
Jack Ma's theory of how America went wrong over the past 30 years - taobility
http://www.businessinsider.com/alibaba-jack-ma-davos-america-history-globalization-2017-1
======
lend000
The Wall Street comments are a bit vague/nebulous, but the amount we've spent
on unnecessary war-mongering even after Vietnam is a relatively obvious
problem that apparently is no longer obvious, now that we lost our "anti-war"
party (the formerly anti-war Democrats).

Our bureaucratic programs at home are enough to dig us into a deep financial
hole (war-mongering wasn't the source of Greece's problems), but with the
added trillions wasted on building old weapons to perpetually blow up and
rebuild bridges (not to mention the magnitude of the atrocities committed by
the US), we are truly buried financially.

He probably doesn't even know about the CIA's less publicized warfare in
Central/South America and the financial/other consequences of the drug war on
our own citizens and especially on our neighbors.

~~~
srean
..but but without frequent wars how are we going to run a welfare state for
big corporations that produces artifacts with no natural demand. How are we
supposed to channel tax payer's money to them so that they can share some of
them back by employing people

~~~
fennecfoxen
Ethanol credits, duh.

------
jusq2
He forgot celebrity worshipfulness and the consumer culture.

The machine that produces celebrity/consumerism today is a hyper efficient
over optimized machine.

He is basically saying people didn't get what they need.

And that's because the celeb/consumerism machine's only job is to keep giving
people what they want.

What they need has nothing to do with it. Whether its Obama or Trump,
Zuckerberg or Musk, subprime mortgages or iphones it's all about what people
want and not need.

~~~
cyberferret
The advertising industry (which includes general media) have a lot to answer
for there. They've been "programming" 2 to 3 generations now to just buy stuff
and pay attention to people making the most noise for attention.

Not having had a TV in the house for over 8 years now, I was reintroduced to
the world of free to air TV during our Christmas holidays when we went away
for a month and stayed with friends who were avid TV watchers.

Been that long since I had seen a TV advertisement, and I was astounded at the
how banal and low brow most advertising is these days. I seem to remember a
time when ads were clever and creative, but the ones I kept seeing with
monotonous regularity were nothing more than quick sound bites ordering people
to go buy junk or watch more crap. Everything was really disjointed and
jarring to me - I actually came across a couple of shows that I wanted to
watch, but they never seemed to get started - every few minutes there was an
interruption telling me what else I "couldn't miss" watching, which are just
more shows that will in turn have interruptions to watch other shows. Oddly,
my friends who owned the TV didn't seem to see a problem.

Really makes me wonder if TV audiences these days are just conditioned to have
such a short attention span and are used to being forced fed suggestions like
this. Or perhaps they are so hardened to it that advertising companies have to
just blast short messages to them with all the subtlety of a drone strike?

Time for humanity to take control back over their time and attention,
otherwise it will just be "All glory to the Hypnotoad"...

~~~
jusq2
I am with you. The attention economy has all kinds of unintended side effects
that don't seem to have any great solutions.

And its not just advertising most entertainment/propaganda/marketing is
designed to just get an instant reaction. No contemplation necessary. Kind of
like porn.

And if we have to be honest hacker news is very similar. Nobody needs this
much news.

~~~
cyberferret
You hit the nail on the head. The ads I saw didn't seem to elicit any thought
or feedback or discussion. It was more like "Here - go do/watch this. I'll be
back shortly to tell you again soon!". Almost like training a dog. Rote
repetition and ever increasing sense of urgency and the fear of missing out.

A clear case of over promising and under delivering - and yet my friends
seemed to be content with lapping that up rather than questioning it or making
moves to reject it. It really is like those dystopian stories where humans are
enslaved by the messages emanating from their TVs. Honestly, I felt like
taking a shower after each TV watching session...

I've been home a month now, and not missing having a TV one iota!

------
panic
This all may be true, but I think the more fundamental problem is the
ignorance of the average American about how their government works. A former
Supreme Court justice lays it out in this prescient video from 2012:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWcVtWennr0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWcVtWennr0).
People are frustrated with their government but don't understand how to fix
it.

~~~
peterwwillis
The argument he's putting forth is so incredibly vapid and simple-minded that
it's a stunning indictment of the lack of vision of a supreme court judge into
the American zeitgeist.

