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Full Employment

locusmag.com

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Re: Full Employment

#81

Post by zozbot234 »

zumachase wrote: post #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…

If the CBs are missing their inflation/nominal income target, they can monetize deficits while not creating more inflation/nominal income flow than is warranted.

This of course gets into the matter of why we would want CBs to create inflation in some circumstances: the simple answer is that it makes the economy a lot more predictable if they do. When the flow of nominal incomes grinds to a halt, prices throughout the economy have trouble adjusting downwards in response, so we get a recession and widespread unemployment. Stability is what matters here, not just minimizing inflation at all costs.

Re: Full Employment

#82

Post by s5300 »

eru wrote: post #23
climwe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unemployment was lower but jobs became worse. If there was no increase in federal minimum wage in a decade, you can see why employment went up in that exact same decade. It's not good enough to just point to one statistic and cancel out a deeply complex claim like that one.

> Unemployment was lower but jobs became worse. How do we know that? > If there was no increase in federal minimum wage in a decade, you can see why employment went up in that exact same decade. That's great news, if true. It suggest a very actionable strategy to keep unemployment in check. (Though, of course, looking around the globe, even the absence of a minimum wage law doesn't make all other unemployment problem…

I mean... have you read the Wikipedia page of the current head of the Dept. of Education? See also: page of the head of the Dept. of Justice?

If you haven't... you really should

If doing that doesn't change any of your opinions on the matter... oh well, we're already doomed.

Re: Full Employment

#83

Post by hhjinks »

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…

What makes you so sure that economics is entirely constructed? Things like supply and demand are clearly natural consequences of resource scarcity, and doesn't only apply to economics. While we do have certain frameworks that are man-made that prop up and support the economy, AN economy of some description just seems like a natural consequence of things being perceived as having value. We even see this in animals.

Re: Full Employment

#84

Post by curation »

Sambdala wrote: post #80
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…

Our available methods for engaging with the economic are, perhaps functionally, not able to answer for any problems. Walters Streeck describes economic theory as race horses hitched to a plow: The complexity of the models developed do nothing to advance the work to be done. The work of economic analysis has to re-orient according to Streeck - > "I am hungry for facts, not for concepts; concepts I access through facts and through the questions they raise, including the need to organize them into a coherent picture."

Re: Full Employment

#85

Post by Havoc »

If anyone saw a path to general AI from current tech then we’d already have general AI.

Pretty week argument for or against general AI being possible.

Re: Full Employment

#86

Post by flr03 »

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…

The ventilator shortage is irrelevant to the point the author is trying to make. It doesn't have to be true or false and should be taken as an hypothesis.

The point he was trying to make is that economy is not about money, it's about resources. Money has no value as such, it's a number in a system, or at best a piece of paper. Food is a resource, a ventilator is a resource. Economy is about choices, about how you allocate a resource, it's not about numbers.

Re: Full Employment

#87

Post by greyface- »

jpxw wrote: post #67
js8 wrote: post #28

It's always refreshing to read someone who really gets that economy is not about money, but rather about what is being produced. The title reminded me of the famous Kalecki essay, Political Aspects of Full Employment, which actually explains deeper why this is not so easy to do as Cory Doctorow imagines (if you hadn't read it, I really recommend it, it's one of the best works on economics ever). Here I think is the c…

We do pay blue collar workers the market rate. Why do you think we don’t?

The market misprices worker health.

Re: Full Employment

#88

Post by humanrebar »

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 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.

Austrians argue that this is the inevitable force of nature. Basically that economic plans are inherently under-informed.

Re: Full Employment

#89

Post by empath75 »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #76
michaelt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s a tax on debt issuers. Anybody loaning money will have to charge a much higher interest rate or they’ll get back less than they lent out.

Re: Full Employment

#90

Post by grasshopperpurp »

js8 wrote: post #70
Reelin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we truly payed blue collar guys a market rate, no white collar jobs would exist, because what is the price for risking your health? Isn't that exactly what we do though? Doesn't pay (very approximately) correlate with required skill? For example, compare the salary of a skilled carpenter with some of the lower skilled "tech" jobs. All of your examples (manager, scum master, programmer) are decidedly high skill j…

My polemic is that at least some of this "high skill" distinction that we attribute to cushy high skilled jobs is a myth. They are well paid, because we claim they are high skill. And everybody with power in that system has an interest in perpetuating that myth. (Including me, I am a programmer.) Part of the myth is that it is skill, not health risks, that should be well paid. And I suspect one reason why we don't wa…

I agree with both your posts, but I want to share an exception. At the Post Office, almost all the smart people, who have their shit together, are carriers and clerks - the blue-collar jobs. The difference in pay between workers and management is small, and it's very easy for OT to push carriers/clerks above management. This is not a secret within the Post Office, so it only makes sense to go into management if you're shooting for upper management, which most don't reach, or you just hate physical activity or like telling people what to do.

Most of the people who go into management seem to do it reflexively. They see the word promotion and go for it. As you can imagine, they don't even get a respect upgrade, because everyone knows the cards.

Of course, the Post Office has a relatively strong union - particularly by US standards. That's the major hurdle for most blue-collar jobs. They don't even have a seat at the negotiating table. Without a coordinated voice and some power, workers take first offers. Companies can afford to pay shit wages the same way that factories during the Industrial Revolution could afford to work people to death.

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