Is America Inc getting less dynamic, less global and more monopolistic?
economist.com
economist.com
Mostly it probably has to do with economies of scale, but at this point I'd rather spend an extra 10%+ on goods and services if it meant a return to true differentiation and a wider variety of consumer culture.
The same goes for billboards. It's always the same companies marketing: Ford, McDonalds, etc. Why do we hardly ever see small brands marketing? I'd be inclined to keep billboards if small brands utilized them to help their business, but that is rarely the case. Given this, why do we still tolerate billboards to the same mega-corporations? Everyone already knows they exist and what they sell. How much more exposure do they really need at the expense of the natural beauty of our towns and our own mental state?
I see (and have bought from) small brands online (especially ones that advertise on social networks and podcasts). In my circles a lot of other people have to. I just assume that these advertisements are a lot more effective than billboards, so billboards are left to the larger companies doing more brand marketing.
When people have something to fall back on they take more risks. Kind of like how the most successful large companies are in tech. Those founders had less downside than someone opening a restaurant.
This is better than sitting doing nothing, starving, and waiting for a handout to come, as happened in many, many countries.
My strongest belief is that America needs an economic shock therapy, to spring out of economic lethargy.
Lets face it. America is no longer the financial superpower. China is currently world biggest foreign investor, and creditor, and has banks that make Morgan's balance sheet look like pocket change.
Betting on banks to lead America's return to prominence is futile. It's akin to trying to wing a card game against a professional card trickster who lives off ripping off casinos.
Nor is the dream of service the dream of "service economy" feeding much of the country materialised. You can't earn much FX selling McKinsey consultants, nor are they are much needed around the world, because the world doesn't have American problems.
If you meant to convey all Chinese banks against just JPM, sure, but that's a silly comparison because there are many more US banks that when also compared in aggregate the % difference is still roughly the same.[0]
Erm. I didn't really say anything to do with that.
If politicians' incentives can be aligned with their constitutional constituencies (not donors), they can make decisions that are actually in the best interest of those they represent, rather than the highest bidder.
Are you saying it is simply having some power over the budget that corrupts politicians, and not what they have to do in order to obtain that power that corrupts them?
Or do you feel like a billionaire space race is a good use of society's efforts?
of course they will not define what what "fair share" is, just that is "more than they are paying now" however much that is...
I firmly believe even if we had a 110% tax rate it would not be "enough" for some of these people
That second class is who the people are referring to when they say "the rich".
And most of them are paying much less taxes over their income than you or I, in percentage. They are so wealthy that they can afford to pay full teams of people who specialize in tax evading, and that costs them 1% of their income, but then they avoid paying taxes on the rest.
The usual "fair share" tax is a gradual tax. For example. 10% for the first $10000 earned. 15% for the next $20000. And so on. Such a tax can never reach 110%, by definition. It cuts a dev salary by 40% or even 50%. For one of these rich people, it can go to 70% or 80%, but it would be orders of magnitude more, in absolute numbers. But as I said, none of them pays that. They'd rather provoke a war than pay that.
And then make you pay for it.
There are 3 problems with that.
1. Even if you took 100% of their wealth, no income, their entire wealth, it would not even pay the interest on the debt. Let alone anything meaningful
2. You still have not defined "the rich" I want a number. 1 Billion? 10 Billion? 100 Billion? Give me an income or even wealth number..
3. It is not actually true. And it is easily proven as we have a few example. The most famous was Bernie. He was always "Millionaires and Billionaires do not pay their fair share" until he became a millionaire then just like that is was "Billionaires do not pay their fair share". Then you have many champagne socialists on YT spending millions on homes, cars, etc all talking about how the "rich do not pay their fair share" and ofcourse they are not the rich
>>And most of them are paying much less taxes over their income than you or I, in percentage.
Playing with the tax rates is not going to change that, in fact most of them increasing the tax rates will cause a inverse in collections as it becomes more profitable to evade..
If you look at the amount of revenue the IRS collects from Income tax as a percent of GDP it is almost a flat line, it does not matter what the rate it, the IRS ends up collecting about the same amount.
>>Such a tax can never reach 110%
Sure it can, in a number of ways because it is not a single taxing entity, State, Federal, Local.. They do not have to allow you to deduct the taxes you paid to the other entities, infact that is a big issue today with the SALT limits. Then you have people proposing WEALTH based taxes, which could exceed the actual income a person made if they are asset heavy and income light.
> it can go to 70% or 80%, but it would be orders of magnitude more, in absolute numbers. But as I said, none of them pays that. They'd rather provoke a war than pay that.
No Shit, that is just strait up theft. I dont know how anyone could even begin to justify 50+%.. I am opposed to income based taxation in the first place, but Shit 80%? really.
So I am left to ask.
1. Please define "Rich" in a actual dollar amount
2. Please define what you believe is a "fair" marginal rate for all income based taxation (state, federal, and local) for a person making this "rich" income.
3. If the government cannot collect the amount if needs to pay for goods and service how or (who) do you propose they make up the difference?
Income tax is fairly worthless when it comes to the actually rich.
There is a strand of thinking that turns up sometimes, something like "they will realise their choices are making things worse, then make different choices!". I have not seen that work out well very often. People usually persist in their mistakes with little heed for the results.
The correct approach is almost always to move directly in a better direction.
Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk all came from at least upper-middle class background. None of them was ever at risk of starvation.
The carrot-and-stick approach to motivation works–in an extremely small band of human experience. But as it works in that band, which is the lower middle class, it draws people in from both sides: those richer ease up a bit, those immediately below put in an extra hour. That's why it's sort of the default experience. It's also a "winnable struggle" so it makes for good stories and is overrepresented in film and literature.
But, once you leave that narrow band, other forces are clearly at work. If inflicting pain on homeless people worked to motivate them to successfully get off the streets, there wouldn't be any homeless people. Because life on the streets sucks. If you think they are "lazy", have you ever toyed with the idea of just quitting and checking out an underpass with a good view? No...? But you do have a vague idea what laziness is? So then: that's not it.
At the time of Bezos' birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student and his father was 19 years old.[18] After completing high school despite challenging conditions, Jacklyn attended night school while bringing Bezos along as a baby.[19] After his parents divorced, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos in April 1968.[20] Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted four-year-old Bezos, whose surname was then legally changed from Jorgensen to Bezos.[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
We can all pick examples to fit our narratives
Bezos is a ridiculous example to use anyway, as he obviously made bank working in finance before he took risks on Amazon such that he was never risking being homeless.
Just the simple fact that your parents own a home where you are welcome to live can be enough for you to be able to take risks. And Zuckerberg and Gates and others were not middle class, they were at least upper middle and I would bet their parents (dentists and prominent lawyers) were already above 90th percentile in wealth.
I love when people tell me examples of extremely poor people taking risks and hitting it big, and at the same time lament how people irresponsibly have children and debt they could not handle. Celebrate them when the gamble pays off, but shit on them when it does not.
How often does this happen? Who says those two things simultaneously?
But many, especially the older generations, also like to complain about people not striking it out on their own as a causal factor for why they remain poor.
It is a popular trope in culture too. It makes people feel good about themselves if they can forget about the shoulders they stood on, and for those who do not have shoulders to stand on, it gives them hope.
