I would say that a UBI is about the least socialist form of redistributive wealth policies. I fully understand and appreciate the argument that we shouldn't be doing that at all, but the current reality is that the U.S. spends about $2.5 trillion per year on programs like Social Security, Medicare, etc. as non-discretionary spending. That comes out to about $7,500 annually for each person living in the U.S. That's including non-citizens and minors. If you remove them, you're probably above $10,000 per adult citizen.
That's a sufficient amount of money to subsist in most parts of the country without doing anything but staying on the dole. The reality is that we already have a massive wealth redistribution system in the U.S., but it's such a poorly designed mess of various programs, rules, and bureaucracy not even the Japanese could make it function efficiently.
There are a lot of things you can do with a UBI that are utterly stupid, but that doesn't mean that a UBI is necessarily bad. Even free market advocates like Milton Friedman proposed solutions like a negative income tax that fundamentally amount to a UBI. Just avoid doing the stupid things that incentivize undesirable behavior (e.g., don't give parents additional UBI for each kid they have and if you do give kids a UBI, lock it away until they reach adulthood) and it's going to be a much better system than the mess we have now. Of course, adopting a UBI probably necessitates other changes (immigration, etc.) but it's a better system than what we've got right now and we could probably get away with spending less for better outcomes.
No, but farmers seem to have the same kind of odd brand loyalty to tractors that tends to be associated to people who drive pickup trucks (or certain types of technology). It's almost as though their brain can't consciously entertain the idea that they could buy something other than "John Deere" or "Chevy" and instead will keep buying their brand of choice even if they have to grumble about its deficiencies. Worse, some will even make excuses for those deficiencies. It's like an even more fucked up version of Stockholm syndrome with those kind of people.
It depends on what type of labor you're doing. Hard physical labor might mean you're only productive for a few hours a day, but most people can do light physical labor for 8 hours if there's some breaks mixed in there. The same holds true for anything sufficiently mentally demanding and some experts have said that most people aren't capable of beyond four to six hours of mentally demanding activity per day, so there is some truth to your claims. Anything sufficiently mindless could be done as long as a person can stay awake, but most people will have their mental concentration break-down before then as mindless tasks tend to be pretty boring. Unless there's someone there to yell at them, most people will probably start slacking off after a few hours straight of any task, which is why some places mandate that employees take a 15 minute break.
The thing is that if your supposition that businesses doing 35 hours a week could out-compete any using 40 hour work weeks, we'd already start to see that. In the software industry you've probably got a lot of places that wish they were only doing 40 hours a week, but there's always a new set of young programmers that can thrown into the grinder. As long as a company can replace them in 5 years, they don't care if they end up with burned out wrecks. Any company that wants to is free to hire developers for 30 or 35 hours per week, but you don't see many that do, though there are other reasons for this beyond the usual everybody does 40 hours.
Your other supposition ("Give people slightly shorter hours, provided they don't veg out in front of the TV") is probably wrong as well. I think it's Russel's main failing in his argument that he puts forth. He imagines that everyone would be like him and use the extra time to learn new things, be creative, or investigate the universes many curiosities. I suspect that you're also imagining that many people would be like you and use the extra time for the kinds of activities that keep them in better health or help them to improve as a human being. Unfortunately, there's a sizable chunk for whom this is not true. Any additional time would go to mindless consumption of media with no real value.
40 hours per week turns out to be about optimum for the average person in the average job, which is why we're here and aren't moving. More than that leads to diminishing returns and an increase in accidents or other mistakes that ultimately hurt productivity more than a few extra hours worth of work can create. Less than that means having to hire additional workers, which generally wouldn't be a problem, but when you have to supply healthcare, it's in your best interest to have as few workers as possible and work them as much as possible.
I doubt it's going to work out for them, especially considering that the UK has been more than willing to bring in new immigrants that are quite happy to work five days a week. Maybe a few of the highly skilled trades could demand this, but I suspect that people will just start finding ways to switch to non-union labor. Even if they manage to force something into law, they'll quickly find that people will gladly outsource wherever possible. That's obviously a lot harder to do if you need plumbing work, but not all jobs are immune from being done somewhere else.
