Tim O'Reilly: The Biggest Ponzi Scheme of Them All

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/the-biggest-ponzi-scheme-of-all.html

by toffer • 18 years ago

68 42 18 years ago

radar.oreilly.com

timf• 18 years ago

Misread the title at first, thinking Tim O'Reilly was the biggest ponzi scheme of them all.

davidw• 18 years ago

Larry Wall got in early and is now fantastically wealthy! You could too, all you have to do is write a programming book and sell it to 10 of your friends.

fredBuddemeyer• 18 years ago

ponzi had better insight into nature than malthus.

andr• 18 years ago

Same here. That's a newspaper worthy headline!

mattmcknight• 18 years ago

Just gave the author a point. What's the exchange rate between whuffie and Hacker News points? How many get you a cup of coffee?

michael_nielsen• 18 years ago

I like it - an OpenKarma standard for karma trading between different sites, maybe with a central exchange and a floating exchange rate. "I'll trade two HN points for one point of your reddit karma".

nuclear_eclipse• 18 years ago

I should think that an HN karma point would be worth a lot more than half a reddit karma point! If anything, I'd say a HN:Reddit ratio of 1:10 or more...

dissenter• 18 years ago

On a related note, whuffie is not a new invention. There is no difference whatsoever between whuffie and money. They are perfectly synonymous. I get the feeling the author, and many of his readers, seem to believe that he has created something distinct from money (from the Wikipedia: 'Whuffie has replaced money...'). Whuffie, as a currency, is no more different from the dollar than the króna is from the euro.

As a descriptor of currency in an inconsequential economy it is somewhat useful. I happen to prefer the word "karma."

shimon• 18 years ago

There are some good points here: it certainly seems the growth of derivative financial products, and the whole financial sector, has outpaced what the "concrete" economy can support. But the claim that the Earth is full? Absurd.

Clearly, we have some serious environmental limitations. CO2 emissions, rainforests, overpopulation, etc. But this Earth is wonderfully well-stocked with potential sources of energy and other resources. We haven't figured out how to use all of them yet, but over time, new inventions and discoveries tend to expose them. The same process also helps us improve the value of resources we already have, like people and (until recently :) capital.

Basically, this is the Peak Oil argument applied to the whole economy. Popular in doom-n-gloom times, unmentioned in the good times. It's a useful extreme to consider, but it is an extreme.

brentr• 18 years ago

"We haven't figured out how to use all of them yet.."

I would modify this a little with the following: "We haven't figured out how to use all of them yet or we don't want to use all of them yet..." Hero of Alexandria, for all practical purposes, discovered the use of steam power, but because labor was so cheap, it was never pursued.

eru3• 18 years ago

The explanation is actually more complex..

biohacker42• 18 years ago

The earth won't be full until we've turned every available inch of fertile soil into farm land. And that includes what ever the Dutch can do to to farm on ex-ocean floor.

I'd rather avoid that scenario though. Luckily as their development continues, birth rates in the developing world are dropping. I'm fairly hopeful that global population growth will peak within our life times.

Also, growing an economy on the back of a growing population is the easiest way to grow but not the only one.

You can produce more and more valuable things with a static population.

ph0rque• 18 years ago

> I'm fairly hopeful that global population growth will peak within our life times.

2075, at <10 billion, according to a study that I can't find at the moment...

swombat• 18 years ago

Oh come on now.

It's like they said in an article I read recently... the world has learned about Ponzi schemes, and now everything is a Ponzi scheme.

At these macro-economic levels, there can be no talk of "Ponzi schemes".

The economy is not an investment vehicle, it's a huge, loose, and fantastic agreement that enables all of us to get far more (in terms of technology, resources, comfort, life expectancy, health, happiness, etc) than we would if we didn't have it. It doesn't exist for its own sake, and it certainly has no need to be a mathematically correct, long-term sustainable, rigorous system designed by a computer scientist.

The capitalist system, with all its problems, is the best system that we have. Who cares that it's not sustainable indefinitely into the future? By the time we get there, things may well have changed so drastically that it becomes completely irrelevant.

A human being is not a sustainable thing either. It overspends its resources instead of maintaining itself in good working condition and eventually dies. Oh shit. We better cancel humanity. It's a Ponzi scheme!

This Ponzi trend is really, really getting ridiculous. Enough with all that crap already! This article is a fancy label placed on a collection of dodgy conclusions drawn from dubious axioms.

Retric2• 18 years ago

You could look at Yahoo in the boom years as a Ponzi scheme. They made a lot of money from advertising start ups which was funded in part because Yahoo was making a lot of money. You can say the same thing about most bubles but a true Ponzi scheme runs out of money where after a housing bubble there are a lot of houses even if there are far more than we need.

