Vaclav Smil on the technology slowdown; Nathan Cofnas gives Heterodox Academy an F; John Cochrane and me on the Social Security Trust fund; Emil O.W. Kirkegaard on IQ and political orientation;
While raising the age limit directly would help, it seems mostly politically unrealistic. A possible way to bribe voters to accept it would be to have three dates: early (reduced) benefits, normal full benefits (as now), and create a "plus" category for later retirees who get more. Then freeze early & normal benefit increases above the (rising) minimum, but allow bigger inflation increases for the plus category.
And yes, get rid of the salary cap - but it could be done by making the paying org pay all (so 12% instead of 6% worker & 6% org), so the orgs are paying more for the highly paid (over 2x median, some $130,000 is current cap).
Big issue is get the productivity of workers up, including getting more workers, fewer disability folk - not talked about. While low unemployment is mentioned, the more important measure is the employment rate - especially that of young men.
I flatly don't believe there is much lost productivity of "most productive' folk above $130k for a 12% higher certain SS rate. At the 90% UK rate the Beatles were facing, it made sense for John to leave ...
LeBron will score exactly the same; Trump & the Bidens make all the same decisions.
Your decision includes tax rates? (really??)
Yes to switch careers - easy with more money (& taxes!), tougher with less. Life is far more than working for money, especially for somebody else (as I always did).
I have slight regret at not trying to start my own business - but successful 28 year marriage w/ 4 kids & 2 g-kids, plus comfy middle class life whole time, much lower risk.
Most top US salarymen would change none of their productivity decisions with 10 or 20% or 30% higher taxes on incomes over $130k. A few more would choose to start their own businesses - but that would likely actually be good for the economy, despite 4 out of 5 going out of business within 5 years.
The fact that half of any additional income I make will go to the government impacts whether I want to take a chance on a new job that is largely about the money. I don’t see how it couldn’t. Do you not believe in incentives?
On Smil’s article: I don’t agree at all. My brother and I were having a conversation last night about a scene in the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers that involves pressing the “button” of a receiver in an old-school telephone and leaving the phone “off the hook” so a person couldn’t call again. This sequence of events completely baffled by teenage niece. If you went back in the 1970s and said “what part of the movie will people be confused about in 2023?” they would never pick out the telephone. But in fact, the “phone” qua phone will be a remarkably short-lived technology in the grand scheme of human technological progress, and what our children and grandchildren will call a “phone” bears only a passing resemblance to its namesake.
And this is my problem with the entire premise of the article: he cherry picks areas that match his conclusions, and proceeds from there. But we will not understand what technologies today will make a significant and lasting impact on tomorrow, and which will vanish. My experience, in my lifetime, is that human technical achievement accelerates at a phenomenal pace. The world that my children, now teenagers, were born into would be foreign to them today. No iPhone, no iPad, no TikTok, no Netflix, no electric car, no mRNA vaccines, no space x reusable space rocket synchronized landings, no video calling, no AI chatbots, etc.
And his semiconductor comment is purely trash, I have to say. That’s the sort of comment you’d expect to see from someone with a New-York-Times-tech-journalist level of understanding of the technology and related industries. Sure, the size of the features you can etch onto a silicon wafer is approaching the point where, you know, there just aren’t many atoms left to play with anymore. But the true innovation, the semiconductor itself and the notion of sequential lithography shrinking as a means to improve performance, was understood half a century ago and the industry has been riding that horse ever since. The fact that a very good (but old) idea is bumping into physics is not a sign of slowing progress or innovation.
To some extent, the semiconductor industry and the industries who benefit from semiconductors have been able to lazily rely, year-after-year, on the steady improvements in power / performance delivered by lithography shrinks. So now what do we do? Well, the very simple answer is make more and bigger chips. The fact that you can only pack so many billions of transistors into a square mm doesn’t say that you can’t add more square mm to get more billions of transistors. It doesn’t say that you can’t put another chip next to the first chip. There are other problems, heat, loss through communication, more complex packaging, etc. that emerge, but those are new opportunities to improve performance. And the incredible amount of money being invested in increases in semiconductor manufacturing capacity around the globe, perhaps for geopolitical reasons but maybe with collateral benefits, should make all of this silicon cheaper than ever before.
