The problem is any set of random data generated *right* *now* has a pattern. If you know something about that pattern, you can limit the amount of entropy someone could possibly derive from a random number source.
The point was people are talking about PRNGs (guaranteed known distribution, can mimic high-quality random data, can provide cryptographic security e.g. in a key scheduling algorithm) or noise-based RNGs (unknown distribution, often provide poor-quality random data, can be influenced by other operations inside the machine). Noise-based RNGs aren't magically high-quality, flat-distribution, unpredictable number sources; they can be the worst random number sources available.
To effectively exploit the unifying em bias of the device, you would need to know very specific features of the device, and how ambient signals interact with it to shape the distributions, THEN introduce very strong EM signals to the system to get the predictable patterns needed to assault the resulting encryption based on those distributions.
You'd only have to know about the particular hardware (e.g. a built-in RNG on a particular Intel board) to know about the RNG's biases. If you know it spikes around a certain cluster thanks to interference by the CPU and memory bus hardware (digital clocking), you can shave a few bits off the entropy. In the most extreme case, you could *theoretically* predict the impact of EMI generated by the computer algorithm doing the key scheduling (which necessarily happens during the request for random data) and provide a higher-probability target area (ranges of likely values); most such malarkey has focused on recovering encryption keys by measuring the timing of data writes or I/O or CPU scheduling to identify how much time the encryption routines are taking on each piece of data, and use that to compute what the key might be.
Breaking encryption isn't all about turning a 128-bit RC4 key into a 0-bit NULL key; AES is considered broken because you can get it down to some 126 bits of entropy, and RC4 was considered broken beyond usability when its entropy was still in the triple-digits.
Given that there are fewer and fewer jobs in farming and manufacturing (due to big technology advances)
Yeah, there's this chart, and it looks startlingly familiar if you were around circa 1840-1920 with factories replacing good old American farming.
The overall improvements in the past do not guarantee the same in the future and I'm sure that you're aware of the fact that the golden era of productivity increase is over.
We are not The Enlightened, and we do not have the end-all of all technology. We can manufacture gold from lead, but it's more expensive than digging it out of the ground; we make cesium and molybdenum by converting other elements using what's essentially a coat hanger stuffed in a glass jar. When our energy-production technology improves (e.g. more efficient nuclear, space solar, or quantum tunneling junctions used for geothermal energy production at 55% efficiency), the labor cost of creating gold from base matter will move downward toward the labor cost of digging it out of the ground. A dyson sphere would quickly make all material concerns moot, but there's no way we're building one in the foreseeable future--it's economically and technologically unfeasible.
Given that there are fewer and fewer jobs in farming and manufacturing (due to big technology advances) and that the service economy is not working for the large majority of our co-nationals (exactly because there is no intrinsic technology innovation solving their issues), I agree 100% with your sig.
Any form of basic income relies on productivity and production. All taxes take a percentage of the total income for a period, which represents the total production for that period. That is to say: all income (business and personal) represents everything produced and sold (even strategic reserves get turned over--their sale is *delayed*--and things produced and ultimately unsold represent a waste cost contributing zero productivity), and we take a portion of that wealth in the form of a portion of the money paid for it. A Basic Income levies a tax to capture a proportion of that wealth and redistribute it to provide everyone with a minimum standard of living (i.e. the capability to buy a minimum amount of stuff).
A Citizen's Dividend as I describe is essentially the pure form: I levy a flat income tax on all income to fund the Dividend, thus directly and stably collecting a percentage of the per-capita income (or GDP or whatever measure you want to use). If you require 1/n of the per-capita income to live at the intended minimum standard-of-living, then the percentage is 1/n--in 2013, that's 17%; in 1950, it's 32% and doesn't fucking work. This dedicated tax operates alongside a general fund tax: I slash the tax brackets so the rich are paying 26% instead of 39.6% (hence the disconcerting 43% upper tax bracket), and the rest of the classes down are paying something equal to or less than their current tax bracket minus 17%, thus retaining a progressive tax system.
If the economy collapses because we have tons of people but no jobs for them, the percentage required becomes *extremely* high. The amount of income is only what the employed labor force makes: 17% of the total income of 64% of the population (that's the 68% labor force minus UE4) can pay for 74% of the population (all adults), plus 1.4% for family welfare (children, from the general fund, on a sharply-reduced public aid system); but if it's only 32% employed, you need a 34% dividend tax, plus you have a *lot* more children needing welfare (bump that figure about 7-10 times--maybe 8% to 14%), plus you need to pretty much double the government's general fund taxes to keep shi
You're right, I was looking at the 55 inch that are $2,999. LG 4K OLED TVs. To be fair, they were over $5,000 last year; and the 65 inch TVs will hit LCD prices eventually, once we have a low-labor, high-yield process that spits out perfect 65-inch panel regions without having to pay a bunch of engineers thousands of dollars along the way just to get one made.
Just as Margaret Thatcher said about socialism in general, this socialistic "Citizen's Dividend/UBI" is/are great until you run out of other people's money
It's 17% and never raised. The proportional cost of goods constantly decreases with technological growth: the average family spent 1/3 of their income on food in 1950, 13% in 2003, and 11.5% in 2010; clothing fell from 12% in 1950 to 3.5% in 2010; and the same amount of money buys 2.7 times as much housing square footage in 2010 compared to 1950 (even in 2003 it's 2.3x: 28% of income for 983sft on a 30 year mortgage versus 33% of income on 2,300sqft for a 30 year mortgage).
In 1950, the cost of a Citizen's Dividend would have been an extra 32% on everyone's taxes; while our public aid system (including Social Security OASDI) totaled 1.3% of everyone's taxable income (AGI). In 2013, the cost of a Citizen's Dividend was 17.0%, while the Public Aid system cost 17.2% despite being hardly functional.
It also falls into the "broken window fallacy" category.
The broken window fallacy suggests paying people to do useless work will create wealth by the mechanism of moving money. That's broken because it reduces consumer spending power for no real return. In the same way, if you add useless people to a production process (or dangle bureaucrats doing nothing into jobs which produce nothing), the cost of the product increases (have to pay those wages) while the amount of stuff made doesn't. That reduces productive output, making us all poorer (the total income buys less stuff).
Similarly, raising wages and applying payroll taxes increases the direct cost of labor: wage-labor costs to produce products go up with wages and taxes as well as with labor time, and so the price of those products must increase. Thus minimum wages have a cost which we can project in number of lost jobs.
A Citizen's Dividend, on the other hand, moves that cost onto profits and income. The Citizen's Dividend as I've described provides a non-wage income rather than a wage increase as a minimum standard-of-living *and* a social safety net. This means you don't pay to have employees work and *possibly* make a profit; instead, you pay taxes on such a profit. If you take risks which don't pan out, you don't pay extra for having hired people to take those risks, and thus you can charge lower prices for your goods.
This is analogous to the broken window fallacy in that the risk created by high wage-labor costs (wages, benefits, and payroll taxes) is the broken window: you pay these costs regardless, even if you manage to make nothing useful. By reducing that risk, we break fewer windows.
The end result of my Citizen's Dividend is a reduction of business income taxes from 39.6% (2013; it's now 40%) to 35.1%; a reduction of payroll taxes by 6.2% (OASDI; medicare stays); a reduction of taxes on employee income such that an employee being paid $80,000/year is actually taking home slightly more than $80,000/year (i.e. has effective negative tax rate), with a break-even point of $625,000/year (someone making 2/3 of a million dollars is paying the same amount of taxes); and a moderate increase at the top bracket from 39.6% to just under 43%.
We can adjust that last tax raise by mucking about with the business and middle-class tax advantages, although the end result designed in the middle class make a good target. With the increased buying power and more stable job cycle, businesses can take bigger risks, driving technological innovation. With faster technological growth comes faster wealth growth; wealth growth of 8.5% would make rich people paying 43% just as rich as their predecessors who were paying 39.6%, but that inevitability won't happen because the technological growth will also reduce the cost of government services, thus allowing a reduction in taxes to stabilize us back to ~40% on that top bracket.
That gives you three strategies: shock tax raise on the rich an
Machine costs are about the same in China, i.e. a CNC machine and electricity cost the same in China as they do in Switzerland.
This will only differ if the machines aren't already present: installing a new machine is going to cost more than using what's available.
If your process is highly automated, making it in China won't save any money once you factor in the additional overhead to coordinate manufacturing and to ensure quality standards are met.
