Patrick Collison's Questions

by apsec112 • 6 years ago

374 259 6 years ago

One common answer for many questions comparing past to present : "More regulations"

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but often it is becoming a nightmare of labyrinthine proportions to navigate, which hinders new entrants.

xoxoy3• 6 years ago

huh? there’s plenty of colleges to choose from and yet costs go up every year.

to me it seems like a distortion caused by a Federal Gov that guarantees payment to universities in the form of federally backed student loans.

peacefulhat• 6 years ago

Subsidized corn is not rapidly and consistently increasing in price.

foolinaround2• 6 years ago

supply/demand

you are right, the demand is artificially propped up by the govt. as you stated.

However, it is tied to the job market, which is more realistic, and we are starting to see the fallout where many of the colleges will be going out of business.

jdkee• 6 years ago

Education is now a Veblen good.

josu• 6 years ago

Cars and Cellphone service sectors are heavily regulated. Textbooks are not regulated.

There is more to it than just "more regulations". Also regulation doesn't necessarily have to come from the government, for example, the Apple App Store is heavily regulated, and yet they have some of the lowest software prices compared to other platforms.

In my opinion, competition through trade may have a stronger effect on prices; you can easily buy a TV or a car made in China, but you can't easily attend the University of Shanghai, or be treated in a Hospital in Hong Kong.

dantheman2• 6 years ago

That is a correct definition of regulation - it captures a feedback cycle; but the parent, was clearly meaning government regulation. If customers don't like a product that helps regulate quality, etc...

noirbot3• 6 years ago

Textbooks aren't regulated in the governmental sense (though they are somewhat at the middle/high school level), but there's certainly been more "regulation" in the sense of schools trying to enforce what books are used for what class for their own enrichment.

ALittleLight• 6 years ago

I don't agree that textbooks aren't affected by regulations. Regulations permit easily available student loans which leads to the glut of college students who need to buy books. The books aren't exactly a free market as you are told by the school which books and which version to buy. Also, government programs subsidize textbooks.

repsilat• 6 years ago

I wonder if it's reasonable to talk about some of these things separately from the rest of the economy. San Francisco can't build a bus lane, but it can build the hell out of some software. (You might argue that our productivity has gone down there too, but I'd say the social impact has never been higher.)

Maybe with "hard" infrastructure being a bit old-fashioned, or bogged down in red tape, maybe the entrepreneurial or organising or effective talent moved into other industries?

It sounds a little self-congratulatory, so I don't like the idea, but it's hard (for me) to see something like SpaceX as something other than a competent "can do" entrant into a stale old industry.

I don't know what lessons we might learn from that, though. Room for small upstart players in industries (especially around government spending) might be one.

eganist2• 6 years ago

How do people decide to make major life changes? Most days, people don't decide to change their lives in big ways. On a few days, they do. What's special about those days? How much is it about the stimulus versus their own inner state?

A recognition of self was what it took for me. Changed my life situation pretty recently for the better after a realization following a personal conversation with a close friend. The realization undermined a lot of my assumptions about how I was living my life, but it took substantial input and questioning from them for me to understand it; it was akin to pulling a thread and unraveling a tapestry, so to speak.

Can't say this is true for everyone, but it was for me.

tl;dr a bit of both.

streulpita• 6 years ago

Can you elaborate on the "recognition of self" bit?

eganist2• 6 years ago

I'm being deliberately obtuse, but in essence I recognized that I was mentally working around growing in a certain area rather than tackling it head on.

gorgoiler• 6 years ago

This is a very heartening comment to read and I would love to know more, or to receive advice to be pointed in the same direction as you.

ajju• 6 years ago

“ Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?

Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. "

Does anyone know if this also true of learning & development in companies? For example sales training or training

thundergolfer3• 6 years ago

Out of everything on the page, this grabbed my attention too. This seems to have immediate implications for how even experienced professionals train.

I'd like to become much better at math than I am now. Should I be putting a lot of effort into working out a one-on-one tutoring partnership?

hectormalot• 6 years ago

That, and/or mastery learning. I haven’t read the research, but I hypothesize the focus on ‘mastery in each subtopic before moving to the next’ is what drives results, while 1-1 tutoring is what drives the speed of attaining them.

dbcurtis2• 6 years ago

Why do you think that takes a lot of effort? I suspect it would not be hard to find a tutor at readonable rates. (Speaking as a former home-schooling dad. We used math toturs for 1:1 instruction at various times. )

jasonhong• 6 years ago

I don't have full answers for all of your questions, but my colleagues doing Learning Science often mention this two-sigma improvement, and are working on computer-based cognitive tutors that can adapt and model what a student is learning. I vaguely recall that these cognitive tutors are at the 1-sigma level for certain subjects (primarily STEM subjects), but that was many years ago and I'm not sure of the details.

Here is one example abstract from one of my colleagues (sorry I don't have the full paper): https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-44566-8_14

Cognitive Computer Tutors: Solving the Two-Sigma Problem

Individual human tutoring is the most effective and most expensive form of instruction. Students working with individual human tutors reach achievement levels as much as two standard deviations higher than students in conventional instruction (that is, 50% of tutored students score higher than 98% of the comparison group). Two early 20th-century innovations attempted to offer benefits of individualized instruction on a broader basis: (1) mechanized individualized feedback (via teaching machines and computers) and (2) mastery learning (individualized pacing of instruction). On average each of these innovations yields about a half standard deviation achievement effect. More recently, cognitive computer tutors have implemented these innovations in the context of a cognitive model of problem solving. This paper examines the achievement effect size of these two types of student-adapted instruction in a cognitive programming tutor. Results suggest that cognitive tutors have closed the gap with and arguably surpass human tutors.

sudhirj2• 6 years ago

Feels like the Khan Academy apps do something like this. You progress through a tree of knowledge and can’t move to any next node until you master the one you’re on, demonstrated by solving problems. It also gives you all the help you need to achieve that mastery.

HarryHirsch3• 6 years ago

Not sure if I'd agree. Khan Academy is firmly rooted in the American tradition, it teaches facts, but it's like Feynman in Brazil, it does not integrate the concepts. For that you need problems tailored to your level. A good tutor can do that.

raverbashing4• 6 years ago

and can’t move to any next node until you master the one you’re on

Oh that's the absolute worse way of teaching people (or, ok, that's my pet peeve in education)

"but how do you expect to learn stuff without knowing the basics blah blah blah" well, because maybe actually knowing how it is used in the end helps with learning. Instead education seems to focus on wasting a lot of time with "basics" disconnected from reality then finally teaching things how it is.

ghaff2• 6 years ago

I assume the answer is... it depends. I've taken training/workshops that clearly depend on group dynamics. I've also had training presenting, skiing, individual projects in grad school, etc. that pretty much depend on 1:1 time and, to the degree you're in a group, it mostly means you just don't get as much attention (but it's cheaper).

jfarmer• 6 years ago

Bloom's paper largely focuses on when/how students get feedback and less on the particulars of the assessments.

For example, maybe mastery learning works (in part) because it helps teachers pay attention in a group setting more like they would in a 1:1 setting. From Bloom's paper: https://share.getcloudapp.com/rRu7WJRz

tylermenezes• 6 years ago

I'm personally pretty confident that with the level of resources now available for learning almost anything online, you can replicate a lot of the benefits of tutoring by (1) getting students excited about a topic and then (2) teaching them the basic keywords and research skills for that topic.

(We've seen a lot of success with this model at CodeDay, n~50,000. It was very exciting when we first tried this as a legitimate educational strategy and saw it work, one of the reasons I decided to work for this nonprofit instead of another startup.)

bohemian992• 6 years ago

Keeping and maintaining that excitement for self-driven learning is the most challenging part.

apsec1123• 6 years ago

There was a thread on this back in 2018, although I think this page has been updated since then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105129

donw7• 6 years ago

It is interesting that the real cost of medical care and hospital services didn't see any sort of inflection change with the introduction of the ACA.

One the key reasons for implementing the ACA -- which I supported, mind you -- was to control rising healthcare costs.

Costs might still rise, but the rate of rise should be lower than before.

This graph doesn't seem to show that.

What am I missing?

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

It is interesting that the real cost of medical care and hospital services didn't see any sort of inflection change with the introduction of the ACA.

No one expected it would.

One the key reasons for implementing the ACA -- which I supported, mind you -- was to control rising healthcare costs.

The immediate reason was to address broad consumer affordability, especially for the people that could least afford it and needed it most.

Long-term, overall cost containment was a long-term goal, but it wasn't expected to have that effect in the short-term, and the pieces that contribute to that either weren't implemented at all, weren't implemented fully, or weren't maintained. (And, heck, a lot of the other pieces weren't in place long before they too started being chipped away at.)