> people tell me examples of extremely poor people taking risks and hitting it big, and at the same time lament how people irresponsibly have children and debt they could not handle
Is having children a risk that could mean one hits it big? And it's definitely also possible (if not normal) for debt to come from lifestyle overspending rather than risking things to make it big. I just don't see the logical connection, although I can see there's an emotional one there.
Also pretending like the barrier of entry into technology _hasn't_ gone up is ignoring the material conditions people face now.
If you think it was easier when you had to study at or work for a wealthy university, and also everything had to be done painstaking by punched card instead of today's instant feedback on a free, beautiful tutorial website, then I'm not sure what to tell you.
After Mike had received his degree from the University of New Mexico, the family moved to Houston, Texas, so that he could begin working as an engineer for Exxon.[22] Jeff Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade.[23] Bezos' maternal grandfather was Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque.[24] Gise retired early to his family's ranch near Cotulla, Texas, where Bezos would spend many summers in his youth.[25]
[...] He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon.[47][51][52] He warned many early investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail or go bankrupt.
The one thing many CEOs have in common is early access to resources and tinkering opportunities which aren't available to most of the population.
Which is the exact opposite of your point.
It's hard to overstate just how bad the track record of "economic shock therapy" strategies is. Tens of millions of people have died, and hundreds of millions more lost their basic freedoms, because leaders thought they could "shock therapy" their way out of economic problems.
People who have a little can’t afford to gamble.
People who have nothing can’t afford not to gamble.
If you can meet all their needs, then whatever you have in excess certainly can be gambled if it can improve both of your odds, but only beyond that baseline threshold. That resource threshold for a parent is going to be higher than for a single person in the same situation, so you inherently have less resources to gamble than someone without a kid.
I would consider less resources as being less free to take unneeded risk, although it really just means you have less you can risk not that you have less ability to risk (unless of course you're already at or below that child's baseline needs where you're making sacrifices of your own needs for them). You could make further sacrifices on your own needs to gamble if that doesn't effect the child but chances are, it's going to effect both of you.
Theres an absolute magnitude of wealth/resources one needs to exceed before they start playing the capital gamble gamble, at least when your risk has significant effects on someone else, especially your own child.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/27/super-founders-median-age-of...
I thought it DID increase with age. A quick search suggests that to be the case, but I stand by to be corrected.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/693467/rate-of-new-entre...
Edit: I appear to be wrong here. After some Googling it appears that PPP loan was based on previous years tax returns to I don't think you could collect PPP the first year to establish a business.
from what I have seen of the PPP and other covid programs the concern was getting the money out as fast as possible not validating claims. There was a SHIT ton of fraud... most of which will never be discovered
Probably only tens or hundreds of thousands
2008-2020: 3 Presidential terms with pretty lax antitrust enforcement.
That’s a long time for the monopolistic tendencies to bloom. Which is to say, yes, it is more monopolistic now (but doesn’t need to continue being that way).
I'd question the premise that the US is the land of free-market capitalism. America is the home of Hamilton's American system, of the Rockefellers and the gilded age, and of monopolistic competition (now Bezos and Amazon).
Startups like to describe themselves as free-market oriented but they're either giants-in-waiting or dead. There's no equilibrium of middle-sized, free market startup capitalism. That Jeffersonian ideal you're more likely to find in the artisanal, small and debt avoiding family business in the German Southwest, say.
Same goes for trade. With trade volume only constituting a quarter of the GDP[1] the US is one of the most domestic economies in the world. Compared to France and the UK at 60% or Germany and South Korea at 85%. It very much explains America's bipartisan streak for protectionism compared to much of Europe and Asia.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_trade-to-...
Because net trade volume is massively and surrealistically negative and has been for a very long time, assuming the fact that exports being small in relation to total domestic production means that Americans consume an unusual proportion of domestic products is not a good assumption.
Especially when you bring up Germany and South Korea, who are massive exporters with huge trade surpluses.
In my experience (have applied for over 50 patents), the act of understanding and inventing around other peoples patents has very often lead to brainstorming resulting in superior solutions (this was an unforeseen advantage of good US IP law that other countries are trying to replicate).
I would note that my ventures are in the area of atoms and not bits :)
To be fair, the current results should have been predictable. A small, finely focused and self-interested group can usually defeat an unruly mass.
>I would note that my ventures are in the area of atoms and not bits :)
Good for you. My own bias and personal experience highly tends towards that, including US manufacture. Thinking about the article at the top, I wonder sometimes what the 'economy' even is anymore. I tend to distrust articles on it as all the news tends to involve internet-based FIRE 'industries' and surveillance marketing startups. I'm not feeling the love for those segments.
Paul Graham said if you're successful you will be sued by patent owners. How many are discouraged from even trying?
That is why it is wise to have good patent lawyers on your team. You may still get sued, but your likelihood to prevail can be increased.
Companies know this, that is why it is often cheaper for, say, Apple to purchase entire start ups than to sue them. The inventor still benefits in this case (actually, they can benefit more than typical inventors when this happens).
More common, from what I've seen, is smaller countries reluctant to adopt liberal US-style IP law and being pressured to do so by the US State Department as a condition in trade negotiations and foreign aid. The US delegation was the principal pusher of IP reform in the TPP, and this evaporated when the US left.
I only know this due to some policy courses I took during IAP when I was at MIT.
Even that infamous wage gap is significantly decreasing.
Japan Inc was Japan Inc because much of their economy was capitalistically centrally planned. The central Gov't would have monumental plans and would greatly incentivize their keiretsu to follow and undertake such monumental tasks. There was METI at the center making policy for an export driven economy.
That is in no way a parallel to what we are seeing in the US. In the US we are seeing companies become more influential and powerful than the central government and implementing their own policies (Uber in transportation, Facebook/YouTube in content censorship). That is no USA Inc. It's Incs in the USA with global projection. Very different.
Ten years ago, Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook employee, wrote: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
Look at the big names now. Google, which did most of its best work in the early days. Facebook, which is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Amazon, which has figured out how to exploit workers. Microsoft, which is still trying to sell Windows N+1. And the gig economy crowd, which has figured out how to pay below minimum wage and not pay benefits.
What don't we have?
- Really good battery companies. Tesla just packages Panasonic. GM just packages LG. They're not making batteries from raw materials.
- Progress in aircraft. Boeing is still flogging variants of the 737, which first flew in 1967.
- Semiconductors. Does anyone in the US still make commodity RAM?
- Electronics in general. There are few US sources left for small components.
- Telecom. The US no longer has anybody who makes telephone central office equipment. The US can no longer make smartphones.
- Power. The US does not make many large power transformers.
- Appliances. Few US manufacturers remain.
- Manufacturing engineering. Who gets a degree in manufacturing engineering today? Who knows how to lay out a production line?
Tesla is also working with Panasonic and CATL to implement their own factories for 4680 cells and scale production.
it slays me that the engineers, the techies, have never had our day. we havent gotten good. we havent started new things, havent been augmenting & enhancing the world: we've been well paid to do the opposite, to capitvate & control & take technology, to dollop it out in little well managed productized offerings. the whole culture of innovation has dried up. i think of tech as still having so much prowess, skills, potential, and power, but wow, it is so squandered. it is so hard to break off on our own, to step away from the giant faucets of money & to start pursuing the radical, the good, the possible, the exciting. the potential.
and what possibilities do arise, they seem so very quickly picked up, bought out, folded in to the mass corporatized system. comoetition & competency & novelty keep dying before they really get a chamce to bloom. it's the Thiel'ian advice to Facebook to sell, to take the money, get rich now, rather than keep working & trudging on, hoping.