The Chinese manufacturing base has a *lot* more experience hitting consistent quality standards. If you want it made cheap, you want it made in China. Americans can't shave off 15% of the cost by shaving 15% of the quality; they'll get some ham-fisted attempt at cutting corners with an axe, while the Chinese will file those corners off with precision and skill.
As for "quality" it starts with quality technical documentation, choosing the correct manufacturing processes, process stability, and the quality-control mechanisms.
All of which varies greatly depending on your quality standards. Quality is only the degree to which a deliverable fulfills requirements, so you can kind of claim cheaply-made goods are high-quality goods; in any case, if you want the goods made to a *specific* set of requirements, you're looking at a higher demand on your process stability and quality control mechanisms, as you say.
For example: all the cell phones I've looked at recently use OLED rather than LCD, and they cost no more than an LCD-bearing phone; yet a 65 inch OLED TV costs $3,000. Why? It's not because they're shiny and new and we can price gouge consumers (although that *is* a market behavior). It's easy to produce a ginormous sheet of OLED; with a few defects here and there, you just cut out little phone-sized rectangles and move on with your day. If you want a 65 inch diagonal wide-screen OLED, you need to use a different process, with different quality control mechanisms, and with a lot more time invested and more labor cost. It happens to cost a *hell* of a lot more to make a defect-free 65 inch diagonal than it does to make a 65 inch diagonal with several dozen dead pixels and cut out 95% or more of the area for cell phone screens.
If you're *really* familiar with thin-film display manufacture--if your business has spent the last 40 years making LCD screens and has been in OLED R&D since it first showed up around the mid 2000s (OLED process is *very* similar to LCD)--you're more likely to have the organizational knowledge to tweak your manufacture process toward an acceptable sheet of phone-screen, running bare minimum costs and producing a highly-usable product with zero waste. You can also produce the super-expensive big-screen panels more cheaply than the next guy; that's not the point. The point is the next rookie manufacturer who tries to get a low-quality sheet to make phone screens out of the good bits will throw away 40% of the surface due to his dozens of dead pixels being scattered all over the place, or due to his process being more faulty and producing *lots* of dead pixels unless he sinks more cost.
That was my point: The Chinese are better at manufacture. Manufacture isn't "Cheaper in China", or even just "already there"; they are actually skilled at hitting quality targets--low or high. We buy cheap shit from them because they can make cheap shit at a reliable quality level for a low cost, rather than sinking excessive costs just to hold quality stable while cutting so many corners. They got that way from selling manufacture services all over the world for decades.
The problem is all costs are labor. The machines are made by people (labor) using machines (recursion) fueled by energy produced by people (labor). Those machines are then operated by people (labor), using fuel produced by people (labor) using other machines (turtles all the way down).
In the end, you can take all business input costs (accounting), shift the labor costs (economics) to the bottom, and find an aggregate cost (economics) and price (economics). When you have tall stacks of production, the price shrinks toward that total cost: GM has steelmakers bid for steel, and those steelmakers slim their margins toward their costs (accounting); the steelmakers go to the coal makers and the steel miners and offer a contract contingent on winning the GM bid for steel, and the coal and steel ore producers slim their margins toward their costs (accounting); thus the contract price moves toward the aggregate labor cost (economics) as the profit margins at each level get squeezed down. Your absolute limit is the aggregate of all labor.
Oh god this is cringeworthy. The same terms are re-used in 6 different fields to mean 14 different things depending on concept being discussed. You might need to reread that paragraph a few times.
Anyway, the point is raising costs raises prices, which reduces consumer buying power. Raising wages raises costs, and that means those consumers subject to the wage increase have more buying power; however, it tends to reduce the total buying power of *all* consumers in aggregate. Reducing that total buying power reduces the amount of stuff that can be bought, which reduces jobs, creating (permanent) unemployment (for a very loose definition of permanent: technological progress creates *transitional* unemployment until the newly-retained consumer buying power moves toward new products; simply reducing consumer buying power permanently removes that particular support, and other factors can change and undo that).
So you have a conflict: you need things like welfare, you need things like a minimum standard of living, you need these services; and providing those services cuts into consumer buying power. Welfare is, by nature, inefficient: you're paying someone to do nothing, so you have an intermediary who is inefficient (each cycle of purchasing includes purchasing nothing, so you have to add that labor cost to the total *and* add zero wealth for it); yet it is also stabilizing (consumers dropping in and out of the economy become a fixed cost, and your labor force stays healthy). Minimum wages are less inefficient, but do create unemployment; and a baseline standard of living must exist, so you make that trade-off. This is what you must balance.
This is why I've determined minimum wages outdated. Our society is wealthy enough now that our public aid system is less-efficient and less-effective than a Citizen's Dividend (a type of UBI in which we cut out the general fund taxes for public aid and replace them with a flat 17% tax, which gets paid out to every adult as an even, untaxed monthly deposit). This provides the basic standard-of-living a minimum wage tries to supply, and it does so without incurring a cost of employment (employers don't pay that proportion of your income). I'm essentially increasing the take-home wage relative to the wage-labor cost: for every $1 your employer pays to employ you, you take home more under a Dividend than you do under the current system. As you can see, that avoids the entire set of conflicts above (notably, it puts a cost on success--profits and income--rather than attempt--wages and payroll tax; the savings comes from reducing business risk, creating a type of financial efficiency).
The 1% don't care, they don't have anything to lose by living in a third world nation because their wealth becomes all the more valuable relatively speaking.
This simply isn't true. Let's look at two effects of the system I proposed.
China has 4 people for every 1 in the US. That means all other things being equal, labor costs in China will be 1/4 that in the US on average.
That is not technically possible if a Chinese person needs more than 1/4 the wages to survive. That is to say: if you have to pay the Chinaman 1/2 as much as a U.S. worker in order for him to eat and have shelter, then it doesn't matter if you have 90 times as many workers; the cost is still going to be 1/2 as much, because you have to feed your damned work force, and that's how much it costs.
Chinese labor estimate is $3.50, versus $8.25 minimum wage in my state and $7.25 minimum wage United States federal. It turns out China isn't 4 times as good at making food as the US.
I'm living at a higher standard of living than my parents. My parents own three houses; I am more effective with my finances.
Even normalizing that out, the cars available to me cost the same as they did in the 70s (the median new car purchase was 56% of the median income; that number is surprisingly rigid), and their cars didn't have standard air conditioning (available in 1/3 of all new cars!), standard radio (60%!), four-wheel anti-lock disc brakes, independent suspension on all four wheels, high gas mileage, electronic stability control, satellite navigation built-in, six CD changer, bluetooth radio hooked up to Spotify, satellite radio, moon roof, and all the other bullshit you get in a mid-grade consumer car.
A cell phone cost $4,000 in 1983 (2010 dollars: over $9,000), and service was $50/month at 42 cents per minute talk time. Talking 2 hours per week, you'd pay what adjusts to $550/month in 2010 dollars. Today I have a $350 OnePlus One smart phone with an OLED touch screen, two cameras(!), $60/month mobile service, video and picture messaging, unlimited talk and mms, roll-over 2GB/month data, and 13GB of data banked even though I stream Spotify all the fucking time (to and from work, half-hour; plus whenever I go out to drive). I was eating some 300-500GB/month with Spotify, e-mail, mint.com, and so forth on my phone before I just paid into Spotify Premium, which lets me skip songs at will, and also let me keep my main playlists stored on my phone (cuts back my data usage). I was *never* going to utilize the full $60 worth of service I bought; I could probably switch to Ting for cheaper.
Food cost the average American family 30% of their income in 1950, and 13% in 2003, and 11.5% in 2010. Clothing has fallen from 12% to 4%. People today are spending their additional money (you know, from not spending it all on food) to buy more and better healthcare, and so are... not living healthier, but living with more doctor's visits and more treatment and vaccination and BASIC FUCKING HEALTHCARE than their parents.
We're spending 40% of our income on non-essential consumption, and another 5% on what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls "entertainment". Instead of spending 28% of our income on houses in 1950 (983sqft new single-family home average), we spent 33% of our income on our houses in 2003 (2,300sqft new single-family home average); we're buying 2.3 times the house for less than 1.2% of the money--housing is nearly half as expensive as it was for our parents. Even rental properties have gotten bigger *much* faster than they've gotten more expensive.
What lower standard of living?... oh, are you not in the United States?
To be fair, ITT is *really* good at churning out IT professionals. Most project managers are bad at communicating with outside culture laborers, so they have a hard time operating with the Chinese or, especially, the Indians.
