The General Economics Thread

How is that different from human service? They go back and complain, the machine apologizes. If Mc Donald's would lose sales overall from stubborn machines (that outweigh the cost of appeasing those customers), then they make the machines less stubborn.

There's also the fact that a lot of people can't describe exactly what they want and how they want it and so on.

Machines are perfect, unless your order is perfect in a very specific way it's gonna fuck it up. That goes for any order you give a machine in any context.

It's for that reason that machines just plain can't do human interaction properly.

Oh really when?

At any given time there is no possible way to have all work positions fully filled. There are areas with worker surplus and other areas with worker short supply. Those two workers would either migrate to another work position or look for another employment on the same field but on a different place.

People build cars and computers by themselves with stuff other people made and were paid to make, you can't make a processor or engine block in your home, not without expensive machinery, and even making a finished good would still require a demand for the parts needed to assemble them.

We ended up developing capitalism because people can't produce all the things they need and producing things for others would require some form of compensation for their labor. There are even jobs that are needed in order to have a working society but no one wants to do them without compensation, like sanitation work. No one really wants to clean clogged up pipes but it pays and for many people that payment is enough motivation to work on that job.

Exchanging physical goods as trade through barter puts a lot of constrains, as a shoe maker needs to eat every day but a bread maker only needs a couple of pairs of shoes and a bread maker can't accept finished goods he can't or won't trade.

Kickstarter isn't trying to get away from capitalism, kickstarter is purely capitalists, the failed attempts at kickstart are either scams or products that either didn't have a demand or were poorly executed. Kickstarter is a mean to get capital, not a mean to escape from capitalism.

edited 5th May '16 10:42:53 AM by AngelusNox

Inter arma enim silent leges

To get rid of human service, they'll first want to get rid of cash money.

Which I am not really fond of as an idea, personally. I support the continued use of paper and metal simply because I can see how much money I have available without sticking a card into a machine. (Also, because debit cards haven't caught up with credit cards in functionality, acceptance, and lack of fees, probably because credit cards...well, deliver loans.)

I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.

@on automation.

Trust me, we're leagues away from having computers to deal with people. Machines can't improvise or account for unknown factors. They are great for making streamlined and fixed jobs like putting parts of a machine together or digging through tons of rocks to find ore, but when it comes to changing environments and dealing with unpredictable patterns they suck hard at the job.

And you still require humans on the loop, machines can't program or repair themselves, they can't design themselves or be tossed into another type of job without some extraneous work applied unto them, meanwhile a human worker can be trained to fill several job categories, improvise and deal with other humans.

Of all the employment fields, it is the service jobs that are the most shielded against automation, and most economies and work tendencies are leaning towards services.

Inter arma enim silent leges

It's a means for people without capital to try to get capital (and fail). The point being that a bunch of people feel restricted because their ideas aren't good enough to sell. They want to do things, earnestly explain their dreams to Kickstarter, and then get cruelly rejected by society. Why shouldn't they be able to do what they want to do? When we already have more productivity than we need, as evidenced by both the existence of unemployment as a significant issue at all, and as a logical consequence of the desire for increased efficiency.

I'm not saying capitalism should never have existed. It's clearly changed our society an awful lot, and heck I'm typing on a computer right now yay! I'm saying we shouldn't be attached to it as the only possible way to structure society, and its seams have been showing more and more. It's time to consider what comes next, and gradually move towards that so we don't all trip when the rug gets pulled out from under our feet.

Edit: In other words, why do you want us to torture ourselves? Why does human advancement necessarily involve people spending most of their waking hours doing something they don't want to do? If it's even conceivable to move away from that, aren't we morally obligated to try?

edited 5th May '16 11:19:06 AM by Clarste

While kickstarter has some pretty high profile failures, there's an inherent risk in ordinary business ventures; it's rather like investing in that sense. IMHO, one of the big issues with crowdfunding is that it's not beholden to the same rules that govern investing; an investor has a right to expect financial reports from their beneficiary, for example.

edited 5th May '16 10:53:42 AM by CaptainCapsase

You are missing my point entirely. For my purposes, Kickstarter is simply a list of dreams. Most fail, and some fail spectacularly, but the main point is that it's a list of what people want to do, but can't do because they don't have enough time and money to do them. If they had to work less, which is clearly possible without altering our standard of living at all, then they would be able to do these things without begging strangers on the internet. It is evidence that people can and will strive to create if they are given the luxury to do so.

