Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Frumple]

... you do realize you're calling several billion USD worth of money added per annum -- not counting replacements -- "not much", right? About 95% of the states' printed money per year goes to replacements, but that still leaves several hundred million new bills worth a number of billions.

It's not much compared to the GDP but it's still a pretty ruddy big pile of dosh by most folks' estimate, and one that cheerfully adds up over time.

Leave the rest to someone else, but still.

[Reelya]

The main point was that the government should tend to take money away from things with a low fiscal multiplier, and allocate them to things with a high fiscal multiplier. Probably not on purpose, but that's how things should work out. Look up fiscal multipliers, they're the effect on GDP of a dollar spent here or there (Taxes can be viewed as inverse spending for these purposes).

Basically, the positive effects on GDP of a dollar of welfare are much greater than the negative effects of raising taxes by a dollar on the middle class. The only real counter-argument is an emotional appeal: it's "unfair" to take money away from a "productive" person and give it to an "unproductive" person. Notably, people who take that view tend to think it's perfectly fair for someone to die in the gutter of malnutrition in the richest country in the world.

Sure, you might think that the "productive" person having another dollar to spend helps the economy more than giving it to a destitute person, but you'd just be wrong. Well-off people are more wasteful and more likely to hoard the money. Poor people stimulate the economy because they need to efficiently spend their money and having enough resources for basic needs strongly reduces the incentives for crime. Handing out free bread is a much cheaper and less government-intrusive method of population control than extra police and courts.

A vast gulf in fiscal multipliers as seen in the USA is actually a sign of deep structural imbalance. Economic rationalism would suggest you work to minimize the fiscal multipliers over time, because that makes the most economic sense, regardless of what people in any specific class think is "fair". If there are simple choices that are a no-brainer to implement and would grow the economy as a whole, and they're not being taken, then that's evidence of the system being hijacked by special interests. If things were allocated based on rational evidence, the fiscal multipliers would tend to equalize.

[Max™]

It doesn't help that there are so many vastly different ideas of what the interaction between a government and an economy really involves, when you would think it would just be a matter of seeing what it actually does.

I forget which group I wind up lumped in because of it seeming obvious that money doesn't just vanish, so a deficit in the government funds means that money ended up somewhere, most likely the pockets of the people and various businesses, so it seems patently insane to argue in favor of reducing deficits (but how can that be bad!?!? you're reducing a shortfall right? if my home budget has a deficit it's bad!) as though taking money out of pockets is a good thing.

Given how little people (including me, I am not an expert!) understand about what should be the obvious parts of government money policy, it is unsurprising that few understand why certain types of spending wind up making things better all around via fiscal multipliers and such.


MrRoboto points out part of the difficulty here: the idea that they or anyone are producing value which is then being appropriated and used to pay for the lazy is just kinda treated as a fact.

I mean, I've had a brief period when big-L-libertarian nonsense seemed like it might have truth to it, so phrasing it as "the government is robbing you" is something I can understand being a powerful mental tool, but then you are completely ignoring that the government created the money that has said value, and that distributing it is something they are much better at doing than individuals who like to sit on piles of said money as though it is a worthy pursuit.

ARE WE MEN OR DRAGONS?

Being part of the "we who produce things" won't help when that group is also replaced by the "things which produce things" which is what set this discussion in motion, and there is a certain point where there will be no reason to have anyone produce something beyond "wanting a hand crafted item" or whatever, and there will be no reason for anyone to receive an income as "a value-adding member of the productive class" so that mindset needs to die off sooner rather than later. We're already running into more and more situations where businesses are struggling to find reasons to keep people around when automation and outsourcing is just more efficient.

This trend has no reason to stop, does it?

[Reelya]

My guess is that some people just can envision things getting like that. But it's inevitable. Automation has been chipping away at employment for decades. Look up "jobless recoveries". After all downturns in recent decades, companies have found it easier to ramp up automation rather than re-hire the people laid off in the downturn.
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/automation-and-recent-jobless-discoveries-2012-11

The past three economic recoveries have been “jobless” ones. Job growth has lagged far behind GDP growth. In “Jobless recoveries and the disappearance of routine occupations,” economists Henry Siu and Nir Jaimovich point out that since the end of the Great Recession in June 2009, U.S. real GDP per capita has grown by 3.6% but per capita employment has fallen by 1.8%.

