I notice you only mention "international corporations". Not every business is or should be such.
Whatever costs there are to hiring people to run their stores isn't punishment, it's needed to build an environment where their business is possible. It builds roads to bring in customers, supplies, and workers. It hires police to protect them from bandits and thieves. It provides a stable currency, without which they could not buy or sell anything.
Who sets the prices for these services? These aren't services that are valuable at any price.
Actual wages collapse because employers can find willing workers at any wage, and make greater profits by not paying workers.
[...]
The burden of wages ends up transferred to the state and only indirectly back to the profitable companies through taxes, but the disconnect between wages and productivity is the opposite of a healthy labor market.
It's interesting how people choose to interpret history in a way that enforces their biases. I don't believe your claim that there was a disconnect between wages and productivity for the simple reason that it wouldn't have made any sense. Do you really believe, for example, that such a business would keep employed people who were for whatever reason well below the norm for productivity?
Second, when wages are too high, a "collapse" (in other words, a modest decline) is what is needed. Not merely trying to keep wages high without providing a reason for employing people at those wages.
Well, I did vote for Romney. I don't think much of him and he probably got the Republican nomination by vote tabulation fraud, but he would have been better than Obama.
So more corporate welfare it is. That's what business-friendly means: government giving favors to a certain group of people. The "business" people... who are they? Oh right, those who funded the politicians' campaign, those who sold their votes for bread and circuses, those who are on the government's teet.
Let's not be stupid here. Look into the process of starting a business and hiring people. I guarantee that no matter where you live, it's going to be difficult. Some places are worse than others. Supposedly, Greece is worse than Germany, for example (both in time it takes and the size of the bribes and fees that need to be paid).
The past few centuries also had some of the bloodiest wars, some of the worse rise of socialism, repeated expansions of government power, untold amounts of inflation and economic malaise, and an overall loss of individual freedom. I think it is quite naive to think that if we repeat the same thing we did before, that only the good parts of history would be repeated, and not the bad.
What "bad parts" of technology development led to massive and permanent unemployment? Nothing. You can talk about how "naive" it is to observe history and apply those lessons to today, but it works.
Given that's an extremely infrequent occurance and Foxconn isn't any worse than Chinese society in general at handling suicide, I'll just have to rest my case.
Those responsibilities have always remained with us. It simply doesn't make sense to push that over uncritically to organizations such as governments or businesses that have substantial conflicts of interest with the people who actually use the services in question.
The other option is to pay your workers enough so that they can pay for their own heatlthcare and pensions.
That already happens. Everyone wants to pay less than they have to. But they don't because they otherwise wouldn't get it.
It will be painful moving from a human based workforce to a robot based workforce. What businesses won't realize is that they're heading for a complete collapse because without employed humans, they have no choice but to get their prices lower to the point of being free (that's where the collapse occurs).
Why hasn't the human-based workforce collapsed? A robot-based workforce still needs stuff done.
In the future, when labor is no longer a "significant" cost
Note, that the reverse has happened. As we've replaced all those workers, the actual cost of labor has gone up. That's because new needs for labor opened up.
Business owners (managers, if you will) will be marginalized much like the working class is today.
Managers aren't owners. And you're basically outlining a scenario where capital becomes extremely valuable. That means owners won't be marginalized.
Society, however, does need to take a long hard look at ways to create opportunities for the offset workers of the future to find new liveable working conditions though.
I'll tell you right now. Those policies will be business-friendly. The problem throughout the developed world (which is incidentally where the the vast majority of complaints about the current state of things come from) is the huge overhead on employing people. Get rid of that, remove the obstacles to creating new businesses, and you've just encouraged businesses to employ you.
Without some thought being put into what happens to those people after that, there will be some serious repercussions and telling ourselves "oh it worked out in the past" or "jobs will appear" as if by magic is foolishness.
I don't think so. It's quite relevant to note that this problem has been worried about for the past few centuries and has naturally resolved itself throughout that period.