As you say, this applies equally well to ordinary investment. The only difference being that it's even harder to be approved in traditional circles because the investors are generally more business savvy and actually expect a profit at some point. Even if there's no publicly available list, it's still a marker of failed dreams.

edited 5th May '16 11:08:25 AM by Clarste

I'd say it serves it's purpose quite well for giving start-ups a place to prove themselves and for enabling people to Do Things For The Art rather than the profit.

edited 5th May '16 10:59:04 AM by CaptainCapsase

...I'm not sure what you think my point is.

I may have just fixated on your comment about crowdfunding, which is a practice I see significant potential in.

I see potential in it too, but it's not really relevant to this discussion right now. I didn't mean to insult it or anything.

Advertising exists, in part, because people don't want to research potential purchases themselves, in part so that companies can steal each other's market shares, and in part because sometimes customers are not aware that a solution exists to one of their problems.

But usually advertising is used to create demand where there is none.

Isn't there like a fully automated McDonalds in china? IIRC it's a test program, and more of a local tourist attraction than anything else.

---

I would like to say that I believe one of the primary reasons why there is so much resistance to paying people without giving them jobs is the somewhat religious idea that it is inethical to not work. To not contribute to society. The truth of this idea does not follow from the facts of the natural world.

Although it is true that one must contribute to be ethical, this is only true so long as there is someone in need. Such as a starving person. In our modern society, our ever increasing productivity is pulling us out of a scarcity model of economics. If we do not live under scarcity conditions, the moral need to contribute is lessened, and may even disappear entirely. This is an example of the way old ideas can damage us if we experience changing conditions and do not adapt with new ideas.

This is why I do not like to make assumptions that the founding ideas of capitalism are true. Under scarcity conditions, there is little harm in a false belief that jobs are moral. 'Cause they kind of are. Temporarily. But capitalism is not a sound theory if you don't assume that jobs are moral. Because capitalism will force people to work to earn money—Without reason.

Ideally, the system can be patched by paying the unemployed a living wage. This would reduce unemployment two ways. First, by causing some people to drop out of the workforce. Second, by drastically increasing demand for goods and services due to drastically increasing the purchasing power of the average person.

Exactly this. The need for this sort of support for aggregate demand was foreseen even by people like Adam Smith, who is supposedly the poster child for capitalism.

edited 5th May '16 2:41:11 PM by Fighteer

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

Social networks mesh neatly with capitalistic markets, it guarantees consumers.

Even Henry Ford said something on the lines of paying his employees enough to afford Ford's cars.

Inter arma enim silent leges

I don't know about fully automated but I went to a Mc Donalds in France where you could order without having to interact with anyone, the machine confused me and I'm reasonably smart, we worked it out in the end though.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

they have those here as well, my local Mc Donalds has one of those

advancing the front into TV Tropes

(EquiBlog) Labor gains in an era of low productivity growth

What struck me of note is that companies and policy makers have created an impossible trinity upon which economic policy has its foundations on, currently:

• They want huge corporate profits
• They want a constant wage growth of 4 percent
• But they want it at 2% inflation, no if ands or buts

God bless you, New Zealand, for creating the 2% inflation obsession

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. - Douglas Adams

In a company where the offices of President and Chief Executive Officer coexist, with the former being the highest ranking one and the latter being tasked with day-to-day administration and decision-making... what would the President's job be?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I would imagine the President's job would be more general strategic planning - sweating the big stuff.

Which entails... what, exactly? I mean, does he come into the company HQ, and sit in his office all day "strategizing"?

Oh, and tangentially, is it possible for both President and CEO positions to be independent from the office of Chairman of the Board (of Directors)?

edited 6th May '16 7:08:38 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

If a company is large enough to have the President and CEO as two separate offices (assuming we aren't in Incompetence, Inc.), strategic planning is liable to be a pretty involved and complex affair. Gathering economic data, whether to sink company funds into a new product that could be a bust or potentially be the iPhone, exploring options on whether to expand, where to expand, what one's financing options are, meeting with other business reps to develop ties on a personal basis (there's just so many companies out there face-to-face meetings are the best way to get to know potential partners on a level one can become comfortable with deciding whether you'll want to continue working with them), possibly motivating your staff by laying out what the company's goal is (beyond making a profit, obviously - really motivated workers come to work for more than just a paycheck since empirically productivity gains with salary drop sharply after a worker (especially those in creative careers) makes ~$80,000 a year or so, i.e., enough to not worry about one's bills), and so on.

