Neelie Kroes raise European Commission hypocrisy level. She acknowledge being spied, but that does not prevent them from discussing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which a secret mandate that is obviously only secret to European citizen. Obviously the US knows the EU mandate, which makes the bargain quite inequitable.
Fraud is an example of overconsumption of these public goods.
What fraud? Do you have anything documented on pension fraud in western Europe? I am interested.
There's also the common matter of not having enough young workers to support the elderly pensioners
What is relevant is not the number of workers vs pensioners, but the wealth produced by the former and consumed by the later. And since workers productivity grows up, we need less and less workers to create the wealth needed by pensioners. The reason why it has trouble to sustain today is that workers wages do not follow GDP increase, and it even shrinks in percentage.
My claim of "tracking GDP" means a substantial increases in GDP correlate with substantial increases in wages
Numbers will tell that it is true, but at the same time you will find that the percentage of GDP that goes to wages shrank in the last 30 years. This means the economy produces more wealth, but workers reap a smaller part of it. And this is a problem because workers are huge part of the demand on the market. If they cannot afford to purchase the extra produced goods, you get the supply crisis.
I have found research that indicates that wages have gone up considerably globally while simultaneously showing that the developed world wages haven't done that much.
You extrapolate a lot from this study, the summary does not even include the word "wage". Poverty reduction may be done through wage raises, but it may also not be correlated at all. For instance give everyone an universal income based on money creation or taxes, and you reduce poverty.
He wants to attack the project at every opportunity, but such a blunt approach should not work against citizen that use their brains. Unfortunately we are probably to rediscover that mass medias have a brain suppression feature.
A lot of social welfare is the creation of cheap public goods (for example, farm subsidies or overly cheap flood insurance). These typically get abused unless there is a strong barrier to consumption, which usually includes monitoring of potential recipients and regulation of their behavior and activities.
Odd examples. I was more referring to what western European countries have been doing with success since 1945, and which is getting more and more impossible to run in a globalized context: public health insurance, public unemployment insurance, public retirement pensions. Where are the tragedy of commons there?
My view is that social welfare collectively is a net loss GDP-wise.
You are right, but as I explained, GDP does not measure everything. It does not measure people happiness, nor does it take into account externalities. A sick worker is less productive, and socialized health insurance make sure that person will not chose to avoid health because it is too expansive.
And do you have studies to back that? On the last 30 years, we have been seeing GDP increasing and GDP wage share decreasing. I am interested if you find a GDP per capita wage share plot for the last 50 years.
And what about the 30 years before that?
No, I am interested in the present configuration that started 30 years ago, when globalization took over. My understanding is that is introduced a competition between workers beyond nation boundaries, that we did not need in order to have a healthy economy. My understanding is that it lowered first world worker's wealth, without increasing worldwide worker's wealth, and that in the end it is damaging to economy because it creates oversupply crisis.
Please prove me wrong. Please show me that percentage of per-capita GDP that goes to wages globally increased since 1980.
If applying a court decision against Apple cannot be done because it hurts the economy, I guess there are strong grounds for an antitrust case that would split Apple.
[social welfare] fails in two ways - by creating tragedy of the commons situations (with the usual inept fixes for them) and zero sum games (social welfare is usually created by impairing others either via regulation or the seizure of resources).
The tragedy of commons will need more explanations. And if the game is indeed zero-sum GDP-wise, it is just because its benefits are not taken into account by GDP. Just one example: having a sick population will degrade workers performances.
Second, I find it interesting that you are advocating protectionism in order to protect a fragile system. Competitive systems are naturally robust.
You chose the right word: naturally. Building cooperating societies runs against natural laws of competition, and this is what humanity has been doing successfully for millions of years. Yes, human being are social animals. Are you going to tell otherwise? Competition is naturally robust, and cooperation is artificially robust as well.
Worker wages normally track GDP per capita
And do you have studies to back that? On the last 30 years, we have been seeing GDP increasing and GDP wage share decreasing. I am interested if you find a GDP per capita wage share plot for the last 50 years.
Human societies are about cooperating. And if they exist, that means humans cooperating in a society succeeded more than individual competing at each others. And they do exist.
That sounds odd when said, but cooperation is more competitive than competition.
I understand it to be quite different from GM crops: The thing will not produce BT toxin, nor it will be raised in a roundup bath because it is resistant to it. Since it is grown in a lab, it will not spread without control in the environment. And even if it did, theses are just natural cattle cells, right? The usual health concerns about GM do not apply there.
