"Have enough" is a static steady state. "Produce enough" now and in the future is a dynamic constraint.
The mechanism is economic surplus, to have the producers (productive people who produce needed goods and inputs to such) create more than they need. This generally requires increasing and maintaining productivity to have surplus.
Once you have a surplus the absolute maximum priority is to maintain it. Plant, machinery, systems, irrigation, fertilizer production etc etc.
The system is dynamic, surplus today is not surplus tommorow.
In my country we have a means to ditribute this excess, and it may even go to those in need, but the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
what i fail to understand is why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. this is entry level material for engineering, mathematics and physics. are they not teaching it in CS?
We are producing enough excess that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves, and we have for a number of years.
No, we're not. It just seems like there's excess because the costs of running social programs are being paid with runaway debt. Those bills will eventually require settling, and it will become obvious how much excess there really is.
There are truckloads of perfectly good food and clothes being incinerated every day since that's somehow cheaper for the owners of capital. The excess is there. It's just not ending up in the pockets of those who need it.
Food and clothing are actually an argument against you here. Sure we waste a lot of both, and yet food insecurity is rare in the First World, and lack of clothing is pretty much the least significant part of poverty. Plus, government-forced redistribution reliably increases prices overall due to the increased costs of logistics and administration. There is no free lunch.
If you want to argue your point, you have to address the real fiscal burdens on modern societies, and the real drivers of debt across the West. The biggest components of government debt are medical care and pensions (including Social Security in the US). These are the things that are bankrupting us, not food and clothing.
Pensions probably ought to be reduced/readjusted in accordance with life time expectancy, or some other maths that actually ends up in the green somehow while still allowing those who cannot take care of themselves to live a decent life. I've seen enough rich pensioners (my own grandmother among them...) to come to that conclusion.
The US spends an inordinate amount on healthcare since the system is covered in leeches (17~% of GDP compared to 10~ in Europe).[1] If a significant part of US debt is caused by healthcare costs, then that sounds like a political own-goal. That's not to say the costs in Europe are insignificant. We can probably do better here too.
Debt is just accounting, and has nothing to do with whether or not a surplus exists and who gets to consume it. The surplus exists, it doesn't magically appear because of your accounting system.
My point is not that economic surpluses don't ever exist, but that the perceived surpluses that people invoke in order to defend the present welfare state are unsustainable, and that the system will inevitably collapse without a miraculous increase in economic productivity. Debt (both private and sovereign) is literally the thing that tells us whether a society is able to pay for the things it demands. That's not an accounting trick any more than plain arithmetic is.
You appear to only be looking at the debt, and not that those debts are held by other people as assets. Do you think it's still a net negative if you add that in too?
The accounting system is what ensures that we can ACCOUNT for if such a statement is true or not.
It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc.
There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn mowing and shopping services (such as disability welfare has created in my country) could easily be accompanied by a shortage in housing. In fact one could be caused by the other.
The economy has capacity today and surplus from yesterday. Beyond that takes vigilance and accountability to maintain the system.
The fundamental question is why exactly you think a system can have some fundamental governing and observation mechanism such as debt (or equity accounting) removed and it would still maintain the same system characteristics that produce said surplus?
This is basic engineering and system architecture 101 and I would expect technologists to have more than a surface level expectation that systems do not operate magically nor label components as redundant without detailed reasoning.
The debt amount is very roughly proportional to the size of the economy.
It's also a system that is unstable in non-booming economies, drifts over time and needs periodic resets (through revolution, debt cancelling or inflation for example).
When dealing with material well-being, it makes much more sense to focus on goods and services and frame things more in the line of "would you trade a bit of wealth (smaller car or home, less Uber Eat, etc) to ensure a few unlucky people have food and roof".
Most western economies, specially one as wasteful as the US, have the luxury to make this choice. Not sharing it is a political & ideological decision, not a materially constrained one.
Anthropomorphising a system to give it attributes such as cruelty is silly.
Entertaining a lump of monolithic production fallacy is also silly.
