Demand for transportation was met with horses, there was more demand but nothing to fill it.
So explain how that demand *created* cars.
Why did cars get invented when they did - a sudden critical level of demand? Did someone ask for a car and send an invention request an inventor? Why wasn't it invented earlier - the demand was there, after all.
People have general needs and wants. Products are specific "solutions" designed to meet some general need or want. General need is insufficient to create specific solutions. N. Korea's population is starving - is it because they don't have enough demand?
If you really don't know about the material science improvement that were mostly led by "ebil socialist" universities and the government I will not explain it to you here. It was not investment that got basic research done. That was the government. No business will invest in basic research. Hell, these days near any research. Look at PARC and the like to see this.
And here you repeat what I already said - products are the result of research and development. Research is investment. Money put into a research department, whether owned by a corporation or a university, is not "demand manipulation". You just put a stake into the heart of your theory that demand is responsible for innovation and new products.
General research also rarely creates specific products. That's usually done by a resourceful researcher or corporation who sees the market potential in a certain technology or principle.
Demand is what gives things value. Ideas that no one has a demand for are worthless. Supply theory fails to explain anything, and that is why it isn inadeguate as an economic theory. Supply theory is just "pray to the great job creators for a good harvest".
Demand is only an instantaneous measure of a thing's value. All you're saying is that "items without value are worthless" - and I'm not disagreeing with that. My point is that demand does not create things. It assigns value to things that are created, but it has NO CREATIVE POWER. Demand doesn't create a computer. A team of engineers and programmers, do.
You're quick to throw a label of "supply theory" on my economic understanding and claiming that's proof that I'm wrong. That's not a counter-argument. That's name-calling. And none of that name-calling changes the inability of "demand theory" to explain actual and common economic events. I'm not asking you to affirm that you're on Team Demand. I'm asking you to explain why Team Demand's understanding is CORRECT.
Demand theory is the rationale behind subsidizing demand for "green" technologies, and giving money to failures like Solyndra. Explain to me why this "correct" economic theory is generating economic failures when put into practice.
The simplest explanation - is that it's wrong. Attacking "supply theory" is ignoring my analysis and what I'm actually arguing.
It's a tool. It doesn't have feelings, and being a reliable entertainment device is as noble a task for it as to be used to calculate some company's P&E numbers.
I am at the bottom end of the top 10% of wage earners. My income tax was less than 10% of my income. When you count medicare, SS, and all property taxes sales taxes, and every other identifiable tax I pay, it still came in under 20%. Oh, and 14%+7% are 21%, which comes out to a little more than 25% increase in income....
So by your math, you have an increased tax rate without factoring in the deductions they want to put into the system. I don't know what that math looks like, but you aren't able to honestly evaluate the FairTax system as a tax increase if you don't account for those.
For people in higher tax brackets, they get a lower tax rate without ever considering deductions. 23%... I don't include employer tax cuts in increased income.
It's still coming out of the pot of money used for employee compensation. Let's say the business pockets it; that's an instant 7% reduction in employee costs for EVERY business. They could give out 1~2 % as a bonus to employees to raise morale. They can use those increased margins to invest in equipment or pay stockholders.
Even though it's charged to the "employer", it's indistinguishable from it being taken out of your paycheck. Since it scales with your income, it *is* coming out of your paycheck, because the business factors in that cost when they decide what they're going to pay you. Businesses can pocket the savings, but competition for employees will result in some of those savings becoming part of the employee's paychecks.
We don't need Human 2.0 to replace human labour sufficiently to create a labour problem. Niche robots are enough as long as we have enough types of niche robots.
What labor problem?
And yet many people use cars over bikes, even when a bike would make more sense. Going fast enough to stay airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with sea vehicles like boats, and yet we still don't travel long distances by boat much any more. The costs of lugging around an engine doesn't presently stop most people from doing it. You're kind of arguing against reality as it is now with this. The niches occupied by these things were once occupied by other things, like horses, that were essentially obsoleted so that you don't see them around much any more.
None of what you said here contradicts my point, which is that all those technologies still exist, and are still in use, often side-by-side.
They may be obsoleted in the future, but that's not a criss, either. When cars replaced horses as a primary form of transportation, there was no "horse overpopulation" crisis. The economics took care of itself as supply followed demand and price signals triggered changes in society.
The solution doesn't create the helpless people, it just stops them from starving to death in a world that doesn't give them any other options. At our population density, they can't fall back on hunter/gatherer behaviour. In a world that won't employ them at a survivable level, they will already be helpless. It's part of the social contract of civilization. Civilization takes away some survival opportunities, but it's supposed to exchange them for better ones.
Socialism is not the only system that can prevent starvation. A system designed around an average person being "useless" from birth to death is one that strips away his humanity, and is more likely to result in mass human murder than any of the other political systems.
In a landscape where there's nothing you can do to be self-sufficient, how do you expect people to do so? They won't be able to put down pegs delineating a plot of land they will farm. They won't be able to hunt in the wilderness. They won't be able to mine. They won't have any capital to buy their own land or mineral rights or production facilities. Understand, I don't think this is an absolute certainty, but I think it's pretty likely. I'm not arguing for a nanny state, I'm just arguing for a state that doesn't let members slip over the edges and down into the abyss.
You're assuming the problem you want to solve with socialism. I'm disagreeing that your scenario even happens in the first place. Industrialization didn't do it. New specialized robotics isn't going to do it either.
Not mass starvations, just lots of little personal tragedies. These days we actually have social services for people living hand to mouth to fall back on when they suddenly lose employment, but not so in the good old days. Poorhouses and prisons were often stops along the way, but quite enough people managed to die in the gutters. The point was that upheaval, even when the broad results are positive, has casualties. We should do what we can to prevent those casualties and not just callously chalk it up as the price of progress.
Citation needed. Is this what you assumed must have happened, or do you have biographies and histories detailing these tragic circumstances? Life is full of little tragedies, and you have to show that technology generated more tragedies than the status quo.
In my view, the real Luddite Fallacy is the notion that the Luddites were simply an expression of fear of technological progress. They were just part of the scattered beginnings of the labour movement. Their real concern was the abuses of the workers by owners. Long hours in dangerous conditions for lower wages in a time of increasing cos
Yes becouse it's not like damn crows or parots can talk and comunicate in English. It's not like Chimpanze can learn sign language. It's not like they can read books eaither. It's not like animals can use medicine. It's not like the can use tools! Most of animals have ability to learn too. So maybe common man is not a dumb animal. We're in fact very smart animals. But there's really nothing separating us from animals.
