191–200 of 310 posts
For anyone who has a theory that involves making new jobs and retraining people, consider these cases: A) 50 something factory worker whos job along with the other 100 folks he works with, have been eliminated by automation or some other sort of efficiency. B) 30 something software engineer who's field (except for research) has been eliminated by AI. "A" is something most of us have the luxury of had waving away with…
"surfs" -> "serfs" Nitpicking I know.
People forget History. The two times where labor was more valuable than capital. 1 | After the black death in Europe 2 | After the second world war Most of history's default was the gilded age, the roman empire survived for 600[1] years with having worse inequality than in the modern times. Usually the only way to reverse the trend is by a large scale elimination of significant portion of young people. [1] EDIT : cor…
Or, we simply wait out the next few centuries. Reproduction rates in many developed countries have dipped below replacement. Maybe the total world population will decrease in our time.
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That's like saying there's plenty of room for musicians if you're Mozart. The amount of investment required to develop yourself for a target field has grown astronomically, but that's been coupled with a push down in wages. I know lawyers who spent a fortune for their degree, passed the Bar, and make barely more than minimum wage. Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this.
Lawyers working on minimum wage...that's something new! Last time I've checked the free market rules didn't apply on law practioners due the "prestige" issue. How does automation affect lawyers anyway?
Electronic discovery -- both scanning docs to electronic versions, and then processing them through search, and more recently, AI, to find evidence for plaintiff/prosecution or defense -- has replace a tremendous amount of that.
Lack of funds to support legal work is another element in reducing lawyers' wages and hiring.
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Are sports economics zero-sum? Both teams get paid for playing. If one team loses, they don't give money to the other team.
Most sports are zero-sum in the sense that over a given set of matches, the number of wins has to equal the number of losses. Obviously not every sport is that way. A major marathon might have one male and one female winner among 30,000 entrants.
You can't have winning teams without losers.
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> Allocating labor on the basis of whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term turns out to be an unintelligent way to strategise an economy. And yet, this turns out to be the most succesful strategy civilization has used so far.
>And yet, this turns out to be the most succesful strategy civilization has used so far. The period in which the American economy was growing most was when it was also most organized. The post-war consensus was about scientific management of industry and the economy, not about free markets and profit maximization; that dogma only took hold in the 80s (both in business schools and in politics), and it has been a stead…
The problem with that is that the post-WWII period was much different than today. Pretty much every other advanced economy besides the US had been economically devastated by a long and bloody war. The US didn't have to be competitive to compete against a Germany or a Japan where people were boiling shoes to eat the leather or catching rats for meat. They only had to be relatively competent. Also, both before and after WWII, scientists flocked to the US, fleeing from repressive and doomed regimes. US R&D got a huge boost from these people.
Another question is just how "organized" the economy actually was back then. Most of the really complicated regulations like Sarbannes-Oxley were still far in the future in the 1940s. By the time the EPA was created in the 1970s, the US was already well on its way to stagflation and economic incontience. Tax rates looked high back then, but just like today, most truly wealthy people found ways around paying them.
Of course the government has a role to play in funding research and moderating some of the excesses of capitalism. But to argue that some bureaucrat can just push a button and bring back the golden years of the 1950s is a leftist fantasy.
First, there are plenty of jobs, but not enough people that have decided to develop themselves enough to have the skills to do them. For example (a real life one, unfortunately for me): I need a biopsy of a mass near my heart, but the current waiting time for this procedure here in Seattle (at both major hospitals) is two months. What we do have is plenty of regulations that constrain the supply of physicians, servic…
> you don't have to convince a committee to give you permission to make a new app. You do if you want to get paid to make it...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354-500-revealed...
Is the "infinite work hypothesis" finally ending?? The answer to "what happens to workers being replaced" has always been "they'll find jobs elsewhere, every time you make a job redundant you create other new jobs", what I've seen called the "infinite work hypothesis" where there will always be new work and the problem is agility, job training, not demand.
No, the problem is misallocation of labor. There's a huge to-do list of jobs that need to be done at almost every level, from design and build of significant infrastructure in most countries around the world, to community-level support work. It would be perfectly possible to retrain the long term unemployed for all but the most difficult design and management elements. They're not done because the metrics of Wall St…
It's impossible that there is simply nothing in the world that needs doing. Exactly how to make sure that things that need doing, are done, is what economics and politics are about, but any "job shortage" is because of inefficiencies along some spectrum, not actually ever a natural state.
So yeah, you're right that this problem is inherently an economic problem, not an "I don't know what to do with all my free time" problem. That doesn't make the problem any less urgent or less difficult to solve. It's actually incredibly difficult to solve because it'll involve rejiggering our social contracts, which will probably take several generations to complete.
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I always wonder, how people can associate effectiveness, success and other positive things with the current developments. The price of the progress, as we experience it today, is enormous. Exhaustion of natural resources, severe climate change, not to mention societal costs. We see a rapid rise in violence across continents and this seems to be just the beginning. I can easily see the western world turning into total…
exhaustion of natural resources? hmm. natural resources are INFINITE by definition since the universe is infinite. what is limited are "reserves". panicking about reserves dwindling is what Tim Worstall calls the 'No breakfast fallacy' we dont look at our refrigerator which is running out of milk and worry that the world is running out of milk. we know that there is an entire ecosystem of farmers , truckers and super…
Natural resources which are accessible are being consumed at high rates, and access to further resources will likely require the use of existing reserves put toward that goal.
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There must be more than two alternatives, though? Surely we can have a 21st century economy to match 21st century challenges? I don't know what that might look like yet - but I think we will know in a decade or so. Currently there's a storm of protest from those being left behind (Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK), and it won't be long before different solutions will be tried for these - eg UBI, direct democracy, ch…
There must be more than two alternatives, though? If we're examining it from the perspective of advancement, and we know that political restrictions on economic development (i.e., regulation) slow development (compare the development delta of periods in 19th century with today), what we end up with is an infinite number of mixtures between freedom and controls. What I'm telling you is that there are some controls we…