Comment by yourapostasy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yourapostasy | Hacker News Reader

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It was more economics and political policy wonks, economists and politicians in general, who didn't just ask that question, but thrust forth the prescriptive rhetoric through a large grid of trade agreements, "Globalism is here to stay! Get over it! Comparative Advantage!" This is only the first in a long, expensive series of lessons these people will be taught by reality in the coming decades. I'm guessing this kind of manufacturing loss will cost at least $1T to catch up and take the lead again after all is said and done, assuming the US can even take the lead.

US organization, economic, and financial management at the macro scale is going through a kind of "architecture astronaut" multi-decade phase with financialization propping up abstracted processes of how to lead massive organizations as big blocks on diagrams instead of highly fractal, constantly shifting networks of ideas and stories repeatedly coalescing around people, processes, and resources into focused discrete action in continguous and continuous OODA feedback loops absorbing and learning mistakes along the way. Ideally, the expensive BA and INTC lessons drive home the urgent need for an evolution in organizational management.

I wryly think how similar the national comparative advantage argument looks to much young adult science fiction portrayal of space opera galactic empire settings with entire worlds dedicated solely to one purpose. This world only produces agricultural goods. That world only provides academician services. It is a very human desire to simplify complex fractal realities, and effective modeling is one of our species' advantages, but at certain scales of size, agility and complexity it breaks down. We know this well in the software world; some problems are intrinsically hard and complex, and there is a baseline level of complexity the software must model to successfully assist with the problem space. Simplifying further past that point deteriorates the delivery.

The US decided that it didn't like all the political disorder that came with managing a large proletariat. Instead, it decided to outsource the management of that proletariat to Asia and the 'global south.' Our proletariat instead was mostly liquidated and shifted itself into the service industry (not that amenable to labor organization) and the welfare/workfare rolls.

There are so many things that the US would have to reform to become more competitive again, but we are so invested into the FIRE economy that it's not unlike the position of the southern states before the Civil War: they were completely invested into the infrastructure of slavery and could not contemplate an alternative economic system because of that. The US is wedded to an economy based on FIRE and Intellectual Property production, with the rest of the economy just in a support role.

I'm not really a pro-organized-labor person, but I think that as a matter of national security we have to figure out a way to reform and compromise to get to the point to which we develop industry even if it is redundant due to globalization. The left needs to compromise on environmental protection, the rich need to compromise on NIMBYism, and the right needs to compromise on labor relations. Unfortunately none of this is on the table even as a point of discussion. Our politics is almost entirely consumed by insane gibberish babbling.

This became very clear when COVID hit and there was no realistic prospect of spinning up significant industrial capacity to make in-demand goods like masks and filters. In the future, hostile countries will challenge and overtake the US in IP production (which is quite nebulous and based on legal control of markets anyway) and in finance as well. The US will be in a very weak negotiating position at that point.

An IP based economy just on its face seems like such a laughable house of cards. So your economy is based on government enforced imaginary rights to ideas? The proliferation of tax havens should be a sign that the system is bullshit - it exposes how little is actually keeping the profits of IP endeavors within a nation.

There is incredibly little respect for the society owning the means of production in a tangible real sense, instead we have economies that run on intangibles, where the intangibles allow 600lb gorillas like Oracle to engage in much rent seeking while simultaneously avoiding paying dues to the precise body that granted them their imaginary rights. The entire status quo feels like something some rich tycoons dreamed up to sell to the public the merits of systematically weakening their negotiating position on the promise that one day a Bernie Sanders type would descend from the heavens and deliver universal basic income fueled by the efficiency of private industry through nothing but incorruptability and force of personality.

China seems to be successful in part because they have no qualms with flexing dictatorial power to increase the leverage of the state itself. This may be less economically efficient but it means they actually get to harvest the fruits of any efficiency. Intellectual property law? They just ignore it and don't get punished, since punishing them would be anti-trade.

Yes, the IP economy rests on a bunch of fragile international treaties the US has with its partner states. The government provides the court system that enforces IP claims, but the costs of litigation are mostly carried by rights holders. So when you are sued for patent infringement, the court's costs are fairly minimal and paid by both sides -- but the court's power is just an externality of state power.

> financialization propping up abstracted processes of how to lead massive organizations as big blocks on diagrams instead of highly fractal, constantly shifting networks of ideas and stories repeatedly coalescing around people, processes, and resources into focused discrete action in continguous and continuous OODA feedback loops absorbing and learning mistakes along the way.

I had trouble reading this without falling into the cadence of Howl! by Allen Ginsberg.

Thanks for introducing me to that, it was enjoyable to listen to Allen.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVGoY9gom50

My pleasure :)

But to my chagrin, I just realized that the reading cadence I had in mind wasn't Allen Ginsberg's, but instead Jack Kerouac's. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/3LLpNKo09Xk?t=197

Ha, that Beat Generation background music really sets the tone.

Are you referring to the music that's (mostly?) Steve Allen's piano playing? Yeah, totally.

I also never knew that Steve Allen was so good at piano. Before watching that video, all I knew about him was that he'd had a popular TV show.

This was very nicely expressed, I would read a book in this style!

By the way, I'm not sure the hnchat.com service linked in your profile works any more?

Thanks. I'm not like that IRL face to face except for a very small subset of close friends. If you like that kind of high information rate, discursive exploration, then you'd probably like or are already hanging around the folks at dredmorbius' various lairs, what used to be slatestarcodex, and gwern.net as jumping off points. I still hold wan hope the Net will lead to the kind of introspection writing tends to encourage. Thanks for letting me know hnchat is gone. I moved to protonmail.ch and updated my HN profile appropriately.

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