Report Card for Donald Trump

[Mikebert]

(01-03-2017, 03:27 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Mike,


Oh, and:

Four - Given this shift in manufacturing (even of the high-value added stuff like Iphones and computer chips that we were originally supposed to hold on to when this outsourcing thing got started) to East Asia, the extent to which IT/telecommunications has enabled the emergence of these sorts of global supply chains, the tremendous growth in China's IT sector, the general pattern of hegemons only holding on for one or at most two k-waves, you can make a substantial argument, as you begun to in your last post, that China may in fact be the locus of the next k-wave/future hegemony, and the chief beneficiary of the tail-end of this one.

Just something to consider.

You are coming at this from only one perspective. K-waves are independent of Modelski's work. He was using the concept in an economic output sense, which is the sense that is least supported by evidence. The original concept was monetary, movements in prices and interest rates, which actually occurred. The interpretation in terms of output made by Kondratiev was never actually established to have happened. I used Harry Dent's, concept of a "new economy" developing along the lines of a product life cycle: innovation, growth, maturity, and death and Modelski's concept of these new economies as leading sectors to develop my own approach to a real interpretation of the K-wave, to supplement the monetary definition to identify cycles before 1790.

It was just a tool. I originally tried to use this to explain cycle timing in the 1990's and early 2000's. But once a 2001 K-winter did not happen, it lost its utility. The monetary version still has some, limited utility but there is not much there either. This is why I haven't done anything with it.

Also trade does not explain trillions of missing output. Our trade deficit is about half a trillion, too small to account for all of it. It plays a role, and I would support some protectionism, but its not very important.

Also, exports involve foreign consumers, so that too comes from consumers.
No net money comes from equity markets either. All output (GDP) is created to be purchased by end consumers. Equity markets are buying future GDP (net output or final sales), which must be sold to consumers. Equity cash also comes from consumers. Ultimately it must come from consumers.

[SomeGuy]

No worries, Dave, no need to stripe it out if you don't want.

Look, I think you're making too much and too little of it at the same time.  Most of the claims being made out the future of AI right now are likely to prove as overblown as most of the claims made at the top of any other tech boom (remember the hype about VR back in the early 90s?  Space travel during the early Space Age?  Walking robots built by DARPA for Vietnam?).  There is a lot of hype going around right now, and no new breakthroughs have been made recently to justify them, simply improvements on old processes.  Eventually this boom will shake itself out, a lot of companies will go out of business, separating out the wheat from the chaff, and the process will start over.  There's definitely a trend towards automation that is going to continue, but you can't just look at it in isolation.  The rest of the world is modernizing, and yet the present resource base and waste sinks can't even handle a European level of consumption on a global scale, much less an American one.  There are arbitrary limits to energy efficiency, and even energy use, for reasons of waste heat if nothing else.  Speaking of heating, what about global warming?  You have been banging on about that for a while, and that is going to place a great deal of strain on the industrial system worldwide.  There is already a great deal of pushback on the use of our present primary sources of energy (fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro, etc.), and places like Hawaii and Germany are already experiencing a great deal of problems integrating sources like PV and wind on a large scale in the absence of effective grid-scale storage.  So mechanization and automation are going to have these other factors affecting their cost structure.


But let's say it continues.  So what?  Deep Blue beat a chess grandmaster back in the late 90s, and yet people still play and compete in chess.  James Boggs was talking about the imminent end of work back in the 60s, and how well placed the African American community was to handle it.  There's a reason why people still watch boxing or the UFC rather than a giant version of rock 'em sock 'em robots, even though I am pretty sure we've been able to build one that could beat the shit out of Mike Tyson ('80s) for decades now.  We industrialized food production decades ago, and people are clamoring for alternatives, and willing to pay through the nose for them (there's a reason why Whole Foods is also known as Whole Paycheck).  And the transition to an economy based more on personal services and entertainment has been going on in the developed world for decades now.  When I was living in New York, I met or saw tons of people with goofy jobs like dog walker/groomer, fantasy football analyst, image consultant, personal assistant, etc.  The popularity for Downton Abbey increased the demand for high level personal services (do you know how much a butler can make?)  Jesus, there are people who make a living playing video games and selling their characters/equipment to people too lazy to do the work for them, and the companies running those environments can be pretty heavy-handed about cracking down on bot usage.  Since, as you pointed out before, this is not something that's going to happen overnight, but an ongoing process, we'll probably continue to see an increase in these sorts of things over time.  People need to find things to do in order to be happy (have you ever had a truly extended period of free time with little to no responsibilities?  It's depressing).  They'll still want to compete for status, still search for novelty, still have limits on the amount of time and interest they can muster, even if we wave away constraints on energy, raw materials, land, processing power, etc. that will likely exist long into the future.  As I alluded to in the other thread, we have examples (segments of the Roman Empire, the 19th century European Aristocracy, the American gentry during the same timeframe, etc.) of whole societies of people who didn't work as a matter of principle, who still founds things to do to occupy their time and make each other happy/miserable, based on, yes, entertainment and emotional satisfaction.

