As a pioneer banker hell bent on decimating the entire population of bison on the Oregon Trail, and yet only being allowed to take 100 pounds of meat and leave the rest as a warning to the other animals, I and my Apple II approve this message.
They're trolling, they're trying to create a logical knot by pitting different values they perceive people to hold against each other to try and create contradiction and confusion. But it's easily untied by recognizing they don't have any interesting point to make and we can just ignore them.
Well, they're still there, they just don't get a platform and the creators get doxxed and hounded off the internet. A fairly recent example was a(nother) school shooter game.
The whole "Fuck big gov bailing out big bank! We are the 99%!" sentiment, if I had to take a guess.
The virtue of bailing out banks is certainly worthy of debate, but that is all irrelevant here because the parent comment implies the need (and there definitely is a need) to teach the masses what banking is, first of all.
Remember, these are people who can't tell apart bank bail outs from loan forgiveness from government handouts. The level of civic understanding among the masses is atrocious, and it isn't helped by the media and the powers that be doing their fucking damnedest to keep the masses ignorant and misguided.
Alas, that's fraught with a lot of ideology that would be a hornet's nest to stir up.
A big part of why historically banking has been so fragile in the US were their asinine bans on branch banking. Until fairly recently, banks were only allowed a single office in a single city. If that city was hit by hard times, the bank was also badly affected.
Compare that with eg Canada's nationwide chains, and their superior financial stability.
That's mispricing risk. Now the depositors have no reason to care whether their bank is creditworthy or well-managed, so the bank has the incentive to gamble with their deposits as much as possible. If they get lucky they get to keep the winnings, if they go belly up the FDIC eats the cost.
You guys are familiar with how we arrived at this particular regime of mispricing risk, right? It’s preferable to the alternative. This is why banks are tightly (but imperfectly) regulated.
Similar observations apply to that more fundamental instrument of mispriced risk - limited liability business entities. The worst possible arrangement, except for all the others.
Personally I prefer to tilt at the windmill of the asymmetrical payoff diagram of US CEO compensation structures. While it’s still the case that nobody much cares about my opinions on the subject, this one at least has less of an aspect of battle-tested socioeconomic optimality.
Americans didn't arrive at this particular set of institutional arrangements by some rational process that weighed the alternatives properly.
Really, have a look at eg https://www.cato.org/blog/there-was-no-place-canada for a comparison between American finance and Canadian finance. The Canadian arrangements were much superior to the old and new American system.
> Similar observations apply to that more fundamental instrument of mispriced risk - limited liability business entities. The worst possible arrangement, except for all the others.
I don't see what's wrong with it? In most countries you can form both limited liability business entities as well as unlimited liability business entities.
When you do business as a company you (typically) have to clearly declare what kind of business you are, and your counter-parties can decide whether they want to deal with you based on that information.
(At least for the most part. If a limited liability contractor paves my driveway, and they damage my neighbour's roses while they are at it, my neighbour never got a choice.)
> Personally I prefer to tilt at the windmill of the asymmetrical payoff diagram of US CEO compensation structures. While it’s still the case that nobody much cares about my opinions on the subject, this one at least has less of an aspect of battle-tested socioeconomic optimality.
Related:
In the years after the big financial crisis of 2008, Credit Suisse paid their bankers' bonuses in the form of 'toxic assets'. See eg https://archive.is/x3GKl
That make got the 'toxic assets' off Credit Suisse's balance sheet. It was also popular with the general public. And, the best part, over time those ostensibly toxic assets actually mostly paid off in full, so the bankers got a much better bonus than if they had gotten straight up cash.
The windmill I like to tilt at is the different tax treatment of equity vs debt in many tax systems around the world. Both shareholders and creditors demand a return on their capital. But when your business pays creditors, via interest and return of principal, that's usually with money that's less taxed ('pre-tax money') than when they pay dividends or do share buybacks ('post-tax money').
Most people agree that an economy with less leverage, ie less debt and more equity, is more stable and less prone to crises. But then we have tax systems that prefer debt.
We should at least treat them equally, or even better, tax debt higher than equity, to nudge company's in the direction of more equity.
