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JonnyBNoHo
United States6277 Posts
On October 27 2012 04:43 sam!zdat wrote: so does this mean that the real problem with the economy is "nothing particularly useful to do"? More or less. I think economists would say nothing to produce at current prices. So, you either buy stuff directly as the government or make it artificially cheaper through a tax cut or interest rate cut. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
But what I don't believe is that the entire problem is "fictional," in the sense that if only the way the money worked worked better, then everything would be great. Everybody seems to assume this and I think it's a bad assumption. I don't think the entire thing can be written off as some sort of negative feedback cycle in financial system. edit: I just feel like people who talk about economics and finance and stuff forget that there is a real world out there and that the graphs about interest rates and stuff is just a little back of the envelope model, basically, compared to the real thing. And then you get stuff like the negative feedback cycle explanation, which essentially tells me "there's a financial crisis because there's a financial crisis" and this one remains unconvinced | ||
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Sub40APM
6336 Posts
On October 27 2012 04:40 sam!zdat wrote: let's not start this. You're the one brought up anti-semitism without any real reason, the financial class does in fact control a large amount of the world's wealth, yes the Rothschilds are some of them, and yes it's possible to be concerned about this without being an anti-semite. Oh okay. Lets not start this, but go ahead and continue to inserting an antisemitic trope in here anyway. The Rothschild family today has less assets than George Soros or John Paulson. They have one bank, and that bank is primarily an M&A shop that generates respectable but not particular large returns.They have literally no impact on the way any of the major banks run. Neither the Rothschild nor the Rockefellers have anything to do with the current financial crisis, and to bring them into a discussion out of the blue cannot be understood outside of the context of conspiracy theory laden with antisemitism. | ||
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Kontys
Finland659 Posts
On October 27 2012 04:57 sam!zdat wrote: Yes, I think that's the problem. Our entire economic thinking is based on the idea that the potential for consumption is without limit of any kind, and our economic policies are based on stimulating that consumption without any consideration of what consumption is and is not a good idea in the first place. It's all just sort of lumped together into this amorphous pile of GDP, and making that number bigger is a "good" thing. Which is to say, I don't think the "normal operating level" is in fact a "normal operating level," I think it's a historically situated state of affairs which is coming to an end and we are willfully oblivious to this... edit: just look at how the economy wants to make things that fall apart quickly and have to be replaced, as opposed to making things that last for a long time and therefore preclude future demand... that's not rational at all. Well.. the operating level is defined by technological achievement and worker productivity. In terms of recessions and depressions, philosophical musings about what human activity should be directed at are futile. It's about how money works as a system. Or.. how it breaks down. What liberal economies are directed at are the satisfaction of individual needs. We have had other, rather un-succesful projects in human history... Making things that intentionally break are to my understanding something of a curiosity. It's actually a pretty funny phenomenon. For me, I don't think much of it. If I was a businessman-engineer I'd probably appreciate it, if there were few constraints on what I'm allowed to manufacture and sell. As is, there are millions of arbitrary constraints there, because ruthless businessmen have profiteered on human suffering since the dawn of time. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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Holy_AT
Austria978 Posts
And the way Money is being distributed is utter nonsense, the meaning of money and the reasons why it was introduced are no longer the reasons why it is being used to day and for what reasons. People are programmed in a way that they can not see reality. Is money here to exchange goods and services ? How is the relation between money and a certain service ? Is hard exhausting work rewarded ? Is complicated work rewarded, where you have to think allot until you cant and just blank out on the evening ? How is it possible that someone earns 1000 times or more then someone else ? Is he doing work that is 1000 x times more exhausting or complicated ? This aint humanly possible. And because of these malfunctions in the system that work/service is in no relation to the money being earned this system can not endure long term without being destroyed over and over again. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:20 Kontys wrote: Well.. the operating level is defined by technological achievement and worker productivity. In terms of recessions and depressions, philosophical musings about what human activity should be directed at are futile. It's about how money works as a system. Or.. how it breaks down. No, that's when you need philosophy the most... What liberal economies are directed at are the satisfaction of individual needs. We have had other, rather un-succesful projects in human history... Yes, yes, I'm a Marxist, get your straw men off your chest and then we can have an interesting discussion howabout? I've got no sympathy with your postmodernism, so if you just want to thrust it at me and have me buckle under in philosophical despair that's not going to work. Making things that intentionally break are to my understanding something of a curiosity. It's actually a pretty funny phenomenon. No, it's a major problem and the only reason that capitalism has sustained itself for as long as it has (among other mechanisms of devaluation, like wars and other kinds of potlatch) ruthless businessmen have profiteered on human suffering since the dawn of time. Oh, yes, well, carry on then I suppose... jeez | ||
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JonnyBNoHo