Chinese (and asians in general) have strong hierarchical cultures: when someone asks you if you can get something done in a week, you say *yes*. Arguing the point is burned out of these people, and they have as hard a hard time adjusting to it as you would if you went to e.g. Japan and saw 23-year-old college guys hitting heavy on 14-year-old high school girls and discovered it's just the way they behave there (most Americans are freaked out about 4-year-old children riding the train all over the god damn archipelago BY THEMSELVES, much less how sexual some cultures will get with middle-teens). This means you have to modify your approach and learn to read subtle cues, and you have to manipulate the power structure: if you think you're seeing a cue for someone just agreeing with you because you're the superior, you need to somehow pass the responsibility of modifying that particular decision to them, and divest yourself of any intentions on the outcome, or else they'll try to judge what you want and expect and provide it.
This happens as well with the Indians. I've worked with looser Indian programmers, and they're quite happy to work to understand what they're supposed to do and then apply their skills to the limit--which, as with Americans, can be a shallow or significantly profound limit. I've also worked with Indian programmers who are trying to not ask a lot of questions and follow instructions to hardly-analyzed precision: they don't try to judge your intention, but only your *instruction*; the results are always bad.
These people are technically-competent--as much as anyone else, which is to say it varies out to extremes--and seriously mismatched to American professional behavior. You have to work with them as is proper in a cross-cultural professional relationship to drive them effectively, and you *really* want to use that position to develop them so they can operate in multiple cultural contexts (improvement of human resources is part of a project manager's job--it's part of a knowledge area called "Human Resources Management"). If you can't figure that much out, you're gonna have a bad time.
Actually, the Chinese are better at efficient manufacture. A *lot* better. Expensive Made-in-USA manufacture cannot compete on quality with much-less-expensive Made-in-China manufacture; and the MiC stuff can go down to low-cost, low-quality-requirements (low acceptance criteria) manufacture to a ridiculous degree. When the Chinese make something light-duty, it's light-duty; when the Americans make something approaching light-duty, it's possibly not even fucking functional, at random, so buy six and hope for the best.
We do sometimes ask the Chinese to make a tool-shaped object that doesn't work at all, and they do exactly that: they send us garbage; to be fair, though, those soft-steel adjustable wrenches might strip on metal bolts, but they'll actually *work* if you're assembling hardware made of or coated with ABS plastic. Let's not forget both the Husky socket set (which stands up to god damn anything) and the one you bought for $10 at a gas station (which bent and stripped the first time you used it on metal bolts) are made in China.
The trick is to show that to the businesses who make the decisions
Consumers. We're also the ones who make the jobs by buying shit until we run out of spending power. That's one of the reasons the Chinese import system has worked so well for America: we buy a ton of crap, so we need a lot of retail workers, truck drivers (trans-continental shipping), advertisers, warehouse operators, and logistics people (the high-level managers deciding what products need stocking where, how much, and when to move it around). If we kicked China off and went to American manufacture, we'd have to cut back our IT and business services and even our healthcare (nobody could afford it--we buy more healthcare now than we did 20 years ago), and we'd have to shed 15-40 million American jobs (there wouldn't be consumer purchasing power to support them).
Don't underestimate a comparative trade advantage.
I went the other way. What's with the "which is absolutely sickening" line? They're talking about murdering people. Murder is a thing. It's murder; it's not special. Brown people in Uganda get murdered. White people get murdered trying to drive through gang neighborhoods at night. Black people get murdered trying to walk through East Texas during the day. What's so special about rich people that we're supposed to feel more or less disturbed that people want to murder them?
Regarding the first point, layoffs are happening even at companies posting profits,
I was unclear: I meant "They" as in the employees. If laying off an employee reduces your net profit, you don't do it. Someone had asserted that companies were laying off employees out of spite or some shit, as if they made $10 million in profits and then fired a bunch of people so they could make $8 million instead.
How much is the buying power of the newly laid-off people?
So we invented new technology in agriculture. Agricultural workers make up 2% of America's workforce (it was over 60% in 1900). This new technology reduces the number of Ag workers required by 5%; and the number of people required to provide supporting infrastructure (production, maintenance, fuel, etc.) for this technology is equivalent to 2% of our agricultural workforce. That means we just laid off a net 3% of America's agricultural workforce, or 3% of 2% of the workforce, or 0.06%.
Because 3% less labor goes into food, food is 3% cheaper. 99.94% of Americans, on average spending 11.5% of their income on food, now spend 11.155% of their income on food, and have 0.345% of their income as unspent income. This gives American's total consumer base 100.285% as much buying power--that includes the 99.94% who have 100.345% as much buying power and the 0.06% who have 0% as much buying power.
With this increase in buying power, most Americans buy more stuff. To make this additional stuff, to ship it, to market it, to sell it... all of that requires labor somewhere--if it didn't it'd be free plus margin, and any cost above pennies would be easily undercut by a new competitor magicking up the product for free. In essence, it either requires labor or you're trying to sell bottled outside air (which you can sell for the cost of the bottle).
That's how those lost jobs get replaced. Because of inflation, it's not dollar-for-dollar more buying power; that's never going to be a thing. Per proportion of *all* *income*, however, the buying power is greater: if your personal income is 1/180,000,000th of the total income in the United States, that 1/180Mth is now buying more stuff--it's also probably a higher number of absolute dollars, due to never-ending inflation (this is NOT a bad thing, unless it's fast inflation).
In the end, with the same number of people working the same number of hours, more stuff is made. 100% of all the money buys, in our example, 100.345% as much stuff. That means everyone can be a bit richer. It also means the rich can be 0.450% richer and the middle-class and poor can be 0.200% richer--that's how you get an ever-growing income gap even as the poor and middle-class get richer, lead more stable lives, get access to more and better healthcare, and load up on what used to be rich-people luxuries all while lagging behind the hyper-rich forever. This income gap is a huge boon: if you set the top income tax bracket higher than the effective flat tax rate, you can continuously lower the income taxes on the middle and lower classes, increasing consumer buying power and strengthening (stabilizing) the job market.
If you don't believe that, trace all of economic history. Why was agriculture such a huge step forward for mankind? Why did clothing used to require 479 labor-hours for a shirt (at $8.25 minimum wage, $4,000), but now costs $15? Why do developed countries have far fewer agricultural workers per output of food, and why is their food cheaper? How does the shrinking proportion of agricultural workers relate to the shrinking cost of food--43% of the median family's income in 1900, 30% in 1950, 13% in 2003, and 11.5% in 2010? Why do new technologies come out expensive as hell, but then become cheap; what happens during their lifecycle?
These aren't just patterns I noticed; the whole concept of technical growth is foundational to modern economics. The Solow-Swan model attempts to measure economic growth in terms
I stopped reading after you made the claim that people making more money will be able to afford fewer products
I said in an economy where a certain small class of people are making more money, the cost of products they produce increases, causing the buying power of others in the economy to decrease; and that, in cases in particular, this means a total population-wide reduction in buying power.
In other words: I claimed part of the poor class becomes elite-class poor people who get richer, and the other part of the poor class becomes poverty-class poor people who become poorer (via unemployment).
Your distorted interpretation of "people with more money will be able to buy less" is a ridiculous straw man. Be more stealthy at least.
Cost of labor is only a small part of most products cost to produce.
Cost of labor is 100% of what *everything* costs to produce. There is no other cost.
if your ideas are truly novel and compelling, someone of influence will notice them and propagate them
You know how there's a branch of computer science called Computer Security, and another called Computer Insecurity? I *might* be doing the same with economics.
Modern economics is about measuring economies: how did the GDP change this year? How much of our growth is from people making babies (thus more consumers, and more people to do the jobs, and so we scale), and how much is from technological growth (eliminating jobs without reducing production)? If we raise the minimum wage to $15, how much more consumer buying power does that generate, what strain does it create, and how many jobs does it provide or eliminate?
In other words: there's a lot of math. There are a lot of numbers and a lot of predictors, and the large theory tries to claim that for some unknowable set of numbers, you can compute the behavioral output of the economy.
I've kind of thrown all that away and gone for mechanism. I have a lot of "conditions converge upon an outcome in which..." going on. For example: technological growth (well-accepted, see modern Solow-Swan analysis) increases the output per labor-hour, meaning more stuff is available per person. I've extended this to suggest that a very un-wealthy society can't have a large income gap or lots and lots of rich people (i.e. the rich can't have 6,000 times more than the poor); and, as well, taken it to the logical conclusion that a very poor society can't have welfare (the amount you'd need to take from each person to support the few in need would cripple everyone), while a moderately-wealthy society can have specific types of public aid, and highly-wealthy societies can have bigger government services and things like Universal Basic Income. I directly measured that in the United States across the past 60 years, but there are no rules about it: it depends entirely on the cost of provided services as a percentage of income, which is basically saying nothing, since those costs depend on a hell of a lot of other economic factors (including the specific technological growth level of each step of the production process for each basic need).
