10 ms·
Serious question -- why not? What makes this a bad idea?
by anoother 9y ago
Serious question -- why not? What makes this a bad idea?
- ChrisLomont 9y agoHistorically, society ends up poorer when doing things sub-optimally, and if society does it long enough, it also becomes obsolete and non-competitive, ensuring that society stays behind for longer than simply allowing the tech changes to evolve as they can. So if your goal is temporary employment gains for long term poverty, this is a good way to start.
- DINKDINK 9y agoCe qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas [1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- jlebar 9y agoBecause automated weaving makes clothes a lot cheaper. Put another way, when workers become more efficient -- one factory worker able to control many weaving machines, or a relatively small group of programmers able to control many cars -- people's standard of living increases. Maybe you're willing to pay more for clothes, or transportation, or any one thing. But paying more for all of the things that have gotten cheaper due to increases in efficiency since time X is tantamount to going back to the standard of living of time X.
- fnl 9y agoEven more radically, you might as well just give everybody a universal basic income instead of heading back for a pre-industrialized way of life (though the Amish people seem to like it?!).
- jimmywanger 9y agoIf you give people a universal basic income, you need to both increase taxes a lot and completely restrict immigration - a basic income in the US is incredibly luxurious for people who live in sub-saharan Africa. Or else the universal basic income is going to be too low in first world countries to make a difference.
- egypturnash 9y agoOr you just start taxing corporations and rich people again. Some stupidly huge percentage of dollars are just sitting in their coffers doing nothing.
- jimmywanger 9y agoCorporations and rich people have ways (completely legal) to get around taxes. If the tax burden becomes too onerous, they'll just move residences and/or stop doing business in your country. You can see this in one of the founders of Facebook - he renounced his US citizenship, because of the onerous tax burdens. (https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/a-facebook-founder-renounces-his-u-s-citizenship/?hpw https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/a-facebook-founder...) It's foolish to just say "we should tax rich people and rich corporations more." You're incentivizing them to not play the game, and wealthy people generally have more abilities to evade taxes than people in the lower upper class or middle class, which is who the burden will inevitably fall upon.
- egypturnash 9y agoWe just have to start guillotining them again, I guess. You need a good revolution once every generation or three to keep capital scared.
- jimmywanger 9y agoDid you not see my previous comment about capital flight? This is not the middle ages anymore, where peoples' riches are tied up in real estate and machinery. Immovable capital. Capital is fluid these days. If you start guillotining people for absolutely nothing except being rich (which is what you're insinuating) they'll just leave and take all the capital and productive capacity with them. See Venezuela.
- fnl 9y agoI am fully aware that UBI is an utopia that would require at the very least a Zeitgeist well evolved beyond our species' current, most common world views. But a similar "time-inverse" utopia is trying to stop technological progress with laws.
- tanilama 9y agoUBI seems unlikely now, maybe very low level like 500 dollars per month, but definitely not going to support a comfortable living, that is only fantasy.
- prawn 9y agoPerhaps if the costs to maintain a comfortable living are lowered? It might be that people end up choosing between city living and the 40 hours a week of work required to support that, and living in a regional area where you can get by working 10 hours/week.
- manigandham 9y ago> not going to support a comfortable living It's not supposed to.
- majewsky 9y agoDepends on whom you ask, and on the definition of "comfortable".
- robotjosh 9y agoIf things have gotten cheaper, why does everything in a 1917 sears catalog, adjusted for inflation, look so inexpensive? Solid metal tools used to cost less than the modern walmart plastic thing.
- hatsunearu 9y agoNot sure if this is right but maybe because wages were lower back then even with inflation?
- didgeoridoo 9y agoSounds like a possible factor. Inflation-adjusted median household income in 1900 was around $12k. Now it's around $55k.
- derekp7 9y agoYou got me curious, so I looked... page 1082 and 1083 of the Sears catalog, from 1912 https://archive.org/details/catalogno12400sear https://archive.org/details/catalogno12400sear shows that a standard hammer was $0.66, and a hand saw was around $1.50 (there are several models from $1.05 to $1.95). So $0.66 (from 1912) is $15.82 in 2016, and $1.95 is $35.96.
- taneq 9y agoFor things like your solid metal tools, it's because the demand for metals is higher now than it was then, compared to supply. Also, solid metal may not actually be better than plastic or other options. It's heavy, and it rusts.
- nashashmi 9y agoWhat's the point of making things cheaper when it centers the wealth on just a few owners? When there are lots of workers working low income jobs versus just a few workers working high income jobs, it creates a healthier more distributed economy.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- closeparen 9y agoThe point is that it delivers real, tangible quality-of-life factors, which typically matter more to someone's well-being than his feelings about aggregate wealth inequality. I could stick it to the rich bastards who own energy stocks, but I'd rather be warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
- tomhoward 9y agoAn estimated 2.3 Billion people now own smartphones. That number is growing at about 10% per year. All those people have access to the sum of all human knowledge and the ability to educate themselves almost as well as (some would argue even better than) the students of the most expensive universities. They can communicate with anyone else at almost zero marginal cost, and can sell products and services to basically anyone else on the planet. All because things keep getting cheaper. That's the point of making things cheaper. Sure, a consequence of that is that the founders and executives and financiers of Google, Samsung, Apple etc are wildly rich. And that means they can (and do) invest in new products and services to keep improving peoples' standard of living, as well as funding benevolent projects. It's pretty amazing if you ask me.
