The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

(https://i.imgur.com/ha61yTn.png)

https://www.archania.org/governance/#Some_economic_inequality_might_be_useful_to_optimize_productivity_and_efficiency (https://www.archania.org/governance/#Some_economic_inequality_might_be_useful_to_optimize_productivity_and_efficiency)

5 or 10 Million USD would put you well out of the same economic stratum as almost everyone. Just saying.

Do you think I should use a different interval in my example? Write it in a different way? Or just exclude the example?

I actually put it quite high, because I kinda wanted to say that we can tax the rich people more, without it hurting them much.

I see. Maybe I'd point out the economic result that the utility of money is logarithmic, and take some derivatives, or something?

Are you sure it is logarithmic? My intuitive understanding about how the value of 1 USD decreases according to how wealthy people are, would be something like "utility=utility+1/utility".

But when I look upon the graphs, the logarithmic function seems to be more in accordance with my intuition....

(https://i.imgur.com/4NhqAWr.png)

That second one can't be right. That expression yields a constant utility value of infinity, and also doesn't use money. I assume you mean Utility = A*Money + B/Money (for some A with units utils per money and B with units utils*money)

Plus, it's shaped all wrong. Once you have enough, money does get less useful, but that other expression just keeps going up. I would not suffer particularly if I lost $20 (indeed, that could well have occurred without my noticing). If I were on the streets, I would DEFINITELY miss it. Your expression covers that side… but In the other direction, if I were to lose $2k, that would hurt. On the other hand, someone with even just ten times as much money as me would have to work to notice a loss like that. And there's some amount that would hurt them but be insignificant to someone more wealthy, and so on.

Logarithm covers that in a scale-free way. X + 1/X does not.

Okay. I have added this section now:

(https://i.imgur.com/zcFYjfe.png)

https://www.archania.org/governance/#The_utility_of_money_seems_to_decrease_with_wealth (https://www.archania.org/governance/#The_utility_of_money_seems_to_decrease_with_wealth)

(https://i.imgur.com/PGETyVL.png)

https://www.archania.org/governance/#Money_as_the_balance_between_individuals (https://www.archania.org/governance/#Money_as_the_balance_between_individuals)

Do you agree with this? I don't understand why this simple understanding isn't more prevalent among economists, and so on.

I feel kinda unsure about if this really is true since I can't find many other people claiming the same.

This seems so obvious though, that I feel like it must be true. Am I missing something?

How do you end up with a negative situation like that? No one having money at all would be a serious beyond-wowza-broken economic situation of a liquidity trap.

Well, lets imagine that Person B, Person C, and Person D got some horrible disease. For example cancer.

Now, Person A invents a medicine against cancer, and uses this medicine to heal Person B, Person C, and Person D.

In the first graph, they all pay him 3 units of money, so Person A gets 9 units of money. In the second graph they all owe him 3 units of money.

My point is that the 2 situations are more or less identical. Person A doesn't necessarily care if they pay him or owe him money. Especially not if they are trustworthy individuals, but the value of money is also to some degree based upon communal trust.

(https://i.imgur.com/6VNQPFW.png)

https://www.archania.org/governance/#Debunking_the_taxation_as_theft_argument (https://www.archania.org/governance/#Debunking_the_taxation_as_theft_argument)

I don't find that a very compelling argument. Have you read Scott Alexander's Non-Libertarian FAQ? I think he makes a better case there.

I agree that the argument sounds a bit weak now, but I think the core of the argument is valid. I just need to find a better way to explain myself. In essence, I think it might be wrong to assume that you own money, since the value of money is ensured by the community/government. It might be more appropriate to think of money as something you are renting from the community/government, and then taxes would be something like interest rate to the community/government.

Anyhow, I will read through Scott Alexander's Non-Libertarian FAQ. I also believe you suggested a book review written by him related to perceptual control theory. You really like this guy?

I also see that he has written an extensive anti-reactionary FAQ which seems to be more or less aligned with my views.

EDIT: I found that infographics have made a youtube video about what would happen if people stopped paying taxes. I don't think it goes sufficiently in detail though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0SFNNu6RNw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0SFNNu6RNw)

Something doesn't add up in these graphs:

In the first one, if everyone started with 3, and B, C, and D paid A 3/each, then A should have 12, not 9.