The problem in writing up something big and complex is it's a lot of work, and you only get to cite yourself when making claims. Even doing it requires a lot of time and research, and it's a multi-disciplinary undertaking: you have to organize the paper, write with good prose, and even be persuasive. Science has a political component in that scientific consensus will pass you right over if your argument doesn't make them feel good, and will sit with you even if you spout ludicrous bullshit but make it *sound* compelling. While these things don't endure the rigors of peer review forever, they've been shown to hold off criticism for several decades. I've been diverting all of that effort to trying to learn to program, and learning other languages, and otherwise amusing myself; maybe I'm lazy.
I really did mean it when I said there's no such thing as a complete theory. We're even discovering new properties of glass and refining new types of glass today (borosilicate glass is fucking fantastic; our new toy in the past decade or so has been alluminate glass--aluminum oxide as a transparent ceramic). Nobody--least of all me--is going to crack economics in one go. Even then, the theories to measure economies are useful; they're not the best thing in the world when designing economic *policy*, which is why I abandoned modern economic theory in favor of something more abstract. Measuring technological growth separate from population growth doesn't tell you whether raising minimum wage is a bad thing, or suggest if sales taxes are going to kill jobs, or help you understand how to approach upcoming technological revolutions like self-driving cars and high automation. We need an evidence-based theory of economic behavior.
You mean corporations keep people employed when they don't make a profit, and lay off people who produce a profit for the business even though this means they'll be made poorer?
Maybe the last one (if you swap it) may make any sense.
The last two are kind of tandem. To produce a new product, you need consumer buying power. You don't go out and say, "I have invented SMART PHONES! Buy them!" and consumers just buy them. Either the consumer stops buying something else (and some people over there lose their jobs) or the consumer had a wad of cash unspent and now spends that.
For the consumer to get an additional wad of cash, the things he buys have to cost less than his income. As product costs are from labor, the lowest price is dictated by the lowest labor costs. By reducing labor time, you lower these costs--and create unemployment. The consumer is paying fewer wages, and buying the same amount of stuff; then he has additional money to buy new things.
None of this works if you examine one company and one person's income and disconnect the two. That is to say: if you assume a business acts in a bubble, that jobs are created by businesses, and that consumer income comes out of a magical hole disconnected from the magical hole consumers shovel their wages into when they buy shit, none of the stuff I said makes any sense. If you've connected the selling of a product to the buying of a product, and the wages of a worker to the income from the selling of a product, all the stuff I've said makes sense. Most people aren't really putting all the blocks together; they have a blue lego and a red lego and are screaming something about how they're supposed to be a tower, but they haven't plugged them together to build said tower.
Solow would be closer than Keynes. Keynes suggests the Government should spend more and tax less in hard economic times; I'm talking about economics in a general sense, which includes fair-weather markets as well as foul, rather than Keynesian "what do we do to fix our now-broken economy?" approach to economic downturns.
You're also making an emotional appeal talking about "how people live", rather than "how economies function."
In India, circa 1970, they were producing 2 tonnes of rice per hectare at cost of $550/tonne. With inflation, that's over $3,000/tonne in 2000; however, in the year 2000, they were producing 6 tonnes of rice per hectare at a cost of under $200/tonne. This happened via an increase in technological development of Indian agricultural practice. The same happened in America, where circa 1900 around 60% of Americans were agricultural workers, while in 2010 around 2% are agricultural workers *and* they produce food, fiber (clothing feed stock), and biofuel feed stock, with 50% of their output exported. The displaced farmers first fed the labor force of the manufacture industry; now the proportion of Americans working in manufacture is dropping (the total number is increasing), diverting to IT services, retail services, and healthcare services.
In other words: both India and America are doing exactly what I described. They always have. That's why Americans in 1950 spent 30% of their income on food and 13% on clothing, while in 2010 they spend 11.5% of their income on food and 4% on clothing. In India, rice hits store shelves for 6% of its 1970 price, adjusted for inflation. Indians, like Americans are providing more tech services and even manufacture services, where 40 years ago these people would have been obligate farmers.
So... I've looked at India and how people live in India. India was part of my initial research which lead me to the conclusions I've drawn. What's your point?
Are you going to take an actual position on economics, or just claim that I'm wrong and offer no counter-arguments of your own?
It's more abstract than that. Not exactly a false analogy, but not quite straight on.
People are all invested in trickle-down economics: money is economy, and the jobs come from businesses or from your hard-work. In other words: either a business sells something or a person gets themselves a job; the rich are greedy and the poor are lazy. This leads them to the belief that higher wages are paid by businesses.
The truth is wages are paid by consumers. Consumers spend their income on goods until they run out of spendable income (any taxes or desire to save money reduces this spendable income). The wage-labor cost of a good is the roll-up of all labor time invested in that good at the price of that labor; that price includes things like benefits and (importantly) payroll taxes. When you put the wage-labor cost together, that's your minimum price: no amount of volume purchase deals, corporate agreements, market competition, or other profit-margin-trimming activity will push the on-the-shelf price of that product below those costs. In short: You have to price your product high enough to pay the wages associated with each unit.
Higher product prices mean consumers have less buying power: their spendable income buys fewer things. Fewer things means fewer jobs to make those things.
Slower recovery isn't about burger flippers. It's about replacing 100,000 people with machines, waiting a while for the market to somehow drag prices down, and then trying to re-employ those 100,000 people. With higher wages, the amount of unspent consumer buying power required to create 100,000 replacement jobs is higher; and the time required for the reduction in wage-labor costs (by using machines which incur total wage-labor costs below the wage-labor cost of the old method) to pad out the consumer's pocket so far increases, simply because "so far" is a bigger number and the rate at which you approach that number isn't bigger.
In wage-driven technological unemployment, the wage worker costs less than the machine *until* wages are raised. For example: $8/hr human, $11/hr machine, minimum wage raised to $13/hr. You've just raised wages to $11/hr, unemployed a bunch of people who were making $13/hr, and now you're waiting for the price gap to close on an $11/hr wage basis. Problem: the people you just unemployed were making $8/hr, and recovery of their jobs requires reaching a point where consumers have the money left over to buy into things which require those $8/hr jobs; all the current products are based on $11/hr wage-labor costs, and employment is based on $13/hr wages, so your economy's going to need a *long* time to re-employ that displaced labor force.
This is all swept up in a complex system where the above basically amounts to "some number of people are now unsustainable," while technological growth (without these kinds of wage raises) tends to *increase* the sustainable population, and also leads to a larger middle- and upper-class population. That means an economy can recover from the above--the Industrial Revolution took around a century to recover from its extremely-high unemployment, though, so what kind of victory do you want?
There's a different model we saw in the information age: rather than moving linear labor (2x the product means 2x the labor) to machines, we moved superlinear labor to machines (2x the product means 3x or 5x or 10x the human labor). Computers made a huge array of products and services possible, creating opportunities for new, low-cost consumer goods. That caused massive technological growth and a large downward movement of income into a growing middle class and an enriched lower class. If you're replacing McDonalds burger flippers, you're not eliminating a growth bottleneck, and that kind of growth won't follow.
It's damned easy to find a job when you're only asking for $3/hr; and it's easy to sell a product to consumers when you only have to pay your workers $3/hr. Conversely, it's really hard to find jobs and make produ
Please don't have this discussion. People discussing economics online overloads my circuits. It's cringeworthy. Folks tell me I need to not worry about idiots, but then you see people raising minimum wages and all this economic fall-out and the slow recovery *because* of the higher wages, while people ignore newer-style policies which accomplish more, create more jobs, and actually reduce poverty, and you can't really pretend the loud voice of people who don't know what in the fuck they're babbling about isn't destroying the world around you.
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The problem is any set of random data generated *right* *now* has a pattern. If you know something about that pattern, you can limit the amount of entropy someone could possibly derive from a random number source.
The point was people are talking about PRNGs (guaranteed known distribution, can mimic high-quality random data, can provide cryptographic security e.g. in a key scheduling algorithm) or noise-based RNGs (unknown distribution, often provide poor-quality random data, can be influenced by other operations inside the machine). Noise-based RNGs aren't magically high-quality, flat-distribution, unpredictable number sources; they can be the worst random number sources available.