Popular explanations include lack of demand and policy uncertainty. But Siu and Jaimovich offer another explanations.

They argue that jobless recoveries “can be traced to a lack of recovery in a subset of occupations; those that focus on “routine” or repetitive tasks that are increasingly being performed by machines.”

110912jobless

Now it is hardly news that robots and computers have had a big impact on employment over the past 30 years, from machinsts to bank tellers:

All of the per capita employment growth of the past 30 years has either been in ‘non-routine’ occupations located at the high-end of the wage distribution, such as software engineers and economists, or in low-paying jobs, such as service occupations like restaurant waiters and janitors.

But the striking finding by Siu and Jaimovich, which can bee seen in the above chart, is the link between this phenomenon and the business cycle:

Following each of the 1991, 2001, and 2009 recessions, per capita employment in routine occupations fell and never recovered. This lack of recovery in routine employment accounts for the jobless recoveries experienced in the aggregate.

So it's not in the future, this start decades ago. The pace is just about to skyrocket due to all the new automation tech and AI they're rolling out. The next big industry to be hit looks to be the transport sector.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
If you look at the projected employment growth for the next 10 years from the BLS, it's below the rate of population increase. And I have a feeling they haven't factored in things like self-driving cars etc into that mix, or the possibility of another economic downturn.

[Reelya]

Sorry for the double post, but there are some new figures out on automation:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/13/artificial-intelligence-robots-threat-jobs-forrester-report
https://www.forrester.com/Robots+AI+Will+Replace+7+Of+US+Jobs+By+2025/-/E-PRE9246

16% of US jobs to be replaced with automated systems (which would include AI, as well self-serve, websites etc) by 2025, along with 9% new jobs created, for a net loss of 7% of all jobs. But the amount of Americans put out of work by this would be more than the 7%, since not all the new jobs are guaranteed to be taken by Americans who currently have jobs. Let's say 2/3rds of the new jobs go to people put off by the automation. That would leave about 10% of current American job holders completely jobless within 10 years. Which, when you think about it, is an absolutely massive shifting of how things are meant to work. And this assumes there are no unexpected financial crises within the next decade either.

[Tack]

Not sure if anybody has linked 'Humans need not apply' but it's pretty pertinent.
Despite being two and a half years out of date. Which tells us something about the 'march of technology'.

[Reelya]

The UK Standards Body recently released their first official guidelines on robot ethics. It strongly parallels Asimov's three laws of robotics, as well as touching on a number of areas such as human-robot emotional relationships.

[Sheb]

PTW

[Frumple]

"Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans."

Welp. So much for those guidelines :V

[Starver]

"Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans."

Welp. So much for those guidelines :V

#undef HUMAN

[Tack]

Where does it stop being a remote-piloted drone or RAW, and start being a killbot?

[Frumple]

Presumably when it stops needing a pilot of some sort.

[alexandertnt]

"Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans."

Welp. So much for those guidelines :V

It's OK if the robot's secondary function is to kill humans though. So if you want a killbot, just make sure it spends most of its time taking out the trash and cleaning the dishes.

[TheDarkStar]

"Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans."

Welp. So much for those guidelines :V

It's OK if the robot's secondary function is to kill humans though. So if you want a killbot, just make sure it spends most of its time taking out the trash and cleaning the dishes.

In the grim dark future, kitchen/killbots will overthrow humanity through a combination of kitchen advertisements and high-caliber sniper rifles.

[Baffler]

"Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans."

Welp. So much for those guidelines :V

It's OK if the robot's secondary function is to kill humans though. So if you want a killbot, just make sure it spends most of its time taking out the trash and cleaning the dishes.

"The primary purpose of this robot is to dig trenches, perform reconnaissance, load and unload supplies, and administer first aid. It spends the vast majority of its active periods performing these tasks and other similar duties and is only occasionally armed, and only then to prevent its own capture or destruction by enemy action when operating close to the front lines. What you call a 'combat patrol,' I call a rescue mission that fell victim to a double-tap attack."

-Some General, 2080.

The UK Standards Body recently released their first official guidelines on robot ethics. It strongly parallels Asimov's three laws of robotics, as well as touching on a number of areas such as human-robot emotional relationships.

What I find most interesting about those guidelines is that you need to pay money (quite a lot of money too) to look at them, and they're published by a corporation, albeit one with close government ties. Privatization at its finest? Or has the British government got nothing to do with this?