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Full Employment

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Re: Full Employment

#171

Post by mac01021 »

There's a lot to digest in this article and I have yet to digest most of it. But I don't think Doctrow understands the nature of immanent technological unemployment. It does not depend on the development of General AI, as he seems to suppose.

90% of professional motor-vehicle operators, retail workers, call center staff, radiologists, surgeons and other jobs can be unemployed due to the deployment of special purpose technologies whose development is well underway.

Some of those people, through the normal avenues of market-based resource distribution, will become plumbers, construction workers, and fill other-hard-to-automate roles in order to earn a living.

If the state institutes something like UBI, then still more of them will become artists, writers, community organizers and fill other roles that might earn them some money but would not on their own guarantee a full, stable income.

When global heating and sea-level rise create clear market incentives to rebuild the national infrastructure, those among the unemployed who are capable to work on that stuff will have a strong incentive to do so.

But for the state to, through a guaranteed jobs program, make effective use of 40-50% of the population in reconstructing national infrastructure as a response to global heating does not seem (to me) realistic. Are enough of those people capable of gaining the required skills for those kinds of projects? Where should they go and what should they do?

Re: Full Employment

#172

Post by jonfw »

ustolemyname wrote: post #148
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.

That could equally be a consequence of technological and scientific development than any particular economic structure.

What motivates technological and scientific development?

Re: Full Employment

#173

Post by ustolemyname »

jonfw wrote: post #172
ustolemyname wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could equally be a consequence of technological and scientific development than any particular economic structure.

What motivates technological and scientific development?

That is a problem that has not been thoroughly explored. What has been motivational historically, and what is necessary to motivate in the future, do not have to be the same.

And even looking at history, the motivations of scientific development seems quite varied. War has been a key promoter of many fields of science, which has in turn lifted may people out of poverty. So we should have more world wars?

Re: Full Employment

#174

Post by username90 »

justin66 wrote: post #131
nine_k wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more obligations a state takes to its population (not limited to citizens), the harder it is to enact an open-borders policy while keeping these obligations. The US used to accept basically anyone, but it did not have any Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, etc. In EU states, the problem is even more severe, as they provide more benefits, to those who pay taxes an to those who don't alike.…

> The more obligations a state takes to its population (not limited to citizens), the harder it is to enact an open-borders policy while keeping these obligations. The opposite is true. Immigrants generally work very hard and accept minimal wages. (This is one reason why many citizens would prefer not to compete with them in the labor market.) Their labor can be highly effective in supporting an economy with strong,…

> Immigrants generally work very hard and accept minimal wages.

Not if they are eligible for social programs without working hard, then you get a different kind of immigration than US gets. US gets hard working people since immigrating there as a non hard working person is just dumb. However when Europe takes refugees who are eligible for social programs as soon as they arrive then they don't really get hard working people, those are the kind of people you would get more of if you opened your border and gave everyone the same social security nets.

Re: Full Employment

#175

Post by charwalker »

zumachase wrote: post #32
skybrian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't agree with Doctorow's argument at all, I would say that inflation is misunderstood more than it's understood. For example, there is a naive belief that inflation is proportional to the money supply. This seems to be a garbled version of monetarism, which is no longer how central banks think about it, but even monetarism is more complicated than that. Monetarist theory is based on MV = PQ, where M is the…

Yes this is all very true, but he makes the case explicitly for money velocity to increase. He’s not suggested printing money for savers or rent seekers, he’s suggested printing money for the express purpose of consumption: I have been automated and thus can not afford basic staples without basic income. This is inflationary not matter how you slice it.

I'll take the side that you are right based on the argument in the article but there are better arguments to make. Right now other factors are driving inflation down like lack of consumer spending, consumers outright not paying rent, and that the US dollar is spread across billions of people outside the US where the dollar underpins their economy or USD reserves back their currency. These factors offset the on paper inflation of injecting $5 trillion into the US/world economy but if this was, say, 2017 then they would definitely not.

Our current economic situation is more like 2008/2009 than a boom year where the velocity of money, not technically perhaps but the idea more or less, is very high. Even the decade since the 2008 crash has seen low inflation, at least in the US, and we've seen double digit drops in revenue and sales volumes for several months let alone numbers for the rest of 2020.

For a relevant example here, would WeWork/Uber/Tesla have raised billions in private funding in late 2009 or early 2020? Did the last decade boom in private equity cash on hand drive ability to gain investment ex. increase velocity of money in private investing? None of those companies are critical day to day for US citizens or the economy, at least compared to major banks or grocery stores and maybe they did actually see huge investments during difficult times, but I think the thought experiment stands.