In the second one, it seems like the graph includes debts owed as liabilities, but not debts collectable as assets, but it makes no sense to treat these inconsistently, especially if you're not considering default risk.  So the numbers here should be 9, -3, -3, -3.

Finally, I'm not sure how one can draw any real conclusions from the graphs.  While wealth disparities are certainly real, you haven't provided any evidence that wealth disparities in the real world are actually caused or perpetuated by the sort of transfers that the graph postulates; they're more often attributed by economists to the relative returns on labor vs. capital.  I'd suggest reading Piketty, who wrote extensively on the subject.  Just make sure to also read some critiques of his work (https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2014/05/31/picking-holes-in-piketty), to balance your perspective.

I actually didn't think that they needed to start with the same amount. But that sounds like a more elegant example, so I will change it.


People aren't necessarily convinced that extreme wealth inequality is a bad thing. Our brains aren't wired for economics. Our brains are mostly wired for collecting food. I suspect that most people think of money as having inherent value in itself, similarly to how people would think of food before we invented money. With food inequality, you wouldn't necessarily care so much if other people had more food than you, as long as you had enough food for yourself. Some of these graphs are made to convince people that extreme wealth inequality is a bad thing, even if they have enough money for themselves.


Thank you for informing me. I will order the book

I get that that's their purpose, but I think the grounding of their argument doesn't really hold up.  The graph shows that if you transfer wealth from (BCD)->(A), A gets richer while the others get poorer...but that's a trivial conclusion.  You haven't shown any data that establishes how this graph accurately captures some aspect of the real world in a way that would allow drawing conclusions from it.

And the logarithmic plot of wealth utility is interesting, but the shape of this curve isn't something that you can just assert; it's also something that you need to build from empirical data.  You could hypothesize that the curve has that shape, but you can't base a policy argument on an unproven hypothesis.

Just to poke at one possible hole, it seems like your decreasing utility function assumes that wealth is only expended on the owner's own personal assets - a second yacht is less useful than the first, etc.  But this ignores reinvestment of that capital on ventures.  Take, for example, Elon Musk's wealth from PayPal, which he used to found Tesla and SpaceX, creating a bunch of jobs, and considerably advancing solar panel, battery, and spaceflight technology.  Would this money actually have generated more societal value if it had been redistributed by a more progressive tax system?  I don't assert an answer to this, but I do assert that the answer is not so obvious that one can handwave away the need for supporting data.

This is a proof of identity, based upon logic and mathematics. I am not denying that we have more advanced technology today than in the past, or that we might have more efficient ways of doing things today than in the past. But that doesn't affect this proof of identity.....

(https://www.archania.org/governance/money_is_equal_to_debt.png)

From this proof, you should be able to see that there is an equally valid way to see the world, where the richest person in the world has a balance of 0, while everybody else have different amounts of debt.


I agree. I should definately try to find emprical ways of proving that the utility function has that shape...


Well... I am certainly not denying that private companies can generate innovations that are beneficial to mankind, and I am not advocating for communism (the absolishment of private enterprise). However, I doubt that most of the billionaires in the world are as good as Elon Musk at utilizing their money to benefit mankind. That some billionaires are good at this, is just what we might expect from pure randomness. And it is not like governments are completely incapable of innovation. China, Russia, and USA all have their space programs, whice are funded by governments.

Anyhow, I am advocating for a system where rich people might need to pay a bit more taxes, but where they also have more freedom to choose what their taxes are used for. In the system I am advocating for, Elon Musk might have had a position as a leader for a project at NASA. But everybody paying taxes could choose to earmark some of their taxes to his project, kinda like crowdfunding Elon Musk with your taxes.

 

I think there are still two problems with this graph.  First, as I mentioned earlier, in the bottom left of that graph (https://www.archania.org/governance/money_is_equal_to_debt.png), person A should be at 9, to represent the value of the debt owned to them by the others.  Otherwise the graph is showing debts owed, but not debts receivable, and that would present a misleading picture.  Second, it's ignoring the value of whatever was received by B, C, and D.  Is there any particular reason that you're restricting this to services, and excluding goods?  If A sells cars, then B, C, and D are now each richer by a car, the value of which is now less than they paid due to depreciation, but the utility of which presumably equals or exceeds the price, or they would not have purchased it.


