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RichardGamingo posted:Its pretty well established that people around the world receiving basic income do not get up and become inventive nor productive members of society.
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Dec 19, 2014 18:52
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RichardGamingo posted:From the point of Basic Income, the only hope is that a combination of culture and technical inheritances prevent the civilization from becoming completely inert and collapsing on itself. Its pretty well established that people around the world receiving basic income do not get up and become inventive nor productive members of society. Basic Income increases the sloth factor and America, as this possible future, society is in big trouble if there's not a culture that somehow drives people who are complacent and ignorant to take action rather than let their time pass away uselessly. It appears you are arguing for a crushing inheritance tax here (I agree with this if you are!), since apparently being given wealth makes society crumble uselessly, am I correct? Yet why do people like Mitt Romney or Steve Jobs, who have more wealth than they can ever possibly spend, continue to work? Why does anyone work hard at a high-paying job when they could take it easy and earn half as much yet still be above the apparently sloth-inducing threshold of basic income? Mitt actually spent a whole bunch of money and dedicated ridiculous amounts of time just two years ago to try to get a job that pays a measly $400k annually, so it appears that your contention that people inevitably stop working once they have enough to exist in slothful comfort is not correct. And you don't have to take my word for it: Candian Mincome posted:The experiments generally found a 13% reduction in work effort from the family as a whole, with one-third of the response coming from the primary earner, one-third from the secondary earner and the final third coming from additional earners in the family (Levine et al. 2005: 99). Because the primary earner typically worked many more hours than the secondary and tertiary earners, this implied a relatively small reduction in work effort by primary earners. Female spouses reduced their hours and re-entered the workforce less quickly after a break. The general result that secondary earners tend to take some part of the increased family income in the form of more time for household production, particularly staying home with newborns, was found in all the experiments. Tertiary earners, largely adolescent males, reduced their hours of work dramatically but the largest decreases occurred because they began to enter the workforce later. Taking a first job at an older age suggests that some of these adolescent males might be spending more years in school. A parent spending more time at home to raise the children and do household chores? Teenagers being able to stay in school and get a valuable education rather than being forced into menial labor to support the family? The horror! How will society survive?! 
VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Dec 19, 2014 |
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Dec 19, 2014 19:01
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RichardGamingo posted:From the point of Basic Income, the only hope is that a combination of culture and technical inheritances prevent the civilization from becoming completely inert and collapsing on itself. Its pretty well established that people around the world receiving basic income do not get up and become inventive nor productive members of society. Basic Income increases the sloth factor and America, as this possible future, society is in big trouble if there's not a culture that somehow drives people who are complacent and ignorant to take action rather than let their time pass away uselessly. Nothing about basic income is well established, but the trials of it that have been done are exactly opposite of what you say. People who receive basic income become more inventive and productive members of society.
