rubiety

Whenever I'm frustrated, I entertain the thought of penguin farming in the Falkland islands.

If smoking is a problem for non-smokers, would it seem like a simpler solution to give non-smokers face masks?

Why should the burden of the negative externality lie on the recipient and not the creator of said externality?

The market will sort it out. I would pay more, lots of people would pay more. The demand curve speaks louder than words.

Yep. "Genetic Fallacy" more specifically. Very widespread.

Room and board is double-counting. You'd ultimately have to pay for that anyways (college or not), so it's hard to attribute that entirely to the "cost of college" - it's not a net cost.

This anecdote does nothing to detract from the central point, stated again: "Billions of people live fulfilling lives without ever stepping foot in the United States."

Gotta love how the absence of state laws restricting what contracts between private individuals can include is described as being "the most repressive".

Ultimately these clauses are part of private, consenting employment agreements. If you don't like a non-compete clause offered by an employer (which is possible in MA since are no strong laws against it), nothing is forcing you to sign it.

Especially since it's a "suppliers market" for labor in our industry, you should be able to easily negotiate out of one if an employer tries to bring it up.

San Diego. I moved here on a whim a bit over a year ago after traveling all over the country on JetBlue flying places. San Diego just seemed to have an incredibly high quality of life, and it does.

There's also a great Ruby community here if you happen to be a Ruby developer: http://sdruby.org

Does anyone care about living in a city that's just plain nice to live in? Everyone's so concerned about whether a city is conducive to start-ups they miss out on evaluating quality of life from a personal perspective.

I choose to live in San Diego because I love to live in San Diego, for innumerable personal reasons, not because it's "startupy". Stocktwits moved to Coronado island near San Diego not because there's a thriving start-up scene here, but because it's just a damn nice place to live and work. Developers who can live anywhere should want to live in great places for personal reasons.

For whatever it's worth, I've done a significant amount of traveling around the United States (mostly on three JetBlue flying passes) and in general find cities like Boston to be overrated in terms of quality of life, especially when factoring in the enormous cost of living.

No doubt these are all personal value judgments. I just wonder why people optimize so little on the simple personal quality of life vector and so much on whether there's a bunch of "startupy people" there.

This is very true, repeated often by economists, but nobody listens.

It's so ironic this is so often pointed out, since the reality (increasing marginal revenue product of labor) is indicative of something good, not bad.

You're missing the point - the TSA watch list is checked with the name you bought the flight under. You can then change that name to the name that matches your ID. The TSA does not check your name against the watch list when you go up to their booth; they only verify that the two documents match (where one of the documents is essentially fabricated).

They definitely don't look. Several itineraries have multiple legs, and the TSA only ever looks at - much less scribbles on - your first leg. Even that aside, you can easily get a boarding pass from an agent inside the terminal, without it ever having been checked by the TSA.

I've actually gone through TSA with one boarding pass on one flight, and boarded a completely different flight before (not just a separate piece of paper) - back when I could book flights for free on JetBlue and had already booked another flight that night. I merely decided once I was in the terminal that I'd hop on a different flight I had also checked in to.

I do a lot of flying and have long though about this. It's total theatre. They could fix it by implementing some cryptographic code that's scanned at TSA entry points, verifying the actual document (boarding passes are a far cry from a verifyable document).

The point of going dark is to announce to bystanders the peril. Everyone who reads Hacker News already knows the peril...

"The sad fact is that America is no longer a country that makes things, and as a result we no longer find ourselves in a position to employ people in positions that are actually worth a damn."

This makes just about as much sense as a similar statement does 100 years ago:

"The sad fact is that America is no longer a country of farmers producing food, and as a result we no longer find ourselves in a position to employ people in positions that are actually worth a damn."

A service economy and relative decline of manufacturing output (NOTE: I said relative - manufacturing output is at an all time high) is something to be celebrated, not bemoaned.

2. I claimed "money is a veil", not "money doesn't matter". People focus too much on money when discussing macroeconomics and the effects of complex changes in the economy, and not on the true measure of prosperity. As a simple example, if the Fed started printing even more obscene amounts of money than it does not, our GDP next might be twice what it is in 2011. Wow, 100% growth! What an easy way to prosperity!

