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"the Duplo economy" "Duplo world"
The Refragmentation
211–220 of 461 posts
Re: The Refragmentation
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
The last paragraph was the whole point: > I worry that if we don't acknowledge this, we're headed for trouble. If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we'll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we'll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its co…
> He's saying income inequality is a feature of technology allowing people to be paid their market value and that you can't 'fix' that. The thing that I worry about is whether this feature is destroying the conditions that allowed it to become a feature in the first place. He mentioned the example of Apple and IBM, which I see as illustrative in another way. Would personal computing devices have become popular in a h…
The middle class has shrunk because more people have become rich. So it seems that today there are greater opportunities to sell expensive hardware, particularly since even the lower classes are (in absolute terms) richer than the middle class of the Apple II era.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...
As for 5k products, like fancy drones, 3d printers or high end bicycles, was the apple II non-niche?
Re: The Refragmentation
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He's saying income inequality is a feature of technology allowing people to be paid their market value and that you can't 'fix' that. The thing that I worry about is whether this feature is destroying the conditions that allowed it to become a feature in the first place. He mentioned the example of Apple and IBM, which I see as illustrative in another way. Would personal computing devices have become popular in a h…
> As an exercise, try to think of something non-niche that costs around $5k, the price of the Apple II, for which there isn't some form of financing (auto/home/college loans and such). I'm hard-pressed to think of something and I believe it's because there's an increasingly small number of people that can afford such a product. If someone can afford something with financing, they can afford it without. The difference…
So, someone who needs a car to get to work at their new job but has no existing wealth can afford the car equally with or without financing, just based on spending and saving habits???
Re: The Refragmentation
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He's saying income inequality is a feature of technology allowing people to be paid their market value and that you can't 'fix' that. The thing that I worry about is whether this feature is destroying the conditions that allowed it to become a feature in the first place. He mentioned the example of Apple and IBM, which I see as illustrative in another way. Would personal computing devices have become popular in a h…
> As an exercise, try to think of something non-niche that costs around $5k, the price of the Apple II, for which there isn't some form of financing (auto/home/college loans and such). I'm hard-pressed to think of something and I believe it's because there's an increasingly small number of people that can afford such a product. If someone can afford something with financing, they can afford it without. The difference…
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Re: The Refragmentation
#215Regarding income inequality, I recommend listening to some of the speeches/debates with Bernie Sanders. E.g. he argues that the greatest receiver of welfare in the US is the wal-Mart family, because they get even richer paying their workers so little that the workers have to live on welfare. (In other words the welfare is "paying" the workers so that Wal-Mart don't have to.) He proposes to rise the minimum wage. http…
Walmart employees are not compelled to work for Walmart; the employment contract is agreed upon voluntarily by both parties. The employees know how much they will be paid and agree to accept the terms. Walmart is operating within the legal employment framework set up by the government, including the welfare state and the minimum wage. That will not change by raising the minimum wage. Rather, Walmart will simply add a…
tl;dr: Raise the minimum wage so that employees don't need to live off of welfare. People lose their job? Good riddance, seriously. People don't lose their job? Called their bluff.
> Walmart employees are not compelled to work for Walmart; the employment contract is agreed upon voluntarily by both parties. The employees know how much they will be paid and agree to accept the terms. Walmart is operating within the legal employment framework set up by the government, including the welfare state and the minimum wage.
Yes. And if you think everything is fine the way they are now, then don't change a thing.
> That will not change by raising the minimum wage. Rather, Walmart will simply add automation and reduce its employment.
Sounds great to me. You're basically arguing that not having minimum wage is actually holding back progress.
> That is, their skills are not worth the minimum amount an employer is allowed to pay, so they will not be able to find a job. Ever. That person will be a permanent liability of the State.
If an economy can produce the same amount of wealth with much less workforce/work hours than today, then why shouldn't it? Sounds great if you ask me. (And if that's not possible, just hire more people, it's apparently worth it, problem solved.)
"Minimum amount" is in this case "amount needed to reasonably survive", ie. not need extra welfare. If you can't produce enough value that you can't even justify being paid to "reasonably survive" then yes you need help.
Okay, so I'm no economist, but it sounds like you're arguing that not having minimum wage is in itself a socialist measure. In other words, paying people something, anything, is better for the poor than paying them nothing. The only reason to pay the employees anything at all is to "help the poor", because their work is not really needed anyway (their work is worth that little).
To follow that line of reasoning, from a capitalistic viewpoint, it would thus be wise to raise the minimum wage. If people are being paid to do work that's not actually worth it (ie. subsidized via welfare), then don't. I seriously don't understand why capitalistic Americans defend that point of view. Why should the state/government subsidize effectively worthless labor?
What I'm doing is "calling the bluff". People won't get hired? That's fine, the work they were doing is practically worthless anyway, and I'm certainly not for subsidizing that. However, I think people actually will be hired anyway. Because their work is not worthless. I think the only reason people are being paid so little is not because of the "worth" of the work they're doing, but because the market allows it.