I'll observe here that it is the responsibility of the workers to have "dignity" and that "semi-decent life" not Foxconn.
Personally speaking I'd like to see Foxconn execs live for one year; hell, one month under the conditions they force everyone else to endure... but strip away their fortunes first so they can't escape to that magical place of "I'll have my old life of ease to go back to once this hell is done."
How about we don't do that and instead let Foxconn continue to gainfully employ people? They're doing all the stuff you pretend to care about such as providing jobs with more dignity and decency than the workers would get without Foxconn.
Where do you find 1 million gainful jobs to replace all of the inefficient human labor they're replacing?
I don't know, but it happened throughout the Industrial Age. It's worth noting here that probably all of those jobs that are being replaced, didn't exist one or two decades ago.
Look at the US, we can't create enough jobs here to meet demands, and there are only so many STEM jobs available folks.
Bad example. The US (as also in much of the developed world) is punishing businesses for hiring people. There are substantial costs associated with employing people (especially when an additional employee would push the business over a bureaucratic threshold, like 50 full time employees). And it's worth noting that minimum wage prevents a lot of people from being employed simply because their labor is worth less than minimum wage at present.
Look at the US, we can't create enough jobs here to meet demands, and there are only so many STEM jobs available folks.
My approach is to get rid of the "demands". Less demands on job creators, more jobs get created.
Are we prepared for a day when 50% of the world or more has to be on welfare simply because there are no jobs available to humans anymore?
Change labor policy before that happens. I already mentioned minimum wage as an example of a policy that creates unemployment. A second one is usual welfare policy where you get less, if you work more.
Consider an alternate welfare policy to those two. Pay everyone a fixed stipend (if you still want to avoid paying rich people, just set the income cut off at a rather high level) and completely do away with minimum wage. I'd also get rid of most health care mandates (the US style ones are particularly bad), regulatory burdens, and pensions. Someone can choose to get by on that stipend, or they can work, even a little, and get more without issue.
A recession like that in the west is a pure economic problem - a problem in the control system, not the physical reality - and the Chinese government is a lot more able to meddle in it.
I disagree. A recession is not a problem. It is a consequence of a problem, here, that whatever society is doing is simply out of whack with reality to the point that when the illusion falls apart and society attempts to return to a more reasonable approach, it results in considerable economic harm in the form of a recession. Such a problem can be as simple as a mistaken perception of what is valuable.
I suppose you can view the avoiding of recession as a control problem, though the usual means of control (such as altering the money supply) aren't particularly powerful unless one is capable of deeply interfering with peoples' choices. But even with that power, attempting to avoid recession is poor strategy.
The difficulty is that recessions are natural corrections of problems, not the actual problems themselves. And trying to prevent for decades on end, societies from fixing inherent problems just ends up with really large recessions in the end when your control systems are overwhelmed.
For example, a lot of people have noted that businesses have collectively grown very short-sighted in how they operate. This wasn't always the case. I believe it to be a direct result of the various attempts to evade recessions and such. When you remove a vast amount of future risk, you also remove the need to plan against that risk.
It's worth noting that we haven't actually run out of things to do for money. For example, in the US, a bit less than a tenth of the population does manufacture. The rest have found something else to do.
Really, I think you're the one engaging mental coping mechanisms to comfort yourself because somebody on the Internet called you mean things.
You are free to think whatever you want to think. However, I should point out for your future efforts at such perception, that I don't agree. And I think I'm sufficiently self-aware to determine that.
Well, would taking humanities classes help instead of hinder in this consideration? I think a key problem here is that some part of the humanities is about indoctrination not education.
For example, every once in a while someone trots out the allegory of Plato's cave (about a person who realizes that they along with everyone else are looking at shadows on a cave wall). It's just a fantasy about how I have secret knowledge which places me above my fellow humans. It's a comforting coping mechanism for people with inferiority complexes not a genuine insight IMHO.
