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Full Employment

locusmag.com

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Re: Full Employment

#71

Post by ivalm »

zumachase wrote: post #69
ivalm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflationary policy in a deflationary market doesn’t lead to inflation (see US or Japan). There are lots of issues but I don’t think inflation is one we need to worry about.

Again, this is not what I said. Inflationary policy in a deflationary market is still inflationary.

But irrelevant to the point he is making? He clearly intends to claim that the outcome is not inflationary.

I agree that in many points the article is not written carefully (and sometimes straight up wrong... Ca has no vent shortage, current thermal load doesn’t melt ice caps, zootonic pandemics even with current covid are not world shattering)

Re: Full Employment

#72

Post by 082349872349872 »

eru wrote: post #60
082349872349872 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's really quite low? Ours hit 3,4% in May due to the virus, but June just came out at 3,2%...

Which place are you talking about? https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf says that US unemployment rate for June 2020 was 11.1%.

"Ours" being swiss. This unemployment level is still very high, 50+% over June 2019.

https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmittei....

(caveat: bei uns gibt's Kurzarbeit.)

Re: Full Employment

#73

Post by evbpcapfxy »

zumachase wrote: post #46
js8 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think the government doesn't have to run deficits, it can always tax the money back out of the economy. (The only problem is nobody likes that, for some reason. People seem to prefer inflation to taxa…

We’re not talking about the Treasury. We’re talking about Central Banks who lack the power to tax (directly at least). > People seem to prefer inflation to taxation. That’s because they’re not the same thing, not at all.

It's not too dissimilar if you think of from the perspective of the government taking away purchasing power from the individual

Re: Full Employment

#74

Post by michaelt »

zumachase wrote: post #46
js8 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think the government doesn't have to run deficits, it can always tax the money back out of the economy. (The only problem is nobody likes that, for some reason. People seem to prefer inflation to taxa…

We’re not talking about the Treasury. We’re talking about Central Banks who lack the power to tax (directly at least). > People seem to prefer inflation to taxation. That’s because they’re not the same thing, not at all.

How is a 1% inflation rate meaningfully different to a 1% tax on savings and investments, and a 1% subsidy on debt?

Re: Full Employment

#75

Post by cousin_it »

> If we’re willing to stipulate a fundamental breakthrough that produces an AI, what about a comparable geoengineering breakthrough? Maybe our (imaginary) AIs will be so smart that they’ll figure out how to change the Earth’s albedo.

Marine cloud brightening was proposed in 1990.

Re: Full Employment

#76

Post by Negitivefrags »

michaelt wrote: post #74
zumachase wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re not talking about the Treasury. We’re talking about Central Banks who lack the power to tax (directly at least). > People seem to prefer inflation to taxation. That’s because they’re not the same thing, not at all.

How is a 1% inflation rate meaningfully different to a 1% tax on savings and investments, and a 1% subsidy on debt?

It’s a tax on savings, but not on most investments which would typically be assets that rise with inflation.

Re: Full Employment

#77

Post by andyjohnson0 »

Reading the economic and tech-fix discussion here, it strikes me again that we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems. Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is.

I don't know how we get from here to a place where these problems become solvable (or even what that place looks like) and from there to a world that is actually going to sustain us again. So its hard to have much confidence that we have much of a future beyond the later part of this century. My children will by my age then and I don't envy them.

Re: Full Employment

#78

Post by redis_mlc »

eru wrote: post #13
redis_mlc wrote: post #10

1) 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 o…

> 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. What's your evidence for that? Unemployment was really quite low in the last decade up until a few months ago, with presumably the same 'oligarchs' already in power?

> Unemployment was really quite low

No, a lot of former workers moved onto permanent disability, or left the job market.

The statistic quoted in the media is only one of about 6, and it the most optimistic. You would be shocked at the true US labor participation rate.

And of course, even people on UI age out after at most 12 months. See above.

Re: Full Employment

#79

Post by wz1000 »

function_seven wrote: post #22
bob33212 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 40k goes to the profits of the shipping companies, which goes to the dividends of the stock owners, who are generally spending the dividends on investing in more stock. In theory shipping prices would go down immediately, but in the real world it could take years for competitors to force the industry to lower costs by the full 40k.

I'm a bit out of my depth here (I always am when it comes to macroeconomics or monetary theory). Let's say that the equity holders of the various shipping companies keep the $40k savings all for themselves, and use those profits to buy more stock. Isn't that still going to drive inflation? The price of shares will continue to rise solely due to more money chasing them. And every buyer of stock is giving money to a se…

From the article

> The 30% who are working under federal jobs programs will have working lives completely decoupled from the workings of the market. The movements of markets – particularly financial markets – will be irrelevant to everyone except for a group of weird, chart-watching, twitchy nerds who fulfill the boring job of capital allocation to an increasingly irrelevant section of the economy.

And earlier

> That money is mostly chasing the same goods that were available before the crisis (rent, groceries, and debt service) so it’s not crowding out other buyers and causing inflation (inflation occurs when more money chases the same goods, so buyers get into bidding wars that drive up prices – when the same quantity of money is chasing the same quantity of goods, there’s no inflation).

Re: Full Employment

#80

Post by Sambdala »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #77

Reading the economic and tech-fix discussion here, it strikes me again that we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems. Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is. I don't know how we get from here to a p…

I agree, we invented this stuff, and we should be able to fix it when it 'breaks.'

However, we see this constantly in any manmade system (system as defined by Systemics), where we can't control the emergent behavior of the system.

It's worse than that because we're talking about systems where change is necessarily political, so in-group/out-group dynamics dominate the perceived discussion ("Democrats think this, but Republicans say that").

This is made worse when one is pleased with the emergent outcome of a system and so ex post facto makes up justifications, but wouldn't feel comfortable arguing directly for the outcome publicly (see "States rights").

It's a problem I think about a lot, and there just aren't any easy answers to either combat bad faith participants or to be convincing that systems thinking needs to be given more weight in discourse.

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