There are any number of detailed and specific problems that need to be solved to solve the greater economic problem you describe. A system that promotes direct effort to solve specific problems is required.
We have runaway debt because since the 1980s Republicans have had a fiscal policy called 'starve the beast' whose intention is to make government funding so fucked government can't function.
Republicans just passed huge tax cuts, it is Republicans that have zero care about debt, again because they choose agenda over strong/healthy federal government so that people like you can make posts like this (and ignore such facts as Republicans are the drivers of debt in order to intentionally undermine/weaken our country/government).
> the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
Is it? Or is it that an increasing proportion of total income ends up going to the people who find ways of hiding it such that it does not get distributed.
either the activity and resource is part of an economy or not, an activity or resource that is still in the economy is not hoarded.
either thise things are in the economic system or not. swiss banking is simply another economic system, eiher it is a separate closed loop system(and not accesible), or an integrated system with flows in and out. if the money is not part of the closed loop of the economy what value does it have? (it's addition and removal simply inflates or deflates the remaining closed loop system) normal banking and currency exchange already creates and destroys money in orders of mangitude larger than private wealth.
land and hard resources are the only place i think you can hoard. it can be taken out of the economy and still maintain value, and depending on the relative holding you can influence value. but even that requires a holding cost. the holding cost is part of the broader closed loop economic system, an/or political system. you could say much of the fuedal economy was paying the holding cost for this hoarding, the advancement of the modern economic system was to build a massive integrated economy around it that made the holding cost higher and significant hoarding moslty unsustainable. (except by goverment)
They are not trolling. They are stating the simple, undeniable fact that there is more than enough to go around and if we had a more equitable distribution of resources, we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
I don't think people realize how much evening out society will impact them. This is a very US (and probably EU) way of thinking. Everyone thinks they are middle class but when it comes down to it there are far more people in poverty and that evening things out will bring down the quality of life for the people advocating for evening out things.
No. This is what capitalists want you to believe. The truth is that we are all subsiziding the capital gains of the wealthiest 2%. You could easily pay for generous social security programs by taxing property and capital more (as opposed to labor). But the ultra-wealthy point at the weakest and poorest and tell the average worker "look, they're coming for your house and your humble savings!". This is a very deliberate distraction.
If that's true, it's odd that so many social welfare programs across the western world are consuming an ever-growing share of GDP, incurring massive debt, and grinding toward insolvency and collapse. Exactly how much more of our money and labor do you want to take from us in order to continue this madness?
European here. I left Europe 14 years ago. I tried to come back. My decision was to run away bc it is impossible to build a reasonable life in a stable way where you do not get smashed mercilessly...
southeast asia for now, but will move on at some point. Not sure how you can reach me without exposing too much. Just ask away here if you need to or let me know how I can reach you.
The problem is that when you get more for less, it kills the incentive to do more. This is a really glaring problem, and people go to really great lengths to either sweep it under the rug or hand wave it away.
I'm an employee. I don't really benefit from doing more. When I do more, someone else makes money. In my experience that someone else is just as likely to lay me off for a cheaper worker as they are to give me a raise
The incentives our system produces are already really skewed, and it would be nice to see them skew the other way for once
It seems your complaint is a lack of recognition, and maybe redistribution would provide vengeance for this injustice. But that is different than "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more" which is what "skewing the other way" seems to imply.
My observation is that if we leave our recognition up to people with power, they will choose to keep it for themselves or give it to their friends a majority of the time and that seems fucked up to continue to allow in a just society
> "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more"
This is completely beside the point, honestly
We should not use the most productive members of society as a measuring stick as though they were the average.
The average person does "way less work" than your very productive workaholic outliers, but that doesn't mean those people deserve way less.
Somehow we've all wound up being measured against the most exceptional people, instead of being measured against the average.
Keep in mind we're talking about a society where the median person only makes like $45k per year and exceptional people make many many times more than that
I'm not sitting here saying that some random shmuck should have Elon Musks income or anything, we could probably do better than 45k a year though
Incentives don't disappear at some arbitrary level of taxation. I think you can have both sufficient incentives and more equitable distribution. The frankly obscene levels of wealth concentration we are witnessing suggest that there is a lot of room for refinement.
