tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48570389418173201452024-03-12T14:42:17.756-07:00Abusing EconomicsAfter studying economics for 6 years, which availed me of the merits of free markets, I have circled back to the conclusion that, overall, Democrats will benefit most people in the long run far more than Republicans. I chronicle my observations in this blog. <br><a href="#learnWikipedia">Learn Econ on Wikipedia</a>|<a href="#blogArchive">Blog Archive</a>Henryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698012741990744311noreply@blogger.comBlogger304125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-15998070467877956132024-03-12T14:41:00.000-07:002024-03-12T14:41:31.860-07:00Jon Stewart is Back. Thank God. <iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/LJUl77rsFEw?si=FpCKVZFCrH3ZbjDq" frameborder="0"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-12270238381710250572021-09-29T11:25:00.006-07:002021-09-29T11:25:58.042-07:00Immigration Reduces Demand for the Policies Democrats Want<p>"<span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1714; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0.142222px;">There is a </span><a href="https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0199267669.001.0001/acprof-9780199267668" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-weight: var(--link-weight); letter-spacing: 0.142222px; text-decoration-line: none;">large</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1714; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0.142222px;"> </span><a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/0002828054825655" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-weight: var(--link-weight); letter-spacing: 0.142222px; text-decoration-line: none;">literature</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1714; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0.142222px;"> </span><a href="https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24733/w24733.pdf" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-weight: var(--link-weight); letter-spacing: 0.142222px; text-decoration-line: none;">that</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1714; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0.142222px;"> </span><a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w25562" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-weight: var(--link-weight); letter-spacing: 0.142222px; text-decoration-line: none;">finds</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1714; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0.142222px;"> </span><a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10887-016-9127-6" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-weight: var(--link-weight); letter-spacing: 0.142222px; text-decoration-line: none;">more</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1714; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0.142222px;"> </span><a href="https://ftp.iza.org/dp14354.pdf" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-weight: var(--link-weight); letter-spacing: 0.142222px; text-decoration-line: none;">ethnic</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1714; font-family: "Inter Variable", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0.142222px;"> diversity and birthplace diversity reduces support for welfare policies."</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-1074522057435548772021-07-22T16:42:00.005-07:002021-07-22T16:42:43.137-07:00Paul Samuelson's Family Tree of Economics (across editions)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">1961 (5th Edition)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7gHot6xuCSdozt_WaE19CTLXbFJ2A8bkFosChoWDuHoju44yZytWbnkFJz-FrVXsp2StPDZ_ymxXuoUJkB7x-j9SZ5-SIAlCRxawBRBMFC7xf43y5SKN8ViWpYYFj5qYyjy0RXWd7OtU/s1629/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_5th_61.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1629" data-original-width="1081" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7gHot6xuCSdozt_WaE19CTLXbFJ2A8bkFosChoWDuHoju44yZytWbnkFJz-FrVXsp2StPDZ_ymxXuoUJkB7x-j9SZ5-SIAlCRxawBRBMFC7xf43y5SKN8ViWpYYFj5qYyjy0RXWd7OtU/s320/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_5th_61.PNG" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">1973 (9th Edition) <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJJ9Mq6vYi7KSavE_ws_s4652GA4yR-ct9XzUdHdwsc0npDqORhc08NktaWPdlVgarpZh50dDBkMr9w2o-CdJLACnOiX2Aahy5fJJJbD5K1ail9thboPWveK5YXxtiOC0hw-JAXi8jdOI/s1230/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_9th_73.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1230" data-original-width="989" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJJ9Mq6vYi7KSavE_ws_s4652GA4yR-ct9XzUdHdwsc0npDqORhc08NktaWPdlVgarpZh50dDBkMr9w2o-CdJLACnOiX2Aahy5fJJJbD5K1ail9thboPWveK5YXxtiOC0hw-JAXi8jdOI/s320/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_9th_73.PNG" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">1976 (10th Edition) unchanged<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPv1iyO0Navl62zHIC4uYfFZ6J2WFLIQz6AoVwJwZ5rMij295QHY87-0_amIvdD_l7gOVSz2HLuOGp_pcfsXXOmxGpLIzEHmvKzUKwf_2IYtOQYoKKrGicii38SdopyypcZMromqUVvHw/s1829/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_10th_76.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1829" data-original-width="1404" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPv1iyO0Navl62zHIC4uYfFZ6J2WFLIQz6AoVwJwZ5rMij295QHY87-0_amIvdD_l7gOVSz2HLuOGp_pcfsXXOmxGpLIzEHmvKzUKwf_2IYtOQYoKKrGicii38SdopyypcZMromqUVvHw/s320/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_10th_76.PNG" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">1980 (11th Edition)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCMX0COMvgfvT-WvS-qDNUucIXcHesVoKbar5vRvvQwzswoXcVAJ1Rhw9SIO6i36mRp7pI8Ia8Ptz-yJwfNJV9Zlmcr3vvcXANaB23vxq5dJrqV-46SQ5QHfJWpyQhcr531-W3sSin8Pk/s1357/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_11th_80.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1357" data-original-width="1045" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCMX0COMvgfvT-WvS-qDNUucIXcHesVoKbar5vRvvQwzswoXcVAJ1Rhw9SIO6i36mRp7pI8Ia8Ptz-yJwfNJV9Zlmcr3vvcXANaB23vxq5dJrqV-46SQ5QHfJWpyQhcr531-W3sSin8Pk/s320/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_11th_80.PNG" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">1985 (12th Edition)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzW7jADEiWYUPATV74hX57BQi_HhLez-dU2XLXtgoEiz0213WckOkEocmZ1n7BbqOFOWXAJWqyAoZcxqZzZf0lLLsmRNyxRKjtZCutFbl5DEdxPymfCLmKfELfCZvakn5XlkD1Bw-A4MQ/s1575/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_12th_85.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="917" data-original-width="1575" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzW7jADEiWYUPATV74hX57BQi_HhLez-dU2XLXtgoEiz0213WckOkEocmZ1n7BbqOFOWXAJWqyAoZcxqZzZf0lLLsmRNyxRKjtZCutFbl5DEdxPymfCLmKfELfCZvakn5XlkD1Bw-A4MQ/s320/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_12th_85.PNG" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-66364224941017815712021-07-22T16:39:00.001-07:002021-07-22T16:39:26.701-07:00Paul Samuelson's Family Tree of Economics (over the years)<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEeUFgA6dGXLFsm5H-uEgKCS5kGd-CLrKr42uT9GQ2ADceFvPDasoeMkLdiY3bvBecEkJAQjK__wzV06EOPzXf08ozAtWZZAkRIrhEsRPYYfXlsZu2hHv0Wes5AmMHhVQkb8TtlnEZYUs/s0/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_9th_73.PNG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1230" data-original-width="989" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEeUFgA6dGXLFsm5H-uEgKCS5kGd-CLrKr42uT9GQ2ADceFvPDasoeMkLdiY3bvBecEkJAQjK__wzV06EOPzXf08ozAtWZZAkRIrhEsRPYYfXlsZu2hHv0Wes5AmMHhVQkb8TtlnEZYUs/s0/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_9th_73.PNG"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOt7z2ao6Fg2hVkZo3nG5qi7a23U9GUHIxbyHOHcfuQTaidZL1iUi47ACXyB-TjDgTAyUpiNfL5_cMLQ7Ooc9XLJK9d9IIOs2IB8wnu5zuzq5D0Q3sQrLziSW-F1ufLhAmW2H_qKZH7NA/s0/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_11th_80.PNG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1357" data-original-width="1045" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOt7z2ao6Fg2hVkZo3nG5qi7a23U9GUHIxbyHOHcfuQTaidZL1iUi47ACXyB-TjDgTAyUpiNfL5_cMLQ7Ooc9XLJK9d9IIOs2IB8wnu5zuzq5D0Q3sQrLziSW-F1ufLhAmW2H_qKZH7NA/s0/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_11th_80.PNG"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo0NOSVkOSiD28eR6FONdVC12jNy943FoXWOVYgJ79AazMm6phNUhup6Wc1MnWeiYbhO2accPTFmjtR2UXrPNAVvhjBR3tb77KCQsqcjXR8Rm9m22sTt96S9tfaQiHt9DmZQl-zHLA1IY/s0/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_5th_61.PNG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1629" data-original-width="1081" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo0NOSVkOSiD28eR6FONdVC12jNy943FoXWOVYgJ79AazMm6phNUhup6Wc1MnWeiYbhO2accPTFmjtR2UXrPNAVvhjBR3tb77KCQsqcjXR8Rm9m22sTt96S9tfaQiHt9DmZQl-zHLA1IY/s0/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_5th_61.PNG"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3vCzBX8VdSEkxVg6qIfwiCXMZHwXyTLEE6KTCdpjAtivUOWWoT3jgHmRL-jmTXRrGbMDMBv1ZEU-yubRCcWe1mhMiR2_T2K8j7q8locz4EcHeReVXaCbrTOV1uLGCASXHkR3zQG6p-sE/s0/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_10th_76.PNG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1829" data-original-width="1404" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3vCzBX8VdSEkxVg6qIfwiCXMZHwXyTLEE6KTCdpjAtivUOWWoT3jgHmRL-jmTXRrGbMDMBv1ZEU-yubRCcWe1mhMiR2_T2K8j7q8locz4EcHeReVXaCbrTOV1uLGCASXHkR3zQG6p-sE/s0/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_10th_76.PNG"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7IVfQR37wQ4AlRu2-fCSMGI3WO4a0bwOAskHHkH1PQnymdY_ilN90nBhzTGj5OTm3GJKNm6XycjV1H9trDGC1YcJm0Z97Md2BYowmQSDuWDg8HVTtc8HiiuPpsFfOUK-QsgSx0IA4GHw/s0/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_12th_85.PNG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="917" data-original-width="1575" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7IVfQR37wQ4AlRu2-fCSMGI3WO4a0bwOAskHHkH1PQnymdY_ilN90nBhzTGj5OTm3GJKNm6XycjV1H9trDGC1YcJm0Z97Md2BYowmQSDuWDg8HVTtc8HiiuPpsFfOUK-QsgSx0IA4GHw/s0/EconSamuelsonFamilyTree_12th_85.PNG"/></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-28662742730449333692021-03-05T14:23:00.006-08:002021-03-05T14:26:43.174-08:00Historic Change for Republicans, complete reversal on Market Fundamentalism<p> Marco Rubio's speech notes:</p><p>PDF link on his site, excerpted below as well.</p><p><a href="https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/5922cc54-2966-48a1-8e88-f7b51bbeca06/D0E7312935012E45F20C67A3450DDAFD.ndu-china-industrial-policy.pdf">https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/5922cc54-2966-48a1-8e88-f7b51bbeca06/D0E7312935012E45F20C67A3450DDAFD.ndu-china-industrial-policy.pdf</a></p><p>Video:</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imy6cdgTCaU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imy6cdgTCaU</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Excerpt of Speech Notes</p><p>●Last month, I spoke to students at Catholic University about the growing sense that our nation’s</p><p>institutions, especially in government, are unable to identify a common good and pursue it.</p><p>● I outlined my view of how that poses a threat to our economic foundation and our ability to</p><p>respond to threats abroad.</p><p>● I started the speech using a 19th</p><p><br /></p><p>-century papal encyclical as its launch point -- a document</p><p>written as industrialization was causing tremendous economic change and disruption, a time not</p><p>unlike our own.</p><p>● This morning I am honored to speak here at the National Defense University to discuss the</p><p>defining geopolitical relationship of this century: the one between the United States and China.</p><p>● Unfortunately, I was unable to find a papal encyclical on this topic.</p><p>● But it is the perfect setting for this message, given the mission of NDU to prepare its graduates</p><p>with the ability to develop strategies to solve our nation's most difficult national security</p><p>challenges.</p><p>Changes in Domestic Attitudes on China</p><p>● For decades, we enjoyed a broad consensus that, once China became rich, they would become</p><p>more like us -- more democratic and respectful of the rules that govern international trade and</p><p>commerce.</p><p>● But while China has become richer, it has only deepened its authoritarian grip domestically,</p><p>while flagrantly defying international law and commerce.</p><p>● The last several years have brought a long overdue and almost too-late readjustment to our views</p><p>on China.</p><p>● Almost overnight, we have awakened to the reality that “while America slept,” the Chinese</p><p>Communist Party has emerged as an immediate and growing threat to prosperity, our freedoms,</p><p>and our security.</p><p><br /></p><p>● Multinational corporations headquartered in our country, in search of quick profits, have</p><p>outsourced the dignified jobs that once sustained Americans to China. And our policymakers</p><p>rewarded this behavior.</p><p>● Now, once vibrant cities and towns are shells of their former selves, where incomes once</p><p>supported by a valuable industry get replaced by government checks and credit card debt.</p><p>● Tons of fentanyl manufactured in China flood our country, take thousands of lives, and destroy</p><p>countless families.</p><p>● Experts were intoxicated with post-Cold War fantasies about “the end of history.” A bipartisan</p><p>consensus formed that an American-helmed international system would forever be the new</p><p>normal, and the arc of all nations was toward democracy and respect for the rule of law.</p><p>● We have made great progress toward advancing our values and interests. But it is now clear that</p><p>our consensus on China was dangerously flawed.</p><p>Explaining the Rise of China</p><p>● China believes that its rightful place is at the center of the world and views the last 100 years as</p><p>an aberration it intends to correct.</p><p>● They have no interest in adhering to the rules of a post-war international system we helped</p><p>create, instead seeking to upend or replace it.</p><p>● They pursued these plans while “hiding their strength and biding their time,” portraying</p><p>themselves as a poor developing country and a non-expansionist power.</p><p>● And they succeeded in luring American policymakers into making negligent and catastrophic</p><p>mistakes.</p><p>● Washington passed financial, trade, tax, and patent laws designed to smooth over the process for</p><p>companies to open up operations in China. In turn, China would force those American</p><p>companies to partner with domestic competitors, which would steal their trade secrets and then</p><p>put them out of business.</p><p><br /></p><p>● Washington allowed China into what was supposed to be the trade union of free states, the</p><p>World Trade Organization. Beijing accepted all the benefits but none of the responsibilities that</p><p>came with that membership.</p><p>● And under intense lobbying from companies desperate for access to the enormous Chinese</p><p>market, Washington did little to call out or address the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights</p><p>abuses in Tibet, in Xinjiang, and three decades ago in Tiananmen Square.</p><p>● Meanwhile, Chinese leaders kept subsidizing their domestic industries while undermining ours.</p><p>● China kept stealing intellectual property and reverse-engineering products.</p><p>● China kept expanding access to our markets for their companies, while restricting access to their</p><p>markets for ours.</p><p>● And China used the profits from these unfair practices to fund substantial investments in research</p><p>and development of their own.</p><p>● And now we awaken to the reality that for the first time in three decades, we are confronted with</p><p>a near-peer rival that seeks to displace us militarily, economically, technologically, and</p><p>geopolitically.</p><p>● Our aim should not be to halt China’s rise.</p><p>● The task before us is to prevent America’s fall.</p><p>● China is and will continue to be a great global power, but we must not continue to allow its</p><p><br /></p><p>progress to come at the expense of our country, our citizens, our values, and the rules-</p><p>based international order that emerged from the incredible sacrifices made by the</p><p><br /></p><p>generations before us – who defeated Nazi Germany in World War II and the Soviet Union</p><p>in the Cold War.</p><p>● This century will be defined by the relationship between the United States and China.</p><p>● And it will either be the story of an unfair and unbalanced relationship that led to the</p><p>decline of a once great beacon of liberty and prosperity.</p><p><br /></p><p>● Or it will be the story of a stable, balanced, and sustainable relationship that allowed us to</p><p>further and protect our national interest and the common good of our people.</p><p>What Is a Balanced Relationship With China?</p><p>● What is that kind of balanced & sustainable relationship?</p><p>● It’s to no longer ignore China’s repeated and flagrant violations of the international rule of</p><p>law.</p><p>● Violations of the assurances they made to the people of Hong Kong when their city was handed</p><p>over.</p><p>● Violations like the construction and militarization of artificial islands in the South China Sea,</p><p>after years of promising the whole world that they would never do so.</p><p>● It’s to no longer ignore China’s repeated and flagrant violations of human rights.</p><p>● Forcing over one million Uyghur and other Muslims into labor camps in Xinjiang.</p><p>● The systematic oppression of all religions: Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Falun</p><p>Gong alike.</p><p>● And the crackdown on political dissent at home and freedom of expression everywhere,</p><p>including here in the United States.</p><p>● It is rejecting Chinese colonial expansionism, which ensnares smaller countries in a state of</p><p>permanent economic vassalage.</p><p>● The exploitation of political corruption to lay debt traps, bleeding countries dry and then</p><p>hijacking their domestic and economic infrastructure.</p><p>And the use of state-associated firms like Huawei to entice foreign nations into exploitative</p><p>contracts that give China access to foreign nations’ critical national security data.</p><p>The Centrality of Economic Power</p><p><br /></p><p>● But the most important element of a balanced relationship with China is to address how China</p><p>has used its material resources, like access to its vast consumer markets, massive labor force, and</p><p>technological development of its companies, to further its national interest and undermine ours.</p><p>● It is a fact that when you’re doing business with a Chinese company, you’re doing business with</p><p>the Chinese Communist Party.</p><p>● Beijing has used the foreign investment of American companies to steal intellectual property and</p><p>technologies in order to build their own native capacities and destroy ours.</p><p>● A few years ago they publicly outlined their plan to dominate ten emerging industries in the 21st</p><p>century.</p><p>● This isn’t just some tin-pot communist “Five Year Plan.” It is a coherent strategy to become the</p><p>world leader in industries such as aerospace, quantum computing, and industrial machinery.</p><p>● Let me read to you a quote, one translation of the plan’s introduction:</p><p>● “Manufacturing is the main pillar of the national economy, the foundation of the country,</p><p>tool of transformation and basis of prosperity. Since the beginning of industrial civilization in</p><p>the middle of the 18th century, it has been proven repeatedly by the rise and fall of world</p><p>powers that without strong manufacturing, there is no national prosperity.”</p><p>● This is a serious and direct challenge our nation must respond to for two reasons.</p><p>● First, because one of the most powerful defenses of our American system has long been the</p><p>prosperity of our way of life.</p><p>● For generations, industrial jobs have made up the core of our middle class, enabling Americans</p><p>to make a good living and give their time and treasure back to their families and communities.</p><p>These are the families where stable, dignified work allowed kids to “do better” than their parents,</p><p>opening up a world of opportunities in education, work, and life.</p><p>● In many of our communities, local factories and other industrial centers provided the “good,”</p><p>productive jobs -- a source of pride to their communities and envy to much of the world.</p><p>● China and its authoritarian communism have aimed to sabotage that defense.</p><p><br /></p><p>● So while it may be true that China is “breaking the rules” or that Chinese companies are</p><p>engaging in “unfair competition” against the American order, the fundamental challenge will not</p><p>simply be solved by some future trade agreement.</p><p>● The fundamental challenge is that China seeks to prove that you can have a prosperous society, a</p><p>contented citizenry, and be the world’s major power without respecting human dignity, freedom,</p><p>or God.</p><p>● And the second reason we must respond to the challenge before us is because the industries that</p><p>China intends to dominate are the very ones that will create the dignified and productive work</p><p>Americans need for us to remain a strong nation.</p><p>The Perils of Free-Market Fundamentalism</p><p>● Responding to this challenge will require us to reject the fundamentalism that argues that the</p><p>greatest virtue in American policy is to maximize “efficiency.”</p><p>● The market will always reach the most efficient economic outcome, but sometimes the most</p><p>efficient outcome is at odds with the common good and the national interest.</p><p>● Outsourcing jobs to China may be more efficient because it lowers labor costs and increases</p><p>profits.</p><p>● But the good jobs we lose end up destroying families and communities.</p><p>● Just last year, a study found that areas of the United States that faced Chinese import saturation</p><p>from 1990 to 2014 experienced drops in male employment, as well as declining marriage and</p><p>fertility rates.</p><p>● In communities that bore the brunt of “normalizing” trade relations with China -- to put it</p><p>euphemistically -- we even see jumps in suicide rates and deaths from substance abuse.</p><p>● For public policy makers, the common good can’t just be about corporate profits. When dignified</p><p>work, particularly for men, goes away, so goes the backbone of our culture. Our communities</p><p>become blighted and wither away. Families collapse, and fewer people get married. Our nation’s</p><p>soul ruptures.</p><p><br /></p><p>● This experience has become essentialized today in images of decaying Rust Belt towns and the</p><p>epidemic of working-class “deaths of despair.” But this story is playing out just as destructively</p><p>in our nation’s inner cities – from Flint to Phoenix and Baltimore to Birmingham. The erosion of</p><p>dignified work is colorblind and geographically limitless.</p><p>● Free enterprise is the greatest mechanism for achieving prosperity.</p><p>● However, the market is agnostic as to whether America is a high- or low-wage economy.</p><p>● The market is agnostic on whether a certain outcome is in our national interest or the common</p><p>good.</p><p>● But as a policymaker I am not.</p><p>● And I suspect that all of you – men and women committed to our national security – are not</p><p>ambivalent either.</p><p>● The market may say short-term profits justify adhering to the requirements China places on our</p><p>companies.</p><p>● But policymakers must take into account that long-term surrendering our productive capacity to</p><p>China is reckless.</p><p>● The market may say Americans – often unwittingly – should invest in Chinese firms.</p><p>● But policymakers must take into account whether American investors should be capitalizing the</p><p>very firms that steal from our companies, commit human rights violations, and develop the</p><p>weapons that could one day kill the men and women of our military.</p><p>● This isn’t a call to socialism or a rejection of capitalism; it’s a call to policymakers to remember</p><p>that the national interest, not economic growth, is our central obligation.</p><p>● This isn’t a call to recreate the economy of America’s past. It’s a call to invest and compete in</p><p>the emerging industries of the future, rather than forfeit them to China.</p><p><br /></p><p>● And this isn’t a call to kneejerk protectionism. It’s a call to maintain the technological and</p><p>industrial superiority necessary to defend our interests and ensure that working Americans have</p><p>access to dignified and productive work.</p><p>Revitalizing American Industrial Policy</p><p>● The critics of this approach argue that I am asking us to choose industries to favor and pick</p><p>winners and losers.</p><p>● But the truth is we are already doing that. The only difference is the path we are on now is</p><p>allowing Beijing to do the picking and the choosing.</p><p>● How secure or prosperous can America be if we cannot carry out heavy industry, pharmaceutical</p><p>manufacturing, and advanced technology?</p><p>● American policymakers must pursue policies that make our economy more productive by</p><p>identifying the critical value of specific industrial sectors and spurring investment in them.</p><p>● The depletion of America’s manufacturing sector has left us with a tremendous national security</p><p>vulnerability.</p><p>● I am not advocating for a government takeover of our means of production.</p><p>● What I am calling for us to do is remember that from World War II to the Space Race and</p><p>beyond, a capitalist America has always relied on public-private collaboration to further our</p><p>national security.</p><p>● And from the internet to GPS, many of the innovations that have made America a technological</p><p>superpower originated from national defense-oriented, public-private partnerships.</p><p>● This kind of collaboration is not a rejection of capitalism. It is a call to encourage and harness the</p><p>dynamism of our economy’s most productive private industries to further our national security</p><p>and ultimately our national economic development.</p><p>● It is a call for a 21st</p><p><br /></p><p>-century pro-American industrial policy.</p><p><br /></p><p>● When it comes to Chinese firms, our companies aren’t competing with private enterprises; they</p><p>are competing with a large and powerful nation-state.</p><p>● And in the long run it is a competition that market fundamentalists won’t win.</p><p>● Because China has learned how to leverage access to short-term profits as a way to get many</p><p>American companies to commit long-term corporate suicide.</p><p>● And because China provides their domestic companies the ability to make investments that make</p><p>no market sense in the short term but are critical to their national and economic security in the</p><p>long term.</p><p>● The market fundamentalists argue that government should not be picking which industries to</p><p>support -- that instead we should unleash the market to make those decisions.</p><p>● But what happens when an industry is critical to our national interest, yet the market determines</p><p>it is more efficient for China to dominate it?</p><p>● The best example of this is rare-earth minerals, which are vital to our defense and technology</p><p>industry.</p><p>● America currently imports 80 percent of rare-earths from China because the market has</p><p>determined that importing them is more efficient than investing in our own domestic mining</p><p>capacity.</p><p>● What is in our national interest? To adhere to the market’s determination and be vulnerable to</p><p>China crippling our industries and defenses? Or deciding that in this case the threat to our</p><p>security makes clear the market is not promoting the common good and, therefore, providing</p><p>government support for increasing our domestic capacity to mine rare-earth minerals?</p><p>● But the decision to observe when the market advances the common good shouldn’t just be</p><p>limited to those instances in which its determination runs contrary to our national defense.</p><p>● The most controversial argument I have made is that the loss of productive, dignified jobs for</p><p>Americans represents an existential threat to the common good -- especially ones that are not</p><p>easily replaced.</p><p><br /></p><p>● Is it not in our national interest to have productive and dignified jobs available for young people</p><p>entering our workforce? For parents who need to support the next generation of Americans? For</p><p>veterans returning to civilian life after serving our country?</p><p>● Is it not in our national interest to ensure that productive new jobs are not only available to Wall</p><p>Street and Silicon Valley but to working Americans across all of our nation?</p><p>● This is what motivates me as chairman of the Small Business Committee to overhaul our Small</p><p>Business Administration.</p><p>● Not because I believe a revitalized SBA alone is the key to creating these kinds of jobs. But</p><p>because I believe our federal policies should be directed toward encouraging physical investment</p><p>and new, dignified work opportunities here in America.</p><p>● I want to ramp up the amount of federal funding for R&D available to small businesses.