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Our economy is in a bubble like everything else. In the 1960s a Big Mac meal cost under a dollar, now in California it is $18. We are headed for a Great Depress

Our economy is in a bubble like everything else. In the 1960s a Big Mac meal cost under a dollar, now in California it is $18. We are headed for a Great Depression as AI and innovation eats jobs, and people will have to learn new skills to find a job. There is an article called The Rise of the Rest: https://fareedzakaria.com/columns/2008/05/12/the-rise-of-the-rest https://fareedzakaria.com/columns/2008/05/12/the-rise-of-the... that talked about Russia getting more aggressive, and everyone else growing their economies and competing with the USA and Europe. It is a global economy and a global war. It is from this book: https://www.amazon.com/Post-American-World-Rise-Rest/dp/024195875X https://www.amazon.com/Post-American-World-Rise-Rest/dp/0241...

BenFranklin100 3y ago
Innovation — that is technological progress — creates net jobs. AI is no different nor is continued automation.
- gregjor 3y ago
  Innovation can create jobs, but at the same time it can displace people from their jobs. Innovation in manufacturing created jobs overseas in places with cheaper labor and less regulation, while eliminating jobs in the USA. AI may do the same, whether by actually replacing people with technology or simply outsourcing overseas and calling it AI like Amazon and others have done. While the "labor market" works globally, across borders, employment does not. Just like food -- American produces more food than Americans need, but people in other parts of the world (and even plenty of poor Americans) don't have enough to eat. So while it's generally true that innovation can lead to net job creation globally, it has local effects that can lead to unemployment and displacement.
  - realusername 3y ago
    The US is currently at a chronically low unemployment rate of 3.8% which means full employment. This fear of the global labor market and technological changes creating mass unemployment hasn't materialized until now so I don't see why it would at this point.
    - gregjor 3y ago
      That seems like a naive reading of the employment rate. A lot of Americans have jobs that don't pay a living wage, and don't have benefits. Many people do gig work to make ends meet. A person who used to have a good-paying manufacturing job but now works as a Walmart greeter with no benefits counts as employed, but with some significant qualitative differences because the manufacturing job went to Mexico or China. People with expensive degrees working as baristas count as employed, but they probably don't think of their situation as "full employment" as fake AI companies outsource jobs to India. The global labor market enables labor arbitrage. A person in India or Vietnam gets an offshored job and goes from 0 to 2. A person in Detroit loses their good job and gets hired at Burger King, going from 8 to 4. The savings goes into the pockets of people like Jeff Bezos. My point was to distinguish between global trends and broadly true -- at scale -- claims about innovation and technology improving employment conditions and local effects caused by job displacement. Those happen together. It does little good to laid-off programmers in California to learn that their sacrifice means thousands of Indian programmers now have jobs.
      - realusername 3y ago
        That's because people nowadays are working in jobs with pretty poor union support compared to the manufacturing jobs of the past so there's not much competition involved when raising salaries. As for the global trends, nothing points at job displacement until now, everything until now points to the pie getting larger, the opposite of your statement. I doubt you could fit the needs of any country on earth with just its local workforce nowadays anyways, even China itself can't. It's been a dozen technological revolutions and none of that happened already so I don't see why the next one would. Black swan events can always happen of course but I would not bet on it.
gregjor 3y ago
I no longer live in the US. A Big Mac costs $4 in Thailand, but I can find better burgers for less. More and more Americans are figuring out how they get scammed and ripped off and leaving.
teamspirit 3y ago
This is demonstrably untrue. The current most expensive Big Mac is $8.09 in the US [0]. [0] https://pantryandlarder.com/mccheapest https://pantryandlarder.com/mccheapest
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  That's not the price of a meal. I'm not sure if you get all the way up to $18 after making it a meal and adding tax/tip/etc but it's insane that McDonald's charges anywhere near that much for their bottom tier food.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    I was cleaning my car out yesterday and found a McDs receipt from my son. He spent $17.47 on a quarter pounder meal near Seattle last summer. He did add bacon for 1.99 plus tax, but it is possible to get up around $18 for a single meal. I'm sure the prices are higher today.
  - nozzlegear 3y ago
    I don't think McDonald's accepts tips.
- jmpman 3y ago
  He said Big Mac Meal. Where I live, outside of California, it’s $10.49 for a medium, and $10.99 for a large according to the McDonalds app.
  - tomjakubowski 3y ago
    A big mac meal is about that price, or lower, at any McDonalds I have been to in southern California. I spot-checked a random location by me: $6.29 for the sandwich, $9.69 (before tax) for a medium meal, $11.19 for a large. That's about double what the menu price was in suburban Chicago ~20 years ago. Extrapolating from the map, I don't know where even a large big mac meal would cost $18 in CA
- orionblastar 3y ago
ManuelKiessling 3y ago
Comparing absolute numbers isn’t helpful, though — the only relevant question to ask is always this: how many hours does the average American have to work to afford X, then and now?

