Later that little solution turned into to the research that earned him a Nobel prize and became the most accurate scientific theory to date (or second most accurate, I'm no expert).
How much did it cost for him to come up with that theory? How many other things did he work on that became nothing? You have to balance such scientific freedom with practicality. Sometimes you gotta reign in curiosity lest it just drift off into trivialism. Google for example does a good job of balancing the curiosity and productivity.
But that mal-investment would only be because of errors in judgment. It will not be because of systemic issues which is the case now.
I still fail to see what the systemic issue is. The fed both expands and contracts the money supply with the specific objective of maintaining growth without letting inflation get out of control. When there is a bubble people will borrow from anywhere, heck people were buying stocks during the dotcom era with credit cards. A low rate of inflation prevents wealth from becoming stagnant. For an economy to function best money needs to be constantly exchanged.
The money supply should grow to reflect the new wealth created. Inflation, by definition, is more money than the actual wealth created.
If the Real GDP is positive that means that the growth in new wealth (nominal gdp) is greater than the expansion of the money supply (inflation).
This is exactly what is happening now. Inflation was created by Greenspan to help investment. All that malinvestment in housing is what is coming back to bite the economy now.
The boom-bust cycle happens in any market. The fed increased rates during the tech bubble and housing bubbles to reduce investment by raising the cost to borrow. All the fed can do is manage the money supply, how individuals invest that money is what causes such economic problems. The reason there were stock and housing bubbles was because there were enormous rates of return in those specific industries (double digit growth rates). Interest rates could have been increased so that people wouldn't have continued investing in those sectors, however, such a move would have a disasterous effect on investment everywhere else in the economy.
Ask yourself this question - if inflation can help investment, why not inflate a lot and inflate all the time. Wouldn't that help growth all the time?
It's all about managing risk. You want to introduce a small level of inflation so that wealth isn't hoarded and people are forced to take limited risk (investment). If inflation is too high, there are no rational opportunities to maintain wealth and the system collapses. A sustainable inflation rate is one where inflation is less than GDP growth (as you point out the money supply growing less than the number of new widgets made). Since the Real GDP is positive this is actually what is happening. As mentioned before the money supply is not micromanaged and bubbles form in specific industries because of the choices at the individual level.
They are not competing currencies because one cannot demand to be paid in those currencies. By law, you have to accept the Fed note as a legal payment.
Not necessarily. Just because dollars are the most generally accepted form of payment doesn't mean I can't exchange other methods of payments or proxy currencies.
Good enough for free + little bit of education would go a long way
Good enough + little bit of legislation would be better. People in the US have been conditioned when things go wrong, find a scapegoat and sue em.
Fighting the present war blew the military budget out of all proportions. That trillion (or whatever the amount was) on top of normal spending is what I had in mind.
Well that can be said about any poorly managed program. The government can overspend on wars, medicine, or anything else.
The problem with the Fed and fiat money is that they consistently create more new money than the new value/products/services created. And this is by design due to the political process.
It's not just the Fed and actual money printing, anytime there is money lending there is effectively a defacto increase in the money supply. Further a small amount of inflation encourages investment.
The standard answer (mostly from supporters of Ron Paul and in mises.org) is "the value of gold will increase to account for the new value created". That is true. But that means that everyone who holds gold gets a share of the new wealth created even if they did not contribute
Exactly. What you end up with is a situation where people who hold wealth are better off hoarding it than investing. That was one of the problems in the late 19th century where farmers could not afford to get loans because the money supply was too limited.
What is needed is a free market in currencies - people will come up with solutions that are varied and that serve different purposes.
We already have that. There are virtual currencies and other exchangable notes for goods & services - linden dollars, QQ, airline miles, gift cards, etc.
However, it is really tragic that in the 21st century the wealthiest countries (apart from few examples) don't provide highest quality healthcare for all their people.
That is the fundamental problem, everybody wants the absolute highest quality of healthcare. Such levels of quality result in much higher expenses in terms of testing, quality control, litigation, etc. People won't accept good enough healthcare, they want the absolute best, and even then if that doesn't work they'll sue because somebody is to blame.
There is just no way that anybody can convince me that money spent on military in USA cannot be spent for more useful purposes.
The military isn't just about fighting wars, it is a strategic tool for trade (which helps fill the tax coffers). The same arguement about "better spent elsewhere" can be made for almost any other government program. NASA, building super colliders, school lunch subsidies could all be "better spent."
There was an article about Range Voting not too long ago...
There are a number of problems with range voting. First you run into the prisoner's dilemma. If I vote honestly, and somebody else does not the weight of my vote is less. When the system is gamed in that way it approaches the plurality model (10points for my candidate 0 for everybody else). The second problem goes more to the philosophical side of government. Are you looking for somebody who merely is a proxy for the masses, or are you looking for leadership. Range voting ideally results in pissing people off the least. This would penalize anyone calling for radical change to the status quo, a characteristic that made previous great leaders.
