You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

wedrifid comments on What jobs are safe in an automated future? - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: PuyaSharif 11 January 2012 08:48PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (101)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 January 2012 01:05:33AM 0 points [-]

Jobs shouldn't be a scarce resource, but markets can stay out of equilibrium for a surprisingly long time

Especially when there are laws involved!

Comment author: mwengler 16 January 2012 05:53:26PM -1 points [-]

Especially when there are laws involved!

Lawless areas seem to have gigantically lower productivity than lawful areas. ALL the high per capita productivity regions of the world have overwhelmingly strong governments providing physical security to lives and property at extraordinarily high levels.

Do you have any evidence that lawless areas do economically better in ANY measure than heavily regulated areas?

Comment author: wedrifid 16 January 2012 10:09:16PM *  0 points [-]

Lawless areas seem to have gigantically lower productivity than lawful areas. ALL the high per capita productivity regions of the world have overwhelmingly strong governments providing physical security to lives and property at extraordinarily high levels.

Do you have any evidence that lawless areas do economically better in ANY measure than heavily regulated areas?

That would be a rather bizarre thing for me to be try to provide evidence for. I have not and would not assert any similar thing. That's the most surprising thing I've had appear in my inbox for ages!

My comment was merely an agreement with CronoDAS that in practice markets are not perfectly efficient and acknowledgement that with respect to job markets in particular things like minimum wage laws contribute to this. And you know what? Without claiming much expertise and so with rather low confidence I say minimum wage laws are a good thing. Ours (in Aus.) are comparatively high (compared to, say, the US) and it seems to work fine.