I do find it interesting that a lot of people (not trying to imply that you are one) bang on about incentives while also fighting tooth and nail in favour of weighting taxes toward earned income (derived from doing useful/productive things) instead of unearned income (derived from simply owning things).
I get that some people view all forms of tax as theft and while I appreciate their honesty, I simply can't take them seriously.
Your tax dollars just go into a cesspool of fraud, corruption, waste, incompetence, distribution to cronies. Money taken and spent badly feels like theft.
There are still human societies on Earth that still live the same way they did 2,000 years ago. Most people would not want to live that way, and therefore they need to rely on people who did/do more. The best way to rely on them is to make then rely on you too.
"Valuable work leads to good outcomes for everyone" is probably one of the slipperiest slopes there is.
The only reason there's more than enough to go around is people work for the betterment of their own life. If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.
> > If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.
The disconnect is already there, any 5 year old already understands that stealing a comic book at the comic book store is better than paying for it. And more and more people are resorting to it at every level of society
Yes, remove the human incentive to produce, which is that the rest can consume in a way that is profitable enough for the producer and you will see the wxcess disappear in front of your eyes for killing the incentive to produce.
Infinitely redistributing does not yield products for all, but scarcity for all.
I see, so you are suggesting making black markets appear. Good, I see you studied economic history a lot...
There is no way around this, believe me.
Not sure why you call pigs to people producing actually. That is how things end up working.
Not waiting for people to produce fornyou while you insult them amd try to set infinite restrictions until they do what you want... which by the way looks to me like modern slavery.
> we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
Yes, like the 40%[1] of Stanford undergrads who have disabilities. The greatest long term impediment to what you're suggesting is folks who don't need the help taking advantage of the resource distribution. It both massively increases the costs and sours those who have to pay into the system on the whole thing leading to a backlash.
If we could just solve this quirk of human nature, we'd be all set.
Yeah, disability accommodation like having single dorm room and being allowed to cook for themselves rather then using cantine. Maybe the question is why the cantine is obligatory anyway.
You've just arrived back at capitalism: it's the least bad resource allocation optimization algorithm assuming everyone is an amoral asshole and willing to take every advantage they can.
Superior systems exist, but they require relaxing the adversarial asshole constraint.
You would not end up in the same place because then you'd be in a world without billionaires, so you would not have people who can too easily just buy every politician and law they wish for their own perpetuation.
I'm so sick and tired of hearing about this mythical "excess". I can't afford housing. Millions like me can't. There is no excess. Unless it's being hoarded by the capital class.
I mean, it is very obviously being hoarded by the capital class! there has been tons of writing on the subject, no one can credibly deny that that's what's happening right now.
The wealth of the "capital class", whatever that means, is dwarfed by the debt being run up by governments.
My favorite example: if you confiscated all of the wealth from all of the billionaires in the USA, it would fund the federal government for around six months. If you add state and local governments, those funds would last just weeks.
The rich don't have your money. Your government does, and they're flushing it down the toilet (and bombing Iran).
The wealth of the capital class is, unsurprisingly, capital - the facilities, equipment, organizational structures, etc. used to make stuff. What does it mean for capital to be hoarded?
Certainly, and notably the 'capital class' that's 'hoarding' the housing he's talking about are what look like normal people. You'd make more money taxing half of the value of those who own SFHs in Santa Clara alone than you would Elon Musk - and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less. The disconnect between the desire to extract what people describe as a fair share from the 'capital class' comes up rapidly against the wall of realizing they themselves are the 'capital class' in question. Everything else then becomes a war of definition as they try to narrowly constrain the scope of this such that they can send their kids to Monta Vista while simultaneously having everyone else pay much higher taxes.
> > and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less
This is so BS, the productivity of a company is given by cash flow and Discounted Cash Flow (output>input) , not stock market value , taxing Musk would force him to sell stock and dilute the ownership of Tesla and SpaceX down among the population proportionally and according to the brackets of taxation applied.
