San Francisco: “Hey, housing is way too expensive. Do you think we should change our laws? Maybe keep some of the safety rules but loosen up some other regulations? Maybe we could copy the rules from some place with high safety standards but also cheap housing?”
Also San Francisco: “Pffft lol no, what kind of nerd would do that?”
London: “Hold my pint and watch this.”
In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,
On the other hand, each link adds a greater chance of costs external to the pilfering of the treasury like hiring a less efficient jet manufacturing company or passing needless regulation to enable rent seeking. Directly raiding the treasury would have less real world consequences besides enriching the crook..
Ah, but you see, one of the cheaper links to add…
Is just to pay your politicians more money.
People just hate politicians, so they’re unwilling to do this, but every doubling of a politician’s income is a doubling of how much money it takes to bribe them, possibly greater as money becomes relatively less important the more of it you have.
Kickbacks have to be hidden in larger projects/funds, so going from $100,000 in kickbacks to $200,000 in kickbacks could mean an increase in costs of $1,000,000, which just makes the thing even more noticeable.
I once calculated that it would cost something like $250 million USD to highly pay the US Federal legislators and President something like $500,000-$1 million each, annually.
That sounds like a lot of money, but suppose the federal government spends 25% of an $18 trillion dollar economy.
If we got a 1% improvement in federal government spending, it would provide potentially $45 billion in value, 180x that increase in cost. Does it seem feasible that we’d get 1% better spending out of congress if we paid them at that level? Not from existing congress critters, maybe, but some of those seats might start to look really tempting to more talented individuals…
Minimum wage, basic income, and wage subsidies are the perfect example of why testing won’t work. All of them will cause effects like migration if tested in a region that won’t apply if used universally. All of them have inflation fears that won’t be seen if tested in a small population. All of them have work disincentive effects that won’t be visible if tested in a small region. And all of them can have effects that are swamped out by economic fluctuations that are unrelated and therefore can have difficult to interpret effects.
And wait, don’t we have to test miti’s
iron fist control of the central government before we test any of the rest? I think we’ve gotten trapped in an infinite recursion here, we have to test the act of experimentation before we test experiments.
To a degree, but incremental testing will have less of those effects, as would varied testing across various areas. It should be possible to extract a decent amount of information just from testing lesser versions of all of them in multiple differing areas.
After all, you have to test them in a world where migration exists, unless one of your tests is banning migration. If your policy fails so badly that you have to build a wall to keep people from leaving the country, that is very important evidence in itself. Likewise, if immigrants swarm into one of your districts to free ride.
For some items that do require national-scale implementation (aside from the rather dramatic alternative of splitting the country in two, which would have been quite interesting to see with Commies/Anarchists), the policymakers should be registering their bets before it goes into effect. (Additional considerations modifying those bets can be worked in later, it will get a little complicated, but should be possible.)
Iron fist control of the national government was presented only as a framing device.
In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,
look man, all I’m saying is I want a semi-secret anti-corruption unit to rope in and either get cooperation from or impersonate various businesses and offshore banks so that my politicians never know whether any kickback/bribe attempt is actually an elaborate sting operation,
and make my politicians pseudonymous so that would-be kickbackers can’t be sure who they’re dealing with is the real legislator they wanted to bribe or a member of the anti-corruption task force impersonating one as part of an elaborate sting operation, or replace them with think tanks which cost more money to bribe
I’m really a very reasonable person
Well, so much for the idea that fixing housing costs would fix our economy.
Seems questionable to draw an analogy here, given the loss of population in Japan, which has both harmed their economy and (from what little I know) caused housing costs outside their major metros to fall
Housing costs have been remarkably stable within the major metros, despite stable or rising urban populations.
Now, I suppose there’s some substitutability between suburban and exurban housing and urban housing, but the fact of the matter is that the Japanese are better at delivering new housing in their city centers.
As Robin Harding remarks, there were more housing starts in 2014 in the city of Tokyo (142,417) than there were in the state of California (83,657) or the entirety of England (137,010), although Tokyo has less than half the population of either California or England.
Japan faces somewhat unique demographic problems, but it has nonetheless enjoyed respectable growth in output per working age adult, while its unemployment rates are still at world-beating lows – they just hit 2.8 percent, a 22-year low – while both unemployment and labor force participation rates have improved markedly since Shinzo Abe became premier.
It’s no cure for the fertility crunch, but it’s pretty good all the same.
Cutting budgets does not actually improve programs, and spending more does not necessarily improve programs. Where is the option in which we create better programs?
I envision a society with lots of mandatory insurance as part of its stealth social safety net and part of pricing in the real cost of recklessness into something people can immediately see.
One thing I keep wondering about is the question of “What’s going to happen in the next economic downturn?“ We’re almost 10 years from the last one, and there are all sorts of possible ways the next one could happen. Given that we haven’t really recovered from the last one, what’s going to happen after that? I think it’s in the crisis that the policy for the next economic era is going to made, so what’s it going to be?
mitigatedchaos: Good question. That’s why I keep chanting “wage subsidies” at all of you.
Yes, the unemployed will be very grateful for wage subsidies.
Combined with a much lower minimum wage, it moves a lot of people from “unemployable” to “employable and making enough money to live off of”.
