Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by ETH_start | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

ETH_start

The government has expanded by any objective measure:

From 20% of GDP to 40% of GDP today

From a 34 regulatory agencies/offices to 77 today.

From 5 percent of occupations needing a license in 1950 to 23 percent today

From zero federal environmental review in 1950 to 26 months today for major projects.

From almost zero collective bargaining agreements in the public sector in 1950 to approximately 36 percent of public sector workers being covered by them today.

From 9,700 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1950 to 200,000 pages today.

This idea that the private sector is crowding out the government isn't supported by any empirical evidence, though it's a very common narrative and widely believed.

View on HN

> From 5 percent of occupations needing a license in 1950 to 23 percent today

Most of these are state-level though?

> From zero federal environmental review in 1950 to 26 months today for major projects

That's because they didn't give a shit about the environment in the 50s. They just yeeted nukes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site) and people watched them from the Las Vegas strip. One river caught on fire 14 times holy mackerel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River.

> From 9,700 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1950 to 200,000 pages today.

That doesn't tell us anything. There's just more stuff today that simply didn't exist in 1950.

It's possible the regulation dial has been turned too far the other way. But arguing for going back to 0 regulations is also insanity.

> From 20% of GDP to 40% of GDP today

Yeah, let's cut where all that spending went- medicaid, medicare, social security, and welfare...oh

How do you cut any of these without everyone losing their minds?

> How do you cut any of these without everyone losing their minds?

> medicaid, medicare

You can't. You're dealing with the inevitably increasing costs of human labor as it becomes more valued over time.

To decrease the costs without devaluing human labor inherently requires the use of labor-magnification tools to perform cost amortization, or use machines to move the performance of labor up by one layer of abstraction (directly performing the work -> maintaining the machines that perform the work) and amortize the costs that way.

> social security, and welfare

Both schemes require a sufficiently large working population that is multiple times larger than the recipient population to remain sustainable & relatively painless (Ratio of > 3).

In scenarios where the aforementioned ratio is lowered, whether incrementally or suddenly, the total supply from the working population decreases whilst total demand remains the same. As told in conventional economics, this results in an increase in prices as the same amount of resources chases a decreasing amount of labor.

Which government has expanded? Most communist governments felt after 1990 and privatised their economies.

So you're saying it's improved.

(If you're not, I think you have to explain why the expansion of between say, 6k YBP and 1950 was good expansion, and the growth between 1950 and today was bad expansion. Otherwise it looks like you're picking an arbitrary point and saying it was "best")

I'm not making a normative claim. I'm saying that the narrative in the article — that the private sector has taken over functions of the government and the government has been in retreat — is exactly the opposite of what the statistics show.

The article is claiming it's happened in the last 20-25 years but you seem to have used 1950 as your starting point, so you're not excluding the possibility it's been in reverse since 2000 but not yet fallen to 1950 levels.

It's up since 20 years ago:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ

Fair enough. But why stats from 1950?

The end of World War II to the present is a fairly stable regime, so it can be instructive to see what changed over the course of that era.

In any case, no matter what two points of time you choose, you see the role of government in society increase, whether you want to look at government spending as a share of GDP or the compliance costs paid by corporations as a share of the revenue or the percentage of the workforce who specialize in navigating government-constructed regulations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com