I'll look forward to interacting with their civilizations, then, whenever that comes along.
Median taxes 14%. 16% increase in take home. 25% sales tax is much more than the 16% take home. 50% increase in taxes is a tax cut? I guess that's why I'm always confused by unFair Tax. The only one with a tax cut are the uber-rich that save more than they spend.
You got me to look it up. From the FairTax website, they want 23%, not 25%. Also:
Exactly what taxes are abolished?
The FairTax is replacement, not reform. It replaces federal income taxes including personal, estate, gift, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, self-employment, and corporate taxes.
SS + Medicare right there are 15%. Add that to your median 14%, and 23% sales tax is a clear net gain over 29% income tax.
Without the combined income tax of 29%, income goes up 40%. Prices only go up 23%, ignoring all the exemption/prebate things they want to apply with their system.
There is a double taxation for existing cash/assets since those were taxed by income tax and would then be taxed again by sales tax, but there is an overall long term net gain, even for the "non-rich".
I'm not sure where you're going with this. My point was that the rich would get hit with a Fair Tax, because the things they want and buy are subject to sales tax.
Property tax is somewhere around 1% per year. You think 1% will dominate home taxes (average length of homeownership of about 6 years), as opposed to a 25% tax?
Sorry, thinking CA, where land cost far outstripped house cost where I grew up.
Quick look has a home builder suggesting materials cost should be about 1/4 of the total cost of the property. 25% of that is 6.25% of the property's cost, for a house that could last say 30 years. Compared to a home ownership of 6 years (6% property value), it's in the same ballpack, thought that depends on where you live. Over the entire life of the house, say 20 years, the property tax would dominate. (And people don't always move into newly built houses)
Applied that way, the Fair Tax does make the home more expensive, but if the FairTax replaces the income tax, take home income will be increased by 1/3 (assume 25% income tax), depending on tax bracket, this would end up making the new home cheaper compared to now.
But the effect will punish those that follow the rules, and only for the first retail transactions thereof. That will cause serious market ripples, at the very least.
How does it punish those who follow the rules? It makes new houses more expensive relative to older homes, but people who can afford houses should see a % increase in take home income that dwarfs the increase in (new) home price.
... In many applications, you can work around the need for those things.
Work around is more work, which is a cost.
The time to actually be worried about the economic scenario you posit is when robots are Human 2.0, capable of doing everything a human can do in the same compact package.
We're not even close. I don't believe it's possible, but even if it is, there's too much new tech that needs to be developed- and that is because a human being is an amazing complex system.
Re:Cars/bikes/aircraft - your hypotheticals ignore the physics of it. Cars aren't going to be simpler than bikes, and aircraft aren't going to be simpler than cars. Going fast enough to go airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with a ground vehicle, and lugging around an engine imposes costs you don't have with a human powered vehicle.
They're competing technologies, but each has a niche that isn't going away any time soon. In the same way, humans have niches that a robot do not occupy, and will not occupy barring some miraculous new technology. (if that pops up, worry about it then)
Jobs may not be zero sum, but the job market is not infinitely elastic either. There are certain things that people need and want. Once they're provided, you can't just suddenly give people a bunch of new wants, no matter how hard the marketing people try.
You're trying to imagine the economy of a post scarcity world, which we are most definitely not in, and which we won't be in for a long time. I say let the post scarcity society worry about it when they get here; they're post scarcity and will have the resources to handle it.
In the meantime, we are living in a scarcity world, and it's premature optimization to rewrite society for a post-scarcity world when we are not in one yet. I don't mind exploring it as an idea, but I do mind this idea that we need to start putting in new rules and giving people a lot of power to handle a not-yet-problem that may never even be a problem. Building the wrong system for the wrong problem is a bad idea; and some wrong systems in the past have taken a very heavy human toll.
No, it just means that we need some sort of safety net in place, and to recognize that the majority of people are going to end up living forever in that safety net. It requires a form of socialism, not matter how much of a dirty word that is to some people. Providing everyone with some sort of basic living wage would seem to be the required eventual outcome.
This "solution" creates helpless people. You are not doing them any favors, and if anything, it's cruel to create dependence where it was not there before. Imagine a 20 year old who still wears diapers and needs to be fed baby-food - that is what your "safety net" will produce - and it'd be considered child-abuse if done by a parent to an actual child.
This is the point of our disagreement - you think that there is a class of people, whom are a majority, who are going to need a nanny state to take care of them forever. I believe the average person can be self-sufficient, and that absent a nanny state's interference, the average person will learn whatever he needs to take care of himself.
So, do you actually have the biographies of all the whalers and the ice delivery men and the lamplighters, and all the other people whose jobs went away due to the new technologies and the appliances they enabled? The fact that society survives does not mean that individual people do. Some people fall through the cracks. As I keep saying, I'm fine with these social changes, as long as we recognize they're coming and take action, on a human time scale (in other words, a lot faster than most current social services, who seem to be organized on the principle that people can go months without food) to seal up those cracks, as enormous as they may get.
What useful function did the slaveowners in the 19th century serve? They were probably useful to people who needed to buy cheap crops harvested from their plantations, but slave owners in aggregate served no useful function. They were merely consumers of the labor of others.
They served an economic function as managers, but with too much power over the ones they managed.
The slaves did not perform work autonomously, but were directed to do so so by their owners. They were clothed, fed, and housed by their owners. (to varying standards; some slaveowners apparently were kinder than others)
It wasn't a great economic system; critics of Southern slavery observed that the economic growth in slavery states was retarded compared to non-slave states because of the type of culture and work ethic slavery encouraged. But the slaveowners did serve a economic purpose, and they defended slavery because they were blind to anything better.
No, it isn't. That computer handled the needs of an entire multinational corporation and resulted in numerous scientific discoveries and papers. Your table is so amazingly un-powerful all you can do is play angry birds on it and post to/.
That tablet has the computing power to run an app that does what the supercomputer did. And it can be prettied up with a pretty GUI even a CEO can understand.
It won't be as influential as the old supercomputer, but it is still pretty amazing that that much computing power is available to the average John Doe, without even requiring a security clearance.