You can also change the functionality that you design on a chip to improve performance. Because of lithography shrinkage, the best vector for performance improvement has been the general purpose computing device, programmed through software to execute specific tasks, shrunk as quickly as possible to a smaller transistor size. But that doesn’t have to be the case at all, and we will see more-and-more custom semiconductor development and purpose-built semiconductor designs going forward, because design will become a better vector for improved performance than simple lithography shrinks. The biggest issue here is that students aren’t studying semiconductor design in large enough numbers, but that presumably will evolve.
And he also doesn’t take into account what people *do* with the semiconductor capacity they already have. First off, the centralization of massive computing power into the cloud means that each cycle of compute power is available to be rented out when it’s needed, rather than sitting idly in a corporate datacenter. That on its own represents a tremendous improvement in the efficiency of use of what we already have. Second, what programs are you going to write to run on the computing capacity you already have? It matters a lot. People will use the existing resources to do ever more interesting things, the explosion in AI/ML applications being the most hyped (probably justifiable).
So, in sum, I’ll bet on progress. The question should be, rather, how do we bring greater innovation to areas where there could be tremendous returns for humanity, e.g., energy production, education, human health and well-being, and so on? How do we uncover the lessons of areas where profound progress has been made (e.g., the semiconductor industry, for one) and transfer as much of what we learn from those areas to other areas where progress is needed? That’s the interesting question, rather than bemoaning a supposed “lack of progress” based on some analysis of patents. Please!
Cochrane: The Original Sin of SS (forgivable in the '30's but copied by Medicare in the 60's) was to finance "retirement" payments and health care in "retirement" with a tax on wages. Wages are at least partially saved so payments to supplement consumption in "old age) should be financed with a consumption tax, a VAT. A "Trust Fund" is just a way of not having to adjust the tax rate frequently (although one of it's advantages is that rate adjustments to keep the systems deficit neutral should be less fraught as they apples more widely and are not aimed at "workers.") [Obiter Dicta: The same goes for "unemployment" (periods of lost income) insurance: Trust Fund, VAT funded at a rate to roughly deficit zero over the business cycle, but with parameters of how soon after lost income and how many weeks of insurance set according to macroeconomic variables]
Agreed, SS should be indexed to longevity maybe something like 70-72 nowadays. Medicare could follow or be separately indexed to some presumed age inflection point in health care costs.
As for how all this affects grandchildren, it does not except as how different arrangements affect the deficit which drains resources from private investment and reduces future growth.
Confas seems totally correct - the Woke lies about race & sex equality, and the unwillingness to fight for the truth, dooms HxA or any other "alternative" college system.
I'm against all censorship, including censoring of lies - but it's important to be able to call them lies.
Haidt & especially Rauch seem particularly obtuse about their acceptance of dishonest demonization of Republicans while claiming to support free speech.
Truth is more important than style, which is why I liked and still like Steve Sailer, whose style Arnold really doesn't care for. Recently he noted the Dem policy of letting criminals out of jail is a big part of the increase of crime. As expected by prior data, it's mostly Black young males doing the crimes and victimizing the innocents - very unPC / unWoke.
I do enjoy all of the libertarians that come out to pat themselves on the back when the data suggest they are the smartest breed, as if that validates that their politics.
That smart people may share the same political outlook doesn’t mean that the political outlook is smart for people.
My guess is that if proper libertarianism (socially liberal and economically conservative policies) were given a shot with, say, running a failing inner city or rust belt town, it wouldn’t work out.
Accepting your definition of libertarianism as a given for the sake of argument, economic conservatism is highly competitive, which is why the federal government took many legislative actions to prevent individual states from engaging in it during the post-1937 period. You can verify this for yourself by reading the landmark Supreme Court cases on commerce clause jurisprudence, the legislative history of the Social Security Act, and in a more popular form by listening to FDR's speeches on these topics. It's explained simply and in a straightforward manner.
