Is America doomed?

This is actually the definition of GDP, which is why it can be a deceiving metric e.g. your economy could be 90% services which generate a lot of revenue thus generating GDP while 10% of your economy is actual production and if you take a 5% hit to your GDP if it’s in the 90% services it may not be a big deal, but if it’s in the 10% that matters you can be fucked.

Are you sure we have this even in the US? I’m also not sure this is necessarily the natural outcome of a “free market”.

Are you sure about this? I’m an Iraq veteran and I don’t think the US military would have done nearly as well if there was an equivalent of NATO giving Saddam’s army modern artillery, ADA systems, and ATGMs. We already started to get fucked up when the Iranians showed the Shia militias how to build EFPs and that’s basically caveman shit you can do in your garage.

And the IO environment in Ukraine makes it very difficult to really see what’s going on aside from a few leaks like the other week with docs that made it to telegram pointing to almost 300k KIA, WIA, and MIA from the Ukrainian side.

GDP is quite a broad measure, which is why i added specifics.

Things like competition are more prevalent because of lack of government intervention. Free market is really a scale in terms of how involved the government is in the economy and to what extent the economy is allowed to respond on it’s own to things like supply and demand. Which is why i was saying the selection process and how the economy are managed aren’t the same thing. We were talking in broad terms of definitions, so mine is not specific to the US. You were asking me to clarify the principles i was stating when evaluating various political structures. Just to remind you, you have a few conversations on the go at the moment. Those principles were Individual over group, separation of church and state, private property, free market. Just for ease of reference.

I would argue that religion does do harm though

I don’t have a problem with folk believing in what ever they like (spirituality etc), but I hate a problem with the codification and politicisation that religion represents. IMO over time the co-option of the human instincts to see patterns and worship the perceived divine, that religion represents, has caused more harm than good

GDP is broad in that it encompasses all economic activity, but it is effectively the measurement of money changing hands and not simply a measurement of production. The logger buys a chainsaw to cut the tree, sells the tree to the mill that processes it into finished wood materials, the trinket maker buys the piece of lumber and sculpts it into a wooden trinket, the trinket store buys the trinket to put on their shelf, the final customer purchases the trinket to put on their shelf. That one trinket just generated five transactions which are all counted in the GDP measurement. So is the income generated from two investment banks trading long and short calls on Trinket Store stock and the bank that loaned the money to the mill to buy more milling machines and the loan to the woodcutter to purchase a new chainsaw etc., as income generated from financial services is also part of GDP.

Are you sure about this? Have you heard of Standard Oil?

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Standard Oil competed very well, and as a result of that competition substantially lowered the price of oil products for consumers.

By the time of it’s anti-trust break up, Standard Oil’s marketshare had already been steadily dropping from its prior 90% marketshare down to around 60%.

The break up of Standard Oil was probably not necessary, and in fact, may have resulted in higher oil product prices for consumers after the break up, than if Standard Oil had not been broken up.

So, Standard Oil was an interesting example for you to pick, regarding whether government interventions help or hinder competition, and/or help or hinder consumers.

Humans come up religion as a matter of course.

Over time religion has done a lot of good for humanity, we have a very long history with religion. Sure it has and can be used for harm but most things can. There is a reason they say the road to hell is paved in good intentions. Early societies gathered around religion and religious concepts, it had a hand in the very formation of society itself. People tend to have this debate in terms of specific religions and specific events, but it is a very broad and very long history.

Yeah it’s interesting how common certain things are. It was the starting point to explain what was happening in nature. So everyone had some form of religious view (in the broadest sense of the word). It’s also interesting that the development of language was common, but writing was not.

The reason i like the idea of a free market is because it adapts to stressors in the market. To assume we can control the market, implies we know what it’s going to do. We know we don’t because black swan events happen. It is also a more “antifragile” approach to economics which I like. I think the more involved the government is in the economy, the more rigid it is and the less ability to adapt. I don’t think the government can predict which levers to pull at which time to get the results they want.

Antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures

Just adding the definition, not sure if it’s a broad concept.

I think Dr. Gonzo’s response is probably better than mine, i don’t know the history of Standard Oil, i’ll definitely check it out. I do think to what degree things like mineral resources are owned in a free market economy is an interesting question i haven’t spent enough time thinking about.

Something i’ve been meaning to read up on is anarcho-capitalism which sounds interesting.

Religion is a function of how our brains work.

It’s the problem of induction.

Pattern recognition…

The system works better with a little chaos, and non-linearity.

So does thinking, when it comes to discovery and advancement of math and science.

My point had nothing to do with government intervention, but that the “nature” of the free market is competition. There is no “hand of the free market” that prevents firms from conspiring together in a non competitive way. A non monopoly example would be the wage fixing scandal that hit animation companies a couple of years ago, that is a lot of animation companies were cooperating on wages to prevent competition among labor (we must remember that labor is a market as well).

I’m not sure this is true simply because it assumes that firms cannot have agency and that firms are also not an input to “the market” and that the only inputs are supply of a product and demand for it.

An example to look at in the US is the firearms industry. Of course you could argue that it is overregulated since manufacturers require an FFL and a SOT if they build and sell class III items. But the firearms industry has not “adapted” in the commonly understood manner of increasing supply due to high prices by increasing output capacity. They’ve actually been hesitant to do so because it requires a capital investment. So the “adaptation to stressors in the market” in this instance has been for consumers to just adapt to the new normal of higher prices and lower supply.

It’s helpful to understand those things you noted, as well as one’s own personal biases.

Not a very common trait, though.

Oh, and chaos and randomness happen no matter what.

As you know already.

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The difference between chaos, and order, is often just a matter of scale.

And perspective.

As a practical matter, at the scale humans notice ? Which scale is that?

Randomness does not equal chaos, though, right? I mean, in a definitional sense.

I’m sure randomness can cause chaos.

I am not sure true randomness exists.

Pseudo randomness certainly does.

Ok sweety…

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