That's not really true. Tesla and Panasonic jointly developed their cells. And the latest 4680 cells are fully designed by Tesla. Tesla also seems to be going independent for production at future factories.
Mikron Technology Inc
https://www.engineering.txstate.edu/Programs/MFGE.html
https://mime.oregonstate.edu/manufacturing-engineering-under...
Or anywhere that offers both an IE and ME degree, you could likely build your own.
We had not a few 6 year degreed engineers from USA working in China full time.
Similarly in semiconductor manufacturing, quite a lot of US semiconductor process engineers were working in Taiwan, with its really low salaries, long before the TSMC made advances into the US market.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11347 (PDF, 2019, so pre-Corona)
Sure, that still leaves plenty of native US students.
I noticed this around the same time. It was 2010 and I was still in grad school, my lab mate and I used to poke fun of what we called the "Twitter researchers", who were working on what we perceived to be very boring projects (i.e. figure out the optimal ranking of N articles on a page to maximize some objective function). They also didn't like the research, but Twitter/Facebook/Microsoft/Google was paying for their tuition and stipend, so they didn't have much of a choice. When the big grant funding agencies are funding projects at a rate of around 20% - 25%, if you're a researcher hurting for federal dollars then that big tech money looks really good. I can only imagine this dynamic being replicated at universities across the country, how many young minds are wasted on this pursuit. And for what? So Google can sell more ads and become even richer? So Facebook can suck all of your attention just to make you depressed and suffer from body dysmorphia and an eating disorder?
I'm in the robotics field, and in our lab we used to draw a clear line that whatever we worked on would not have a direct military application, because we couldn't stand the thought of our work being used to kill people. Obviously the line is blurry (will my localization algorithm be used on a predator drone?), but there was always at least an eye toward ethical considerations in our research group. We always asked ourselves "How could this be used to hurt people?" It was in our culture, because our work had such obvious evil implications. Just watch pretty much any sci-fi movie ever, there was no shortage of ideas about how robotics research could go wrong.
But there's not a lot of sci-fi source material on how page-ranking algorithms can destroy society. These "Twitter researchers" as I called them never really had a notion that their work could be used for evil purposes, and who could blame them? In 2010 it seemed so benign. But looking around at the state of social media, maybe there should have been more conversations early on about the ethical implications of the research they were doing.
I have available weapons and drugs. zmI do not use either. I am convinced it is a bad decision except in probably very extreme conditions.
We cannot be blaming others just for doing ads. No demand, no offer. Got it? Easy as that.
We all like a world we do not have, we always find problems. But that is not a reason to say what is bad or good. The market will decide :D
I do not get stressed at all with all these Betting houses (now fashionable in Spain) or drugs or anything: just need to be responsible.
We regulate gambling and tobacco for the same reason we should regulate this. Google and Facebook ads have been scientifically tuned to hijack your brain chemistry for money. This isn't blame, or whining, it's simply acknowledging that these companies weaponized visual stimulus and data collection to sell ads on the internet. No amount of personal responsibility is going to solve a human society level problem.
That said... well, I still think that at the end, nothing can beat having good information. Close Facebook, Google and put ads blockers.
And again, the whole thrust of my argument is that telling people to close Facebook is the same as telling them to stop smoking. It's naïve and ignores the reality of brain chemistry and addiction.
Seriously? I was not taught like that at my home sorry. It is not the way it should.
You do something and, unless fooled or cheated, you are responsible for the consequences.
> So if I have all the information known for years from tobacco and I smoke and get into trouble, then I blame it on not having regulations?
If you, as a fully-informed, grown adult in 2021 make that choice, then no. In the real world, that's not how people get addicted to cigarettes. People generally get addicted when they are young, uninformed, and highly susceptible to the marketing aimed at them. Plenty of people living today remember doctors recommending cigarettes for pregnant women - it's silly to assume every person is going to know the risks of these things from the very minute they decide to engage in them. Just look at how quickly Juul took over high schools - you are really going to tell me that a 15 year old trying to fit in is making a full informed, long term decision about tobacco usage? Absurd. Or the Oxycotin epidemic - all those people were addicted to drugs because of Sackler's marketing and the corruption of their doctors - how does one take personal responsibility for following medical advice?
Social media is now where tobacco was in the 70s and 80s before all the information was released in a narrative form that the public could easily digest. All that knowledge about the risks comes from the process of bringing that information into the public light.
That would prevent way more I guess. Of course, in our law, trying to sell cigarrettes actively to underage is illegal and I find that regulation reasonable.
But trying to protect adults from their own irresponsibility is a totally different story. It is their problem.
I get your point and in some way you are right also. I am just advocating for little regulation, but, of course, I am talking also about adults here.
I did not mean underage people. If you target underage for gambling or any addiction in bad faith, that is an attempt to cause damage and punishable.
But that does not mean that the most important thing is to have the information there and decide. Again, I am talking about adults.
By the way, talking about regulations. In my country you can open a university only if it has 8 or 9 degrees offered. If I want to open the best CS degree in the country as a University, I cannot. Do you find it reasonable? Do you think this goes in the interest of consumers? Do you think the state abuses its position by doing so? (Clearly yes). That is why I do not want regulations. You give them the power and they end up regulating even your position to go to the toilet. That said, I find under/overage, even if it is arbitrary (there are teenagers that are responsible people), reasonable, to protect them from unscrupulous people.
But I do not need my life to be ruled in the name of so many things, that is bad and it goes against us if you think of it carefully.
But you will always have responsible teenagers and irresponsible adults. We should not help people that do not want to be helped.
The same way we should help people that have trouble. We should, I think, honestly, but... that we should does not mean we should have that responsibility unconditionally and coactively.
You know what? It can look selfish to you but you are going to have way more autonomous, responsible and self-sufficient people if you apply this rule. A good outcome IMHO.
I'd argue the technology that did most of the heavy-lifting for disinformation, polarization, and conspiracy was AM radio, followed by cable TV. Smartphones, the web and social media were not the cause, but a natural progression of, and an amplifier of a pre-existing trend.
There are no technological solutions to the human condition, but technology amplifies aspects of it.
The sad truth of our reality is that as long as there are people willing to inflict violence against us, we need people who can plausibly threaten to inflict violence in return. It is hypocritical to condemn your country's military in general, while depending on said military for protection. [1]
[1] It isn't necessarily hypocritical to condemn certain militar actions or policies, though.
What would not be great is if we just allow a handful of people to own all the robots in the world (and their output), just as we allow a handful of people to own all the capital producing equipment in the world. Then we're just where we are today, but even worse off. This is actually my nightmare, and partly why I don't do much robotics anymore these days...
Remember, people only need jobs because we as a society have decided if they don't have jobs, we will allow them to go hungry and suffer exposure of the elements due to homelessness. This is perhaps necessary when there's so much work to be done you want people working instead of idle and comfortable. But if the robots can do all the work, then why do people need jobs? Only if the benefits of that work accrue to a handful of people rather that society as a whole.
It is interesting about peoplr must havr jobs or not. If you do not provide value and someone has to pay those costs with their work, is that fair? Even if we have robots: who maintains them, manufacture, program the AI?
You want tha some people work doing that and the rest enjoy a life as good as the ones who work hard and people who benefit from them just be privileged?
Something does not match well here.