(And, of course, there's also the big, big windmill of land value taxes being superior to almost every other form of taxation. But almost no one uses them.)
> If a limited liability contractor paves my driveway, and they damage my neighbour's roses while they are at it, my neighbour never got a choice.
Limited liability doesn't mean no liability. You can still go after them and get the assets of the company or its recent profits, which will generally be more than the value of some roses. You just can't get company owner's house.
But that sort of thing is always the case. There is no such thing as unlimited liability because nobody has unlimited assets. You can cause a million dollars in damage when you only have a hundred dollars to your name and there is nowhere for the money to come from.
Limited liability is just choosing the line at which we say something is closely enough associated with another thing to have to pay for its mistakes.
> But when your business pays creditors, via interest and return of principal, that's usually with money that's less taxed ('pre-tax money') than when they pay dividends or do share buybacks ('post-tax money').
It's worse than that. Corporate acquisitions use pre-tax money, which encourages business consolidation.
The real solution is to use consumption taxes instead of income taxes, which are much fairer, harder for tax laywers to avoid and less invasive of individual privacy, and are one of the best ways to tax international corporations. Then if you want a progressive tax system you just give each individual a tax refund in a fixed amount, which creates a progressive effective rate curve.
This would also have the benefit of disadvantaging debt, because you would have to borrow enough to pay the tax on whatever you buy and then pay interest on the higher amount, discouraging debt-based purchases.
But there are a bunch of misguided claims that it would hurt the poor somehow (even though they would be paying less in total tax after the refund), probably because it would actually work and the people who benefit from the status quo have to put out some argument against it.
Right, the depositors (up to the limit) don't have to care if it is solvent. They also don't get to keep any winnings by the bank.
The shareholder both get to keep the winnings and can get wiped out. So they are the ones who set the bank policy.
Factually, it seems that retail banks, those covered by the FDIC, don't tend to be poorly managed. There were some recent counterexamples in 2023 with rising interest rates, but in general bank failures are pretty rare. In the heights of the 2008 mess (which was in 2009/2010) around 2.5% banks were failing annually. That's not bad.
> The shareholder both get to keep the winnings and can get wiped out. So they are the ones who set the bank policy.
But it's the depositors' money they're gambling with.
Suppose you can put a million dollars of your money in something that has a 10% chance of netting you 20 million dollars and a 90% chance of losing your million dollars plus 20 million dollars of the depositors' money. That now has a positive expected value for you even though it has a negative expected value overall and results in a 90% chance of triggering a 20 million dollar claim against the FDIC.
Meanwhile your counterparty is quite happy because you gave them 21 million dollars in exchange for a 10% chance to less than double "your" money.
The industry eats the cost, not the FDIC, which funds it through industry taxes.
If your gamble fails, not only do you lose everything related to your endeavor, but now banking as a whole is more expensive, more people centralize into the big banks, and whatever business you want to start up or run afterwards is going to be more expensive.
This is why most banks don't gamble, because gambling like SVB did is really fucking stupid. You can be a boring bank and most likely mint profit for yourself for eternity, while also being seen as a positive actor in your city! The only people who aren't satisfied with such a set up are the same "Gotta grift everyone" silicon valley style assholes who think an economy is an idle game and they have to have the highest number because they are smartest and bestest.
> The industry eats the cost, not the FDIC, which funds it through industry taxes.
So in other words the FDIC eats the cost but the FDIC is really the taxpayer, or the customers of "banking industry" which is to say basically everybody.
> If your gamble fails, not only do you lose everything related to your endeavor, but now banking as a whole is more expensive, more people centralize into the big banks, and whatever business you want to start up or run afterwards is going to be more expensive.
But if your gamble succeeds you make an enormous amount of money and if it fails someone else pays most of the cost, so it's more profitable to make the gamble because you have privatized gains and socialized losses.
> You can be a boring bank and most likely mint profit for yourself for eternity, while also being seen as a positive actor in your city!
Are banks known for their desire to leave money on the table?
Isn't "banks will be conservative and responsible" the argument for not having mandatory insurance?
> Isn't "banks will be conservative and responsible" the argument for not having mandatory insurance?
