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HorseLord posted:I don't think Cicero knows what a centrally planned economy even is. What you just described is the economic equivalent of an aerospace engineer solving the challenges of designing an airplane by pretending gravity doesn't exist. The result of a command economy printing money is identical to a market economy printing money, it increases the rate of inflation. Maintaining a low and steady rate of inflation is the basis of sound monetary policy, and is like the first stated job function of every developed country's monetary authority.
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Mar 7, 2016 00:31
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rscott posted:Except the laws of physics are immutable and the laws of economics are not, so that's a pretty fuckin stupid analogy The analogy is appropriate enough. There may be a lot of horse-poo poo surrounding economics but a lot of it is well established and has predictive power. If your solution to an economic problem says what we know is wrong, it better do a good job explaining why everything we know is wrong, and also why our incorrect theories were right so much of the time. This isn't just abstract philosophizing, the real world consequences of politicians rejecting established economic theory has resulted in mass suffering up to and including people starving to death by the millions.
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Mar 7, 2016 05:10
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The hysteria about overpopulation is not only wrong, its also like 40 years out of fashion. As already mentioned, global birth rates are falling and are projected to keep falling. One of the main driving forces of declining birth rates is the very evil regressive environmentalists rail against, which is the development of the 3rd world. Draconian population control measures have not only proven to be completely ineffectual at slowing population growth, but they are also frequently used as tools of oppression and genocide against minorities and the poor. Actual effective methods of lowering population growth include educating the population (especially women), making sure contraceptives are readily available to the public, lowering infant & childhood mortality rates, and developing local economies beyond subsistence farming. Improving the environment and improving peoples lives are often complementary, not mutually exclusive. OtherworldlyInvader fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Mar 10, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 16:47
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McDowell posted:There is every reason to be concerned about overpopulation. It isn't just an issue of ecological carrying capacity, but economic. 40 years ago there was basically infinite room for employment if you needed a sophisticated system of record keeping - today you can create much more advanced information systems that require far fewer man-hours to update and maintain. What is your solution to mass unemployment besides raging at some hippie strawman? I'm not even entirely sure what you're trying to say here, as you seem to be conflating multiple issues together. For starters, governments, corporations, and even individuals now have huge stockpiles of data, access to tons of computational power, and an enormous shortage of people who can actually combine the two to deliver meaningful information. Your claim that 40 years ago there were way more jobs in this area is wrong, information systems management and related fields are in demand and are rapidly growing. You also seem to be making the claim that a large or growing population is a cause of unemployment, which is also wrong. If a population is growing, and the economy is also growing in absolute terms but failing to keep up with population growth, then your economy isn't actually growing. If a wizard snapped their fingers and magically halted population growth, you would find that the absolute number of jobs in that economy would now be shrinking. As to my solution to the economic problems we face, I don't have an easy answer because one doesn't exist. If we're talking about the US though, mass unemployment is not really the problem we're facing. The US unemployment rate is slightly elevated, and it doesn't really take into account people who are underemployed very well, but we're talking like a single percentage point higher than ideal. In fact the US unemployment rate is already lower than the unemployment rate in many other countries with reasonably healthy economies and good standards of living. The reason people are hurting is not unemployment, but because our social safety nets suck, wages for the people who do work have stagnated, public infrastructure is vastly underfunded, the lack of universal health care places an unbearable burden on both individuals and employers, and housing prices are shooting through the roof in many urban areas for reasons not directly related to "people actually live here". Tackle those problems, and more, and you've got my solution.
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Mar 13, 2016 06:33
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