You do your contribution and find a place in society. If your contribution is not great, I do not find a reason to be in exactlythe same position as others. Yes you have the right to live and so on. But do not expect a Ferrari at your door and a luxury life.
And imposing others share the fruit of their value, unethical.
- building the business
- maintaining it healthy (this can incur additional expenses at unpredictable times)
- the jobs it generates (that never mind, they are bad in your mind I suppose or they just do it to earn money! They do... but you also pick the job in the first place to make money!)
- the expenses they have to pay in case of firing someone if it does not produce.
- social security they pay and contribute for everyone (at least in the spanish system)
Do you find ethical to just ask for more money go and leave them bankrupt, without any regard of how they coud survive, when you just went pick up a position when much of that business was built? Really? I find it unethical also.
Get your best deal, with your employer, they will give you what they think they can or want, but by mutual contract. If you do not like it, go move to the next chance, it is not anyone's fault. Nothing bad into it. It is how you do in life: you choose what you drink (and what you do not!), who you join, where you go... nothing different here.
Otherwise, the logical consequence would be that we would not. I believe in win-win deals. The voluntary ones are by definition like that. You can take a bad decision, yes. But still, you get my point.
This depends on more variables, but the goal is to avoid barriers and regulations so that the wealth increases, since these break monopolies or de-facto monopolies (via absurd regulations).
But yes, that has its own set of risks. Risks that are disregarded all the time making employers the bad part of the story and employees the good ones. This is not at all like that you can find good and bad on both sides...
An employer is not bad for trying to pay you less. The reverse argument should be true also: the employee is bad because they want more (than they deserve or produce).
No part is bad, it is natural to want to maximize our outcome. It is how things are. I see many people having a problem with this thing. But they only have the problem when it is the other who tries to do that. When they do it for their own benefit then everything is fair and alright.
Considering the huge variety in "natural by definition wealth inequality" across countries it feels like we have enough freedom to choose how much inequality we want. What we definitively know we is that we can make wealth inequality much worse than it has to be. Just take a look at South Africa. 30% unemployment by nature. Thank god we chose a different "natural by definition wealth inequality". What your argument also fails to consider is that wealth inequality is getting worse over time implying there must have been a natural shift rather than a political one.
>And imposing others share the fruit of their value, unethical.
If you refuse to share work, then you must share income by definition.
Consider a society that only needs a 4 hour work week. One person decides to work 8 hours because they like their job and talk about how amazing work is and people should work more. One person no longer has to work. The hard working person will then look at the unemployed person and then tell everyone how lazy he is.
Before you invoke the lump of labor fallacy, you have to realize that the argument relies on Say's law which assumes that the hard working person worked because he wasn't satisfied with the products and services one can obtain in a 4 hour work week, essentially that all the money that person earns will be spent and therefore generate demand for the person that is unemployed. The truth is far more pessimistic.
The hard working person will insist that he should keep his money even though he has no intention to spend it, essentially denying that say's law even exists (empirical evidence shows it's being broken all the time). This insistence is what keeps the lazy person unemployed. That unemployed person still needs 1 hour of services and goods (housing and food). The bandaid answer is to tax the hard working person and transfer the bare minimum to the unemployed person and it works because making everyone spend all their money is never going to happen, there are too many morally inclined people on this planet that insist on a oddly specific and harmful form of saving.
There are plenty of people that take bad decisions or take jobs with lower income or no jobs at all and they try to blame the rest. I do not feel responsible for the bad decisions of others. I am not morally forced to help them.
You can be sure that if they are people I know and I know their stories I could help. But that is very, I mean, VERY different from being morally responsible for the failures of others.
Saving harmful? First, it is good in that it will lower the inflation lolol. But leaving that apart... so it is bad to not spend the money so we must force them? Seriously, I do not understand anything.
In order to make money u mist provide services or goods. If u have money is bc ur service is serving others, at least in a free market... so tell me why those people that took yhe trouble to serve others and take risks should be penalized. Do not tell me they do it for money not for serving others... that is not important. The important thing is that the side-effects is satisfying a demandand that u bought either bc it is better than the competition or cheaper.
In my view it should be much more penalized a person that does not want to work bc they say those jobs are all shit and expects the welfare to rescue them.
Sorry to be so harsh with the topic, because I know that there are people who are not like that. But the problem is not helping itself, it is systematizing it. At that point people abuse it.
This is difficult to say: you mean a person that works has exactly the same skills? In the case they have, you still can have a 4h/day person that is more skilled. That person will still have a job.
And yes, if a person works harder, it will get more from it. They cannot be blamed for working I think. In any case people should be blamed for not wanting to work and wanting to live from others. I do not find a problem with the reverse reasoning. Just my opinion, I understand your point, though.
It is this. Nothing else.
And I mean the lazy. I understand there are other kind of people that are broke for other reasons.
Forbiding is not the way to go. The way to go is to make people aware of the dangers and implications of their choices and convince them why we should avoid damaging others. Empathy is key here: just do not do to others what you do not want for you seems to me like the most basic of the rules.
Imposing a view of what others can or cannot do is absurd, harmful and also we can miss all the good things we can do with things that can also be misused.
Social media is one of those things. It doesn't present itself with the same raw force of nuclear power, but it has proven to have an undeniable power over the human mind. Despite the evidence we have now, though, it still seems that ethical considerations of social media are not being taken seriously enough by the people with the most power of social media platforms, and this worries me.
I would like to know which ones. If you do something to not harm, why do you have to be blamed because other misuse it? I do not think this is the right line of thinking if you mean that we should not do it just on the basis that "someone evil could misuse it". Of course, as an individual you can refuse to research if you think it can yield those results, but never blame it on a researcher that someone else misused their invention.
Social media is a fight because there is an obsession for censorship from some interested parties, in part. That is why.
I do not believe in those super powers as much in the sense that you can always stay away from it as much as you wish. It is a matter of self-discipline also, even if it is indeed a "powerful weapon".
What I’m talking about is twofold: a cultural recognition and appreciation of the ethical issues, and secondly appropriate safeguards to prevent maluse of said technology, where appropriate.
Take nuclear weapons for instance. I personally wouldn’t have involved myself in building them, but others did and here we are. We as a society don’t just let that technology run amok though. There are laws about their proliferation, organizations dedicated to keeping their use in check, and a society-level understanding that their use have such terrible consequences that they can never, ever be taken lightly.
With this environment, so far we’ve averted armed nuclear conflict. But it’s important to realize this is a purposeful thing. People dedicate their lives to this pursuit. It takes effort to build this shared understanding of their dangers.
I agree with you that an individual researcher is not to blame if they are doing careful, considered research. If the attitude is “the implications of my research are not my concern. That is for someone else to worry about” then I do have a problem with that. And yes, that is a real opinion I have heard expressed by a researcher in deep fakes, and it deeply dismayed me.
I would also refuse to be involved in programs to harm people honestly.
Would you rather fish out a map and look for directions or simply ask your car for navigation directions?
Would a cancer researcher use his library card and read literature or simply Google it?
Would you like to solve the protein folding problem?
All of these have been paid for by advertisements.
And protein folding isn't exactly solved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
It had a lot of content back then.
Work since has gone into scaling and transcoding, but much more work has gone into ads, platform stickiness, music rights management, abuse detection, etc. Not really solving problems at the forefront of humanity.
Semiconductors, computing theory, GPS, GSM, satellites, airplanes, X-ray, optical cables, analog radio transmission and spread spectrum, industrial chemistry, solar power, nuclear power, vaccines, genetic research, and much more.