</p><p><br /></p><p>● I want to modernize existing SBA programs so they prioritize encouraging investment in high-</p><p>potential firms in strategically important industries such as aerospace, rail, electronics,</p><p><br /></p><p>telecommunications, and agricultural machinery.</p><p>● In essence, in the same industries China is trying to dominate via their Made in China 2025</p><p>initiative.</p><p>● This is just a small part of the much broader modernization of our economic policies that we</p><p>need.</p><p>● Furthermore, we should expand and make permanent the immediate write-off for any business</p><p>investment in machinery, structures, and land, as well as remove bias in our tax code that</p><p>incentivizes businesses to buy back shares, instead of reinvesting profits into their firms and</p><p>workers.</p><p>● We should continue President Trump’s regulatory rollback to achieve a better balance between</p><p>our nation’s economic vitality and commonsense protections.</p><p>● Doing so will provide a viable alternative for American companies considering joint ventures</p><p>with Chinese firms in order to gain access to capital.</p><p><br /></p><p>● It will help revitalize American manufacturing, which in turn will bring higher wages and stable</p><p>work opportunities that allow for renewed family and community engagement. We will</p><p>reestablish a capitalism of the common good.</p><p>● In an essay last month, NDU professor Walter Hudson invoked the words of President</p><p>Eisenhower – an alumnus and the namesake, of course, of your school: “Spiritual force</p><p>multiplied by economic force multiplied by military force is roughly equivalent to security. If</p><p>any one of those factors fell to zero, or nearly so, the resulting product does likewise.”</p><p>● For the United States to be strong in all of these areas, and provide for our long-term national</p><p>prosperity, and for a strong national defense, and for the dignified work that allows families and</p><p>communities to thrive and share a sense of purpose – we need to restore our commitment to that</p><p>kind of common-good capitalism.</p><p>Conclusion</p><p>● Our current economic policy debate offers us an archaic and false choice.</p><p>● The left wants more government programs and more taxes on everything and everyone to pay for</p><p>them -- often advocating incentives and punishments on private industry that stoke identity</p><p>politics and culture wars, but ignore and even undermine our national security and job creation.</p><p>● The market fundamentalists on the right want more record-setting days in the stock market above</p><p>all else -- even if it means our dependence on and losses to China continue expanding to</p><p>American industries higher up the value chain.</p><p>● It is this financialization of economic policymaking that first allowed China to take over the</p><p>production of toys, cabinets, and mass consumer electronics -- and then take over the production</p><p>of generic pharmaceuticals. And now, they move to take over our genomic therapy industry.</p><p>● To what end?</p><p>● Until it doesn’t matter what innovation we come up with, because China will steal it and make it</p><p>cheaper?</p><p><br /></p><p>● Until it doesn’t matter how much we spend on research and development, because we need</p><p>China to manufacture the end result for us?</p><p>● Until every leading technology, communication, transportation, and aerospace leader in the</p><p>world is a Chinese state-backed firm?</p><p>● If that day should ever come, then we will live in a world in which the most powerful nation on</p><p>Earth will not be one that believes all people are created equal and born with a God-given right</p><p>to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.</p><p>● The most powerful nation on Earth will be a dictatorship that believes man exists to serve the</p><p>state; that its citizens’ opinions and religion must be cleared by political leaders first; and that the</p><p>only rights you have are those that the government allows us to have.</p><p>● What kind of world would that be? What would it mean for Americans here at home?</p><p>● We can already see a preview of it in our current events.</p><p>● How dozens of Muslim nations defend China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims for fear of losing</p><p>access to the Chinese market or investment.</p><p>● How Hollywood self-censors movies and television shows for fear of not being able to make</p><p>money in China.</p><p>● How the most downloaded social media app in the United States, owned by a Chinese firm,</p><p>banned a young American from the platform because she posted a video drawing attention to the</p><p>mass atrocities in Xinjiang.</p><p>● How under pressure from China, an hourly employee of Marriott in Omaha, Nebraska was fired</p><p>for liking a Twitter post from a Tibetan separatist group.</p><p>● How nations throughout the world, despite knowing the espionage risk posed by Chinese</p><p>telecommunications companies, have allowed them to take over their domestic deployment of</p><p>5G, because no non-Chinese, cost-effective competitor exists.</p><p>● And how these same companies are so deeply embedded in our own domestic networks that we</p><p>still aren’t able to remove their equipment from our own military bases.</p><p><br /></p><p>● This is but a small preview of the future that awaits us if do not undertake a complete</p><p>reorientation of our economic policies.</p><p>● It is not enough to ban Chinese technology or condemn Chinese human rights abuses.</p><p>● Achieving a peaceful, sustainable balance between the United States and China will require us to</p><p>increase our national strength.</p><p>● By rejuvenating our nation’s economic power.</p><p>● By prioritizing and incentivizing private economic activities that give Americans opportunities</p><p>for dignified work.</p><p>● And by furthering our national development through 21st</p><p><br /></p><p>-century American industrial policy</p><p><br /></p><p>compatible with and complementary to our free market system.</p><p>● The stakes could not be higher.</p><p>● Because the outcome will define the 21st century.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-34235053400266370492020-01-13T12:36:00.001-08:002020-01-13T12:36:15.996-08:00Thoughts on Our Possible Future Without Work<div class="story">
<span class="story-title" id="title-122996388"> <a href="https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/01/12/1929251/thoughts-on-our-possible-future-without-work">Thoughts on Our Possible Future Without Work</a></span></div>
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<span class="story-title" id="title-122996388"> <span class=" no extlnk"><a class="story-sourcelnk" href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/09/world-without-work-david-susskind-review" target="_blank" title="External link - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/09/world-without-work-david-susskind-review">https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/01/12/1929251/thoughts-on-our-possible-future-without-work</a></span></span><span class="comment-bubble"></span>
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EditorDavid
<time datetime="on Sunday January 12, 2020 @02:38PM" id="fhtime-122996388">on Sunday January 12, 2020 @02:38PM</time>
from the <span class="dept-text">utopia-or-bust</span> dept.
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There's a new book called <a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/a-world-without-work-9780241321096.html"> <em>A World Without Work</em></a> by economics scholar/former government policy adviser Daniel Susskind. The Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/09/world-without-work-david-susskind-review">succinctly summarizes its prognostications for the future</a>:<br />
<i>It used to be argued that workers who lost their low-skilled jobs
should retrain for more challenging roles, but what happens when the
robots, or drones, or driverless cars, come for those as well?
Predictions vary but up to half of jobs are at least partially
vulnerable to AI, from truck-driving, retail and warehouse work to
medicine, law and accountancy. That's why the former US treasury
secretary Larry Summers confessed in 2013 that he used to think "the
Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological
progress were right. I'm not so completely certain now." That same year,
the economist and Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky wrote that fears
of technological unemployment were not so much wrong as premature:
"Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs." Yet Skidelsky, like Keynes,
saw this as an opportunity. If the doomsayers are to be finally proven
right, then why not the utopians, too...?<br /> <br />
The work ethic, [Susskind] says, is a modern religion that purports to
be the only source of meaning and purpose. "What do you do for a
living?" is for many people the first question they ask when meeting a
stranger, and there is no entity more beloved of politicians than the
"hard-working family". Yet faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and
stagnant wages, many are losing faith in the gospel of work. In a 2015
YouGov survey, 37% of UK workers said their jobs made no meaningful
contribution. Susskind wonders in the final pages "whether the academics
and commentators who write fearfully about a world with less work are
just mistakenly projecting the personal enjoyment they take from their
jobs on to the experience of everyone else".<br /> <br />
That deserves to be more than an afterthought. The challenge of a world
without work isn't just economic but political and psychological...
[I]s relying on work to provide self-worth and social status an
inevitable human truth or the relatively recent product of a puritan
work ethic? Keynes regretted that the possibility of an "age of leisure
and abundance" was freighted with dread: "For we have been trained too
long to strive and not to enjoy." The state, Susskind concedes with
ambivalence, will need to smooth the transition. Moving beyond the "Age
of Labour" will require something like a universal basic income (he
prefers a more selective conditional basic income), funded by taxes on
capital to share the proceeds of technological prosperity. The available
work will also need to be more evenly distributed. After decades of a
40-hour week, the recent Labour manifesto, influenced by Skidelsky,
promised 32 hours by 2030. And that's the relatively easy part. <br /> <br />
Moving society's centre of gravity away from waged labour will require
visionary "leisure policies" on every level, from urban planning to
education, and a revolution in thinking. "We will be forced to consider
what it really means to live a meaningful life," Susskind writes,
implying that this is above his pay grade.</i> <br />
The review concludes that "if AI really does to employment what previous
technologies did not, radical change can't be postponed indefinitely. <br /> <br />
"It may well be utopia or bust."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-29336032910020951632018-04-01T19:03:00.004-07:002018-04-01T19:03:57.527-07:00Inflation Benefits the Borrower<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 17px;">"Embracing higher inflation, however, could cause political problems for the Fed."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 17px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 17px;">from </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/us/politics/federal-reserve-interest-rate-increase.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/us/politics/federal-reserve-interest-rate-increase.html</a></span></span><br />
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As Economy Grows, Federal Reserve Frets Next Downturn</h1>
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<span class="byline" itemid="https://www.nytimes.com/by/binyamin-appelbaum" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" style="font-family: nyt-cheltenham-sh, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 0.6875rem; font-weight: 700; line-height: 0.75rem; margin-right: 12px;">By <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/binyamin-appelbaum" style="color: black; text-decoration-line: none;" title="More Articles by BINYAMIN APPELBAUM"><span class="byline-author" data-byline-name="BINYAMIN APPELBAUM" data-twitter-handle="BCAppelbaum" itemprop="name" style="white-space: nowrap;">BINYAMIN APPELBAUM</span></a></span><time class="dateline" content="2018-02-27T08:30:06-05:00" datetime="2018-02-27T08:30:06-05:00" itemprop="dateModified" style="color: black; font-family: nyt-cheltenham-sh, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 0.6875rem; line-height: 0.75rem; margin-left: 0px; white-space: nowrap;">FEB. 23, 2018</time></div>
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<div aria-label="tools" class="sharetools theme-classic sharetools-story-meta-footer " data-author="By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM" data-description="The Fed’s biannual policy report to Congress made little mention of the stock market’s fluctuations, but it affirmed plans to raise interest rates." data-media="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/02/26/business/26DC-FED1-print/merlin_132786686_968a877a-9abf-4538-a796-d259e4497e92-jumbo.jpg" data-publish-date="February 23, 2018" data-share-tools-initialized="1" data-shares="facebook,twitter,email,show-all,save" data-title="As Economy Grows, Federal Reserve Frets Next Downturn" data-url="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/us/politics/federal-reserve-interest-rate-increase.html" id="sharetools-story-meta-footer" role="group">
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<figure aria-label="media" class="media photo lede layout-large-horizontal" data-media-action="modal" id="media-100000005755714" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/02/26/business/26DC-FED1-print/merlin_132786686_968a877a-9abf-4538-a796-d259e4497e92-master768.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group" style="clear: both; display: flex; flex-direction: column; margin: 0px 0px 45px; position: relative; width: 705px;"><span class="visually-hidden" style="border: 0px; clip: rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px); height: 1px; margin: -1px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; position: absolute; width: 1px;">Photo</span><div class="image" style="cursor: pointer; flex-shrink: 0; margin-bottom: 7px; position: relative;">
<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, which is confronting the question of how quickly to raise interest rates." data-mediaviewer-credit="Joshua Roberts/Reuters" data-mediaviewer-src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/02/26/business/26DC-FED1-print/merlin_132786686_968a877a-9abf-4538-a796-d259e4497e92-superJumbo.jpg" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/02/26/business/26DC-FED1-print/merlin_132786686_968a877a-9abf-4538-a796-d259e4497e92-master768.jpg" itemprop="url" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/02/26/business/26DC-FED1-print/merlin_132786686_968a877a-9abf-4538-a796-d259e4497e92-master768.jpg" style="display: block; height: auto; max-width: 100%; width: 705px;" /><div class="media-action-overlay" style="border-radius: 6px; border: 1px solid rgba(200, 200, 200, 0.8); bottom: 15px; cursor: pointer; left: 15px; opacity: 0; position: absolute; transition: opacity 0.2s ease-in; z-index: 5;">
<span class="icon sprite-icon" style="background-image: url("/assets/article/20180322-142545/images/sprite/sprite-no-repeat.svg"); background-position: -256px -135px; background-repeat: no-repeat; display: inline-block; height: 38px; line-height: 0; vertical-align: middle; width: 38px;"></span></div>
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<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description" style="color: #666666; font-family: nyt-cheltenham-sh, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 0.8125rem; line-height: 1.0625rem; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; max-width: 630px;"><span class="caption-text">Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, which is confronting the question of how quickly to raise interest rates.</span> <span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder" style="color: #999999; display: inline-block; font-size: 0.6875rem; line-height: 1rem;"><span class="visually-hidden" style="border: 0px; clip: rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px); height: 1px; margin: -1px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; position: absolute; width: 1px;">Credit</span>Joshua Roberts/Reuters</span></figcaption></figure><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="176" data-total-count="176" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
The Federal Reserve on Friday described recent volatility in financial markets as a brief blip and affirmed its plans to raise its benchmark interest rate in the coming months.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="269" data-total-count="445" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
The Fed painted economic conditions in bright and happy colors in its <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/20180223_mprfullreport.pdf" style="color: #326891;">biannual report to Congress on the conduct of monetary policy</a>. It said the labor market was “near or a little beyond full employment,” an important milestone in the recovery from the 2008 crisis.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="269" data-total-count="714" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
“The U.S. economy appears to be performing very well and, certainly, is in the best shape that it has been in since the crisis and, by many metrics, since well before the crisis,” Randal K. Quarles, the Fed’s vice chairman for supervision, <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/quarles20180222a.htm" style="color: #326891;">said Thursday in Tokyo</a>.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="436" data-total-count="1150" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
The immediate problem confronting the Fed is how quickly to raise interest rates. The Fed forecast in December that it would raise rates three times in 2018, just as it did in 2017. Fed officials say stronger growth is fortifying those intentions, and the next rate increase is expected in March. A growing number of Wall Street analysts predict the improving economic forecast will persuade the Fed to raise rates four times this year.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="163" data-total-count="1313" id="story-continues-1" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
The hot topic on Friday, however, at a conference attended by several Fed officials in New York, was whether the Fed would be ready for the next economic downturn.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="322" data-total-count="1635" id="story-continues-3" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
The Fed’s benchmark rate is in a range of 1.25 percent to 1.5 percent, and the Fed does not expect it to rise much higher than 3 percent in the current economic expansion. That’s a problem given that, in the last four downturns, the Fed has cut rates by an average of 5.5 percentage points to stimulate renewed growth.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="244" data-total-count="1879" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
During the last downturn, the Fed reduced the benchmark rate to nearly zero in 2008, and then supplemented its efforts by pledging to keep interest rates at a low level and by purchasing large quantities of Treasuries and mortgage-backed bonds.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="393" data-total-count="2272" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Fed officials have said that those policies benefited the economy, and could be used again during a future downturn. Other central banks have relied on similar policies in recent years, and have reached similar conclusions. Benoît Cœuré, a board member of the European Central Bank, said economic research was “fairly clear” that such asset purchases helped to hold down interest rates.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="187" data-total-count="2459" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
But <a href="https://research.chicagobooth.edu/igm/usmpf/usmpf-paper" style="color: #326891;">the main paper presented at the conference</a> on Friday, which is hosted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, asserted that bond-buying had little economic benefit.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="191" data-total-count="2650" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
“Our conclusion is that the most important and reliable instrument of monetary policy is the short term interest rate,” wrote the authors, a team of two academics and two bank economists-</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="458" data-total-count="3108" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
The danger of a rapid return to near-zero interest rates seemed particularly acute in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, as the Fed repeatedly delayed any increase in rates. Now, the economy has gained strength and the Fed has raised rates five times. Jan Hatzius, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, said the progress showed the Fed’s policies had helped, and that the Fed might be able to raise interest rates above current expectations.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="136" data-total-count="3244" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
“My own view about what is possible at the zero lower bound is quite a bit more optimistic than it was back then,” Mr. Hatzius said.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="244" data-total-count="3488" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
An account of the Fed’s most recent policymaking meeting, in January, reported that some officials had shared that optimism, expressing the view that the Fed might be able to increase its benchmark rate <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/business/economy/fed-economy.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fbinyamin-appelbaum&action=click&contentCollection=undefined&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection" style="color: #326891;">somewhat closer to its precrisis level</a>.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="193" data-total-count="3681" id="story-continues-4" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Nonetheless, there is growing support among Fed officials for a review of the Fed’s approach to policy, and of alternatives that might allow it to respond more forcefully to future downturns.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="172" data-total-count="3853" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Loretta Mester, the relatively conservative president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, told the conference she favored starting such a study “later this year.”</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="254" data-total-count="4107" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/us/politics/federal-reserve-inflation.html" style="color: #326891;">The Fed aims to keep inflation at an annual pace of 2 percent a year</a>, by raising and lower interest rates and by training the public to expect a certain level of inflation, disciplining the pricing decisions of businesses and the wage demands of workers.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="151" data-total-count="4258" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Alternative approaches fall into two broad categories: Permanently replace the Fed’s 2 percent target, or set it aside in the aftermath of downturns.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="160" data-total-count="4418" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Raising the target is a simple way of creating more room to respond to crises. Interest rates include expected inflation, so higher inflation would raise rates.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="80" data-total-count="4498" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Embracing higher inflation, however, could cause political problems for the Fed.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="352" data-total-count="4850" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Alternatively, the Fed could tolerate higher inflation on a temporary basis. For example, the Fed could aim to maintain average inflation at 2 percent over some specified period, meaning that it would compensate for periods of lower inflation, as during the last six years, by allowing periods of higher inflation, thus maintaining a 2 percent average.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="168" data-total-count="5018" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Last year, the Fed began to include a comparison between its actual management of interest rates, and the results produced by alternative approaches to monetary policy.</div>
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The report on Friday included an inflation-averaging approach among those alternatives for the first time.</div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px;"><br /></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-28031481226898575442018-03-21T19:55:00.001-07:002018-03-21T19:55:18.427-07:00Steady-State EconomyI just added the first new link to my list of "Learn Econ from Wikipedia" links in .... over 5 years, at least.<br />
<br />
TLDR: is "In all my years studying and following Economics as an academic discipline, I never, ever heard the term Steady-State Economy. In every discussion of Macroeconomics, Growth was as assumed as the sky is blue."<br />
<br />
And I am at long last relieved I'm not the only one thinking this is absurd. <br />
<br />
This article also has a great section on the history of the idea, which has given me a clearer explanation for the flow of ideas from Smith to Ricardo than anything I've encountered, including Heilbronner's "Worldly Philosophers".<br />
<br />
"<br />
<h4 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); border-bottom: 0px; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.6; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0.5em;">
<span class="mw-headline" id="Adam_Smith's_concept">Adam Smith's concept</span><span class="mw-editsection" style="font-size: x-small; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1em; margin-left: 1em; unicode-bidi: isolate; user-select: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color: #54595d; margin-right: 0.25em;">[</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steady-state_economy&action=edit&section=5" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Edit section: Adam Smith's concept">edit</a><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color: #54595d; margin-left: 0.25em;">]</span></span></h4>
<div class="hatnote navigation-not-searchable" role="note" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 0.5em; padding-left: 1.6em;">
Main article: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Adam Smith">Adam Smith</a></div>
<div class="hatnote navigation-not-searchable" role="note" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-top: -0.5em; padding-left: 1.6em;">
See also: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Invisible hand">Invisible hand</a></div>
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Further information: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="The Wealth of Nations">The Wealth of Nations</a></div>
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Smith examined the economic states of various nations in the world</div>
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Adam Smith">Adam Smith</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Masterpiece">magnum opus</a> on <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="The Wealth of Nations">The Wealth of Nations</a></i>, published in 1776, laid the foundation of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_economics" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Classical economics">classical economics</a> in Britain. Smith thereby disseminated and established a concept that has since been a cornerstone in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Economics">economics</a> throughout most of the world: In a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Capitalism">liberal capitalist society</a>, provided with a stable institutional and legal framework, an '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Invisible hand">invisible hand</a>' will ensure that the enlightened self-interest of all members of society will contribute to the growth and prosperity of society as a whole, thereby leading to an 'obvious and simple system of natural liberty'.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-as01_36-0" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#cite_note-as01-36" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">[36]</a></sup><sup class="reference" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">:349f, 533f</sup></div>
