>Marie Antoinette literally had to lose her head for this to happen.
Arguably it was actually Robespierre losing is head that had to happen to stop the madness (Terror) in France, or at least create the conditions for it to stop eventually.
I don't know what has to happen in Russia. It is possible for autocratic states, that have always been autocratic, to transition to liberal democracy. It did happen in France, but even after the end of the Terror it still went through a long phase of imperial autocracy. It takes time to develop institutions strong enough to resist autocracy.
Zelensky was arguably a nobody internationally, until he lead his country to stalling out the entire military might of the Russian Federation in a war that's only a few months away from being longer than the Great Patriotic One, and keep on giving Russia bloodey noses like taking out a chunk of their strategic bomber fleet, the underwater drone strike on Novorossiysk, and tanking the Russian economy. Not bad for a literal comedian.
Or buy an up-specced conventional laptop with a ton more storage and RAM to start with for the same price. Get your upgrades in first at no extra cost.
If you're getting a Framework with the top specs and can't get a competing laptop at higher spec cheaper, I can see the argument that you might benefit from the extra upgradability headroom. However that almost certainly means a mainboard upgrade, and I'd be concerned about the thermals of a current chassis with a hypothetical future mainboard.
Sure, capitalism isn't perfect. No economic system is, mainly because they're all composed of us semi-evolved chimps. Every economic system has that problem. Getting rid of or severely constraining economic freedoms isn't a solution, it makes it worse.
Ok but if its taken you just three comments to get to "well... nothing is perfect I guess" where did that initial conviction come from?? Like why even play out this same argument if your heart isn't even in it? Is it a sense of obligation? If anything, you do your entire position a disservice by folding so quickly. It just goes to show noone deep down even believes these stories anymore, even we expect others to.
Like, yes, we are discussing an "imperfection" here! You are the one that asserting the greater perfection, not the lesser.
The Baumol effect says wages for doctors will also have to go up. Society can afford this because it now has commensurately more resources due to increased efficiency. It’s a tide that raises all boats, precisely because of this effect. This is why a taxi in London costs and pays better than the same service in Cairo.
> Society can afford this because it now has commensurately more resources due to increased efficiency.
Does it though? Suppose that Wall St has discovered a strategy, like high frequency trading, that produces nothing but allows the one doing it to extract a margin that would otherwise have gone to the second-fastest trader. Many people are employed in a competition to be the fastest because being the fastest is rewarded but it's a zero-sum game where nothing useful is produced and the players each have to continuously spend resources to keep running faster in order to stay in the same place.
What benefit is the person now paying more for healthcare getting in exchange for this?
> It’s a tide that raises all boats, precisely because of this effect.
What if it's not all boats? Suppose it causes doctors to get paid more because people who have the wherewithal to become doctors could also work in finance, but it doesn't cause retail clerks to get paid more because Wall St isn't hiring them away from their existing jobs, and in the meantime they now have to pay more for healthcare.
High frequency trading does create benefits. It speeds up market corrections, increases liquidity, and means buyers and sellers get quicker execution closer to consensus market value.
If financiers and doctors are wealthier, they have more disposable income, some of which they will spend in retail, benefiting retail clerks. They will also get taxed more, benefiting other tax payers.
The Baumol effect is sometimes described as a disease. It isn’t. It’s fundamentally redistributive.
> It speeds up market corrections, increases liquidity, and means buyers and sellers get quicker execution closer to consensus market value.
This is the BS that Wall St says whenever people complain about them doing it. Nobody actually benefits from getting their liquidity in 8ms instead of 8.2ms, and in fact it costs them the money the high frequency trader was making compared to having the exchange's computers do it without taking a margin for itself.
> If financiers and doctors are wealthier, they have more disposable income, some of which they will spend in retail, benefiting retail clerks.
Or they'll further outbid the people in retail on things like housing, making them poorer yet.
> They will also get taxed more, benefiting other tax payers.
Only if the other taxpayers actually get taxed less instead of the government giving the extra money to cronies.
> it doesn't cause retail clerks to get paid more because Wall St isn't hiring them away from their existing jobs
Nobody with an existing job actually has to switch professions for Baumol to occur. As the pay gap widens, more kids would study finance and fewer kids would consider retail an adequate career, leading to a relative shortage of retail labor, raising retail wages.
Your premise is that the people who work in retail have the option of studying finance or medicine. Suppose they work in retail because they scored at the 20th percentile on entrance exams and couldn't get into college.
The 20th percentile probably wouldn't go into finance. But there's a "average" cutoff somewhere. Maybe 50th percentile. Maybe 80th. It doesn't matter. That cutoff will move if demand shifts.