For example, the pieces building on the HIPAA Administrative Simplification provisions designed to by increasing the coverage of transaction standards and doing regular modernization so that incompatible ad hoc approaches wouldn't be needed as extensively were largely unimplemented, with the most important mandated standard operating rules never adopted and the mandated regular (3-year, IIRC) update cycle for the standards and standard operating rules never begun. There are mandated dates in law, but HHS never adopted the required regulations. (That's actually one of the more minor unimplemented cost containment measures, but the one I'm most intimately familiar with because I spent a lot of time those rules were in limbo being involved in planning compliance catch-up and forward looking planning for a component of a state Medicaid system.)

paxys6• 6 years ago

The key reason for ACA was to get more people insured. In fact the biggest criticism against it was that it would cost too much. No one expected overall healthcare spending to decrease.

nugget• 6 years ago

You need 2 things to bring down health care costs (without resorting to rationing): first, introduce price transparency so that consumers can find the low cost providers, and second, provide an incentive for consumers to balance cost vs quality of care and seek out the lowest cost provider for the care needed. This doesn't work for all procedures needed but for huge segments of health care like imaging, this seems to be the best bet.

andrewstuart2• 6 years ago

(I chose to delete this because it's not a sufficiently positive response.)

CincinnatiMan• 6 years ago

Interesting thought but what are you trying to get across?

sudhirj2• 6 years ago

There are different questions that we have at each level in Maslow’s pyramid, and HN tends to focus on the last two levels - but that doesn’t mean the questions at the other levels are any less important. There are other site, communities and blogs that cater to people at these levels.

A one size fits all solution wouldn’t be good for any of the levels, and it doesn’t mean people are one level are any better or worse than people at others.

apsec1123• 6 years ago

"Where will the money come from to get the car fixed?" is a very personal question; answering it well would require knowing a lot about the person asking, and what their life circumstances, talents, resources, and obstacles were. This makes it harder to discuss on HN (or most other Internet sites), since these are very large groups who are mostly strangers, and don't know that much about each other. Questions about economic equality, the cost of housing, career advice, and so on in general are reasonably well represented here, I think.

akirakurusu• 6 years ago

"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?"

Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness, the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is just amazing. Anyone here have more insights on this question? What are the non-cultural factors which contribute to this phenomenon that seemingly makes Japan an outlier?

donw7• 6 years ago

I live in Japan, and have for about a decade.

You're bang-on when it comes to culture, but it has nothing to do with being optimized for tourism.

Japan is a very conservative country. Change happens slowly here, and Japan does a lot to ensure that people raised here share a common culture, with a strong focus on stability and harmony.

To provide some examples:

- NHK, the national broadcaster, has several series of popular programs showing life across all of Japan -- rural, urban, suburban, every prefecture. There are also programs showing Japanese people living overseas, and showing how they have integrated into the local culture. There is no "rural vs urban" divide in Japan.

- Japanese schools focus heavily on structure and responsibility. Students maintain their classrooms, clean their bathrooms, staff the cafeterias, etc. All of this is under adult supervision, but the kids do the actual work. Discipline is strong as well -- there are real consequences for poor behavior.

- Japan follows the Prussian education model. Compulsory schooling ends at 14 (9th grade). From there, you can immediately begin working, go to a trade school, or go to high school. There is also a professional education track separate from university.

- There is a strong culture around keeping families whole and raising kids as a whole family in Japan. Often the wife will move back home and live with her family shortly before and after childbirth, and there's a lot of cultural reinforcement there.

- Parents are very active in the education of their children, and the locus of responsibility is first on the child, second on the parent.

- The Koban system is fantastic. Police live in their communities, and interact with people every day. You never want to end up on the wrong side of the law -- the conviction rate is well north of 90%, and the accused have very few rights here -- but overall, Japanese police are very polite and professional.

There are downsides to this -- everything comes with trade-offs -- but it delivers a very stable and safe society.

actuator4• 6 years ago

Few questions, would be glad if anyone can answer these:

- Would you know of good companies which have a good work life balance in Japan?

- I know among the big tech, Microsoft and Google have offices there. Both seem to pay well as well. Do they have similar WLB as their US offices?

- I have heard of racism, like certain apartments being off limits for non Japanese people. Some clubs only allowing white caucasians among foreigners. How true is this in your experience?

- I have no problem in learning Japanese over time, but without it at the start, is it very difficult to get by?

- Do most people live in Tokyo/Kyoto(where Tech companies seem to be) itself or can you live a bit in outskirts(a bit of greenery) and commute using the fast public transport?

fomine32• 6 years ago

There is no "rural vs urban" divide in Japan.

Hmm maybe not divided like US but exists. Tokyo vs other big cities(Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Nagoya,..) vs others is popular conflict. Young people move to Tokyo to get jobs or go to univ and never goes back, meanwhile rural areas are losing younger smart people. And all govs and most news are in Tokyo so not considering others well.

I hope covid improves this situation.

james_s_tayler3• 6 years ago

The no rural vs urban divide thing...

I never ever thought about it before but I see _exactly_ what you mean. And I think you're spot on. There isn't this idea/phenomenon of country folks being very different than city folks, rather there is an extremely strong cultural narrative around how a Japanese person behaves and what it means to be Japanese that transcends the settings in which one lives. The cultural machine just continuously markets Japaneseness to it's citizens.

I agree it comes with good and bad, but for sure when it comes to safety and stability it's huge factor.

icelancer3• 6 years ago

...have you considered that things are much nicer there but at great cost to the sections of people they consider "not nice?" Especially in Japan?

andrewstuart2• 6 years ago

I visited Japan and was just astounded at how much better the society is run.

As a tourist, my obviously naive impression was of a place that is incredibly well organised, that seems to have no trouble investing in its own infrastructure, that is extremely safe and clean and generally prosperous. Where the people seem to have a sense of joy and fun.

Just. so. well. organised.

I really loved Japan. My favorite country in so many ways. I really wish I'd visited when younger and maybe lived there for a while.

I did feel unsafe and threatened during my trip there at one point when an Australian tourist became belligerent and angry when someone (not Japanese of course) stepped ahead of him in a queue. I felt ashamed at his behavior.

drcode• 6 years ago

I agree Japan is awesome (visited twice) but let's not overlook this: https://www.businessinsider.com/world-suicide-rate-map-2014-...

hn_throwaway_994• 6 years ago

Where the people seem to have a sense of joy and fun.

I'm going to take issue with that one. Of course "a sense of joy and fun" is subjective, but the extreme social conformism of Japan definitely has its drawbacks.

I mean, take one measurable metric when it comes to "joy and fun": sex. Much as been written about Japan's extremely low birth rates, but that also extends to sex and even just romantic relationships. Decent article: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/japan-m...

james_s_tayler3• 6 years ago

Depends which end of society you're on.

My sister's in law are up early and on a train for hours into the city where they work until well after dark and are home at about 11pm.

My wife who lives in my home country on the other hand runs her own business from home, sets her own hours and has a lot more free time and independence.

I feel pretty sorry for the workforce in Japan. It's pretty dystopian if you ask me.

It's amazing for kids, university students, senior citizens and if you ever get a day off.

ffggvv• 6 years ago

why can’t you just attribute it to culture? it’s clearly that

nemothekid• 6 years ago

You can, but it looks like everyone else in this thread is lazer focused on Japan (likely due to the prestige of Japanese culture).

But that doesn't explain Switzerland. Is Switzerland closer to Japanese in culture than they are to Dutch? I think obviously not, but from the thread you would assume otherwsie.

kevindong• 6 years ago

I've only been to Switzerland once and that was during a <2 hour layover in the Zurich airport. As an American used to frequently decrepit American airports/infrastructure, I was seriously shocked at how nice the entire airport was. The aesthetic of the airport was just quintessentially Swiss (aka beautifully minimalistic).

When I pay for something with an American credit card in Europe, the machine prints out a receipt for me to sign. I was buying a snack at a store in the Zurich airport and the clerk actually compared the signature on the back of my card to the signature that I scrawled on the receipt. That was the one and only time I've ever had someone do that.

I generally don't put any effort into those signatures so my signature looked nothing like what was on the back of my card so the clerk actually asked me to try again.

ghaff2• 6 years ago

So they have an archaic system that requires comparing a signature? I'm pretty sure I couldn't match my credit card unless I were trying to do it while looking at the card signature. I hardly consider that a benefit.

And I've been through Zurich. I don't consider it anything special better or worse than going through most major European or American airports. [Oh. I take that back. I had my luggage lost on the way there by SwissAir and it was a nightmare finding who to talk to.]

tempsy4• 6 years ago

homogenous societies are inherently more efficient? the reality is the beauty of America is that we are a heterogeneous one, but there are of course some downsides to that.

0823498723498728• 6 years ago

Considering that I use at least four languages[1] every day, and am thankful[2] to be living someplace that has not yet been completely overrun by chains and big box stores, I'd argue the assertion of a "heterogenous" US might need defending.

On the original question: I think switzerland is nice for two reasons. (a) we didn't blow ourselves up twice last century, which meant that even with little absolute growth we went from being a relatively poor european country to a relatively rich one, and (b) putting more emphasis on quality of life than on hustle results in, well, more quality of life.

[1] It doesn't work for francophones, who have a general swiss (or at best cantonal) idiom, but in swiss-german there are several isoglosses just within my valley that allow me to place a speaker. Granted, my valley has been historically universally catholic, but these days that just means that our protestants and muslims get lumped together in the "not christian" bucket :-)

[2] a french friend put it this way, earlier this century: "Modern europeans are too busy feeling sorry for those poor benighted savages who had the misfortune to be born a few villages over, to bother travelling halfway around the world to bring their superior way of life to people at gunpoint." À mon avis, c pas faux.

vikiomega9• 6 years ago

I think it's a little disingenuous to call America a heterogenous society. While the share of population for different ancestries[1] makes it look heterogenous, a large part of the equation is cultural homogeneity. American culture is derived from its anglo history and I'd argue economic and political pressures have forced "model minorities" to forgo their heritage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

ta12345678903• 6 years ago

What are the non-cultural factors which contribute to this phenomenon

It's simply impossible to detach Japan from their culture.

