I suspect that Google France is a separate company (and if it isn't, it could easily be turned into one). That company needs to comply with French law.
The idea that any company anywhere in the world that is owned by the same people as a French company becomes subject to French law would be ridiculous. If France tried to enforce that, they'd create a real problem for themselves.
Technically, humanity probably could colonize Mars already. It would be expensive and unpleasant, but lots of things that have advanced humanity were expensive and unpleasant at first.
A bigger reason not to colonize Mars is that there are far better things to do in space. Mars is a deep gravity well, and there's little evidence that there is anything in it we want. The asteroid belt, on the other hand, is full of useful stuff in convenient orbits.
The YouTube CEO said her daughter had stated point-blank that she did not like computers, so Wojcicki enrolled her in a computer camp. Wojcicki reported her daughter came back saying, 'Everyone in the class was a boy and nobody was like me and now I hate computers even more.'
Wojcicki made her career in marketing, after studying history and literature. She evidently didn't like computers either. But now she sends her little girl to computer camp?
Seems to me the girl wants to step into her mother's footsteps: she doesn't like computers, but she has already figured out which buttons to push to get her mother to jump.
I think you're overly optimistic about our ability to adapt to the changes but I could be wrong.
Well, it's not my optimism, it's what the latest IPCC report effectively says: climate change in 2100 amounts to a couple percent loss of income for everybody if we do nothing (about the same as doing something according to the IPCC). Note that this is a couple of percent lower from a massively higher (in real terms) worldwide average income after decades of growth. So, no falling skies even under the IPCC scenarios. In reality, the IPCC estimates scenarios are actually far too pessimistic, so it only gets better than that.
In principle, it shouldn't be all that hard to design drones that don't pose a risk in crowded areas, that harmlessly spin to the ground if anything goes wrong. Blanket restrictions like this strongly discourage such developments.
A second issue with these restrictions is that they often mix up criminal and civil matters and are at risk of getting abused by police and politicians for purposes other than public safety and protecting private property rights.
It turns out that infrastructure isn't built on the basis of fund availability - it's built on the basis of demand. If the demand is there, the money will be found.
Money isn't the issue, resources are. Labor and resources are scarce and they are nearly fully utilized already. Money is simply bookkeeping for allocating those resources between different uses, in this case, either producing something useful or producing something for consumption.
If the people who have the money are considering buying a chip factory, but the current demand for chips is satisfied by existing fabs, [...] And I'm simplifying here, it's more like they'd still be able to sell their chips at a profit at the lower price point that chips settle into after production increases.
You reason as if demand were perfectly inelastic, and your bogus disclaimer doesn't change that. For any real good. demand is never "satisifed" because demand is elastic. And if it were "likely" that there would be a higher overall profit being made at the higher volume, companies would already be investing in those factories. (Chip factories are a lousy example, because lots of those are being built.)
despite having the money to do so
What do you think people do with their "money"? Stuff it under a mattress? People allocate their resources according to where it gets the largest expected return. The reason people aren't investing quite as much in productive ventures these days is because there are a bunch of really good unproductive ventures: municipal bonds, treasury bills, Federal Reserve deposits, and real estate. They are attractive because government policy makes them attractive. In the case of government debt, government promises a high risk-free return to investors in order to then spend that money on things that actually produce a lower return.
And even if people did stuff their money under a mattress it wouldn't matter. If I choose to remove $1T from the economy by stuffing it under my mattress for the long term, nothing changes about the rest of the economy: all the chip factories and MP3 players that would have been built still will get built.
The politicians hate my macroeconomic theories.
"Your" macroeconomic theories sound like textbook Keynesianism and progressivism, except that you think they ought to be a permanent fixture of the economy. Furthermore, "your" macroeconomic theories have nothing to do with fixing the welfare system: whether increased consumer spending is good for the economy has nothing to do with the efficiency of the welfare system. After all, even in an inefficient and bureaucratic welfare system, the money still gets spent on consumption; whether it's the bureaucrats or "the poor" doing the spending doesn't matter to "your macroeconomic theories". You're mixing up the two for political reasons.
Why is it needed: We can no longer support the bureaucratic nightmare that is the conventional welfare system, which currently provides a lot of dis-incentives to work. I believe that fixing that would be too complicated
Fixing that is actually very simple: we just spend less money on it and benefits will decrease.
