Full Employment
locusmag.com
Full Employment
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Re: Full Employment
#2Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch...
Wikipedia quotes studies that put the estimated aggregate impact at losing about 0% to 20% of world GDP. That's comparable eg to moving from NYC to a place with average US GDP per capita.
That's certainly a lot, but perhaps not a world shattering impact.
(Edit: the studies quoted on that Wikipedia page are quite old by now. It would be useful to find more up to date material.)
For some thoughts on a government job guarantee, see https://web.archive.org/web/20200404052902/https://slatestar...
Re: Full Employment
#3I think the general marketing problem with climate change is that people know it's going to happen, but not exactly when. Are we going to have issues next year, 5 years, 20 years, etc? How will these issues impact me and my neighbors? It's difficult to predict these things, so I think many people become skeptical of the milestones we are supposed to be hitting due to climate change and we just become reactive as a society rather than fully proactive.
Re: Full Employment
#4> Should that day come to pass, the money-issuer – the central bank – can procure all that idle labor, without creating inflation. If the private sector doesn’t want labor, then there’s no bidding war between companies and a federal jobs program or a universal basic income, so creating money to buy people’s labor won’t drive up the price of that labor.
I had to stop reading after this. This is not how inflation works and it borders on the preposterous to surmise that CBs can monetize deficits without creating inflation because there is excess supply in one market.
All of these people who would otherwise have less/no money are now spending that printed money to purchase goods like food, thus driving inflation higher. You can debate the merits of people being entitled to basic services like food, but the economic pressures are fairly well understood, even by MMTers
Re: Full Employment
#5I think the general marketing problem with climate change is that people know it's going to happen, but not exactly when. Are we going to have issues next year, 5 years, 20 years, etc? How will these issues impact me and my neighbors? It's difficult to predict these things, so I think many people become skeptical of the milestones we are supposed to be hitting due to climate change and we just become reactive as a so…
[deleted]
Re: Full Employment
#6I think the general marketing problem with climate change is that people know it's going to happen, but not exactly when. Are we going to have issues next year, 5 years, 20 years, etc? How will these issues impact me and my neighbors? It's difficult to predict these things, so I think many people become skeptical of the milestones we are supposed to be hitting due to climate change and we just become reactive as a so…
But... we are having issues right now? People aren't acting because there's no economic incentive, it is only in part due to denial or ignorance. Many of the world's leaders who have to power to shift the narrative are not doing so because it would be a short term economic loss and businesses aren't happy about it.
I mean, many technologies like carbon scrubbers already exist. Why aren't businesses buying them?
This is something we need to decide as a society to act on out of pure good faith, there will not be any profit to be made from the sacrifices that need to take place. People need to come to terms with just... being kinder. It would help if world leaders created jobs for this industry on a budget deficit and helped people get into those jobs.
Re: Full Employment
#7> Should that day come to pass, the money-issuer – the central bank – can procure all that idle labor, without creating inflation. If the private sector doesn’t want labor, then there’s no bidding war between companies and a federal jobs program or a universal basic income, so creating money to buy people’s labor won’t drive up the price of that labor. I had to stop reading after this. This is not how inflation works…
> All of these people who would otherwise have less/no money are now spending that printed money to purchase goods like food, thus driving inflation higher.
This assumes those goods are a scarce resource, so that increased consumption eventually leads to shortage. I can't quote sources, but my understanding is that we have enough food to feed everyone ATM, and any remaining hunger is just a failure of the economy to solve the distribution of currency.
Re: Full Employment
#8> Should that day come to pass, the money-issuer – the central bank – can procure all that idle labor, without creating inflation. If the private sector doesn’t want labor, then there’s no bidding war between companies and a federal jobs program or a universal basic income, so creating money to buy people’s labor won’t drive up the price of that labor. I had to stop reading after this. This is not how inflation works…
Say that 100k truckers making 50k a year lost their jobs to self driving trucks, which cost 10k year. If the government paid those people 40k a year the demand and purchasing power for food would not change for those 100k people.
Re: Full Employment
#9This is a great essay, but it doesn’t give me much hope for the US. Our behavior during this pandemic has been for one part of the country to finger wag and disbelieve while the other part suffers, while doing very little to actually fight the disease. It feels like we are so incapable of responding to this crisis that we are simply retreating into fantasy and pretending it’s not a big deal. This is all with a fast moving crisis that is in each of our own neighborhoods, and has already directly impacted about one in every hundred Americans.
When it comes to responding to climate change, I expect we will do basically nothing to prepare, and that we will abandon flooded coastal cities only after they’ve already been permanently flooded.
Re: Full Employment
#101) I tried to read the article, but it's badly structured and edited.
2) The SF Bay Area has never had a ventilator shortage. In fact, we gave away 500 in March/April to other states because we have too many.
3) The article mixes up various timelines into an incoherent wall of text - General AI, corona pandemic and global warming effects all have different timelines.
4) The USA is run by oligarchs who have a policy of discarding workers, so that completely undermines the article - the unemployed will not be working on moving cities inland, they will just be forgotten and destitute.
(I hope when Cory is able to focus he can improve the article. Maybe there is something worthwhile in there.)