The problem is not so much that the insurance is mandatory, but that it's provided by an entity whose pricing is set by the government, and which also enjoys the (implicit or explicit) backing of the government.
Privately and competitively provided insurance, even if mandated by the government, wouldn't be quite as bad.
Though I agree that giving banks the choice whether to get insured is a good one. Otherwise, you'd have to write regulation about what counts as 'good enough' insurance. Instead of letting customers of the bank decide what they are ok with.
> The industry eats the cost, not the FDIC, which funds it through industry taxes.
One problem is that FDIC does an insufficient job at charging banks of different riskiness different premiums.
Privately organised deposit insurance without an (implicit or explicit) government backstop would avoid that problem.
> You can be a boring bank and most likely mint profit for yourself for eternity, while also being seen as a positive actor in your city!
Banks caring about individual cities is a weird Americanism. Mostly stemming from their long standing bans on branch banking.
Minting profits for eternity is nice, but having money right now is also nice. A company can use their 'cost of capital' metric to make a rational decision between the two.
> The only people who aren't satisfied with such a set up are the same "Gotta grift everyone" silicon valley style assholes who think an economy is an idle game and they have to have the highest number because they are smartest and bestest.
Leave the ad-hominem at the door, please.
Managers have a fiduciary duty to the owners of the company. For most companies, and especially most banks, that means they have a duty to make money for the shareholders. (Shareholders can have other goals that they can task management with; making money is just the default.)
If managers shirk their fiduciary, shareholders can sue them. And that includes when they are shirking making the right trade-off between long term profits and short term profits:
Use your cost of capital to calculate the present value of future cash flows. Choose the path that has the largest present value.
If interest rates are high enough, it _is_ economic rational to chop down the entire forest for wood today, instead of harvesting it sustainable.
Btw, most banks do 'gamble'. They just differ in how much they gamble and on what.
Shares in a bank essentially behave like call options on the assets of the bank, where the strike price is the sum of debt and other liabilities of the bank.
When you are pricing an option ahead of time, you can still misprice them; even if it turns out that at the end of the day, the option turned out to expire out-of-the-money (ie the bank's shareholders get wiped out).
> Some states have also had restrictive bank branch laws; for example, Illinois outlawed branches (other than the main office) until 1967, and did not allow an unlimited number until 1993.
No worries. Though I should have been a bit more precise in my original statement.
Branch banking was almost universally forbidden in the US from the start of the country, then over the course of the 20th century, most restrictions were gradually lifted. That process was essentially completed in the 1990s.
The anti-branch-banking restrictions were (mostly) done at the state level; so it's hard to generalise over the whole union.
That stability comes from having a handful of banks declared too big to fail, and holding oligopoly power. Canadians enjoy some of the highest retail banking fees when compared with peer nations.
Yeah. I've played many video games with built in economies but not one of them ever tried to introduce the concept of lending. People really need to understand this.
MMORPGs provide a nice example of inflation though: when random enemies drop gold, you're printing money by playing the game. It's only natural that industrial money printing presses in the form of bots show up.
Counterpoint: Eve Online has both a massive in-game economy and a player base doing a ton of things on the side, including things like giving out loans and the like.
I mean the legitimate loans are outweighed by the scams so people are hesitant to actually set up these things, but still.
Renting is another one, you and your friends can rent a system from one of the larger alliances and get some protection while doing money making activities.
Supporting a lending economy in an MMO is an interesting problem. Collateralized loans would be pretty easy to implement. Maybe implementing a system for getting a lien against a long-term absentee debtor would be interesting as well. Making a more risky loan business, where lenders are responsible for reclaiming their loans by force if necessary could be a cool mechanic as well.
The responses to this comment illustrate how badly such things are needed.
What's so frustrating about all of it, is I agree heavily with the sentiment, but it's like saying a house is badly built because the sky is too heavy. No it's because it's made of cheap wood and bad angles, and you can't get anyone to change that if you don't understand and just go with your gut, ignoring hundreds of years of history.
People can have negative / positive sentiment on my proposal which seems like it tends to be something like a good idea. But, it seems like everyone isn't arguing about the merit of the idea but instead only of their own sentiment of banks instead of whether people need the education or not.
