coxmichael

no profile record

Submissions

Book Review: Seeing Like a State

slatestarcodex.com

2 pointsby coxmichael4 ปีที่แล้ว0 comments

The UK Energy Crisis: An MMT Analysis

new-wayland.com

2 pointsby coxmichael4 ปีที่แล้ว2 comments

comments

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I’d wager that’s more to do with raising finance than organisational productivity, but I’m not aware of any actual research on something of that scale or even how to accurately study those effects without it turning into more of a qualitative theory.

Still, it’s quite an interesting possibility worth pursuing in my opinion. (Full disclosure, I work for a small nominally employee-owned company, and have mixed thoughts about how it works in practice).

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I’m not convinced this is inevitable, but it certainly feels it within the current system. Co-ops exist and can be very successful.

Hierarchies can be time-limited, or democratically limited, it just depends on the legal and organisational framework.

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It’s harder to get finance as a co-operative, so it’s hardly a fair competition.

Also, in most studies, co-ops and employee ownership models do actually end up being more profitable and sustainable in the long term [0, 1].

[0] Page 23+ in this UK government review on employee ownership: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[1] ONS report showing the rate of survival of cooperatives in the UK after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/2020-10/co-operative...

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Thanks, I’ll give it a read

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

> Math is an epistemological tool to abstract the causality of existence into a simplified structure

The mathematics to accurately predict or relay reality is still complex enough that it’s often beyond us. You’re right in that it’s a tool to understand, but if we’re using simplified math for simplified reality, is it really epistemological?

As you suggest, math isn’t outside the boundary of philosophic investigation. It never was in the past, and I don’t think better approximations change that calculation.

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Nice site/typography!

The bold and italics look like they’re being applied in browser though, rather than specific faces.

And it’s calling out for some small caps for acronyms like ‘HTML’.

Nice to see sites with this style, it’s very rare nowadays!

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Roads were often made of wood blocks, so maybe that’s an option here too?

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

In more political phraseology, that would be tyranny rather than anarchy (that is, without hierarchy)

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

> broadly the analysis results in better outcomes or else there would be no economic incentive to facilitate medical research

This is true to a degree, but outcomes for real healthcare rely on much more than research, as you’ve indicated.

Documentation is part of that research, of course, and whether they have short-term or long-term effects for researchers’ ability to work out better treatment is relatively lossy.

Actual treatment also includes the rest of healthcare (training, hell, even their housing costs), and rules-based or centralised administrative systems backed by insurance don’t necessarily create the right environment for that information to be propagated more widely.

People training to be health workers don’t use the frequency or quality of medical research papers to decide whether to become a doctor.

I think there’s a view you can take on the information topology here that’s a little odd in how it’s currently set up — documentation for front-line workers and information wealth for researchers feels like it’s relatively polarised.

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Both can be true, and greater systems of medical research and analysis don’t necessarily lead to greater on-the-ground treatment.

As you’ve pointed out, access to those information systems is critical. I’d add the distribution of that information as well as the right economic incentives to participate in using that information.

I’m not sure we’ve really got any one of those things right.

Edit: adding a bit of humanity to the system, as the OP is hinting at, could very much be a part of the fix.

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

How do you structure the 2 hour session?

Would be interesting to hear which kinds of tasks you use in a short space of time.

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Thanks, I appreciate your response, and agree on many of your points.

> whatever happens with the dollars and financial instruments you ignore, and you take a pure look at the real goods and services involved

The trick of forgetting about money altogether in definitions of wealth is incredibly useful. It's definitely an idea we're missing today, when we're surrounded by ideas of wealth being primarily measured in currency, I think, but you're mostly right in that economics is the art of redirecting real resources in the real world.

There's a nice history to the idea too, where theorists as broad as the Georgists, who discount finance (and land) in their definition of wealth [0]; or Ricardo, who used it as a basis for Metallism from a perspective of a (mostly) labour theory of value.