That's the reason why minimum wage law and mandatory pension programs like SS needed to be implemented at the federal level: otherwise, defector states attract significantly more investment. Limiting interstate competition was the entire impetus behind the New Deal and our modern regulatory state. Since the fundamental assumption at the root of the modern economic left is that it must ban competition at the policy level because otherwise their favored policies would not be otherwise competitive, the notion that typical right-wing economic policies would not be competitive just doesn't make sense.
With entitlements as with many other things, it will only be addressed when it explodes and the legislative branch can pretend that it had no idea that it was going to happen.
The Dem demonization of Republicans, often supported by those who claim to be in favor of honestly talking about these things, means Republicans (like Paul Ryan) who discuss reform get demonized and LOSE their next election.
Reform only really happens when Dems agree it's needed enough to support the reform.
Or, Reps win WH, Senate & House and do reform w/o Dems (but get demonized for it) .
Or, it explodes into a crisis and Reps have a "crisis reform" package which reduces the crisis problem AND reforms the system without making (too many?) poor folk poorer.
The Social Security Trust Fund was created as a way to push the knowing bagholders well into the future. The people who created it may have believed their own bullshit, but the simple fact is that it really is a Ponzi Scheme with one key difference- the government can put a gun to your head and force you to "invest". In any case, the bagholders have arrived- essentially no one above median income under the age of 50 will ever get out as much as they have put in via payroll taxes, and their support simply rides on their adherence to the sunk-cost fallacy.
Squaring this circle probably won't ever be easy- you either start to cut the benefits of the people nearing the present retirement age, or you tell much younger workers that they won't be able to collect until they are 70-75- neither plan is going to be politically popular. The most likely path is simply borrowing more and more money to cover the unfunded liabilities, at least until it all falls apart.
This isn't charitable to the architects of the SSA. They were not really thinking that far into the future. They were trying to address an immediate problem related to the routine failures of corporate pension plans and the challenges of interstate competition for employees. The primary thing the feds were doing was limiting competition between firms in providing pensions to workers. They did not foresee the long term demographic trends at the time.
Secondarily, there was the political impulse to imitate the German SS program based on the theory that the German-style central state was going to be a more modern and effective type of government than was possible under the original understanding of the Constitution. But congressmen are not intellectuals: they were responding to complaints from their fat cat constituents that administering worker pension programs was making business less stable. The routine failures of corporate pension programs (which happened at massive scale after 1929) provided the government with a strong justification for absorbing that responsibility.
Longevity is different for many people. My father did a difficult physical job. His body was done by age 65 (before that really). We shouldn't assume that the fact that comfortable professional office workers can work to 70 means everyone can.
I think what makes more sense, especially on Medicare, is to spend less on the back end (the useless years of life at the very end).
The theory behind the trust fund is that the excess revenue was “invested” in future productivity. The same way when you buy stocks in your 401k you are investing in plant and equipment, etc.
Perhaps you are cynical that all of the things the government spent the money on were productivity enhancing investments.
And yet, people buy treasury bonds knowing that the government often blows the money, but also knowing that it has a monopoly on force and can tax the productive to pay them first.
Think of the Trust Fund like funding a Viking raiding party. You give it money up front and they promise to give you a share of the spoils if the raid is successful. Maybe they have hit up the monestaries too much and there is nothing left to loot, but you kind of had the impression that you would be forced to make the investment no matter what anyway.
Is investment even a real thing at the scale of societies? This is something that really worries me about modern finance. I personally can "invest" in a whole host of ways but what does that net out to in aggregate? Investing in a company is essentially investing in an arrangement of people and contracts that only really works if the rest of society continues to function similarly. Investing in e.g. bonds is even sillier on a social level.
Most financial instruments ultimately boil down to agreements to re-organize income streams/benefits in the future. Very few investments are _actually_ the kind of physical investments that will pay dividends in the futures (even fewer in the US given that most of the economy focuses on services as opposed to manufacturing, etc...). "Investing" in a restaurant doesn't help if there isn't enough food to serve and not enough people to staff it.
