In the real world, it's been noted that employment above a certain threshold is unstable. In the United States, Full Employment is usually defined as 95%, meaning our current 4.9% unemployment is higher than full employment; some people speculate we'd be okay as low as 4%, and the 4.9% thing is incorrect anyway (UE4 is 5.6%, which includes people who would work but have given up because they think there aren't jobs for them; UE5 and UE6 include people who would like to work, but can't because their situation precludes employment on its own).
To be fair, economists speculate low unemployment causes inflation. That is to say: at low unemployment rates, a business's strategic advantage for hiring an employee exceeds the cost of market wages, and so businesses pay more. If you cause high employment by providing a ton of extra spendable income, then businesses can raise prices, capture that income, and pay it as higher wages. The benefit vanishes, debts shrink, and savings go away. Such inflation also has all of the other destabilizing effects of inflation; and with a lot of people's savings held in 401(k) markets (which inflate right along with inflation) and increased income allowing further increased spending, you can easily get a hyperinflation effect, followed by a money shortage, followed by extreme unemployment.
If the effect is particularly large, your economy collapses outright. If it's not so large, you get a minor recession, like in 2008.
As for real-world examples of negative unemployment, they don't exist because nobody has ever managed to increase the income efficiency of an economy by 15% before (we take 30% in taxes in the United States; cutting out 50% of that would be a 15% increase in take-home wages, and the way I structured it mostly puts that back down to the lower and middle-classes, so consumer spending power gets a 20%-25% boost). That is to say: Nobody's taken an economy where consumer demand requires 95% of the labor force to be employed and boosted it such that you now need 95% * 1.15 = 109% (or 1.18% for a 25% boost).
Let's put some numbers to this, and you tell me if this sounds like something that's ever happened anywhere in history.
At minimum wage, a single-adult household moves from $12,754 to $19,996 (+57% income); a two-adult married household moves from $14,166 to $27,957 (+97%).
The median household as a single-adult household moves from $42,621 to $49,085 (+15%); the median as a two-adult married household moves to $57,697 (+35%).
The median married couple household moves from $66,560 to $77,128 (+16%).
Low-income HUD households range from an extra 30% of spendable income to an increase of 111%. Single-adult poverty households (bottom 20%) range from a 38% increase to a 111% increase (the richest of the bottom 5%); married poverty households range from a 75% increase to a 219% increase (tripling their income, yes).
At the high end, a top-10% household with $158,500 of taxable income moves from a take-home income of $114,970 to $118,282 (+2.9%). The top-1% earners move from $231,721 to $230,126 (-0.79%). Someone at the top 0.1% moves from $1,065,061 to $1,056,557 (-0.80%). Someone with a $10,000,000 gross income moves from $6,078,261 to $6,036,557 (-0.69%).
At the same time, business payroll taxes reduce (businesses pay LESS to employ you, while you take home MORE), business income taxes reduce (4.5% marginal or about 11% proportional reduction), and the top-tier taxes don't exceed 40% (they're 39.6% now, and can actually be kept that way relatively easily--there's some $1,060 billion moving around here, and eliminating any and all tax increases on absolutely anyone would only involve shifting about $16-$24 billion around).
What you're looking at is a bit of financial reorganization with impact of similar magnitude to showing up in caveman days and giving them modern agriculture with GMOs and oil refineries and everything. The way we're doing things is so shitty compared to what we're
I have ADD and had childhood ADHD. They put me on methylphenidate as a kid; I went with Modafinil recently. My psychiatrist didn't have a problem with this because modafinil is safe (my backup would be Vyvanse) to such a ridiculous degree that the DEA appears to not care if you get several years's worth illegally (I still got a Rx).
Amphetamines and methylphenidate (cocaine-like) will get you kind of high. Even phenylpiracetam at alzheimers doses (100mg) will make you feel like a freaking super hero. You feel great; you feel excited; you feel like you could climb a mountain. You want to do something. Clean your house, study a new language, run a mile--running when on phenotropil feels really fucking great, by the way, even after the drug has worn off and only like 6mg is still in your blood. This is why people kill themselves on meth (amphetamines at higher doses cause muscular breakdown--your body rots out from around you).
I'm not saying adderall isn't a great drug for ADHD, and of course Vyvanse is an excellent option because it's slow to metabolize and thus more-difficult to overdose on (get high, poison yourself); I'm just saying these are dangerous drugs, and they get you *way* motivated in safe, clinical doses.
Modafinil doesn't do that.
If I sit down to work on something, I can't stop thinking about other crap. I go do that other crap because I'm useless: trying to study on Duolingo involves staring at Duolingo while thinking about checking Fark. I struggle through. It sucks.
If I sit down to work on something on a Modafinil dose, my attention stays where I put it. I can break away--I'm not hyperfocusing--and I make continuous decisions on if I should attend a distraction or set it aside for later. The drug lets me actually work, study, and generally get things done.
Modafinil doesn't make me particularly want to work. I have to decide to do something. I have to decide to clean my house, or to study, or to attend to my job function. It's annoying, it's effort, and it's just plain dull. I can do it, but I'm not thrilled about it. For some people--and at higher doses--Modafinil makes them hate anything inefficient and want to get on with work and get their shit done; at lower doses, and at the dose I'm currently experimenting with (because my psychiatrist said to experiment with the dosing, since it won't fuck you up like Adderall if you take too much), it's an enabler instead of a motivator.
For ADD and ADHD, drug therapy works great; and cognitive behavioral therapy improves on that. CBT helps on and off the drug, and the drug often enables you to establish a CBT behavior which you wouldn't otherwise stick with. When you're not on the drug, you perform worse than when on the drug; if you've had CBT, that baseline "worse" performance is improved, so it's not as bad.
CBT includes executive function training, which encompasses things like scheduling.
Scheduling is a developed, habitual behavior in which you set aside time to attend to particular tasks. Rather than filling your time continuously, you plan out what to do with your time. You attend to certain types of work in some half-hour or hour-long block, other types of work in some other block. You break your schedule when needed, and adhere when the task at hand is not de-prioritized by other things. For the sake of mental and social health, you can reschedule things so you can hang out with your friends, so long as you then attend to those things at the new time; flexibility in scheduling comes with the habit of developing and adhering to a schedule, as changing a schedule is just creating a new schedule--something you learn to do over time.
I would suggest that this phenomena of removing access to smart phones reflects the impact of executive functions such as focus, response-inhibition, self-activation, prioritization, time management, planning, and organization. If you plan, prioritize, and retain focus on a task, then you won't constantly poke a few thing
I designed a Universal Social Security plan which reduces the tax burden on Americans by over $1 TRILLION per year. This plan completely remediates the welfare system; establishes a stable minimum income, eliminating many risks in providing goods and services to lower-income markets (currently, their income is unstable and can go away quickly, incurring massive costs for landlords especially); and slows and thus spreads the reduction of jobs by technical progress (including globalization and automation), thus reducing the short-term economic threat of sudden rapid progress (the long-term impact is always an immense increase in standard-of-living; a sudden industrial revolution creates an economic train wreck, while a longer period of growth creates immediate prosperity).
Money bound up in big bank accounts has almost no impact on the economy. Pulling it out and spending it in bulk, suddenly, causes a temporary stimulus, and largely creates inflation. This is because more money is put into play, but not more productivity; after you stop infusing huge piles of cash into the economy, there's no support for any new jobs created, except for what technical progress has occurred during the inflationary period of excess money creation (money idled and not spent is essentially removed; pouring it into the economy is essentially money creation, and differs from printing new money in that it doesn't then increase the fractional reserve basis and lead to more money creation by loaning).