It also makes the most sense when large groups can get massive discounts for healthcare coverage due to their buying power and the fact that it minimizes the risk.
It is a terrible system, and I believe it actually hinders innovation and risk taking in business (because people feel they cant afford to quit a job, start a small business, move, etc) but it does have some benefits for those trapped in the cycle.
Insurance premiums don't have to be based on group membership. They can be based entirely on your personal risk - look at car insurance for a better system. Good driver discounts, insurance premiums based on what you can afford and what you need, and entirely handled by the individual rather being based on employment.
We don't have that type of health insurance market because we've passed so many laws to make it economically unsound. Businesses get tax writeoffs for health insurance; individuals don't. It's cheaper for the business to offer health insurance than for indiviuals to buy it themselves. Thus we end up with a distorted health insurance market thanks to gov't regulations.
There is a finite (and, ultimately, small) demand for brain-work (you only need one genius to invent a trinket in order for everybody to be able to have one), so the majority of displaced workers cannot simply promote themselves to more interesting work. When production is very high but the labor cost is very low, you wind up with large masses of people who can't find *any* work (or at least nothing that provides a livable wage). That results in severe crime and upheaval.
How small is that demand for brain-work? How did you measure it?
The idea that we can hit a post scarcity society and end up with massive poverty and unemployment is inane.
Technology has a huge number of pre-reqs to build and to sustain. That is all valuable work that needs doing just for the technology to continue to run, let alone be improved.
The highly skilled people who build the automation technology are still going to need to live in homes and to eat; and if their work is that valuable, they can afford hired help, and if there is such massive unemployment, there will be a supply of people who are willing to fill those jobs. The chances of this developing into some form of neo-aristocracy is not very high as these new technologies are making everything *cheaper*. That means an economic minimum wage can afford goods that used to be high class luxury items.
When even the "poor" are touting around advanced computing devices in the palm of their hands, that's not really what a sane person can describe as "massive poverty".
That's going to reflected in the sales price for the used house, and there's always been an extra cost for buying new.
Property taxes are going to the biggest factor in any case, which is a local tax.
Fair Tax is a federal tax proposal, and it isn't important that it gets maximum revenue from real estate transactions, only that it extracts enough revenue from general consumption. (Which is possible considering the amount taken by the income tax)
The problem is that, by supposition, the machines will eventually also have literacy, the ability to use [arbitrary] tools, the ability to communicate, the ability to learn and think abstractly.
So the comparison to the fate of horses is still relevant -- machines will replicate the supposed human-unique abilities.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Considering the amount of work that gets put into developing a computing system, I disbelieve that intelligence is just a happy accident waiting to be replicated in silicon.
In the meantime, contempt for the "common" man is a red flag that you want to join the murderous "elites" of the previous century. Few mourn the horses converted into glue and dog food.
In states with sales tax, I've not seen any that apply to real estate. Though sales tax technically applies to used items, most people don't apply it.
Even assuming the land itself doesn't get sales tax (there's always property taxes), they're going to want to live in a house.
I don't expect the rich to want to live in a shabby shack, so they're going to spend money building themselves a nice looking (and expensive) house, furnished with high class items. There's always exceptions, of course, but people with money tend to spend it.
The only difference I see between horses and the common man is that he or she can vote....
And literacy. And the ability to use tools. And the ability to communicate with language. And the ability to learn, think abstractly and plan for the future.
Aside from all that, the common man is just a dumb animal.
Do you think you're a super genius surrounded by idiots, per chance?
Without your and my demand for steaks no one would raise cattle.
It really is that simple. The mother would not feed the child if it did not want/need to eat.
You can create all the useless junk you want, if no one is willing to trade for it, it is useless junk. Demand is what decides which it is. Please go take some econ classes. This supply side BS is rotting your brain.
So where was the demand for PCs before they invented?
Where was the demand for cars before the first one was invented?
In many cases, goods just need incremental tweaks. A faster computer, a more durable shoe, a snazzier car. It seems reasonable to say that the demand drove the improvement.
But this theory of economics cannot explain innovation, the invention of entirely new categories of goods, and the creation of demand where none existed before. Is the reason a PC never existed prior to the 1970s the lack of demand for one? Did someone flip a switch in society to turn on the demand and start the computing revolution? Why didn't they flip the switch in the 1950s, or the 1800s?
The PC could not have existed until various new technologies and skills were developed, and those happened to occur in the 1970s. Where did that technology and where did those skills come from? Investment, in the form of education, R&D, and paying innovators to transform ideas into things. There is a demand for money that drove the investment and R&D, but that in of itself is insufficient. After all, the thief has demands, but his actions only destroy wealth.
Demand does not create value. Demand just reflects the value of a good that's produced. Sometimes people inaccurately judge the value of their ideas, and so their new product fails to see demand and the business idea fails. But demand does not create the idea, it evaluates them and provides a measure of their value.
Demand theory fails to explain innovation, and that is why it is inadequate as an economic theory.
And you believe that "robots can't actually replace humans" and "jobs are not zero sum" are purely economic? What does economics have to do with whether a machine can functionally replace a human being in a job? As for jobs not being zero sum, they may not be, but they have to hold up to the principles of supply and demand to have any value. As all of the actual physical production, delivery, logistics and other facets of all necessities and conventional luxuries are taken over by machines the jobs that are left are either only for highly skilled geniuses (and even they can be cut out by the uncaring owners of the means of production) or are increasingly abstract and removed from any traditional human activity. Those jobs will have low demand and very high supply.
Robots not being a replacement for humans is a physical observation. Just compare the feature lists. The economic conclusion is that this is sufficient evidence that robots do not replace humans.
Consider how bikes and cars and airplanes co-exist. All are transportation technologies. The existence of one good does change the use and prevalence of the other goods; but in the case of robots, the limitations of robots compared to a human being guarantees that humans have a competitive advantage even if robots can be used as burger flippers. This would change if there was a self-replicating robot that could think, learn, modify its design, and run on table scraps; that robot doesn't exist. (yet?)
"Jobs are not zero sum" is an economic claim, and is trivially proven by the fact that computer programmers did not exist before the invention of computers, but is currently a major career field. For jobs to be zero-sum, there must have been a bunch of computer programmers in the middle ages that we've never heard about. (Secret society running the world?)
Your concern about a society where there are only a few high paying jobs is based on an assumption that there are no new jobs to replace the older ones. Again, jobs are not zero-sum. New jobs can and do pop up, and the adaptability of a human being means that humans will fill those jobs at first, even if we can later design robots to do them. Note that each new robot type deployed requires a lot of design AND testing; this makes them expensive to use and makes human employees more desirable; it also generates a lot of human jobs. (Some of which are not that difficult; just tedious)
Humans who can't adapt are somewhat SOL, but life is harder if you're stupid; and a moral society will take care of them because it recognizes the innate worth of a human being and that the helpless should be helped. This question, however, is independent of technology. (And technology can provide opportunities for those who used to be completely helpless.)
"every new technology also creates new jobs" sounds more like an article of faith than a serious scientific result. It's also meaningless without quantities. Do the new jobs created replace the old jobs lost? Also, abstracted out to an eagle-eye view of the overall market, it ignores the actual human realities. How many people died in the gutter? How many people survived but were financially devastated? How many people went from expert labour back to menial because their skills were no longer relevant? I am the last person to argue against technological progress, but it's vitally important to recognize the human cost as it occurs. Basing our reasoning on articles of faith from a discipline as ridiculously insubstantial as economics is clearly a bad idea.
If that were true, that means there are some technologies we must delay or destroy, otherwise it would devastate society.
You might argue this applies to nuclear weapons, but that is a weapons technology designed to inflict maximum harm. The technology we're discussing is one designed to produce goods at a higher quality and lower cost. Society will be destroyed by cheaper goods? What hist
I said me, I make a lot more than $30k a year. I was discussing the percent of income that was taxed, not the overall rate.
1. You're rich Congratulations.
2. You don't have to spend all of your money. If you spend 30% of your income, 30% of your income is taxed.
3. The rich guy who spends all of his money gets taxed at 50% too.
That invested money is untaxed as far as he is concerned. Often it is not used for any of those things, since loans do not in and of themselves create demand. People spending money creates demand, which your little tax scheme will kill.
It isn't taxed, and neither is the money that *you* invest. This tax scheme spurs investment, which translates into more companies, more jobs, and more goods.
Demand doesn't create goods. Who demanded an iPad before it was built and sold? Who demanded an IBM PC running DOS or Windows before it existed? You''ve learned from an economic school of thought that got cause and effect backwards.
Companies create goods, and the value of those goods spurs the demand for them. People who recognize the value of those goods buy them and enjoy the benefits and savings.
I am not interested in harming anyone, merely paying for the things our society needs in a fair manner.
I am not a sore loser, I am happy for them. I just want them to pay their fair share. That is how bills get paid.
Bills aren't paid by fairness. Bills are paid with sound fiscal policy, which many progressive tax systems do NOT have. Fairness is a completely different goal than paying the bills, and it'd be good for you to recognize that.
BTW, your salary that is far above $30k is "unfair", considering how many people around the world live on far less than that. They just don't get to comment on Slashdot to talk about "real" fairness.
Investment DOES NOT FUCKING CREATE JOBS, only demand can do that. This is more supply side stupidity. No matter how cheap loans are if no one is buying widgets there is no money to be made in selling widgets thus no jobs making widgets.
You have to create value to create jobs.
Demand doesn't create value, it just consumes it.
How do you create value? People with ideas executing those ideas. It might be a widget that saves labor. It could be a system of thinking, written down into a book. It could be a learning process taught in the classrooms. It could be a way of doing things, taught by doing in a lab or workshop.
None of that is created by demand. Demand is infinite. I may want steak dinners, a mansion, a fast car, and a supercomputer; but my want does not result in me getting those things. My "demand" does not result in those things being built.
A baby doesn't get milk because he cries for it. A baby gets milk because his mother provides it to him. Society doesn't have wealth because people demand wealth, society has wealth because people CREATE wealth and trade it to each other for the things they want.
Get involved dumbass. Communities control their schools. The ones with problems are the ones where parents have ceded their responsibility so they can dive into the two income trap and/or get free daycare.
Perhaps you are not familiar with how broken some of the US State public education systems are. When the state controls the purse strings, it's not just a matter of getting the local community motivated and involved.
Yes, I get to pay for all the dumbasses who screwed up the system. No, it's not easy to fix. No, that does not make me a dumbass. A sucker, maybe, but not a dumbass.
No one earns a billion/year at a steady rate. Those types of spikes are generally a once in a lifetime thing.
The billionaire easily gets 1000x more services. Not only does he have assets for the police to protect, he has property and his assets and business use more services.
Why do you think the billionaire is able to buy products and services without triggering the Fair Tax?
Do you think he gets his mansion for free? That his fancy home theater system can be filed as a business expense? (Business expenses are not necessarily exempt from a Fair Tax)
You last point is pointless. Even if we exempt the first $30k in spending you are still talking about a system where I could be taxed on 50% of my income, while someone making $30 million a year is taxed on 1% of his.
You're so interested in harming the rich that you don't even get what's happening. If your $30k in spending is exempt and you earned $30k, you paid $0 (0%) in taxes.
With a $30k exemption in place, it is numerically impossible for you to ever reach 50%; If you earned $60k (a pretty solid salary, and around the nation's median) and spent it all, you pay 50% on $30k spent, paying 25% of your overall income on taxes. To be close to 50%, you must be stinking rich, and you must spend all of your money. (ex: to reach 49% taxation, you must earn and spend $1.5 million/yr. Poor, poor you.)
The rich guy taxed on 1% of his income has spent 1%, or $300k. Where did the remaining 29 million 700k go? The rich don't hide their money under their mattresses, they invest it. That "untaxed" 29 million is invested into companies; who hire employees, buy machinery and rent facilities, all of which trigger the Fair Tax.
You're completely missing the point of taxation. Taxation is not about harming "the rich" for some % of their income. Taxation is about paying for the amount of gov't we need (and/or want).
Your complaining about the rich's tax % is you being a sore loser. If a rich guy wants to live far beneath his means and invest the rest, that creates more jobs and more wealth, and that's a great thing. If a Fair Tax encourages that behavior, that's going to be a much richer society.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in California. It's in the frickin' Californian constitution that a fixed % of the state budget is allocated to K-12. That money is control.
I have facts, you have insults. Thank you for your gracious concession.
Demand for transportation was met with horses, there was more demand but nothing to fill it.
So explain how that demand *created* cars.
