from reading this forum i got the sense that money is the only thing important to them
them? who? me? Indian? Colored people?
You know what, you sound pathetic. You always label people with your stereotype thinking. You always blame Indians for problems of this world.
You lable every Indian as a RR who is trying to destroy this forum. I always ignored your comments because who wants to engage into a discussion who can’t view the situation from a different perspective. You say whatever you want to say I don’t care. Comment on my post and I’ll ignore you just like I did many times…
man you really gotta get it together. youre not gonna make it being so thin-skinned, sensitive and emotional.
you gotta stop taking Ls
I agree with the fact that you just do it for fun but believe me all the time? You got nothing else to say here? Always RR or Indians? You are smart and definitely make a ton of money. But I strongly believe you can past this RR thing and move on. Anyways, it is your wish.
There is no other forum like AF and I know that I’m going after accounting and banking career which has no relevance to this forum. But if everytime discussions are turned into making fun of a race then it is not worth. Yes, people are poor in 3rd world country. I was born poor and only thing which is important to me is $$$. I believe that there is not wrong with that. If you were born into place where you have to worry about electricity and water every day then yes you would think the same way. I don’t feel bad about it.
but resources don’t really mean anything anymore. what are resources used for? housing, transportation, major appliances/cars. that’s about it. technology will reduce the number of cars or other transport vehicles required per person as well as help push for commodity-light technology in the appliance and housing sectors. technology will virtually eliminate the need for anything to be resource-heavy. it is better for everyone that we use less resources to create anything as resource extration is an incredibly inefficient and has a high social cost for those involved involved (e.g. much higher mortality and morbidity). commodity cycles have a major economic cost as this cyclicality creates inefficiencies in capital and labour markets perhaps more so than any other industry. for those who work and invest in the cycle, it means complete retraining for workers every two decades or so and the bankruptcy of almost all invested capital every two decades or so (and huge associated legal costs to sort it all out).
further, the definition of wealth is dynamic. so long as the average, poor and rich person see an improvement in their daily life as time goes on, that is an increase in wealth. i would much rather be poor now than rich 800 years ago.
wealth is driven almost entirely by technology and leisure workers. technology workers make life better by creating efficiencies or new experiences. lesiure workers provide the service that everyone strives for. nobody would feel rich if leisure workers didn’t exist. today, most poor people experience a level of leisure that was unimaginable 800 years ago. that’s rich.
Uh. Technology has a real wealth effect (producing new or higher quality goods and services with fewer wasted resources), but it also has a distributional effect (winner-take-all results which reduce competition and concentrate profits). Just because they have one doesn’t mean you can ignore the other, unless you have a good argument as to why it should be easy to topple Amazon and Microsoft, WalMart and Starbucks.
And just because there may be reductions in resource use at the margin doesn’t mean that the global use of resources is declining. US consumers may be declining in the steel per household, but BRICs are definitely increasing resource use. Moreover, it’s hard to square the decreasing resources consumption with the growth of the self-storage sector. It wouldn’t be profitable if a minimum number of us weren’t acquiring ever greater quantities of stuff (though it is conceivable that some of those profits are for people who have been forced to downsize). Finally food production requires resources, not all of which are renewable, or ar renewable at limited rates.
It is true that catering to the desires of the wealthy seems to be the safest career choice these days. If you can make the wealthy feel beautiful, or powerful, or admired, that’s the kind of thing that people with disposable income are willing to pay for.
i agree and fully recognize the distributional effect of technology but you can’t argue that the distributional effect is anywhere near the “real wealth effect” that consumers experience over time (not sure i’m using the terminology effectively). while technology is helping create income inequality, it is an inequality that is more fair than it has been in the past (e.g. income inequality is more like the top 5% versus the bottom 95% compared to the top 1% versus the 99% 100 years ago). gone are the days that government needs to break up large companies due to their monopolistic nature (e.g. Standard Oil, Bell Phone Company, etc). businesses today are more transient and many of the largest ones in existence today will go under due to the quickly changing nature of their businesses relative to Standard or Bell or even the conglomerates of the 1960/70s.
my argument wasn’t so much about today versus 50 years ago as it was about the general trend over time. i’m fairly certain we’re on the same team when it comes to income inequality in that we both think there is an injustice currently and that if left unchecked, income and wealth will concentrate itself at the very top to an unprecedented degree. but that is a relative argument about fairness. on an absolute basis, it is impossible to argue that life is getting better for 100% of the population over longer periods of time due to technological advances. most of the improvement in living standards is directly tied to less labour being involved in the resource extration business. add in the increases in government transfers to the poor over time and in the future, likely funded with higher taxes on those technology “winners”, to make up for higher unemployment rates and everyone is tangibly financially better off as well as better off wrt to technological advances.
