So LVT separates the value created by your labor (building the cabin, plowing, etc) from the value you did not create. I think its more just than taxing, i.e. cabins or crops.
Most of Musk’s money comes from astronomical stock valuations. Most of that stock is bought by hedge funds and the financial sector. That money mostly comes from mortgages and loans, which allow the financial sector to capture the land value that could otherwise belong to the people.
So basically land value (which nobody creates through their own labor- its created by a community and should be owned by the community) is vacuumed up by the financial sector, which they throw at tech.
For more on this process, look into Michael Hudson, who accurately forecasted the 08 financial crisis.
I used to think this way. I guess it is possible, in the long-term, that we might see some kind of social collapse due to a tragedy-of-the-commons driven depletion of some critical resource.
But I see no evidence this is close. Humans are flourishing more than ever before. And in the places that humans aren't flourishing, this is more due to social issues (inequality, deaths of despair) than to resource depletion. Moreover, stalling birthrates obviate any kind of Malthusian concerns for at least a generation or so.
People have been predicting resource-driven collapses for a long time now, since the Club of Rome and Donella Meadow’s Limits to Growth in the 70s. I haven't read Geoffrey West but it looks like he is in the same camp. A lot of very smart modelers and game theoreticians have come up with models predicting collapse. But they've been wrong so far when pressed to make falsifiable predictions (see the Simon-Erlich wager). And beyond falsifiable predictions, more empirical and less theoretical work also seems to show that models of resource-depletion and collapse are too simple to map on to what actually happens. See for example, Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, about how societies around the world and through history have successfully managed common-pool resources.
So Im not worried about resource-depletion-driven collapse.
> this is more due to social issues (inequality, deaths of despair) than to resource depletion
You've missed the point if you think this is about resource depletion. There is an abundance of resources. It's the process of extracting them and refining them that is killing life on this planet (it's not just about humans).
Population, Kardashev scale, literacy rates, child mortality rates, sexual equality, the very definition of poverty, per-capita frequency of violent death, great-power war frequency, vaccine and medical sophistication, education rates, patent filings…
It takes a cantankerous set of blinders to see us as being in anything but a golden age. Much of the hand wringing arises precisely from the fact that we don’t want to lose what we have.
Projected to stop growing this decade and go down, with many fist world countries staring the barrel of socioeconomic collapse due to lack of new births to grow into the workforce to sustain the outsized outgoing aging population, while developing nations are seeing population booms that they cannot sustain as a result of many of the easily extracted resources already being plundered or polluted (Fish, Clean water).
So many of the countries that are losing are projected to soon start losing population (To name some big ones, Japan, South Korea, China countries and if US immigration faulters, USA as well) and face a demographic retirement crisis, while many of the countries that are projected to (keep) gain(ing) are doing so without the access to resources to acquire them.
You need blinders to look at the current population demographic and think "Yeah, this everybody is flourishing, this is going to work out great"
> Kardashev Scale
Not taking this seriously I see as we don't even rank, We're over 5 orders of magnitude from the first threshold, so it's not even like it's close. So a meaningless suggestion.
> literacy rates
No argument there, but if basic human literacy is "flourishing" to you I see the bar you've set and I've set for "Flourishing" are as stark as "Alive" and "Dead".
> sexual equality
Those rose tinted glasses are polarized as fuck
> the very definition of poverty
The goalposts they keep moving so that less people than ever qualify so as to appear as poverty rates have largely remained stable instead of ballooning 3 fold in the US as they slowly squeeze the middle class out? Yeah. Real Flourishing.
> per-capita frequency of violent death
Fair point here too, Has been on a general decline in the 2000's, and too soon to say anything about the 2020's. The first thing you've listed I'd agree as actually "Flourishing".
> great-power war frequency
You mean the continuous Great Power Proxy struggles that have killed millions with regularity across the world, forcing non-great powers to suffer the evils of war while those great powers sit back in comfort and throw shit at each other on twitter/TV/Newspapers? Yeah. Really flourishing. That MAD policy was a reaaaal step forward for life on Earth.
> vaccine and medical sophistication
Hey, another one you slam dunked.
> education rates
You seem to keep repeating the mistake at looking at averages of people that are just "educated" and not looking at the level of education. More people recieve AN Education today than ever before, even as a percentage of population, true, on a global scale. However, general performance across the board has been on the decline, as have academic and journalistic standards and integrity. From China to the US, the education systems are doing a worse and worse job of educating people, despite churning out more white papers and degrees than ever.
