Spain’s Lessons for American Decline(compactmag.com) |
Spain’s Lessons for American Decline(compactmag.com) |
Spain was a real monarchy, although much of the power actually lay in the hands of one royal adviser. In case of Spain's 17th century decline, that was Olivares. But the downfall was not only overspending on warfare, but also personal ambitions (leading to infighting), rebellion (Portugal and Catalonia internally, but in colonies as well), and the ad-hoc structure of financing. The monarch was paying the army out of his own pocket. Lending, tax evasion and consequently renewed taxation formed a death spiral, certainly when the imports from South America faltered (a direct consequence of the war).
So if there's a lesson, it's: structural reforms should be made well in advance. But that lesson can be learned elsewhere, too.
It is political in nature due to the political processes that have a hold on whether and how it might change.
We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity. One man's "hire people besides white men" is another's "hire using racist criteria and violate every hard-fought and hard-won civil, moral, and ethical principle of the past century of US history."
The word ‘merit’ is doing a lot of work here. What traits/aspects of a person would you use to calculate into their merit? I’ll argue that between two people who’ve crossed a finish line at the same time, the one who started furthest from that line is more meritorious. From a hiring/placement perspective however, especially during the first screening, there isn’t a good way to determine a candidate’s starting line.
The dichotomy is a bit wrong as well, but I’ll get into that once we get past the first hurdle (for the curious, it is about a selection bias after an initial screen).
I don't think it's hard at all to understand the opposition. Just reread what you wrote what the straightforward good is. I mean to say, be wary of the paving stones you're laying on your path.
I guess because racism is a crime in most modern societies and living in prison is uncomfortable?
I can't recommend the article either, it's just a casually-interesting premise to which the author then attaches a trailer of the usual half-wit cries of oppression by some invisible conspiracy threatening the author's narrow comfort zone.
But in doing so, the article does illustrate the characteristics of the loud and untethered lunacy of the libertarian, petroleum-inhaling populist factions that are occupying so much space in social discourse today.
That seems entirely different from American (US) history to me, which while also host to a ton of resources, utilized them for productive ends. A whole lot of technological and political innovation happened in the US, especially by the mid-late 1800s. I don’t think there was a similar phenomenon in the Spanish empire?
If one studies the price revolution [0] in Europe mainly taking place during the Spanish Golden century ("Siglo Oro") the statement: [...]access to unlimited quantities of a universal medium of exchange, craved and accepted everywhere at best just forces an analogy but in reality the "Spanish elite" weren't even near it.
America's silver (and to some extend gold) pouring into Western Europe was just one aspect of financial power but without adequate instruments like (1) safe enough infrastructure to protect against piracy, (2) appropriate financial instruments and (3) a solid framework of economics (academic institutions like the "School of Salamanca"[1] could just barely keep up, offered some new insights but ultimately those were tragically forgotten after the fast decline) the "new wealth" couldn't be properly utilized and leveraged. In the end both France and Spain had to declare state bankruptcy over their costly wars to their respective wealthy merchants sitting in cities like Antwerpen. France then emerged as the new center of power in Europe.
The "financial innovations" were mostly driven by the merchant class in the Low Countries who had freedom to establish their own judicial system regarding trade and loans, those were slowly adapted by the Netherlands and later by England.
Jakob Fugger is prime example [2] of that class at that time in Europe having built a monopoly on copper mining, he went on to establish new silver mining techniques in the wake of the Great Bullion Famine. In 1527 - at his peak - Jakob Fugger resided over 2,800,000 Florins about 2% Europe's GDP at that time or in today's standard an estimated $400 billon fortunate. He was also instrumental into securing a gigantic loan of of about 100,000 ounces of gold for Charles I later becoming the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
[0]https://eh.net/book_reviews/american-treasure-and-the-price-...
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca#Economic...
If you can’t tell the difference between stealing a bunch of gold in a gold based economy and the US Dollar, then there is not much hope for a decent analysis.
