The US Recovery

[DOR]

I do not negotiate my private faith and beliefs. They are mine alone. Elizabeth l I think said "I do not seek a window into men's hearts". As long as you conform to the law and do not harm others do and believe as you wish. It is not the business of Government to force some idea of 'social justice' on the population but to lead by example for the benefit of all.

Thank you for making my point for me.
What you believe, how you were raised, the history of your family have nothing to do with whether you are welcome in my community.
All that matters is how you behave.

[DOR]

Intolerance of intolerance is still intolerance. The same logic that suggests tolerance for other traits also suggests tolerance for intolerance. Other people aren't like you and don't think like you and that's just part of life. Sometimes "don't think like you" includes "hates random group of people for no reason." Sometimes it includes "hates random group of people for GOOD reason." (like a crime victim suddenly becoming suspicious of all men because men commit most crime, or Tutsis becoming suspicious of Hutu-inspired institutions cropping up in their midst).

Enforcing viewpoints on other cultures will result in blow-back, like all the right-wing governments popping up in Eastern Europe right now. This has been the same since time immemorial, and is why compromise is the basis of politics.

Another convert!

Yes, hating a random group of people because of no good reason is ... well, you know the drill.

[snapper]

Thank you for making my point for me.
What you believe, how you were raised, the history of your family have nothing to do with whether you are welcome in my community.
All that matters is how you behave.

In some communities it does matter. There Kings and Queens still in Europe - aristocrats too who's families pre-date the discovery of the Americas. Whole peoples and communities for that matter. Nearest neighbours to me right now - staying with my Husband - are Hutsuls, said to be descended from 'White Croats'. They have long horns much akin to the Swiss Alpine horn. We still have Shamans in the hills too - I met one about 7 months ago. Tradition is what binds a society/community together. Enforcement of your style of multiculturalism - while it may be 'socially just' (whatever that actually means) - is more divisive in enforcing your "intolerance of intolerance" than it is of respecting the traditions of others. It is intolerance of their history and being. They have a right to respect the traditions of their ancestors as long as it does not harm others.

[kato]

In some communities it does matter. There Kings and Queens still in Europe - aristocrats too who's families pre-date the discovery of the Americas.

Don't need to go to the aristocrats, we have a freakin' shooting club in this town that predates the discovery of the Americas.

And it's not a particular old or distinguished one. We have almost four dozen still active shooting clubs in this country who predate the introduction of firearms to Europe, including two dozen who predate Marco Polo visiting Kublai Khan.

[DOR]

Don't need to go to the aristocrats, we have a freakin' shooting club in this town that predates the discovery of the Americas.

And it's not a particular old or distinguished one. We have almost four dozen still active shooting clubs in this country who predate the introduction of firearms to Europe, including two dozen who predate Marco Polo visiting Kublai Khan.

I love it!
A shooting club that predates ... shooting!

[kato]

Well, they did have bows and stuff back then.

[GVChamp]

Another convert!

Yes, hating a random group of people because of no good reason is ... well, you know the drill.

I can tolerate random group of people hating other groups of people. Tolerate does not mean Accept.

[tbm3fan]

DOR question for you.

Was just listening to some tech guy on KFSO news radio doing an interview about future automation, 10-15 years, eliminating 70 million jobs in the U.S. Basically destroying the middle class as we know it. He sort of touched on that as a side effect. Of course there was the standard talk about acquiring new skills and retraining but nothing on how those people would pay for it now that they are out of work.

Now that guy was completely detached from those losing work since he was completely enthralled about the work he was doing in robotics. Typical disconnect one can get between science and real world effects. So what are economic gurus thinking about this?

I'm curious about how losing 70 million jobs to automation would affect Social Security taxes and Social Security solvency? Federal withholding taxes and Federal government solvency? Medicare solvency? Unemployment insurance taxes? Should robots pay SSI, Medicare, Fed Tax, and State Tax? People's opinion about immigration when a typical politician blames the loss on immigrants and not the actual cause? Is anyone really thinking this stuff through just going to wait till the shit hits the fan and then try to deal with it?