> patent filings
lol no. This is like measuring a mobile phone platforms app stores success by how many apps it has. If it has 100,000 shitty flappy bird clones, but no weather, social media, entertainment, finance, or other very common tools, that doesn't mean it's good or flourishing. People flooding the Patent office with bullshit just to compete on "Patents filed" is Cold War era childish oneupsmanship. Quantity is Not Quality.
> Much of the hand wringing arises precisely from the fact that we don’t want to lose what we have
Yes, and their wringing their hands because they're losing it. It takes a cantankerous set of blinders to look at everything they HAVE and assume it'll just continue being that way.
The issue is not resource depletion, but more how we f* the planet by producing / consuming too much (heating it and killing biodiversity in miscellaneous other ways).
I think the thing that people miscalculate is that resource-depletion-driven collapse happens once. Everything the happens prior to the collapse is largely irrelevant, irrespective of how nice life was prior to the collapse.
Ultimately we live in a world of physical limits. Current society is predicated upon exponential growth, it is literally unsustainable by definition.
>Current society is predicated upon exponential growth
Is it though? There is no law in economics that I’m aware of that bars steady state. Exponential growth seems to be nothing more that a (possibly shortsighted) preference
Besides the fact that people like Robert Solow say the same thing, I feel like this comment misses the point. It’s begging the question.
It’s like pointing to people who are constantly trying to increase their salary as evidence that increasing your salary is necessary. When the measure becomes the target it ceases to be a good measure.
To answer your question directly, Japan has had roughly the same GDP for nearly 30 years.
Economic growth doesn't necessarily mean increased resource consumption, especially when you take into account services. For example, Having more doctors and fewer unemployed people improves your GDP, but doesn't require more food to feed more people
Your response is resource blind, and is part of the problem why we're in the predicament we're in. Think of the amount of resources that a doctor consumes in the services they provide, from all the medical equipment to the medicines and other devices that they administer to their patients.
There is an important distinction between using resources more efficiently and requiring more resources.
My point is that we may not be using resources to efficiently raise quality of life. Just adding more resources to that problem seems to ironically be blind to the process and goal.
I don't think you even need to make an efficiency argument.
More doctors can provide more benefit even if you gave them no medical devices and medicine. They can answer questions, diagnose, triage, ect.
There is a whole class of knowledge services in the economy that can scale without consuming more resources. Therapists, musicians, architects, educators, home-decoration consultants, ect.
I think that is an efficiency argument. Whether time or knowledge, the resource doesn’t go away. It just gets placed into a more useful direction. The distinction is how the utility is measured. They later point is that sometimes that definition of utility function can sometimes maximize economic measures while turning a blind eye to societal ones. I’d argue the former puts the cart before the horse, I.e., the economy should serve society and not ur other way around
Oh, I certainly agree there is an efficiency opportunity as well, I was just saying that it isn't strictly necessary to improve resource efficiency to have growth.
How do you think that having two doctors instead of one, where the 2nd has no access to tools is still a resource efficiency solution? It could be even better by having them share fixed resources, but that isn't strictly necessary to see benefit and economic growth (medical advice still adds value).
I don't have much to say about your second point, except that you can prioritize any measures you want. Growth of those measures, economic or social, are not bound by resource consumption.
I think most reasonable people would agree that economic growth for its own sake isn't important. Its value is simply as an imperfect approximation of other things that society does value.
>How do you think that having two doctors instead of one, where the 2nd has no access to tools is still a resource efficiency solution?
Because you are still more efficiently using that 2nd doctors time. Time is the resource in that case.
And I agree with your last point. The mail issue I’m bringing up is that economic growth, as traditionally defined, is a blunt tool at best to measure what we really care about: quality of life. I think there is a good argument that there is marginal utility past a certain point, if not outright negative impacts. We confuse the measure for the target.
>Because you are still more efficiently using that 2nd doctors time. Time is the resource in that case.
Yes, it is a more productive use of human human capital and time.
I think that time is a different resource than the parent poster was talking about when they spoke of resource-depletion-driven collapse, physical limits, and unsustainable growth.
I take that to mean they think physical material consumption must always go up if we want economic growth. This is why I tried to point out that economic growth can include many things that don't need raw materials.
You're conflating two separate things. Yes, society can collapse multiple times. Yes, there can be innumerable resource-driven collapses. These are given.
What I'm referring to is the literal running out of the necessary resources to progress modern society in the same way that we have up until now. This is also a given. Take oil for example, and think of the vast amounts of plastic we rely on, which we currently have no equivalent alternative.