3. In the economic analysis I made, I've pointed out that the effects that he is so worried about are identical, in much the same way that the effect of increasing trade patterns and specialization is very similar to the effect of increasing technological efficiency. Sure people stopped wanting them instead of them literally being free, but that doesn't change the analysis regarding the effects.

1. "provides cheaper supply for a demand" - Nice ;-). I'm not disagreeing with you that if it's free there is no market. But that's an entirely different question from asking whether or not the value of goods and services produced is a net increase or decrease, and this is the relevant question. You're also treading very close to confusing "supply" with "quantity supplied", which is ironic as you simultaneously accuse me of misunderstanding supply and demand: http://econperspectives.blogspot.com/2008/05/supply-vs-quant...

2. Huh? Of course money is a store of value, and it's a medium of exchange. And I'm totally with you on skepticism of the Fed/printing money. All of that is completely tangential to my original argument. Your comments on Spain and China could deserve another ten paragraphs of explanation concerning comparative advantage and the benefits of unilateral free trade. It would not be a worthwhile debate.

3. The size of the market doesn't have anything to do with the economics I'm explaining to you. This is another common fallacy where people confuse magnitudes of the parameters in reasoning with the reasoning itself. We're talking at the margin.

4. Once again, a total evasion of any substance. Not even worth it.

5. Sure. Clearly the there is not a net benefit to that particular company and its employees. And? Does analysis of net economic costs and benefits befall one particular company or the economy as a whole? You haven't thought past stage 1, nor does what you said address my (5) whatsoever.

6. Still no argument here, as you completely evade accounting for all costs and benefits over the costs and benefits which are either 1) very visible to you and everyone else, or 2) extreme for one particular group of (special interest) people.

You might enjoy this article: http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html

"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen."

I think what you're trying to say is that technological progress brings highly increasing returns to intelligence such that one person has the capability to produce an extremely high amount of value relative to their peers (increase in income inequality, perhaps).

And I agree, this is most likely the case. But inequality as a side-effect is something that can be dealt with via relatively inefficient policies that do not distort too heavily the division of labor as it exists.

In other words, we should let this grand increase in efficiency happen, but correct perhaps for inequality resulting therefrom in a relatively efficient way as we need too.

Far too many people use the inequality argument to prove too much (that we should attempt to slow specialization of flat-ouf efficiency at its source), and this argument is deeply flawed IMO. In other words, don't shoot the messenger. Intelligent people are creating enormous amounts of value, but their income/price is just a messenger of this information.

I'm not even sure where to begin on your confusion here.

1. Firstly, efficiency concerns the ability to more with less. Zero is less, and there's no reason why zero is substantively different than paying $0.01 per car - it's on a continuity that affords the same analysis. So saying you reply "has to do with free" speaks absolutely nothing about my initial arguments focused on efficiency.

2. Money is a veil. Like the discredited mercantilist beliefs century ago, you're confusing output with money. What matters for prosperity is the quantity of goods and services being produced in an economy. You may not realize it, but your argument is essentially granting authority of money over output in estimating prosperity. Output - the actual goods and services produced in an economy - is what matters (and the consumption we enjoy therefrom), not whatever dollar value we assign to them. This by the way is an extremely common confusion among non-economists, so don't feel bad about misunderstanding it.

3. Since you seem so fixated on this concept of "free" sidestepping my arguments, let me take your analogy and present another similar one. Imagine that it's the year 1910 and the price for buggy whips is $25, with a thriving industry producing them. It's already clear that I'm claiming efficiency improvements resulting in a price reduction is a good thing. Now let's introduce your concern: buggy whips are free! "Therefore an existing market was destroyed." Yes, this market would be destroyed. And in fact it was - buggy whips were free in the sense that cars displacing buggies simply did not require them. There is no economic difference here. Yet no one with the knowledge of hindsight today wouldn't even think about arguing that the production of value which is essentially "free" in that case is something "bad", and it's not clear whatsoever that there is some net decline in jobs (in fact all evidence points to this being precisely the opposite - touched upon by your point "There might be more jobs in the new industry").

