"Really? How come only 18 percent of Japanese polled believe the 2 trillion yen plan by the Aso government will work? A full 71 percent don't think it will do anything to stimulate the economy."
Hard to blame them after, what, 11 or so failed "stimulus packages" so far since the beginning of 1990s. I lost count, really.
"In aggregate economic terms Roosevelt's pre-war policies, including the New Deal, appear to have worked pretty well; the recession that begain in 1929 ended in 1933, and 1933-1937 saw fairly strong aggregate economic growth; the 1937-38 recession, while substantial, was much shallower than the 1929-1933 one."
In aggregate Roosevelt has done horribly badly: were it not for his idiot policies, recession would have been over in 2 years at most. 10 years recession combined with permanent high unemployment (reduced during war by National War Labor Board I think that forced unions to knock off wage demands, and that helped to increase demand for labor) *just do not happen if not caused by policies making them last*.
"1933: 20.6% 1937: 9.1% 1938: 12.5% 1941: 8.0%"...except if that idiot Roosevelt didn't conspire with unions to keep the labor prices artificially high and didn't force retailers to keep the prices artificially high (he publicly berated and regulated the "bad shopkeepers" who dared to reduce prices - just imagine what that did to consumer demand), the recession would have ended in 2 years *at most*, not in 10 years.
Just ask any semi-competent economist, really.
And get it once and for all: correlation is not causation. What you cite is not the proof that New Deal helped reduce the unemployment, what you show is that New Deal kept unemployment *artificially high* for 10 years! In most not very high regulated economies, recession is over in 1-2 years. All by itself. Provided central bank doesn't strangle money supply, and idiot like Roosevelt doesn't prevent prices of labor and goods to naturally adjust.
Just because you stop systematically beating someone doesn't mean you help his health, even if his health improves.
Japan didn't have deflation (well strictly speaking there were some points in 1990s where they had negative _real_ interest rates, but generally it doesn't count as deflation).
There is much simpler explanation to what you write: Japan was simply unwilling to write off the bad loans resulting from their speculative real estate bubble in the 1980s (any similarities to today situation? naa) and in result they couldn't get consumer spending off the ground. That was really the factor behind deferring spending or investment, and not "fear of current situation / uncertain future" which is a psychological factor that doesn't last permanently.
Most likely, all the stimulus packages made their situation even worse, bc they used up money that Japanese consumers could have used to kickstart the investment & consumption cycle again. So yes, no "stimulus" package (which is just a rhetorical hyperbole for taking away money from consumers and spending them on roads & bridges to nowhere) probably would have made them exit recession sooner.
Nnope. Profit of *the most expensive supplier* goes to zero. Even less efficient suppliers bankrupt. The rest (more efficient suppliers) keep their profits.
What I meant is not that you advocated socialism. You may or may not do so; but that is orthogonal to the problem that all govt-backing proposals have so called "socialist calculation problem", in that not being individual purchases they do not have collective wealth of opportunity cost estimation done for them by the large group of people each evaluating utility of the solution in question and voting with dollars accordingly. You don't have to advocate socialism to have an economic calculation problem!
And ugh, Lotus Notes, the worst program ever written (even though as I write I'm forced to use it). Believe me, such crap is best rewritten from scratch. Judging what I can see at work (big computer corporation) software vendors acquiring and selling other software makers are largely trading in crap...
I really don't think that opening Notes source would create healthy open source project. If Mozilla experience is any guide, that is, and even then look how many years it took them, and even then a spinoff project of Firefox was meant to be complementary product while it took off as main thing. Let's even assume IBM would let Notes go for $150 mln, which I don't believe it would.
Making Notes "free product" would certainly have some utility, but without healthy open source project on one hand, and without fee-paying customers supporting development on the other, how much time would it take for it to undergo "bit rot"?
The question remains, how *exactly and in detail*, without hand-waving, you select the programs worth turning into public domain / OSS, and how you provide for their development? I'm afraid you're wishing for good business and would not get one...
"The supermarket will close, leaving a small number of people out of work, which will be offset by the new people employed by the government store, and the government store may even employ more people resulting in a net win... Meanwhile, every single person in the town benefits from the lower prices."