This notion of shorter work weeks is hardly new. Bertrand Russel opined about it almost a century ago. While it's certainly true that productivity has massively increased over the years, including even more from the time he wrote this piece, his conclusion that this would mean a reduction in the amount of time a laborer works has turned out to be wrong. Instead, what tends to happen is that when productivity doubles (and demand remains fixed) is that half of the laborers will be let go and the remaining half will use their improved productivity to produce the same amount as before.
There are also many people who already work 4 days a week. They just work 10 hour shifts.
Sure the internet is shit compared to the big cities, but they probably don't have to spend several hours stuck in traffic every day. If there were a perfect place where you could truly have it all, everyone would try to move their and that would probably ruin it. So ask yourself what's really important to you and realize that you might have to give up some other things in pursuit of that.
Size plays a role, but I do not think it is the only or main reason. Instead I think that companies lose their soul when the original owners take it public.
Instead of focusing on what the company strives for, more effort is spent appeasing stock holders. They could care less what the company does as long as it makes money. If you told some of those blue bloods that their share value would double if the company burned kittens in the street, those assholes would bring them in by the sack load.
Meanwhile, employees get demoralized as the company shifts to keeping share holders happy and starts making the kinds of decisions that might be good for business, but crush the souls of the people who joined the company for something new and exciting or specifically to get away from some other soul crushing organization.
On top of that, due to the battery-operated, portable nature of the devices, they don't do the CPU-intensive tasks as well as something designed to be plugged into the wall, or even something that carries a lot more mass in batteries.
With a big push to move a lot of applications into the cloud (gmail, Google docs, etc.) we're starting so see the same kind of situation where the tablet just acts as a dumb terminal or thin client and most of the computation happens elsewhere. I think there were even some services where this was done for games. All of the rendering was done on high-end graphics cards in a rack somewhere else and the video was streamed to the customer's device where they'd input commands that got sent off to the cloud.
I'm not saying that I like this model, or even think it's a good idea, but it's certainly one that's come back into vogue again. Personally I don't use my tablet for any kind of real productivity. At most I've taken notes on it before. I use it for casual web-browsing and watching videos, where I think it works better than a laptop.
I think that the biggest reason for me switching over to Apple was that you could expect the device to get software updates 4 years later. I used to use Motorola exclusively (stretching back well before smart phones even existed) and could get 5+ years out a phone. After everyone switched over to making smartphones, Motorola still made great devices (before they kept getting bought and sold to different companies on a regular basis anyhow) I found that it was hard to get 2 years out of a device before support dried up. Things have gotten slightly better since then in terms of being able to unlock the bootloader, or get a device that has a reasonable expectation of support beyond a couple of years, but Apple does a much better job making this less of a hassle for the end user.
I'm skeptical that this will go anywhere near as well as planned. I suppose if it doesn't work out, they can always park what they do manage to haul all the way there off of the world islands.
It's not a bad location really. While Singapore is technically in the ring of fire, it's not close to any volcanoes itself. It also doesn't get a lot of typhoons compared to other parts of the region. Outside of those worries it has a lot of upsides. Geographically it's really close to around 50% of the world's population, the infrastructure is good, and it's unlikely that Facebook will run into any political issues as Singapore is pretty business friendly.
For any other manufacturer, this would probably work, but Apple's phones (at least their flagship model) are ridiculously expensive. The iPhone X starts at $999 according to Apple's own site. Even the base model for the iPhone 8 Plus is $799, so if you have to factor in tax or you want to upgrade the storage capacity, this plan wouldn't work.
Before I bother to get excited about this, what was the effect size? It's one thing if this is effective enough to replace painkillers in some patients, but completely another if it's only good for something slightly less painful than a mosquito bite.
I realize that this is not going to be a popular opinion, but aren't you the very example against the argument you're making though? You took an opioid and did not become addicted (just as a number of other people, such as myself who took a strong painkiller exactly once and never again due to not liking the side effects) and took some personal responsibility to realize that even if the pills would treat your pain, it may not be a good idea for you to take them. There are clearly some people who should not be given opioids under any circumstances as they're exactly the type who are susceptible to becoming addicted. It's about as irresponsible as giving an arsonist a book of matches.
