Steve Randy Waldman

>I'm having a hard time with the statement as a super-majority of economists agree that liberal trade is a net boon

Not the OP but familiar with some of these arguments.

Free trade is held to be pareto optimal outcome - you and I get cheaper tshirts, people in bangladesh get higher incomes because of tshirt manufacturing, everyone is better off because of comparative advantage, etc.

However, if we distinguish between development or industrialization, then free trade provides strong disincentives wrt investing in capital intensive industries where one does not have a comparative advantage.

If I have capital to invest in Bangladesh, it does not make sense for me to try to create a high-end equipment factory; German manufacturers are way more efficient and effective, so it will be very hard for me to compete.

The competitive advantage of my region is cheap-labour, so all investment will be biased towards that. Unfortunately, this means that it's very hard to create high-value-added industries that can substantially raise average incomes.

If we look into the historical record, we find that the industrial revolution was a period of high tariffs and protectionism; the British empire had a great advantage in acquiring raw materials but IIRC, the French textile industry was more efficient at the time.

As a result, they were incentivized to export raw resources and import high value added materials. This is a loser's game. Instead, with the application of high tariffs British…

Mencius Moldbug describes it best:

"Money is the bubble that doesn’t need to pop. As long as there is demand for indirect exchange, at least one asset will be stockpiled by hoarders, hence experience demand that is not a consequence of any direct utility, hence be overvalued. As long as the storage cost for this asset is zero and the supply in existence is fixed, you have a perfect Nash equilibrium - using any other asset as a medium of indirect exchange provides no advantage, and runs the risk of buying into a bubble which will subsequently pop as punters revert back to the stable standard." (source: http://www.interfluidity.com/posts/1233118501.shtml)

The story of the past ten years is that people started trading dollars for substitute stores of value ( houses, stocks, oil futures, etc). But those substitutes were not stable Nash equilibriums. In the long run, supply of housing is elastic and bubble prices cannot be sustained. Prices crashed, and people rushed back to using dollars as a store of value. When demand for dollars increases, it becomes harder to trade goods and labor for dollars, so the price of goods and labor in dollars decreases ( deflation). However, employment contracts and debts are denominated assuming a higher price level. Thus businesses are unable to meet payroll and pay creditors. Businesses fire workers or go out of business. That's the stage we are at now. The solution is to simply renominate the currency by mailing everyone checks, in…

You raise some extremely good points here, and you're right, the trade offs are massive, partially due to how early the project is.

My view is that maturity of the project will bring some of the answers everyone is looking for.

As an anecdote, the first name auctions are actually ending in the next 48h.

Mean bids for early names (a few hundred) from the last time I looked in a cli were under 10 HNS, so under 5 USD at current prices.
.coin for low thousands of USD.
.11 for low hundreds of USD.

So that may give you a bit of an early view of what the prices are looking like. All subject to change of course because the auctions are not done yet.

For what it's worth, as someone enthusiastic about Handshake, crypto, and decentralized systems in general...I can totally empathize with the irritation you've expressed here. There's so much noise out there and 2017-2018 blockchain projects are notorious for over-promising on vague and impossible things, and then fading to nothing when the impossible things turn out to actually be impossible.

One thing I'd like to emphasize: Handshake's community may be what ends up being the differentiator against ICANN, less so anything financial or crypto related. I think that is what Rasengan is trying to accomplish here: build a true grassroots effort to work together to make Handshake a real contender. Because many of the readers here already have a piece of the network (majority of the coin supply being given not to investors, but Foss…

Yeah this is all pretty wrong.

>> upset that Greece might actually be forced to pay its bills and what that means for the welfare state model the EU has built itself on.

1) Those aren't just Greece's bills. Steve Waldman put it best: "The European financial system was architected to make lending to Greece — and Spain and Portugal and Italy — a money machine for bankers with little career risk over a medium term. Sketchy credits tend to punch above their weight in terms of volume of issuance, so there was a lot of nice paper to buy. The bankers who lent to these states understood perfectly well that there was in fact a long-term risk, an uncertainty, a constructive ambiguity. They lent anyway, and took home very nice salaries and bonuses for doing so." (http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html)

2) This has nothing to do with implicating the welfare-state model; as you note, there are a ton of Euro welfare states with extremely robust economies. Some Euro welfare states have been chronically mismanaged (Greece, Italy, probably Spain) and now they're in trouble, in part for reasons not of their making.

>> Only the most wealthy, least corrupt, and productive EU states can have a proper welfare state

Oh, so in other words, if you take out Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Norway, Finland, Belgium and Switzerland, the European welfare state is a total disaster, huh?

>> and even some of them have problems with youth unemployment, job growth, low military…

Yes this article makes some good points but the rhetoric is all wrong. Here, this guy says it much better than I can:

>Home is where the cartel is. I use the word “home” not “housing” advisedly. Homeowners understand their actions not as monopolizing the housing market but as protecting their homes and neighborhoods from the market. The libertarian “deregulatory” rhetoric by which market urbanists sometimes make their case is counterproductive. Telling people to think of their homes as a commodity upon which market forces should be brought to bear in order to ensure production of housing services at competitive prices is obtuse. People purchase property, rather than renting, largely to gain security and control, to escape the vicissitudes of the market. The worst place to emphasize “deregulation” is in dense urban environments, where almost every sort of action has spillovers.

Policies like up/rezoning which decrease current home prices in order to lower rents are directly redistributionary and I think you have to make your case in those terms and I just don't find redistribution on the basis of age that convincing.

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html

Fair enough. Steve Waldman described about this mentality pretty well here: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html

This is not as divorced from property values as you believe. The features of suburbs you like such as low-crime (usually coded as "quiet"), amenities, good schools, access to jobs through a quick commute etc. are exactly what give them their high value. However, the single family home subdivision suburban form cannot scale provisioning these amenities to many people. That is exactly why suburbs are exclusionary whereas cities need not be.

Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be a nice place to live. The detached houses probably have little to do with what you like about your community; there are plenty of places in Central California with detaches homes, high crime, bad schools, etc.