Are there going to be issues?  Of course there are, but fixating solely on the issue of automation and the apparent concomitant need for a basic income to go along with it misses the point entirely.  How do we reconcile our productive technical capacity with our consumption?  How is our productive capacity (and the inputs it requires) distributed?  If there is a basic income (like, say, a universal Social Security regardless of age), how much does it give out?  How is that figure adjusted, and who (what?) adjusts it?  Where does that money go as it is presumably spent on things?  Is it taxed back out of circulation?  Who is taxing it?  Who is being taxed?  If we aren't using something recognizable as money, how are allocation and distribution being handled instead?  What is being produced, and how is that decided?  How are all of these decisions being made and remade according to conditions?  We don't know, and since the conditions in question are at this point largely hypothetical and will be for some time, we can't know, and so all of this handwringing about the RISE OF THE MACHINES is, at this point, ahistorical and entirely beside the point.

[SomeGuy]

Quote: used Harry Dent's

Am immediately skeptical.

Quote:But once a 2001 K-winter did not happen, it lost its utility. The monetary version still has some, limited utility but there is not much there either. This is why I haven't done anything with it.

So why are you complaining if I am not using it?

Quote:Also trade does not explain trillions of missing output.

What missing output?

Quote:Also, exports involve foreign consumers, so that too comes from consumers.

No net money comes from equity markets either. All output (GDP) is created to be purchased by end consumers. Equity markets are buying future GDP (net output or final sales), which must be sold to consumers. Equity cash also comes from consumers. Ultimately it must come from consumers.

And where do the consumers get their money from?  I have a feeling we're going to go round and round in circles if we play this out.

[Warren Dew]

(01-04-2017, 12:51 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-04-2017, 01:54 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(01-03-2017, 06:00 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-30-2016, 06:38 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: As for me, I'm taking an over the counter supplement that reduces cancer incidence by 77% at a cost of about $15/year.  That's the kind of efficiency that we would see if it weren't for the economic distortions imposed on the health care system by our tax regulations.  Unfortunately, because of the tax regulations, no one can make money preventing cancer, so solutions like that are reserved for the favored few that spend hours investigating things like that for ourselves.

There is no single item that can have that impact, because cancer is not a singular disease.  Which class of cancers are you warding off with your OTC product?

The trial looked at all cancer, treating them as a single outcome.  There was a 77% reduction in incidence, even though the compliance of the experimental group was only 85%.

This makes sense because all cancers are fundamentally the same:  unchecked reproduction at the cellular level.

But hey, if we really cared about finding out more, we could redo the trial with a enough subjects to differentiate between different types of cancer as different outcomes.  Unfortunately, for a product that only sells for $15/year, there's no incentive to do a new trial like that.

I know a bit about oncology, and I'm skeptical.  The only general purpose "cure" in the works involves phages and chlorotoxin.  I might include Tumor Paint too, though its function is more diagnostic.

As I said, it reduces cancer incidence; it may not affect progression.  If you don't get the cancer in the first place, you don't have to worry about a cure.