By contrast, a Universal Social Security (or other effective form of Universal Basic Income) increases the amount of take-home pay relative to cost dollars. That is to say: If an employer pays $10,000 to have an employee, then that employee's work is paid for by consumers of the product the employee makes. If the employee makes 10,000 units of said product per year, then $1 of that product's per-unit price represents the employee's pay. Out of this, the employee may take home only $6,000. UBIs such as the USS change the situation such that the employee takes home, for example, $8,000, while the employer still pays only $10,000.
Obviously, such a situation means products don't face a cost increase (you still need $1 of revenue per unit to pay that guy's salary and benefits), yet consumers have more money to spend.
Look back and think about the engineering involved there. Some changes to tax policy reduce the welfare burden by over $1 trillion per year, increasing the amount of take-home pay for all working Americans, lifting low-income households out of poverty, and ensuring even non-working Americans have income sufficient for a hard-bounded minimum (but low) standard of living. Businesses don't pay any additional costs, and particularly don't pay more costs as consequence of hiring an employee; and the employee takes home more dollars per dollar paid by the employer to employ them. That changes the stable set points of the system, increasing the consumer's spending power relative to the cost of production, thus increasing buying power.
What's the engineering involved in grabbing a fistful of cash out of Apple? Hint: Apple's entire profits ($10 billion per year) would amount to $58.48/year more in every single American's paycheck; their entire cash savings is about $1,000 per working American (ONE time, not repeating). Total actual corporate profits in the United States are roughly 10% of all income--that's not small and not insignificant (it's 10%), and it's only unimportant because the economy is so much bigger than all that.
Because a market with negative unemployment can't sustain itself, and rapidly destabilizes and then collapses. It's the same question as "why do we vaccinate against a fatal disease if the vaccine makes you ill for a day or two?"
The whole point of any sort of universal basic income is to make most people less poor. Yet here, you state your fix makes all people poorer.
Make all people poorer AFTER IMPLEMENTING A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME. That means richer than X, less-rich than X+n. You've slipped in a sneaky logical proposition to suggest poorer than X (the starting condition), which is a deceptive argument (lying).
Besides that, the whole point of a universal basic income is stability. A basic income prevents people from entering poverty, and creates a firm poverty floor. In the United States, not everyone has access to housing, food, and clean water; our welfare system doesn't provide that at all. HUD provides housing assistance to 1 in every 4 qualified households; the other 75% go onto a waiting list AND NEVER RECEIVE A BENEFIT. Unemployment insurance pays a benefit for only 6 months.
A basic income can remediate all of this. My Universal Social Security plan immediately places all HUD-qualified households above the poverty line--and bumps everyone from the lowest 5% of incomes up (that's about $7k/year) above the single-person household poverty line. It creates a minimum stable income class, whereas currently lower income classes are *unstable*--meaning low-income rental units today have to charge a high mark-up to cover risk of lost income (i.e. evictions, empty units), while low-income rental units under an effective form of basic income don't face that particular risk and so can charge a rent affordable by non-working individuals and *still* turn a reliable profit. Food, personal care, and other needs are within financial reach as well. It's a very low standard of living, and it's one we simply can't guarantee in our current system.
This approach *also* prevents sharp unemployment spikes from technical progress, such as mass automation. Rather than raise wages for the classes of workers whose jobs are easy to reduce, you provide them a supplemental income. That means they have more buying power, and they don't cost the employer any additional money. There is, thus, no added pressure to replace them as a cost-reduction measure, and so strategic integration (i.e. employing a more-expensive human because you think the machines will be even-less-expensive in a few years) carries a lower risk (cost) and a relatively-higher benefit (the gap between your wage and the cost of the machine is smaller, so the business can swallow that if it expects a big ROI for later implementation). Different businesses will have different risk appetites and tolerances, and so this situation causes a more-gradual replacement of labor, allowing the market to adjust and provide replacement jobs before unemployment increases too much.
The side-effect of all this is it's $1 trillion cheaper: it reduces effective tax burden on Americans by 40% ($1 trillion), and moves the remainder of replaced service costs directly into low-income consumer hands rather than into bureaucratic benefits systems. That tends to adjust from low-efficiency (high-margin) business to high-efficiency (low-margin) business, creating a hell of a lot of jobs. On-balance, it's more jobs than people; and an increase in the labor force would just push spending power up, leaving us with even more jobs and still not enough people.
That effect is reigned in by cutting back on working hours. That makes everyone poorer by cutting back production (fiat currency is backed by productive output rather than something like gold). With 118%-123% employment, a cut of 20% would bring us to 5.6%-1.6% unemployment (anything less than 4% unemployment is dangerously low), with similar productivity to current. Tha
The long and short of it is, somewhere behind the opaque shroud, Apple goes from selling the last-model iPhone at a 10% profit to selling it at a 10% loss. What's probably actually happening is people just aren't interested in spending on a new phone now, and will take a low-cost phone at a bargain. Apple can't cut the current-model back to that cost, and can't even get the old-model down that low, and so is trying to hit prices that the consumer will pay by cutting costs back.
In other words: the "cutting into profits" is more like "losing business, and facing extinction." Apple isn't going to die out today; they know that if they can't keep their phones in the consumer market, they're going to die out in a decade, maybe. Strategic executives actually look way ahead and try to minimize the likelihood of such an outcome.
You're talking about a 20% mark-up, and you've managed to ignore that Apple will take a 10% mark-up but the consumer won't pay $600 for a $550 phone. If Apple wants to sell a phone like that in a market of $350 full-featured phones, it needs its Chinese manufacturers to deliver a $350 phone that it can *maybe* mark up to $400 as a premium option.
At the base, this happens when competitors are offering top-of-the-line technology at the break-out price point. 10% more for 10% more feature, until you're suddenly paying 50% more for 10% more feature; you stop just at that point, and now your next competitor can only offer a better product at 1.5 times the price. Yours might cost $400, but their barely-any-better gadget now costs $600. Even if most of your market is in mid-tier $250-$300 phones, your major competitor can't distinguish themselves as a better product without a distinguished price point: to stand apart in features, you must stand apart in price.
This is a common strategy for other reasons. You release a low, mid-tier, and high-end flagship product; then the customer sees that the mid-tier product is much cheaper than the top-tier product but almost as good, and buys the mid-tier product due to its excellent value. Without the top-tier product, they make a more price-conscious decision, determining their need rather than bare purchasing efficiency. What I've described is an extension: you ensure that the high-end flagship product of distinction is someone else's, and that it's *very* expensive by way of making the most-expensive *reasonable* product on the market yourself. Maybe nobody buys your Galaxy S7; but they're sure as hell not going to spend twice as much on a fucking iPhone.
Apple has the extra disadvantage of not selling a mid-tier product; they sell the iPhone 5 currently, which broadcasts loudly that it's an out-of-date product because it was the premier product four years ago. If it was called the iPhone 7n (new budget offering), people would perceive it as a modern, budget-friendly phone without all the bells and whistles.
Because creating further artificial labor scarcity via work week restrictions will fix a labor scarcity problem.
Labor restrictions restrict productivity, raising prices and reducing what people buy, thus reducing employment. In short: you have less to barter with, therefor there is less you can barter for, therefor somebody who produces something will find nobody can pay them for the product, and so he becomes unemployed.
Imagine you spend 10% of your income on food, 4% on clothing, 2% on personal care, 30% on housing, 18% on transportation, and 36% on entertainment and other non-essential spending. Call it by dollars: $100, $40, $20, $300, $180, $360. You have a total of $1,000 to spend.
