Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[mainiac]

Then from one insider to another, you really seem to be missing the forest for the trees here.

This debate has somehow segued into how it would be super duper easy to reform the healthcare system.  Apparently the burden of proof is that if I have to disprove that in order to say that Keynes predicted a lower level of consumption then today.  Are you sure I'm the one missing the forest for the trees?

[RedKing]

Or you can easily make the argument that if wealth were more equitably distributed, we WOULDN'T need more than 15 hours. Especially when CEOs make more in 15 hours than I make in 4 YEARS. And more than smoe of their employees would make in 8 years.

One could easily make the argument.  One would be wrong.

Well, can't argue with that. By which I mean, I literally can't argue with that, because there's not enough "that" to argue with.
You're an economist, and your response is "No, because I said so"? Pretty weaksauce, bro.

Take net personal income of 9 trillion dollars.  Divide it by three because apparently soaking the rich will pay for us working one third as much.  We now have 3 trillion dollars net personal income.  Divide that by 320 million Americans.  That's less then 10,000 dollars per capita.  Multiply that by average household size of 2.58 perople and you are left with household income of about 25,000 dollars.  So assuming we flawlessly redirect all efforts towards perfect equality and there are no diseconomies of scale to this 15 hour work week our perfectly egalitarian society still has to get by on half as many resources per household.  However a great number of costs are not very elastic.  Having more free time wont really reduce the amount of healthcare you need.  So healthcare is now a massively bigger chunk of household spending, and it wasn't a small chunk to begin with...

That's an exquisitely crafted strawman. I particularly like the hat. And the nose.

I'm not calling for Communist-style flat pay (not that it was ever flat in Communist systems). But when CEO's salaries are thousands of times higher than their average employees (as opposed to the modest ratios in most of the rest of the world), then the system is fucking broken. Especially when the economies where those compensation rates are more modest also seem to be able to manage more egalitarian societies with things like subsidized healthcare and education.

I get it, you're a capitalist and you see me as a dirty, unwashed Marxist. That's why you have your Hillary body pillow and I'm all in for Bernie.

But all this is because I've seen capitalism up close, I've seen its gross excesses and I've seen the way it's destroying American businesses with its obsession with quarterly earnings and short-term profit, the way it's destroying Americans by shipping their jobs to "low-cost regions" and the way it's destroying American politics by making money equivalent to speech, with the result that a handful of rich ideologues are very loudly heard in the halls of power while the rest of us whisper in the dark.

[mainiac]

RedKing, I wasn't strawmanning you, I was showing the extreme case of how the numbers could be handled.

I'm not calling for Communist-style flat pay (not that it was ever flat in Communist systems). But when CEO's salaries are thousands of times higher than their average employees (as opposed to the modest ratios in most of the rest of the world), then the system is fucking broken.

Yeah, that's probably true.  But I was discussing whether or not it is possible for a society to sustain the levels of consumption it does with one third the labor.  Wait... maybe I hadn't considered everything...

[RedKing]

You're also equating dollars to resources, which you of all people should know is a false equivalency.

[mainiac]

It's an illuminating approximation however.

[RedKing]

Not over time, especially if you're trying to prove/disprove a theory comparing resource usage in two periods 80 years apart.

You might as well say the laws of thermodynamics have been disproven because a dollar today doesn't buy as much horsepower (based on one gallon of gas in a Model T engine) as it did in 1930.

A dollar in 1930 is considerably more than a dollar in 2015, for most resources. Conversely, many of the products we use regularly now require materials, processing and especially logistical chains that Keynes probably could scarcely have imagined then. How many people regularly ate food imported from halfway around the world on a daily basis then? How many had advanced electronics that were the end result of hundreds of chains of production in a dozen or more countries?

Compared to the 1930s, we ALL live like royalty.

[mainiac]

Not over time, especially if you're trying to prove/disprove a theory comparing resource usage in two periods 80 years apart.

Was I doing that?  I thought I was comparing an 80 year old prediction with the present day.

Conversely, many of the products we use regularly now require materials, processing and especially logistical chains that Keynes probably could scarcely have imagined then. How many people regularly ate food imported from halfway around the world on a daily basis then? How many had advanced electronics that were the end result of hundreds of chains of production in a dozen or more countries?

Yes, those are great examples of new forms of consumption that Keynes did not account for when he assumed that everyone would be satisfied in the future.

[RedKing]

Ummm okay, so what are we arguing about again?   



Thank you, crazy black guy.

[mainiac]

Ummm okay, so what are we arguing about again?

I thought Graeber started from a flawed premise and arrived at a flawed conclusion.  I dont know what anyone else thought on the subject.

[WealthyRadish]

I'm kind of interested in the discussion about what makes a "bullshit job". My (uneducated) impression has been that most of the growth of service jobs was expanding on the margins of inefficiency and waste, with previously unprofitable businesses (due to their wastefulness and frivolity, like fast food) only becoming viable as the minimum wage and the general labor market lags behind growth and inflation (along with things like government subsidies of corn cheapening low-quality food, exploitation of cheaper manufacturing outside the US, no need for corporations to provide benefits, etc).

What I'm really curious about is if those trends reversed (and the marginal service business died), what would replace them in an entrenched service economy, and is it even possible for a service economy to be healthy without these bottom-tier businesses and jobs existing?

[smjjames]

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/fec-2016-campaign-finance-fundraising-candidates-214825 got updated with the rest of the candidates.

Chafee has spent and raised even LESS than Gilmore, if that isn't a DOA campaign, I don't know what is. And that's saying something because Gilmore isn't even trying to campaign at all.

Santorums campaign doesn't look like it's in a good place either though.

Edit: An analysis from CNN (so what if it's shit, insight is insight) Edit2: Linkage, derp: http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/15/politics/campaign-finance-fundraising-third-quarter-highlights/index.html

[Playergamer]

I have a feeling that a drastic restructuring of pricing would accompany such a drastic restructuring of wealth. And healthcare costs are known to be massively inflated anyway.

iirc that super inflated price is more a haggle point for insurance companies.

i believe there's a decent chance of saying "yo i don't have insurance" and they'll bring the prices down to something...less then 60 bucks an aspirin.

[Frumple]

Generally the answer to that is no, there's not. You do get put on a payment plan or something of that note, instead of having to pay everything upfront, but the hospitals rarely actually drop prices if you don't possess insurance. They just expect your ass to go bankrupt and them to not get most of the money.

[Playergamer]

yeah, remembered wrong. chargemaster is targeted at insurance, but they don't really care about uninsured people. mea culpa.

[mainiac]

Some better polling data has emerged. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/huffpost-yougov-poll-democratic-debate_56203935e4b06462a13b8449
Note that while this is an online poll, it is an online panel poll, not a self selected poll.  Online panel polls now compare favorably to telephone polling.

My takeaway:
Most democrats came away from the debate liking both Clinton and Bernie.
People thought their preferred candidate won.
O'Malley has the bronze medal on lockdown.