We have succeeded as a civilization: we are providing far more than we could ask for.
Really? There is nothing you could improve in the human condition that would make life better?
Really? There is nothing you could improve in the human condition that would make life better?
The world isn't static.
In pure economic terms, curing cancer has little benefit to society. Cancer is not any one specific disease. It's a class of diseases, of which there are thousands (or more) of variants.
We may stumble on some amazingly technologically advanced cure to some forms of cancer but the more rare the form, the less likely there will ever be a treatment.
Most people get upset when you talk about humans as assets because we're indoctrinated at a very young age to value human life above all else.
If you can, in fact, speak about humans in economic terms of supply/demand. We have an overabundance of people, and nothing useful to give them jobs to do.
It's like the current oil market. Oil was highly valued due to the inelasticity of supply. Now that there is a glut of over supply and inelasticity greatly reduced, the value has dropped dramatically.
The supply of humans capable of doing useful work used to be somewhat constrained. Now, we have more people than can be reasonably assigned to do useful work without essentially paying them to warm a chair. Yet, like the oil market nothing is stopping people from having more kids and increasing the supply. The government even directly subsidizes people for the number of children they have due the persistent belief that GDP is directly dependent on population.
People can increase their value proposition by earning many degrees and racking up huge amounts of debt but, unless you're going to work in the industries that are thriving, it's a buyers market for employers.
Business owners have their choice pick of the herd. They can keep wages as low as possible and skim more cream off the top because there's a line out the door of people waiting the replace a worker who quits.
Who knows, maybe this is just the supply limit (ie in environmental science terms) as it applies to the human population. Poverty and misery is the expected result of making too many people before we can come up with enough useful reasons to sustain them.
One counter to this argument is that as this process of overpopulation (relative to useful jobs) begins to happen, standard of living decreases.* As standard of living decreases on average, people start to have less children. So the imbalance is somewhat self-correcting, it's just that human lives are getting to be longer while the time between inventions that obviate the need for human labor seems to be getting shorter.
Longer average lifespans (with the same legal retirement age for social security, medical benefits) exacerbate this problem.
But there is always one industry that can be fueled by human lives and that looks great on an economic balance sheet - war. It decreases surplus labor, increases nationalism and social cohesion (if people generally see the necessity of the war), and injects a huge stimulus of demand into the economy through gov spending on all sorts of goods for the war effort, as well as investments in R&D that adds to the country's infrastructure base.
If the latency between idle/restless/poor/disenfranchised population and meaningful/useful jobs gets to be too large, then all it takes is a spark to start a protest, rebellion, or war as people have nothing else to really live for.
* I would use GDP/capita to have a more quantifiable benchmark, but I find GDP to be almost completely useless when accounting for things that matter to actual human beings such as quality of social cohesion, potential social mobility, amount of pollution, etc.
That seems counter to all actual evidence doesn't it? The places with the poorest standards of living have the most children and visa verse.
We actually have some pretty good existing examples to draw from to conclude this. Japan has arguably the highest standard of living, but also a decreaseing birth rate.
Women in Australia and America are having children later in life, and having fewer of them as well.
Meanwhile in developing countries where access to birth control and education are more limited, birth rates are sky high.
Production does not fund other things, and disease cures are not something that people willingly buy. Excess production just wastes resources on things people do not want to buy (unsold automobile inventory, etc.) and is enabled by access to too much speculative capital. Redistribution of that capital (in the form of higher taxes) into government-mandated and funded research programs to find cures for cancer is how you find a cure for cancer. Disease research in the United States is not funded by pouring water on your head (http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/ice-bucket-challen...) or Tim Ferriss (https://www.crowdrise.com/timferriss), but by the $30 billion budget of the National Institutes of Health.
The person you replied to said "production isn't the problem, distribution is", and you seemed to agree with that in your comment. Getting poor people cars and houses and services isn't a production problem, it's a distribution problem. It's a pricing problem. It's an efficiency problem. Producing more cars isn't going to make them easier for poor people to afford.
And even when they do overestimate demand, like you said, it gets marked down. So it all gets consumed in the end, and the producers might not even take that big of a loss depending on how much it was marked down. And the poor people benefit from that too of course.
Unless people start throwing away new cars then they aren't over producing.
About throwing away new things - heard of planned obsolescence? That's what companies now do to cope with falling demand. Yes, your car maker does it too.
I don't actually think they are overproducing. They make a huge markup on new cars, so having to discount a few that don't sell isn't a loss.
Also factories are pretty much large fixed costs. Overproducing actually doesn't cost that much. The car might only cost $500 worth of raw materials, but the cost of the factories and infrastructure necessary to turn that into a car is massive.
>(aka. no one wants to buy the last few carrots)
Which is literally only true for vegetables, not the economy in general. And you only need to sacrifice a handful of vegetables to for it, so it's a fixed cost.
But just because we don't overproduce right now doesn't mean we couldn't if we wanted to. I'm still not seeing where production is the problem. If production was the limiting factor, they would be running the factories 24/7 instead of shutting them down. The only reason to underproduce is to increase demand. But if you lower supply and demand doesn't increase, you've already been overproducing. So if they're closing factories, it means they've been overproducing.
Which was done just after a recession. That's not evidence of overproduction in general, just one year when demand unexpectedly went down.
>But just because we don't overproduce right now doesn't mean we couldn't if we wanted to. I'm still not seeing where production is the problem. If production was the limiting factor, they would be running the factories 24/7 instead of shutting them down.
But if we can produce so many cars, why are cars still expensive? Shouldn't the ability to create massive supply drive the price down a lot?
There are plenty of people that want new cars. And are willing to pay for them. It's not like we have more cars than people actually want. It just costs a lot to make a car. And that cost includes fixed costs like the factory itself. But factories wouldn't be closing down if other costs weren't also very large.
Yes in theory we could make millions more cars than we do. But not for free. It would require buying more materials, hiring more workers, building new production lines, etc. Those costs must be greater than the expected return for selling another car. Otherwise they would already be doing it.
But again, we're talking economics right now. The subject is production. Once again I ask: you said we're limited by our ability to produce, do you have anything to back that up? And no, saying "it costs a lot of money" is not proof of a production bottleneck, it's proof that companies hire accountants.
So at this point I'm going to step away from this conversation because I don't think it's going anywhere. You've made me think a bit about economics, so thanks. Good conversation.
What I'm arguing for is on how we should look at universal basic income. Some people see UBI as a way to increase aggregate demand. I see UBI as a way to get rid of poverty, so there would be no such thing as what you call "the poor". The difference is that I don't see a lack of aggregate demand as a problem. If we could rid our society of poverty without making a dent in aggregate demand, I see that as a win.
Another way to think about it is in terms of productivity. Do we really need to make everyone more productive? Do we need to be make the poor maximally productive before lifting them out of poverty? Why can't we just lift them out of poverty?
People regularly die from starvation, but the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone. It is a problem of distribution.
There are hundreds of thousands of vacant homes in San Bernardino, there are many thousands of homeless that could easily be transported there. If those homeless were to move into those homes they would soon be evicted or arrested and imprisoned. This is an issue with ownership, not distribution. Much food from local restaurants, cafes, and grocery stores is thrown out every day as it nears expiration. Thousands of hungry would love to enjoy this food rather than waste it. This food could be donated or even left out for people to scavenge, yet it ends up in locked dumpsters. Again, this doesn't sound like a distribution problem but instead a problem with ownership.
We do produce more than we need, if need is conditioned on ability to pay.
Redistributing wealth means spreading out ownership more.
For the people with no excess of capital, though, we can improve the situation.