
The Limits of Capitalism - gz5
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/12/the-limits-of-capitalism.html
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ctdonath
_We see a world where many jobs will not exist anymore. Taken out by
technology._

This has all happened before, and it will all happen again. Jobs taken out by
technology are balanced by jobs created, directly and indirectly, by the same
technology. There is always a need for mundane labor. The shift may be
painful, but stagnating innovation is not preferable.

Be thankful that, on the whole, technology makes sustenance cheaper so more
people can live better on less (not nothing, but costs of basics are
dropping). The shifting baseline confuses many.

~~~
parrotdoxical
Uhh..not always. The work is balanced out, but often, there is a net loss of
jobs. There may always be a need for mundane labor, but that doesn't mean it
will be priced at a point that makes living very sustainable. And no,
technology doesn't necessarily make sustenance cheaper -- perhaps in theory
but not in practice. Technology, like any other kind of a driver of industrial
development, frequently concentrates power in the hands of those who can take
it. Sometimes, that happens in a way that does make it such that more people
can live better on less. It also sometimes happens in a way that blots out
much of China's skyline with dangerous smog.

The ability for people to be able to live well, on the whole, is something
that depends on society. Technology is merely a lever, not an autonomous agent
or operator.

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snowwrestler
The market is a system for solving problems. However, not all problems are
obvious to market participants. The problem might cause harm on a longer
timeframe than their typical focus (for example: environmental destruction).
Or the problem might cause harm to people who participate less fully in the
market (for example: the problems of poverty).

One of the roles of government is to pose these problems to the market, for
the market to solve.

For example, we, as a society, don't want old people to die starving in the
street. So we have posed this problem to the market in the forms of Medicare
and Social Security taxes. The market needs to find a way to pay those taxes
while meeting consumer demand, and it largely has.

We don't want to drink polluted water, so we have posed this problem to the
market in form of limits on pollutants that can be released. The market has to
find a way to meet consumer demand while staying within these limits, and it
largely has.

So, we need to be clear about what problem we are asking the market to solve
if we create a guaranteed government-supplied income for everyone. Is the
problem a basic standard of living for everyone? Or is the problem full
employment for everyone? I agree with Fred that those two things are not
equivalent.

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userulluipeste
"People need to work. They need to have something to feel good about doing
every day. Work is a big part of self image and self worth. Any system that
makes it possible for people to sit at home eating bon bons (as the Gotham Gal
likes to say) is not a good system."

This reminds me about the importance of choosing our questions. The quoted
piece is focused on the individual, and I presume that the feed-back would be
accounted on that level too. The thing is, any given system makes things
easy/comfortable for some kinds of individuals and not so much for the other
kinds, so framing the problem around a generic citizen doesn't bring up in my
view even a stable desirable target. (The communist system is the first
relevant example that comes to my mind - they thought that they can afford to
please just the limited kind of individuals that happened to form the mediocre
majority. They were wrong, of course. They avoided mass unrest and violent
revolutions, but suffered brain drain à la "Atlas Shrugged".) The framing
level that I see relevant in this regard comprises the entire humanity and
considers the effects on its entirety - what will allow us (all of us) to
evolve, to get better, to "get there" (where "there" is to be continuously
defined). Please note that I didn't tried to answer the question that was
being implied, I merely tried to fix it.

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sharemywin
I think of this stuff like a the search for an energy function. you have
gradiant decent or greedy alogrithems which find local minimums but to find
global or to get off the current peak you need to add entropy. Redistribution
of wealth is entropy. but you probably shouldn't listen to me because I
advotcate randomly picking large companys and breaking them apart just so we
have different solutions.