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Dec 19, 2014 19:06
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on the left posted:Even if you made everyone in America rich, you wouldn't increase for example, iPhone sales as much as you would by making even a fraction of China or India a little bit better off. Yeah, because clearly what I was saying in that post is that we should redistribute income in whatever way will best maximize iPhone sales  asdf32 posted:You're essentially advocating wealth redistribution to push the savings rate down further to spur demand. The U.S. for example already has a very very low savings rate. So that's not what's needed. Actually the "essence" of why I'm advocating a basic income is because it will improve living standards and also because it will likely raise the bargaining power of labour relative to that of capital. The fact that it would probably also increase demand and reduce our dependence on credit to fund consumption is a nice side effect but it isn't the essence of my argument. And if you want to explain why putting money into the hands of folks with a high MPC is not going to increase demand, or why increasing demand is not going to boost overall economic activity then explain where you think is going to happen instead. And since we had a very similar argument in this very thread like a month ago please keep in mind that we're discussing current economic conditions where there do indeed appear to be idle resources and unemployed workers that could be put to use. We're not describing some hypothetical scenario where maybe the economy is already at full employment and therefore the only way to boost production will be through increasing productivity. Best Regards, Helsing
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Dec 19, 2014 19:44
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I'm pretty sure Mr. Gamingo was being satirical. If he kept going the next paragraph would've been about shock collars for the poor that're like how if you stand still too long in Counter-Strike: Source you lose some health? You might not know what that means but I guarantee you the poor generally do so they'll be familiar with the concept immediately.Helsing posted:...putting money into the hands of folks with a high MPC... Are there other angles on how it induces domestic consumption? I always go with MPC, too, telling people it shifts dollars down the income gradient, 'converting savings into spending, converting this guy's stock and savings and money into this guy's food and shelter and money,' that kind of thing. But I've only got the one pitch on that point. Accretionist fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Dec 19, 2014 |
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Dec 19, 2014 19:55
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Basic income is all about improving the efficiency of society, by allowing citizens the fiscal stability to pursue long-term projects. It's about ensuring that most people can afford a basic room to rent rather than living on the street and constantly needing intervention from emergency services; it's about being able to regularly buy toothpaste so they don't need a $25,000 dental surgery; it's about ensuring that most people can afford to live a decent life, so they aren't forced to turn to crime and drugs to make ends meet; it's about having a refrigerator and a cooking unit available rather than having to shell out for unhealthy prepared meals; it's about raising kids in a secure environment so they're able to take advantage of education and become productive citizens. And overall it's about creating a good society that isn't so blinded with short-term gains that it ends up bleeding money to pay for all the quick-fixes. This principle of efficiency has been proven over and over again. Disputing the policy of basic income is also a refutation of basic economics.
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Dec 19, 2014 20:07
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Helsing posted:Yeah, because clearly what I was saying in that post is that we should redistribute income in whatever way will best maximize iPhone sales Well not much changes does it. Here is something you can probably understand: I don't like short term issues being intertwined with long term policy. Whether GMI is good or bad should have little to do with current economic conditions (either way). "We need stimulus now lets just enact this permanent policy!" sets off alarm bells that get my attention every time. Current events get used to justify bad policy all the time, and it's a problem. So I'm not disagreeing with the argument, I'm disagreeing that our short term need for stimulus should should dictate permanent policy. Especially when we have a well established Keynesian toolkit including borrow and spend, print money and lower interest rates. In fact we're doing all of these things and could just do them more (my favorite would be infrastructure projects) to deal with short term issues. (Beyond the short term, demand, like all financial policy, can't create growth on its own). Besides that there are actually a lot of really good fundamental arguments for GMI: Kaal posted:Basic income is all about improving the efficiency of society, by allowing citizens the fiscal stability to pursue long-term projects. It's about ensuring that most people can afford a basic room to rent rather than living on the street and constantly needing intervention from emergency services; it's about being able to regularly buy toothpaste so they don't need a $25,000 dental surgery; it's about ensuring that most people can afford to live a decent life, so they aren't forced to turn to crime and drugs to make ends meet; it's about having a refrigerator and a cooking unit available rather than having to shell out for unhealthy prepared meals; it's about raising kids in a secure environment so they're able to take advantage of education and become productive citizens. And overall it's about creating a good society that isn't so blinded with short-term gains that it ends up bleeding money to pay for all the quick-fixes. This principle of efficiency has been proven over and over again. Disputing the policy of basic income is also a refutation of basic economics. Basically everything here is a sound long term argument for GMI and reduction in inequality and poverty in general. Having a low education, poor health, high crime self perpetuating underclass is fundamentally bad for the economy for reasons anyone can see (even ignoring fairness). Accretionist posted:Are there other angles on how it induces domestic consumption? That's basically it for financial arguments. If money is borrowed to pay for it that would also increase demand. But I'd categorize that borrowing as independent policy. GMI is wealth transfer policy. The increased demand comes from the different rates of savings of the groups involved in the transfer.