Why did cars get invented when they did - a sudden critical level of demand? Did someone ask for a car and send an invention request an inventor? Why wasn't it invented earlier - the demand was there, after all.
People have general needs and wants. Products are specific "solutions" designed to meet some general need or want. General need is insufficient to create specific solutions. N. Korea's population is starving - is it because they don't have enough demand?
If you really don't know about the material science improvement that were mostly led by "ebil socialist" universities and the government I will not explain it to you here. It was not investment that got basic research done. That was the government. No business will invest in basic research. Hell, these days near any research. Look at PARC and the like to see this.
And here you repeat what I already said - products are the result of research and development. Research is investment. Money put into a research department, whether owned by a corporation or a university, is not "demand manipulation". You just put a stake into the heart of your theory that demand is responsible for innovation and new products.
General research also rarely creates specific products. That's usually done by a resourceful researcher or corporation who sees the market potential in a certain technology or principle.
Demand is what gives things value. Ideas that no one has a demand for are worthless. Supply theory fails to explain anything, and that is why it isn inadeguate as an economic theory. Supply theory is just "pray to the great job creators for a good harvest".
Demand is only an instantaneous measure of a thing's value. All you're saying is that "items without value are worthless" - and I'm not disagreeing with that. My point is that demand does not create things. It assigns value to things that are created, but it has NO CREATIVE POWER. Demand doesn't create a computer. A team of engineers and programmers, do.
You're quick to throw a label of "supply theory" on my economic understanding and claiming that's proof that I'm wrong. That's not a counter-argument. That's name-calling. And none of that name-calling changes the inability of "demand theory" to explain actual and common economic events. I'm not asking you to affirm that you're on Team Demand. I'm asking you to explain why Team Demand's understanding is CORRECT.
Demand theory is the rationale behind subsidizing demand for "green" technologies, and giving money to failures like Solyndra. Explain to me why this "correct" economic theory is generating economic failures when put into practice.
The simplest explanation - is that it's wrong. Attacking "supply theory" is ignoring my analysis and what I'm actually arguing.
It's a tool. It doesn't have feelings, and being a reliable entertainment device is as noble a task for it as to be used to calculate some company's P&E numbers.
I am at the bottom end of the top 10% of wage earners. My income tax was less than 10% of my income. When you count medicare, SS, and all property taxes sales taxes, and every other identifiable tax I pay, it still came in under 20%. Oh, and 14%+7% are 21%, which comes out to a little more than 25% increase in income. ...
So by your math, you have an increased tax rate without factoring in the deductions they want to put into the system. I don't know what that math looks like, but you aren't able to honestly evaluate the FairTax system as a tax increase if you don't account for those.
For people in higher tax brackets, they get a lower tax rate without ever considering deductions. 23% ... I don't include employer tax cuts in increased income.
It's still coming out of the pot of money used for employee compensation. Let's say the business pockets it; that's an instant 7% reduction in employee costs for EVERY business. They could give out 1~2 % as a bonus to employees to raise morale. They can use those increased margins to invest in equipment or pay stockholders.
Even though it's charged to the "employer", it's indistinguishable from it being taken out of your paycheck. Since it scales with your income, it *is* coming out of your paycheck, because the business factors in that cost when they decide what they're going to pay you. Businesses can pocket the savings, but competition for employees will result in some of those savings becoming part of the employee's paychecks.
We don't need Human 2.0 to replace human labour sufficiently to create a labour problem. Niche robots are enough as long as we have enough types of niche robots.
What labor problem?
And yet many people use cars over bikes, even when a bike would make more sense. Going fast enough to stay airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with sea vehicles like boats, and yet we still don't travel long distances by boat much any more. The costs of lugging around an engine doesn't presently stop most people from doing it. You're kind of arguing against reality as it is now with this. The niches occupied by these things were once occupied by other things, like horses, that were essentially obsoleted so that you don't see them around much any more.
None of what you said here contradicts my point, which is that all those technologies still exist, and are still in use, often side-by-side.
They may be obsoleted in the future, but that's not a criss, either. When cars replaced horses as a primary form of transportation, there was no "horse overpopulation" crisis. The economics took care of itself as supply followed demand and price signals triggered changes in society.
The solution doesn't create the helpless people, it just stops them from starving to death in a world that doesn't give them any other options. At our population density, they can't fall back on hunter/gatherer behaviour. In a world that won't employ them at a survivable level, they will already be helpless. It's part of the social contract of civilization. Civilization takes away some survival opportunities, but it's supposed to exchange them for better ones.
Socialism is not the only system that can prevent starvation. A system designed around an average person being "useless" from birth to death is one that strips away his humanity, and is more likely to result in mass human murder than any of the other political systems.
In a landscape where there's nothing you can do to be self-sufficient, how do you expect people to do so? They won't be able to put down pegs delineating a plot of land they will farm. They won't be able to hunt in the wilderness. They won't be able to mine. They won't have any capital to buy their own land or mineral rights or production facilities. Understand, I don't think this is an absolute certainty, but I think it's pretty likely. I'm not arguing for a nanny state, I'm just arguing for a state that doesn't let members slip over the edges and down into the abyss.
You're assuming the problem you want to solve with socialism. I'm disagreeing that your scenario even happens in the first place. Industrialization didn't do it. New specialized robotics isn't going to do it either.
Not mass starvations, just lots of little personal tragedies. These days we actually have social services for people living hand to mouth to fall back on when they suddenly lose employment, but not so in the good old days. Poorhouses and prisons were often stops along the way, but quite enough people managed to die in the gutters. The point was that upheaval, even when the broad results are positive, has casualties. We should do what we can to prevent those casualties and not just callously chalk it up as the price of progress.
Citation needed. Is this what you assumed must have happened, or do you have biographies and histories detailing these tragic circumstances? Life is full of little tragedies, and you have to show that technology generated more tragedies than the status quo.
In my view, the real Luddite Fallacy is the notion that the Luddites were simply an expression of fear of technological progress. They were just part of the scattered beginnings of the labour movement. Their real concern was the abuses of the workers by owners. Long hours in dangerous conditions for lower wages in a time of increasing cos
Yes becouse it's not like damn crows or parots can talk and comunicate in English. It's not like Chimpanze can learn sign language. It's not like they can read books eaither. It's not like animals can use medicine. It's not like the can use tools! Most of animals have ability to learn too. So maybe common man is not a dumb animal. We're in fact very smart animals. But there's really nothing separating us from animals.