Executives lying about the effects of a medication is its own matter. Let's suppose there were no lies (or that this drug was never released and we're still using morphine instead) and we knew exactly how addictive this medication was. Does it still excuse anyone who disregards that information and uses is anyway, or continues to use it after they have a good reason to believe that they need to tell their doctor to switch them to another medication? If we were talking about crack cocaine, you'd tell people that they have a personal responsibility not to get addicted to crack. You wouldn't completely absolve those people who do get addicted just because there was a dealer who sold it to them and told them that everything would be fine.
I think that a person has to be severely mentally retarded (in the actual medical sense) before their own lack of ability to be personal responsible for themselves means that they're better off completing largely or completely abdicating that responsibility to someone else. How many less addicts would their be if patients were a little more responsible and did some of their own research instead of blindly trusting a physician, and how many physicians would have written prescriptions if they'd been a little bit more responsible instead of blindly trusting the sales rep from the pharmaceutical company? I really do think that if you want to get through life with a minimum amount of suffering that you do have to try to take as much personal responsibility as possible, even if no one else would blame you if you didn't. No one else is going to do a better job of having your own best interests in mind than you yourself. It might feel comforting to be able to blame someone else after the fact, but I'd rather not have to have the bad experience and look for where to spread the blame in the first place. Even when you don't have malicious assholes lying to you, other people are still capable of making innocent mistakes that can bite you in the ass.
Prosecute the executives to the full extent of the law if you can prove that they intentionally mislead the FDA, but don't throw personal responsibility out along with them.
I'm not a fan of making drugs illegal at all, but I'll take "big pharma" over the drug cartels. You end up with people consuming drugs and ruining their own lives either way, but at least "big pharma" isn't leaving a pile of extra corpses with Colombian neckties lying around.
The question is not whether or not progress occurs, but the rate at which it occurs.
If you think that low wages are holding back progress, then raising them should drive progress. Set the minimum wage at $50 and we should progress much faster. Hike it up again to $100 and even more progress, right? That's essentially what you're proposing. Are you proposing this across the board or just singling out Amazon workers because that's where you want to drive progress?
What you're failing to consider is that there isn't just one form of low wage labor. There are hundreds if not thousands of different jobs that pay minimum wage. The ones that get replaced first are where the greatest differential lies between the cost of labor and the savings due to automation.
Why would invest high-cost labor to reduce a minor part of costs?
This assumes that the high-cost labor is focused on reducing the cost of low-cost labor, which isn't necessarily true. Instead it would be invested in reducing whatever had the largest differential between current cost and potential savings. Perhaps that means developing a new material that can used to build a product which costs considerably less, engineering the product to be more reliable so that there are fewer returns of defective units, finding a less expensive way of transporting the products to the consumers, or any number of other areas that might reduce production costs. No company will page more than they have to for low skill labor if there's a pool of willing replacements available, which is why there are a lot of minimum wage jobs. Only when there is a shortage of available labor will companies actually raise wages. However, that just makes the cost of labor a relatively more expensive part of production.
And this is especially true if the CxO structure is oriented around short-term gains.
Which works in the short term, but the more money that a company snatches up in profit, just means the larger opportunity for someone else to undercut them, especially if that company has been neglecting advances and insists on doing things the same old way. Look at retail, which is a perfect example. One hundred years ago Sears Roebuck was quickly replacing companies doing things the old way, and now they're gone. Walmart came in and ate their lunch, and now Amazon is quickly becoming the dominant player. The business of selling goods to consumers has carried on, but the individual companies that were doing it have come and gone, in part because some executive was worried about the next quarter instead of the next two decades. Consumers are not worse off for the folly of executives as long as it's possible for some other company to form and attract their business.
I would imagine that if he didn't realize this (it's hard for someone who's run a business to be that daft, but Trump does make it believable) he's had economic advisors telling him.
It doesn't matter what he believes as long as his political base believes that Trump is going to lead them to their imagined fantastic version of America that all of this is supposed to create. They should probably just go back to church and pray. I'm much less convinced of tariffs doing any good for our economy than I am of the second coming.