[David Horn]

(01-05-2017, 04:30 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Are there going to be issues?  Of course there are, but fixating solely on the issue of automation and the apparent concomitant need for a basic income to go along with it misses the point entirely.  How do we reconcile our productive technical capacity with our consumption?  How is our productive capacity (and the inputs it requires) distributed?  If there is a basic income (like, say, a universal Social Security regardless of age), how much does it give out?  How is that figure adjusted, and who (what?) adjusts it?  Where does that money go as it is presumably spent on things?  Is it taxed back out of circulation?  Who is taxing it?  Who is being taxed?  If we aren't using something recognizable as money, how are allocation and distribution being handled instead?  What is being produced, and how is that decided?  How are all of these decisions being made and remade according to conditions?  We don't know, and since the conditions in question are at this point largely hypothetical and will be for some time, we can't know, and so all of this handwringing about the RISE OF THE MACHINES is, at this point, ahistorical and entirely beside the point.

None of this will affect me directly, but it may affect my  son and will certainly affect my grandchildren.  That said, deriving a solution to an amorphous problem that will arrive at some as yet undetermined time is an exercise in futility ... mostly.  A large percentage of the new ideas we develop originated in sci-fi decades ago, so there's hope.

[SomeGuy]

(01-06-2017, 03:41 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-05-2017, 04:30 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Are there going to be issues?  Of course there are, but fixating solely on the issue of automation and the apparent concomitant need for a basic income to go along with it misses the point entirely.  How do we reconcile our productive technical capacity with our consumption?  How is our productive capacity (and the inputs it requires) distributed?  If there is a basic income (like, say, a universal Social Security regardless of age), how much does it give out?  How is that figure adjusted, and who (what?) adjusts it?  Where does that money go as it is presumably spent on things?  Is it taxed back out of circulation?  Who is taxing it?  Who is being taxed?  If we aren't using something recognizable as money, how are allocation and distribution being handled instead?  What is being produced, and how is that decided?  How are all of these decisions being made and remade according to conditions?  We don't know, and since the conditions in question are at this point largely hypothetical and will be for some time, we can't know, and so all of this handwringing about the RISE OF THE MACHINES is, at this point, ahistorical and entirely beside the point.

None of this will affect me directly, but it may affect my  son and will certainly affect my grandchildren.  That said, deriving a solution to an amorphous problem that will arrive at some as yet undetermined time is an exercise in futility ... mostly.  A large percentage of the new ideas we develop originated in sci-fi decades ago.  There's hope.

That's part of the reason why I have been so dismissive of the latest panic over automation I have been seeing recently.  It's neither a new technical development, and I have been reading SF stories exploring this idea since I was a child.  You should check out Bruce Sterling, Dave Marusek, etc. for some ideas.  It's pretty old hat to me at this point, at least as an idea.  And, as you said, trying to derive "a solution to an amorphous problem that will arrive at some as yet undetermined time is an exercise in futility", and doesn't really tell us what we should do about problems right now.  In my first post in this thread, I outlined some things I'd like to see.

[David Horn]

(01-06-2017, 03:53 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(01-06-2017, 03:41 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-05-2017, 04:30 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Are there going to be issues?  Of course there are, but fixating solely on the issue of automation and the apparent concomitant need for a basic income to go along with it misses the point entirely.  How do we reconcile our productive technical capacity with our consumption?  How is our productive capacity (and the inputs it requires) distributed?  If there is a basic income (like, say, a universal Social Security regardless of age), how much does it give out?  How is that figure adjusted, and who (what?) adjusts it?  Where does that money go as it is presumably spent on things?  Is it taxed back out of circulation?  Who is taxing it?  Who is being taxed?  If we aren't using something recognizable as money, how are allocation and distribution being handled instead?  What is being produced, and how is that decided?  How are all of these decisions being made and remade according to conditions?  We don't know, and since the conditions in question are at this point largely hypothetical and will be for some time, we can't know, and so all of this handwringing about the RISE OF THE MACHINES is, at this point, ahistorical and entirely beside the point.

None of this will affect me directly, but it may affect my  son and will certainly affect my grandchildren.  That said, deriving a solution to an amorphous problem that will arrive at some as yet undetermined time is an exercise in futility ... mostly.  A large percentage of the new ideas we develop originated in sci-fi decades ago.  There's hope.