I'll look forward to interacting with their civilizations, then, whenever that comes along.
Median taxes 14%. 16% increase in take home. 25% sales tax is much more than the 16% take home. 50% increase in taxes is a tax cut? I guess that's why I'm always confused by unFair Tax. The only one with a tax cut are the uber-rich that save more than they spend.
You got me to look it up. From the FairTax website, they want 23%, not 25%. Also:
Exactly what taxes are abolished?
The FairTax is replacement, not reform. It replaces federal income taxes including personal, estate, gift, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, self-employment, and corporate taxes.
SS + Medicare right there are 15%. Add that to your median 14%, and 23% sales tax is a clear net gain over 29% income tax.
Without the combined income tax of 29%, income goes up 40%. Prices only go up 23%, ignoring all the exemption/prebate things they want to apply with their system.
There is a double taxation for existing cash/assets since those were taxed by income tax and would then be taxed again by sales tax, but there is an overall long term net gain, even for the "non-rich".
I'm not sure where you're going with this. My point was that the rich would get hit with a Fair Tax, because the things they want and buy are subject to sales tax.
Property tax is somewhere around 1% per year. You think 1% will dominate home taxes (average length of homeownership of about 6 years), as opposed to a 25% tax?
Sorry, thinking CA, where land cost far outstripped house cost where I grew up.
Quick look has a home builder suggesting materials cost should be about 1/4 of the total cost of the property. 25% of that is 6.25% of the property's cost, for a house that could last say 30 years. Compared to a home ownership of 6 years (6% property value), it's in the same ballpack, thought that depends on where you live. Over the entire life of the house, say 20 years, the property tax would dominate. (And people don't always move into newly built houses)
Applied that way, the Fair Tax does make the home more expensive, but if the FairTax replaces the income tax, take home income will be increased by 1/3 (assume 25% income tax), depending on tax bracket, this would end up making the new home cheaper compared to now.
But the effect will punish those that follow the rules, and only for the first retail transactions thereof. That will cause serious market ripples, at the very least.
How does it punish those who follow the rules? It makes new houses more expensive relative to older homes, but people who can afford houses should see a % increase in take home income that dwarfs the increase in (new) home price.
wait, is this a religious thing?
Any opinion on the origin of humanity and our sole example of intelligent minds is a religious thing.
In the meantime, there's nothing religious about recognizing the gap between human capabilities and the best robotics and computing has to offer.
Humans invented robots; we're a looooong way from robots inventing a human.
... In many applications, you can work around the need for those things.
Work around is more work, which is a cost.
The time to actually be worried about the economic scenario you posit is when robots are Human 2.0, capable of doing everything a human can do in the same compact package.
We're not even close. I don't believe it's possible, but even if it is, there's too much new tech that needs to be developed- and that is because a human being is an amazing complex system.
Re:Cars/bikes/aircraft - your hypotheticals ignore the physics of it. Cars aren't going to be simpler than bikes, and aircraft aren't going to be simpler than cars. Going fast enough to go airborne imposes energy costs that are not present with a ground vehicle, and lugging around an engine imposes costs you don't have with a human powered vehicle.
They're competing technologies, but each has a niche that isn't going away any time soon. In the same way, humans have niches that a robot do not occupy, and will not occupy barring some miraculous new technology. (if that pops up, worry about it then)
Jobs may not be zero sum, but the job market is not infinitely elastic either. There are certain things that people need and want. Once they're provided, you can't just suddenly give people a bunch of new wants, no matter how hard the marketing people try.
You're trying to imagine the economy of a post scarcity world, which we are most definitely not in, and which we won't be in for a long time. I say let the post scarcity society worry about it when they get here; they're post scarcity and will have the resources to handle it.
In the meantime, we are living in a scarcity world, and it's premature optimization to rewrite society for a post-scarcity world when we are not in one yet. I don't mind exploring it as an idea, but I do mind this idea that we need to start putting in new rules and giving people a lot of power to handle a not-yet-problem that may never even be a problem. Building the wrong system for the wrong problem is a bad idea; and some wrong systems in the past have taken a very heavy human toll.
No, it just means that we need some sort of safety net in place, and to recognize that the majority of people are going to end up living forever in that safety net. It requires a form of socialism, not matter how much of a dirty word that is to some people. Providing everyone with some sort of basic living wage would seem to be the required eventual outcome.
This "solution" creates helpless people. You are not doing them any favors, and if anything, it's cruel to create dependence where it was not there before. Imagine a 20 year old who still wears diapers and needs to be fed baby-food - that is what your "safety net" will produce - and it'd be considered child-abuse if done by a parent to an actual child.
This is the point of our disagreement - you think that there is a class of people, whom are a majority, who are going to need a nanny state to take care of them forever. I believe the average person can be self-sufficient, and that absent a nanny state's interference, the average person will learn whatever he needs to take care of himself.
So, do you actually have the biographies of all the whalers and the ice delivery men and the lamplighters, and all the other people whose jobs went away due to the new technologies and the appliances they enabled? The fact that society survives does not mean that individual people do. Some people fall through the cracks. As I keep saying, I'm fine with these social changes, as long as we recognize they're coming and take action, on a human time scale (in other words, a lot faster than most current social services, who seem to be organized on the principle that people can go months without food) to seal up those cracks, as enormous as they may get.
I do not have those bi
What useful function did the slaveowners in the 19th century serve? They were probably useful to people who needed to buy cheap crops harvested from their plantations, but slave owners in aggregate served no useful function. They were merely consumers of the labor of others.
They served an economic function as managers, but with too much power over the ones they managed.
The slaves did not perform work autonomously, but were directed to do so so by their owners. They were clothed, fed, and housed by their owners. (to varying standards; some slaveowners apparently were kinder than others)
It wasn't a great economic system; critics of Southern slavery observed that the economic growth in slavery states was retarded compared to non-slave states because of the type of culture and work ethic slavery encouraged. But the slaveowners did serve a economic purpose, and they defended slavery because they were blind to anything better.
No, it isn't. That computer handled the needs of an entire multinational corporation and resulted in numerous scientific discoveries and papers. Your table is so amazingly un-powerful all you can do is play angry birds on it and post to /.
That tablet has the computing power to run an app that does what the supercomputer did. And it can be prettied up with a pretty GUI even a CEO can understand.
