EPTI'm personally more interested in cooperatives.
European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 606
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Incognoto
France10239 Posts
I'm personally more interested in cooperatives. | ||
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Laurens
Belgium4553 Posts
On November 29 2016 18:51 Incognoto wrote: I'm still unsure about the idea of basic income. I think it may work (yes, it's like a drastic contradiction of everything I've said so far) but I'm unsure yet. I'm personally more interested in cooperatives. It better work, or we'll be in trouble. Here's an article from a Belgian newspaper 2 months ago: www.hln.be It's in Dutch, the title reads: "100.000 students are taking an education without future". (Note that our population is only 11 million.) The reason cited is automation, making several courses obsolete. It further states that Deloitte did some research and finds that 300.000 students in The Netherlands are doing a course that results in a job that will no longer exist in 20 years. I have no doubt that there is some exaggeration in there, but the general point stands. | ||
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Incognoto
France10239 Posts
Back in the 50s-60s, during the harvest period everyone would pitch in to help harvest wheat / corn. Today that is automated. I think you just need to go into sectors which require more brainpower, less brawn. Construction is still remarkably human though and tough to automate. Software can take over data manipulation and whatnot, most menial tasks (driving is still far off, maybe 20 years off) can also be automated. I'm a pilot (private atm) and I know that aircraft flying will not be automated in our lifetime, though a large amount of aircraft systems have been automated over the past years (just not the flying itself). The engineering position has been taken out of commercial aircraft (used to be 2 pilots + engineer, now the engineer is useless). I think we're far off from complete automation so the argument is a bit moot today, but big factories can and should be automated. I think it's a good thing. In terms of work, something else needs to be found. We can't keep hanging on to jobs for the sake of having jobs. Something I can see happening is many people coming together and buying a factory through cooperatives. Why not? That could work. They could democratically elect a CEO to run it all and get dividends from factory. Problem is that dividends and investors are hell-spawn in Europe so maybe people won't like the idea. I think there is always something useful which can be done, though obviously not everyone can do it. I really think people should stay in school and study long, that is the best job security. | ||
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opisska
Poland8852 Posts
You can see how we fight the increasing uselessness of work by creating more and more nonsensical jobs. Such an enormous quantity of people in the West now does completely disposable things just because we aren't able to restructure our society. People complain about the "cost of labour", but labor has actually become so cheap (compared to other inputs) that you have to hire people just to compete with your competitors who also hired people - look at how much worktime gets drowned in marketing, sales, advertising - so much of that is not really creating any value, just one-upping each other because everyone has so much workforce to use. Similarly with all the instances where you see a human being acting as essentially a holder of a sign, a door, a phone-answering machine or an excel spreadsheet. There is so much that could be instantly automated, but there is no pressure as long as the only way to obtain goods is to get paid for a job. Surely, lowering working hours is a reasonable step, but it's not the ultimate solution, because the really useful applications of human labour that will be left probably can't be divided into indefinitely small chunks. The problem with all this "post-scarcity" talk and with "automation taking over human work" though is that this isn't really happening as much as we would like to - because a lot of our "automation" is actually manually working children in poor Asian countries. At the moment, promoting basic income in Europe could seriously backfire just because the competition of countries where people will continue actually work. We have two options - either the whole world reaches the post-scarcity level or we establish complete self-sufficiency with respect to work-based societies. As long as we buy all our electronics from China, that's just not happening and the whole thing is a just a big farce. I have been really thinking about this topic a lot lately and all it brought me is sadness and grief for all the people who are wasting away their life doing something totally useless just because we can't collectively think of a better solution. But I still don't know the answer ... | ||
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Laurens
Belgium4553 Posts
On November 29 2016 20:16 Incognoto wrote: I think we're far off from complete automation so the argument is a bit moot today, but big factories can and should be automated. I think it's a good thing. In terms of work, something else needs to be found. We can't keep hanging on to jobs for the sake of having jobs. In some sectors, sure. The article talked about specific courses that train you for a job that would largely be automated in the next 20 years. With this knowledge, these courses should take in fewer students imo, but that isn't happening. The courses they mention include various economic ones, industrial agriculture, journalism (??), and some more. An automation example: Adidas moving its shoe factory from Asia (where it employs a total of one million workers according to the article) back to Germany, where it will be staffed by robots. www.theguardian.com Nike is doing the same. | ||