How about I do what you're doing? You need to look in the mirror, my friend, and decide to make a change. Humanity is a social animal, pure 'I have mine' results in injustice and less for all.
Ah, the usual progressive platitudes and denunciations of anybody who disagrees with you as a selfish prick. What you do is peddling the economic equivalent of Young Earth Creationism, and those ideas are disastrous. The fact that you couple them to a legitimate grievance about the inefficiency of our current welfare system doesn't alter that one bit.
Actually, it does 'generate' wealth, because it takes investments in infrastructure to generate the goods they consume, and the investments you're talking about don't have that positive return unless there's demand for the goods they produce.
If you take money away from people who invest it into chip factories and give it to people who buy Star Wars action figures, indeed, the producers of Star Wars action figures will have a bigger return on their investment. However, the chip factory won't get built. Now ask yourself: overall, is society better off with a hundred million new Star Wars action figures produced in China and thrown away in a few days, or a new chip factory? Which do you think benefits society more overall You can't just look at the positive return on investment that the new spending generates, you also need to account for the opportunity cost of what that money would have been used for otherwise.
So there's no investments to make money off of without consumption. Spur consumption and you spur investment.
You spur investment in the production of consumer goods, but at the cost of investment in the production of capital goods. Politicians like to do that because voters like to consume and they don't understand the long term economic price of such choices (as you just demonstrated). Furthermore, there are big, powerful corporate lobbies who also like those policies.
May I suggest you read up on macro-economics?
May I suggest you do? While the macroeconomic theories you like are popular with big spending politicians, they are dubious at best and probably wrong. Even if they were right, they were never intended as permanent macroeconomic policy, but as fixes to temporary market failures.
My take from the last 50 years of 'war on poverty' is that we had traitors in our midst - carefully sabotoging our every move in the name of racism, classism, even relegion.
If you want to see one of those "traitors", look in the mirror. Oh, you don't consider yourself "that" kind of person, but it is people who think like you who are responsible for these failures and injustices.
Why do you think I support a basic income guarantee? It's to simpify administrative expenses.
And that's exactly why it isn't going to happen. Any attempt to pass a basic income guarantee would only result in even more government spending and bureaucracy.
Furthermore, why is it even needed? What actual problem does that address? What evidence is there that people are better off with a basic income guarantee than without one?
You presume there will be devastating economic consequences. Other economic analysis including a recent report from Citibank that says it will be cheaper to do something than to not. Link [citi.com] (PDF)
The cost voters are concerned with is what they have to pay for right now, not how the books balance in a few centuries. So even if the Citibank analysis (and similar analyses) were true, they don't get to the point I was making. (In reality, such analyses are meaningless guesswork even for what they purport to show.)
It's more like 130 feet over the last 10,000 years (400 feet over the last 20,000 years).
If you want to be picky, it was about 390 feet over 14000 years, depending on the estimate you look at.
before we had trillions of dollars in infrastructure built near sea level.... I agree that melting all the rest of the ice will take millennia but with up to 6 feet of SLR by 2100 it's going to be pretty costly to move all of the affected infrastructure and 2100 won't be the end of it.
You're thinking of infrastructure as something permanent with an enduring, fixed value, but that doesn't reflect reality. Infrastructure stays around because it constantly gets rebuilt. After a few decades, you have basically paid for an entirely new structure. The actual cost of abandoning a coastal city over a time span of a century and moving it somewhere else is tiny relative to the construction cost of a new structure, and irrelevant compared to the actual sales price of the structure. In fact, often, rebuilding would be cheaper, but people simply avoid it because they value the location and don't want to risk disruption. Westerners need to understand much more that every glass is already broken, instead of clinging to a delusion of permanence and eternity.
There are other problems with your reasoning. For example, sea level rise doesn't mean that many coastal areas get flooded; coast lines are not at a fixed level, they adapt to sea level changes. Bangladesh is currently gaining land area despite being largely at sea level and despite sea level rise. Furthermore, citizens of advanced economies seem to have no significant problems living below sea level to begin with; a quarter of the Netherlands is already below sea level. Given the choice, Bangladeshi people would be far better off living below sea level at Dutch living standards than maintaining their current living standards and not experiencing sea level rise.
