Well, now we have a bunch of professions that no longer work full time, simply because idiots can't figure out how their stupid ideas would be handled by businesses.
Yes, it bewilders me, too. I've suggested a partial subsidy to make up the difference (e.g. 50% of the employer's healthcare costs incurred for a non-full-time employee for the portion represented by the hours discounted from full-time). That would encourage full-time employment, but reduce the impact: maybe you have a 20-hour worker and the $6,800/year healthcare costs are now subsidized by $1,700, so the employee costs you an extra 85 cents an hour. If that's a 30-hour worker (32 legally receives full-time benefits IIRC), you get $850 of subsidy, and your cost increase per hour is 42.5 cents per hour.
Of course, that also cuts into your profits, thus reducing your corporate taxes (35%), so your ultimate end-of-year profit impact is 65% of that (55 and 28 cents per hour).
unless you're equally ranting about how immoral socialist policies are that cause these problems in the first place.
It's not socialist. Socialism involves social ownership: the Government would need to own the insurers, hospitals, or whatever. This is tax-and-spend government.
Government is a social contract: the governed empower the government to protect their rights and general welfare. Without government, people are infinitely free to go anywhere, take anything, and do anything. They can murder you, imprison you, take your property, and so forth. We give up those natural rights, placing them in trust of the Government, and so cannot murder, imprison, and steal; in exchange, the Government provides for the general welfare and protects our rights to life, liberty, and property.
As such, I have suggested Government must actively seek to provide the services which best provide for the general welfare while also reducing the cost of those services. Technical progress reduces the cost to produce the same thing, and the Government provides things to a population: the cost per person to provide a service should go down, or the amount of service (e.g. healthcare) should go up. If the Government is taking 10% of the population's income (property) and providing service only worth 5%, it is unjustly taking 5% of the population's property.
That doesn't mean we don't provide services; it means we need to stop seeing taxpayers (and certain classes of taxpayers) as endless sources of money and start considering our moral obligation to take their property only in good faith and with the greatest care to minimize the tax necessary to provide the services our society determines necessary and desirable.
This entire philosophy doesn't mesh with socialism because you don't have property in socialism: we all own it, so your property is our property. We can't unjustly deprive you of what is ours in the first place. The ideal that Government must provide a fair exchange--that taxes are necessary and may be high, but must not be higher than necessary to provide service--necessarily requires an individual right to property and an obligation for the Government to protect that right.
Modafinil is a Schedule-IV controlled substance with no physical dependence or other addictive nature, no long-term health effects from long-term use (study used 3 years, 56 hours awake, 8 hours asleep, then immediate discontinuation and return to regular sleeping cycle), and no abuse by overuse potential (taking extra makes you feel like shit). It also has been shown not a medical emergency if someone takes 50 pills at once (this has happened a LOT: a teenager tried to commit suicide once, and they used some 156 test subjects at extremely-high doses to determine safety).
Modafinil makes it ridiculously easy to focus. A lot of people interpret that as "making you smarter", so it's sought after as a cognitive enhancement drug. It's not approved for ADHD, despite multiple studies showing it's highly-effective for ADHD; we use amphetamine as the front-line treatment, which is far more effective than Methylphenidate, but has a much higher rate of abuse (and the abuse rates taper off around 8th-10th grade for MPH, but continue to increase into college for AMP). Modafinil has a lower incidence of side-effects (notably insomnia, at 4%). I'd quite like to see Modafinil become the front-line treatment for ADHD due to its safety and efficacy, but oh well.
So... a lot of people use it as a so-called cognitive enhancement drug.
A lot of people order Modafinil illegally from India and stuff. It comes across the border fine--customs does not care.
Customs cares so little that they will often cut open a shipment, remove half of the pills, and tape it back up.
That is: the customs agent is stealing half your drugs.
This is the dumbest shit. If they're just going to let people buy it, make it OTC. If you're going to make it illegal, enforce it. I don't particularly have a problem with CE, and am concerned about the toxic shit being pushed on the grey market to these people, so I'd actually back making CE an approved medical reason for prescription and putting it on-label for Modafinil and certain other compounds (there's one that's even more tolerated in humans, doesn't have a stimulant effect, but causes your memory to suddenly work really well--yes, actual learning drugs).
People wonder why I push back when they talk about paper ballots "being kept in a secure location" and "transported with a representative from each major party". Why would you trust the State Board of Elections? Customs is stealing people's drugs and putting half the shipment back in the package to go on through. They're not halting it at the border; they're taking their cut. Why wouldn't State agents tamper with elections?
Paul Samuelson's landmark paper on the efficient provision of public goods was only three pages in the 1954 Review of Economics and Statistics. If someone tells you to fill five and you have a landmark argument in three, "Not being able to intelligently fill the space given to you" is just being too smart to ramble for five pages about a three-page topic. You lose points, but you gain a Nobel prize.
You can't base on the premise that maybe you end up with three paragraphs, but you haven't thought enough if you didn't write thirty pages first. Arbitrary minimum lengths are pointless.
The shortest scientific thesis ever published was five characters long. It had a massive impact, to the point of immediately shifting an entire nation's direction of scientific study.
LTE peak is 50Mbit/s, and I pay $180/year ($15/month) for cellular with unlimited voice and SMS plus 2GB monthly LTE+ before throttling to 2Mbit.
I don't have a problem with throttling. Especially in rural areas, where you can get higher speeds due to lower saturation (one cable run out to a tower instead of running a ton of last-mile fiber is cheaper), having a 25Mbit/s with a 10Mbit/s throttle at something like 10GB for $20/month would be fine. We can regulate an increase in the data cap and throttling speed as technology improves.
Note that streaming HD is 4,000Kbit-8,000Kbit. 10Mbit/s allows for one HD stream at maximum quality. It's not much, but it's access. When 5G whatever comes, we'll have a talk about 4K streaming, throttling, and whatnot.
Of course, with all this usage, they'll need to put up more towers if density increases, or start running last-mile cabling to houses to get people off the cellular network. That's fine. The important thing is everyone has access to useful high-speed Internet and can watch streaming TV and telework reliably.
Oh, I don't think the economic perfect market can exist without political controls to keep it running. It'll turn itself into a monopolistic quasi-government unless you come in with a broomstick and break up the salt bridges now and then.
Not being able to intelligently fill space that's been given to you is stupid too.
Maybe you should stick to one concise topic and discuss it well instead of describing several topics at length.