The problem is that you're trying to handwave away a major counterpoint  to your argument by essentially saying "I doubt that's true".  You need to back your doubts up with data, and I think what you'll find if you go through the literature is that the question of the relative efficiency of private vs. public endeavors is an immensely complex topic, the analysis of which has spanned many Ph.D. dissertations.


I get that you're trying to make this argument, but I also get the strong sense that you're approaching the question with some pretty strong preconceptions, and are trying to find arguments to reach your desired conclusion, rather than looking at the data, and letting it drive the analysis where it will.  I'd encourage you to try deliberately seeking out sources contrary to where you're trying to go - perhaps someone like Friedman - and read those sources until you feel you understand how their arguments interplay with your own.

I think your proposal also would be confusing, since it might imply that Person A had received 9 USD, and that the other individuals also owed him 3 USD each. In any case, that scenario is supposed to be in a world where they haven't invented money, but for some reason are exremely good at keeping track of debt.

Actually. That sounds like a nice idea for a new star control species. One that doesn't have money, but is extremely good at keeping track of debt.


Yes, there is a specific reason why I write it like that, which is to keep it simple. To include goods would just make it unnecessarily more complex, for no good reason. The point of the diagram is not to show how wealth inequality is generated, but rather to show that the bottom left graph/state is equal to the bottom right graph/state.

You don't necessarily need to know anything about how a state was formed, in order to prove that it is equivalent to another state. For example. 1 liter of water is more or less equivalent to 1 kilogram of water at room temperature, which is also more or less equivalent to 3.34*10^25 water molecules. This is true no matter how you collected 1 liter of water. It wouldn't seem like a valid criticism, if somebody claimed that this is true only because you collected the water in a specific way.

We have a lot wealth inequality today. That is a fact. This diagram is not trying to explain how we got there. It is just showing one possible route to wealth inequality, to prove that the bottom right graph/state with lots of wealth inequality is equivalent to the bottom left graph/state with lots of debt.

Also. Since I know how many water molecules there are in 1 liter of water, I can also figure out how many water molecules there are on Earth, if I know how many liters of water there is on Earth. Similarly, if I know that my example with 4 individuals is true, it must also be possible to make a similar debt based graph for all the individuals on Earth.

So, two points here:

First, they appear to only be good at tracking the (negative-value) debts they owe to other people, but not the (positive-value) debts that other people owe to them.  That seems...implausible.

Second, what are their debts denominated in, if they don't have the concept of money?

This doesn't need to be the case. They could all be keeping track of debt:

(https://i.imgur.com/nwFDiJB.png)

Where UD is an abbreviation for Unit of Debt.


It seems plausible that we could have made generalized units of debt before we invented money. Coins weren't invented before the 7th century BC, while writing seems to have been invented around the 6th millennium BC.

Coins have the weakness that somebody might find a way to manufacture them illegally. If debt was personalized between 2 individuals, they would both have the memory of the agreement, and possibly written notes to aid memory. So it wouldn't necessarily be as easy to cheat somebody in a system with personalized debt.

I found this book which seems to claim that money originated from debt: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290 (https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290)

I was referring to the previous graph, which included (negative value) debts owed, but omitted (positive value) debts payable.  It's your graph, so you can make it as you like, but I think that anyone with an accounting/finance/business/economics background is likely to consider the graph pretty nonsensical if you don't treat debt consistently.  And if you do, the two graphs become so alike that the point you're trying to make becomes obvious - which seems like something you'd want to do.


It's possible...but once you've got a "generalized unit of debt", you've essentially already invented ledger money.  All you need to do is introduce a tradeable token worth "UD$1", and you've got currency.


I'm aware of it, but haven't read it.  It sounds like it needs to be read with a critical eye, because the author is an anarchist with an anti-capitalist political agenda, but the reviews I perused indicated that there are some thought-provoking points there.

Maybe you are right. I have changed it now, but I also changed the titles of the y-axises, to emphasize that the graphs on the left side are talking about debt ,while the graphs on the right side are talking about coins.