a note on the BRICs… their above average resource use is a one-time phenomenon that almost all societies go through one day or another. China has officially peaked in that regard and India will eventually peak as well but due to India’s geographical constraints and non centrally planned society, it will likely never come close to China’s resource intensity. resources are merely a means to an end. it doesn’t matter anyway. eventually resources will be extracted 100% by machines as it is a completely automatable industry and it serves society well to automate it. as for food, yes, a finite resource but many efficiencies to be achieved there as well. in reality, if we actually had to start reacting to market prices (due to scarcity of goods), we could probably add another 40 billion people to the planet from more efficient and less energy intense consumption. plus, soylent has already been invented so i see no issue there.
MLA, I am swinging toward your perspective. I admit a bias to smaller population based on my natural intoversion. (As a personal preference, I think a modest population would be more plesant and efficient even if more is possible) I suppose an economy could run entirely on services and culture. In the case where resources associated with basic needs are provided mechanically, the resource to be coveted by national economies would be inovative minds. The root of wealth would be the service or culture most coveted for consumption. On a small and simplified scale I can see how an economy built only of a performer, gifted culinary chef, writer, and educator could generate wealth by barter amongst themselves for their particular skills. No other root of wealth would be necessary. I originally thought there would need to be a more fundamental basis for wealth. But is this a correct assumption? The assumption is that with basic needs (resources) being mechanized, the ability to afford such things will be negligable. That is how the economy I mentioned above would work. Since wealth put toward basic needs are negligable, the wealth is entirely able to be put towards supporting the culture and service industry. (Which would be necessary to support the massive amont of workers in the sector) This is the assumption needed for all individuals to have the chance to thirve. However, this overlooks the power those who own the natural resources. Even if robotics are used for labor, what is keeping the resource owners from charging more? If those non resource owners are able to afford to support a service and culture based industry, the resource owners have no reason not to charge more. Why wouldn’t they? The result would be that funds would be strangled out of the massive service/ culture industry. Again, too many people with not enough jobs. This is why I am still undecided. Are natural resources the limit to wealth or not?
@KMD. we have seen and do/will continue to see increased mechanization in the food and water production industries. think about how these things are procured in developing economies today and compare them to developed economies. lower end food preparation will soon be mechanized as we already have burger flippers and pos kiosks, etc. one day, all basic needs will be covered entirely by mechanization (potentially even sex). why pay a human for literally no value add? in a mcdonalds environment, food preparers actually add zero value. it’s impossible for them to do so versus a machine. it is the client facing employees who add the value in a mcdonalds. despite full mechanization, competition will still remain in these industries just as competition exists today despite the massive changes relative to 1000 years ago. there will always be another robot programmer who thinks he can developed a more efficient burger flipper or a harvester programmer who thinks he can develop a more efficient harvester. look at microsoft. in the late 90s, most countries were antsy to stamp strict antitrust conditions on microsoft. in hindsight, would that have had any effect on microsoft’s fading importance in today’s world. does microsoft charge obscene amounts for their software, even despite the fact there are few OS competitors in the business world in particular? no. if MSFT charged an obscene amount for their software, 100 entrepreneurs would create competing solutions and push the price back down. basic economics.
increased mechanization will likely lead to more job losses and possibly a higher natural unemployment rate. maybe. it’s hard to tell. if it does, we’ll require greater government transfers to the poor paid for with taxes on the robot resource owners (which will basically be most rich people 50 years from now) in order to maintain living standards for the low end of the population. that said, increased mechanization begets more opportunities for technologists which actually provides greater opportunity to smart people of any socioeconomic group. so despite the relative unfairness between rich and poor these days, relative to the past 80 years, opportunity is actually increasing for those who are able to seize it. i can guarantee you all of us who come from modest means but are of above average intelligence have much greater opportunity today than 50 years ago. we can become upper class if we try hard enough and get a little luck. you basically needed to blow rich dudes daily 50 years ago to become upper class.