Second part - possible, though I think the company would probably have to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of a bigger corporation or something for it to be plausible and not interfere with efficient functioning of it.

edited 6th May '16 7:18:30 AM by megarockman

@Clarste (15941): "This is entirely circular logic. It is the way it is because it is."

That's like me explaining how a thermostat works, or the predator-prey relationship among animals, and you claiming that's circular logic. It's not a logic at all- its a description of a cycle. The outputs become inputs again. That's how it works.

"Need, or rather demand, is artificially (and intentionally) introduced. Why would advertising even exist if demand was naturally infinite?"

Well, now, this is a little tricky. Does advertising actually increase demand? Or does it merely shift demand around, as businesses compete over a fixed amount of spending power? Obviously businesses have strong incentives to increase demand for their particular product or service. But do consumers in general actually spend more due to commercial advirtising? Its surprisingly difficult to find good research on this- my best guess is that when you factor in the fact that the costs of advertising are passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices, the effect on total demand is probably minor (compared to other factors like wages and prices). At the very least, the overall effect is complicated.

But in any case, businesses themselves arent investing in advertising campaigns in order to increase total overall consumption. They are competing for market share.

"Or you could give that surplus away to people who want it. You're essentially saying that human satisfaction, a basic right, needs to be help hostage behind work, which people don't want to do without being paid for it, by your own admission."

Yes, that is more or less exactly what I'm saying. For better or for worse, people want to exchange things for equal value, not give them to those who need them (unless they have a close personal relationship to that person). There's a large number of research studies that have explored this. Google Scholar "behavioral economics" for the studies. This appears to be a primary human emotional motivation that affects us outside of strictly economic relationships. Google "Psychology Exchange Theory" and "Reciprocity Norm" for the details.

"I call that wage slavery, and I don't see how it's supposed to be a good thing."

I never claimed it was a "good thing". It's just a thing. Like ambition, it can be good or bad, depending on the context.

"Lots of people want to be artists, but only a very few can actually succeed at any given time, because there's only so much money people are willing to spend on them."

Yes, that's true. That's why labor is specialized. You can be an artist, I can be a garbage collector, Sally over there can run for office, and none of us starve to death, because we have a medium of exchange we call "money".

"Birthrates in developed countries go down because the costs of raising children become unbearable, and would require the parents to work even more."

Are you referring to the demographic transition?. If so, you have the facts wrong. Birth rates go down as an economy develops because the death rate is also going down, which means that a woman doesn't have to endure multiple childbirths in order to have a few children who survive to adulthood. It makes more sense (and is safer and more comfortable) for parents to invest their resources in a smaller number of children. I call that a "good thing."

"I feel like you're describing the current economic system without even attempting to justify why it's a good option for human society."

That is precisely what I am doing. When did I claim otherwise? Before you can change anything, you first have to recognize the state of affairs as it currently exists.

The basic problem with your analysis of crowdfunding and labor employment is that, while people might all prefer to to engage in leisure pursuits, but they need people to collect the garbage and pull rotten teeth. The simple fact is that we cant support seven billion people without a highly structured global economy, including specialization of labor.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of global economic reform, and one day we will hang all the lassez faire economists from lamp-posts, but we have to start where people are at. And where they are at is heavily invested in a system of mutual exploitation.

TL/DR: Capitalism isn't "good" or "bad"; like the predator-prey relationship in nature, it grew organically, it just is. You want to change it, then you have to show people where the resources they need to live is going to come from.

edited 6th May '16 7:22:34 AM by DeMarquis

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

RE company president: OK, that makes sense. It does present me with a problem, though, because I'm trying to figure out what kind of corporate title to give to a particular character in a story who is the majority shareholder of a company in which ownership of said majority shares is passed down through the founder's family, and the character has such latitude that they can spend most of their time living a life that's somewhere between Idle Rich and Non-Idle Rich, with their presence/input at company meetings being only being required a handful of times per year (barring emergency meetings of exceptional importance). It may be relevant to note that the character is a genius who provided more than their fair share of contribution to the company's success through personal innovations, high-end technologies such as teleconferencing are rather significantly more advanced in the setting than in our contemporary real life, and the company's CEO is a Lucius Fox-like character who would make a fine president himself/herself (assuming that the president title is actually appropiate for what I'm describing here).

RE all three positions coexisting: Well, it appears that Microsoft does have all three positions being held by different people, and AFAIK they're not subsidiaries of any other company.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Geniuses are mostly myths. Most important innovations are the result of teamwork.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.