but I've noticed a running theme with libertarians; whenever the market doesn't behave the way they expect and/or want it just wasn't "free" enough
I noticed that too although they're usually not the people with those expectations. I also notice that they're usually right when they make that observation.
You still fail to deal with the fact that automated "labor" will get cheaper over time while human capital really can only get so much cheaper.
As has been pointed out in the past, somehow this trend towards greater automation hasn't resulted in human capital getting cheaper over the long run except in the places that have been discouraging the use of human labor such as the developed world.
A low minimum wage means the government is subsidising corporate profits - if the wages are insufficient to live on, those people end up on government benefits of some kind. Their subsistence becomes dependant on our taxes, rather than the ability of the corporation to pay them.
That's not what a subsidy means. IHMO Walmart isn't saving a dime in labor costs because of food stamps. I bet it's actually having to pay a little more due to a somewhat reduced demand for work.
This is typical of the magic thinking surround labor policy. Walmart must be benefiting from a "subsidy" because it's an evil corporation we don't like.
Lowering or removing the minimum wage means that the poor will either starve or receive food stamps. Both jackbooted security forces and food assistance require money. And that, in turn, means the only difference between keeping - or preferably rising - the minimum wage or lowering it is that in the latter case my taxes ultimately go to subsidize McDonald's and Wal-Mart's profits and oppress people.
Who's going to employ poor people once you destroy the businesses who employ poor people? This argument is just stupid. Society is not a suicide pact. These people are paid so little because their labor is worth so little. Making them unemployable doesn't make their labor worth any more than it currently is.
What valuable economic activity would that be? Surely you aren't referring to activities so unprofitable that paying minimum wage for them is a "punishment"
Manufacture for example. And Walmart and McDonald's do have valid business models and very useful services that depend on low wages. They can achieve that by automation or by paying people what they're worth.
The fundamental flaw is that you imagine "high" minimum wages (I hope you aren't talking about the US national minimum), and "plush" benefits are the cause of underemployment/stagnation in employment.
I have two obvious rebuttals. First, I cited a large list of obstructions. These were one of many and weren't intended to explain it all in isolation. Second, you exhibit a provincial first world outlook. For example, people still build cars, they just don't build as many of them in the developed world as they used to. And employment in Asia continues to grow despite automation.
people would still not work for you for less than $5/hr for very well or long in any part of the country. They couldn't afford their basic needs.
Actually, yes they would. They'd find ways to have less costly "basic needs" or move to regions with lower cost of living. And need I remind you that the minimum wage remains $0 per hour no matter how high you raise it?
A robot needs only electricity and perhaps occasional repairs (but not enough to even come close to make up for the net loss in jobs).
And a vast expenditure in capital and resources.
What I find most bizarre about your arguments is this:
Over time this is very likely to cause societal tension at bare minimum, bloody revolution and quality of life going backwards at worst.
What are you proposing that does even a little bit to stop this? How is not employing people at all better than employing them at low wages?
If the demand for productive labor can be filled by more robots, the value of human labor can still stay at zero.
That is a non sequitur. Even in a situation where robots can do any job better than humans, doesn't mean that human labor has no value. You first have to get that robot labor down to "too cheap to meter".
Less sighing. More using that lump on the top of your neck for something other than breath control.
So when the USofA becomes "no longer developed" then the rich will move to the countries that have been polluted by their factories.
What makes you think those places will still be more polluted than the US by that time? There's this magic assumption on your part that the current state remains unchanged. Given that the developing world is getting better economically at a rapid rate while much of the developed world is not, I believe this idea to be very foolish.
The Greeks looking for work are moving to other 1st world countries where the job opportunities in their fields are better. So they chase those opportunities... in the 1st world.
Greece is first world too. Those Greek workers aren't pursuing opportunities in Greece. They are actually chasing opportunities in the developed world. If the EU ceases to be developed world, which I think is a valid possibility, then those opportunities may well be in future developed world countries that currently aren't developed world countries.
Also Greece isn't an unusual case of a first world country with net emigration. The article mentions Ireland, Spain, and Portugal as well.
