chris_t

But... accountants do work for AI companies, right? That doesn't seem like a good example.

I agree with all of this. The example of the patent on steam engines is fascinating, thank you! It's certainly true government granted monopolies are far from the ideal incentive structure, with many downsides. (And lobbying for EG patent extensions likely IS rent-seeking). Advance market commitments and other systems likely have better characteristics.

I was rather objecting to the misuse of a technical term, and the idea that we should expect all innovation to happen without reasonable incentives.

Rent-seeking has a technical definition; earning money from things you invented does not meet it. While Salk is obviously an inspiring example, a wise society should happily incentivize the development of useful technology.

I'm not sure that argument is rigorous enough to be called a proof. We have no guarantee that the S&P 500 will grow faster than world wealth. It's plausible it will, but one could reasonably purchase something like gold or BTC to hedge against scenarios where it doesn't.

Sadly it is often not so simple. Complex regulations can advantage large incumbent firms by making it harder for newer entrants to their markets.

Wealth correlates with health correlates with better reaction times & general fitness

I agree with your general point, but you can't just join up 2 correlations like that, that isn't always going to work when there are other confounding factors (and there always are). Wealth also correlates with age which anticorrelates with reaction times and general fitness.

Oh, that makes sense. I'd hoped the trend was towards a higher level of reliability but perhaps it's just a change of direction in the manipulation.

The unreliability of those figures will be no surprise to anyone who follows China's economy or politics closely, and I hope this bodes for better quality statistics in the future.

There's a small industry of people who try to measure Chinese growth in other ways that are harder to forge such as railway shipment tonnage and energy consumption; it'll be interesting to see to what extent those methods are vindicated if/when better quality data becomes available.

If the underlying motivation for understanding or judging is to figure out what public policy to adopt, then the choice of what to do is simply what works best. If some people are irredeemable and locking them away forever ends up creating the safest and healthiest society for the most people, then judge away. If it turns out that helping people and understanding them where possible works better, do that. Most progress seems to me to originate in moving from the former to the latter, in moving more people out of the "irredeemable" category.

A big reason for the bias towards new things is that greenfield development is easier and more fun, especially in organisations that aren't capable of producing good software. Learning a new framework every couple of years makes sense if it means you get to avoid having to work on confusing spaghetti code from a decade ago.

I agree that I'm being a little silly, it's what my last line hinted at! I do think outrage is better directed at our legislators than at corporations though, but I don't hold out hope for substantive change either way.

This is the key point that is so often missed. Getting angry at Apple et al for following their incentives rationally is silly.

I'd love to see journalists doing a better job of explaining the failures of the tax system rather than peddling pointless outrage, but I suppose that they too are following their incentives rationally; outrage gets more clicks.

Interesting, thank you. Aquifer depletion seems like a modest problem on a 1k year scale, there's plenty of water around generally. But I hadn't heard of topsoil depletion before; I wonder how difficult it will be to produce it artifically? It sounds like something that will soon be in demand.

What is it about current agricultural practices that makes them unsustainable? I know there is a reliance on fossil fuels, but that seems like it could be overcome in the long term (1000 years) without needing to move to a decentralized system.

I'd be interested in seeing proof that protectionism actually does benefit workers; I suspect the effect is mixed. Cheap goods from overseas often can help improve poorer people's standards of living, and it's not hard to see how protecting industries from more efficient competition overseas can benefit business owners.

Government doesn't have unlimited power to alter reality, there are countless examples of legislation being ineffective or having unintended consequences. The canonical example is prohibition of various drugs, but more recently the "ban the box" initiative is quite illustrative:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/consequ...

Perhaps I'm nitpicking, but I don't think it's fair to characterise loaning money successfully as "parasitic". Credit is a useful thing to provide, many endeavours valuable to people would not exist without it. Moreover, loans (and trade more generally) aren't necessarily zero-sum; Warren Buffett getting rich doesn't automatically mean somebody somewhere else is losing out.

food stamps that stop people from wasting their money on alcohol, cigarettes, lottery tickets, and casinos

Are you certain they are effective at that? It isn't hard to imagine that a secondary market for food stamps could exist wherein they're traded for cash at some reduced rate.