We're in a Low-Growth World. How Did We Get Here? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/upshot/were-in-a-low-growth-world-how-did-we-get-here.html <comment><USER3> Growth as a result of consumption is destructive. We need to find ways to 'grow' our economy without increasing consumption. For example, measure growth by how people are becoming more educated. If people could live healthily and intelligent and only work 10 hours a week until they were 100, wouldn't that be better than being able to buy a new car every year? Or a 5000sq house with the latest big screen tv?

I believe (or rather, I pray) that we have hit peak consumption which will lead to this problem forevermore. We need to find new ways to improve ourselves than shopping more.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that we live in a world governed by natural forces, and not by spiritual revolutions.

<comment><USER5> Which natural forces are you referring to? Are you sure that they are natural forces (rather than learned behaviour)?

<comment><USER6> Game theory, mostly.

<comment><USER5> If game theory is natural law then it should apply to all humans, regardless of background. How does it apply to the groups of people who aren't driven by amassing material possessions (hunter-gatherer tribes, monks/nuns, etc...)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm so tired to hear about growth. Growth is not a very beneficial situation to be in. We should focus on sustainability. Do we tell people to grow as fat as they can be? No, we encourage a sustainable in and out, just what we need for a happy and healthy life.

Billionaires are not a thousand times happier or healthier then millionaires. Growth is overrated.

There's a baseline of wealth that we must sustain, then we need to focus on horizontally scaling that baseline to as many people as possible, and finally, we must work to sustain that scale too. Growth appears twice in this equation, but always at a very well defined scale. We need to grow to reach the baseline, and then grow to have everyone base-lined.

Once we have achieved the above in a sustainable way, then we should focus all our remaining efforts into having fun, being curious, enjoying ourselves, and enjoying each others company. This should similarly be handled in a sustainable way. A heroine high is not a sustainable enjoyable and fun activity. Going for a walk along a park or a coast is. The dosage is important, a night out partying here and there is sustainable, day after day of it is not. Sprinkle in some learning and curiosity, I for example, would keep coding for pleasure. In fact, sustainability will probably motivate people towards sciences and technological advancement even faster, as we'll finally let free of our intrinsic motivations to do so.

To quote Nietzsche: "To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general."

The first part of that quote is Growth, endless, unhealthy, never ending Growth, simply to address our own boredom. The second part is sustainable life, easy, playful, and fun.

I really hope as we progress, I stop hearing about Growth, and I start hearing a lot more about Sustainability.

<comment><USER8> "Growth is not a very beneficial situation to be in."

Again this is false.

There are so many financially illiterate people here on Hackernews.

Growth is a _great_ situation to be in. When there is growth - there is money for projects, hospitals, infrastructure etc.

When there is no growth - everything goes out the window, and the first thing to go are longer term things like 'sustainability'.

You want to switch to solar - then you need a lot of 'growth' \- why? Because the US cannot function on 40 cents/kwh electricity.

Now - growth by 'adding bodies' \- which is where most growth comes from in the West - is bad. Immigration is where 80% of GDP growth comes from and that is definitely a Ponzi scheme.

IF you normalize for growth across US and EU countries, it's much more similar. The US simply imports people to grow the GDP whereas EU does less of that.

So, to your point, measuring GDP/capita would be a good start for 'sustainable growth'.

<comment><USER9> I'm financially illiterate, so you'll have to pardon me. But why is growth necessary for spending? If my income is steady at $10,000,000 a year, I have money for projects, hospitals, and infrastructure. No growth, but I do have money.

<comment><USER10> Not sure I'd call myself financially literate, but I do have an MBA and computer science degree for whatever that's worth.

The short answer to that is it's necessary to encourage people to invest. $10,000,0000 is only a meaningful figure if it is spendable ... which means that people want to receive that money and others want to spend it. In order for someone with excess money to spend it, they need to be incentivized to do so. If they get no return on their money, then why would they spend? If on the other hand, they can grow their money by spending it, they will. That's why, for example, a VC would take the risk of spending it on a startup (or someone more risk averse would spend on bonds). If you're just stashing money under your mattress, then the economy comes to a halt. For the most part, people don't need $10,000,000 to live a happy life so the excess money they have will not be spent unless there is a growth opportunity to use it.

Having said that, I agree with many others on here that "growth for the sake of growth" is dangerous and I'd like to see more focus on happiness (rather than money) and sustainability rather than growth. The growth spurt we had in the 20th century is likely not going to be reproduced in this century (the industrial revolution is a rare and unusual event). We need to find some way to keep this world moving forward in a low growth era, but I don't necessarily know how that will happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _"Lack of demand creates lack of supply."_

Exactly. Americans are spent out. The US savings rate is near a low. Americans are spending 95% of their income, and for the bottom 90%, it's more than that.[1] About 1 in 7 Americans has trouble getting enough food.

What we're discovering is that, when it doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff, the economy winds down to a state where most people are just surviving. This is a new thing. Historically, the big problem was making enough stuff. For millenia, society ran out of labor before it could make enough stuff. We're past that. And we have no idea how to cope with this.

[1] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT)

<comment><USER12> Sounds like we need to start spending globally. Massive infrastructure spending in third world countries to encourage demand for our products.

<comment><USER13> Um. No thanks.

Unless you're being sarcastic, the casual way in which this is being proposed makes me very uncomfortable. That is imperialism in all but name. An example of such a phenomena is that South Africa was forced to take on millions of tons of American "waste" poultry. It hurts our economy and makes us policy slaves. The IMF is another institution which has a long history of forcing African countries to act counter to their best interests. We'd like to retain some scraps of our sovereignty.

<comment><USER14> > An example of such a phenomena is that South Africa was forced to take on > millions of tons of American "waste" poultry.

I haven't heard of this. How was it forced to do so? Did the US threaten to bomb South Africa unless South Africa buys its waste poultry?

<comment><USER13> They way they do everything else. The threat of economic sanctions. Tit-for- tat. Except that the US has the stronger hand

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> People have been saying this since 2009, yet the S&P 500 is up 250% since then.

We need to put things in perspective.

The reality is:

The US has greater inflation-adjusted GDP growth than most of the world, including much of Europe, the Middle East, and South America, and Japan [http://i.imgur.com/SBqFqtt.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/SBqFqtt.jpg)

Profits & earnings for tech companies, payment processing, retail, and consumer staples companies have far-outpaced GDP growth. A lot of the lag comes from the chronically weak financial, commodity, and energy sector.

It's much harder to grow a large economy than a smaller one. There's diminishing returns to scale. It's harder to grow an economy at the same rate it was growing when it was 10x smaller.

2% real GDP growth, while slow, is still growth. Most people cannot perceive the difference between 2% growth and 7% growth.

Real GDP is back to 2003 levels, and far fewer people were complaining about slow growth back then

Slow growth doesn't preclude discovery and innovation, things like web 2.0, smart phones, apps, theoretical physics, mathematics, uber, self-driving cars, on-demand entertainment, etc.

So while more growth may desirable, 'slow growth' isn't too much to lose sleep over.

A lot of ppl have mentioned the UBI, but it's worth reminding that the effective income tax for the lowest 20-40% of earners is negative

<comment><USER16> Of course the S&P 500 has been growing, central banks are buying stocks left and right. What's worth mentioning is that both governments and companies have massively increased their debt during that period, so its really hard to judge what the 250% S&P 500 growth means.

<comment><USER17> The S&P 500 growth means that companies are confident enough in their future cash flow that they will borrow money against that to buyback their own stock. This has been a trend since the 80s.

We are living in situation where, instead of competition driving profits down to 0, or profits being used to finance investment and growth -- profits are simply returned to shareholders. Low interest rates are only reinforcing this. It's a great time to be a shareholder, and not a great time to be a consumer.

<comment><USER18> Alternatively, it means that executives that are mostly incentivized by short- term stock price movements via option grants have found a way to juice their compensation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> it's interesting that the report mentioned the start of 2001 as the low GDP growth for US and EU......but it's also around the same time that China joins WTO.

For 15 years, jobs, communities and quality of goods were sacrificed in US and europe for cheap, shoddy goods that were produced by laborers in China in abysmal conditions, the rewards reaped by Chinese communist party insiders.

For 15 years, US and european companies outsourced their money and time to China, only come to find out that by being short sighted to profit, they've lost their trade secrets, technologies, know-hows, skills, market shares to Chinese manufacturers and technology companies. They paid a big price to learn that with the Chinese government, Only China wins. There's no win-win for both. When dealing with Chinese government, you lose.

So we're at an interesting intersection in 2016. China's membership in WTO is at its end this year. China is exposed as having an authoritarian regime that is hiding trillions of debt and likely having a 0-2% gdp growth. It is exposed as having an anti-foreign environment where companies like Uber, Wynn, Yum, Apple are all suffering. What will happen?

<comment><USER19> ""Made in China 2025" initiative, which aims to ensure Chinese-made components and materials account for 70 percent of China's manufacturing inputs by 2025."

[http://atimes.com/2016/07/us-warns-at-wto-of-china- backslidi...](http://atimes.com/2016/07/us-warns-at-wto-of-china-backsliding- on-economic-openness/)

US warns at WTO of China backsliding on economic openness

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Using the Solow growth model, economic growth has three factors: population growth, technological improvement, and financial savings. All three factors are reducing growth in the developed world. Populations are stagnant or declining, technology may be displacing more jobs than it creates, and we are in more debt than ever.