I have a paper on structural wage--on the impacts of minimum wage on the labor force size and distribution of income, notably considering minimum and median wage each as a percentage of the per-capita gross national income and minimum wage in terms of percentage of median wage.
In this paper, I touch briefly on Malthus to describe employment as the gateway to abundance, thus suggesting that wages as a smaller percentage of GNI/C expands our labor force while wages as a larger percentage of GNI/C slows labor force growth rather than leading to high unemployment. A shock of sudden wage increases can shrink the labor force faster than its natural growth rate, increasing unemployment; carry out that more jobs are becoming available and that there isn't as much of a labor shortage and you remove the driving force of labor force growth, concentrating wealth into fewer hands. Smaller GDP, more income per capita, higher standard of living.
I could write an entire separate paper on labor force trends and what mechanisms drive the labor force short and long term. Structural wage is part of structural wealth theory, which includes a Universal Dividend; I could write an enormous paper on the hypothetical American Citizen's Dividend implementation, along with the implications (taxes continuously fall, recessions no longer occur, and the sudden shock of excess economic efficiency drives a sudden labor force shortage, thus requiring a dramatic cut in weekly working hours to slow per-capita productivity and raise unemployment back to something not prone to trigger hyperinflation).
I could also take a paper on minimum wage trends and expand it to include 6 different topics, bloating it up into a massive tome to add space while I try to pretend I'm not off-topic because the economics are all related.
Get your point across clearly, completely, and concisely. Don't ramble about other shit to fill space.
Making your paper longer is stupid anyway. The discovery of the Double Helix was published in a two-page article. There are journals now with maximum length limits and restrictions on how many figures and tables you can include, so either stfu and say something useful or just stfu.
Adam Smith wrote a five-paragraph essay in fifty pages.
Ah, but you miss the salient detail: without the anti-trust regulations, the capitalist market eventually turns into superconglomerates selling out for big money, until the final merger and acquisition cycle leaves you with one giant megacorporation which can unilaterally crush all competition by shutting off access by anyone to anything. That is your government: a single corporate dictator, owner of all.
That's not capitalism anymore. Capitalism only survives, as you observe, by the maintenance of government. Capitalism involves the means of production being controlled by private owners rather than the state; and when you've reached the conclusion of buy-outs down to one, your megacorporation is your government. At that scale, they don't need a military; they'll just cut off the supply chain to yours.
Well, really, the problem here is a lack of capitalism. Capitalism handles this quite well: somebody buys all the patents for these emissions technologies, positions themselves as having great emissions, causes the standards to tighten, and licenses the technology to their competitors so they make a fucking mint.
When you don't have regulations--notably, anti-trust regulations--capitalism goes away. Instead of competing, they collude, and they don't bring these technologies forward.
So you see, anti-trust regulations are the great protector of capitalism: they prevent companies from acting against market forces and suppressing the great innovation power of competition. If the government doesn't step in with a hammer and smash this little cabal into its rightful many pieces, then it will sicken and tear down our glorious market system, leading to corporate fascism and dominance by what ultimately becomes a single commercial entity owning everything.
Therefor, by decree of the duly elected representatives of the States of Europe and their sovereign citizens, it is time to kick ass and chew bubblegum.
A Federal comp time policy to prevent uncompensated overtime for salaried workers (you don't get time-and-a-half--that's part of the deal--but you should get that time back as vacation or 1x your hourly rate) would normalize the work schedule.
We can achieve four seven-hour days, either by natural order or by necessary response to a social insurance policy which brings too much economic prosperity in one shot (there are policies that improve our total productivity and reduce economic strain, with the side-effect of causing negative unemployment around -12%). Shortening working hours reduces the amount of tradeable labor and production, which means you're reducing effective demand and thus jobs; it's one way to take advantage of productivity gains.
This was one of my core issues when I ran for Congress this year.
Streaming is an interesting technical problem, and not necessarily one worth solving for gaming. They're in the wrong market.
For gaming, streaming is trying to solve enormous problems with decoding highly-compressed video data: you have a description of where visual elements go, and you want to turn that into pixel data. In practice, this is cheap until you hit a point of diminishing returns: even an Intel Core i7 4750K with HD4500 does a pretty good job, and a more-specialized console will trade the expense of an integrated HD4500 for the expense of something slightly better and only slightly more-expensive.
The problem simplifies down to not knowing what video data you're providing ahead of time: you're able to generate positions and lighting elements, so you may only know the exact video data at the moment it's required. At 60fps, that's about 17mS ahead of time. Even at 24fps, you want the image to be newer than 40mS, so the frame rate isn't your actual target but rather your physical maximum latency.
They're trying to solve these by performing positional computations locally, sending those computations far away, performing rendering remotely, then encoding the raster image into a compressed video format, sending that back, decoding the compressed video, and finally displaying it. That's a linear process.
Instead, they could perform the rendering locally, while also providing the positional computations to the remote server. The local and remote engines could use any non-utilized GPU time to derive additional information and derive higher-quality rendering.
For example: you can pre-render lighting, and then calculate shadows and dynamic lighting on surfaces which move relative to the light source. Knowing the illumination and results, you can also compute how to alter these results by general relative position change, and then alter the overlay of lighting, shadow, and reflection, simply adding that to the surfaces or even the rendered output. When the information has changed so much that it's outside of an error bound, you discard it; and you can use extra cycles to start pre-calculating something closer whenever the GPU is idle, avoiding the total discard situation.
With that sort of approach, you can pre-render offsite; or you can drop your quality by a tiny value to free up extra cycles used to maintain artificially-high quality, which may paradoxically give you a better visual experience anyway. Same concept as mip mapping, but a lot more moving parts.
The offsite approach is simply rethinking video rendering: instead of prerendering the whole scene, you're prerendering information about the scene as the scene changes, allowing the local renderer to do less work.
Oddly enough, IBM had published an internal memo that they wanted to hire more younger workers to connect to the younger market base or whatever, and stressed that their older workforce were valuable workers with large amounts of skill and experience they must absolutely retain for strategic purposes.
That suggests IBM would have a strategy of hiring younger workers and passing over older applicants, but not that they should be engaging in rounds of layoffs of their aging workforce. It's still enough to raise some eyebrows ("Don't hire or fire any old people").
You're still thinking vertically: fewer low-end workers and more high-end engineers making the robots who replace them. That thinking is incorrect even in its own sphere: you're not saving any money unless there are fewer engineers and robot maintainers making and maintaining the robots than there are laborers replaced by robots.