Now imagine everything just got 20% more expensive because everyone working 5 days making $1,000 is now working 4 days making $1,000 and, for every 5 such people, we hire another worker making $1,000 to fill in the gap (i.e. that last day costs an extra $200 per person now). I suppose you got this far and then determined there's that extra worker now, right? Let's look at it further.
So now nobody's getting paid more; they're working less, and MORE PEOPLE ARE BEING PAID to make the products you buy. Your expenses are $120, $48, $24, $360, $216, and $432. That's $1,200--or $200 more than you were able to spend before, and even more than you're able to spend now.
Well let's tie it all together. Food, clothing, personal care, housing, transportation... that's $768 right there. You have about $232 to spend on the other stuff you were buying--about 64% as much. 36% of the production related to those jobs is now unsustainable (there's no revenue to pay all those wages), and so those jobs vanish.
That's the point. You create a situation where people have more money to spend than there are workers to supply, and then you boost the labor expense of anything they want to buy by restricting labor hours. Suddenly everything becomes more expensive, but nobody has any more money; the capacity to buy products beyond what our labor force can supply goes away, because we're suddenly all poorer.
Interesting (to me): One of the side-effects of my Universal Social Security proposal is excess demand--a labor shortage. The fix is re-defining full-time working hours as 26-32 hours per week, meaning everyone gets dropped to 4-day work weeks. This happens because it's a trillion dollars cheaper than current strategy.
In theory, with or without salary adjustment, dropping everyone's work time by 20% decreases their share of labor pay. That is to say: to make 1,000 things takes 4 people, or it takes 5 people each working 80% as much. As long as your entire economy changes at this ratio and wages don't change relative to each other (they can increase, decrease, or stay the same, but all by the same percentage), whatever salary you end up with is suddenly only capable of buying 80% as much.
In practice, I'm pretty sure we have a lot of part-time workers (I've looked this up before) and a lot of slack time. On one hand, part-time workers would experience no change, so neither their income nor the influence they have on price would change: the stuff they make wouldn't become any more expensive. On the other, many people would work the same amount and spend their work slack-time as leisure-in-earnest instead of non-productive office hours: instead of being restricted by the facade of office hours, you'd be outside work enjoying the time you're spending doing nothing useful.
That's actually a bigger problem. It means cutting hours without a salary cut raises the price of certain goods for part-time workers, but not for office workers; while cutting hours with a salary cut raises the price of certain goods for full-time workers, but not part-timers. The first case is regressive onto the poorer, and benefits the middle-classes; the second is harder on the middle-classes, and doesn't directly-benefit the poor. The second case is arguably better, since cutting working time in this way definitely cuts buying power in total, so someone has to get poorer, and you've restricted how much that happens and to who; but it has obvious undesirable issues.
On the other hand, the end result would probably be about break-even for the middle classes in total (when you include the Universal Social Security benefit), plus a 3-day weekend every week, so... eh?
Doing more with less is how technology works; and technology comes with discovery, not mandate.
Natural gas burned in power plants and transmitted as electricity produces much more light out of LED lamps than natural gas piped to gas lamps. They couldn't just up and switch to electricity and LED lamps 50 years before Edison and Westinghouse, even if the Government told them they had a week to figure out how to produce more ten times light with half as much gas.
(The chief effect of all this is less labor: you use 5% as much gas to run lights, that means 5% as many human labor-hours invested in running lights, and that proportion of society--not those particular people, but the constant inflow of people becoming working-age adults to replace the retiring seniors, at least at least--can now become doctors and engineers, since we don't need them mining for gas. Again: you can't just dictate there shall be more doctors and fewer farmers, and the halved farm workforce shall work to produce twice the food output at half the price; it won't work.)
People today are more wealthy than people 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. The median family spends less on food, Cars have more features, yet only reflect a purchase price of 56% of the purchaser's income in the median case. We've gone from extremely-expensive computers with 4MB EDO RAM and 33MHz CPUs to having high-speed, multi-gigabyte RAM, 64GB storage devices in our pockets as a simple fact of life. Communication is ubiquitous with cell phones and high-speed Internet.
Clothing is cheaper; people today have about 50% increased access to more and better healthcare than people of the 90s; and we spend nearly half our money on luxuries.
Automation won't just put us into caves and cages to be fed a nutritious gruel by robotic keepers; it will make the Tesla Model S the household car of the lower-middle class, while the poors make do with that currently-$45,000 Model 3. It will place more electronic gadgets into everyone's hands. It will dramatically increase the access to healthcare, while lowering the cost of complex tests and treatments. $800 ceramic-on-ceramic fillings--the best remediation you can get for dental caries--will become the standard, even among the poor, because they cost $20.
The poor will not simply be shoveled off into the corner. They'll work, hard, and live beneath the rest of us, as they do today. They'll work and they'll live as well-off middle-class families live today. Their hard-earned money will buy them the sorts of $2,000 appliances I purchase for myself, because that $1,897 double-oven stove only costs $350 in the world of the future (well, there's inflation, but the poors have that much more money, too, so whatever).
Luxury. Technical progress brings luxury down to the people. There was a time rags were made of old clothes because cloth cost more than 90% of the population could afford; people wore one or two sets of simple clothing--nothing fancy and expensive, because frills and pleats increased fabric use--and many were haphazardly dressed in the poor's last-season fashion, tacky and out-of-style, handed down to the rabble because it simply won't do in noble social circles. Now we all have 10 days's worth of fancy clothing, coats, hats, a million pairs of shoes... things that would have cost us 15 years's salary--and, the fancy stuff with all the pockets and pleats we use today, 40 or 60 years's salary--back then.
Remember when a cell phone cost $4,000 in 1983? In 2015 that's over $9,000; two hours per week of talk would cost you $550/month. Not everyone can afford that; yet poor people buy a $60 feature phone or spend $170 on a used iPhone, and $60/month for unlimited talk and text plus 3GB data. I use under 500MB of data, so I spend $33/month and just get Ting.
How many rich people luxuries do you use now? How much of the stuff you're using is a much-more-advanced version of something that was available to people who could spend 3 times the median income on it 25 years ago? Your cell phone is comparable to a multi-million-dollar supercomputer in 1985. Microwaves were an invention of the air force, because a million-dollar radar emitter in a fighter jet pumps out a lot of microwaves, and they put a door in the cockpit where you can slide in a tray of food and then have yourself a hot meal; your microwave probably cost $70.
Do you really think people will just roll over and eat the slop the robots pour down their throats? We'll do what we've always done: Get richer. We'll take all the luxuries of the rich and then complain they've found new toys we can't afford.
improving an economy's efficiency lowers the unemployment rate rather than saying that lowering the unemployment rate improves an economy's efficiency because otherwise you are talking nonsense.
They're both sort-of true. Higher employment means higher production-per-capita, thus more buying power per-capita, thus more wealth; although an extremely-low-unemployment economy falters because of labor shortage, thus can't grow.
Efficiency in an economy is complicated.
One of the primary drivers of efficiency is technical progress. Technical progress simply means new technology allows us to produce more goods in the same labor. Take the same population, employ fewer farmers, employ more engineers, employ more doctors, and still produce the same amount of food because the farmers plus engineers are able to output more food per total labor hour; these doctors used to be farmers, but we don't need them anymore, so now we have healthcare. When you get down to money, you realize all the services being bought are paid for by consumers (that's where revenue comes from, and we pay wages out of revenue), and so necessarily things must get cheaper as a percentage of the per-capita income (that doesn't say the distribution is equitable; just that the cost of product X is a smaller fraction of *all* money being spent).
I like to talk about the cost of wage dollars. An employer pays an employee's wage, plus payroll taxes, plus benefits, plus unemployment insurance premiums; and the employee pays income taxes and such things as OASDI and Medicare (not to mention sales taxes, VAT, etc.). An employer has to spend some number of dollars for an employee to take home some number of dollars--for example, $1000 minus 6.2% OASDI is $938; at a 25% tax rate, the employee takes home $703.50. An employee's time is divided among products, and the employer's cost is divided into products; the employee must buy those products (and produce the revenue source to pay wages of employees) out of his wages.
Obviously, more take-home pay per employer cost means more maximum buying power. A business may or may not lower the price of goods to a minimum. Tere are economic pressures which cause this to occur to varying degrees, which is why food has a slimmer margin than diamonds and cars have a slimmer margin than food (lots of bulk negotiation up the production chain for cars; the manufacturer might make 10%, but the coal and steel mines negotiate low-margin contracts for multi-billion-dollar profits). Still, a 10% or 3% or 40% margin is a proportion on top of cost; and costs have always trended toward stability--lowering--when technology improves, else we would never advance as a society because we'd never have the consumer buying power to buy anything we hadn't bought before.
That's efficient. It's why progressive taxes are efficient, why some forms of universal basic income are efficient, and why accomplishing economic goals such as state welfare to greater effect with lower cost is efficient: consumers end up with more spending money per dollar paid as production cost by employers, and thus can buy more.
That effect tends to not simply lower unemployment, but stabilize the economy: when there are problems, your Jenga tower doesn't just collapse; it wobbles a little, and a piece falls off the top.
Your argument is that the economy is a zero-sum game, for business A to be successful it must reduce the success of business B. This is false
Technical progress would suggest that an economy is not a zero-sum game because the economy grows.
That does not mean that the economy is infinite at a given time. The economy, as it is now, has limited consumer buying power. In the future, technical progress will increase the per-capita buying power, and population growth will increase the number of consumers, thus causing an exponential (f(t) = g(t)*p(t))) growth in the economy. For any point in time (t), there is a limited amo
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I put my phone number on goods I'm having shipped to America illegally so customs can call me for an explanation if they so desire. Yes, I'm trafficking things across the border that I'm not allowed to traffick across the border; and yes, customs inspects the package and decides it's fine.
I still don't want them digging through my Facebook and shit. My Facebook is online and exposes a ton of shit to everyone; there is no expectation of privacy, and they're welcome to go looking, and I still don't want to hand over a compendium of all the leads they should use to investigate me at their leisure. It's just a hassle to keep myself that well-documented.
Perhaps true; and that doesn't debase my argument. If NewMobile employed 1,000 people and Verizon, being more-efficient, lost fewer in equivalent operations, then the remaining balance would be taken from other businesses. Those businesses aren't necessarily mobile; maybe you spend more on phones, and you can't spend as much on fancy shoes.
The point is jobs are paid for from revenue, and so consumer spending supplies jobs. You get more jobs with population growth (more people) and improvements in an economy's efficiency (lower unemployment rates); businesses grow employment by taking a share of this or by reducing another business's employment.
As an aside, if NewMobile is truly less-efficient, its products must cost more. That doesn't mean they don't employ more people per dollar of revenue; it means they must employ fewer people per product or service provided. To employ more people per dollar of revenue, they would *pay lower wages*; to fully-describe this situation, I'd have to write a lengthy Ph.D. thesis, and so what I wrote is an appropriate approximation and grossly-correct.
Those solutions are not optimal. Full automation at a rapid pace creates a distribution problem: it can only produce and distribute goods with a command economy, which is ineffective at managing the large amounts of data required to maximize growth. Technical progress would slow.
Reducing population size isn't efficient; it's reductive. It's like saying that you could make your car more efficient by driving it less: you would simply drive less, and still get 17mpg. This would leave you less-wealthy (you don't have the ability to go everywhere all the time anymore, because you're driving less).
You seem to have responded to a technical analysis of economics with a well-poisoning argument. Your fantasy about being fair and equitable hurts people, and you don't like to acknowledge that.
In economies, you expand population until you end up with the haves and the have-nots. 40% of the American workforce turns over every year, and there are job postings everywhere; the 5% unemployed have 6 months of unemployment insurance before they run out, and our unemployment system thus relies on some of that 40% turn-over ending up unemployed as someone else snaps up their job and escapes the jaws of economic death.
A nuclear accident wobbles your economy for sure. Some source of production is gone, thus a chunk of wealth vanishes. A strong economy can recover from this in short years, rather than decades; some of the people whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed will get back on their feet, others will take the place of some other poor sod who got their place in society instead. Who are you to judge whether the terminally-poor should remain that way or have his chance? Either decision throws somebody into the gutter to fight with the rats.
The base problem here (unemployment is a fact of economics) is why we need a universal social security; and it also blunts the concern about ruined lives and lost jobs, because the void fills back in. You can claim it's unfair--it's no fun to be working, then not working, then remain not working because someone else got your job--but what is fairness? There are 3 people and 2 jobs, and this situation is entirely unresolvable by any means; is it fair that one person must be condemned to eternal poverty, or fair that he get his chance now and then at the expense of someone else?
Nuclear power provides strong value to society in terms of dense power production, low environmental impact, and a reduction of lives lost. Everyone--rich and poor--enjoys this benefit; and a nuclear powerplant exports energy in a wide geographical area, bringing purchasing power to the town, raising the average income class, lowering crime, and generally making everyone's lives better. It's like living in Cupertino with Apple bringing $2 billion in employee salaries to that tiny little scrap of a town. If you live in such wealth while others live in poverty, is it fair to make you accept the risk that, one day, your life might get uprooted, and one of those others might jump into your place before you can get back on your feet? Does privilege mean you can demand your place be held and rebuilt for you?
No, wrong. It's nuclear waste disposal. It has a precise set of instructions and materials. Do not substitute anything for anything else without involving a nuclear waste disposal engineer. Don't even consider a different type of *steel* for the barrels--steel made from ore sourced from a different mine can have a much different chemical composition, including different levels of vanadium or copper or whatnot, so only used the approved material from the approved manufacturer operating on approved quality controls.
No, it's because reactors which recycle used fuel efficiently cost more to run. We can produce new fuel from freshly-mined uranium cheaper than we can breed and refine uranium and plutonium fuel rods. We don't even run plutonium fuel rods in reactors, usually, so there's all kinds of risk in using plutonium fuel and all kinds of costs in getting to a point where we can even attempt it.
They didn't even hype it as *the* costliest; they put it in with three-mile island. 1979, $1 billion over 12 years, three-mile island. In 1979, that'd be inflation to $3.26 billion 2014; in 1991, that'd inflate to $1.74 billion 2014. You're looking at an average in the range of $2.5 billion; counting from straight 1985, it's still $2.2 billion.
In other words: this disaster has cost less than three-mile island. Amortized over the decade it'll cost, it's actually not so bad; there are 171 million taxpaying households in the U.S., and this is less than $2/year from each. Large populations.
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In the real world, it's been noted that employment above a certain threshold is unstable. In the United States, Full Employment is usually defined as 95%, meaning our current 4.9% unemployment is higher than full employment; some people speculate we'd be okay as low as 4%, and the 4.9% thing is incorrect anyway (UE4 is 5.6%, which includes people who would work but have given up because they think there aren't jobs for them; UE5 and UE6 include people who would like to work, but can't because their situation precludes employment on its own).
To be fair, economists speculate low unemployment causes inflation. That is to say: at low unemployment rates, a business's strategic advantage for hiring an employee exceeds the cost of market wages, and so businesses pay more. If you cause high employment by providing a ton of extra spendable income, then businesses can raise prices, capture that income, and pay it as higher wages. The benefit vanishes, debts shrink, and savings go away. Such inflation also has all of the other destabilizing effects of inflation; and with a lot of people's savings held in 401(k) markets (which inflate right along with inflation) and increased income allowing further increased spending, you can easily get a hyperinflation effect, followed by a money shortage, followed by extreme unemployment.
If the effect is particularly large, your economy collapses outright. If it's not so large, you get a minor recession, like in 2008.
As for real-world examples of negative unemployment, they don't exist because nobody has ever managed to increase the income efficiency of an economy by 15% before (we take 30% in taxes in the United States; cutting out 50% of that would be a 15% increase in take-home wages, and the way I structured it mostly puts that back down to the lower and middle-classes, so consumer spending power gets a 20%-25% boost). That is to say: Nobody's taken an economy where consumer demand requires 95% of the labor force to be employed and boosted it such that you now need 95% * 1.15 = 109% (or 1.18% for a 25% boost).
Let's put some numbers to this, and you tell me if this sounds like something that's ever happened anywhere in history.
At minimum wage, a single-adult household moves from $12,754 to $19,996 (+57% income); a two-adult married household moves from $14,166 to $27,957 (+97%).
The median household as a single-adult household moves from $42,621 to $49,085 (+15%); the median as a two-adult married household moves to $57,697 (+35%).
The median married couple household moves from $66,560 to $77,128 (+16%).
Low-income HUD households range from an extra 30% of spendable income to an increase of 111%. Single-adult poverty households (bottom 20%) range from a 38% increase to a 111% increase (the richest of the bottom 5%); married poverty households range from a 75% increase to a 219% increase (tripling their income, yes).
At the high end, a top-10% household with $158,500 of taxable income moves from a take-home income of $114,970 to $118,282 (+2.9%). The top-1% earners move from $231,721 to $230,126 (-0.79%). Someone at the top 0.1% moves from $1,065,061 to $1,056,557 (-0.80%). Someone with a $10,000,000 gross income moves from $6,078,261 to $6,036,557 (-0.69%).
At the same time, business payroll taxes reduce (businesses pay LESS to employ you, while you take home MORE), business income taxes reduce (4.5% marginal or about 11% proportional reduction), and the top-tier taxes don't exceed 40% (they're 39.6% now, and can actually be kept that way relatively easily--there's some $1,060 billion moving around here, and eliminating any and all tax increases on absolutely anyone would only involve shifting about $16-$24 billion around).
What you're looking at is a bit of financial reorganization with impact of similar magnitude to showing up in caveman days and giving them modern agriculture with GMOs and oil refineries and everything. The way we're doing things is so shitty compared to what we're
I have ADD and had childhood ADHD. They put me on methylphenidate as a kid; I went with Modafinil recently. My psychiatrist didn't have a problem with this because modafinil is safe (my backup would be Vyvanse) to such a ridiculous degree that the DEA appears to not care if you get several years's worth illegally (I still got a Rx).
Amphetamines and methylphenidate (cocaine-like) will get you kind of high. Even phenylpiracetam at alzheimers doses (100mg) will make you feel like a freaking super hero. You feel great; you feel excited; you feel like you could climb a mountain. You want to do something. Clean your house, study a new language, run a mile--running when on phenotropil feels really fucking great, by the way, even after the drug has worn off and only like 6mg is still in your blood. This is why people kill themselves on meth (amphetamines at higher doses cause muscular breakdown--your body rots out from around you).
I'm not saying adderall isn't a great drug for ADHD, and of course Vyvanse is an excellent option because it's slow to metabolize and thus more-difficult to overdose on (get high, poison yourself); I'm just saying these are dangerous drugs, and they get you *way* motivated in safe, clinical doses.
Modafinil doesn't do that.
If I sit down to work on something, I can't stop thinking about other crap. I go do that other crap because I'm useless: trying to study on Duolingo involves staring at Duolingo while thinking about checking Fark. I struggle through. It sucks.
If I sit down to work on something on a Modafinil dose, my attention stays where I put it. I can break away--I'm not hyperfocusing--and I make continuous decisions on if I should attend a distraction or set it aside for later. The drug lets me actually work, study, and generally get things done.
Modafinil doesn't make me particularly want to work. I have to decide to do something. I have to decide to clean my house, or to study, or to attend to my job function. It's annoying, it's effort, and it's just plain dull. I can do it, but I'm not thrilled about it. For some people--and at higher doses--Modafinil makes them hate anything inefficient and want to get on with work and get their shit done; at lower doses, and at the dose I'm currently experimenting with (because my psychiatrist said to experiment with the dosing, since it won't fuck you up like Adderall if you take too much), it's an enabler instead of a motivator.
For ADD and ADHD, drug therapy works great; and cognitive behavioral therapy improves on that. CBT helps on and off the drug, and the drug often enables you to establish a CBT behavior which you wouldn't otherwise stick with. When you're not on the drug, you perform worse than when on the drug; if you've had CBT, that baseline "worse" performance is improved, so it's not as bad.
CBT includes executive function training, which encompasses things like scheduling.
Scheduling is a developed, habitual behavior in which you set aside time to attend to particular tasks. Rather than filling your time continuously, you plan out what to do with your time. You attend to certain types of work in some half-hour or hour-long block, other types of work in some other block. You break your schedule when needed, and adhere when the task at hand is not de-prioritized by other things. For the sake of mental and social health, you can reschedule things so you can hang out with your friends, so long as you then attend to those things at the new time; flexibility in scheduling comes with the habit of developing and adhering to a schedule, as changing a schedule is just creating a new schedule--something you learn to do over time.
I would suggest that this phenomena of removing access to smart phones reflects the impact of executive functions such as focus, response-inhibition, self-activation, prioritization, time management, planning, and organization. If you plan, prioritize, and retain focus on a task, then you won't constantly poke a few thing
That's a moral standpoint with no useful impact.
I designed a Universal Social Security plan which reduces the tax burden on Americans by over $1 TRILLION per year. This plan completely remediates the welfare system; establishes a stable minimum income, eliminating many risks in providing goods and services to lower-income markets (currently, their income is unstable and can go away quickly, incurring massive costs for landlords especially); and slows and thus spreads the reduction of jobs by technical progress (including globalization and automation), thus reducing the short-term economic threat of sudden rapid progress (the long-term impact is always an immense increase in standard-of-living; a sudden industrial revolution creates an economic train wreck, while a longer period of growth creates immediate prosperity).
Money bound up in big bank accounts has almost no impact on the economy. Pulling it out and spending it in bulk, suddenly, causes a temporary stimulus, and largely creates inflation. This is because more money is put into play, but not more productivity; after you stop infusing huge piles of cash into the economy, there's no support for any new jobs created, except for what technical progress has occurred during the inflationary period of excess money creation (money idled and not spent is essentially removed; pouring it into the economy is essentially money creation, and differs from printing new money in that it doesn't then increase the fractional reserve basis and lead to more money creation by loaning).
By contrast, a Universal Social Security (or other effective form of Universal Basic Income) increases the amount of take-home pay relative to cost dollars. That is to say: If an employer pays $10,000 to have an employee, then that employee's work is paid for by consumers of the product the employee makes. If the employee makes 10,000 units of said product per year, then $1 of that product's per-unit price represents the employee's pay. Out of this, the employee may take home only $6,000. UBIs such as the USS change the situation such that the employee takes home, for example, $8,000, while the employer still pays only $10,000.
Obviously, such a situation means products don't face a cost increase (you still need $1 of revenue per unit to pay that guy's salary and benefits), yet consumers have more money to spend.
Look back and think about the engineering involved there. Some changes to tax policy reduce the welfare burden by over $1 trillion per year, increasing the amount of take-home pay for all working Americans, lifting low-income households out of poverty, and ensuring even non-working Americans have income sufficient for a hard-bounded minimum (but low) standard of living. Businesses don't pay any additional costs, and particularly don't pay more costs as consequence of hiring an employee; and the employee takes home more dollars per dollar paid by the employer to employ them. That changes the stable set points of the system, increasing the consumer's spending power relative to the cost of production, thus increasing buying power.
What's the engineering involved in grabbing a fistful of cash out of Apple? Hint: Apple's entire profits ($10 billion per year) would amount to $58.48/year more in every single American's paycheck; their entire cash savings is about $1,000 per working American (ONE time, not repeating). Total actual corporate profits in the United States are roughly 10% of all income--that's not small and not insignificant (it's 10%), and it's only unimportant because the economy is so much bigger than all that.
Why would we want to make everyone poorer?
Because a market with negative unemployment can't sustain itself, and rapidly destabilizes and then collapses. It's the same question as "why do we vaccinate against a fatal disease if the vaccine makes you ill for a day or two?"
The whole point of any sort of universal basic income is to make most people less poor. Yet here, you state your fix makes all people poorer.
Make all people poorer AFTER IMPLEMENTING A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME. That means richer than X, less-rich than X+n. You've slipped in a sneaky logical proposition to suggest poorer than X (the starting condition), which is a deceptive argument (lying).
Besides that, the whole point of a universal basic income is stability. A basic income prevents people from entering poverty, and creates a firm poverty floor. In the United States, not everyone has access to housing, food, and clean water; our welfare system doesn't provide that at all. HUD provides housing assistance to 1 in every 4 qualified households; the other 75% go onto a waiting list AND NEVER RECEIVE A BENEFIT. Unemployment insurance pays a benefit for only 6 months.
A basic income can remediate all of this. My Universal Social Security plan immediately places all HUD-qualified households above the poverty line--and bumps everyone from the lowest 5% of incomes up (that's about $7k/year) above the single-person household poverty line. It creates a minimum stable income class, whereas currently lower income classes are *unstable*--meaning low-income rental units today have to charge a high mark-up to cover risk of lost income (i.e. evictions, empty units), while low-income rental units under an effective form of basic income don't face that particular risk and so can charge a rent affordable by non-working individuals and *still* turn a reliable profit. Food, personal care, and other needs are within financial reach as well. It's a very low standard of living, and it's one we simply can't guarantee in our current system.
This approach *also* prevents sharp unemployment spikes from technical progress, such as mass automation. Rather than raise wages for the classes of workers whose jobs are easy to reduce, you provide them a supplemental income. That means they have more buying power, and they don't cost the employer any additional money. There is, thus, no added pressure to replace them as a cost-reduction measure, and so strategic integration (i.e. employing a more-expensive human because you think the machines will be even-less-expensive in a few years) carries a lower risk (cost) and a relatively-higher benefit (the gap between your wage and the cost of the machine is smaller, so the business can swallow that if it expects a big ROI for later implementation). Different businesses will have different risk appetites and tolerances, and so this situation causes a more-gradual replacement of labor, allowing the market to adjust and provide replacement jobs before unemployment increases too much.
The side-effect of all this is it's $1 trillion cheaper: it reduces effective tax burden on Americans by 40% ($1 trillion), and moves the remainder of replaced service costs directly into low-income consumer hands rather than into bureaucratic benefits systems. That tends to adjust from low-efficiency (high-margin) business to high-efficiency (low-margin) business, creating a hell of a lot of jobs. On-balance, it's more jobs than people; and an increase in the labor force would just push spending power up, leaving us with even more jobs and still not enough people.
That effect is reigned in by cutting back on working hours. That makes everyone poorer by cutting back production (fiat currency is backed by productive output rather than something like gold). With 118%-123% employment, a cut of 20% would bring us to 5.6%-1.6% unemployment (anything less than 4% unemployment is dangerously low), with similar productivity to current. Tha
People say "profits" a lot. They try to ignore that prices don't follow inflation, and that costs are real.
The long and short of it is, somewhere behind the opaque shroud, Apple goes from selling the last-model iPhone at a 10% profit to selling it at a 10% loss. What's probably actually happening is people just aren't interested in spending on a new phone now, and will take a low-cost phone at a bargain. Apple can't cut the current-model back to that cost, and can't even get the old-model down that low, and so is trying to hit prices that the consumer will pay by cutting costs back.
In other words: the "cutting into profits" is more like "losing business, and facing extinction." Apple isn't going to die out today; they know that if they can't keep their phones in the consumer market, they're going to die out in a decade, maybe. Strategic executives actually look way ahead and try to minimize the likelihood of such an outcome.
You're talking about a 20% mark-up, and you've managed to ignore that Apple will take a 10% mark-up but the consumer won't pay $600 for a $550 phone. If Apple wants to sell a phone like that in a market of $350 full-featured phones, it needs its Chinese manufacturers to deliver a $350 phone that it can *maybe* mark up to $400 as a premium option.
At the base, this happens when competitors are offering top-of-the-line technology at the break-out price point. 10% more for 10% more feature, until you're suddenly paying 50% more for 10% more feature; you stop just at that point, and now your next competitor can only offer a better product at 1.5 times the price. Yours might cost $400, but their barely-any-better gadget now costs $600. Even if most of your market is in mid-tier $250-$300 phones, your major competitor can't distinguish themselves as a better product without a distinguished price point: to stand apart in features, you must stand apart in price.
This is a common strategy for other reasons. You release a low, mid-tier, and high-end flagship product; then the customer sees that the mid-tier product is much cheaper than the top-tier product but almost as good, and buys the mid-tier product due to its excellent value. Without the top-tier product, they make a more price-conscious decision, determining their need rather than bare purchasing efficiency. What I've described is an extension: you ensure that the high-end flagship product of distinction is someone else's, and that it's *very* expensive by way of making the most-expensive *reasonable* product on the market yourself. Maybe nobody buys your Galaxy S7; but they're sure as hell not going to spend twice as much on a fucking iPhone.
Apple has the extra disadvantage of not selling a mid-tier product; they sell the iPhone 5 currently, which broadcasts loudly that it's an out-of-date product because it was the premier product four years ago. If it was called the iPhone 7n (new budget offering), people would perceive it as a modern, budget-friendly phone without all the bells and whistles.
Because creating further artificial labor scarcity via work week restrictions will fix a labor scarcity problem.
Labor restrictions restrict productivity, raising prices and reducing what people buy, thus reducing employment. In short: you have less to barter with, therefor there is less you can barter for, therefor somebody who produces something will find nobody can pay them for the product, and so he becomes unemployed.
Imagine you spend 10% of your income on food, 4% on clothing, 2% on personal care, 30% on housing, 18% on transportation, and 36% on entertainment and other non-essential spending. Call it by dollars: $100, $40, $20, $300, $180, $360. You have a total of $1,000 to spend.
Now imagine everything just got 20% more expensive because everyone working 5 days making $1,000 is now working 4 days making $1,000 and, for every 5 such people, we hire another worker making $1,000 to fill in the gap (i.e. that last day costs an extra $200 per person now). I suppose you got this far and then determined there's that extra worker now, right? Let's look at it further.