Private companies putting together a search engine or uber or deliveroo are sitting on the shoulders of giants.
Isn't Deep Mind a british company that Google bought it? Seems to me that most of the credit should go to UK society/education and just a bit to advertising industry.
Or I see arguments like "why there is any non US company for X ?" and the implication is that SV is the best where in fact SV has the money to buy anything that is promising and sometimes kill it but sometimes like in DeepMind case managed it good enough ot to waste it.
How do you think these free products get paid for? By the 10% of engineering that does ads. The engineers optimizing ads are actually getting everything else in the company funded, including revenue less Deepmind, which would have folded years ago unless it was purchased by Big Tech.
Sure give credit to the government and educational system, but what is the point of denigrating ads engineers who are funding all of these while also optimizing ads results so that they are relevant to users. Would you rather have them work on cancer research? Do you really think cancer research is desperate for machine learning engineers to help them out?
Or would something like DeepMind, Google brain, automated medical report analysis, smart search of medical archives help them better?
Edit: as an aside, its presumptuous to say that the best minds of our generation are ML and systems engineers. ML engineers are good at math, programming and optimizing models. This doesn't automatically make them great biologists, oncologists, physicists or even mathematicians.
I don't have an issue with a honest ad, what I have an issue is on team of people focusing on manipulating others to watch more videos, or stay more on a page, or write a giant comment so they can place more ads(or similar with shitty video games). Money from this evil operations are dirty. You could have won this money in a better way in a better world, we should strive for that better world and at least we can do is give the credit properly.
"Major venture capital firms Horizons Ventures and Founders Fund invested in the company,[18] as well as entrepreneurs Scott Banister,[19] Peter Thiel,[20] and Elon Musk.[21] Jaan Tallinn was an early investor and an adviser to the company.[22] On 26 January 2014, Google announced the company had acquired DeepMind for $500 million,[23][24][25][26][27][28] and that it had agreed to take over DeepMind Technologies. The sale to Google took place after Facebook reportedly ended negotiations with DeepMind Technologies in 2013"
Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, all have engineering centres in China.
When Zuckerberg was flying to suck up to Xi Jinping, he didn't fly there in hopes of getting Facebook.com available in China. What he got from Xi is a permission to setup an office to sell ads, and hire cheap Chinese engineers.
Apple famously tried to conceal even the fact of the existence of their RnD office in China, claiming that they don't have "design centres" outside of USA. Up to some point, people working in Apple RnD centre in China had a contract clause prohibiting them from posting the fact of their employment there on their LinkedIns.
Google... almost the same story as the two above, it almost felt as if they felt "beshamed" to admit that they were opening an RnD shop in Shenzhen. "A small auxiliary office" that takes a few floors in Shenzhen's biggest building.
Amazon started their Echo, and Fire RnD in USA, and then sent it off to China after a few releases, and repeated flops of Fire.
Not going to happen.
Why doesn't the US try to onshore critical manufacturing? This is braindead stupid behavior. Existentially risky.
Nothing short of global war will fix this. Enter war with China where all trade is halted, and I promise you we’ll figure out how to on-shore manufacturing in a jiffy. A terrible price, but the only solution.
Yes, let’s start a global military conflict between nuclear powers in the hope that an economic activity that’s no longer feasible maybe becomes feasible.
Also in part because much of our leadership isn't composed of Americans working for American national interests, it's composed of humanists who perceive themselves to be global citizens and believe in a worldwide frictionless marketplace operating under a universal liberalism that incidentally control American resources.
All of those things make a very small overlap between people who need to work such low value manufacturing jobs and those who have the skills and personality to do them. In essence, we've settled in to enormous wealth and safety by cooperating with other countries, and you are proposing that we should cooperate less and be poorer.
I'm not convinced that you're wrong, but that's what you're propounding.
Update: In other words, you're asking the national level version of "why don't we move back to the land and become self sufficient and steer clear of industrial ag and make our own food?" Same answer: we like our wealth, comfort, and safety where we are, thank you very much.
We now have a good understanding of just how far ahead we pushed ourselves beyond what market forces were going to pursue: 50-60 years, which is pretty cool.
Actually, that might be electronics and computers. The basis for Silicon Valley was created during WWII - by unrestrained debt-based government spending.
https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo -- "Secret History of Silicon Valley"
Of course, maybe trying to rank the developments by industry or sector makes no sense, sooo much was influenced by what happened in that period. Agriculture too, if what I read and remember correctly a lot of WWII chemical industry was reused for things like fertilizer, but I don't have a good (i.e. direct and good quality scientific study instead of some blog post or pop book) source for that.
I dislike this separation of "government" vs. "business". I remember an MIT biology course (genetics) where the professor explained Gregor Mendel (the guy with the beans) a bit more - his circumstances. That man wasn't some random person who purely by chance happened to be interested in biology and inheritance. Turns out he was part of a far wider effort of church, state and industry to produce economic progress. Historically, even looking at how England became a world power, there never was such a separation. Government always acted as an extension of economic interests in combination with the merchants, later with the capitalists.
Let me try to make some optimistic spins?
- Intel is hopefully turning their foundry business around. I think this will be a slow (1-2 decades?) process but will pay results.
- Tesla and SpaceX are actually really positive spins, though I agree Tesla isn't completely isolated from the rest of the eletronics world. It's what we've got and it's not half bad. SpaceX in particular I is world-class at this point and hopefully will continue to get better
- Toyota makes more cars in the US than not. Worst case, these are still functioning production lines staffed by good workers, that talent and working knowledge (hopefully) doesn't just disappear
- A lot of your examples are lower down the value chain, for instance Intel doesn't produce commodity RAM since they famously got out of that game in the 80s(?) to focus on the higher margin CPU business. Maybe this is good?
Ultimately though, I agree that working in ads or finance is largely flat or negative sum to society (as someone who has or is in both). It's worse than that, too. People actively look down on manufacturing, as somehow less exciting and less complex than finance.
But these are not American cars, these are German cars made in America.
Americans I meet are always surprised when they see how close are manufacturing jobs salaries in China, and US.
There are other countries that are simply better than the US at doing certain things. I don’t understand why Americans can’t just accept that. Embrace the things we’re really good at, work with others to get from them the things they’re good at.
America is good at things at the edge of the value chain. High-end goods. Services. Demand manufacturing[1]. Things that have value during good times, where the earlier links in the chain are healthy, and consumers have plenty of money to spend. In times of crisis, all this can evaporate quickly.
Also, I feel it might be that the kind of jobs America is good at are different from the lower-level jobs in ways that are not conductive to having a healthy middle class. I've read some convincingly-sounding arguments going in this direction, but I can't recall any right now, and I haven't thought about this topic hard enough to come up with one myself.
--
[0] - This is not an unprecedented idea. See Boeing as a point of comparison. From what I read, the company would've been dead long ago if not for government spending. This spending looks wasteful if you look at what gets produced, but not when you realize it's really a way to ensure that manufacturing plants and people knowing how to use them are available in case they're needed for war production.
[1] - Without being too bitter about it in this thread, I feel quite a lot of ways US brings in money are fads and artificial scarcities, created using marketing and intellectual property laws.
