The Baliocene Apocrypha

People killed: around three quarters of a million.

Everyone quoting this number is quoting what certain people predicted would be the number after a year without aid. I have never seen anyone cite a number that was not a projection written beforehand, based on estimates of what would happen with no aid.

Except that isn't what happened.

The "dissolution" and "aid freeze" were constantly tied up in the courts instead of being implemented. Marco Rubio was put in charge of USAID, and despite being a Republican, he is an actual human being who would show activity on an EEG and not an arc node of Trumpism. He issued waivers to keep funding the "critical" lifesaving operations of USAID going during the funding freeze, regardless of the courts' decisions. His explicit intent was to dissolve USAID as he saw it as a wasteful and counterproducrive program, but incorporate the parts of USAID that actually were useful (like these programs) into the State Department. From other pages linked on the same site, he appears to have done that. Rubio's "America First Global Health Strategy" lays out an extremely reasonable argument for what he is doing and why. He even goes into specific detail about how great PEPFAR is and why so much of its budget is being wasted on buck-wild overhead costs and inefficiencies instead of integrating local services.

The moral reason is that "refrained from rescuing" is not the same thing as "killed"; the equivalence is made up by people who will grab onto anything to Get Trump but they never apply the same standard for e.g. the Obama Presidential Library "killing" thousands of people by spending that money on something other than aid. (Except for like five Effective Altruists.)

The practical reason is that we don't have to lean on hypothetical "sophisticated modelling tools" any more now that we have data from countries that got their aid cut, and the data indicates the model was wrong, the projected deaths didn't happen.

Any NGO that had to lay off hundreds of people when the USAID check failed to come in one time is either a scam or so catastrophically mismanaged that it should not be getting that money to begin with. Not only does anyone need the ability to deal with unexpected expenses and losses, groups in impoverished African nations should expect major disruptions to their supplies and funding to happen. It's why you need to be there at all! When over 2/3rds of the money is going to administrative costs, and you respond to a disruption in funding by firing thousands of health care providers forever instead of firing administrators or furloughing administrators, you're either a scam or catastrophically mismanaged! All the news reports talking about this all said something to the effect of "these health providers are gone and fired and not able to provide health care any more ever," as though a temporary funding disruption made the NGO lose their fucking pager numbers.

If I remember correctly, the assertion ultimately comes from a USAID report - which I had some trouble finding, because, uh, all the USAID material has been taken down, but thank you Wayback Machine - which explains that only something like 12% of USAID money went directly to local service providers. But that doesn't mean that the rest was administrative overhead! Most of it was pass-through donations to other non-local charities, which could often provide relevant services at scale much more easily than the locals could.

Actual overhead costs seem to have averaged something like 10%, which is about what you'd expect. Recipients included groups like Gavi and the Global Fund, which are easily researchable and auditable.

I'm aware of the concept of the labor market and wages are a function of more than just "capitalism bad". I'm not a leftist.

But if we can have a more mature engagement with the topic then surely we can also acknowledge that there are toxic pressures an unregulated market can place on individuals.

Hopefully you can see how being restricted from accepting the bottom half of positive deals can be a good thing from the perspective of an employee, they still get hired at a price both parties make money off, but at a higher price than without the restriction. Voting for a minimum wage as an employee is somewhat similar to throwing your steering wheel out the window in a game of chicken.

IF?

You're assuming that people at the lowest level of wages are engaging in individual contract negotiations where their opponent can see them throw the wheel out. That's not how it works; they have "filled position" and "not filled position." What's gonna actually happen is that the law makes it illegal to employ people if their work doesn't generate a certain amount of value.

A simplified worked example:

A company has a position that they would like filled. An employee would like to work in that position. The range of prices in which they are both happy with this arrangement is from $A to $B. Below $A, the employee doesn't find the employment worth it. Above $B, the employer doesn't find the employment worth it.

Say the employee and employer negotiate, and come to a price $N, between $A and $B. Then, counterfactually, say that a minimum wage $M is present, with N < M < B. In this case, the employee and employer will not come to the price $N, but instead $M, as it is still mutually beneficial.

In this case, the minimum wage law has resulted in a transfer of $(M-N) from employer to employee. It has prevented no employment.

Not quite. The company determines, "what is the smallest wage we can [lawfully] offer that will allow us to fill this position and make a profit off it?" If the government makes that number higher, but the wage would still result in a profitable job, then the higher wage gets offered. No individual negotiations needed.

I'm aware of the concept of the labor market and wages are a function of more than just "capitalism bad". I'm not a leftist.

But if we can have a more mature engagement with the topic then surely we can also acknowledge that there are toxic pressures an unregulated market can place on individuals.

Hopefully you can see how being restricted from accepting the bottom half of positive deals can be a good thing from the perspective of an employee, they still get hired at a price both parties make money off, but at a higher price than without the restriction. Voting for a minimum wage as an employee is somewhat similar to throwing your steering wheel out the window in a game of chicken.

