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You might want to read about the Zero Marginal Product Hypothesis. The summary is here: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/dregs-of-earth.html http://no
by SandB0x 15y ago
You might want to read about the Zero Marginal Product Hypothesis. The summary is here: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/dregs-of-earth.html http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/dregs-of-earth.ht... and the approximate origins are here: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/the-speed-of-labor-market-adjustment.html http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07...
"I find myself coming back to the view that many previously employed workers simply have a current marginal product pretty close to zero."
- api 15y agoA solution might be forthcoming: peak oil. Put them to work making biofuels at a large scale.
- eftpotrm 15y agoI don't believe that's a very manpower-intensive production system though, unless we're going for the Soylent Green option...
- lukeschlather 15y agoStill sounds like a negligible amount of biofuels.
- eftpotrm 15y agoThough, I should say, that masks another contingency with possibly the same effect. We have an economy which is predicated on cheap energy. As such it's frequently cheaper to produce goods by comparitively inefficient automated processes due to the reduction in manpower required, or to produce goods at distance from their end user as the reduction of labour costs from a remote supplier outweights the transportation costs. It seems plausible that an energy scarce world could reverse the economics of both situations. It would have enough other consequences that I'm not at all suggesting it as some sort of worker's utopia, but greater employment may be an interesting side-effect.
- dstein 15y agoHuman beings aren't a good source of biofuels.
- Calamitous 15y agoYou clearly haven't been around my cousin Jimmy after Thanksgiving dinner.
- lotharbot 15y agoA large number of workers with Zero Marginal Product can be a sign of an economy in transition -- that is, a sign that people are employed in positions where they may have been productive in the past, but changes in the overall environment have rendered them obsolete. This does not mean they're incapable of doing valuable work. It just means they haven't yet finished the transition from whatever no-value-added position they were in to a value-added position.