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Dec 20, 2014 01:48
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asdf32 posted:Well not much changes does it. Here is something you can probably understand: I don't like short term issues being intertwined with long term policy. Whether GMI is good or bad should have little to do with current economic conditions (either way). "We need stimulus now lets just enact this permanent policy!" sets off alarm bells that get my attention every time. Current events get used to justify bad policy all the time, and it's a problem. What you're saying is far as far as it goes - we shouldn't implement permanent solutions if the problems are short term - but it's highly questionable whether declining returns to labour or weak aggregate demand is a "short term" problem. We're talking about a phenomenon that's been going on for four decades. Until now households have been able to work more hours (partially by having men work more hours of the week, partially by pushing women into the workforce), take on more credit, or finance consumption through various forms of credits, in particular by relying on the increasing equity in their homes. But unless you think we're going to suddenly discover more hours in the day or unless you think it would be good to keep our domestic consumption reliant on inflating asset bubbles then something has got to give here. quote:So I'm not disagreeing with the argument, I'm disagreeing that our short term need for stimulus should should dictate permanent policy. Especially when we have a well established Keynesian toolkit including borrow and spend, print money and lower interest rates. In fact we're doing all of these things and could just do them more (my favorite would be infrastructure projects) to deal with short term issues. (Beyond the short term, demand, like all financial policy, can't create growth on its own). Keynesian policy is hard to sustain when you've got globally mobile capital, floating exchange rates and a government that has been captured by financial interests. Unfortunately it takes fairly extraordinary political situations for business as a class to tolerate Keynesian fiscal policy, and most financial institutions prefer tight money policies. Now I know that we strongly disagree on the extent to which business has actively captured government but even if you set that aside, as long as capital is fully mobile they don't need to lobby government to veto Keynesian policy: they can just threaten to relocate. Keynesian mostly worked because markets were embedded within a thick cluster of regulatory and social institutions. Now personally I would be strongly in favour of rolling back the changes of the last 40 years and returning to a situation where capital controls are strict and governments extensively regulate economic activity. Would you be? Because if you aren't, then the policy solutions you propose are only going to have limited effectiveness. I mean just look at how hysterical the reaction of Obama's very tame stimulus has been, or the way people are tearing their hair out over unorthodox monetary policy. That's how they're behaving in the midsts of some of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression! The political dynamics of Keynesianism were predicated on a very particular postwar situation that hasn't really obtained since, at best, the late 1970s.
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Dec 20, 2014 02:47
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Helsing posted:Yeah, because clearly what I was saying in that post is that we should redistribute income in whatever way will best maximize iPhone sales We have redistributed income, it's just been income that's been redistributed from the bottom half of the top 10% of incomes to the rich and to the bottom 90% of the world. This is why companies won't experience a demand-based squeeze for quite some time, provided that they are globally exposed.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:03
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asdf32 posted:Well not much changes does it. Here is something you can probably understand: I don't like short term issues being intertwined with long term policy. Whether GMI is good or bad should have little to do with current economic conditions (either way). "We need stimulus now lets just enact this permanent policy!" sets off alarm bells that get my attention every time. Current events get used to justify bad policy all the time, and it's a problem. You're the one using short-term issues to argue against policy though. You brought up some vague feeling that savings rates are too low right now in response to Helsing describing long-term trends.