The secret to macro-economic effects is how they alter the overall efficiency of the economy. Does people overpaying for housing cause damage? Yes, because people build much better houses than they need and people who think they have a lot of money waste a lot more of it. However, the US housing bubble was still fairly minor and it's only really scary because things are still over priced and few living people know how to deal with really hard times.

PS: Money is a signal for wealth creation, but it's not wealth. Forget it and things start to break down.

walterk• 18 years ago

It's simply being used as a metaphor. Two words that get you to look at X from a particular angle.

The function of metaphors has never been to imply complete equivalence, obviously. Rather, some aspects of the concept used as a metaphor are shared with aspects of the concept it's being likened to. By invoking the metaphor, those aspects are made salient.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=xpYZoVNzdykC&...

Notions like the "Ponzi economy", I think, are to actual Ponzi schemes what Searle's Chinese Room is to Chinese speakers. Or, to put it another way, the Ponzi economy is simply a grand Ponzi scheme, minus the scheming.

gaius2• 18 years ago

Metaphors are a Ponzi scheme.

Maascamp• 18 years ago

This is a straw man argument. Saying "now everything is a Ponzi scheme" doesn't address his point that we're going to have to start looking at how a global steady state economy will work.

He isn't saying Capitalism isn't the best system, he's saying (precisely as you have said) that it won't last forever in it's current form. That we should start thinking about the repercussions of our current model so when this model becomes unsustainable, we'll already be transitioned into the new.

I certainly see no problem in thinking about our future instead of refusing to look ahead because... well it's going so well right now we shouldn't rock the boat.

Retric2• 18 years ago

Capitalism works just fine in a steady state economy because things break down. Buildings need to be repaired, styles change etc. Just look look at the plumbing industry it can grow or shrink but when your sink is broken and you don't know how to fix it you call someone.

Unless you're suggesting some form of utopia where people don't need to eat and nothing ever breaks. But even then someone is going to setup an MMO and the cycle of pretend money can start all over again.

dantheman• 18 years ago

what the article talks about is not a ponzi scheme... so it's not a straw man, the article may be of merit but any comparison to a ponzi scheme merely confuses the issue.

gaius2• 18 years ago

start looking at how a global steady state economy will work

Err, except that we don't. That kind of thinking is a fallacy, that there is only economic value in tangible items. There is literally (in the sense that it is not bounded by how much stuff there is) no limit on the economic value that can be created through services and intangible assets such as information.

A microprocessor is worth more than the sand it's made from. Where did that value come from?

yters• 18 years ago

Another annoying thing is that people think a certain structure is a Ponzi scheme, when really it is the parameters of the structure. What might be a Ponzi scheme in one generation is social security in a shorter living, more prolific generation.

known• 18 years ago

Isn't PageRank a type of Ponzi scheme?

jwesley• 18 years ago

PageRank is a tool used to rank web pages in search results. But maybe Google is a Ponzi scheme. Users create all the content, Google sells all the ads!

llimllib2• 18 years ago

Not everything is a dang Ponzi Scheme! Sheesh.

justindz• 18 years ago

A Ponzi scheme is where new investors pay returns to existing investors, but there is no actual trade made using the income.

EDIT: Oops. Explained adsense. Too much multi-tasking. Irrelevant anyway, since PageRank does not have any of the above characteristics.

Per prior comments, everything is not suddenly a Ponzi scheme.

jerf• 18 years ago

You don't have to be a full-blown singulatarian to see that technology still has a number of game-changing tricks up its sleeve. Robotics is getting to the point that I think we could see a fully robotic factory of some significance in the next five to ten years, where "significance" means something like a car factory or something, not just a demo product.

Computer AI doesn't seem to be on the verge of a breakthrough on the strong-AI front, but there really seems to have been a qualitative change in the past few years in computer vision, brought on by having more computer power available.

Nanotechnology is continuing to advance, primarily in materials science right now, but it will also continue to make progress in other areas. Even without full-on molecular nano-constructors (which there is no obvious physical reason we can't build, but let's leave that to the "full-on singulatarians"), we will continue to improve our abilities to manipulate matter on a fine scale in a large way (no contradiction), much like life does. Look for garbage dumps to go from a blight upon the environment to awesome materials resource sometime in the next 10 to 15 years. (Future investment opportunity! There will be a period of time when it becomes obvious that this will be true, but it is not generally recognized, and an interested individual will be able to pick up old dumps for a song, relative to what they will be worth.)