OK, MLA. So what your saying is greater population will mean more inequality, but still improvement in living standards for those worse off. So what I am saying is smaller population is better. We get the higher standards of living AND potentiality less inequality due to the smaller risk of increased unemployment levels. I’ll vote for the system without forced socialism.
i’m arguing that we wouldn’t have higher standards of living with lower population, not indefinitely. if you can go kill 1/2 of the world population today and spread the current capital stock amongst the remaining population, yes, everyone except the top 1%-5% or so would be better off similar to after WWII but since the decline will be slow and the capital stock will adjust with the population, nobody will be better off because the decline in innovation rates will more than offset the minor increase in average capital stock per person. a rapid population decline would be terrible for capital owners and could even create an economic crisis that derailed the entire economic system, making everyone worse off.
low population = less innovation which equals less improvement in the things that matter most, like the survival probability of each individual human as well as the human race in general. but yes, rising socialism is a direct response to rising population.
The Julian Simon hypothesis that higher population --> greater innovation is nothing more than a hypothesis.
In reality, there are many many intervening variables that likely have a greater impact on innovation rates, such as freedoms of association, well tuned intellectual property rights (this is tricky because intellectual property rights can stifle innovation as well as promote it), a reasonably educated population, and suitable networks for innovation dissemination.
If population were the prime variable, we should observe Nigeria as being more than 2x as innovative as Germany, China 4x as innovative as the US and approximately as innovative as India. China should be 27x as innovative as South Korea. It just doesn’t bear out, or - to the extent that it does - it has a ridiculous amount of noise.
Now you can say that China is in fact being very innovative, but if you whacked off the poorest 50% of the population (not that I advocate this), I’d bet the innovation rate would not drop by 50% - indeed, it would likely stay more or less unchanged, or perhaps with a small drop.
So yes, a larger scientific and business class will likely promote innovation, and - other things equal - larger populations will have larger business and and scientific communities, but a lot of this can be done with smaller populations too, as the China vs South Korea example shows.
but we’re talking on a planet wide basis and as we’ve seen in recent years, the number of occupations in truly innovative industries (mostly CS) has risen dramatically. we’ve gone from an intellectual/innovative class that was negligible to basically 1 in 10 jobs having at least some innovative component. as we continue to pump out more and more computer scientists, innovation will have to increase. computer scientists are natually entrepreneurial as well, as opposed to traditional scientists that often require complex and expensive equipment to innovate, so the trend is your friend toward greater innovation. add higher population and some of that population is likely to enter this entrepreneurial field where one guy can change how the entire world operates within a couple of years. i think my line of reasoning goes like this. it is presumed that China and all the other developing nations will eventually catch up to the West anyway. with that said and expected, greater population growth will add to the innovation that greater specialization in developing nations will already bring. bottom line, all things equal, it is almost impossible to argue that greater population will not result in greater innovation. if it didn’t, real GDP per capita should be falling over time. it’s basically the einstein effect. you don’t want to miss giving birth to an einstein for the rest of us would regret it.
Let’s assume for the moment that innovation = # of computer science people (and that the Henry Fords, Eli Whitneys, Robert Fultons, and Thomas Edisons weren’t real innovators because - well, I don’t know why you wouldn’t include them, actually).
The wasteful way to improve innovation in that scenario is to start popping out more babies in the hopes that some of them will go into CS and innovate. The *sensible* way to improve innovation is to educate more people in CS, perhaps by paying CS people well and making it easier for people to learn it (say, online, or such).
(BTW, I see this as a friendly debate. I just think you’re a bit too optimistic about how easily the bottom 50-80% of the pyramid is going to adapt to the automation of nearly anything they could train themselves for, and cutthroat competition for whatever paid opportunities remain.)
we’re both arguing completely unprovable theories thus why we can keep going back and forth. this is the essence of debate. love it.
i agree that population growth is an inefficient way to produce greater innovation but since innovation is measured on an absolute basis rather than a per capita basis as the benefits of most technology is provided to all (to some degree), efficiency doesn’t really matter. i’m not advocating that we incentivize rapid population growth to acheive this, just that population growth in general is easy for society to deal with and it provides a net benefit for society in terms of the pace of technological achievement, particularly in today’s world.
i recognize the contributions of the great innovators of the past and do not mean to belittle those contributions.
i don’t think i’m being that optimistic about the bottom 50-80% given that i’m aware that increased social spending will likely be required to maintain this group’s lifestyle, well the bottom ~30% at least. i just find it funny that people fear technology as some great job killing monster when people have held this fear for centures/millenia. the guys harvesting crops by hand were likely scared that the harvester or less technologically advanced vehicles would displace them and create chaos for their personal existence, and they were often right. the moral of the story is that we have the capabilities to make those guys whole now with social transfers and ease their transition. technology didn’t start deplacing working this or last century, technology has displaced workers since the beginning of time.
