Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mises]

[DIsbell]

Democratic decisions and democratically elected groups can do the planning necessary to make up for the shortcomings of markets. Markets can be pretty good at telling us how many hammers to make or how much rice to grow, but markets don't bring us important invention or public infrastructure as you'd like to believe they do/would.

Additionally, markets in and of themselves don't particularly care if people are sick, hungry, or oppressed, or if the environment is being damaged, and individuals within a market can get too caught up in their own affairs or feel too small to do anything. But as a society, people have the ability to speak out and act in ways incongruent with markets.

[visitorq]

[DIsbell]

haha, yes, the era before the fed was more inventive than after...

let's just ignore some of the most revolutionary inventions of humankind, why don't we. computers? atomic bombs/energy? artificial hearts and other medical advances? the internet? jet propulsion? satellites? manned space flight?

not to denigrate the light bulb, telephone, peanut butter, and early airplane, but they don't quite manage to stack up.

and virtually all of those happened due to collective funding. you can't even try to make all of it sound bad by tying it to the MIC; many modern innovations come simply from universities and grant research.

[Junior]

Met data shows global warming over 150 years

The Met Office on Tuesday released data from hundreds of monitoring stations worldwide showing that the global surface temperature has risen significantly over the last 150 years.

Perhaps the most striking finding is that the rise in global surface temperature has averaged more than 0.15 degrees Celsius per decade since the middle of the 1970s.

The Met Office released millions of records from over 1,500 of 5,000 stations worldwide which monitor land surface temperatures.

The records, which it has only just received permission to release, date back to 1850.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20091208/tuk-met-data-shows-global-warming-over-1-a7ad41d.html

Past decade was warmest on record

While 1998 remains the hottest single year since records began, the past decade has been the warmest period in the 160-year record of global surface temperatures, the Met Office announced.

And the past year is another in the top 10 warmest years, according to a separate announcement by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) which published provisional findings that 2009 was 0.44C above the long term average of 14C.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20091208/tuk-past-decade-was-warmest-on-record-6323e80.html

[visitorq]

[DIsbell]

didn't say the government was needed; just more likely to make them happen at a faster pace.

atomic science and tech came about due to government funded research and development.

the computer itself came about due in large part to government funded research and development. consumer computers as an industry were pushed and developed by apple, ibm, etc but you don't have a personal computer without those early army and university machines.

i like how you point out that "people will be inventive regardless"- I'm glad you agree that they don't need a profit motive to innovate! although that's not a commonly heard statement from free-marketeers.

however, some inventions need more resources than one man can get a hold of while simultaneously not being the sort of invention that has a short-enough term to profitability (or no profitability period), making it unattractive to investors. this is where collective funding comes in.

40 years ago, you'd be deriding the wasteful spending of the government on a bunch of elitist scientists researching junk that could already be done by telegraph and telephone... and in the present day, you're surfing the internet.

[visitorq]

[DIsbell]

You can't be this dense, you really can't.

I'm saying that government or collective funding is for things that are unattractive to entrepreneurship.

The market was not interested in creating the core groundwork that would eventually become our modern internet. The market was not interested in or able to develop atomic science for a variety of applications. The market was not interested or able to launch the first satellites.

Once the ground had been paved and the tech refined further, then markets stepped in when they saw profitability.

If you want a current example: cancer research. It's a common criticism by libertarians that the pharmaceutical industry abuses government protections and simply cashes in on long-term drugs that don't actually cure anything. Accepting that, who is really doing the work to cure and combat cancer? Publicly funded universities and institutes. It's not a profitable or efficient enterprise at all, but we're seeing little steps of progress and certainly hope for more, given that cancer is what it is.

Further illustration: it wasn't some capitalist superhero entrepreneur who, while tinkering in his garage, decided he would find a way to prevent cervical cancer and become a billionaire. It was researchers at several universities worldwide and the US National Cancer Institute that researched over a couple decades to develop a vaccine for HPV, which they discovered caused 100% of a cancer that claims 230k lives every year. THEN, after that vaccine was developed, the market stepped in to produce it.

[visitorq]

[DIsbell]

you've literally offered nothing in response there. I flat out said that certain research and development is inherently inefficient from the perspective of markets, to which you respond "hurk durk gov't is inefficient and wastes money."

I agreed that the pharmaceutical industry is a monster thriving off of undeserved gov't protections, however you completely ignored my point about medical research (which is what the pharm industry isn't doing well, compared to publicly funded institutes), instead choosing to rant about how bad pharm is. again, nothing offered in response.

then with HPV/cancer/gardasil, you post about a corrupt GOP governor and some medical conspiracy (spoilers: most medicines and and vaccines have some sort of side-effects). again, you completely ignore that government institutes and universities discovered and created a surefire way to completely prevent a deadly cancer. Things that take decades to develop, test, and perfect to a safe enough standard are not attractive to markets (especially when the end product is a one-time vaccine- that's something that can't be counted on to be milked for profit too much, in light of the extensive period required to develop).[/b]

[Junior]

[visitorq]

[visitorq]

[Rusty Shackleford]