And if Plato had lived today and had posted that in his blog, it'd be ignored. But because he lived several thousand years ago and was able to use his wealth to build one of the first places of learning, his fantasies get immortalized.
Anyway, I bring this up because someone pulled the Cave on me, claiming that I was delusional because they had this story. They had some degree of exposure to philosophy, but no ability to rationally argue their points. All they had been able to manage was to incorporate a few new stories into their worldview.
This is the sort of problem I see with modern humanities education - too often it doesn't actually improve someone in some way.
Sure, with engineering, you can get a bad teacher or two. But the approach is fundamentally sound and the tools learned are second to none.
Bottom line: Socrates disagreed with most of the other citizens of Athens. He was right. They were wrong.
That's your subjective opinion. Remember if you will, that this was written by Plato after the fact and meant as a bit of propaganda. It might be mostly truthful, but it's still meant to push a certain point of view.
And simultaneously created rent seeking for contractors, lawyers, and regulators. The externalities might have been removed or mitigated, but that came at a remarkable cost.
the hole in the ozone layer
No one has shown that the ozone "hole" wasn't always there. Now we use more expensive and somewhat inferior products for the same job.
the dust bowl
And replaced that with huge agricultural subsidies.
And it can do so again with global warming.
Let's see how much economic activity we can destroy and people impoverish for a hypothetical risk that has only been demonstrated in computer models based on tenuous data.
This isn't going to be monkeying around with a relatively minor part of society, but how we generate energy and move our goods around. I think it's already proving to be destructive in Europe. And countries like China and India already see this as a great way to advance their own industries at the expense of the developed world.
One external cost of energy is the cost of air pollution
There are other things which contribute to air pollution such as barbecue grills, wood fires, agriculture, and even foreign sources. For example, some portion of that "$1600 per person annually" cost comes from Chinese pollution.
The costs are themselves not heavily dependent on the actual pollution. Some portion comes from poor labor and health care laws (hiding in the "health care costs" and "missed work" categories).
You can have a market completely free from government regulation or one that's as efficient as possible, but not both at the same time. Which do you choose?
False dichotomy for the win. You have yet to establish that government regulation in the real world helps reduce externalities.
There are very few countries that have political systems which have survived centuries intact. The US is one of those venerable few. I'll be more impressed by the above claims when the countries which have "changed or adopted" have survived more than a few decades without collapse.
It's worth noting, for example, that a significant portion of European countries are currently troubled. Obviously, nobody wants their day's reality to look like a Greece or a Spain.
But all this talk of listing a bunch of systems and services, and categorizing them as first through third world ignores that one eventually has to come up with something sustainable and affordable, not merely something which meets some ephemeral and possibly unattainable standard.
As far as I can tell this is part of the "fuck you, I got mine" philosophy. Which is fine if you want to live in a third world hell hole, since that is what it will lead too. I for one rather have a nice first world nation.
Interesting how you blame people who are concerned about paying for other peoples' poor decisions rather than the people who embrace the "fuck you, I got mine" philosophy.
My take is that if you want a first world country, you need to deal with tragedy of the commons issues such as people milking publicly subsidized flood insurance. It's deeply perverse to project the faults of those destroying a commons on the people concerned about protecting said commons.
There have been ships capable of navigating the high seas, 5500 years ago!
So? Circumnavigating is a much harder feat. Glancing at discussion on it, apparently it takes one now about two to ten years to do it now, including careful planning to avoid dangerous storm seasons and human-based perils.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever costs there are to hiring people to run their stores isn't punishment, it's needed to build an environment where their business is possible. It builds roads to bring in customers, supplies, and workers. It hires police to protect them from bandits and thieves. It provides a stable currency, without which they could not buy or sell anything.
Who sets the prices for these services? These aren't services that are valuable at any price.
Why would you care if rich people got a monthly stipend wish is a VERY small part of the taxes they pay?