Imagine if shoes can suddenly be made with half the labor in total. Not just half as many people sewing them together--maybe that doesn't even happen--but there are fewer people digging out materials, performing chemical synthesis, shipping the materials, etc., and yet more material shows up and more shoes get made. Now you have 40 shoe manufacturers selling everything from high-end athletic shoes to overpriced prestige brands, right down to the cheapest shoes made for the poorest people. They're all competing on price, with the narrowest margins on the commodity goods, the next being functional goods (athletic shoes), and the widest margins on those competing for brand prestige.
Your general consumer isn't a top-10% rich kid, so prices come down about half for shoes. That means what would be $40 shoes are instead $20. That $20 can be spent somewhere else.
The $20 represents all labor invested in all levels of production, plus a profit margin. So does the $40.
Spending this additional $20 necessarily entails creating a need and demand for the same amount of labor displaced. If you decrease the number of people making shoes by 70% (30% still working) and add 20% of the labor cost in machine production and maintenance to get your 50% savings, then buying twice as many shoes will theoretically require employing an additional 30% of your original shoe-making workforce (60% as many low-end workers operating the machines) and 20% in machine manufacture and maintenance.
So there are a few issues with this math.
First, we've only looked at the cost to make the shoes when moving that $20 onto buying new shoes. We're forgetting something: machines, parts, lubrication, and other maintenance bits have to be shipped in. The materials have to be shipped in. The finished shoes have to be shipped out, stocked, and retailed. This is low-end work that balances toward low-end labor, so a bigger portion of the new workforce--whether you're buying shoes or something else--is represented.
If we automate the shipping (self-driving trucks), we still have to load and unload goods. The wooden shipping pallet eliminated 85% of that labor easily along the way; we've still got the labor of loading onto initial pallets even with mechanized transfers of containerized goods; and the small retail center is going to find a need for constant unloading (renting equipment doesn't make sense), while the capital investment in a machine to unload and stock things in a local K-Mart is enormous and underutilized. Not only are humans cheaper for stocking store shelves, but they're better at it and will be so long as planograms are day-to-day dynamic and based on human behavior and critical thinking to compromise on the situation while managing oddly-shaped goods.
The automated shipping is really the biggest part: it's going to be heavy on low-skill automechanics instead of drivers.
There was a time when elevator operator was a skilled job. So was cash register operator. Nowadays we hire 16-year-old high school kids to do oil changes at Jiffy Lube.
So the situation is demonstratably that labor utilization will remain stable because we'll transfer our purchasing power to new goods and services, spreading horizontally. We don't have to worry about an unemployment rate increase.
Geographical structure is likely the bigger one. Everyone likes to lean on retraining and education, which is important; and yet changes like this tend to happen in conjunction with labor force turn-over (college graduation, retirement) simply because turn-over is fast and huge while individual industries and new technologies have small impacts
Of course some industries grow, others shrink, and others appear out of nowhere. They don't always all grow; it depends on if technical progress exceeds consumption.
It's notable that any stock awards are taxed as income at the award price: if Amazon gives him $1M in equity, he pays full income tax on $1M. If it's worth $1.2M later and he sells it, then he pays capital gains on $0.2M of income.
It is infuriatingly-difficult to escape the tax man. This is by design.
This is an English forum, and employment means jobs.
There are more people that work in the agricultural industry doing chemistry, engineering, soil science, marketing, import shipping, just-in-time distribution, etc.
Not really. The engineering, chemistry, marketing, import shipping, and logistics industries are highly-efficient: they devote a fraction of their resources to agriculture, and each person working in those industries is producing outputs for a large span of industries. Only part of a given worker's output is an input to agriculture; and when you combine those fractions, you get strikingly-few workers.
Your strongest connection is the manufacturing behind farm equipment, and even that's not really well-correlated: John Deere supplies the construction industry, the homeowner, the landscaper, and so forth.
Your front-end, on the other hand, is arguably not even part of the industry: shipping, stocking, and selling--truckers and grocery stores--isn't agricultural work, and distribution comes because we've moved from a small farm a cart-ride away to a continental and global industry. You might as well claim polyester clothing manufacture (which uses oil, not cotton or wool) is part of the agricultural industry because people can't go grocery shopping naked.
By the same token, the bakery industry, fabric industry, and meat industry aren't part of the agricultural industry: they take inputs from the agricultural industry (food and fiber). To include marketing and distribution in the agricultural industry is along the same lines, and is collapsing all industries into a single industry of everything made anywhere ever.
Input industries are arguably separate, too. Maybe your travel agency employs system administrators and network engineers; it also buys CISCO gear, and we don't count CISCO router manufacture as part of the travel industry. Counting John Deere as part of the agriculture work industry is even a stretch; agricultural bioengineers might mesh better; and we absolutely count the contractors who fly spray planes over the fields.
So if you use actual economic definitions and standard measures, you're wrong. If you wave a flag of bullshit, you can pretty much justify that pretty much 100% of American workers work in the agricultural industry.
Actually, with the income the top 1% have divided among the other 99%, you get $135 per person per year. It's not a lot until you start deciding who gets it and who doesn't.
We can build a universal dividend that pays $6,000 per person per year, make Social Security stronger (and solvent), and create a foundation under our welfare system, obliterating all homelessness and hunger almost immediately. That's actually a $300 billion tax cut (2016 model).
It's also not hitting the distribution problem, although it's an important program.
The big secret is the rich haven't been taking all the money; it's been going to the poor. Minimum wage has increased with inflation--that is: more-slowly than productivity gains. That means instead of twice as much bread per mouth, we have twice as much bread and twice as many mouths: we spread the wages around to a poverty class which has become an ever-growing portion of our economy.
You work, you make more per hour of work than workers did 20 years ago, and we pay you enough to buy the same amount that workers 20 years ago could. What about the gains? Well... the gains have spread among the working class... which has gotten bigger, so the amount each person gets hasn't increased by as much as the amount each person produces.
The rich only get like $135 per person. Okay. There are also a lot of not-rich people.
You fix this by tying minimum wage to some correlate of the per-capita GNI--the amount of income earned in total per person. I've proposed 25% of the per-adult GNI--about $10.20/hr in 2018, and just over a third of the per-capita GNI--and it might make sense to approach 33% of the per-adult GNI. My 25% proposal, when you include the Dividend, is equivalent to a single minimum-wage worker earning 45% of the per-capita GNI; but minimum wages drive median household incomes, and a demogrant like the Dividend doesn't.
In other words: you make your labor force grow more-slowly so productivity gains spread among the workers instead of spreading out to a larger (and poorer) workforce.