Sure, I said that the faster money is moving, the more economic activity it generate. I then immediately put a disclaimer in that it's possible to 'fake out' the metric
No, you aren't listening. I was saying that your disclaimer doesn't matter. Even if the metric is not faked out, the "velocity of money" or "economic activity" has no consistent relationship to either employment or wealth. I explained why. Re-read it.
What the government can, and should, do is use estimates of this 'velocity', which is a fairly abstract concept, to help determine the most effective forms of intervention.
The correct "velocity of money", in the sense of creating the most employment and wealth, is the velocity a free market chooses in the absence of government intervention. The only reason it ever slows down too much is because of government intervention; so when government needs to speed it up, it is merely to correct a problem that it created in the first place.
In the short term, under specific conditions, you may find empirical correlations between the "velocity of money" and other economic and social indicators, but they aren't causative; that is, while some factor may cause both the velocity of money and some economic indicator to change, it doesn't follow that intervening to change the velocity of money causes the economic indicator to change.
Turns out, giving poor people money tends to give pretty good results.
When you give money to poor people, they will mostly spend it on consumption, and consumption generates no wealth. The only thing that generates wealth is investment, i.e. spending money on something that has an expected positive return.
There may be other reasons to justify taking money from rich people and giving it to poor people (equality, social harmony, whatever), but wealth generation isn't among them. And if you look at the last half century of the war on poverty, it "turns out" that giving money to poor people is ineffective for wealth generation.
So I counter, again, that you're agreeing with me in a disagreeable fashion.
I am disagreeable because you (1) promote an economic agenda that has proven to be harmful to the US as a whole and to poor people in general, and (2) rather than reflecting on it just keep repeating it as if it were fact.
In short, you didn't read the second paragraph of my original post, did you?
You said a lot of stuff, some right, some wrong. I responded to the wrong stuff.
Basically, you're restating something I said, that I agree with, in a disagreeable fashion.
No, I'm sorry. You may superficially agree with it, but you still don't seem to get it. You said "The faster the money is moving, the more economic activity it generates." and "More economic activity = more people employed = more wealth created, on average." That's simply wrong. There is an optimal "velocity of money", and too fast is just as detrimental to wealth creation as too slow. Attempts by governments to "stimulate the economy" or make money "move faster" are as harmful to wealth creation as is interference in the movement of money.
Even if we get extremely serious about it right now it will take 30 or 40 years to implement the necessary changes. [...] The thing about not making changes now is that the effects of anthropogenic global warming are not something we can stop in a short time period.
Any democratic nation would lynch its leaders given the devastating economic consequences such policies have; it's not going to happen.
Meanwhile the ultimate effects will continue to get worse.
There are no "ultimate effects". The climate is changing, like it always has been. Sea levels have been rising more than 400 ft over the last 10000 years; did civilization end? Did humans become extinct? No, of course not. Even if all the ice on the planet melts, they can only rise another 200 ft, and that would still take centuries, if not millennia.
Furthermore, between 200 ft sea level rise and the kind of totalitarian government necessary to impose worldwide carbon neutrality, I take the 200 ft sea level rise any day.
For instance the melting of the great ice sheets is way behind the curve of warming and it will take several centuries for them to reach a new equilibrium so the concomitant sea level rise will continue for that whole time period.
And that's the reason it's not much of a problem: climate change and sea level rise may be fast on geological time scales, but they are slow on human time scales.
And things have changed, the later 21st century is 38 years closer, the uncertainties a lot smaller
Things have changed, but the conclusions haven't: the temperature predictions are still pretty much the same, their consequences are still as much guesswork now as back then, and the cost of intervention is much higher now; on balance, government should still not intervene.
and alternative sources of energy a lot more mature.
And the best strategy is to focus on economic growth so that they will soon become actually competitive with fossil fuels. Carbon taxes and other government mandates, as well as government subsidies, are counterproductive if the goal is to get economically efficient alternative sources of energy.
Oil companies don't make "outrageous profits". Corporations on average make about 7% profits; Exxon fluctuates between 5-10%.
Solar panel companies have had poor profitability, and the profits they do make are largely derived from lobbying and crony capitalism. Exxon would have been foolish to switch their business to solar panels. But if you think solar panels are a great thing, by all means, invest your money in them.
They DID "take action" on climate change, they hired a PR firm to lie for them.
Exxon's PR said exactly what the report says: there are big scientific uncertainties and it's too early to take action.
Their scientists also told them that drilling for oil is uncertain and fraught with risks, but that didn't stop them from "taking action".
