Haven - cutting welfare

Actually DD, in Manticore what we see if through the lense of those characters who don't believe in free rides.

We've seen plenty of evidence that that's not how the whole aristocracy thinks.

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Annachie wrote:Actually DD, in Manticore what we see if through the lense of those characters who don't believe in free rides.

We've seen plenty of evidence that that's not how the whole aristocracy thinks.

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Right! The Young family certainly doesn't. What matters is the percentages. As more become parasites, whether the crony type or the shiftless type, it increases the drag on the economy. Mass production allows a higher percentage of parasitism before major damage, but whether in improvement or decline, the process tends to be a spiraling snowball. When it reaches the point where the infrastructure starts being destroyed (riots, moving against noveau rich earnings, etc.) the rate increases drastically. See compounding returns, and compounding debt


The change in Haven occurs when they find a way to get the proles to move away from being parasites.

Scientific American, some decades back, had a small article reporting on an experiment in New Jersey. They picked a group of welfare families, and arranged it so that only half of what they earned was deducted from the welfare payments. In a year, when the experiment ended, only one of the families had no one working. Too bad the experiment wasn't expanded!

Minimum wage works this in reverse. Instead of shrinking the first step out of poverty, it makes it harder to mount. No matter what some politicos believe, businesses are not cornucopias. If they consistently pay out more than the increase of value from the workers, they go out of business. There is also the human factor, people who know they are making major contributions to success don't like being paid no more than the beginners, and if there are no upper rungs, the beginners can't aspire to them

I think this got mentioned before, as did the fact that this is almost how welfare works down here in Oz.

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Annachie wrote:I think this got mentioned before, as did the fact that this is almost how welfare works down here in Oz.

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From:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/economist ... le/2003942

Automation is killing jobs far faster than foreign country employment.

also:

What we call "the economy" isn't a machine or even a system; it's the constantly churning accumulation of individual decisions made by several billion people in the course of a day, along with the many billions of consequences, large and small, foreseen and unforeseen, that those decisions entail.

In order to think about something, we need to simplify it. But often we think our model is real, and don't watch out for errors. This is called oversimplification.

Economies are so complex that we have the data choke problem that, in more recent supercomputers, is solved by having a multitude of less capable processors working in parallel, each on its own little part of the problem. In an economic situation, someone who goofs up with his small section and at his own expense, won't produce the major damage of a central controller who is wrong.

Haven had centralized control of the economy under the Legislaturists, and still has leftovers in their attitudes.

Often, something new comes along by one or a few people working on it, instead of a large group. Could this be why countries with economic freedom tend to be more innovative than those where the elites control the economy? Isn't it true that most disruptive technologies and systems go through a period when experts are sure they will always be minor players, so collectives won't provide the support needed for them to grow to maturity


In Haven, the proles start being interested in learning, but the stories don't mention any methods for real learning. IIRC, Jerry Pournelle's wife, working with "can't read" kids would throw away the stack of excuses (school provided) that came with them, and just teach them to read.

From:

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomasso ... sletterad=

There are in fact whole chains of charter schools where black and Hispanic youngsters score well above the national average on tests. There are the KIPP (Knowledge IS Power Program) schools and the Success Academy schools, for example.
snip
In other words, minority kids from the same neighborhood, going to school in classes across the hall from each other, or on different floors, are scoring far above average and far below average on the same tests.

If black success was considered half as newsworthy as black failures, such facts would be headline news -- and people who have the real interests of black and other minority students at heart would be asking, "Wow! How can we get more kids into these charter schools?"
snip
Black success has very little to offer politicians or the intelligentsia. But black children's lives and futures ought to matter -- and would, if politicians and the intelligentsia were for real.

Politicos take large contributions from teacher's unions, which oppose charter schools.

Then there is the problem of other misused data:

From:

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.c ... 8DCOYXTNFQ

Political Calculations is worth reading by any who want to change their thinking to be closer to reality.

The first chart’s message is: an economic recession is either in progress or imminent. The second chart’s message is: the US economy is not in recession and is presently not close to entering recession.

The same data, opposite messages.

And

In the case of today's example of junk science, it's the difference between suggesting that the risk of recession is imminent or of there being a comparatively low risk of recession in the near term.

This kind of thing is one reason for my assumption on assumptions: