The General Economics Thread

Resources are not scarce. Look. When I think of scarcity I think of dirt farmers barely scratching out a living. Resources are plentiful. Under current economic circumstances, there is no excuse for anyone to go without food or medical care. And because of automation, there is no shortage of labour available to industry.

Scarcity is always going to be around. In the minds of rich a-holes who want the moon, the sun, and also the stars. But for ordinary practical purposes, we have already eliminated scarcity in three key resources and are working on the rest.

edited 7th May '16 9:13:03 AM by war877

Eventually humanity will become the a-hole that wants the moon, the sun, and the stars.

Humanity has always looked skyward for its true path.

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

Like Local Town Councils, who are also incorporated entities?

Keep Rolling On

Since people were talking about jobs being taken by robots, have a CGP Grey video about just that. What I found most troubling about this was the assertion that 9 of the top 10 most populous job fields could be almost entirely automated in the next two decades.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

You've presented no actual argument for this. You're just going "OH MY GOD THINGS ARE CHANGING AAAAAAAAAAH!". Things are always changing. We get through them. Why should this time around be any different?

"Scarcity" in economic terms basically means "worth charging money for". Water isn't scarce in the common usage of the term, because you can go to your sink and turn on the faucet and get all the water you want, but it's scarce in economic terms because you still have to pay your water bill. A post-scarcity society refers to a hypothetical situation where pretty much everything is free because technology has advanced to the point where stuff can be made so cheaply that it's literally not worth anyone's time to charge for it. (This is more of a thought experiment than anything else, as it would require straight-up sci fi magic like a Matter Replicator.)

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Functional post-scarcity, as opposed to the mythical sort where matter replicators assemble everything from atoms, is just a matter of the marginal cost of producing any given commodity being low enough that everyone can have "enough", for a particular definition.

For example, food production. Enough food is produced on Earth to feed every one of its citizens. The challenge to getting it to them is twofold: distributional and socio-economic. Distributional, because there are a lot of costs involved in getting it to some areas. Socio-economic, because we are stuck in a model wherein we insist on forcing people to pay for food rather than giving everyone what they need and covering the marginal costs out of general tax revenue.

edited 7th May '16 1:24:02 PM by Fighteer

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

It's a societal outgrowth of phenomena like procrastination and the bystander effect; I'll collect a few examples of papers written on the relative ineptitude of humans at extreme long term planning, and deveral on its macro-scale consequences.

I' me also not saying we're all doomed, though there's a high probability you yourself will find yourself unemployable before you reach a position to retire. What I'm saying is that it's important that we as a society start caring about this potential crisis now rather than 40 years down the line (conservatively) when rapid shifts in employment have given rise to social unrest against which our current situation will pale in comparison.

Also, what's different this time around is that failure to adapt means the collapse of civilization, and possibly even the extinction of our species; there countless examples in history of empires, cultures, and peoples which have ceased to exist. While the fine details of such "extinction" varies, all such situations arise from a failure to adapt to changing circumstances.

edited 7th May '16 1:37:38 PM by CaptainCapsase

Wouldn't that be beautiful, if everyone had free access to enough food to get themselves a nice and balanced diet, and only had to pay for luxuries such as rare ingredients, fine chesses, pre-cooked stuff, and so on?

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

Sorry, I meant that you haven't made any argument for "it could be disastrous in this context" part. Should have been more specific.

[citation needed]

We can't start reacting to a system that doesn't exist yet when we don't actually know when it will arrive or what it will look like when we get there. And again, these things won't happen at all once, so we'll have plenty of time to react to it once it starts. You're borrowing trouble by worrying about one possible reaction to one possible economic development that may or may not happen within our lifetimes. It's pointless.

No, that's not different at all. It's literally always been like that. Just because we can look back at history and see how things turned out and how people managed to carry on doesn't mean that they weren't facing an existential crisis at the time.

Not going to happen. I could right up a whole rant about it, but that's really off topic. tldr, even if we were actively TRYING to exterminate humanity, we probably couldn't manage it.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

@Blue: It makes a lot of sense to target automation research at the most populous industries. There is the greatest possible revenue from firing those groups.

This is like a global warming thing. A permanent large unemployment statistic is already here. The first sign of the coming apocalypse.

Well, if you think severe social unrest and/or socialism becoming more popular is an apocalypse.

