the US I’d think twice about taking the sort of risks that I’d be ok with taking in a “welfare state”.
(I have many more stories of course)
There are other countries that can’t be invaded, or speak a single language, or have a large market, or have ambitious people, or culturally permit failure without ostracizing people.
Have a job that affords you a roof over your head? Hero. Have a job where you need public assistance because your employer won't pay you enough to make ends meet? Villain.
American rhetoric is ambitious. Americans in practice are just as lazy as everybody else. Americans will point to the French and claim that they're lazy and don't want to work, but would never dream of fighting for their labor rights the way the French do.
There are certainly lazy Americans, but I’ve worked in multi-national offices where youd get fired in the US for the type of slacking i saw.
And that's not just management expectations of employees, but also employees expectations of other employees.
If my coworkers in the US pulled what I saw in some parts of Asia, they'd stick out like sore thumb and be generally despised by other employees for screwing them over.
Anyway I did travel America though and lived 7 months in Ohio (went to OSU for exchange) and I don't know in which fields do you think where expectations are higher.
Food industry, including fast food in US, has extremely low quality/pressure and expectations. It didn't seem to me like people work harder in that field.
Building/craftsmen too I didn't see any noticeable difference at all, as most of these people are generally self-employed or in very small business anywhere in the world.
People working in shops or supermarkets, again, I haven't seen any noticeable difference.
Thus, I ask, what are those field where expectations are "generally higher"? Dystopic corporate ladder climbing?
Also, I have few colleagues that worked for Facebook, Indeed and Google (specifically Youtube) in Dublin and they recounted that it was American coworkers being consistently late, lazy, and taking every single excuse for class actions and work avoidance (such as getting PTSD or problems over any minor issue).
Also, Europe is a very huge place with different cultures.
I agree that service jobs I don't see much of a difference, but I assume in those jobs you can't really slack off without it being a problem really quick.
European software engineers? Or is it European lawyers that do less? Or accountants?
It seems to me like you're overgeneralizing.
While I don't doubt that US can have a more competitive nature compared to many countries (in Europe we care much less about status or what other people think about our car and how big is our house, we aren't that insecure) I still think that the scenario you present is just an average where there's more incentives for great performers and low performers to perform better, but the median isn't different at all.
The workers’ rights Americans are accustomed to might be viewed as lazy or unambitious in places where working more is the norm. And across the other pond, where many Europeans have generous PTO and leave allowances, they view Americans as very hard working while some Americans might view Europeans as lazy or entitled. It’s all relative.
https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm
Slightly above Sweden and slightly below Denmark and quite a bit less than Ireland.
I am being a little sarcastic. This is a description of a standard tax-avoidance scheme.
My point, ultimately, is that I suspect Ireland's numbers are inflated by its status as a tax haven for multinationals.
No, the reason is simple: unions. Most Americans aren’t in one, which makes collective organization nearly impossible. Businesses know this, and politicians know this, which is why some of them have made it a point to demonize and defang unions.
France
Collective Bargaining Coverage: 98%
Proportion of Employees in Unions: 8%
------
Sweden
Collective Bargaining Coverage: 88%
Proportion of Employees in Unions: 70%
------
United Kingdom
Collective Bargaining Coverage: 29%
Proportion of Employees in Unions: 26%
--------------
From https://www.worker-participation.eu/national-industrial-rela...
Tech is probably an outlier. Service workers, which far outnumber tech workers, farmers, taxi drivers, etc are all better compensated in nearly every other European equivalent country than in the U.S.
As far as why tech workers are better compensated in the US? Well, for one thing, tech workers are not similarly compensated even within the US. Those working in the Bay Area, Boston, NYC are far better compensated than their counterparts in say the Midwest (the pandemic may have changed things, but looking at pre-pandemic figures is useful to gain an understanding of the wage disparity). When you factor in healthcare and other social services provided in Europe, West European tech workers are not disimilarly compensated from their Midwest counterparts.