In theory, the baby boomers overpaid during their prime years and the surplus was "invested" in things like education, R&D, etc which would make the next generation of workers more productive so that they could pay off all those bonds in the trust fund.
Obviously, that is all bull because these were bad "investments". But if those taxes had funded 401ks we would all be calling it an investment.
The purpose of a trust fund with an earmarked tax is to keep the system deficit over time w/o frequent adjustments in the tax rate. The same applies to the transportation infrastructure,
"highway," trust fund, although in that case the tax should be a vehicle category specific miles traveled fee.
RE: the post on IQ and political ideology, is the data based on self-reported IQ? If so, is there any reason to believe the data is an accurate measure of actual variance in IQ, as opposed to an artifact of who’s reporting? Curious if there any corroborating data.
Virtue signaling is fine as long as what's being signaled is a virtue, as free speech is.
I'd guess that HxA folks are less squeamish about making common cause with Republicans than Republicans are at making common cause with them
There are no "Never DEI buttons" as there are "Never Trump" buttons becasue "Trump" id not a good thing just sometimes pursued in ways damaging to other good things.
I'm sure your guess is wrong - Hillsdale seems much more likely to invite Haidt to talk than Haidt's group would have somebody like Helmuth Nyborg talk.
US Democrats and their policies is why free speech, and truth, is being destroyed in US colleges.
On buttons, I'm reminded of a good Libber one of a screw, with IRS on it.
Arnold, Thanks for the simple, incisive explanation of the real economics of social security and medicare benefits.
While raising the age limit directly would help, it seems mostly politically unrealistic. A possible way to bribe voters to accept it would be to have three dates: early (reduced) benefits, normal full benefits (as now), and create a "plus" category for later retirees who get more. Then freeze early & normal benefit increases above the (rising) minimum, but allow bigger inflation increases for the plus category.
And yes, get rid of the salary cap - but it could be done by making the paying org pay all (so 12% instead of 6% worker & 6% org), so the orgs are paying more for the highly paid (over 2x median, some $130,000 is current cap).
Big issue is get the productivity of workers up, including getting more workers, fewer disability folk - not talked about. While low unemployment is mentioned, the more important measure is the employment rate - especially that of young men.
If you proposed a 12% increase in the marginal tax rate above $130k, and didn't mention SS, wouldn't you consider that a huge tax increase.
Just what marginal tax rate do you think professionals should face?
Great question!
If the after tax income growth of the top 10% (90th) or top 1% is higher than the growth of the median, the top tax rate is too low.
Median income should grow faster than top income.
But the people at the top are more productive.
Why should we subsidize sink costs?
Look, I’m contemplating a career switch and “a lot of my income goes to the government” is part of my decision making process.
I flatly don't believe there is much lost productivity of "most productive' folk above $130k for a 12% higher certain SS rate. At the 90% UK rate the Beatles were facing, it made sense for John to leave ...
LeBron will score exactly the same; Trump & the Bidens make all the same decisions.
Your decision includes tax rates? (really??)
Yes to switch careers - easy with more money (& taxes!), tougher with less. Life is far more than working for money, especially for somebody else (as I always did).
I have slight regret at not trying to start my own business - but successful 28 year marriage w/ 4 kids & 2 g-kids, plus comfy middle class life whole time, much lower risk.
Most top US salarymen would change none of their productivity decisions with 10 or 20% or 30% higher taxes on incomes over $130k. A few more would choose to start their own businesses - but that would likely actually be good for the economy, despite 4 out of 5 going out of business within 5 years.
The fact that half of any additional income I make will go to the government impacts whether I want to take a chance on a new job that is largely about the money. I don’t see how it couldn’t. Do you not believe in incentives?