A number of things: elimination of any sort of forced labor obligation, including slavery, indentured servitude, debtor's prison, and conscription; minimal obstruction of immigration; no restrictions on hiring or firing people; no minimum wage or mandatory benefits; no restrictions on the trade or creation of capital; and no health or safety regulation of businesses that are below a certain threshold of deaths per hour worked. I'm sure, if I looked, I could find more such things.
Truly minimal means zero regulation, thus allowing armed gangs to roam the streets and steal your stuff.
And it means no market. Constrained optimization is not a new thing.
And as soon as you add more regulation, you need laws. And laws means you have to have representatives to write the laws, and others to enforce them. And before you know it, people want more laws, and you end up where we are now.
That's an example of the slippery slope fallacy. No, it doesn't mean that.
It has not been "chased out" of any where. What you see is the people who own the companies looking for the cheapest means to produce their products.
I already noted the developed world as a counterexample.
If it really was "chased out" then they'd also be moving their families to those less-regulated, less-restricted countries.
This is a non sequitur. Of course, when portions of the developed world are no longer developed, then the people who own companies and many other people as well, will move to places where basic services are still supported.
There is a window of opportunity here to correct damaging behavior before it becomes a long term setback. Currently, developed world economies are more pleasant places to live. That need not remain the case, as Greece has demonstrated (they already are emigrating at a substantial rate to other parts of the EU).
Yes. This is basic supply and demand. Due to globalization and automation, the supply of labor has gone up a lot over the past few decades. Either find ways to increase the demand for that labor or expect a decline in price. That's how economic systems work.
I think adaptation is a better solution than the current approach for the developed world. Keep in mind that the developing world doesn't have the stagnating median wage problem. Shouldn't we adapt or emulate within reason the approaches that have been demonstrated to be successful, than the approaches that have been demonstrated to be failures?
Guess what, humans are essentially the only ones who can't tell when bad weather is coming. Ask anyone who spends some time in nature rather than hiding in some office or school room.
Except, unlike globalization which moves jobs around, robotization just kills the jobs (i.e. no foreign workers to benefit this time around).
'
Except that foreign workers are still benefiting.
In my opinion, it will be painful in developing countries most of all since America (and the "West") already kind of went through that so it's just one more nail in the coffin.
Once again we have a clueless story about automation destroying jobs which ignores that the claimed effect doesn't happen. Most of the developing world just doesn't have this problem. It's just another imaginary first world problem.
Instead the problem is the punishing of employers. When you mandate high minimum wages and plush benefits, regulations which drive up the cost of an employee while simultaneously making them hard to fire, and the creation of a variety of liabilities (eg, being exposed to large liabilities due to unsanctioned actions of your employees), you create an environment where it is better for employees to move the work to a better location and/or automate it.
We will see not only jobs moved to other parts of the world, but the automation as well. Call it "race to the bottom", "exporting the pollution", whatever, but it remains that a growing amount of valuable economic activity has been chased out of the developed world and it's not coming back.
90% is insignificant compared to the actual several orders of magnitude reduction in cases observed. I think it's instructive to compare measles vaccination to current climate research.
In the latter case, it's a study of a rather subtle effect by people who have biases large enough to easily swamp the observation and a huge degree of uncertainty that is ignored and downplayed (a notable example is the large error in the temperature forcing due to carbon dioxide concentration). While in the former case, there's no accounting of systemic biases that can explain the huge drop in incident of measles.
Science 101: Could there be any other explanation for that? If so how do we rule it out?
When are you going to present this other explanation? There's been a several orders of magnitude reduction in the incident of measles in areas that widely use a measles vaccine. The observation doesn't have to be made in a very particular format in order to be observed.
Slashdot Mirror
but I've noticed a running theme with libertarians; whenever the market doesn't behave the way they expect and/or want it just wasn't "free" enough
I noticed that too although they're usually not the people with those expectations. I also notice that they're usually right when they make that observation.
You still fail to deal with the fact that automated "labor" will get cheaper over time while human capital really can only get so much cheaper.