At that time gold was the universal currency. So everyone wanted gold itself, and nobody cared where you got it from or if it was backed by anything, as long as the gold was real. So to summarize, people only cared about the material medium, not the backing of the Spanish government and economy.
With the US Dollar, nobody wants the paper or ink that is the material medium. People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its economy. The US Dollar could be paper, plastic or digital bits. People wants what it represents, not its medium. This is exactly opposite to Spanish gold.
Then...
> The American ruling class found itself compelled to spin bizarre fantasies of Russian “disinformation” to explain away the results of the 2016 election. It can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausible. The same elite ties itself into absurd knots to deny the fact that it seeks to establish a system of racial quotas in education, government, and business.
Where the fuck did this come from?
1. It's been known for decades that it's essentially impossible to not run a trade deifict with a reserve currency. It's called the Triffin Dilemma [1];
2. The US Dollar is unlike gold in that you can create it out of thin air at any point. Many gold bugs and Crypto Andys (who are usually the same people) have a problem with this. This isn't actually a problem because the notion of "value" is completely made up anyway;
3. What backs the value of the US dollar is the long dick of the American military. Just look at all the wars the US has been involved in [2];
4. Colonies often turned into a drain on the colonizer's economy even with all th eexploitation (ie outright theft) going on. The costs of holding a colony only go up as the locals (rightly) become increasingly unhappy about the situation.
There's an interesting parallel with the Roman world here. Carthage, for example, used the common system at the time of tribute for its holdings. Rome, on the other hand, used a system of military alliances that tied the colony to Rome in a much more stable way. Some of Rome's colonies were colonies for a thousand years and became so Roman that even when conquered the conquerors became more Roman than the other way around.
5. The US has largely avoided the colony drain problem with economic imperialism. For example, the US now uses child labor in West Africa through intermediaries [3];
6. One cannot overstate the importance of slavery to American economic development and power. To be cleaer, slavery has never really gone away. It still exists in the form of prison labor (ie convict leasing). You could argue that the reason the US is the most incarcerated nation in the world (ie 4% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prisoners) is driven by economic exploitation more than anything else.
If you didn't get to the end, there's a bizarre conservative screed at the end:
> [The American ruling class] can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausible. The same elite ties itself into absurd knots to deny the fact that it seeks to establish a system of racial quotas in education, government, and business.
So, transphobia, conspiracy theories and complaints about anti-white racism (which is not real, by definition). I'm not sure how any of this is relevant to a comparison between the Spanish and American empires.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
[3]: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/our-work/child-forced-labo...
Corrected that for you.
The USA economy is the most dynamic and powerful in the world by a large margin. People want their wealth backed by this and will pay a premium for the right.
This may be changing. The US may have overextended its “credit line” if you will.
The US has an almost unlimited credit line because investors are clamoring for it. It's literally the best, most stable investment going right now. They wanted it to be the EU and it has not been. They wanted it to be BRICs and that is a flaming dumpster fire right now. Very soon, they will state Africa is a better bet than the US. It's a young, dynamic economy; the very opposite of stable.
Really? Or is it that oil is purchased in dollars? There's no other reason to find it useful over say the Euro (for example).
Doubt. The economic decline of the American south was well on its way by the 19th century. That some prisoners today make license plates has no material affect on US GDP - this claim needs sources.
Specifically, the US built a massive cotton industry [1] that created an enormous amount of wealth and funded expansion of hte United States westward. Cheap labor was essential to that. Even partial mechanization (ie the cotton gin) actually just increased demand for slave labor because cotton became much cheaper as a result.
As for prison labor, the direct economic output of incarcerated persons is relatively small to overall GDP but, just like with slavery, you can't ignore the secondary effects, specifically in suppressing in wages.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/empire-...
"The US has an almost unlimited credit line because investors are clamoring for it. It's literally the best, most stable investment going right now. "
Its hubris like this that worries people, not partisanship.
Slavery was wildly economically feasible, still is. All you need to do is add pressure to the workers and their performance increases. Like Amazon warehouse workers, but, you know, with whippings.
