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Full Employment

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Re: Full Employment

#101

Post by kingkawn »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #99
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.

An economy is the net result of individual and collective (social) behaviours. You could, indeed, argue that other species such as other primates or even ants behave in a way that bears resemblance to an economy with a due stretch of imagination. Even so, you have to be mindful about projection bias when you make such assertions. The difference is that humans have this unique ability: self awareness. Humans are able…

I have yet to meet a human that exhibits this so called self-awareness

Re: Full Employment

#102

Post by luckylion »

cameronbrown wrote: post #98
luckylion wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of the myth is that it is skill, not health risks, that should be well paid. It's hard and expensive to turn somebody into a programmer, and you can't scale it up as you wish. It's easy in comparison to have more people who can do dangerous jobs: you just need more children and wait 20 years. For management and similar roles, I agree somewhat (it's much harder to pinpoint the skills required, and they often ha…

> It's hard and expensive to turn somebody into a programmer, and you can't scale it up as you wish. Is it? We work in one of the few industries where self-taught may actually be the norm (or at least, a significant minority).

I believe the self-taught (which is hard to define, as most are still learning by reading and imitating, it's not like people are completely removed from the world and suddenly walk out of the woods as a software developer) are pretty much here because it's so hard. If it was easier to scale the number of developers up, the people who took up programming as a hobby and then (often accidentally) transitioned into doing it for money would still be hobbyists. They're being recruited because we can't fill the seats with formally trained people.

I am an autodidact, and I'm clearly worse than actual CS people in the CS stuff, but that's not a problem for me, because we're in an industry where we lump together people who work on hard problems and people who basically translate requirements into business logic code. The CS people could do my job, I couldn't do theirs (there are some autodidacts that could, but they are a tiny minority imho), and for most intents and purposes, it doesn't matter, because most requirements don't require high level computer science, they require python, php, javascript and css etc.

Re: Full Employment

#103

Post by setgree »

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…

> we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems

Generalization: most of those problems are political rather than technical, and unlike with technical problems, if you make a wrong guess about how to solve a political problem, the costs might be unboundedly catastrophic (e.g. world war).

I personally believe that the best response to global warming is open borders, because it would mean that all the people who:

* are living in the global south could relocate somewhere colder and further inland, if they wanted;

* are subsistence farming, but who would be great engineers, scientists, etc. given the right opportunities, would be more likely to get those opportunities.

Most people think that open borders would be bad, and I don't think I will be able to persuade them otherwise in my lifetime.

In general, alternatives to persuasion in politics amount to seizing power and/or changing the rules of the game. Even if I thought I could do that, which I don't, I wouldn't, because all too often in history, the cure is worse than the disease.

That's why I think these problems are hard -- and why I'm scared of people who propose grand solutions to them.

Re: Full Employment

#104

Post by throwanem »

082349872349872 wrote: post #54
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…

The only way your breakdown differs from The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is that the "clueless middle class" in Oceania seems to split into two mutually antagonistic but still self policing Outer Parties. (also I think calling "white collar" "middle class" is a bit ahistorical: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23671937 but, as with "hacker", I guess I should make an attempt to go with the tim…

Not that I especially want to validate your reference to a piece of diegetic COINTELPRO agitprop in a not very good and rather outdated polemical novel, but if it's "two mutually antagonistic but still self policing Outer Parties" you want, have you seen the ostensibly competing libertarian tendencies that currently make up American public politics?

Re: Full Employment

#105

Post by naveen99 »

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…

It’s sociopath (not psychopath), clueless, and loser...

Re: Full Employment

#106

Post by Folcon »

kingkawn wrote: post #101
CaptArmchair wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An economy is the net result of individual and collective (social) behaviours. You could, indeed, argue that other species such as other primates or even ants behave in a way that bears resemblance to an economy with a due stretch of imagination. Even so, you have to be mindful about projection bias when you make such assertions. The difference is that humans have this unique ability: self awareness. Humans are able…

I have yet to meet a human that exhibits this so called self-awareness

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!

Re: Full Employment

#107

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

setgree wrote: post #103
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…

> we're trapped in a system that doesn't provide workable means to solve our pressing problems Generalization: most of those problems are political rather than technical, and unlike with technical problems, if you make a wrong guess about how to solve a political problem, the costs might be unboundedly catastrophic (e.g. world war). I personally believe that the best response to global warming is open borders, becaus…

If you haven't seen it, you might like Open Borders by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith[1]. Comic-book form advocating for open borders, with pretty good reasoning.

[1] https://smile.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigra...

Re: Full Employment

#108

Post by fallingfrog »

One thing I think is not said often enough is that money might be a store of value on an individual level, but in the level of the whole economy, it is not. It’s just lubricant for making transactions. You can’t take a big pile of money out of the economy one one year and then spend it 10 years later. You would get deflation and unemployment when you took the money out, then inflation when you put it back in. That’s because money has no real value, it’s just paper or numbers in a database. Property and labor power have real value but not money. That’s why claims of there being a “social security trust fund” just seem bizarre to me- the account holding that money is purely imaginary and in reality they spent all the money collected right away. They had to spend it because otherwise it would have decreased the money supply. And whether the money they spend on the program later comes out of the trust fund or whether they just print it makes no difference. On the level of the nation as a whole, money is only lubricant. Not a store of value.

Re: Full Employment

#109

Post by gridlockd »

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…

> 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.

Because markets and financials systems behave like a force of nature. Nobody sat down and invented them, they emerged. The only thing you can invent is regulations.

However, you can't arbitrarily regulate markets, or credit. If you do, black markets and informal credit systems emerge. You can't arbitrarily set prices, if you do, shortages and scalping are the result.

There is a window where regulation doesn't fail, which is going to be fairly close to where the market wanted to go anyway - kind of like building a dam.

Re: Full Employment

#110

Post by XaspR8d »

Folcon wrote: post #106
kingkawn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to meet a human that exhibits this so called self-awareness

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.

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