Wow! An easy answer to every problem. I think you might actually have a semantic stop-sign; an answer to everything that suppresses curiosity. Why isn’t the hospital curing more patients? “That’s not its purpose!”
The purpose of the hospital is to cure patients as cost-effectively as it can. We don’t have enough doctors in Canada, not because that is by design, but because we are failing as a country and could do better.
The internet was obviously not created with that intention, but social media may have that purpose.
Anyway, what I love about this phrase, the purpose of a system is what it does, is that it implies there’s no point in trying to fix anything. There’s no point in even checking if there is anything that can be fixed or improved; there is no point in separating the good stuff from the bad when we burn everything down; the only way to improve anything is revolution. That’s different of course from my perspective – revolution can fix the worst problems but there still exist other problems that can be solved without such a dicy method.
If the purpose of a hospital is to only cure enough patients, the question becomes; “Why is the purpose of a hospital to cure just enough patients?”
You aren’t supposed to just use it to argue in a circle. The purpose of a system is what it does, so, why is that the purpose of the system and why do we have that system?
It implies that the system is working as intented, and that’s why we need to destroy it to build an entirely different system.
I think you’re describing an heuristic for predicting how the hospital behaves as part of a larger dynamic system. For instance, the Canadian government makes the trade-off on where to reduce funding; it can pull tax dollars from hospitals and put it towards something else if it appears that doing so would increase the likelihood of re-election. So I assume you’re saying, the hospital saves just enough lives that it doesn’t create outrage that we’re not funding the hospital enough. (Or, perhaps, that the expected marginal cost:outrage tradeoff is not lower than any other place the government can sink tax dollars.) I think we ought at least agree here.
What I don’t get is why you describe this as “the purpose of the hospital.” I would say it like this: it’s the purpose of the government to identify the pareto frontier of where to put tax dollars (this may benefit some members of society more than others, and you could perhaps even convince me that’s its purpose); but it’s the purpose of the hospital to provide the best reduction in public outrage per dollar tax money received as possible – or in other words, to save as many lives as it can.
After the revolution, should we really tear down the hospital because it can’t meet our new government’s demands? Or is the hospital perfunctory and the system that it’s part of to blame? This is what is muddled, IMO, by “the purpose of the system is what it does.”
For instance, the Canadian government makes the trade-off on where to reduce funding; it can pull tax dollars from hospitals and put it towards something else if it appears that doing so would increase the likelihood of re-election.
But this isn’t how money works.
Canada prints its own currency, it doesn’t need to pull dollars from one place to fund something else. The government can actually fund everything and just print more dollars to make up the difference. Austerity isn’t necessary.
So, why does it happen?
This heuristic can’t explain why anything happens, but that’s not what it’s for? It’s for raising the contradictions and forcing us to ask harder questions of systems, like: if a country prints its own currency why would it ever choose austerity?
There’s still more work to do to answer that question and this heuristic is useless for doing so, it’s really only a basic first step towards building a critique.
The government can actually fund everything and just print more dollars to make up the difference.
That is simply not true. The government may print arbitrarily much money, but due to inflation that will not necessarily fund everything. Who would accept worthless money in exchange for services?
If “TPOASIWID” actually raised further questions, that would be very useful! But it does not raise further questions. When I see somebody say that phrase, I assume they have no interest in learning more about the system as they already have the only answer they ever need. Who would say “TPOASIWID” and then go on to do a cost-benefit analysis? It is not the first basic step toward a critique – it’s the last.
That is simply not true. The government may print arbitrarily much money, but due to inflation that will not necessarily fund everything. Who would accept worthless money in exchange for services?
But that still begs the question of “would printing money for hospitals produce enough liquidity to cause runaway inflation (almost certainly not)?” and “why fund this and not that?” and “why do we collect taxes instead of letting inflation do the exact same thing?” or even “so what stops the government from using price controls to fight inflation instead of just austerity?”
There are answers to these questions, but without TPOASIWID these questions never even get asked.
When I see somebody say that phrase, I assume they have no interest in learning more about the system as they already have the only answer they ever need.
Is that what you’re seeing from my comments? I think I’ve shown you that this heuristic can be useful for raising further questions!
When I see people not using this heuristic I see people fall for lies.
Yes, printing more money for hospitals would liquefy the whole economy into jello. We can’t solve our problems by printing more money. Inflation is very bad, in particular it’s bad for the working class who don’t have the luxury of having non-monetary assets.