If your time to reproduce a tshirt is worth less than $7 then it makes sense for you to do that. Now try to sell your bootleg tshirt.
Who says I have to sell the bootleg t-shirt? Just as sharing MP3's is trivial, sharing t-shirt graphics is trivial, and easy for anybody to make it online. You don't have to enter the market to subvert it.
A user with a music subscription has nothing invested (except perhaps commodity hardware) and can switch easily. The ability of a customer to switch to a competior easily means you make very little money.
You can make the person invest their time, and make it difficult to switch to a competitor (eg specialized hardware).
If 53% of people vote for Person A, and Person B gets elected, many would argue that something very wrong has happened somewhere along the line.
The problem is that really 31% of people voted for person A, 30% voted for person B, and 4% voted for person C, and 35% didn't vote. So the election does not represent the majority anyways (69% of people didn't vote for the guy with the most votes).
Median income probably does a good job controlling for age, sex, ethnicity, and job type, and population density will, to some degree, cover polling station proximity.
Using such general variables makes sense when the data set is very large, but in this case the total data set of 200k is not enough to really be able to use such sweeping generalizations. For example there is a difference in voting habits between a $40k/year job in manufacturing and $40k/year job in the service industry.
Treat the nonrival/nonexcludable product as advertising to sell something else that is rival or excludable -- like concerts or t-shirts.
Problem is that t-shirts can be cheaply reproduced (buy the concert t-shirt for $25 or download the images and make one myself for $18 online), and concerts are an extremely limited revenue generator that using CD's & downloads as advertising doesn't make sense. What we will more likely see is streaming subscription services. Lock the user in, stream the information so that instead of taking 3 minutes to rip and burn a CD, the user has to spend 45 minutes recording off the stream. Maybe even encrypting the stream so that it is trivial for dedicated hardware to decode, but is slow for non-dedicated chip to tie the service into hardware.
Corporations that sell infinite goods can sell extremely cheap-to-produce reproductions of their products with no practical limits, and do not require more labor to make them (except for DVD pressings or servers hosting the material for example, which typically represent a tiny fraction of production costs).
The key thing you are forgetting is that the corporation must sell the "infinite good." Yes the cost to reproduce is cheap, but the cost to find another customer increases. If you want to sell more of an item you don't just cheaply reproduce it, you also must have increased labor cost in terms of marketing spends.
It seems to me that laborers in "infinite" production industries have a very good argument for residuals, from the perspective of fairness.
So does the lighting guy, carpenter, or caterer, who are laborers in an "infinite" industry, deserve residuals? Ideally every movie makes money, but in reality many fail. Do you think laborers on a movie set would accept not getting paid because a movie bombed?
The reality is that any industry is a combination of "finite" and "infinite" resources given your definition.
RTFA. We controlled for % holding bachelor's degrees, median household income, and population density - that's why this is newsworthy. The diebold effect is still significant.
What about age, sex, ethnicity, job types, distance from polling station, etc? There are a huge number of variables that not only affect which candidate a particular district supports, but also the motivation of those people to vote.
That, and with the two dominant parties in the USA garnering around what, 85% of the vote, if one of the leading candidate's parties screws the public as you say, they are left with only one viable alternative, which is unfortunate. (gets into a "lesser of the two evils" doesn't it?)
If there is a special interest group that commands a large chunk of votes if they are not represented by either party, one of those political parties will absorb their agenda to gain an advantage.
Ask the PC Games industry whether copy protection is needed or futile.
Actually whats more interesting is look at how more PC game developers are moving towards closed box consoles. Part of the reason is because the risk of piracy is lower, sure you can mod chip or emulate, but those are steps which are more difficult for the average consumers.
I never told people to hoard for decades, just during bubble periods so you can buy assets post-crash at a huge discount.
Buy-low, sell-high is great in theory, but timing the market to be effective is the problem. If you started hoarding in 2005 yes it paid off, if you started in 2001 then no you lost out significantly.
Trillions in new dollars have been created, and still exist sitting hoarded in China and India's central banks, but credit is tight.
Those countries aren't hoarding dollars, they are buying US debt (paying for our wars)
Saving via hoarding keeps you liquid, and ready. I bought a great home (100 year old and solid) for 1X income, not 3X or heaven forbid 5X. I bought an almost new 42" 1080p LCD for half price. I'm buying used gold jewelry for 65% of spot -- with hoarded cash.
Now imagine if you had invested that cash in something like oil.
But during the bubble popping periods, after the dead cat bounces, bubbled assets tend to crash below their theoretical equilibrium values, bringing the hoarded cash value to a stronger level.
If you look at the housing market, values are still well above the 2001 levels when the bubble started to form.
We also hoard mostly in gold, but since 2005 over half our cash hoardings have been in Euros and Dirhams. I sold all my Euros to buy the house.