Oh I know; part of that change is industry dominance as a fraction of total economy, however.
1.2 million agricultural workers, 2008. 856,300 agricultural workers, 2016. Outlook: 0% employment change, 2016-2026, projected to have 400 fewer employed in the industry in 2026 than in 2016.
Total number of employed workers in the United States in 2006 was 145 million, and over 150 million in 2016. Even at a rate of zero additional jobs, farm industry employment is shrinking relative to the economy's total employment growth.
There are more jobs in the United States; there are fewer jobs in the agricultural worker industry. More engineers, chemists, and doctors; fewer people riding tractors.
Agricultural productivity has increased faster than agricultural production. That means for each unit good, we employ fewer labor hours; and the number of unit goods demanded (and produced) has increased at a slower rate. We can make 110% as much per worker-hour, and we buy 105% as much, thus number of employed in the entire industry goes down.
Bad bet. Structure can change--look at farming, which went from 26 million to as low as 2 million over the span of a century. You want to look at the unemployment rate across all industries.
We may invent new industries. We might conceivably alter the manner in which we set wages to slow labor force growth, drive wage compression, and produce a nation of relatively-wealthy workers (the poor are not that poor, even if they're not exactly middle-class).
or reducing the concept of private ownership of capital. Either of those would be a tenuous transition, if for no other reason that people are not used to anything else.
That and because this is a fundamental violation of human rights. The core natural rights are the rights to life, liberty, and property; we cut into property all the time (taxes) because governments take away some natural rights under a social contract to protect other natural rights.
I have proposed the theory that governments must actively seek efficiency: if a government taxes 10% and delivers 5% worth of service, the government is unjustly depriving the governed of 5% of their property. This is a human rights violation; thus governments must expend resources to seek efficiency improvements, as they are bound to provide for the welfare of the people and cannot cut spending by simply cutting service.
By the same token, governments have a duty to create and enforce regulation; yet the unnecessary deprivation of private property is a violation of the social contract. A government may, for example, decide that the businessman and the shareholder are entitled to a fair and reasonable profit by their enterprise; and thus the government may tax corporate profits at higher marginal rates when those profit margins are excessive, reasoning that the businessman and shareholders are not simply reaping the benefits of success, but harming society by exercising their market power to excess and creating unnecessary and unusually-large burdens on the common consumer.
It seems excessive and unwarranted, then, for a government to step in and deprive a person or group of property. By taxing them, we place the property in their trust; by taxing them on excessive profits, we reclaim the wealth taken in violation of that trust. By taking the property they have amassed by their own efforts, cunning, and luck, we simply deprive them unjustly.
Many of your assertions base around the idea that labor will no longer be a thing in the future; if that occurs, then people will come together to produce their own means of production. Governments can use tax money to do so. These means of production are magical sources of infinite free things, in your scenario: once created, no human ever need monitor, fuel, or maintain them. It is a one-time expense, and becomes the property of all without depriving it unjustly from anyone.
Should that not happen, it will be because the same thing that has always happened continues: human labor is marginalized, costs fall, and the productive capacity of human labor increases. There is turmoil and displacement, converging toward the same numerical employment rates; there is not a bleeding of employment until full unemployment and mass poverty set in. (Mass poverty at present is a result of certain defective structural policies.)
This isn't the Industrial Revolution. We've been watching the process of increasing automation for nearly fifty years, and from where I sit, I can see major industrial centers like Detroit basically depopulating.
Well, yes. We don't always create jobs in place; productivity gains come from structural change. That means your farm job goes away and the 300-population small town out west becomes a booming tech megatropolis with 10 million people crammed together in huge apartment complexes.
Detroit didn't depopulate because of lost factory jobs, by the way; it depopulated because the factory jobs moved away. While we have Mexico doing some final assembly, we still employ as many Americans... in the cities surrounding Detroit. The locals of those cities have shorter commutes, and many Detroit workers moved or lost their jobs by some mechanism. Detroit, then, became a collapsed husk.
This is the same as Harley Davidson moving its factory across the country to Pennsylvania. Kansas City is going to lose a huge income inflow, and jobs supported by the spending of now-unemployed factory workers will become unsupportable. A small town in PA will become a booming economy; and people who buy Harleys will spend a little less, since the new factory is closer to the steel mill and the cost of shipping is lower. Not only that, but the new factory uses the latest manufacture processes and technology, so the labor per unit vehicle produced is lower. (That's not the entire factory employment drop: they're also moving some production bound for foreign markets to foreign markets to realize the same efficiency gains and evade Trump tariffs.)
For the moment the system is buoyed by a need for service industry workers, but in part that low unemployment will simply drive automation even faster as businesses give up on finding employees and invest in automation. And then, at some point when unemployment starts to rise those traditional back stops will no longer be there.
A pizza shop needs its input goods (wheat, cheese), its utilities (water, electricity), its mechanism to make pizza (cooks), its mechanism to take orders (cashiers), its mechanism to deliver (drivers), local trucking to deliver its input goods (truckers), people to open and close the store (managers), and its overhead for business operations (inventory, finance, etc.).
Until you eliminate 100% of labor in all of those, pizza stores will employ or cause the employment of somebody. Even self-driving trucks require mechanics. Each step of technology reduces the requirements, which lowers costs. This is, again, structural change: you can buy more pizza--or pizza and other things--and there will be fewer people employed by the same quantity demanded for pizza.
In other words: cheaper goods means more consumption; and the root of all costs is labor--wages paid out of revenues. This balances itself.
Locality does not balance itself. As mentioned above: your town collapses; my town gets all the new jobs; I become rich while you beg for food from neighbors who can't even feed themselves.
Strong social insurances bring things like unemployment insurance, universal healthcare, food and housing assistance, disability assistance, and retirement pensions to these areas. Poverty reduces spending power, which makes it impossible to create jobs (you can't sell things to make revenue to pay workers if your customers are all poor and jobless). Social insurances dump money into those areas, creating an economic stimulus to create jobs.
Means-tested welfares generally cut out as people become employed. This happens too early, cutting off the support for jobs before the economy begins demanding higher-income and broader-reaching jobs. That means you don't couple with the economies around your blown-out factory town, and then you end up with no support when welfare goes away.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, now we have a bunch of professions that no longer work full time, simply because idiots can't figure out how their stupid ideas would be handled by businesses.
It looks like U-6 and U-5 have been falling slightly faster than U-3, which is the opposite of what you said.