It doesn't matter if Apple did bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. (they won't, but let's play along) as a result of all of this. There are already all kinds of new jobs available in the U.S. and those coal workers don't want to take any of them. They can have their jobs back when they start paying the farriers money so that horse-drawn carriages can haul their coal to power plants. I'll empathize a little bit with someone that's lost their job, but that goes out the window when there's mounds of opportunity and they can't be bothered to even try.
Unemployment numbers are meaningless if they fail to consider the labor participation rate (which itself isn't the full picture). There are still a lot of people without jobs that have essentially given up on finding one. What we should be looking at is the number of hours of labor that are being worked. It doesn't matter if you've got two jobs on paper if they're both being filled by the same person because they can't get a 40 hour position any longer.
Tariffs are beyond idiotic as a solution to our economic issues and even if Trump does somehow manage to enact them, they're not going to survive beyond his presidency. We should be going in the opposite direction and removing all tariffs. If China or some other government wants to subsidize a local industry, let's import the hell out of those products. I'd be over the moon to get some other country's tax payers to foot the bill for the goods I purchase.
Why bother automating while its still cheaper to just throw cheap labor at your problems?
If labor is inexpensive relative to other costs, investments will be made to find ways to reduce those other costs first. After this has been done, labor will be relatively more expensive. At a certain point, it may become the most expensive and then investments will be made in order to reduce labor costs. Technological innovation is going to occur in some area regardless of labor costs and it's likely that driving down the cost of raw material inputs requires automation in a different sector. The labor that is most easy to automate, will generally get replaced before the labor which is more difficult to replace even if you pay both of those people the same wage.
Having cheap labor means that you have more money to throw at your other problems. Couldn't one then argue that by paying your low skill labor the least amount possible means that you have more money to spend on research and development or investing in other areas to improve productivity? I don't believe that low wages have any (or if it does, then it's incredibly small compared to other factors) affect on the rate of automation and technological advancement in the overall scheme of things. Advancement and automation are going to occur somewhere and in a free market, it will tend to occur in the areas where it produces the largest increases in value. People will seek to automate where replacing a minimum wage human laborer results in a cost savings of say $5 and hour over where it only results in a savings of $1 an hour.
So if we increased the minimum wage to $50 an hour, everything would be great all of a sudden. Wouldn't $100 an hour be better still then? I think the logic breaks down and it's easy to see why.
It also doesn't make much sense when looking at history. There were no minimum wage laws and people often were paid starvation wages if they were paid at all. And yet useful progress occurred nonetheless. People are always going to try to find a cheaper way of doing something as long as there's a potential for increased profit that they can realize as a result of doing so. While there are some that don't even need that and are quite happy to work away at some problem for its own sake, they are rare.
Perhaps what you're thinking of is that there's less pressure to find a less expensive alternative when the cost of some aspect of production is low relative to the other components and that's certainly true, but the logic still does not hold. One could argue that paying starvation wages to the low skill labor leaves more money available to invest into research and development. That naturally implies that there will be higher wages for researchers if there is more demand for that kind of labor, but it does nothing for the kind of low skill employees whose plight the original poster was bemoaning.
I suppose you can try to play economic god and demand that certain jobs pay more in order to try to drive technological advancement in those areas, but history has shown that the people who try to run planned economies often make an utter mess of things.
So what? They have hundreds of thousands or millions of people that want to pay money to see them perform. Would you rather a record company or sports team owner get all of that money instead?
Why should I disparage someone who earns millions of dollars when I haven't had to pay them any of it unless I wanted to. It doesn't cost me anything if Taylor Swift or LeBron James are able to sell their time and talents for millions of dollars and I'm not about to start telling other people what they're allowed to spend their own money on either.
I cannot see how low wages holds technology back. Low wages are a consequence of labor that is not valuable. In one hundred years after all of the technological advances there will still be low wage jobs. Not all people are equally skilled and not all jobs are equally valued.
The difference is that technological progress improves productivity and reduces costs. A low wage job in the future may be able to afford a trip to the moon whereas now even most high wage jobs could not imagine doing this.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say that a UBI is about the least socialist form of redistributive wealth policies. I fully understand and appreciate the argument that we shouldn't be doing that at all, but the current reality is that the U.S. spends about $2.5 trillion per year on programs like Social Security, Medicare, etc. as non-discretionary spending. That comes out to about $7,500 annually for each person living in the U.S. That's including non-citizens and minors. If you remove them, you're probably above $10,000 per adult citizen.