Globally, of course. Those first world countries aren't isolated from the rest of the world.
Here again you are biased toward competition. Competition is enforced by globalization. Globalization is a political choice, not a law of nature. If People want to have cooperation (e.g.: social welfare), they need some boundaries in which competition leaves room for cooperation.
GDP grows faster than population, that is excellent news. But how does it tells us about how many people are employed? This was your point, IIRC
If one looks at it globally, you see a global increase in wages.
Wait, wait, wait. Growing GDP per capita does not means growing wages. You have to find another study that tells us the money does go in worker's pockets. And here I am skeptical.
If we looking at what actually is going on, we see 1) considerable increase in labor productivity (which is predicted by your claim), 2) a vast increase in the number of people employed (which isn't really predicted by your claim), and 3) a substantial rise in mean/median wages globally (which runs counter to your claim).
I agree on point 1.
Point 2 is more difficult to sort, as we have first to tell if we talk globally or in first world countries. And do we talk about the last years or the last decades? I guess we can say that there are indeed more people available to work, since population increased, but are there more people employed? If you think about third world countries, you have to realize that the myriad of industrial workers we have know were agricultural workers before.
On point 3 I am sure it is wrong because you look as absolute value of wages without taking inflation into account: if we consider the percentage of GDP that goes to workers in first world countries, it has only lowered in the last decades. I have no numbers for third world countries, but I doubt the situation is better.
[children are the school's product] No they aren't. The school doesn't make children.
You'll just reap a lot of unpleasant unintended consequences when you neglect competition.
Just like you reap a lot of unpleasant unintended consequences when you neglect cooperation. A healthy economy is just a matter of equilibrium.
But we need to keep in mind that the global labor force has expanded several fold in the last half century. Increase in supply of labor means a decrease in price of labor.
Very true, and at the same time, worker productivity has increased, which means they produce more wealth. At the end of the road is an oversupply crisis. This leads us back to my initial post: we will need a way to pay people for nothing.
[unpaid children at school] producing educated, productive members of society. And if they really were producing nothing of value, then why do we have them in schools?
Because children are the school's product, not the school's workers. The teachers are the school's workers. And they are paid for that.
No, I think we in the developed world have to accept that our labor isn't as competitive as it used to be.
You have a bias here, you consider competition is some kind of natural law that we cannot spare. But we made tribes, societies and nations to promote cooperation within boundaries, instead of competition.
Globalization destroys the boundaries, removing huge chunks of political decisions outside of People sovereignty. Once the rule is competition, cooperative behaviors such as social welfare get impossible to enforce.
But while People sovereignty has been neutralized, it can still be reactivated. People can choose to run against the globalization trend, and add enough protectionism (note I did not said North Korean style full isolationism!) so that social welfare becomes possible again.
I note here that we all have a vast amount of unpaid child labor through the world. For example, children in the developed world generally are required to spend a considerable portion of their lives working in a school for no pay.
Did you notice that children at school do not produce goods or service? At University level, students even pay for getting taught.
If the US government can coerce an operator, it can get access to your data stored in its datacenters (and I understand this is what PRISM is about), and therefore who cares it can decipher the data in transit?
In other words. Money isn't what you think it is either.
And US money is special among others, as it is a reserve money: every bank in the world want to purchase dollars, which is why US has to print dollars like crazy. As you noted, that oddly leave little money for US real economy.
But you know how it works. Big corporation will outsource wherever in the world labor is cheapest. When workers attempt to get raises, factories get moved to poorer countries
And the workers out of a job? They can find new work.
If there are jobs available... when workers are to poor to buy goods, the trend is to cut more jobs because there is no outlet for worker's production.
Big corporation reduce workforce to increase profit. At some point they will produce everything for cheap using abroad subcontractors. That means a lot of money goes straight to shareholders without having any chance to go in workers' pockets. And since workers are also consumers, this badly impact the economy
At some point we will need to find a way to tax the profit and reinject money in consumer's pockets so that they can purchase the goods produced.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that there could be special rights (that is, privileges) for believers of some particular religion, sounds crazy to me.
Providing for the common defense is constitutional.
But is the US following an efficient strategy in order to provide its own defense? It spends more than any nation in the world on it.
Neelie Kroes raise European Commission hypocrisy level. She acknowledge being spied, but that does not prevent them from discussing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which a secret mandate that is obviously only secret to European citizen. Obviously the US knows the EU mandate, which makes the bargain quite inequitable.