The main thing that stands out to me is their selflessness.

One anectdata: Tokyo feels pretty much the opposite of NYC. In NYC it feels like people are obstacles to avoid on the way to where you are going. Nobody waits for anybody. At first it seems rude, then you realize "it's not personal" and just assume the same stance. It's ok to quickly walk in front of someone who's not paying attention, it's ok to not say hi and just quickly ask what they want. You end up thinking a city that big and with so many people can only be that way. Then you go to Japan and are completely blown away. Everybody is aware of everyone else on the street, even if it's packed people will give you the right of way, they'll wait for you if you are distracted, they'll stop and try to help you if you seem lost, and seemingly everywhere people will be super polite. To me the difference is that in NY (and maybe the US in general), I'm always first and most important, whereas in Tokyo (and probably Japan in general), everyone is more important than just myself.

Two small stories about Japan: 1) a friend was trying to find a place to exchange some USD and got a bit lost, he asked a random person about it, this person walked my friend for 3 blocks to the currency exchange shop. 2) when going through a bus station in Tokyo, one of the escalators was closed for cleaning, when I walked by, the janitor was laying down flat on the floor, holding a special brush, meticulously cleaning the yellow metal mat at the entrance of the escalator, completely absorbed in what he was doing. I've never seen anyone, anywhere else in the world, put so much care into cleaning a public space.

keiferski3• 6 years ago

a friend was trying to find a place to exchange some USD and got a bit lost, he asked a random person about it, this person walked my friend for 3 blocks to the currency exchange shop.

This exact same thing happened to me. Two anecdotes don't make a pattern, but...Japan does have a magnificent culture of service.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 6 years ago

I worked for a Japanese corporation for decades; regularly traveling to Tokyo.

Japanese culture is really unique; even for East Asia.

They aren’t a “warm and fuzzy” bunch, but every Japanese person is aware that they are a member of Society, with the ensuing obligations and personal boundaries.

Every person in Japan takes their vocation seriously. Quality is absolutely stunning, and is deeply personal to each worker; bordering on obsession. Quality is almost a religious obligation. I feel like a slob, in my own work, compared to them, but most Americans seem to think that I’m way too overbearing about Quality.

That said, it’s no utopia. Management techniques can be difficult to endure, working hours and stress are insane. There aren’t many stress-free jobs, and the nation has a high suicide rate.

I liked to visit, but I don’t think I could live or work there.

nojvek2• 6 years ago

Are you sure this wasn’t because you seemed western/white privilege?

When I was backpacking it was shocking to see how other countries will perceive white people as superior and go above and beyond to help them while someone who is Asian gets treated like just another average Joe. It’s opposite for black folks.

It’s like decades of movies and media have built this implicit bias in our brains.

calinet62• 6 years ago

Appreciation of systems.

Continuous improvement, and respect for people.

They are closer to this reality than most societies. It shows.

Yet, they are not without problems, which are inextricably linked to the same culture. There are still tradeoffs.

totetsu3• 6 years ago

As a Japan resident and expat from a small south pacific nation you may of heard of recently, I don't find Japanese "baseline execution quality" to be categorically better. There are a lot of places where it is worse.

Buses and trains are better (and more punctual); Japan's public transport is great.(where there is money)
low-end food is tastier; 50/50 on this. Maybe gyudon or kaiten-zushi are tasty, but a lot of the low end food is over processed, over packaged, over sweetened, uninspired imitations of food, factory made, prepared by low wage workers, with all the challenging and exciting bits take out.
cheap hotels are more comfortable; you even get complimentary right wing nationalist literature in the bedside table.. but This is probably true.
streets are cleaner; People just throw things where no one can see, when no one is looking. They neatly tie up their convenience store rubbish in its plastic bag, and throw it into a stream. dump their fireworks and BBQS on the beach, fluorescent lightbulbs in the forest,
grocery stores and corner stores are nicer; Every thing comes in sooo much plastic, and the selection is very limited. Corner stores are all franchises of a few big players, who don't share much profit with local owners or suppliers. sure Fami-chikin is tasty, if you don't think about where it came from.
ostensibly unremarkable villages have more beautiful buildings and are more pleasant places to spend a few days.;

Sure they are nice to "spend a few days". But a village is supposed to be the centre peoples lives. These nice villages with cool old buildings are emptying out fast and becoming abandoned along with the rural way of life because of the lack of immigrations and the economy being so centralised on Tokyo.

It strikes me that all the writer's points are very much about what appeals to a middle class visitor. Is this a good metric to judge a society by?

mft_2• 6 years ago

Likewise, I find understanding why Switzerland is so successful very interesting – especially as it differs dramatically in approach from the other countries in Europe held up as successful and happy societies (the more northerly Nordic countries).

I can’t give a full explanation, but there are a couple of unique aspects of Switzerland that I believe may influence the situation heavily:

1. A strong aspect of Swiss culture is to expect responsibility and interest in the affairs of Switzerland from its citizens. This is reflected, for example, in the very strict rules and tests implemented for foreigners wishing to assume Swiss citizenship, which include a wide variety of questions on the history and current affairs.

2. Allied to this, they have implemented probably the most direct form of democracy I’m aware of in the world. The country is divided into a number of cantons (roughly equivalent to American states) which are largely self governing and self determining, including (for example) setting dramatically different rates of taxation. Further, many issues are decided by way of referendum: votes take place relatively frequently. Lastly, in theory any citizen can generate a new law: a series of votes would be taken on a new suggestion, first at a local level, then at a cantonal level, and then potentially at the national level.

Economically though one aspect I don’t understand is how Switzerland can support such high salaries and high costs of living, in contrast to other countries. (What came first: the high cost of living, or the high salaries?) And therefore with it being an acknowledged expensive place for businesses to operate (in terms of salary costs) why do multinational businesses choose to open or continue operations there, in contrast to other more affordable locations? (Also noting that there is significant skilled inward migration, to support the needs of some of those large businesses.)

skrebbel2• 6 years ago

Non-expert armchair analysis:

I always thought that the key reason Switzerland is richer than surrounding countries is their big financial sector + trickle down economics. And the financial sector got big because of their bank secrecy. Of course culture helps, but I'd wager that without the bank secrecy, they'd be a bigger Tyrol. Innsbruck is nice too but it doesn't lead every magazine's "best place to live in" list.

A cynic might say that Switzerland got rich by helping criminals all over the world get away with their crimes. So Switzerland getting richer ties in with everybody else getting a little poorer (because crime is a tax on society).

I think it's a foreign policy. A very cynical one, which says "we'll happily help other countries get worse, as long as we get better off it". It's not unlike America's offensive neorealism, but with money instead of guns.

dizz• 6 years ago

Might be of use/help: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/multimedia/switzerland-explaine...

james_s_tayler3• 6 years ago

It's almost 100% cultural I feel. At least Japanese people always attribute it to their culture and self concept of what Japanese do / how Japanese (and therefore themselves) behave.

If there are non-cultural factors I would think they contribute a fairly small amount.

But there's a light side and a dark side to the cultural factors. It has some seemingly unavoidable side effects.

Feels to me very much like a trade-off.

cdavid2• 6 years ago

There is a culture of doing things very well up to perfection, at least in certain domains. I don't think it has anything to do with tourism. One folk story is that this is linked with the perpetual destruction of things in Japan, because of natural elements, etc. so there is an emphasis on controlling the process as most things tend to be short lived.

You also need to be careful about cleanliness. If you go into more traditional areas, things tend to be quite messy. Japan's record in terms of pollution is not that great either.

You need to live there for a while to start seeing the other side of the story on the social side. Social pressure is huge, starting from early age. Huge gender gap in almost every metric you can think of. People who do not conform are push out of the society very violently. For example, have you noticed how little you see intellectually disabled children ? Hint: it is not because Japanese are particularly immune to it. Also, why do young Japanese women all have black hair ? Hint, it is not because all Japanese woman have black hair. Etc.

I love the country, the culture and the people, have lived there most of my adult life, but as in every culture, once you go beneath the surface, you see that it is a bit less bright than it appears. There is also a tendency from a certain faction of the Japanese society to believe in the uniqueness of Japan, called nihonjiron, a set of essentialist nonsense particularly popular on the extreme right for obvious reasons.

wenc4• 6 years ago

Also, why do young Japanese women all have black hair ? Hint, it is not because all Japanese woman have black hair. Etc.

Curious what you mean by this? Most Asian people have naturally black hair.

If anything, there was a period in the late 90s-2000s when most young Japanese people dyed their hair brown (it was a fashion fad), so if you saw an Asian person with brown hair, it was likely they were Japanese.

