Steve Randy Waldman[new draft post] Quietly expensive desperation https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/06/04/quietly-expensive-desperation/index.html
Dennis Clark@interfluidity just fyi, Alon goes by they/them.
@dbfclark (thanks! i’ll correct it when i get back home.)
Clinical Rawlsian@interfluidity This is a very good piece and tracks with something I've come to believe more as I get older: most Americans, and most people in general, are not avaricious or excessively materialistic. They don't want summer houses in the Hamptons or private jets or other trappings of plutocracy. Most people just want a sense of security and stability. But American society is set up so that the only way to insure against ruination is to behave like far more of a greedy SOB than you actually are.
@MadMadMadMadRN yes. exactly.
@interfluidity In my experience, whenever the Power Ball gets really big and friends and co-workers start discussing what they would do if they actually won, most say they probably wouldn't move or change their lives much at all. Most say they would just quit their jobs, travel more, and spend more time with and help out friends and family.
@MadMadMadMadRN Right. The dream is to be able to live without financial worries, travel nicely and more, and help family and friends who also suffer from precarity.
@interfluidity It occurs to me that America's Expensive Desperation also puts us in a doom loop in which our threadbare safety increases our labor and infrastructure costs and these elevated costs are then used as a reason we can't have a better social safety net. How, the argument goes, can we possibly ever have public housing / universal higher ed / universal healthcare etc. when high building and labor costs make the cost of providing such services so financially ruinous to government?
@MadMadMadMadRN it’s a pretty bad equilibrium… aka a pickle.
antipode77@MadMadMadMadRN @interfluidity
Unlimited influence by Oligarchs is bad for Society.
They are a threat to politics, law and voting rights. In short #Democracy .
Some ideas.
Put a cap on maximum amount of profits allowed for products or services.
Start controlling the very rich of the USA.
Limit rent seeking behavior by the rich.
Read this for an overview of Reform for a better Democracy.
Robert Thau@interfluidity When similar incentives in, say, Africa yield similar results, we call it systemic corruption and say it's the reason those countries can't achieve strong economic results.
@rst we, like they, now have a very hard time making any real progress in aggregate. we just started from a better baseline.
@interfluidity BTW, case in point: France's SNCF (leaders in high-speed rail worldwide) tried to help California. They gave up, and left for North Africa, where they've since built a functional system in Morocco, complaining about California's "dysfunction" -- which largely took the form of local pols demanding diversion of funds, or the trains themselves, to suit local interests. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html
Daniel Feldman@interfluidity does it matter that both transit projects and warships are purchased through a government contracting process, which seem to be both uniquely convoluted and prone to corruption in the US? Are big private sector projects as overpriced?
@dfeldman I was pretty ambiguous in the piece about that, but I think private sector prices are subject to the same forces, but private sector contracting projects can pit those forces against one another, when the contractors have similar market power. So it's harder to make claims as general. Agency issues — to what degree are the people doing the contracting exposed to contract outcomes (especially price) — may then largely decide the balance. 1/
@dfeldman Public sector agents tend to be very weakly exposed to contract outcomes. Sometimes their exposure may be more aligned with vendor than purchaser interest (when, for example, there's the possibility of a job or board seat with the vendor as a downstream career). But even without such blatant corruption, public sector agents (both civil servants and electeds) are unlikely to have their salary or tenures tightly coupled to contract outcomes. 2/
@dfeldman Even in splashy cases in the public eye like CA HSR, blame is just too shiftable. So public sector purchasers tend pretty reliably to be unable to counter vendor determination to maximize take. 3/
@dfeldman Private sector purchasers definitely face that same determination, and as individuals we experience the same rapaciousness when, eg, we interact with private-equity-owned medicine or housing providers for example. Their "efficiency" is in large part a willingness to squeeze customers in ways that local, customer-interacting business people still balk at, for ethical and customary reasons. As individuals, we face a cost disease from minimal market power and motivated counterparties. 4/
@dfeldman But in private sector contracts where the contractor has a high degree of market power relative to many vendors, and where agents have strong incentives aligned with economic performance of the project, the same forces might lead to efficient outcomes for the purchaser, matched sometimes by brutal outcomes for vendors. I think it's harder to make very general claims. /fin
Detroit Dan@interfluidity How to deal with our "structural greediness"? Perhaps we need to reform our democracy so that it encourages cooperation more than division and animosity. Start with approval voting. Then root out the cancer of national security spending and related secrecy. On a personal level, we can stop performing the 2 minutes of hate every day. Be hard on the problem, soft on the people. Anyway, good contribution!
@interfluidity Related content from Michael Hudson: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/06/michael-hudson-on-the-us-economy-surprisingly-resilient-or-potemkin-village.html
"They have to have medical care. That’s 18% of America’s GDP, higher than any other country. So the money that is paid to the financial, insurance and real estate sector in America is so large that there’s no way that America can be competitive with other countries... for the United States sanctions have not only become a political tool, but an economic necessity as well".
@DetroitDan i agree with the bit you quote, but i find Hudson mostly discredits himself throughout that interview by offering very caricatured and implausible takes on eg the Biden Administration. his description of the changes to food stamps is just inaccurate. i don't think you can look at the totality of the Biden Administration, including the ambitious and humiliating BBB drama, and write the whole thing off as a cynical game of good cop in cahoots with bad-cop Republicans.