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Working on Economics with Fable 5

51 pointsby Wilsoniumiteyesterday at 9:18 PM34 commentsview on HN

Comments

skew-aberrationyesterday at 11:25 PM

This is a topic I'm interested in, but the presentation and exposition on the website leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, it does make you sound like a crank.

Almost all of the theory and predictions presented seems to be those of regular classical economics, per Smith, Riccardo, and particularly George. You can find them in Wealth of Nations, Progress and Poverty. This surprises people who have been failed by our education systems. There are still many people writing about this exact topic now - the author does mention e.g Stiglitz.

The author seems to be overcome by the explanatory power of a 150-250 year-old well-established economic theory, of which fable has built a fairly general (novel? improved?) macro model for him, including the effects of certain tax policies. They present this as a new theory of economics rather than a new macro model.

It's very off-putting as a reader - you can't distinguish at a glance between what the author claims to have contributed vs merely discovered by reading about Georgism. Established concepts are not referred to be their usual names, etc.

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larsiusprimetoday at 12:58 AM

RE sovereign wealth funds, You might find it interesting that the Norwegian approach to natural resource management is also based on the classical principles of Ricardo and George:

https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/book-review-the-natural-div...

estearumyesterday at 11:18 PM

As a Georgist I'm naturally very sympathetic to anything in this vein, but as you say: dense!

What do you believe are the most important contributions here over standard Georgism or Ricardo's theory of rents?

delichonyesterday at 11:35 PM

> And the intuitive idea for this is that the wage is set by technology and access to physically scarce things (land as an example, but tbh you can add other things you think are scarce), and then it’s scaled by how efficiently machines can make machines and how much labor you need to make machines. That’s it.

There is no term for human value here, and it is values that set prices. Scarcity is not itself a value. A particular snowflake or UUID being unique adds no demand. Wages are set in the context of every possible opportunity that the employer can imagine, as ordered by values. So a wage-predicting equation needs arguments that measure all of those value-weighted opportunities against paying a given wage, but this one doesn't. And "That's it" seems to declare them not relevant.

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owenpaytonyesterday at 11:15 PM

the paper abstract is generated by ai: https://www.pangram.com/history/c480c94f-2d19-4cc3-95e0-c4fa...

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Stevvotoday at 12:11 AM

My high-school economics teacher taught us Georgism is the optimal form of taxation. He gave us a bunch of dense math to back up that claim, but I can remember none of it.

firesteelrainyesterday at 11:14 PM

Are there other alternatives to UBI in solving this problem?

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bethekidyouwantyesterday at 11:21 PM

I think the answer to the last question is obvious. That we are standing on the shoulders or something completely new.

0x70runtoday at 12:06 AM

[dead]

lwansbroughyesterday at 10:16 PM

[flagged]

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