Chemtrail posted:

2-4 years depending on the next election dates and subsequent rise of right wing dominated governments in many parts of Europe.

Geriatric Pirate posted:

They "literally" did not. Workers would have lost their jobs anyway, either through firing or having their employers go bankrupt. I really can't think of anyone that thinks that the way to maintain high employment rates is by telling employers they can't fire workers. The reason these laws are implemented is to make conditions better for workers, not to improve overall employment levels.

Pluskut Tukker posted:

Yeah that's just totally wrong. Looking at the most relevant example, Spain's infamous 2012 labour market reform, the goal was to create a more flexible labour market in the hopes that employers would hire more people. This was done by, most importantly, making it easier and cheaper to lay off workers and to increase the possiblity of collective dismissals for economic reasons (i.e. by businesses in trouble), but also by allowing employers to deviate from collective bargaining agreements and to reduce the possibility of them being extended. The government did this in the hopes of driving wages down to increase competitiveness and achieve the much-desired internal devaluation that would increase employment levels, since now it would no no longer be such a risk for firms to hire workers on permanent contracts. The evidence of the effects on overall employment levels is mixed at best (see here and here for some analysis), but the law has done basically nothing at all to reduce segmentation in the Spanish labour market and only increased precarity for workers, so that by now it is not uncommon for Spanish workers to have labour contracts that last only a few hours. It's absolutely a supply-side law and the fact that unemployment rates in Spain have decreased most likely has more to do with Mario Draghi than with Mariano Rajoy.

Tesseraction posted:

Simple aversion to fiscal stimulus and a desire to obtain state resources on the cheap by starving the coffers.

If you're asking for the purpose of the legal reforms then of course it was to sort out the aforementioned inefficiency, corruption, etc. but the fiscal policy need not have created that and Greece instead gets to spend years upon years of starvation, joblessness and humiliation.

Geriatric Pirate posted:

Now you've changed the (your?) argument from "it increased unemployment" to "it didn't decrease unemployment". Which is still wrong, but a definite improvement.

Geriatric Pirate posted:

But I'm curious, what economic mechanism do YOU think is actually at play here?
1) Government changes law to make it easier to fire people.
2) Workers now have more 0-hours contracts, are easier to lay off if their job is no longer economically viable.
So who gains? If the law wasn't in place, what would companies be doing instead? And how sustainable do you think that solution is?

Geriatric Pirate posted:

But I'm curious, what economic mechanism do YOU think is actually at play here?
1) Government changes law to make it easier to fire people.
2) Workers now have more 0-hours contracts, are easier to lay off if their job is no longer economically viable.
So who gains? If the law wasn't in place, what would companies be doing instead? And how sustainable do you think that solution is?

Friendly Humour posted:

Workers are easier to fire regardless of the economic viability of their job. Economic viability does not enter the discussion. And do you really need to ask who gains? Are you that stupid?

Geriatric Pirate posted:

Do you have any actual numbers for starvation in Greece, or are you going to quote a Guardian article again? I'm just remembering the "HIV epidemic" that you guys felt was going on in Greece, where it turned out that in real terms the number of new infections was smaller than the number that followed the introduction of Craigslist's casual encounters in cities across the US.

And Greece ran a budget deficit of 15% the year before asking for a bailout, how much more of a stimulus do you need? And what stage would you have started cutting back? And how do you not see the connection between legal reforms intended to improvement efficiency (such as improving tax collection, cut back on government waste) and budget discipline?

GaussianCopula posted:

It just baffles me that people continue to believe that if you simply throw enough money at an economy it will suddenly start to perform at peak levels. What gives you this conviction?

Tesseraction posted:

We're not, but clearly the 'starve them of money until they explode with productivity' is working about as well as an inflatable dartboard, so you'll have to forgive us for calling you an idiot.

GaussianCopula posted:

If a worker is economically viable there is no need to fire him. if he is not, the only solution is to fire him. I really don't see the problem.

GaussianCopula posted:

It just baffles me that people continue to believe that if you simply throw enough money at an economy it will suddenly start to perform at peak levels. What gives you this conviction? All of the southern countries enjoyed a huge influx of cash prior to the crisis and it did not make them more efficient but rather glutted the arteries of their economy and made them depend on more cheap cash.

Sure, you could fight the symptoms of the crisis by finding fresh sources of money, but that's not a solution.

What needs to happen in these countries is a national consensus that they lived beyond their means and have now go back to the standard of living they actually can support with their productivity.


If a worker is economically viable there is no need to fire him. if he is not, the only solution is to fire him. I really don't see the problem.

GaussianCopula posted:

Given that none of these countries has an actual balanced budget I have a very hard time seeing how they are getting starved. Rather it makes me think of an obese person who is told "buddy, you might want to reduce your diet to 2000kcal per day", who than still eats 2500kcal per day and complains he is starving.

