[nicoburns]

> Don't be fooled by the contemporary contempt against finance. It's still the most important reason that explain the constant improvmements in prosperity and peace of recent years

I think the contempt comes from the fact that financial instruments have a tendency to concentrate those benefits in small proportion of the population. Low-cost mortgages are an excellent example: these have enabled wealth gain for those who were able to get them at a certain time. But that gain has come almost entirely at the expense of those who weren't able to (or simply didn't) get them, who now face greatly increased rent and house prices.

[lazide]

It isn’t financial instruments doing that - it’s people.

Be thankful that it allows this to happen somewhat transparently and peacefully, rather than at the hands of pinkertons, criminals, or the military - which is how historically it has happened.

[nicoburns]

The financial instruments (and the underlying rules of the economic system) are the enablers here. You're probably right that it's probably better than what came before, but that doesn't mean we can improve on the system we have.

[lazide]

Of course we can improve it - by identifying where people’s behaviors and systemic effects are causing undesirable behaviors. That probably doesn’t happen if we blame ‘finance’ for it though?

Every system has exploitable loopholes and will become unbalanced once enough people start gaming it. Some of them (especially new ones) are easier than others.

It’s easy to say ‘this is terrible’, but that can easily turn into rejecting a known system with adjustments and corrections for bad behaviors that isn’t perfect into a system that gets gamed even easier by bad actors and turns into an even worse (but different) mess. See 90% of all revolutions ever.

[CRConrad]

Judging from how utterly close that was to a well-worn idiom, I'm guessing what the GP meant to write was "that doesn't mean we can't improve..."

Just so you guys don't get into violent agreement.

[nicoburns]

Ha, yes I certainly did mean that. Sometimes I type HN comments too quickly.

[lazide]

Haha, for sure.

That’s it! Handshakes at dawn it is!

[CRConrad]

The new Russian-roulette-ish form of dueling: Handshakes at dawn -- without hand sanitizer.

[andrepd]

> It isn’t X doing that - it’s people.

That's quite a silly argument since you can very literally replace X by anything and get a true statement.

[lazide]

Definitely not true.

Wildfire burns down your house (assuming no intentional negligence?) - fire burned down your house.

Tsunami happens and wipes out your village? That was a tsunami, not people.

Neighboring countries army invades? Yeah, that’s people.

[andrepd]

Anything man-made, as should be obvious.

Example: It isn't democracy doing that, just people. It isn't autocracy doing that, just people. It isn't socialism doing that, it's people. It isn't capitalism doing that, it's people.

Therefore democracy = dictatorship, and socialism = capitalism. It's all the same, it's all people in the end, so it's no matter.

Patently absurd.

[lazide]

If you replace ‘finance’ with another system, I guarantee you’ll end up with another disaster soon enough. The only way you get halfway decent stability in any human run system is to build in expectations of human corruption and add in methods for self interested (aka greedy) people to get payoffs by tackling said corruption.

The problem is that people are involved, and you’re not realizing what that means - people inherently are corrupt, self interested, short sighted, power hungry, etc.

[andrepd]

>If you replace ‘finance’ with another system, I guarantee you’ll end up with another disaster soon enough.

>The only way you get stability in any human run system is to build in expectations of human corruption and add in methods for self interested people to get payoffs.

So which is it? Systems don't matter, or we need to build better systems? x) It seems these two sentences directly contradict each other.

>you’re not realizing what that means - people inherently are corrupt, self interested, short sighted, power hungry, etc.

I'm pretty sure I've noticed this before, actually. Why the condescension? Precisely what I'm defending is that we need systems where the greedy and the powerful cannot run steamrollers over the weak.