United States6277 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:21 Holy_AT wrote: Money does not exist it is just a program running in the heads of people. And the way Money is being distributed is utter nonsense, the meaning of money and the reasons why it was introduced are no longer the reasons why it is being used to day and for what reasons. People are programmed in a way that they can not see reality. Is money here to exchange goods and services ? How is the relation between money and a certain service ? Is hard exhausting work rewarded ? Is complicated work rewarded, where you have to think allot until you cant and just blank out on the evening ? How is it possible that someone earns 1000 times or more then someone else ? Is he doing work that is 1000 x times more exhausting or complicated ? This aint humanly possible. And because of these malfunctions in the system that work/service is in no relation to the money being earned this system can not endure long term without being destroyed over and over again. Well with technology you can easily be 1000X more productive. Ex. Compare an actor live on stage to an actor in a movie. The actor in the movie can be far more productive because technology will enable one performance to be repeated multiple times at little added cost. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:29 JonnyBNoHo wrote: Well with technology you can easily be 1000X more productive. Ex. Compare an actor live on stage to an actor in a movie. The actor in the movie can be far more productive because technology will enable one performance to be repeated multiple times at little added cost. But see that analogy is terrible because you are talking about art! An actor on a stage is different than an actor in a movie. It's totally disingenuous to think about it as "production" which can be compared in this way. | ||
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Rassy
Netherlands2308 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:11 sam!zdat wrote: @Kontys: Yeah, I understand all this actually. I understand what a crisis of effective demand is. But what I don't believe is that the entire problem is "fictional," in the sense that if only the way the money worked worked better, then everything would be great. Everybody seems to assume this and I think it's a bad assumption. I don't think the entire thing can be written off as some sort of negative feedback cycle in financial system. edit: I just feel like people who talk about economics and finance and stuff forget that there is a real world out there and that the graphs about interest rates and stuff is just a little back of the envelope model, basically, compared to the real thing. And then you get stuff like the negative feedback cycle explanation, which essentially tells me "there's a financial crisis because there's a financial crisis" and this one remains unconvinced The crisis in the end i think is the result of a huge re-alocation of purchase power on a global scale (towards asia/china) combined with limited resources.(this purchase power comes from asias economic growth and succes) Monetary expansion is done in cooperation with other major powers.(to prevent currency crisis) Asia was (and is) running faster, they made more of their monetary expansion in relation to the seize of it then we did of ours. | ||
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Kontys
Finland659 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:11 sam!zdat wrote: @Kontys: Yeah, I understand all this actually. I understand what a crisis of effective demand is. But what I don't believe is that the entire problem is "fictional," in the sense that if only the way the money worked worked better, then everything would be great. Everybody seems to assume this and I think it's a bad assumption. I don't think the entire thing can be written off as some sort of negative feedback cycle in financial system. edit: I just feel like people who talk about economics and finance and stuff forget that there is a real world out there and that the graphs about interest rates and stuff is just a little back of the envelope model, basically, compared to the real thing. And then you get stuff like the negative feedback cycle explanation, which essentially tells me "there's a financial crisis because there's a financial crisis" and this one remains unconvinced What would you direct human activity toward if you got to decide? How could you be certain that this direction is what's best, or what others want? On the other hand, you mention this, and it intrigues me, so I'll take a few more minutes try and explain "there's a financial crisis because.." Wall street cooked it up. The details are many and terrifying, but if I had to point to the most crucial, I'd pick a practice called shadow banking. Major banks used to own "small" special purpose investment vehicles in their balance sheets, hedge funds and such, that would profiteer on the different rates charged of long and short term loans. They would take out a multitude of short term loans themselves, and loan out these funds long, for a higher interest than they were paying for the short term loans of course. This meant that they would continuously need more short term loans to keep paying the older short term loans back. When their solvency (their ability to service their debts) came under scrutiny, they went bust almost immediately, simply because their business-model entirely relied on constant un-diminishing stream of cheap short term money. Well, this would have been okay, I guess, if the practice wasn't so widespread and so succesful, that about half of all the world's banking assets were in these "shadow banks". And well.. you can imagine the impact on the real economy when half of the world's banking sector goes asses overnight. The shadow banks weren't even the only problem. (I wrote some essays on the matter a year and half ago.. I'm not sure if I got it all right on shadow banks, but you get the idea: There was a financial crisis because the financial system came to be in terrible condition after years of short term profiteering by greedy people who either didn't know or didn't care what they were doing. My money, if it matters, is on the "didn't care", because they were swimming in gold) | ||
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Brainling