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Smith was convinced of the beneficial effect of the enlightened self-interest on the wealth of nations; but he was less certain this wealth would grow forever. Smith observed that any country in the world found itself in either a 'progressive', a 'stationary', or a 'declining' state: Although England was wealthier than its North American colonies, wages were higher in the latter place as wealth in North America was growing faster than in England; hence, North America was in the 'cheerful and hearty' progressive state. In China, on the other hand, wages were low, the condition of poor people was scantier than in any nation in Europe, and more marriages were contracted here because the 'horrid' killing of newborn babies was permitted and even widely practised; hence, China was in the 'dull' stationary state, although it did not yet seem to be declining. In nations situated in the 'melancholic' declining state, the higher ranks of society would fall down and settle for occupation amid the lower ranks, while the lowest ranks would either subsist on a miserable and insufficient wage, resort to begging or crime, or slide into starvation and early death. Bengal and some other English settlements in the East Indies possibly found themselves in this state, Smith reckoned.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-as01_36-1" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#cite_note-as01-36" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">[36]</a></sup><sup class="reference" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">:59–68</sup></div>
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Smith pointed out that as wealth was growing in any nation, the rate of profit would tend to fall and investment opportunities would diminish. In a nation that had thereby reached this 'full complement of riches', society would finally settle in a stationary state with a constant stock of people and capital. In an 18th-century anticipation of <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="The Limits to Growth">The Limits to Growth</a></i> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#LtG" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">see below</a>), Smith described the state as follows:</div>
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<tr><td style="border: none; color: #b2b7f2; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 40px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 0.6em; padding: 10px; vertical-align: top; width: 20px;">“</td><td style="border: none; padding: 4px 10px; vertical-align: top;">In a country which had acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its soil and climate, and its situation with respect to other countries, allowed it to acquire; which could, therefore, advance no further, and which was not going backwards, both the wages of labour and the profits of stock would probably be very low. In a country fully peopled in proportion to what either its territory could maintain or its stock employ, the competition for employment would necessarily be so great as to reduce the wages of labour to what was barely sufficient to keep up the number of labourers, and, the country being already fully peopled, that number could never be augmented. In a country fully stocked in proportion to all the business it had to transact, as great a quantity of stock would be employed in every particular branch as the nature and extent of the trade would admit. The competition, therefore, would everywhere be as great, and consequently the ordinary profit as low as possible."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-as01_36-2" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#cite_note-as01-36" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">[36]</a></sup><sup class="reference" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">:78</sup></td><td style="border: none; color: #b2b7f2; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 40px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 0.6em; padding: 10px; text-align: right; vertical-align: bottom; width: 20px;">”</td></tr>
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According to Smith, Holland seemed to be approaching this stationary state, although at a much higher level than in China. Smith believed the laws and institutions of China prevented this country from achieving the potential wealth its soil, climate and situation might have admitted of.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-as01_36-3" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#cite_note-as01-36" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">[36]</a></sup><sup class="reference" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">:78f</sup> Smith was unable to provide any contemporary examples of a nation in the world that had in fact reached the full complement of riches and thus had settled in stationarity, because, as he conjectured, "... perhaps no country has ever yet arrived at this degree of opulence."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-as01_36-4" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#cite_note-as01-36" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">[36]</a></sup><sup class="reference" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">:78</sup></div>
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<span id="David_Ricardo.27s_concept"></span><span class="mw-headline" id="David_Ricardo's_concept">David Ricardo's concept</span><span class="mw-editsection" style="font-size: x-small; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1em; margin-left: 1em; unicode-bidi: isolate; user-select: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color: #54595d; margin-right: 0.25em;">[</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steady-state_economy&action=edit&section=6" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Edit section: David Ricardo's concept">edit</a><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color: #54595d; margin-left: 0.25em;">]</span></span></h4>
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Main article: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="David Ricardo">David Ricardo</a></div>
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See also: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardian_economics" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Ricardian economics">Ricardian economics</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Corn Laws">Corn Laws</a></div>
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Further information: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Principles_of_Political_Economy_and_Taxation" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation">On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation</a></div>
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Ricardo was opposed to the interests of the landowning class</div>
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In the early 19th century, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="David Ricardo">David Ricardo</a> was the leading economist of the day and the champion of British <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Classical liberalism"><i>laissez-faire</i> liberalism</a>. Ricardo replaced Adam Smith's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_research" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Empirical research">empirical reasoning</a> with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Deductive reasoning">abstract principles and deductive argument</a>. This new methodology would later become the norm in economics as a science.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-mb02_2-2" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#cite_note-mb02-2" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">[2]</a></sup><sup class="reference" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">:135f</sup></div>
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In Ricardo's times, Britain's trade with the European continent was somewhat disrupted during the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Napoleonic Wars">Napoleonic Wars</a> that had raged since 1803. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_System" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Continental System">Continental System</a> brought into effect a large-scale <a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embargo" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Embargo">embargo</a> against British trade, whereby the nation's food supply came to rely heavily on domestic agriculture to the benefit of the landowning classes. When the wars ended with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo#French_disintegration" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Battle of Waterloo">Napoleon's final defeat</a> in 1815, the landowning classes dominating the British parliament had managed to tighten the existing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Corn Laws">Corn Laws</a> in order to retain their <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Monopoly">monopoly status</a> on the home market during peacetime. The controversial Corn Laws were a <a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionist" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Protectionist">protectionist</a> two-sided measure of <a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidies" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Subsidies">subsidies</a> on corn exports and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Tariff">tariffs</a> on corn imports. The tightening was opposed by both the capitalist and the labouring classes, as the high price of bread effectively reduced real profits and real wages in the economy. So was the political setting when Ricardo published his treatise <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Principles_of_Political_Economy_and_Taxation" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation">On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation</a></i> in 1817.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-mb01_37-0" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#cite_note-mb01-37" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">[37]</a></sup><sup class="reference" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">:6–10</sup></div>
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According to Ricardo, the limits to growth were ever present due to scarcity of arable agricultural land in the country. In the wake of the wartime period, the British economy seemed to be approaching the stationary state as population was growing, plots of land with lower fertility were put into agricultural use, and the rising rents of the rural landowning class were crowding out the profits of the urban capitalists. This was the broad outline of Ricardo's controversial <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent#Land_rent" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Economic rent">land rent theory</a>. Ricardo believed that the only way for Britain to avoid the stationary state was to increase her volume of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_trade" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="International trade">international trade</a>: The country should export more industrial products and start importing cheap agricultural products from abroad in turn. However, this course of development was impeded by the Corn Laws that seemed to be hampering both the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrialisation" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Industrialisation">industrialisation</a> and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Internationalization">internationalization</a> of the British economy. In the 1820s, Ricardo and his followers – Ricardo himself died in 1823 – directed much of their fire at the Corn Laws in order to have them repealed, and various other free trade campaigners borrowed indiscriminately from Ricardo's doctrines to suit their agenda.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-mb01_37-1" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#cite_note-mb01-37" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">[37]</a></sup><sup class="reference" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">:202f</sup></div>
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The Corn Laws were not repealed before 1846. In the meantime, the British economy kept growing, a fact that effectively undermined the credibility and thrust of Ricardian economics in Britain;<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-mb01_37-2" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#cite_note-mb01-37" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">[37]</a></sup><sup class="reference" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">:223</sup> but Ricardo had by now established himself as the first stationary state theorist in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_economic_thought" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="History of economic thought">history of economic thought</a>.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-mb02_2-3" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#cite_note-mb02-2" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">[2]</a></sup><sup class="reference" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;">:88f</sup></div>
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Ricardo's preoccupation with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Class conflict">class conflict</a> anticipated the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Karl Marx">Karl Marx</a> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#Karl_Marx" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration-line: none;">see below</a>)."</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-79080135964066370482018-03-21T19:46:00.001-07:002018-03-21T19:46:40.792-07:00Repairing the rungs on the ladderfrom The Economist, <a href="https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571417-how-prevent-virtuous-meritocracy-entrenching-itself-top-repairing-rungs" target="_blank">https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571417-how-prevent-virtuous-meritocracy-entrenching-itself-top-repairing-rungs</a><br />
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“<span style="color: #7a7a7a; font-family: "econsans" , "tahoma" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.0466px; letter-spacing: 0.210699px;">Feb 9th 2013</span></div>
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<span class="flytitle-and-title__flytitle" style="color: #e3120b; display: block; font-size: 0.88889em; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.35; margin: 0px 0px 0.1em; overflow: hidden;">Social mobility in America</span><span class="flytitle-and-title__title" style="color: #121212; display: block; font-family: "miloserifpro" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 1.80204em; font-weight: 500; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px 0px 0.75rem; transition: 0.2s;">Repairing the rungs on the ladder</span></h1>
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<span style="font-style: italic; text-align: center;">How to prevent a virtuous meritocracy entrenching itself at the top</span></div>
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MERITOCRACY” tends to be spoken of approvingly these days. Its ascendancy is seen as a measure of progress. In the dark ages, the dumb scions of the aristocracy inherited their seats on cabinets and on the boards of great companies. These days, people succeed through brains and hard work.</div>
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Yet the man who invented the word meant it as a pejorative term. In “The Rise of the Meritocracy”, published in 1958, Michael Young, a British sociologist and Labour Party activist, painted a futuristic picture of a dystopian Britain, where the class-based elite had been replaced with a hierarchy of talent. Democracy was dispensed with. Clever children were siphoned into special schools and showered with resources. The demoralised talentless masses eventually revolted.</div>
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The world is starting to look a bit like Young’s nightmare vision. The top 1% have seen their incomes soar because of the premium that a globalised high-tech economy places on brainy people. An aristocracy that gambled its money away on “wine, women and song” has been replaced by a business-school-educated elite whose members marry one another and spend their money wisely on Mandarin lessons and <em class="Italic">Economist</em>subscriptions for their children.</div>
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It is, of course, good that money flows to talent rather than connections, and that people invest in their children’s education. But the clever rich are turning themselves into an entrenched elite. This phenomenon—call it the paradox of virtuous meritocracy—undermines equality of opportunity.</div>
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A very American paradox</div>
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This is happening throughout the rich world, where elites have proved remarkably adept at passing on privilege down the generations (see <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21571399" style="border-bottom: 2px solid rgb(62, 81, 181); color: #3e51b5; padding-bottom: 1px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 101ms ease, border-bottom-color;" target="_self">article</a>). But it is most acute in America. Back in its Horatio Alger days, America was more fluid than Europe. Now it is not. Using one-generation measures of social mobility—how much a father’s relative income influences that of his adult son—America does half as well as Nordic countries, and about the same as Britain and Italy, Europe’s least-mobile places. America is particularly exposed to the virtuous-meritocracy paradox because its poor are getting married in ever smaller numbers, leaving more children with single mothers short of time and money. One study suggests that the gap in test scores between the children of America’s richest 10% and its poorest has risen by 30-40% over the past 25 years.</div>
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American conservatives say the answer lies in boosting marriage; the left focuses on redistribution. This newspaper would sweep away tax breaks such as mortgage-interest deduction that help richer people, and target more state spending on the poor. But the main focus should be education policy.</div>
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Whereas most OECD countries spend more on the education of poor children than rich ones, in America the opposite is true. It is especially bad at early-childhood education, which can have a big influence on results later (see <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21571416" style="border-bottom: 2px solid rgb(62, 81, 181); color: #3e51b5; padding-bottom: 1px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 101ms ease, border-bottom-color;" target="_self">article</a>): only one four-year-old in six in America is in a public pre-school programme. Barack Obama has increased pre-school funding, but deeper change is needed. Because the school system is organised at the local level, and funded mainly through property taxes, affluent areas spend more. And thanks to the teachers’ unions, America has been far less willing than, say, Sweden to open its schools to choice through vouchers.</div>
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In higher education stiff fees in America mean that many poor children never get to university, and too many of those who do drop out. Outdated affirmative-action programmes should give way to schemes to help students based on the poverty of the applicant rather than the colour of his skin.</div>
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As for the rich strivers, there is nothing that you can, or should, do to stop people investing in their children, but you can prevent them from unfairly adding to their already privileged position. For instance, standardised tests were supposed to favour the brainy, but the $4.5 billion test-prep industry, which disproportionately caters to the rich, indicates that this is being gamed. Intelligence tests should be more widely used. The other great unfairness has to do with the preferences that elite American universities give to well-connected children, either because their parents went to the university themselves or because they have given money. An educational institution should focus on attracting the best people, and then work out how to finance the poorer people in that category.</div>
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None of these things will stop rich couples who invest in the children having an advantage. But they may stop that advantage being as insurmountable as it is today, and thus prevent Michael Young’s ugly fantasy from becoming real."</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-25267572172776503332018-01-25T12:46:00.000-08:002018-01-25T12:46:26.780-08:00Democrats against immigrationDemocrats against immigration<br />
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By Ashley Taylor <br />
Friday Nov 09, 2007 · 5:40 AM MST<br />
247 Comments (221 New)<br />
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I’m a Democrat, and I’m opposed to immigration.<br />
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Because too many people are unable to understand subtle differences between words, let me explain that I’m not opposed to immigrants—people who moved here legally and who don’t violate our laws—I’m opposed to illegal immigrants (who by very definition are violating our laws), and I’m opposed to future immigration (at least for the next ten years until our immigrant imbalance has time to work itself out). This makes me a Democrat in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt was a very pro-immigrant president who stood up for the rights of immigrants. But during his administration, the United States saw the lowest levels of new immigration in our nation’s history. "Total immigration in the decade of 1931 to 1940 was 528,000 averaging less than 53,000 a year." (source)<br />
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Illegal immigrants<br />
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It’s sad that I have to explain why I’m opposed to illegal immigrants, who by very definition are violating our laws by being here, but nevertheless I find myself in the strange situation of having to defend the obvious. Congress correctly decided that there are limits to how many new immigrants the country can absorb. In my opinion Congress set the limit way too high (as will be explained below), but I hope that all sane Americans who care about our country understand that America is unable to allow all the billions of people of the world into our borders. Therefore, it’s necessary to have laws limiting the number of new immigrants. But illegal immigrants decided to violate the laws created by Congress for the protection of Americans. Illegal immigrants should not be rewarded for violating the laws, which is what people who want to grant them amnesty want to do.<br />
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I’m not advocating punishment of illegal immigrants. Just a free trip back to their home country, with reasonable time to wrap up their affairs in America. I would even be in favor giving destitute illegal immigrants a few hundred dollars to help them get their lives in order when the return to their home countries. But nevertheless, we need a plan to return the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to their home countries.<br />
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The oversupply of labor relative to capital<br />
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It’s a basic principle of microeconomics that economic output requires two inputs: labor and capital. It’s also a basic principal of economics that if you increase the supply of something while the demand remains constant, the result is lower prices.<br />
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If we increase the supply of labor without increasing the supply of capital, the natural result is that the wages paid to laborers decrease and the returns to capital increase.<br />
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We can observe this effect in the economy today. Paul Krugman writes:<br />
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[T]he America I grew up in -- the America of the 1950's and 1960's -- was a middle-class society, both in reality and in feel. The vast income and wealth inequalities of the Gilded Age had disappeared. Yes, of course, there was the poverty of the underclass -- but the conventional wisdom of the time viewed that as a social rather than an economic problem. Yes, of course, some wealthy businessmen and heirs to large fortunes lived far better than the average American. But they weren't rich the way the robber barons who built the mansions had been rich, and there weren't that many of them. The days when plutocrats were a force to be reckoned with in American society, economically or politically, seemed long past.<br />
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Daily experience confirmed the sense of a fairly equal society. The economic disparities you were conscious of were quite muted. Highly educated professionals -- middle managers, college teachers, even lawyers -- often claimed that they earned less than unionized blue-collar workers. Those considered very well off lived in split-levels, had a housecleaner come in once a week and took summer vacations in Europe. But they sent their kids to public schools and drove themselves to work, just like everyone else.<br />
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But that was long ago. The middle-class America of my youth was another country.<br />
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We are now living in a new Gilded Age, as extravagant as the original. Mansions have made a comeback. Back in 1999 this magazine profiled Thierry Despont, the ''eminence of excess,'' an architect who specializes in designing houses for the superrich. His creations typically range from 20,000 to 60,000 square feet; houses at the upper end of his range are not much smaller than the White House. Needless to say, the armies of servants are back, too. So are the yachts. Still, even J.P. Morgan didn't have a Gulfstream.<br />
The reason for the phenomenon of the shrinking middle-class should be obvious. America is oversupplied with labor relative to capital. According to the 1960 census, there were only 10.3 million foreign born residents. Today there are approximately 35 million legal foreign born residents (source), and an estimated 12 million additional illegal immigrants. All these people competing for American jobs (at a time when outsourcing is already reducing the demand for domestic labor) means lower wages for everyone who has to work for a living. Lower wages for everyone except those in elite professions such as law; lawyers are protected from immigrant competition by the fact that you need three years of U.S. law school education in order to be allowed to work as a lawyer. As usual, the laws protect the interests of the elites.<br />
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Who is behind this massive and unprecedented increase in immigration? The rich people who own the capital. As has always been the case with the rich, the quest for profits comes before what’s right for America. The upper-class elites want cheap labor to work for American businesses so rich shareholders can maximize their profits. Rich corporate interests spend hundreds of millions of dollars on political donations and lobbying so they can buy the votes of our politicians. Thus we see that both political parties are fully behind the massive wave of immigration. Some will have you believe that the Republican party is the anti-immigration party. That’s very funny. There has never been a more pro-immigration president than George W. Bush. The only difference between the parties is that they try to sell the idea of immigration to the voters using different rhetoric. The Republicans say "immigrants help the economy." Yes, they help the economy for the wealthy elite, but not for regular Americans. The Democrats say "you must support immigration or you’re racist." But it’s all the same thing, about spinning things so the average American is fooled into voting against his or her interests.<br />
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"scary brown people"<br />
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"Scary brown people" are the words of kos himself. Which he repeated. This is supposed to mock the sentiments of people who care about what’s happening to America, and to shame people into kowtowing to the elite upper-class corporate wing of the Democratic party. This is just like Republican talk, except instead of saying "vote this way to prove you love Jesus," kos says "vote this way to prove you're not racist."<br />
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It’s not racist to care about Americans, of all skin colors, who have to work for a living. It’s very unracist. The pro-immigration people are the racists. They apparently dream of an America where rich white people live in McMansions, attended to by a staff of "brown people" who do the gardening and the cooking and the cleaning, and who work in their factories. They’re trying to bring back the racist South, and using the same arguments of plantation owners who enslaved other humans do their labor. "We need more African slaves to pick our cotton and do other jobs that white Americans won’t do." The only difference is that back then the "brown" immigrants really were slaves. Today they just get paid slave-labor-like wages.<br />
