I would guess the shipbuilding industry in Finland is also built on subsidy and "protectionism" just like every other successful industry too. A cursory google search shows millions that were made available to shipbuilders: https://www.businessfinland.fi/en/for-finnish-customers/serv...
I'd bet that's just scratching the surface. The only way any country has been able to develop their productive capacities is through public grants and subsidies. The history of US industry shows the same thing, research in materials, electronics, the internet, etc were all accomplished through publicly funded research.
The decline in quality of out Boeing has coincided with a collapse of the regulatory framework that kept profit extraction limited since the 70's and 80's. Now you've got the worst of both worlds, where the industry is protected and subsidized, production gets off-shored and outsourced anyway while massive profits flow into shareholders pockets in the form of stock buybacks. It's funny that you look at this and blame the protectionist aspect when "protectionism" literally built the industry in the first place.
Every country who isn't just getting exploited for their natural resources or labor has built their industry by protecting it.
Take a person with a full head of hair and remove one hair, are they bald? Remove another one, bald? Clearly not, but if you keep removing hairs at some point you have a head we consider bald. Deregulation has been working like that. It's hard to point to one discrete event.
In any case, the process really got going under Jimmy Carter. If we're talking about airlines, I guess you could point to the Airline Deregulation Act. The airline industry had been built in the first place by what people in this thread would call "protectionist" policies.
Stock buybacks are a big part of the story as well. These were illegal market manipulation I think from the Great Depression until the 80's under Reagan.
The book "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" covers lots of stories like this from the industrial revolution. The luddites resisted having their work taken over by machines. The machines produced worse quality, but were cheaper and lowered the skill level required to do the work. It also made output predictable, allowed people to be bunched into factories and enabled child labour and other kinds of exploitation.
At the time people resisted having their autonomy taken away by smashing the machines and burning factories. It's a great book that will surprise you with how similar many of the situations we deal with today are.
I know the post is about "discernment", but I think the author kind of missed the real issue. It's about automation making things shitty, so that society can be reshaped to maximize profit extraction. We _could_ live in a world that strikes a balance between the relentless drive to automate and a more humanistic approach, but that would require structural changes.
Sure, but that would still make it bad, right? I may be a hypocrite (for argument's sake), but that doesn't change whether being steeped in ideology is a bad thing.
Would you agree? Or do you think being steeped in ideology leads to more rational decision making? (independent of whether ideology is needed for social mobilization)
I’m saying it’s what people want. Very few people complaining about it being undemocratic actually want it to be “more democratic” because that would involve a transfer of power from the member states to the EU.
In as much as it is what people actually want through revealed preference, it’s as democratic as they come.
> Even the smartest people I know have a commendable tendency not to take certain ideas seriously. Bostrom’s simulation argument, the anthropic doomsday argument, Pascal’s Mugging – I’ve never heard anyone give a coherent argument against any of these, but I’ve also never met anyone who fully accepts them and lives life according to their implications.
Maybe you ought to think about why that is? I wonder why "smart" people don't live their lives according to magical situations with no bearing in reality?
You mention bankruptcy, it should be noted that Greece was loaded up with debt it could never hope to pay back to private French and German banks, and it was not allowed to declare itself bankrupt and restructure. Instead, they kept "extending and pretending" rather than restructure the debt. Some economists have called it a modern form of debtors prison.
The Greeks also had no control over monetary policy as a result of being part of the EU currency union so they were essentially at the mercy of the banks and the EU leadership.
It's usually the opposite. In a crash or time of hardship you want to spend more. Austerity in a downturn creates a virtuous cycle. That's the insight of Keynes and what got the world out of the Great Depression.
The austerity policy you're suggesting has been overwhelmingly found to have failed almost everywhere it's been tried. Cutting spending in a downturn creates slower growth, which makes it even harder to recover. The book in OP argues that austerity is not about recovery, it's about disciplining workers.
Yeah, I do agree. I meant that there may need to be a temporary refocus of spending (with the emphesis on temporary) during the difficult period, which may include some cutting-back on development, spending instead of expanding infrastructure, etc.
Totally agree that austerity as practiced in this country is dogmatic and about keeping people in place.
I'd bet that's just scratching the surface. The only way any country has been able to develop their productive capacities is through public grants and subsidies. The history of US industry shows the same thing, research in materials, electronics, the internet, etc were all accomplished through publicly funded research.