Is this sarcasm on your part or have you reached new depths of economic illiteracy?
Socialism == System of production owned by State. Communism == System of production owned by the People.
GNU == System of production owned by voyeuristic developers pissing on 99% of users and 99% of users pissing on GNU software. The People declared war on Microsoft and Microsoft won.
P.S. Communism == Silly sentiment system of castles flying in air, believed into by economically illiterate and sociologically hopelessly dense and impervious to experience, all wrapped in pink package.
Meanwhile, I say, Ubuntu or DEATH! Err, that was socialism or death.
I believe Linux and Apache, to name just 2 projects, do benefit USA to at least some extent. Not that *anything comparable* would be produced by the said program.
Most important point: it is not hard to estimate that city A needs to be connected to B. Just look at the map.
This largely deflates Socialist Calculation Problem. A road is also comparatively easy to build, technology is established and not much different than it was before, and there are many other reasons why roads are pretty much exception to "govt production".
Software doesn't have any economic properties of a road: it definitely isn't easy to flesh out, design, monitor its development and evaluate skills of people developing it. A better comparison of software would be to aerospace work or perhaps weapons development. Check the prices and efficiency of those.
Obama, we are going to learn if you really are intelligent right out of the gate.
Politically, he's dead duck: can't do anything without infringing on grounds of *some* important (ideological, economic, etc) majority, simply because he doesn't lead simple majority big enough, while govt tools he has at his disposal have been historically proven as ineffective.
A tax cut makes people invest more and spend more. It is true that character of spending matters: private spending doesn't have Socialist Calculation Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem which is why it is efficient and develops economy, even if that means some money ends up in China (hint: this is because Americans have better things to do than manufacturing cheap shoes, read up on comparative advantage, intl trade, mercantilism and such). People estimate opportunity costs in their lives, which drives them to spend money on A and not B. This in turn drives companies to deliver A and not B.
Public spending has political problem on top of Socialist Calculation Problem: it just *doesn't measure opportunity costs and doesn't adjust production accordingly*. Got it? Private economy is directed. Public one isn't. Not in any reasonable sense of the word "direction".
In comparison to economy driven by private needs, public sector is a headless chicken: it just *isn't directed well enough*.
This ultra-short recap should remind some why traditional economy works and New Deal / stimulus packages don't and haven't worked.
Churchill wrote smth about new generations forgetting the experience of previous generations and repeating the same mistakes all over again. You're a living proof he was right.
Basically, the federal government would be "buying" the program from the corporation that developed it and the people would win. Eligibility would have to be determined by a broad spectrum panel of IT/CS professionals from business and academia and would be based on net benefit to the government and the citizens, taking into account whether adequate OSS projects already exist to cover that use.
Why do people always treat politics as non-issue and just assume "hey this is a nice idea let's do this" without consideration for political aspects in person selection, group responsibility, pecking order, pet ideas, lobbying, corruption, laziness, incompetence, Socialist Calculation Problem, inefficiency, irresponsibility....
This principle you describe could conceivably be used in just about any venue of life. Hey! We could make socialism work! Except not: historically and demonstrably, you can't make socialism or govt-backed FOSS work for complex political, sociological and economic reasons. Covering "why" in detail would take 20,000 times the volume of "The Road to Serfdom" by Hayek. Or more.
Yes, those people were dumb, which is why they couldn't make it work. We're not that dumb. Right?
The space program, for example, has resulted in lots of useful product spin-offs, but almost nothing that could not have been discovered independently without spending billions on a manned space program
"In contemporary dollars, Apollo cost $25 billion USD, and at its peak it accounted for almost one cent on every dollar of US economic output. Apollo funds similarly totaled about 20% of all US public and private research money at that time. In 1971, NASA commissioned a study that claimed the Apollo program generated a $7 USD return for every dollar spent. The impartiality of such a study was suspect, since NASA used it to justify their funding requests, and the Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), never much of a friend to the agency, was highly critical.
There was also the question of how relevant such a statistic was even if it was true. A critic could easily observe that to justify the Apollo program only in terms of its incidental benefits and not on its own merit was to imply that it had no merit in itself. States with industries and centers that were the beneficiaries of Apollo funding, such as Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, and California, of course obtained an economic benefit from the work, but could the money have been better spent?
The US interstate highway program, another huge Federal project, also boosted the economy through government contracts, but the end result of the interstate highway system was an "infrastructure" that was directly useful to the vast majority of American citizens, and by even conservative accounting exercises paid back its investment many times over. It is difficult to identify similar long-term benefits from Apollo. The specific technologies developed for the program, such as the Saturn V booster, were more or less abandoned later. While manufacturers used the publicity hype associated with Apollo to promote "space age" products such as Velcro and Teflon, these products had been developed long before. Teflon was actually discovered, more or less by accident, in 1938, and had been used in chemical processing for the US atomic bomb project in World War II.
The only major consumer products to obviously owe their origins to the Apollo program are cordless tools. The Black & Decker company had won a contract to develop a lightweight portable drill for the Apollo program, and promptly developed and delivered it. The company thought they could leverage this effort into a commercial product, and in 1974, Black & Decker introduced a multifunction portable tool that could be configured as a drill, portable vacuum cleaner, and a hedge trimmer. The product died in the marketplace, since nobody had developed low-cost rechargeable batteries that had acceptable lifetimes. The Moon drill itself had used high-grade silver-zinc batteries that were too expensive for a consumer product. It wasn't until 1978 that General Electric was able to provide Black & Decker with rechargeable batteries that could last from five to six years, and in 1979 Black & Decker introduced the popular "Dustbuster" cordless vacuum cleaner. "
I would defend Moon program on the argument that it *made entire humanity more ambitious and feeling less constrained on this planet*, but not even on basis on producing usable technologies as side effects.
As free software conquers more and more areas, funding will become an issue. I think the government will play a crucial role there; in the end, a large part of the software industry will have to be socialized.
With all the consequences one sees (if bothers to look) found in "socialized" medicine (govt medicine is anti-socialized really), on "socialized" roads, and in total flop of everything "socialized" in former Soviet systems. You think people employed by Soviets were dumb, which is why it all collapsed? Think again.
Nope. The worst case is as it often happens with govt funding, politically connected companies get to spend it *legally* on producing ultra-expensive and poor stuff. Just look at weapons industries. To make sure even that happens, an elaborate govt control apparatus has to be developed, or else it would all be sucked out to private accounts in Bahamas and other Liechtensteins.
Have people contribute towards existing well known projects, have the existing developers judge the submissions, including assessing the quality of the code to judge who is worthy of being paid to write more.
Except:
Why would clerks bother (let alone be capable of!) with making sure anything good done? The track record suggests smth different. Did smth artistically valuable come out of those federal grants to artists during the New Deal?
You think current developers are incorruptible? You think that GROUP of developers as such is incorruptible? Those are very real concerns.
Most FOSS is done to scratch the developer's itch. Whose itch would such projects scratch?
I can already see $$$s in lobbyists eyes and empty-shell companies created overnight to scam as much money as possible out of this dense govt milk cow.
I could go on like this for a long time, and I think each of such points would be an obstacle that would be politically insurmountable to overcome.
It would be monumental waste of money and it would be the worst PR ever for open source. This could undo FLOSS for many, many years.
Consider: right now only those who have motivation & skills to contribute, do so.
In govt-backed scheme, those who want to milk the money and produce crap, are the first and the most active (read: the most aggressive, politically connected, and successful in getting to the trough) in acquiring govt backing.
It all ends up like Ministry of Silly Walks: "Your walk is not particularly silly, is it?... I feel with govt backing I could make it a lot more silly".
So the logical next step is to create monumental apparatus of control, verification and planning. Why, what else can government do? That eats up money, too.
There are already precedents for this. In Europe there are big "investment" programs into IT called "structural programs", planned and distributed every several years. Have you *ever*, I mean *ever* heard of or used a usable piece of software that came out of it? Most likely you never heard of it, not because money wasn't spent, but bc it never produced anything usable.
Slashdot Mirror
"Don't Capitalize! CO-OPERATE! AND FREE EVERYTHING!"
Don't Fornicate! Make Love! To Everything!
"Really? How come only 18 percent of Japanese polled believe the 2 trillion yen plan by the Aso government will work? A full 71 percent don't think it will do anything to stimulate the economy."