Is there anything set up so that the journal is still be able to tell us whether Amazon is involved in dirty stuff with the NSA?
Fraud is an example of overconsumption of these public goods.
What fraud? Do you have anything documented on pension fraud in western Europe? I am interested.
There's also the common matter of not having enough young workers to support the elderly pensioners
What is relevant is not the number of workers vs pensioners, but the wealth produced by the former and consumed by the later. And since workers productivity grows up, we need less and less workers to create the wealth needed by pensioners. The reason why it has trouble to sustain today is that workers wages do not follow GDP increase, and it even shrinks in percentage.
My claim of "tracking GDP" means a substantial increases in GDP correlate with substantial increases in wages
Numbers will tell that it is true, but at the same time you will find that the percentage of GDP that goes to wages shrank in the last 30 years. This means the economy produces more wealth, but workers reap a smaller part of it. And this is a problem because workers are huge part of the demand on the market. If they cannot afford to purchase the extra produced goods, you get the supply crisis.
I have found research that indicates that wages have gone up considerably globally while simultaneously showing that the developed world wages haven't done that much.
You extrapolate a lot from this study, the summary does not even include the word "wage". Poverty reduction may be done through wage raises, but it may also not be correlated at all. For instance give everyone an universal income based on money creation or taxes, and you reduce poverty.
He wants to attack the project at every opportunity, but such a blunt approach should not work against citizen that use their brains. Unfortunately we are probably to rediscover that mass medias have a brain suppression feature.
I will buy some when the price will have been dumped low enough that I can make a benefit reselling components.
A lot of social welfare is the creation of cheap public goods (for example, farm subsidies or overly cheap flood insurance). These typically get abused unless there is a strong barrier to consumption, which usually includes monitoring of potential recipients and regulation of their behavior and activities.
Odd examples. I was more referring to what western European countries have been doing with success since 1945, and which is getting more and more impossible to run in a globalized context: public health insurance, public unemployment insurance, public retirement pensions. Where are the tragedy of commons there?
My view is that social welfare collectively is a net loss GDP-wise.
You are right, but as I explained, GDP does not measure everything. It does not measure people happiness, nor does it take into account externalities. A sick worker is less productive, and socialized health insurance make sure that person will not chose to avoid health because it is too expansive.
And do you have studies to back that? On the last 30 years, we have been seeing GDP increasing and GDP wage share decreasing. I am interested if you find a GDP per capita wage share plot for the last 50 years.
And what about the 30 years before that?
No, I am interested in the present configuration that started 30 years ago, when globalization took over. My understanding is that is introduced a competition between workers beyond nation boundaries, that we did not need in order to have a healthy economy. My understanding is that it lowered first world worker's wealth, without increasing worldwide worker's wealth, and that in the end it is damaging to economy because it creates oversupply crisis.
Please prove me wrong. Please show me that percentage of per-capita GDP that goes to wages globally increased since 1980.
I wonder on what hardware this software runs. TFA tells about it just like if it was obvious to run a common spyware on all ISP heterogeneous setups.
If applying a court decision against Apple cannot be done because it hurts the economy, I guess there are strong grounds for an antitrust case that would split Apple.
[social welfare] fails in two ways - by creating tragedy of the commons situations (with the usual inept fixes for them) and zero sum games (social welfare is usually created by impairing others either via regulation or the seizure of resources).
The tragedy of commons will need more explanations. And if the game is indeed zero-sum GDP-wise, it is just because its benefits are not taken into account by GDP. Just one example: having a sick population will degrade workers performances.
Second, I find it interesting that you are advocating protectionism in order to protect a fragile system. Competitive systems are naturally robust.
You chose the right word: naturally. Building cooperating societies runs against natural laws of competition, and this is what humanity has been doing successfully for millions of years. Yes, human being are social animals. Are you going to tell otherwise? Competition is naturally robust, and cooperation is artificially robust as well.
Worker wages normally track GDP per capita
And do you have studies to back that? On the last 30 years, we have been seeing GDP increasing and GDP wage share decreasing. I am interested if you find a GDP per capita wage share plot for the last 50 years.
My little experience of this environment is rather: server is crashing? Add more servers.
Human societies are about cooperating. And if they exist, that means humans cooperating in a society succeeded more than individual competing at each others. And they do exist.
That sounds odd when said, but cooperation is more competitive than competition.
I understand it to be quite different from GM crops: The thing will not produce BT toxin, nor it will be raised in a roundup bath because it is resistant to it. Since it is grown in a lab, it will not spread without control in the environment. And even if it did, theses are just natural cattle cells, right? The usual health concerns about GM do not apply there.
