10 ms·

The economy doubling in size helps most people even if the resulting wealth is unevenly distributed. Goods, services, technologies, jobs, etc are good.

by slibhb 3y ago

Retric 3y ago
Hardly, 99% of the population can be worse off with a sufficiently uneven distribution despite 2x GDP growth. Read up on countries hit by the “resource curse” where dictators suddenly don’t care about the productivity of most of their citizens. Also, extremely uneven economic distributions tend to be bad for large segments of the population due to inherently limited resources like desirable beach front property as well as artificially limited resources like city apartments.
notfromhere 3y ago
No it doesn't. Growth in the economy has to increase real wages, and real wages need to keep pace with housing, food, healthcare, etc increases in order to be meaningful. More jobs are only good if they actually provide a living wage.
- Alupis 3y ago
  > More jobs are only good if they actually provide a living wage. This is false if you spend even a few seconds thinking about it. Not all jobs are intended to "live" off of. Most of your entry-level jobs were supposed to be for highschool and college kids working part time. The problem is we have more and more people never graduating out of entry level positions, and today we have folks demanding those entry level positions support a comfortable lifestyle. You're supposed to graduate out of entry level work after you acquire skills, training, and/or education. Why are people not "moving up" is the real problem...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Supermancho 3y ago
    > Most of your entry-level jobs were supposed to be for highschool and college kids working part time. This is some soft language hiding some bad assumptions. "supposed to be" - what does this mean? because it's a lot more interesting...low skilled jobs, are probably what we're going to be talking about. However, it's not the 1950s anymore. eg Staffing a movie theater is not a part-time job (which you would know if you have ever worked one), even post-covid. Targeting for graduates (or current students) is reserved for economies like college towns, historically. Those places have also experienced wages rising noticeably over, at least, the last 2 decades. Industrial and metropolitan areas don't have enough "school labor" to staff all the unskilled positions, regardless. > Not all jobs are intended to "live" off of If you have a fulltime job, the minimum wage is intended to allow you to survive^. The main issue is that places with fulltime positions open to unskilled labor, have living costs that outpace the minimum wage...all the way out to the most rural of US towns. The financial guidelines for employees from McDonalds, Wallmart, etc are telling. ^Claiming that jobs that pay minimum wage and only allow working 30 hours a week, aren't intended to "live" off of, is cherry picking exploitative employers. This is not compelling, nor the common case, so we can focus the discussion on the issues that the majority of the economy deal with.
    - Alupis 3y ago
      > If you have a fulltime job, the minimum wage is intended to allow you to survive This is the issue - the idea that minimum wage is supposed to be "livable" is a modern notion. Unskilled labor probably shouldn't be livable. If someone can be trained to replace you in a few minutes (i.e. unskilled labor), then the truth is your labor is not worth a lot. We need more people moving up into skilled labor. It's really hard to imagine someone working 30+ years at a job and not developing skills... yet that is what's happening more often today than ever before. Highschool and College kids don't need a living wage. They need flexible hours, and schedules that fit their available time (night shift, swing shift, whatever...).
      - carlosjobim 3y ago
        > Unskilled labor probably shouldn't be livable. The only way for that to work is to have a slave population, because why should a living and breathing human being waste their time and their life with work that doesn't even sustain them? The concept of "unskilled labour" is a lie. Otherwise you could hire dead people from the graveyard. > Highschool and College kids don't need a living wage. Do you have any good arguments as to why you should be allowed to have a living wage?
  - OGWhales 3y ago
