The General Economics Thread

All of those facts you posted ought to provide the textbook incentive for massive stimulus efforts. /sigh

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

And IIRC, Europe has no appetite it due to a combination of wary old people who don't want to see their savings obliterated and the general impression Stimulus leads to massive boondoggles and bridges and airports to nowhere the last time European countries tried Stimulus.

This is why noone is also running 3~4% inflation: The older people refuse to see their decades' worth of saving accounts become worthless. And since they're a fairly regular voting bloc...

The worst example of that being the Ciudad Real Central Airport.

edited 22nd Aug '14 8:20:01 AM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On

Worth noting that that was apparently a scam:

A BBC News magazine report suggests the airport was planned to fail by its investors, who benefited from construction contracts awarded to their own companies.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

It makes sense that governments made up of people who don't believe that stimulus can (or should) work would screw up stimulus when it manages to pass the legislature.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Why the Robots might not take our jobs after all: They lack common sense, something that's incredibly subconscious for a lot of humans, and not very easy to explain. Or program.

This nails it on the head. Jobs shift. But people will find things to do.

Here's the problem, though. Health care: robots, finance? robots. Leisure? Robots.

Not entertainment, not yet, but that's a negligible field in terms of full-time employment anyway, and the parts of the entertainment sector that are likely to employ more people are more susceptible to automation.

So basically we have to create more bullshit jobs or learn to Star Trek.

It's possible that the 2008 crash coincided with a collapse of the labor force via long term trends. Companies are getting older and more stable. The work force is getting older. It's getting too expensive in many companies' eyes to train employees due to an increase in employees requiring government licenses, and legal changes have made it more difficult to fire employees, as well as the issue of employees being tied to their jobs via healthcare.

Businesses care about your work history and internships, not your college or grades, going to college is just a way for employers to cut undesirable hires from the list.

Patent trolls as the new rentier class: Society usually routes around parasites in economies by innovating, however the terror of IP Trolls is "innovative society now has to pay the patent troll a toll to innovate, he might not be able to afford to innovate at all."

@ Fighteer:

I'm not sure a lot of it was stimulus in the way you describe — a fair amount of the funding came from European Union Structural Funds and Cohesion Funds including the European Regional Development Fund.

edited 22nd Aug '14 2:16:36 PM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On

While I do remember there being some stimulus in Europe after the Crisis I don't remember it being that much or lasting a particularly long time. When and what was all of this?

I'm probably thinking mostly Ciudad.

Though the EU did to try and keep itself afloat in 2008 via stimulus spending, though I swear I remember a European troper or two previously citing that boondoggles similar to Ciudad Real (though I think this goes before the Great Recession) being why at least Northern Europe views the words "Stimulus Spending" with great suspicion.

edited 22nd Aug '14 9:43:27 PM by PotatoesRock

On the whole, before 2007 — under funding I described in the post .

edited 22nd Aug '14 11:51:53 PM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On

That sounds less like stimulus and more like spending that was prompted by a combination of the property bubble and corrupt business and politics. Particularly if this came before the crisis happened.

edited 23rd Aug '14 5:53:20 AM by Mio

Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot?Silicon Valley Is Split

Robots won't destroy jobs, but they may destroy the middle class, and the Middle Class needs more education to keep up with automation.

I'm alright Jack - you can't automate legal work. (*puts feet up on desk and smiles smugly).

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Legalzoom.com my friend. Plus bots to search lexis nexus and do other things confined to paralegals. The system won't replace lawyers outright, but will increasingly edge them out of the more mundane aspects of lawyering, further decreasing demand in an already overpopulated pool.

Edit: I'm not trying to be a doomsayer or to say that everyone's screwed. Just that the next epoch is coming in our working lifetimes (as long as you're under 40, pretty much), and we as a society need to prepare.

edited 23rd Aug '14 10:19:41 AM by Ogodei

World getting 'super-aged' at scary speed

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

Clearly we need to invent immortality and reverse aging. Or just spend more money on space travel and start a new baby boom for colonization purposes. I'm good with either.

