I've always voted the left. 👍 Though I will admit that I didn't vote at the last Election 😒Got sick of being told how to live my life, being told what I should and shouldn't do and their one system for them and one system for the rest. 👎Now we have a wonna be mini US Government 😒''Defund'' 🙄
They are destroying a lot of government functions in hope they can privatize it to all their cronies. But a lot of this govt scaffolding will need to be rebuilt eventually. Just because they are destroying it doesn't mean they get to keep how it's being rebuilt.
Could you elaborate on the "fund public R&D" thing? I would have guessed pretty much every economist would be in favour of funding public R&D, since we seem to get so much from it.
yeah, that's what I got from WK's response. I read his OP as saying that we shouldn't do public R&D, hence my confusion. "We should do both public and private R&D and in doing so exploit comparative advantage" seems like a pretty uncontroversial statement.
Your CV lists grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, five from the Research Council of Norway... Not to mention your graduate fellowship from U of Michigan. So should those governments not have funded your research, or...?
A bit creepy to inspect my cv for the purpose of a gotcha, but to answer your question: public funding of R&D makes sense when it generates externalities. Both private and public r&d may generate that. The key thing is externalities and stressing "public" as a condition misses that
Fixing market failures is manipulating the market ( and that's good ). Do you think the markets would look anything like they do now if all infrastructure had to be privately funded!?
Capital interests don't care about your market. They sit on vacant property now. That won't change when suddenly there are 10,000 more houses. They'll buy them, too.
I see so many people promoting housing. Builders come drooling because they’d love contracts to build the cheapest, as dense as possible, trashy structures that will also never be even remotely sound-proofed (mostly impossible but they won’t even try). Can we not find better proposals?
would they though? The frustration of our era are the people who are in love with their chains and that includes excessive housing prices, since more people own than don't still.
Yes, that's one of the fundamental the problem here , years of bad housing + investment policy have made housing the primary investment asset of a lot of people. It's hard to be mad at people who would like money to retire with even if the net outcome is socially extremely bad.
Very much a "burn the world down to be king of the ashes" energy. These losers read fantasy books and rather than taking them as great escapism or reflections on what it means to be a hero they crave feudalism and think "I am a Great Man and Protagonist, why should I care about the little people."
I would love to have you on CCC. If nothing else it’d be amazing to rehash your amazing Balaji bet, but also you make easily digestible, sound points about why we’re taking money and governance in a wildly wrong direction.
You forgot the crème de la crème: Amend zoning laws so you can keep honeybees and chickens across all of the country. The people shall have cheap eggs and they shall love it!
Ideas and information do not exhibit scarcity. Public funding of all forms of research (basic and R&D) is good as the product of money invested can then benefit the entire economy rather than the specific business that "owns" it or those they choose to license it to.
Comments
The former: Public pays private sector to perform
The latter: Public plays public sector to perform
Which is better? Depends on task and comparative advantage
weather infrastructure should be privately funded. depends on whether it's excludable. roads are absolutely excludable, and should be funded by tolls.
you should take econ 101.
Right: the Medieval Dark Age + Inquisition
The only "super" the techbros are is super-misanthropic, not super-smart.