Hacker News Reader

Comment by incrudible | Hacker News Reader

The core neoliberal claim that the economy would thrive if government just got out of the way has been demolished by the events of the past three decades.

Has it though? Where did government get "out of the way"? Where did government "in the way" to make the economy thrive? What does it mean for an economy to thrive anyway? Is it more important for an economy to be efficient, or the people being (ostensibly) subjectively happier with it? After all, several poor countries rank among the happiest in the world.

The fact that neoliberalism has not shown itself to be a panacea should not be held against it, considering the lack of demonstrably superior alternatives.

View on HN

So far as I can tell the main things we did was make it illegal to build homes, and say that you can buy stuff made by slaves with horrible environmental impact so long as it’s imported.

And that's good because the slaves have a slightly higher quality of life than before. Even though our low skill workers are priced out of the economy. But that's good because they should go to college and learn to code! Which 100% of society definitely can afford financially and cognitively since we're all interchangeable cogs. No free college that's too extreme though lol. Plus, iPhones are so cheap! Would you rather have Detroit not in ruins but not be able to afford a new iPhone every year???

>the lack of demonstrably superior alternatives.

Denmark, Finland...

Not really. 1) Their most prosperous years happened before the wellfare movement. 2) Their economy is hardly more robust than the US.

False on both accounts.

When two people argue and neither has sources or reasoning, we all suffer.

You're forgetting common knowledge and obviousness.

If I say I'm thinking of getting a dog and someone else on the Internet says credulously "What? What would it ever breathe?" I don't need to find sources to show that dogs can breathe air or that the air where I live is ok for dogs or that dogs don't overly deplete the oxygen meant for me.

That's a bit of an extreme example though. Its fair to assume people will know dogs need to breath air. It isn't fair to assume that people will be aware of economic and political history of Denmark and Finland. The GP comments also don't include enough information, in my opinion, for a person who is interested to easily search for information to fill in the blanks themselves.

We just had:

- a global pandemic that killed millions - a shutdown of most industry for months - a shutdown of most travel for 2 years - a cut off of trade with one of the world's leading energy suppliers

And we didn't tip into recession or significant improvement. Yes, it was close. Yes, we had some inflation. Yes, we're still wobbly. But primary indicators, GDP and unemployment stayed positive.

To have only 4% unemployment after the stresses of the last five years is a gosh darn miracle and fairly convincing proof of competent stewardship over the economy.

It will be interesting to see how these events look after a few decades. Most countries reached for extreme measures to attempt to avoid economic disaster after the pandemic response.

It could turn out that worked with little or no important side effects. It also could turn out that the economic and social impacts are delayed by more than a few years.

I'm still waiting for the trickle-down economics from tax breaks to corporations and the ultra-rich to trickle my way. Maybe if I wait harder.

Median Household Income in the US is 75K. In Germany its 42K (lets round up to 50)

Tax Rates on 75K income in the US: 19% (take home 60K). In Germany on 50K: 35% (take home 32K)

What are you waiting for, exactly? America is profoundly, almost absurdly prosperous. Truck drivers here make more than software developers in many "modern" countries, even in spite of the fruits of remote work.

edit: aredox in replies has even better proof of mass American prosperity vs the rest of the world over the last 20 years. It shows 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile incomes all shooting up for the US and the major European nations mostly stagnating, especially for the 10th and 50th pct populations.

These numbers are very apples to oranges. You also need to account for additional healthcare spending, dental, vision, pension, benefits, cost of living, expenses, costs of education etc.

I lived and worked both in LA and in Germany and while the salary sticker prices are quite different, the outcomes are quite similar. Furthermore, the "prosperity" in the US is much, much more unevenly distributed with luxury on one end (e.g. Westwood or Pasadena) and living and working conditions for others that felt more like a third world country (e.g. south of LAX felt very sketchy). And that is not even touching on the drugs and homeless problems.

Germans definitely grumble too much, but Americans overshoot in the other direction and gloss over very real problems.

Surely that's not the whole story, though.

In your example just consider what a German gets from their contribution to the state compared to the USAian. I'm particularly thinking about universal health care and free higher education.

According to numbeo.com, the cost of living in the US is 26% higher than Germany (the US is more expensive in almost every metric).

It's not just Germany that's both easier and less expensive to live in, either.

Your statistics are crude. Here is a proper analysis:

https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68...

That shows 50th percentile disposable income shooting upwards over the last 20 years and the only competition being Norway and Switzerland, and breaking away upwards from the developed country average. Again, if OP is waiting for prosperity and doesn't see it yet, they'll be waiting forever.

Add US, Germany, France, Spain, UK and you'll see the US graph incomes shoot upwards for 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile, and the other countries stagnate or even decline, even for the 50th and 10th!

America has absurd amounts of natural resources, compared to all European countries except Russia. It would be fairly rich just by exploiting them, without any advanced economy, just like Australia or Canada are. Add advanced economy on top of that, and regular Americans should be swimming in money, compared to rest of the world.