So now nobody's getting paid more; they're working less, and MORE PEOPLE ARE BEING PAID to make the products you buy. Your expenses are $120, $48, $24, $360, $216, and $432. That's $1,200--or $200 more than you were able to spend before, and even more than you're able to spend now.
Well let's tie it all together. Food, clothing, personal care, housing, transportation... that's $768 right there. You have about $232 to spend on the other stuff you were buying--about 64% as much. 36% of the production related to those jobs is now unsustainable (there's no revenue to pay all those wages), and so those jobs vanish.
That's the point. You create a situation where people have more money to spend than there are workers to supply, and then you boost the labor expense of anything they want to buy by restricting labor hours. Suddenly everything becomes more expensive, but nobody has any more money; the capacity to buy products beyond what our labor force can supply goes away, because we're suddenly all poorer.
Nope, they've requested they not be listed.
What about Antarctic Research Station 1?
Interesting (to me): One of the side-effects of my Universal Social Security proposal is excess demand--a labor shortage. The fix is re-defining full-time working hours as 26-32 hours per week, meaning everyone gets dropped to 4-day work weeks. This happens because it's a trillion dollars cheaper than current strategy.
In theory, with or without salary adjustment, dropping everyone's work time by 20% decreases their share of labor pay. That is to say: to make 1,000 things takes 4 people, or it takes 5 people each working 80% as much. As long as your entire economy changes at this ratio and wages don't change relative to each other (they can increase, decrease, or stay the same, but all by the same percentage), whatever salary you end up with is suddenly only capable of buying 80% as much.
In practice, I'm pretty sure we have a lot of part-time workers (I've looked this up before) and a lot of slack time. On one hand, part-time workers would experience no change, so neither their income nor the influence they have on price would change: the stuff they make wouldn't become any more expensive. On the other, many people would work the same amount and spend their work slack-time as leisure-in-earnest instead of non-productive office hours: instead of being restricted by the facade of office hours, you'd be outside work enjoying the time you're spending doing nothing useful.
That's actually a bigger problem. It means cutting hours without a salary cut raises the price of certain goods for part-time workers, but not for office workers; while cutting hours with a salary cut raises the price of certain goods for full-time workers, but not part-timers. The first case is regressive onto the poorer, and benefits the middle-classes; the second is harder on the middle-classes, and doesn't directly-benefit the poor. The second case is arguably better, since cutting working time in this way definitely cuts buying power in total, so someone has to get poorer, and you've restricted how much that happens and to who; but it has obvious undesirable issues.
On the other hand, the end result would probably be about break-even for the middle classes in total (when you include the Universal Social Security benefit), plus a 3-day weekend every week, so ... eh?
Doing more with less is how technology works; and technology comes with discovery, not mandate.
Natural gas burned in power plants and transmitted as electricity produces much more light out of LED lamps than natural gas piped to gas lamps. They couldn't just up and switch to electricity and LED lamps 50 years before Edison and Westinghouse, even if the Government told them they had a week to figure out how to produce more ten times light with half as much gas.
(The chief effect of all this is less labor: you use 5% as much gas to run lights, that means 5% as many human labor-hours invested in running lights, and that proportion of society--not those particular people, but the constant inflow of people becoming working-age adults to replace the retiring seniors, at least at least--can now become doctors and engineers, since we don't need them mining for gas. Again: you can't just dictate there shall be more doctors and fewer farmers, and the halved farm workforce shall work to produce twice the food output at half the price; it won't work.)
They'll find out about it themselves; the Adult Conspiracy only holds so much power.
The board flexes because it warms and cools during operation. The Apple 3 had the same problem.
FreeBSD is a giant hunk of shit that takes as much nerd-cred to install as Linux did in 1995. Good luck slicing your partitions.
Growth is technical progress.
People today are more wealthy than people 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. The median family spends less on food, Cars have more features, yet only reflect a purchase price of 56% of the purchaser's income in the median case. We've gone from extremely-expensive computers with 4MB EDO RAM and 33MHz CPUs to having high-speed, multi-gigabyte RAM, 64GB storage devices in our pockets as a simple fact of life. Communication is ubiquitous with cell phones and high-speed Internet.
Clothing is cheaper; people today have about 50% increased access to more and better healthcare than people of the 90s; and we spend nearly half our money on luxuries.
Automation won't just put us into caves and cages to be fed a nutritious gruel by robotic keepers; it will make the Tesla Model S the household car of the lower-middle class, while the poors make do with that currently-$45,000 Model 3. It will place more electronic gadgets into everyone's hands. It will dramatically increase the access to healthcare, while lowering the cost of complex tests and treatments. $800 ceramic-on-ceramic fillings--the best remediation you can get for dental caries--will become the standard, even among the poor, because they cost $20.
The poor will not simply be shoveled off into the corner. They'll work, hard, and live beneath the rest of us, as they do today. They'll work and they'll live as well-off middle-class families live today. Their hard-earned money will buy them the sorts of $2,000 appliances I purchase for myself, because that $1,897 double-oven stove only costs $350 in the world of the future (well, there's inflation, but the poors have that much more money, too, so whatever).
Luxury. Technical progress brings luxury down to the people. There was a time rags were made of old clothes because cloth cost more than 90% of the population could afford; people wore one or two sets of simple clothing--nothing fancy and expensive, because frills and pleats increased fabric use--and many were haphazardly dressed in the poor's last-season fashion, tacky and out-of-style, handed down to the rabble because it simply won't do in noble social circles. Now we all have 10 days's worth of fancy clothing, coats, hats, a million pairs of shoes... things that would have cost us 15 years's salary--and, the fancy stuff with all the pockets and pleats we use today, 40 or 60 years's salary--back then.
Remember when a cell phone cost $4,000 in 1983? In 2015 that's over $9,000; two hours per week of talk would cost you $550/month. Not everyone can afford that; yet poor people buy a $60 feature phone or spend $170 on a used iPhone, and $60/month for unlimited talk and text plus 3GB data. I use under 500MB of data, so I spend $33/month and just get Ting.
How many rich people luxuries do you use now? How much of the stuff you're using is a much-more-advanced version of something that was available to people who could spend 3 times the median income on it 25 years ago? Your cell phone is comparable to a multi-million-dollar supercomputer in 1985. Microwaves were an invention of the air force, because a million-dollar radar emitter in a fighter jet pumps out a lot of microwaves, and they put a door in the cockpit where you can slide in a tray of food and then have yourself a hot meal; your microwave probably cost $70.
Do you really think people will just roll over and eat the slop the robots pour down their throats? We'll do what we've always done: Get richer. We'll take all the luxuries of the rich and then complain they've found new toys we can't afford.
improving an economy's efficiency lowers the unemployment rate rather than saying that lowering the unemployment rate improves an economy's efficiency because otherwise you are talking nonsense.
They're both sort-of true. Higher employment means higher production-per-capita, thus more buying power per-capita, thus more wealth; although an extremely-low-unemployment economy falters because of labor shortage, thus can't grow.
Efficiency in an economy is complicated.
One of the primary drivers of efficiency is technical progress. Technical progress simply means new technology allows us to produce more goods in the same labor. Take the same population, employ fewer farmers, employ more engineers, employ more doctors, and still produce the same amount of food because the farmers plus engineers are able to output more food per total labor hour; these doctors used to be farmers, but we don't need them anymore, so now we have healthcare. When you get down to money, you realize all the services being bought are paid for by consumers (that's where revenue comes from, and we pay wages out of revenue), and so necessarily things must get cheaper as a percentage of the per-capita income (that doesn't say the distribution is equitable; just that the cost of product X is a smaller fraction of *all* money being spent).