That's part of the reason why I have been so dismissive of the latest panic over automation I have been seeing recently.  It's neither a new technical development, and I have been reading SF stories exploring this idea since I was a child.  You should check out Bruce Sterling, Dave Marusek, etc. for some ideas.  It's pretty old hat to me at this point, at least as an idea.  And, as you said, trying to derive "a solution to an amorphous problem that will arrive at some as yet undetermined time is an exercise in futility", and doesn't really tell us what we should do about problems right now.  In my first post in this thread, I outlined some things I'd like to see.

Yeah, but there is also the issue of inertia.  If we design a fix suitable for today, it must be adjustable later as times and situations change.  We humans tend to like fixed solutions -- especially the more conservative among us.  Since we seem destined to be a conservative nation with only brief bursts of progressivism, let's plan on that.  Fair disclosure: I have not the slightest idea how to make that happen, only that it should must.

[Eric the Green]

The machine takeover today and the next few decades is unprecedented. Machines will replace all but a few jobs. Denying this seems to me an attempt to salvage the neo-liberal doctrine that everyone should work and that those who receive government benefits are freeloaders and thieves. What needs to be faced is not only the falsehood of trickle-down libertarian economics/neo-liberalism etc., but the fact that it is outdated. This is hard for believers in the ideology to accept; an ideology that still dominates our government after over 37 years of failure.

[David Horn]

(01-05-2017, 09:40 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(01-04-2017, 12:51 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-04-2017, 01:54 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: ... This makes sense because all cancers are fundamentally the same:  unchecked reproduction at the cellular level.

But hey, if we really cared about finding out more, we could redo the trial with a enough subjects to differentiate between different types of cancer as different outcomes.  Unfortunately, for a product that only sells for $15/year, there's no incentive to do a new trial like that.

I know a bit about oncology, and I'm skeptical.  The only general purpose "cure" in the works involves phages and chlorotoxin.  I might include Tumor Paint too, though its function is more diagnostic.

As I said, it reduces cancer incidence; it may not affect progression.  If you don't get the cancer in the first place, you don't have to worry about a cure.

Actually, cancers fall into many categories, and similarities are pretty limited.  The biggest similarity seems to be DNA changes that the body can't recognize, though other ailments have that property too.  Triggers are different.  Having any of numerous DNA flaws and any number of environmental issues -- radiation being enemy #1.  If your home has radon in high concentrations, your risks are higher, but only for a limited ranges of cancers and only certain variants. 

I have a hard time believing in a prophylactic that stabilizes DNA, but stranger things have happened.

[pbrower2a]

(01-03-2017, 04:16 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

(01-03-2017, 03:57 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(01-03-2017, 02:07 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I first look at innovation wave/leading sector stuff in the 1990's.  Back then I saw the K-peaks in 1864, 1920 and 1981 and the period of strong growth afterward 4.7% (1866-73) 4.8% (1921-29) and 4.4% (1982-89) as the same points of time in the K-cycle.  These periods were followed by downturns and then a period of very strong growth afterward: 8.9% (1877-81) and 9.4% (1933-37). Both of these periods occurred during growth phase of cluster of leading sectors, or "new economy" as Harry Dent puts it. The previous growth phases ended in 1888 and 1937 for the industrial and mass-market economy, respectively and the current one was forecasted to end in 2007. Based on this concept I anticipated strong growth in the late 1990's, not as strong as in 1877-81 or 1933-37, since these were coming off economic lows, but still stronger than what was saw in the 1980's.  Didn't happen, growth over 1996-2000 was the same as in the 1980's.

This was all before generations. In 2000-1 I added the idea of generations to my thinking and concluded that the K-cycle was longer today than its historic 50-60 year length. Based on a correlation between the start of K-winter and the 4T in 1929, I took the apparent 2001 start of the 4T as evidence that K-winter began in 2000.  This makes the economic boom over the 1982-2000 bull market cycle equivalent to the 1861-81 and 1921-29 bull markets, for which growth averaged 4.9% and 4.8%, respectively.  Growth over the 1982-2000 bull averaged only 3.7%, a bit less but not way out of line.