As for the middle class: I do agree here, we made a huge mistake gutting the manufacturing sector too quickly. But I suspect where we failed was in providing assistance to the affected communities rather than artificially trying to prop up manufacturing. The increased savings from manufacturing abroad could have been used to fund better healthcare and educational opportunities. Provide some kind of unemployment assistance. Instead all the rewards disproportionately went to a small minority of the owner/shareholder class.
I agree that fully internalizing this kind of manufacturing is counterproductive. I feel that the optimum level is a limited capacity that could be scaled up quickly in an emergency. It's less efficient short-term, but resiliency always has some costs.
> Instead all the rewards disproportionately went to a small minority of the owner/shareholder class.
I feel there's some confusion in the way offshoring savings were, and are, being talked about. Possibly a purposeful confusion. The way I see it, one can't say "we're saving money by offshoring", where "we" means "our country/our economy". It's the private owners/shareholders that are saving money. The country only saves if they get to appropriate those savings, e.g. through a tax. If companies start to offshore and the government doesn't adapt taxation, then the country is actually losing on this.
This is essentially a reworded version of the "ricardian law of comparative advantage" which was treated as gospel as an economic theory in the 1990s-early 2000s.
It's almost dead today. The widely believed built in presumption that comparative advantage was static and unchangrable essentially led to American manufacturing being siphoned off overseas to countries that did not share this view.
Almost all policymakers are now starting to treat this as a geopolitical threat.
- no transportation costs
- no unemployment
- barter economy
- 100% fungible labor - farmer, teacher, chemical engineer, doctor - they're all the same and can switch between jobs instantly, and immediately attain the level of productivity within that sector
- prices are 100% determined by labor costs
- demand for various types of items is static, and never changes
- the demand structure is the same across all countries - i.e. if British prefer tea to coffee, we assume all countries prefer tea to coffee
It's not just a "spherical cow" theory, it's more akin to "if a spherical cow rolls frictionlessly down a valley described by a parabola, then it will oscillate forever". True, but useless.
Keynes, as usual, is ahead of the pack - calling out the theory's unrealistic assumptions, and predicting (in 1930s) that not the production, but the interest rates will do the adjustments - leading to persistent trade imbalances and move the economy further from full employment. Which is exactly what happened
Not as influential as Keynes since he is at the top. But for me, the most correct theories (without being an expert in the matter) come from there.
Austrians are a crotchety bunch and a bit stuck in their ways. They never really tried to explain the rise of China and are still somewhat in denial about it.
I would say they did not get here faster because of too much intervention honestly...
Nothing is pure capitalism or socialism. As you open the economy the cash flows more. That is what happened...
BTW, I do not consider China a success since they are like one century late from America and on top of that there is no regike that has killed more than the Chinese. Do you really think it is a success? Well... I would say despite of the people managing it, not because of them...
That said, I am not meaning austrians got everything right, just that I find them relatively convincing in many areas. Of course, they are subjrct to criticism, as everyone else.
India shared similar population size, geography and wealth to China initially.
India had something closer to a market economy that was less interventionist/communist and for far longer and yet it has grown at a far slower pace.
Austrian predictions from the 90s presumed that China keeping tight control of the economy/currency/inward flows of investment and high level of state ownership was shooting itself in the foot.
However, for me the discussion is also ethical: I do not find a reason to have an ellite forcing on all the others through coaction what to do. Whether it maximizes economy or not. In other words: peopke are ends not means for others. That is the fundamental point in my view.
I would not take a regime with over 60 million deaths (big leap forward, Chinese cultural revolution, etc.) as an example of something ethical by any measure.
The history of a reasonably good country that had successes as the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese Cultural revolution and now the Uyghurs, among many others.
You know, Chinese government is not reasonably good at any level by any moral assessment.
Capitalism has been superior in every aspect: as a proof, migration flows went from socialists to capitalists countries, being East/West Germany just one example.
The truth lies in neither. The biggest economic problems stem from rigidity. Money has such an extreme degree of rigidity, it is capable of traveling through both space and time unhindered. It's a time machine and massless particle all in one.
The reason why Austrian economics appeals to some people is either because they have an anti government axe to grind and want more trivial reasons to blame the government, they want to be on the receiving end of a regressive money system (gold bugs), macroeconomics are often abandoned in favor of microeconomics which hides the fact that local decision making can still result in seemingly coordinated failure and finally because they have mistaken moral beliefs about an amoral system most notably the myth of the protestant work ethic and the belief that the promise of work is their own personal property and it should be their right to delay redeeming that promise for all eternity.
I will repeat it again. There are no morals in economics. Anyone who worships savings and frugality in monetary terms is worshipping poverty in real terms. Eat your economic cake, it will be bigger tomorrow because of that and when somebody needs you to show restraint and want to borrow your slice, they'll tell you.
You are missing that growing in permanent debt has consequences. Some countries have been ruined by external debt. We are on our way.
We people do not manage wealth like that. A call for poverty is to live over our real outcome permanently (this does not mean we cannot invest and have debt as long as we are able to pay and as long as it has expected return in controlled ways).
Eventually you go bankrupt. What is being poorer than not being able to finance your basic services?
And yes, I admit to hsve become somewhat antistate. Because it is a scam, basically, to monopolize services, offer them more expensive, without the innovations that markets could provide you mich faster and on the way saying you are ok thanks to them and that you owe the state everything.
I can deal with market prices and free choice and save a bunch of money, which is MY invested effort, so it is me who should manage it.
States do not give me anything except poor justifications for their existence. The only exceptions could be (and I am not convinced either) security and justice.
I really think they are way more correct than the alternative: that we must be forced in groups under the decisions of ellites. This is not morally right. And, BTW, a higher goal for the sake of others under coaction lead to fascisms and communism. Little by little we lose our freedom. Not a good thing.
For me that is plain envy sorry. And, who is the greedy the ones that save their work or the ones that want the wealth made by others? Because that is more greedy IMHO.
Adtran (Huntsville, AL & just acquired ADVA), Infinera (fab in Sunnyvale, CA). Both make optical transport systems. Adtran also makes access network systems (POTS, DSL, PON, Ethernet). Adtran has (or had) some manufacturing capability in Alabama.
It is extremely costly to develop a new airplane and to train staff on it, at the price point and fuel efficiency for airlines to sell ever cheaper tickets. Airbus is doing the exact same with its neo models. Bombardier and Embraer were driven into the arms of the duopoly because they cannot afford to develop new aircraft. Russia, China, and Japan have all tried their hand at pumping billions of dollars into commercial aircraft manufacturing and haven’t been successful.
I am just saying that the economic incentives are not aligned so that a decision other than the 737MAX would've been the prudent, competitive move.
Southwest, Ryanair and their competition are literally nickel and diming everything to offer ever cheaper seats to fliers. Until that changes, airlines will balk at new aircraft.
It's why 737Max was developed instead of NMA; Airbus came out with the 320 and 330neo series, which did not require retraining.
Nope. What has been going on over the last decades is simply the consequence of unregulated capitalism - by design, capitalism seeks to eliminate or reduce cost to increase profit, and China (as well as India and Vietnam) were/are the most cost-efficient locations to produce goods and provide services.
I am sure Kissinger played a part in many things, but he seems small pickles compared to labor costs (and hence quality of life) in the US being multiple standard deviations above the mean compared to the rest of the world.
How long did people expect that arbitrage opportunity to not be taken advantage of?
Also, adding China to the WTO was probably a bad thing for the lower half of the income distribution in the developed world.