I don't know how that happened, perhaps because the big cooperations have too much power, perhaps it's just inevitable in a free market. But I do not support subsidizing labor, and I don't buy the argument that you have to. The money is there, the value of their work is there, there's no problem paying people more, they just don't want to, and luckily for them they don't need to either. And as long as everyone plays along, that's how it's going to stay.
Sometime in the future I'm sure we'll be able to produce enormous amounts of wealth with minimum man power (re: automation). What will everyone do then? That's up for debate, but it looks like the best bet is putting everyone on universal basic income. And that's not a problem, because the wealth is there, the "problem" is that no one needs to do anything to produce it. I'm sure our future selves will find a fix. (If not, then that sounds like a base line for a revolution. Let's hope that's not needed.)
In the meantime, redistribute some of the wealth by raising the minimum wage. Wal-Mart don't need employees? Fantastic, the future is already here.
Re: The Refragmentation
#216"And as long as it's possible to get rich by creating wealth, the default tendency will be for economic inequality to increase." This seems to be the ontological point of his essay, which reads as a loosey historical narrative manufactured to defend his belief that the fight against "economic inequality" will undermine innovation by disincentivizing the next Zuckerberg. But it misses the underlying point of wealth cr…
> his essay [...] reads as a loosey historical narrative manufactured to defend his belief that the fight against "economic inequality" will undermine innovation by disincentivizing the next Zuckerberg Well put. The argument that general taxation disincentives innovation has never made any sense to me: no matter how high the tax rate, your post-tax income still scales linearly with your gross income. If your object i…
Devil's advocate: If more income takes more work, and I'm already rich, then the extra work is only worth it to me if I get a really substantial return, not just some minor increase.
(In reality, only totally naive people believe that any billionaire cares at all about making more money for the sake of the money. It's actually about power and about irrational desire to be higher in the rankings compared to other billionaires… unless they have other motivations that aren't related to their profit, of course)
Re: The Refragmentation
#217A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo warrior and that nothing can be done to remedy the problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy and more specifically in the US and that it's a "natural" product of the state of affairs in our world. A classical example of « the nat…
The last paragraph was the whole point: > I worry that if we don't acknowledge this, we're headed for trouble. If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we'll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we'll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its co…
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Re: The Refragmentation
#218A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo warrior and that nothing can be done to remedy the problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy and more specifically in the US and that it's a "natural" product of the state of affairs in our world. A classical example of « the nat…
Central planning of the US economy & powerful big government (1930s & beyond) was a Progressive Era initiated reaction to the era of robber barons & crony capitalism (1870s-1910s).
The U.S. had plenty of centralized planning in the form of protectionism well before the 20th century.
Re: The Refragmentation
#219I think this essay ignores the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and feminism in undermining the 1950s. The world of the 1950's wasn't one where women could work, despite that having been the case since the 1920's. It was also the world in which Brown v. Board of Ed. lead to federal troops being deployed in the south to safeguard the rights of citizens, and ultimately lead to the Freedom Summer which radicalized a…
There's no real reason/mechanism for the exclusions to have made anything work better. Compared to the US being the Arsenal of Democracy, the economic effect of liberalization was very small, ignoring long-term government debt. The New Left in the 1960s mostly just failed outright. Any change then was due to judicial or executive action.
Partially devil's advocate: Women not working en masse means single-income households as a norm, which means all the real economic value of someone staying at home to take care of home issues and a general supply-and-demand situation where workers needed to be paid enough to make things work on a single income. Flood the market with twice as many workers, wages go down and the expectation becomes two-incomes, and thus people end up working harder (there's still work at home to do), but they aren't richer for it.
Re: The Refragmentation
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
A war in Europe could definitely happen, the outward unity belies the inner rivalries. There is also the option of civil war. Breakaway provinces wanna be nations, religious factions, old hatchets barely buried. The potential for war has never gone away.
As a European, I doubt that unless you are thinking balkan scale wars on the edges of Europe in countries that are not normally considered Europe as the term in commonly used or possibly Turkey actually get of its ass and do something about ISIS. It is true that there are a lot of rivalries, but nobody wants another world war. We are all fat, rich (relatively compared to 1939) and entertained, but more importantly th…
Nobody wanted a world war in 1914 either. History is littered with the outcomes of unforeseen nonlinearities.
Northern Ireland is more peaceful than it has been in decades
It is now, but why do you assume that that is a one-way street? Northern Ireland was also relatively peaceful from 1922 to 1968, when Catholics became more aggressive about their demands for civil rights and violent conflict broke out and then escalated rapidly.
Across Europe as a whole (and also the US and other places), look at the rise of populist/ideological politicians. A few decades ago they would have been too marginal to succeed in many elections, but the internet has proved a great organizing tool even for people who want to reduce the scope of civil liberties, just as weapon technology doesn't discriminate based on the morality of who is deploying it against whom. Hardcore ideological politicians are unmoved by or even hostile to arguments about the greater good.