Hard to blame them after, what, 11 or so failed "stimulus packages" so far since the beginning of 1990s. I lost count, really.
"In aggregate economic terms Roosevelt's pre-war policies, including the New Deal, appear to have worked pretty well; the recession that begain in 1929 ended in 1933, and 1933-1937 saw fairly strong aggregate economic growth; the 1937-38 recession, while substantial, was much shallower than the 1929-1933 one."
In aggregate Roosevelt has done horribly badly: were it not for his idiot policies, recession would have been over in 2 years at most. 10 years recession combined with permanent high unemployment (reduced during war by National War Labor Board I think that forced unions to knock off wage demands, and that helped to increase demand for labor) *just do not happen if not caused by policies making them last*.
"1933: 20.6% ...except if that idiot Roosevelt didn't conspire with unions to keep the labor prices artificially high and didn't force retailers to keep the prices artificially high (he publicly berated and regulated the "bad shopkeepers" who dared to reduce prices - just imagine what that did to consumer demand), the recession would have ended in 2 years *at most*, not in 10 years.
1937: 9.1%
1938: 12.5%
1941: 8.0%"
Just ask any semi-competent economist, really.
And get it once and for all: correlation is not causation. What you cite is not the proof that New Deal helped reduce the unemployment, what you show is that New Deal kept unemployment *artificially high* for 10 years! In most not very high regulated economies, recession is over in 1-2 years. All by itself. Provided central bank doesn't strangle money supply, and idiot like Roosevelt doesn't prevent prices of labor and goods to naturally adjust.
Just because you stop systematically beating someone doesn't mean you help his health, even if his health improves.
Japan didn't have deflation (well strictly speaking there were some points in 1990s where they had negative _real_ interest rates, but generally it doesn't count as deflation).
There is much simpler explanation to what you write: Japan was simply unwilling to write off the bad loans resulting from their speculative real estate bubble in the 1980s (any similarities to today situation? naa) and in result they couldn't get consumer spending off the ground. That was really the factor behind deferring spending or investment, and not "fear of current situation / uncertain future" which is a psychological factor that doesn't last permanently.
Most likely, all the stimulus packages made their situation even worse, bc they used up money that Japanese consumers could have used to kickstart the investment & consumption cycle again. So yes, no "stimulus" package (which is just a rhetorical hyperbole for taking away money from consumers and spending them on roads & bridges to nowhere) probably would have made them exit recession sooner.
Nnope. Profit of *the most expensive supplier* goes to zero. Even less efficient suppliers bankrupt. The rest (more efficient suppliers) keep their profits.
There was quite a lot of politics and govt regulation *directly* feeding the problem over the years:
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=307061229501695
Tragi-comical version:
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/03/subprime-mortgage-blues.html
What I meant is not that you advocated socialism. You may or may not do so; but that is orthogonal to the problem that all govt-backing proposals have so called "socialist calculation problem", in that not being individual purchases they do not have collective wealth of opportunity cost estimation done for them by the large group of people each evaluating utility of the solution in question and voting with dollars accordingly. You don't have to advocate socialism to have an economic calculation problem!
And ugh, Lotus Notes, the worst program ever written (even though as I write I'm forced to use it). Believe me, such crap is best rewritten from scratch. Judging what I can see at work (big computer corporation) software vendors acquiring and selling other software makers are largely trading in crap...
I really don't think that opening Notes source would create healthy open source project. If Mozilla experience is any guide, that is, and even then look how many years it took them, and even then a spinoff project of Firefox was meant to be complementary product while it took off as main thing. Let's even assume IBM would let Notes go for $150 mln, which I don't believe it would.
Making Notes "free product" would certainly have some utility, but without healthy open source project on one hand, and without fee-paying customers supporting development on the other, how much time would it take for it to undergo "bit rot"?
The question remains, how *exactly and in detail*, without hand-waving, you select the programs worth turning into public domain / OSS, and how you provide for their development? I'm afraid you're wishing for good business and would not get one...
"The supermarket will close, leaving a small number of people out of work, which will be offset by the new people employed by the government store, and the government store may even employ more people resulting in a net win... Meanwhile, every single person in the town benefits from the lower prices."