On Smil’s article: I don’t agree at all. My brother and I were having a conversation last night about a scene in the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers that involves pressing the “button” of a receiver in an old-school telephone and leaving the phone “off the hook” so a person couldn’t call again. This sequence of events completely baffled by teenage niece. If you went back in the 1970s and said “what part of the movie will people be confused about in 2023?” they would never pick out the telephone. But in fact, the “phone” qua phone will be a remarkably short-lived technology in the grand scheme of human technological progress, and what our children and grandchildren will call a “phone” bears only a passing resemblance to its namesake.
And this is my problem with the entire premise of the article: he cherry picks areas that match his conclusions, and proceeds from there. But we will not understand what technologies today will make a significant and lasting impact on tomorrow, and which will vanish. My experience, in my lifetime, is that human technical achievement accelerates at a phenomenal pace. The world that my children, now teenagers, were born into would be foreign to them today. No iPhone, no iPad, no TikTok, no Netflix, no electric car, no mRNA vaccines, no space x reusable space rocket synchronized landings, no video calling, no AI chatbots, etc.
And his semiconductor comment is purely trash, I have to say. That’s the sort of comment you’d expect to see from someone with a New-York-Times-tech-journalist level of understanding of the technology and related industries. Sure, the size of the features you can etch onto a silicon wafer is approaching the point where, you know, there just aren’t many atoms left to play with anymore. But the true innovation, the semiconductor itself and the notion of sequential lithography shrinking as a means to improve performance, was understood half a century ago and the industry has been riding that horse ever since. The fact that a very good (but old) idea is bumping into physics is not a sign of slowing progress or innovation.
To some extent, the semiconductor industry and the industries who benefit from semiconductors have been able to lazily rely, year-after-year, on the steady improvements in power / performance delivered by lithography shrinks. So now what do we do? Well, the very simple answer is make more and bigger chips. The fact that you can only pack so many billions of transistors into a square mm doesn’t say that you can’t add more square mm to get more billions of transistors. It doesn’t say that you can’t put another chip next to the first chip. There are other problems, heat, loss through communication, more complex packaging, etc. that emerge, but those are new opportunities to improve performance. And the incredible amount of money being invested in increases in semiconductor manufacturing capacity around the globe, perhaps for geopolitical reasons but maybe with collateral benefits, should make all of this silicon cheaper than ever before.
You can also change the functionality that you design on a chip to improve performance. Because of lithography shrinkage, the best vector for performance improvement has been the general purpose computing device, programmed through software to execute specific tasks, shrunk as quickly as possible to a smaller transistor size. But that doesn’t have to be the case at all, and we will see more-and-more custom semiconductor development and purpose-built semiconductor designs going forward, because design will become a better vector for improved performance than simple lithography shrinks. The biggest issue here is that students aren’t studying semiconductor design in large enough numbers, but that presumably will evolve.
And he also doesn’t take into account what people *do* with the semiconductor capacity they already have. First off, the centralization of massive computing power into the cloud means that each cycle of compute power is available to be rented out when it’s needed, rather than sitting idly in a corporate datacenter. That on its own represents a tremendous improvement in the efficiency of use of what we already have. Second, what programs are you going to write to run on the computing capacity you already have? It matters a lot. People will use the existing resources to do ever more interesting things, the explosion in AI/ML applications being the most hyped (probably justifiable).
So, in sum, I’ll bet on progress. The question should be, rather, how do we bring greater innovation to areas where there could be tremendous returns for humanity, e.g., energy production, education, human health and well-being, and so on? How do we uncover the lessons of areas where profound progress has been made (e.g., the semiconductor industry, for one) and transfer as much of what we learn from those areas to other areas where progress is needed? That’s the interesting question, rather than bemoaning a supposed “lack of progress” based on some analysis of patents. Please!
Cochrane: The Original Sin of SS (forgivable in the '30's but copied by Medicare in the 60's) was to finance "retirement" payments and health care in "retirement" with a tax on wages. Wages are at least partially saved so payments to supplement consumption in "old age) should be financed with a consumption tax, a VAT. A "Trust Fund" is just a way of not having to adjust the tax rate frequently (although one of it's advantages is that rate adjustments to keep the systems deficit neutral should be less fraught as they apples more widely and are not aimed at "workers.") [Obiter Dicta: The same goes for "unemployment" (periods of lost income) insurance: Trust Fund, VAT funded at a rate to roughly deficit zero over the business cycle, but with parameters of how soon after lost income and how many weeks of insurance set according to macroeconomic variables]
Agreed, SS should be indexed to longevity maybe something like 70-72 nowadays. Medicare could follow or be separately indexed to some presumed age inflection point in health care costs.