[citation needed]

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I don't trust words. Here are some numbers. These are some random long term unemployment charts from large countries. Please note the overall upward trend of most of them. (Except the British one, which is only upward since the turn of the new millennium for some reason.) Man, looking up stuff is a pain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Unemployment_measures.svg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unemployment_Rate_of_Japan_1953-2009.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Unemployment_Rate_Time_Series.png

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ABS-1364.0.15.003-ModellersDatabase-NifLabourMarket_SeasonallyAdjusted-Value-Unemployment-A2454521V.svg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ChomageFrance19672006.png

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GermanyUnemploymentRate.svg

Color me a skeptic of the whole "post-scarcity" thing. "Scarcity" in economic terms means that resources are unevenly distributed. I dont have enough of what I think I need, and neither do you. But we lack different things, and therefore we can trade. That other person over there with nothing to trade to us? They are what we call "poor", and I have never understood how higher productivity or automation or technology is ever going to change that.

Dont get me wrong- it could change. But economic re-distribution is a political problem, not a technical one, and it will get resolved, if it gets resolved, in the political arena.

You realize that most of those numbers are actually pretty healthy, right? A zero percent unemployment rate is bad, because it means that employers can't find new employees when they're trying to hire.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Of course those numbers are healthy. You wouldn't want everyone working, you'd be forced to hire people with mental illnesses.

More seriously, you are completely right. The slowly rising unemployment numbers from an average of 5% -ish worldwide to 6% -ish worldwide is indicative that labour is no longer a scarce resource in this world. Companies are not being pressured to get employees. Instead they have to fight over things like land and material. In theory, if land and material got easier to get at the same rate as labour, then economic growth would have been sufficient to keep unemployment stable.

Uh, I think.

@war877: The extinction scenario I'm talking about pretty much requires this issue to come to a head at the same time as we reach the more or less inevitable crisis point of climate change, and also assumes that, with society on the verge of collapse, a nuclear exchange is no longer unthinkable. It's not particularly likely, but the right combination of simultaneous man-made crises that are looming over the next century or two could induce a mass extinction event severe enough to render Earth virtually uninhabitable for humans without advanced technology that very well might be lost in the process of society's collapse.

edited 7th May '16 8:37:56 PM by CaptainCapsase

There is not going to be a crisis point of climate change. The reason climate change is bad is that it causes widespread ecosystem damage. From a human economic perspective, the damage is short term.

A nuclear exchange is possible now. It will hardly increase in likelihood in the event of societal collapse. The places most likely to become uninhabitable are merely the US and Russia.

And the internet is harder to kill than cockroaches. Technology will not be lost in the way it has in the past.

Your wrong about climate change. One danger is that agriculture will experience a significant ans sudden collapse. Prices skyrocket, and people starve. Add in water scarcity, fishery collapse, and significant increases in human migration and refugees, and the scenario can go downhill in a hurry.

I'll believe that when I see it. Bad water PH is a serious issue for fish farms that will not go away. But climate change is too slow for the rate of human responsiveness to lead to an agriculture collapse. Climate change takes years. Humans take year. Basically the time it takes to change out the crops in a field. Orchards may be at risk.

You dont get it. We dont control what crops a given geographical area may support, or not. If Kansas loses wheat, there's nothing we can do about it, no matter the time scale involved. If that were the case, Mexico would be growing wheat.

Maybe you are not overreacting. I may be biased as a Canadian. Due to increased rainfall and higher temperatures, the amount of food Canada will be able to produce will go up. Canadian soil is also compatible with most crops. No major salinity or PH issues anywhere.

Actually, it doesn't work like that. The fertility of soil is built up over many years as a result of organic material being deposited in it. Much of Canada is permafrost- there is no capacity in that to grow mainstay crops, no matter the temp or humidity. Much of the rest of it is known as the "Canadian Shield"- which also isnt all that fertile. Before you can turn those regions into breadbaskets, you would have to build up the soil, but that's expensive. If we wait until the middle of the crisis, it will be too late to sustain current global population. That means a die off.

If current climate change continue, the current world population of seven billion and change becomes unsustainable sometime in the next century. Population will therefore decline. Whether that happens quickly or slowly will depend on how much foresight world leaders demonstrate. So far they dont have a good track record.

We think that population decline may happen anyway, though. It's already beginning in the wealthy countries, propped up mostly only by immigration from the poorer ones (though there are exceptions like France and the US).

Climate change will be bad precisely because it will hit the most overpopulated countries, though, like taking away a good chunk of Bangladesh straight off the map.

Uber and Lyft to leave Austin, Texas after voters rejected Proposition 1 which would have let the taxi companies continue to use their own background checks.

"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."

No further feedback for this question? The "consortium vs. corporate group" angle hasn't been answered yet, as I've pointed out that "corporation" is not the same thing as "corporate group" (otherwise known as "group of companies").

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.