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America is rich and can afford to help the less fortunate of the world<br />
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I agree that America is rich and that we should do more to help those in the world who are less fortunate. But there are billions of people in the world living in poverty. We are not helping the bulk of the less fortunate of the world by letting a few million into America. If we let too many immigrants into out country without increasing our capital base, we’ll wind up being another poor country. The world is better off if America remains wealthy so we can help other nations become wealthy. When we help another nation become wealthy, we help all people of that nation. When we allow immigration from another nation, we just help the lucky few who win the green card lottery, while harming those who remain behind by draining away their most ambitious citizens.<br />
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America is too crowded<br />
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This is an aspect of immigration that few people talk about. But look around, there’s traffic all over the place, forests are being bulldozed to make way for new developments, no one can afford to buy a house near where they work, the country is too crowded.<br />
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Why are houses so expensive today? It’s because of supply and demand. The population increases because of unchecked immigration, but houses aren’t built fast enough (because of zoning regulations), so today regular working Americans can’t afford to buy their own their own home or even afford to rent a tiny apartment.<br />
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Throughout America, communities are passing anti-growth initiatives. This is proof that there are too many people around. It’s the ultimate in hypocrisy and NIMBYism when upper-middle-class elite pro-immigrant people clamor for anti-growth legislation. "Let the ‘brown people’ into the country, but don’t let them live near me!"<br />
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My call for action<br />
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Today neither party is the anti-immigration party. The Democratic Party, the party that has traditionally stood up against the big-money corporate interests in favor of regular working Americans, should take up this cause.<br />
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Remember, "anti-immigration" doesn’t mean "anti-immigrant." People who are opposed to immigration are not calling for any policies that would harm those immigrants who came here legally. In fact, we want to help those immigrants by eliminating competition for their jobs, thus increasing their salaries and allowing them to partake of the American Dream. But we need a plan for returning illegal immigrants to their home countries, and we need a moratorium on new immigration until our current imbalance of labor and capital is fixed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-1724948406708225092018-01-25T12:44:00.001-08:002018-01-25T12:44:15.179-08:00Democrats against immigration<a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2007/11/9/408275/-">https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2007/11/9/408275/-</a><br />
<br />
Back in 2007, Ashely Taylor covered pretty much the whole story. Probably the only fact she left out worthy of mentioning is that our natural population increase was down to 0 since about 1970.<br />
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I have reprinted here for posterity her well-reasoned argument.<br />
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<span class="author-name" data-original-title="" data-placement="right" data-toggle="mini-profile" data-user-id="141904" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold;" title=""><a href="https://www.dailykos.com/user/Ashley%20Taylor" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ea7106; cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;">By Ashley Taylor</a> </span> </div>
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<span class="timestamp " data-epoch-time="1194612030000" data-localize-time="" data-time-format="%A %b %d, %Y" data-time-zone="-0700" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Friday Nov 09, 2007</span> <span class="time-dot" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 7px; margin-left: 2px; margin-right: 2px; position: relative; top: -1px;">·</span> <span class="timestamp " data-epoch-time="1194612030000" data-localize-time="" data-time-format="%l:%M %p %Z" data-time-zone="-0700" style="box-sizing: border-box;">5:40 AM MST</span></div>
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<button class="dk-social-btn-unit dk-social-btn facebook-share" data-url="https://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/9/408275/-" style="border-color: initial; border-style: none; border-width: initial; color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; text-align: right;"><span class="dkons icon-facebook-f" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border-radius: 50%; border: 1px solid rgb(59, 89, 152); box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; font-family: fondkons; font-size: 18px; line-height: 1; margin: 5px; padding: 8px; position: relative; speak: none; top: 3px;"></span></button><a class="dk-social-btn-unit dk-social-btn twitter-share" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailykos.com%2Fstory%2F2007%2F11%2F9%2F408275%2F-&text=Democrats+against+immigration" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #55acee; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; margin-left: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-align: right; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="dkons icon-twitter" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border-radius: 50%; border: 1px solid rgb(85, 172, 238); box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; font-family: fondkons; font-size: 18px; line-height: 1; margin: 5px; padding: 8px; position: relative; speak: none; top: 3px;"></span></a></div>
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I’m a Democrat, and I’m opposed to immigration.</div>
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Because too many people are unable to understand subtle differences between words, let me explain that I’m not opposed to immigrants—people who moved here legally and who don’t violate our laws—I’m opposed to <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">illegal immigrants</em> (who by very definition are violating our laws), and I’m opposed to future immigration (at least for the next ten years until our immigrant imbalance has time to work itself out). This makes me a Democrat in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt was a very pro-immigrant president who stood up for the rights of immigrants. But during his administration, the United States saw the lowest levels of new immigration in our nation’s history. "Total immigration in the decade of 1931 to 1940 was 528,000 averaging less than 53,000 a year." (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States#Laws_concerning_immigration_and_naturalization" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(153, 107, 61) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">source</a>)</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Illegal immigrants</strong></div>
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It’s sad that I have to explain why I’m opposed to <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">illegal</em> immigrants, who by very definition are violating our laws by being here, but nevertheless I find myself in the strange situation of having to defend the obvious. Congress correctly decided that there are limits to how many new immigrants the country can absorb. In my opinion Congress set the limit way too high (as will be explained below), but I hope that all sane Americans who care about our country understand that America is unable to allow all the billions of people of the world into our borders. Therefore, it’s necessary to have laws limiting the number of new immigrants. But illegal immigrants decided to violate the laws created by Congress for the protection of Americans. Illegal immigrants should not be rewarded for violating the laws, which is what people who want to grant them amnesty want to do.</div>
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I’m not advocating punishment of illegal immigrants. Just a free trip back to their home country, with reasonable time to wrap up their affairs in America. I would even be in favor giving destitute illegal immigrants a few hundred dollars to help them get their lives in order when the return to their home countries. But nevertheless, we need a plan to return the <a href="http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=61" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(153, 107, 61) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">estimated 12 million illegal immigrants</a> to their home countries.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">The oversupply of labor relative to capital</strong></div>
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It’s a basic principle of microeconomics that economic output requires two inputs: labor and capital. It’s also a basic principal of economics that if you increase the supply of something while the demand remains constant, the result is lower prices.</div>
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If we increase the supply of labor without increasing the supply of capital, the natural result is that the wages paid to laborers <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">decrease</em> and the returns to capital <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">increase</em>.</div>
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We can observe this effect in the economy today. <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9505EFD9113AF933A15753C1A9649C8B63" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(153, 107, 61) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">Paul Krugman writes</a>:</div>
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[T]he America I grew up in -- the America of the 1950's and 1960's -- was a middle-class society, both in reality and in feel. The vast income and wealth inequalities of the Gilded Age had disappeared. Yes, of course, there was the poverty of the underclass -- but the conventional wisdom of the time viewed that as a social rather than an economic problem. Yes, of course, some wealthy businessmen and heirs to large fortunes lived far better than the average American. But they weren't rich the way the robber barons who built the mansions had been rich, and there weren't that many of them. The days when plutocrats were a force to be reckoned with in American society, economically or politically, seemed long past.</div>
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Daily experience confirmed the sense of a fairly equal society. The economic disparities you were conscious of were quite muted. Highly educated professionals -- middle managers, college teachers, even lawyers -- often claimed that they earned less than unionized blue-collar workers. Those considered very well off lived in split-levels, had a housecleaner come in once a week and took summer vacations in Europe. But they sent their kids to public schools and drove themselves to work, just like everyone else.</div>
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But that was long ago. The middle-class America of my youth was another country.</div>
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We are now living in a new Gilded Age, as extravagant as the original. Mansions have made a comeback. Back in 1999 this magazine profiled Thierry Despont, the ''eminence of excess,'' an architect who specializes in designing houses for the superrich. His creations typically range from 20,000 to 60,000 square feet; houses at the upper end of his range are not much smaller than the White House. Needless to say, the armies of servants are back, too. So are the yachts. Still, even J.P. Morgan didn't have a Gulfstream.</div>
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The reason for the phenomenon of the shrinking middle-class should be obvious. <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">America is oversupplied with labor relative to capital.</em> According to the 1960 census, there were only 10.3 million foreign born residents. Today there are approximately 35 million legal foreign born residents (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States#Origin" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(153, 107, 61) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">source</a>), and an estimated 12 million additional illegal immigrants. All these people competing for American jobs (at a time when outsourcing is already reducing the demand for domestic labor) means lower wages for everyone who has to work for a living. Lower wages for everyone except those in elite professions such as law; lawyers are protected from immigrant competition by the fact that you need three years of U.S. law school education in order to be allowed to work as a lawyer. As usual, the laws protect the interests of the elites.</div>
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Who is behind this massive and unprecedented increase in immigration? The rich people who own the capital. As has always been the case with the rich, the quest for profits comes before what’s right for America. The upper-class elites want cheap labor to work for American businesses so rich shareholders can maximize their profits. Rich corporate interests spend hundreds of millions of dollars on political donations and lobbying so they can buy the votes of our politicians. Thus we see that <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">both</em> political parties are fully behind the massive wave of immigration. Some will have you believe that the Republican party is the anti-immigration party. That’s very funny. There has never been a more pro-immigration president than George W. Bush. The only difference between the parties is that they try to sell the idea of immigration to the voters using different rhetoric. The Republicans say "immigrants help the economy." Yes, they help the economy for the wealthy elite, but not for regular Americans. The Democrats say "you must support immigration or you’re <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">racist</em>." But it’s all the same thing, about spinning things so the average American is fooled into voting against his or her interests.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">"scary brown people"</strong></div>
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"Scary brown people" are the words of <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/7/11120/9415" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(153, 107, 61) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">kos himself</a>. Which he <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/8/165643/228" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(153, 107, 61) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">repeated</a>. This is supposed to mock the sentiments of people who care about what’s happening to America, and to shame people into kowtowing to the elite upper-class corporate wing of the Democratic party. This is just like Republican talk, except instead of saying "vote this way to prove you love Jesus," kos says "vote this way to prove you're not racist."</div>
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It’s not racist to care about Americans, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">of all skin colors</em>, who have to work for a living. It’s very unracist. The pro-immigration people are the racists. They apparently dream of an America where rich white people live in McMansions, attended to by a staff of "brown people" who do the gardening and the cooking and the cleaning, and who work in their factories. They’re trying to bring back the racist South, and using the same arguments of plantation owners who enslaved other humans do their labor. "We need more African slaves to pick our cotton and do other jobs that white Americans won’t do." The only difference is that back then the "brown" immigrants really were slaves. Today they just get paid slave-labor-like wages.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">America is rich and can afford to help the less fortunate of the world</strong></div>
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I agree that America is rich and that we should do more to help those in the world who are less fortunate. But there are billions of people in the world living in poverty. We are not helping the bulk of the less fortunate of the world by letting a few million into America. If we let too many immigrants into out country without increasing our capital base, we’ll wind up <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">being</em> another poor country. The world is better off if America remains wealthy so we can help <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">other nations become wealthy</em>. When we help another nation become wealthy, we help <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">all people of that nation</em>. When we allow immigration from another nation, we just help the lucky few who win the green card lottery, while harming those who remain behind by draining away their most ambitious citizens.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">America is too crowded</strong></div>
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This is an aspect of immigration that few people talk about. But look around, there’s traffic all over the place, forests are being bulldozed to make way for new developments, no one can afford to buy a house near where they work, the country is too crowded.</div>
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Why are houses so expensive today? It’s because of supply and demand. The population increases because of unchecked immigration, but houses aren’t built fast enough (because of zoning regulations), so today regular working Americans can’t afford to buy their own their own home or even afford to rent a tiny apartment.</div>
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Throughout America, communities are passing <a href="http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/08/14/news/inland/3_03_538_13_07.txt" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(153, 107, 61) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">anti-growth initiatives</a>. This is proof that there are too many people around. It’s the ultimate in hypocrisy and NIMBYism when upper-middle-class elite pro-immigrant people clamor for anti-growth legislation. "Let the ‘brown people’ into the country, but don’t let them live near me!"</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">My call for action</strong></div>
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Today neither party is the anti-immigration party. The Democratic Party, the party that has traditionally stood up against the big-money corporate interests in favor of regular working Americans, should take up this cause.</div>
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Remember, "anti-immigration" doesn’t mean "anti-immigrant." People who are opposed to immigration are not calling for any policies that would harm those immigrants who came here legally. In fact, we want to <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">help</em> those immigrants by eliminating competition for their jobs, thus increasing their salaries and allowing them to partake of the American Dream. But we need a plan for returning <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">illegal</em> immigrants to their home countries, and we need a moratorium on new immigration until our current imbalance of labor and capital is fixed.</div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-8386988886162300182017-12-22T22:40:00.003-08:002017-12-22T22:43:44.746-08:00Go Fund Yourself (Mother Jones)Paying for health care is now a popularity contest.<br />
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BY STEPHEN MARCHE DEC 19, 2017 14 MINUTES<br />
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TWO DAYS AFTER receiving a diagnosis of stage 4 breast cancer, Marisa Rahdar had to figure out how to beg for her life. “I didn’t want to do it at all,” she recalls. Rahdar is a 32-year-old bartender from Detroit, and she has insurance. Her brother, Dante, the one in the family who’s good with numbers, worked out the amount she’d need to cover her out-of-pocket medical expenses and take a break from serving beer so she could rest up after chemotherapy. The number he came up with was $25,000. Next came the pitch. That job fell to Dante, too. He chose YouCaring.com, rather than another crowdfunding site, because he’d recently seen a campaign posted on GoFundMe.com by a guy trying to raise money for potato salad; he didn’t want to post his sister’s suffering beside practical jokes. The pitch was brief:<br />
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My sister, Marisa Rahdar, was diagnosed with breast cancer on March 16th of 2017. Through the testing phase she has also been diagnosed with cancer located in her lymph nodes and tailbone. This upcoming week she will begin radiation and meet with her team of doctors at Troy Beaumont to finalize a plan of action for her treatment. In the meantime, we have estimated her medical expenses not covered by her insurance, as well as her living expenses during the time of her treatment. We will update this site during her treatment so you can all get a small sample of that famous Marisa “charm.” For those concerned, her eyebrows remain unsullied.<br />
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By now, almost everybody has seen pleas for help covering urgent medical bills in their Facebook feeds. With health care costs and high-deductible plans on the rise for more than a decade, medical expenses are the largest single cause of bankruptcies nationwide. Despite Obamacare’s efforts to rein in costs, the average deductible on a typical plan under the Affordable Care Act is $2,550—nearly as much as the entire monthly take-home pay of the average American worker. President Donald Trump’s efforts to destabilize Obamacare have already raised premiums, and experts predict the cost of a deductible under some versions of Republican health care legislation would rise to an average of at least $4,100. Meanwhile, according to the Federal Reserve, 44 percent of Americans in 2016 didn’t have so much as $400 saved up in the event of an emergency.<br />
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Health care in America is the wedge of inequality: It’s the luxury everyone has to have and millions can’t afford. Sites like YouCaring have stepped in to fill the gap. The total amount in donations generated by crowdfunding sites has increased elevenfold since the appearance of Obamacare. In 2011, sites like GoFundMe and YouCaring were generating a total of $837 million. Three years later, that number had climbed to $9.5 billion. Under the Trump administration, YouCaring expects donations to jump even higher, and the company has already seen an estimated 25 percent spike since the election, which company representatives believe is partly a response to the administration’s threats to Obamacare.<br />
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Crowdfunding companies say they’re using technology to help people helping people, the miracle of interconnectedness leading to globalized compassion. But an emerging consensus is starting to suggest a darker, more fraught reality—sites like YouCaring and GoFundMe may in fact be fueling the inequities of the American health care system, not fighting them. And they are potentially exacerbating racial, economic, and educational divides. “Crowdfunding websites have helped a lot of people,” medical researcher Jeremy Snyder wrote in a 2016 article for the Hastings Center Report, a journal focused on medical ethics. But, echoing other scholars, he warned that they’re “ultimately not a solution to injustices in the health system. Indeed, they may themselves be a cause of injustices.” Crowdfunding is yet another example of tech’s best intentions generating unseen and unfortunate outcomes.<br />
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The night Rahdar’s brother, Dante, wrote the pitch, she looked it over. She liked the title he’d given it—“Help Marisa Kick Cancer in the Teeth”—and the crack about the eyebrows, and so she told him, sure, go ahead and post it. But then she and Dante paused. They burst out laughing. It was April 1, 2017. They agreed to post it the next day. They didn’t want her suffering confused with an April Fools’ joke.<br />
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IN THE LATE 19th and early 20th centuries, many Americans relied on charity for their health care needs. After the Civil War, middle-class do-gooders moved into impoverished communities and established settlement houses, where low-income residents could get medical care and other social services. Separately, thousands of fraternal societies organized by ethnicity, religion, and age offered payments when someone was sick and covered funeral costs when he or she died. The limits of this patchwork system—the settlement houses fragmented as the social-work industry professionalized, and the fraternal societies mostly covered working-age men while excluding women, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities—helped give rise to the Progressive movement and, eventually, the New Deal and the modern-day panoply of social-insurance benefits. When President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law in 1965, former President Harry Truman made a cameo to celebrate the state’s replacement of charities as providers of key services. “Not one of these, our citizens, should ever be abandoned to the indignity of charity,” Truman told the crowd. “Charity is indignity when you have to have it.”<br />
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But within less than 30 years, a conservative backlash profoundly redefined and reasserted the role of charity in American politics. Ronald Reagan’s notorious campaign against the “welfare queen” helped make government programs synonymous with graft. Volunteerism was soon pushed as an alternative. “We’re not advocating private initiatives and voluntary activities as a halfhearted replacement for budget cuts,” he told a group of businesspeople in 1981. “We advocate them because they’re right in their own regard. They’re a part of what we can proudly call ‘the American personality.’”<br />
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By the 1990s, the idea that government-run welfare programs would damage the charitable impulses of the nation had become fully entrenched in right-wing thinking, most explicitly in Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion,a significant influence on Newt Gingrich, among others. To adherents of this idea, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and cash assistance programs were all legal plunder—immoral distractions from individual philanthropic impulses.<br />
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Obamacare, a program whose details were partly inspired by Stuart Butler, a former director of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, displays a contradictory mix—with elements of both the Johnsonian welfare state ethic and conservative skepticism about the state’s right and ability to provide social insurance directly to citizens. The Affordable Care Act expanded coverage and protections to 20 million Americans, but it relied on private companies to administer care, allowing insurers to make a profit on the package that Obamacare required patients to purchase. At the same time, it provided government subsidies for those who couldn’t afford insurance. As such, it was a sort of Frankenstein between a for-profit and a social benefit, designed in part to appease both progressives and hostile Republican lawmakers. The result has been that more people have access to health care and insurance companies have experienced a “profit spiral,” making billions of dollars, even while premiums for many middle-class constituencies, in addition to high deductibles, can cost more than $1,000 per month.<br />
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When YouCaring first started in 2011, a year after the passage of the ACA, its founders unknowingly inherited this contradictory legacy. Three friends, Brock Ketcher, Naomi Ketcher, and Luke Miner, founded YouCaring after two years spent on religious missions abroad. The original purpose was to help students raise money for college, but they soon began hosting other charitable fundraising campaigns and then medical campaigns. By April 2013, they were attracting as many as 87,000 unique users daily, raising more than $180,000 a day. Today medical campaigns bring in the largest volume of YouCaring donations, more than $900 million in total since 2011. Last March, the company acquired GiveForward.com, another charitable crowdfunding site founded in 2008.<br />
