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What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

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Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#261

Post by pfranz »

Trundle wrote: post #256
pfranz wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this suspicion that I've been meaning to look into to find out if the numbers match up. The biggest growing industries to me seem to be the service industry and entertainment. Both of these are really superfluous. If is true, I see this as a symptom that we have fewer useful jobs and are pushing people into these superfluous jobs--kind of a sign that soon we'll have more people than jobs. More to your case,…

If entertainment is superfluous then you have an enviable vision of man kinds purpose. As far as I can tell amusing ourselves until we die is our whole deal. Entertainment isn't superfluous, entertainment is the truest and most important industry we have.

Maybe it's just my vision of man kind's purpose. I was speaking as entertainment as a profit driven industry, not entertainment all together.

Also, in talking to friends, when I used "service industry" it may not have conveyed what I thought it did. I grew up in a tourist area and service industry was used for people who worked in restaurants and hotels.

The natural conclusion for this future lack of jobs for many people is basic income. I'm confident if people didn't have the 9-5 they would be writing books, putting on plays, and preparing food for each other--just not necessarily for maximizing profit.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#262

Post by vacri »

WalterBright wrote: post #229
vacri wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend's mother worked in a high-level consulting agency. Her time was billed out at $1000/hour, and she got less than 10% of that. Still a good wage, but she wasn't getting the lion's share of the fee.

If she was being temped out for $1000, she could hang out her own shingle and charge $500.

In addition to what the others have said, it's also more difficult to strike out on your own due to 'having no replacement'. If a corp is reliant on you and you're part of a collective, then something happens to you, the collective will replace you. If you're on your own, a corp will be much more reticent, as the proverbial hit-by-a-bus scenario will leave them high and dry.

Disclaimer: this is only how I've had it described to me; I frequent the small end of town :)

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#263

Post by Falkon1313 »

dsylexicus wrote: post #153

jobs are the cost of satisfying human economic desires. we want to minimise costs, not increase them.since nobody knows what sort of jobs will exist even 5 years from today, there is no point in speculating and wringing hands. who saw the rise of zumba dance teachers? theres atleast a million of them today and they dont need high education or be employed in silicon valley. did president clinton with all the informati…

>jobs are the cost of satisfying human economic desires. we want to minimise costs

That's an excellent perspective. There's a major barrier though.

Even if we produce enough that everyone could satisfy their desires and then some with a cost of only 34 minutes work per week (But there would be no demand for that work. So what would the people do? And more importantly, why do we demand that they do it? That becomes a philosophical question, not an economic one.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#264

Post by ZeroGravitas »

civilian wrote: post #217
Apocryphon wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America got out of the Great Depression and WWII with deficit spending. Sure we wouldn't be able to spend as much as then, but $900 billion could go a long way towards paying for these projects http://theweek.com/articles/624334/how-world-war-ii-reveals-...

That's a myth, granted a myth that was taught in all of our history classes. The Great Depression was going to end anyway. Here's a paper that discusses just that: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2123226?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont... and here's CATO's discussion of it. (I'm showing my bias now.) http://www.cato.org/blog/did-new-deal-help The thing is--- when does the deficit spending stop?! Our economy is doing decently no…

Global warming is a good measuring stick of how close to reality a free market ideologue will go:

http://www.cato.org/research/global-warming

I particularly enjoy how reasonable they're trying to be in the initial paragraphs and how it descends into insanity as you scroll further down.

Clearly their propaganda has evolved as it become more and more accepted as reality, but their prescription remains the same "all government intervention is bad". They just have to work a great deal harder to justify that.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#265

Post by lastyearman »

vkou wrote: post #107
lastyearman wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you would like government to compete in private markets with tax payers money?

Common infrastructure is typically not considered to be a private market.

Don't know the details about US but around here government uses private contractors to build infrastructure. Using the unemployed would be competing against said contractors and make their employees unemployed instead.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#266

Post by tdkl »

zghst wrote: post #192
krapht wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, we simply wait out the next few centuries. Reproduction rates in many developed countries have dipped below replacement. Maybe the total world population will decrease in our time.

Current European politicians are trying to reverse this trend with the injection of fresh migrants, following the American model.

Except in the American model they didn't come for welfare benefits, free housing and cars as told by their "recruiters".

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#267

Post by sokoloff »

maxharris wrote: post #242
sokoloff wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with SS is that if the 25 year olds don't keep paying, there's no money to give to the 75 year olds who paid their whole working life. The money THEY contributed is long ago spent. It's much harder to tell the 25 year olds to keep paying FICA and save for their own retirement.

If 25-year-olds are in a booming economy (a result of decreasing the economic controls), the taxes won't hurt nearly as much. Also, the knowledge that those are getting phased out and are a one-time thing will help a great deal. The end result is a society where entire generations of people stop viewing each other as burdens and resources (young and old), and instead as individuals, with their own lives and responsib…

IMO, it would take a very strong economy and very selfless generation to contribute 12.4% of their earnings over a lifetime and get nothing. They'd have to save well over a third of their earning power to have a hope of retiring. (12.4% that FICA is taking and giving to someone else, 12.4% for their own private replacement version of it, and at least 10% to replace what would today be their own supplemental retirement [today's 401k/403b/IRA/investments].) That's seriously into Mr Money Mustache territory!