Anon4Now• 6 years ago

Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?
* College textbooks

I've always felt that textbook pricing is predatory and should be subject to price gouging laws.

bumby• 6 years ago

I think it was Freakanomics that had an episode about textbook cost. Their idea was it was a disparity between those choosing the textbooks (professors) to those bearing the costs (students). In other words, it is much easier to increase the cost of a product if those bearing the cost don’t have a say.

aeternum4• 6 years ago

I definitely had a few classes in which the professor wrote the text-book which while impressive in some ways also yields a conflict of interest.

ipnon• 6 years ago

It's a racket. Universities must use the latest textbooks to remain accredited. This is why syllabi will always list the latest edition of a textbook as the required text (and mentioning that the last edition is sufficient is always done parenthetically). Publishers can fix a few typos, change some example problems, and call it a new edition. Every university will have to recommend the new edition to their students. The students who bought the last edition last year will have to sell their now obsolete textbook for a fraction of the purchasing price.

Markets in everything: University textbooks are always priced to be marginally outrageous. If they were to cost something ridiculous like $1,000 a piece, there would be protests and riots on campus. Instead they merely fleece the students for $100 or $200. Enough people pay up that the system is deemed imperfect rather than inherently flawed.

ISL5• 6 years ago

On the Chinese research question: Just wait a decade.

In all likelihood, I am permanently departing academia in about a month. The underlying reason is structural -- neither our funding agency nor our institution is willing to yield on a fundamental sticking point that is causing all of our young researchers to leave. I am about to join them. There is literally no path forward.

In the decade that I have watched my world-leading research group wither, our Chinese colleagues have expanded their laboratories by 4-5x, appear to be well-resourced, and are poised to lead the world on all fronts within the decade.

An excellent colleague of mine, who had done excellent work for US particle-physics experiments, went to China for a high-energy physics faculty interview. On arrival, he was surprised to find that there appeared to be another candidate competing for the position. He did his best, as did the other candidate. As he prepared to depart, he asked whether or not it had been a competition for the open position. The reply? "We had one position, but we liked both of your talks so much, we are extending offers to both of you." There was no matching US offer of which I am aware: he accepted.

That essentially never happens these days in the United States. It is a story the likes of which one might have heard from 1950-1970.

Chinese physics results are continuing to gain in reliability. Where once we saw quite a bit of copy-catting, Chinese fundamental science research is beginning to transition into regularly breaking new ground.

Wait a decade.

We should welcome this development with open arms. A billion smart people, with equal potential, should be able to turn out roughly three times as much research as the 0.34 billion smart people in the US. We can encourage that research at the same time that we must stand against the regime's attacks on democracy in Hong Kong, the atrocities occurring in Xinjiang, their surveillance state, threatening the independence of Taiwan, enabling North Korea, and more. ( The US has dirty laundry, too: Our President is incompetent. Vote! )

apsec1123• 6 years ago

If academia is structured the same way in China as it is in the US, that situation won't be sustainable for long there, either. If each professor produces ten new PhDs, the only way for them to all find academic jobs is through very rapid growth in faculty size, which can't be sustained for that long.

ISL5• 6 years ago

Agreed -- one can only hire like crazy in a growth phase. The frequently promulgated expectation that every new PhD can become an R1 professor is incorrect, unwise, and unhealthy. If that expectation alone were altered in the undergraduate consciousness, a lot of sadness could be averted.

The contrast here is that the US (in particular -- the EU seems to be more thoughtful) doesn't seem to be maintaining its robust research program, while China seems to understand that leadership in basic research has compounding benefits on decadal timescales.

AnimalMuppet• 6 years ago

I recall reading here, within the past month, that China had blown up its' academic institutions, and they were considerably behind the rest of the world as late as 1990, and perhaps even later. They may in fact have lots of room to grow. They can't grow exponentially forever, but maybe they can for a while.

mark4• 6 years ago

Your answer resonated with me a lot. Can you elaborate on this? What is that structural reason?

The underlying reason is structural -- neither our funding agency nor our institution is willing to yield on a fundamental sticking point that is causing all of our young researchers to leave.

ISL5• 6 years ago

The National Science Foundation (for good reasons) will not fund more than a month or two of a Principal Investigator's annual salary. They'll fund many other types of position, but not that one.

Our University (for good reasons) is reticent to hire into faculty positions, where the state/university would fund a PI's salary. Furthermore, any research professors must fund themselves through grants.

NSF is the only serious game in town for our grant funding.

Even though we have the country's best infrastructure for these experiments, are leaders in our field, can attract grants, and have done so since 1987, we haven't been institutionally capable of retaining promising early/mid-career researchers since ~1999.

The big losers in this situation are the country's experimental capability and science in general. We easily have at least another decade's advances ahead of us. The issue isn't really one of total amounts of funding, but rather whether we are allowed to invest in retaining skilled and knowledgeable leadership.

ncmncm3• 6 years ago

In my informal searches, a surprising number of the really interesting new catalytic materials seem to be coming from Chinese researchers.

Ologn• 6 years ago

If we just think of something that is part of the fabric of a prominent university like a university press - MIT Press was formed in 1932. Oxford University press was founded in 1586.

Tsinghua University Press was founded in 1980. The university probably wasn't even open during the cultural revolution. This is where Xi Jinping graduated, it is considered by many to be the best university in Asia, and its press didn't open until 1980. I know a CS professor who published a book via TUP about 15 years ago, and there were all kinds of problems, they just didn't know how to publish a textbook in the manner that MIT Press or some equivalent university press could, the publication process was much more amateurish. But - at the end of the day - the textbook was published, the content was good, and the printing was adequate. I have a feeling that they will get there.

paxys6• 6 years ago

Something else to mention - the pipeline of attracting smart students from all over the world (especially China and India), educating them, giving them green cards and having them continue researching at US universities or working for US companies is basically done. It might not be immediately apparent, but we are going to see a significant change in high-skilled labor availability and output in America over the next decade.

throwawaydad1012• 6 years ago

A good chunk of the young top talent in the last 2-3 years in my area have returned home (India, China, Europe, Canada). I expect them to produce top notch work wherever they are.

hyperpallium22• 6 years ago

The obvious issue is whether you can think openly when you can get in trouble for it.

Einstein was not a conformist. Could he have survived such an environment? Or would they beat him down, or would he leave?

Consider Li Wenliang, who first noticed covid19, and was interviewed by the police, and investigated after his death for disrupting public order.

OTOH the PRC have been very astute in adopting capitalism. If they can, they will find a way for research. I'm just not sure if it's possible to reconcile thought-control in one sphere, and not in another.

wolfgke• 6 years ago

I'm just not sure if it's possible to reconcile thought-control in one sphere, and not in another.

On Slate Star Codex, there is an interesting article about this topic:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...

Gatsky• 6 years ago

I think about this a lot as well. To a scientist, funding more science and scientists seems like a no brainer. It's not like everything's worked out, we are inured against all the reasonable existential threats, and we all live to 150 in perfect health. There seems like a clear line between scientific discoveries and almost everything that is good about the world. If everyone in the world took military spending for one year, and made a huge fund to give money to scientists, it at least has a chance to be one of the most beneficial actions in human history. It would also be an eye-watering waste of money, as in literally money disappearing into the void.

This is the thing. Science is a massive waste of money. It is the most important waste of money there is, but it is still a waste of money. If you try to make it less of a waste of money, it stops being worthwhile. To any sort of accountant, it looks like setting money on fire. Academia has shown the ability to proliferate and essentially soak up as much money as they can. Now at the moment, China can see that line between funding and future good. They can tolerate the huge wastage it entails. They are also a functionally permanent regime.

In western countries, my opinion is that science funding will contract over time. I think one of the reasons is that society is ageing. This is partly an economic effect, where the cost of caring for the elderly goes up, the number of people working and paying taxes goes down, and there is less money to fund science. In my country, the biggest government spending ticket is aged care, not including healthcare. But I think the main effect is psychological - more elderly leaders and a more elderly society have a harder time seeing the point of funding science. I'm not saying this is good or bad, only that it is there. In the end, a society decides on the appetite it has for funding science.

throwawaydad1012• 6 years ago

Did you consider leaving the US to continue in academia? What industry are you joining?

pchristensen• 6 years ago

"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?"

That list is pretty much rank ordered by the amount of non-substitutable human labor involved per unit. Everything in red is a pretty universal need (health, education, child care, housing, food), while the blues are mostly wants. So we want medical care, but that requires a lot of labor, and each of those workers requires housing, but that's supply constrained in much of the country, and they have be educated, but college cost is rising, and their employees need child care, and the child care workers need to go to the doctor ...

If there was a way to reduce the cost of living (my hobby horse is dramatically increasing the amount of by-right housing permitted to be built in an area), then that would ripple through all of these industries. High and increasing costs and wages make labor-intensive industries much more expensive by comparison.

hn_throwaway_994• 6 years ago

The answer linked to in Collison's question, https://medium.com/@arnoldkling/what-gets-expensive-and-why-... , is really insightful and interesting in my opinion and goes to a deep level of analysis.

bohemian992• 6 years ago

Exactly- people don't/can't really comparison shop when it comes to medical procedures. They don't know how good their doctors are at it, this is all unpublished information.

Similarly college textbooks- if your professors assigns work from their book, then you need that book. You can't competitively shop on that.