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Dec 20, 2014 06:22
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mistake
asdf32 fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 17:00
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Accretionist posted:Can you provide numbers for your point? Here are some:   Compensation has continued to go up (no not as fast as productivity), it's just that it's been eaten primarily by healthcare (and taxes and other benefits). According to the second chart, of the 107% divergence 37% is accounted for by this. It's a big piece of the puzzle. Helsing posted:What you're saying is far as far as it goes - we shouldn't implement permanent solutions if the problems are short term - but it's highly questionable whether declining returns to labour or weak aggregate demand is a "short term" problem. We're talking about a phenomenon that's been going on for four decades. Declining returns to labor and weak aggregate demand are entirely different subjects, we can have high local demand that still doesn't touch certain worker segments (for some of the reasons you acknowledge below). quote:Until now households have been able to work more hours (partially by having men work more hours of the week, partially by pushing women into the workforce), take on more credit, or finance consumption through various forms of credits, in particular by relying on the increasing equity in their homes. But unless you think we're going to suddenly discover more hours in the day or unless you think it would be good to keep our domestic consumption reliant on inflating asset bubbles then something has got to give here. This is why I think these discussions are important - [I think] you're missing all the primary reasons people are working harder for less: the societal cancers known as healthcare, housing and education and global competition. They don't relate primarily to narratives involving the elite (particularly the part where hospitals and academia are screwing society). They relate to people missing the primary problems directly in front of them. quote:Keynesian policy is hard to sustain when you've got globally mobile capital, floating exchange rates and a government that has been captured by financial interests. Everyone tolerates Keynesian fiscal policy because it's the dominant economic policy? We're engaged in large amounts of keynesian policy at this moment and have been particularly since the financial crisis. Starting with George Bush mailing out stimulus checks to everyone in the country and continuing with 0% interest rates, quantitative easing (printing money) and record deficits. One thing that sometimes gets lost is that deficits are stimulus. It doesn't matter what the name of the bill is. The stimulus part comes from the government spending more than it takes in, regardless of what that spending is on. Will republicans fight a new "stimulus" bill? Yes, but that's basically a publicity stunt by both sides compared to the massive [keynesian] stimulus the current deficits represent. Well like I mentioned above there is a point here with the capital controls in that stimulus spending or higher demand can leak outside the borders and might miss some groups altogether. I don't think we know for sure. But that's one reason why my preferred policy would be local spending first on things like infrastructure which stay here. Implement capital controls? Absolutely not. I'm not convinced it's needed and it would be a massive FYGM to the rest of the world.
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Dec 20, 2014 17:04
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on the left posted:We have redistributed income, it's just been income that's been redistributed from the bottom half of the top 10% of incomes to the rich and to the bottom 90% of the world. This is why companies won't experience a demand-based squeeze for quite some time, provided that they are globally exposed. That exception you carved out - "provided they are globally exposed" - makes your point irrelevant to this discussion, because a significant part of the economy still provides goods and services to the domestic market. asdf32 posted:Here are some: Don't you think you should be disaggregating those statistics a lot more than you are? How are you distinguishing between the stock options paid to CEOs vs. the healthcare provided for workers, and why are you using average wages instead of median wages? You're chart is at such a high level of abstraction that it is impossible to verify whether the numbers are showing what you claim they are showing. Also maybe I'm just tired right now and missing something obvious Edit: Ok I was definitely too tired and didn't read that graph correctly, my bad for writing this when I haven't slept in way too long. I'll leave my error there for the sake of full disclosure. Anyway, the point I was trying to make but fumbled here was that the divergence you're showing doesn't make a lot of sense because production and none-supervisory workers often don't have benefits, whereas many of the benefits on that graphs are likely to be stock options or benefits. The decline in wages is somewhat overdetermined (meaning, there are seemingly multiple overlapping causes that could explain) but I'd suggest a much better explanation, if we're going to focus on one factor, is the decline of unions and, with them, the relaxing of social norms that kept managerial salaries from getting too many orders of magnitude higher than front line workers. That, and the move toward rewarding managers with stock options. asdf32 posted:Declining returns to labor and weak aggregate demand are entirely different