So what is the root cause? Birth rates fell because of declining economic prospects, and savings declined for the same reason as well. Alone among these three factors, technology has continued its advancement, except now instead of improving labor it is a substitute for labor.

There were other supply shocks, such as the oil crises and more importantly the baby boom in developing countries that made outsourcing possible. But those are transient factors in the long run.

In the long run technology stands alone as the disruptive factor. We can try to mask the problem with financial debt or economic redistribution, but the problem remains that unskilled labor is no longer needed, and skilled labor is an increasingly high hurdle to clear.

<comment><USER21> Isn't immigration making up for the low birth rates? It seems to be here in Europe.

<comment><USER20> Not if the immigrants are past school age and have not learned needed skills in their home countries. Implicit in the population growth factor is education and training that makes those new people marketable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The article speaks mostly of Macroeconomic forces such as increasing the money supply.

The problems with the economy are mostly caused by microeconomic issues. Politically induced scarcity ("economic rents") that results in higher prices, externalities, and asymmetric information.

A very, very large problem is the use of zoning laws which reduce density and overuse of historic landmark status which artificially increases land value and hence the cost of renting apartments and buying houses. This results in a transfer of income and wealth from people renting apartments and buying houses to landlords.

Income that should be going towards purchasing goods and services and thus stimulating the economy goes towards landlords instead. Removing the politically induced artificial restriction on zoning would lower the cost of housing and stimulate a housing boom.

This is the reason for the high cost of housing in NYC, SF, LA, Boston, Washington DC and other cities.

In NYC, there is a limit of 13,000 taxi medallions which resulted in a medallion market value of $1.2 million. After Uber/Lyft came along the value dropped to $700,000 and not surprisingly the cost of taking Uber/Lyft has decreased compared to taking a taxi. This makes it so that New Yorkers can spend less income on taxis and taxi-like vehicles and more on goods and services. Of course course, the "taxi medallion landlords" have lost big time, because the political scarcity of medallions has been undermined.

Many occupations have unnecessary licenses or unreasonable licensing requirements in order to create scarcity in that occupation creating artificially high prices while keeping others who would like to work out of the market.

Stop the "rent-seeking" of "economic rents" through Federal Laws and we'll make sure the markets are more efficient a huge growth to the economy.

What is baffling, and perhaps others can comment is why the NYTimes is writing economics columns without addressing the microeconomic inefficiencies which includes "economic rents." Can't they find someone with a basic understanding of economics to write an appropriate column?

</comment><comment><USER23> Piketty argues, from extensive historical data, that the hi growth of the 1950s-1970s was unusual, and low growth is the norm.

So we might want to look at another aspect, such as how wealth is distributed - the low growth rate tends to accentuate the accumulation of growth on capital, so those who inherited a lot of wealth capture even more of it over time, without having to do anything with that capital [ such as investing in startups, building next gen transport systems ]. Which means we most likely need a much more aggressive tax on uber-high incomes and uber-large inheritance wealth.

[ Im not saying don't look at wealth creation technologies such as - <USER2> 3d printing, VR-work-from-home, asteroid-mining etc. ]

Reading Piketty's Capital is a bit like waking up in the matrix after taking the red pill - the gradual torrent of facts hits you viscerally, because you really had no idea things were this extreme.

As preparation, I recommend watching this short vid on wealth distribution - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM)

<comment><USER24> Piketty is one of the rare to actually pinpoint the problem and call it like it is. This NY Times article definitely does not, even if has some of the elements. Even early on it writes: "This trend helps explain why incomes have risen so slowly since the turn of the century". Maybe it is the other way around. I mean, if our economy is based on increasing production for the sake of increasing production, so by the same vain consumption needs to keep up, but then people can't afford consuming, or whatever they are consuming wasn't the result of value addition.

Then there is the CBO farce, and the use and abuse of GDP, and also believing to know what other people actually wants to buy, while also omitting to include what is it that 81% of the people with declining income can buy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm shocked to see no one here has even discussed over-regulation as an issue. The more things you tell people they can't do, and instead mandate they do things they may not want to or need to do, the less opportunity they have to do things they want to do, which is what people generally are willing to pay for (an thus increases economic growth).

<comment><USER26> Interesting, then, that this slowdown should coincide so closely with a period of increasing _de_ -regulation.

<comment><USER27> _should coincide so closely with a period of increasing de-regulation_

?

The last 16 years has seen little or no de-regulation. The last serious bout of de-regulation that I can remember was back in the 80's when Reagan threw out the rulebook on airlines or when the RBOCs were allowed to reconstitute themselves.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, it's true, the big stuff was all pretty much done by the end of the last century. I'm aware, and I'm not worried about that. I assume no big regulatory change is going to have immediate effects - companies take time to re-align, especially ones in the kinds of mature industries that get to be heavily regulated in the first place. So for my purposes it's good that this is the case, since it means we've had enough time to sit back and observe what happens.

So, on that front: We have this hypothesis that regulation is a huge drag on the economy, and that we should therefore deregulate in order to stimulate greater economic growth. If this is true, then you would expect that we'd see the US economy to take off during or shortly after the bulk of the deregulation. With that prediction in mind, go back and look at the graph of GDP growth by year. In the three economies shown, de-regulation instead coincides with periods of consistently declining or perennially weak growth.

Which, to me, suggests that it's not reasonable to be so confident about the idea that regulation will have this or that profound effect on the overall economy. The idea that regulation is a horrible drag doesn't seem to have much of an empirical leg to stand on. I don't see much evidence that the opposite is true, either. The two regions that entered the graph with higher growth were also just exiting a period of rebuilding and recovery following a very destructive war, for example, so it's tough to say the pattern you see for them isn't a reflection of outside factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I get paid to write online. The things I write are typically intended to be published somewhere online. I rarely read paper books or magazines, yet I consume information all day. When a system is infused with information, it often can accomplish the same thing -- or something better/more -- with less material matter.

I think no one is measuring any of that. The fact that I can do freelance work online means I can earn less (gross) and keep more of it (net) because I do not need a car to get to work or clothes to meet dress code, etc. So, I am seeing real gains in my quality of life -- paying down debt, eating better, better health etc -- than I could achieve when I had a corporate job. The "overhead" for having a corporate job meant that by the time I quit, I was far deeper in debt than when I got the job. It was a frustrating, frightening way to live. Now, the money I earn is net gain, not "Oh, my god, I can't eat without a job, but having a job has me barreling towards bankruptcy!"

<comment><USER29> This. The disconnect from "having a real job" and working is spreading. The corporate sector seems to be rapidly declining in exactly this way.

In my most recent gig, having to be onsite was a huge drain on productivity. It really needed to be roughly 10% of my time. I stayed way ahead of my job mainly by doing stuff at home - just the moronic network filters alone meant I had ... 10x the bandwidth available.

But onsite was still required.

I have two kids around 30 or so; neither has an onsite corporate fulltime job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In first generation post-WW2, we built out productive infrastructure, and started to do so with our savings. In the second generation, we expanded with debt spending and started to increase consumer debt. Now, most well-educated new entrants to the market have already taken more debt than they have an appetite for, so they're saving to pay down that debt. There may be quite a few who are still doing frivolous things with their money that could go to service the debt, but in the end we're all paying off activity that already happened, to one extent or another.

<comment><USER31> This is entirely due to the baby-boomer demographic changes. Saving on a generational and national scale is basically impossible: things you make today are going to break down, wear out, or become obsolete thirty years from now. The only way the retiring generation can receive care is by obligating or mandating younger workers to pay for it.

This is the core of why college is pushed so hard, why home ownership is pushed so hard, and why interest rates are so low. The baby-boomers need to have someone paying back debt thirty years from now, so there's a ton of money sloshing around trying to fund current consumption.

<comment><USER32> "things you make today are going to break down, wear out, or become obsolete thirty years from now."

Planned obsolescence started not too long ago and everything now needs replacing much earlier than thirty years. We can see its inefficiency in every industries generated from this money printing scheme. Turning what once was considered permanent and high quality will now break and need replacing.

Everybody is doing it, and it's hard to stop, but it probably should stop.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1j0XDGIsUg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1j0XDGIsUg)

<comment><USER30> I guess the flip side of this is that we can have access to so many things, so affordably. I don't need an industrial-grade waffle iron, but it's kind of fun to have for the occasional weekend if I've got space.

Having said that, I tend to avoid that side. If I have to buy something, I tend to do a buy-it-for-life type of purchase. This drives my fiancee crazy, as I spend 50% more money and 500% more time making my purchase. Most of the time it's not even about the money; I just get upset when I have tons of trash, so I try to avoid buying things that make or become trash.

<comment><USER33> and this is the niche manufacturing opportunity of the future.

I have a friend living it right now - he makes buy-it-for-your-grandkids-lives tools and sells direct via the internet to his end user. His end user is in a particular niche and my friend is an expert in it.