Friendly Humour posted:

Speaking of ideology though, it's funny how the neoliberals in this thread are so blinded by their ideology that they're incapable of admitting any fault in the disasterous economic policies of the past decade.

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

Spain had a budget surplus before the 2008 crisis. Their problems are not the result of fiscal profligacy.

A diet analogy makes no sense whatsoever in an economic contest. What exactly is the obese person eating? Who is providing it? It serves to obscure, not clarify.

GaussianCopula posted:

Nope, their problem was an over-reliance on a construction sector that was built on a credit bubble. The only difference is that it was private not public credit that allowed them to live beyond their means.

GaussianCopula posted:

Nope, their problem was an over-reliance on a construction sector that was built on a credit bubble. The only difference is that it was private not public credit that allowed them to live beyond their means.

GaussianCopula posted:

What needs to happen in these countries is a national consensus that they lived beyond their means and have now go back to the standard of living they actually can support with their productivity.

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

And your policy recommendation for this is...what? As far as I can tell, your position to be seems to be that economic consequences are the results of moral failings; thus, the countries in trouble deserve to be in trouble because they're in trouble.

GaussianCopula posted:

If a worker is economically viable there is no need to fire him.

Cat Mattress posted:

The definition of "economically viable" is the problem.

Suppose you've got a factory in place A that gives you 1% profit: for every 100 money unit you spend in it (all included -- wages, taxes, raw materials, maintenance, R&D, equipment upgrades, etc.) you get back 101 money unit. Is it viable? Let's suppose you say yes. Now you've got a factory in place B that gives you 2% profit. Is factory A still viable? But there's factory C with 5% profit. And you're told that if you open a factory in place D it'll do 10% profit. Are factories A, B, and C still viable?

The actual answer from real world experience is that no, they're not. Europe is full of abandoned factories that were closed despite turning a profit, because they turned less of a profit than outsourcing to Chinese or Bangladeshi subcontractors did. (Then ten year later the subcontractors stop subcontracting and emerge as competitors, and the European company that used them is hosed because it has lost all of its know-how and cannot resume in-house production even if it wanted to. But that's what happens when you're looking for economic viability...)

Pluskut Tukker posted:

Other than that, there really are no solutions to the problems of the Spanish labour market that would not cause Spain to violate the Stability Pact yet again (it would require large investments in the modernization of the education system, in particular vocational education, and in the public employment services. Increasing unemployment benefits and reintroducing rent benefits to make Spanish workers more mobile within Spain would help too).

GaussianCopula posted:

Moreover the reason for a lot of those abandoned factories are incentives by the different public entities (local, state, federal, EU) to built the plan right there. If you would not have those, there would be far less abandoned factories.

Friendly Humour posted:

That's not how subsidies work.

steinrokkan posted:

Yes it is? Governments offer incentives to investors for putting money into areas designated by their development priority policies, generally. Sometimes it means the investor will put down a factory they would otherwise not consider due to high levels of risk.

Friendly Humour posted:

Yeah, but GC said that abandoned factories are a result of 'public incentives'. Or at least I think that's what he's saying? It's hard to tell with his terrible spelling and grammar.

steinrokkan posted:

Yeah, the logic is that because investors have much lower set-up costs under public incentives, their projects have a higher than average failure / abandonment rate. There certainly have been cases of very poorly thought out incentive policies that have lead to industrial parks littered with derelict plants, though it obviously doesn't mean incentives are totally wrong 100% time, they just tend to be disastrous in hands of incompetent governments that seek short-term employment boosts in pivotal constituencies.

ChainsawCharlie posted:

While that may be true,governments are at most half of the equation there.

Cat Mattress posted:

The actual answer from real world experience is that no, they're not. Europe is full of abandoned factories that were closed despite turning a profit, because they turned less of a profit than outsourcing to Chinese or Bangladeshi subcontractors did. (Then ten year later the subcontractors stop subcontracting and emerge as competitors, and the European company that used them is hosed because it has lost all of its know-how and cannot resume in-house production even if it wanted to. But that's what happens when you're looking for economic viability...)

Friendly Humour posted:

ChainsawCharlie posted:

While that may be true,governments are at most half of the equation there.

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

Hard to know where to start. "Economically viable" is a strange term. Corporations do not care about the economy as a whole, only whether a worker turns a profit *for them* in the immediate now. So for example if a company makes a lot of profit pushing really hard with a lot of workers for 4 months in order to get product out before their competition, and then lay off all their workers because now the market is saturated, they are fine with that. But that is a dismal situation for workers, and for the economy as a whole; workers without stable incomes have a hard time maintaining mortgages and creating families. But in an economy with high unemployment, there are enough people looking for work that corporations can easily get away with this, since a given unemployed worker would rather have some money than none. The opposite applies in an economy/economic sectors with low unemployment; a worker who can pick and choose will either refuse the short job in favor of a steady long term job, or demand such high wages for the short job that they can budget out the rest of the year.