But that wasn't right.  We now think 2008 is a 4T start and I did confirm that 2008 was a 1929-equivalent economic event.  So this means the analog to 1921-29 is now 1982-2007 for which average growth was only 3.2% due to poor growth of 2.7% over the 2001-2007 expansion.  In other words during the growth phase of the information economy growth was strongest in the 1980's before the internet, when PCs and floppy disks were cutting edge. The addition of much more capable machines, capable hard drives, and the internet (which changed everything so said the stock market boosters in the nineties bubble) gave us slightly slower growth.  Then after 2000, broadband, B2B and social media, brought us even slower growth. Adding smart phones since 2007 and a lot more social media hasn't helped--growth over 2009-15 was even slower at 2.2%.  These leading sectors aren't powering growth like they used to.  If what you say is true about all this huge spending on IT infrastructure creating growth, then it would show up in the numbers.

Why do you think the k cycle and the generational cycle have to be aligned?

I don't anymore.  Back in the 1990's and early 2000's it looked promising. There was a correspondence between turnings 1929-1946, 1946-1964, 1964-1984 and 1984-  and K-cycle seasons 1929-1946, 1946-1966, 1966-1982, 1982-2008.  It was driven by the correspondence between the 1980's and the 1920's in economic and political terms, and the 1990's and the 1920's in new innovation/new economy terms.  Roy Neuberger, who shorted Radio at its peak in '29, still active a nearly 100 in the late nineties noted the similarity between the late 1920's and the current times.  So yeah I thought there was a connection 10-20 years ago.  Now?  Not so much.

I thought the "Is Connecticut the Best State in which to Live?" thread of potential interest. I could not bring back everything, and whether I knew what the "Law of Large Numbers" really was wasn;t that important.

Neither was much of the nasty stuff that I left out. I had limited time in which to revive anything,. so I had to be selective.

If someone has a problem with what I had to say about the states on statistical levels on politics, living standards, and education -- tough luck. How well one lives depends upon many things, including formal education, avoiding teen sex, staying clean of street drugs, abstaining from crime, and not using tobacco. Ethnicity? Although it was a statistical disadvantage to be black anywhere, it was statistically more of a disadvantage to be white in West Virginia than to be black in Maryland, which may demonstrate not to much that people of West Virginia were schmucks, but instead that the government in West Virginia had not well met certain basic needs well.

I introduced the concept of statewide credit scores as a way to deflate the effects of high real estate prices (in effect, one can live better on $25K a year in Mississippi than on $40K in parts of California and Greater New York because of the difference in real estate prices between rural America and the megalopolises) but I still found patterns that showed the Mountain and Deep South terribly disadvantaged. I also found a correlation between smoking and poor credit scores. Add to that -- someone with good habits will fare better in a state with a lesser rating of quality of life, and that someone taking bad habits from a state with a lesser rating in quality of life to a state with a higher quality of life (like being a high-school drop-out and a chain-smoker) will do little good.

As large as the USA is in geographic scope, I might have expected that costs of living would in part reflect winter costs of heating and clothing. Even so, Minnesota did better in statewide credit scores than Mississippi. I came to the conclusion that if someone who has a fresh teachers certificate granted in a place equidistant between job offers in Minnesota and Mississippi, then go to Minnesota because the schools are likely to be better funded.

Politics? I had little good to say about the Republican Party, but I noticed that if I made adjustments for the cost of living, Nebraska and Utah did well enough. Those two states spend their public funds well. Of course, Utah residents are the lightest smokers, by far, in America... so Utah doesn't have to spend as much on public health to cover people with smoking-related ailments. I noticed that Texas did far better than most other states in the Deep and Mountain South -- probably because Texans do not smoke as much, and because many of the poor in Texas are Mexican-Americans who have yet to assimilate the anti-intellectualism characteristic of white and black people on the whole in the Mountain and Deep South.

I had little good to say about my own state Michigan. After it voted for Demagogue Don, I have even less good to say of it, but that was before I did the thread 'necromancy'. Michigan is beginning to look more like a state in the Mountain South -- West Virginia with lakes instead of hills. Michigan over-invested in highways early to facilitate the power of the automobile industry that it depended upon for jobs and high incomes. Michigan has a bigger agricultural base than does West Virginia, but in parallel the automobile and coal industries went into relative decline while the state politicians failed to make the appropriate adjustments. Michigan was less partisan than West Virginia, so Democrats and Republicans both got culpability for the bad economic consequences. West Virginia was more Democratic, and Democratic politicians got caught with the consequences of their incompetence and inattention. West Virginia should have put more funds into roads, schools, and public health in the good times... and didn't.