Yes, it bewilders me, too. I've suggested a partial subsidy to make up the difference (e.g. 50% of the employer's healthcare costs incurred for a non-full-time employee for the portion represented by the hours discounted from full-time). That would encourage full-time employment, but reduce the impact: maybe you have a 20-hour worker and the $6,800/year healthcare costs are now subsidized by $1,700, so the employee costs you an extra 85 cents an hour. If that's a 30-hour worker (32 legally receives full-time benefits IIRC), you get $850 of subsidy, and your cost increase per hour is 42.5 cents per hour.
Of course, that also cuts into your profits, thus reducing your corporate taxes (35%), so your ultimate end-of-year profit impact is 65% of that (55 and 28 cents per hour).
unless you're equally ranting about how immoral socialist policies are that cause these problems in the first place.
It's not socialist. Socialism involves social ownership: the Government would need to own the insurers, hospitals, or whatever. This is tax-and-spend government.
Government is a social contract: the governed empower the government to protect their rights and general welfare. Without government, people are infinitely free to go anywhere, take anything, and do anything. They can murder you, imprison you, take your property, and so forth. We give up those natural rights, placing them in trust of the Government, and so cannot murder, imprison, and steal; in exchange, the Government provides for the general welfare and protects our rights to life, liberty, and property.
As such, I have suggested Government must actively seek to provide the services which best provide for the general welfare while also reducing the cost of those services. Technical progress reduces the cost to produce the same thing, and the Government provides things to a population: the cost per person to provide a service should go down, or the amount of service (e.g. healthcare) should go up. If the Government is taking 10% of the population's income (property) and providing service only worth 5%, it is unjustly taking 5% of the population's property.
That doesn't mean we don't provide services; it means we need to stop seeing taxpayers (and certain classes of taxpayers) as endless sources of money and start considering our moral obligation to take their property only in good faith and with the greatest care to minimize the tax necessary to provide the services our society determines necessary and desirable.
This entire philosophy doesn't mesh with socialism because you don't have property in socialism: we all own it, so your property is our property. We can't unjustly deprive you of what is ours in the first place. The ideal that Government must provide a fair exchange--that taxes are necessary and may be high, but must not be higher than necessary to provide service--necessarily requires an individual right to property and an obligation for the Government to protect that right.
That happens with Modafinil all the time.
Modafinil is a Schedule-IV controlled substance with no physical dependence or other addictive nature, no long-term health effects from long-term use (study used 3 years, 56 hours awake, 8 hours asleep, then immediate discontinuation and return to regular sleeping cycle), and no abuse by overuse potential (taking extra makes you feel like shit). It also has been shown not a medical emergency if someone takes 50 pills at once (this has happened a LOT: a teenager tried to commit suicide once, and they used some 156 test subjects at extremely-high doses to determine safety).
Modafinil makes it ridiculously easy to focus. A lot of people interpret that as "making you smarter", so it's sought after as a cognitive enhancement drug. It's not approved for ADHD, despite multiple studies showing it's highly-effective for ADHD; we use amphetamine as the front-line treatment, which is far more effective than Methylphenidate, but has a much higher rate of abuse (and the abuse rates taper off around 8th-10th grade for MPH, but continue to increase into college for AMP). Modafinil has a lower incidence of side-effects (notably insomnia, at 4%). I'd quite like to see Modafinil become the front-line treatment for ADHD due to its safety and efficacy, but oh well.
So... a lot of people use it as a so-called cognitive enhancement drug.
A lot of people order Modafinil illegally from India and stuff. It comes across the border fine--customs does not care.
Customs cares so little that they will often cut open a shipment, remove half of the pills, and tape it back up.
That is: the customs agent is stealing half your drugs.
This is the dumbest shit. If they're just going to let people buy it, make it OTC. If you're going to make it illegal, enforce it. I don't particularly have a problem with CE, and am concerned about the toxic shit being pushed on the grey market to these people, so I'd actually back making CE an approved medical reason for prescription and putting it on-label for Modafinil and certain other compounds (there's one that's even more tolerated in humans, doesn't have a stimulant effect, but causes your memory to suddenly work really well--yes, actual learning drugs).
People wonder why I push back when they talk about paper ballots "being kept in a secure location" and "transported with a representative from each major party". Why would you trust the State Board of Elections? Customs is stealing people's drugs and putting half the shipment back in the package to go on through. They're not halting it at the border; they're taking their cut. Why wouldn't State agents tamper with elections?
Well maybe we shouldn't assign minimum lengths at all.
Paul Samuelson's landmark paper on the efficient provision of public goods was only three pages in the 1954 Review of Economics and Statistics. If someone tells you to fill five and you have a landmark argument in three, "Not being able to intelligently fill the space given to you" is just being too smart to ramble for five pages about a three-page topic. You lose points, but you gain a Nobel prize.
You can't base on the premise that maybe you end up with three paragraphs, but you haven't thought enough if you didn't write thirty pages first. Arbitrary minimum lengths are pointless.
The shortest scientific thesis ever published was five characters long. It had a massive impact, to the point of immediately shifting an entire nation's direction of scientific study.
I'm on 250Mbit cable Internet, $95/month now.
LTE peak is 50Mbit/s, and I pay $180/year ($15/month) for cellular with unlimited voice and SMS plus 2GB monthly LTE+ before throttling to 2Mbit.
I don't have a problem with throttling. Especially in rural areas, where you can get higher speeds due to lower saturation (one cable run out to a tower instead of running a ton of last-mile fiber is cheaper), having a 25Mbit/s with a 10Mbit/s throttle at something like 10GB for $20/month would be fine. We can regulate an increase in the data cap and throttling speed as technology improves.
Note that streaming HD is 4,000Kbit-8,000Kbit. 10Mbit/s allows for one HD stream at maximum quality. It's not much, but it's access. When 5G whatever comes, we'll have a talk about 4K streaming, throttling, and whatnot.
Of course, with all this usage, they'll need to put up more towers if density increases, or start running last-mile cabling to houses to get people off the cellular network. That's fine. The important thing is everyone has access to useful high-speed Internet and can watch streaming TV and telework reliably.
Oh, I don't think the economic perfect market can exist without political controls to keep it running. It'll turn itself into a monopolistic quasi-government unless you come in with a broomstick and break up the salt bridges now and then.
Not being able to intelligently fill space that's been given to you is stupid too.
Maybe you should stick to one concise topic and discuss it well instead of describing several topics at length.