If any reprioritisation of mortgage or buy-to-let finance ever happens, as you've rightly described, there will be various squeezes and reallocations of consumption and production. But what I think you're underestimating is that other configurations of the economy can be more (or less) productive than this one, even given the same amount of labour, energy, and resource.

> How do you want to redirect the widget consumption to make the actual physical changes necessary to have additional productive economic activity? Do you want to apply the squeeze to landlord, tenants, or both?

If you're solely talking about physical widget consumption, I don't think our current arrangement is particularly efficient. In the UK at least, new dwellings have mostly kept pace with population increases — we've got more bedrooms per capita than we've ever had in aggregate. Even so, there's still been a reduction in availability of rental properties and ownership for vast swathes of the population, notwithstanding the increases in homelessness and housing insecurity, with all of the stress and inefficiency that creates. Tenants (and prospective buyers who are attempting to save huge deposits) are also likely to consume the least, so we could theoretically redirect that consumption into other pursuits.

If we flip that around and talk about misallocation of widget production, there are very real resources today that are ultimately directed into purely financial returns, that could otherwise be directed in more productive, wealth-creating opportunities.

That's everything from:

– Landlords who would otherwise be working to produce goods and services, alongside all of the legal, retail, and management support they receive.

– Builders, architects, and project managers who are working to extract more of their tenant's labour, by badly refitting existing dwellings into flat shares, HMOs, rather than building new towns and cities.

– Financial institutions spending much of their time and energy on creating financial returns above increasing the real wealth of society.

– Tenants, who may otherwise be able to invest in other productive activities.

– People currently working in other industries, which may or may not be particularly useful to society (I have my list of favourites…), who may switch to a productive one.

– Speculative land investments from builders, who are using real energy to devise and capture the inflation created from QE, alongside various demand-side reforms like Help to Buy.

From a macro perspective, around 70+% of new money created in the UK goes into existing housing stock, and is mostly inflationary. We appear to have stumbled into a system where this financial inflation is captured by some and not by others, leading directly to inequality and the misallocation of real wealth.

[0] https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/george-progress-and-povert...

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Apologies here, my previous comment was a little flippant (I was at the pub…).

There's absolutely an argument here that rents, as a basic dead-weight cost of all people within a society, don't affect the real economy or productivity.

This could be true, but only if the access to finance is distributed across society relatively equally, with a positive effect on productivity. My understanding of, at least in the UK, is that it's not.

The relationship between financial capital and other forms is lossy at the moment — the purpose of financial capital is the creation of new goods and services, and we've spent 40-odd years making sure it goes largely into something that already exists (housing).

In that process, funding for new stuff, for non-rent economic activity, hasn't been properly funded.

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I think one of the options here is to remove the standing charge, making pricing reflect usage — higher energy users will get a sudden disincentive to use the same level of energy.

The article also mentions a domestic cap set at reasonable levels, so anyone heating a swimming pool will be charged at higher rates.

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Exactly, it’s redistributive to the public good. That is, productive.

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Again, there’s the idea that wages and businesses produce nothing. They don’t.

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I feel like this kind of zero-sum argument does the rounds quite frequently.

The reality is that housing is the main mechanism used by the older wealthy folk for their pensions, and subsequently transfers wealth up through the generations.

What we need is a way for all that unproductive capital used to directly fund the businesses of the young, growing the real economy (rather than the financial).

Alongside that, additional legislative arrangements to provide security for renters.

Pension pots should be a return on investment, not speculation.

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Can we not just have something like:

  a {
    &:hover {…}

    &:parent(.theme):hover {…}
  }

No crazy selectors with an ampersand in the middle allowed, but a way to apply a parent or ancestor selector, a bit like :where() or :is(). There could be :in() for ancestors.

No one needs this monstrosity:

  dialog {
    @nest html:has(&[open]) {…}
  }

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

A favourite of mine was something along the lines of:

Short circuit; a man, thinking peas would increase his virility, shovels them straight into his lap