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The first YouCaring campaign to pass $1 million was a 2014 memorial for Riley Sandler, a nine-year-old girl who died of respiratory arrest at camp. Massive successes of campaigns like that one spread the word and elevated YouCaring’s brand. This past August, football star J.J. Watt’s YouCaring campaign to raise money for survivors of Hurricane Harvey in Houston passed its initial goal of $200,000 in a couple of hours. He has now raised $37 million.<br />
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YouCaring, along with GoFundMe and their competitors, addressed a real need: With faltering budgets in schools and welfare services, people used the programs to fill in the gaps imposed by years of economic austerity. Today, there’s Donors-Choose, which allows users to raise money for public schools. Meal Train raises cash for food. Plumfund raises money for life events like pregnancies and honeymoons. GiveForward has prevented 4 percent of all medical bankruptcies.<br />
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And make no mistake, the profits are potentially lucrative. GoFundMe charges 5 percent to every donation, plus 30 cents and another 2.9 percent for the transaction fee. (Indiegogo and Kickstarter charge similar fees.) With a total of more than $4 billion raised, that puts GoFundMe’s profits in the range of $200 million.<br />
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YouCaring doesn’t charge anything to recipients but asks for a tip from every donor. In 2014, the company was acquired by the private equity firm Alpine Investors, whose portfolio includes about 13 other technology companies. YouCaring representatives declined to discuss their revenue or business model with me, but Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, believes they are likely playing a long game—forgoing user fees and profits for now in order to capture a larger market share from their competitors. “It’s not an unusual strategy to burn through cash,” Mollick says. “GoFundMe is winning. They charge their fee, and YouCaring is competing with them. The winners take all.”<br />
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In their competitive race for donations, these companies combine the old spirit of American charity with the modern dynamics of the 21st-century tech economy. Regardless of whether Obamacare survives another three or seven years of Trump or is replaced with something else entirely, one thing is certain: As health care becomes more expensive and resources become more unequally distributed, the crowd may become the insurer of last resort.<br />
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THE YOUCARING office on California Street in downtown San Francisco is all open spaces and white and wood, like a massive condo. Windows on the 12th floor cast rays of sun onto Bertoia-style chairs where about 30 people work in glass-walled cubicles, clacking away on computers and perfecting algorithms.<br />
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Maly Ly, the chief marketing officer, met me in the foyer. Ly’s own story represents a version of the tech utopian dream. A refugee from Cambodia, she is now building the future. Arriving in the United States after members of her family were murdered by the Khmer Rouge, she says she was initially held captive by a religious cult and then moved to a house where she, her grandmother, her aunt, and her uncle worked as domestics without pay. When Ly was nine, a couple from Georgia helped extricate them and enrolled Ly in school. “Because of their compassion, I was saved,” she says. “We see that kind of compassion every day on our site.” Eventually Ly came to run product development for Lucasfilm, the makers of the Star Wars movies, and she believes YouCaring is involved in a similar type of storytelling—helping people sell their illness as a “narrative of the hero’s journey.”<br />
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Ly introduced me to Jesse Boland, the director of online marketing. “What works is coming up with a very clear ask of your network,” Boland said, explaining that soliciting money on YouCaring relies on the same tools as any kind of digital marketing. “Outlining what are you asking and why are you asking for it.” Funding an animal shelter is more difficult than funding dogs, one by one. To apply the lesson: Users shouldn’t say they need $10,000; they should say that if they receive $100 today, they can go on living.<br />
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The quantity and quality of the information matter, too. Images help. So does a continuous stream of information, just like on the most popular Twitter or Instagram accounts. People want to come back to the story, to find out what happens, Boland said, to see how their money has changed somebody’s life. Timing matters, too. The best times to post a campaign are “around lunchtime and after dinner during the week,” he said, and “earlier in the week is better.” Don’t panic because you’ve been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness and throw up your campaign at midnight.<br />
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Many users intuitively grasp the rules. Take Shelly Vaughn, a GoFundMe user from Ohio. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, her friends Christopher and Aubree Uhler asked for $6,000 to help pay the bills during her treatments. They met their goal in five days, ultimately earning $15,411. “It’s a testament to Shelly, and her personality,” Christopher told me when I talked to him on the phone. Of course, Shelly’s bio helped. She’s a children’s speech therapist at a local hospital, a young mother, a marathon runner, a member of a local church. “We basically flipped a switch,” Christopher said, meaning that as soon as they asked, the money came pouring in.<br />
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But 90 percent of GoFundMe campaigns fail to meet their target, according to a small study by Lauren Berliner and Nora Kenworthy, professors at the University of Washington. They believe that the need for online marketing skills is one of crowdfunding’s most pernicious features. Successful crowdfunding requires that campaigners master so-called medical and media literacies—they must be savvy online marketers of their own tragedy.<br />
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Because online marketing skills and large social networks correlate strongly with income, say Berliner and Kenworthy, crowdfunding reproduces inequality. The well-off earn more money on YouCaring than the poor because in general they already have the skills and the friends required to raise money.<br />
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<img src="https://article-imgs.scribdassets.com/14xav3kups66v6ha/images/file9PYE9F1R.jpg" /><br />
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<br />
Marisa Rahdar’s co-workers and friends helped her raise more than $17,000 for cancer treatment.<br />
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“This isn’t a replacement for health care,” Ly acknowledged. “This isn’t going to solve everyone’s problems.”<br />
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IT TURNS OUT Marisa Rahdar was naturally good at crowdfunding: $1,200, $4,750, $9,500—the amount she raised kept going up. Her campaign was run like a good social media account. She was clever, self-deprecating. Even in suffering, Rahdar was charming.<br />
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But the thing about suffering is that, most of the time, it’s not charming. Chronic conditions are especially unglamorous, which is why few get results on crowdfunding sites. The story people want to hear is that they’re giving you money and you’ll get better right away and return to being a contributing member of society. A search for lupus, Crohn’s disease, or fibromyalgia campaigns turns up a lot of folks who have raised next to nothing. And that’s not even mentioning diseases or health procedures you won’t find many campaigns for: sexually transmitted diseases or abortions. You Caring allows campaigns for these, but they are almost never successful. (Until recently, GoFundMe banned abortion campaigns entirely.) Snyder, in the Hastings Center Report, argues that socially stigmatized health issues are typically less compelling to donors, and that restrictions, such as GoFundMe’s ban on abortion campaigns, “point to the potential for these private companies to decide to restrict fundraising in politically sensitive areas.”<br />
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By unwittingly rewarding certain types of illnesses over others, crowdfunding sites risk amplifying people’s prejudices about the “deservingness and worth” of users, as Berliner and Kenworthy put it.<br />
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Preventive and long-term care also tend to garner few donations. “Crisis stories work so much better than chronic stories,” Daryl Hatton, CEO of FundRazr, another crowdfunding site, explained to me. He pointed out that dramatic stories succeed over staid ones—particularly effective are “some of the traditional Shakespearean story arcs, where you start off with an introduction, something [tragic] happens, and then there’s the moment of epiphany.”<br />
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When I emailed Khy Jones, the founder of the Brown Baby Brigade, a new 501(c)(3) group based near Tampa, Florida, I saw how these trends might play out. Jones’ nonprofit aimed to increase the breastfeeding rates for women of color by community outreach. The group had failed to raise a single dollar. “The crazy thing is the community of people we service can’t afford to donate,” Jones told me.<br />
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By all measures, Brown Baby Brigade offers a socially valuable service. About 76 percent of white women sometimes breastfeed their children, compared with 58 percent of black women, a significant discrepancy given breastfeeding’s lifetime health advantages for mothers and infants—it has been shown to improve outcomes for conditions as diverse as depression and diabetes. But the story doesn’t sell.<br />
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This prioritizing of the sensational seems to be replicated nationwide, as more and more people donate to YouCaring and other crowdfunding sites instead of traditional charities. Since the 2008 recession, when one of the first crowdfunding sites, GiveForward, was founded, charitable giving has declined precipitously, and the propensity to give dropped 6 percent between 2000 and 2012. Meanwhile crowdfunding has exploded. The relationship isn’t causal, but it does signal an alarming shift in people’s priorities and the way they give: away from the community, toward the individual.<br />
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Racial disparities also appear to be reproduced on crowdfunding sites, in large part because racial and economic inequalities often overlap. For example, African Americans tend to have less wealthy social networks, and therefore fewer resources available to draw from in times of crisis. It’s anecdotal but striking that a quick way to find a lot of failed campaigns, and very few successful ones, is to search for “sickle cell anemia,” a disease that disproportionately affects people of African heritage.<br />
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By rewarding dramatic stories over logical public health policies, YouCaring and its competitors encourage “a shift in funding priorities and the distribution of resources for medical care away from the need for or efficient use of resources by the recipient,” says Snyder. “Instead, medical resources for crowdfunding campaigns are largely distributed according to personal appeal, sensationalism, and one’s social position or luck.”<br />
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I called Kaneisha Northern, a 35-year-old in Atlanta who suffered from multiple sclerosis. Northern, an African American woman, had a lot of overlapping disadvantages. She had moved around a lot, and her social network skewed toward the less wealthy side. She had an unglamorous chronic illness, with almost no chance of full recovery. “It’s so difficult,” she told me. “You go from being this independent go-with-the-flow kind of person to being disabled, being unable to do for yourself.”<br />
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Before Northern fell sick and moved to Georgia, she ran a charity called Grad Girls Network that helped underprivileged girls in Los Angeles. Now, her medical insurance wouldn’t cover the rehabilitation program she wanted to undertake at the Shepherd Center, a well-respected clinic. She had requested $47,000 on her YouCaring page so she could get back into rehab, and she had raised a decent amount, $8,455, but it wasn’t nearly enough to pay out of pocket to attend physical therapy. Crowdfunding, she said, was not working for her, at least not yet. “It’s still ongoing,” she said.<br />
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LAST SUMMER, I met Marisa Rahdar in Thomas Magee’s Sporting House, a gritty joint just off the Fisher Freeway in Detroit. Rahdar used to tend bar there, and when she fell sick her customers and friends rallied to help her out.<br />
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Rahdar’s arms display bold tattoos: flamingos draped around apple blossoms, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a beer ringed by a halo. Her curly hair, black to the chin and blond past it, would soon be sacrificed to chemo. Rahdar’s friends had organized a fundraiser in the bar for her cancer treatment. “It sucks to be brought up in this way of being proud to be in this country,” she told me. “And all the amazing things that you have, and I gotta fucking beg people for money to make sure I can pay a light bill.”<br />
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At Thomas Magee’s, they came up with a lot of cute tricks to raise cash: music and booze and a 50-50 raffle—half the money would go to the winner and half to Rahdar. The biggest prizes were a basket full of donated Lot 40 Whisky and a Tucker Torpedo, the beautiful 1948 car of which only 51 were ever made. The organizers even reserved a parking space out front for the ultrarare Tucker—you know, like the car was about to pull up any minute—but it turned out to be a tiny toy car, not the real thing. The joke raised a good deal of cash anyway. The man who won the 50-50 donated his earnings. Fellow members of the Detroit bartenders’ guild, forgotten regulars, ex-boyfriends—all came out to give. Rahdar saw people she hadn’t seen since she was 18. One friend forked over $1,800.<br />
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Rahdar has what sociologists call a “deep social network,” that alchemic mix that makes people want to help her out. Newfangled charity and old-fashioned charity, it turns out, tend to draw on the same resources—a community with enough money to donate; popularity; living in a city; having a sympathetic disease and story about that disease. (Breast cancer is the most common cancer in America, and it’s one of the most popular types of medical campaigns on YouCaring.) In that Detroit barroom, the 19th century and the 21st collided. “There are times when I feel bad that I’ve had success in this and other people are faltering,” Rahdar said. I asked her why the people she knew were so generous and her government wasn’t. “The people who are like this”—she pointed to the bartenders—“aren’t the ones in charge.”<br />
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AFTER LEAVING Detroit, I revisited Kaneisha Northern’s YouCaring page. It was mostly quiet, with little activity save for a few friends chiming in to offer good wishes. Her earnings seemed to have stalled out at the $8,455 mark and hadn’t increased in weeks. Then I went to her Facebook page and saw that she had died. She was 35 years old.<br />
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It happened in the morning. Seated in her wheelchair beside her bed, she had called out to her mother for help, according to a neighbor, and by the time her mother arrived she had passed. No one had expected her to deteriorate so quickly—she’d been hoping to raise money to attend rehab for her multiple sclerosis, after all.<br />
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“I’m still trying to hang in there and go strong with it,” Northern had told me before her death. The emotional experience of crowdfunding, she lamented, was one of the greatest cruelties in her ordeal—the sense of needing to rely on other people’s generosity, the feeling of not quite measuring up. “It hasn’t really given me what I hoped for.”<br />
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If you’re looking for monsters, you won’t find them at YouCaring.com or any of the other crowdfunding sites that are rising to fill the ever-widening cracks in the American health care system. It’s just that the marketplace of compassion, which is what crowdfunding sites amount to, produces winners and losers like any other marketplace. America is becoming a country so free that everyone must beg to survive, and most will not beg well enough.<br />
<br />
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In November, I visited a new crowdfunding page that had been set up for Northern, this one on GoFundMe. Titled “A Tribute to Kaneisha Northern,” it is, if you follow the recommendations of social-media marketing experts, not a very good campaign. There’s no text, no story, just a photo of her face and the title, without details or information about her death. It has raised $2,312 so far.<br />
<br />
<br />
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER<br />
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<br />
LAURA MCDERMOTTUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-22157638925217004282015-07-21T01:04:00.001-07:002015-07-21T01:04:10.443-07:00The Left Has Won the Culture WarsDemocrats and others of the Left, a group I have felt solidarity with the majority of my life, I have a message for you: Science, which "fucking love", has concluded (conclusively, to the best of my knowledge) that happiness and contentment is based primarily on Expectations. This has pretty phenomenal consequences, if you stop and consider all the implications. This is why humans who still live in hunter-gatherer communities are no less happy than those of us that live in modern societies. This also means that as a privileged class loses privilege, which you know (supposedly) is inevitable due to demographic changes (no matter how desperately they try to cling, futilely, to power), it is as painful as your rise in power is joyful. The only purpose served by your crowing about how pathetic they are is to slap each other on the back and whip yourselves up into a self-reinforcing frenzy, while simultaneously antagonizing your opponents. Why can't we be Good Winners?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-13858191069839870872015-07-20T16:11:00.002-07:002015-07-20T16:11:28.710-07:00Labor Market Demand Predictions<div class="_209g _2vxa" data-block="true" data-offset-key="a9po4-0-0" data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$a9po4" style="background-color: white; color: #373e4d; direction: ltr; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; position: relative; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<span data-offset-key="a9po4-0-0" data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$a9po4.0:$a9po4-0-0">Matching training to demand has long troubled me, especially as with each generation, the (supposed) amount of training required for "good" jobs increases, thereby increasing the lead time and ballooning uncertainty. I just heard that the best predictions by the best economists in 2000 was that IT jobs would grow from 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 by 2010. As of 2013, the number of IT jobs? 3,500,000. </span></div>
<div class="_209g _2vxa" data-block="true" data-offset-key="easmk-0-0" data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$easmk" style="background-color: white; color: #373e4d; direction: ltr; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; position: relative; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<span data-offset-key="easmk-0-0" data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$easmk.0:$easmk-0-0"><br data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$easmk.0:$easmk-0-0.0" /></span></div>
<div class="_209g _2vxa" data-block="true" data-offset-key="eb24t-0-0" data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$eb24t" style="background-color: white; color: #373e4d; direction: ltr; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; position: relative; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<span data-offset-key="eb24t-0-0" data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$eb24t.0:$eb24t-0-0">How to fix this problem? If businesses would TRAIN THEIR OWN WORKERS, the match between supply and demand would be more direct. We also would have a lot less unpaid student loan debt.</span></div>
<div class="_209g _2vxa" data-block="true" data-offset-key="2608p-0-0" data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$2608p" style="background-color: white; color: #373e4d; direction: ltr; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; position: relative; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<span data-offset-key="2608p-0-0" data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$2608p.0:$2608p-0-0"><br data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$2608p.0:$2608p-0-0.0" /></span></div>
<div class="_209g _2vxa" data-block="true" data-offset-key="bbieg-0-0" data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$bbieg" style="background-color: white; color: #373e4d; direction: ltr; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; position: relative; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<span data-offset-key="bbieg-0-0" data-reactid=".2d.1.0.1.0.0.$editor0.0.0.$bbieg.0:$bbieg-0-0">The most economically disadvantaged demographic groups are the ones most victimized by the current system, since they have to rely on market demand signals very far removed (and intercepted by parties with incentives to manipulate for short-term monetary gain) from employers. The people with relatives in the "good jobs" fields get insider information. This is anathema to a society which purportedly is all for economic mobility.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-26084375377989017702014-12-16T10:04:00.002-08:002014-12-16T10:04:15.462-08:00No longer so certain<a href="http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_eKbRnXZWx3jSRBb">http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_eKbRnXZWx3jSRBb</a><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-6196656239679065352014-12-16T10:02:00.002-08:002014-12-16T10:02:30.602-08:00Economists Held These As Given PositivesAutomation<br />
Free Trade<br />
ImmigrationUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-82917576828152509562014-10-27T14:26:00.003-07:002014-10-27T14:26:47.496-07:00Hillary Would Have Given Us Single-Payer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqw4bdwBDD0VH0N_dfOdjzmJ9YiPP5LG2z4XlnnsF0zp5Fmi3-PH7qC4g508DAqwYvZ1Y7pjQzhuGjMpAaqujgKVWMxLBAv2g0wVnZKr9ZpJxSfdjYZivF372AZpIUuV6lYWvn-8lR4hQ/s1600/greatestHits.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqw4bdwBDD0VH0N_dfOdjzmJ9YiPP5LG2z4XlnnsF0zp5Fmi3-PH7qC4g508DAqwYvZ1Y7pjQzhuGjMpAaqujgKVWMxLBAv2g0wVnZKr9ZpJxSfdjYZivF372AZpIUuV6lYWvn-8lR4hQ/s1600/greatestHits.PNG" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-76683426856379012342014-10-23T22:29:00.002-07:002014-10-23T22:32:48.796-07:00How Technology Is Destroying JobsHow Technology Is Destroying Jobs
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How Technology Is Destroying Jobs
By David Rotman on June 12, 2013
Also featured in:
MIT Technology Review magazine
July/August 2013
WHY IT MATTERS
Economic theory and government policy will have to be rethought if technology is indeed destroying jobs faster than it is creating new ones.
Given his calm and reasoned academic demeanor, it is easy to miss just how provocative Erik Brynjolfsson’s contention really is. Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine.
That robots, automation, and software can replace people might seem obvious to anyone who’s worked in automotive manufacturing or as a travel agent. But Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s claim is more troubling and controversial. They believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. And, they suspect, something similar is happening in other technologically advanced countries.
Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence, according to Brynjolfsson, is a chart that only an economist could love. In economics, productivity—the amount of economic value created for a given unit of input, such as an hour of labor—is a crucial indicator of growth and wealth creation. It is a measure of progress. On the chart Brynjolfsson likes to show, separate lines represent productivity and total employment in the United States. For years after World War II, the two lines closely tracked each other, with increases in jobs corresponding to increases in productivity. The pattern is clear: as businesses generated more value from their workers, the country as a whole became richer, which fueled more economic activity and created even more jobs. Then, beginning in 2000, the lines diverge; productivity continues to rise robustly, but employment suddenly wilts. By 2011, a significant gap appears between the two lines, showing economic growth with no parallel increase in job creation. Brynjolfsson and McAfee call it the “great decoupling.” And Brynjolfsson says he is confident that technology is behind both the healthy growth in productivity and the weak growth in jobs.
It’s a startling assertion because it threatens the faith that many economists place in technological progress. Brynjolfsson and McAfee still believe that technology boosts productivity and makes societies wealthier, but they think that it can also have a dark side: technological progress is eliminating the need for many types of jobs and leaving the typical worker worse off than before. Brynjolfsson can point to a second chart indicating that median income is failing to rise even as the gross domestic product soars. “It’s the great paradox of our era,” he says. “Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren’t keeping up.”
Brynjolfsson and McAfee are not Luddites. Indeed, they are sometimes accused of being too optimistic about the extent and speed of recent digital advances. Brynjolfsson says they began writing Race Against the Machine, the 2011 book in which they laid out much of their argument, because they wanted to explain the economic benefits of these new technologies (Brynjolfsson spent much of the 1990s sniffing out evidence that information technology was boosting rates of productivity). But it became clear to them that the same technologies making many jobs safer, easier, and more productive were also reducing the demand for many types of human workers.
Anecdotal evidence that digital technologies threaten jobs is, of course, everywhere. Robots and advanced automation have been common in many types of manufacturing for decades. In the United States and China, the world’s manufacturing powerhouses, fewer people work in manufacturing today than in 1997, thanks at least in part to automation. Modern automotive plants, many of which were transformed by industrial robotics in the 1980s, routinely use machines that autonomously weld and paint body parts—tasks that were once handled by humans. Most recently, industrial robots like Rethink Robotics’ Baxter (see “The Blue-Collar Robot,” May/June 2013), more flexible and far cheaper than their predecessors, have been introduced to perform simple jobs for small manufacturers in a variety of sectors. The website of a Silicon Valley startup called Industrial Perception features a video of the robot it has designed for use in warehouses picking up and throwing boxes like a bored elephant. And such sensations as Google’s driverless car suggest what automation might be able to accomplish someday soon.
A less dramatic change, but one with a potentially far larger impact on employment, is taking place in clerical work and professional services. Technologies like the Web, artificial intelligence, big data, and improved analytics—all made possible by the ever increasing availability of cheap computing power and storage capacity—are automating many routine tasks. Countless traditional white-collar jobs, such as many in the post office and in customer service, have disappeared. W. Brian Arthur, a visiting researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s intelligence systems lab and a former economics professor at Stanford University, calls it the “autonomous economy.” It’s far more subtle than the idea of robots and automation doing human jobs, he says: it involves “digital processes talking to other digital processes and creating new processes,” enabling us to do many things with fewer people and making yet other human jobs obsolete.