I have a paper on structural wage--on the impacts of minimum wage on the labor force size and distribution of income, notably considering minimum and median wage each as a percentage of the per-capita gross national income and minimum wage in terms of percentage of median wage.
In this paper, I touch briefly on Malthus to describe employment as the gateway to abundance, thus suggesting that wages as a smaller percentage of GNI/C expands our labor force while wages as a larger percentage of GNI/C slows labor force growth rather than leading to high unemployment. A shock of sudden wage increases can shrink the labor force faster than its natural growth rate, increasing unemployment; carry out that more jobs are becoming available and that there isn't as much of a labor shortage and you remove the driving force of labor force growth, concentrating wealth into fewer hands. Smaller GDP, more income per capita, higher standard of living.
I could write an entire separate paper on labor force trends and what mechanisms drive the labor force short and long term. Structural wage is part of structural wealth theory, which includes a Universal Dividend; I could write an enormous paper on the hypothetical American Citizen's Dividend implementation, along with the implications (taxes continuously fall, recessions no longer occur, and the sudden shock of excess economic efficiency drives a sudden labor force shortage, thus requiring a dramatic cut in weekly working hours to slow per-capita productivity and raise unemployment back to something not prone to trigger hyperinflation).
I could also take a paper on minimum wage trends and expand it to include 6 different topics, bloating it up into a massive tome to add space while I try to pretend I'm not off-topic because the economics are all related.
Get your point across clearly, completely, and concisely. Don't ramble about other shit to fill space.
Making your paper longer is stupid anyway. The discovery of the Double Helix was published in a two-page article. There are journals now with maximum length limits and restrictions on how many figures and tables you can include, so either stfu and say something useful or just stfu.
Adam Smith wrote a five-paragraph essay in fifty pages.
Ah, but you miss the salient detail: without the anti-trust regulations, the capitalist market eventually turns into superconglomerates selling out for big money, until the final merger and acquisition cycle leaves you with one giant megacorporation which can unilaterally crush all competition by shutting off access by anyone to anything. That is your government: a single corporate dictator, owner of all.
That's not capitalism anymore. Capitalism only survives, as you observe, by the maintenance of government. Capitalism involves the means of production being controlled by private owners rather than the state; and when you've reached the conclusion of buy-outs down to one, your megacorporation is your government. At that scale, they don't need a military; they'll just cut off the supply chain to yours.
If the EU tips over, the US is going down with it.
Well, really, the problem here is a lack of capitalism. Capitalism handles this quite well: somebody buys all the patents for these emissions technologies, positions themselves as having great emissions, causes the standards to tighten, and licenses the technology to their competitors so they make a fucking mint.
When you don't have regulations--notably, anti-trust regulations--capitalism goes away. Instead of competing, they collude, and they don't bring these technologies forward.
So you see, anti-trust regulations are the great protector of capitalism: they prevent companies from acting against market forces and suppressing the great innovation power of competition. If the government doesn't step in with a hammer and smash this little cabal into its rightful many pieces, then it will sicken and tear down our glorious market system, leading to corporate fascism and dominance by what ultimately becomes a single commercial entity owning everything.
Therefor, by decree of the duly elected representatives of the States of Europe and their sovereign citizens, it is time to kick ass and chew bubblegum.
A Federal comp time policy to prevent uncompensated overtime for salaried workers (you don't get time-and-a-half--that's part of the deal--but you should get that time back as vacation or 1x your hourly rate) would normalize the work schedule.
We can achieve four seven-hour days, either by natural order or by necessary response to a social insurance policy which brings too much economic prosperity in one shot (there are policies that improve our total productivity and reduce economic strain, with the side-effect of causing negative unemployment around -12%). Shortening working hours reduces the amount of tradeable labor and production, which means you're reducing effective demand and thus jobs; it's one way to take advantage of productivity gains.
This was one of my core issues when I ran for Congress this year.
I'm waiting for the future of computing: RISC-V.
Streaming is an interesting technical problem, and not necessarily one worth solving for gaming. They're in the wrong market.
For gaming, streaming is trying to solve enormous problems with decoding highly-compressed video data: you have a description of where visual elements go, and you want to turn that into pixel data. In practice, this is cheap until you hit a point of diminishing returns: even an Intel Core i7 4750K with HD4500 does a pretty good job, and a more-specialized console will trade the expense of an integrated HD4500 for the expense of something slightly better and only slightly more-expensive.
The problem simplifies down to not knowing what video data you're providing ahead of time: you're able to generate positions and lighting elements, so you may only know the exact video data at the moment it's required. At 60fps, that's about 17mS ahead of time. Even at 24fps, you want the image to be newer than 40mS, so the frame rate isn't your actual target but rather your physical maximum latency.
They're trying to solve these by performing positional computations locally, sending those computations far away, performing rendering remotely, then encoding the raster image into a compressed video format, sending that back, decoding the compressed video, and finally displaying it. That's a linear process.
Instead, they could perform the rendering locally, while also providing the positional computations to the remote server. The local and remote engines could use any non-utilized GPU time to derive additional information and derive higher-quality rendering.
For example: you can pre-render lighting, and then calculate shadows and dynamic lighting on surfaces which move relative to the light source. Knowing the illumination and results, you can also compute how to alter these results by general relative position change, and then alter the overlay of lighting, shadow, and reflection, simply adding that to the surfaces or even the rendered output. When the information has changed so much that it's outside of an error bound, you discard it; and you can use extra cycles to start pre-calculating something closer whenever the GPU is idle, avoiding the total discard situation.
With that sort of approach, you can pre-render offsite; or you can drop your quality by a tiny value to free up extra cycles used to maintain artificially-high quality, which may paradoxically give you a better visual experience anyway. Same concept as mip mapping, but a lot more moving parts.
The offsite approach is simply rethinking video rendering: instead of prerendering the whole scene, you're prerendering information about the scene as the scene changes, allowing the local renderer to do less work.
Oddly enough, IBM had published an internal memo that they wanted to hire more younger workers to connect to the younger market base or whatever, and stressed that their older workforce were valuable workers with large amounts of skill and experience they must absolutely retain for strategic purposes.
That suggests IBM would have a strategy of hiring younger workers and passing over older applicants, but not that they should be engaging in rounds of layoffs of their aging workforce. It's still enough to raise some eyebrows ("Don't hire or fire any old people").
You're still thinking vertically: fewer low-end workers and more high-end engineers making the robots who replace them. That thinking is incorrect even in its own sphere: you're not saving any money unless there are fewer engineers and robot maintainers making and maintaining the robots than there are laborers replaced by robots.