As the response points out, all of these groups and then backed by accreditation systems to limit new entrants.

raverbashing4• 6 years ago

And to be fair that graph is weird

-100%? If something lost 100% of its value it is now free? I don't think TVs are free now.

D_Alex• 6 years ago

It is 95%, not 100%... and amazingly that looks accurate.

As an example, a 32" CRT with remote control (eg Sony Trinitron) cost about $1500-2000 back in 1997.

Today, you can buy a 32" TV for $85, delivered. And even though this will be "Brand X" and not Sony, it will have better picture quality, more functionality, be more reliable and use less power to boot.

valuearb2• 6 years ago

Medical care and education have seen a massive torrent of government funding and regulation over the last 60 years, while the things that get cheaper live mostly in free markets.

dredmorbius9• 6 years ago

Housing, childcare, textbooks, and food and beverages seem strongly market based, and private college tuition has risen far more than public, challenging your characterisation.

I note textbook prices took a dive about the time book-sharing services became prevalent.

lisper• 6 years ago

Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?

Different risk postures. If you're willing to sacrifice a few lives and limbs and not worry about the disposition of toxic waste, you can get things done just as fast today as yesterday.

thundergolfer3• 6 years ago

P Collison comes across pretty well in his 'thinking in public' type stuff. The questions are all pretty interesting and important, or at least important to the class of society that he occupies.

twoodfin• 6 years ago

For the first chart/question it’s important to distinguish cost from spending. For example, “food and beverage”: Americans are (at least pre-Covid) eating out a lot more than they were 20 or 30 years ago, so that category presumably now covers a very different basket of goods than in the past, even if they add up to roughly the same number of calories.

swyx• 6 years ago

i wonder what pc thinks of https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ - is this a cherrypicked statistical fluke or is this an actually important long term economic trend worth exploring?

counter_point• 6 years ago

One thing I have found about HN in general is a refusal to ponder the meaning of money itself.

1 Why is a small amount of inflation considered a "good thing"? In just one generation, inflation targets reduce the purchasing power by nearly 50%. What if you knew that assumption lead to all kinds of terrible outcomes, but they only surfaced after 7-8 election cycles?

2 Why is a gold standard considered impractical? After all, today, the technology actually exists to at least make this a worthwhile pursuit (that is, a digital gold standard which doesn't involve the actual movement of physical gold)

3 Why is there so little discussion on the "amount of currency units your central government printed this year"? I find it remarkable, and somewhat amusing frankly, that there could be so many intelligent people on a forum (compared to the average online forum) and how few of these folks have asked themselves this question.

4 Why is there so little discussion on the possibility of currency deflation being a very good thing for the people on the margins of society?

It certainly doesn't help that 99% of the folks who ask these questions happen to be both male and white, which just makes people auto-associate these ideas with racism, privilege etc. I don't think the core ideas themselves have been given sufficient thought for a few decades.

And as for Patrick Collison, I am willing to bet he hasn't read a single book written by Thomas Sowell (whose books will at the very least force you to ask these questions, even if you might come to different conclusions to others who read his books).

SpicyLemonZest3• 6 years ago

It’s very challenging to ponder these questions in a public forum, because so many people hold uninformed or nonsensical views on them. Whenever I’ve tried to discuss them, I’ve had to fight off very basic misunderstandings like:

* The Fed prints money by giving free gifts to banks. That is, QE for $500 billion means banks are $500 billion richer.

* The first person to get a new dollar has an unfair advantage, since they can spend it before the rest of the economy knows about the extra dollar.

* Inflation is a deterministic function of the money supply. There wouldn’t be inflation if we didn’t create more money.

I’m sure you understand the problems here, and I certainly don’t hate educating people about them. But it’s hard to have a deep discussion punctuated by constant breaks into monetary theory 101.

zuhayeer• 6 years ago

I find the replacement rate question really interesting. Is there an aligned way we can allow companies to decay once they have stalled in innovation? What do we do about companies that have reached a point of monopolistic advantage but provide no real new innovation (PG&E comes to mind)? In some cases like Internet access, is competition the only driver of affordability or do we eventually have to find a way to regulate pricing on things that evolve to become general public needs. This question likely comes up a lot in healthcare and pharma, but I'm not sure there's a good answer. It's sort of muddled in between providing enough incentive to creators to start things and ensuring that once things do get created, that privatized commercial interest doesn't work to remove the very value it helped create (which happens when the company stops innovating).

aeternum4• 6 years ago

I believe regulation is often the cause rather than the solution to stalled innovation. If you look at areas where innovation has stalled, high barriers to entry for new companies is typically a primary cause and in many cases regulations contribute to that barrier.

We should make it a goal to lower those barriers and encourage competition wherever possible. NASA's commercial crew program is one example of this. Another is how Illinois forced their electric companies to open access to the power lines, fostering healthy competition.

jariel3• 6 years ago

Some of these are odd questions.

"How do we help more experimental cities get started?

It seems that the returns to entrepreneurialism in cities remain high: Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and others, "

???

HK and to a lesser extent Singapore are some of the most inegalitarian places in the world, that thrive because they have established Western commercial practices in a sea of otherwise more obvious corruption. There is a very dark underbelly to HK.

Dubai is an Oil Rich state, with a fairly ruthless totalitarian leadership wherein the pay Indian workers 10's of cents an hour in a form of indentured servitude. An Arab Dubai resident could kill one of these workers and probably get away with it.

They also are nice places for rich people to hide their money.

There are no mysteries here.

Dubai is the 'anti civilisation' - maybe one of he worst examples of 'what to build'.

As for 'why some things are more expensive'?

Some things are commodities, some are not, some things have price inelasticity, some do not.

Why was the P43 made in a few months?

Because WW2 planes are very simple, and it was during war, and we didn't care about safety back in the day. 'Crash tests' for cars? We didn't even wear seat belts. No emissions standards. etc.. Most of today's projects are much more complex. It takes government 10 years to do anything because those systems are complicated, we have strong government unions, and a kind of civic dysfunction in many places.

The GDP is not consistent - it just looks like that in the chart.

The GDP naturally, is not going to change that much year over year - because we are largely engaged in the same patters of activity. But the rate of growth swings a lot. There is no mystery to solve here.

jonny_eh• 6 years ago

Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

Not anymore! [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

paxys6• 6 years ago

The infrastructure one really stands out to me, and I'm always astounded by it. Adding yet another example - The Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years for $1.6 billion (inflation adjusted), under budget and ahead of schedule. 11 workers died during construction, a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects.

In contrast, a project to install suicide nets around the bridge has been under development for 12 years. It was recently delayed for another 2 years, and is estimated to cost ~$250 million.

Where/when did we go wrong, and how do we fix it?

calinet62• 6 years ago

I would bet it’s tied to the neglect of work in both real wages and respect for workers.

We no longer take pride in work. We pay people less and make them compete for the mere privilege of holding a job. Then, we tell them what to do, disrespecting their intelligence and autonomy and ability to make something they can be proud of. For the brilliance of this strategy, we pay leaders ten times more than we did before, and even more when they fail and need to be replaced—surely installing a new CEO is the answer.

It is no surprise at all.

Deming tried to lay it out for us, but no one really listened.

graeme2• 6 years ago

The issue might actually be the opposite. It would probably cost too much to employ the number of bridgeworkers that were employed for the Golden Gate Bridge.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease

This can’t be a complete explanation though as other places can still build things.

zachware• 6 years ago

It's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil project jobs.

I've built several large-scale buildings and developments at urban scale in California and Nevada, both heavy heavy union states.

I can't point to the systemic problem leading to the delays but I can tell you that any job even tangentially related to construction requires high wage labor. This is universally true for civic projects.

Some of those unions (e.g. electrical workers, carpenters) provide exceptional training services for apprentices. Others (e.g. the people holding the stop signs at highway construction sites) are mostly strong-arm groups.

These groups could be causing delays and from personal experience I can tell you they do, sometimes. But overall I can certainly say that the point you made here is not the reason why projects are delayed.

raverbashing4• 6 years ago

And we let more politicians have a hand at bikeshedding the project (to their interests, of course)

skrebbel2• 6 years ago

It is no surprise at all.

I'm totally nitpicking on your style here, but IMO this line reduces the value of the rest of your comment. Without it, your comment could be interpreted as a call to action, eg to encourage people to take more pride in their work. With it, it's clear that you've already given up, and you're not really adding anything except maybe encouraging others to give up on stuff too. That makes me sad.

dsaavy• 6 years ago

We pay people less and make them compete for the mere privilege of holding a job. Then, we tell them what to do, disrespecting their intelligence and autonomy and ability to make something they can be proud of.

This fully embodies the experience of the modern-day Agile experience in software development. "I know you're a senior but I (a non-technical Product Manager/Scrum Master) am going to have to check in multiple times a day and dictate every single feature and how it's built."

hn_throwaway_994• 6 years ago

11 workers died during construction, a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects.