As has been pointed out in the past, somehow this trend towards greater automation hasn't resulted in human capital getting cheaper over the long run except in the places that have been discouraging the use of human labor such as the developed world.
A low minimum wage means the government is subsidising corporate profits - if the wages are insufficient to live on, those people end up on government benefits of some kind. Their subsistence becomes dependant on our taxes, rather than the ability of the corporation to pay them.
That's not what a subsidy means. IHMO Walmart isn't saving a dime in labor costs because of food stamps. I bet it's actually having to pay a little more due to a somewhat reduced demand for work.
This is typical of the magic thinking surround labor policy. Walmart must be benefiting from a "subsidy" because it's an evil corporation we don't like.
Lowering or removing the minimum wage means that the poor will either starve or receive food stamps. Both jackbooted security forces and food assistance require money. And that, in turn, means the only difference between keeping - or preferably rising - the minimum wage or lowering it is that in the latter case my taxes ultimately go to subsidize McDonald's and Wal-Mart's profits and oppress people.
Who's going to employ poor people once you destroy the businesses who employ poor people? This argument is just stupid. Society is not a suicide pact. These people are paid so little because their labor is worth so little. Making them unemployable doesn't make their labor worth any more than it currently is.
What valuable economic activity would that be? Surely you aren't referring to activities so unprofitable that paying minimum wage for them is a "punishment"
Manufacture for example. And Walmart and McDonald's do have valid business models and very useful services that depend on low wages. They can achieve that by automation or by paying people what they're worth.
The fundamental flaw is that you imagine "high" minimum wages (I hope you aren't talking about the US national minimum), and "plush" benefits are the cause of underemployment/stagnation in employment.
I have two obvious rebuttals. First, I cited a large list of obstructions. These were one of many and weren't intended to explain it all in isolation. Second, you exhibit a provincial first world outlook. For example, people still build cars, they just don't build as many of them in the developed world as they used to. And employment in Asia continues to grow despite automation.
people would still not work for you for less than $5/hr for very well or long in any part of the country. They couldn't afford their basic needs.
Actually, yes they would. They'd find ways to have less costly "basic needs" or move to regions with lower cost of living. And need I remind you that the minimum wage remains $0 per hour no matter how high you raise it?
A robot needs only electricity and perhaps occasional repairs (but not enough to even come close to make up for the net loss in jobs).
And a vast expenditure in capital and resources.
What I find most bizarre about your arguments is this:
Over time this is very likely to cause societal tension at bare minimum, bloody revolution and quality of life going backwards at worst.
What are you proposing that does even a little bit to stop this? How is not employing people at all better than employing them at low wages?
If the demand for productive labor can be filled by more robots, the value of human labor can still stay at zero.
That is a non sequitur. Even in a situation where robots can do any job better than humans, doesn't mean that human labor has no value. You first have to get that robot labor down to "too cheap to meter".
*sigh*
Less sighing. More using that lump on the top of your neck for something other than breath control.
So when the USofA becomes "no longer developed" then the rich will move to the countries that have been polluted by their factories.
What makes you think those places will still be more polluted than the US by that time? There's this magic assumption on your part that the current state remains unchanged. Given that the developing world is getting better economically at a rapid rate while much of the developed world is not, I believe this idea to be very foolish.
The Greeks looking for work are moving to other 1st world countries where the job opportunities in their fields are better. So they chase those opportunities ... in the 1st world.
Greece is first world too. Those Greek workers aren't pursuing opportunities in Greece. They are actually chasing opportunities in the developed world. If the EU ceases to be developed world, which I think is a valid possibility, then those opportunities may well be in future developed world countries that currently aren't developed world countries.
Also Greece isn't an unusual case of a first world country with net emigration. The article mentions Ireland, Spain, and Portugal as well.
A number of things: elimination of any sort of forced labor obligation, including slavery, indentured servitude, debtor's prison, and conscription; minimal obstruction of immigration; no restrictions on hiring or firing people; no minimum wage or mandatory benefits; no restrictions on the trade or creation of capital; and no health or safety regulation of businesses that are below a certain threshold of deaths per hour worked. I'm sure, if I looked, I could find more such things.