To effectively exploit the unifying em bias of the device, you would need to know very specific features of the device, and how ambient signals interact with it to shape the distributions, THEN introduce very strong EM signals to the system to get the predictable patterns needed to assault the resulting encryption based on those distributions.
You'd only have to know about the particular hardware (e.g. a built-in RNG on a particular Intel board) to know about the RNG's biases. If you know it spikes around a certain cluster thanks to interference by the CPU and memory bus hardware (digital clocking), you can shave a few bits off the entropy. In the most extreme case, you could *theoretically* predict the impact of EMI generated by the computer algorithm doing the key scheduling (which necessarily happens during the request for random data) and provide a higher-probability target area (ranges of likely values); most such malarkey has focused on recovering encryption keys by measuring the timing of data writes or I/O or CPU scheduling to identify how much time the encryption routines are taking on each piece of data, and use that to compute what the key might be.
Breaking encryption isn't all about turning a 128-bit RC4 key into a 0-bit NULL key; AES is considered broken because you can get it down to some 126 bits of entropy, and RC4 was considered broken beyond usability when its entropy was still in the triple-digits.
All those white noise sources are affected by radio signals from the outside and EMR from digital processing circuits on the same board.
You have zero points to argue, and just go "nuh-uh". I think my argument is stronger, since it has actual substance.
Given that there are fewer and fewer jobs in farming and manufacturing (due to big technology advances)
Yeah, there's this chart, and it looks startlingly familiar if you were around circa 1840-1920 with factories replacing good old American farming.
The overall improvements in the past do not guarantee the same in the future and I'm sure that you're aware of the fact that the golden era of productivity increase is over.
We are not The Enlightened, and we do not have the end-all of all technology. We can manufacture gold from lead, but it's more expensive than digging it out of the ground; we make cesium and molybdenum by converting other elements using what's essentially a coat hanger stuffed in a glass jar. When our energy-production technology improves (e.g. more efficient nuclear, space solar, or quantum tunneling junctions used for geothermal energy production at 55% efficiency), the labor cost of creating gold from base matter will move downward toward the labor cost of digging it out of the ground. A dyson sphere would quickly make all material concerns moot, but there's no way we're building one in the foreseeable future--it's economically and technologically unfeasible.
Given that there are fewer and fewer jobs in farming and manufacturing (due to big technology advances) and that the service economy is not working for the large majority of our co-nationals (exactly because there is no intrinsic technology innovation solving their issues), I agree 100% with your sig.
Any form of basic income relies on productivity and production. All taxes take a percentage of the total income for a period, which represents the total production for that period. That is to say: all income (business and personal) represents everything produced and sold (even strategic reserves get turned over--their sale is *delayed*--and things produced and ultimately unsold represent a waste cost contributing zero productivity), and we take a portion of that wealth in the form of a portion of the money paid for it. A Basic Income levies a tax to capture a proportion of that wealth and redistribute it to provide everyone with a minimum standard of living (i.e. the capability to buy a minimum amount of stuff).
A Citizen's Dividend as I describe is essentially the pure form: I levy a flat income tax on all income to fund the Dividend, thus directly and stably collecting a percentage of the per-capita income (or GDP or whatever measure you want to use). If you require 1/n of the per-capita income to live at the intended minimum standard-of-living, then the percentage is 1/n--in 2013, that's 17%; in 1950, it's 32% and doesn't fucking work. This dedicated tax operates alongside a general fund tax: I slash the tax brackets so the rich are paying 26% instead of 39.6% (hence the disconcerting 43% upper tax bracket), and the rest of the classes down are paying something equal to or less than their current tax bracket minus 17%, thus retaining a progressive tax system.
If the economy collapses because we have tons of people but no jobs for them, the percentage required becomes *extremely* high. The amount of income is only what the employed labor force makes: 17% of the total income of 64% of the population (that's the 68% labor force minus UE4) can pay for 74% of the population (all adults), plus 1.4% for family welfare (children, from the general fund, on a sharply-reduced public aid system); but if it's only 32% employed, you need a 34% dividend tax, plus you have a *lot* more children needing welfare (bump that figure about 7-10 times--maybe 8% to 14%), plus you need to pretty much double the government's general fund taxes to keep shi
You're right, I was looking at the 55 inch that are $2,999. LG 4K OLED TVs. To be fair, they were over $5,000 last year; and the 65 inch TVs will hit LCD prices eventually, once we have a low-labor, high-yield process that spits out perfect 65-inch panel regions without having to pay a bunch of engineers thousands of dollars along the way just to get one made.
Just as Margaret Thatcher said about socialism in general, this socialistic "Citizen's Dividend/UBI" is/are great until you run out of other people's money
It's 17% and never raised. The proportional cost of goods constantly decreases with technological growth: the average family spent 1/3 of their income on food in 1950, 13% in 2003, and 11.5% in 2010; clothing fell from 12% in 1950 to 3.5% in 2010; and the same amount of money buys 2.7 times as much housing square footage in 2010 compared to 1950 (even in 2003 it's 2.3x: 28% of income for 983sft on a 30 year mortgage versus 33% of income on 2,300sqft for a 30 year mortgage).
In 1950, the cost of a Citizen's Dividend would have been an extra 32% on everyone's taxes; while our public aid system (including Social Security OASDI) totaled 1.3% of everyone's taxable income (AGI). In 2013, the cost of a Citizen's Dividend was 17.0%, while the Public Aid system cost 17.2% despite being hardly functional.
It also falls into the "broken window fallacy" category.
The broken window fallacy suggests paying people to do useless work will create wealth by the mechanism of moving money. That's broken because it reduces consumer spending power for no real return. In the same way, if you add useless people to a production process (or dangle bureaucrats doing nothing into jobs which produce nothing), the cost of the product increases (have to pay those wages) while the amount of stuff made doesn't. That reduces productive output, making us all poorer (the total income buys less stuff).
Similarly, raising wages and applying payroll taxes increases the direct cost of labor: wage-labor costs to produce products go up with wages and taxes as well as with labor time, and so the price of those products must increase. Thus minimum wages have a cost which we can project in number of lost jobs.
A Citizen's Dividend, on the other hand, moves that cost onto profits and income. The Citizen's Dividend as I've described provides a non-wage income rather than a wage increase as a minimum standard-of-living *and* a social safety net. This means you don't pay to have employees work and *possibly* make a profit; instead, you pay taxes on such a profit. If you take risks which don't pan out, you don't pay extra for having hired people to take those risks, and thus you can charge lower prices for your goods.
This is analogous to the broken window fallacy in that the risk created by high wage-labor costs (wages, benefits, and payroll taxes) is the broken window: you pay these costs regardless, even if you manage to make nothing useful. By reducing that risk, we break fewer windows.
The end result of my Citizen's Dividend is a reduction of business income taxes from 39.6% (2013; it's now 40%) to 35.1%; a reduction of payroll taxes by 6.2% (OASDI; medicare stays); a reduction of taxes on employee income such that an employee being paid $80,000/year is actually taking home slightly more than $80,000/year (i.e. has effective negative tax rate), with a break-even point of $625,000/year (someone making 2/3 of a million dollars is paying the same amount of taxes); and a moderate increase at the top bracket from 39.6% to just under 43%.
We can adjust that last tax raise by mucking about with the business and middle-class tax advantages, although the end result designed in the middle class make a good target. With the increased buying power and more stable job cycle, businesses can take bigger risks, driving technological innovation. With faster technological growth comes faster wealth growth; wealth growth of 8.5% would make rich people paying 43% just as rich as their predecessors who were paying 39.6%, but that inevitability won't happen because the technological growth will also reduce the cost of government services, thus allowing a reduction in taxes to stabilize us back to ~40% on that top bracket.
That gives you three strategies: shock tax raise on the rich an
Machine costs are about the same in China, i.e. a CNC machine and electricity cost the same in China as they do in Switzerland.
This will only differ if the machines aren't already present: installing a new machine is going to cost more than using what's available.
If your process is highly automated, making it in China won't save any money once you factor in the additional overhead to coordinate manufacturing and to ensure quality standards are met.
The Chinese manufacturing base has a *lot* more experience hitting consistent quality standards. If you want it made cheap, you want it made in China. Americans can't shave off 15% of the cost by shaving 15% of the quality; they'll get some ham-fisted attempt at cutting corners with an axe, while the Chinese will file those corners off with precision and skill.