>regular Americans should be swimming in money

That's not how business works here. Money trickles up and people who worked to make it happen are living paycheck to paycheck. Only the business owners and the shareholders see any prosperity in that equation.

And not to sound too pessimistic, but many local governments would rather take the tax money and give it to Walmart, Cabelas, Sports stadium building rather than paying for stuff like school lunches or better teacher pay.

> should be

One of the resonant political messages now is that Americans are too poor to afford basic necessities.

Or rather the cost of basic necessities is (and has been) rising so much faster than income. Education, health care, insurance, housing, are all rising many times faster than 'core' inflation numbers suggest and incomes aren't even rising as fast as cpi.

That's not different in Europe. Especially housing is a problem.

Education is a problem, at much lower prices than in the US, in most places, e.g. Germany. Thankfully not in Belgium, although quality is an issue. I don't know about insurance, but most types of insurance in the US aren't a problem ... because they don't exist except for expats (which means mostly EU employees/politicians). In .be you do not get to go outside of the normal insurance if you're a normal person.

Treatments outside of what the country insures are generally not accessible at any price. There was a very famous example of that in the "baby Pia" case.

And housing is shooting up. Both rent and prices. From a lower base, sure, but still shooting up and you have to finance it from a much lower salary.

You should compare individual incomes, not household incomes. American households are large by the standards of the developed world, and single-member households are rare.

What exactly are you looking for? The quality of life has increased by many metrics for the vast majority of people in the world over the last century.

The quality of my life has not improved over the course of my adulthood. It was for a while then stalled and now I'm seeing reductions. Like for instance, it used to be that I could go out with dinner at restaurant now and again without having to think about the cost and its impact on my monthly budget. Now I have to ration that kind of activity. I was considering moving to a larger house, but that's fiscally impossible now. I used to take actual vacations on a plane to places - also now off the table. This may seem like whining because I have a place to live and can buy groceries and pay bills. But that's it. I am seeing objective losses in my options because my income is well below inflation (both real and reported). My personal quality of life is decreasing. That is the metric I'm using.

Probably some of the other metrics then I would guess.

I agree with your second paragraph completely, but I would say that a Scandinavian-style democratic socialism has plenty of evidence for a system that works better. A Mondragon-style cooperative system has a much smaller sample size, but even more positive results in a myriad of outcomes.

There's enough alternatives out there to get a conversation started, we shouldn't be dismissive.

Social democracy, not democratic socialism. Scandinavian social democrats abandoned socialism during the cold war and embraced mostly free but regulated markets. Democratic socialism is more similar to what Eurocommunists believed in, but most of them also abandoned socialism after the cold war.

Scandinavian countries have tax rates above 50%, quasi free healthcare and free meals at school.

In the US that isn't even considered socialist, That's seen at total communism that would destroy the country in q couple years.

Scandinavian countries have done it for decades and are some of the freest countries in the world.

Socialism means the abolition of private property. If it's possible to own shares in a company you don't work in, the country is by definition not socialist.

Actual socialism was a mainstream political option in Europe until recently. Using the word to refer to something mostly unrelated will only confuse people.

Marx's version of "socialism" meant the abolition of private property.

In practicality, like it or not, "socialism" is used to represent an extremely large range of ideas. Today it almost exclusively refers to "social democracy" (ie, what we see in Scandinavia) and almost nobody is out here advocating for the abolition of private property.

In America, we see a lot of intentional conflation of these terms, used as a scare tactic, because our public is under-educated on these terms and we have a lot of emotional baggage left over from the Cold War.

Many in the media and in politics talk about socialist ideas such as free healthcare and education as if they're a prelude to full-blown Marxist abolition of private property when in reality, literally nobody is asking for that.

In American use, "socialism" often means the same as "fascism": people and ideas on the other side you don't like.

In European use, it often refers to actual socialism, though this varies by country. When it means actual socialism, the left rarely talks about it at all. Because it's something they (or their parents/grandparents) explicitly rejected.

As someone working in an American university known for activism, it seems to me that actual socialism is more popular in the US than in Europe. When something happens on campus, socialists are often involved. But almost none of the radical left activists I knew as a student in Finland were socialists.

You are mixing socialism and communism.

In the US the last President to try to give us all free health care was Nixon.

Early on, Nixon made his name rooting out communists in America with HUAC.

How times have changed.

even tried to implement a negative income tax until that got torpedoed by his advisors.

also set up the EPA.

> Where did government get "out of the way"?

Come to Eastern Europe and notice the privatization of many services that we had taken for granted back in the day, such as Healthcare.

I'd argue that government didn't get out of the way per se, but was slowly captured by money.

Which country in Eastern Europe doesn't have national healthcare anymore?

Romania’s is all but privatized by this point, I’m talking de facto.

Neoliberalism was a loan against the future for cheaper goods and profits today. It has contributed significantly to the wealth inequality in the US and the dismantling of worker's rights.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com