Then you were not hording dollars, you were investing in other assets.
The Special Interest Groups only need to focus on 435 people currently. If they had to spread their $ around to more people, the amount they could offer each would be much less and more easily overcome by a small band of normal constituents.
Making Senators into super-Representatives was just silly. The House has a 2-year term because the electorate is fickle. Senators have a 6-year term because (in theory) your legislators are wise enough to make more thoughtful decisions. If we trust them enough to make laws for the state, can't we trust them enough to select Senators?
Back when senators were elected by legislatures they were more reflective of the elite class. It was a good ol' boys network that represented the defacto aristocracy of the rich and powerful that state legislators typically came from.
Oh, wait.. Are you suggesting they have representation on the national level, but not the state level? I'm confused. What's your point?
The period where local and state government got to choose lifestyles allowed states to choose slavery to be legal and cast non-whites as a lower class.
I kinda like the freedoms that used to come with the US....and the choices of lifestyle presented by letting local and state govts rule based on the needs and wants of the white males that occupy them.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to balance such scientific freedom with practicality. Sometimes you gotta reign in curiosity lest it just drift off into trivialism. Google for example does a good job of balancing the curiosity and productivity.
When there is a bubble people will borrow from anywhere, heck people were buying stocks during the dotcom era with credit cards.
A low rate of inflation prevents wealth from becoming stagnant. For an economy to function best money needs to be constantly exchanged.
If the Real GDP is positive that means that the growth in new wealth (nominal gdp) is greater than the expansion of the money supply (inflation).
All the fed can do is manage the money supply, how individuals invest that money is what causes such economic problems. The reason there were stock and housing bubbles was because there were enormous rates of return in those specific industries (double digit growth rates). Interest rates could have been increased so that people wouldn't have continued investing in those sectors, however, such a move would have a disasterous effect on investment everywhere else in the economy.
It's all about managing risk. You want to introduce a small level of inflation so that wealth isn't hoarded and people are forced to take limited risk (investment). If inflation is too high, there are no rational opportunities to maintain wealth and the system collapses.
A sustainable inflation rate is one where inflation is less than GDP growth (as you point out the money supply growing less than the number of new widgets made). Since the Real GDP is positive this is actually what is happening. As mentioned before the money supply is not micromanaged and bubbles form in specific industries because of the choices at the individual level.
Not necessarily. Just because dollars are the most generally accepted form of payment doesn't mean I can't exchange other methods of payments or proxy currencies.
Well that can be said about any poorly managed program. The government can overspend on wars, medicine, or anything else.
Exactly. What you end up with is a situation where people who hold wealth are better off hoarding it than investing. That was one of the problems in the late 19th century where farmers could not afford to get loans because the money supply was too limited.
We already have that. There are virtual currencies and other exchangable notes for goods & services - linden dollars, QQ, airline miles, gift cards, etc.
The military isn't just about fighting wars, it is a strategic tool for trade (which helps fill the tax coffers). The same arguement about "better spent elsewhere" can be made for almost any other government program. NASA, building super colliders, school lunch subsidies could all be "better spent."
First you run into the prisoner's dilemma. If I vote honestly, and somebody else does not the weight of my vote is less. When the system is gamed in that way it approaches the plurality model (10points for my candidate 0 for everybody else).
The second problem goes more to the philosophical side of government. Are you looking for somebody who merely is a proxy for the masses, or are you looking for leadership. Range voting ideally results in pissing people off the least. This would penalize anyone calling for radical change to the status quo, a characteristic that made previous great leaders.
You can make the person invest their time, and make it difficult to switch to a competitor (eg specialized hardware).
What we will more likely see is streaming subscription services. Lock the user in, stream the information so that instead of taking 3 minutes to rip and burn a CD, the user has to spend 45 minutes recording off the stream. Maybe even encrypting the stream so that it is trivial for dedicated hardware to decode, but is slow for non-dedicated chip to tie the service into hardware.
If you want to sell more of an item you don't just cheaply reproduce it, you also must have increased labor cost in terms of marketing spends.
So does the lighting guy, carpenter, or caterer, who are laborers in an "infinite" industry, deserve residuals?
Ideally every movie makes money, but in reality many fail. Do you think laborers on a movie set would accept not getting paid because a movie bombed?
The reality is that any industry is a combination of "finite" and "infinite" resources given your definition.
Same applies to quality carriers flying to asia like Singapore Air. US airlines suck, domestically and internationally
that was pretty much violated soon after the ink dried... The latest stuff is just a continuation of the last 200 years
Those countries aren't hoarding dollars, they are buying US debt (paying for our wars)
Now imagine if you had invested that cash in something like oil.
Then you were not hording dollars, you were investing in other assets.
I kinda like the freedoms that used to come with the US....and the choices of lifestyle presented by letting local and state govts rule based on the needs and wants of the white males that occupy them.
Fixed it for you