It is this onslaught of digital processes, says Arthur, that primarily explains how productivity has grown without a significant increase in human labor. And, he says, “digital versions of human intelligence” are increasingly replacing even those jobs once thought to require people. “It will change every profession in ways we have barely seen yet,” he warns.
McAfee, associate director of the MIT Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management, speaks rapidly and with a certain awe as he describes advances such as Google’s driverless car. Still, despite his obvious enthusiasm for the technologies, he doesn’t see the recently vanished jobs coming back. The pressure on employment and the resulting inequality will only get worse, he suggests, as digital technologies—fueled with “enough computing power, data, and geeks”—continue their exponential advances over the next several decades. “I would like to be wrong,” he says, “but when all these science-fiction technologies are deployed, what will we need all the people for?”
New Economy?
But are these new technologies really responsible for a decade of lackluster job growth? Many labor economists say the data are, at best, far from conclusive. Several other plausible explanations, including events related to global trade and the financial crises of the early and late 2000s, could account for the relative slowness of job creation since the turn of the century. “No one really knows,” says Richard Freeman, a labor economist at Harvard University. That’s because it’s very difficult to “extricate” the effects of technology from other macroeconomic effects, he says. But he’s skeptical that technology would change a wide range of business sectors fast enough to explain recent job numbers.
Employment trends have polarized the workforce and hollowed out the middle class.
David Autor, an economist at MIT who has extensively studied the connections between jobs and technology, also doubts that technology could account for such an abrupt change in total employment. “There was a great sag in employment beginning in 2000. Something did change,” he says. “But no one knows the cause.” Moreover, he doubts that productivity has, in fact, risen robustly in the United States in the past decade (economists can disagree about that statistic because there are different ways of measuring and weighing economic inputs and outputs). If he’s right, it raises the possibility that poor job growth could be simply a result of a sluggish economy. The sudden slowdown in job creation “is a big puzzle,” he says, “but there’s not a lot of evidence it’s linked to computers.”
To be sure, Autor says, computer technologies are changing the types of jobs available, and those changes “are not always for the good.” At least since the 1980s, he says, computers have increasingly taken over such tasks as bookkeeping, clerical work, and repetitive production jobs in manufacturing—all of which typically provided middle-class pay. At the same time, higher-paying jobs requiring creativity and problem-solving skills, often aided by computers, have proliferated. So have low-skill jobs: demand has increased for restaurant workers, janitors, home health aides, and others doing service work that is nearly impossible to automate. The result, says Autor, has been a “polarization” of the workforce and a “hollowing out” of the middle class—something that has been happening in numerous industrialized countries for the last several decades. But “that is very different from saying technology is affecting the total number of jobs,” he adds. “Jobs can change a lot without there being huge changes in employment rates.”
What’s more, even if today’s digital technologies are holding down job creation, history suggests that it is most likely a temporary, albeit painful, shock; as workers adjust their skills and entrepreneurs create opportunities based on the new technologies, the number of jobs will rebound. That, at least, has always been the pattern. The question, then, is whether today’s computing technologies will be different, creating long-term involuntary unemployment.
At least since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1700s, improvements in technology have changed the nature of work and destroyed some types of jobs in the process. In 1900, 41 percent of Americans worked in agriculture; by 2000, it was only 2 percent. Likewise, the proportion of Americans employed in manufacturing has dropped from 30 percent in the post–World War II years to around 10 percent today—partly because of increasing automation, especially during the 1980s.
While such changes can be painful for workers whose skills no longer match the needs of employers, Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, says that no historical pattern shows these shifts leading to a net decrease in jobs over an extended period. Katz has done extensive research on how technological advances have affected jobs over the last few centuries—describing, for example, how highly skilled artisans in the mid-19th century were displaced by lower-skilled workers in factories. While it can take decades for workers to acquire the expertise needed for new types of employment, he says, “we never have run out of jobs. There is no long-term trend of eliminating work for people. Over the long term, employment rates are fairly stable. People have always been able to create new jobs. People come up with new things to do.”
Still, Katz doesn’t dismiss the notion that there is something different about today’s digital technologies—something that could affect an even broader range of work. The question, he says, is whether economic history will serve as a useful guide. Will the job disruptions caused by technology be temporary as the workforce adapts, or will we see a science-fiction scenario in which automated processes and robots with superhuman skills take over a broad swath of human tasks? Though Katz expects the historical pattern to hold, it is “genuinely a question,” he says. “If technology disrupts enough, who knows what will happen?”
Dr. Watson
To get some insight into Katz’s question, it is worth looking at how today’s most advanced technologies are being deployed in industry. Though these technologies have undoubtedly taken over some human jobs, finding evidence of workers being displaced by machines on a large scale is not all that easy. One reason it is difficult to pinpoint the net impact on jobs is that automation is often used to make human workers more efficient, not necessarily to replace them. Rising productivity means businesses can do the same work with fewer employees, but it can also enable the businesses to expand production with their existing workers, and even to enter new markets.
Take the bright-orange Kiva robot, a boon to fledgling e-commerce companies. Created and sold by Kiva Systems, a startup that was founded in 2002 and bought by Amazon for $775 million in 2012, the robots are designed to scurry across large warehouses, fetching racks of ordered goods and delivering the products to humans who package the orders. In Kiva’s large demonstration warehouse and assembly facility at its headquarters outside Boston, fleets of robots move about with seemingly endless energy: some newly assembled machines perform tests to prove they’re ready to be shipped to customers around the world, while others wait to demonstrate to a visitor how they can almost instantly respond to an electronic order and bring the desired product to a worker’s station.
A warehouse equipped with Kiva robots can handle up to four times as many orders as a similar unautomated warehouse, where workers might spend as much as 70 percent of their time walking about to retrieve goods. (Coincidentally or not, Amazon bought Kiva soon after a press report revealed that workers at one of the retailer’s giant warehouses often walked more than 10 miles a day.)
Despite the labor-saving potential of the robots, Mick Mountz, Kiva’s founder and CEO, says he doubts the machines have put many people out of work or will do so in the future. For one thing, he says, most of Kiva’s customers are e-commerce retailers, some of them growing so rapidly they can’t hire people fast enough. By making distribution operations cheaper and more efficient, the robotic technology has helped many of these retailers survive and even expand. Before founding Kiva, Mountz worked at Webvan, an online grocery delivery company that was one of the 1990s dot-com era’s most infamous flameouts. He likes to show the numbers demonstrating that Webvan was doomed from the start; a $100 order cost the company $120 to ship. Mountz’s point is clear: something as mundane as the cost of materials handling can consign a new business to an early death. Automation can solve that problem.
Meanwhile, Kiva itself is hiring. Orange balloons—the same color as the robots—hover over multiple cubicles in its sprawling office, signaling that the occupants arrived within the last month. Most of these new employees are software engineers: while the robots are the company’s poster boys, its lesser-known innovations lie in the complex algorithms that guide the robots’ movements and determine where in the warehouse products are stored. These algorithms help make the system adaptable. It can learn, for example, that a certain product is seldom ordered, so it should be stored in a remote area.
Though advances like these suggest how some aspects of work could be subject to automation, they also illustrate that humans still excel at certain tasks—for example, packaging various items together. Many of the traditional problems in robotics—such as how to teach a machine to recognize an object as, say, a chair—remain largely intractable and are especially difficult to solve when the robots are free to move about a relatively unstructured environment like a factory or office.
Techniques using vast amounts of computational power have gone a long way toward helping robots understand their surroundings, but John Leonard, a professor of engineering at MIT and a member of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), says many familiar difficulties remain. “Part of me sees accelerating progress; the other part of me sees the same old problems,” he says. “I see how hard it is to do anything with robots. The big challenge is uncertainty.” In other words, people are still far better at dealing with changes in their environment and reacting to unexpected events.
For that reason, Leonard says, it is easier to see how robots could work with humans than on their own in many applications. “People and robots working together can happen much more quickly than robots simply replacing humans,” he says. “That’s not going to happen in my lifetime at a massive scale. The semiautonomous taxi will still have a driver.”
One of the friendlier, more flexible robots meant to work with humans is Rethink’s Baxter. The creation of Rodney Brooks, the company’s founder, Baxter needs minimal training to perform simple tasks like picking up objects and moving them to a box. It’s meant for use in relatively small manufacturing facilities where conventional industrial robots would cost too much and pose too much danger to workers. The idea, says Brooks, is to have the robots take care of dull, repetitive jobs that no one wants to do.
It’s hard not to instantly like Baxter, in part because it seems so eager to please. The “eyebrows” on its display rise quizzically when it’s puzzled; its arms submissively and gently retreat when bumped. Asked about the claim that such advanced industrial robots could eliminate jobs, Brooks answers simply that he doesn’t see it that way. Robots, he says, can be to factory workers as electric drills are to construction workers: “It makes them more productive and efficient, but it doesn’t take jobs.”
The machines created at Kiva and Rethink have been cleverly designed and built to work with people, taking over the tasks that the humans often don’t want to do or aren’t especially good at. They are specifically designed to enhance these workers’ productivity. And it’s hard to see how even these increasingly sophisticated robots will replace humans in most manufacturing and industrial jobs anytime soon. But clerical and some professional jobs could be more vulnerable. That’s because the marriage of artificial intelligence and big data is beginning to give machines a more humanlike ability to reason and to solve many new types of problems.
Even if the economy is only going through a transition, it is an extremely painful one for many.
In the tony northern suburbs of New York City, IBM Research is pushing super-smart computing into the realms of such professions as medicine, finance, and customer service. IBM’s efforts have resulted in Watson, a computer system best known for beating human champions on the game show Jeopardy! in 2011. That version of Watson now sits in a corner of a large data center at the research facility in Yorktown Heights, marked with a glowing plaque commemorating its glory days. Meanwhile, researchers there are already testing new generations of Watson in medicine, where the technology could help physicians diagnose diseases like cancer, evaluate patients, and prescribe treatments.
IBM likes to call it cognitive computing. Essentially, Watson uses artificial-intelligence techniques, advanced natural-language processing and analytics, and massive amounts of data drawn from sources specific to a given application (in the case of health care, that means medical journals, textbooks, and information collected from the physicians or hospitals using the system). Thanks to these innovative techniques and huge amounts of computing power, it can quickly come up with “advice”—for example, the most recent and relevant information to guide a doctor’s diagnosis and treatment decisions.
Despite the system’s remarkable ability to make sense of all that data, it’s still early days for Dr. Watson. While it has rudimentary abilities to “learn” from specific patterns and evaluate different possibilities, it is far from having the type of judgment and intuition a physician often needs. But IBM has also announced it will begin selling Watson’s services to customer-support call centers, which rarely require human judgment that’s quite so sophisticated. IBM says companies will rent an updated version of Watson for use as a “customer service agent” that responds to questions from consumers; it has already signed on several banks. Automation is nothing new in call centers, of course, but Watson’s improved capacity for natural-language processing and its ability to tap into a large amount of data suggest that this system could speak plainly with callers, offering them specific advice on even technical and complex questions. It’s easy to see it replacing many human holdouts in its new field.
Digital Losers
The contention that automation and digital technologies are partly responsible for today’s lack of jobs has obviously touched a raw nerve for many worried about their own employment. But this is only one consequence of what Brynjolfsson and McAfee see as a broader trend. The rapid acceleration of technological progress, they say, has greatly widened the gap between economic winners and losers—the income inequalities that many economists have worried about for decades. Digital technologies tend to favor “superstars,” they point out. For example, someone who creates a computer program to automate tax preparation might earn millions or billions of dollars while eliminating the need for countless accountants.
New technologies are “encroaching into human skills in a way that is completely unprecedented,” McAfee says, and many middle-class jobs are right in the bull’s-eye; even relatively high-skill work in education, medicine, and law is affected. “The middle seems to be going away,” he adds. “The top and bottom are clearly getting farther apart.” While technology might be only one factor, says McAfee, it has been an “underappreciated” one, and it is likely to become increasingly significant.
Not everyone agrees with Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s conclusions—particularly the contention that the impact of recent technological change could be different from anything seen before. But it’s hard to ignore their warning that technology is widening the income gap between the tech-savvy and everyone else. And even if the economy is only going through a transition similar to those it’s endured before, it is an extremely painful one for many workers, and that will have to be addressed somehow. Harvard’s Katz has shown that the United States prospered in the early 1900s in part because secondary education became accessible to many people at a time when employment in agriculture was drying up. The result, at least through the 1980s, was an increase in educated workers who found jobs in the industrial sectors, boosting incomes and reducing inequality. Katz’s lesson: painful long-term consequences for the labor force do not follow inevitably from technological changes.
Brynjolfsson himself says he’s not ready to conclude that economic progress and employment have diverged for good. “I don’t know whether we can recover, but I hope we can,” he says. But that, he suggests, will depend on recognizing the problem and taking steps such as investing more in the training and education of workers.
“We were lucky and steadily rising productivity raised all boats for much of the 20th century,” he says. “Many people, especially economists, jumped to the conclusion that was just the way the world worked. I used to say that if we took care of productivity, everything else would take care of itself; it was the single most important economic statistic. But that’s no longer true.” He adds, “It’s one of the dirty secrets of economics: technology progress does grow the economy and create wealth, but there is no economic law that says everyone will benefit.” In other words, in the race against the machine, some are likely to win while many others lose.
777 COMMENTS. Share your thoughts »
Credits: Noma Bar (Illustration); Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics (Productivity, Output, GDP Per Capita); International Federation of Robotics; CIA World Factbook (GDP by Sector), Bureau of Labor Statistics (Job Growth, Manufacturing Employment); D. Autor and D. Dorn, U.S. Census, American Community Survey, and Department of Labor (Change in Employment and Wages by Skill, Routine Jobs)
Tagged: Computing, Biomedicine, Business, Communications, Energy, Web, Mobile, robotics, AI, economy, jobs, automation, middle class
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andyrwebman 9 days ago
The trouble with the "dream up new jobs" idea is that there is a tacit dependence on us consuming the produce made by these new jobs - be it physical or information.
I personally find that I'm at the limit of what I can reasonably consume. I don't find that the new iPads or million and one other gizmos improve my life much at all, even though I'm a programmer by trade. Many are invented to sole "problems" that don't really need solving at all.
Actually, they can be apt to make us all more apathetic - witness the people with eyes glued to the smartphone screen in bars and "social" places, downloading apps to make ever more of their decisions for them.
It is fitting that this article is partly about robots, since Isaac Asimov famously predicted that robots would make humans apathetic by taking away all meaningful tasks from them. Worryingly, it's not the physical tasks that have been devolved, but many of the mental ones - as per the earlier smarphone comments.
I wonder how long it will be before more and more people step out of the rat race - at least to the extent that they eschew the many consumer goods that are cheaper and more worthless by the day?
The sad thing is that the actual raw material of the planet - particularly real estate to live on - IS becoming rarer and more precious. We have rooms full of gadgets and an ever decreasing space to put them in.
Against this backdrop, the economic value of an individual person seems greatly reduced - far more a consumer of the limited resources than a producer of anything worth having.
I'm left with a conclusion that recurs everywhere - that this planet would be better off with a smaller and more highly educated human population.
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howiem 9 days ago
@andyrwebman Take this with a grain of salt. Do you really think that your experience (or mine, for that matter) are indicative of the experiences of each of the other 7 billion people on the planet? My point is that you seem to be taking too narrow a view of the world and the potentials of individuals.
But it is your last sentence that is disturbing: "I'm left with a conclusion that recurs everywhere - that this planet would be better off with a smaller and more highly educated human population."
Firs, the claim the conclusion recurs everywhere needs to be justified. But more importantly, do you realize what you are advocating? You are asking for the e4xtermination of billions of people, unless you have a way to reduce the population by some other means. And how could you be sure that one of those billions would not be the Could you be sure that one of those terminated lives would not be the person with the breakthrough ways of better employing people so technology doesn't ace them all out of work of some type, or who will think up ways of getting to other planets in fast time, for example? That would be a better way to reduce the population on earth than exterminating those who some bureaucrat determines are "no longer essential". Or perhaps the robots will also exterminate the bureaucrats. Can you be certain that you would be one of those "allowed" to keep on living? Are you saying that the only jobs in life require a high level of education? If everyone has a very high level of education, who will change the light bulbs? I am not saying that the PhDs would not be capable, but it would be beneath their "dignity". Besides what's the point of becoming an intellectual elite if there is no one to lord over? Certainly if technology goes too far, the politicians will legislate then robots out of their jobs. Perhaps the robots will make life so easy that we will all over eat and explode. We can even have arenas lie on old Rome or in "Logan's Run". No need for lions. Just pins for the Pop the People weekly contests. Bottom line is don't discount humans too easily. It wasn't long ago that no one ever heard the word computer. We probably shouldn't assume that we know everything there is to know. But if we do, others will not.
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breister 8 days ago
@howiem @andyrwebman howiem, I don't think anyone anywhere except nut jobs are asking for global exterminations, so maybe we can keep the hyperbole down?
On the other hand, offering free birth control perhaps with incentives would probably be doing some impoverished nations a true favor, instead of simply sending them just enough food to create more people who can't feed themselves as we have been doing for decades.
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howiem 8 days ago
@breister If you had really read my post you might have even noticed that I started with "Take this with a grain of salt." That means it was tongue in cheek. Unfortunately some of those nut jobs you refer to happen to be in positions of power, and cannot be taken too lightly.
You might want to rethink your suggestion to give free birth control to people in impoverished countries. In impoverished countries, people want to have children to care from them in their old age, and many of their babies die young. Therefore the more children they can produce the more chance there is of some surviving to take care for their parents when they get old. Do you really think that is a "true favor"?
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breister 8 days ago
@howiem @breister "You might want to rethink your suggestion to give free birth control to people in impoverished countries. In impoverished countries, people want to have children to care from them in their old age, and many of their babies die young. Therefore the more children they can produce the more chance there is of some surviving to take care for their parents when they get old. Do you really think that is a "true favor"?"
Let's think about this. In these countries, there are are already 10 people chasing barely enough food to feed 8. Do I understand that you are proposing that the "best thing to do" is to encourage them to continue their current practices, which will result in 20 people competing for only enough food to feed 8?
Somehow, I don't think I am the one who needs to re-think that. Your suggestion is to perpetuate a cruel and deadly game of musical chairs. IMHO, if that is the only alternative then it would be more humane to follow your "dark-humored" suggestion of extermination than to doom future unborn generations to a perpetual cycle of death by starvation. At least it would be quick, rather than condemning them to a life of suffering.
Offering voluntary birth control would at least offer them a third alternative unavailable to them today, and one which would not condemn their children to the same impoverished fate.
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howiem 7 days ago
@breister @howiem In fact, I was doing sort of a spoof on andyrwebman's comment in my first post. There are people in the current U.,S. government today who have in the past advocated for mass extermination. I do not agree with that.
I live in a country where there were, and are relatively poor people; most in the agricultural sector. Some years ago, there was a successful campaign to get them to practice birth control by persuasion, which resulted in having too few children to meet the replacement needs. Other factors came along and the prosperity of the country increased. Today, there is a severe labor shortage, and instead of poor farmers having children to help them with the harvests, they have to use more hired labor than before. Much of this labor is now imported, and sometimes includes criminal elements. Now the “poor” farmers must pay cash to those they hire to bring in the crops instead of the cost of room and board for their children and hiring friends at low cost to help out, as they would help their friends. Thus, because of birth control practices it is now more costly to be a farmer, and poor farmers have it as bad as or worse than before. There are consequences of every action, foreseeable and unforeseen, as well as helpful and harmful. So, we need to consider very carefully before we determine what is “right” for someone else, particularly people we do not know, who are also unique individuals as we are, not commodities.
Just giving out condoms or pills is sort of a cop out unless we know each person’s needs and wants, and what will really benefit them. Can we be certain that the intended recipients get the pills/condoms at no cost to them? Suppose their government takes control of the donations? What if their government, national or local, forces the poor to pay for the items? That will make them even poorer.
Giving people birth control pills is saying, "Here's a pill, take it, go forth and have no more children and you shall be happy." However, some people are willing to take the risk of having children to make them happy. Furthermore, neither condoms nor pills last forever. Who will supply the next round, .... and the round after that? Should we force every man in "poor" countries to have a “voluntary” operation? Who will pay? Who will get the operations? Just the poor men? What about the not-so-poor men that impregnate poor girls and don't take care of them? These are all foreseeable impacts in many countries.
Your comment that it is perpetuating a cruel and deadly game of death by starvation is not necessarily true, although in some cases that is the reality of life. People born in poverty do not always remain poor. Not all of the “poor” are starving to death. Young people, who live at home and have no income may be classified as poor, even if their family is well off. In many countries, farmers may be relatively “poor” in terms of cash, but they grow their own food and need less cash to survive,, and can live comfortable with little cash. They may be better off than people who have more money but who live in an expensive city. To determine relative “poorness” we can use Purchasing Power Parityto some extent for the products the “poor” in country A use compared to the products that the “poor” use country B or C. For example, where I live, I can buy a shirt that is also exported to the USA. I pay about 1/.3 of what someone in the U.S. pays, therefore, for that shirt, my purchasing power is three times that of an American in the US. Much of my food is a lot less expensive, and so are my accommodations.