Do you have a source for that? 11 deaths seems like it would be shockingly high for a modern project.

paxys6• 6 years ago

The bridge's safety record was revolutionary at the time, mainly due to the introduction of hard hats and safety nets (https://www.history.com/news/6-things-you-may-not-know-about...). It's hard to find a comparison to an equivalent project in America today, but looking around the world the numbers aren't much better (e.g. 9 people died in 2019 building world cup stadiums in Qatar - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/mar/16/q...). And construction is still in the top 3 most fatal job categories in America (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm).

fanf2• 6 years ago

No-one died during the construction of the Humber Bridge in the 1970s, which was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Construction took nine years and cost £530 million (adjusted to 2016 prices).

No-one died during the construction of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge (Dartford Crossing) in 1988-1991, which was the longest cable-stayed bridge in Europe. Construction took less than three years and cost £260 million (adjusted to 2016 prices).

shaklee3• 6 years ago

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.history.com/.amp/news/6-thi...

jariel3• 6 years ago

"11 workers died during construction, a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects."

????

No, this is not a safety record 'matching or exceeding modern projects' - this is abysmally wrong.

Modern bridge builds generally involve 0 deaths.

koonsolo2• 6 years ago

I sometimes wonder about this too. When you walk through European cities and look at the decoration of those old houses, they were all handcrafted. I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details. Same with all those old chairs, where some woodworker sculpted everything by hand. You can't imagine that right now anymore.

Is it because we throw away stuff after 5 years? Or because we just have way more stuff to produce? Because we don't work as hard? I have no idea.

patrickk2• 6 years ago

I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details.

On a tangential question - I sometimes wonder why modern buildings are so boring. Postwar buildings in many European cities are drab and devoid of interesting detail and yet with CAD designs, 3D printing and so on it should be possible to create all kinds of intricate detail (perhaps let a computer conjure up a wild pattern to dress up a facade with, like something from a Tool album cover) to create visually interesting features - cheaply. I think it's much more to do with postmodernism rather than cost. There was a great discussion on HN some time ago about it which I cannot find unfortunately.

TheOtherHobbes• 6 years ago

There isn't really a concept of civic pride any more. The Victorians - for all their many faults - did have a kind of local-scale pseudo-patriotism which motivated some very impressive buildings.

When modernism decided that decoration was superfluous and forbidden, it also did a lot of damage to the tradition of civic building.

Buildings were no longer designed to be aesthetic. If private, they were supposed to be utilitarian money factories put up by capital as cheaply as possible for the generation of more capital. Or they were supposed to fill a social need - again, as cheaply as possible.

A few architects, like Calatrava, produce public statement buildings, but they're often poorly regarded and not necessarily designed to wear well. (Calatrava has a very striking visual style but is notorious for poor build quality.)

Modern corporate HQs - like Amazon's and Apple's - half buck the trend, but only half. They're modernist statement buildings, but they're still motivated by a kind of minimalist corporate narcissism rather than pride.

The only buildings that don't fit the trend are some of the religious mega-projects. They're designed to be awe-inspiring and spectacular, and they often are.

So the real culprit is penny-pinching modernist utilitarianism - mostly capitalist, but not exclusively. If you removed that you could recreate a 21st century aesthetic of imaginative but robust civic architecture at all scales, with high quality materials and handcrafted detailing and decoration.

In a very literal sense the entire culture is run on an ethic of ever-narrowing acquisitive miserliness. This started to become a serious problem in the 80s, and it's been hugely dispiriting - not just for the arts but for civics in every respect.

the-dude• 6 years ago

It is because the wages are too high.

bondarchuk• 6 years ago

I have not looked up the numbers, but would guess wealth inequality is a big part of it. Those houses were built for people who were richer, and they had people working for them who were poorer, than is common nowadays in the west.

roenxi• 6 years ago

Where/when did we go wrong, and how do we fix it?

Speaking logically; there can't be anything is making it physically harder to build infrastructure over time. And nothing physical is making the economics of railroads worse.

Therefore the changes have to be entirely legal, political and social. The specifics are probably things like increased environmental scrutiny, greater political impediments to forcing people out of their homes, requiring higher standards for construction, increased safety. Reduced political will to build infrastructure due to competing models of public/private ownership.

My personal theory; I suspect big chunks of modern infrastructure are now illegal to build. I don't know if it is still acceptable to sign off on a project where it is expected that 11 people to die. I know that would be wholly unacceptable in a mining context; for example. Probably construction too.

fomine32• 6 years ago

Speaking logically; there can't be anything is making it physically harder to build infrastructure over time. And nothing physical is making the economics of railroads worse.

Building could be harder over time when lands to build is used for other purpose. Railloads economics could be worse relatively over time when competitor(car, airplane) getting cheaper and improves quality.

switz• 6 years ago

This is something I've ruminated on a lot – but frankly, I'm in no way qualified to understand or make sense of it. The two things that I often come back to are:

1) the pathways that infrastructure would run through have more "things" (a scientific term) in the way, raising the time and cost of a project. My father often mentioned how when I-95 was built, many homes near where he grew up had to be physically moved to accommodate it. That was in the 1950s. That problem only grows more complex over time. It's no surprise that building a new subway in NYC would have been 'easier' and cheaper in 1900 than in 2000, despite advances in technology, per Patrick's question.

2) investment in infrastructure requires foresight and time. It demands a long view. Who wants to be the one responsible for allocating a huge chunk of change for a project that they won't be in office to get credit for?

Please tell me why I'm wrong or what else I'm missing, I'd love to learn more about this.

mhb• 6 years ago

1) You would have to explain how the problem of existing structures account for the orders of magnitude cost of new construction.

2) Why is this any different now than at the times of the examples? It would seem as though, if you initiate a project, you would have an incentive to complete it within your term in office. This could have been accomplished with many of the historical projects cited - Empire State Building, Golden Gate bridge, man on the moon (mostly).

sershe• 6 years ago

Could it be incentives? Make the project bidding fixed-cost; as a contractor if you add delays without the change in requirements, you eat the costs.

hyperpallium22• 6 years ago

  Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?

"the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"[1]

As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are?

As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these alternative interpretations work... mostly. So when they cause problems many layers later, the learner can see no clues to the cause. But an attentive tutor can.

Subtle gaps and misunderstanding have an outsize effect, and maybe could account for 2σ?

OTOH teachers accidentally trained me to disentangle ambiguity, and that is a valuable real-world skill.

The mentor relationship has magic in it and I remember the moment I learnt certain things. So maybe social aspects contribute too, as wiki suggests.

What to do? Like mandatory military service, mandatory tutoring service. We appear to be wasting obscene quanities of human capital. Imagine the economic productivity unleashed by a more fully realized workforce.

PS did pc receive one-on-one tutoring? Intelligent parents often tutor their children, conferring this outsize headstart.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

paxys6• 6 years ago

I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago. He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures, presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources, limited as they are, are much better spent helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help. Of course this brings us to the more fundamental question - are schools more for learning or daycare?

bschne2• 6 years ago

helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help.

This is where most learning resources fall short of ideal - if you work on a problem without human guidance, you can often either work through it in whole and learn, or check out the solution if you get stuck, have a short "ah, of course!" moment and not learn much at all. A tutor can sort of "debug" through questions and targeted hints where you're going wrong, and thus make the concepts stick in a more lasting way.

I wonder if there's potential for some sort of digital learning medium which actively tries to "figure out" where the student's misunderstandings and gaps lie and addresses them in a more targeted way (optional hints are a first step, but there must be better).

ovi256• 6 years ago

Yes, this is called "inverted classroom" and it's practiced by some private schools in the US.

And yes, schools are for both daycare and learning - or acclimating, indoctrinating the young into our society.

hoseja• 6 years ago

Neither, they are for the State.

aeneasmackenzie• 6 years ago

They have moved on from both into shakedown rackets.[0]

0: https://mobile.twitter.com/deangeliscorey/status/12975304053...

jodrellblank• 6 years ago

Most online forums have an "RTFM" or FAQ approach to beginners. Reddit's LearnPython sub has a ton of "explain OOP/Recursion/debug my beginner code/restart game/etc." style questions, and while there is a FAQ, it's not enforced very hard. Almost the opposite of StackOverflow.

As a result, there are a huge number of people learning themselves by explaining to other people, practising by solving other people's problems, and answering the beginner questions over and over.

I think things like that have got to be part of the future of learning online, instead of dumping what you know into a FAQ and pulling the ladder up after you, closing the community from outsiders.

padolsey• 6 years ago

What to do?

Mandatory tutoring seems unrealistic and probably wouldn't yield quality, but I do think that some kind of scaled tutoring "norm" would be incredibly valuable to society. Just as Khan Academy has revolutionised explanations of complex topics (resolving the ambiguities from school), scaled tutoring in which everyone participates could augment traditional teaching with soft skills, conversation, expansive exploration of worldly topics, and specific technical help.

Imagine a norm where ~everyone, in some way, relays knowledge and experience to youth, freeing youth from the segregation of school. It's always been odd to me that we separate ourselves (especially in western culture) from people of a different age. There's not as much integration between children and adults (outside of formalised schooling) as there could be. This separation seems to limit the transfer of knowledge but also the transfer of culture. And I think it also prevents bridges of commonality and empathy from forming, further entrenching homogeneity and aversion to difference.

It's worth asking ourselves: what would a society look like if we ~all engaged in the education of our young?

igneo676• 6 years ago

I find this doubly interesting in the context of homeschooling.