Re: Full Employment

#176

Post by charwalker »

Reelin wrote: post #57
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…

> 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…

Partially with much of that pay won via union work or like building codes to prevent a race to the bottom while enforcing some standard for safety. That skilled carpenter might be offered a contract for $10/hour under their union requirement but chooses to enforce their standards instead of subverting their fellow tradesmen.

A good comparison is quality comments and coding standards. Consider if there was an enforceable standard for code structure, comments, documentation, etc like most decent github repos with developers striving to reach Linux kernel level overall quality. This would include a standard training/education process, collective bargaining and action for pay/benefits and standard to changes. It is a field where not every ISO standard needs to be applied in full, but there could still be some base enforcement.

Like, what if every code base was commented, well structured, and followed general best practices like to-code electrical or plumbing work? What if code review or inspections against a standard were enforced time set aside and sign off required before wrapping a project? What if the lowest bidder on a coding job had a floor due to set benefits and standing agreement on rates and max hours per week/day? These are practices the best employers may strive for and are able to apply but are required in most trades.

I appreciate a line comparing how artists are payed compared to trades: If a band is asked to do a show for the 'exposure' they should ask the planner to call the local plumbers union and ask their going rate for 4 plumbers for a 4 hour job. Home advisor has a few estimates but project data puts an average at $317/hour. Maybe a random band isn't worth $1200/hour or $5k a gig but some definitely can command that price. If most bands stuck to a standard rate range the planner will expect and budget for proper pay.

https://www.homeadvisor.com/cost/plumbing/hire-a-plumber/

Re: Full Employment

#177

Post by mdorazio »

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.

Sure, see pages 35-36 (combined with the previous section on poverty) of [1]. Note that most studies claiming otherwise do not account for income level of immigrants, which is what I am responding to here. Higher income immigrants are generally a net positive for social programs, but lower income immigrants are not.

[1] https://cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2001/mexico/mex...

Re: Full Employment

#178

Post by kerkeslager »

hhjinks wrote: post #83
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.

Supply and demand are natural consequences of scarcity, but they're also consequences of all sorts of market manipulation, and there are good reasons to believe that the supply and demand created by market manipulation far outweighs the supply and demand created by scarcity.

There are approximately 570,000 homeless people in the US[1]. Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $188 billion[2]. The median price of a house in the US is $218,000. Jeff Bezos could buy every homeless person in the US a house at that median price, and still have $63.7 billion[3], leaving him the 5th richest person in the world[4].

And that's massively more money than is necessary to solve the actual homelessness problem in the US, which doesn't require 570,000 homes (because more than one person can live in one home) and doesn't require median value homes (because much cheaper homes are adequate). Yes, buying housing for hundreds of thousands of people would drive up housing prices, but surely a massive influx of capital would prompt more construction to meet demand. This is absolutely doable if Bezos decided to do it.

In short, the entire US housing crisis is smaller than a manufactured scarcity that only exists because Jeff Bezos has decided that $63.7 billion isn't enough incentive to work at Amazon, so 570,000 people should be homeless.

I realize I'm singling out Bezos here--yes, Bezos is a terrible person, but there are other billionaires who could easily solve the US housing crisis, and there's an entire system of people who have sided with the billionaires over the homeless time and time again. The responsibility for this travesty doesn't rest solely on Bezos' shoulders.

I also realize that homelessness isn't our only problem. There is real scarcity, and simply fixing income inequality isn't going to fix all scarcities.

But there can be no doubt that at least some of our most chronic problems only exist because there is a consensus that solving those problems isn't worth the wealthy giving up a portion of their wealth. You can argue whether that's justified or not, but you can't argue that these problems aren't solvable.

[1] https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/#575a78ae1b23

[3] 188,000,000,000 -(218,000 * 570,000) = 63,740,000,000

[4] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

Re: Full Employment

#179

Post by amadeuspagel »

kerkeslager wrote: post #178
hhjinks wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Supply and demand are natural consequences of scarcity, but they're also consequences of all sorts of market manipulation, and there are good reasons to believe that the supply and demand created by market manipulation far outweighs the supply and demand created by scarcity. There are approximately 570,000 homeless people in the US[1]. Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $188 billion[2]. The median price of a house in the…

>There are approximately 570,000 homeless people in the US[1]. Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $188 billion[2]. The median price of a house in the US is $218,000. Jeff Bezos could buy every homeless person in the US a house at that median price, and still have $63.7 billion[3], leaving him the 5th richest person in the world[4].

What about the people living in those homes now? Where do they move? And: Wouldn't the price of homes rise if Jeff Bezos were to start buying them up?

Re: Full Employment

#180

Post by JackFr »

ustolemyname wrote: post #148
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.

That could equally be a consequence of technological and scientific development than any particular economic structure.

But if everyone has access to the same scientific developments, then why the disparity in standards of living around the world?

You might chalk it up to power structures, but that couldn’t explain the disparity in standard of living between the Soviet Union and Western Europe.

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