The reality is that the outliers are these handful of American tech hubs which have outsized outcomes. Which brings us to what’s probably the real reasons for the US’s high economic output.
Immigration and college education, which is what these places have in common.
Huh? The US has the highest median disposable income in the world[0], let alone tech which blows Europe out of the water even in the lowest of cost of living states.
You're not going to find accurate income information for service workers because service workers notoriously do not report their cash tips which make up for a large portion of their income. That means the median is even higher.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
No, they're not. The median income wouldn't be higher in the U.S. if the majority of its workers were not compensated more. In particular, with regards to commercial, full-time farming, farmers make far more in the U.S. (median commercial farm income was $186K in 2021 [1]).
Truck drivers in the U.S. earned a median income of $47K in 2019 [2] while truck drivers in France as of 2021 report around 25K EUR [3]. Many such examples.
> Well, for one thing, tech workers are not similarly compensated even within the US.
Sure, but we can compare tech hubs in France (are there any besides Paris?) to tech hubs in the U.S. or we can compare overall U.S. vs France. It doesn't matter how you slice the data: U.S. salaries come on top and by a large factor. This is also generally true across all engineering professions. As an example, take Civil Engineers (37K EUR vs $71K USD base) [4].
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps... [3] https://www.salary.com/research/fr-salary/benchmark/truck-dr... [4] https://www.payscale.com/research/FR/Job=Civil_Engineer/Sala... https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Civil_Engineer/Sala...
My anecdotal experience is that the Mexicans¹ I have known have been way more entrepreneurial than the Americans. If the Spanish-speaking Americas were to establish economic union a la the E.U., I suspect that they would become the dominant economy in the world in a generation.
⸻
1. Speaking here, specifically, of Mexicans living in Mexico and not immigrants to the U.S., although come to think of it, the immigrants are likewise also highly entrepreneurial, but this is a self-selecting segment of the population who are willing to undergo great hardship and go to a whole other country, suffer discrimination and struggle with living outside their language and culture to make a better living for themselves. Which, of course, is true of the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S. which is probably a big factor in American (U.S.) entrepreneurship.
mexico etc the courts etc are easily corrupted. hence they can never be #1.
same for every other poor country.
the other country that I can think of with almost comparable laws to the states is the uk i.e favourable to enterprise -- but they're not doing enough to encourage labor participation
Not necessarily. It's definitely a cultural thing: Latin American immigrants are far more entrepreneurial than Asian immigrants, even after correcting for wealth and education.
Can I ask why you chose to move to NZ considering the rest of your comment? Do you intend to move back to the USA in the near future?
America is most of (and the most temperate region of) a vast continent, the local inhabitants of which no longer exist, with resources, some of which people didn't even know they needed when it was settled. It has direct access to both the edges of the great old world continent of Eurasia in the form of coasts on both oceans. It has an absolutely massive population, and the government has smartly invested in the past in infrastructure to transport between them both over land.
In past times, america drained the population of the leading power center at the time, Europe, to populate itself. This held back it's competition at a time when the ability to produce depended on the number of hands and minds at your disposal. It currently has the third largest population of any one government in the world.
There have been various theories about the grand chessboard throughout history, ideas like "whoever controls central Asia controls the world", " whoever controls the seas controls the world" and "if one power has control of all of Europe they can then move on to control the world", all with various levels of truth to them (Genghis Khan controlled central Asia for example), and the grand chessboard was tossed into the air when the continent was discovered, but that wasn't really realized until the west coast was discovered. There are ways to threaten America's position, but as long as one polity controls both coasts and the land in between it's mostly safe. You can institute any form of government and it will be a major force, maybe not the big guy, but just the territory and population itself is built to be powerful.
stating this as a "fact" about americans as an american helps feed the fact that a lot of people see americans as obnoxious, but being as you are i also assume you dont care
what you might care about, maybe, are the following questions:
what is the average success rate of expectations?
is the playing field even for everyone?
