This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I doubt it contains many rare earths!
I accept that manufacturing is necessary. I accept that R&D, which relates closely to manufacturing, is neccessary. I accept that finance is needed to fund the whole operation. You do need trained workers to operate machinery.
What I'm trying to strike at is the jobs that are furthest from primary production and manufacturing. Most jobs in modern economies are in the service sector, there are many, many jobs which could just be put on hold during the pandemic. All kinds of 'coordinators', 'inspectors' and 'consultants' that didn't seem to be needed at all. What is the point of them, then? No real wealth is being produced from people who make others fill out forms, check paperwork and refuse approvals for other people to go and create wealth.
Some of that is necessary. There does need to be some law, amongst other things. But there's a huge amount that isn't and it hugely pumps up GDP figures to the point where they become unhelpful, abstract measurements. The EU couldn't manage to send a million artillery shells to Ukraine, North Korea could. I'm told their GDP is less than a hundredth of the EU's, that it's a shithole country if ever there was one... What good are these intangibles in and of themselves?
They aren't very rare, just costly to separate. They make up a good amount of the impurities in other metals, for the matter. The difficulty in extracting them is accumulating them, because a lot of random dirt will have them in small amounts, so you need to pick them out of a lot of dirt. This isn't generally economical, but China has been subsidizing it. Other mines can "simply" spend the money to accumulate them when processing other ores and some are beginning to.
As of 2023, China leads the world in rare earths because they are the only country with good chemists and weak environmental laws. The US has plenty of rare earths - they just need to agree to some unimportant parts of the mountain west being despoiled in order to get at them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with your take in spirit, although I think you're a little too negative on how much the West produces. We still produce plenty of real wealth. And it shouldn't be underestimated just how expensive logistics is, deciding where to move resources and then actually moving them can take a lot of people to do.
But that said, I think burdensome regulations and taxation that's overly focused on redistributing the pie instead of making the pie bigger limit us a lot. It should be far easier than it is to build dense housing when you have such high prices. We need to and should be increasing housing supply much more than we are currently able to.
More options
Context Copy link
Most valuable things, including the examples you raised in your post (CPUs, GPUs, drugs, and surgical equipment) don't contain rare earth metals. Of course, rare earth metals are indeed important and I am not claiming otherwise. But you'll notice that the countries with large rare earth metal deposits aren't necessarily the richest countries on earth -- some of them are among the poorest. This seems to be in tension with your claim that the wealth of nations is derived from natural resources.
The jobs that are truly not needed are, by and large, jobs that exist as a result of useless government regulations. Either government jobs, or private sector "compliance" jobs. It's true that many of these specific types of "service sector" jobs are dead weight and serve no purpose. You have correctly observed that government regulations are often pointless or counterproductive.
It does not follow, however, that service sector jobs are generally useless or fail to create wealth. In fact, as I laid out above, the vast majority of the wealth of modern economies derives from service sector jobs. Just not the specific class of useless service sector jobs you have identified.
The simple reason is that NK has a bunch of artillery shells lying around, whereas the EU doesn't. This is a pretty extreme case of special pleading. If we're talking about literally anything other than artillery shells (cell phones, eggs, insulin, toilets, tractors, etc.) the EU has far more of it and far higher quality versions of it than NK. And if the EU wanted or needed to, it could surely close the artillery gap with NK as well. This has almost nothing to do with natural resources and everything to do with intangibles like human capital, rule of law, markets, etc.
Good, persuasive points. I feel like the number of people who are directly and clearly needed in the whole IP, R&D, law+order, STEM university, manufacturing, logistics and extraction stack are in the minority but that's only a feeling, I highly doubt I could find any statistic to prove it. And what's the point of even being here if we don't put fact before feeling?
Let's run with this premise for a moment and assume it's true. Let's assume that if we were smarter about how we run these sectors we could cut 90% of the people in them and still get the same benefits. What are the implications of that?
First of all, it would still be true that the service sectors are creating most of the wealth in the economy. It would just be fewer people creating the same amount of wealth. Which means these sectors would be creating even more wealth on net, because we are having to pay fewer people to get the same result.
And now we can potentially do even more R&D, IP, logistics, manufacturing, etc. with the resources that are no longer being wasted on useless employees. I would expect these sectors to use their efficiency gains to grow and contribute an even larger fraction of the economy's wealth going forward. Money spent on bullshit jobs can now be spent on non-bullshit job. People who worked bullshit jobs can now be retrained to work non-bullshit jobs.
So even if you are completely correct about this, it doesn't undermine the importance of the service sector. If anything, it shows that services could potentially be even more important to the economy than they already are.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link