Would the car have been any less useful to african people if it was invented by a black henry ford?
Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?
Are they adjustable for different people's shapes and sizes?
How long was it before car chairs were adjustable to be driven by women, and how much longer until regulators started considering women-sized crash dummies?
Sure, your skin color doesn't mean much to a car, but it does to an automatic faucet, a skin-toned band aid, face login (or whatever apple calls it). There are obvious benefits to hiring or doing studies within your target market.
"Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?"
I would argue they always were. The color of a band-aide does not change its main functionality. Neither do any of your other examples. Humans all need a car with 4 wheels and band-aides that stick.
Gold has zero intrinsic value. Like all forms of money, its value is a psychological and sociological construct to treat it as if it had value.
The Incas for example simply used it for religious and ornamental purposes:
* https://www.tourinperu.com/blog/inca-gold-culture-invasion-r...
Anything can be used as money, including giant rocks:
There's a reason people buy gold. 1kg of Argentinian gold has the same value as 1kg of American gold. And both have the same value as 1kg of gold from any ancient civilization. Big rocks as currency is purely anecdotic.
Of course, if you're in the desert and you're thirsty, a bottle of water has more value to you than all the gold in the world, but that doesn't change the fact that through millennia people has seen gold as something valuable that it's not tied to an economy, a country, an empire or even a culture despite de Incas.
Papers have been written on how it does not:
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789
See also Roy Jastram's The Golden Constant: The English and American Experience 1560 to 1976 on how it's no good against infaltion:
> Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning.
* PDF: http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RoyJastram...
* https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/
Having gold as one's monetary base (e.g. Gold Standard) doesn't even help in stabilizing currencies:
* https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...
> Big rocks as currency is purely anecdotic.
Big rocks as currency is one example of how any arbitrary object can be treated as such:
* https://americanhistory.si.edu/the-value-of-money/origins-mo...
Gold (or silver) bars and coins are nothing more than shiny rocks and are just as arbitrary.
Modern society needed something scarce and was hard to manufacture/process (thus ensuring price stability) to use as an intermediate currency between currencies. Those countries agreed to use gold as this intermediate currency. Other ideas have been to use groups of commodities but these incur more complexity since they're purpose is to be consumed in some process.
So does this not give gold an intrinsic value? Economists regard it as a "shiny rock" but I think that is an oversimplification used to make opponents of fiat money look stupid.
And now we have no intermediary and no one bothers with gold when going between USD and EUR or JPY and CAD. Gold is completely useless for such exchanges in 2023 and would just add overhead. So given that it is worse than useless (being an hinderance due to an extra step) in such transactions, how can it have "intrinsic" value? If you're travelling internationally, do you exchange your domestic currency for gold, cross the border, and then exchange the gold for the destination currency?
What exactly is gold useful for in 2023 besides jewelry and some minor industrial uses? Can you buy groceries? Pay property taxes? Can you show up at a car dealership with a brick or two and get a new ride?
What is the value of me having gold in my possession?
> Those countries agreed to use gold as this intermediate currency.
It was socially agreed to it having value, but if it had "intrinsic" value, (a) no such agreement would have been needed because it would have been self-evident (the Gold Standard was only formalized in 1870), and (b) it would still be valid today. When the agreement stopped the intermediary status also stopped, showing there was nothing "intrinsic" about it: it just happened to be a convenient convention (for a time).
The Spanish price revolution crippled the Spanish state due to the huge inflation driven by New World treasure fleets. Gold is nothing special here.
My argument for gold (if you even want to call it that) is more to keep politicians in check from printing more money where "printing more money" really means a politicization of the financial industry and increasing wealth inequality. The human element was less when a gold standard existed. I'd be all for a paper currency if limits to politician involvement were somehow built into it, I'm not really a fan of Gold in any sense. I've read that in 1972 some of these checks were supposed to be implemented but never were, partly because the nixon shock was supposed to be temporary and partly because polticians realized they could have more power.