Though, one could assume where an official game from the Library of Congress would only approve a game that would further some kind of narrative but, I don't think it would be a good idea .
The economic games I've seen all were terrible simulations of markets, and would teach the wrong messages. Monopoly is one such example. (One of its major faults is one must roll the die and do whatever you land on says.)
I expect a banking simulator would hew to the ubiquitous propaganda that the Fed is there to stabilize the money supply. (It's actual purpose is to inflate the money. See Freidman's "Monetary History of the United States")
Markets are fundamentally about choice and trade offs. Monopoly is about runaway power dynamics created through random chance and force (you have to pay rent, you can’t choose not too).
1. you cannot increase the supply of property, or build something bigger than a hotel
2. rents are rules. You cannot be creative with rents. I.e. rent control
3. there are no predictable expenses to owning property
4. the only business you can engage in is property
5. there is no supply & demand at work
6. what properties you acquire is completely random
7. the outcome of the game is controlled by a roll of the dice. There is a strategy to Monopoly, but it is very simple, and soon everyone learns it and that ceases to be a choice
8. Not being able to collect rents on mortgaged properties is quite unlike any actual business
9. No interest is paid on debt
The biggest divergence from an actual marketplace is it is designed to be zero-sum. Markets are not zero-sum.
But if all players work together and vow to not buy any property, they will just keep accumulating money (the odd card aside) and eventually bankrupt the bank.
(I'm aware you can't technically bankrupt the bank but you get the idea).
No, it's to inflate the money whenever the government needs to spend it. Which is what it has done continuously since its inception. The same has happened in every other country that switched to fiat money.
Monetary policy isn't fiscal policy. Perhaps monetary policy is preventing politicians from facing the consequences of bad fiscal policy, but the alternative is suggesting accelerationism. It's not countries that relied on gold never overspent themselves to ruin.
>Think Oregon Trail, Flappy Bird, or Candy Crush, but with educational content that
teaches lessons about civics and incorporates Library of Congress resources.
That's a fairly interesting list. The author hasn't looked at games in a decade, I bet a themed version of 2048 would blow their mind.
I'm envisioning 2048, but themed around voting drives, with cookie-clicker-like graphics progression, culminating in a "you won all 50 states!" celebration.
> A cheat code must be built into the game to allow the judges to quickly play through the game in its entirety
Man, the NSA really can't control themselves...
But on a more serious note, the challenge doesn't require the participants to be US citizens nor US residents. I can imagine lots of interesting entries resulting from this policy: a game about privacy sponsored by the CCC, third-world developers for whom 10k is a big amount, games like Monopoly containing a hidden message about the failings of capitalism...
The rules specify that the games must be non-partisan. Are there any major contemporary issues being debated where opposing sides of the issue do not end up falling on partisan lines? It seems to me like anything as controversial as "privacy" could be labeled as partisan and disqualified.
Free speech is now considered "partisan" and "conservative ideology" in a bizarre turn of events.
Nowadays, the only dichotomy I face that seems to hold true is authoritarians vs not. No matter how they label themselves as in terms of regional party politics or political compass terms.
I think in this case, given the structure around the rules, I could imagine the mean “partisan” in a more explicit sense:
A game where you play as the Democrats to defeat Republicans would be explicitly partisan. A game where you learn about the consequences of defunding social security, in a way that nudges you away from cutting social security probably wouldn’t be considered partisan, even though it’s an issue ghat largely follows party lines.
Superb game. Wonder what the logic was to get that feeling of "no matter what you do you're doomed" but still made it incredibly fun and, to a degree, relatable looking at different parts of history (it's not one country but has aspects that are very familiar to many).
I hadn't seen this before and just played through it. I totally agree! And I think this is exactly appropriate for a civics game, except for that it doesn't incorporate LoC content.
Users can also find a text-only transcript of the game published by the developer, which can useful for making study notes or for accessibility (ideally after playing the game at least once if possible, as the concepts are more memorable with the interactivity and animations): https://ncase.me/trust/words.html
The developer also provides additional written notes about the different strategies featured in the game at: https://ncase.me/trust/notes/
Civics as it's designed to function, with checks and balances?