One of the problems with just deciding that birth control is necessary is that there are economic and other repercussions. Just giving out condoms does mean that we understand the needs and wants of the people themselves. To know that, they must be asked. I know many people with very low income who do not want handouts, because handouts are rarely sustainable, but mainly because they have self-pride.
When we want to do something, after deciding what it is we want to do, just keep asking, "What happens next?" until you find out what can go wrong. Then decide if the benefits outweigh the pitfalls.
If it were up to me, I would have everyone be a millionaire and able to purchase whatever each one wants. But who would make the products and provide the services they want if they were wealthy? Would enough of the millionaires be willing to work? This of course relates to the main theme of this thread which I have no time for now. I’ll just say that I doubt that there will ever be a robot who can see value in everything that humans see value in.
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rrusson 7 days ago
@howiem I'm always struck by the way some people feel that providing birth control is the equivalent of mandatory sterilization. It just perplexes me how offering something as a choice for adults that have free will is a bad thing. If they want children, they decline; if they don't, there's nothing preventing family planning and more control over their lives (and finances). I suppose if our government provided free donuts, within a year 90% of us would be bloated and dead because we'd be compelled to eat them? Your other objections are similarly illogical. I can only imagine there's some odd, emotional eugenics baggage here to explain your reaction.
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howiem 6 days ago
@rrusson @howiem Read the other posts that led to my comments. I never advocated birth control. I just discussed it.
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breister 6 days ago
@howiem @rrusson "Read the other posts that led to my comments. I never advocated birth control. I just discussed it."
Clearly you did not - in fact, after parsing through your rather wordy response it appears you are in favor of perpetuating the status quo - which can be summed up as continuing the ongoing global intervention in other countries which consists solely of sending food, which only results in exacerbating their problems.
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howiem 6 days ago
@breister @howiem @rrusson No, I did not say that either. And if you don't like my "wordy" responses, then don't read them. I see no point in continuing this.
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Pavla Foley Sep 18, 2014
Yes, the truth is that robots will take our jobs away, something they have actually already done for some while – they often take away unsafe, backbreaking, repetitive and boring jobs, freeing up humans’ capacity to do more interesting and less physical strenuous jobs. More importantly, as robots take on more jobs, we hopefully will dream up new jobs just as humanity has done for decades.
Our Industries of the Future: Robotics Report is trying to answer the following questions:
· How changes in global demographics are driving the need for “robotic workers” in the future.
·How technology advancements are pushing the world towards an era of robotic deployment.
·How robotic technology is impacting existing industries and markets.
·How innovative robotic technologies could impact jobs and skills required for the future.
·How we prepare the workforce for an era of “robotic workers.”
http://www.globaltrends.com/reports/?doc_id=500541&task=view_details
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Gary Reber Sep 17, 2014
if your assertions were true then we would have full employment and everyone with a job that pays a decent, livable wage. But this is not the reality, as the non-human factor of production constantly "saves" labor and shifts production off of human labor while increasing productiveness.
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leopardpm Sep 16, 2014
Really ridiculous. There are always people claiming that machines, computers, and other people are 'taking jobs'. Fact is, humans have unlimited wants/needs/desires and the process of supplying these is called a 'job'... there will ALWAYS be work to do. People may have to understand better what a 'job' is (providing valued labor), and what it is not (getting a paycheck for 'working' at doing anything). Unemployment comes from two sources: frictional (the time/effort/study it takes to find another job), or institutional (the barriers put in place through government, ie: min wage, regulations, etc).
Technology is just a 'tool'. It helps us produce more, or better, or faster, with less. Which frees up our time/resources for other things we might want to do/produce. If we desired, as humans, to increase our leisure time with these productivity gains, we could. But history has shown that instead we choose to continue to try to improve our living situation/conditions and develop even better/faster/more stuff.
Another thing, the canard that 'only low-wage jobs' will be left, or, that technology puts 'downward pressure' on wages. Simply untrue! The economy, if left unhindered, will continually adjust wage rates according to changing values. Even if we were to become a nation of Massage Therapists, with every other conceivable 'job' being done (at no cost, of course) by robots/computers, we would 'earn' enough to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves as we wished, perhaps only 'working' by giving one massage a week. Maybe that wasn't really clear, basically, the economy will work out wage rates depending upon how WE value different labors, if robots make the value of a certain (or all) manufacturing labor go down, WE will more highly value OTHER things which will increase the wage rates in those industries.
and... lastly. the notion that changes are occurring 'too fast' for society to keep up. Pfft! It is US that is changing things, so of course WE can keep up! Things are changing EXACTLY at the speed we desire, we can speed up or slow down as we see fit and there is no need to artificially (through some governmental intervention or edict) try to affect things.
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Nicholas P Sep 26, 2014
@leopardpm "Unemployment comes from two sources: frictional (the time/effort/study it takes to find another job), or institutional (the barriers put in place through government, ie: min wage, regulations, etc)." This is an ignorant statement. You imply government regulation is the sole of cause of an area having fewer jobs available than its population can support, which is outrageous, as there are many other factors that contribute to the job market. You seem to think that economies are all the same and are not competing with each other, but they are, largely due to resource availability, location and infrastructure (think extraction and shipping). Besides, do you really want America to be more like China, where workers have no rights, a low quality of living (low pay), and a filthy environment to live in (air pollution in northern China is directly responsible for decreasing life expectancy by 5.5 years (1))? I personally am thankful for environmental regulation and workers rights, and believe more barriers should be put in place that discourage outsourcing and importation.
If we were all massage therapists (or participant in any other undiverse job market), then there would be no demand in the field, since we would all have only one customer. Durp.
(1) http://www.pnas.org/content/110/32/12936.abstract
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andyrwebman 9 days ago
@leopardpm "Fact is, humans have unlimited wants/needs/desires and the process of supplying these is called a 'job"
Not true. So many people are actually finding that endless gratification just doesn't make for happiness - especially not if you have to work extra hard to get the money to pay for an undending stream of consumer goods.
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patricksteenks Jul 15, 2014
Very interesting article. Recently I have watched a video by a Harvard professor which addresses the exact same problem and explains it by distinguishing between three types of innovation. See the 15 minute video on the link below to learn more about his explanation. This professor thinks that unless we change our innovation focus, technology will be destroying jobs in the near future at an alarming rate.
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Gary Reber Jul 15, 2014
@patricksteenks Tectonic shifts in the technologies of production are exponential and will destroy jobs as capital assets––structures, machines, tools, super-automation, robotics, computerized operations––replace the need for human labor. But still there is no one in academia addressing the issue of who owns the capital assets? We need to reform the system to empower EVERY child, woman and man equal access in interest-free, insured capital credit loans to purchase new issues of stock in the corporations growing the economy, repayable out of the FUTURE earnings of the capital investments.
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andyrwebman 9 days ago
@Gary Reber @patricksteenks Interest free insured loans? Two probelms with that
1. Who would put up the capital - effectively all risk and no return?
2. Do you realise how much cheap - in this case free - credit pushes up the prices of things? You're asking for the worst kind of hyper inflation.
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Gary Reber 9 days ago
@andyrwebman @Gary Reber @patricksteenks Influential economists and business leaders, as well as political leaders, should read Harold Moulton's The Formation Of Capital, in which he argues that it makes no sense to finance new productive capital out of past savings. Instead, economic growth should be financed out of future earnings (savings), and provide that every citizen become an owner. The Federal Reserve, which has been largely responsible for the powerlessness of most American citizens, should set an example for all the central banks in the world. Chairman Janet Yellen and other members of the Federal Reserve need to wake-up and implement Section 13 paragraph 2, which directs the Federal Reserve to create credit for local banks to make loans where there isn't enough savings in the system to finance economic growth. We should not destroy the Federal Reserve or make it a political extension of the Treasury Department, but instead reform it so that the American citizens in each of the 12 Federal Reserve Regions become the owners. The result will be that money power will flow from the bottom up, not from the top down––not for consumer credit, not for credit that doesn't pay for itself or non-productive uses of credit, but for credit for productive uses to expand the economy's rate of growth.
The Federal Reserve should be required to stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks "too big to fail" and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every child, woman and man to establish a Capital Homestead Account or "CHA" (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. The CHA would process an equal allocation of productive credit to every citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets, The shares would be purchased on credit wholly backed by projected "future savings" in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable goods and services produced by the newly added technology, renewable energy systems, plant, rentable space and infrastructure added to the economy. Risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.
The end result is that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on our only legitimate social monopoly –– the State –– and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.
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bowlweevils Apr 30, 2014
Here's the problem with economists: "Katz has done extensive research on how technological advances have affected jobs over the last few centuries...we never have run out of jobs"
The "last few centuries" are nothing. Try extending the data set back to 1400 (how are those plagues going?) instead of 1700, 1100 (barley gruel and cold stone walls), 800 (look, Karl der Größe is being crowned emperor), 500 (der Volkswanderung), etc.
And most of the data from "the last few centuries" comes selectively, from countries that experienced the industrial revolution. And they were added to the data set when they industrialized. There is no data from Russia 1700 because they weren't building steamships. There is no data from Africa, India, China.
The fact is that the main human economic system has been small groups that manufactured their own goods out of animal and plant parts with assistance from stone. They occasionally exchanged precious (shiny, hard) objects and negotiated mating exchanges. There was an incredible level of inter-group violence. This system lasted, to be generous in our dating, 90000 years (we're going with 100kya for official "humans" to exist, 10000bc as end of the neolithic. Yes, those are very generous numbers, I know).
This was followed by the domestication of animals and development of agriculture in certain areas, usually large river systems surrounding by poor living zones (i.e., the desert or mountains) to keep the population from wandering. And small empires emerged. When this happened depended on where you look. That lasted a very long time. With better technology for transportation, the range of activity increased. Some empires grew large and collapsed and grew large and collapsed and...
But this lasted a very long time. So long that it did not even start for many areas of the world, which lived in a neolithic(maybe +agriculture) situation until the Europeans developed ocean-going vessels in the 15th century. Other regions remained as small empires. Some pretended they were democracies as long as you didn't count the slaves as people.
Even in the traditional centers of the "civilized world", the Mediterranean, the Middle East and India (with east Africa joining in), and east Asia, our horse, sword, and coast-hugging boats provided the basics of the economic system until the 14th century.
So data from a few centuries out of 100000 years, from a cherry-picked area of the world - essentially the parts of the world that produced the records used to make the data set - say that technology makes jobs.
I'm not going to pretend I know what's going to happen. But let's bear in mind that many economists thought that Japan was going to dominate the world in the 1980s. If the world existed, because economists also failed to predict the relatively peaceful end of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And then the 1990s became "the end of history" when we would all have no more war and pets.com shares worth millions, and live happily ever after.
So what we know is that the data from 300 years from the countries producing the data are virtually nothing in the scope of human history. We also know that economists are terrible at making predictions 10-20 years in advance.
When technologists and serious science fiction authors say it's time to worry, think about worrying. When economists tell you everything will be fine, they have nothing but false confidence and misleading graphs to support those claims.Economists may have physics envy, but it is not so great as to drive them to actually study physics.
I also didn't see anything about the impact of rising oceans on billions of people living in small low-lying pockets of shoreline. You don't need to worry about where 25 million people in Florida will find jobs because there won't be a Florida.
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zdzisiekm Apr 30, 2014
@bowlweevils
"I also didn't see anything about the impact of rising oceans on billions of people living in small low-lying pockets of shoreline."
Because it's not an issue. Sea levels have been rising and falling for centuries. During the Medieval Warm Period there was less ice on Greenland than today. During the Holocene Thermal Maximum, 7000 years ago, the sea level around Australia was 1 meter higher than today. According to Palanisamy et al the sea level in the Indian Ocean rises by between 4 and 7 inches per century only, doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2014.02.001, which is a small fraction of an average ocean wave height. No sea level rise acceleration has been observed. It's been rising like this at a relatively steady and slow pace ever since the end of the Little Ice Age.
You are also wrong when you limit the scope of human civilization to the last 300 years only. Medieval China and Arabia were shining centers of human civilization with advanced technologies, knowledge and highly organized societies in place, as were Ancient Greece and Rome in Europe. Eratosthenes estimated correctly the Earth's size and shape in 240BC. To be able to do so, you had to live in a highly advanced society already, with profound knowledge of geometry and geography, and means to preserve and disseminate it. Economy was understood and practiced in the Ancient Mesopotamia, 3000BC, and Romans used to collect exhaustive statistics about their own society. The Egyptians have been taking regular censuses already in the early Pharaonic period, 3340BC-3056BC.
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bowlweevils May 1, 2014
@zdzisiekm @bowlweevilsI was not intending at all to limit the scope of human civilization to the last 300 years in Euro-America. In fact, I think my comment makes it clear that I think there is far more to human civilization than that period.
What I was saying was that economists are relying on the last 300 years in Euro-America when they are making their predictions about the future, and neglecting most of human history and most of the world.
As I said, even within Europe, the economists' data set is limited to industrializing nations. Those that are not industrializing are not included. So your very early period is mostly limited to England. Then parts of what is now Germany and the United States get added, then northern France, Silesia, the low countries. Eventually Spain and Prussia and Russia will be included. But only after they start building steamships, railroads, and factories. As long as they remain largely agricultural, they aren't included by economists. For economists, the world starts when those steamships and factories displace the agricultural workers.
I was criticizing the limitations on the data economists use. I agree entirely with you regarding the scope of world civilization.
However, you are wrong about sea level being a non-issue. And in a sense, you are reasoning like today's economists.
First, your argument is that, on a macroscopic level, sea level fluctuation has been not an issue. This is true. However, this data is based on a world with a much smaller population. The population of the world has grown so much, and so many marginal regions have been populated that 150 million Bangladeshis don't have somewhere else to migrate to without causing major warfare.
And that's the other flaw in your argument. Sea level fluctuations matter very much on the local level, and actions at the local level can change world history. Before the Medieval Warm Period, most of the Netherlands was firm ground, along with lower Saxony. Rising sea levels and post-glacial rebound caused massive flooding and loss of habitable land on the continental North Sea coast from Flanders to Jutland.
The result of this was the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes migrating to Celto-Romanic Britain. Continued warming boosted the population of Scandinavia, resulting in the Danes invading Anglo-Saxon Britain and Norwegians conquering Normandy, and later the Italian Peninsula south of Rome and Sicily, along with assorted smaller islands, Malta, Rhodes.
It also sent the rising population of western and central Europe on the Southern and Northern Crusades. While we are pretty familiar with the massive change in world history that accompanied the Southern Crusades, the Northern Crusades resulted in Germanic rule over what is today's Poland and Baltic States, the formation of the Hanseatic League, and the increasing integration of Russia into the European sphere of influence. Amsterdam, London, Koln, and Hamburg were created by the Medieval Warm Period.
The Medieval Warm Period resulted in huge changes in European population structure and permanently altered world history. The impact of Great Britain, Germany, and Russia on the world cannot be underestimated, and all three were sent on an expansionist mindset by the impact of invasion, migration, and trade networks.
Again, I am not trying to limit civilization to Europe. But I am extremely familiar with northern European history. And northern Europeans and their former colonies conquered much of the world and continue to dominate today.
This will probably change in the next century. For much of human history China or South Asia was more important than Europe. It will likely be China and the other East and Southeast Asian nations that are dominant in the future. But for the past 500 years, Northern Europeans and their former colonies have been the dominant force in the world, and the Northern European cultures and nations were very much shaped by the sea level and temperature changes of the Medieval Warm Period.
Perhaps you are thinking now, What about Spain? Spain before the Moorish period was ruled by Visigoths, a Germanic people. Their descendants led the Reconquista. Not long after the unification of Spain, Spain became part of the Habsburg Empire. This was the first empire that the sun never set upon, long before the British Empire. And a key part of the Habsburg Spanish line was the low countries. The redistribution of precious metals, animals, plants, and peoples by Spain and the Netherlands again altered the world in the most profound way. The post-Roman forms of these nations were triggered by the Medieval Warm Period.
Even if we ignore everything else, and just focus on the single group of people that the Medieval Warm Period affected the most, the Netherlanders, we have a massive change in world history - the discovery of Australia, the conquest of Indonesia, the monopoly on trade with Japan, the founders of New York, the masters of the transatlantic slave trade - that was generated by the sea level fluctuations of the Medieval Warm Period.
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zdzisiekm May 1, 2014
@bowlweevils @zdzisiekm
"Even if we ignore everything else, and just focus on the single group of people that the Medieval Warm Period affected the most, the Netherlanders, we have a massive change in world history - the discovery of Australia, the conquest of Indonesia, the monopoly on trade with Japan, the founders of New York, the masters of the transatlantic slave trade - that was generated by the sea level fluctuations of the Medieval Warm Period."
So? These were all good things. They led to the development of the world, technological and scientific progress, prosperity, modern medicine, etc. What's here to complain about? The building of terps and dikes in medieval Netherlands also contributed to human development by making the Dutch skilled in such earthworks and related technologies, e.g., pumping water by using wind power. By the time of the Dutch Republic, 1581-1795, the Dutch were amongst the richest people in Europe.
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andyrwebman 9 days ago
@zdzisiekm @bowlweevils They might seem like good things with the benefit of hindsight, but living through turbulent change is never pleasant. Hence the chinese curse "may you live in interesting times"
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falstaff 9 days ago
@andyrwebman @zdzisiekm @bowlweevils That saying is given as a blessing, not a curse.
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Lafayette May 1, 2014
@zdzisiekm @bowlweevils
{ By the time of the Dutch Republic, 1581-1795, the Dutch were amongst the richest people in Europe.}
Because they were traders, but not producers?
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zdzisiekm May 1, 2014
@Lafayette @zdzisiekm@bowlweevils
"Because they were traders, but not producers?"
They were producers and traders. They excelled in high technology goods, e.g., clocks, watches, springs, jewellery, lenses. They excelled in producing food: dairy products, flowers, poultry, vegetables. Textiles--famous throughout all of Europe at the time. Their skill in using wind power led to mechanized sawmills, paper making, linens, oils, brewing, ceramics. They were people with great (Calvinist) work ethic. Their manufacturing prowess then led to them establishing the largest trading empire in the world at the time, having the largest merchant fleet and the best navy.
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kbillet@hotmail.com Apr 25, 2014
It's interesting to see persons that manufacture and sell robotic applications to business and manufacturing claim that it doesn't eliminate jobs. Well let me tell you I am not nieve. I've been a manufacturing engineer for a lot of years, and I can tell you that all of the managements I've worked for insisted in seeing reduction of manpower to justify the expenditure for robots. Business is all about making money, that is all that matters to the stock holders and the company. The automation of factories will absolutely eliminate more jobs than it will create, otherwise the econoics of purchasing robots would not be justified and it would not occur.
Sorry, but that is the reality. A very few will get richer at the expense of the middle. We are just beginning to see the effects of mass automation and the squeeze of the middle. There are a lot of big lies out there in our society, propagated by big business and the wealthy. Education is one of those lies. We already have many young people graduating from college whom can't get jobs, and yet these people keep touting that education is the answer. Education is important, however we have many, many engineers that can't find a job.
Greed is why they lie, it's all about money, not people.
We have all this technology, but we still have not learned how to treat each other decently.
Best Regards,
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paula.nef.3 Apr 24, 2014
There may not be any good historical analogy in past technological changes to the changes that computers will bring for us. Computers are so intelligent, so capable of learning, and evolving so fast -- past technologies essentially involved machinery without anything approaching intelligence and therefore make poor analogies to them.
The best historical analogy we have may be to slave societies. Slaves could replace a broad range of paid workers without being paid. In slave societies like ancient Rome or the American South, slaves performed a very wide variety of both repetitive and skilled labor, (even in the American South, where slaves were forbidden to read and write, they both picked cotton which was repetitive but difficult to do by a simple machine, and in some cases performed skilled labor like blacksmithing or animal husbandry; in Rome, slaves performed an even wider variety of occupations such as tutoring, not unlike Khan Academy or computer programs which teach people at home). Because of the range of occupations that slaves could do, I think slave societies make a better analogy than early industrial society, with it's steam engines and so on, to what our future with computers may be like.
If that is true, then what might our future look like? Well, one thing is that the societies which used massive slave labor, like Rome and the southern U.S., tended to have a very wealthy upper class that benefitted most from this labor, and a large poor class of people. Unemployment was chronically high in both cases, b/c there just weren't enough paid jobs available. Neither society produced a really strong, large middle class. And in both cases, these were chronic problems that persisted for generations. To the extent this analogy is valid, I think it is a rather pessimistic one.
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zdzisiekm Apr 25, 2014
@paula.nef.3
"even in the American South, where slaves were forbidden to read and write"
This is incorrect. American slaves could read and it was legal to teach them to read. They were expected, for example, to read the Bible. Following Stono Rebellion of 1739--pre US, note--it became illegal to teach slaves to *write*, but it was never illegal for a slave to know how to write, so the ban was on teachers alone. Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) who was African American, born in Senegambia, became renowned for her poetry, on both sides of the Atlantic. Her white owners, the Wheatley family of Boston, taught her to read and write. Jupiter Hammon (1711-1806) was another African American writer, a slave all his life, was accepted as a writer and published in the US.