That is a fair warning to any state that relies heavily upon one industry for above-average incomes. Thus if high technology falters in California, there will be bad consequences for California. Texas might want to hedge upon oil with solar power (example: Dallas is almost as sunny as Phoenix) in the event that the oil fields go dry.

But in reviving that thread I had to rush, and rush jobs usually have their faults. I am not like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in composition, being able to write quickly while writing scores with no mistakes.

[Mikebert]

Quote:And where do the consumers get their money from?  I have a feeling we're going to go round and round in circles if we play this out.

Well of course. The economic process is circular, surely you most know this.  Output is produced, some of which is purchased by present consumers, and some it is purchased by current investors who hope to recover their investment from their share of (larger) future consumer spending.  Current output generates income for consumers which finances their current consumption.  As long as the share of output that goes to consumers remains strong, future output made possible by current investment will provide the income necessary for the future consumers to purchase the output necessary to ensure the future return that justifies current investment.  It's a reflexive process.

What makes the system work is the reliable transmission of output to consumer income, which ensures the arrival of that future consumption on schedule.   The key issue behind sluggish growth trends in recent decades is that this reliability is breaking down, making investing more risky.  This is why companies are sitting on all that cash.

[SomeGuy]

That's the point, Pbrower, you don't know enough about statistics to be able to make the inferences you did.  Which I, and others, pointed out repeatedly.

But, more importantly, if you wanted to save the thread, archive it in its entirety.  There is a large archive of threads that people asked to have saved from the old one, you should have put it there.  Don't selectively requote my posts and write new responses to them in a new thread.

[Mikebert]

(01-04-2017, 12:53 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Emphasis mine.  Is the SW adequate as is, or does it require more development work?  What's the power consumption like?  How on earth can something be "self-maintaining" and also "simpler than a toaster"?  Is all this stuff going to be manufactured here?  Will it manufacturer itself?  What about liability concerns?  Consumer uptake?  Is machine-grown food today more or less prestigious than low-tech alternatives?  Are people really going to want interact solely with robots all day, for every task?  Are these only going to be software systems or industrial robots, or are they going to be walking around, grooming dogs, carrying groceries?  How much will these things cost?  Is everything going to be free in the glorious communist paradise of progress?  Materials, energy, land, time, etc?

You don't need many people to manufacture, program, and service the machines.  We already have people doing these things and they do not make up a majority of the workforce.  With automation they will become more productive and so will be able to support more and more robots. 

The issue Dave is talking about will first be manifest in service jobs that employ large numbers of people like truck driving, delivery people, warehouse staff, retail workers, food service workers, housekeepers and home caregivers, orderlies, nursing staff, phlebotomists, etc.  Some jobs will be automated more easily than others.  A machine that can communicate in and comprehend verbal instructions given in natural language, and which can move fluidly as a human does, will be able perform tasks just like those performed by servant or a slave.  The future could be a robot slave economy like ancient Rome. The majority of citizens of the ancient city of Rome did not work and even those who did had more days off due to holidays than work days.

[SomeGuy]

Mike,


Yes, of course I know, that was not an idle comment.  I was merely reminding you that it is not a linear transmission from end users down the value chain through all the intermediary processes to, presumably, raw materials somewhere.

The problem is that our present policies and circumstances have conspired to render an increasingly wide segment of our population without a comparative advantage in much of anything (due to lower limits on labor costs and regulatory compliance, among others), impoverishing them even as the total economy (emcompassing almost the whole world) grows.  The problem western leaders are finding now is that most of the people whose lives have been most improved by free trade don't get to vote in their elections, whereas many of those most affected do.

And here we are.

[SomeGuy]

Quote:You don't need many people to manufacture, program, and service the machines.  We already have people doing these things and they do not make up a majority of the workforce.  With automation they will become more productive and so will be able to support more and more robots. 