Often the parent's goals are to make the student as capable of being self-taught as possible. After the early years, the parent essentially steps into the role of tutor. You look for shortcomings and help the student step through those knowledge gaps. Otherwise the student can go as quickly or slowly through the material as they need to

Not that this scales, we'd have to look elsewhere for that, but interesting to see this function in a small community.

keiferski3• 6 years ago

What does religion cause?

There has been considerable philosophical work on this topic. Contemporary scientific studies (such as the ones in the link) are not particularly useful here, as they are too trapped in the current societal context to understand deeper cultural trends. Religion as a word is so broad as to basically be meaningless. Separating religion from culture or history is a modern legacy of academic and industrial specialization.

In any case, some reading suggestions, if you're interested in this topic.

- Max Weber. Pretty much the founder of modern social science, particularly with regards to religion. He originated the idea of “The Protestant Work Ethic” and argues that specific features of Protestantism lead to market capitalism arising in Northern Europe, rather than in India or China.

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

- Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. This book really changed the way I think about the modern world and what I'll call "the preference for scientistic, humanistic atheism". Taylor essentially argues that modern secularity is not merely the subtraction of religious belief, but a new historical situation where religious beliefs are co-existent both with each other and with immanent beliefs (entirely focused in the world.) This book is huge, so I recommend starting with How Not to Be Secular by James K. A. Smith, as it's a condensed summary of Taylor's book.

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

https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Secular-Reading/dp/0802867...

- Friedrich Nietzsche. A philosopher quite interested in this problem. His main goal was to trace the development of moral ideas and subsequently create new, healthier (to him) ones. Too many books to list, but I recommend The Genealogy of Morality and Beyond Good and Evil.

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

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

nazgulnarsil• 6 years ago

A few of interest to me:

1. Is steelmanned buddhism wrong in important ways? Can some sort of minimal set of claims version of buddhism even be steelmanned consistently?

2. The joint-stock corporation appears to be the most scalable coordination tech ever invented. What is the embedding space of the things that make it possible and what else is in the space?

3. Does most progress come from pairs of people in high bandwidth collaboration? How could we test this and how could we scale the matching problem implied? If this is true why aren't there more famously successful twins? (also mentioned by Gwern)

4. Are dramatically better matching algorithms possible (lemon markets, costly signal bandwidth saturation)? Ones good enough that they would encourage more geographic mobility?

5. What's the natural embedding space of 'values'? If discovered and rendered tractable would this solve problems with our current attempts at formalization (VNM, Arrow's impossibility, various decision theory gotchas etc)?

6. Why are all the general purpose 'how to navigate life' resources so poor in quality? (also mentioned by Patrick)

7. Does DNA (and RNA?) transcription error rate emerge as a natural kind in large scale biological prediction? Does this create natural limits on malleability of biological systems?

8. Is there low hanging fruit in CNS imaging? Would this directly lead to dramatically better mental health interventions?

9. Can research stagnation be undermined by funding more research review enabling more cross collaborative legibility of researchers into each other's work?

leobabauta• 6 years ago

Can you say more about the steelmanned buddhism questions? I'm interested but not clear on what you're pointing to with the term "steelmanned buddhism" or what important ways you think it might be wrong about.

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm familiar with the idea of steelmanning, but not what set of buddhist ideas you're pointing to with the term "steelmanned buddhism".

jacquesm• 6 years ago

Lovely list. As for real estate and housing prices: interest rates are ridiculously low, once you account for that the price increase from the 1970's to today makes really good sense. Corrected for inflation it is now much cheaper to own rather than to rent real estate even though the sticker price of the houses went up.

Rents then predictably increased because houses/apartments that got bought reduced the supply available for renting out. Especially in the bigger cities where the economy is a bit better rents have skyrocketed.

But the cost of owning a house as a function of take home pay has dropped. The same house that cost my parents a ridiculously high mortgage (10% was pretty normal in the 70's here) can now be had for a fraction of the inflation adjusted wages today. Even though the on-paper value of the house is roughly 10x what it cost back then.

To fix the rental market a lot of new housing would have to be built, but then you run into zoning issues, transportation issues, the price of land and other limitations that make it hard to expand affordable housing for cities. Historically institutional investors (for instance: pension funds) would fund these developments but since they now have shorter time horizons for their ROI and want higher returns they are not as interested as they used to be to pick this up.

This problem will not resolve easily or even at all as long as people are willing to pay high rents and the market is as restricted as it is I would expect rents to continue to go up. Even an increase in interest will likely not return all that many houses to the rental market because that would require the sticker price of houses to come down, which hardly even happens. Even in the 2009 financial crises housing prices reacted only in a limited way: people had bought in at a certain price level and could not let go of their properties without ending up with a debt to the bank, a situation best avoided.

totetsu3• 6 years ago

on "What's the right way to understand and model personality?"

Personality is an outdated concept, personality types triply so. There is no fundamental stability of personality, just behavior context.

Christian Miller - The character gap https://philosophybites.com/2019/02/christian-miller-on-the-... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/24/4818596...

Robert Sapolsky - Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

hcta• 6 years ago

If you taboo the word 'personality', the underlying question here is still interesting. Do different people in the "exact same" situation always behave /identically/? (Obviously not.) What are the most informative features of the person explaining the divergence in response?

totetsu3• 6 years ago

Christian Miller is arguing that while we do have phycological character traits and motivations, that persist between situations, how we actually behave is a complex interaction between these and our contexts. Divergence can maybe be explained as much by contexts as by characteristics. If I were to meet someone who works a similar job, has a similar social and familia situation, but divergent motivations, I might have more in common with them than I would have if I met the university student version of myself.

dalbasal6• 6 years ago

What great questions. I've had pub debates about 3/5 of these over the last year. Reminds me a lot of pg during his prolific periods.

What makes a lot of these interesting is that most have bad answers. Some (eg the inflation question) have answers were sustainable 10-20 years ago, but grew out of them. Some have cliched or even ideological answers. Again, time has changed the strength of these answers. Time to re-ask and re-answer.

Some (eg progress in science) have no obvious or common answer, but are commonly discussed at a smaller scale. Academic incentives, publishing & such are commonly discussed, but no ways forward seem to emerge.. even rhetorically.

In any case, I think the first one (inflation by sector) hits squarely at a major blindspot in most economic thinking. I think it's responsible for a lot of the divergent views of economists (relying on measurements) and non economists relying on intuition.

Your answer to this question may relate to GDP growth consistency. Again, I feel this is a blindspot in most theoretical economics. One of Thomas Picketty's controversy bombshells was treating GDP growth and rate-of-return (r>g) as basically constant. Almost all other theories (even Marx) treat these as determined by everything else in the theory. All that doesn't seem consistent with consistency, as patrick points out.

I would have also asked, "what is the successor to the university" since several of these questions could be answered if you had an answer to that. It's a loaded form of a question, but other questions take that form.

How you load questions can be the most important thing. "What's the successor to the scientific paper and the scientific journal?" is loaded in an opposite way to "* How do we help more experimental cities get started?*" I'm not saying questions shouldn't be loaded, just that they should be loaded carefully.

Great read. i will come back for the links.

dalbasal6• 6 years ago

I like the way "Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?" is loaded. Touches on several "questions" in the vein of this article.

One load is "why don't we know this with more certainty?" It's a useful thing to know. What is achievable? What's the bar? How good could education be, regardless of resources and other limitations. If true, that can be our 100% marker for instructional effectiveness.

From there, we cold say that average school instruction is 10% effective or 60% effective.

Realistically, this needs to be tackled with a lot of force to make progress. Change is likely inconvenient, in a real world environment with limited resources. Maybe school should be 3 hrs per day, not 8.

In any case, I think it's notable that high-end private education, which has more resources available, have not pursued these kind of goals any more than public education.

cloogshicer• 6 years ago

There's an assumption in this line of thinking which I think is unlikely to be true: that this stuff is measurable, at least in principle.

I think 'instructional effectiveness' can't ever be clearly and unambiguously defined, much less measured. As with anything that involves people. In my experience, most attempts to do so only cause more harm than good.

dalbasal6• 6 years ago

There are different kinds of measurable, and the purpose of the measure is important. Measuring for the purpose of management (eg creating incentives for teachers and schools), measuring for the purpose of most academic publishing, etc. Each have their own pitfalls, and I agree with you on these.

That said... there is clearly such a thing as better and worse instruction.

Where the 2-sigma claim gets interesting is scale. We're not concerned with marginal differences (management measures) and we're not concerned with legibly identifiable causal relationships (academic publishing). We're just concerned with establishing a high watermark.

The simple measures (eg testing) we have, work fine for that... in the context of math, reading/writing, foreign language, etc. Stuff that's easy to test for, and assuming we're only interested in big differences.

Two sigma implies that within 1 year of instruction, the two sigma group will have progressed by several years. 12th grade math level by grade 10. This doesn't have to be achievable by every teacher, it just has to be achievable at the high end.. assuming a random sample of students.

Agreed though.. we have a history of insisting that the unmeasurable be measured... and its a very common, long term failure mode. more harm than good. I'm not suggesting implementing anything, let alone implementing anything using measures. Just setting that watermark, so we know what awesome looks like.