Or a congress based on 100 year old apportionment & pointless census, a hyperwealthy hyperminority bribing congressmen left and right, then getting receipts for their bribes via Congress's famous lack of a secret ballot?
Because one of those is a fantasy, and the other is the world we live in.
I can't find any detailed information on this outside of this post. What kind of Library Of Congress resources are there? Is there anywhere to discuss things with other people?
GPT means there's lots of opportunity to do more qualitative stuff, similar in spirit to Oregon Trail, than there used to be. There's lots of issues with anything that uses GPT interactively (fun as that can be), but pre-calculating a ton of narrative material (including structured material) opens up a lot of possibilities.
Hi! I'm a game developer and software architect building a platform to enable the quick design, iteration and deployment of web games. I would LOVE to build a game with you for this challenge (and we can split the prize money if we win.) DM me if interested, email in my bio. :-]
Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit fame runs a yearly game jam centered around a specific theme [1], which would line up well with this initiative. The quality of submissions is really, really impressive.
Civics as it's designed to function, with checks and balances?
Or a congress based on 100 year old apportionment & pointless census, a hyperwealthy hyperminority bribing congressmen left and right, then getting receipts for their bribes via Congress's famous lack of a secret ballot?
Because one of those is a fantasy, and the other is the world we live in.
What we need is motivation to learn civics. The culture has largely abandoned them, and in many cases has demonized those that know them. Consider the concerted and successful attacks on state-level organizations that administer voting in the US. Those people, from the Sec State on down are probably the top 1% of those who understand civics, and they are under fire. Why? Because cultural norms tell people to not care about civics, and institutions are so weak that even the "elitist cabal" doesn't seem to care about it, either.
At least, this is the appearance. Perhaps there is a firm bedrock of dedicated, knowledgeable citizens making American democracy work, and the recent attacks are less hard body blows and more jabs that are easily ignored. I hope so.
It is ironic and tragic that people who complain about how governments in the US are structured also have no fucking clue about what they're complaining about.
We are the United States of America, and yet most people don't understand what a state even is.
Not sure why you're being downvoted- that's my experience as well. It's still their right to complain but taking a single US govt course in college dispelled almost all of my frustration just by understanding the structure.
What exactly would a 'civics' curriculum teach that would be consonant with contemporary political culture? The next generation is being taught a "civics" that is hostile to the American civics tradition. This sort of program is DOA.
I know they don't qualify because of the needs-to-run-on-the-web requirement,[1] but I firmly believe that every politician (heck, every citizen, period) ought to play MULE, SimCity, and Civilization.
This is awesome, thanks for sharing! For those interested here are some similar recent or upcoming efforts to encourage more participatory and generative civic engagement:
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadHere's a really good article about the history of the company that made it and other similar products: https://kotaku.com/porno-hustlers-of-the-atari-age-184762217...
Or, if you prefer podcast form: https://gamehistory.org/ep-53-x-rated-atari-games/
The virtue of bailing out banks is certainly worthy of debate, but that is all irrelevant here because the parent comment implies the need (and there definitely is a need) to teach the masses what banking is, first of all.
Remember, these are people who can't tell apart bank bail outs from loan forgiveness from government handouts. The level of civic understanding among the masses is atrocious, and it isn't helped by the media and the powers that be doing their fucking damnedest to keep the masses ignorant and misguided.
A big part of why historically banking has been so fragile in the US were their asinine bans on branch banking. Until fairly recently, banks were only allowed a single office in a single city. If that city was hit by hard times, the bank was also badly affected.
Compare that with eg Canada's nationwide chains, and their superior financial stability.
See https://www.alt-m.org/2015/07/29/there-was-no-place-like-can... for more.
Similar observations apply to that more fundamental instrument of mispriced risk - limited liability business entities. The worst possible arrangement, except for all the others.
Personally I prefer to tilt at the windmill of the asymmetrical payoff diagram of US CEO compensation structures. While it’s still the case that nobody much cares about my opinions on the subject, this one at least has less of an aspect of battle-tested socioeconomic optimality.
Americans didn't arrive at this particular set of institutional arrangements by some rational process that weighed the alternatives properly.
Really, have a look at eg https://www.cato.org/blog/there-was-no-place-canada for a comparison between American finance and Canadian finance. The Canadian arrangements were much superior to the old and new American system.