The aging could counteract the robots by reducing the pool of people who need to work, especially since we already give guaranteed income to the aged.

With a news report talking about how much information is collected from users who download free apps, my brother naturally went off about how he's against government regulation, because private business is always better than government at regulating things.

Yeah, like they don't BOTH have a possible agenda, or incentive to be lazy and screw around if there's nothing pushing them to do their jobs right.

He's pissed at the amount of corruption in the government, and is running towards libertarianism and Austrian economics because they promise easy (or simple, at least) solutions to his woes. What a tool.

I went through a similar phase when I was a bit younger than him (he's 25), and I grew out of that phase once I came to realize that either extreme isn't good, and that even if the government is frustratingly, maddeningly corrupt, libertarianism is WORSE.

Do you agree? And why/why not?

Neither the government nor the companies/corporations should have too much power over the citizens and the nations. With great power (and no regulation) comes abuse, corruption, and a severe mistrust which ultimately causes a greater socio-economical gap/rift.

Going to one extreme is no better than the other. Giving private industries control over everything just leads to slightly different problems than giving the government complete control. Instead, you let both sides do what they're best at. Capitalism works swimmingly as long as monopolies can't form; food, for example, is the poster child of capitalism for a reason. Governments need to be in charge of things that need to be monopolies. Power and other utilities work best when tightly regulated so that everything is working on the same system.

People who are pissed off at the system and run to an opposite extreme really don't help. My brother can't see that. The rest of the family (except one of my cousins) thinks he's an idiot. But he's stuck on his "the government can't do anything right, so private companies should take care of it, and the market will take care of itself because [mises.org and Austrian economics crap here]" line, and gets randomly cocky or angry if you disagree with him. He likes to brag about how "rational" he is, and his favorite saying is "Think about it from a rational perspective." Well, I did.

I see Austrian economics as an answer to government abuse to be no different than communism as an answer to capitalist abuse. In other words, it attempts to fix a big problem with a solution that relies entirely on a bizarre, unrealistic view of human nature, which makes things worse.

edited 24th Aug '14 7:38:58 PM by BonsaiForest

The problem is, if we use this as the answer to what to do about unemployment and automation, the result is that we'll just be screwing the younger generations over even more. Essentially a world of 'live in poverty as a wage slave until you get old'. I don't think that's what we want.

Disagree, sort of.

Over and over, I see people blaming the circumstance of the abusive corporate oligarchy on 'too much capitalism' (or some terminology that boils down to that), and claiming on this basis that 'the free market' is fundamentally flawed. But the problems we have now are mostly because the markets aren't free (hence the term 'oligarchy'). The big corporations have corrupted the government, and arranged to be given enormously asymmetrical legal weapons that they can use to destroy smaller competitors without having to actually outcompete them. These weapons, along with strong rent-capture tools (such as private land ownership, IP law, etc, things not strictly part of capitalism in that they aren't about capital), are what make the current system more like feudalism than free-market capitalism. At any rate, neither one is by any means necessary in a libertarian economy, and the former is quite the opposite of libertarianism.

The main complaint that can legitimately be leveled against free-market capitalism is that it's too easy to corrupt, that it doesn't have enough safeguards against reverting to feudalism. I don't think we have enough different examples to say that this is the case (in particular, note that private rent-capture tools have been pretty much ubiquitous in western countries the whole time), but it's possible. What I'm mostly saying, though, is that we have no adequate basis for claiming that libertarian economics in its pure form doesn't work, or at least that I've yet to see any (and that most of the arguments I have seen to that effect use examples that aren't really libertarian at all, mostly regarding recent economic history in the US and other advanced western countries).

So the question is, can you (or anyone) come up with a view of human nature that isn't bizarre and unrealistic, and yet can support a framework for real progress?

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