“Why fund this and not that”
This is the very thing I raised as an argument against TPOASIWID. If a hospital isn’t saving enough cancer patients, it’s because it doesn’t have enough money. Now, money doesn’t explain everything of course – perhaps there are some racially-linked diseases that are underfunded, and here “TPOASIWID” serves an explanation, but a rather bad one because it doesn’t actually explain anything. A better explanation might be “it’s due to institutional racism,” or “it’s simply an oversight,” or “the technology to cure this disease doesn’t exist yet” – and then you might look at why it doesn’t exist and you’ll be looking at something other than the hospital. “The purpose of the hospital is to have institutional racism” doesn’t make sense at all – it’s the purpose of institutional racism to infect the hospital, and the purpose of leftists to purge institutional racism.
“why do we collect taxes instead of letting inflation do the exact same thing?”
This presents the best case for TPOASIWID in my opinion. That’s an interesting question too. (I suppose the answer is that taxes benefit the working class of course, whereas inflation benefits the wealthy, who hardly have any money when compared to their investments.) But I don’t see how saying “The purpose of taxes is what they do” leads one to querying about inflation. I’m not an expert about the economy, but taxes seem to me like they more or less do the thing they’re supposed to be doing so TPOASIWID does seem to match here, at least when compared to “why not just use inflation for taxation.” (Neither of these methods will touch tax-averse autocrats of course.)
Does it match because TPOASIWID is good at prediction? No – it simply discounts the possibility that a system could be failing, so of course it looks accurate when a system is apparently not failing. It’s a brazen assertion that whoever is running the world is doing things exactly right and simply can’t fail. This seems insane to me because things are hard. Take the USA’s “War on Drugs” – in my view and probably that of most people, it was a spectacular failure in retrospect. What was the purpose of the war on drugs? Well to answer that we should look at who wanted it to happen and why. In my opinion, it was spurred on by many people who just really wanted to eradicate drugs, and didn’t have ulterior motives. But TPOASIWID just leads one to conspiracy theories: since the War on Drugs basically just got a lot of black people thrown in jail, then surely all those people who claim to hate drugs must actually just hate black people, and not drugs at all! After all, if they actually hated drugs, then WoD would have been successful.
But I’ll admit that if you don’t know the purpose of a system, figuring out what it does is a good place to start.
Yes, printing more money for hospitals would liquefy the whole economy into jello.
The value of money floats on the market - supply and demand.
On the supply side the government creates money when it funds programs and destroys money when it collects taxes. Importantly, taxes don’t fund programs. Programs are funded by fiat and taxes are a way to reduce the supply of money in the economy.
On the demand side, funding programs creates economic growth and taxes must be paid in the currency being printed. Printing money doesn’t create “national debt” or whatever, it creates jobs and investment and growth by funding essential services.
Taxation acts on both the supply and demand side of the problem. The way to control inflation is taxation, not austerity. Austerity, in fact, can make inflation worse because it shrinks the economy and reduces demand for dollars i.e. stagflation.
Printing money for the hospitals would be immensely positive. It would create economic growth by giving people longer and more productive lives (which means economic productivity), on top of employing more hospital staff and creating demand for more pharmaceuticals and equipment, which in turn creates jobs for pharmacists and equipment manufacturers, etc etc.
Someone lied to you when they told you we can’t afford to fund the hospitals.
Now, money doesn’t explain everything of course – perhaps there are some racially-linked diseases that are underfunded, and here “TPOASIWID” serves an explanation, but a rather bad one because it doesn’t actually explain anything.
…
“The purpose of the hospital is to have institutional racism” doesn’t make sense at all – it’s the purpose of institutional racism to infect the hospital, and the purpose of leftists to purge institutional racism.
The purpose of hospitals in Canada is to have institutional racism. That doesn’t mean that the concept of hospitals is racist and I think we can be a little more granular than defining all hospitals as racist.
It’s a brazen assertion that whoever is running the world is doing things exactly right and simply can’t fail.
Yet you do the opposite, you’re making the credulous assertion that whoever is running the hospitals is trying their best and they aren’t intentionally killing people. You do it again here:
But TPOASIWID just leads one to conspiracy theories: since the War on Drugs basically just got a lot of black people thrown in jail, then surely all those people who claim to hate drugs must actually just hate black people, and not drugs at all!