Is this sarcasm on your part or have you reached new depths of economic illiteracy?
Socialism == System of production owned by State.
Communism == System of production owned by the People.
GNU == System of production owned by voyeuristic developers pissing on 99% of users and 99% of users pissing on GNU software. The People declared war on Microsoft and Microsoft won.
P.S. Communism == Silly sentiment system of castles flying in air, believed into by economically illiterate and sociologically hopelessly dense and impervious to experience, all wrapped in pink package.
Meanwhile, I say, Ubuntu or DEATH! Err, that was socialism or death.
I believe Linux and Apache, to name just 2 projects, do benefit USA to at least some extent. Not that *anything comparable* would be produced by the said program.
Most important point: it is not hard to estimate that city A needs to be connected to B. Just look at the map.
This largely deflates Socialist Calculation Problem. A road is also comparatively easy to build, technology is established and not much different than it was before, and there are many other reasons why roads are pretty much exception to "govt production".
Software doesn't have any economic properties of a road: it definitely isn't easy to flesh out, design, monitor its development and evaluate skills of people developing it. A better comparison of software would be to aerospace work or perhaps weapons development. Check the prices and efficiency of those.
1. Small scale.
2. Has vested incentives to make it worthwhile. Not much different from private contributor to FOSS.
Obama, we are going to learn if you really are intelligent right out of the gate.
Politically, he's dead duck: can't do anything without infringing on grounds of *some* important (ideological, economic, etc) majority, simply because he doesn't lead simple majority big enough, while govt tools he has at his disposal have been historically proven as ineffective.
Obama - the Change You Can Forget About.
A tax cut makes people invest more and spend more. It is true that character of spending matters: private spending doesn't have Socialist Calculation Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem which is why it is efficient and develops economy, even if that means some money ends up in China (hint: this is because Americans have better things to do than manufacturing cheap shoes, read up on comparative advantage, intl trade, mercantilism and such). People estimate opportunity costs in their lives, which drives them to spend money on A and not B. This in turn drives companies to deliver A and not B.
Public spending has political problem on top of Socialist Calculation Problem: it just *doesn't measure opportunity costs and doesn't adjust production accordingly*. Got it? Private economy is directed. Public one isn't. Not in any reasonable sense of the word "direction".
In comparison to economy driven by private needs, public sector is a headless chicken: it just *isn't directed well enough*.
This ultra-short recap should remind some why traditional economy works and New Deal / stimulus packages don't and haven't worked.
Churchill wrote smth about new generations forgetting the experience of previous generations and repeating the same mistakes all over again. You're a living proof he was right.
Basically, the federal government would be "buying" the program from the corporation that developed it and the people would win. Eligibility would have to be determined by a broad spectrum panel of IT/CS professionals from business and academia and would be based on net benefit to the government and the citizens, taking into account whether adequate OSS projects already exist to cover that use.
Why do people always treat politics as non-issue and just assume "hey this is a nice idea let's do this" without consideration for political aspects in person selection, group responsibility, pecking order, pet ideas, lobbying, corruption, laziness, incompetence, Socialist Calculation Problem, inefficiency, irresponsibility....
This principle you describe could conceivably be used in just about any venue of life. Hey! We could make socialism work! Except not: historically and demonstrably, you can't make socialism or govt-backed FOSS work for complex political, sociological and economic reasons. Covering "why" in detail would take 20,000 times the volume of "The Road to Serfdom" by Hayek. Or more.
Yes, those people were dumb, which is why they couldn't make it work. We're not that dumb. Right?
Except it didn't really help them in 1990s to spend their way out of recession. Stimulus packages work, except those (most) that don't.
The space program, for example, has resulted in lots of useful product spin-offs, but almost nothing that could not have been discovered independently without spending billions on a manned space program
If this site: http://www.vectorsite.net/tamrc_24.html is worth anything, it didn't do even that:
"In contemporary dollars, Apollo cost $25 billion USD, and at its peak it accounted for almost one cent on every dollar of US economic output. Apollo funds similarly totaled about 20% of all US public and private research money at that time. In 1971, NASA commissioned a study that claimed the Apollo program generated a $7 USD return for every dollar spent. The impartiality of such a study was suspect, since NASA used it to justify their funding requests, and the Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), never much of a friend to the agency, was highly critical.