subjects, we can have high local demand that still doesn't touch certain worker segments (for some of the reasons you acknowledge below). I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here but it certainly doesn't follow that stagnating wages and salaries are disconnected from weak aggregate demand. Households are underpaid and over leveraged and that is depressing the demand for goods and services in an economy where roughly 70% of GDP is composed of consumption. quote:This is why I think these discussions are important - [I think] you're missing all the primary reasons people are working harder for less: the societal cancers known as healthcare, housing and education and global competition. They don't relate primarily to narratives involving the elite (particularly the part where hospitals and academia are screwing society). They relate to people missing the primary problems directly in front of them. You cannot talk coherently about any of the sectors you just mentioned without discussing how the government has been captured by monied interests. I'm honestly a bit shocked that you could type that list of sectors out without somehow recognizing that. Healthcare costs in the US are massively inflated by the private sector and the overwhelming reason that these costs can't be curbed is the political power of private healthcare insurers and providers. Housing costs are rising for a variety of reasons but one of the biggest ones is deregulation and a financial system that loves profiting off of asset bubbles. Education costs are rising because of privatization and because we've decided to just make loans available to students rather than actually controlling costs. "Globalization" (really, it's just "managed trade") is being managed in a very particular way that insulates some sectors of the economy from international competition (i.e. nobody seriously pushes for greater medical tourism that might bring down the wages of US doctors). These are irrational policies but they are policies that happen to massively and disproportionately benefit a narrow set of interests who go out of their way to ensure that these policies remain in place. But most remarkably of all you're ignoring the massive financial meltdown we just had that was triggered by massive fraud and predatory lending and which revealed that financial oligarchs in this country are essentially above the law now. This is a former chief economist at the IMF, who not exactly a socialist firebrand: quote:But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund’s economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out. quote:In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people. A lot of the health insurance and financial industry are basically a deadweight loss for the overall economy. We basically have a class of parasitic rentier capitalists adding very little value to the economy but sucking up money that could otherwise be distributed more evenly. quote:Everyone tolerates Keynesian fiscal policy because it's the dominant economic policy? We're engaged in large amounts of keynesian policy at this moment and have been particularly since the financial crisis. Starting with George Bush mailing out stimulus checks to everyone in the country and continuing with 0% interest rates, quantitative easing (printing money) and record deficits. Keynesianism tends to refer to a cluster of policies that goes beyond just deficit spending and includes controls on capital and an emphasis on fiscal policy rather than monetary policy, which generally means a larger role for government. But even restricting ourselves to the sort of vulgar Keynesianism you're referring to we haven't actually seen a huge return to Keynesian policy and insofar as we have adopted more Keynesian policies than in the past they have been strongly opposed. Most of Europe tried to double down hard on austerity and continues to do so. The EU only gave modest ground on the monetary policy front after a number of prominent commentators started seriously contemplating the breakup of the Euro area. And while the US Federal government did have a very mild stimulus (one that every prominent Keynesian I know of complained was much too small) this was mostly cancelled out by massive austerity at state level. The US has been more willing to try unorthodox monetary policy but that hasn't proven terribly effective and also relies on propping up asset prices. So you'll excuse me if I'm not terribly impressed by the supposed return of Keynesianism. And even if we do want to call this "Keynesianism" it has only been implemented under extraordinary circumstances and is already being withdrawn. It simply cannot fulfil the role that you were saying it could. quote:One thing that sometimes gets lost is that deficits are stimulus. It doesn't matter what the name of the bill is. The stimulus part comes from the government spending more than it takes in, regardless of what that spending is on. Will republicans fight a new "stimulus" bill? Yes, but that's basically a publicity stunt by both sides compared to the massive [keynesian] stimulus the current deficits represent. Simply running up deficits is a totally inadequate policy for addressing the problem's we're facing. Obviously if the economy is in recession then the government should run deficits but that doesn't mean that this policy on its own is going to accomplish much. There's a big difference between, say, cutting the capital gains tax vs. building a bunch of roads and bridges. quote:Well like I mentioned above there is a point here with the capital controls in that stimulus spending or higher demand can leak outside the borders and might miss some groups