If China and other countries are bringing 1B+ people online to make products at a fifth of your wages, then it is only a matter of time before the buyers outside the country start buying from them.
What happened was that American (and European) corporations started producing their goods in other countries, because it was cheaper for them.
Like, I would have no issue with this in general if China developed their own companies, rather than already profitable US companies slashing their labour costs massively by using cheaper labour. It's super problematic, and while one can argue it's been good for the world, it's been pretty crap for all the manual/manufacturing workers in the US, Uk and other developed countries.
Full disclosure: I'm from Ireland, and this sort of outsourcing was what employed my Dad (and now me).
The side-effect of it is that technology that the day back was not reachable for most is now available for everyone: phones, cheap clothes, cheaper food, hot water, electricity, railways...
BTW I have lived in VN almost 10 years. It is true that VN has factories and workers are much cheaper.
Jobs move there. People buy cheaper products (automatically people that did not have access to something have access to it by the cost reduction).
Workers there get 4 times more of what they would get on their own and an insurance they would not have and do not need to work god knows where, probably selling in the street drinks or similar stuff.
I think that with all its imperfections, capitalism is the better alternative.
Btw we have never had unregulated capitalism... if we had, we would have worse salaries probably but more people could earn a life by themselves. Our friends the politicians are always there to tell you that you have to pay and shut up. For the good of all... lol. I do not buy that.
Trade surplus nations work more than they should. Trade deficit nations work less than they should. That has strong implication on where "all the jobs" end up.
My favorite example is Greece. "All the jobs" have moved to Germany.
Aren’t they working for them?? At McDonald’s?? And honestly they’re probably working harder than me, a software engineer, who also has a 1000$ phone. But I also have healthcare, and never have to put up with mopping any flooring.
Sure, but devices with replaceable batteries are theoretically easier to use longer. The average person buys a mobile phone every other year and discards their old ones. Practically every consumer electronic out there uses rechargeable batteries now which puts a limited lifespan on them.
In fact, there are like famous semiconductor companies that make their stuff in the US. Makes me suspect the rest of the list as similar doomsaying.
You don't need that kind of equipment any more since the advent of VoIP and software-defined radio/networking.
> The US can no longer make smartphones.
Apple is US-based as is the world's leading provider of mobile communication chips Qualcomm (and for what it's worth I seriously believe Apple is going to go vertical on that part too!), and with Google you have a second US-based vendor of operating systems.
Or are you referring to the capability of produce all components of a smartphone on US soils?
I’d also say the creative works has seen a massive revolution from technology. Anyone can make professional video/audio/graphics today and distribute it.
For starters, what about all the startups powered by AWS?
Amazon lets my programmer cousins in India buy the latest technical books in days, while my generation used to torrent and print 15-20 years ago.
Boeing does have its faults though.
Investors can't withdraw funds from companies by design. When you sell shares in a public company it's another investor buying it from you.
Runway is runway, it can be looked as a glass half empty ("running on fumes") or half full. If a company runs out of time/funding rounds it can cut costs. It's easier to make a profit when you have high revenue, brand recognition, fewer competitors. That's why growth companies run for years on losses.
- Hos is the Greek definitive article (i.e. "the")
- Pollos is a Greek word, most generally, meaning "many'
- They are used with the nominative plural ('oi' ending)
- In Greek, the article delclines with the noun so "hos" -> "hoi"
Snark aside, this trajectory has been clear as day since the 1990s (for anyone willing to broach this question) and brazenly undeniable since the early 2000s.
Often Ive wondered they dont build a social network.
The iTunes stuff was unidirectional from 'artists' (i.e. ad-agencies) to users.
No, I think they perfectly understand that. The iPhone is their social network. You can use it to manage your contacts, call, send messages(both long and short), share photos and videos, and video chat. What more else do they need that they don't already have?
Just compare customization/personalization options in Apple software and other software, historically. MySpace it ain't. Apple products are not the ones you import your personality into.
They've certainly dabbled in social features here and there, but none of them have been useful enough to be a hit with customers, I'd argue because what they're willing to do within the limits of their brand guidelines doesn't make for easy social success. Unclear if a working formula exists somewhere in that space on the spectrum.
Apple markets itself as family friendly, which directly collides with the tendency of people to post copyright-protected content, abuse of all kinds, pornography and similarly disgusting content, and not to mention consumers of CSAM who will invade any new platform that crops up to avoid getting booted off in seconds.
I vaguely remember Edison fighting AC solutions (as opposed to his DC solutions) by spreading FUD instead of attempting to compete on technical merits. So, no news here?
The manufacturing is unfortunately not only not returning to the US, despite efforts of 3 previous administration, but is leaving at the accelerated pace, faster than even at the "peak outsourcing."
Having no real economy, but banks, and McKinsey, while being in a such dependency on imports is a recipe for nothing good. US trade deficit has passed $70B, and we are on the route to see it pass 100 this decade because of enormous government borrowing to fight covid, and stimulate the economy.
Why it is so bad? Because, it tends to spiral out of control, when your only means to pay for basic living necessities is to spin the printing press, and kill the economy even more, precluding any chance at repayment.
People wee saying that US is facing the worst balance of payment crisis in eighties, when it just passed $10B, and the White House was in total panic. Now, fancy economists are now coming, and saying "nah, $70B is normal, we can always print more"
I wonder why we can't seem to invest in the future (in the USA).
There are far richer Asian countries than China, business people with far more capital to buy fancy tooling. You think they never tried that? They did, and it didn't work largely, or the impact was minimal. Look at Malaysia, or Taiwan.
Hopes on robots, and automation as an economic "Wunderwaffe" is plainly silly, and are largely coming from people who haven't put in a single nail in their life. Don't listen to these men who say that.
I don't see how automation will save anyone's economy, but it surely will put a always growing dent in the economy
I know an engineer who started a small business (in the USA) that makes specialized types of plastic-coated copper wiring. The process is 90% automated and runs around the clock. He keeps two employees on at all times, but they basically just change spools and then hang out and watch the machines.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-sign-buy-...
Definitely agree with the second, and you can add “CEO” as well.
The media cannot stand it when china is criticized. They have a long history of this, like how they hid he one child policy from Americans for years, and then openly persecuted the grad student who uncovered it
The same media that has been reporting on Chinese suppression of Hong Kong protests and Uighurs in Xinjiang for several years? That media?
The media has a vested interest to not only portray china as evil, but to make sure china stays that way, and to thwart american presidents from doing anything to limit china's growth, so that the American media has a powerful short-term source of profits for its owners.
This is not rocket science. Notice how the Hong Kong and Uighur stories are just designed to provoke outrage. The moment anyone suggests a solution or a potential action the US can take, the media fall silent or starts attacking, depending on how likely it is for that action to work.
40 years of "misplaced policy," were a 40 years of actually very deliberate, and well placed policy called "monetary expansion."
Everything to facilitate the sale of US debt around the world, probably including a conscious effort to open door to foreign creditors at the expense of US industry was taken.
Chinese call this schema "You make all the work, and I make all money"
Inbound capital transfers aren't “at the expense of US industry”.
The supply chain issues are also real and seeing bare shelves, empty car lots, throughout the duration of my visit was disturbing.
I noticed a significant decline in the quality of service at many businesses. The labor shortage is apparent, and many service workers seemed not to care about their work, which reflected in their attitudes towards customers.
On a personal level, I felt that people were less friendly and, more worryingly, less respectful. The public cursing everywhere I went was really unattractive.