The before-mentioned effect of the value of a dollar decreasing with economic success can simply be referred to as inflation. It is often regarded as a result of basic supply and demand interactions. When the entire population has more money, they start buying more products and producers raise the prices of products as a result to maintain economic equilibrium that prevents shortages. Once inflation happens, it's usually there to stay.

I also don't see an actual argument in favor of the title of the OP, just a graph with nothing more. An example that contradicts that statement is the psychology classroom example. If 15 students are given an option to give each student of the class a 10% grade boost, or, to themselves a 90% grade boost, the net surplus is in favor of the 10% to each student since the total surplus would be 150% for the classroom versus 90% for the classroom. It was found that students more often chose the 90%, more likely due to the evolution of humans who traditionally organized into small bands of a single family.
EDIT: I now see the yellow link at the very bottom.

However, this point is only relevant if the classroom is large enough to support the equity distribution. It illustrates that denser populations are more well supported by equity distribution (not necessarily "equality") versus smaller populations that would benefit from a clear flat bonus to an individual. Unsurprisingly, you can see that countries with very dense populations tend to be communist, like China or Vietnam, and countries with smaller populations tend to be capitalist like Luxenbourg while those with moderate populations tend to be in-between and progressive like the U.S., which forms a gradient corresponding to the OP's graph.

You seem to have a lot of problems with links. What kind of browser are you using?

That seems like an intentional derailment from a discussion about economics. Please refrain from that.

Look:

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d0/Countries_by_Population_Density_in_2015.svg/863px-Countries_by_Population_Density_in_2015.svg.png)

Many European countries have almost the same population density as China, while Japan and India actually have a much higher population density than China. None of those countries are communistic. Actually, even China isn't really a communist country today either. It is more like an authoritarian capitalistic society today. And historically communistic societies like Russia and Kazakhstan actually have a much lower population density than the U.S.

So you see that Germany and Italy have the highest population densities in Europe. Did you forget who the Axis powers were? Their economy was really bad when the rise of communism happened. They currently aren't very communist post WW-II, but even despite being forced to give that up, they have a much more progressive attitude than the U.S. although Italy is comparatively more corrupt. Also India, unlike the majority of China (mostly Hong Kong), was directly occupied by British forces. So India could have still originally been interested in being communist, but as with Germany and Italy was forced to give that up and India isn't exactly in the best shape today. China as a single country also has over a billion people to support and the bulk of those people aren't equally distributed over China's desert or the Tibetan plateau contrary to what the map may suggest, unlike any of the European countries.

Maybe it is a bit difficult to see from the map, but Italy and Germany are not the countries with the highest population density in Europe.  Netherlands, Belgium, and the United Kingdom have a higher population density.

Country	People per km2
Netherlands	416
Belgium	355
United Kingdom	255
Germany	229
Italy	200

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density)

I do get different numbers from different sources

https://www.statista.com/statistics/281322/population-density-in-the-united-kingdom-uk-by-country/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density

But I would likely trust wikipedia over just a commercial source, so I would anticipate that order is currently more accurate. However, there is still the timeline to consider, as the genocide didn't primary take place in the United Kingdom, and, can you extrapolate its economic stance based on formerly having many fewer people which other sources seem to support
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/population-density-people-per-sq-km-wb-data.html
So like I also said, many European countries have collectively adopted a more progressive attitude than the United States, and  the U.S.  only has 33 pop/km, like for instance how European countries tend to have universal healthcare.
I think formally assessing the issue would require actually looking at the relevant land mass of the countries, not simply dividing the population by the surface area as wiki does, because obviously there aren't many people living in the middle of a lake or a desert. Different countries also have more or less resources available too, so they can just as easily adopt a different rhetoric based on the offset times at which they approach their respective population caps. The Netherlands for instance has access to the North sea whereas the Baltic sea faces marine ecosystem failure from overfishing. But the fact that information like that hasn't been formally assessed could just then be grounds to say that no one should be making definite statements like ours in the first place.

What about Russia, which only has 8.3 People per km². If communism had any correlation with population density, wouldn't you expect Russia to have been super capitalistic?

So like I'm saying for the third time now, to have any accurate assessment as to whether your presumption is right or wrong, we would at the least have to look at what landmass the population is actually relevant to, because simply dividing population by surface area doesn't consider the fact that some parts of a country are completely uninhabited or uninhabitable, and that's not to mentioned the dynamics of each country's different ecosystem that supports a higher or lower population cap. I'm sure you know that the bulk of the population of Russia lives in the Western portion.