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RvB
Netherlands6262 Posts
On November 29 2016 18:51 Incognoto wrote: I'm still unsure about the idea of basic income. I think it may work (yes, it's like a drastic contradiction of everything I've said so far) but I'm unsure yet. I'm personally more interested in cooperatives. Since you seem to be liberal like me check out Friedman's negative income tax. It's a basic income which keeps some of the incentove to work. | ||
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RvB
Netherlands6262 Posts
When Minos Zombanakis devised Libor—the London interbank offered rate—half a century ago, he had no way of knowing it would star in one of history’s greatest financial scandals. The product of a big survey and a little math, Libor helps set interest rates worldwide, affecting the price of more than $300 trillion in mortgages, loans, and derivatives. Despite its ubiquity, few outside the world of finance had heard of Libor until 2012, when regulators found that a dozen banks—Barclays, UBS, and Citigroup among them—had colluded to manipulate the benchmark interest rate and fined them $9 billion. In this excerpt from The Fix (Wiley, December 2016), a forthcoming book about the Libor scandal, Bloomberg reporters Gavin Finch and Liam Vaughan trace the roots of this mysterious number. In 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Richard Nixon became president of the U.S., and 400,000 hippies descended on a sleepy New York farm near Woodstock. On the other side of the Atlantic, on a winter’s day in London, a mustachioed Greek banker named Minos Zombanakis was taking his own small step into history. He’d hit upon a novel way to lend large amounts of money to companies and countries that wanted to borrow dollars but would rather avoid the rigors of U.S. financial regulation. As the sun set over the rooftops of London’s West End, Zombanakis was standing by his desk in Manufacturers Hanover’s new top-floor office, drinking Champagne and eating caviar with Iran’s central bank governor, Khodadad Farmanfarmaian. Zombanakis had just pulled off the biggest coup of his career with the signing of an $80 million loan for the cash-strapped shah of Iran. The Iranians had brought the beluga caviar and Zombanakis the vintage Champagne—the party went on into the night. www.bloomberg.com For anyone interested this is about Libor. The article is too big to post it all but I think it's interesting enough to share anyway. It gives some insight in the creation of Libor and how it works and the scandal surrounding it. | ||
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
On November 29 2016 18:50 RvB wrote: A good source please. Shadowstats gives negative economic growth for the last 10 years which is obviously wrong. It's also data from the US and not the EU. Here's the BLS defending the CPI if you want to read it. www.bls.gov Do you have any data supporting your claim that low skilled workers have lower wages? I can only find average real wages sadly. The 2nd part of your post I dont really know what you're trying to say sorry. Leeching from everything else? Is industry leeching from agriculture as well? I don't get your dislike of services. What does it matter when services is not actually creating physical goods. If we have enough machines to create them an increase in non physical goods is fine. Don't you prefer personal advice for your mortgage as well? Does that make these people less valuable because they don't provide you something physical? Yes a coffee shop in Paris is worth more than in Botswana but that is because France is more productive than Botswana. This isn't just in capital but also in education, a strong government, the rule of law etc. Someone in Botswana simply produces less for the same amount of labour so they get paid less. I don't see anything wrong with that. Here is an article from a big German newspaper (sorry it's in German) on wages gives the following chart which shows the overall real wages (the bottom curve in pink) and the union-based real wages. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/5cetVsr.png) http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2016-05/gehalt-tarifloehne-gewerkschaften-gehalt-steigerung-deutschland In the article it further says that in West-Germany only 60% and in East-Germany 47% get such a union-based "Tariflohn" (without further research I will assume it's around 55% overall). Now the math for non-union wages in 2014 is: 0.55*110.9+0.45*x=101.4 --> x=89.79. So the real wages for non-union based work are lower by around 10% than they were in 2014, while the real wages for others are 10% up. The article further says that these contracts are very prevalent in low-wage sectors. It's not easy to get a ton of data on split-data, but in general most articles that talk about who profits the most about income increases say that it's basically top-to-bottom. Managers have the biggest wage increases (so even higher than the +10% of the union-wages), then intermediate management then specialists and so on. Hence, the poor are always getting less than the average. Which is pretty logical, as they are easily replaceable if states are not forcing minimum wages and higher increases. Inflation for the poorer classes should obviously not be