As for "quality" it starts with quality technical documentation, choosing the correct manufacturing processes, process stability, and the quality-control mechanisms.
All of which varies greatly depending on your quality standards. Quality is only the degree to which a deliverable fulfills requirements, so you can kind of claim cheaply-made goods are high-quality goods; in any case, if you want the goods made to a *specific* set of requirements, you're looking at a higher demand on your process stability and quality control mechanisms, as you say.
For example: all the cell phones I've looked at recently use OLED rather than LCD, and they cost no more than an LCD-bearing phone; yet a 65 inch OLED TV costs $3,000. Why? It's not because they're shiny and new and we can price gouge consumers (although that *is* a market behavior). It's easy to produce a ginormous sheet of OLED; with a few defects here and there, you just cut out little phone-sized rectangles and move on with your day. If you want a 65 inch diagonal wide-screen OLED, you need to use a different process, with different quality control mechanisms, and with a lot more time invested and more labor cost. It happens to cost a *hell* of a lot more to make a defect-free 65 inch diagonal than it does to make a 65 inch diagonal with several dozen dead pixels and cut out 95% or more of the area for cell phone screens.
If you're *really* familiar with thin-film display manufacture--if your business has spent the last 40 years making LCD screens and has been in OLED R&D since it first showed up around the mid 2000s (OLED process is *very* similar to LCD)--you're more likely to have the organizational knowledge to tweak your manufacture process toward an acceptable sheet of phone-screen, running bare minimum costs and producing a highly-usable product with zero waste. You can also produce the super-expensive big-screen panels more cheaply than the next guy; that's not the point. The point is the next rookie manufacturer who tries to get a low-quality sheet to make phone screens out of the good bits will throw away 40% of the surface due to his dozens of dead pixels being scattered all over the place, or due to his process being more faulty and producing *lots* of dead pixels unless he sinks more cost.
That was my point: The Chinese are better at manufacture. Manufacture isn't "Cheaper in China", or even just "already there"; they are actually skilled at hitting quality targets--low or high. We buy cheap shit from them because they can make cheap shit at a reliable quality level for a low cost, rather than sinking excessive costs just to hold quality stable while cutting so many corners. They got that way from selling manufacture services all over the world for decades.
Supply-and-demand is an effect, not a cause. Notably, it won't drive prices below costs.
The problem is all costs are labor. The machines are made by people (labor) using machines (recursion) fueled by energy produced by people (labor). Those machines are then operated by people (labor), using fuel produced by people (labor) using other machines (turtles all the way down).
In the end, you can take all business input costs (accounting), shift the labor costs (economics) to the bottom, and find an aggregate cost (economics) and price (economics). When you have tall stacks of production, the price shrinks toward that total cost: GM has steelmakers bid for steel, and those steelmakers slim their margins toward their costs (accounting); the steelmakers go to the coal makers and the steel miners and offer a contract contingent on winning the GM bid for steel, and the coal and steel ore producers slim their margins toward their costs (accounting); thus the contract price moves toward the aggregate labor cost (economics) as the profit margins at each level get squeezed down. Your absolute limit is the aggregate of all labor.
Oh god this is cringeworthy. The same terms are re-used in 6 different fields to mean 14 different things depending on concept being discussed. You might need to reread that paragraph a few times.
Anyway, the point is raising costs raises prices, which reduces consumer buying power. Raising wages raises costs, and that means those consumers subject to the wage increase have more buying power; however, it tends to reduce the total buying power of *all* consumers in aggregate. Reducing that total buying power reduces the amount of stuff that can be bought, which reduces jobs, creating (permanent) unemployment (for a very loose definition of permanent: technological progress creates *transitional* unemployment until the newly-retained consumer buying power moves toward new products; simply reducing consumer buying power permanently removes that particular support, and other factors can change and undo that).
So you have a conflict: you need things like welfare, you need things like a minimum standard of living, you need these services; and providing those services cuts into consumer buying power. Welfare is, by nature, inefficient: you're paying someone to do nothing, so you have an intermediary who is inefficient (each cycle of purchasing includes purchasing nothing, so you have to add that labor cost to the total *and* add zero wealth for it); yet it is also stabilizing (consumers dropping in and out of the economy become a fixed cost, and your labor force stays healthy). Minimum wages are less inefficient, but do create unemployment; and a baseline standard of living must exist, so you make that trade-off. This is what you must balance.
This is why I've determined minimum wages outdated. Our society is wealthy enough now that our public aid system is less-efficient and less-effective than a Citizen's Dividend (a type of UBI in which we cut out the general fund taxes for public aid and replace them with a flat 17% tax, which gets paid out to every adult as an even, untaxed monthly deposit). This provides the basic standard-of-living a minimum wage tries to supply, and it does so without incurring a cost of employment (employers don't pay that proportion of your income). I'm essentially increasing the take-home wage relative to the wage-labor cost: for every $1 your employer pays to employ you, you take home more under a Dividend than you do under the current system. As you can see, that avoids the entire set of conflicts above (notably, it puts a cost on success--profits and income--rather than attempt--wages and payroll tax; the savings comes from reducing business risk, creating a type of financial efficiency).
The 1% don't care, they don't have anything to lose by living in a third world nation because their wealth becomes all the more valuable relatively speaking.
This simply isn't true. Let's look at two effects of the system I proposed.
The Citizen's Dividend creates more consumer
China has 4 people for every 1 in the US. That means all other things being equal, labor costs in China will be 1/4 that in the US on average.
That is not technically possible if a Chinese person needs more than 1/4 the wages to survive. That is to say: if you have to pay the Chinaman 1/2 as much as a U.S. worker in order for him to eat and have shelter, then it doesn't matter if you have 90 times as many workers; the cost is still going to be 1/2 as much, because you have to feed your damned work force, and that's how much it costs.
Chinese labor estimate is $3.50, versus $8.25 minimum wage in my state and $7.25 minimum wage United States federal. It turns out China isn't 4 times as good at making food as the US.
I'm living at a higher standard of living than my parents. My parents own three houses; I am more effective with my finances.
Even normalizing that out, the cars available to me cost the same as they did in the 70s (the median new car purchase was 56% of the median income; that number is surprisingly rigid), and their cars didn't have standard air conditioning (available in 1/3 of all new cars!), standard radio (60%!), four-wheel anti-lock disc brakes, independent suspension on all four wheels, high gas mileage, electronic stability control, satellite navigation built-in, six CD changer, bluetooth radio hooked up to Spotify, satellite radio, moon roof, and all the other bullshit you get in a mid-grade consumer car.
A cell phone cost $4,000 in 1983 (2010 dollars: over $9,000), and service was $50/month at 42 cents per minute talk time. Talking 2 hours per week, you'd pay what adjusts to $550/month in 2010 dollars. Today I have a $350 OnePlus One smart phone with an OLED touch screen, two cameras(!), $60/month mobile service, video and picture messaging, unlimited talk and mms, roll-over 2GB/month data, and 13GB of data banked even though I stream Spotify all the fucking time (to and from work, half-hour; plus whenever I go out to drive). I was eating some 300-500GB/month with Spotify, e-mail, mint.com, and so forth on my phone before I just paid into Spotify Premium, which lets me skip songs at will, and also let me keep my main playlists stored on my phone (cuts back my data usage). I was *never* going to utilize the full $60 worth of service I bought; I could probably switch to Ting for cheaper.
Food cost the average American family 30% of their income in 1950, and 13% in 2003, and 11.5% in 2010. Clothing has fallen from 12% to 4%. People today are spending their additional money (you know, from not spending it all on food) to buy more and better healthcare, and so are... not living healthier, but living with more doctor's visits and more treatment and vaccination and BASIC FUCKING HEALTHCARE than their parents.
We're spending 40% of our income on non-essential consumption, and another 5% on what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls "entertainment". Instead of spending 28% of our income on houses in 1950 (983sqft new single-family home average), we spent 33% of our income on our houses in 2003 (2,300sqft new single-family home average); we're buying 2.3 times the house for less than 1.2% of the money--housing is nearly half as expensive as it was for our parents. Even rental properties have gotten bigger *much* faster than they've gotten more expensive.
What lower standard of living? ... oh, are you not in the United States?
To be fair, ITT is *really* good at churning out IT professionals. Most project managers are bad at communicating with outside culture laborers, so they have a hard time operating with the Chinese or, especially, the Indians.