So what? Some parts of the United States are also much more densely populated than other parts.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/Map_of_states_showing_population_density_in_2013.svg/1200px-Map_of_states_showing_population_density_in_2013.svg.png)

And I'm not disputing that that's true. However, that's still not to say that a particular state can't elect to make an irrational decision based on inaccurate claims anyway.

Your claim is that it is more rational for dense populations to be more communistic, while it is more rational for less dense populations to be capitalistic?

My claim is that with a particular model of rational decision making, that I can make an argument that mathematically disputes one of your claims. That doesn't mean there aren't other variables though.

For instance, what if the choice isn't between 90% and 10%, but instead it's between 20% and 0.00001% with 10 people versus 100,000 people? Well, in that particular instance, it's more rational for the society to choose the flat 20%. The overall point I'm trying to make is that you shouldn't expect every country to conform to a single assumption about what's "best" for them (a dispute that has lead to genocide across the planet), because what's best will always vary on a case by case basis. I would say communist countries are as wrong to impose their system as capitalist countries are to impose their other system.

Okay, but there are huge multinational corporations today, and if different countries have different levels of taxes for corporations, don't you think multinational corporations will have a tendency to migrate to the countries with the lowest taxes?

Also, don't you think that will incentivize other countries to lower their taxes for the corporations, to attract businesses to themselves?

(https://www.archania.org/governance/tax_competition.png)

It's definitely "an" incentive, but it's not the only incentive and not for every industry. A company doesn't actually need to move to a whole other part of the planet just to get a tax break, they can filter through shell corporations to the Caiman islands. I think your point is that "if they're just going to shortcut the system, why fight them?" and the answer is because they can still be prosecuted for the money they think they've loopholed and there are policies many countries as a whole can enforce to mitigate that damage.
Money is just a facade, it's an illusion we agree to for the sake of conveniently deciding how to allocate resources, there still are physical limits to how many resources need to be allocated to actually sustain the civilization people want, you can't just keep perpetually lowering taxes more and more and expect nothing to go wrong, and obviously different countries recognize that. Different countries happen to specialize in particular industries, so China specializes in production, so they make production labor cheap. The United States specializes in media, so they make lots of songs and movies and games for a higher quality than what other countries could make, so the same rhetoric of outsourcing doesn't automatically apply to everything.

You really think your countries are winning against the multinational corporations? I think the sharks are eating your countries for dinner.

(https://www.archania.org/tax-evasion.png/)

And what exactly makes you think corporations have that kind of power when Google temporarily lost its own domain name due to a single policy that says they're obligated to renew it? Countries aren't just going to take corporate abuse lying down, they're the ones who actually control the resources companies need to make any money in the first place and have actual armed forces that can be deployed.

So what? Lots of your government officials are "owned" by corporations. Your democracy is a joke. Donald Trump is a joke.

So aside from the fact that you keep changing the subject to avoid the logical holes I point out in your rhetoic and aside from the fact that corrupt individuals can be either voted out of office in a democracy or dismissed/executed in a dictatorship, let's say that you're right that all companies automatically want to move to any country that has the lowest taxes and that they would have zero negative consequences as a result. If that actually happens, then that country now becomes flooded in every industry which devalues all those industries in that country, which then gives the corporations an incentive to move back to their original countries.

The industries don't necessarily need to be devalued, especially not if they are mainly exporting whatever they are making. But of course, the entire global economic system is going to collapse sooner or later, probably because of the US dollar going into hyperinflation. But then the Chinese economy will also collapse since they are mainly exporting to the U.S. And of course EU isn't safe either. The entire world is interconnected today.

Except that supply and demand is literally the entire basis for your argument that lower taxes will attract more corporations and those same exact mechanics show that a flooded industry must necessarily be devalued. What you're failing to consider is that this back and forth isn't perpetual, there are physical constraints that would prevent it from running amok and that's why companies settle on an intermediate solution at economic equilibrium, you can't take something that isn't there and frankly it's just irrational for corporations to expect they can. It's not in a corporation's best interest for civilization to collapse, they want people to attain a higher human capital who they can then hire, they want people to be able to buy their products and they want a legal force that can protect them from getting ransacked in anarchy that they don't have to waste money on themselves.