    > The problem is we have more and more people never graduating out of entry level positions, and today we have folks demanding those entry level positions support a comfortable lifestyle. That doesn’t sound right. To me it seems obvious the problem is these jobs used to provide more purchasing power than they do today. The increased grievance would be because of this drop in purchasing power, not because people are suddenly demanding a “comfortable” (<- loaded word) lifestyle out of the blue.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    > Most of your entry-level jobs were supposed to be for highschool and college kids working part time Did McDonalds used to be closed during weekdays when all their cooks and register staff were in school? I don't remember that.
  - notfromhere 3y ago
    You are fundamentally asking someone else to subsidize the cost of that labor.
- slibhb 3y ago
  I don't agree: having more stuff makes people's lives better even if that doesn't show up in terms of real wages.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Not if they can't afford the basics, though. Another way of framing the problem GP is pointing out is: necessities are getting increasingly expensive relative to trinkets and niceties.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    No it doesn’t. If I spend $100 on takeout because I don’t have time to cook a fresh meal that increases gdp but makes my life worse.
  - smolder 3y ago
    It very much depends on what stuff you're talking about. Consumption and QoL are only loosely correlated. If we have a culture that values status signalling, everyone may might work harder to afford status signalling without any real benefit to their quality of life. Efficiency of consumption matters. The relationship between dollars spent to degree of life improvement is nowhere close to 1:1. Some purchases pay dividends in that sense while others come with hidden costs and fleeting benefits.
Sterm 3y ago
If it did US life expectancy wouldn't lower today than it was in 2008.
- philwelch 3y ago
  That’s mostly due to obesity, which is a consequence of the quantity and (flavor) quality of food getting better over time; a side effect of economic prosperity.
  - r00fus 3y ago
    s/economic prosperity/lack of regulation/ Palm oil is in everything in the US, in France there's a lot more lighter oils and butter.
    - philwelch 3y ago
      The obesity epidemic hasn’t spared France either: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_France https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_France
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    You meant getting worse.
    - philwelch 3y ago
      No, I didn’t. Obesity is a side effect of having so much food that calories are cheap and plentiful. That’s why obesity rates are rising everywhere in the first world. It’s also something virtually unprecedented in human history.
      - actionfromafar 3y ago
        And it won't last. Fossil fuels make up almost all fertilizer.
  - 3y ago
mepian 3y ago
Ah yes, the good ol' trickle-down economics.
- masfuerte 3y ago
  AKA tinkle-down economics.
- Alupis 3y ago
  It's very difficult to argue in good faith "trickle-down" economics was/is a failure. A rising tide obviously raises all ships, including the nation's poorest. To create vast wealth generally requires vast resources, which requires vast amounts of people. Behemoths the size of Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Google, et al employ significant chunks of the population - and not just directly. Trickle-down doesn't mean everyone will be a millionaire by doing nothing... instead, it means a ton of smaller companies are boosted while servicing larger companies, and so on - spreading wealth around in terms of employment and providing people with a living they can fairly earn.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > A rising tide obviously raises all ships, including the nation's poorest. To throw a wrench in that tired metaphor: a rising tide may raise all ships, but a fat lot of good that does to the poor, if it's only the well-of that can afford to buy a boat.
    - Alupis 3y ago
      You're missing the point. Even the poor do better when there's more jobs available, more job mobility, more housing, more stores, etc. All things that are created by wealthy companies and individuals. Everyone, including our poorest, benefit from a growing economy. We just have to examine our average poverty-level person, and compare them to poverty-level persons of other nations to understand this point.
      - sangnoir 3y ago
louthy 3y ago
Something D O O economics
FpUser 3y ago
Not when more and more people can no longer afford place to live and lots of other things for which prices have skyrocketed.