It helps undermine "fairness" arguments against the plan. I'm willing to extend modestly socialist policies in order to get most of what I want.
Actual wages collapse because employers can find willing workers at any wage, and make greater profits by not paying workers.
[...]
The burden of wages ends up transferred to the state and only indirectly back to the profitable companies through taxes, but the disconnect between wages and productivity is the opposite of a healthy labor market.
It's interesting how people choose to interpret history in a way that enforces their biases. I don't believe your claim that there was a disconnect between wages and productivity for the simple reason that it wouldn't have made any sense. Do you really believe, for example, that such a business would keep employed people who were for whatever reason well below the norm for productivity?
Second, when wages are too high, a "collapse" (in other words, a modest decline) is what is needed. Not merely trying to keep wages high without providing a reason for employing people at those wages.
Well, I did vote for Romney. I don't think much of him and he probably got the Republican nomination by vote tabulation fraud, but he would have been better than Obama.
So more corporate welfare it is. That's what business-friendly means: government giving favors to a certain group of people. The "business" people ... who are they? Oh right, those who funded the politicians' campaign, those who sold their votes for bread and circuses, those who are on the government's teet.
Let's not be stupid here. Look into the process of starting a business and hiring people. I guarantee that no matter where you live, it's going to be difficult. Some places are worse than others. Supposedly, Greece is worse than Germany, for example (both in time it takes and the size of the bribes and fees that need to be paid).
The past few centuries also had some of the bloodiest wars, some of the worse rise of socialism, repeated expansions of government power, untold amounts of inflation and economic malaise, and an overall loss of individual freedom. I think it is quite naive to think that if we repeat the same thing we did before, that only the good parts of history would be repeated, and not the bad.
What "bad parts" of technology development led to massive and permanent unemployment? Nothing. You can talk about how "naive" it is to observe history and apply those lessons to today, but it works.
Except when they are committing suicide...
Given that's an extremely infrequent occurance and Foxconn isn't any worse than Chinese society in general at handling suicide, I'll just have to rest my case.
those responsibilities fall to the government
Those responsibilities have always remained with us. It simply doesn't make sense to push that over uncritically to organizations such as governments or businesses that have substantial conflicts of interest with the people who actually use the services in question.
The other option is to pay your workers enough so that they can pay for their own heatlthcare and pensions.
That already happens. Everyone wants to pay less than they have to. But they don't because they otherwise wouldn't get it.
It will be painful moving from a human based workforce to a robot based workforce. What businesses won't realize is that they're heading for a complete collapse because without employed humans, they have no choice but to get their prices lower to the point of being free (that's where the collapse occurs).
Why hasn't the human-based workforce collapsed? A robot-based workforce still needs stuff done.
In the future, when labor is no longer a "significant" cost
Note, that the reverse has happened. As we've replaced all those workers, the actual cost of labor has gone up. That's because new needs for labor opened up.
Business owners (managers, if you will) will be marginalized much like the working class is today.
Managers aren't owners. And you're basically outlining a scenario where capital becomes extremely valuable. That means owners won't be marginalized.
Society, however, does need to take a long hard look at ways to create opportunities for the offset workers of the future to find new liveable working conditions though.
I'll tell you right now. Those policies will be business-friendly. The problem throughout the developed world (which is incidentally where the the vast majority of complaints about the current state of things come from) is the huge overhead on employing people. Get rid of that, remove the obstacles to creating new businesses, and you've just encouraged businesses to employ you.
Without some thought being put into what happens to those people after that, there will be some serious repercussions and telling ourselves "oh it worked out in the past" or "jobs will appear" as if by magic is foolishness.
I don't think so. It's quite relevant to note that this problem has been worried about for the past few centuries and has naturally resolved itself throughout that period.
Personally speaking I'd like to see Foxconn execs live for one year; hell, one month under the conditions they force everyone else to endure... but strip away their fortunes first so they can't escape to that magical place of "I'll have my old life of ease to go back to once this hell is done."