Inflation is always a natural consequence of countries experiencing economic growth, on its own it isn't an indication of anything wrong.

Different countries specialize in different industries which is why they trade, they want it that way specifically because it's more rational for all parties involved than every country trying to do every single little thing itself.

Sure, but what makes you think that people or corporations are acting in their own long-term best interest? People and corporations are stupid. Humans have lots of cognitive biases and are horrible at long-term thinking. You might be able to think a few years into the future. Not much more.



Well, I didn't say inflation, I said hyperinflation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation)


Maybe, but if whatever you are giving to China is worth less than whatever China is giving to you, you will get a trade deficit, and that will eventually cause your currency to go into hyperinflation. This will happen as soon as the international investors realize how much trouble you are in. Donald Trump is working very hard to make this happen sooner rather than later, but investors aren't so clever so you might still have some time.

I agree, not everyone will make rational decisions. At the same time, this discussion only proves that people are capable of making rational decisions and seeing beyond bad ones, which means so are most other people. It's not really anything to do with intelligence, people are 99% the same, it's more to do with access to information.

So do you have data that suggests the world is experiencing hyperinflation? Because I live in a city with hundreds of thousands of people and I haven't seen prices go up very much.

Which is completely fine when the other party plans on paying it back, and both China and the U.S. have that trust which is why they keep doing it every single year after year after year after year. Apple takes out millions of dollars in loans annually, but are they bankrupt? No, they pay it back, so it doesn't matter that they keep taking out millions in loans on an annual basis because they can expect to pay it back.

The world isn't experiencing hyperinflation right now. It is in a bubble of false beliefs. Once the Chinese realize that they can't trust you anymore, that bubble will break.

I don't know who you think "you" entails exactly because I never negotiated a trade deal with any world leader, but any country is free to loan from any other, the U.S. and China were never obligated to enter into an agreement. Whether or not they trust each other politically is clear, but economically they have a long history of trade and they both do whatever they can to make sure they don't go bankrupt. I don't see any strong indication that will change even under the current U.S. presidency because Trump doesn't have all the power and Xi will likely be a leader for life to enforce the previous history once the situation settles down.  

Your country cannot be trusted mostly because your healthcare system and military complex are consuming way too much of your budget, and there is little prospect for decreasing how much those sectors are consuming.

I think you're referring to Ragonomics which predates the current U.S. presidency. While it doesn't seem to be the most rational, it doesn't seem ineffective either given that the U.S. and China have continued to trade for years after those policies were adopted. A lot of technology tends to enter society as a result of military spending, like robotics, instant coffee, auto parts, a lot of communication/networking technology like html tags and GPS and radars, drones, etc. It's not all the U.S. or China, a lot of armed forces eventually end up doing this.

So what? If I take a huge loan from my bank, and use lots of money every month on feeding poor people, it doesn't necessarily matter to the bank what I am using the money on. What matters to the bank is that I pay back.

In the current trade relationship between the US and China, China is basically just giving money to the US. There is no way in hell the US is ever going to pay China back all of the trade deficit.

And how is that relevant to the fact that despite your claims that the U.S. and China have continued to trade year after year after year after year? It's been the case for decades that the U.S. uses lots of money to feed poor people.

Perhaps you'd like to call China and tell them they have no idea what they're doing.

Even if they listened to me, what are they supposed to do? They need to continue to export to the US to fuel their own "fake" economic growth.

I don't think you saw the point. Who are you to suggest that you know more about what's best for the country than the country itself?

You seem to have a lot of faith in politicians.... But what makes you think China doesn't already know?

Look. They are even limiting criticism of Donald Trump to protect their "false" narrative:

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/international-taxes/396539-china-orders-media-to-limit-criticism-of-trump-for-fear-of

It's like this. Lets, for example, imagine that I have deadly cancer and that there is nothing I can do to save myself. Maybe I don't want to tell my children since I know they are going to be devastated then. So, instead of telling my children, I let them keep their "false belief" about my health. At least then they can enjoy some more time with me without being devastated before I die.