Of course, this is only relevant to modern society. This is not to say that humans cannot exist in a pre-modern society. It just won't be pleasant.
I got scammed by this exact type of thing when I needed a tow truck ASAP to jump my car. They had a fake business <1 mile away with lots of good reviews. After giving them my credit card info right away and after a long delay, I gave it more scrutiny and realized it was definitely a fake business. I called multiple times to figure out where the F$&@ my tow truck was, each time talking to a different person with a filipino accent. An impressively sophisticated scam, Im not sure how google could fight it
AAA has been utterly useless. In the past 2 times I needed a tow, they couldn't arrange one in a timely manner, with lots of delays and miscommunications.
Huh my experience is very different. I used the app to get a jump start on my car and they came out in 20 minutes with no hassle. I think it really depends on your location.
I got a PhD in 2.5 years (already had a masters), a very fast amount of time, and the advice I always give people is “pick a program with clear deliverables.”
My advisor said that after publishing 3 articles in good journals, I was done. So I was very motivated, had a clear target, and had a more satisfying and quick experience than probably 98% of PhD students.
I looked at programs in more attractive locations and at better rated schools, where they said essentially “you are done when we feel like you are done”. I turned them down and it was a fantastic decision.
IMO this is exactly not how to do a PhD which should be about exploring a topic and becoming an expert over time. A meandering path concentrated around self directed learning.
If you want clear deliverables and a set path to follow, just get a job in industry.
>If you want clear deliverables and a set path to follow, just get a job in industry.
I find this to be an extremely over-generous view of what industry work is like.
But my actual point is that whether you are in academia or industry, you should prefer a position where you have some real control over the deliverables, rather than being a puppet on the strings of a boss or advisor.
Yes, it's true that industry is not like this all the time. I've done the PhD/Postdoc route now working as a data scientist in mega corp.
The value of a PhD IMO is the pain of forcing yourself to learn things independently, work on hard problems for long periods of time and develop expertise. I think following a set path laid out by a supervisor defeats alot of this as the hard work is being done for you, you're just following your supervisor's set agenda.
Industry simply doesn't allow for this long deep, mostly unproductive work. Things change constantly and projects move, adapt etc. However the goals are for the most part better defined with a clear outcome.
A post below put this well, academia is closer to a start up lifestyle.
3 different papers in 2.5 years with a group? Did they all have to be lead author works? And if so may I ask what is your field?
That kind of requirement would be way too strict for some fields. Flexible graduation guidelines can be abused by bad programs and/or bad PIs, but they also allow flexibility in what you get out of the PhD and when you can leave. I know people that graduated from my program with 0 lead author papers (and <= 2 contributing author papers) because they had already lined up an industry job or a pivot to research in a different field. They'd be in school forever if there were strict authorship requirements.
PS - some PIs, whether intentionally or not, can actually abuse strict requirements more than flexible ones. If you used PI resources to do research, which is often unavoidable in experimental fields, you need their permission to publish. Some PIs have extremely high standards for what journals they will allow their work to be published in. Often students end up with 4th author via a piece of a paper that got published in a journal like Cell, but could've been a stand alone lead author work in a mid tier journal. Nothing wrong with that, arguably it's better from a scientific perspective, but you can see how that might impact student careers.
This doesn't work as a reasonable objective measure of population mental health disorders for several reasons.
1) The oversampling of the training set makes it uncalibrated when applied to the general population (to recalibrate you need an estimate of the prevalence to begin with, which sort of defeats the purpose).
2) Online posts are not a random sample of the population. (Perhaps this is solveable with some poststratification of the estimates, although requires demographic data on the poster.) If you take self reports that the researchers used to define disorders at face value, those would make more sense than using this model.
These text based models are so superficial, when applied to mass datasets with low prevalence of the underlying condition, they will ultimately result in very low positive predictive values (e.g. flag 100 people, if the model is good will only get 5/100 as actual mental health problems).
As version_five asks, it is hard to imagine any reasonable use of the model given such low positive predictive values (which imply incredibly high false positive rates).
> getting rates of mental disorders at the population level is a useful application
this post sounds dangerous to me -- there are vast differences in a legal judgement and a medical judgement; thirdly, political policy levers are sometimes used in ways that make very little sense, due to situational factors.
It is no secret that humans are competitive, tend towards violence, and political oppression exists to some extent, of some groups, almost everywhere. A "medical judgement" used for legal or worse, political purposes, I claim, is dangerous. The post above this one appears to make no distinctions and leans towards "yes, do this."
