It does not work that way. Game changers *are* incremental technology.
Yes and no. Technology tends to increase incrementally, it's effects on society may not.
As far as Genetic Engineering goes, right now we're building tools which make gene manipulation possible, easy, and cheap. We're already read everything, but we understand very little of how the code works, so we're building databases to explain that. These tools which build tools or explain how other things work are still growing, but the rate of growth and the rate of our increase in understanding seems high.
With cloning sheep, making stronger corn, and three parent'ed people as a baseline, I'm not sure what +X% more technology means in terms of our abilities, but we might be staring at multiple game changers, and it's hard for me to picture this NOT happening in the next 50 years.
Designer kids may be a boring technology when they finally come out, but the impact on society won't be.
The next game changer is almost certainly self-driving cars.
2) Considering how much you owe Deutsche Bank, what do you think about the fact they will have trouble playing their fine for their role in defrauding people during the mortgage crisis?
And, maybe most importantly, does the size of the fine have anything to do with the fact that they're Trump's bank?
As *supposedly* part of Warren Buffet’s shtick was ‘making sure to investigate companies he was investigating it’, a lot of his shine has worn off recently, and the jury is kinda out if he’s *actually* an investor that beats the market, or just a guy that was lucky until now.
He's been doing his thing for 60 years and has gone from being a millionaire to Billionaire to many many Billions.
The scale of his mistakes and successes has certainly gotten larger, and he's also 86, it's possible he's off his prime.
Except, uh, it actually hasn’t. It’s gone into *incremental* upgrades, but, in reality, that’s *always* what it’s gone into…it’s just, between the 20s and 60s, a lot of stuff incrementally got good enough (Or at least small and cheap enough) for households to use.
Incremental is great (useful, etc) but a few times a century we get a real game changer. Genetic engineering might be next. :)
One of the problems with the idea of a guy who can consistently beat the market is... why should he do it for you? He should charge a premium for that service equal to most of the "extra" money you'd get. Which in turn leads to lots of people claiming they can do this, charging "appropriately", and then handing in substandard results after subtracting their pricy fees.
I'd love to think that Trump is done... but I never understood his attraction to voters to start with. A lot of the people claiming he's done have claimed that lots of times, that doesn't bode well.
When they do this, they consider exactly the sorts of things you ask about:
Sure, that's the example of a well functioning gov program. That's how it's supposed to work.
But nothing in your description justifies what we see in practice, which is exponential growth. Even if we subtract GNP per cap growth, it's still exponential growth.
Which is why I keep pointing out that we have serious long term problems stemming from all this, and why I try to bring up causes... but there's a lot of people who look at these trends and proclaim 'don't worry, be happy', it can't happen here, and if it does we can use hyperinflation.
The first step in dealing with a problem is to admit that there's a problem.
...countries don’t have programs to vaccinate against mumps.
You can substitute in "disease X" if you want.
First, a lot of the costs in a vaccine program are gonna be fixed, so it really oughta scale with per capita GDP.
I'm not following. Can you use an example?
New vaccines protecting against new diseases are being developed pretty consistently. For you have more money (’cause you have more revenue) you can protect people against other infections, like HPV or varicella, and derive more public health benefits.
True, but this is also an example of a program increasing scope that ought to be budget approved if it's going to require more money.
How much is the vaccination, how nasty is the disease, what happens if we wait 7 years for the drug to go off patent? If it's a nasty disease and we don't have budget, then should we be ending vaccination for disease "X" and doing this one instead?
True but it's not the bulk of GDP's growth. Earlier I posted links suggesting pop growth was roughly responsible for 20% of GDP's. Further roughly 70% of our pop growth is because of immigration, and aren't immigrates under-consumers of these sorts of programs?
Further these programs are growing faster than GDP, and a lot faster than pop growth. We might as well handwave it because it's not the bulk of the problem.
[GDP's growth] has nothing to do with new fancy goods or services.
From wiki: "Another major cause of economic growth is the introduction of new products and services..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_growth#New_products_and_services
If the vaccine prices go up with inflation the vaccine costs as a percentage...
True, but if we start a vaccine program in 1950, then by 1970 the technology is twenty years old, and by 2000 it's 50 years old. 50+ year old technologies don't normally "increase" (especially exponentially) in price after adjusted for inflation. Further during that time transportation costs also went down, record keeping went from paper to computer, etc.
A program like vaccines, absent pharma jacking vaccine prices because it can...
Yes, price jacking is an example of misuse.
Do you have proof (little long term charts) that individual programs are doing what you say they are doing?