Chinese (and asians in general) have strong hierarchical cultures: when someone asks you if you can get something done in a week, you say *yes*. Arguing the point is burned out of these people, and they have as hard a hard time adjusting to it as you would if you went to e.g. Japan and saw 23-year-old college guys hitting heavy on 14-year-old high school girls and discovered it's just the way they behave there (most Americans are freaked out about 4-year-old children riding the train all over the god damn archipelago BY THEMSELVES, much less how sexual some cultures will get with middle-teens). This means you have to modify your approach and learn to read subtle cues, and you have to manipulate the power structure: if you think you're seeing a cue for someone just agreeing with you because you're the superior, you need to somehow pass the responsibility of modifying that particular decision to them, and divest yourself of any intentions on the outcome, or else they'll try to judge what you want and expect and provide it.
This happens as well with the Indians. I've worked with looser Indian programmers, and they're quite happy to work to understand what they're supposed to do and then apply their skills to the limit--which, as with Americans, can be a shallow or significantly profound limit. I've also worked with Indian programmers who are trying to not ask a lot of questions and follow instructions to hardly-analyzed precision: they don't try to judge your intention, but only your *instruction*; the results are always bad.
These people are technically-competent--as much as anyone else, which is to say it varies out to extremes--and seriously mismatched to American professional behavior. You have to work with them as is proper in a cross-cultural professional relationship to drive them effectively, and you *really* want to use that position to develop them so they can operate in multiple cultural contexts (improvement of human resources is part of a project manager's job--it's part of a knowledge area called "Human Resources Management"). If you can't figure that much out, you're gonna have a bad time.
As to what makes a person efficient - capital savings and investment into labour saving devices.
It's amazing how many people can understand this, but can't understand layoffs.
Actually, the Chinese are better at efficient manufacture. A *lot* better. Expensive Made-in-USA manufacture cannot compete on quality with much-less-expensive Made-in-China manufacture; and the MiC stuff can go down to low-cost, low-quality-requirements (low acceptance criteria) manufacture to a ridiculous degree. When the Chinese make something light-duty, it's light-duty; when the Americans make something approaching light-duty, it's possibly not even fucking functional, at random, so buy six and hope for the best.
We do sometimes ask the Chinese to make a tool-shaped object that doesn't work at all, and they do exactly that: they send us garbage; to be fair, though, those soft-steel adjustable wrenches might strip on metal bolts, but they'll actually *work* if you're assembling hardware made of or coated with ABS plastic. Let's not forget both the Husky socket set (which stands up to god damn anything) and the one you bought for $10 at a gas station (which bent and stripped the first time you used it on metal bolts) are made in China.
The trick is to show that to the businesses who make the decisions
Consumers. We're also the ones who make the jobs by buying shit until we run out of spending power. That's one of the reasons the Chinese import system has worked so well for America: we buy a ton of crap, so we need a lot of retail workers, truck drivers (trans-continental shipping), advertisers, warehouse operators, and logistics people (the high-level managers deciding what products need stocking where, how much, and when to move it around). If we kicked China off and went to American manufacture, we'd have to cut back our IT and business services and even our healthcare (nobody could afford it--we buy more healthcare now than we did 20 years ago), and we'd have to shed 15-40 million American jobs (there wouldn't be consumer purchasing power to support them).
Don't underestimate a comparative trade advantage.
I wanna know if the Fine Brothers are going to react to Facebook reacting, and if they're going to react by suing Facebook for reacting.
I went the other way. What's with the "which is absolutely sickening" line? They're talking about murdering people. Murder is a thing. It's murder; it's not special. Brown people in Uganda get murdered. White people get murdered trying to drive through gang neighborhoods at night. Black people get murdered trying to walk through East Texas during the day. What's so special about rich people that we're supposed to feel more or less disturbed that people want to murder them?
Regarding the first point, layoffs are happening even at companies posting profits,
I was unclear: I meant "They" as in the employees. If laying off an employee reduces your net profit, you don't do it. Someone had asserted that companies were laying off employees out of spite or some shit, as if they made $10 million in profits and then fired a bunch of people so they could make $8 million instead.
How much is the buying power of the newly laid-off people?
So we invented new technology in agriculture. Agricultural workers make up 2% of America's workforce (it was over 60% in 1900). This new technology reduces the number of Ag workers required by 5%; and the number of people required to provide supporting infrastructure (production, maintenance, fuel, etc.) for this technology is equivalent to 2% of our agricultural workforce. That means we just laid off a net 3% of America's agricultural workforce, or 3% of 2% of the workforce, or 0.06%.
Because 3% less labor goes into food, food is 3% cheaper. 99.94% of Americans, on average spending 11.5% of their income on food, now spend 11.155% of their income on food, and have 0.345% of their income as unspent income. This gives American's total consumer base 100.285% as much buying power--that includes the 99.94% who have 100.345% as much buying power and the 0.06% who have 0% as much buying power.
With this increase in buying power, most Americans buy more stuff. To make this additional stuff, to ship it, to market it, to sell it... all of that requires labor somewhere--if it didn't it'd be free plus margin, and any cost above pennies would be easily undercut by a new competitor magicking up the product for free. In essence, it either requires labor or you're trying to sell bottled outside air (which you can sell for the cost of the bottle).
That's how those lost jobs get replaced. Because of inflation, it's not dollar-for-dollar more buying power; that's never going to be a thing. Per proportion of *all* *income*, however, the buying power is greater: if your personal income is 1/180,000,000th of the total income in the United States, that 1/180Mth is now buying more stuff--it's also probably a higher number of absolute dollars, due to never-ending inflation (this is NOT a bad thing, unless it's fast inflation).
In the end, with the same number of people working the same number of hours, more stuff is made. 100% of all the money buys, in our example, 100.345% as much stuff. That means everyone can be a bit richer. It also means the rich can be 0.450% richer and the middle-class and poor can be 0.200% richer--that's how you get an ever-growing income gap even as the poor and middle-class get richer, lead more stable lives, get access to more and better healthcare, and load up on what used to be rich-people luxuries all while lagging behind the hyper-rich forever. This income gap is a huge boon: if you set the top income tax bracket higher than the effective flat tax rate, you can continuously lower the income taxes on the middle and lower classes, increasing consumer buying power and strengthening (stabilizing) the job market.
If you don't believe that, trace all of economic history. Why was agriculture such a huge step forward for mankind? Why did clothing used to require 479 labor-hours for a shirt (at $8.25 minimum wage, $4,000), but now costs $15? Why do developed countries have far fewer agricultural workers per output of food, and why is their food cheaper? How does the shrinking proportion of agricultural workers relate to the shrinking cost of food--43% of the median family's income in 1900, 30% in 1950, 13% in 2003, and 11.5% in 2010? Why do new technologies come out expensive as hell, but then become cheap; what happens during their lifecycle?
These aren't just patterns I noticed; the whole concept of technical growth is foundational to modern economics. The Solow-Swan model attempts to measure economic growth in terms
I stopped reading after you made the claim that people making more money will be able to afford fewer products
I said in an economy where a certain small class of people are making more money, the cost of products they produce increases, causing the buying power of others in the economy to decrease; and that, in cases in particular, this means a total population-wide reduction in buying power.
In other words: I claimed part of the poor class becomes elite-class poor people who get richer, and the other part of the poor class becomes poverty-class poor people who become poorer (via unemployment).
Your distorted interpretation of "people with more money will be able to buy less" is a ridiculous straw man. Be more stealthy at least.
Cost of labor is only a small part of most products cost to produce.
Cost of labor is 100% of what *everything* costs to produce. There is no other cost.
if your ideas are truly novel and compelling, someone of influence will notice them and propagate them
You know how there's a branch of computer science called Computer Security, and another called Computer Insecurity? I *might* be doing the same with economics.
Modern economics is about measuring economies: how did the GDP change this year? How much of our growth is from people making babies (thus more consumers, and more people to do the jobs, and so we scale), and how much is from technological growth (eliminating jobs without reducing production)? If we raise the minimum wage to $15, how much more consumer buying power does that generate, what strain does it create, and how many jobs does it provide or eliminate?
In other words: there's a lot of math. There are a lot of numbers and a lot of predictors, and the large theory tries to claim that for some unknowable set of numbers, you can compute the behavioral output of the economy.
