If there's no need for jobs then that means robots are doing everything and so everything is cheap. That means the small nominal income becomes a large real income.
986 karma · joined October 9, 2013
hnchat.com:3Qm9yJCNy40eKuCR8XFY
> Of course laws let the companies "export" the jobs to other countries for lower wages since the 70's.
That's wonderful. Poor people's wages are rising and global inequality is decreasing thanks to that.
I'm pretty sure I heard similar stuff regarding the internet.
How do you know they're gaining the most? That depends on the relative elasticities.
Economics is not zero-sum. Even the unemployed people will gain in the long-term as the gains trickle down and/or they gain from other technological advances.
> The world population is something like ~7.5 billion people. Everyone needs some form of meaningful employment and income.
See lump of labor fallacy. There are always jobs, but people don't take them because the wages are too low.
In the long-term disruptions and changes in jobs are part of the changes in the world. These people are unemployed temporarily and will lose some wages in the short-term but in the long term they will benefit from technological changes.
Taxing innovation is bad. If you want to achieve social welfare goals why not use NIT (negative income tax) or less preferably, UBI (universal basic income)?
Why should people using robots pay for it rather than everybody? After all, many people (in the long-term, everybody) indirectly benefit from the usage of robots. It's a net economic win.
The owners already pay taxes though. Why should they pay additional tax for using robots?
By banning competition, the H-1B person's wage and the employer's profits go down and the product price increases.
How much depends on the relative elasticities.
Isn't this richer people banning much poorer people (immigrants) from competing with them?
PING imgur.com (151.101.40.193) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 151.101.40.193 (151.101.40.193): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=342 ms
imgur.com works fine
~$ ping python.org
PING python.org (23.253.135.79) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 23.253.135.79 (23.253.135.79): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=267 ms
python.org works fine
news.ycombinator.com and reddit.com also works fine even though I'm logged in (there's about a 300ms, 700ms delay in the Network tab of Chrome's devtools for news.ycombinator.com and reddit.com)
What is "too much"? Do people here, who are mostly globally (and often nationally) rich, earn "too much" money?
Is it wrong for a poor person to earn more money?
A better way is the NIT (negative income tax) which simply gives money to the poor and lets them decide how to spend it.
No. Global inequality has been decreasing in the past 2 decades. There used to be a bifurcation in income but now there isn't. https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ourwor... (Note that it uses absolute population numbers)
> This puts you almost directly at odds with all non-shareholders who are negatively affected by increasing profits.
Economics is not zero-sum. Few people such as competitors will be negatively affected, but for the average person there will be little impact. For example, if Google makes more profits I am hardly impacted.
Why?
> What I am talking about is that it is good an proper to have employee friendly Labor Laws, because under ordinary circumpstances the asymetry of power between employers and employees is simply too great.
The asymmetry of power between a manager and an employee is not large. The asymmetry of power between a company and an employee is large because a company is composed of much more people than an employee.
Employees can negotiate for whatever conditions they want.
> You cannot possibly be concerned with the multiple civic duties of free citizenship if your means of life
As I said, such labor laws can make employment harder because the company doesn't want to hire the wrong person and be unable to fire that person.
> plutocrat elite.
Who?
I want the best returns out of the corporations I invest in.
> Question how we're conditioned to think of lower corporate profits as a bad thing.
Perhaps it is my neoliberal worldview, but I think most people are like "corporate profits can go down" for <my cause>. People think that corporations are owned only by billionares.
Lower corporate profits are a bad thing for shareholders.
Why don't we just take poor people's money since they're so greedy for wanting money? Most of the arguments against excess wealth can be used against many first-world people including HNers.
Could you give an example of how you can't say no to advertisement?
Corporations provide those things because people want them.
They do make healthcare and lawyers more expensive. It is a question of whether the government should force a minimum standard on buyers which removes cheaper sellers that do not conform to the standards.
> If you are going to throw your lot with an employer, you want to be very sure that said employer is willing to go the extra mile to bring you up and see you succeed; and yes, that will be harder that going to work for the first john that waves a $20USD bill in front of your nose.
That's your opinion and you are free to ask your employer a contract that makes it harder to fire you.
What I'm talking about is the government mandating this.
"Reasonable" protections unduly impose costs on companies and may cause disemployment effects.
Now I know you'll say "companies are evil", but shareholders and banks loan to companies. When companies make profit some people make a profit.
If you have noble goals of helping the poor, a NIT (negative income tax) which transfers money to the poor would be more efficient.
That's the existing scenario/how the world works. The model is an intended effect of copyright.
Then you can improve patent protection or other mechanisms for compensating scientists. Subsidizing mail for everybody is inefficient.