Americans understand the basic concept of the vote. A freaking six year old
understands it. There are leaders, and they sycophantically grovel for the
favor of the public, which the public gives freely in exchange for the
politician promising to give them their hearts' desire. And then the public
may or may not get what they want. If the politician cannot appropriately
explain the reasons for this, they are dumped and the next sycophant is wrung
through.

That's about all they know, and all they need to know, because the people
should not have to lobby their government in a democracy, the democratic
leaders should already know what the people want and achieve it on their
behalf, and in general do good for the people. But that is not what happens in
America.

Here, our political leaders don't serve the people. And the people know that.
But the people can't do anything about it. And the reason they can't do
anything about it is the people voted their way into this mess. Trying to vote
their way out will just result in exactly the same thing.

What the former Justice is saying is, the biggest problem in politics and
public life is people don't understand how the legislative and judicial and
executive processes work. But people do not need to know how this works, they
merely need to voice their opinions and vote. And half of the people do vote.
The other half don't vote either because they can't, or because they know what
the result of voting is.

The American democracy in the 20th and 21st century is an artisanal machine
which produces a specific output. Votes and labor go in, and money comes out.
But the machine is designed to mostly spit out money which can only be used by
corporations and rich people; only a small percentage of that comes out in a
form usable by the people. The people know their votes are mostly meaningless,
but it is their only tangible method left to express their discontent. So they
support the system that produces an awful result because it's the only way
they can express that the machine produces an awful result.

I think the people see this contradiction, and I think this is why so many do
not vote: it's like complaining that your shoe hurts and then putting it on
again to see how it will fit.

~~~
FooBarWidget
I'm not an American and I don't really understand why you say this. Only a
small percentage that the machine produces comes out in a form usable by non-
rich people? Then what's, for example, Obamacare, which seems to be a system
that finally resembles how health insurance works in many European countries?
And isn't that same Obamacare under fire by lots of people who think that the
machine _shouldn 't_ support the people and that everybody needs to support
themselves instead of taking a piece of tax money?

I'm more confused than before.

~~~
mirimir
No, Obamacare only _pretends_ to resemble European-style healthcare. In fact,
it merely forces everyone to sign up with _private_ health insurance
companies. Which still take their _huge_ profits.

~~~
fennecfoxen
Yes, and private health insurance companies have profits so huge that they're
pulling out of the insurance markets left and right and saying "sorry, we're
just not interested in this business anymore!" Arizona's had it worst – many
places there are on their last insurer – but that's just a taste of the
phenomenon.

The premium hikes are paying for the treatment of the "uninsurable" and
chronically ill. Even the profitable for-profit insurers are only running
margins of 3%, maybe 4% in a good year. You could turn them all nonprofit and
it wouldn't really help premiums. (And people tried! Look at the health-care
co-op collapses in Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, Nevada and
Tennessee, and Oregon, as well!)

~~~
mirimir
OK, maybe Obamacare is melting down in some states. But national healthcare
works in Europe, Canada, etc. So what's so special about the US?

~~~
fennecfoxen
If we want to compare apples to apples, national healthcare doesn't work in
Europe. It works in _a variety of individual countries within Europe_ , some
of which are imperiled. (And Canada has a population a tenth the size of the
US.) Some of those countries have culturally homogenous well-educated
populations smaller than the United States illegal immigrant population, so
there's a demographic difference. That said...

Euro health care, writ large, works in the sense that "this is a substantial
tax on our national incomes and possibly contributes to an economy which
continues to suffer low growth rates and youth unemployment rates regularly in
excess of 25% – and given the Euro crisis on top of that there may be some
ugly cuts in the future, especially in places that aren't Germany." (Canada's
health care at least has less of that problem.)

These national health care systems generally deal with cost control for the
chronically ill and the elderly by rationing care through waiting lists for
various operations... or, in the case of the Netherlands, by building a
culture which pushes the elderly into assisted suicide.

(This is as opposed to the US who has historically dealt with them by making
them pay for their own care, but has recently switched to dealing with them by
hiking everyone's health care premiums to the point of unaffordability.)

Don't think I'm pitching solutions here!! I've just got buckets of cynicism
for _everyone_!

~~~
UncleSlacky
> Some of those countries have culturally homogenous well-educated populations
> smaller than the United States illegal immigrant population, so there's a
> demographic difference.