BenFranklin100 3y ago

Innovation — that is technological progress — creates net jobs. AI is no different nor is continued automation.

gregjor 3y ago
Innovation can create jobs, but at the same time it can displace people from their jobs. Innovation in manufacturing created jobs overseas in places with cheaper labor and less regulation, while eliminating jobs in the USA. AI may do the same, whether by actually replacing people with technology or simply outsourcing overseas and calling it AI like Amazon and others have done. While the "labor market" works globally, across borders, employment does not. Just like food -- American produces more food than Americans need, but people in other parts of the world (and even plenty of poor Americans) don't have enough to eat. So while it's generally true that innovation can lead to net job creation globally, it has local effects that can lead to unemployment and displacement.
- realusername 3y ago
  The US is currently at a chronically low unemployment rate of 3.8% which means full employment. This fear of the global labor market and technological changes creating mass unemployment hasn't materialized until now so I don't see why it would at this point.
  - gregjor 3y ago
    That seems like a naive reading of the employment rate. A lot of Americans have jobs that don't pay a living wage, and don't have benefits. Many people do gig work to make ends meet. A person who used to have a good-paying manufacturing job but now works as a Walmart greeter with no benefits counts as employed, but with some significant qualitative differences because the manufacturing job went to Mexico or China. People with expensive degrees working as baristas count as employed, but they probably don't think of their situation as "full employment" as fake AI companies outsource jobs to India. The global labor market enables labor arbitrage. A person in India or Vietnam gets an offshored job and goes from 0 to 2. A person in Detroit loses their good job and gets hired at Burger King, going from 8 to 4. The savings goes into the pockets of people like Jeff Bezos. My point was to distinguish between global trends and broadly true -- at scale -- claims about innovation and technology improving employment conditions and local effects caused by job displacement. Those happen together. It does little good to laid-off programmers in California to learn that their sacrifice means thousands of Indian programmers now have jobs.
    - realusername 3y ago
      That's because people nowadays are working in jobs with pretty poor union support compared to the manufacturing jobs of the past so there's not much competition involved when raising salaries. As for the global trends, nothing points at job displacement until now, everything until now points to the pie getting larger, the opposite of your statement. I doubt you could fit the needs of any country on earth with just its local workforce nowadays anyways, even China itself can't. It's been a dozen technological revolutions and none of that happened already so I don't see why the next one would. Black swan events can always happen of course but I would not bet on it.

gregjor 3y ago

I no longer live in the US. A Big Mac costs $4 in Thailand, but I can find better burgers for less. More and more Americans are figuring out how they get scammed and ripped off and leaving.

teamspirit 3y ago

This is demonstrably untrue. The current most expensive Big Mac is $8.09 in the US [0]. [0] https://pantryandlarder.com/mccheapest https://pantryandlarder.com/mccheapest

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
That's not the price of a meal. I'm not sure if you get all the way up to $18 after making it a meal and adding tax/tip/etc but it's insane that McDonald's charges anywhere near that much for their bottom tier food.
- brewdad 3y ago
  I was cleaning my car out yesterday and found a McDs receipt from my son. He spent $17.47 on a quarter pounder meal near Seattle last summer. He did add bacon for 1.99 plus tax, but it is possible to get up around $18 for a single meal. I'm sure the prices are higher today.
- nozzlegear 3y ago
  I don't think McDonald's accepts tips.
jmpman 3y ago
He said Big Mac Meal. Where I live, outside of California, it’s $10.49 for a medium, and $10.99 for a large according to the McDonalds app.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  A big mac meal is about that price, or lower, at any McDonalds I have been to in southern California. I spot-checked a random location by me: $6.29 for the sandwich, $9.69 (before tax) for a medium meal, $11.19 for a large. That's about double what the menu price was in suburban Chicago ~20 years ago. Extrapolating from the map, I don't know where even a large big mac meal would cost $18 in CA
orionblastar 3y ago

ManuelKiessling 3y ago

Comparing absolute numbers isn’t helpful, though — the only relevant question to ask is always this: how many hours does the average American have to work to afford X, then and now?