Correct. But their scientists also told them that the expected benefits outweigh the risks, so they took a chance with their own money and invested in drilling.
The problem with climate change action is that the expected benefit is likely no larger than doing nothing even according to the IPCC; furthermore, the people making a profit on climate change action are not the people paying the costs.
I know, right? the government made an effort to save lives on the road, and over the decades it's only saved about a million lives, really just nothing at all.
So you are saying that because some government regulations are useful, people should unquestioningly accept all government regulations, no matter what? Or what exactly is your point?
The bods in white coats said: burning oil (etc) may be bad news and furthermore it may be bad if you don't change your business strategy in the light of that soon.
No, that's not what they said (even if the article leads you to believe otherwise). Read the actual report that the article is based on. What the scientists actually said was that action on climate change was "premature" because of the "large scientific uncertainties" and the "severe impact of climate change policies on the world's economies".
What were they supposed to do to not be accused of "ignoring" warnings?
In fact, the report advised a wait-and-see attitude based on all available scientific data. So, it's not that they ignored the advice of their scientists, they actually followed it.
The warnings get louder and more shrill and catastrophic and angry.
The scientific situation hasn't changed much in the last 30 years. (1) The planet is getting warmer (mainly at the poles). (2) That will lead to changes in climate, redistribution of arable land, and gradual and significant sea level rise over the next few centuries. (3) There is little reason to believe that massive government intervention at this point is would be either beneficial or effective in the long run, and it would certainly be quite harmful in the short run.
Instead of the biased article, read what the report actually concludes:
Overall, the current outlook suggests potentially serious climate problems are not likely to occur until the late 21st century or perhaps beyond at projected energy demand rates. This should provide time to resolve uncertainties regarding the overall carbon cycle and the contribution of fossil fuel combustion as well as the role of the oceans as a reservoir for both heat and carbon dioxide. [...] Making significant changes in energy consumption patterns now to deal with this potential problem amid all the scientific uncertainties would be premature in view of the severe impact such moves could have on the world's economies and societies.
The report also points out that temperature increases would not be uniform, with strong increase at the polar caps and little increase near the equator.
The interesting thing is that little has changed about these conclusions in the last 30 years; science has produced a lot of new data, but the conclusions have changed little.
Define "wealth"? Do you mean things like durable goods, infrastructure, and art? How about a business? Standard of living?
Wealth, in economics, is things that have an exchange value and/or utility.
More economic activity = more people employed = more wealth created, on average.
Economic activity, that is the exchange of goods and services, increases wealth due to comparative advantage. But that happens only if the exchanges are voluntary and mutually beneficial. Without comparative advantage, economic activity doesn't make anybody wealthier. If we keep buying and selling the same house and land between us ten times for 100000 dollars, we didn't generate a million dollars in new wealth; rather, there is still only a house and land worth 100000 dollars.
Likewise, more people employed does not mean more wealth created. We can get 100% employment by forcing everybody to dig ditches (popular in communist countries), but we would be worse off than we are now. And if you simply double the size of the workforce, but otherwise nothing changes, nobody ends up being better off on average either. Conversely, the labor participation rate has grown steadily for decades (well, until Obama), due to population growth and women entering the workforce; economic activity had nothing to do with it.
Governments frequently talk about "stimulating the economy" and "lowering the unemployment rate" in order to get voters; it's economic snake oil.
Neither shareholders nor corporate management get to "decide" anything
Before your overly literal mind takes that out of context, what I mean is: "Neither shareholders nor corporate management get to "decide" compensation unilaterally; they are subject to the iron law of supply and demand. They choose compensation such that they get the number of workers they need."
Consider two people on a desert island. One owns the island and gets to decide the disposition of every single resource. The other owns nothing and has to work for everything he gets.
AC wasn't claiming that he was prevented from working, he was saying that he was making a voluntary choice not to work and that others had a moral obligation to support him. I was responding to that.
Your response has nothing to do with that scenario. You are just repeating progressive talking points about inequality and corporate power. But let's look at that:
The owners have now decided that labor gets 1/2 the share of corporate productivity,
"The owners" of corporations are largely pension funds, retirement funds, and other institutional investors; they don't manage corporations. They simply invest their money where it yields the biggest return. Neither shareholders nor corporate management get to "decide" anything; labor is priced by supply and demand. The reason labor gets less and less of the share of corporate productivity is because of automation and labor saving devices; labor doesn't get less, it's that labor gets replaced with other inputs: energy, resources, ideas. That's a good thing.