increasing as drastically as shadowstats suggest. However there are many alternate approaches for inflation, since it is without a doubt a very complicated topic. E.g. how to deal with old products getting replaced by new ones that are better but more expensive, how to deal with luxury products of the same category emerging (e.g. organic food in the food sector) or how to deal with increasing rents in city areas, when cheaper alternates emerge further away from the centers. The experimental CPI-E for elderly people in America is roughly 8% higher than the traditional CPI over the course of 30-years. When I'm saying leeching from everyone else it means pretty much the same as you say. France is more productive than Botswana. The quality of your labor is not the deciding factor that you get paid more, it's that you can demand more because everyone else is also getting paid more and because your work is paid as a part of the overall experience your coffee bar provides, which is a result of the products your serve and the enviroment you are in. But again, it is not your labor that is drastically worth that much more. It is that there is the demand for your labor in that economy that creates the wage (and why we need higher wages, so that we increase demand and get higher growth, which we don't get from rich people fooling around on the stock markets). | ||
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
On November 30 2016 03:32 Big J wrote: When I'm saying leeching from everyone else it means pretty much the same as you say. France is more productive than Botswana. The quality of your labor is not the deciding factor that you get paid more, it's that you can demand more because everyone else is also getting paid more and because your work is paid as a part of the overall experience your coffee bar provides, which is a result of the products your serve and the enviroment you are in. But again, it is not your labor that is drastically worth that much more. It is that there is the demand for your labor in that economy that creates the wage (and why we need higher wages, so that we increase demand and get higher growth, which we don't get from rich people fooling around on the stock markets). You don't really get paid more than a service provider in Botswana if you account for purchasing power. It's not like anybody's position in the service economy is inflated, they're at the same place of the hierarchy were anybody with the equivalent job in any other economy is. If you cut hair in Paris you'll nominally earn more money than someone with the same occuption in a cheaper area, but likewise everything is more expensive. There's no leeching happening in the sense you're implying. | ||
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Dangermousecatdog
United Kingdom7084 Posts
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
On November 30 2016 05:37 Nyxisto wrote: No of course the quality of life overall is much better for everybody in Paris, but the service provider in country X is at the same relative place as someone in country Y (provided the services are about equally popular in both countries. Obviously everybody in Botswana is a lot poorer than their equivalent in Paris. Which in essence means that such a service provider is sustained by the producing society and their machines. Which I don't mind. I like services. I like people being sustained by machines. Whether you distributed by the market or centralist I don't care, just distribute it. | ||
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Dangermousecatdog
United Kingdom7084 Posts
On November 30 2016 05:37 Nyxisto wrote: You wrote "You don't really get paid more than a service provider in Botswana if you account for purchasing power." That is literally untrue. They are not in the same relative place. PPP wise, that Parisian hairdresser is so much richer. No of course the quality of life overall is much better for everybody in Paris, but the service provider in country X is at the same relative place as someone in country Y (provided the services are about equally popular in both countries. Obviously everybody in Botswana is a lot poorer than their equivalent in Paris. | ||
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SoSexy
Italy3725 Posts
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
On December 01 2016 05:23 SoSexy wrote: Norway arrested Krekar. Italy withdrew its extradiction claim. Krekar was set free. My country should just drown in the mediterranean and be repopulated by people with some moral sense. Wow. The fuck? Definitely sounds like a decision of dubious wisdom, to put it lightly. | ||
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SoSexy
Italy3725 Posts
On December 01 2016 05:26 LegalLord wrote: Wow. The fuck? Definitely sounds like a decision of dubious wisdom, to put it lightly. Welcome to Italy. I always say 'Italy is the best country in the world - until something bad happens to you. Then it is the worst'. (10+ years trials, people getting sued for 'kidnapping' by a thief that they discovered and locked into a room waiting for the police etc.) | ||
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TheDwf
France19747 Posts
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farvacola
United States18846 Posts
On December 02 2016 04:11 TheDwf wrote: Hollande just announced that he would not run for a second mandate. How does this news strike you? This is a good thing, no? | ||
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Furikawari
France2522 Posts
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
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