I've kind of thrown all that away and gone for mechanism. I have a lot of "conditions converge upon an outcome in which..." going on. For example: technological growth (well-accepted, see modern Solow-Swan analysis) increases the output per labor-hour, meaning more stuff is available per person. I've extended this to suggest that a very un-wealthy society can't have a large income gap or lots and lots of rich people (i.e. the rich can't have 6,000 times more than the poor); and, as well, taken it to the logical conclusion that a very poor society can't have welfare (the amount you'd need to take from each person to support the few in need would cripple everyone), while a moderately-wealthy society can have specific types of public aid, and highly-wealthy societies can have bigger government services and things like Universal Basic Income. I directly measured that in the United States across the past 60 years, but there are no rules about it: it depends entirely on the cost of provided services as a percentage of income, which is basically saying nothing, since those costs depend on a hell of a lot of other economic factors (including the specific technological growth level of each step of the production process for each basic need).
The problem in writing up something big and complex is it's a lot of work, and you only get to cite yourself when making claims. Even doing it requires a lot of time and research, and it's a multi-disciplinary undertaking: you have to organize the paper, write with good prose, and even be persuasive. Science has a political component in that scientific consensus will pass you right over if your argument doesn't make them feel good, and will sit with you even if you spout ludicrous bullshit but make it *sound* compelling. While these things don't endure the rigors of peer review forever, they've been shown to hold off criticism for several decades. I've been diverting all of that effort to trying to learn to program, and learning other languages, and otherwise amusing myself; maybe I'm lazy.
I really did mean it when I said there's no such thing as a complete theory. We're even discovering new properties of glass and refining new types of glass today (borosilicate glass is fucking fantastic; our new toy in the past decade or so has been alluminate glass--aluminum oxide as a transparent ceramic). Nobody--least of all me--is going to crack economics in one go. Even then, the theories to measure economies are useful; they're not the best thing in the world when designing economic *policy*, which is why I abandoned modern economic theory in favor of something more abstract. Measuring technological growth separate from population growth doesn't tell you whether raising minimum wage is a bad thing, or suggest if sales taxes are going to kill jobs, or help you understand how to approach upcoming technological revolutions like self-driving cars and high automation. We need an evidence-based theory of economic behavior.
You mean corporations keep people employed when they don't make a profit, and lay off people who produce a profit for the business even though this means they'll be made poorer?
Maybe the last one (if you swap it) may make any sense.
The last two are kind of tandem. To produce a new product, you need consumer buying power. You don't go out and say, "I have invented SMART PHONES! Buy them!" and consumers just buy them. Either the consumer stops buying something else (and some people over there lose their jobs) or the consumer had a wad of cash unspent and now spends that.
For the consumer to get an additional wad of cash, the things he buys have to cost less than his income. As product costs are from labor, the lowest price is dictated by the lowest labor costs. By reducing labor time, you lower these costs--and create unemployment. The consumer is paying fewer wages, and buying the same amount of stuff; then he has additional money to buy new things.
None of this works if you examine one company and one person's income and disconnect the two. That is to say: if you assume a business acts in a bubble, that jobs are created by businesses, and that consumer income comes out of a magical hole disconnected from the magical hole consumers shovel their wages into when they buy shit, none of the stuff I said makes any sense. If you've connected the selling of a product to the buying of a product, and the wages of a worker to the income from the selling of a product, all the stuff I've said makes sense. Most people aren't really putting all the blocks together; they have a blue lego and a red lego and are screaming something about how they're supposed to be a tower, but they haven't plugged them together to build said tower.
Solow would be closer than Keynes. Keynes suggests the Government should spend more and tax less in hard economic times; I'm talking about economics in a general sense, which includes fair-weather markets as well as foul, rather than Keynesian "what do we do to fix our now-broken economy?" approach to economic downturns.
You're also making an emotional appeal talking about "how people live", rather than "how economies function."
In India, circa 1970, they were producing 2 tonnes of rice per hectare at cost of $550/tonne. With inflation, that's over $3,000/tonne in 2000; however, in the year 2000, they were producing 6 tonnes of rice per hectare at a cost of under $200/tonne. This happened via an increase in technological development of Indian agricultural practice. The same happened in America, where circa 1900 around 60% of Americans were agricultural workers, while in 2010 around 2% are agricultural workers *and* they produce food, fiber (clothing feed stock), and biofuel feed stock, with 50% of their output exported. The displaced farmers first fed the labor force of the manufacture industry; now the proportion of Americans working in manufacture is dropping (the total number is increasing), diverting to IT services, retail services, and healthcare services.
In other words: both India and America are doing exactly what I described. They always have. That's why Americans in 1950 spent 30% of their income on food and 13% on clothing, while in 2010 they spend 11.5% of their income on food and 4% on clothing. In India, rice hits store shelves for 6% of its 1970 price, adjusted for inflation. Indians, like Americans are providing more tech services and even manufacture services, where 40 years ago these people would have been obligate farmers.
So... I've looked at India and how people live in India. India was part of my initial research which lead me to the conclusions I've drawn. What's your point?
Are you going to take an actual position on economics, or just claim that I'm wrong and offer no counter-arguments of your own?
So you're proud of your ignorance, and then attacking me for what you assert is mine?
Maybe you're just wrong. You're also still arguing trickle-down economics and haven't actually addressed any point I made.
It's more abstract than that. Not exactly a false analogy, but not quite straight on.
People are all invested in trickle-down economics: money is economy, and the jobs come from businesses or from your hard-work. In other words: either a business sells something or a person gets themselves a job; the rich are greedy and the poor are lazy. This leads them to the belief that higher wages are paid by businesses.
The truth is wages are paid by consumers. Consumers spend their income on goods until they run out of spendable income (any taxes or desire to save money reduces this spendable income). The wage-labor cost of a good is the roll-up of all labor time invested in that good at the price of that labor; that price includes things like benefits and (importantly) payroll taxes. When you put the wage-labor cost together, that's your minimum price: no amount of volume purchase deals, corporate agreements, market competition, or other profit-margin-trimming activity will push the on-the-shelf price of that product below those costs. In short: You have to price your product high enough to pay the wages associated with each unit.
Higher product prices mean consumers have less buying power: their spendable income buys fewer things. Fewer things means fewer jobs to make those things.
Slower recovery isn't about burger flippers. It's about replacing 100,000 people with machines, waiting a while for the market to somehow drag prices down, and then trying to re-employ those 100,000 people. With higher wages, the amount of unspent consumer buying power required to create 100,000 replacement jobs is higher; and the time required for the reduction in wage-labor costs (by using machines which incur total wage-labor costs below the wage-labor cost of the old method) to pad out the consumer's pocket so far increases, simply because "so far" is a bigger number and the rate at which you approach that number isn't bigger.
In wage-driven technological unemployment, the wage worker costs less than the machine *until* wages are raised. For example: $8/hr human, $11/hr machine, minimum wage raised to $13/hr. You've just raised wages to $11/hr, unemployed a bunch of people who were making $13/hr, and now you're waiting for the price gap to close on an $11/hr wage basis. Problem: the people you just unemployed were making $8/hr, and recovery of their jobs requires reaching a point where consumers have the money left over to buy into things which require those $8/hr jobs; all the current products are based on $11/hr wage-labor costs, and employment is based on $13/hr wages, so your economy's going to need a *long* time to re-employ that displaced labor force.
This is all swept up in a complex system where the above basically amounts to "some number of people are now unsustainable," while technological growth (without these kinds of wage raises) tends to *increase* the sustainable population, and also leads to a larger middle- and upper-class population. That means an economy can recover from the above--the Industrial Revolution took around a century to recover from its extremely-high unemployment, though, so what kind of victory do you want?
There's a different model we saw in the information age: rather than moving linear labor (2x the product means 2x the labor) to machines, we moved superlinear labor to machines (2x the product means 3x or 5x or 10x the human labor). Computers made a huge array of products and services possible, creating opportunities for new, low-cost consumer goods. That caused massive technological growth and a large downward movement of income into a growing middle class and an enriched lower class. If you're replacing McDonalds burger flippers, you're not eliminating a growth bottleneck, and that kind of growth won't follow.
It's damned easy to find a job when you're only asking for $3/hr; and it's easy to sell a product to consumers when you only have to pay your workers $3/hr. Conversely, it's really hard to find jobs and make produ
Please don't have this discussion. People discussing economics online overloads my circuits. It's cringeworthy. Folks tell me I need to not worry about idiots, but then you see people raising minimum wages and all this economic fall-out and the slow recovery *because* of the higher wages, while people ignore newer-style policies which accomplish more, create more jobs, and actually reduce poverty, and you can't really pretend the loud voice of people who don't know what in the fuck they're babbling about isn't destroying the world around you.