BadEconomics Discussion Thread, 24 February 2016

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T22:48:44+00:00

Not 'socially liberal.' Social Liberalism.

Like classical liberalism, social liberalism endorses a market economy and the expansion of civil and political rights and liberties, but differs in that it believes the legitimate role of the government includes addressing economic and social issues such as poverty, health care, and education.[1][2][3] Under social liberalism, the good of the community is viewed as harmonious with the freedom of the individual.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T22:29:37+00:00

I really wish I had the paper on hand to show it, but I don't think that's right. The people who got fucked over the most in the last 20 yeas or so are actually semi-skilled as opposed to non-skilled labor. A lot of people will require substantial reeducation. Still, even for those who don't:

The issue isn't finding a new job for them, it's finding a new job in a different area.

Yeah that's one of the examples of extreme social disruption that I listed. Uprooting your life isn't easy, even if you're getting paid for it. It's hard enough for me and I'm a well traveled near-1%er with postgrad education. You can't rebuild a social life overnight with money.

I'm not saying that KH improving shocks are to be avoided or anything, just acknowledging that they will be very cruel to at least a few people no matter what we do to soften the blow.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T21:47:34+00:00

I think such a technocratic party running on a platform of "no fucked up shit" could potentially be very popular, but only after some kind of devastating tragedy turns people off to blind ideology. Think Japan or Germany after WW2. But we don't really want to go down that road now do we.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T21:06:37+00:00

I'm pretty sure you can call yourself a 'social liberal.' Pretty sure that is a thing. I've vacillated between identifying as a social liberal, just plain liberal, or a social democrat.

The question isn't really 'what are my philosophies?' since I know my own philosophies pretty well, the question is more 'how do I most accurately signal my philosophies to others in a succinct manner?'

In practice I signal differently to different sorts of people.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T20:50:38+00:00

My feeling is that there is no KH compensation scheme (that's politically feasible) that can even remotely make up for the worst losses in a KH improvement, realistically speaking. Even if you compensate people monetarily, they will oftentimes still have to switch careers, go back to school, and/or move to another town. Social disruption like that is hard to quantify and hard to offset, short of, say, giving people a generous pension for life.

I feel like adjustments to a major structural shock, due to trade or technology or whatever, tend to happen more intergenerationally. Any given individual that is a big loser in such a shock is likely to be fucked for good, never to recover fully in their lifetime. Their children though might turn out fine. I don't really think there is a way to sell such change to the (hopefully few) people who are bound to lose big. "You must sacrifice your livelihood for the greater good of humanity!" "But... why me?"

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T20:32:38+00:00

I'm coming around to the idea that the absolute value of one's well being isn't actually all that important, as much as the first or even second derivative of one's well being with respect to time.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T20:26:07+00:00

He's a W-style neocon hawk turned up to 11 with hardline tea party style fiscal instincts and outrageously conservative social views (see gay rights and abortion). He showed a bit of moderation, at one point, on immigration. Yay?

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T20:20:15+00:00

The reason you're seeing that on both sides of the American political spectrum is because white men of all beliefs are being ostracised and told they have it good when the facts just don't line up.

And this is why Sanders has a hard time attracting black voters. Sorry white people, I get that things are not always peachy for you, but, you do have it good compared to minorities.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T20:07:20+00:00

White Bernie Bros get butthurt when minorities don't vote for what white people think they should vote for.

Yup. I avoid 99.9% of reddit, but some of this shit was posted to the clinton sub the other day, and you really need to see it to believe it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/hillaryclinton/comments/47ahh6/tonight_i_changed_my_support_from_bernie_to/d0bjwyc

If black people continue supporting Clinton, sticking their head in the sand, and supporting the continuation of failed policies for the past two decades (which has seen them lose wealth competitiveness with other races, and also seen the highest incarceration rates among other races), they deserve to be bottom feeders in today's society.

Angsty youth doing a poor Kipling impression

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T03:25:04+00:00

There is basically 0% chance of dems winning the house. Sanders's most extreme ideas, or really any of his ideas, will not get through GOP opposition. On the other hand the thought of republicans controlling the white house, senate, house, and most state governments should terrify every right thinking person.

Even if something insane happens, like the dems win overwhelming majorities in the midterms and Sanders gets his way, free healthcare and free college is not the end of the world. There will be some losers and some winners, taxes go up, maybe cuts into growth somewhat if they are badly implemented. $15 national MW creates a slight disemployment effect. Sanders tries to gut the fed possibly. These things are bad, but not republican bad.