His stuff is expensive, niche, and his marketing consists of crappy phone videos on Facebook. He is authentic however, his stuff is super high quality, and he gives great customer service. His business has been growing at 30% a year thanks to the internet allowing him to reach the few people that care about his niche. He will surpass $1M in gross sales with a high net margin, and he has zero competitors in his micro niche - a million dollar micro niche.

And its truly micro - 200 units per year of the $800 piece of equipment, and the rest of the sales in the 14,000 accessories he has for the equipment. He is doing quite a bit better than a well paid SV engineer and is direct to 10,000 consumers. His moat is impenetrable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Ben-G I think there are multiple interesting factors at play here: most importantly downward pressure on prices (brought by technology) and the unequal distribution of wealth/income.

Technology has made a lot of stuff far cheaper than it used to be. Instead of buying a photo camera, a video recorder a tape recorder, etc. you can buy a smartphone for the price of one of these individual items (at 1980/90 inflation adjusted prices).

A lot of services we consume have become a lot cheaper as well. Compare Netflix & Spotify for a few $ months to buying individual movies & CDs. A lot of people spend their free time on Youtube/Facebook/Reddit essentially spending nothing at all.

A lot of younger people living in cities are no longer purchasing cars or homes. Overall travel has become a lot cheaper as well. IKEA has commoditized furniture which used to be extremely expensive a few decades ago.

Cheaper prices mean lower spending & lower GDP.

At the same time a smaller group of large companies is capturing the profits in the low cost sectors (again IKEA, Netflix, Google, Facebook). These companies are making huge profits per employee and they are facing very little successful competition.

A majority of the middle class (that doesn't work for any of these highly profitable companies) has very limited free cash flow, due to the rising cost of housing and education and the stagnation of wages. They can't afford to purchase expensive homes, expensive furniture or expensive cars.

More wealth is going to the highest earners, where each additional $ contributes a lot less to GDP than it would in the hands of a middle class household.

\---

I'm throwing a lot of stuff together here, but this is what I'm missing from most discussions about the economy: try to describe trends with the concrete situation at hand rather than with generic theories that have been around for decades yet have mostly failed to predict the economic outlook correctly (it seems like the rise of behavioral economics could help here)

</comment><comment><USER34> A lot of it seems insufficient demand after asset bubbles. Houses or whatever keep going up for a while, people mortgage themselves to the hilt to buy and when the bubble pops cut back spending to pay off the debts over the following decade or three. That leads to less spending jobs tax revenue and so on.

The solution I think should be something like governments borrowing money at the near zero rates we have at the moment and doing stuff like investing in infrastructure and things that will boost spending. When you get back to too much money chasing too few goods and inflation they can back off but we're way off that point in most economies at the moment.

<comment><USER35> >The solution I think should be something like governments borrowing money at the near zero rates we have at the moment and doing stuff like investing in infrastructure and things that will boost spending. When you get back to too much money chasing too few goods and inflation they can back off but we're way off that point in most economies at the moment.

This is a popular idea but the problem is that in practice the cutting back never happens, so you end up with government policy together with central bank interest rates causing deeper recessions, or even creating the depressions they were intended to prevent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is it possible that some things are just a lot cheaper than they used to be, and from a macro perspective focused totally on dollar figures this looks like shrinkage?

I used to drive to the bookstore and spend $22 on a brand new hardcover book because it was written by a famous author and promoted heavily at the bookstore.

Now I might buy a Humble eBook Bundle and pay $8 for 8 books, and the car, the bookstore, and the big advertising campaign are all long gone (but for the most part, not missed).

There's very little out there I _want_ to spend a lot of money on (travel is the main exception).

And growth is mainly driven by wants, not needs.

</comment><comment><USER37> I believe there are efficincies in the marketplace that are not captured in the financial data - everything in my daily life is much easier now that I have a smartphone in my pocket and everything is online. Maybe the fact that everything is more efficient means one can get more value with less - thus, making the daily consumer effectively better off although the capital is hurt. What does this mean for the economy in total? Everything except truly constrained things like land are utterly commoditized?

<comment><USER37> To elaborate - we measure the price of the big mac, but put no price a) finding the big mac b) finding the cheapest bigmac (both of a and b are easier, but there is no way for the McBurger chain to capture the value of this) c) discovering bigmacs are actually bad for you, abstaining from them and saving a ton in healthcare costs later on, and also living longer (thus, consuming and producing more over ones lifespan).

<comment><USER38> It makes sense to not measure those things because they don't increase our overall happiness or productivity.

You can't live off imgur cat pictures or spreadsheets about big mac nutrition. If that were the case the Western populations would be as happy as they were never before. People need a house, an occupation that gives meaning to their lives, the right to political participation and shape their everyday experiences. These things are currently under a lot of fire and it won't go away by appeasing the population with Netflix.

It's really not that much of a mystery, if a whole segment of the population is robbed of these opportunities it's going to get ugly.

<comment><USER37> "It makes sense to not measure those things because they don't increase our overall happiness or productivity."

I disagree. The accessibility of everything nowadays reduces the opportunities for frustration very often (i.e I don't need to queue at a bank at my lunch hour except in very special circumstances). Thus - more happiness.

"You can't live off imgur cat pictures or spreadsheets about big mac nutrition."

No, my comment was not about the internet alone. It was about the secondary effects accessibility of information has on daily life in the strictly physical domain.

"People need a house, an occupation that gives meaning to their lives, the right to political participation and shape their everyday experiences."

Yes, I agree. The human life is very shallow without the joy of self- expression. I was not suggesting smartphones connected to internet will replace life. My comment was about the fact how they reduce the tedious, non- productive segments of life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> When you get to a 70% service sector of course growth is going to be low [1]. Waiters aren't anymore efficient than they were 100 years ago (probably less) and the same applies to nearly every service industry. Without improvements in unit labor costs then the economy can't grow per capita.

1\. [http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.SRV.TETC.ZS](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.SRV.TETC.ZS)

</comment><comment><USER40> Note that very long run GDP per capita growth is driven more or less by technological change, and there's _no reason to expect that technological change is constant._

Major technological innovations are often discrete, their impact can take decades to be fully realized in the economy, and the timing of the next major innovation is unpredictable.

<comment><USER29> There is a great deal of grumbling, dour dissent with any sort of technological change outside of the tech sector - aka the "true believers". I'd stop short of calling it Luddism but it's like that.

I've presented far too many solutions to non-specialists who stared in unblinking misunderstanding at these solutions to think otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm more amazed we had the high growth we've had in the past. Why would the steady-state of such a complex worldwide system be at a point where we have good employment, rising standard of living, growing populations, relative peace? There are so many other local minima which we've managed to hit over man kind history...

The key word is sustainability. Without it something has to give. It should be obvious that given finite resources on this planet we can't continue expanding our population and the standard of living indefinitely. The reason the trajectory we were on could not continue is that it was not sustainable. We can't have more people in the world, every such person living in a McMansion, with two cars in the garage, buying new gadgets all the time. And really why? Wouldn't it be better to have a contracting population that consumes less?

Humanity would be better off trying to reduce the population size, reduce consumption ($ and resources), maximizing the utility/$ of goods rather than the absolute $ of crappy goods sold. Aiming for more equal distribution of wealth. Less conflicts. Social security (so sure, basic income but not as a catalyst of growth). Everyone should work less hours and earn enough to sustain themselves with a reasonable standard of living. So this is all perhaps a deflationary, negative growth, environment.

<comment><USER7> Agree wholeheartedly. Sustainability is key. The last generations were raised being told that success is growth, I hope the next generation will be raised knowing that success is sustainability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> People complaining that UBI wouldn't help are missing an important point. In the US, and most of the world, we have a demand problem not a supply problem. The UBI "plan" then is to bump up the wealth of those that would essentially immediately consume it, which generates demand. It's not controversial to argue that an extra $1000 a year to a millionaire will just end up being reinvested, while most Americans (the bottom 50%+1) would easily spend it all sloshing it back into the economy.

<comment><USER43> Then that's not going to result in much good. To grow the economy, you want investment, not people funneling a free $!000 to China for some cheap consumer goods.

<comment><USER44> > you want investment

In what?

A company that sells goods to consumers who can't buy it?

Those aren't doing any good.

There are mountains of cash right now, all seeking investment. They have trouble finding anything worth investing in. This is why we see massive valuations - with zero interest rates, a tiny revenue stream is worth a huge amount of cash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> > The United States is adding jobs at a healthy clip, as a new report showed > Friday, and the unemployment rate is relatively low

One of those isn't true and the other is misleading. Healthy would be something to combat the massive existing unemployment. Unemployment Rate has little to do with growth. Let's not talk at all about how GDP numbers are being manipulated quarter after quarter and the endless easing putting us in a freefall, since that news is inconvenient for the administration who did it (Clinton then Obama...hmmm). The republicans just continue existing policies anyway so it's self-serving Fed shenanigans as usual. Typical vacuous NYT narrative is what I got out of it.

</comment><comment><USER46> > Like most things in economics, the slowdown boils down to supply and demand: > the ability of the global economy to produce goods and services, and the > desire of consumers and businesses to buy them. What's worrisome is that > weakness in global supply and demand seems to be pushing each other in a > vicious circle.