Globally, of course. Those first world countries aren't isolated from the rest of the world.
Here again you are biased toward competition. Competition is enforced by globalization. Globalization is a political choice, not a law of nature. If People want to have cooperation (e.g.: social welfare), they need some boundaries in which competition leaves room for cooperation.
How about since 1300? That long enough for you?
GDP grows faster than population, that is excellent news. But how does it tells us about how many people are employed? This was your point, IIRC
If one looks at it globally, you see a global increase in wages.
Wait, wait, wait. Growing GDP per capita does not means growing wages. You have to find another study that tells us the money does go in worker's pockets. And here I am skeptical.
If we looking at what actually is going on, we see 1) considerable increase in labor productivity (which is predicted by your claim), 2) a vast increase in the number of people employed (which isn't really predicted by your claim), and 3) a substantial rise in mean/median wages globally (which runs counter to your claim).
I agree on point 1.
Point 2 is more difficult to sort, as we have first to tell if we talk globally or in first world countries. And do we talk about the last years or the last decades? I guess we can say that there are indeed more people available to work, since population increased, but are there more people employed? If you think about third world countries, you have to realize that the myriad of industrial workers we have know were agricultural workers before.
On point 3 I am sure it is wrong because you look as absolute value of wages without taking inflation into account: if we consider the percentage of GDP that goes to workers in first world countries, it has only lowered in the last decades. I have no numbers for third world countries, but I doubt the situation is better.
[children are the school's product] No they aren't. The school doesn't make children.
Right, school produces educated people.
You'll just reap a lot of unpleasant unintended consequences when you neglect competition.
Just like you reap a lot of unpleasant unintended consequences when you neglect cooperation. A healthy economy is just a matter of equilibrium.
But we need to keep in mind that the global labor force has expanded several fold in the last half century. Increase in supply of labor means a decrease in price of labor.
Very true, and at the same time, worker productivity has increased, which means they produce more wealth. At the end of the road is an oversupply crisis. This leads us back to my initial post: we will need a way to pay people for nothing.
[unpaid children at school] producing educated, productive members of society. And if they really were producing nothing of value, then why do we have them in schools?
Because children are the school's product, not the school's workers. The teachers are the school's workers. And they are paid for that.
No, I think we in the developed world have to accept that our labor isn't as competitive as it used to be.
You have a bias here, you consider competition is some kind of natural law that we cannot spare. But we made tribes, societies and nations to promote cooperation within boundaries, instead of competition.
Globalization destroys the boundaries, removing huge chunks of political decisions outside of People sovereignty. Once the rule is competition, cooperative behaviors such as social welfare get impossible to enforce.
But while People sovereignty has been neutralized, it can still be reactivated. People can choose to run against the globalization trend, and add enough protectionism (note I did not said North Korean style full isolationism!) so that social welfare becomes possible again.
I note here that we all have a vast amount of unpaid child labor through the world. For example, children in the developed world generally are required to spend a considerable portion of their lives working in a school for no pay.
Did you notice that children at school do not produce goods or service? At University level, students even pay for getting taught.
What else?
Any race to the bottom eventually finds that bottom.
We have to think about what bottom we can accept. Do we accept child labour? It already happens, sometimes. Will we accept Slavery?
If the US government can coerce an operator, it can get access to your data stored in its datacenters (and I understand this is what PRISM is about), and therefore who cares it can decipher the data in transit?
In other words. Money isn't what you think it is either.
And US money is special among others, as it is a reserve money: every bank in the world want to purchase dollars, which is why US has to print dollars like crazy. As you noted, that oddly leave little money for US real economy.
The subcontractors have workers too.
But you know how it works. Big corporation will outsource wherever in the world labor is cheapest. When workers attempt to get raises, factories get moved to poorer countries
And the workers out of a job? They can find new work.
If there are jobs available... when workers are to poor to buy goods, the trend is to cut more jobs because there is no outlet for worker's production.
Now I just need to find someone with a few hundred million to invest in new infrastructure to support this thing.
And work around entertainment industry resistance to switch to anything new
Big corporation reduce workforce to increase profit. At some point they will produce everything for cheap using abroad subcontractors. That means a lot of money goes straight to shareholders without having any chance to go in workers' pockets. And since workers are also consumers, this badly impact the economy
At some point we will need to find a way to tax the profit and reinject money in consumer's pockets so that they can purchase the goods produced.