4. Speaking of net decline in jobs, I'm disputing this being necessarily a problem at all. To say otherwise is to ignore trade-offs and categorically value one thing over another as a society. Jobs are another thing people routinely confuse with prosperity, and they also tend to believe that they are somehow assets instead of transactions. It's like saying "buying a car" is an asset, instead of the car itself. With labor, the software we produce is the asset, not our job that allows such production to take place via a quid-pro-quo. If I could purchase everything I wanted to live by for $1, I'd only work one hour the entire year doing some freelance, and not have a job. Is "not having a job" bad in that sense? Not really - but the point is it depends on the amount of consumption I'm able to enjoy, and the job is just a transaction that effectively grants me consumption purchasing power. It's the seen vs. the unseen that makes thinking about these issues (and really most things in economics) very difficult.

5. You made an important point about willingness to pay, but drew the wrong lesson from it. You seem to think that having a high willingness to pay and a low price ($0 in your example) is a bad thing, but this is precisely the opposite of the truth. In fact this is the very definition of "Consumer Surplus", the net increase of which is a good thing. See my point (1) concerning actual output/consumption being what matters.

6. Really this all boils down to your closing argument, "Therefore an existing market was destroyed", and focusing on some costs and benefits while completely ignoring others. Whether or not destruction of any particular industry is good or bad is not relevant unless you fully account for all costs/benefits. Actual accounting for this empirically is difficult, but axiomatic economics shows that advances in efficiency and producing more with less is precisely the way growth occurs - a net benefit.

To fully explore all the issues here would require much longer. Hence is the simple fact that making nonsense claims takes one paragraph and carefully explaining the often non-intuitive economists implicit in such claims takes 10x as long. Sounds like some debate asymmetry if there ever was any.

Wow, you should be embarrassed. Read the rest of the comments and see my real reply to the original article - posted 10 minutes before yours.

It's also hilarious that this comment commits the very fallacy you seek to expose!

All the more ironic that the next item in my feed reader is, "The Problem Began When the Invention of the Spear Reduced the Price of Food":

http://cafehayek.com/2011/05/the-problem-began-when-the-inve...

How fitting to this discussion.

Yet another absolutely classic example of both the "lump of labor fallacy" and "make work bias".

When are we going to starting teaching more Economics and less Literature in high school?

His definition for "ephemeralization" is "doing more with less", which is strange since my academic background in economics teaches me the word for this is nothing more than "efficiency".

So many of his claims supporting his "net destroyer of jobs argument" contain no real analysis are amount to fallacies exposed by the history of economic progress. At almost any point in history you could make an almost identical argument about something else where efficiency improvements reduce the number of jobs in one particular industry. People used to also worry that more women getting into the work force would reduce the jobs "available for men". Classic "lump of labor fallacy": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Even all this aside, and sweeping away any historical parallels (one of which he mentions - Ford) where the ultimate conclusion flatly contradicts his pessimism, there's a healthy dose of "make work bias" implicit in the entire article. It's still puzzling to me why people focus so much on work as being something desirable to per-sue in it's own right. Work is the price we have to pay for consumption: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter:...

This statement alone completely blows away his credibility to speak on economics: "And for all its vaunted technological prowess, the United States hasn’t outpaced the rest of the world in GDP growth". It's well understood in growth economics that we wouldn't expect advanced economics such as the United States to outpace growth of 3rd world countries playing "catch up". He could do the same analysis against modern, industrialized countries instead and come to a very different conclusion. Even if this statement was accurate, it's a complete non-sequitur in support of his overall claim.

It's funny that the second part of his article back-tracks from his original claims and contains far more sense than the first part. "Ephemeralization [READ: efficiency] itself might eventually give rise to new types of jobs." That's exactly right, and has been true for centuries without fail.

Finally, it's embarrassing that he chooses to quote Tyler Cowen, a respectable economist who would would surely call out this article more forcefully than I.

Sounds like someone isn't testing their code. "one would need to write tests to catch in ruby". You're damn right you need to write tests to catch problems in Ruby, as you should probably be doing anyways - in any language - in which case confidence gained from your test suite is almost entirely redundant to the confidence gained from successful compilation in a static language.

But if you're not testing your code, then the compiler is indeed a great dose of confidence.

I do, though, firmly agree with this: "I wouldn't argue against the notion that ruby's expressiveness and use of functional paradigms might make up for it's lack of static typing, and ruby in the hands of a great programmer is pure pleasure, but most teams don't have just great programmers."

Ultimately things do depend quite a bit on the developer resources you have.