Dogwhistle for "can't have nice things because blacks". Notwithstanding the
relative homogeneity of their populations (the US is well down the list BTW),
what difference should it make?

~~~
fennecfoxen
> Dogwhistle for "can't have nice things because blacks"

Eh. To constrain it deliberately to white people, think "established
prosperous modern family, maybe WASPs or atheists, living in the Washington,
D.C. suburbs with two stable incomes, commute on the Metro" vs, oh, "army
veteran in a community in rural Appalachia which is reeling from the end of
coal mining and wreaked by both prescription painkiller abuse and obesity,
heavy smoker... local no-name church is the main community center ...
considering a job driving a truck."

"Inner city African-American community" or not is but a small portion of this
class of differences. Copenhagen vs Aeroskobing is a smaller gap than New York
City vs Beards Fork, WV.

------
snowwrestler
This "brutal theory" is the banal obvious stuff you can find on Twitter for
free in 5 minutes.

~~~
kelukelugames
Mods should remove the word brutal from the title.

------
NicoJuicy
Jack Ma is very protective like China, if Americans / rest of the world was
like that, chances were unlikely that China could grew so much.

Also, by any measures, China is cheating right now and trying to minimize the
capital bubble risk created by the government ( loans that are not payed back
with worthless warranties eg. Failed buildings, subsidized shipping,
manipulated / protected stocks,... ). Let's see what the future brings.

PS. If downvoted, please explain why and if you have ever travelled to China
:)

------
visarga
It's always about the choice between short-term vs long-term benefits, or
between us and them, or rich and poor. When people don't act as if other
people (or even themselves, in the future) are connected to them, they make
bad choices in the long term. On personal terms it's a battle between
temptation and moral action.

It's basically a problem of strategy in games (here, the game being well-
being). There are two main strategies: optimize for low level features
(immediate benefit) or high-level features (what you should do in order to
succeed). Companies battle the same choices, often very rich and successful
ones optimizing for short term instead of long term, as if they expect to
close shop in a few years.

The main purpose of politics should be to balance the focus between short and
long term strategies, but short term relies on corruption and long term on
consciousness, so it's an uphill battle. It's also called principle of
"delayed gratification" \- few can handle the rigors of it.

With the new Trump administration we should prepare for a lot of short-term
based choices that ignore the long-term consequences.

------
teknologist
Jack Ma: a guy whose success can only be attributed to the existence of
China's Internet firewall. I try to avoid reading about his "insights".

~~~
runholm
He is not a neutral source of information, but his views might be interesting
to read because of his unique bias. He has a perspective on the world which is
very different from most other sources I read.

------
woodandsteel
The idea that the US's economic problems are due to war expenditures is just
plain silly.

The economic golden age for the US was during the cold war, when the country
spent 6-10% of its gdp on the military. Then the cold war ended, and military
expenditures have been below 4% most of the time, but the US economy has done
worse. Oh, and China has boomed at the same time it has been engaging in a
huge, expensive military modernization program.

I am not saying high military expenditures produce economic prosperity, just
that they don't prevent it (unless they are much higher, as the Soviet Union's
were).

------
thinkingkong
So... hindsight is 50/50\. Anyone can look back and say what someone shouldnt
have done and be "correct" but other action would have resulted in a different
unknown outcome.

It is cool that theres a dialogue about this at such a forum and spearheaded
by a respected individual, but its nowhere near new information. Without an
alternative its also just non-constructive criticism.

~~~
lobster_johnson
On the other hand, what he's describing is still the status quo.

------
lexap
Ma makes a good point, but he's implicitly saying the China's authoritarian
regime wouldn't have lost the money as "free" market actors did in the US.