Suppose the cutoff to get into finance is at the 70th percentile of the general population and 99% of retail clerks are below the 50th percentile or otherwise have some reason not to even though those jobs already pay significantly more. How much more are they going to get paid because of that?
Or let's even suppose that the amount isn't totally inconsequential. Say they end up with an extra $1000/year. But now they're also paying $1500/year more for medicine. They're still down $500/year.
Throwing out random numbers is not a convincing argument about how things would actually work in reality.
Consider the fact that median real income tends to move up [1]. This is the metric that matters. It's the 50th percentile person, so mega rich outliers are ignored. And it weighs incomes against the CPI, which incorporates the price of medicine, construction, education, as well as consumer electronics, food, and pretty much everything people spend money on in realistic proportions. That's objective evidence that people actually get richer, even though the price of labor does tend to go up across the board, relative to goods.
> Consider the fact that median real income tends to move up [1]. This is the metric that matters.
Well, it's what matters if the CPI metric is perfect and doesn't e.g. over-weight things like food that haven't increased in cost as much as some other things.
And again, nobody is claiming that efficiency hasn't improved or that that isn't good. The issue is, if efficiency improves by 300% and then you get a 70% improvement out of it, that's bad -- people should have gotten the whole thing instead of having rent seekers capture a huge proportion of the improvement.
And for some specific subset of "efficiency improvements" the result isn't even guaranteed to be positive for the average person, so we don't need to lump them all together into an aggregate.
Exactly. Even though Baumol himself used the phrase "Cost Disease", I think that framing distracts from the fact that it is a result of something desirable happening, namely increased efficiency in some sectors. You could also posit a case where some sectors become less efficient, due to badly conceived regulations, exhaustion of non-renewable resources, an unchecked monopoly, or some other factor, but you don't need a special mechanism to explain why prices rise in such a scenario.
> ...consider a case where finance becomes much more productive... leading to fewer people becoming doctors because finance is much more attractive.
This is the opposite of what one would expect from a sector whose efficiency increases, as modeled by Baumol. See the first bullet in the article: "The share of total employment in sectors with high productivity growth decreases, while that of low productivity sectors increases" (also see the detailed analysis in the Technical Description section). It might be theoretically possible that induced demand could still increase overall employment in a sector as its efficiency increases, but I think you have to make an argument why that would be true. During the industrial revolution, automation eliminated 98% of the labor required to produce a yard of cotton cloth, but between 1830 and 1900 the number of weavers in the US increased by a factor of 4, because demand increased due to lower prices [0]... although the US population also increased by a factor of 6, so as a percentage of the workforce weavers still declined, even as people consumed much more cloth per capita.
[0] James Bessen, Learning by Doing - The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth (2015), pp. 96–97.
I picked finance for my example because demand is practically unlimited. People only need so many clothes, but when your business comes from making money directly, there’s a lot of room for growth.
Imagine some new math allows HFT to make more money. HFT firms wouldn’t start laying off quants. They’d probably hire more to try to capture more of that new money, and they’d have more money available for hiring.
It’s not like their wages will always go up exactly in proportion to your income. Goods and services that are afflicted will become less accessible if your own wages increase at a lower rate.
Infringing on that should be justified in terms of protecting the rights of those involved, such as ensuring the quality of goods, enforcement of reasonable contract terms and such. We are involved in the process as participants in the market, and that’s the basis of any legitimacy we have to impose any rules in the market. That includes an obligation to fair treatment of other participants.
If someone writes notes, procedures, a diary, software etc for their own use they are under no obligation to publish it, ever. That’s basic privacy protection. Whether an executable was written from scratch in an assembler or is compiled from high level source code isn’t anyone else’s business. It should meet quality standards for commercial transactions and that’s it. There’s no more obligation to publish source than there is to publish design documents, early versions, or unpublished material. That would be an overreaching invasion of privacy.
On what justification? You just want to take their stuff, because?
People shouldn’t lose their rights to what they own, just because they do so through a company.
I do think reasonable taxation and regulation is justifiable but on the understanding that it is an imposition. There is a give and take when it comes to rights and obligations, but this seems like overreach.
On the spectrum of authoritarian oligarchy of the type you describe, from 0 (liberal democracy with well regulated free market capitalism) to 100 (totalitarian oligarchy), where would you put: The USA; The average EU country; Russia.
Arguably it was actually Robespierre losing is head that had to happen to stop the madness (Terror) in France, or at least create the conditions for it to stop eventually.
I don't know what has to happen in Russia. It is possible for autocratic states, that have always been autocratic, to transition to liberal democracy. It did happen in France, but even after the end of the Terror it still went through a long phase of imperial autocracy. It takes time to develop institutions strong enough to resist autocracy.
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