This is the sort of thing that makes people think economists live on a different planet. "Demand," in particular the "desire of consumers and individuals" for things, is something we have in spades- for a good example, walk down a main street of any city and you'll find some people who desparately want to stop being homeless. The problem, and on a more general scale this is the whole problem of our kind of economy, is that _their demand doesn 't matter._

These homeless people could, in many cases, work- they could do things that generate more value than they require in exchange to live decent lives. But their kind of work is ubiquitous, and they have no control over the market for it; as a result, the market has been manipulated by much more savvy actors to shift that labor market against them. Once this happens to a kind of laborer, an entire segment of "demand" is functionally removed from the economy.

The answer to that sort of thing has been known for ages- unions, substantial minimum wages, perhaps even basic income. But while the article talks about the kind of economic inequality that these measures combat, it does an impressive job of not putting two and two together. Economic stagnation and inequality are two sides of the same coin, but no one talks about this- because the managers of the economy are, predictably, wealthy, and have everything to lose to redistribution of wealth.

</comment><comment><USER17> It seems that a potential solution to this, as various economists have proposed, is "helicopter money". In other words, have the central bank print money and distribute it to the people. The main criticism for this is that it is irreversible -- there would be no asset to balance the liability on the Fed's balance sheet. But this is an extremely simple problem to solve: monetize government debt. In that case, we would no longer call it "helicopter money", and recognize it for what it is: basic income. Despite all its flaws, basic income inspires a wide variety of Internet discussions about social justice and robots (as if automation is something that just started happening now, and not at the beginning of the 18th century) but ultimately it can be understood as a tool of monetary policy. And if you manage to hand people free money and yet the economy STILL doesn't grow, and inflation STILL doesn't rear it's head -- guess what? That's a GOOD thing. That's called... utopia. So maybe we should stop caring about GDP, and measure progress with a different metric: how much basic income can our country stably generate?

<comment><USER47> If companies and service providers know that an individual canpay $50 more. What insentive do they have to keep costs low? As it stands the price of living is absurd. Free money would only provide excuses for higher charges. GDP can be increased by making people buy more but is that really the solution?

As it stands we have a ton of communities that are not sustainable and end up a net loss. Where Mcdollars have value. The issue with these communities is that they cannot produce their own food, materials for housing or clothes and once factories leave they export nothing. If you want higher gdp, making sustainable communitiesis far better than printing free money. One makes more areas attractive to live tge other makes the average citizen have umbilical cord connected to the central bank

<comment><USER48> jganetsk had already answered your question, you simply have to read what they wrote. Anticipating a question like "What insentive do they have to keep costs low?" they answered before you wrote, when they wrote: "And if you manage to hand people free money and yet the economy STILL doesn't grow, and inflation STILL doesn't rear it's head -- guess what? That's a GOOD thing."

Put differently, the government should print money until inflation appears. This is what Keynesian economists have been recommending since 2008, yet most Western governments went in the opposite direction and engaged in long bouts of austerity.

<comment><USER49> The US has been buying bad debt with borrowed money (QE). There is so much cash in circulation that the banks don't know what to do with it.

"So no, the Fed is not printing money. In fact, the Fed is doing much worse than that. In allocating $4 trillion borrowed from banks, it's supporting the very government spending and housing consumption that got us into trouble to begin with. More to the point, the Fed is financing ongoing economic hardship through its expanded borrowing of bank reserves."

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2014/03/09/the-fed- is-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2014/03/09/the-fed-is-not- printing-money-its-doing-something-much-worse/#76f682db43a1)

<comment><USER48> This idea has been disproven hundreds of times. It is a zombie idea -- no matter how many times it is killed, it just keeps shambling along.

Also, the context here was helicopter money -- sending money to people, not banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The Center for Economic Policy Research has a great free pdf ebook on Secular Stagnation from 2014 which has essays from a variety of economic heavyweights discussing the possibility of lower growth going forward.

[http://voxeu.org/content/secular-stagnation-facts-causes- and...](http://voxeu.org/content/secular-stagnation-facts-causes-and-cures)

</comment><comment><USER51> There are two ways producing widgets can grow 10%.

The standard way is where production methods stay the same, and 10% more offices/factories are added and 10% more workers are added. The reason this would be done is because there was a 10% growth in demand for widgets. This would be due to a 10% growth in population that could afford widgets, or a 10% growth in income for consumers/workers that they decide to spend on widgets.

With population growth shrinking in the standard consumer societies, that aspect goes out. Insofar as income, the average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage today is below what it was 43 years ago - it has shrunk. So the demand is not really increasing. Since demand for widgets in general is not going up, companies are not desperate to employ the average worker, and thus wages are stagnant (or as I said, the average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage has shrunk over the past 43 years).

When were companies investing the capital necessary for automation, technological improvement etc.? From the 1940s to the 1960s. When demand was high due to increased population (baby boom). There was a baby boom because after a long depression, the economy started paying good wages to the average worker due to strong unions and government stimulus starting heavily during World War II. Money in workers/consumers pockets led to increased consumer demand.

Due to the highest unionization rate in American history after World War II you have high wages at these growing companies. How to lower costs? Invest in automation, invest in technological improvement.

Without high wages, and some of the other factors mentioned, the financial impetus to invest in technological improvement and automation fades. It's always there, but it ebbs in the absence of high demand, high wage employees.

</comment><comment><USER52> > 81 percent of the United States population is in an income bracket with flat > or declining income over the last decade. That number was 97 percent in > Italy, 70 percent in Britain, and 63 percent in France.

Ok so growth slowed in the West, but weren't a lot of people brought into the middle class in the East?

> It argued that the internet would not have the same transformative impact on > how much economic output would emerge from an hour of human labor as 20th- > century innovations like electricity, air transport and indoor plumbing did.

There's lots of back office automation going on in the Fortune 500 that is eliminating white collar labor. I seriously doubt these statements about productivity. If its productivity per capita they want then just wait until self driving trucks wipe out millions of jobs.

Am I missing something here? Isn't this basically what happens when labor (the jobs I mean) moves somewhere else and automation eats away at whatever is left?

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm hearing lots about this low-growth economy from various major news sources, but it doesn't seem to me to be consistent with the data that I can look up on my own.

For example, the chart here seems to me to show regular traditional reasonbly- fast growth rates.([http://www.statista.com/statistics/188105/annual-gdp-of- the-...](http://www.statista.com/statistics/188105/annual-gdp-of-the-united- states-since-1990/))

If you look at a 20-year plot of the S&P 500 (not the same thing as the GDP, I know, but still some kind of indicator of economic health) the net growth probably is low, but only because of the giant housing crash that causes a rapid setback right in the middle of the time period we're measuring. It looks like we've been growing at full speed ever since.

So what's the deal?

<comment><USER54> > It looks like we've been growing at full speed ever since.

S&P 500 valuations after the crisis are out of touch with reality. Look here: [http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/](http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/). The stock market is incredibly overpriced i.e. companies' earnings aren't growing as much as people and institutions are buying stocks, driving their prices up. The reason for the bull market is that with near zero interest rates, everyone is looking for an investment vehicle that offers better inflation-adjusted returns than cash and bonds, even if it means taking more risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> There are a lot of calls in these comments for basic income, or schemes like it. But that is just redistributing existing wealth, not creating new growth, which is exactly the problem we have. You have to produce things before they can be consumed, and this is also the case with economics.

<comment><USER56> UBI is even worse than redistributing existing wealth. It is a simplistic plan to throw more fuel on the monthly-rent fire, ignoring that price feedback will eagerly consume it.

I had been wondering why it had quickly gained mainstream popularity, but then I realized it is simply the latest way central banksters can conjure money to have it collected by their cronies.

What we need is an end to this many-decades regressive policy of forcing inflation, so that a middle class is once again able to save and thereby gain economic security and bargaining power.

<comment><USER57> A lot of people move to the city because that's where the jobs are. If the job is no longer the primary motivation to choose their location then they would go into a low cost city and decrease the pressure on the housing market of the high cost city.

Oh and inflation is already very low.

<comment><USER56> Yes, many people will move to rural areas where a lack of competition for land will keep housing prices down. So BI will be good general welfare program for those rural lower-paced areas.

But if one wants much income beyond the BI, they'll still be lured cities for their economic opportunities. Housing competition will still exist there, and thus we'd expect housing prices to stay in line with what people can afford by rising. So the economic divide between the rural poor and urban rat racers will actually _increase_.

I think much the interest in BI comes from urban rat racers frustrated with making rent, wishing for a relief from that pressure so they could take time off. But simplistically adding money to the situation will have the opposite effect of what they want, just as how college loans fucked up college tuition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I think it partly has to do with how we measure growth (i.e. GDP). For example, try using a laptop and a mobile phone from 2001 for a week or so. How does that feel? No growth, ehu? ;P

Another aspect I think is how much "non-monetized" value the Internet is creating. What would you pay for access to an Internet search engine (like Google or one of it's competitors), if you really had to? Going without is just not an option, but the price still hovers around zero.

That brings us to yet another aspect; the Internet puts a huge downward pressure on all (comparable) prices. I think this is a major factor behind the lack of inflation: hiking prices is just not possible the way it used to be.

<comment><USER39> This is taken into account in the GDP deflator (i.e. inflation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> It would be interesting to analyze central bank interest rate vs inflation and test for R2 r-squared errors.