That's a sufficient amount of money to subsist in most parts of the country without doing anything but staying on the dole. The reality is that we already have a massive wealth redistribution system in the U.S., but it's such a poorly designed mess of various programs, rules, and bureaucracy not even the Japanese could make it function efficiently.
There are a lot of things you can do with a UBI that are utterly stupid, but that doesn't mean that a UBI is necessarily bad. Even free market advocates like Milton Friedman proposed solutions like a negative income tax that fundamentally amount to a UBI. Just avoid doing the stupid things that incentivize undesirable behavior (e.g., don't give parents additional UBI for each kid they have and if you do give kids a UBI, lock it away until they reach adulthood) and it's going to be a much better system than the mess we have now. Of course, adopting a UBI probably necessitates other changes (immigration, etc.) but it's a better system than what we've got right now and we could probably get away with spending less for better outcomes.
No, but farmers seem to have the same kind of odd brand loyalty to tractors that tends to be associated to people who drive pickup trucks (or certain types of technology). It's almost as though their brain can't consciously entertain the idea that they could buy something other than "John Deere" or "Chevy" and instead will keep buying their brand of choice even if they have to grumble about its deficiencies. Worse, some will even make excuses for those deficiencies. It's like an even more fucked up version of Stockholm syndrome with those kind of people.
It depends on what type of labor you're doing. Hard physical labor might mean you're only productive for a few hours a day, but most people can do light physical labor for 8 hours if there's some breaks mixed in there. The same holds true for anything sufficiently mentally demanding and some experts have said that most people aren't capable of beyond four to six hours of mentally demanding activity per day, so there is some truth to your claims. Anything sufficiently mindless could be done as long as a person can stay awake, but most people will have their mental concentration break-down before then as mindless tasks tend to be pretty boring. Unless there's someone there to yell at them, most people will probably start slacking off after a few hours straight of any task, which is why some places mandate that employees take a 15 minute break.
The thing is that if your supposition that businesses doing 35 hours a week could out-compete any using 40 hour work weeks, we'd already start to see that. In the software industry you've probably got a lot of places that wish they were only doing 40 hours a week, but there's always a new set of young programmers that can thrown into the grinder. As long as a company can replace them in 5 years, they don't care if they end up with burned out wrecks. Any company that wants to is free to hire developers for 30 or 35 hours per week, but you don't see many that do, though there are other reasons for this beyond the usual everybody does 40 hours.
Your other supposition ("Give people slightly shorter hours, provided they don't veg out in front of the TV") is probably wrong as well. I think it's Russel's main failing in his argument that he puts forth. He imagines that everyone would be like him and use the extra time to learn new things, be creative, or investigate the universes many curiosities. I suspect that you're also imagining that many people would be like you and use the extra time for the kinds of activities that keep them in better health or help them to improve as a human being. Unfortunately, there's a sizable chunk for whom this is not true. Any additional time would go to mindless consumption of media with no real value.
40 hours per week turns out to be about optimum for the average person in the average job, which is why we're here and aren't moving. More than that leads to diminishing returns and an increase in accidents or other mistakes that ultimately hurt productivity more than a few extra hours worth of work can create. Less than that means having to hire additional workers, which generally wouldn't be a problem, but when you have to supply healthcare, it's in your best interest to have as few workers as possible and work them as much as possible.
I doubt it's going to work out for them, especially considering that the UK has been more than willing to bring in new immigrants that are quite happy to work five days a week. Maybe a few of the highly skilled trades could demand this, but I suspect that people will just start finding ways to switch to non-union labor. Even if they manage to force something into law, they'll quickly find that people will gladly outsource wherever possible. That's obviously a lot harder to do if you need plumbing work, but not all jobs are immune from being done somewhere else.
This notion of shorter work weeks is hardly new. Bertrand Russel opined about it almost a century ago. While it's certainly true that productivity has massively increased over the years, including even more from the time he wrote this piece, his conclusion that this would mean a reduction in the amount of time a laborer works has turned out to be wrong. Instead, what tends to happen is that when productivity doubles (and demand remains fixed) is that half of the laborers will be let go and the remaining half will use their improved productivity to produce the same amount as before.