“Whoever is running this War on Drugs is simply doing their best to stop drugs and they aren’t intentionally filling the prisons with Black people. They certainly aren’t running drugs and guns for cartels to fund CIA off-the-books operations in Latin America!”
You’re very trusting of the people in charge and this is why TPOASIWID is so useful - it makes me skeptical of powerful people. At the very least it should be one of the ways you approach systems when you try to understand them, even if it isn’t the only one. I certainly don’t assume the people in charge are perfect and that everything is going Just As Planned!
The purpose of a hospital is to cure just enough patients.
And the purpose of Ukraine is to be caught in a stalemate. The West gives them just enough support to never lose, but never enough support to win.
And the purpose of the British government is to pretend like it is responsive to protests.
And the purpose of buses is to burn gasoline and support the oil industry, when trains or trams would be much more efficient.
And the purpose of arguing on the internet is to waste everyone’s time while accomplishing nothing
Etc etc
Wow! An easy answer to every problem. I think you might actually have a semantic stop-sign; an answer to everything that suppresses curiosity. Why isn’t the hospital curing more patients? “That’s not its purpose!”
The purpose of the hospital is to cure patients as cost-effectively as it can. We don’t have enough doctors in Canada, not because that is by design, but because we are failing as a country and could do better.
The internet was obviously not created with that intention, but social media may have that purpose.
Anyway, what I love about this phrase, the purpose of a system is what it does, is that it implies there’s no point in trying to fix anything. There’s no point in even checking if there is anything that can be fixed or improved; there is no point in separating the good stuff from the bad when we burn everything down; the only way to improve anything is revolution. That’s different of course from my perspective – revolution can fix the worst problems but there still exist other problems that can be solved without such a dicy method.
If the purpose of a hospital is to only cure enough patients, the question becomes; “Why is the purpose of a hospital to cure just enough patients?”
You aren’t supposed to just use it to argue in a circle. The purpose of a system is what it does, so, why is that the purpose of the system and why do we have that system?
It implies that the system is working as intented, and that’s why we need to destroy it to build an entirely different system.
I think you’re describing an heuristic for predicting how the hospital behaves as part of a larger dynamic system. For instance, the Canadian government makes the trade-off on where to reduce funding; it can pull tax dollars from hospitals and put it towards something else if it appears that doing so would increase the likelihood of re-election. So I assume you’re saying, the hospital saves just enough lives that it doesn’t create outrage that we’re not funding the hospital enough. (Or, perhaps, that the expected marginal cost:outrage tradeoff is not lower than any other place the government can sink tax dollars.) I think we ought at least agree here.
What I don’t get is why you describe this as “the purpose of the hospital.” I would say it like this: it’s the purpose of the government to identify the pareto frontier of where to put tax dollars (this may benefit some members of society more than others, and you could perhaps even convince me that’s its purpose); but it’s the purpose of the hospital to provide the best reduction in public outrage per dollar tax money received as possible – or in other words, to save as many lives as it can.
After the revolution, should we really tear down the hospital because it can’t meet our new government’s demands? Or is the hospital perfunctory and the system that it’s part of to blame? This is what is muddled, IMO, by “the purpose of the system is what it does.”
But this isn’t how money works.
Canada prints its own currency, it doesn’t need to pull dollars from one place to fund something else. The government can actually fund everything and just print more dollars to make up the difference. Austerity isn’t necessary.
So, why does it happen?
This heuristic can’t explain why anything happens, but that’s not what it’s for? It’s for raising the contradictions and forcing us to ask harder questions of systems, like: if a country prints its own currency why would it ever choose austerity?
There’s still more work to do to answer that question and this heuristic is useless for doing so, it’s really only a basic first step towards building a critique.
I still think it’s extremely useful.
That is simply not true. The government may print arbitrarily much money, but due to inflation that will not necessarily fund everything. Who would accept worthless money in exchange for services?
If “TPOASIWID” actually raised further questions, that would be very useful! But it does not raise further questions. When I see somebody say that phrase, I assume they have no interest in learning more about the system as they already have the only answer they ever need. Who would say “TPOASIWID” and then go on to do a cost-benefit analysis? It is not the first basic step toward a critique – it’s the last.
But that still begs the question of “would printing money for hospitals produce enough liquidity to cause runaway inflation (almost certainly not)?” and “why fund this and not that?” and “why do we collect taxes instead of letting inflation do the exact same thing?” or even “so what stops the government from using price controls to fight inflation instead of just austerity?”