altogether. I don't think we know for sure. But that's one reason why my preferred policy would be local spending first on things like infrastructure which stay here. Infrastructure is good to build and can help the local (and national) economy but unless we're contemplating infrastructure projects on a totally unprecedented and politically infeasible scale then it's not going to be enough to roll back 40 years of stagnating wages, nor will it address the underlying problems. quote:Implement capital controls? Absolutely not. I'm not convinced it's needed and it would be a massive FYGM to the rest of the world. This is just silly. Most countries, including countries in the developing world, grew faster during the Bretton Woods era than they have in the Washington Consensus period. Countries like South Korea, Japan, and Finland very successfully built up their economies in that period and were able to create broadly based middle class societies. By contrast the deregulation of capital flows has created devastating financial crisis and heavily unbalanced growth. And the big success story of the deregulated period, China, mostly succeeds because it is large enough and independent enough from the US that it can essentially ignore the parts of the Washington Consensus that do not benefit it. But go ahead and explain why having a financial crisis every ten or so years that unnecessarily wipes out billions of dollars of wealth is actually a huge boon to the global south. Helsing fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 18:57
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Helsing posted:Don't you think you should be disaggregating those statistics a lot more than you are? How are you distinguishing between the stock options paid to CEOs vs. the healthcare provided for workers, and why are you using average wages instead of median wages? You're chart is at such a high level of abstraction that it is impossible to verify whether the numbers are showing what you claim they are showing. The graph is the same level of abstraction as the one I originally replied too. Certainly the heritage foundation graph is not the be all end all here. But it's capturing an obviously important point that's often lost - a significant chunk of wage stagnation is explained by healthcare costs. Unions? I continue to fail to see how you can look at titanic shifts in the global economy that coincided with wage stagnation and conclude: "Nope, mostly unions". But we've had this discussion. Note that this point about healthcare is important for comparing wages between the U.S. and other countries which have national healthcare. quote:I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here but it certainly doesn't follow that stagnating wages and salaries are disconnected from weak aggregate demand. Households are underpaid and over leveraged and that is depressing the demand for goods and services in an economy where roughly 70% of GDP is composed of consumption. Increased aggregate demand should generally help everyone if the economy is depressed. But not evenly. And as we've basically seen the economy can grow while leaving certain segments behind. So increased demand can still leave some labor segments out. Whether it does and who it leaves behind are entirely separate variables from demand itself. I'd also caution you again on putting too much emphasis on demand. Aggregate demand matters mostly in terms of changes (quick decline = recession, quick increase = bubble) but not in absolutes. Different economies function just fine with wildly varying rates of savings for example (Norway 39, US 17). The financial system does a good job of balancing these things out over time and shifting supply to wherever the demand may be. If we wanted permanent policy to increase aggregate demand we'd just print money and mail it out as checks. We know that doesn't work and it doesn't work because increasing aggregate demand isn't universally good policy. quote:You cannot talk coherently about any of the sectors you just mentioned without discussing how the government has been captured by monied interests. I'm honestly a bit shocked that you could type that list of sectors out without somehow recognizing that. Yes I can because none of these things primarily have to do with that. Healthcare is a problem of market supply with non-market demand but it's also intertwined with culture (fight to the end), exacerbated by things like too much liability and privacy but most importantly: a lack of interest in reform. Americans haven't really ever wanted a national healthcare system and have lived the consequences. The elites haven't foisted this upon them. And, lo and behold, it's currently changing. Housing prices have been on their way up since the 90's well before mortgage backed securities were relevant at a time when Fannie and Freddie dominated the market with a mandate to subsidize middle class home ownership rates (in tandem with tax credits and other incentives). That's driven the longer term housing increase. The bubble was a temporary side show in that story. And, given that the bubble popped spectacularly, it's not clear housing prices would be lower today if none of it had happened. Increased housing prices are part of a large trend, not simply "deregulation". Separately, the idea that the financial industry loves market crushing bubbles is absurd.  The red line below is Fannie and Freddie. Asset backed securities are barely a thing until 2003.  