> Similar observations apply to that more fundamental instrument of mispriced risk - limited liability business entities. The worst possible arrangement, except for all the others.
I don't see what's wrong with it? In most countries you can form both limited liability business entities as well as unlimited liability business entities.
When you do business as a company you (typically) have to clearly declare what kind of business you are, and your counter-parties can decide whether they want to deal with you based on that information.
(At least for the most part. If a limited liability contractor paves my driveway, and they damage my neighbour's roses while they are at it, my neighbour never got a choice.)
> Personally I prefer to tilt at the windmill of the asymmetrical payoff diagram of US CEO compensation structures. While it’s still the case that nobody much cares about my opinions on the subject, this one at least has less of an aspect of battle-tested socioeconomic optimality.
Related:
In the years after the big financial crisis of 2008, Credit Suisse paid their bankers' bonuses in the form of 'toxic assets'. See eg https://archive.is/x3GKl
That make got the 'toxic assets' off Credit Suisse's balance sheet. It was also popular with the general public. And, the best part, over time those ostensibly toxic assets actually mostly paid off in full, so the bankers got a much better bonus than if they had gotten straight up cash.
The windmill I like to tilt at is the different tax treatment of equity vs debt in many tax systems around the world. Both shareholders and creditors demand a return on their capital. But when your business pays creditors, via interest and return of principal, that's usually with money that's less taxed ('pre-tax money') than when they pay dividends or do share buybacks ('post-tax money').
Most people agree that an economy with less leverage, ie less debt and more equity, is more stable and less prone to crises. But then we have tax systems that prefer debt.
We should at least treat them equally, or even better, tax debt higher than equity, to nudge company's in the direction of more equity.
(And, of course, there's also the big, big windmill of land value taxes being superior to almost every other form of taxation. But almost no one uses them.)
Limited liability doesn't mean no liability. You can still go after them and get the assets of the company or its recent profits, which will generally be more than the value of some roses. You just can't get company owner's house.
But that sort of thing is always the case. There is no such thing as unlimited liability because nobody has unlimited assets. You can cause a million dollars in damage when you only have a hundred dollars to your name and there is nowhere for the money to come from.
Limited liability is just choosing the line at which we say something is closely enough associated with another thing to have to pay for its mistakes.
> But when your business pays creditors, via interest and return of principal, that's usually with money that's less taxed ('pre-tax money') than when they pay dividends or do share buybacks ('post-tax money').
It's worse than that. Corporate acquisitions use pre-tax money, which encourages business consolidation.
The real solution is to use consumption taxes instead of income taxes, which are much fairer, harder for tax laywers to avoid and less invasive of individual privacy, and are one of the best ways to tax international corporations. Then if you want a progressive tax system you just give each individual a tax refund in a fixed amount, which creates a progressive effective rate curve.
This would also have the benefit of disadvantaging debt, because you would have to borrow enough to pay the tax on whatever you buy and then pay interest on the higher amount, discouraging debt-based purchases.
But there are a bunch of misguided claims that it would hurt the poor somehow (even though they would be paying less in total tax after the refund), probably because it would actually work and the people who benefit from the status quo have to put out some argument against it.
The shareholder both get to keep the winnings and can get wiped out. So they are the ones who set the bank policy.
Factually, it seems that retail banks, those covered by the FDIC, don't tend to be poorly managed. There were some recent counterexamples in 2023 with rising interest rates, but in general bank failures are pretty rare. In the heights of the 2008 mess (which was in 2009/2010) around 2.5% banks were failing annually. That's not bad.
But it's the depositors' money they're gambling with.
Suppose you can put a million dollars of your money in something that has a 10% chance of netting you 20 million dollars and a 90% chance of losing your million dollars plus 20 million dollars of the depositors' money. That now has a positive expected value for you even though it has a negative expected value overall and results in a 90% chance of triggering a 20 million dollar claim against the FDIC.
Meanwhile your counterparty is quite happy because you gave them 21 million dollars in exchange for a 10% chance to less than double "your" money.