Yes, it's in your court now. I've already pointed out that your systemic biases don't account for the observed decline in measles cases.
Truly minimal means zero regulation, thus allowing armed gangs to roam the streets and steal your stuff.
And it means no market. Constrained optimization is not a new thing.
And as soon as you add more regulation, you need laws. And laws means you have to have representatives to write the laws, and others to enforce them. And before you know it, people want more laws, and you end up where we are now.
That's an example of the slippery slope fallacy. No, it doesn't mean that.
The whole point of this topic is that as the supply of labor (provided by workers and/or robots) goes up, the value goes down.
Which isn't true. If you have an economy where creation of demand for productive labor exists, then the value of labor need not go down.
It has not been "chased out" of any where. What you see is the people who own the companies looking for the cheapest means to produce their products.
I already noted the developed world as a counterexample.
If it really was "chased out" then they'd also be moving their families to those less-regulated, less-restricted countries.
This is a non sequitur. Of course, when portions of the developed world are no longer developed, then the people who own companies and many other people as well, will move to places where basic services are still supported.
There is a window of opportunity here to correct damaging behavior before it becomes a long term setback. Currently, developed world economies are more pleasant places to live. That need not remain the case, as Greece has demonstrated (they already are emigrating at a substantial rate to other parts of the EU).
Why don't we discuss what you think is wrong with my assertion?
They cannot exist in the real world, because of things like entropy and quantisation, and "stuff".
So free markets haven't been tried. Do you see where I'm going with this?
A minimally regulated market which has perfect knowledge by all participants.
Yes. This is basic supply and demand. Due to globalization and automation, the supply of labor has gone up a lot over the past few decades. Either find ways to increase the demand for that labor or expect a decline in price. That's how economic systems work.
I think adaptation is a better solution than the current approach for the developed world. Keep in mind that the developing world doesn't have the stagnating median wage problem. Shouldn't we adapt or emulate within reason the approaches that have been demonstrated to be successful, than the approaches that have been demonstrated to be failures?
I think the surprise was how far in advance they detected it.
Or maybe the storm was well telegraphed.
Guess what, humans are essentially the only ones who can't tell when bad weather is coming. Ask anyone who spends some time in nature rather than hiding in some office or school room.
Humans aren't an exception either.
Again, show systemic errors large enough to explain the effect. You still have not.
Again, free markets haven't been tried.
Except, unlike globalization which moves jobs around, robotization just kills the jobs (i.e. no foreign workers to benefit this time around).
' Except that foreign workers are still benefiting.
In my opinion, it will be painful in developing countries most of all since America (and the "West") already kind of went through that so it's just one more nail in the coffin.
It has to happen first.
Free markets haven't even been tried.
Once again we have a clueless story about automation destroying jobs which ignores that the claimed effect doesn't happen. Most of the developing world just doesn't have this problem. It's just another imaginary first world problem.
Instead the problem is the punishing of employers. When you mandate high minimum wages and plush benefits, regulations which drive up the cost of an employee while simultaneously making them hard to fire, and the creation of a variety of liabilities (eg, being exposed to large liabilities due to unsanctioned actions of your employees), you create an environment where it is better for employees to move the work to a better location and/or automate it.
We will see not only jobs moved to other parts of the world, but the automation as well. Call it "race to the bottom", "exporting the pollution", whatever, but it remains that a growing amount of valuable economic activity has been chased out of the developed world and it's not coming back.
90% is insignificant compared to the actual several orders of magnitude reduction in cases observed. I think it's instructive to compare measles vaccination to current climate research.
In the latter case, it's a study of a rather subtle effect by people who have biases large enough to easily swamp the observation and a huge degree of uncertainty that is ignored and downplayed (a notable example is the large error in the temperature forcing due to carbon dioxide concentration). While in the former case, there's no accounting of systemic biases that can explain the huge drop in incident of measles.
Science 101: Could there be any other explanation for that? If so how do we rule it out?
When are you going to present this other explanation? There's been a several orders of magnitude reduction in the incident of measles in areas that widely use a measles vaccine. The observation doesn't have to be made in a very particular format in order to be observed.