You used to blame "Jewish bankers and capitalists" and imagined that they were in a big conspiracy to deprive workers of their just compensation. Now that anti-Semitism has become less popular, you just have changed your vocabulary a little and talk about "The Owners" or "the 1%". When will you people learn?
You are correct on this. A better term would be to consider money to have a 'velocity'. The faster the money is moving, the more economic activity it generates.
Yes, but economic activity by itself is useless. The only thing that ultimately matters is the wealth people produce.
How can you believe that? Krugman has a Nobel Prize.
You mean like, for example, Shockley, Mullis, Lenard, Pauling, or Josephson? The Nobel Prize is often awarded for important contributions in a narrow technical field. A consequence of the Nobel Prize is that its recipients often suffer delusions of grandeur, believing themselves to be experts on everything in their field and beyond. And that's the real Nobel Prize, no the joke that's awarded to economists.
Krugman got his prize for his work on spatial economics, and there mostly not for sharp predictions, but just for mucking around with it and popularizing the area. That doesn't make him an expert central economic planner or prognosticator. In fact, Krugman's economic policy statements border on the crackpot.
If you're on a desert island with someone who doesn't want to work, and you have a source of food that provides a comfortable excess
If we had such a source, the food would cost nothing. But food costs something. The amount of money that food costs reflects exactly the value of the sacrifices other people make to provide it. Food is cheap, though. You can easily get by with less than $100/week for food (average is $150 in the US).
you are absolutely morally obligated to give some food to the other person
I am in no way morally obligated to feed someone who could feed himself but simply chooses not to.
And if you try to force me to do so legally, there is something very wrong with your sense of morality.
That principle is also in the bible, if your the type who believes morality springs from a book.
You should be more concerned about where your sense of morality comes from, because you sound like a sociopath.
in order to not stave. Only Republicans are mean enough to want people to die for not wanting to work.
Let's say society just consisted of two people on a desert island. You say "I shouldn't have to work in order not to starve". Does your friend have a moral obligation to give you food so that you don't starve, even though you refuse to work? I don't think so.
So, why should it be any different when society is larger? At what size of a society does "I shouldn't have to work in order not to starve" turn from unacceptable selfishness into a moral principle?
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that Google France is a separate company (and if it isn't, it could easily be turned into one). That company needs to comply with French law.
The idea that any company anywhere in the world that is owned by the same people as a French company becomes subject to French law would be ridiculous. If France tried to enforce that, they'd create a real problem for themselves.
Technically, humanity probably could colonize Mars already. It would be expensive and unpleasant, but lots of things that have advanced humanity were expensive and unpleasant at first.
A bigger reason not to colonize Mars is that there are far better things to do in space. Mars is a deep gravity well, and there's little evidence that there is anything in it we want. The asteroid belt, on the other hand, is full of useful stuff in convenient orbits.
Wojcicki made her career in marketing, after studying history and literature. She evidently didn't like computers either. But now she sends her little girl to computer camp?
Seems to me the girl wants to step into her mother's footsteps: she doesn't like computers, but she has already figured out which buttons to push to get her mother to jump.
Well, it's not my optimism, it's what the latest IPCC report effectively says: climate change in 2100 amounts to a couple percent loss of income for everybody if we do nothing (about the same as doing something according to the IPCC). Note that this is a couple of percent lower from a massively higher (in real terms) worldwide average income after decades of growth. So, no falling skies even under the IPCC scenarios. In reality, the IPCC estimates scenarios are actually far too pessimistic, so it only gets better than that.
In principle, it shouldn't be all that hard to design drones that don't pose a risk in crowded areas, that harmlessly spin to the ground if anything goes wrong. Blanket restrictions like this strongly discourage such developments.
A second issue with these restrictions is that they often mix up criminal and civil matters and are at risk of getting abused by police and politicians for purposes other than public safety and protecting private property rights.
Money isn't the issue, resources are. Labor and resources are scarce and they are nearly fully utilized already. Money is simply bookkeeping for allocating those resources between different uses, in this case, either producing something useful or producing something for consumption.
