Politics Discussion Thread February 2013

OrphanWilde

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

We've lost, by my count, 1,394,100,000 jobs in the US in the last two hundred years. You may notice that is a larger number of jobs than people actually exist; this is because, if all those jobs actually existed, we'd still be farmers. (Value calculated by dividing current median income in the US by an estimation of sustenance income necessary to a lifestyle appropriate to, say, the 1700's. Not terribly accurate, as it doesn't account for the increased value of leisure time, or the automation of non-economic tasks; the actual figure in these terms may be as much as 30x rather than 9x the labor force. Additionally, I didn't include the massive reduction in work hours over the past two hundred years, which could as much as double that figure again)

The challenge isn't to figure out how many jobs automation will eliminate; it's already eliminated nine times more jobs than there are people doing jobs in this country. That's what permits our high standards of living; each person is enjoying the fruits of the labor of at least eight additional counterfactual people whose jobs are being performed by automation.

The challenge is to figure out to what extent this trend can continue; there's obvious room for improvement in that most of the world still has substantial improvements to be made to its standard of living. The challenge is to figure out whether or not the most fundamental tenet of economics - that demand is unlimited - holds true.

I always thought demand was limited by factors such as the size of one's stomach the speed at which clothes wear out or go out of fashion, and most importantly income among other things. I'm actually kind of surprised to hear that unlimited demand was a fundamental tenet of economics.

5buybuydandavis13y

Even if demands are unlimited, the problem is that automation will drive down the costs of a lot of labor to where regulatory and transaction costs make hiring most people more trouble than it's worth. It's not that there won't be labor people want done, it's that machines will out compete most people in those tasks, making then economically unviable.