is this expectation to aim high contributing to societal stress, including high crime rates?
maybe, just maybe, people with massive individualistic ambitions have great potential to become parasites on a greater society
i think this comes down to the view "work to live" vs "live to work". for me it is a much greater success having a stable functioning family then it is to found a new google or be the next potus. the latter to me is honestly boring and people ascribing to the latter view just cant handle the actual fact that there are some things money cant buy
of course, none of what im saying should be understood as "ambition is bad". but, as almost everything in life, balance and healthy doses is key, not XXL
nor of course that everything that comes from the american lifestyle is bad. for example i find the european obsession with titles absolutely retarded, and i think american (and aussie!) culture does alot to see through that
Your first point, “America is a single market” is a fact, and a pretty uncontroversial one.
America being “geographically isolated from war” is conjecture. Whether Mexico will invade, or whether Pearl Harbor is part of your definition of “America” is irrelevant, it’s not a fact.
America “being able to produce everything” is not a fact and much too vague to ever be a fact. To begin with there are 20 mineral commodities that the US fully relies on imports to acquire. Could these be found in the US? We don’t know, and this is only one example, regardless it’s not a fact.
Americans being “ambitious to a fault” is not a fact, it’s your opinion and generalization based on the americans and non-americans you have met and interacted with.
A fact means something, it doesn’t mean “like an opinion but a really strongly held opinion”.
FWIW, the U.S. would be incredibly hard to invade. It does have a number of geographic advantages that no other country can match (not least of which is the Mississippi River system).
Even Pearl Harbor was a hit and run attack. No Japanese troops ever touched shore.
The Brits, Spaniards and French didn't invade, they established colonies. These colonies actively engaged in trade and defense agreements with various native American tribes. At various times different tribes were aligned with one European nation or another, with the most famous example being the French and Indian War, with the Iroquois and Cherokee allying with the British and the Wabanaki, Abenaki, Shawnee, etc allying with the French.
Native American tribes and nations had deep seated rivalries and disputes going back centuries (just as the Europeans did), so there never was any kind of single unified America until the U.S. expanded across the continent.
Notably the British did not succeed in the War of Independence or the War of 1812, despite having a superior military and navy.
Several fellow commenters have already pointed out as the contrary is actually true, and I'd like to add a corollary: risking everything you have in a business is simpler in the USA than abroad because the society knows that they will lend a helpful lend should you lose everything.
Safety nets are a thing worldwide, and they cost money; thus some responsibility is imposed to each individual in order to limit the risks.
I'm probably being pedantic, but: the "single set of regulations" really is an oversimplification. Each state has it's own rules in addition to Federal regulations (trying selling cars in California that meet Federal emissions standards, but not California's). Plus, there are state taxes to consider.
(fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entities, and languages, and shipping costs more.
(fact) America is geographically isolated from war, can't be invaded, isn't saddled with war or reconstruction debts.
(fact) Also by virtue of geography, America can produce everything: it has plenty of space to create anything it needs, from mines to farms to factories.
(fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault. I am an American living overseas, and possibly one of the most offensive things anyone has said to me here is "you should lower your expectations". I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations. I don't give a shit if I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying; 9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.
(opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower; in some other countries, you're forbidden from starting a new company and they will revoke your passport for some time. People don't try because there's no "try again". They also have no access to capital, essentially.
(opinion) America also siphons wealth from every other nation; for example, it seems like people are more likely to invest in public markets in America than in their own countries a lot of the time. That means access to capital on the stock market is more accessible for American companies than others. It also seems like as soon as someone gets rich overseas, they move to America.
On the other hand, it's not all doom and gloom overseas, here in NZ all I have to do to start a business is walk outside and start selling shit. To file taxes for that all I have to do is fill in my Net Income on a 1 page web form and click Submit. There's no medical debt, car insurance costs $100 a year, and nothing has a barrier to entry; I can talk to the person in charge at just about any company or organization in NZ.