There are also many people who already work 4 days a week. They just work 10 hour shifts.
Audiophiles.
Sure the internet is shit compared to the big cities, but they probably don't have to spend several hours stuck in traffic every day. If there were a perfect place where you could truly have it all, everyone would try to move their and that would probably ruin it. So ask yourself what's really important to you and realize that you might have to give up some other things in pursuit of that.
Size plays a role, but I do not think it is the only or main reason. Instead I think that companies lose their soul when the original owners take it public.
Instead of focusing on what the company strives for, more effort is spent appeasing stock holders. They could care less what the company does as long as it makes money. If you told some of those blue bloods that their share value would double if the company burned kittens in the street, those assholes would bring them in by the sack load.
Meanwhile, employees get demoralized as the company shifts to keeping share holders happy and starts making the kinds of decisions that might be good for business, but crush the souls of the people who joined the company for something new and exciting or specifically to get away from some other soul crushing organization.
I don't think this has anything to do with third wold countries or groups of people experiencing a new technology. Look at all of the lives that have been destroyed in the U.S. over various moral panics over the years. Fortunately we've at least stopped lynching people, but even back in the 80's people went to jail over a supposed (and wrong) belief that there was rampant Satanic ritual abuse of children in day care facilities.
On top of that, due to the battery-operated, portable nature of the devices, they don't do the CPU-intensive tasks as well as something designed to be plugged into the wall, or even something that carries a lot more mass in batteries.
With a big push to move a lot of applications into the cloud (gmail, Google docs, etc.) we're starting so see the same kind of situation where the tablet just acts as a dumb terminal or thin client and most of the computation happens elsewhere. I think there were even some services where this was done for games. All of the rendering was done on high-end graphics cards in a rack somewhere else and the video was streamed to the customer's device where they'd input commands that got sent off to the cloud.
I'm not saying that I like this model, or even think it's a good idea, but it's certainly one that's come back into vogue again. Personally I don't use my tablet for any kind of real productivity. At most I've taken notes on it before. I use it for casual web-browsing and watching videos, where I think it works better than a laptop.
I think that the biggest reason for me switching over to Apple was that you could expect the device to get software updates 4 years later. I used to use Motorola exclusively (stretching back well before smart phones even existed) and could get 5+ years out a phone. After everyone switched over to making smartphones, Motorola still made great devices (before they kept getting bought and sold to different companies on a regular basis anyhow) I found that it was hard to get 2 years out of a device before support dried up. Things have gotten slightly better since then in terms of being able to unlock the bootloader, or get a device that has a reasonable expectation of support beyond a couple of years, but Apple does a much better job making this less of a hassle for the end user.
I'm skeptical that this will go anywhere near as well as planned. I suppose if it doesn't work out, they can always park what they do manage to haul all the way there off of the world islands.
It's not a bad location really. While Singapore is technically in the ring of fire, it's not close to any volcanoes itself. It also doesn't get a lot of typhoons compared to other parts of the region. Outside of those worries it has a lot of upsides. Geographically it's really close to around 50% of the world's population, the infrastructure is good, and it's unlikely that Facebook will run into any political issues as Singapore is pretty business friendly.
You must have a pretty good memory. Normally it tends to slip when people get to be that age.
I kid, but how long has it been since Sony was well regarded for their products?
For any other manufacturer, this would probably work, but Apple's phones (at least their flagship model) are ridiculously expensive. The iPhone X starts at $999 according to Apple's own site. Even the base model for the iPhone 8 Plus is $799, so if you have to factor in tax or you want to upgrade the storage capacity, this plan wouldn't work.
Before I bother to get excited about this, what was the effect size? It's one thing if this is effective enough to replace painkillers in some patients, but completely another if it's only good for something slightly less painful than a mosquito bite.
I realize that this is not going to be a popular opinion, but aren't you the very example against the argument you're making though? You took an opioid and did not become addicted (just as a number of other people, such as myself who took a strong painkiller exactly once and never again due to not liking the side effects) and took some personal responsibility to realize that even if the pills would treat your pain, it may not be a good idea for you to take them. There are clearly some people who should not be given opioids under any circumstances as they're exactly the type who are susceptible to becoming addicted. It's about as irresponsible as giving an arsonist a book of matches.