0823498723498728• 6 years ago

If one is trying to improve education given class sizes of 1 or 2 dozen students, it may not be helpful to pursue better quantitative studies for class sizes of 1 or 2 students.

dalbasal6• 6 years ago

I think the opposite, though I might be wrong.

The goal, in my view, of such research is to make discoveries. I'm dubious of academic research that targets scalable educational methods too closely.

In essence, I agree with Patrick. I want to know if "2-sigma" is true, replicable. Establish that watermark. At that point we'll have a high watermark for education, what a median student can achieve in a near ideal environment. Is there really a 2 sigma difference between normal school results and ideal?

If so, this difference represents potential.

Figuring out how to apply that IRL with resource constraints, scaling issues, etc... That may not be a job for academics. Either way, it comes later.

known• 6 years ago

Social ills in Japan https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34615972

anonu• 6 years ago

Why don't we build nice neighborhoods any more?

We might, we just dont know that we are building them. Assuming today's nice neighborhoods are the old ones, I would argue that they escaped a period of modernization. I think we look back at our recent creations and always think about how we can tear them down and rebuild. The neighborhoods that escape this cycle of "tear down and rebuild" and luckily slip into the status of "vintage charm" suddenly hold more caché and may even get protected status by their city or municipality.

huevosabio• 6 years ago

Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?

Alex Tabarrok argues that this is largely do to Baumol cost disease [0]: "rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth". He has a book about it [1]

This aligns well with Patrick's graph: healthcare, college, childcare are all labor intensive and have seen little to no productivity increase in the last 23 years.

The story for housing is different, though. We are consistently concentrating economic opportunity in the urban centers. However, through NIMBYism, we have made it very difficult to build new housing. The "surprising" result: very expensive housing. Relatedly, Matt Rognlie found out [2] that the increase in the capital share of income since 1970, as noticed by Piketty, can be mostly explained by the housing sector.

The solution to both, in my view, are related. We need to reduce barriers for labor movement. We can reduce labor cost by liberalizing immigration to the USA and by liberalizing (re-zoning) and incentivizing (via Land Value Taxation) housing production within the main US urban areas.

Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?

My suspicion is institutional ossification in the USA. With time we accumulate rules / regulations / procedures that increase the complexity of the task at hand. Eventually, the marginal procedure increases complexity such that our competence is exceeded, making the task impossible.

I think the solution is related to his other question "How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?". We should have a way to replace these institutions. Market forces are a great way to do so for private endeavors, startups being the prime example. But for public institutions, it is less clear what could be the proper approach. If there was a way to have states compete for citizens in a non-violent way, that may help.

Why don't we build nice neighborhoods any more?

I think it is a mixture of i) survivorship bias (as he suggests), ii) car-oriented development (as he suggests), and iii) the fact that attractive neighborhoods have an organic feel to them that only time can give. Thus, in the car-era we built new neighborhoods but they were car-oriented so they never aged into nice, walking neighborhoods. We are trying to rectify that with new walking-oriented developments, but they have a synthetic feel to them that will only go away with time.

What's going on with infrastructure?

I would say this is a combination of the Baumol cost disease and the ossification of our institutions (both mentioned above).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46013009-why-are-the-pri...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...

CyberRabbi• 6 years ago

The answer to every question is either “because of smart and/or virtuous people” or “because of Stupid and/or immoral people”

Japan’s cleanliness, healthcare costs, etc

cryptica• 6 years ago

Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?

Because we have been shifting responsibility away from individuals who have the best knowledge to complete a task (I.e. engineers) towards managers. In software development, this can be seen by an increased focus on frameworks, statically typed languages, 100% test coverage, CI pipelines, code analysis tools; all designed to relieve developers from a sense of responsibility and ownership over the code and to give managers extra visibility.

Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

Because there is no growth. What looks like growth is just inflation of the dollar relative to the value of goods and services which underlie the GDP calculation.

How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?

Abolish the Federal Reserve, introduce UBI. Trickle-up economics will bring back the free market because companies will compete to actually satisfy people instead of competing to manipulate them at the behest of their institutional paymasters.

How do we help more experimental cities get started?

This is an artificial concept which does not align with free market dynamics. Does the market need experimental cities to begin with?

How do people decide to make major life changes?

When they become deeply unhappy with their current situation.

Could there be more good blogs?

Only in a free market. If visitor numbers are being shaped and suppressed by algorithms, there will not be any good blogs. It will devolve to mindless hedonistic garbage.

Why are programming environments still so primitive?

Because simple tooling is essential. Complex programming environments will create more reliance on tools which will pull back the sense of responsibility from developers which will make them produce inferior work. No amount of tooling can make a developer care more about the work; the more you automate a developer's work, the less they will feel as if it is their own work and the less they will care. No tool cannot ever compensate for lack of care.

What does religion cause?

It's a very positive force. People need to share ideals related to altruism and fairness in order to allow social contracts to remain coherent. People need to believe that if they do nice things for others, they will be rewarded with eternal life. Without this, most people will work only in their own self-interest and the whole capitalist system, which is rooted in the exploitation of the altruism of others, won't work.

Pervasive, single-minded self-interest is not compatible with capitalism. Capitalism needs somebody altruistic to exploit; religious people, young people, etc...

When capitalism runs out of altruists, it runs out of fuel.

What influences when people act in accordance with their self-interest and when they don't?

People always act in accordance with their self interest or in the interest of their kin. If they think otherwise, they're lying to themselves.

Balgair• 6 years ago

Why is there no canon for life's most important questions?

There is!

Well, sorta, but a very good attempt at least: Mortimer J. Adler's Great Works of the Western World, 1965 (a bit dated by now).

It's the supra-compilation of 'western' thought, and the works in there do come close to a canon for the most important questions in life. That list of questions does need to be formalized first, unlike, say Electromagnetism; you're dealing with more than just charged particles after all.

Still, the best thing about Adler's work was the Syntopicon: a 'quick' reference of the great works based on ~100 topics (Astronomy, God, Justice, Family, Dialectic, etc.). Each of those topics was further subdivided into specific areas (The nature of Jesus' human form, Ellipses, Jurisprudence of Judges, etc.). It's a huge work.

Most critically, these specific areas listed a where you could find the relating pages in the great works.

For example: Under the topic of 'Mind' and the subtopic of 'The condition of the human mind when the soul is separate from the body', you have a listing for 'GIBBON: Decline and Fall, 233d' and a lot of other listings too.

It's not exactly what the question asks, but it is as good a starting point as I think you can get shipped to your door.

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

https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-weste... (pricey, but the search feature is essential)

nojvek2• 6 years ago

The question about healthcare, infrastructure, college, housing is a major one.

The explanation I’ve come up with is that they aren’t machine scalable problems and that the barrier to entry is so high that existing incumbents have little incentive to do “more with less $” when due to increased demand they are racking in billions.

Matt Stroller’s BIG newsletter goes deep into the little monopolies and consolidation of markets by private equity.

There’s also insurance and loans that comes into play. You can charge obscene amounts of money when it’s other people’s money. In a complex system, accountability is hard, so it’s ripe for rent seeking and corruption by the few people who are the bottleneck.

raldi• 6 years ago

Sublime's built-in ⌘-T works better than every third-party Emacs package.

What's this about? Google's not helping.

jl2718• 6 years ago

Quick answers just for fun: 1. Technological abundance vs regulated scarcity 2. Complexity outpacing human understanding. Plus regulation/approvals. 3. Because the FOMC controls it. 4. Reduce legal barriers to entry. 5. Reduce central control. 6. Risk minimization. 7. Trust by common identity. 8. Maybe. Pace tracking classes. 9. Money is cheap enough now for investors to fund most science for profit. 10. No programming. AI queries (e.g. “Her”) 11. Audiobooks 12. Arxiv / citation ranking 13. No. Too easy to ignore ads on text. 14. Nobody’s paying for IDEs anymore. 15. See #7. 16. See #15. 17. See #7. 18. Political vs scientific incentives. 19. contra to #7. 20. See #7. 21. It’s more lucrative to fail than to succeed. 22. I’ve heard it was due to mass burning by humans. Fire/regrowth fixes more carbon than it releases.

simonebrunozzi• 6 years ago

In relation to the Golden Gate Bridge construction, it was mostly financed by the son of Italian immigrants turner banker, Giannini; his bank also lent to people devastated by the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. The "Bank of Italy" changed its name to "Bank of America" [0].

From the article linked at the bottom of my comment [0]:

A. P. Giannini, President of Bank of America, was legendary for his dedication to the development of the San Francisco region. A native of San Jose with a blue-collar background, Giannini believed that banks should lend more freely to working-class people, whom he believed to be fiscally responsible. Following the 1906 earthquake that destroyed much of San Francisco, most banks closed up shop, but Giannini set up a makeshift desk and issued credit "on a handshake and a signature" to families and small businesses in immediate, desperate need. His investments built a foundation for San Francisco's economic recovery.

Also, it's ironic that A.P. Giannini was what we would call today a "college dropout", which is particularly "cool" and "popular" in the San Francisco Bay Area. From [1]:

Giannini attended Heald College but realized he could do better in business than at school. In 1885, he dropped out and took a full-time position as a produce broker for L. Scatena & Co.

[0] https://about.bankofamerica.com/en-us/our-story/building-the...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Giannini

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