These programs weren't created to consume this much GDP. From a budgetary standpoint, exponential growth in costs in combination with a blank check is "misuse" or "scope growth" by definition. If you and I agree I'll buy a new car from you every year, you don't get to increase the price by 20x and claim it's still what we originally agreed, very clearly it's not.
The point was the growth in these social programs has been partly hidden by the decrease in the military. Their growth as a percentage of GDP has always been problematic.
Why should a gov program expand to match GDP? Shouldn't most programs, if they're sticking within their original mandate, get less expensive (especially as a percentage of the total economy)?
Say we decide we're going to vaccinate every kid in America against Mumps.
Presumably that doesn't get more expensive if Apple comes out with a new 'must have' product. Actually the program should get less expensive as we figure out different and better ways to reach all children, and economies of scale should reduce the cost per kid (inflation and pop growth would change things, but I'm handwaving that for this example).
New goods and services come out, the GDP doubles... but we're not talking about inflation so the cost of the vaccination (etc) aren't supposed to also double.
For the cost of the program to grow faster than inflation+population growth means the program is either being misused or it's expanding it's scope. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if it's expanding it's scope it really should be getting budget approval.
Dark Matter: where cuts in military spending have hidden the costs of these programs
David Parsons: Uh, that’s not actually true.
In "Washington-speak" 'cut' means 'don't increase as fast'.
The best but not the easiest to read. Shows Military spending as a percentage of GDP.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2020USp_17s2li011lcn_30f_20th_Century_Defense_Spending
Defense spending as a percentage of federal
http://www.heritage.org/~/media/images/reports/2011/11/defending%20defense/chart2.ashx?w=543&h=333&as=1
Entitlements vs. Military spending as a gov percentage.
http://www.heritage.org/~/media/images/reports/2012/10/sr121/srfedspendingnumbers2012p12chart1.ashx?w=600&h=531&as=1
David Parsons: I’m not so sure about that.A brief search through the net of a billion lies gives me a bunch of charts that don’t seem to show any sort of exponential growth over the last 100 years. What are the parameters you’re using to claim exponential growth?
Those charts are gov spending as a whole, on a time frame where cuts in military spending have hidden the costs of these programs. Money is fungible, the programs were originally small and military spending originally large.
If you look at military spending as a percentage of GDP over that time frame you'll see a linear line trending down with a few blips up for various wars.
If you track these programs individually you'll see blips up when the seniors have voted themselves higher benefits (most recently the drug benefit), but even absent that they consistently grow a few percentage points over inflation, for decades, the very definition of exponential growth.
Do I get to chose? Very well, let’s get completely rid of the USA Armed Forces “Well, not that”
Very good. That is EXACTLY the conversation we need to have, and the best way to have it is to put the big programs on budgets.
Then there would be a political cost to not funding them (i.e. to not raising taxes), and there'd also be a political cost to funding them by raising taxes.
At the moment we're trying to pass the costs on to future taxpayers, and sooner or later we'll run out of other people's money.
I find that the USA has inverted the discussion about government and taxes by not asking “What do you want the government to do?”, and, when getting the public’s answer, setting the taxes taxes required to pay for those things.
One issue is the gov comes back year after year for exponentially more taxes to deal with the same problem. Because of that, there is a massive disconnect between the publics support (desire) for programs and it's support for the tax increases needed to fully fund them.
IMHO it is very fair to say "do what you can with a limited budget", these programs really need to be structured to tolerate that and put on budgets. If they need more money, let Congress approve it and raise the needed taxes to pay for it.
So long as big government is theoretically possible, even by your own terms every election has big consequences because it will always be possible for the government to act in big ways.
The potential is certainly there, the president has the ability to nuke the planet, he and congress could outlaw cars to fight global warming. However most elections are about incremental change, not massive reorganizations.
In short, the Feds had taken no actual steps to abolish slavery and had exerted considerable power to preserve and extend the institution. But the South rebelled anyway, because if an abolitionist party could win national elections consistently, none of that mattered.
Sure. Agreed with all of that.
just as abolitionism was a genie that couldn’t be put back in the bottle then, the welfare state is a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle now.
The moral case for ending slavery is so extreme that it justified burning down the South's economy and making them start over.
The moral case for the welfare state isn't that extreme. Either we figure out a way limit these programs to what we can pay, or lots of people will get hurt when they run out of money and/or break the budget.
"Breaking the budget" includes "needing to raise taxes above what is politically possible".
And it doesn’t occur to you that the greater morality would be ending slavery even if a few Southern planters could make “economic” (but really social) arguments in favor of it.