There was also the question of how relevant such a statistic was even if it was true. A critic could easily observe that to justify the Apollo program only in terms of its incidental benefits and not on its own merit was to imply that it had no merit in itself. States with industries and centers that were the beneficiaries of Apollo funding, such as Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, and California, of course obtained an economic benefit from the work, but could the money have been better spent?
The US interstate highway program, another huge Federal project, also boosted the economy through government contracts, but the end result of the interstate highway system was an "infrastructure" that was directly useful to the vast majority of American citizens, and by even conservative accounting exercises paid back its investment many times over. It is difficult to identify similar long-term benefits from Apollo. The specific technologies developed for the program, such as the Saturn V booster, were more or less abandoned later. While manufacturers used the publicity hype associated with Apollo to promote "space age" products such as Velcro and Teflon, these products had been developed long before. Teflon was actually discovered, more or less by accident, in 1938, and had been used in chemical processing for the US atomic bomb project in World War II.
The only major consumer products to obviously owe their origins to the Apollo program are cordless tools. The Black & Decker company had won a contract to develop a lightweight portable drill for the Apollo program, and promptly developed and delivered it. The company thought they could leverage this effort into a commercial product, and in 1974, Black & Decker introduced a multifunction portable tool that could be configured as a drill, portable vacuum cleaner, and a hedge trimmer. The product died in the marketplace, since nobody had developed low-cost rechargeable batteries that had acceptable lifetimes. The Moon drill itself had used high-grade silver-zinc batteries that were too expensive for a consumer product. It wasn't until 1978 that General Electric was able to provide Black & Decker with rechargeable batteries that could last from five to six years, and in 1979 Black & Decker introduced the popular "Dustbuster" cordless vacuum cleaner. "
I would defend Moon program on the argument that it *made entire humanity more ambitious and feeling less constrained on this planet*, but not even on basis on producing usable technologies as side effects.
If you want FOSS to function like commie "car", support this idea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant
Hey, Linux already resembles AK-47 in its primitive robustness. Maybe we could fuse the two somehow?
As free software conquers more and more areas, funding will become an issue. I think the government will play a crucial role there; in the end, a large part of the software industry will have to be socialized.
With all the consequences one sees (if bothers to look) found in "socialized" medicine (govt medicine is anti-socialized really), on "socialized" roads, and in total flop of everything "socialized" in former Soviet systems. You think people employed by Soviets were dumb, which is why it all collapsed? Think again.
Nope. The worst case is as it often happens with govt funding, politically connected companies get to spend it *legally* on producing ultra-expensive and poor stuff. Just look at weapons industries. To make sure even that happens, an elaborate govt control apparatus has to be developed, or else it would all be sucked out to private accounts in Bahamas and other Liechtensteins.
Hey, you were supposed to *distribute* the money to worthy submitters.
*Distribute* some to me or govt audit costing $2,000,000 will get you code from behind bars.
Except:
I could go on like this for a long time, and I think each of such points would be an obstacle that would be politically insurmountable to overcome.
Open Source is the ultimate in re-usable investments in the area of computer technology.
Except govt funding proposed in the article would degenerate it to Frantic Orchestration of Silly Surfing. Or Open Scam.
It would be monumental waste of money and it would be the worst PR ever for open source. This could undo FLOSS for many, many years.
Consider: right now only those who have motivation & skills to contribute, do so.
In govt-backed scheme, those who want to milk the money and produce crap, are the first and the most active (read: the most aggressive, politically connected, and successful in getting to the trough) in acquiring govt backing.
It all ends up like Ministry of Silly Walks: "Your walk is not particularly silly, is it? ... I feel with govt backing I could make it a lot more silly".
So the logical next step is to create monumental apparatus of control, verification and planning. Why, what else can government do? That eats up money, too.
There are already precedents for this. In Europe there are big "investment" programs into IT called "structural programs", planned and distributed every several years. Have you *ever*, I mean *ever* heard of or used a usable piece of software that came out of it? Most likely you never heard of it, not because money wasn't spent, but bc it never produced anything usable.