(As a side-note, any actually indefinitely-sustainable economy will require this technology, be it biologically derived or otherwise. Any proposal that involves freezing our current tech level in a mis-guided attempt to be "sustainable" is simply a death sentence.)

The primary reason we can't go strolling through space isn't material or technological, it's energy, and if any of the fusion proposals go through (ITER, Polywell, any of them at all), the energy problem is significantly mitigated. Especially if it's not ITER; I don't know if we could practically loft an ITER into space, but a Polywell fusion device certainly could be, and a fusion-powered space ship would be quite capable, unlike today's models. Even just growing a pair and getting into fission could significantly mitigate our energy problems for a very long time. (I wonder when the fear of nuclear will be exceeded by the fear of not having energy. My guess is one big blackout in the US and you can kiss anti-power-plant sentiment goodbye.)

And there's more stuff coming up.

Yes. We're in a recession. We may even be in a depression. Fucking stop crying about it. Sheesh. It is not the end of humanity just because you're not as rich as you think you should be. (What a selfish model of the future!)

markessien2• 18 years ago

He's wrong, there is no Ponzi scheme at all. Let me explain...

First of all, we have limited resources. The resources we absolutely need, for example, food and water, however, exist in enough quantity for all the people that currently exist (otherwise they would die).

The second layer of resources, for example, metal to build cars, crude oil for energy, also exist in enough quantity for now.

The exchange between basic needs and not-so-basic needs is irrelevant of the price that we are actually paying for them, because there is enough for everyone.

So the economy is built on the most important part of all - human labour. When I program, I expend labour, and though nothing gets added or removed from the world, I can still exchange the time I spent for a basic need like food.

This debt he is talking about is debt of human labour, and even if you wipe it out completely, the worst that has happened is that people wasted their time, and they will not get paid for it. There is no real destruction of the most basic needs.

If for example, we were destroying farmland to produce in excess right now, and we know this will make the farmland completely useless in the future, then this is a scheme that will collapse. But we're not doing that in any significant quantity.

Furthemore, we don't need to conserve things that are not finished yet. For example, let's imagine that we are going to run out of iron in 100 years. Obviously, this will be problematic, but 10 years before it happens, the price of iron is going to skyrocket, because we know of the impending scarcity. And there are lots of materials we can use to replace iron. Same with oil.

There is no ponzi scheme. People are paying for an easier life, and they are paying other people to make life easier for them.

eru3• 18 years ago

We are sitting on a huge ball of matter orbiting around an even huger source of low-enough-entropy energy. We are not running out of stuff anytime soon.

(Oil and animal/plant species may become quite scarce, though.)

bmj2• 18 years ago

Err, people _do_ die because they don't have enough food. That's not to say that we _could_ have enough food to feed the world, but famine is a real issue in some parts of the world.

There are many who believe this is the case (see Wendell Berry, for example).

markessien2• 18 years ago

People don't die because we don't have enough food. If there were not enough food, those people would survive a week or so, and would be long dead.

People are dying because they are restricted from moving to areas with enough food. They are not dying because we lack food in the world.

Be very careful with this line of argumentation, because the surface scratching articles in papers are different from what the reality of the situation in the world is.

thwarted• 18 years ago

Is it that people die because there isn't enough food or because the people don't have access to enough food? How many people experience a lack of food because of political issues rather than total-food-supply issues?

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

"It may well be that in some possible worlds, that could still be true, but it's increasingly looking like we're going to be stuck here with only one world's resources to draw on."

Umm, what? We're finally getting private space exploration.

undertoad• 18 years ago

I liked the one where Ponzi jumped over the shark on his waterskis.

1gor• 18 years ago

>It is a crisis of overgrowth of financial assets relative to growth of real wealth /.../paper exchanging for paper is now 20 times greater than exchanges of paper for real commodities.

Unfortunately, even former World Bank economists could have dismal understanding of modern finance. But everybody nowadays likes to sing a populist tune.

A financial transaction is simply passing of legal title of a real asset from one person to another. Think of a pension fund who wants to makes sure it will be able to pay future pensions to the widows and orphans and buys a corporate bond portfolio.

Of course, a pension fund will not want to manage each corporation in its portfolio. So it will buy securities rather than do direct lending, sit on company boards etc. The fund will try to diversify its risk among many bonds. This is the first step of separation of 'real wealth' from 'financial assets'.

When you have many pension funds doing the same thing -- buying corporate bonds diversified enough and be representative of US economy -- they are likely to outsource this task to a specialist. An 'index fund' will be creating a 'collection of corporate bonds' with desired characteristics (credit quality, size etc.), and all other investors will buy a piece of this index fund as large as they want.