Imagine if shoes can suddenly be made with half the labor in total. Not just half as many people sewing them together--maybe that doesn't even happen--but there are fewer people digging out materials, performing chemical synthesis, shipping the materials, etc., and yet more material shows up and more shoes get made. Now you have 40 shoe manufacturers selling everything from high-end athletic shoes to overpriced prestige brands, right down to the cheapest shoes made for the poorest people. They're all competing on price, with the narrowest margins on the commodity goods, the next being functional goods (athletic shoes), and the widest margins on those competing for brand prestige.
Your general consumer isn't a top-10% rich kid, so prices come down about half for shoes. That means what would be $40 shoes are instead $20. That $20 can be spent somewhere else.
The $20 represents all labor invested in all levels of production, plus a profit margin. So does the $40.
Spending this additional $20 necessarily entails creating a need and demand for the same amount of labor displaced. If you decrease the number of people making shoes by 70% (30% still working) and add 20% of the labor cost in machine production and maintenance to get your 50% savings, then buying twice as many shoes will theoretically require employing an additional 30% of your original shoe-making workforce (60% as many low-end workers operating the machines) and 20% in machine manufacture and maintenance.
So there are a few issues with this math.
First, we've only looked at the cost to make the shoes when moving that $20 onto buying new shoes. We're forgetting something: machines, parts, lubrication, and other maintenance bits have to be shipped in. The materials have to be shipped in. The finished shoes have to be shipped out, stocked, and retailed. This is low-end work that balances toward low-end labor, so a bigger portion of the new workforce--whether you're buying shoes or something else--is represented.
If we automate the shipping (self-driving trucks), we still have to load and unload goods. The wooden shipping pallet eliminated 85% of that labor easily along the way; we've still got the labor of loading onto initial pallets even with mechanized transfers of containerized goods; and the small retail center is going to find a need for constant unloading (renting equipment doesn't make sense), while the capital investment in a machine to unload and stock things in a local K-Mart is enormous and underutilized. Not only are humans cheaper for stocking store shelves, but they're better at it and will be so long as planograms are day-to-day dynamic and based on human behavior and critical thinking to compromise on the situation while managing oddly-shaped goods.
The automated shipping is really the biggest part: it's going to be heavy on low-skill automechanics instead of drivers.
There was a time when elevator operator was a skilled job. So was cash register operator. Nowadays we hire 16-year-old high school kids to do oil changes at Jiffy Lube.
So the situation is demonstratably that labor utilization will remain stable because we'll transfer our purchasing power to new goods and services, spreading horizontally. We don't have to worry about an unemployment rate increase.
Geographical structure is likely the bigger one. Everyone likes to lean on retraining and education, which is important; and yet changes like this tend to happen in conjunction with labor force turn-over (college graduation, retirement) simply because turn-over is fast and huge while individual industries and new technologies have small impacts
Of course some industries grow, others shrink, and others appear out of nowhere. They don't always all grow; it depends on if technical progress exceeds consumption.
It's notable that any stock awards are taxed as income at the award price: if Amazon gives him $1M in equity, he pays full income tax on $1M. If it's worth $1.2M later and he sells it, then he pays capital gains on $0.2M of income.
It is infuriatingly-difficult to escape the tax man. This is by design.
I'm not talking about jobs.
This is an English forum, and employment means jobs.
There are more people that work in the agricultural industry doing chemistry, engineering, soil science, marketing, import shipping, just-in-time distribution, etc.
Not really. The engineering, chemistry, marketing, import shipping, and logistics industries are highly-efficient: they devote a fraction of their resources to agriculture, and each person working in those industries is producing outputs for a large span of industries. Only part of a given worker's output is an input to agriculture; and when you combine those fractions, you get strikingly-few workers.
Your strongest connection is the manufacturing behind farm equipment, and even that's not really well-correlated: John Deere supplies the construction industry, the homeowner, the landscaper, and so forth.
Your front-end, on the other hand, is arguably not even part of the industry: shipping, stocking, and selling--truckers and grocery stores--isn't agricultural work, and distribution comes because we've moved from a small farm a cart-ride away to a continental and global industry. You might as well claim polyester clothing manufacture (which uses oil, not cotton or wool) is part of the agricultural industry because people can't go grocery shopping naked.
By the same token, the bakery industry, fabric industry, and meat industry aren't part of the agricultural industry: they take inputs from the agricultural industry (food and fiber). To include marketing and distribution in the agricultural industry is along the same lines, and is collapsing all industries into a single industry of everything made anywhere ever.
Input industries are arguably separate, too. Maybe your travel agency employs system administrators and network engineers; it also buys CISCO gear, and we don't count CISCO router manufacture as part of the travel industry. Counting John Deere as part of the agriculture work industry is even a stretch; agricultural bioengineers might mesh better; and we absolutely count the contractors who fly spray planes over the fields.
So if you use actual economic definitions and standard measures, you're wrong. If you wave a flag of bullshit, you can pretty much justify that pretty much 100% of American workers work in the agricultural industry.
Don't forget Dividends are from corporate profits--they're not deductible--and are taxed at 35% first.
Well, they were before the horrible TCJA.
Actually, with the income the top 1% have divided among the other 99%, you get $135 per person per year. It's not a lot until you start deciding who gets it and who doesn't.
We can build a universal dividend that pays $6,000 per person per year, make Social Security stronger (and solvent), and create a foundation under our welfare system, obliterating all homelessness and hunger almost immediately. That's actually a $300 billion tax cut (2016 model).
It's also not hitting the distribution problem, although it's an important program.
The big secret is the rich haven't been taking all the money; it's been going to the poor. Minimum wage has increased with inflation--that is: more-slowly than productivity gains. That means instead of twice as much bread per mouth, we have twice as much bread and twice as many mouths: we spread the wages around to a poverty class which has become an ever-growing portion of our economy.
You work, you make more per hour of work than workers did 20 years ago, and we pay you enough to buy the same amount that workers 20 years ago could. What about the gains? Well... the gains have spread among the working class... which has gotten bigger, so the amount each person gets hasn't increased by as much as the amount each person produces.
The rich only get like $135 per person. Okay. There are also a lot of not-rich people.
You fix this by tying minimum wage to some correlate of the per-capita GNI--the amount of income earned in total per person. I've proposed 25% of the per-adult GNI--about $10.20/hr in 2018, and just over a third of the per-capita GNI--and it might make sense to approach 33% of the per-adult GNI. My 25% proposal, when you include the Dividend, is equivalent to a single minimum-wage worker earning 45% of the per-capita GNI; but minimum wages drive median household incomes, and a demogrant like the Dividend doesn't.