I'm not supporting slavery, you're just pretending I am so you have a straw man to argue against.
Of course, it’s probably much more complicated than simply “more taxes = fewer jobs.”
Absolutely. Taxes become services, infrastructure, etc, some are highly beneficial.
Reduce the size of government down to zero and you're looking at places where murder is legal, and there is no power, or roads, or contract enforcement. A government which prevents murder, enforces contracts, and builds roads is highly useful and necessary for certain levels of industry.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Moore’s Law Investing Strategy”
Yes and no. Technology tends to increase incrementally, it's effects on society may not.
As far as Genetic Engineering goes, right now we're building tools which make gene manipulation possible, easy, and cheap. We're already read everything, but we understand very little of how the code works, so we're building databases to explain that. These tools which build tools or explain how other things work are still growing, but the rate of growth and the rate of our increase in understanding seems high.
With cloning sheep, making stronger corn, and three parent'ed people as a baseline, I'm not sure what +X% more technology means in terms of our abilities, but we might be staring at multiple game changers, and it's hard for me to picture this NOT happening in the next 50 years.
Designer kids may be a boring technology when they finally come out, but the impact on society won't be.
I think that's a reasonable guess.
On “This Election Is Probably Over”
And, maybe most importantly, does the size of the fine have anything to do with the fact that they're Trump's bank?
On “Moore’s Law Investing Strategy”
He's been doing his thing for 60 years and has gone from being a millionaire to Billionaire to many many Billions.
The scale of his mistakes and successes has certainly gotten larger, and he's also 86, it's possible he's off his prime.
Incremental is great (useful, etc) but a few times a century we get a real game changer. Genetic engineering might be next. :)
"
One of the problems with the idea of a guy who can consistently beat the market is... why should he do it for you? He should charge a premium for that service equal to most of the "extra" money you'd get. Which in turn leads to lots of people claiming they can do this, charging "appropriately", and then handing in substandard results after subtracting their pricy fees.
On “This Election Is Probably Over”
I'd love to think that Trump is done... but I never understood his attraction to voters to start with. A lot of the people claiming he's done have claimed that lots of times, that doesn't bode well.
"
The early rounds were basically a name recognition (and/or who can get the most media coverage) contest, and Trump wins that hands down.
On “The American Interest: A Republic If You Can Keep It”
Yes. And that tracks decently well with the gov's growth into command+control and social(istic) programs.
"
Sure, that's the example of a well functioning gov program. That's how it's supposed to work.
But nothing in your description justifies what we see in practice, which is exponential growth. Even if we subtract GNP per cap growth, it's still exponential growth.
Which is why I keep pointing out that we have serious long term problems stemming from all this, and why I try to bring up causes... but there's a lot of people who look at these trends and proclaim 'don't worry, be happy', it can't happen here, and if it does we can use hyperinflation.
The first step in dealing with a problem is to admit that there's a problem.
"
@j_a
@stillwater
Fair enough.
Graph of long term growth per capita.
http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2011/03/08/long-term-real-growth-in-us-gdp-per-capita-1871-2009
Graph of long term real growth
https://visualizingeconomics.squarespace.com/blog/2010/11/03/us-gdp-1871-2009
Hmm... instead of growing 5x we grew 4x, so pop growth was indeed a 20% effect, or in other words it's a bit player in all this.
"
You can substitute in "disease X" if you want.
I'm not following. Can you use an example?
True, but this is also an example of a program increasing scope that ought to be budget approved if it's going to require more money.
How much is the vaccination, how nasty is the disease, what happens if we wait 7 years for the drug to go off patent? If it's a nasty disease and we don't have budget, then should we be ending vaccination for disease "X" and doing this one instead?
"
Darn it. I want dark matter to fall because of a rewrite of the theory of gravity, maybe one that makes a star drive possible.
Well thanks for the link.
"
True but it's not the bulk of GDP's growth. Earlier I posted links suggesting pop growth was roughly responsible for 20% of GDP's. Further roughly 70% of our pop growth is because of immigration, and aren't immigrates under-consumers of these sorts of programs?
Further these programs are growing faster than GDP, and a lot faster than pop growth. We might as well handwave it because it's not the bulk of the problem.
From wiki: "Another major cause of economic growth is the introduction of new products and services..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_growth#New_products_and_services
True, but if we start a vaccine program in 1950, then by 1970 the technology is twenty years old, and by 2000 it's 50 years old. 50+ year old technologies don't normally "increase" (especially exponentially) in price after adjusted for inflation. Further during that time transportation costs also went down, record keeping went from paper to computer, etc.