[DOR]

I’d start by vehemently disagreeing with the underlying premises: wide spread automation isn’t going to lead to wide spread unemployment. When one thinks in terms of “70 million jobs over 10-15 years,” one has to assume this is supposed to be a permanent thing, and if that were to happen, … it wouldn’t.


In 10-15 years, the US labor force rises by about 5%, and employment by about the same. If the number of jobs falls by 30%, that implies an unemployment rate of 36%. No US administration is going to continue doing what it’s doing as unemployment rises into the double digits, let alone tops 35%. Individual income tax revenues would fall by $500 billion, even with the wild-assed assumption that other wages were unaffected. Payroll taxes (ditto re: other wages) would fall by $350 billion, so now we’ve got budget deficit that’s three times as large, or an extra $1.5 trillion per year without The GOPer rip off plan.

Ain’t gonna happen.
Wouldn’t be prudent.

Somewhere along the way someone is going to impose a tax or something that makes that level of automation economic suicide for any corporation.

Electric power (mains) came about in the 1880s, just as automation (the assembly line) came about in the 1920s. Neither one led to wide spread unemployment, not immediately nor in the subsequent decades (the Great Depression wasn’t due to assembly lines).


Here’s two graphs to illustrate.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02032202
Management, Business and Financial operations employment, 1983-2017.
Identify the point at which personal computers automated the hell out of what people used to do in 1983.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USFIRE
All financial sector employees, 1939-2017.
Repeat the ID exercise.

[tbm3fan]

Ok, ok but what is automation now? Is it the old definition sited here or a much newer definition. One can foresee in the not to distant future all cab drivers, bus drivers, and truck drivers eliminated. While people are still discussing self driving cars there seems to be full speed ahead for commercial vehicles. I can also see all retail employees eliminated particularly when us older folks, who like the personal touch, fade out as major consumers. Consequently all warehouse employees. What else can be eliminated is open to the imagination. This all do to improved robotic technology and artificial intelligence. While desktop computers didn't put people out of work, as they actually created jobs, what happens when the desktop stays but a human is no longer needed?

Just supposing here. Being in the sciences I know the tendency to be so awed by the journey to learn new things, and create new things, yet pay little attention to the ethical and long term effects on society as a whole until afterwards.

[astralis]

i doubt it'd be anywhere close to 70 million jobs-- more likely there's going to be another large labor -shift-.

but that doesn't mean everything is hunky dory either, even as we're approaching full employment now, it's also pretty clear that there's a deep sense of discontent about how labor has shifted. i'd be concerned about the same thing regarding automaton. even without catastrophic job losses, there will be displacement.

[DOR]

Ok, ok but what is automation now? Is it the old definition sited here or a much newer definition. One can foresee in the not to distant future all cab drivers, bus drivers, and truck drivers eliminated. While people are still discussing self driving cars there seems to be full speed ahead for commercial vehicles. I can also see all retail employees eliminated particularly when us older folks, who like the personal touch, fade out as major consumers. Consequently all warehouse employees. What else can be eliminated is open to the imagination. This all do to improved robotic technology and artificial intelligence. While desktop computers didn't put people out of work, as they actually created jobs, what happens when the desktop stays but a human is no longer needed?

Just supposing here. Being in the sciences I know the tendency to be so awed by the journey to learn new things, and create new things, yet pay little attention to the ethical and long term effects on society as a whole until afterwards.

Automation … doing things automatically? So, the number crunchers that put astronauts into space (cf Hidden Figures, one hell of a great film) were replaced by calculators and calculators were replaced by computers. No more work for number crunchers. Multiply by retail workers and bank tellers.


US retail workers as a percent of total employment
1950s _ _ 8.2%
1960s _ _ 8.8%
1970s _ _10.0%
1980s _ _10.8%
1990s _ _11.1%
2000s _ _10.8%
2010s _ _10.5%

Now, given the widespread introduction of cash registers – no, they weren’t in every retail store in the 1950s – and later bar codes, bag-it-yourself and self-checkout, one would have expected retail employment to have collapsed in comparison to other kinds of employment, but it didn’t. Did you want me to check under the hood, ma'am?