The economy doubling in size helps most people even if the resulting wealth is unevenly distributed. Goods, services, technologies, jobs, etc are good.

by slibhb 3y ago

The economy doubling in size helps most people even if the resulting wealth is unevenly distributed. Goods, services, technologies, jobs, etc are good.

Retric 3y ago

Hardly, 99% of the population can be worse off with a sufficiently uneven distribution despite 2x GDP growth. Read up on countries hit by the “resource curse” where dictators suddenly don’t care about the productivity of most of their citizens. Also, extremely uneven economic distributions tend to be bad for large segments of the population due to inherently limited resources like desirable beach front property as well as artificially limited resources like city apartments.

notfromhere 3y ago

No it doesn't. Growth in the economy has to increase real wages, and real wages need to keep pace with housing, food, healthcare, etc increases in order to be meaningful. More jobs are only good if they actually provide a living wage.

Alupis 3y ago
> More jobs are only good if they actually provide a living wage. This is false if you spend even a few seconds thinking about it. Not all jobs are intended to "live" off of. Most of your entry-level jobs were supposed to be for highschool and college kids working part time. The problem is we have more and more people never graduating out of entry level positions, and today we have folks demanding those entry level positions support a comfortable lifestyle. You're supposed to graduate out of entry level work after you acquire skills, training, and/or education. Why are people not "moving up" is the real problem...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Supermancho 3y ago
  > Most of your entry-level jobs were supposed to be for highschool and college kids working part time. This is some soft language hiding some bad assumptions. "supposed to be" - what does this mean? because it's a lot more interesting...low skilled jobs, are probably what we're going to be talking about. However, it's not the 1950s anymore. eg Staffing a movie theater is not a part-time job (which you would know if you have ever worked one), even post-covid. Targeting for graduates (or current students) is reserved for economies like college towns, historically. Those places have also experienced wages rising noticeably over, at least, the last 2 decades. Industrial and metropolitan areas don't have enough "school labor" to staff all the unskilled positions, regardless. > Not all jobs are intended to "live" off of If you have a fulltime job, the minimum wage is intended to allow you to survive^. The main issue is that places with fulltime positions open to unskilled labor, have living costs that outpace the minimum wage...all the way out to the most rural of US towns. The financial guidelines for employees from McDonalds, Wallmart, etc are telling. ^Claiming that jobs that pay minimum wage and only allow working 30 hours a week, aren't intended to "live" off of, is cherry picking exploitative employers. This is not compelling, nor the common case, so we can focus the discussion on the issues that the majority of the economy deal with.
  - Alupis 3y ago
    > If you have a fulltime job, the minimum wage is intended to allow you to survive This is the issue - the idea that minimum wage is supposed to be "livable" is a modern notion. Unskilled labor probably shouldn't be livable. If someone can be trained to replace you in a few minutes (i.e. unskilled labor), then the truth is your labor is not worth a lot. We need more people moving up into skilled labor. It's really hard to imagine someone working 30+ years at a job and not developing skills... yet that is what's happening more often today than ever before. Highschool and College kids don't need a living wage. They need flexible hours, and schedules that fit their available time (night shift, swing shift, whatever...).
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      > Unskilled labor probably shouldn't be livable. The only way for that to work is to have a slave population, because why should a living and breathing human being waste their time and their life with work that doesn't even sustain them? The concept of "unskilled labour" is a lie. Otherwise you could hire dead people from the graveyard. > Highschool and College kids don't need a living wage. Do you have any good arguments as to why you should be allowed to have a living wage?
- OGWhales 3y ago
  > The problem is we have more and more people never graduating out of entry level positions, and today we have folks demanding those entry level positions support a comfortable lifestyle. That doesn’t sound right. To me it seems obvious the problem is these jobs used to provide more purchasing power than they do today. The increased grievance would be because of this drop in purchasing power, not because people are suddenly demanding a “comfortable” (<- loaded word) lifestyle out of the blue.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  > Most of your entry-level jobs were supposed to be for highschool and college kids working part time Did McDonalds used to be closed during weekdays when all their cooks and register staff were in school? I don't remember that.
- notfromhere 3y ago
  You are fundamentally asking someone else to subsidize the cost of that labor.
slibhb 3y ago
I don't agree: having more stuff makes people's lives better even if that doesn't show up in terms of real wages.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Not if they can't afford the basics, though. Another way of framing the problem GP is pointing out is: necessities are getting increasingly expensive relative to trinkets and niceties.
- midasuni 3y ago
  No it doesn’t. If I spend $100 on takeout because I don’t have time to cook a fresh meal that increases gdp but makes my life worse.
- smolder 3y ago
  It very much depends on what stuff you're talking about. Consumption and QoL are only loosely correlated. If we have a culture that values status signalling, everyone may might work harder to afford status signalling without any real benefit to their quality of life. Efficiency of consumption matters. The relationship between dollars spent to degree of life improvement is nowhere close to 1:1. Some purchases pay dividends in that sense while others come with hidden costs and fleeting benefits.

Sterm 3y ago

If it did US life expectancy wouldn't lower today than it was in 2008.

philwelch 3y ago
That’s mostly due to obesity, which is a consequence of the quantity and (flavor) quality of food getting better over time; a side effect of economic prosperity.
- r00fus 3y ago
  s/economic prosperity/lack of regulation/ Palm oil is in everything in the US, in France there's a lot more lighter oils and butter.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    The obesity epidemic hasn’t spared France either: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_France https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_France
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  You meant getting worse.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    No, I didn’t. Obesity is a side effect of having so much food that calories are cheap and plentiful. That’s why obesity rates are rising everywhere in the first world. It’s also something virtually unprecedented in human history.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      And it won't last. Fossil fuels make up almost all fertilizer.
- 3y ago

mepian 3y ago

Ah yes, the good ol' trickle-down economics.

masfuerte 3y ago
AKA tinkle-down economics.
Alupis 3y ago
It's very difficult to argue in good faith "trickle-down" economics was/is a failure. A rising tide obviously raises all ships, including the nation's poorest. To create vast wealth generally requires vast resources, which requires vast amounts of people. Behemoths the size of Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Google, et al employ significant chunks of the population - and not just directly. Trickle-down doesn't mean everyone will be a millionaire by doing nothing... instead, it means a ton of smaller companies are boosted while servicing larger companies, and so on - spreading wealth around in terms of employment and providing people with a living they can fairly earn.
- tivert 3y ago
  > A rising tide obviously raises all ships, including the nation's poorest. To throw a wrench in that tired metaphor: a rising tide may raise all ships, but a fat lot of good that does to the poor, if it's only the well-of that can afford to buy a boat.
  - Alupis 3y ago
    You're missing the point. Even the poor do better when there's more jobs available, more job mobility, more housing, more stores, etc. All things that are created by wealthy companies and individuals. Everyone, including our poorest, benefit from a growing economy. We just have to examine our average poverty-level person, and compare them to poverty-level persons of other nations to understand this point.
    - sangnoir 3y ago

louthy 3y ago

Something D O O economics

FpUser 3y ago

Not when more and more people can no longer afford place to live and lots of other things for which prices have skyrocketed.