Now we have removed 'financial assets' two steps from the 'real business'. Buying a share in an index fund is obviously not the same as making a direct loan to the corporation and a having dinner with the CEO. It is much cheaper, so more money is left for widows and orphans.

Here comes the last step. When large players (pension funds) buy or sell these baskets of securities, they don't want their brokers (investment banks) to get rich from all those commission on trading individual securities in it. So they pass the ownership to each other through so called swaps. A swap between two funds would look like this: 'Fund A to Fund B (current owner of the portfolio): I will take the risk of owning these bonds for a year. If they drop in price comparing to today, I'll pay you the difference. If they rise - you'll pay me. It's as good as if I owned the thing for a year. But you'll remain the formal owner'.

And these two would record the transaction based on the total value of the bonds, even though they are only risking the price difference between two set dates. And then the swap buyer may change his mind in a week's time and enter in another swap with another fund. So value of the swaps outstanding will grow larger and larger until it looks really scary to journalists and other clueless people. There has been $596 trillion of derivatives outstanding (as of December 2007). So what? It's a backlog of the transactions, more or less. If you off-set them against each other, you'll arrive back to underlying securities' value, and eventually trace it all back to the balance sheet of individual companies.

So there is no such thing as 'financial assets'. Each title associated with a financial paper can be traced back to a 'real thing', a real asset somewhere.

One should not forget that derivatives (financial assets etc. whatever) have made capital transaction costs very low. Low costs have led to more efficient allocation of capital and to great benefits to the society.

That's why a backlash against financial innovation is dangerous. I don't think we'll be better off by destroying the financial markets and moving back to barter.

Finally, if you want to find a real Ponzi scheme mastermind, this is Mr Greenspan and the US government in general. They were trying to prevent a bit of an economic pain -- a post 2000 dot-com slowdown -- by artificially lowering interest rates which had led to unrealistic pricing of capital everywhere, not only in the US. Which has led to property bubble growing and bursting (soon to be followed by US government debt bubble) and now we all face much bigger pain. But this should not be blamed on derivatives and financial markets. The easier it is to pass an ownership title on a real asset to another person - the better.

Ardit20• 18 years ago

I do not understand what makes Tim O' Rilly think that he has any authority to express an opinion on such an issue.

I belive this is endemic to the internet as a whole. I say why does he not stick to technology an let scholars who have actually studied the issues he speak of enlighten us on them.

jonasvp• 18 years ago

Obviously, not everything is a Ponzi scheme but the point the article is making is totally valid. Any child can understand that you cannot grow indefinitely in a confined space, even if that space is the Earth and even if the value measured is quality. The measure of quality is appreciation and we only have a limited amount of time on our hands.

I wonder why so few people think about the following line of reasoning:

1. Our current economy is based on money as a medium of exchange to function (separation of labor -> good)

2. Therefore, money is a universal medium of exchange and acquires a value separate from the exchange value: liquidity, the possibility to exchange it for anything else (see Keynes et.al) -> unintended but ok

3. As a consequence, our current money relies on a positive rate of interest to circulate. Whenever the interest rate gets too close to zero, money holders will not give up their privilege of liquidity and not lend out their money (bad!)

4. As a result, the economy collapses - simply because the medium of exchange stops circulating. In the end, the government has to print new money to replace the money not being spent/lent, leading to inflation. Alternatively, the state has to make new debts or fund dying industries only to keep interest rates positive... (very bad!)

This reasoning does not depend on any technology or production-based argument because every human undertaking these days is based on beating the rate of interest. Even if you only invest your own money, you have to factor in the interest you might have gotten at the bank.

There's a really simple fix to it: motivate money holders to part with their money even without interest. You would get an economy that can grow when it needs to but can contract as well without collapsing.

Even though it seems god-given, money itself is actually pretty hackable. If you're interested, one interesting proposal is here: http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/suhr/nngengl.html

fauigerzigerk• 18 years ago

We should keep two things in mind before we go overboard with the ponzi scheme thing:

1) Exponential GDP growth does not necessarily mean using exponentially more natural resources. Quite the contrary. A lot of growth could come from work going into reducing resource consumption. Describing this distinction as quantitative vs qualitative growth creates the false impression of a need for some kind of revolution in order to make that switch. It's not a switch. We're already right in the middle of it and it's a gradual development.

2) Global debt is always zero. Debt is always a claim on other people's labour. If debtors throw their hands up and say, sorry I can't work enough to provide that labour, debt is written off and that's it. There's no link to the use of natural resources at all.

Tim O'Reilly: The Biggest Ponzi Scheme of Them All

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