Back to my original idea of wealth per individal. What good would it do to have a massive population of people if there is not enough wealth to fully develop even a fraction of them. I would think that if the population was either modest or massive, you would harvest the same quantity of inovation out of each condition. It is all going to come down to owners of resources (physical and intellectual) and how large of a service/ culture/ inovation industry those can support. After that it is just high unemployment and/or forced socialism. Small population… that is my thesis. .
it could also come down to owners of resources and how large of a R&D industry those can support. we will continue to see more and more people pushed into R&D type roles as a percentage of population going forward as we have seen in the past. R&D 100 years ago was a bunch of einstein-types in a lab. now there are millions of R&D types in North America. even the non-einsteins can innovate. this is what greater population provides. not only do you get a higher chance of finding a true einstein but you get more R&D workers in general. i’m fairly certain that most innovation is spread evenly across the population over time and that more R&D types is good for technological progress both on an absolute and per capital basis. a lot of the world’s best inventors in the past just took an old idea and made it commercial. Eli Whitney, wrt to the cotton gin, simply improved on a prototype that was developed 80 years prior and had touched many other innovators’ hands before he made THE cotton gin. i believe the same can be said for the combustion engine but i believe the combustion engine may have taken well over 100 years from prototype to successful commercial concept. i’m pulling these examples from Guns, Germs and Steel. the innovators that we praise are often businessment not the true innovators who created the prototype. in retrospect, it is likely that many of the treasured innovators weren’t all that innovative. you might be able to say that the millions of R&D people we now have working for various multinationals, startups and governments closely reflect many of our treasured innovators on average.
When I taught environmental political economy, my approach to the question of population was always “Human population control is not the only solution to ecological pressure - technology and the distribution of benefits are also extremely important - but to the extent that populations are smaller, the ecological problems are easier to address.” What this means is that as the other interventions are ruled either exhausted or politically impossible, the pressure to use population control as a measure becomes higher and higher, and the pressure to abandon democratic practices to make it happen is also higher.
The real result is that since no one with any power likes redistributional politics, and no one really likes what population control means in practice - people place all their bets on technology: something that so far has delivered, but which (in a world of finite size) can only delay the moment in which the other issues have to be addressed. At some point, technology will start to deliver diminishing returns (the result of physics’ conservation laws), and whatever form society is in at that point will likely determine how this plays out. This is one reason why the distributional challenges of today are so alarming to me.
As to your quote above, Amartya Sen has a comment that always rang true for me: “To justify an economic process that concentrates wealth based on the idea that it would generate larger per capita wealth if it were distributed evenly is meaningless if - in fact - that wealth is never actually distributed evenly (or even close to it).”
A Rawlsian approach to distributional issues is more flexible, where the tolerance of wealth differences is acceptable provided that it benefits (or at least does not harm) the worst of, and it resonates with MLA’s claim that even if the bottom of the pyramid doesn’t get much of the wealth generated by economic processes today, it’s still better off than it was 100 or 1000 years ago. That doesn’t mean it’s optimal, though, merely that it’s better than a situation where the bottom of the pyramid goes backwards in quality of life. This is why there’s a debate about whether things like income and job security are less important than the fact that more of the poor have cell phones, so it isn’t as awful to be destitute these days as it was 100 years ago, even if perhaps a higher percentage of the population is destitute than it was 50 years ago.
well said. though i rebut amartya sen in that as a species, we have much greater success in reacting to problems (income/wealth inequality) as can be seen in most socialist leaning democracies (e.g. most of Europe, Canada, U.S. to an extent) than controlling population or economic sector growth (e.g. soviet era russia). if western democracies actually wanted to attack the income/wealth inequality issue, they would and they could. history has shown that you can tax income inequality away. in a world of low returns on capital, the effect of this taxation on the general economy should theoretically be much more muted than in the past. it is even possible that brining income inequality back to a more normalized level could boost economic activity as money taken from the rich will be spent.
amartya’s arguement ignores the fact that the definition of poor changes with time. technology is a key reason for changes in the definition. you can’t say don’t support the technology sector because it will not improve the lives of the poor in financial terms when it boosts the baseline of what poor is.