I like to talk about the cost of wage dollars. An employer pays an employee's wage, plus payroll taxes, plus benefits, plus unemployment insurance premiums; and the employee pays income taxes and such things as OASDI and Medicare (not to mention sales taxes, VAT, etc.). An employer has to spend some number of dollars for an employee to take home some number of dollars--for example, $1000 minus 6.2% OASDI is $938; at a 25% tax rate, the employee takes home $703.50. An employee's time is divided among products, and the employer's cost is divided into products; the employee must buy those products (and produce the revenue source to pay wages of employees) out of his wages.
Obviously, more take-home pay per employer cost means more maximum buying power. A business may or may not lower the price of goods to a minimum. Tere are economic pressures which cause this to occur to varying degrees, which is why food has a slimmer margin than diamonds and cars have a slimmer margin than food (lots of bulk negotiation up the production chain for cars; the manufacturer might make 10%, but the coal and steel mines negotiate low-margin contracts for multi-billion-dollar profits). Still, a 10% or 3% or 40% margin is a proportion on top of cost; and costs have always trended toward stability--lowering--when technology improves, else we would never advance as a society because we'd never have the consumer buying power to buy anything we hadn't bought before.
That's efficient. It's why progressive taxes are efficient, why some forms of universal basic income are efficient, and why accomplishing economic goals such as state welfare to greater effect with lower cost is efficient: consumers end up with more spending money per dollar paid as production cost by employers, and thus can buy more.
That effect tends to not simply lower unemployment, but stabilize the economy: when there are problems, your Jenga tower doesn't just collapse; it wobbles a little, and a piece falls off the top.
Your argument is that the economy is a zero-sum game, for business A to be successful it must reduce the success of business B. This is false
Technical progress would suggest that an economy is not a zero-sum game because the economy grows.
That does not mean that the economy is infinite at a given time. The economy, as it is now, has limited consumer buying power. In the future, technical progress will increase the per-capita buying power, and population growth will increase the number of consumers, thus causing an exponential (f(t) = g(t)*p(t))) growth in the economy. For any point in time (t), there is a limited amo
A multi-cat household can be hard on even the toughest kitty litter; so when your litterbox needs a change, go for the Nuclear Option. Containment 100% silica-based kitty litter can handle even the toughest jobs, whether you're managing a two-cat household or a nuclear waste disposal site.
Containment 100% silica-based kitty litter: don't let your waste go nuclear.
I put my phone number on goods I'm having shipped to America illegally so customs can call me for an explanation if they so desire. Yes, I'm trafficking things across the border that I'm not allowed to traffick across the border; and yes, customs inspects the package and decides it's fine.
I still don't want them digging through my Facebook and shit. My Facebook is online and exposes a ton of shit to everyone; there is no expectation of privacy, and they're welcome to go looking, and I still don't want to hand over a compendium of all the leads they should use to investigate me at their leisure. It's just a hassle to keep myself that well-documented.
Perhaps true; and that doesn't debase my argument. If NewMobile employed 1,000 people and Verizon, being more-efficient, lost fewer in equivalent operations, then the remaining balance would be taken from other businesses. Those businesses aren't necessarily mobile; maybe you spend more on phones, and you can't spend as much on fancy shoes.
The point is jobs are paid for from revenue, and so consumer spending supplies jobs. You get more jobs with population growth (more people) and improvements in an economy's efficiency (lower unemployment rates); businesses grow employment by taking a share of this or by reducing another business's employment.
As an aside, if NewMobile is truly less-efficient, its products must cost more. That doesn't mean they don't employ more people per dollar of revenue; it means they must employ fewer people per product or service provided. To employ more people per dollar of revenue, they would *pay lower wages*; to fully-describe this situation, I'd have to write a lengthy Ph.D. thesis, and so what I wrote is an appropriate approximation and grossly-correct.
Those solutions are not optimal. Full automation at a rapid pace creates a distribution problem: it can only produce and distribute goods with a command economy, which is ineffective at managing the large amounts of data required to maximize growth. Technical progress would slow.
Reducing population size isn't efficient; it's reductive. It's like saying that you could make your car more efficient by driving it less: you would simply drive less, and still get 17mpg. This would leave you less-wealthy (you don't have the ability to go everywhere all the time anymore, because you're driving less).
You seem to have responded to a technical analysis of economics with a well-poisoning argument. Your fantasy about being fair and equitable hurts people, and you don't like to acknowledge that.
Hey, hey, hold on now. Wind just blows a lot; she can't be too upset about that.
In economies, you expand population until you end up with the haves and the have-nots. 40% of the American workforce turns over every year, and there are job postings everywhere; the 5% unemployed have 6 months of unemployment insurance before they run out, and our unemployment system thus relies on some of that 40% turn-over ending up unemployed as someone else snaps up their job and escapes the jaws of economic death.
A nuclear accident wobbles your economy for sure. Some source of production is gone, thus a chunk of wealth vanishes. A strong economy can recover from this in short years, rather than decades; some of the people whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed will get back on their feet, others will take the place of some other poor sod who got their place in society instead. Who are you to judge whether the terminally-poor should remain that way or have his chance? Either decision throws somebody into the gutter to fight with the rats.
The base problem here (unemployment is a fact of economics) is why we need a universal social security; and it also blunts the concern about ruined lives and lost jobs, because the void fills back in. You can claim it's unfair--it's no fun to be working, then not working, then remain not working because someone else got your job--but what is fairness? There are 3 people and 2 jobs, and this situation is entirely unresolvable by any means; is it fair that one person must be condemned to eternal poverty, or fair that he get his chance now and then at the expense of someone else?
Nuclear power provides strong value to society in terms of dense power production, low environmental impact, and a reduction of lives lost. Everyone--rich and poor--enjoys this benefit; and a nuclear powerplant exports energy in a wide geographical area, bringing purchasing power to the town, raising the average income class, lowering crime, and generally making everyone's lives better. It's like living in Cupertino with Apple bringing $2 billion in employee salaries to that tiny little scrap of a town. If you live in such wealth while others live in poverty, is it fair to make you accept the risk that, one day, your life might get uprooted, and one of those others might jump into your place before you can get back on your feet? Does privilege mean you can demand your place be held and rebuilt for you?
No, wrong. It's nuclear waste disposal. It has a precise set of instructions and materials. Do not substitute anything for anything else without involving a nuclear waste disposal engineer. Don't even consider a different type of *steel* for the barrels--steel made from ore sourced from a different mine can have a much different chemical composition, including different levels of vanadium or copper or whatnot, so only used the approved material from the approved manufacturer operating on approved quality controls.
Try substituting ethanol for methanol in your whiskey. They're both alcohol...
No, it's because reactors which recycle used fuel efficiently cost more to run. We can produce new fuel from freshly-mined uranium cheaper than we can breed and refine uranium and plutonium fuel rods. We don't even run plutonium fuel rods in reactors, usually, so there's all kinds of risk in using plutonium fuel and all kinds of costs in getting to a point where we can even attempt it.
Burning the fuel out completely is expensive.
They didn't even hype it as *the* costliest; they put it in with three-mile island. 1979, $1 billion over 12 years, three-mile island. In 1979, that'd be inflation to $3.26 billion 2014; in 1991, that'd inflate to $1.74 billion 2014. You're looking at an average in the range of $2.5 billion; counting from straight 1985, it's still $2.2 billion.
In other words: this disaster has cost less than three-mile island. Amortized over the decade it'll cost, it's actually not so bad; there are 171 million taxpaying households in the U.S., and this is less than $2/year from each. Large populations.