Sure, fine, but most Chinese would trade that money for American political
freedoms and economic opportunities in a heartbeat.

~~~
SwellJoe
I don't know if "free market actors" is exactly the right way to describe the
two things he talks about. War is certainly not a function of the market, Wall
Street is kind of a grey area that uses the language of free markets to
describe something that is an odd state-empowered cartel. Clearly the bailout
was not a "free market" event.

So...I don't think he is implicitly or explicitly saying anything about
China's authoritarian regime. It wasn't free markets that lost the money he's
speaking of. And, there wasn't a trade of that money for political freedoms
and economic opportunities. The American people just got a bad deal out of
their government and their financiers. They didn't buy freedom with that
money, they just got fleeced.

------
rmetzler
I think it might be much more than $2 trillion the US spent on wars. Remember
Sept 10th 2001? Donald Rumsfeld said on this day, they can't find out how they
spent $2.3 trillion.

------
thisnotmyacc
What rubbish!

This is the thinking of someone that lives in a country with a philosophy that
puts country before individuals.

By almost every and any measure, we are all better off than 30, 40 or 50 years
ago - Chinese, Americans, Indians, Europeans, almost everyone. There IS a
subset within those places that has benefited less, or even gone backwards, no
doubt.

But even for those people, what is the economic value of the wonders of the
modern, internet and mobile phone age? When for the cost of an internet
connection, people have access to millions of free flash games? Is that a
better life than 1970s Harlem? I'm not sure either way, but it is a lot closer
run thing that life is worse for the "losers" of globalization than people
realize, and that is the comparison for the small minority that have missed
out in the modern world, not the mean or median experience.

The only way people are worse off is if they compare the best of 1960s living
- e.g. have only the husband work, own a 4 bedroom house in the burbs, make a
decent salary without a degree - and ignore the things missing that are
present in the modern lifestyle. Because in the 1960/70/80s west, people ate
only basic food (nothing "foreign" like Thai or Indian), very few had cable
TV, and went out at most once a week to the movies. They never bought an
espresso, never owned a modern electronic device like a computer, never got to
use the internet to settle an argument or play a computer game, unless they
were extremely well off and got to play Pong circa say 1980.

If that sounds like a life people prefer - a big house, no lifestyle, no
electronics, basic cable if lucky and only white people food - then I reckon
most people could live like that even today if they so chose. But man, that
isn't a life I'd be happy with. Not even slightly.

If that is "losing" \- better lifestyle, better food, better (and cheaper)
entertainment and slightly smaller living conditions and more people working,
man, "winning" would have been insanely good.

~~~
timthelion
We eat less fresh food, we are less healthy, we are less happy, we are less
able to go out in the woods or to the beach, because the woods have been
logged or otherwise privatised in such a way that they are no longer
accessible . The products we own and buy are of lower quality, they break more
quickly. But that lower quality has not caused their price to drop
tremendously. There are fewer Americans with the capital to sustain
themselves, aka fewer small business owners who are able to make a living
without having to find employment from some larger firm. And that directly
results in reduced freedom for everyone, because there is less choice both in
the employment sector and in the sector of choosing who you buy from.

And the only thing you have to offer is shitty cat videos with 30 second
advertizements before 2 minutes of user created content.

Oh, and your stupid GDP. You know what the GDP measures? It is value transfer
economics. It measures how many times money passed back and forth between two
parties. If there weren't taxes you and I could spend all day passing $20
bills back and forth and our collective GDP would be higher than that of
Switzerland. Completely meaningless number.

~~~
leereeves
People today eat less fresh food and are less healthy largely by choice.

People like to sit around, watch TV, play video games, and eat junk food. No
one has to force us to do those things.

~~~
timthelion
I dissagree. I know of a number of famillies who used to have a small
business, grow their own veggitables, and sell some vegitables on the side.
However, the price of food, and the simple services of that these people
provided has dropped, due to mass production, and those famillies were forced
by lack of money, to change their lifestyles. They had to either sell land or
take up a full time job elsewhere which meant that they no longer had time to
live the way they used to.

~~~
leereeves
No doubt the economy has been hard for small farmers, but that's not why
people aren't eating fresh food or exercising enough.

As you said, the price of food has dropped, and exercise is free.

~~~
timthelion
The price of food has dropped, but the price of fresh food has risen.

If you live in LA, unless you have the time to go out to one of the farmers
markets, its not even possible to buy fresh food. The "fresh" food in the
stores isn't fresh. It is usually weeks or even months old. Sometimes it has
been on a ship across the ocean stored in a special atmosphere, maybe it
"looks fresh" but it isn't. I grew up in Seattle, things are a bit better
there, but you still have to drive out of your way to find fresh food. The
concept of fresh and the concept of supermarket are just incompatible.

~~~
leereeves
But as you said, fresh food is available in farmer's markets. And if the price
of fresh food has risen, it should be possible to make a living growing and
selling it.

Except that the majority of people don't seek out fresh food.