Yes, but the income those people have pays for plumbers, restaurants, clothes, haircuts, etc.  And many of the goods we consume presently are not necessarily produced by machines here at home, but large numbers of people working in factories in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.  While bringing those jobs back on shore would lead to a net reduction in total employment, it would lead to an increase in jobs HERE, which would then pay for more haircuts, plumbers, electricians, etc. Subject to the inevitable caveat that there could be an impact on consumption here from a rise in prices... Or so the going arguments for past several decades goes.  I think its political currency has faded.

Quote:The issue Dave is talking about will first be manifest in service jobs that employ large numbers of people like truck driving, delivery people, warehouse staff, retail workers, food service workers, housekeepers and home caregivers, orderlies, nursing staff, phlebotomists, etc.

Dave is a big boy and can speak for himself.  If you'd like to participate in this section of the debate, please do so directly and not on (supposed) behalf of someone else.

Quote:A machine that can communicate in and comprehend verbal instructions given in natural language, and which can move fluidly as a human does, will be able perform tasks just like those performed by servant or a slave. 

Which, as I have already stated, would presumably involved an enormous amount of money and energy to create and maintain all of these ambulatory androids, which are not much in evidence right now and may never be as cost-effective compared to human labor as you suppose, if they ever get around to going through the trouble of actually existing.

Quote:The future could be a robot slave economy like ancient Rome. The majority of citizens of the ancient city of Rome did not work and even those who did had more days off due to holidays than work days.

Once again, I have already made that exact same reference a couple of posts prior in my response to Dave.  If you're going to try and speak for both of you, could you at least do me the courtesy of reading my responses to both?

[David Horn]

(01-07-2017, 04:18 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

Mikebert Wrote:You don't need many people to manufacture, program, and service the machines.  We already have people doing these things and they do not make up a majority of the workforce.  With automation they will become more productive and so will be able to support more and more robots. [/size][/color]

Yes, but the income those people have pays for plumbers, restaurants, clothes, haircuts, etc.  And many of the goods we consume presently are not necessarily produced by machines here at home, but large numbers of people working in factories in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.  While bringing those jobs back on shore would lead to a net reduction in total employment, it would lead to an increase in jobs HERE, which would then pay for more haircuts, plumbers, electricians, etc. Subject to the inevitable caveat that there could be an impact on consumption here from a rise in prices... Or so the going arguments for past several decades goes.  I think its political currency has faded.

Your argument is fine, until you made this statement.  Any automation will ultimately lead to fewer jobs unless a even greater gain in GDP is created, which is unlikely in this scenario.  Instead, you get a reduction in exporting jobs that may more than offset the gains from on-shoring.  The bugaboo is still technology.  This is the real challenge.  How is this disruption scenario accommodated as the destructive part consistently outpaces the creative part? 

Remember, self-replicating machines are already well underway for applications in space.  Why assume that this is the only use they will have?  Once machines can reproduce, the value of human labor drops almost to nothing.  We better be ready a long time before we get there.

[SomeGuy]

Quote:Any automation will ultimately lead to fewer jobs unless a even greater gain in GDP is created, which is unlikely in this scenario.  Instead, you get a reduction in exporting jobs that may more than offset the gains from on-shoring.

You presume that manufacturing exports are larger than manufacturing imports.  They are not.  As imports are subtracted from GDP, a shift in this balance of trade would lead to an increase in GDP, other things being equal.  They are not, but whether the net effect is positive depends on a host of questions that neither of us have addressed, viz the extent to which the increase in prices counteracts an increase in US income available for consumption, how this affects the value of the dollar, the resulting distribution of income, etc.  You also need to remember that a lot of the things the US still exports are things like petrochemicals, aircraft, military equipment, pharmaceuticals, grain, etc. that are not traded purely in terms of price, that other sources of these products may not be regarded as acceptable substitutes do to issues of distribution channels, quality, geopolitics, etc.
I personally am inclined to think that a reduction of manufacturing imports from low-wage nations, particularly in Asia, in favor of domestic production would be a net positive, but I cannot claim to know how all of those issues I mentioned above would play out and I accept that there may be perfectly valid differences of opinion here in the absence of more data.

Quote:The bugaboo is still technology.  This is the real challenge.  How is this disruption scenario accommodated as the destructive part consistently outpaces the creative part? 

Remember, self-replicating machines are already well underway for applications in space.  Why assume that this is the only use they will have?  Once machines can reproduce, the value of human labor drops almost to nothing.  We better be ready a long time before we get there.