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-05/central-bank- death-...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-05/central-bank-death-cross)

[https://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2013/041813a.pdf](https://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2013/041813a.pdf)

There might be diminishing return for every new credit money created which in turn leads to lower growth.

It is also not certain that low interest rates will lead to inflation. If you were a big company and suddenly got a lot of cheap credit. Would you A) increase the wages of your workers or B) invest in cheaper production through automation? What does choice A) or B) yield for consumer prices, do they go up or down?

<comment><USER17> You would do neither. Instead, you would do C) borrow to buyback stock.

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/share-buybacks-the-bill-is- comin...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/share-buybacks-the-bill-is-coming- due-1456685173)

</comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash I often see articles like these result in a broad call for a universal basic income. The reasons are simple: it doesn't dictate what you should or should not spend your money on; it provides a standard-of-living floor; it balances out the inequalities of a globalized and increasingly automated world.

I have a different proposal: instead of guaranteeing basic income, guarantee broad access to basic services.

Off the top of my head, I see five basic services anybody in an industrialized society ought to have provided for them: food/water, shelter, transportation, health care, electricity/information. If these needs can be met cheaply enough, then we won't need a guaranteed income. The basics are cheap enough and if you want a higher standard of living, you can work towards it, but in a market society there are winners and there are losers, and at least under the guaranteed service mechanism, the losers aren't mired in poverty.

In the short term, food/water and electricity/information are nearly cheap enough to be universal. We just don't choose to provide it in a low-tax society.

Medium term, health care costs can be reduced through automated diagnosis and operations. Some automated surgeons exist today and there was a recent report that IBM's Watson was able to correctly diagnose patients.

Long term issue will be shelter and transportation. Even with self-driving automobiles, providing shelter for everybody will require a delicate balance between dense urban housing (which is currently in high demand and very expensive) and suburban sprawl (which is harmful to the environment and requires vast and expensive infrastructure like roads and water).

By investing heavily in an ultra-low-cost society, governments can ensure all people have access to the services they need, while refraining from redistribution-via-taxation, which, while good in intentions, dents the very growth and ROI necessary to make these big investments.

<comment><USER60> Are you proposing the the government directly provide these services? No thanks. You're providing an alternative to UBI without providing any explanation of why it would be superior, while ignoring the very real impact which competition has on lowering costs and increasing quality.

What is the benefit of that? Generally, government services are inferior to those provided by the market. Just take a sample of public housing or government cheese to see why having the government provision services is suboptimal.

If the government wants to get into these businesses, it should do so as a non-profit corporation directly competing with private sector alternatives. Then we can see if government cheese is actually more desirable than private alternatives.

> in a market society there are winners and there are losers, and at least > under the guaranteed service mechanism, the losers aren't mired in poverty.

UBI would be a market solution and could still prevent losers. Poverty reduction and personal choice are not mutually exclusive.

What you're proposing has been tried before and failed.

<comment><USER61> _the very real impact which competition has on lowering costs and increasing quality._

Oh please, what fallacy. Here on HN you have neoliberal truisms like this being repeated, at the same time as articles about celebrated icons of American capitalism clearly stating that in business they always seek to establish monopolies and that competition is for losers.

As an example of how fallacious this line of bullshit is, look at what privatization and 'competition' did to Australian telecommunications (instantly bought by foreigners, now a national security threat... some of the most expensive internet in the western world... metered downloads in 2016... new government program to fund infrastructure is broken down in to a government-pays, private-industry profits model... fiber is virtually unheard of, and is exceptionally difficult to acquire even eg. for a relative who lives right opposite the Sydney Opera House in central Sydney!) Whereas, here in China everyone can have fiber and a flat screen and a mobile phone for almost nothing, and they had no infrastructure at all 20 years ago.

<comment><USER60> > Here on HN you have neoliberal truisms like this being repeated, at the same > time as articles about celebrated icons of American capitalism clearly > stating that in business they always seek to establish monopolies and that > competition is for losers.

The fact that you don't understand how those are literally two sides of the same coin shows how limited your understanding of economics is. Competition driving down prices is _precisely_ why as a businessman I want to avoid it and establish a monopoly.

Since you lack even the critical thinking skills or economic understanding to see how monopoly benefiting businesses and hurting consumers is entirely self- consistent, it's not really worth arguing with you much more.

I'll just point out that we have numerous examples of competition benefiting consumers. For example, airline deregulation has led to a sharp reduction in ticket prices.

In the unfortunate cases where supposed "privatization" has had ill effects, if you look below the surface it's usually the case that the underlying market is anything but free. For example, internet service where only incumbent providers are allowed to offer operate and new entrants are barred from entrance while costs are subsidized by taxpayers. I suspect that the Australian telecommunications industry falls into that category.

<comment><USER61> _two sides of the same coin_

Actually, I was describing the progression from government run to "competition wins!" to commercial actors to commercial actors barring competition. Net result: effectively replaced something government owned (accountable to people, non-profit motive) with something privately operated (accountable to investors, sole profit motive). But you seem to have missed that, instead spending three paragraphs attacking your perception of my person.

<comment><USER60> Where is this eloquent description of that? All you did was try to imply that monopoly-seeking and competition are incompatible.

Incentives are fundamental to human behavior. Corporations will automatically try to seek a monopoly position, but if the government isn't involved they can only maintain it until a superior alternative is created (see: Facebook supplanting MySpace).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> "As a matter of arithmetic, the slowdown in growth has two potential components: people working fewer hours, and less economic output being generated for each hour of labor. Both have contributed to the economy's underperformance."

Really? So it's basically the workers fault because they're lazy?

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm still trying to find the time to complete Piketty's Capital, but one thing that I was surprised to learn from it thus far is that global population growth has a much greater impact on GDP growth than you might think. I'm loath to leave a comment like this without citing some of his data (not at my disposal, atm) but if I recall correctly, it's like more than half of GDP growth (roughly). As global population growth slows, and it is, invariably economic growth is going to slow down. It sounds like a common sense thing, but the numbers Piketty put on it were very surprising.

</comment><comment><USER64> Real issue is that humanity's ability to exceed technology is limited. Even if humanity was to conserve more resources and invest more, majority of value and effort would be to increase the rate of returns from technology.

<comment><USER29> Technology ( as the term is widely used ) is the principal mechanism by which resources are conserved.

<comment><USER65> Do you consoder economies of scale a technology? I ask because it seems to me that economies of scale in manufacturing and agriculture have been a huge driver in producing more with less inputs (especially labor inputs).

<comment><USER29> Economy of scale is a specialization of logistics, so yeah.

Gears or transistors are not required for something to be a technology; a technology is just a bundle of techniques.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> We got not in a small part by China having double digit growth in GDP for well more than a decade, this or course is no longer the case. Double digit growth is not sustainable. The fact that it went on for as long as it did was an anomaly. Also double digit growth is something that while not sustainable is also maybe something that might not be desirable either. I would recommend this read on the subject:

[http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-curse-of-double-digit- growth](http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-curse-of-double-digit-growth)

</comment><comment><USER67> Because we are focusing more and more on sustainability, which means more conservation, less consumption all around, and therefore low growth.

Beyond that, the entire foundation of economics is flawed. Computer scientists and software engineers should seriously examine the underlying assumptions of economics and revise them to be in line with technical reality.

Money is a technology. Think about the design from first principles. If you are an economist, you probably can't do that, because the design is fixed in your mind and first principles aren't known or considered unchangeable.

</comment><comment><USER68> The financial industry and elites sucking up all of the capital and holding it, while heavily lobbying to maintain a low-tax environment and to prevent governments from spending on infrastructure and lifestyle improvements for the general population, although they generally are borrowing at near zero or negative interest rates. This results in insufficient demand and secular stagnation. No investment = no growth.

Luxury goods and services are doing well, though.

Also, the United States is not adding jobs at a healthy clip; the jobs are worse and the prime-age (25-54) employment rate has only retraced halfway since the stock crash _nearly 10 years ago_. The US intentionally pushes a strange number for joblessness that drops people from being counted, and can be adjusted through legislation lengthening and then reducing the period during which unemployment benefits can be collected. The rate jobs are being added would be fine for an economy not recovering from a crash. This is not that economy.

1) 15 years ago marks the crashing of the dotcom bubble, which was used to recover from the recession of the early 90s, which was caused by Reagan ruining the country. So, IMO the way to view it is that Reagan destroys the working class and causes it to live on credit and prayer while cutting infrastructure spending and lowering taxes on the rich. The best thing he does is spend an enormous amount on the military and other welfare for the rich, which creates some sort of replacement demand, although he finances it by driving the national debt into the stratosphere.

2) Clinton deregulates everything, ends welfare as we know it, and encourages a bubble in stocks. A bubble is not a boom - a bubble is a time when people take out loans with collateral that is on fire. During this, he raises taxes, which shifts the Reagan debt to personal debt. The stock bubble crashes as soon as he leaves, and what seemed to be a reasonable amount of debt for the working class to carry became a crushing amount of debt.

3) Then Bush encourages another bubble to save the economy, and it's in houses, an asset that is spread widely among the working class. They mortgage those houses to pay off their debt, and many get to buy some stuff. Bush immediately starts spending again like a maniac in the Reagan model, with an administration consisting largely of exactly the same people: wars on multiple fronts, welfare and tax cuts for the rich, and massive government contracts for insiders.

