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Full Employment

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Re: Full Employment

#151

Post by refurb »

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…

It’s clear that past attempts to “fix” the economic system (e.g. Nixon’s price controls, rent control) have often made things worse.

So to a degree, a free market is “inevitable” to a degree. There is only so much control you can exert without mucking it up. The other alternative is place more of the economy under gov’t control and we’ve seen how well that works.

And have no idea why you think the future will be worse. Think about living in 1930’s France. The world was far more unstable than it is now, yet prosperity and freedom are more broadly available than ever before. Not sure what the doom and gloom prediction is based on - we are NOT in unique times here.

Re: Full Employment

#152

Post by toomuchtodo »

justin66 wrote: post #138
mdorazio wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite is true. Social programs are funded by tax dollars, not cheap labor that may or may not be reported for taxes at all. If you want to make an argument that immigrants are good for these programs you need to limit immigration to higher economic output (and thus tax revenue) individuals like many other countries do.

> Social programs are funded by tax dollars, not cheap labor that may or may not be reported for taxes at all. The economy provides tax dollars. If immigrants are working hard for low wages, they're supporting the economy and economic growth. You're thinking very unclearly if you gauge the economic impact of a worker, or a class of workers, solely on how much income tax they pay.

> The economy provides tax dollars. If immigrants are working hard for low wages, they're supporting the economy and economic growth. You're thinking very unclearly if you gauge the economic impact of a worker, or a class of workers, solely on how much income tax they pay.

That economic growth is going to shareholders, not the immigrants who are being squeezed for their labor at low wages.

People with high wages pay into social programs (Medicare and Social Security comes out of W2 income). Shareholders, via taxes on capital gains, do not. Ergo, underpaid immigrants are exploited by the shareholder class, at the detriment to society as a whole.

Economic growth for growth’s sake is not a metric to be chased when you're discounting quality of life to achieve it.

Re: Full Employment

#153

Post by JackFr »

salawat wrote: post #112
roenxi wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If you want a good guess; the economy is complicated, there is no consensus on how it works and the plurality position on how it works among the public is badly misaligned with reality.

I find that that misalignment tends to stem not from any failing of the public, but from the institution of finance itself. I have encountered no vein of human endeavor so mired in jargon or completely disconnected from everyday experience such that most of the public stands little if any chance of properly understanding it than finance. The public has a relatively simple working model of the financial world. A)Keep…

It takes a proper finance person to make the jump to:

1) There is a temporal mismatch between the need to consume economic value and the ability to produce economic value. The so called desirability of savings, and taking on debt within your capacity to reasonably repay are not first principals but rather results of this temporal mismatch.

2) Assets (as distinct from goods) are the best means to achieve the saving and borrowing in (1). A farmer cannot save food for retirement. Selling goods and services and lending the money to, or purchasing an equitable share in a productive enterprise is the best way to save.

Re: Full Employment

#154

Post by Folcon »

XaspR8d wrote: post #110
Folcon wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify, you don't believe anyone including yourself is self-aware? If you believe you are self-aware then I suspect that it's more a problem of recognition than self-awareness being absent. If you don't believe that you are self-aware, that's really interesting. Please elaborate!

I think kingkawn is using a less technical meaning that I hear often... "having no self-awareness" ≅ not considering the effects of one's actions. Certainly I think that's what my parents were implying when they accused me of it. At least I doubt they were worried I was a p-zombie.

That's fair, however I'd put forward that considering consequences is hard and mentally taxing which is why people don't do it much, as opposed to them being unable to do so.

Re: Full Employment

#155

Post by JackFr »

metalliqaz wrote: post #149
JackFr wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simplest clue I have is to look at who benefits from this perspective Start with the billions of people lifted out of poverty. Never in history have so many people enjoyed such a high standard of living. The market isn't perfect and it isn't magic, and I don't mean to minimize climate change and other tragedies-of-the-commons, but in practice it's been very successful at improving peoples lives.

This is always attributed to the market, or capitalism, or some other such thing. Why is that? Citation please. The system not only encourages but requires inequality. Today's billionaires accumulated that wealth off the back of countless toiling workers, many doing so in miserable conditions. Why is it so clearly capitalism that lifted those people out of poverty, and not modern advances in technology, such as in fo…

> Why is it so clearly capitalism that lifted those people out of poverty, and not modern advances in technology, such as in food production, efficient transportation of goods, sanitation, and medicine?