There are answers to these questions, but without TPOASIWID these questions never even get asked.
Is that what you’re seeing from my comments? I think I’ve shown you that this heuristic can be useful for raising further questions!
When I see people not using this heuristic I see people fall for lies.
(Sorry for the wall of text!)
Yes, printing more money for hospitals would liquefy the whole economy into jello. We can’t solve our problems by printing more money. Inflation is very bad, in particular it’s bad for the working class who don’t have the luxury of having non-monetary assets.
This is the very thing I raised as an argument against TPOASIWID. If a hospital isn’t saving enough cancer patients, it’s because it doesn’t have enough money. Now, money doesn’t explain everything of course – perhaps there are some racially-linked diseases that are underfunded, and here “TPOASIWID” serves an explanation, but a rather bad one because it doesn’t actually explain anything. A better explanation might be “it’s due to institutional racism,” or “it’s simply an oversight,” or “the technology to cure this disease doesn’t exist yet” – and then you might look at why it doesn’t exist and you’ll be looking at something other than the hospital. “The purpose of the hospital is to have institutional racism” doesn’t make sense at all – it’s the purpose of institutional racism to infect the hospital, and the purpose of leftists to purge institutional racism.
This presents the best case for TPOASIWID in my opinion. That’s an interesting question too. (I suppose the answer is that taxes benefit the working class of course, whereas inflation benefits the wealthy, who hardly have any money when compared to their investments.) But I don’t see how saying “The purpose of taxes is what they do” leads one to querying about inflation. I’m not an expert about the economy, but taxes seem to me like they more or less do the thing they’re supposed to be doing so TPOASIWID does seem to match here, at least when compared to “why not just use inflation for taxation.” (Neither of these methods will touch tax-averse autocrats of course.)
Does it match because TPOASIWID is good at prediction? No – it simply discounts the possibility that a system could be failing, so of course it looks accurate when a system is apparently not failing. It’s a brazen assertion that whoever is running the world is doing things exactly right and simply can’t fail. This seems insane to me because things are hard. Take the USA’s “War on Drugs” – in my view and probably that of most people, it was a spectacular failure in retrospect. What was the purpose of the war on drugs? Well to answer that we should look at who wanted it to happen and why. In my opinion, it was spurred on by many people who just really wanted to eradicate drugs, and didn’t have ulterior motives. But TPOASIWID just leads one to conspiracy theories: since the War on Drugs basically just got a lot of black people thrown in jail, then surely all those people who claim to hate drugs must actually just hate black people, and not drugs at all! After all, if they actually hated drugs, then WoD would have been successful.
But I’ll admit that if you don’t know the purpose of a system, figuring out what it does is a good place to start.
The value of money floats on the market - supply and demand.
On the supply side the government creates money when it funds programs and destroys money when it collects taxes. Importantly, taxes don’t fund programs. Programs are funded by fiat and taxes are a way to reduce the supply of money in the economy.
On the demand side, funding programs creates economic growth and taxes must be paid in the currency being printed. Printing money doesn’t create “national debt” or whatever, it creates jobs and investment and growth by funding essential services.
Taxation acts on both the supply and demand side of the problem. The way to control inflation is taxation, not austerity. Austerity, in fact, can make inflation worse because it shrinks the economy and reduces demand for dollars i.e. stagflation.
Printing money for the hospitals would be immensely positive. It would create economic growth by giving people longer and more productive lives (which means economic productivity), on top of employing more hospital staff and creating demand for more pharmaceuticals and equipment, which in turn creates jobs for pharmacists and equipment manufacturers, etc etc.
Someone lied to you when they told you we can’t afford to fund the hospitals.
The purpose of hospitals in Canada is to have institutional racism. That doesn’t mean that the concept of hospitals is racist and I think we can be a little more granular than defining all hospitals as racist.
Yet you do the opposite, you’re making the credulous assertion that whoever is running the hospitals is trying their best and they aren’t intentionally killing people. You do it again here:
“Whoever is running this War on Drugs is simply doing their best to stop drugs and they aren’t intentionally filling the prisons with Black people. They certainly aren’t running drugs and guns for cartels to fund CIA off-the-books operations in Latin America!”
You’re very trusting of the people in charge and this is why TPOASIWID is so useful - it makes me skeptical of powerful people. At the very least it should be one of the ways you approach systems when you try to understand them, even if it isn’t the only one. I certainly don’t assume the people in charge are perfect and that everything is going Just As Planned!