I don't have "faith" in politicians, there are definitely corrupt politicians. But what you need to understand is that it's not quite that simple, it actually does matter a lot more what the public thinks, but you don't recognize that when you see arguments you disagree with take the spotlight.

Even if a politician disagrees with their constituents, like if for instance their constituents believe the sky is purple, senators and representatives are still compelled to agree with their constituents and would vote to rename the sky purple on behalf of their constituents, and if the issue is important enough, and they don't vote according to their constituents, they will almost surely be voted out of office. So whether public opinion matters in a democracy is indisputable, but what shapes public opinion is how corporations and the media portray different issues as important or unimportant in order to compel people to write to their representatives with particular opinions or vote for particular candidates who claim to support different political stances. Even if a decision isn't in the best interest of constituents, the people in a democracy still ultimately bear the responsibility for that, and that's why education and media are very important.

So lets take climate change. Even if a congress person believes in human climate change but their constituents tell them it's fake, they will be strongly compelled to vote according to their constituents and vote to pass bills that suggest human climate change is fake even if they don't want to. The constituents will compel their congress person to do so both directly in writing and indirectly through mass and social media, and since climate change is a volatile issue, the congress person knows they will almost certainly be voted out of office if they don't vote according to their constituents. The only realistic way this given congress person could consistently vote in favor of human-caused climate change is if their constituents also believe it to be true or don't take notice of the congress person's unfaithful voting.


Again, Trump doesn't hold all the power, I'm sure you've noticed by this point he boasts a lot more than what he can actually can lay claim to. I don't see an indication that Xi doesn't understand this as well.


But both China and the U.S. have records of their transactions in order to extrapolate the future, and the U.S. is publicly rated on the security of its currency by world-wide sources based on a long history of transactions and the health of companies in its own economy. The reason why it isn't declared risky is because it currently isn't, and the rest of the world doesn't see a legitimate reason to think it will collapse any time in the near future, that's why the dollar still has some strength, more than the yen.

You know that most of the debt pools that were involved in the financial crisis of 2007–2008 had triple-A rating:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the_subprime_crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the_subprime_crisis)

And that's why world leaders don't limit their reactions to only specific debt holders, it's a culmination of factors that considers many different companies and policies and history, and frankly panicking about the issue just makes it worse, they don't want to have to worry about global economies collapsing.

(https://heatherstinnett.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/head-in-the-sand-lion-blog.jpg)

Can you both reduce the sniping and stay close to object-level discussion?

I don't see how continuing to post big pictures logically makes you right, and frankly it's just weird to keep doing it in the middle of what should be a reasonable discussion. All you're doing is reiterating a previous opinion that is contrary to decades international relationships with no indication of change. It would be like if you typed in all caps because you somehow thought typing in all caps proved the Earth is flat, the two are unrelated. It also looks like you kept changing the subject to avoid addressing other points brought up, which didn't disappear, they're still there waiting to be addressed.

Ok. Sorry for my bad behavior. Can you rephrase the points I haven't addressed, because I not quite sure what you mean....

I found this youtube video which might be of interest in regard to this topic:

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Eric Cline, PhD):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4)

Interesting video, thanks for pointing it out.

I now at least have the closure of knowing what killed my favorite civilizations.

(https://image.ibb.co/hs4AOA/warp.png)

I have added these graphs in this section on my website:

https://www.archania.org/governance/#Money_as_hidden_debt (https://www.archania.org/governance/#Money_as_hidden_debt)

(https://image.ibb.co/imJGAL/the-libertarian-bias.png)

Just wanted to say that I have started to discuss with people here:

https://discord.gg/SZgJyq (https://discord.gg/SZgJyq)

Under deb8-politics

That seems like a good place for this.

On that note, could all of these topics be combined into one thread now? They make it a challenge to navigate this sub forum.

Wow, there are a lot more of them than I thought. I'll see about compacting some of the more similar ones.

Make a specific subforum?
World-improving round of regulars...

(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/633058524489842711/643411793187831808/money1.png)

(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/574292590363672588/644922304962494510/living_conditions.png)

I don't like how the first paragraph there doesn't take into acount worker efficiency improvements even aside from automation or animal effort. if you're going to present a wrong argument, it helps to portray it as being wrong as you make it.

Thank you for the feedback. I have changed the first paragraph a little now.