IF?

You're assuming that people at the lowest level of wages are engaging in individual contract negotiations where their opponent can see them throw the wheel out. That's not how it works; they have "filled position" and "not filled position." What's gonna actually happen is that the law makes it illegal to employ people if their work doesn't generate a certain amount of value.

A simplified worked example:

A company has a position that they would like filled. An employee would like to work in that position. The range of prices in which they are both happy with this arrangement is from $A to $B. Below $A, the employee doesn't find the employment worth it. Above $B, the employer doesn't find the employment worth it.

Say the employee and employer negotiate, and come to a price $N, between $A and $B. Then, counterfactually, say that a minimum wage $M is present, with N < M < B. In this case, the employee and employer will not come to the price $N, but instead $M, as it is still mutually beneficial.

In this case, the minimum wage law has resulted in a transfer of $(M-N) from employer to employee. It has prevented no employment.

Not quite. The company determines, "what is the smallest wage we can [lawfully] offer that will allow us to fill this position and make a profit off it?" If the government makes that number higher, but the wage would still result in a profitable job, then the higher wage gets offered. No individual negotiations needed.

Much of the time, the only motivation that matters is internal motivation.

Much of the time, if you want to cheat at the thing or cut corners, you can, and the results will be...not necessarily as good, depending on your skills, but vastly more efficient.

Much of the time, if you want people to do the thing the real way - you have no choice but to reward them for doing the thing the real way, directly, with status and resources and meaning, instead of looking to some external goal or metric and hoping that this one will somehow be cheat-proof.

To spell out the thought process a bit more sedulously -

People are not going to do the thing unless you teach them to want to do the thing. For its own sake, more or less. In the idealized case, because they care about doing the thing in a sort of pure abstract autistic way; in the more-easily-managed psychological/narcissistic case, because they care about being thing-doers. Either of these is fine, and works, mostly.

How do you get people there? Through education, indoctrination, and cultural suasion. Y'know, all the usual ways of inculcating values in people. [NOTE FOR PEOPLE SKIMMING ALONG: none of these things works reliably or precisely, we haven't invented mind control and you shouldn't act like we have, but they sorta-kinda work in aggregate and they're what we've got.] Which involves doing things like "creating the legible cultural role of the thing-doer" and "paying people to be thing-doers." (That last is what I've been thinking about, in the context of the weirdly parallel monastery economies invented by medieval Europe and classical China, where "paying people to pray" was absolutely a giant load-bearing part of the system.)

Because of course the entire modern worldview is shaped by industrialism, and in a scientific-industrial process you generally do only care about the outputs, and in fact getting more outputs for lower levels of effort is often exactly what you want. And even then, mature high-quality manufacturing has to include QA testing that includes lots of tests that a naive output metric would not capture, because otherwise people will optimize the quality away in the name of efficiency. There is a constant pendulum swing between "optimizing away the quality" and "actually insisting on quality", and at any given moment a given output (or even whole product categories) will find themselves at different points in the cycle.

But of course I agree with the broader point about there being a constant pull towards optimizing away quality. That's the baseline concept, really.

The takeaway here - which I imagine that you, in particular, are likely to find sympathetic - is that there's really no way around the character-forming and culture-forming parts of this dynamic. Which means (a) that you have to throw resources at things that are inefficient, and not listen when people yell about how they could get the same output more efficiently, and (b) that you have to be willing to take explicit cultural stances of the kind that are anathema to contemporary bureaucratic regimes.

Much of the time, the only motivation that matters is internal motivation.

Much of the time, if you want to cheat at the thing or cut corners, you can, and the results will be...not necessarily as good, depending on your skills, but vastly more efficient.

Much of the time, if you want people to do the thing the real way - you have no choice but to reward them for doing the thing the real way, directly, with status and resources and meaning, instead of looking to some external goal or metric and hoping that this one will somehow be cheat-proof.

To spell out the thought process a bit more sedulously -

People are not going to do the thing unless you teach them to want to do the thing. For its own sake, more or less. In the idealized case, because they care about doing the thing in a sort of pure abstract autistic way; in the more-easily-managed psychological/narcissistic case, because they care about being thing-doers. Either of these is fine, and works, mostly.

How do you get people there? Through education, indoctrination, and cultural suasion. Y'know, all the usual ways of inculcating values in people. [NOTE FOR PEOPLE SKIMMING ALONG: none of these things works reliably or precisely, we haven't invented mind control and you shouldn't act like we have, but they sorta-kinda work in aggregate and they're what we've got.] Which involves doing things like "creating the legible cultural role of the thing-doer" and "paying people to be thing-doers." (That last is what I've been thinking about, in the context of the weirdly parallel monastery economies invented by medieval Europe and classical China, where "paying people to pray" was absolutely a giant load-bearing part of the system.)