In other words: you make your labor force grow more-slowly so productivity gains spread among the workers instead of spreading out to a larger (and poorer) workforce.
Oh I know; part of that change is industry dominance as a fraction of total economy, however.
1.2 million agricultural workers, 2008. 856,300 agricultural workers, 2016. Outlook: 0% employment change, 2016-2026, projected to have 400 fewer employed in the industry in 2026 than in 2016.
Total number of employed workers in the United States in 2006 was 145 million, and over 150 million in 2016. Even at a rate of zero additional jobs, farm industry employment is shrinking relative to the economy's total employment growth.
There are more jobs in the United States; there are fewer jobs in the agricultural worker industry. More engineers, chemists, and doctors; fewer people riding tractors.
Agricultural productivity has increased faster than agricultural production. That means for each unit good, we employ fewer labor hours; and the number of unit goods demanded (and produced) has increased at a slower rate. We can make 110% as much per worker-hour, and we buy 105% as much, thus number of employed in the entire industry goes down.
Bad bet. Structure can change--look at farming, which went from 26 million to as low as 2 million over the span of a century. You want to look at the unemployment rate across all industries.
We may invent new industries. We might conceivably alter the manner in which we set wages to slow labor force growth, drive wage compression, and produce a nation of relatively-wealthy workers (the poor are not that poor, even if they're not exactly middle-class).
or reducing the concept of private ownership of capital. Either of those would be a tenuous transition, if for no other reason that people are not used to anything else.
That and because this is a fundamental violation of human rights. The core natural rights are the rights to life, liberty, and property; we cut into property all the time (taxes) because governments take away some natural rights under a social contract to protect other natural rights.
I have proposed the theory that governments must actively seek efficiency: if a government taxes 10% and delivers 5% worth of service, the government is unjustly depriving the governed of 5% of their property. This is a human rights violation; thus governments must expend resources to seek efficiency improvements, as they are bound to provide for the welfare of the people and cannot cut spending by simply cutting service.
By the same token, governments have a duty to create and enforce regulation; yet the unnecessary deprivation of private property is a violation of the social contract. A government may, for example, decide that the businessman and the shareholder are entitled to a fair and reasonable profit by their enterprise; and thus the government may tax corporate profits at higher marginal rates when those profit margins are excessive, reasoning that the businessman and shareholders are not simply reaping the benefits of success, but harming society by exercising their market power to excess and creating unnecessary and unusually-large burdens on the common consumer.
It seems excessive and unwarranted, then, for a government to step in and deprive a person or group of property. By taxing them, we place the property in their trust; by taxing them on excessive profits, we reclaim the wealth taken in violation of that trust. By taking the property they have amassed by their own efforts, cunning, and luck, we simply deprive them unjustly.
Many of your assertions base around the idea that labor will no longer be a thing in the future; if that occurs, then people will come together to produce their own means of production. Governments can use tax money to do so. These means of production are magical sources of infinite free things, in your scenario: once created, no human ever need monitor, fuel, or maintain them. It is a one-time expense, and becomes the property of all without depriving it unjustly from anyone.
Should that not happen, it will be because the same thing that has always happened continues: human labor is marginalized, costs fall, and the productive capacity of human labor increases. There is turmoil and displacement, converging toward the same numerical employment rates; there is not a bleeding of employment until full unemployment and mass poverty set in. (Mass poverty at present is a result of certain defective structural policies.)
This isn't the Industrial Revolution. We've been watching the process of increasing automation for nearly fifty years, and from where I sit, I can see major industrial centers like Detroit basically depopulating.
Well, yes. We don't always create jobs in place; productivity gains come from structural change. That means your farm job goes away and the 300-population small town out west becomes a booming tech megatropolis with 10 million people crammed together in huge apartment complexes.
Detroit didn't depopulate because of lost factory jobs, by the way; it depopulated because the factory jobs moved away. While we have Mexico doing some final assembly, we still employ as many Americans... in the cities surrounding Detroit. The locals of those cities have shorter commutes, and many Detroit workers moved or lost their jobs by some mechanism. Detroit, then, became a collapsed husk.
This is the same as Harley Davidson moving its factory across the country to Pennsylvania. Kansas City is going to lose a huge income inflow, and jobs supported by the spending of now-unemployed factory workers will become unsupportable. A small town in PA will become a booming economy; and people who buy Harleys will spend a little less, since the new factory is closer to the steel mill and the cost of shipping is lower. Not only that, but the new factory uses the latest manufacture processes and technology, so the labor per unit vehicle produced is lower. (That's not the entire factory employment drop: they're also moving some production bound for foreign markets to foreign markets to realize the same efficiency gains and evade Trump tariffs.)
For the moment the system is buoyed by a need for service industry workers, but in part that low unemployment will simply drive automation even faster as businesses give up on finding employees and invest in automation. And then, at some point when unemployment starts to rise those traditional back stops will no longer be there.
A pizza shop needs its input goods (wheat, cheese), its utilities (water, electricity), its mechanism to make pizza (cooks), its mechanism to take orders (cashiers), its mechanism to deliver (drivers), local trucking to deliver its input goods (truckers), people to open and close the store (managers), and its overhead for business operations (inventory, finance, etc.).
Until you eliminate 100% of labor in all of those, pizza stores will employ or cause the employment of somebody. Even self-driving trucks require mechanics. Each step of technology reduces the requirements, which lowers costs. This is, again, structural change: you can buy more pizza--or pizza and other things--and there will be fewer people employed by the same quantity demanded for pizza.
In other words: cheaper goods means more consumption; and the root of all costs is labor--wages paid out of revenues. This balances itself.
Locality does not balance itself. As mentioned above: your town collapses; my town gets all the new jobs; I become rich while you beg for food from neighbors who can't even feed themselves.
Strong social insurances bring things like unemployment insurance, universal healthcare, food and housing assistance, disability assistance, and retirement pensions to these areas. Poverty reduces spending power, which makes it impossible to create jobs (you can't sell things to make revenue to pay workers if your customers are all poor and jobless). Social insurances dump money into those areas, creating an economic stimulus to create jobs.
Means-tested welfares generally cut out as people become employed. This happens too early, cutting off the support for jobs before the economy begins demanding higher-income and broader-reaching jobs. That means you don't couple with the economies around your blown-out factory town, and then you end up with no support when welfare goes away.
Traditionally, we've solved this w