What is back to basics mean here? Forgetting metrics, for a national economy, seems not good.

Incentivize our basic necessities and come down hard on fraud. If a bridge needs to be rebuilt pay to have it done. If shipping infrastructure needs to be modernized pay to have it done. If we need more mining get it done. Get it done and get it done fast. If bids are won but they go and fuck all the money away send them to jail. This is how stuff worked before people became obsessed with metrics.

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glenstein 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

So just for one example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics started publishing jobs reports in 1915. But having monthly jobs reports on the cotton sector lead to increased fraud and stopped bridges from being built?

What's the mechanism? People are distracted by the amount of cotton production, which is the perfect time to falsify an earnings report?

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franktankbank 3 days ago | parent [-]

How long were supply chains back then? 2-5 nodes in a typical case?

I'm not saying publishing of statistics is what caused this shit to happen dingus. I'm saying focusing on it exclusively is dumb and it is wiser to look at a granular level. We can't look at this level because once you have a 150 node supply chain how trustworthy are the receipts?

What if your body had a metric as dumb as our high level economic metrics. We'd all be doing our best to get fat as fuck.

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brnaftr361 3 days ago | parent [-]

I think you have a point, at the resolution of personal liability shit is and has been cooked. Without being able to hold people to account for their misdeeds, misdeeds are de facto allowed and especially when you can obfuscate information. It's Goodhart's law in action, the sector looks good because we're shooting for targets in a heuristic measure but the reality is glum.

Worse is when fundamentals are [effectively] meaningless and everyone is a betting and hoping to pass it on to the greatest fool, even worse when that greater fool is the general public who are too with their own lives to fixate on the intractable nuances of the effects that Algerian hornet slayers are having on the price of tangerines which is buoying banana prices in Rwanada because legislation was passed last week in Kentucky.

Paradoxically, scale and complexity, but also psuedocomplexity (read:obscurantism) drive us towards these heuristics and effectively incentivise deeper cycles of Goodhart derangement. I expect this is a peculiar aspect of America's largess, though. The American cultural diaspora is actually pretty diverse from my experience.

	▲	franktankbank 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you. I don't know if my point is any good but you understood what I was trying to get across with my general frustration with how our economy is managed and discussed.

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pavlov 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When exactly was this golden age of getting things done fast without metrics and corruption?

	▲	wredcoll 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Oh yes, the famously non corrupt years of standard oil or randall hearst?
	▲	3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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JumpCrisscross 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> If a bridge needs to be rebuilt pay to have it done. If shipping infrastructure needs to be modernized pay to have it done

This is what they did in Weimar Germany, Erdogan’s Turkey and Argentina. You’re describing massive deficit spending and inflation.

> If bids are won but they go and fuck all the money away send them to jail

Add in Ba’athist Iraq.

Also, guess what you do to fuck over your competitors in this system? You sabotage their supply chains. The politically connected wind up with all the tenders because they’re the only ones who can build.

> This is how stuff worked before people became obsessed with metrics

Literally never how it has worked in any functioning society. When you see this sort of strong arming, it describes a society in decline. The Late Roman Empire. The British in Suez. The French in Indochine. The Russians in Ukraine.

	▲	franktankbank 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		How do you sabotage your competitors supply line without sabotaging your own? Seems like it would be mitigated quite effectively by strong anti-trust enforcement. If a corporate empire is so diversified then it should be broken up in separate entities. How was it done in the US during WWII and in the following few decades? I guess that was just command done therightway(TM) like China does today? Is jailing fraudsters really the equivalent of some failed Iragi regime? I think you could make a better argument. What do you think should be done about the state of the USA economy? Do you even see any problems that need addressing? I have a feeling venture capitalists see wildly different incentives from the laborers.