I have no problem with “things are different now;” the combination of communications and computational power changes everything. Economic evolution moves at a faster pace, as we’ve seen in China vis-à-vis Japan/Taiwan/Korea. Things really are different now.

There’s also the demographic shift to consider. For every new worker (labor force) created in the 1950s, there were 2.6 new people (population). This dropped to 1:1 in the 1980s, and rose to the 1:2 range thereafter. More, from the 1950s to the 1970s, the share of the labor force under 25 years of age rose from 16% to 24%. In the 1990s to the 2010s, the share over 55 rose from 12% to 21%. So, retire a few (tens of) thousand truckers and … what happens?

[GVChamp]

I think the major divide is this part:

While desktop computers didn't put people out of work, as they actually created jobs, what happens when the desktop stays but a human is no longer needed?

I don't think of employment in terms of "jobs," I think of it in terms of "tasks." Automation and capital make certain tasks easier, which means I now have time to do other tasks, and other tasks become more economical. Because the dishwasher cleans my dishes, I have more time to cook. I can also cook much more extravagant meals, because now I don't have to spend as much time cleaning up the mess afterwards.

There will always be tasks at which humans are comparatively better than machines, so there will always be employment for humans.

I guess the hypothesis is that there will eventually be AI Robots that will be better and more cost-effective at every single task than low-skill humans. But that doesn't seem particularly likely. Even so, how does this actually play out in practice? Low-skill humans are too poor to afford robots...which means they have to find some sort of work to sustain themselves...and they'd create their own underground economy. it'd basically be like the poor in India today, vs how we work in the US. Poor Indians do all sorts of menial shit that is automated in the US. They don't NOT work, they work harder than we do.

The only way to get people not to work at all is to place them on the dole.


Should add that economists and engineers seem to think differently about problems. Like, Elon Musk wants to bore giant tunnels underground to ease traffic congestion. I'd prefer charging higher tolls.

[DOR]

Low-skill humans are too poor to afford robots...

How's that again?

Consider how widely spread smart phones are (which means we don't have to consider how many people have calculators, web browers or internet banking), and then recalculate the income needed to own a automation device.

Yes, I know an iPhone isn't a robot. But, it acts like one for the purpose of replacing people doing things they did 10 or 50 years ago.

[DOR]

Fiscal WTF 101

“Senate leadership, who had hoped to vote to pass the $1.5 trillion tax bill by late Thursday night, instead sent lawmakers home and began to search for a new way to offset the cost of the legislation,” per Erica Werner, Mike DeBonis and Damian Paletta. “They are looking to win the support of several senators, including Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has led a small group of colleagues in demanding that the bill not drive up the nation’s debt (too much). … The Senate parliamentarian ruled that a Corker-backed proposal to automatically raise taxes in the future if Republican expectations of higher growth did not materialize was not consistent with Senate rules. Although most of the Republicans would have been happy to move on and pass the bill, Corker stood his ground and demanded a solution. He is joined by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) in insisting the bill not drive up the deficit.”

Comment--
So, if the economy slows down more than a certain amount, taxes should rise. Unless one has taken an introduction to economics, in which case this is exactly, 180 degrees the wrong thing to do.

As Calvin explains to Hobbes, "It's backwards day."

Of course, we don’t know what the Administration thinks that economic pace might be since the Treasury has refused to release a formal assessment of the bill’s impact on the economy. The Treasury Inspector General is looking into that, as in "he's launched a formal investigation."

What we do know is that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office thinks it would add $1.4 trillion to the deficit in 2018-27. (Since there has never been any solid evidence from the CBO, Joint Congressional Taxation committee or Office of the Management of the Budget that anything in the bill would generate significantly more economic growth than a random throw of the dice, the “expected” $400 billion in revenue over the next decade is comprised of dark fog and shiny surfaces.)

This notion of raising taxes when the economy tanks makes sense if, and only if the economy is less important than the size of the budget. In other words, only in those places outside the set known as “planet earth.”

Which goes some ways toward explaining why there have been no committee hearings on this bill.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.547f246c9ac8