United States660 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:21 Holy_AT wrote: Money does not exist it is just a program running in the heads of people. And the way Money is being distributed is utter nonsense, the meaning of money and the reasons why it was introduced are no longer the reasons why it is being used to day and for what reasons. People are programmed in a way that they can not see reality. Is money here to exchange goods and services ? How is the relation between money and a certain service ? Is hard exhausting work rewarded ? Is complicated work rewarded, where you have to think allot until you cant and just blank out on the evening ? How is it possible that someone earns 1000 times or more then someone else ? Is he doing work that is 1000 x times more exhausting or complicated ? This aint humanly possible. And because of these malfunctions in the system that work/service is in no relation to the money being earned this system can not endure long term without being destroyed over and over again. Labor is just another economic resource. Supply and demand. Yes, digging ditches may be "hard", but anyone, short of the disabled, can learn how to dig a ditch. It takes about 15 minutes of training. So while the work may be HARD, it's not skilled, and I can pull almost anyone off the street and make them a ditch digger. That doesn't mean it's not good honest work, but that does mean that ditch diggers aren't going to get paid huge salaries. Now take what I do for a living, software engineering. Much more specialized skill. I cannot pull your average Joe off the street and turn them in to a top level programmer, I just can't. Hell, a huge chunk of people who actually graduate college with computer science degrees aren't even fully capable of performing in the modern software workforce. What does this mean in the end? My job skills are in much higher demand than a ditch digger, and the supply to fill those jobs is much much smaller. Thus I make a huge amount more than a ditch digger does, even though my work is not "harder", at least not in the physical sense. Essentially, I can do his job, but he can't do mine. This means that I am naturally going to be "worth" more. And I hate to use that term, because a ditch digger isn't some subhuman that isn't worth anything...but in the supply and demand workforce, I am simply worth more money. This starts to break down a bit at the very top level, where you have executives making 20 and 30 million a year, but that's an entirely different problem that completely breaks the basic S&D of labor. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:39 Kontys wrote: What would you direct human activity toward if you got to decide? How could you be certain that this direction is what's best, or what others want? Yeah, it's a hard problem, isn't it? Why don't we spend some time talking about that, hmmm? Wall street cooked it up. The details are many and terrifying, but if I had to point to the most crucial, I'd pick a practice called shadow banking. Yeah I read the book by Posner and he explained all about the shadow banks. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:43 Brainling wrote: Labor is just another economic resource. Supply and demand. Can you justify this claim? also, can you elaborate on the logical structure of the fragment "supply and demand" and how it fits into your claim? | ||
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Kontys
Finland659 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:24 sam!zdat wrote: No, that's when you need philosophy the most... Is philosophy going to feed clothe and house millions of jobless people? Political scientists call pushing your own agenda on the back of difficult short term circumstances "shock doctrine". I am very sad to see it having been used mostly for the purposes of conservatives and libertarians during the last few years. If you do have vision of how the world "could" work, say, without money, or somehow otherwise, I'd be interested to hear about it. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:44 Kontys wrote: Is philosophy going to feed clothe and house millions of jobless people? Don't be facile... Political scientists call pushing your own agenda on the back of difficult short term circumstances "shock doctrine". I am very sad to see it having been used mostly for the purposes of conservatives and libertarians during the last few years. You mean like what the IMF does? My point is that I don't believe the circumstances are short term. If you do have vision of how the world "could" work, say, without money, or somehow otherwise, I'd be interested to hear about it. What do you mean, "without money"? What makes you think I object to money? | ||
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Brainling
United States660 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:44 sam!zdat wrote: Can you justify this claim? also, can you elaborate on the logical structure of the fragment "supply and demand" and how it fits into your claim? Ask an economist? They'll tell you that labor is a supply and demand resource. Let me reverse your question: Why do you think a ditch digger should make as much money as I do? What skill does he bring to the work force that I don't? What skills do I bring to the work force that he doesn't? Do you feel people should be justly compensated for the unique abilities they bring? | ||
Gaga
Germany433 Posts
Tells you something how much trust the prophets of money have in each other. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On October 27 2012 05:48 Brainling wrote: Ask an economist? They'll tell you that labor is a supply and demand resource. Yes, I disagree with them. I'm wondering about your take on the matter. (well, I don't disagree that we TREAT it as such, my objection is normative.) Let me reverse your question: Why do you think a ditch digger should make as much money as I do? What skill does he bring to the work force that I don't? What skills do I bring to the work force that he doesn't? Do you feel people should be justly compensated for the unique abilities they bring? Yeah, of course. Only a total fool would disagree with this. | ||
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Brainling
United States660 Posts
The supply is either constrained or not, and there is either demand or there is not. The ratio of those two things will determine fair market value. Now, if you want to discuss whether workers are currently getting paid fair market value, that's definitely a discussion we can have, and one we would probably agree on (in most cases, they aren't). There is certainly an issue with the current pay structures, but that has way more to do with the decision makers skewing things toward themselves, than some break down in the basic idea of supply and demand. Current pay structures are FAR too top heavy, that's not in doubt...but I don't think the basic idea of S&D and incentive pay is a bad thing. | ||
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