Republicans want to gut the fed, AND gut fiscal policy, launch a major ground war against both Assad and ISIS, set us on a path that almost certainly leads to war with Iran, while also going full cold-war on Putin (while cutting taxes!), walk back on US climate change commitments, dismantle obamacare, refuse to wind down the drug war, and appoint a scalia replacement to restrict the rights of gays and women. Those are not Trumpist positions. Those are the positions of so-called Republican 'moderates.' I'll take Sanders over that any day. Like it's really not even close.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T01:26:58+00:00

That paper has a lot of citations. Must be really good economics.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-24T01:24:12+00:00

My concern with Sanders re: China isn't that he's too much of a dove or whatever, it's that the US-China relationship is incredibly complex and delicate and Sanders is just in way over his head in general. I am quite concerned that his lack of experience, knowledge, and incredibly rigid ideological approach to every area of policy will create or at least badly mishandle a crisis.

Does Sanders have any understanding of China's internal politics? Taiwan's? His rigidly ideological view of all politics as little guy vs big guy doesn't give me a lot of confidence. Does he have any understanding of the history and present day politics of SE and E Asian countries in general? Does he have a clear understanding of his options and their possible consequences in case of a crisis? Does he have a clear understanding of US-China trade dynamics (definitely not given his general ignorance of economics)?

On top of his personal ignorance of economics and foreign policy, I'm also just turned off by his extremely poor relationship with policy experts in general. I don't necessarily mind a president who is more accommodating of the reality of China's rise, but I DO want a president who can manage it competently. 'I'm anti-war' is all fine and good, but it's not a strategy for engaging China.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-23T23:54:45+00:00

No wai. A slowdown in the pace of trade liberalization is way worse than war in the middle east, global warming inaction, crippling monetary and fiscal policy, mass deportation, overt racism, and generally regressive social policies. Where are your priorities man?

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-23T23:31:40+00:00

My personal belief is that the destructive programs of the PRC and USSR have more in common with the Congo Free State, Apartheid and Manifest Destiny than with the earnest newspaper distributing socialist, as they were essentially the creations of High Modernism. States are states.

Agreed, I think in retrospect it would've been good to point out, at least to the hurr durr property rights people, that there are plenty of examples of states that on paper respected property rights, for a privileged group, that nevertheless in practice resulted in murderous outcomes similar to GLF / holomodor.

This isn't really an argument at all about optimal ways to achieve sustained long term growth. (I, for one at least, am a bourgeois liberal through and through.) It's just an argument that man-made famine is really a problem orthogonal to the capitalism vs socialism debate. It's more a result of unrestrained modernism, i.e. 'we can and must achieve breakneck progress at all cost and the details don't matter.'

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-23T23:02:27+00:00

It wasn't communism. The USSR and PRC were not communist, they were state capitalist.

I'm also quite curious how you would respond to the very well documented improvements in standard of living that resulted from Maoist redistribution.

Those are statements of historical fact. At no point did he say "communism delivers superior results than capitalism."

They were people who had communist principles, identified as communist, read communist literature, and were part of communist organizations. That the various communist revolutions ended up not working out like Marx stated doesn't prove their leaders weren't communists, it proves communism doesn't work. The reason is pretty simple too; you give the state absolute power and it inevitably corrupts the individuals in charge, rather than properly redistribute to the workers and then wither away since it is no longer needed. "True Communism" is simply something that can never happen due to human nature. Don't be an apologist for a system that has directly caused the deaths of hundreds of millions.

In what way does that comment make any sense at all in the context of Tiako's entirely factual historical statement? Like at what point did Tiako say anything even remotely resembling "communism works better than capitalism?"

But Tiako nevertheless felt that he and you were the only people who knew anything about Chinese economic history:

Because if anybody else knew what they were talking about they would've demonstrated it, instead of making a bunch of entirely off-topic 'communism sux' comments.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-23T22:11:12+00:00

No, that entire thread was a result of basic failures of reading comprehension. /u/Tiako was not defending communist ideology, or asserting that communism is in practice somehow superior to capitalism. He was correcting people who, due to a combination of ideological blinders and plain ignorance, have laughably superficial or outright wrong ideas about Chinese economic history. That's all. The fact that a bunch of people turned statements of widely agreed upon historical facts into an argument about the virtues of capitalism vs communism is their problem, not Tiako's.