I'm sure some of this is that I have been changed by living in East Asia, where people tend to be more polite (if not friendly) and focus less on the individual than the group. But I don't think it was just me 100% either. I believe the increased politicization of just about every subject is a part of this.
From a raw cultural perspective, it strikes me how commercially uniform the country became: outside of enjoying differences topography and pre-homogenization (what remains of walkable old towns), I deeply don’t find much of a compelling reason to travel within the country due to how damned cookie cutter it feels.
I am sufficiently concerned about this trajectory (among a suit of other more significant concerns) to aim to get a second citizenship for my family.
The pace of homogenization might have increased because technology greatly enables it. If you want a product just type “best whatever’s” into Reddit or wire cutter or consumer reports and you can have thousands of people’s experiences distilled down within minutes. Same thing for food and travel.
Do I want to take chances on various stores owned by various owners sourcing goods from various places?
Or do I want to get my sister a gift from Target, where if she does not like it, she can go home and return at the Target near her home.
If you love nature, America is still one of the best countries to travel in. It has some of the most magnificent natural places and is massive, so even if you're driven away from popular parks because of overtourism, there are many less popular places that are amazing.
Unfortunately, the camping plans for my visit were severely hampered by wildfires, which looks to be a permanent fixture of the American west going forward.
Where? China, who has effectively no immigration? Definitely not Europe.
For example, Cowen later softened some of his positions on learning how much of the data he commented on was retail driven. Retail is relevant, but he was accidentally modeling the retail market where he intended to model the economy.
Besides crude metrics, there are always implied assumptions connecting new business starts, IPOs or unicorn milestones to the bigger picture.
In short, this is rhetoric. Hypotheses testing is fine figuratively, but let's remember where the pitfalls are.
IMO, it's worth noting where a lot of this is coming from: market caps. These are very much monopoly-related. The bull case expectation for a 2020s Great Company is 25-40% profit margins, double digit growth or potential for such. This is possible because Alphabet, FB, Apple & such do not need to borrow or raise to grow.
This fuels a fire of speculative startup investing at the lower tiers, the only place where capital is required.
The problem is, IMO, that there's almost no relationship between FB's size and gross economic output, productivity, economic utility, etc. Online communication is great, but online communication isn't better because FB is 10X bigger. Google's freeware is great, but we were getting search, gmail, etc when Google was 10X smaller.
Where's the relationship between aggregate revenue (nevermind profit) at JPMorgan, Alphabet or FB and economic utility?
IMO Cowen, The Economist and much of this cohort/generation of economists have an economic worldview that totally lacks an adequate model for market structure/maturity and such. This has led to a lot foolishness.
If you are Ford in 1921, the world is young. You get more efficient each year. Cost per car decreases, but you can outrun this by making more cars. The market is growing in both dollars and number of cars. If you are intel in 2021, same game. The world is young. Moore's law only tells half the tale. Transistors halve in price and size every two years, but the number of transistors produced increases by more than than. The more they make, the more we want. Gotta mine that crypto, train GPT-N, etc. We need more chips every year, and the cheaper they get the more we need.
If productivity keeps goes up, but we don't need more and more cars... the market contracts and this is now a different game.
If $Nbn worth of grocery shopping that once happened in supermarkets now happens on amazon, the markets value this is a net capital gain, because $Nbn at amazon is presumably more profit generative in the long run. That doesn't society bought more groceries, or received much more value.
This is not that hard. Look to the largest companies. What are they outputting? How much of it? How good is it? What changed? I get that it's harder to add up than the number of cars coming out of factories but, it's still less abstract than viewing the world through a purely financial lens.
In the real world externalities have real effects, whether they're ecological costs or business losses created by monopolistic growth.
That's not even counting second order effects like loss of experimentation and fundamental research - not packaging existing tech, but inventing completely new and unimagined classes of tech through (ideally) genius math, but next best is original blue sky research.
On Wall St externalities are ignored. The show only continues because it's fundamentally and polemically about denying reality in favour of an entirely imaginary world of financial story-telling.
Google, FB, JPM, etc. achieve 350% growth over 5 years. OK. Does that mean they produce 350% as much utility?
If these were Tesla, we'd also count the number of cars and the conversation would be a lot more grounded. We'd quickly realize that the market values Tesla's future in a certain way, Ford's another. We wouldn't accidentally conclude that the economy is suddenly making way more cars.
What is it that the economy is doing more of?
No reason to not let them suffer from their erroneous assumptions though. But politically, I expect them to be bailed out.
Why not? If we were talking about a tech company, would you feel the same way?
The feedback mechanism for identifying errors is failure as is the incentive to correct them. Otherwise, we end up in a privatize the profits, socialize the risks situation. As we currently are.
For example, I bid for land for commercial real estate. I have been outbid by another developer who assumes they can pay more for the land because their labor costs will be lower for the business. They want to bet they can get away with paying bottom tier wages, whereas I want to pay higher wages. Or have more redundancies or use higher quality materials. Of course, the land gets sold to them at the higher price, they get to build the business.
Why should they get bailed out? They wanted to take on more risk, in the form of not allow much wiggle room for labor costs or using subpar materials. That is their fault, and society benefits from the market sending a signal from that developers failure to better allocate resources.
>If we were talking about a tech company, would you feel the same way?
Yes.
High wage countries don't seem to have a shortage of places to eat. if competitors are subject to the same labor market, all prices should go up together which would not give you a competitive disadvantage. certainly a lesser disadvantage than not being able to open because you are unwilling to pay the market labour rate.
That's a textbook example of price elasticity from economics 101. You can also think about it this way: if that weren't the case, they would have already raised their prices even before there was a labor shortage.
> all prices should go up together which would not give you a competitive disadvantage
Not a competitive disadvantage, but still a disadvantage. Take restaurants for example. If every restaurant in the world raised all of their prices by the exact same amount at the exact same time, they wouldn't lose any business to each other, but they'd still lose a bunch of business to people eating at home.
I find the argument irksome, as it ignores a lot of the peculiarities and variances between markets, but at least it's an interesting perspective.
If I am complaining that I cannot afford a private chef in my home, then the answer is for me to figure out how to earn more. Or go without a chef.
It is the same thing for a restaurant. Either figure out how to make more money (even if it means closing the business and changing your line of work, or figure out how make do without the chef).
We would never expect a business owner to work for less than a livable wage and we definitely shouldn’t expect its employees to either.
If a business can’t provide both its owner _and_ its employees a livable wage, then it should probably go under since it would seem that either it’s product isn’t valuable enough or it’s being mismanaged to the point that it can’t provide a livable wage to anyone.
Never heard anyone complaining about business being bad because people have to wear shoes.
Shoes are a bad comparison. The vast majority of people have always lived in a society where wearing shoes is the status quo. This is not the case for masks.
Yes, a certain amount of the price of goods and services is determined organically, but the market is by no means "free" in the way that people think it is. It's heavily regulated, influenced by powerful industry lobbies, and substantially dictated by how the federal and state governments want to trade with other nations. It might not be overtly communistic or totalitarian, but that doesn't make it Laissez-faire, and it never really was in the first place.
If we had a free market, then we wouldn't be allowing a small number of corporations to drive down prices, invite regulation, and collude with the press so as to snuff out meaningful competition. Some would argue that this is indeed a free market by the virtue that it is what the market has chosen, but not really. It's hardly different from feudalism.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...