Executives lying about the effects of a medication is its own matter. Let's suppose there were no lies (or that this drug was never released and we're still using morphine instead) and we knew exactly how addictive this medication was. Does it still excuse anyone who disregards that information and uses is anyway, or continues to use it after they have a good reason to believe that they need to tell their doctor to switch them to another medication? If we were talking about crack cocaine, you'd tell people that they have a personal responsibility not to get addicted to crack. You wouldn't completely absolve those people who do get addicted just because there was a dealer who sold it to them and told them that everything would be fine.
I think that a person has to be severely mentally retarded (in the actual medical sense) before their own lack of ability to be personal responsible for themselves means that they're better off completing largely or completely abdicating that responsibility to someone else. How many less addicts would their be if patients were a little more responsible and did some of their own research instead of blindly trusting a physician, and how many physicians would have written prescriptions if they'd been a little bit more responsible instead of blindly trusting the sales rep from the pharmaceutical company? I really do think that if you want to get through life with a minimum amount of suffering that you do have to try to take as much personal responsibility as possible, even if no one else would blame you if you didn't. No one else is going to do a better job of having your own best interests in mind than you yourself. It might feel comforting to be able to blame someone else after the fact, but I'd rather not have to have the bad experience and look for where to spread the blame in the first place. Even when you don't have malicious assholes lying to you, other people are still capable of making innocent mistakes that can bite you in the ass.
Prosecute the executives to the full extent of the law if you can prove that they intentionally mislead the FDA, but don't throw personal responsibility out along with them.
I'm not a fan of making drugs illegal at all, but I'll take "big pharma" over the drug cartels. You end up with people consuming drugs and ruining their own lives either way, but at least "big pharma" isn't leaving a pile of extra corpses with Colombian neckties lying around.
The question is not whether or not progress occurs, but the rate at which it occurs.
If you think that low wages are holding back progress, then raising them should drive progress. Set the minimum wage at $50 and we should progress much faster. Hike it up again to $100 and even more progress, right? That's essentially what you're proposing. Are you proposing this across the board or just singling out Amazon workers because that's where you want to drive progress?
What you're failing to consider is that there isn't just one form of low wage labor. There are hundreds if not thousands of different jobs that pay minimum wage. The ones that get replaced first are where the greatest differential lies between the cost of labor and the savings due to automation.
Why would invest high-cost labor to reduce a minor part of costs?
This assumes that the high-cost labor is focused on reducing the cost of low-cost labor, which isn't necessarily true. Instead it would be invested in reducing whatever had the largest differential between current cost and potential savings. Perhaps that means developing a new material that can used to build a product which costs considerably less, engineering the product to be more reliable so that there are fewer returns of defective units, finding a less expensive way of transporting the products to the consumers, or any number of other areas that might reduce production costs. No company will page more than they have to for low skill labor if there's a pool of willing replacements available, which is why there are a lot of minimum wage jobs. Only when there is a shortage of available labor will companies actually raise wages. However, that just makes the cost of labor a relatively more expensive part of production.
And this is especially true if the CxO structure is oriented around short-term gains.
Which works in the short term, but the more money that a company snatches up in profit, just means the larger opportunity for someone else to undercut them, especially if that company has been neglecting advances and insists on doing things the same old way. Look at retail, which is a perfect example. One hundred years ago Sears Roebuck was quickly replacing companies doing things the old way, and now they're gone. Walmart came in and ate their lunch, and now Amazon is quickly becoming the dominant player. The business of selling goods to consumers has carried on, but the individual companies that were doing it have come and gone, in part because some executive was worried about the next quarter instead of the next two decades. Consumers are not worse off for the folly of executives as long as it's possible for some other company to form and attract their business.
I would imagine that if he didn't realize this (it's hard for someone who's run a business to be that daft, but Trump does make it believable) he's had economic advisors telling him.
It doesn't matter what he believes as long as his political base believes that Trump is going to lead them to their imagined fantastic version of America that all of this is supposed to create. They should probably just go back to church and pray. I'm much less convinced of tariffs doing any good for our economy than I am of the second coming.
