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Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

It takes ten years to train people of that skill. Not having access to a capable glassblower as a chemical researcher is an infrastructure problem that cannot be solved with any amount of money. You need a master glassblower to train the next generation, and you need capable apprentices, and it still takes ten years.

Neoliberals, note that fact.

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Noted. Please explain how this interesting article warrants political mudslinging.

While snarky in tone, he has a point - The Market doesn't have a spectacular track record of having foresight longer than the next quarterly report.

Yours is an example of an interesting comment. Had he made an actual argument I wouldn't have called it out.

I remember having this argument with an invisible-hand fanatic, who thought that the economics of supply and demand simply solved everything.

"So... a neurologist takes 13 years to train from scratch. How does the market manage that?"

Well, to be fair the market does manage quite well! Since it's so hard to become a neurologist, there's a shortage unless the pay is so good that people are willing to forgo 13 years of their life to get there.

And the bodies of the people that did not get their treatment (or got the wrong one, because their neurologist was overworked, tired of burning the midnight oil) pile up.

Free market is good only when you have both elastic supply and demand.

13 years is a very slow lag time. For comparison, the general public has only been aware of the internet for about 20 years.

If you ignore the massive subsidization by the federal government, then the market manages just dandy. Taxpayers spend north of $15B on graduate medical education annually.

Were there no neurosurgeons before those gov't subsidies were in place?

Government subsidy of the arts and sciences is a practice that dates back to the ancient world in the form of patronage [1]. If you wanted to be ridiculously pedantic, as some people on the internet are known to be, you could argue that the neurosurgical procedure known as trepanation [2] dates back to at least 7000 years ago. However, the modern science of neurosurgery is far more recent so I do not think it is at all unfair to claim that gov't subsidy predates neurosurgery by a wide margin.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning

Neurosurgery (as we know it today) first came about in the early 1900's.[1] CMS, the gov't institution that funds residencies, was created in the 1930's (well, it predecessor was).

And if we look outside of neurosurgery to general medical practice, we'll find that it was humming along quite nicely without any gov't support.

[1]http://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/index.php/about_us_history.html

You just provided a link to UCSF, a government-funded public university [1], to prove your point that the government didn't fund the development of neurosurgery?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California#Histo...

Just because a government-funded institution creates a webpage describing the history of a subject, doesn't mean that government funded institution created that subject.

If I link to a NHTSA website on the history of cars, are you going to argue the government invented cars?

So your argument is that government didn't come up with the original idea for neurology and therefore, what, exactly?

What is your argument?

I think that, because at some point there was a doctor, therefore the free market will make doctors just fine. Ignoring that medicine is one of the least free markets in the US (and even less outside the US) as irrelevant. From education (college subsidies, loans), public financing of med schools, public financing of post med school education, etc. Not to mention who actually pays for all that medical treatment. Or just random free market magic argle bargle.

I don't disagree that the US healthcare system is the exact opposite of a free market. But I do disagree that it would be impossible for a functioning healthcare system to exist without the gov't.

I disagree. The free market is predicated on free individuals making free choices. If you contract a fatal, but curable disease there is no practical limit to the amount of money you'll pay for the cure. The fact that your very life depends on this treatment makes you a non-free person, rendering the free market dysfunctional.

Sure, if your definition of market includes government-funded universities. Of course, such a definition has a tendency to swallow everything in the world like some kind of intellectual black hole. This is why the idea of the invisible hand is commonly derided as a religion.

Trivially. For starters, student loans, wherein lenders profit from interest on the loan.

Better example is how does the free market build the Sydney Opera House? Or a decent healthcare system?

Dunno about the Opera House but the free market built Disneyland.

Disney receives some of the biggest tax breaks of any company on earth. They pay no tax at Disneyland Anaheim and get massive subsides for movies (Pirates of Caribbean and Starwars being recent examples). They get tax breaks internationally and are rivals to oil and arms in scale. Free market does not apply.

Disney also has special flight restrictions, which Congress, not the FAA, mandated. Nominally described as an anti-terrorist measure, I agree with the many who say it was to prevent aerial advertising and sightseeing helicopters.

In Florida they have their own special tax district, the Reedy Creek Improvement District. It is "exempt from all county and most state regulations, such as development-impact fees or costly and time-consuming regional-impact studies. The district is regulated by building codes drafted with the developer`s help. Waterways, utilities and sewer systems are built to suit the developer`s needs. The district is governed by a ruling body that is handpicked by the developer." http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1987-02-23/business/8701120...

Low or no taxes would seem to be an important part of the definition of free market

Low or no taxes for everyone would be a free market. If only certain corps get it then it's like a subsidy from the rest of society.

You're forgetting the 12+ years of schooling.

He is absolutely right, scientific glass blowing does take about 10 years to be exceptional. And then the work is painstaking (low output) and the pay isn't that good. You can earn more money making bongs. A lot of old neon tube benders are ex-lab glass blowers, but that field is dying off too.

yup, last neon plant within 3 hours of me recently closed. they will be outsourcing it all to a vendor in seattle, with an additional wait time of at least two weeks per project.

It's a shame that a single snarky line gets a comment flagged and hidden.

Here's the parent comment, in case you can't see it:

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Neoliberals, note that fact.

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I think there is a point here, but it could have been worded less incendiary.

If you always try to lower costs, outsource everything, buy the cheapest glass from some chinese factory, you will lose local expertise. If you outsource entry level positions now, you will lose experienced craftsmen in the future.

But with some foresight, a university (or any company) can easily avoid this, by hiring apprentices early; if you give a young person a chance, they will often be loyal and stay even if, after years of training, they could now get a better paying job somewhere else.

The people down voting you are the same people who mock the Brexit leave voters.

Doesn't even read as incendiary, just a slightly snippy turn of phrase. I doubt anyone sees neoliberalism as problem free. One of the problems being an excess of short-termism.

I think it's entirely appropriate. The exact same point is made just as well in other comments, so it really doesn't add anything, and the offhand comment at the end spawned a flame war.

If Neoliberals were in power, useless schools and education tracks wouldn't be so massively overfunded both with tax dollars and tax-funded loans, and thus people would actually have to learn a trade, something useful and something someone on the market requires, rather than, idk, gender studies. The idea that the free market creates useless people is ludicrous - given that the government is gobbling up everything that even resembles education and bastardizes it.

> "If Neoliberals were in power"

Neoliberals are in power.

I disagree. If you see the size of our governments and the amount of laws, it's absolutely mindboggling. Our laws have tens of thousands of pages and the volume of regulations and laws seem to be at an all-time high and growing. No substantial deregulation ever happened across the board in almost 100 years, possibly more. The volume of the regulation is so incredibly huge that even large and well funded companies are incapable of following them all, nor is it possible to enforce anything but an arbitrary selection. If you talk to industry leaders, CEOs and people in the business, you see that this is a real problem and a harmful practice everyone has to deal with every day.

Big regulation != Strong regulation. Seems like non-programmers don't understand this so well.

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