It's like a religious thing with you, isn't it?  That link isn't for something in production, it's the wikipedia page of a concept that has more sources from science fiction going back decades than it does current projects.  You keep asserting that "the destructive part" MUST "consistently outpace the creative part", but you never prove why that must be so.  All you do is wave your hands, and completely ignore the long history of those claims, their persistent failure in the past, and the absence of any real evidence in support of why IT's DIFFERENT THIS TIME.
Atomic energy was supposed to be "too cheap to meter", and prototypes were built of atomic cars, atomic airplanes, etc.?  What happened there?  We landed people on the Moon in 1969, when did we land people on Mars?  The Space Shuttle was supposed to make travel to orbit as cheap and convenient as jet airplane ride?  How did that work out?  DARPA built a walking robot for the US Army for use in Vietnam, and they're still playing around with the idea now.
Just because something can be imagined doesn't mean it can be built.  Just because it can be built doesn't mean it is feasible to use.  Just because it can be used doesn't mean it will be cost-effective to do so compared to the alternatives.  
You have already acknowledged that this is not an imminent thing, need I quote you to nail you down on that subject?  Given this, what you are instead making is a long-term prediction on technological trends, several decades out.  Do you have any idea what the history of that sort of thing looks like?  You should check out Victorian predictions of the 20th century, mid-century depictions of the early 21th century.  Where are the jet packs, the space colonies, the food pills?  Where was the Internet in any of their predictions?  The very fact that people here at the height of a tech boom are converging on one vision of what the future a few decades out looks like is a pretty solid indicator that that isn't how it is going to be.
Do you actually have a real response to any of these issues I raised as to consumer preference, energy usage, relative labor costs, or the like, or is all you can manage a plaintive "THE MACHINES WILL TAKE OVER BECAUSE SCIENCE!"?

[Warren Dew]

(01-08-2017, 07:16 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: I personally am inclined to think that a reduction of manufacturing imports from low-wage nations, particularly in Asia, in favor of domestic production would be a net positive, but I cannot claim to know how all of those issues I mentioned above would play out and I accept that there may be perfectly valid differences of opinion here in the absence of more data.

Are we talking about natural movement of manufacturing back to the US due to use of automation and relative advantage, as in the case of modern cotton mills someone - I believe you - linked to earlier, or are we talking about forced movement of manufacturing back to the US due to tarriffs or other barriers?

The natural movement case is very likely advantageous to the US, as there is no inflation directly involved, so any jobs created, even if they are small in number, are a net positive.  There might be some diffuse secondary inflation in whatever industries the workers come from, if any, but by definition, if the worker moves to a better paying job in a free market, his time is being used more efficiently from an economic standpoint.

I don't see how the forced movement case can possibly be positive in the current economic environment.  The labor market is tight, as evidenced by low unemployment, so we're not talking about employing large numbers of people who are currently unemployed.  Given the very large wage differentials involved, and given the offshored work is exactly that work which is labor intensive, forcing movement back to the US is likely to result in extremely high inflation in the relevant industries, and consequently massive production and consumption decreases in those industries, and massive reduction in associated consumer surplus and well being.

[SomeGuy]

Warren,

It was me, and the answer is, probably a mixture of both.  Given the labor force participation rate, and the regional disparities in job creation, there is probably more slack in the labor market than you think, and other inflationary pressures are so low in the economy right now that a modest rise in inflation wouldn't hurt.

[Warren Dew]

(01-09-2017, 09:09 AM)SomeGuy Wrote: Warren,

It was me, and the answer is, probably a mixture of both.  Given the labor force participation rate, and the regional disparities in job creation, there is probably more slack in the labor market than you think, and other inflationary pressures are so low in the economy right now that a modest rise in inflation wouldn't hurt.

There's certainly potential for the labor force to expand.  The fact that they're out of the market, though, suggests they're not desperate for $10/hour jobs, let alone $10/day jobs.

I really don't think there's much of a market for $200 dress shirts produced in US sweat shops, which is around where today's $40 dress shirts would be if sewn in the US.  And that has upstream repercussions for those nice automated cotton mills, if people don't buy cotton shirts any more.