IME with people, knowing that they are the only ones in history getting so screwed and this is a one-time thing will NOT make it OK nor reduce the feelings of burdens and resources.

(I do like that phrase a lot. I also wish you a good medical outcome, ofc.)

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#268

Post by TFYS »

maxharris wrote: post #239
ZenPsycho wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disingenuously left out of your arguments here is the fact that a medical education costs a hell of a lot of money, and your economic measures would remove the ability to study medicine from a lot of people who might be willing to learn, but don't have massively rich parents. Deregulating university fees, getting rid of social security, and so fourth massively reduces the number of people who are able to study medici…

Disingenuously left out of your arguments here First, this is way out of line. I'm going to reply anyway, but please don't do this kind of thing in your next reply. Second, instead of treating it like a black box that has a fixed cost that we have to accept, take a medical education apart the way Musk would do when figuring the ultimate cost of one his cars or rockets: Putting people in a room, books in their hands,…

> Finally, what is the point here? An more economically "equal" society, or a society where people like me don't die waiting in line for care? I stridently advocate for the latter.

So only the amount of economic value a person can produce should decide the value of the persons life, is that what you are saying? The more money you have, the more your life is worth? This kind of neoliberal ideology sounds absolutely horrible to me. Just because you have the ability to produce more than some other person doesn't mean that your life is more important. What you are experiencing now with the wait is nothing compared to what poor people would have to endure in the system you advocate.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#269

Post by MagnumOpus »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #151
jdminhbg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To see why that is true, imagine we lived in a sports-based economy. Sports are zero-sum, the real-world economy is not.

Are sports economics zero-sum? Both teams get paid for playing. If one team loses, they don't give money to the other team.

Sports is zero-sum in the way that there's a fixed amount of money to be distributed from ticket sales and TV rights.

That money goes to the top few hundred athletes/clubs/franchises in every sport - doesn't matter whether there are a million or a billion aspiring players.

Pertinently, active investment management - Buffett's forte - is similarly zero-sum in the way fees on managed assets accrue, although the stock market as a whole isn't.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#270

Post by maxharris »

TFYS wrote: post #268
maxharris wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disingenuously left out of your arguments here First, this is way out of line. I'm going to reply anyway, but please don't do this kind of thing in your next reply. Second, instead of treating it like a black box that has a fixed cost that we have to accept, take a medical education apart the way Musk would do when figuring the ultimate cost of one his cars or rockets: Putting people in a room, books in their hands,…

> Finally, what is the point here? An more economically "equal" society, or a society where people like me don't die waiting in line for care? I stridently advocate for the latter. So only the amount of economic value a person can produce should decide the value of the persons life, is that what you are saying? The more money you have, the more your life is worth? This kind of neoliberal ideology sounds absolutely ho…

What you are experiencing now with the wait is nothing compared to what poor people would have to endure in the system you advocate.

First, you do realize that not everyone that goes into the hospital today comes back out alive, right? There are a lot of things medicine can't yet cure - today - for any price.

Second, if you block high-priced medical advances, you are also blocking the low-priced ones that inevitably follow in a free market.

Just as UNIX workstations sold for tens of thousands in the early 1990s, and were supplanted by desktop computers costing a tenth as much in the following decade, expensive medical technology would become cheap quickly under freedom.

We haven't seen this happen with most of medicine because of the controls placed on it. For example, I learned (via this thread) of a new machine that administers anesthesia. Its use would make my biopsy $1800 cheaper, in addition to reducing my wait time (you can't have an endoscopy without general anesthesia): https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-machine-...

This device was ready to go six years ago, but the FDA rejected it initially (under pressure from anesthesiologists). Three years later, after much foot-dragging, it finally approved it. And yet today it's not available in most places because the American Society of Anesthesiologists lobbied hard for a "narrow indication" and "restrictive guidelines."

Note that it's not up me or my doctor as to whether or not I might opt-in to this. Nor is it even a choice that can be made by any of the local hospitals around me (I would shop around if it would help, believe me!) What happened here is a direct and inevitable consequence of regulatory control over which innovations are permitted to enter medical use. (The only tool the government has in regulatory matters is more regulation or less. Therefore there is no way to prevent regulatory capture in a mixed economy except to steadily de-control it.)

What good is it to me that the device has been vetted more? Every minute I wait allows my condition to worsen, increasing my risk of death.

The facts I've outlined here are not just some "neoliberal ideology" intended to offend you. This is a thing that I (and hundreds of thousands of other people like me) need desperately. All I'm advocating for is a society that recognizes the life-saving role of freedom in medicine. And I'm advocating for that only because nothing else could possibly work.

You can't just throw your hands up in the air and say "to heck with early adopters, they shouldn't be allowed to pay more to be a year ahead!" If the government forced all the tech companies to do that, tech would be about as slow to improve as medicine currently is. This is because there would be no money put into the right hands (and it is a constantly changing group of people and organizations), at the right time to make the technology steadily improve.

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