How about we don't do that and instead let Foxconn continue to gainfully employ people? They're doing all the stuff you pretend to care about such as providing jobs with more dignity and decency than the workers would get without Foxconn.
Where do you find 1 million gainful jobs to replace all of the inefficient human labor they're replacing?
I don't know, but it happened throughout the Industrial Age. It's worth noting here that probably all of those jobs that are being replaced, didn't exist one or two decades ago.
Look at the US, we can't create enough jobs here to meet demands, and there are only so many STEM jobs available folks.
Bad example. The US (as also in much of the developed world) is punishing businesses for hiring people. There are substantial costs associated with employing people (especially when an additional employee would push the business over a bureaucratic threshold, like 50 full time employees). And it's worth noting that minimum wage prevents a lot of people from being employed simply because their labor is worth less than minimum wage at present.
Look at the US, we can't create enough jobs here to meet demands, and there are only so many STEM jobs available folks.
My approach is to get rid of the "demands". Less demands on job creators, more jobs get created.
Are we prepared for a day when 50% of the world or more has to be on welfare simply because there are no jobs available to humans anymore?
Change labor policy before that happens. I already mentioned minimum wage as an example of a policy that creates unemployment. A second one is usual welfare policy where you get less, if you work more.
Consider an alternate welfare policy to those two. Pay everyone a fixed stipend (if you still want to avoid paying rich people, just set the income cut off at a rather high level) and completely do away with minimum wage. I'd also get rid of most health care mandates (the US style ones are particularly bad), regulatory burdens, and pensions. Someone can choose to get by on that stipend, or they can work, even a little, and get more without issue.
A recession like that in the west is a pure economic problem - a problem in the control system, not the physical reality - and the Chinese government is a lot more able to meddle in it.
I disagree. A recession is not a problem. It is a consequence of a problem, here, that whatever society is doing is simply out of whack with reality to the point that when the illusion falls apart and society attempts to return to a more reasonable approach, it results in considerable economic harm in the form of a recession. Such a problem can be as simple as a mistaken perception of what is valuable.
I suppose you can view the avoiding of recession as a control problem, though the usual means of control (such as altering the money supply) aren't particularly powerful unless one is capable of deeply interfering with peoples' choices. But even with that power, attempting to avoid recession is poor strategy.
The difficulty is that recessions are natural corrections of problems, not the actual problems themselves. And trying to prevent for decades on end, societies from fixing inherent problems just ends up with really large recessions in the end when your control systems are overwhelmed.
For example, a lot of people have noted that businesses have collectively grown very short-sighted in how they operate. This wasn't always the case. I believe it to be a direct result of the various attempts to evade recessions and such. When you remove a vast amount of future risk, you also remove the need to plan against that risk.
It's worth noting that we haven't actually run out of things to do for money. For example, in the US, a bit less than a tenth of the population does manufacture. The rest have found something else to do.
Sounds like it wasn't a wave of the sort you're thinking of. I don't know what the wavelengths of tsunami are, but they last several minutes as well.
It'd probably be cheaper to cool the volcano off with a vast flood of sea water and then bulldoze it down to sea level.
Really, I think you're the one engaging mental coping mechanisms to comfort yourself because somebody on the Internet called you mean things.
You are free to think whatever you want to think. However, I should point out for your future efforts at such perception, that I don't agree. And I think I'm sufficiently self-aware to determine that.
I'm telling you what I was taught in my humanities class. I was there. We were talking about what you can do in the humanities today.
Remember that the original poster was complaining about groupthink in the humanities. This is an example. Even philosophy can be so subverted.
Well, would taking humanities classes help instead of hinder in this consideration? I think a key problem here is that some part of the humanities is about indoctrination not education.
