5 ms·

Productivity has stalled because there is no more competition with winner making it big. Part of it is too much regulation. Part is just that no-one bothers whe

Productivity has stalled because there is no more competition with winner making it big. Part of it is too much regulation. Part is just that no-one bothers when the big monopolies can and do destroy you. Bad government policies all around in both cases. Demand is not natural and was not for the past century. We have all our basics, as per the Maslow pyramid. Any future demand must be artificially induced with advertising. And with the fat-cats reaping profits every year old products are just rehashed with a sprinkle of new colours every year. Principle of least resistance. People working full employment will not change anything. The value of a second iPhone is zero after the first iPhone. Same for everything. Look into the Marginal Theory of Value.

js8 5y ago
To me it seems you both are really talking about the different parts of the same elephant. One of the Marx's objections about capitalism was if the capitalists are being rewarded for building services by additional capital ownership, who are they eventually gonna provide additional services to that this additional capital generates? And so we finally arrived at this endgame. This manifests as low demand, both from labor (unemployment is keeping wages down) and firms (lack of competition caused by lack of investment opportunities because of predicted lack of demand).
Ericson2314 5y ago
There are a lot of hidden assumptions in this response. With the wage share of income and employment fallen, there simply isn't enough purchasing power given to the masses to sustain the consumer economy at full throttle. If you want more growth, either you have to fix those things, or shift away from a consumer economy.
- axelroze 5y ago
  Yes. Universal Basic Income, with perhaps decaying value currencies, is needed once due to inflation everything gets too expensive while wages stagnate due to capital concentration. Or some big marxist wet dream revolution happens and the society resets. What is IMO most likely to happen is a proliferation of bullshit jobs as people need money (and hence need jobs which pay salary) because giving UBI is some sort of ultimate evil decadence of communism* or something (even though it is great for a consumption driven economy). So no taxation of the richer folk directly but indirect taxation through employment of pen-pushers. * UBI makes no sense in a communist society BTW. One of the core tenets is no money.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    > is needed once due to inflation everything gets too expensive while wages stagnate due to capital concentration We have seen vanishingly little inflation over the last decade precisely because the job market was so week. Rich people don't chase after basic goods, so healthcare and housing get more expensive but milk stays the same. I suggest taking a look at http://jwmason.org/slackwire/alternative-visions-of-inflation/ http://jwmason.org/slackwire/alternative-visions-of-inflatio... > What is IMO most likely to happen is a proliferation of bullshit jobs as people need money (and hence need jobs which pay salary) Yes given low demand for labor / strong employer power, productivity I think always declines. There isn't enough demand to do real work, and plenty of mouths that need to earn their feed. https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/construction-labor-shortage https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/construction-labor-shor... goes into some details of exactly how this played out in one case. > because giving UBI is some sort of ultimate evil decadence of communism* or something (even though it is great for a consumption driven economy). https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf laid it out nicely almost 80 years ago. The rich don't want demand-driven growth because they care about their slice of the pie in relative terms more than they do in absolute. Great essay shows just how ignorant we got in the post-war slide away of Keynesianism :(. > So no taxation of the richer folk directly but indirect taxation through employment of pen-pushers. I don't think that should be viewed as a tax on the rich per-se. The situation is still a regressive division of labor. The proliferation of low-productivity work simply represents the limits of the rich's ability to commandeer resources, after a certain point people do need to be paid off lest they get more mad. And remember this doesn't happen explicitly, but simply because the marginal cost of labor dips so low that further automation isn't worth it. > UBI makes no sense in a communist society BTW. One of the core tenets is no money. I don't think that need be a core tenant. Credit money (from banks) is on a spectrum with non-fungible deeply communal informal IOUs and reciprocity. UBI translates over that spectrum into basically mandatory social obligations to anyone in the village/tribe/whatever. What's bad is having no purchasing power or debts one cannot erase through bankruptcy. Or even letting the market collapse many dimensions to one with a single currency. In teasing out exactly what money is, we can keep the good parts.

js8 5y ago

To me it seems you both are really talking about the different parts of the same elephant. One of the Marx's objections about capitalism was if the capitalists are being rewarded for building services by additional capital ownership, who are they eventually gonna provide additional services to that this additional capital generates? And so we finally arrived at this endgame. This manifests as low demand, both from labor (unemployment is keeping wages down) and firms (lack of competition caused by lack of investment opportunities because of predicted lack of demand).

Ericson2314 5y ago

There are a lot of hidden assumptions in this response. With the wage share of income and employment fallen, there simply isn't enough purchasing power given to the masses to sustain the consumer economy at full throttle. If you want more growth, either you have to fix those things, or shift away from a consumer economy.

axelroze 5y ago
Yes. Universal Basic Income, with perhaps decaying value currencies, is needed once due to inflation everything gets too expensive while wages stagnate due to capital concentration. Or some big marxist wet dream revolution happens and the society resets. What is IMO most likely to happen is a proliferation of bullshit jobs as people need money (and hence need jobs which pay salary) because giving UBI is some sort of ultimate evil decadence of communism* or something (even though it is great for a consumption driven economy). So no taxation of the richer folk directly but indirect taxation through employment of pen-pushers. * UBI makes no sense in a communist society BTW. One of the core tenets is no money.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  > is needed once due to inflation everything gets too expensive while wages stagnate due to capital concentration We have seen vanishingly little inflation over the last decade precisely because the job market was so week. Rich people don't chase after basic goods, so healthcare and housing get more expensive but milk stays the same. I suggest taking a look at http://jwmason.org/slackwire/alternative-visions-of-inflation/ http://jwmason.org/slackwire/alternative-visions-of-inflatio... > What is IMO most likely to happen is a proliferation of bullshit jobs as people need money (and hence need jobs which pay salary) Yes given low demand for labor / strong employer power, productivity I think always declines. There isn't enough demand to do real work, and plenty of mouths that need to earn their feed. https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/construction-labor-shortage https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/construction-labor-shor... goes into some details of exactly how this played out in one case. > because giving UBI is some sort of ultimate evil decadence of communism* or something (even though it is great for a consumption driven economy). https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf laid it out nicely almost 80 years ago. The rich don't want demand-driven growth because they care about their slice of the pie in relative terms more than they do in absolute. Great essay shows just how ignorant we got in the post-war slide away of Keynesianism :(. > So no taxation of the richer folk directly but indirect taxation through employment of pen-pushers. I don't think that should be viewed as a tax on the rich per-se. The situation is still a regressive division of labor. The proliferation of low-productivity work simply represents the limits of the rich's ability to commandeer resources, after a certain point people do need to be paid off lest they get more mad. And remember this doesn't happen explicitly, but simply because the marginal cost of labor dips so low that further automation isn't worth it. > UBI makes no sense in a communist society BTW. One of the core tenets is no money. I don't think that need be a core tenant. Credit money (from banks) is on a spectrum with non-fungible deeply communal informal IOUs and reciprocity. UBI translates over that spectrum into basically mandatory social obligations to anyone in the village/tribe/whatever. What's bad is having no purchasing power or debts one cannot erase through bankruptcy. Or even letting the market collapse many dimensions to one with a single currency. In teasing out exactly what money is, we can keep the good parts.