The fear that you are describing is exactly what's wrong with society, the virus of the mind that attributes to CEOs and especially tech CEOs demigod properties and if their ownership and decision making control were to be diluted the company would collapse and die.
If anything it's the opposite, the oldest companies in America have their ownership much more diluted than they once were . JPMorgan is not controlled by John Pierpont Morgan, same for all the companies which make up what once was Standard Oil
If anything history is showing that for the survival of a company it is almost a condition non negotiable that its ownership and decision making has to be diluted among millions of people with a low inequality factor, or at least lower than the one necessary in the first years of the company
People say this, but I'm not sure I understand how it could be true. For example, taxing billionaires is often cited as the solution to this problem. But if we took Elon Musk's $730 billion fortune and divided it evenly among the US population, people would receive a one-time payment of about $2000, and then that fortune would be gone, and any opportunities or advancements it was creating. So I'm genuinely curious where you see this incredible excess coming from.
It also misunderstands that nature of Musk's fortune. He's not Scrooge McDuck and they pretend he is. Sell SpaceX at a fire sale. What's it worth? A lot less then it is now. Who would buy it? Poor people? Somehow I don't think so.
Musk is a golden goose and there are people who think the best move is to cut him in half and get at all the gold inside.
Anyone who thinks that it's "controversial" to discuss where the benefits from productivity gains go isn't worth talking to: they are either ideologues set in their ways, or underinformed on recent economic history.
You’re missing the point of the article and of the post. Why do you assume that someone who reads and takes breaks is unproductive? Should we get a second job instead? I spend 8 hours sleeping. Would you like me to work those hours as well? I spend some of my day cooking and cleaning and raising my son. Would you rather I keep working instead?
Maybe it’s time that we worked together to gain that time back for you instead of you fighting for us to lose our free time.
More than half of employment is “bullshit jobs” needed only for capitalism. There’s artificial scarcity but artificial scarcity in minds of people is much worse problem.
Recently, I had a conversation with a bunch of people who have worked in the tech industry since the 90s. Someone asked which technologies have greatly improved our lives. Outside of some specific medical innovations, we struggled to agree on more than three.
What you are saying here, and I am not a protestant, is that some people will work for you while you do what you feel like.
That mindset, taken to the extreme, hides a kind of sibylline slavery, Idk if you get why.
It also makes for far less responsible and comfortable individuals.
Trying to be useful and auronomous is our obligation. Thinking others will do it and that it is automatically ok is not the best we can do to contribute.
The other commentor mentioned food and clothes to you. I'll add that I can get food for free locally (soup kitchen style, although I don't think they actually serve soup) if I really need it.
Around 10% of houses in the US are vacant, although I'm sure a fair amount are that for good reasons (shitty locations, old and worn to high hell). This to me sounds like a resource allocation problem and not a lack-of-resources problem.
Energy could be free close to free if we made the right choices. The sun's right there. Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a political rut for a long while, making long term projects like 'do something about global warming' and 'transition away from fossil fuels' uninteresting.
Many medicines are only expensive due to patents and making up for research costs. Actual production is usually cheap as hell.
I don't have all the answers. People smarter than me might have them. But I do know that we can do better.
Yes to all of this, and want to double stress the Housing theory of everything [1]. Most of the "scarcity" people feel today in the North American context is driven by housing. And there simply isn't enough of it. And citing badly measured vacancy stats does a huge disservice to the effort to fix this.
I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".
And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.
Housing is clearly the biggest problem, yes, and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem. But it's a big problem for political reasons. If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes', I'm sure it could happen. It's just not in the short-term (and long-term?) interests of the economy as it is now. Maybe we should do something about that?
Or maybe, just maybe, we should do it because it's a thing that raises people's quality of life? I only care about the economy insofar as it helps actual people on the ground, so I'll be happy to ignore it for things like this, assuming that doesn't put us in an even worse rut than we are in now.
>If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes
The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.
We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
> The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1].
That sounds worth it to me.