Another expression of this is 'flex hours' - corporations demand retail workers stay on call, unable to even get another job, to scrabble and fight with other employees for a tiny number of daily hours.

Furthermore, you don't seem to understand the fundamental insight of Keynesian economics - that a demand-side economic crisis is an unnecessary systemic paralysis. You have a lot of workers sitting around doing *nothing*. Putting them to work, even on suboptimal activities, will always improve an economy because *some* production is always better than *no* production. There is not actually a shortage of money, even. There are huge reserves of capital sitting around doing nothing because the investors see no viable economic activities to invest in. Lower demand leads to corporations rationally reducing production. Less wages leads to less consumption. Less consumption leads to lower demand. It is a death spiral. Government deficit spending through the issuance of bonds gives this idle capital something to do - even small returns are better than no returns. The proof of this is easily at hand; enormous amounts of government spending that caused no inflation whatsoever because demand for bonds was so high.

Edit: It should be noted that a normal economic situation does NOT benefit from deficit spending; without the reserve of untapped potential (idle workers & idle capital), deficit spending results directly in inflation.

Spain had a budget surplus before the 2008 crisis. Their problems are not the result of fiscal profligacy.

A diet analogy makes no sense whatsoever in an economic contest. What exactly is the obese person eating? Who is providing it? It serves to obscure, not clarify.

Dawncloack posted:

Hey, I am interested in this, can you give me more details about what you think is to be done with the Spanish education system? Thanks in advance

GaussianCopula posted:

But to come back to my original point, if it's is so easy to fix an economy (throw money at the education system)

GaussianCopula posted:

if it's is so easy to fix an economy (throw money at the education system) why did Greece and other countries not do THAT with the money they got before the crisis

Pluskut Tukker posted:

No, I'm addressing your argument that "The reason these laws are implemented is to make conditions better for workers, not to improve overall employment levels." I don't think the 2012 labour reform increased unemployment, except possibly in the short term, since more firms would have wanted to fire people in the context of 2012 Spain than would be willing to hire new workers. It's probably too soon to talk about the long term effects but the increase in precarity means that unemployment levels are likely to explode again as fast as in 2008-9 if a new crisis hits.

quote:

Who knows? There is no good counterfactual. Given that Draghi ended the Spanish sovereign debt crisis and the EU bailed out the Spanish banks, it's entirely possible that unemployment would have gone down in the absence of the law. Other than that, there really are no solutions to the problems of the Spanish labour market that would not cause Spain to violate the Stability Pact yet again (it would require large investments in the modernization of the education system, in particular vocational education, and in the public employment services. Increasing unemployment benefits and reintroducing rent benefits to make Spanish workers more mobile within Spain would help too).

Tesseraction posted:

Because idiots like you were in charge.

Tesseraction posted:

I actually corrected your diction, not your grammar, although your grammar is comically broken half the time.


That's nice dear but Friendly Humour was talking about the fact that refugees by and large loving hate Daesh. I additionally mentioned the economic migrants because I'm talking about people I've interacted with in real life. I know the concept of socialising is alien to you but some of us do it, and because I live in a utopia of high diversity (or a cesspool of miscegenation as you'd call it) I encounter a lot of the fabled Muslim, none of whom I've found supports Daesh. This isn't to say some of them don't have questionable views on Israel, but even the most openly racist ones has not shown any allegiance to terror groups and considers them un-Islamic.


Because people like you come out with dumb poo poo and I find it funny to mock you. If I felt you had the mental capacity to be convinced that Muslims aren't the most imminent threat to the west I'd be more charitable to your views. Hell, in my lovely shithole of a country you're far more likely to die homeless than in a terror attack.

Stockholm Syndrome posted:

Muslims aren't an imminent threat, no, but what happens in the future when the birth rates for muslims are 8 and 2 for the indigenous people in Europe? People don't seem to consider what will happen in the future. It's simple math. But apparently we shouldn't care about our own people and just welcome all this "diversity" because we're good people. So good in fact, that we'll be minorities in our own countries after some time. And the majority then will be muslims, and you can take a look what goes on in muslim majority countries, like Saudi Arabia. This is what Europe will get after 50% of our population is muslim. Who the gently caress wants that? Because unless something is done, it will be inevitable. Simple loving math.

CommieGIR posted:

Please tell me this is a joke post and you are not that pathetically racist.