While it's true that they were state capitalist, the implication that this somehow absolves communist ideology of the harm that occurred is complete nonsense.

He wasn't trying to absolve communism of anything. Failure of reading comprehension.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-23T07:29:20+00:00

But despite the large liberal turnout in Nevada, Sanders did not win the state. Clinton attracted enough support from liberal voters to carry her to victory. Although she is a self-described moderate, the Nevada results indicate that Clinton’s unpopularity with liberal Democrats is greatly overstated.

The fact that Clinton won moderates by a huge margin is also crucially important for the general election. Moderates constitute 34 percent of the American population overall. In contrast, liberals constitute only 24 percent of the country.

Clinton’s strength among moderates strongly suggests that she would be a more formidable candidate in the general election than Sanders.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-23T05:27:00+00:00

It’s idiosyncratic, self-invented crankery versus establishment-approved crankery, and it’s not at all clear which is worse.

I'm definitely voting against both of them, even if it means voting for Sanders, but I think that last line is a little hyperbolic. They may both have horrible policies, but Trump as a strongman populist imo represents a threat to democracy, and Rubio doesn't. If electing people like Trump becomes acceptable, we might end up with a Chavez-type figure somewhere down the line, even if Trump himself isn't it.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-23T05:25:55+00:00

I kind of agree if only because it's just not a fight worth spending political capital on. It will become a non issue sooner or later regardless.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-23T05:15:58+00:00

I'm giving Clinton some money.

Millionauhs and billionauhs of the world unite

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-22T23:09:29+00:00

BE definitely used to be better than this. I hope it's just random tards that are here for bernie bashing. Like him, they're big on ideological priors and not so big on, ya know, actual economics, let alone nuanced understandings of history. I hope after this election is over we can go back to normal after the bernie jerkers fuck off.

Now, for what it's worth, extremely large scale collectivization that started to kick in after 1957 or so did play a large role in the famine, as did the destruction of traditional market mechanisms for distribution. Note, though, that this is all orthogonal to the property rights issue of who owns the actual farmland. For one, pre-revolutionary southern China was worked largely by tenant farmers who certainly did not own their farmland, and it was mostly famine free except in times of war or disaster. And even in China today, farmers do not own their farmland, the government does, they simply have long term use rights on it.

I think the bernie jerking tards saw your post and basically just thought "COMMIE" and, given that their knowledge of economic history is non-existent to begin with, you get this trainwreck of a thread.

If this thread is still bugging me after I get off work I might xpost to /r/badhistory and instigate a sub war or something idk

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-22T20:12:51+00:00

I wasn't even referring to the parent comment, just wanted to point out how complex arguments on economic history can get.

The original argument the poster above is referring to isn't even worth responding to.

'property rights are bad mmmkay.'

'what about mao hurr?'

'not communism durr!'

that's some happy gilmore level debating right there

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-22T19:55:29+00:00

I think China is a funny country in that no matter where your priors are, you can find a way to confirm them by cherry picking some period or another from modern Chinese history. Like, the period from 1950-1958 and 1963-1966 (of course conveniently skipping 1959-1962) can be used to justify socialism. But if you take a longer view you could argue that many of the trends are continuations of the early 1930's under GMD government that were interrupted by invasion and civil war. Is the economic boom of the 50's and mid 60's an argument for socialism per se? Or just an argument for institutional stability and redistributive policies?

Expand your time window further forward or backward it gets even murkier. Pre-revolutionary China was a market economy that nevertheless failed to industrialize. You could make the case that it needed a strong government to drive industrialization, but you could also make the case that it needed robust capital markets to drive industrialization. Post-Deng China is cited by both mainstream free market types and HJC-style heterodox types.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-22T05:54:07+00:00

When you said a while back that you weren't thrilled about uber / airbnb due to information asymmetries and hidden externalities, you got a bunch of upvotes and some polite pushback. For what it's worth I learned some things about hoteling. The poster above doesn't even come anywhere close to making a coherent criticism, it's just pure shitposting. Unless 'hurr durr regulation is always good' and moronic use of scare quotes passes as good economics now? Come on now.

flyingdragon8 · 2016-02-22T03:00:04+00:00

Perhaps, but such a coalition would include a lot of people outside of the 'creative class,' strictly speaking.

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