Qasaur

I'd say that this is more of a culture thing rather than a language thing.

I think it is a little ironic that he speaks of performance culture but simutaneously advises to use dynamic dispatch and avoid polymorphism. I can see the justification in non-critical code paths, but serialisation is a pretty important part of most networked software nowadays so I do not think that smaller binaries and faster compilation times (better developer experience) justifies a performance hit in the form of dynamic dispatch through crates like miniserde.

We are very comfortable as technologists and other high-paying (read: inflationary) professionals, but there is a large class of people who are getting thoroughly shafted by these monetary policies and they are your Uber drivers, the people who work at the coffee store, the factory workers in the midwest, and the homeless. The exponential rise in rents in cities are not a natural consequence of the capitalist marketplace, rather its a consequence of loose monetary policy whereby money has entered real estate markets to gain returns by exploiting ridiculous rents.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Again, no coincidence that productivity and wage increases started to diverge significantly after the gold standard was abandoned.

Our modern loose monetary policy and inflation targeting is probably the greatest regressionary redistributional scheme in the history of mankind, and will go down in history as such.

I think what a lot of these articles lack is a discussion of the role that monetary policy plays in the financialization of the American (and, indeed, global) economy. While I agree that there are other factors that lead to the rise of shareholder primacy, I think the most important one is the distortion of relative capital proportions in the economy largely caused through the mechanism of monetary inflation.

I find it odd how there is so little literature on this apart from books and papers from the relatively fringe (but no less accurate) Austrian school of economics. Inflation is not something that happens everywhere in the economy at the same time (the Cantillon effect). Inflationary central banking policies benefit those who are closest (relatively) to the money printer, and in modern Western economies this is almost always financial firms and those who marshal capital. Large inflows of money (inflows that have vastly increaed sinced 2008 after the advent of extensive quantitative easing) allow those close to the central bank to have a larger purchasing power than the rest of the economy as inflation has not "trickled down" yet. This allows said financial firms to purchase assets, invest in companies, and capture value in ways they would otherwise not be able to do and in scales that are completely unnatural. And yes, this includes venture capital firms (for many of us who work in startups, we are among those who are relatively closer to central banks, hence the ridiculous salaries). As there is much more money flowing in the system but less "real" wealth, much of this money heads to equity markets to chase returns, and the result is what is described in the article.

This distortion of the capital base allows financial firms to hold and direct more capital than they otherwise would, so it is no wonder that the financialisation of the American economy and increases in general economic inequality globally largely began after the gold standard was abolished in 1971 and central bank printing presses were set free.

Indeed, I would go so far to say that the real fix to this problem is to abolish inflation targeting (and by consequence the central planning of the money supply through central banks).

It's not free, it's financed by exorbitantly high tax rates, which in the long-run is arguably more expensive.

This isn't really true. When Human Action was written there already was a fair bit of literature on behavioural psychology and other fields, but Mises made a conscious choice to not base his theories on them. In the first part of Human Action Mises does bring this point up but makes a clear distinction between investigations into human behaviour that are rooted in the natural and empirical sciences (i.e. biology) and his own flavour which is rooted in a Kantian-esque introspection. This concept is referred to in Mises' work as well as in the works of his successors as methodological dualism, and is a core tenet of Austrian social analysis.

I disagree. How can we even begin to design or improve a system that emulates intelligence if we do not even know what it means to be intelligent?

It is not a reasonable question because inquiries into this matter start from the assumption that capitalism is a conscious creation by man (and thus replaceable) and not something that, through the laws of human action, evolves spontaneously between free individuals.

>Right off the bat, you insist that any alternative to capitalism is necessarily the whim of a "central planner", and go on to suggest that:

Yes, because an alternative to capitalism (the interactions between free individuals in a market) necessitates the use of coercion to enforce, coercion that will inevitably be directed by someone.

>But of course, Socialism does not prescribe a central authority (although many theories suggest one), and an exchange market is not the only way to collectively make decisions.

Let us assume that a collective has made a decision to produce pineapples and not bananas, what happens to the guy who likes bananas and funds the production of bananas and refuses to participate in the production of pineapples?

>The market doesn't tell us why things cost what they do. Proponents of a free market argue that anything the market values is inherently valuable, even if that seems unintuitive. However, I think when many many people are unhappy with the priorities of the market, we should perhaps consider this claim with more scrutiny.

No, and we will never ever know why things cost the way they do, but we can draw some reasonable conclusions based on things like supply and demand. Ultimately however prices are the result of the choices of billions of people in an enormous decentralised system (the market), and it is literally impossible to objectively know the chain of choices that led to one specific good being priced one dollar or ten dollars. Doing so would require knowing every single choice that every man, woman, and child makes every single moment as well as taking into account the choices they didn't choose, the ordinal scale of which is quite literally infinite for every individual.

>Proponents of a free market argue that anything the market values is inherently valuable, even if that seems unintuitive.

No, the subjective theory of value does not say that, in fact it says the opposite: it is impossible to determine the objective value of goods since they come from the subjective choices of free individuals. Prices come pretty damn close though. Ironically, it is Marx that said that value can be determined objectively through the lens of the labour theory of value where the amount of labor put into a good is what determines its value. That, most certainly, is unintuitive.

Let us, for the sake of the argument ignore the fact that capitalism, voluntary exchange, and the free market is the _only_ system that is capable of rationally allocating resources in a society and instead assume that we have somehow surpassed the need for capital-based economics. What do the central planners like the author of the book have in mind to "replace" capitalism? The proposed solutions always boil down to some form of common ownership of the means of production. Private ownership is considered obsolete and common ownership of resources with a rational distribution system where everyone receives what they need. In the past people proposed that this rational distribution system would be controlled by a committee of experts, and today the same people say that a highly intelligent computer system would marshal the resources. Human needs can be objectively determined, and damn those who demand more than what they are entitled to from the rational distribution system.

Sounds familiar? That is because it is. Socialism _always_ fails because a central authority cannot, objectively, plan an economy better than the collective decisions by acting men in the free market. Hayek wrote about this in his essay _The Use of Knowledge in Society_ [1] This is the same fallacy that caused the collapse of every single planned economy in the past and will in the future. Without prices there is no economic calculation, and the best pricing system is one that is based on private property. Frankly, after skimming the book, I find that his entire argument boils down to the fact that he believes that certain things should be worth more and others should be worth less, and damn the market for telling me why they cost the way they do. There is a reason space travel costs as much as it does, but luckily for us we have a system that allows for entrepreneurship where innovative individuals and corporations who are able to arbitrage between the cost of factor inputs and the prices of their output get rewarded with a handsome profit. Since it is in their interest to maximise their spread they always tend to discover ways cut costs while still delivering the product that their customers demand (just look at Elon Musk and his space venture).

While I agree with the author that enabling people to widely access information will speed up the process of entrepreneurship, time is unfortunately an element in entrepreneurial discovery and there is no coming around that.

[1] http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html