4) The bubble crashes as Bush leaves, and Obama comes in with a mandate for a massive national veer to the left, wastes most of it on an inadequate healthcare program of right-wing origin that is very nearly a no-op, and in almost every other way is continuity to the Bush administration. He freezes government spending in the lowest interest rate environment in history, and fills the demand hole by handing free money to wealthy people through the bailouts and QE, shifting all of that public debt partially to private working/middle class debt.

5) The rest of that free money has nowhere to go, due to the previously mentioned historically low interest rates, and in addition the tailing off of the marginal return on further investments in technology and industries based on the invention of the transistor, so it ends up in a combination of traditional large industry/natural resource extraction, banks (betting on a repeat of the experience of the bursting of the property bubble, where banks failing from intentionally taking on irrational risk was rewarded by direct, open payments of cash and grants of credit), and tech companies in-name-only, where service companies use the internet in place of phones (as in the original dotcom bubble where they were used in place of mail-order catalogs), or where the actual profits were made in services for B2B, such as advertising or computing infrastructure (the kind of stuff that large industries/finance/fake-tech-companies can park all of their cash in.)

tl;dr it's just kleptocracy.

Majorities of the youth and the marginalized now openly despise government, and have made this election cycle the scariest one we'll see until the midterms which will be the scariest one until the next presidential election. This "low-growth world" is the closest thing we're going to get to a bubble in this financial cycle, since the working/lower-middle classes are seeing absolutely no benefit from QE and the bank bailouts (unlike dotcom and the property bubble.) The only place to fall is open rebellion, tribal violence, and the aimless violence of suicide, mass shootings, and property crime.

/rant (sorry)

<comment><USER69> _15 years ago marks the crashing of the dotcom bubble, which was used to recover from the recession of the early 90s, which was caused by Reagan ruining the country._

I couldn't disagree more. The US economy was crap through most of the 1970's. The 1980's was one of the strongest periods of growth in the US for a long time. And the growth in wages was across all income quintiles. In fact, the runaway growth for the top income brackets started to take off in the 1990s.[1]

[1][http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-...](http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household- Income-Distribution.php)

<comment><USER68> The 80s weren't a strong period for investment, they were a strong period of deficit defense spending and tax cuts, which were stimulative. When that became unsustainable, the bottom dropped out of the economy. The history of the presidency since Reagan has been continuous giveaways to the wealthy financed by credit taken out by the middle class on phantom assets that vanish into thin air as the president exits. The way the Reagan era was different was that the asset was American world hegemony as a hedge against the eternal threat of Russia (which collapsed partially because it couldn't spend as fast as we could in Afghanistan.)

(Also, according to every graph on the page you linked, the incomes of the top 5% started their climb in 1981, dipped in 1989, recovered to the 1981 trend in 1993, and maintained it steadily until 2001. I don't know how you're reading that differently. After 2001, even the incomes of the top 5% are stagnant, and the important groups become the top 1% and the top 0.1%.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Low growth is sustainable! Rampant consumerism and the drive by corporations to move money faster and faster by changing resources to garbage is a drug that needs to be stamped out. The addiction to population growth just to fund social security schemes is similar. Societies can get addicted too.

Now we just have to figure out how to weather the human->robot worker transition smoothly.

</comment><comment><USER71> "Growth" is really just cheap oil ("energy prices"). As this is an obvious path to imminent doom, energy prices go up and thus growth diminishes. Cheap(-er) energy is what's keeping the States ahead of the EU too.

The world isn't black and white, mostly. Sometimes there is an easy explanation to things though.

</comment><comment><USER72> In addition to the other good observations..."quarterly capitalism" has reduced risk appetite.

Furthermore, we live in a very regulated world. Rules can be beneficial but tend to also slow progress

</comment><comment><USER73> It's the rising inequality silly! All the gains going to the top is inefficient for the economy as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER74> it's debt see Steve Keen eg [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPIQnOdjoZk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPIQnOdjoZk)

</comment><comment><USER75> What we're missing is cash in peoples hands to spend on innovations. For many 80% of income is going to rent. How can you even hope to build an economy on that?

<comment><USER69> You do realize that most people don't live in Silicon Valley or NYC, right?

I'd say a small fraction of the US population is paying "80%" of income for rent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> We let worker wages stagnate such that there is now insufficient demand.

</comment><comment><USER23> Should we make it a policy not to link paywall urls ?

<comment><USER54> I didn't get a paywall, and I'm not a subscriber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Free Trade is the problem.

The developed countries must impose 50% or higher tariffs on imported goods, services and intellectual property to protect their workers.

The USA enjoyed very high growth rates in the 1800s.

When economists get around to simulating the economy via agent based modelling of every decision making financial entity, akin to how weather is forecasted in voxels, then Free Trade will be revealed as the root cause of the slow growth rate of the developed countries.</comment>


How 20 Popular Websites Looked When They Launched - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular-websites-looked-when-they-launched.html <comment><USER2> one of my favorite's is microsoft.com: <http://www.microsoft.com/misc/features/features_flshbk.htm>

The web server sat under an employee's desk until 1994, when it was moved to a server room. It's a reminder that Microsoft almost totally missed out on the importance of the Internet and actually could've lost the browser wars to Netscape. Netscape foolishly sold out to AOL in 1998 and that was pretty much the end of it. But thems were the days.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the archived versions may be missing some CSS files. Twitter's font doesn't look right compared to its own screenshot.</comment>


Hackers grab 400,000 Nvidia passwords - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/chip-maker-nvidia-says-up-to-400000-users-encrypted-passwords-compromised-in-attacks/2012/07/13/gJQAqgaeiW_story.html

<comment><USER2> "the stolen passwords had been scrambled using an encryption algorithm, a technique which generally makes it harder for hackers to use the compromised information" ...</comment>


Radio Hacker Can Hijack Emergency Sirens to Play Any Sound - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/this-radio-hacker-could-hijack-emergency-sirens-to-play-any-sound/ <comment><USER2> Although this is an entirely different system, it brings to mind how badly insecure the US Emergency Alert System is, which is used for television and radio alerts.

EAS was designed in the late eighties, when infosec was not a well- established, household-name field. It works by relaying an unencrypted signal; that rather unsettling data burst you hear when there's an Amber Alert or a thunderstorm warning. There's no authentication on this. There's no encryption. Literally anyone with software to generate NOAA SAME tones, together with a software-defined radio and amplifier, can walk near one of a handful of "primary entry points" and belt out an alert that gets mindlessly repeated across the country. It's already happened on a local level by simply logging into network-connected endecs at TV stations; probably none of them changed the default passwords.

Every day I see something like this, I'm reminded of why anyone still considers security-by-obscurity to be a sound strategy. State actors are the prime target of vulnerabilities you call obscure.

<comment><USER3> >Literally anyone with software to generate NOAA SAME tones, together with a software-defined radio and amplifier, can walk near one of a handful of "primary entry points" and belt out an alert that gets mindlessly repeated across the country.

So a fake alert can be sent out nationwide from broadcasting to just one access point??

<comment><USER4> > So a fake alert can be sent out nationwide from broadcasting to just one > access point??

I believe OP meant "country" as in "countryside", which is feasible when you're up on a hill and your signal can reach a distribution source antenna (which will then distribute your spoofed alert to its attached sirens).

<comment><USER2> No, I meant the country as in the United States. EAS on the national level works by playing telephone: hopping the alert from station to station in a mesh configuration. PEP stations are origins for national alerts.

<comment><USER4> Oh wow. Clearly, something like widespread availability of SDRs was not an issue back then.

I wonder why it hasn't been abused/trolled on a large scale, though. Really, if I were interested in trolling that's what I'd do: next to zero chance of the cops catching you as you won't leave a trail, plus the entire country will be wide awake once the sirens ring and it will likely need months or years until the government secures the stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know why but this reminds me of a story I read long long ago about someone figuring out that the local Big Box store had their PA system attached to a phone number. You could call in and say anything you want.

They kept up the ruse for quite a while by being subtle at first with their mischief.

<comment><USER6> How do these system avoid robocalls and the like?

<comment><USER7> I'm curious about this as well.

Though at a previous job, I got on the elevator one day to hear a telemarketer's voice coming from the emergency speaker. I'm guessing it happens, but just very rarely?

<comment><USER8> I had something similar, twice. Once I was in the elevator when the emergency phone started ringing. I picked up, and it was the Seattle Times trying to sell subscriptions.

The other time, same elevator, it was someone asking for a specific person that I had never heard of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Side note: Balint Seeber, the lead on this paper, has given a number of excellent talks on wireless communications and signal processing. I'd recommend his series of "Hacking the wireless world" talks (available on youtube) given at DefCon for anyone interested in digital signal processing and RF security.