If your gamble fails, not only do you lose everything related to your endeavor, but now banking as a whole is more expensive, more people centralize into the big banks, and whatever business you want to start up or run afterwards is going to be more expensive.
This is why most banks don't gamble, because gambling like SVB did is really fucking stupid. You can be a boring bank and most likely mint profit for yourself for eternity, while also being seen as a positive actor in your city! The only people who aren't satisfied with such a set up are the same "Gotta grift everyone" silicon valley style assholes who think an economy is an idle game and they have to have the highest number because they are smartest and bestest.
So in other words the FDIC eats the cost but the FDIC is really the taxpayer, or the customers of "banking industry" which is to say basically everybody.
> If your gamble fails, not only do you lose everything related to your endeavor, but now banking as a whole is more expensive, more people centralize into the big banks, and whatever business you want to start up or run afterwards is going to be more expensive.
But if your gamble succeeds you make an enormous amount of money and if it fails someone else pays most of the cost, so it's more profitable to make the gamble because you have privatized gains and socialized losses.
> You can be a boring bank and most likely mint profit for yourself for eternity, while also being seen as a positive actor in your city!
Are banks known for their desire to leave money on the table?
Isn't "banks will be conservative and responsible" the argument for not having mandatory insurance?
The problem is not so much that the insurance is mandatory, but that it's provided by an entity whose pricing is set by the government, and which also enjoys the (implicit or explicit) backing of the government.
Privately and competitively provided insurance, even if mandated by the government, wouldn't be quite as bad.
Though I agree that giving banks the choice whether to get insured is a good one. Otherwise, you'd have to write regulation about what counts as 'good enough' insurance. Instead of letting customers of the bank decide what they are ok with.
One problem is that FDIC does an insufficient job at charging banks of different riskiness different premiums.
Privately organised deposit insurance without an (implicit or explicit) government backstop would avoid that problem.
> You can be a boring bank and most likely mint profit for yourself for eternity, while also being seen as a positive actor in your city!
Banks caring about individual cities is a weird Americanism. Mostly stemming from their long standing bans on branch banking.
Minting profits for eternity is nice, but having money right now is also nice. A company can use their 'cost of capital' metric to make a rational decision between the two.
> The only people who aren't satisfied with such a set up are the same "Gotta grift everyone" silicon valley style assholes who think an economy is an idle game and they have to have the highest number because they are smartest and bestest.
Leave the ad-hominem at the door, please.
Managers have a fiduciary duty to the owners of the company. For most companies, and especially most banks, that means they have a duty to make money for the shareholders. (Shareholders can have other goals that they can task management with; making money is just the default.)
If managers shirk their fiduciary, shareholders can sue them. And that includes when they are shirking making the right trade-off between long term profits and short term profits:
Use your cost of capital to calculate the present value of future cash flows. Choose the path that has the largest present value.
If interest rates are high enough, it _is_ economic rational to chop down the entire forest for wood today, instead of harvesting it sustainable.
Btw, most banks do 'gamble'. They just differ in how much they gamble and on what.
Shares in a bank essentially behave like call options on the assets of the bank, where the strike price is the sum of debt and other liabilities of the bank.
When you are pricing an option ahead of time, you can still misprice them; even if it turns out that at the end of the day, the option turned out to expire out-of-the-money (ie the bank's shareholders get wiped out).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953459 probably gave a cleaner description.
> Some states have also had restrictive bank branch laws; for example, Illinois outlawed branches (other than the main office) until 1967, and did not allow an unlimited number until 1993.
Branch banking was almost universally forbidden in the US from the start of the country, then over the course of the 20th century, most restrictions were gradually lifted. That process was essentially completed in the 1990s.
The anti-branch-banking restrictions were (mostly) done at the state level; so it's hard to generalise over the whole union.
You might be right about the current Canadian banking industry, I don't know that much about what they did in the last few decades.
MMORPGs provide a nice example of inflation though: when random enemies drop gold, you're printing money by playing the game. It's only natural that industrial money printing presses in the form of bots show up.
I mean the legitimate loans are outweighed by the scams so people are hesitant to actually set up these things, but still.
Renting is another one, you and your friends can rent a system from one of the larger alliances and get some protection while doing money making activities.