You reason as if demand were perfectly inelastic, and your bogus disclaimer doesn't change that. For any real good. demand is never "satisifed" because demand is elastic. And if it were "likely" that there would be a higher overall profit being made at the higher volume, companies would already be investing in those factories. (Chip factories are a lousy example, because lots of those are being built.)
What do you think people do with their "money"? Stuff it under a mattress? People allocate their resources according to where it gets the largest expected return. The reason people aren't investing quite as much in productive ventures these days is because there are a bunch of really good unproductive ventures: municipal bonds, treasury bills, Federal Reserve deposits, and real estate. They are attractive because government policy makes them attractive. In the case of government debt, government promises a high risk-free return to investors in order to then spend that money on things that actually produce a lower return.
And even if people did stuff their money under a mattress it wouldn't matter. If I choose to remove $1T from the economy by stuffing it under my mattress for the long term, nothing changes about the rest of the economy: all the chip factories and MP3 players that would have been built still will get built.
"Your" macroeconomic theories sound like textbook Keynesianism and progressivism, except that you think they ought to be a permanent fixture of the economy. Furthermore, "your" macroeconomic theories have nothing to do with fixing the welfare system: whether increased consumer spending is good for the economy has nothing to do with the efficiency of the welfare system. After all, even in an inefficient and bureaucratic welfare system, the money still gets spent on consumption; whether it's the bureaucrats or "the poor" doing the spending doesn't matter to "your macroeconomic theories". You're mixing up the two for political reasons.
Fixing that is actually very simple: we just spend less money on it and benefits will decrease.
Ah, the usual progressive platitudes and denunciations of anybody who disagrees with you as a selfish prick. What you do is peddling the economic equivalent of Young Earth Creationism, and those ideas are disastrous. The fact that you couple them to a legitimate grievance about the inefficiency of our current welfare system doesn't alter that one bit.
If you take money away from people who invest it into chip factories and give it to people who buy Star Wars action figures, indeed, the producers of Star Wars action figures will have a bigger return on their investment. However, the chip factory won't get built. Now ask yourself: overall, is society better off with a hundred million new Star Wars action figures produced in China and thrown away in a few days, or a new chip factory? Which do you think benefits society more overall You can't just look at the positive return on investment that the new spending generates, you also need to account for the opportunity cost of what that money would have been used for otherwise.
You spur investment in the production of consumer goods, but at the cost of investment in the production of capital goods. Politicians like to do that because voters like to consume and they don't understand the long term economic price of such choices (as you just demonstrated). Furthermore, there are big, powerful corporate lobbies who also like those policies.
May I suggest you do? While the macroeconomic theories you like are popular with big spending politicians, they are dubious at best and probably wrong. Even if they were right, they were never intended as permanent macroeconomic policy, but as fixes to temporary market failures.
If you want to see one of those "traitors", look in the mirror. Oh, you don't consider yourself "that" kind of person, but it is people who think like you who are responsible for these failures and injustices.
And that's exactly why it isn't going to happen. Any attempt to pass a basic income guarantee would only result in even more government spending and bureaucracy.
Furthermore, why is it even needed? What actual problem does that address? What evidence is there that people are better off with a basic income guarantee than without one?
The cost voters are concerned with is what they have to pay for right now, not how the books balance in a few centuries. So even if the Citibank analysis (and similar analyses) were true, they don't get to the point I was making. (In reality, such analyses are meaningless guesswork even for what they purport to show.)
If you want to be picky, it was about 390 feet over 14000 years, depending on the estimate you look at.
You're thinking of infrastructure as something permanent with an enduring, fixed value, but that doesn't reflect reality. Infrastructure stays around because it constantly gets rebuilt. After a few decades, you have basically paid for an entirely new structure. The actual cost of abandoning a coastal city over a time span of a century and moving it somewhere else is tiny relative to the construction cost of a new structure, and irrelevant compared to the actual sales price of the structure. In fact, often, rebuilding would be cheaper, but people simply avoid it because they value the location and don't want to risk disruption. Westerners need to understand much more that every glass is already broken, instead of clinging to a delusion of permanence and eternity.
There are other problems with your reasoning. For example, sea level rise doesn't mean that many coastal areas get flooded; coast lines are not at a fixed level, they adapt to sea level changes. Bangladesh is currently gaining land area despite being largely at sea level and despite sea level rise. Furthermore, citizens of advanced economies seem to have no significant problems living below sea level to begin with; a quarter of the Netherlands is already below sea level. Given the choice, Bangladeshi people would be far better off living below sea level at Dutch living standards than maintaining their current living standards and not experiencing sea level rise.