<comment><USER10> Balint is great! He's presented at Dorkbot-SF a couple of times:

* about the ISEE-3 space probe reboot: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTljlMH-0oM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTljlMH-0oM)

* visualizing flights in airspace: [http://youtu.be/a623A6JVuek](http://youtu.be/a623A6JVuek)

(I'm the Dorkbot A/V geek, but these aren't my recordings.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember as a kid, my dad had a police scanner and eventually I realized that the nearby tornado siren had it's Saturday noon test directly preceded by a 4 digit DTMF on the radio. It's probably a good thing I never had a ham radio

<comment><USER12> I was 16 when I discovered this (except instead of DTMF it was a special two- tone dispatch alert), but I somehow had enough discipline to not attempt a replay attack. My (now ex) girlfriend's sister was a dispatcher who I mentioned it to, and about three months later they changed the system.

In my college town, there was a tornado siren placed very close to the biggest multistory residence hall. I learned (through the ham radio club) that it had a long history of mischief before my time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Bastille's researchers note that ATI's website references siren systems installed in many other sensitive locations, including 1 World Trade Center in New York, the Indian Point nuclear power plant along the Hudson River, and campuses including UMass Amherst, Long Island University, and West Point. Bastille's researchers caution that they couldn't confirm whether those customers had installed the same vulnerable setups."

New York City can get crowded around 1 World Trade Center. A false alarm could kill, not to mention cause tremendous economic damage.

</comment><comment><USER14> Looking at the site for the vulnerability (sirenjack.com)[0], what's the motivation behind the snazzy animations, video, and custom domain? Is this a form of advertising for the security researchers?

[0] [https://www.sirenjack.com/](https://www.sirenjack.com/)

<comment><USER15> Not sure what the motivations are, but I think it's nice that vulnerabilities get their own bit of marketing and everything, as it can appeal to the non- tech crowd. Most people wouldn't give a shit about a paper or some technical info, but a nice-looking website and a video demonstrating it could interest them and at the very least make them aware that such mischief is actually possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > [https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and- > divulg...](https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-divulgence- > radio-communications)

They should check with the FCC before making threats like that.

<comment><USER17> I'm not aware of any exclusion for emergency/public service transmissions. Lots of police departments have been switching to encrypted P25 to prevent scanners and the like.

Basically anything other than the cell bands is trivial to receive and decode w/ $15 SDR dongle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Source: [https://www.sirenjack.com/](https://www.sirenjack.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> ~20 years or so ago, the warning sirens in the small town I grew up in could be easily turned on/off by simply dialing a phone number and issuing the correct DTMF tones. I'd like to think they have a more secure mechanism nowadays but I would be quite surprised if they actually did.

</comment><comment><USER20> Vulnerable, yes, but how about secret/secure on the part of the hacker? It's no good to abuse one of these systems if the only result is the government showing up with a warrant and a lot of anger. Maybe they don't need to be secure, because it's so easy to trace interference?

<comment><USER15> The source of the interference doesn't give you any information as to where the attacker is. The source could be a Raspberry Pi connected to a cheap SDR and controlled over Tor. By the time the feds find it, the damage has already been done and the attacker could've planted another one of those somewhere else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice bit of deflection by the vendor.

"However, we wish to point out these are technically sophisticated people who have devoted significant time and effort to this task. Before customers panic too much, please understand that this is not a trivially easy thing that just anyone can do."

[https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ab64621aa49a10ba0d06...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ab64621aa49a10ba0d06151/t/5acc378c8a922dc77307c7e8/1523333006993/UPDATED_ATI_SYSTEMS_OFFICIAL_STATEMENT_4-3-18.pdf)

<comment><USER22> I don't think the vendor is deflecting too much. The extended quote from the article is a lot less one-sided:

> ATI wrote that Bastille's findings are "likely true" and that it's testing a > software update it plans to roll out soon. "Before customers panic too much, > please understand that this is not a trivially easy thing that just anyone > can do," that earlier statement notes. "At the same time, a certain level of > concern is justified. As technology evolves, the level of threat evolves."

<comment><USER17> > In fact, anyone can generate those commands, Seeber says, with a radio as > simple as this $35 one sold by the Chinese company Baofeng

If you can do it via a Baofeng there's a 99% chance this is just obscured DTMF tones + possibly PL tone which is freaking trivial to do on any FM radio.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They should make them say, "We are the Borg. Resistance is futile". That would be so cool.

</comment><comment><USER24> Mass suicide caused by playing Kanye West ?</comment>


The Future Is So Bright, it's Dematerializing - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204909104577237220008056712.html

<comment><USER2> If you checked here before reading the article, it's a short intro to the X Prize, starting with a concept called "Dematerialization":

"...dematerialization, the reduction in the quantity of stuff needed to produce a product. An iPhone, for example, weighs 1/100th and costs 1/10th as much as an Osborne Executive computer did in 1982, but it has 150 times the processing speed and 100,000 times the memory."

</comment><comment><USER3> This is why I think Capitalism is failing. As we move into a more virtual world, where the means of production are owned by all, value derived from utility (the principle tenet of neoclassical thought) becomes almost meaningless, less a few required cases.

Look at Communism, it began to crumble when Labour as value stopped making sense, i.e. intellectual work was the driving force of the economy during the cold war. Just ask Doctors in Cuba, where farmers often earn more.

As we move into a more virtual world, where work is no longer connected to sweat labour, or direct utility, when everyone owns a machine capable of digital and physical reproduction our fundamental understanding of value will shift; bringing about new economic principles.

(I am not an economist)

<comment><USER4> > As we move into a more virtual world

What will you eat?

Where will you live?

Who will tend to you when you're ill?

We could lose all this virtual stuff overnight and the world would be much like before, it's funny how things are all different and yet nothing changes. Facebook could disappear and you'd likely never notice (unless you happened to hold stock).

But someone still has to grow crops, build houses, produce the goods we use and someone still has to know how to set bones and how to apply stitches.

The virtual world is mostly a first world luxury, if not an outright illusion.

Work will always be connected to sweat labour, maybe not directly but it will be very hard to get rid of that factor in a sustainable manner.

Capitalism is not failing, it is simply adapting to a new situation. And Communism didn't crumble because labour as value stopped making sense, we simply have never had communism, only a bunch of people using it as a fig leaf to cover up their crimes.

<comment><USER5> Robots/Automation already grows crops, builds houses and produces goods we use. 6 people are involved in the production of millions of TVs at Panasonic. Foxconn is adding millions of robots to its workforce. While not a virtual world, it definitely is a growing into a more digitally operated world.

Ubiquitous surveillance and a swarm of drones doing policing probably is as effective as most law enforcement is. I don't like it though... but not liking something does not make it less effective.

In the new world, the value of sweat is falling, but the value of each person's time is improving.

<comment><USER3> Seriously, how the fuck does this get down voted? and parent up?

Mindless groupthink.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to teach computational thinking - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/how-to-teach-computational-thinking-29e45c8a2664#.b4hdqhocd <comment><USER2> I see there are lots of skeptics here. Well, as a developer with kids of 11 and 15 (who are not particularly attracted to the idea of programming, in general), I can say that the Mathematica environment/Wolfram Language is both fantastic and effective. So great that I'm willing to plug it despite not being on Wolfram's payroll.

After several years of trying to use this or that other language with the kids in an attempt to stir up some sort of longer term interest and to get them to begin thinking in a problem-solving way, the Wolfram Language is the only one that's managed to produce results and hold their interest.

Two of the most key features of the Wolfram Language, IMO, are the very high level of abstraction available through the many built-in functions and, as a result, the quick feedback given to the user. When I compare the reams of code that must be written in any other language to achieve only a fraction of what a Wolfram Language one-liner does, I cringe at the thought of trying to convince someone (who's point isn't to become a developer, but to simply find a solution to a problem) that they need to man-up and type a book before they can expect any appreciable results.

The book, An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language, mentioned in the article, is also an amazing resource. It begins with no expectations of prior programming experience and progresses at a decent pace with captivating examples throughout.

So, yeah, I'd like an non-commercial (remember that there are free tiers and products) environment+language that's equal (in terms of being very suitable for kids up to domain experts) to what's available from Wolfram, but from what I've seen, there is nothing that comes close. Sure, people will point to the various notebook type environments out there, but these have got quite a ways to go before they reach the breadth and slickness of Wolfram's offerings.

<comment><USER3> _> So, yeah, I'd like an non-commercial (remember that there are free tiers and products) environment+language that's equal_

This will never happen I fear. And IMO it's not even a matter of interface issues -- environment, language, etc. -- although matching those would take a lot of effort as well.

But more importantly, I think a lot of people massively under-estimate the sheer number of best-in-class implementations of important algorithms that are locked up in Mathematica's source code. I try to avoid Mathematica whenever an alternative exists, but in a lot of cases there _just isn 't_ an alternative. Especially as you get closer to "real" mathematical capabilities.

<comment><USER4> I have heard something similar to this sentiment expressed many times. Can someone explain how this turned out to be the case? Especially considering, math is one of those subjects which will tremendously benefit from being unlocked from a paid software's source code.

<comment><USER5> Its an interesting question. One reason is Wolfram is extremely talented at language design, which is necessary to build an artifact of this size without self-immolating. Another is that it is a commercial company following a plan. A third is that few people have learned the lessons of Mathematica enough to apply them.

<comment><USER3> _> One reason is Wolfram is extremely talented at language design_

It's always a matter of taste when it comes to language design, but I'd have to disagree with this assessment ;-)

 _> which is necessary to build an artifact of this size without self- immolating_

Well, that's _certainly_ not the case. Plenty of huge software artifacts of very impressive quality have been built by non-language-designers.