> We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
What if we let people build their own homes and gave them courses on how to do that?
Also 1 trillion dollars sounds like a single year of national debt interest, the total amount spent and destroyed by the Iran war, or the Pentagon's black budget. I'm sure we can give up one of those for a year to fix every economic problem plaguing the country.
Housing is a problem and not surprisingly a very big problem in all the English speaking countries the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, the scarcity of starter homes, high cost, low pay, and a epidemic of those so-called luxury apartments being built everywhere.
Most young people will be going back to the good old days, staying home and not leaving until they are married, which is what happens in most of the world today.
> and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem.
As far as I know, people vote against housing developments, among other things to prop up their own house values. They might not disagree it's a problem, but they also don't care to do anything about it. I don't think the housing issue is strictly economics and logistics.
Sure, if one ignores constraints then we can do everything. It's like saying that you could find an element in an unsorted array in O(1) if you just pick the right index. Obviously. The part that makes it hard is that you can't pick the right index. Coordination and resource allocation is everything. It's not free. It costs effort just like searching an unsorted array is O(n) worst case. There's no way to not pay the price. Energy has to be expended.
You'll see this if you're ever at sea. You have an infinite amount of fresh water around you. All you have to do is avoid the salt in it.
...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.
Just a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number).
Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
This assumes production of food is the bottleneck rather than distribution. If distribution is actually the bottleneck, overstocked food is not a measure of excess in society.
Don't expect much sympathy here, as per many comments folks are mostly on purely capitalistic camps to the extreme. Its distillation of US approach to work and society, something I've grown to detest by mere fact of living in much more humane, while vastly more financially efficient system that doesn't use my tax money to kill civilians all over the world (none other than Swiss system and yes it could easily work elsewhere if people reduced their egos significantly, which they won't).
Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life.
Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.
Switzerland got its wealth predominantly by shielding money stolen from around the entire world. I'm glad US ended that carnival of happiness to a large degree in 2009.
Whatever the US did in 2009 doesn't seem to have had any long term effect on Swiss GDP. It dipped in 2009, like everyone else, from the "global financial crisis" but recovered the next year.
Switzerland was already the second richest country in Europe in 1913 despite not having a colonial empire to exploit, ample raw resources or the best geographic location.
Norway is kind of the same, but they made a decision to set up the Norwegian sovereign fund to save and invest that North Sea oil money their counterparts however on the other side of the North Sea, Great Britain decided to spend like a drunken sailors most of the money ended up mostly in the hands of the upper crust of the country. if a country is wealthy and unselfish enough, they can make provisions for society in general.
What is terrible is the fact that our leaders who should think ahead long-term don’t whether it’s Covid or current measles outbreak there are going be a large number of people that will potentially be disabled by the effects of catching either one, and sadly the policy makers who are charged with the responsibility of solving problems, can’t think ahead. Those are just two recent examples, but there are many things in the course of life which can happen to anyone.
Norway's fiscal discipline is certainly the exception that proves the rule. Britain's failure to steward the wealth of its half of the North Sea's bounty provides a good example of that rule.
We have enough medication. People not being able to afford it has little to do with whether or not we have (or could easily make) an excess.
Insulin costs ~3 USD to make per vial. People not being able to afford ~30 USD insulin is not because we have too little medication. It's because there are leeches all over the healthcare system.
And if you genuinely cannot afford it, you should get it for free, as part of a proper healthcare system, which the US famously lacks.
"Have enough" is a static steady state. "Produce enough" now and in the future is a dynamic constraint.
The mechanism is economic surplus, to have the producers (productive people who produce needed goods and inputs to such) create more than they need. This generally requires increasing and maintaining productivity to have surplus.
Once you have a surplus the absolute maximum priority is to maintain it. Plant, machinery, systems, irrigation, fertilizer production etc etc.
The system is dynamic, surplus today is not surplus tommorow.
In my country we have a means to ditribute this excess, and it may even go to those in need, but the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
what i fail to understand is why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. this is entry level material for engineering, mathematics and physics. are they not teaching it in CS?