As for how all this affects grandchildren, it does not except as how different arrangements affect the deficit which drains resources from private investment and reduces future growth.
Confas seems totally correct - the Woke lies about race & sex equality, and the unwillingness to fight for the truth, dooms HxA or any other "alternative" college system.
I'm against all censorship, including censoring of lies - but it's important to be able to call them lies.
Haidt & especially Rauch seem particularly obtuse about their acceptance of dishonest demonization of Republicans while claiming to support free speech.
Truth is more important than style, which is why I liked and still like Steve Sailer, whose style Arnold really doesn't care for. Recently he noted the Dem policy of letting criminals out of jail is a big part of the increase of crime. As expected by prior data, it's mostly Black young males doing the crimes and victimizing the innocents - very unPC / unWoke.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/setting-so-many-jailbirds-free-in-2020-backfired-into-higher-crime/
Republicans should insist on colleges with tax exempt status having at least 30% of Reps (& of Dems) to maintain tax advantages.
Also RE: the post on IQ and political ideology:
I do enjoy all of the libertarians that come out to pat themselves on the back when the data suggest they are the smartest breed, as if that validates that their politics.
That smart people may share the same political outlook doesn’t mean that the political outlook is smart for people.
My guess is that if proper libertarianism (socially liberal and economically conservative policies) were given a shot with, say, running a failing inner city or rust belt town, it wouldn’t work out.
Accepting your definition of libertarianism as a given for the sake of argument, economic conservatism is highly competitive, which is why the federal government took many legislative actions to prevent individual states from engaging in it during the post-1937 period. You can verify this for yourself by reading the landmark Supreme Court cases on commerce clause jurisprudence, the legislative history of the Social Security Act, and in a more popular form by listening to FDR's speeches on these topics. It's explained simply and in a straightforward manner.
That's the reason why minimum wage law and mandatory pension programs like SS needed to be implemented at the federal level: otherwise, defector states attract significantly more investment. Limiting interstate competition was the entire impetus behind the New Deal and our modern regulatory state. Since the fundamental assumption at the root of the modern economic left is that it must ban competition at the policy level because otherwise their favored policies would not be otherwise competitive, the notion that typical right-wing economic policies would not be competitive just doesn't make sense.
Taking all of that as a given, I’m not sure what that has to do with my comment. Maybe you could clarify?
With entitlements as with many other things, it will only be addressed when it explodes and the legislative branch can pretend that it had no idea that it was going to happen.
The Dem demonization of Republicans, often supported by those who claim to be in favor of honestly talking about these things, means Republicans (like Paul Ryan) who discuss reform get demonized and LOSE their next election.
Reform only really happens when Dems agree it's needed enough to support the reform.
Or, Reps win WH, Senate & House and do reform w/o Dems (but get demonized for it) .
Or, it explodes into a crisis and Reps have a "crisis reform" package which reduces the crisis problem AND reforms the system without making (too many?) poor folk poorer.
The Social Security Trust Fund was created as a way to push the knowing bagholders well into the future. The people who created it may have believed their own bullshit, but the simple fact is that it really is a Ponzi Scheme with one key difference- the government can put a gun to your head and force you to "invest". In any case, the bagholders have arrived- essentially no one above median income under the age of 50 will ever get out as much as they have put in via payroll taxes, and their support simply rides on their adherence to the sunk-cost fallacy.
Squaring this circle probably won't ever be easy- you either start to cut the benefits of the people nearing the present retirement age, or you tell much younger workers that they won't be able to collect until they are 70-75- neither plan is going to be politically popular. The most likely path is simply borrowing more and more money to cover the unfunded liabilities, at least until it all falls apart.