- dorian-graph 9y ago> All those people have access to the sum of all human knowledge and the ability to educate themselves almost as well (some would argue even better) than students of the most expensive universities. They can communicate with anyone at almost no marginal cost, and can sell products and services to basically anyone else on the planet. Is this even happening though?
- poke111 9y agoBecause you create wealth by producing goods and services. Jobs are a cost, not the end goal. Sacrificing production for jobs gets it exactly backwards and makes us, in the aggregate, poorer, even though it makes a few people richer.
- zghst 9y agoAnd it ensures that the economy is based on time and low pay rather than valuable skills or invention. It removes the incentives to innovate in areas of life that are time consuming but have lots of workers.
- malchow 9y agoNicely put. I'd add that your response makes a tidy argument against the abusive public employee unions that hold public fisc hostage in the U.S. Right now, U.S. teachers' unions have crafted a public education industry that is a lot like what this technocrat in India might have conceived .
- hackinthebochs 9y agoBut jobs are how those goods and services are distributed. A country like India is not in a state to transition to basic income yet.
- poke111 9y agoBecause you create wealth by producing goods and services. Jobs are a cost, not the end goal. Sacrificing production for jobs gets it exactly backwards and makes us, in the aggregate, poorer, even though it makes a few people richer.
- taneq 9y agoBecause it's busywork, and it's wasting all those peoples' time. It's strictly inferior to letting a few workers use machinery to do the job, while paying the rest of the workers to sit around idle, because when using machinery you can rapidly increase output if required and the idle workers have the option to find something more useful to do.
- KekDemaga 9y agoWhere do I sign up to be one of the idle workers?
- taneq 9y agoGive it 10-20 years and you won't need to sign up, you'll just receive your UBI into your bank account every week. Well, that or the country you live in will have to let 30-40% of its people starve because there's nothing they can do better than a machine. Remember, those idle workers aren't being paid a nice pay packet. They'll be on subsistence wages only. You'll still want to work a job if you want nice things.
- KekDemaga 9y agoIf I'm one of those skilled workers who can do something better than a machine it seems the rational course of action is to move to one of the places where they let people starve and keep more of the fruits of my labor.
- cjalmeida 9y agoUntil those people decide they should forcefully separate your head from your neck. See France (1787), Haiti (1791), USA (1861), Turkey(1908), Russia (1917), China (1949)... Those are only the most notable major civil wars, but it's amazing how revolts are common across the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebellions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebell...
- tspike 9y ago
- zghst 9y agoSeriously limits technological progress. Pretty much insures Indian tech companies cannot develop this IP in their homelands. Who knows what kind of tech driverless car might beget, like space navigation, etc? What kind of economy of scale it would enable? The quality and lifestyle and savings from freeing people of having to be fully present during this dull activity. People could use that time in the car to do so many things. Cars could be available always, not just when people are up. This could lead to a stronger economy, the car delivers the customer to the product, instead of he customer having to think about it. Less friction in decision making, more freedom. For people of developed nations that get used to that lifestyle, it would be a world of night and day when they arrive in a place that is actively against the conveniences of life afforded by technology. Life, for these people banned from this awesome experience, would appear more bleak and torturous. Even viewed by some as primitive. Locally developed military technology suffers, with the lack of local talent they would have to accept inferior technology. There are probably endless implications for banning things. They could have been smart and just taxed this tech very high in place of taking jobs. It is a silent catastrophe as a governing decision.
- kthejoker2 9y agoAs a consultant I recently traveled to a client office; the Wifi was spotty and failed so often I literally had a mild anxiety attack and had to head back to the home office just to clear my mind. I can only imagine what privileges the next generation are going to upgrade to necessities.
- deepnotderp 9y agoWhat's the purpose? Companies are obviously not going to do that if they have autonomy since it's inefficient production. Instead, the government will have to do so, and at that point they only do so to pump money into the economy. Why not instead spend that on NASA like space programs instead? I've long advocated for a "techno-Keynesian" approach to economics.
- sintaxi 9y agoIts like thinking breaking windows adds to the economy because someone gets paid to fix it. In the end the window gets restored to its original condition and money is simply transferred from one person to another but no value has been created. Stifling innovation in a way is like handing everyone a hammer and telling them to break things to stimulate the economy.
- jimmywanger 9y agoIf you do this, you'd also logically have to ban imports or tax them at an extremely high rate. By banning any sort of technology, you're indirectly increasing the costs of domestically placed goods, by increasing the costs of production.