I am not enough of a business guy to know whether this is an accurate vision of How Things Work Right Now. I certainly don't regard the source as trustworthy or authoritative. It feels accurate, it matches up with lots of things I've heard in lots of different places, but - if the answer is "that's just not the system," I'm prepared to believe it.

Assuming arguendo, though, that it is How Things Work Right Now -

- that's the whole ballgame, right? That's every theory about why markets work, done and dusted, when it comes to the giant companies on which the modern world and the modern economy are built. That's "it doesn't matter how you feel about capitalism, because we are not actually doing capitalism right now in any sense that matters."

If make a good product, have people buy it, make lots of money, enjoy success is no longer viable as a business strategy in the realms that matter - if you literally have to be chasing unicorns forever until you flame out and die, even if you've already caught a unicorn or ten - if all your vast reams of profit are never allowed to cycle into the rest of the economy -

- how the hell is this supposed to work, even in theory?

I do not consider this a mortal wound to capitalism though. For many non-contiguous years it has been believed that at the "heights" of capitalism, the big macro-economics of what sectors of the economy money should flow to, socialism and capitalism just aren't that different. They both have very similar failures. In 2008 the financial-real estate-industrial complex destroyed $4 trillion of value, and if a government ever did that we'd have anarchy in a week.

Our society will run on a free market for rivalrous consumer goods, and only for rivalrous consumer goods. If you want to sell people cars or chicken nuggets or shampoo or board games, you found your company and make your product and reap either the profits or the doom. But that's not how we fund education or healthcare or art or research. Or, notably, software.

I am not enough of a business guy to know whether this is an accurate vision of How Things Work Right Now. I certainly don't regard the source as trustworthy or authoritative. It feels accurate, it matches up with lots of things I've heard in lots of different places, but - if the answer is "that's just not the system," I'm prepared to believe it.

Assuming arguendo, though, that it is How Things Work Right Now -

- that's the whole ballgame, right? That's every theory about why markets work, done and dusted, when it comes to the giant companies on which the modern world and the modern economy are built. That's "it doesn't matter how you feel about capitalism, because we are not actually doing capitalism right now in any sense that matters."

If make a good product, have people buy it, make lots of money, enjoy success is no longer viable as a business strategy in the realms that matter - if you literally have to be chasing unicorns forever until you flame out and die, even if you've already caught a unicorn or ten - if all your vast reams of profit are never allowed to cycle into the rest of the economy -

- how the hell is this supposed to work, even in theory?

4Chan World

Q: Why does so much of society seem to be made up of basically-interchangeable peasants with no distinguishing personal traits? A: Because it is.

There is a magic that comes to you sometime in your early adolescence. It asks you - Do you really want to be an individual person? Do you really want to be responsible for everything you do and everything you are? Because you don't have to be. You can be a face in the crowd, a part of the whole. You can experience and enjoy the world without having to bear up under it alone.

You can reject the magic. If you do, it will come back to you occasionally for a few years, making its offer again and again. Eventually it will stop.

If you ever accept, you cease to be yourself, and you become part of a...

...not a hive mind, not the way that we usually think of that thing. You're still there. Your consciousness doesn't dissolve into a greater whole. Let us call it, for now, a hive identity.

Also it would be very funny, also he's a great American who loves America and the American people (as opposed to a lot of people who love what they imagine building after they dismantle America for parts), also @daisukitoo's other reply:

This would make Donald Trump's face the symbol of unethical, clandestine financial transactions.

He's really not, though, and he really doesn't.

...I don't mean this in a "check out my counterintuitive lefty definition of patriotism" way. I mean that he openly despises large sectors of the country, including traditional touchstones of American patriotic identity, in a way that has no parallel in any other US politician of comparable stature. He's the guy who flubs and flouts military ritual observances, and basically insulted John McCain to his face for his veteran status. He's the guy who makes a point of tearing down the architecture of Washington, DC. He's the guy who doesn't even bother pretending that he values Every Citizen, as opposed to valuing Those Citizens Who Support Him.

And you can say that all of this is symbolic frou-frou, which is true, and that symbols can sometimes get detached from the things they're supposed to symbolize, which is also true.

But - it's all of a piece with everything we've already known about Donald Trump forever. From way before 2016! He values money and celebrity and success and nothing else! He spits on everyone that he considers a loser, which definitely includes most Americans! He is cosmopolitan enough to think of those foreigners who swim in his circles as His People - enough to marry one! He would absolutely have been a part of hoity-toity New York sophisticate culture, if the sophisticates would have had him!

How viable would it be to impose an entitlements tax on (certain forms of) non-cash compensation? Y'know - if you give your employee 5 shares of stock, you have to give 1 share to the Social Security Administration.

We already do this right? Those shares are taxable income.

...so they are. Told you it was a dumb question.