No, you aren't listening. I was saying that your disclaimer doesn't matter. Even if the metric is not faked out, the "velocity of money" or "economic activity" has no consistent relationship to either employment or wealth. I explained why. Re-read it.
The correct "velocity of money", in the sense of creating the most employment and wealth, is the velocity a free market chooses in the absence of government intervention. The only reason it ever slows down too much is because of government intervention; so when government needs to speed it up, it is merely to correct a problem that it created in the first place.
In the short term, under specific conditions, you may find empirical correlations between the "velocity of money" and other economic and social indicators, but they aren't causative; that is, while some factor may cause both the velocity of money and some economic indicator to change, it doesn't follow that intervening to change the velocity of money causes the economic indicator to change.
When you give money to poor people, they will mostly spend it on consumption, and consumption generates no wealth. The only thing that generates wealth is investment, i.e. spending money on something that has an expected positive return.
There may be other reasons to justify taking money from rich people and giving it to poor people (equality, social harmony, whatever), but wealth generation isn't among them. And if you look at the last half century of the war on poverty, it "turns out" that giving money to poor people is ineffective for wealth generation.
I am disagreeable because you (1) promote an economic agenda that has proven to be harmful to the US as a whole and to poor people in general, and (2) rather than reflecting on it just keep repeating it as if it were fact.
You said a lot of stuff, some right, some wrong. I responded to the wrong stuff.
No, I'm sorry. You may superficially agree with it, but you still don't seem to get it. You said "The faster the money is moving, the more economic activity it generates." and "More economic activity = more people employed = more wealth created, on average." That's simply wrong. There is an optimal "velocity of money", and too fast is just as detrimental to wealth creation as too slow. Attempts by governments to "stimulate the economy" or make money "move faster" are as harmful to wealth creation as is interference in the movement of money.
Any democratic nation would lynch its leaders given the devastating economic consequences such policies have; it's not going to happen.
There are no "ultimate effects". The climate is changing, like it always has been. Sea levels have been rising more than 400 ft over the last 10000 years; did civilization end? Did humans become extinct? No, of course not. Even if all the ice on the planet melts, they can only rise another 200 ft, and that would still take centuries, if not millennia.
Furthermore, between 200 ft sea level rise and the kind of totalitarian government necessary to impose worldwide carbon neutrality, I take the 200 ft sea level rise any day.
And that's the reason it's not much of a problem: climate change and sea level rise may be fast on geological time scales, but they are slow on human time scales.
Things have changed, but the conclusions haven't: the temperature predictions are still pretty much the same, their consequences are still as much guesswork now as back then, and the cost of intervention is much higher now; on balance, government should still not intervene.
And the best strategy is to focus on economic growth so that they will soon become actually competitive with fossil fuels. Carbon taxes and other government mandates, as well as government subsidies, are counterproductive if the goal is to get economically efficient alternative sources of energy.
Oil companies don't make "outrageous profits". Corporations on average make about 7% profits; Exxon fluctuates between 5-10%.
Solar panel companies have had poor profitability, and the profits they do make are largely derived from lobbying and crony capitalism. Exxon would have been foolish to switch their business to solar panels. But if you think solar panels are a great thing, by all means, invest your money in them.
Exxon's PR said exactly what the report says: there are big scientific uncertainties and it's too early to take action.
Correct. But their scientists also told them that the expected benefits outweigh the risks, so they took a chance with their own money and invested in drilling.
The problem with climate change action is that the expected benefit is likely no larger than doing nothing even according to the IPCC; furthermore, the people making a profit on climate change action are not the people paying the costs.
So you are saying that because some government regulations are useful, people should unquestioningly accept all government regulations, no matter what? Or what exactly is your point?
No, that's not what they said (even if the article leads you to believe otherwise). Read the actual report that the article is based on. What the scientists actually said was that action on climate change was "premature" because of the "large scientific uncertainties" and the "severe impact of climate change policies on the world's economies".
http://insideclimatenews.org/s...
So, Exxon followed the advice of its scientists.
(In addition, little has changed in the intervening 30 years, so the conclusions are arguably still valid.)