What's so frustrating about all of it, is I agree heavily with the sentiment, but it's like saying a house is badly built because the sky is too heavy. No it's because it's made of cheap wood and bad angles, and you can't get anyone to change that if you don't understand and just go with your gut, ignoring hundreds of years of history.
Though, one could assume where an official game from the Library of Congress would only approve a game that would further some kind of narrative but, I don't think it would be a good idea .
I expect a banking simulator would hew to the ubiquitous propaganda that the Fed is there to stabilize the money supply. (It's actual purpose is to inflate the money. See Freidman's "Monetary History of the United States")
Monopoly was based on “The Landord’s Game” and was never meant to teach economic decision making.
It was meant to promote Georgism and demonstrate the power of landlords, for which that “fault” is a feature.
2. rents are rules. You cannot be creative with rents. I.e. rent control
3. there are no predictable expenses to owning property
4. the only business you can engage in is property
5. there is no supply & demand at work
6. what properties you acquire is completely random
7. the outcome of the game is controlled by a roll of the dice. There is a strategy to Monopoly, but it is very simple, and soon everyone learns it and that ceases to be a choice
8. Not being able to collect rents on mortgaged properties is quite unlike any actual business
9. No interest is paid on debt
The biggest divergence from an actual marketplace is it is designed to be zero-sum. Markets are not zero-sum.
(I'm aware you can't technically bankrupt the bank but you get the idea).
You win by taking out lots of debt and getting lucky. Pretty much like real life.
... during economic crisis... to stabilize the money supply.
Not sure how that part works into the game
That's a fairly interesting list. The author hasn't looked at games in a decade, I bet a themed version of 2048 would blow their mind.
Man, the NSA really can't control themselves...
But on a more serious note, the challenge doesn't require the participants to be US citizens nor US residents. I can imagine lots of interesting entries resulting from this policy: a game about privacy sponsored by the CCC, third-world developers for whom 10k is a big amount, games like Monopoly containing a hidden message about the failings of capitalism...
Nowadays, the only dichotomy I face that seems to hold true is authoritarians vs not. No matter how they label themselves as in terms of regional party politics or political compass terms.
A game where you play as the Democrats to defeat Republicans would be explicitly partisan. A game where you learn about the consequences of defunding social security, in a way that nudges you away from cutting social security probably wouldn’t be considered partisan, even though it’s an issue ghat largely follows party lines.
That’s just my speculation, though
I think "Win the White House" was the game I enjoyed the most.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Agenda_(1988_video_game...
Was pretty proud of how the related game turned out, though sadly it won't run anymore on modern machines as it was done in Flash: https://www.kongregate.com/games/larsiusprime/super-energy-a...
https://ruffle.rs/
[1]https://ncase.me/trust/
The developer also provides additional written notes about the different strategies featured in the game at: https://ncase.me/trust/notes/
That'll civic ya real good.
Or a congress based on 100 year old apportionment & pointless census, a hyperwealthy hyperminority bribing congressmen left and right, then getting receipts for their bribes via Congress's famous lack of a secret ballot?
Because one of those is a fantasy, and the other is the world we live in.
GPT means there's lots of opportunity to do more qualitative stuff, similar in spirit to Oregon Trail, than there used to be. There's lots of issues with anything that uses GPT interactively (fun as that can be), but pre-calculating a ton of narrative material (including structured material) opens up a lot of possibilities.
https://www.challenge.gov/?challenge=library-of-congress-fri...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYxZ_LOlFnU
Because one of those is a fantasy, and the other is the world we live in.
At least, this is the appearance. Perhaps there is a firm bedrock of dedicated, knowledgeable citizens making American democracy work, and the recent attacks are less hard body blows and more jabs that are easily ignored. I hope so.
We are the United States of America, and yet most people don't understand what a state even is.
Even here I see ridiculous takes daily.
[1] Would in-browser emulator qualify?
A redistricting simulator would seem to be, actually, dead on the kind of thing that would fit this well.
Speculative fiction + civics
- https://open.usa.gov/national-action-plan/5/pilot-new-forms-...
Art x Climate
- https://www.globalchange.gov/content/art-x-climate-project-f...
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/evaamsen/2023/07/27/the-art-fea...