For example, every once in a while someone trots out the allegory of Plato's cave (about a person who realizes that they along with everyone else are looking at shadows on a cave wall). It's just a fantasy about how I have secret knowledge which places me above my fellow humans. It's a comforting coping mechanism for people with inferiority complexes not a genuine insight IMHO.
And if Plato had lived today and had posted that in his blog, it'd be ignored. But because he lived several thousand years ago and was able to use his wealth to build one of the first places of learning, his fantasies get immortalized.
Anyway, I bring this up because someone pulled the Cave on me, claiming that I was delusional because they had this story. They had some degree of exposure to philosophy, but no ability to rationally argue their points. All they had been able to manage was to incorporate a few new stories into their worldview.
This is the sort of problem I see with modern humanities education - too often it doesn't actually improve someone in some way.
Sure, with engineering, you can get a bad teacher or two. But the approach is fundamentally sound and the tools learned are second to none.
Bottom line: Socrates disagreed with most of the other citizens of Athens. He was right. They were wrong.
That's your subjective opinion. Remember if you will, that this was written by Plato after the fact and meant as a bit of propaganda. It might be mostly truthful, but it's still meant to push a certain point of view.
Government regulation reduced acid rain
And simultaneously created rent seeking for contractors, lawyers, and regulators. The externalities might have been removed or mitigated, but that came at a remarkable cost.
the hole in the ozone layer
No one has shown that the ozone "hole" wasn't always there. Now we use more expensive and somewhat inferior products for the same job.
the dust bowl
And replaced that with huge agricultural subsidies.
And it can do so again with global warming.
Let's see how much economic activity we can destroy and people impoverish for a hypothetical risk that has only been demonstrated in computer models based on tenuous data.
This isn't going to be monkeying around with a relatively minor part of society, but how we generate energy and move our goods around. I think it's already proving to be destructive in Europe. And countries like China and India already see this as a great way to advance their own industries at the expense of the developed world.
One external cost of energy is the cost of air pollution
There are other things which contribute to air pollution such as barbecue grills, wood fires, agriculture, and even foreign sources. For example, some portion of that "$1600 per person annually" cost comes from Chinese pollution.
The costs are themselves not heavily dependent on the actual pollution. Some portion comes from poor labor and health care laws (hiding in the "health care costs" and "missed work" categories).
You can have a market completely free from government regulation or one that's as efficient as possible, but not both at the same time. Which do you choose?
False dichotomy for the win. You have yet to establish that government regulation in the real world helps reduce externalities.
There are very few countries that have political systems which have survived centuries intact. The US is one of those venerable few. I'll be more impressed by the above claims when the countries which have "changed or adopted" have survived more than a few decades without collapse.
It's worth noting, for example, that a significant portion of European countries are currently troubled. Obviously, nobody wants their day's reality to look like a Greece or a Spain.
But all this talk of listing a bunch of systems and services, and categorizing them as first through third world ignores that one eventually has to come up with something sustainable and affordable, not merely something which meets some ephemeral and possibly unattainable standard.
As far as I can tell this is part of the "fuck you, I got mine" philosophy. Which is fine if you want to live in a third world hell hole, since that is what it will lead too. I for one rather have a nice first world nation.
Interesting how you blame people who are concerned about paying for other peoples' poor decisions rather than the people who embrace the "fuck you, I got mine" philosophy.
My take is that if you want a first world country, you need to deal with tragedy of the commons issues such as people milking publicly subsidized flood insurance. It's deeply perverse to project the faults of those destroying a commons on the people concerned about protecting said commons.
There have been ships capable of navigating the high seas, 5500 years ago!
So? Circumnavigating is a much harder feat. Glancing at discussion on it, apparently it takes one now about two to ten years to do it now, including careful planning to avoid dangerous storm seasons and human-based perils.
Someone already mentioned number of patents, jokingly, though that is a measure. Or revenue or profit from new products that didn't exist X years ago.
A regulation of a crucial part is a regulation of the whole.