And as for education, right, a major part is well meaning subsidies for education. Reminder of the point: Housing, healthcare and higher ed are huge pieces of the puzzle for why middle class economic gains have stagnated. And they don't easily tie to any single narrative. The market is a big problem in healthcare but less so in housing and education where well intended government policy has helped cause long term problems. quote:This is a former chief economist at the IMF, who not exactly a socialist firebrand: I'm not sure at this point how we got on the financial crisis but like I said, it and the potential oligarchs that caused it are not the primary causes of the things above. Healthcare is literally an economic cancer in my opinion but I'd caution you against declaring any category within it "deadweight". If the government took over healthcare the entire industry would be subsumed within it and all categories of jobs would continue to exist in some form (certainly the government shouldn't rubber stamp every claim for example). The financial industry, well, lets agree that I think rich people and rich corporations don't like giving money away for nothing yet seem to pay quite a bit for finance. That, and finance plays a roll in capital allocation and investment choice. Not an easy case for "dead-weight" quote:Keynesianism tends to refer to a cluster of policies that goes beyond just deficit spending and includes controls on capital and an emphasis on fiscal policy rather than monetary policy, which generally means a larger role for government. Well austerity in Europe is primarily the result of the Euro tying the hands of all the nations involved. When any normal country faces a debt crisis it can devalue it's currency. Greece, Spain etc couldn't do that, hence Austerity. Yeah it was a huge mistake and everyone gets that now. But the Euro created a unique set of circumstances that hadn't really been encountered before. Beyond that I'm not really going to quibble. Certainly there is room for more aggressive government stimulus. But to suggest that we're not deep in the middle of an era of Keynesian economic policy is sort of ridiculous. quote:Simply running up deficits is a totally inadequate policy for addressing the problem's we're facing. Obviously if the economy is in recession then the government should run deficits but that doesn't mean that this policy on its own is going to accomplish much. There's a big difference between, say, cutting the capital gains tax vs. building a bunch of roads and bridges. Well again borrowing is stimulus and the scale at which we're borrowing far exceeds the size of any real or proposed "stimulus" bill. Some of it may not be directed but that borrowing goes to pay for government employees who would otherwise be laid off and programs like unemployment which are every bit as good as as any "stimulus" bill. quote:
It hasn't created unbalanced growth it's created growth across the board with the first world middle class as the only major exception. Not perfect, but I'll take it. The countries you list grew with significant amounts of trade with a first world willing to outsource industries and directly invest in them. Japan wouldn't grow for example if the U.S. wasn't willing to import huge amounts of steel, cars and electronics starting the 70's - exactly the things capital controls, which you're calling for, prevent. asdf32 fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 17:29
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asdf32 posted:The financial industry, well, lets agree that I think rich people and rich corporations don't like giving money away for nothing yet seem to pay quite a bit for finance. That, and finance plays a roll in capital allocation and investment choice. Not an easy case for "dead-weight" Considering the financial industry just last week succeeded in the goal it has set for itself since the recession of removing the rule that forbade them from gambling federally-insured funds on the derivatives market so taxpayers can once again be on the hook to bail them out when their short-term bonus-seeking fucks over their entire industry in the long term, I'd say it actually is very reasonable to question whether the ever-growing pile of trillions and trillions of dollars that the finance industry has transferred to itself through its control of the regulatory system is really providing us worthwhile benefits in exchange for our money. Just  I can't believe you're actually using "well rich people pay for it so it must be worth the money!" in AD 2014, just six years after we had to spend several trillion dollars bailing out rich people who had pledged to pay for things that weren't worth the money when they couldn't make good on their obligations.
VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 19:56
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
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HappyHippo posted:Missed this part. This is the usual hyperbole I get when I ask people to back up this idea, and as usual most of it is based on a science fiction understanding of technological progress. You're discounting the cost of robotics and extrapolating far too much from your example. Advances in computing power may have been exponential over the last few decades (although there are signs that that is slowing down) but not all technology follows that curve: advances in robotics have been much less impressive. We're nowhere close to having a fully automated mine. This is what you get when you extrapolate the efficiency of automating a static assembly line process and assume it can be just as easily applied to every other task. In short, it's massively shortsighted. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Dec 26, 2014 |
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Dec 26, 2014 17:45
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