It won't be as influential as the old supercomputer, but it is still pretty amazing that that much computing power is available to the average John Doe, without even requiring a security clearance.
It also makes the most sense when large groups can get massive discounts for healthcare coverage due to their buying power and the fact that it minimizes the risk. It is a terrible system, and I believe it actually hinders innovation and risk taking in business (because people feel they cant afford to quit a job, start a small business, move, etc) but it does have some benefits for those trapped in the cycle.
Insurance premiums don't have to be based on group membership. They can be based entirely on your personal risk - look at car insurance for a better system. Good driver discounts, insurance premiums based on what you can afford and what you need, and entirely handled by the individual rather being based on employment.
We don't have that type of health insurance market because we've passed so many laws to make it economically unsound. Businesses get tax writeoffs for health insurance; individuals don't. It's cheaper for the business to offer health insurance than for indiviuals to buy it themselves. Thus we end up with a distorted health insurance market thanks to gov't regulations.
There is a finite (and, ultimately, small) demand for brain-work (you only need one genius to invent a trinket in order for everybody to be able to have one), so the majority of displaced workers cannot simply promote themselves to more interesting work. When production is very high but the labor cost is very low, you wind up with large masses of people who can't find *any* work (or at least nothing that provides a livable wage). That results in severe crime and upheaval.
How small is that demand for brain-work? How did you measure it?
The idea that we can hit a post scarcity society and end up with massive poverty and unemployment is inane.
Technology has a huge number of pre-reqs to build and to sustain. That is all valuable work that needs doing just for the technology to continue to run, let alone be improved.
The highly skilled people who build the automation technology are still going to need to live in homes and to eat; and if their work is that valuable, they can afford hired help, and if there is such massive unemployment, there will be a supply of people who are willing to fill those jobs. The chances of this developing into some form of neo-aristocracy is not very high as these new technologies are making everything *cheaper*. That means an economic minimum wage can afford goods that used to be high class luxury items.
When even the "poor" are touting around advanced computing devices in the palm of their hands, that's not really what a sane person can describe as "massive poverty".
That's going to reflected in the sales price for the used house, and there's always been an extra cost for buying new.
Property taxes are going to the biggest factor in any case, which is a local tax.
Fair Tax is a federal tax proposal, and it isn't important that it gets maximum revenue from real estate transactions, only that it extracts enough revenue from general consumption. (Which is possible considering the amount taken by the income tax)
The problem is that, by supposition, the machines will eventually also have literacy, the ability to use [arbitrary] tools, the ability to communicate, the ability to learn and think abstractly. So the comparison to the fate of horses is still relevant -- machines will replicate the supposed human-unique abilities.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Considering the amount of work that gets put into developing a computing system, I disbelieve that intelligence is just a happy accident waiting to be replicated in silicon.
In the meantime, contempt for the "common" man is a red flag that you want to join the murderous "elites" of the previous century. Few mourn the horses converted into glue and dog food.
And can the rock throwers and the jar smashers earn enough to be middle class?
It must pay a living wage or it's social INJUSTICE.
In states with sales tax, I've not seen any that apply to real estate. Though sales tax technically applies to used items, most people don't apply it.
Even assuming the land itself doesn't get sales tax (there's always property taxes), they're going to want to live in a house.
I don't expect the rich to want to live in a shabby shack, so they're going to spend money building themselves a nice looking (and expensive) house, furnished with high class items. There's always exceptions, of course, but people with money tend to spend it.
The only difference I see between horses and the common man is that he or she can vote. ...
And literacy. And the ability to use tools. And the ability to communicate with language. And the ability to learn, think abstractly and plan for the future.
Aside from all that, the common man is just a dumb animal.
Do you think you're a super genius surrounded by idiots, per chance?
Without your and my demand for steaks no one would raise cattle.
It really is that simple. The mother would not feed the child if it did not want/need to eat.
You can create all the useless junk you want, if no one is willing to trade for it, it is useless junk. Demand is what decides which it is. Please go take some econ classes. This supply side BS is rotting your brain.
So where was the demand for PCs before they invented?
Where was the demand for cars before the first one was invented?
In many cases, goods just need incremental tweaks. A faster computer, a more durable shoe, a snazzier car. It seems reasonable to say that the demand drove the improvement.
But this theory of economics cannot explain innovation, the invention of entirely new categories of goods, and the creation of demand where none existed before. Is the reason a PC never existed prior to the 1970s the lack of demand for one? Did someone flip a switch in society to turn on the demand and start the computing revolution? Why didn't they flip the switch in the 1950s, or the 1800s?
The PC could not have existed until various new technologies and skills were developed, and those happened to occur in the 1970s. Where did that technology and where did those skills come from? Investment, in the form of education, R&D, and paying innovators to transform ideas into things. There is a demand for money that drove the investment and R&D, but that in of itself is insufficient. After all, the thief has demands, but his actions only destroy wealth.
Demand does not create value. Demand just reflects the value of a good that's produced. Sometimes people inaccurately judge the value of their ideas, and so their new product fails to see demand and the business idea fails. But demand does not create the idea, it evaluates them and provides a measure of their value.
Demand theory fails to explain innovation, and that is why it is inadequate as an economic theory.
And you believe that "robots can't actually replace humans" and "jobs are not zero sum" are purely economic? What does economics have to do with whether a machine can functionally replace a human being in a job? As for jobs not being zero sum, they may not be, but they have to hold up to the principles of supply and demand to have any value. As all of the actual physical production, delivery, logistics and other facets of all necessities and conventional luxuries are taken over by machines the jobs that are left are either only for highly skilled geniuses (and even they can be cut out by the uncaring owners of the means of production) or are increasingly abstract and removed from any traditional human activity. Those jobs will have low demand and very high supply.
Robots not being a replacement for humans is a physical observation. Just compare the feature lists. The economic conclusion is that this is sufficient evidence that robots do not replace humans.
Consider how bikes and cars and airplanes co-exist. All are transportation technologies. The existence of one good does change the use and prevalence of the other goods; but in the case of robots, the limitations of robots compared to a human being guarantees that humans have a competitive advantage even if robots can be used as burger flippers. This would change if there was a self-replicating robot that could think, learn, modify its design, and run on table scraps; that robot doesn't exist. (yet?)