Others should be covered by some sort of disability scheme (which won’t eliminate eligibility for the wage subsidies). Children, of course, are to be supported by their parents and the various other child protection systems we need.
At a low enough minimum wage, but with subsidies so the pay is actually reasonable, the economy will find work for these people to do that isn’t digging holes and filling them back up again.
…that’s true.
I don’t know what a good solution would look like, but it doesn’t have to involve any more high-IQ individuals than we have now, just a better distribution of resources schools already have.
I want to test solutions to the current system, and to find many different possible set-ups that are different from the one we have now. (They might not scale well, of course.)
Even improvement in a limited geographical area or to some minor aspects, for relatively affluent middle-class individuals, would be really valuable to me.
Roight, let me suggest my plan, which would only help matters that you want tangentially most likely.
Are you familiar with Spaced Repetition? It’s used in programs like Anki. The basic summary is this: your brain flags things as important by whether or not you use them, and forgets them gradually over time. Spaced repetition brings the item up again at a certain point in the forgetting, so that your brain goes “oh hey this came up again, it must be important, I better remember it!”
Gamification is also a thing, and I have a theory that a big part of why people don’t like school stuff is that it doesn’t feel applicable, or that it will ever be applicable. But while I do not enjoy math for its own sake, I feel almost no resistance to doing math when I have to in order to accomplish some other task.
I’d like @argumate to read this post, too, and probably a few of the others as well.
So here’s my proposal:
1. This will be primarily implemented as a computer program. It will be implemented on a custom computer system that is not easily compromised.
2. All textbooks will be presented in both a fuller, contextualized format, and as semi-atomic facts of information, ready for use for spaced repetition memorization.
3. Exercises will be split between grinding and synthesis. Synthesis exercises will sometimes be in the form of game-like programs that have a complex problem which the students must integrate their knowledge of the subject to perform. (That is, students must be able to take the knowledge and use it and apply it, not just repeat it.) Other times, for other subjects like English, they will be items like essays that are manually graded by teachers. Students earn resource points to attempt synthesis exercises through grinding exercises, which are the rote learning component intended to reinforce the knowledge and speed up processing (e.g. of doing math). If you fail the synthesis exercise, you may have to do more grinding to attempt it again.
4. The computer program will conduct a review of all the subjects the student needs to know, based on spaced repetition algorithms and data about the student and their previous performance. This prevents the constant information loss that is pervasive in the American school system.
5. All of this is individualized. Students go at their own pace, and graduate when it has all been completed, or are pushed out of the school system at 21.
6. Homework is mostly rare or non-existent. Instead, students will stay another hour or two at school. Homework is for doing exercises, which we are having them do at school.
7. The school day will be broken up by various social activities to let students’ brains relax in between blocks of studying, which will still be somewhat unified by subject of study to make #8 easier.
8. In addition to grading work, teachers will also act as tutors to individual students. Students will be grouped in classes with students who are in a similar position of progress within the system. Teachers will go around the room answering various questions and helping students with items they are having trouble with. There may be some small lecturing sections, maybe.
The following is less necessary, but additional depending on your balance of Nationalism/Capitalism/Technocracy/etc.
9. Students will be awarded points based on a mix of (about 1/3 each) progress, attendance, and and percentile academic standing within their school. These points can be spent on a very larger variety (over 100) of uniform parts, snacks, media, and other items at participating retailers. This has the virtue of aligning the school’s social hierarchy more closely with the desired outcome of learning & academic performance, as well as giving students practical experience with small amounts of “money”.
10. Research shows that teaching math below a certain age doesn’t actually accelerate learning progress on it much at all, so for very young students, the system will focus on “moral/social” education and socialization and potentially language skills.
Conservatives have so much fucking nerve talking about how “ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ARE OUT OF CONTROL” when absolutely no-one feels inconvenienced by them or has ever even encountered them in their personal lives unless they’re the CEO’s of a megaconglomerate bitter that they couldn’t rip up a national park and buy like their fifth house boat
Yeah, it’s literally the Kochs saying “It’s so UNFAIR that when the oil pipelines we own but don’t maintain bust and flood a town with toxic sludge, that WE have to pay to fix it.” and “An employee we forced to clean chemical storage tanks without the proper gear for 15 years developed cancer, and they’re allowed to sue us over it? TYRANNY!!”
How is it never occurred to me to put it like this before?
this honestly comes off as pretty silly and out-of-touch, because there are of course plenty of people who get laid off in industries that are subject to environmental regulations, and while it’s certainly possible to make an empirical case that, say, coal regulations have little to do with the decline of coal jobs, it’s at least plausible that there is some effect.
of course the solution to this is that you need a full employment economy so that losing any particular job doesn’t mean losing a job, period, but until you do so (and obviously there are general capitalist interests against having a genuinely full employment economy outside of wartime) there will be entirely understandable resistance among certain fractions of labor against things (environmental regulations, immigration, labor-saving machinery) that are extremely good in themselves
I would argue against immigration being a general good in itself, but…
Wage subsidies with low minimum wage would get us pretty close to full employment without harming workers (in terms of net income) or crashing the economy (it has support from economists).
Admittedly I’m kind of a broken record, here, but it seems like something that could actually happen without a revolution and without potentially ruining everything.