~~~
timthelion
It might be possible to make a living growing and selling it, but it is
actually quite unrealistic that a sizable portion of the population could
choose to start doing so. %100 of the land in the US is owned now. Its not
like the fronteir days when anyone who wanted to start a farm could just go
out west. If 1 million americans wanted to start a fresh foods farm within
driving distance of a city, that wouldn't be possible. The price of land would
skyrocket. And that would only be one third of one percent of all Americans.
Not even a significant shift. What if 20 or 30 million Americans wanted to
make that transition. Is that economically possible in todays world? What if
the government were to give anyone who wanted to start a familly farm a
million dollars to buy land. Would it be possible then? I don't think so. I
think that it isn't about choice. I think that it is litterally impossible for
our society to change without the fundamental ideas regarding property rights
or urbanization changing.

~~~
leereeves
You just said you know families who owned land who couldn't make a living
growing and selling it anymore.

So it's not lack of land that stopped them.

~~~
timthelion
"So it's not lack of land that stopped them." You're missing a sense of
timescale here. For a long time the number of familly farms has been
decreasing all across the country. Recently, it has become possible to make a
living selling fresh food if you live within driving distance of a city where
you can sell the food for a premium. The high cost of a fresh head of letuce
in LA in 2016-17 doesn't help a small time farmer in rural Colorado in the
90s.

~~~
leereeves
Still leaves the question of why people in the 90s weren't buying fresh food
from the small farmers.

~~~
timthelion
That's true. It is a good question. And its the question we should be asking.
We should be trying to debug this problem, rather than pretending that it is a
non-problem.

I personally don't see my own anti-capitalistic views as being a matter of
politics or political direction. I see the problems posed as being similar to
aging or the need to find better forms of transportation. No one argues that
aging is good. Everyone agrees that the outcome of aging is bad, people get
slower, less inteligent, suffer and die. That is bad... I see the current
outcome of American globalist capitalism to be similar. Obviously, the outcome
sucks. Most people are unhealthy, unhappy, there are advertizements
everywhere, we are destroying the earth, and living in smelly toxic concrete
filled cities. I'm not a communist, or a socialist, or a progressive, I'm an
engineer who is baffled by a huge problem that I don't know how to solve. I am
totally baffled by the huge number of people who seem to question whether
these problems are real. Its like if this thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13419352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13419352)
was full of people writing that "well you can point to some problems with
aging, but really, we're all better off getting old and dying". My response
would be similar, it would be like WTF? I don't have a solution to American
corporate globalism and the problems it causes, I don't have a solution to
aging either, but I want a solution to both.

~~~
leereeves
I'm not pretending it's a non-problem.

It's a much much bigger problem: human nature leads us to make bad choices,
willingly.

But short of a miracle pill or a totalitarian regime that forces us all to
live healthy lives, I don't see a solution.

~~~
timthelion
You are also not the OP who I origionally responded to. thisnotmyacc wrote "By
almost every and any measure, we are all better off than 30, 40 or 50 years
ago - Chinese, Americans, Indians, Europeans, almost everyone." And that is
pretending we have a non-problem and that our society is functional.

Edit:

I think that it is worse than just a problem with human nature. As I wrote,
previously, I think it is economically non-possible for Americans to choose to
go back to growing local food. %100 land is owned, and most owners are not
selling, the price of land is high, and most Americans cannot afford to buy
that land. Perhaps charging large farms land rent (aka, only charging land
rent to large corporations) would help
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism)
but I'm not sure if I believe that democracy is capable of implementing any
sort of reform non-corruptly.

~~~
leereeves
I think we're talking about different things. You're talking about being self-
sufficient small farmers; I'm just talking about eating healthy and
exercising.

People could certainly choose to do that if they wanted to.

~~~
timthelion
I don't think that they could. Because in order to be able to buy fresh food,
you need a suply of fresh food, and where is that fresh food going to come
from, if not from small time farmers? And if it is impossible for a large
number of people to become small time farmers, then if more people choose to
eat fresh, the price of fresh food will only rise to the point where they no
longer have the choice to do so.

~~~
leereeves
If enough people wanted fresh food, more would be grown.