In fact, the report advised a wait-and-see attitude based on all available scientific data. So, it's not that they ignored the advice of their scientists, they actually followed it.
The scientific situation hasn't changed much in the last 30 years. (1) The planet is getting warmer (mainly at the poles). (2) That will lead to changes in climate, redistribution of arable land, and gradual and significant sea level rise over the next few centuries. (3) There is little reason to believe that massive government intervention at this point is would be either beneficial or effective in the long run, and it would certainly be quite harmful in the short run.
Instead of the biased article, read what the report actually concludes:
http://insideclimatenews.org/s...
The report also points out that temperature increases would not be uniform, with strong increase at the polar caps and little increase near the equator.
The interesting thing is that little has changed about these conclusions in the last 30 years; science has produced a lot of new data, but the conclusions have changed little.
Wealth, in economics, is things that have an exchange value and/or utility.
Economic activity, that is the exchange of goods and services, increases wealth due to comparative advantage. But that happens only if the exchanges are voluntary and mutually beneficial. Without comparative advantage, economic activity doesn't make anybody wealthier. If we keep buying and selling the same house and land between us ten times for 100000 dollars, we didn't generate a million dollars in new wealth; rather, there is still only a house and land worth 100000 dollars.
Likewise, more people employed does not mean more wealth created. We can get 100% employment by forcing everybody to dig ditches (popular in communist countries), but we would be worse off than we are now. And if you simply double the size of the workforce, but otherwise nothing changes, nobody ends up being better off on average either. Conversely, the labor participation rate has grown steadily for decades (well, until Obama), due to population growth and women entering the workforce; economic activity had nothing to do with it.
Governments frequently talk about "stimulating the economy" and "lowering the unemployment rate" in order to get voters; it's economic snake oil.
Before your overly literal mind takes that out of context, what I mean is: "Neither shareholders nor corporate management get to "decide" compensation unilaterally; they are subject to the iron law of supply and demand. They choose compensation such that they get the number of workers they need."
AC wasn't claiming that he was prevented from working, he was saying that he was making a voluntary choice not to work and that others had a moral obligation to support him. I was responding to that.
Your response has nothing to do with that scenario. You are just repeating progressive talking points about inequality and corporate power. But let's look at that:
"The owners" of corporations are largely pension funds, retirement funds, and other institutional investors; they don't manage corporations. They simply invest their money where it yields the biggest return. Neither shareholders nor corporate management get to "decide" anything; labor is priced by supply and demand. The reason labor gets less and less of the share of corporate productivity is because of automation and labor saving devices; labor doesn't get less, it's that labor gets replaced with other inputs: energy, resources, ideas. That's a good thing.
You used to blame "Jewish bankers and capitalists" and imagined that they were in a big conspiracy to deprive workers of their just compensation. Now that anti-Semitism has become less popular, you just have changed your vocabulary a little and talk about "The Owners" or "the 1%". When will you people learn?
Yes, but economic activity by itself is useless. The only thing that ultimately matters is the wealth people produce.
You mean like, for example, Shockley, Mullis, Lenard, Pauling, or Josephson? The Nobel Prize is often awarded for important contributions in a narrow technical field. A consequence of the Nobel Prize is that its recipients often suffer delusions of grandeur, believing themselves to be experts on everything in their field and beyond. And that's the real Nobel Prize, no the joke that's awarded to economists.
Krugman got his prize for his work on spatial economics, and there mostly not for sharp predictions, but just for mucking around with it and popularizing the area. That doesn't make him an expert central economic planner or prognosticator. In fact, Krugman's economic policy statements border on the crackpot.
If we had such a source, the food would cost nothing. But food costs something. The amount of money that food costs reflects exactly the value of the sacrifices other people make to provide it. Food is cheap, though. You can easily get by with less than $100/week for food (average is $150 in the US).
I am in no way morally obligated to feed someone who could feed himself but simply chooses not to.
And if you try to force me to do so legally, there is something very wrong with your sense of morality.
You should be more concerned about where your sense of morality comes from, because you sound like a sociopath.
Let's say society just consisted of two people on a desert island. You say "I shouldn't have to work in order not to starve". Does your friend have a moral obligation to give you food so that you don't starve, even though you refuse to work? I don't think so.
So, why should it be any different when society is larger? At what size of a society does "I shouldn't have to work in order not to starve" turn from unacceptable selfishness into a moral principle?