Yes, price jacking is an example of misuse.
These programs weren't created to consume this much GDP. From a budgetary standpoint, exponential growth in costs in combination with a blank check is "misuse" or "scope growth" by definition. If you and I agree I'll buy a new car from you every year, you don't get to increase the price by 20x and claim it's still what we originally agreed, very clearly it's not.
"
The point was the growth in these social programs has been partly hidden by the decrease in the military. Their growth as a percentage of GDP has always been problematic.
"
Why should a gov program expand to match GDP? Shouldn't most programs, if they're sticking within their original mandate, get less expensive (especially as a percentage of the total economy)?
Say we decide we're going to vaccinate every kid in America against Mumps.
Presumably that doesn't get more expensive if Apple comes out with a new 'must have' product. Actually the program should get less expensive as we figure out different and better ways to reach all children, and economies of scale should reduce the cost per kid (inflation and pop growth would change things, but I'm handwaving that for this example).
New goods and services come out, the GDP doubles... but we're not talking about inflation so the cost of the vaccination (etc) aren't supposed to also double.
For the cost of the program to grow faster than inflation+population growth means the program is either being misused or it's expanding it's scope. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if it's expanding it's scope it really should be getting budget approval.
"
Test
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real GDP already adjusts for inflation.
You have a point about population but only about 20% of one.
US population roughly doubled between 1940 and 2000, but GDP roughly increased by a factor of 5. So population growth accounts for roughly 20% (ish).
And that assumes no efficiency gains in running the program due to experience (which various industries actually count on).
"
%GDP is exponential because the GDP itself grows exponentially.
So yes, these programs grow "exponentially" (see below links if you don't understand the concept).
http://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/460/why-is-economic-growth-measured-exponentially-rather-than-linearly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth
"
In "Washington-speak" 'cut' means 'don't increase as fast'.
The best but not the easiest to read. Shows Military spending as a percentage of GDP.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2020USp_17s2li011lcn_30f_20th_Century_Defense_Spending
Defense spending as a percentage of federal
http://www.heritage.org/~/media/images/reports/2011/11/defending%20defense/chart2.ashx?w=543&h=333&as=1
Entitlements vs. Military spending as a gov percentage.
http://www.heritage.org/~/media/images/reports/2012/10/sr121/srfedspendingnumbers2012p12chart1.ashx?w=600&h=531&as=1
"
Those charts are gov spending as a whole, on a time frame where cuts in military spending have hidden the costs of these programs. Money is fungible, the programs were originally small and military spending originally large.
If you look at military spending as a percentage of GDP over that time frame you'll see a linear line trending down with a few blips up for various wars.
If you track these programs individually you'll see blips up when the seniors have voted themselves higher benefits (most recently the drug benefit), but even absent that they consistently grow a few percentage points over inflation, for decades, the very definition of exponential growth.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Medicare_2-1.png
"
Very good. That is EXACTLY the conversation we need to have, and the best way to have it is to put the big programs on budgets.
Then there would be a political cost to not funding them (i.e. to not raising taxes), and there'd also be a political cost to funding them by raising taxes.
At the moment we're trying to pass the costs on to future taxpayers, and sooner or later we'll run out of other people's money.
"
One issue is the gov comes back year after year for exponentially more taxes to deal with the same problem. Because of that, there is a massive disconnect between the publics support (desire) for programs and it's support for the tax increases needed to fully fund them.
IMHO it is very fair to say "do what you can with a limited budget", these programs really need to be structured to tolerate that and put on budgets. If they need more money, let Congress approve it and raise the needed taxes to pay for it.
"
The potential is certainly there, the president has the ability to nuke the planet, he and congress could outlaw cars to fight global warming. However most elections are about incremental change, not massive reorganizations.
Sure. Agreed with all of that.
The moral case for ending slavery is so extreme that it justified burning down the South's economy and making them start over.
The moral case for the welfare state isn't that extreme. Either we figure out a way limit these programs to what we can pay, or lots of people will get hurt when they run out of money and/or break the budget.
"Breaking the budget" includes "needing to raise taxes above what is politically possible".
"
I'm not supporting slavery, you're just pretending I am so you have a straw man to argue against.
"
Faith is what you're doing when you're staring at math and data filled trend lines and ignoring them. Following the data is the exact opposite.
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Absolutely. Taxes become services, infrastructure, etc, some are highly beneficial.
Reduce the size of government down to zero and you're looking at places where murder is legal, and there is no power, or roads, or contract enforcement. A government which prevents murder, enforces contracts, and builds roads is highly useful and necessary for certain levels of industry.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.