Because of the evidence of India and China is compelling.

https://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018

Re: Full Employment

#156

Post by zelon88 »

My only concern with this, is he assumes that all that work is going to take an extremely long time and doesn't even consider the fact that it might take significantly less time than he proposes. He acknowledges this but doesn't actually go down the rabbit hole.

> Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoontoic and insectborne pandemics.

This does sound like a lot of work, but realistically it's like, what... maybe 10-20 years worth of actual human labor at current levels? Our capacity is so enormous that probably 90% of the things you'll interact with today were created in the past 10 years. If machines are slated to replace that amount of manufacturing, imagine the labor that would be displaced! If we could hypothetically throw double the labor into these projects than before these cities would go up instantly. Like Chinese Ghost cities.

Our civilization is already built. Most of the work went into building the required tools and technology which enable us to do more with less. Building skyscrapers is just large scale Legos when you have the right tools. What took Egyptians thousands of people now takes about 12 equipment operators. Now that we have those tools, now that we've commoditized them all this isn't really a "daunting" task for us as a species. Societally it presents new challenges, but humans are nothing if not resilient.

Re: Full Employment

#157

Post by jeffreyrogers »

LatteLazy wrote: post #140
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #129

> Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland Isn't sea level rise likely to only be a few feet? Regardless, Holland seems fine living below sea level. I don't think we really need to move cities kilometers inland.

2.3m per degree C. That's about 7ft per degree. And we're looking at a 5C (aka 35ft) rise. And that's without the "leverage" of flat land: you might have to go a mile in land to find the first place that's an inch about the beach. Ever been on a flat beach when the tide came in? You can lose a lot of land to a very small rise in sea...

Thanks. Either way, it seems much simpler to do something similar to what Holland has done than to move millions of people (hundreds of millions if we're talking about the entire world) inland.

Re: Full Employment

#158

Post by nine_k »

take_a_breath wrote: post #142
mdorazio wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite is true. Social programs are funded by tax dollars, not cheap labor that may or may not be reported for taxes at all. If you want to make an argument that immigrants are good for these programs you need to limit immigration to higher economic output (and thus tax revenue) individuals like many other countries do.

==If you want to make an argument that immigrants are good for these programs you need to limit immigration to higher economic output (and thus tax revenue) individuals== Do you have any sources on this claim? I'd be interested to read.

I suppose similar was the reasoning behind the H1 visa program, which explicitly limited the lower bounds of salaries for the immigrants. (It did not limit other immigration types, of course.)

Re: Full Employment

#159

Post by grasshopperpurp »

credit_guy wrote: post #128
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…

> to solve our pressing problems We will always have finite resources. Given finite resources not every human need/wish will ever be achievable, and various people have various needs and wishes. There will always be a boundary between the needs that are achievable with very little resource allocation and needs that are completely out of the realm of possibility. On that boundary, people will always have disagreements…

Separating needs and wishes would be a good start. Security and dignity would serve as nice starting points imo. Then, we could argue over the rest, but we're not there. Most people - in the US anyway - see everything as something to fight for, and if you fight for more than you need while others are unable to fight for what they need - or fight well enough to get what they need - it just means you're winning.

Re: Full Employment

#160

Post by JackFr »

JackFr wrote: post #155
metalliqaz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is always attributed to the market, or capitalism, or some other such thing. Why is that? Citation please. The system not only encourages but requires inequality. Today's billionaires accumulated that wealth off the back of countless toiling workers, many doing so in miserable conditions. Why is it so clearly capitalism that lifted those people out of poverty, and not modern advances in technology, such as in fo…

> Why is it so clearly capitalism that lifted those people out of poverty, and not modern advances in technology, such as in food production, efficient transportation of goods, sanitation, and medicine? Because of the evidence of India and China is compelling. https://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018

I think I provided the wrong link. To be clear, the Gap Minder tools show the majority of the improvement came to India and China after they opened their economies.

https://www.gapminder.org/tools/

And in fairness, 'capitalism' is a very imprecise term which often means different things to different people.

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