This isn't charitable to the architects of the SSA. They were not really thinking that far into the future. They were trying to address an immediate problem related to the routine failures of corporate pension plans and the challenges of interstate competition for employees. The primary thing the feds were doing was limiting competition between firms in providing pensions to workers. They did not foresee the long term demographic trends at the time.
Secondarily, there was the political impulse to imitate the German SS program based on the theory that the German-style central state was going to be a more modern and effective type of government than was possible under the original understanding of the Constitution. But congressmen are not intellectuals: they were responding to complaints from their fat cat constituents that administering worker pension programs was making business less stable. The routine failures of corporate pension programs (which happened at massive scale after 1929) provided the government with a strong justification for absorbing that responsibility.
In other words, they believed their own bullshit.
Longevity is different for many people. My father did a difficult physical job. His body was done by age 65 (before that really). We shouldn't assume that the fact that comfortable professional office workers can work to 70 means everyone can.
I think what makes more sense, especially on Medicare, is to spend less on the back end (the useless years of life at the very end).
The theory behind the trust fund is that the excess revenue was “invested” in future productivity. The same way when you buy stocks in your 401k you are investing in plant and equipment, etc.
Perhaps you are cynical that all of the things the government spent the money on were productivity enhancing investments.
And yet, people buy treasury bonds knowing that the government often blows the money, but also knowing that it has a monopoly on force and can tax the productive to pay them first.
Think of the Trust Fund like funding a Viking raiding party. You give it money up front and they promise to give you a share of the spoils if the raid is successful. Maybe they have hit up the monestaries too much and there is nothing left to loot, but you kind of had the impression that you would be forced to make the investment no matter what anyway.
Is investment even a real thing at the scale of societies? This is something that really worries me about modern finance. I personally can "invest" in a whole host of ways but what does that net out to in aggregate? Investing in a company is essentially investing in an arrangement of people and contracts that only really works if the rest of society continues to function similarly. Investing in e.g. bonds is even sillier on a social level.
Most financial instruments ultimately boil down to agreements to re-organize income streams/benefits in the future. Very few investments are _actually_ the kind of physical investments that will pay dividends in the futures (even fewer in the US given that most of the economy focuses on services as opposed to manufacturing, etc...). "Investing" in a restaurant doesn't help if there isn't enough food to serve and not enough people to staff it.
??? Investing is a real thing. It is an expenditure that is expected to yield income in the future. Expectations can be wrong. So what?
I think the reality is as you say.
In theory, the baby boomers overpaid during their prime years and the surplus was "invested" in things like education, R&D, etc which would make the next generation of workers more productive so that they could pay off all those bonds in the trust fund.
Obviously, that is all bull because these were bad "investments". But if those taxes had funded 401ks we would all be calling it an investment.
The purpose of a trust fund with an earmarked tax is to keep the system deficit over time w/o frequent adjustments in the tax rate. The same applies to the transportation infrastructure,
"highway," trust fund, although in that case the tax should be a vehicle category specific miles traveled fee.
RE: the post on IQ and political ideology, is the data based on self-reported IQ? If so, is there any reason to believe the data is an accurate measure of actual variance in IQ, as opposed to an artifact of who’s reporting? Curious if there any corroborating data.
Cofnas:
Virtue signaling is fine as long as what's being signaled is a virtue, as free speech is.
I'd guess that HxA folks are less squeamish about making common cause with Republicans than Republicans are at making common cause with them
There are no "Never DEI buttons" as there are "Never Trump" buttons becasue "Trump" id not a good thing just sometimes pursued in ways damaging to other good things.
I'm sure your guess is wrong - Hillsdale seems much more likely to invite Haidt to talk than Haidt's group would have somebody like Helmuth Nyborg talk.
US Democrats and their policies is why free speech, and truth, is being destroyed in US colleges.
On buttons, I'm reminded of a good Libber one of a screw, with IRS on it.
I was thinking about DeSantis reaching out to Pinker for advice on how to increase ideological diversity in FL universities.