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jay.viradiya.1 Feb 26, 2014
Automation is troubling for human being Because now a days large scale industries Firing their employees .Because large scale industries needs their production fast so it implement the machines to their industries and no space for human being.So I thought that Robots are replacing humans.I think that Technologies are very good for industries because with the help of technologies we can reduced our time as well as money.but if the Technologies are on its way then it's a big trouble for human being.
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woodstock Dan Jan 15, 2014
discussions of previous histories of unemployment and recovery miss the most significant point in your article i.e. we are entering a new paradigm where job destruction and job creation will not play out as they did in the Industrial Revolution. The exponential growth fo knowledge shared ubiquitously by the internet will drive development of new technologies and therefore job displacement at rates of change never before experienced. So for the first time those who study history may be doomed for disaster. And it isn't going to be robots competing for manufacturing jobs [we would be fighting over about 10% of the job market] the real dark side is what is beginning to happen in the service sector where 70% of the jobs are. Goodbye sales clerks cashiers,back office works, call centers for major corporations and financial institutions,paralegals,mom and pop anythings etc. Some of these jobs are going overseas but most are just gone--gone like blacksmiths.
And who is counting the indirect loss of jobs? Everybody has a cell phone with a camera, so goodbye Kodak but also goodbye to sales of film,developing,photo journals etc and when was the last time you visited your local camera store? The service market left is not safe -very shortly voice recognition will work and IBM Watson smart machines will answer our phone calls so basic legal skills {yes ABA it is coming],accounting caregiving security,teaching government employees,yes even Doctors {you say never--prostrate cancer is being done every day with robots]. We have been in an exponential curve of knowledge [Moore's Law ]for a long time but rolling out job replacing technologies takes catch up time but we have more [no pun intended] than entered Kurzweil's " knee "of Radical Change. Studying history will only distract the dialogue in the new paradigm. There is, of course, the argument that most service jobs will always require a humans because of the "comfort" level. For me -a retiree- that is true but tell that to my grandson -when he is ready- because he is two playing with his child iPhone in his crib - quite happily!
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UConnRon Dec 30, 2013
One thing not mentioned in this article is the bell shaped distribution of intelligence. This implies that half the population is average or above while the other half is average or below. Many of the new jobs wrought by technology require more than average IQs. Many in the lower half and those of average intellect will be drawn to service jobs that are less amenable to "robotization" and automation. I expect that as technology grows and productivity expands the cost of products will decline along with the work force. We must address the issue of an increasing decline in employment. I propose one resolution for this event in my blog: http://rlabate.blogspot.com/
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James A. Burt Dec 30, 2013
@UConnRon If you look at the broadest measure which is the population / employment ratio from the Bureau of Labor Statistics there has been no decline since 2010--
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000
Unfortunately, there has also been no increase.
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breister Dec 30, 2013
@James A. Burt@UConnRon
Hmm, you shouldn't cherry-pick your data....
From the same page: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000
Change the start year to 1990 for a 20-year trend. Yes, if you go back further you'll see that that is cherry picking too, but here is the important part. The decline in employment in the past few years reflects the decline in overall prosperity of our nation, which can be traced to the collapse of 2008. I won't discuss the reasons for that collapse because it can only lead to partisan bickering. However, factually the overall employment rate is not up at all despite all the crowing about "lower unemployment rates," and much of the employment is now part-time instead of full-time which means things are worse than even the graph makes it look. That puts any claims about a "recovery" into the "pants on fire" category.
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James A. Burt Dec 30, 2013
@breister @James A. Burt @UConnRon I wasn't claiming recovery. Far from it.
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breister Dec 30, 2013
@James A. Burt@breister@UConnRon "I wasn't claiming recovery. Far from it."
I got that; I was simply driving your point a bit further for others who may have not been as curious that our overall employment rate among working-age people has dropped immensely since 2008. By picking 2010 (your original link) it may have looked like things were "doing ok compared to before the drop;" I just wanted to make it clear that things are NOT ok and aren't getting better. The party currently holding the biggest microphone is trying to pretend things are getting better - which is rather disingenuous.
Going backwards before 1990 we see employment rates drop below the 1990-2008 average, but that was for multiple reasons. Part of it was that a lot of "employment" was not documented; part of it was that women had not fully moved into the workplace; part of it was that it took a continuously growing (real growth, not simple inflation as we are now seeing) economy to absorb the additional population. The graph does not tell the full picture - throughout the 60's - 1990 we saw an almost continuous rise in the percent of working age people even though the population was growing; meaning that the economy was truly expanding. Now we see stagnation with about 30 million fewer real jobs than before the bust.
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Gary Reber Sep 29, 2013
We need to connect via private sector individual ownership in FUTURE non-human wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets––human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.––and establish the full voting and full dividend-payout of the earnings of capital to those who own. Future capital formation needs to be finance such that new owners are created via insured capital credit loans that pay for themselves, without taking from those who already own.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm. See the full Act at http://cesj.org/homestead/strategies/national/cha-full.pdf
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Mr. Rant Sep 29, 2013
What will happen to industry and big business when no one can afford their services and merchandise due to losing jobs to technology? Will there be a void of consumers? Moreover, there has been a large increase in government dependency since 2000, a considerable portion of which is paid for by successful business owners and large stock holders. Will technology lead us toward socialism? Would that be such a bad thing if technology could provide a high standard of living for the people? Without profit driving development, the rate of technological advancement would surely slow down. Then, of course, there is also the danger of becoming overly dependent on the government, which could potentially lead to totalitarianism. Maybe those old sci-fi authors were hitting on something.
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Kiljoy616 Dec 22, 2013
@Mr. Rant The rich will sell to the world, so basically with just 10% of the world been able to pay for it, the rest could be sex slaves or indentured servants if owning people is your cup of tea. I don't see when your selling to the world that you need to worry in finding customers. For now we have not reached that level of depravity but time is not on the side of most of our population.
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THE FUTURES FORUM Feb 27, 2014
@Mr. Rant @sagientfuturist This is what I dont understand about the policy makers. They dont seem to understand that the summation of technology efficiency with profit motive means that the 19th century economic model of profit first, will eventually make people last. Unless we start focussing on the real costs of AI and robots such as environmental cost of steel of plastic used to make robots etc.
we wont be able to make sound decisions on what is long run good for HUMAN Economy..
I really want to know who they expect to buy all these goods when no one has work..
AI is replacing common sense....
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Gary Reber Feb 27, 2014
@THE FUTURES FORUM @Mr. Rant "I really want to know who they expect to buy all these goods when no one has work.." As the Future source of income from ownership is broadened to include EVERY child, woman and man, people will earn income through the ownership of their "tool" or productive capital asset, and not be the slave to "jobs" that they are today, freeing them to develop their unique personal qualities and further contribute to society.
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Mr. Rant Mar 1, 2014
@Gary Reber @THE FUTURES FORUM @Mr. Rant It might take a while to reach that kind of utopia. I'd say we need to start focusing more on family planning and on utilizing technology to prevent ecological damage.
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andyrwebman 9 days ago
@Gary Reber @THE FUTURES FORUM @Mr. Rant I personally think that most people have a lot less to contribute to society than the optimists would ahve us believe.
Look at the web - plenty of interesting education material if you want to learn maths, science, history etc, provided by educated people.
But most of what you'll find is banal dross - pictures of people's babies, gossip about who said what, who is sleeping with whom etc. And lots of Pron.
Yes, people are the most overvalued asset, in my opinion, and the one we have too much of.
By the same token we don't value green space and nature half as much as we should, bulldozing over it to make more space for the useless dross producing morons.
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goosh69 Sep 24, 2013
Excellent. Robots are replacing people even in highly populous, low-wage countries. This seems like it will turn out well.
"Robots May Revolutionize China's Electronics Manufacturing"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303759604579093122607195610.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLE_Video_second
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goosh69 Sep 23, 2013
What he said:
"The American Dream, RIP?An economist asks provocative questions about the future of social mobility"
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21586581-economist-asks-provocative-questions-about-future-social-mobility-american
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Lafayette Sep 21, 2013
In French: "Les cordonniers sont toujours le plus mal chaussés!"
In English: 'The shoemakers always wear the worst shoes!"
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ezra abrams Sep 21, 2013
I find it amusing that (a) the MIT tech rev - an offspring of an institution about scholarship - doesn't have a pdf link to the orignal; that the login for comments is seriously broken; and that the form asking for feedback is FUBARed
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jpontin Sep 21, 2013
@ezra abrams We are a digital-first media organization: the Web site story *is* the original. The magazine publishes stories that are generally published first online. Our chief digital officer will reach out to you about your problems with log-in and feedback.
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crlf Sep 13, 2013
Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519241/report-suggests-nearly-half-of-us-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-computerization/
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Lafayette Sep 13, 2013
@crlf DUNCES-ON-THE-DOLE
Given the fact that the US economy has been trending towards a Services Industry economy for a great many years, it should not be surprising that employment is becoming more Information Technology related.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts out to 2020 that 80% of all employment will be Services Industry related. (See here: www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2012/01/art4full.pdf )
Which means what? Not necessarily that all jobs are lost and not replaced. So, let’s not go overboard just yet.
The Services Industry will continue to create jobs, but they will be Skills-Oriented work. It does not take much skill to flip-hamburgers or slip a pizza into a fired oven and serve it. However, it does take some skill to manipulate the back-office process for following inventory, ordering ingredients and materials and the reports generation.
And that skill implies not only manipulating a computer, but having the ability to Analyze And Think.
My point: Our educational system can no longer stop at the HS diploma. We must find a way to throughput our young-adults into Tertiary Education - at the least possible cost to them.
The cost of Tertiary Education [vocational, college (2 years), university (4 years)] is putting them off. Largely because the costs of such education are skyrocketing. The average debt of a student graduating from university is now around $25K.
Why should our families have to support such a cost? Credit is NOT cheap, whether that credit is provided by the government or not. Europe has had a better idea, for over half a century.
A postsecondary education must be as least expensive as possible, that is, it should be subsidized. In this manner, it is considered an investment in the future of our children.
Either we (the taxpayer) make that investment by means of government expenditure, or we pay inevitably Unemployment Insurance. The choice of consequences, imho, is obvious.
Another point … about criminality. Did you know that nearly 80% of all incarcerated felons have no High School diploma? So, what do you think is the obvious solution? Our secondary-schooling is failing them.
It is useless to point fingers, but it is also obvious that we must make the investments necessary to really 'n truly assure that "No Child Is Left Behind".
We cannot blind ourselves to this national challenge. If we do, we end up with a society of Dunces on the Dole.
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THE FUTURES FORUM Feb 27, 2014
@Lafayette @crlf@sagientfuturist Well said.. They did away with the Office of Technology Assessment and now technology is the Emperor of anything.. No one is thinking about impacts and consequences.. We need an economic paradigm for the technological revolution. We are still using economic paradigms based on the industrial revolution..
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Gary Reber Feb 27, 2014
@THE FUTURES FORUM @Lafayette @crlf And on one-factor thinking: LABOR.
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© 2014v1.13.05.10Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-69725381448950676682014-06-12T15:02:00.003-07:002014-06-12T15:02:39.553-07:00UPDATE on HRC and Iraq Vote<a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/06/12/321313477/hillary-clinton-the-fresh-air-interview">http://www.npr.org/2014/06/12/321313477/hillary-clinton-the-fresh-air-interview</a><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-68385134914583899632013-07-25T12:24:00.001-07:002013-10-22T15:54:29.191-07:00Summing Things UpCouldn't ask for a better summary of our shared economic history than this:<br />
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<span style="color: #38761d; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"In the period after World War II, a growing middle class was the engine of our prosperity. Whether you owned a company, swept its floors, or worked anywhere in between, this country offered you a basic bargain – a sense that your hard work would be rewarded with fair wages and benefits, the chance to buy a home, to save for retirement, and, above all, to hand down a better life for your kids.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20px; list-style: none; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #38761d; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But over time, that engine began to stall. That bargain began to fray. Technology made some jobs obsolete. Global competition sent others overseas. It became harder for unions to fight for the middle class. Washington doled out bigger tax cuts to the rich and smaller minimum wage increases for the working poor. The link between higher productivity and people’s wages and salaries was severed – the income of the top 1% nearly quadrupled from 1979 to 2007, while the typical family’s barely budged.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20px; list-style: none; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #38761d; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Towards the end of those three decades, a housing bubble, credit cards, and a churning financial sector kept the economy artificially juiced up."</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20px; list-style: none; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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You may be surprised to learn who <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/07/24/transcript-obamas-remarks-on-middle-class-prosperity/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">said it</a>.</div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-64105190423970502042013-06-09T12:54:00.003-07:002013-06-09T12:54:56.578-07:00Frame the Debate: We're Not Broke, Check the Other PocketI challenge ANYONE to counter this argument. But you can't, can you Libertarians? You Republicans have no answer to this, do you?
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gerbLKZw1yQ?rel=0" width="560"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-47067522939457446372013-03-20T23:04:00.000-07:002013-03-20T23:04:14.481-07:00Immigration: Progressive perspectivefrom:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/us/16immig3.html?pagewanted=print<br />
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<div class="timestamp" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; margin-top: 15px;">
April 16, 2006</div>
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<nyt_kicker>THE ADVOCATE</nyt_kicker></div>
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<nyt_headline type=" " version="1.0">A Liberal's Contrarian Views</nyt_headline></h1>
<nyt_byline style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;" type=" " version="1.0"><div class="byline" style="font-size: 10pt; font-weight: bold;">
By <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/kirk_johnson/index.html?inline=nyt-per" style="color: #000066;" title="More Articles by Kirk Johnson">KIRK JOHNSON</a></div>
</nyt_byline><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><nyt_text style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"><div id="articleBody">
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DENVER, April 15 — Sitting at the Auraria Community Center here on a recent morning with his cat, Tails, perched before him on the desk, Waldo Benavidez gestured to a large portrait of Emiliano Zapata, the leader of the 1910 Mexican revolution — and Mr. Benavidez's personal hero.</div>
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Mexicans here illegally, Mr. Benavidez said, should take a lesson from those days and return home to fight for change in their own country.</div>
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"If you're tough enough to cross the desert, you're tough to take on your own government and change it," he said.</div>
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Mr. Benavidez has spent most of his adult life working on behalf of the poor. For the last 25 years he has managed the community center and a food bank here on Denver's west side, where low-income families can get groceries. He marched for civil rights in the 1960's and relishes the memory of his first vote for president, for <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/john_fitzgerald_kennedy/index.html?inline=nyt-per" style="color: #000066;" title="More articles about John Fitzgerald Kennedy.">John F. Kennedy</a>, in 1960.</div>
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But <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #000066;" title="More articles about Immigration.">immigration's</a> tangled implications have pushed him out of his comfortable old political box with its predictably liberal labels and causes. Supporting the poor in America, he said, now means shutting down the system that has created a flood of even poorer immigrants from Mexico.</div>
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"It has nothing to do with whether I like Mexicans, or whether I've got one foot in Mexico myself because of my ancestry — I'm an American first," said Mr. Benavidez, 67. "I'm very liberal on a lot of issues, but on this one I've taken a stand because of the impact it has on the working people of this country."</div>
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Mr. Benavidez, whose ancestors have been in the West for 250 years, since the days of the Spanish empire, supports sealing the Mexican border, and is working for a proposed ballot proposition here in Colorado that would deny government social services to illegal immigrants.</div>
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He rails against multinational corporations that he says have rigged the political systems of the United States and Mexico to keep the border porous as a tool for suppressing wages and labor unions.</div>
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A Democrat, he nonetheless says he may vote for his first Republican ever this fall because he thinks many Democrats are "pandering" to Hispanic voters on the immigration issue and not keeping their eyes on what is good for the country.</div>
<div style="font-size: medium; line-height: 24px;">
Mr. Benavidez said he had been offended by the recent waves of protests around the country, with illegal immigrants demanding rights, and by the comparisons that had been made between those efforts and the civil rights struggles of the past over things like voter registration.</div>
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"This is not a civil rights issue," he said. "These people are not citizens demanding their rights — that's different."</div>
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Hispanics, like all Americans, are divided in their thinking about illegal immigrants. In a poll in February and March by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Hispanic Center, about one in five Hispanics said that illegal immigrants should be required to go home, compared with just over half of the respondents as a whole who said that. Almost one-third of Hispanics in the survey said they thought illegal immigrants should not be eligible for social services provided by state and local governments, compared with about two-thirds of the respondents as a whole who thought services should be denied.</div>
<div style="font-size: medium; line-height: 24px;">
Mr. Benavidez also acknowledged that his position was not without its inconsistencies. Many illegal immigrants are poor people, too, like his multigeneration Hispanic neighbors here in Denver, just from a different place. And immigration is not the only source of poverty or downward wage pressures in a society.</div>
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"It's a complicated issue, and I don't have all the answers," he said. "I do know that there's injustice."</div>
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Mr. Benavidez said that to him, the issue is not about ethnicity at all. It is about governments allowing poor people to sink further into poverty by indifference or direct action — and both the United States and Mexico, he said, are guilty.</div>
<div style="font-size: medium; line-height: 24px;">
In places like Denver, he said, the social safety net of job training programs and educational support efforts embodied by the Great Society programs of the 1960's would once have made illegal immigration less of a blow to the American poor. But those protections have largely been stripped away over the years.</div>
<div style="font-size: medium; line-height: 24px;">
In Mexico, the oligarchy of wealthy families that he said controlled most of the power had exploited the poor just as callously, shipping them north as a safety valve to diffuse political pressure for economic reform.</div>
<div style="font-size: medium; line-height: 24px;">
What is changing this year, and putting the immigration issue on the burner in Washington and in state capitals, Mr. Benavidez said, is that the middle class suddenly cares about immigration, and he thinks a political thunderclap could result in this fall's elections if people are still aroused.</div>
<div style="font-size: medium; line-height: 24px;">
"There is a revolt out there," he said. "Change will come."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
</nyt_text><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-53909665944660705682013-03-11T09:51:00.000-07:002013-03-11T09:53:01.235-07:00On ImmigrationThis is by P.Gold:<br />
"The devil is in the details--most people want immigrants to be treated fairly--but what about not enforcing fair labor laws and what about allowing 11 million illegal immigrants (which equates to about 7.5 % of the American work force) to work legally in the USA--when there is 14.5 unemployment in America. Immigration negatively impacts on the American labor market and negatively impacts wages and job conditions for everyone. Already we have seen the ill effects of jobs going overseas to third world workers. Deregulation here would just exacerbate the problem. JCUA says its a partner with the "Fair" Immigration Movement --(FIR) FIR wants all 11 million illegal immigrants to work in the USA quickly. You can talk about how the average Mexican is better off by taking a low wage job here vs. a no wage job in Mexico--or the average Chinese person is slightly better off with a job that used to be here---the fact is they are not much better off--and they are only slightly better off at great expense to the working class in America all to the benefit to the world bourgeois. As we have seen already the move of American jobs to China has benefited the bourgeois at the expense of the working class. Social justice should be evaluated at how it impacts society as a whole and with an eye to all the effects--not just how it impacts one aspect of society. Social Justice does not mean removing one bad policy in exchange for another. Social Justice should be about shared responsibility --but the proposal to allow 11 million illegal immigrants to work in the USA benefits the bourgeois at the expense of the working class--by putting downward pressure on the labor market. 20 years ago the same kind of well-meaning people we see in the picture were marching for the Free Trade Act--we see where that got the world's workers. I'm afraid those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Helping 3rd world workers is a noble ideal --but we have to find a way to do this without driving down the working class in America--America has been great and a driver of the world economy because of its strong middle class --helping the world's downtrodden on the backs of working people in the USA is not the answer. The solution to world poverty is not allowing third world people to compete for American jobs in a laissez -faire manner but in a way that allows world peoples to enjoy work at standards most Americans enjoyed before the Free Trade Act and ensures that American work standards are not brought down. We must not achieve parity by bringing America down to third world standards (wake up and smell the coffee because that's what's happening). Rather, third world workers must be brought up to the standards that had recently existed here. JCUA should be opposed to immigration "reform" packages that call for the 11 million illegal immigrants to be able to fast track to being legal workers here. Liberals should stop being for equality when it means equally bad or equally worse---or as in this case equally worse for a segment of society while another segment exploits the policy to its advantage. Instead, liberals should embrace what could be done for progress holistically."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-34572194011163844302012-11-29T12:22:00.002-08:002012-11-29T12:22:54.658-08:00Congressman Torn Between Meaningless Pledge To Anti-Tax Zealot, Well-Being Of Nationhttp://www.theonion.com/articles/congressman-torn-between-meaningless-pledge-to-ant,30539/?ref=auto
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Congressman Torn Between Meaningless Pledge To Anti-Tax Zealot, Well-Being Of NationUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857038941817320145.post-1615528801952115892011-10-04T13:58:00.000-07:002011-10-04T13:58:43.433-07:00Solyndra Loan Drama Overblown"Many have cautioned that the drama around Solyndra is overblown. The Solyndra loan represents just 1.3 percent of the $39 billion in loans that the loan-guarantee program has generated thus far, and only around 3 percent of the total loan guarantees targeting the solar industry. The fact that Solyndra received up to $1 billion in private sector banking alone would suggest that leaders at the DOE weren't the only ones who saw promise in the technology."<br />
<br />
And meanwhile China is giving it's companies HUNDREDS of billions.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/03/obama-solyndra-loan_n_993085.html">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/03/obama-solyndra-loan_n_993085.html</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0