The Gilded Age, when income inequality in the US and EU was at its highest, occurred during the Gold Standard:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
The US has returned to those levels of wealth concentration, but having paper currency backed by gold didn't prevent the first round. Further, there was much more wealth inequality, with the aristocracy, when gold and silver coins were the actual currency (rather than paper notes).
> The human element was less when a gold standard existed.
Wild gyrations of finance and economy due to human behaviour were worse pre-Fed and during the Gold Standard:
* https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...
Various 'incidents' during the Gold Standard era:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893
I would posit we can't even get healthcare without bias for people that aren't straight white men. There are subtle differences in body composition between men and women, doubly so for larger (or smaller) body types, but ignoring those differences isn't exactly something from the far-flung past [0].
Otherwise we can quibble over how treating everyone as an average can and has cost lives [1]. People are different, and very small differences can have unexpectedly outsized impacts on usability.
> The most important products don't care about what you look like
The product doesn't care, but this site is awash in stories about how management or engineering should have just talked to the damn floor workers. Worked together, instead of dictating from on-high that the machine in question works well in the lab, and is an elegant, cost-effective solution - that the people actually in the shop know will fail immediately.
DEI (when done right) is not diversity hires. It's accepting others have different ideas that you may not have seen.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28343109/
[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...
You're all over the place trying to avoid my question. We're talking about product consumers. Mismanagement is an aberration in a long reversion to the mean of the product's specs that people want. What car would black Henry Ford make? What kind of induction motor would hispanic Tesla make? Keep cherry-picking references, though. Isn't there a crisis in the replication of journal articles anyway??
There are many examples like this if you care to look for them. I would recommend the books Weapons of Math Destruction and Invisible Women for some very well done research on the way that you can codify human biases in processes that should neutral.
I would also personally recommend that you give an earnest try to understanding why so many people argue for diversity. A genuine attempt. Even if you don't fully change your mind on it I think you will find it easier to approach the world with a little more compassion for people who don't look like you.
[0]: https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/commentary-more-health-inequalit...
Pulse oximiters are another terrible example by the way. Couldn't we hire a bunch of really tanned white people since you're just talking skin color?
I wish I could agree in good conscience that we are currently in a perfectly meritocratic system, but alas (sorry to drop another reference on you, I guess I just enjoy having evidence to point to for justifying my beliefs), there's many cases where minorities are being unfairly passed up on [0].
Regarding pulse oximeters... maybe, maybe not. Seems like it would be an interesting field of study, the research of the different levels of light absorption between skin with different melanin pigments, and whether tanning or genetics plays a bigger role. If only there was more funding for something like that, huh? :)
[0] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...
I understand the DEI stuff as partially trying to get more diverse input, but also as a way to help make up for disadvantages that minorities have had historically. Of course a white person from a wealthy background has more chances to get in the "merit" club.
r.e. tsmc VS Intel, is tsmc much more meritocratic than Intel? I haven't really heard this anywhere. I've heard they're an extremely hierarchical org and work insane hours for comparatively low pay.
For Explore type problems diversity has a much bigger impact then Exploit type problems. To add to the drama/misunderstandings/confusion sometimes you assemble a team for explore and they do find the gold mine, but then they arent suited to exploit it cuz its in their nature to explore. And vice versa.
What is your clearly rhetorical question getting at?
You can make whatever excuses that you want, but Asian companies are not diverse at all and they are doing pretty well and show no signs of slowing down. Don't you think that if a diverse workforce really mattered (as opposed to the most qualified workforce) they would be pursuing it?
> Don't you think that if a diverse workforce really mattered (as opposed to the most qualified workforce) they would be pursuing it?
"A company from a homogenous country is homogenous. They are the best at XYZ, therefore DEI must be bad because how else could they become number 1 without diversity"
This is a bad argument because there's a million other things that other companies, diverse or not, are best at. It doesn't really tell us much.
I'm sad your profile says you joined to talk fpga, since I used to do that and you don't seem nice to work with.