 _> Another is that it is a commercial company following a plan_

This is certainly true. Or rather, several plans, all of which intersect at common mathematical sub-questions. So then the entire company can leverage effort that's been poured into those components.

 _> A third is that few people have learned the lessons of Mathematica enough to apply them_

Nah. I think the third reason is that Wolfram hires excellent hackers who are also excellent mathematicians. He hires a lot of them. And he puts them to work on the intersectional capabilities I mentioned above.

(Disclaimer: pure conjecture. I've never worked at Wolfram)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nv-vn I can't help but feel that the Wolfram Language is less of a programming language and more of a DSL for querying a very precisely defined set of data. I think that the whole thing falls apart once you step outside the boundaries of the data they offer. In that sense, it doesn't seem very well suited for teaching computational thinking at all -- there's no logic involved in letting another person solve a problem for you. The examples show how computers can enrich the work of people in the future, but to me that's entirely different from computational thinking. What's going on here is little more than teaching kids how to use Google efficiently.

<comment><USER6> > I can't help but feel that the Wolfram Language is less of a programming > language and more of a DSL for querying a very precisely defined set of > data.

If what you're thinking about is Entity and EntityValue, you can't be more wrong: the built-in data is so slow it's impossible to use, even Wolfram employee steer away from it when giving presentations. You clearly can't give a demo where returning a bunch of missing data takes several seconds.

If by 'data' you mean a certain library of algorithmic content, then you might be onto something.

<comment> nv-vn Well, both here really. But the amounts of data normally showed in demos is a bit over the top. Showing me that you can color states on the map of the US in 3 lines of code is not impressive when you already have the map data set up in order to be colored. The interesting part of the problem is finding the boundaries and creating shapes to color using that. The algorithmic content also detracts from the examples showing programmatic thinking, but not to the same extent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _I've noticed an interesting trend. Pick any field X, from archeology to zoology. There either is now a "computational X" or there soon will be. And it's widely viewed as the future of the field._

I was dubious about this particular example and searched for [computational zoology]. There's nothing really there, except for a Craig Thompson making a similar "X could be Zoology in Computational X" claim. Computational Zoology is certainly not viewed as the future of zoology.

[https://www.google.com/search?q="computational+zoology"](https://www.google.com/search?q="computational+zoology")

Why make this precise claim without checking if it's true? Just an odd way to write an essay.

Overall this essay reads like a long, long, long laundry list of features of the Wolfram Language and the Many Wolfram-Branded Products With Many Features, rather than an explanation of "how to teach computational thinking". It's like I wrote an essay "How to use Google for Education", found a thousand educational pages on the internet, and wrote a story in which I googled each one.

<comment><USER8> Disclaimer: I work in bioinformatics

It's a bit of a weird thing to say that 'computational zoology' will be a field since zoology itself (and botany FWIW) has become 'computational zoology'. Instead of comparing the way an arm looks or counting the number of stamen to delineate species, you now use molecular markers (SNPs, SSRs, gene presence/absence) to distinguish species, and you do that using computers instead of your magnifying glass. A recent example would be that 'giraffes are 4 species' paper - traditional zoologists had them down as one species based no the way they look, but the computer (DNA analysis) says they're four different ones.

Biology is really shifting away from the lab to the computer - people who used to do 100% lab-based work now do 50% computer-based, 50% lab-based work (mileage may vary).

<comment><USER7> Hmm. I guess it's not an example that helps my point, then - even if it's not called "computational zoology", you're basically saying zoology _is_ moving in that direction. Ah well.

"Computational archaeology" is a thing, but it doesn't seem like it's the future of archaeology. IANAA of course ;-) I'm just going off of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_archaeology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_archaeology)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you want to teach computational thinking to kids, here are some much better (and researched) resources:

[http://csunplugged.org/](http://csunplugged.org/)

[https://code.org/](https://code.org/)

[https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)

and many others: [http://bit.ly/ortonacode](http://bit.ly/ortonacode)

I would avoid proprietary tools (like Wolfram or Microsoft/Apple code) and avoid tools designed for professionals, not beginners (like java, python, and the like), until they are ready for them and choose them on their own.

</comment><comment><USER10> I dunno. This seems a little like the "putting a GUI over the CLI" discussion.

> its intellectual core is about formulating things with enough clarity, and > in a systematic enough way, that one can tell a computer how to do them.

I think the thing to teach is logic. (Make that Logic with a capital "L.") It covers all the basics: clarity of thought, language and its hidden dangers, definitions, systematic thinking, order, etc. Studying Plato and Aristotle is a great place to start.

</comment><comment><USER11> And we all need to learn radio because its 1897 and radio is the future, or its 1940 and electronics are the future or whatever.

You don't need to know how a combustion engine or an electric motor work in order to operate a chainsaw, the tree falls down either way.

We have a society, an economy, and a civilization, other people do some of the work, and you do some. We don't need to, and can not know how it all works. Pay someone to do the stuff you don't know. That's how we got to the moon.

Why does everyone keep saying we all have to learn how to code and think like computers? We all have to live in human bodies, and I would wager the vast, vast majority of HN knows a lot more about their computer than their anatomy. No one goes around saying we all need to learn internal medicine and human anatomy, because the future is living in a human body.

<comment><USER12> If you don't know how anything works, all you can do is follow, and cannot separate misinformation from truth. It's funny you mention engines because it's widely known that auto mechanics will take advantage of the general public's ignorance of how their cars work in order to profit. The same goes for several other industries. Sometimes the corporations actively try to prevent their consumers from knowing too much. Maybe you're fine with that. Others aren't.

Computers have permeated almost every aspect of our lives. It makes great sense and empowerment to actually know how they work.

As the saying goes, "knowledge is power".

<comment><USER11> Yeah, the mechanic profits off of me not knowing my engine, and I profit off of him not knowing his computer, and in the end we all get along.

The pharma co is taking advantage of me because I don't know enough chemistry to mix that stuff up at home? Their profits are through the roof!

At some point you have to concede that one man with one life can't know everything, and focus on learning what you care about.

You can be a jack of all trades and master of none, in other words.

<comment><USER2> Maybe you didn't read the whole article to get Stephen's point that the Wolfram Language allows you to experiment with a very, very wide variety of subjects without requiring deep expertise (but of course allowing for that as well).

So your point is quite valid, one person can't hope to know everything. This is why it's great to find a tool that allows you to dive deeper into the things you do care about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Still thinking that primary education should be some sort of Ancient Greece curriculum and that applied subjects must only come at a later stage.

<comment><USER14> Would you mind giving an example of such a curriculum?

<comment><USER13> First reference from the wiki here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_ancient_Greece](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_ancient_Greece) . The idea is that a pupil must learn himself first, then his own world and finally something practical to make a living. Greece is for Westerners, though. I can imagine different communities in the world having their own way to license considerate and compassionate human beings before hard professionals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Real world problem -> Mathematical problem -> algorithm(computation) -> Mathematical solution -> Real world solution.

Teaching people only one part of this chain is just useless.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Mathematical thinking is about formulating things so that one can handle > them mathematically, when that's possible. Computational thinking is a much > bigger and broader story, because there are just a lot more things that can > be handled computationally.

This is a completely lopsided statement. Computation(via some automaton) is a small subset of what mathematics deals with.

It is possible to deal with concepts and objects mathematically a lot more often than computationally.

<comment><USER17> There was some recent HN discussion on the limits of formal methods:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12468479](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12468479)

If we're willing to accept broken software some of the time we can do far more, and in practice this is how the vast majority of software is developed. In this context I think "mathematical" vs "computational" has the colloquial meaning of "proven" vs "empirically tested".

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the author glosses over the issue of _keywords_. In order to be productive in the Wolfram Language (or any language), you need to build up an understanding of what operations it supports. There are thousands of such operations, neccesitating a method of looking up the correct operation for each task. And it's not always clear how to glue them together. What kid would think to type "GeoPlot" or "{n,20}" unprompted? In other words, people still need to build a mapping between their internal desires and valid syntax. We are still a long way from being able to compute in the language of thought.

<comment><USER19> There is an extremely well furnished documentation system, describing every option, and giving usually playful and interesting examples. I often take "mathematica" days where I just go through the help system finding nice examples and building up on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've said it before: In two thousand years Wolfram will be remembered for being first to computerize thought, as we remember Democritus for being first to describe atomic theory.

I truly wish he weren't insufferable (I say this as one who has read his tome) because he deserves greater fame than he has. (But not as much as he thinks he does.)

</comment><comment><USER21> I always wondered why Wolfram didn't choose a pure functional language, which seems so much more in line with mathematical thinking.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is not about computational thinking. This is about Wolfram advertising.

</comment><comment><USER23> I might be in the minority here, but I don't think that 'thinking like a programmer' is something that everyone is capable of doing. I think there might be some kind of tyranny in trying to force it on everyone.

<comment><USER24> I don't think everyone can be a mathematician, but I see the value in putting Calculus in the core curriculum.

<comment><USER25> Calculus is a poor example. Most people don't get much of a benefit from a course in calculus. They would be much better served by a course in statistics or personal finance, or perhaps a computer science course as described in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> the usual plug for wolfram...</comment>