the stupid economy

[Thailandnotes]

America didn't get a raise in 40 years. Meanwhile inflation was rampant.

Health insurance, tuition, fees, fines, credit card rates, and the price to get your teeth cleaned soared.

The price of a gigabyte of memory declined and a ½ gallon of coke stayed the same, yawn...zzzzzzz

“It's the economy, Stupid!” Clinton ran on it, but it was a ruse.

Name one president in your lifetime who tried (not ran on a platform) to make life better economically for the common man, the guy in the middle, the guy who works 40 hours a week.

Are you better off? Do your think you will be better off?

[vt]

Re: the stupid economy

What leaders of any nation have made the life of the common man better?

As EJ says China is mercantile capitalism, but there are still elite families and a few breaking through to incredible wealth.

It's easier to take a nation from agricultural to industrial than to take one from industrial to knowledge based and creating new industries. Free enterprise has helped significantly.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: the stupid economy

What leaders of any nation have made the life of the common man better?

As EJ says China is mercantile capitalism, but there are still elite families and a few breaking through to incredible wealth.

It's easier to take a nation from agricultural to industrial than to take one from industrial to knowledge based and creating new industries. Free reade has helped significantly.

I agree partially, on the difficulty in shifting to a knowledge based economy.

The road to success is paved with the exportation of technological complexity.

But what of an innovation based economy?

Intellectual horsepower as we ten to think of it is focused mainly on crystallised intelligence, IQ tests et al.

But what about creativity?

Well regarded SMEs like Stanford's Dr Tina Seelig view it as absolutely trainable like a muscle.

I'm not confident of turning a steel worker into a website designer(knowledge worker circa 1997)

But I am confident we can turn folks whose jobs will be destroyed in 5-10 years into workers capable of performing well in small creative/innovative teams as a core future competency.

[SeanO]

Re: the stupid economy

The bigger issue is that we are transitioning from a world where we needed everyone to be productive, to one where we simply don't.

These politicians have no idea how to fix that. Most don't even understand that to be the problem. To expect any of them to fix it, let alone understand it, or even explain it to the population at large is a tall order. I've seen no inkling of anyone being up to the task in any political debate of my recollection.

We need a new economic model that incentivizes and benefits those that work hard, innovate and make the world better, while also giving those that simply aren't needed for production dignity and a purpose. Current socialist and capitalist models fall short. Not to be unpatriotic, but on a philosophical level I even wonder if our nation based legal/economic islands are at odds with reaching a real solution.

Until we figure this out, the wealth gap, civil unrest, terrorism, etc will increase. Perhaps even accelerate under the policies of the very politicians claiming they can fix it... especially those who think they can do it via protectionism imho.

[seobook]

Re: the stupid economy

I'm not confident of turning a steel worker into a website designer(knowledge worker circa 1997)

Not only this, but there is wave after wave after wave of commodification beyond that.

There's cheaper outsourced work, then there's platforms like 99Designs, then there's general purpose cheapo platforms like Fiverr.

And other layers of the stack have similar issues. There might be competitive issues with using Google Analytics, but at a price point of free there isn't room for many competitors. And then on the CMS front Wordpress is free.

It seems the end goal of any platform sort of layer is to reduce enough friction to gain enough marketshare & influence that it can then re-introduce other forms of friction and start raising rents. For example, Akismet comment spam protection was a free part of Wordpress, but now it is $500 a year for a license. That is somewhat similar to how Google Analytics shows less & less keyword data from search BUT the same data is available fairly granularly in Google AdWords. And the free Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool now blends words together (even if some of them have vastly different user intents) & also shows really broad ranges unless you have had an active advertising account going for about a year or such.

But I am confident we can turn folks whose jobs will be destroyed in 5-10 years into workers capable of performing well in small creative/innovative teams as a core future competency.

The rub is almost all the smaller companies will ultimately somehow be heavily reliant on a vertical platform play like Google or Amazon or Facebook. And if one day a certain market segment is banned or pulled back on it can be hard for those smaller businesses to rise above the noise and have any level of say, influence over public opinion, or negotiating power against those larger platform plays that own the consumer relationships.

When Facebook shifts from social games to live video to something else they are just mixing the soup ingredients, but if you are one of the social game makers then best of luck when the underlying platform changes what they are interested in.

Even things as benign as email can become issues. Last time I changed servers I was issued a pre-poisoned IP address to where I wasn't receiving support request tickets in Outlook. Not only was Microsoft not showing them in the inbox, but they also skipped the spam bin & just went straight to being vanished. There's a similar deal with Gmail priority inbox, where "commercial" emails go into another lesser used tab.

Then there is promotion of all sorts of layers of complexity like AMP & Instant Articles & HTTPS ... where the increased investment simply increases the chunk size of competition & complexity of the business, but offers the website nothing in return for all that sunk cost & ongoing technical pain.

The bigger issue is that we are transitioning from a world where we needed everyone to be productive, to one where we simply don't.

These politicians have no idea how to fix that. Most don't even understand that to be the problem. To expect any of them to fix it, let alone understand it, or even explain it to the population at large is a tall order. I've seen no inkling of anyone being up to the task in any political debate of my recollection.

We need a new economic model that incentivizes and benefits those that work hard, innovate and make the world better, while also giving those that simply aren't needed for production dignity and a purpose. Current socialist and capitalist models fall short. Not to be unpatriotic, but on a philosophical level I even wonder if our nation based legal/economic islands are at odds with reaching a real solution.

Until we figure this out, the wealth gap, civil unrest, terrorism, etc will increase. Perhaps even accelerate under the policies of the very politicians claiming they can fix it... especially those who think they can do it via protectionism imho.

The other issue is the layering in of junk fees. Required purchase of health insurance where a CEO of the health insurance company "earns" the equivalent of 1,300+ median household incomes every year for operating a legally required purchase for a monopoly utility.

Part of selling that crap was claiming you could keep your doctor, etc. ... and then also that you can't be dropped arbitrarily ... yet a person I know who had a pre-existing condition was dropped (the letter claimed the person asked to be dropped when in fact they did not).

Cost and risk have been shunted off onto the individual / employee.

Capital is accumulated & used to write the rules to ensure that cycle only accelerates.

I think part of the appeal of Facebook for many people is it is an easy distraction & a way to put their best foot forward even if things aren't going so well.

I sort of get the sense that so much of everything is fake. We certainly saw that in the political discourse last year.

And then if you back out the market monopoly plays like Google & Facebook the ad revenue of the rest of the ecosystem is shrinking. And then even Google hired a CFO to engage in various aspects of financial engineering (stock buybacks, charging "other bets" subsidiaries as customers, etc.) to keep the stock propped up.

While protectionism may be viewed as bad, there are already large trade partners heavily engaged in it. In China all the big tech leaders of the web (Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent) are home grown. Even when US companies wanted to offer cloud hosting services in China they had to host there, then they had to have majority ownership by local company of the operation, then marketing an offering under a foreign trademark or brand was disallowed. Meanwhile, the big Chinese companies like Alibaba & Ctrip buy up foreign brand names to trade under internationally.

So much of what is pitched as "free trade" is investor rights agreements sold under an alternate label.