It doesn't matter if Apple did bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. (they won't, but let's play along) as a result of all of this. There are already all kinds of new jobs available in the U.S. and those coal workers don't want to take any of them. They can have their jobs back when they start paying the farriers money so that horse-drawn carriages can haul their coal to power plants. I'll empathize a little bit with someone that's lost their job, but that goes out the window when there's mounds of opportunity and they can't be bothered to even try.
Unemployment numbers are meaningless if they fail to consider the labor participation rate (which itself isn't the full picture). There are still a lot of people without jobs that have essentially given up on finding one. What we should be looking at is the number of hours of labor that are being worked. It doesn't matter if you've got two jobs on paper if they're both being filled by the same person because they can't get a 40 hour position any longer.
Tariffs are beyond idiotic as a solution to our economic issues and even if Trump does somehow manage to enact them, they're not going to survive beyond his presidency. We should be going in the opposite direction and removing all tariffs. If China or some other government wants to subsidize a local industry, let's import the hell out of those products. I'd be over the moon to get some other country's tax payers to foot the bill for the goods I purchase.
Why bother automating while its still cheaper to just throw cheap labor at your problems?
If labor is inexpensive relative to other costs, investments will be made to find ways to reduce those other costs first. After this has been done, labor will be relatively more expensive. At a certain point, it may become the most expensive and then investments will be made in order to reduce labor costs. Technological innovation is going to occur in some area regardless of labor costs and it's likely that driving down the cost of raw material inputs requires automation in a different sector. The labor that is most easy to automate, will generally get replaced before the labor which is more difficult to replace even if you pay both of those people the same wage.
Having cheap labor means that you have more money to throw at your other problems. Couldn't one then argue that by paying your low skill labor the least amount possible means that you have more money to spend on research and development or investing in other areas to improve productivity? I don't believe that low wages have any (or if it does, then it's incredibly small compared to other factors) affect on the rate of automation and technological advancement in the overall scheme of things. Advancement and automation are going to occur somewhere and in a free market, it will tend to occur in the areas where it produces the largest increases in value. People will seek to automate where replacing a minimum wage human laborer results in a cost savings of say $5 and hour over where it only results in a savings of $1 an hour.
So if we increased the minimum wage to $50 an hour, everything would be great all of a sudden. Wouldn't $100 an hour be better still then? I think the logic breaks down and it's easy to see why.
It also doesn't make much sense when looking at history. There were no minimum wage laws and people often were paid starvation wages if they were paid at all. And yet useful progress occurred nonetheless. People are always going to try to find a cheaper way of doing something as long as there's a potential for increased profit that they can realize as a result of doing so. While there are some that don't even need that and are quite happy to work away at some problem for its own sake, they are rare.
Perhaps what you're thinking of is that there's less pressure to find a less expensive alternative when the cost of some aspect of production is low relative to the other components and that's certainly true, but the logic still does not hold. One could argue that paying starvation wages to the low skill labor leaves more money available to invest into research and development. That naturally implies that there will be higher wages for researchers if there is more demand for that kind of labor, but it does nothing for the kind of low skill employees whose plight the original poster was bemoaning.
I suppose you can try to play economic god and demand that certain jobs pay more in order to try to drive technological advancement in those areas, but history has shown that the people who try to run planned economies often make an utter mess of things.
So what? They have hundreds of thousands or millions of people that want to pay money to see them perform. Would you rather a record company or sports team owner get all of that money instead?
Why should I disparage someone who earns millions of dollars when I haven't had to pay them any of it unless I wanted to. It doesn't cost me anything if Taylor Swift or LeBron James are able to sell their time and talents for millions of dollars and I'm not about to start telling other people what they're allowed to spend their own money on either.
I cannot see how low wages holds technology back. Low wages are a consequence of labor that is not valuable. In one hundred years after all of the technological advances there will still be low wage jobs. Not all people are equally skilled and not all jobs are equally valued.
The difference is that technological progress improves productivity and reduces costs. A low wage job in the future may be able to afford a trip to the moon whereas now even most high wage jobs could not imagine doing this.