"Jobs are not zero sum" is an economic claim, and is trivially proven by the fact that computer programmers did not exist before the invention of computers, but is currently a major career field. For jobs to be zero-sum, there must have been a bunch of computer programmers in the middle ages that we've never heard about. (Secret society running the world?)
Your concern about a society where there are only a few high paying jobs is based on an assumption that there are no new jobs to replace the older ones. Again, jobs are not zero-sum. New jobs can and do pop up, and the adaptability of a human being means that humans will fill those jobs at first, even if we can later design robots to do them. Note that each new robot type deployed requires a lot of design AND testing; this makes them expensive to use and makes human employees more desirable; it also generates a lot of human jobs. (Some of which are not that difficult; just tedious)
Humans who can't adapt are somewhat SOL, but life is harder if you're stupid; and a moral society will take care of them because it recognizes the innate worth of a human being and that the helpless should be helped. This question, however, is independent of technology. (And technology can provide opportunities for those who used to be completely helpless.)
"every new technology also creates new jobs" sounds more like an article of faith than a serious scientific result. It's also meaningless without quantities. Do the new jobs created replace the old jobs lost? Also, abstracted out to an eagle-eye view of the overall market, it ignores the actual human realities. How many people died in the gutter? How many people survived but were financially devastated? How many people went from expert labour back to menial because their skills were no longer relevant? I am the last person to argue against technological progress, but it's vitally important to recognize the human cost as it occurs. Basing our reasoning on articles of faith from a discipline as ridiculously insubstantial as economics is clearly a bad idea.
If that were true, that means there are some technologies we must delay or destroy, otherwise it would devastate society.
You might argue this applies to nuclear weapons, but that is a weapons technology designed to inflict maximum harm. The technology we're discussing is one designed to produce goods at a higher quality and lower cost. Society will be destroyed by cheaper goods? What hist
What if the sky is really falling?
I said me, I make a lot more than $30k a year. I was discussing the percent of income that was taxed, not the overall rate.
1. You're rich Congratulations.
2. You don't have to spend all of your money. If you spend 30% of your income, 30% of your income is taxed.
3. The rich guy who spends all of his money gets taxed at 50% too.
That invested money is untaxed as far as he is concerned. Often it is not used for any of those things, since loans do not in and of themselves create demand. People spending money creates demand, which your little tax scheme will kill.
It isn't taxed, and neither is the money that *you* invest. This tax scheme spurs investment, which translates into more companies, more jobs, and more goods.
Demand doesn't create goods. Who demanded an iPad before it was built and sold? Who demanded an IBM PC running DOS or Windows before it existed? You''ve learned from an economic school of thought that got cause and effect backwards.
Companies create goods, and the value of those goods spurs the demand for them. People who recognize the value of those goods buy them and enjoy the benefits and savings.
I am not interested in harming anyone, merely paying for the things our society needs in a fair manner.
I am not a sore loser, I am happy for them. I just want them to pay their fair share. That is how bills get paid.
Bills aren't paid by fairness. Bills are paid with sound fiscal policy, which many progressive tax systems do NOT have. Fairness is a completely different goal than paying the bills, and it'd be good for you to recognize that.
BTW, your salary that is far above $30k is "unfair", considering how many people around the world live on far less than that. They just don't get to comment on Slashdot to talk about "real" fairness.
Investment DOES NOT FUCKING CREATE JOBS, only demand can do that. This is more supply side stupidity. No matter how cheap loans are if no one is buying widgets there is no money to be made in selling widgets thus no jobs making widgets.
You have to create value to create jobs.
Demand doesn't create value, it just consumes it.
How do you create value? People with ideas executing those ideas. It might be a widget that saves labor. It could be a system of thinking, written down into a book. It could be a learning process taught in the classrooms. It could be a way of doing things, taught by doing in a lab or workshop.
None of that is created by demand. Demand is infinite. I may want steak dinners, a mansion, a fast car, and a supercomputer; but my want does not result in me getting those things. My "demand" does not result in those things being built.
A baby doesn't get milk because he cries for it. A baby gets milk because his mother provides it to him. Society doesn't have wealth because people demand wealth, society has wealth because people CREATE wealth and trade it to each other for the things they want.
Get involved dumbass. Communities control their schools. The ones with problems are the ones where parents have ceded their responsibility so they can dive into the two income trap and/or get free daycare.
Perhaps you are not familiar with how broken some of the US State public education systems are. When the state controls the purse strings, it's not just a matter of getting the local community motivated and involved.
Yes, I get to pay for all the dumbasses who screwed up the system. No, it's not easy to fix. No, that does not make me a dumbass. A sucker, maybe, but not a dumbass.
Fine compare it to a billion a year in income.
No one earns a billion/year at a steady rate. Those types of spikes are generally a once in a lifetime thing.
The billionaire easily gets 1000x more services. Not only does he have assets for the police to protect, he has property and his assets and business use more services.
Why do you think the billionaire is able to buy products and services without triggering the Fair Tax?
Do you think he gets his mansion for free? That his fancy home theater system can be filed as a business expense? (Business expenses are not necessarily exempt from a Fair Tax)
You last point is pointless. Even if we exempt the first $30k in spending you are still talking about a system where I could be taxed on 50% of my income, while someone making $30 million a year is taxed on 1% of his.
You're so interested in harming the rich that you don't even get what's happening. If your $30k in spending is exempt and you earned $30k, you paid $0 (0%) in taxes.
With a $30k exemption in place, it is numerically impossible for you to ever reach 50%; If you earned $60k (a pretty solid salary, and around the nation's median) and spent it all, you pay 50% on $30k spent, paying 25% of your overall income on taxes. To be close to 50%, you must be stinking rich, and you must spend all of your money. (ex: to reach 49% taxation, you must earn and spend $1.5 million /yr. Poor, poor you.)
The rich guy taxed on 1% of his income has spent 1%, or $300k. Where did the remaining 29 million 700k go? The rich don't hide their money under their mattresses, they invest it. That "untaxed" 29 million is invested into companies; who hire employees, buy machinery and rent facilities, all of which trigger the Fair Tax.
You're completely missing the point of taxation. Taxation is not about harming "the rich" for some % of their income. Taxation is about paying for the amount of gov't we need (and/or want).
Your complaining about the rich's tax % is you being a sore loser. If a rich guy wants to live far beneath his means and invest the rest, that creates more jobs and more wealth, and that's a great thing. If a Fair Tax encourages that behavior, that's going to be a much richer society.