Your response misses the entire point. (That there are a lot of people who are simply GIVEN a windfall by fate.)
Who? Lottery winners?
In a manner of speaking. Lottery winners in the game of life. Some people are BORN into wealth. Some people MARRY into wealth. Some people LUCK into wealth.
As an example of what I am talking about, what did any member of the Kennedy Clan ever do to earn their hundreds of millions of dollars? (Excluding the patriarch who built the fortune of course.)
TallDave wrote:
Again, this is an economy in which people make voluntary exchanges in order to maximize their utility. Generally, those who accumulate wealth do so by offering the best value in their exchanges.
Chance or fate plays a part, but as they say -- chance favors the prepared mind, and fortune favors the bold.
Your easiest path to wealth? Pick wealthy parents. Marry into it. Get Lucky.
Your most likely path to wealth? Work Hard, be thrifty, invest shrewdly.
It is the first group that I am attempting (so far in vain) to draw your attention to.
Sam Walton and the people who worked with him created an international phenomenon. Walmart's effect on the economy of the United States and the world is difficult to overstate, but did Michael Duke, running an established company, work that much harder and smarter than his lowest-paid employee?
Irrelevant. The point of an economic exchange is not to reward the other person for hard work, it is to maximize one's utility. We don't shop at WalMart because Sam Walton or Michael Duke worked so hard, we shop there because they offer the best prices under either man. Walton/Duke's wealth isn't a windfall either, as Dogenes suggests -- it is the entire point of an economy.
Permit me to interject here. I draw a distinction between those who EARNED their wealth, and those who did nothing or very little and acquired it anyway. An example of the latter kind is John Kerry who married the widow of the Heinz ketchup fortune. Neither HE nor the Widow earned that money, and yet they have it none the less.
TallDave wrote:Manufacturing jobs have declined, and yes, job loss due to increased productivity is very definitely a Good Thing.
The truest measure of the economy is goods and services produced. Keeping someone on the payroll who isn't pulling their weight is bad for both the company and the economy as a whole, keeping that person from other productive work. At the same time, sometimes businesses are short sighted in who they let go, and usually pay for it in the long run. Wages and jobs can both deceive as measures of economic strength.
I would not suggest keeping a group of assemblers on the payroll after robotic machinery has been installed, doing the jobs faster and with higher quality product. However, it was the profits generated by product produced by that group of assemblers that enabled the purchase of the robotic machinery. Putting laborers with outmoded skills on the street in mass creates a social problem. As it stands, neither the robotic machinery or the company that owns it has any responsibility to those assemblers, beyond unemployment insurance. That is a good first step, and might be enough if the company hadn't moved the robots off shore thereby eliminating all the jobs at the plant, not just those replaced by the robots.
Unemployment insurance and retraining should work well, as long as there are descent wage jobs available for the retrained workers. It breaks down when the number of jobs is significantly fewer than the number of available workers as seems to be the case today. Have the jobs really moved off shore, have they simply been automated out of existence, or are they out there waiting for the properly retrained workers? And is there any motivation for the unemployed assembler to seek retraining while still drawing unemployment, or is it the hard times following the lapse of the unemployment insurance benefit that spurs the retraining efforts. I suspect it is the latter, but to be effective, retraining should be started sooner, rather than later.
I am curious as to what shall happen when the descendants of ASIMO are sufficiently advanced and powerful to supplant actual laborers. What then of the under skilled humans?
What irks is that a lot of people get the fruits while performing no labor, or minuscule labor.
Yeah. Just thinking to make money is a really bad idea. Or getting lucky.
We can outlaw thinking and luck or perhaps get a government bureau to confiscate unearned profits.
Am I to conclude from your response that you regard "thinking" as minuscule labor? I would not have counted it so.
MSimon wrote:
Or we can become a truly Christian nation and abjure envy.
We can call humans "Angels" yet they will still be humans. Envy is a natural instinct, and it is greatly difficult to train people to ignore their natural instincts.
MSimon wrote:
The envious have done more damage to our nation (by at least a factor of 100X) than all the dopers and alcoholics that have ever lived here. So who is Master D worried about? Dopers. While giving the envious an oblique ("What irks...") boost.
I am merely pointing out that the other side has a point. At least according to natural instinct and regarding those who luxuriate in unearned wealth. The fact that I defend such occurrences (unearned wealth) as something we must accept as a side effect of our Financial\Moral social system does not mean that I don't see why the other side resents it. I certainly do, and so should anyone else that bothers to consider it.
And I find it irksome. Does this mean I think we should change it? No. As I remarked before, our capitalist system is much like Winston Churchill said of democracy. "It is the worst system, except for all the others."
Again, this is an economy in which people make voluntary exchanges in order to maximize their utility. Generally, those who accumulate wealth do so by offering the best value in their exchanges.
Chance or fate plays a part, but as they say -- chance favors the prepared mind, and fortune favors the bold.
Well, there is the "fate" of being born to someone who was a good businessman. Not all scions of a rich family are good businessmen themselves.
We can fix that. Don't allow the "rich" to have children.
Does anyone ever respond usefully to a facetious argument?
Manufacturing jobs have declined, and yes, job loss due to increased productivity is very definitely a Good Thing
Unless you're one of the 15% of unemployed Americans who have spent their lives to date training and working to become proficient at one of those careers.
No, that's still a Good Thing for everyone that isn't you. Sorry, bad decisions by you should not be subsidized by everyone else. You control your own fate -- you need to acquire skills that are marketable. If you find that your skill set is becoming less marketable, you must acquire new skills that are more marketable.
From an employer's point of view it is impractical to hire an overqualified worker because should that worker find a job suiting his/her qualifications, he/she will quit and take the appropriate job, and anyway, their are several eager young people for the job so their is no motivation to hire an older, overqualified person.
From a consumer's point of view it's impractical to buy a product that costs more because the company employed older, overqualified people.
These companies generally prefer the cheaper young workers, falsely believing them to be just as effective ("all engineers are the same, a dime a dozen, like grapes").
To the extent they are wrong to do so, they will tend to fail, and the companies that are correctly keeping valuable senior workers will tend to succeed.
n*kBolt*Te = B**2/(2*mu0) and B^.25 loss scaling? Or not so much? Hopefully we'll know soon...
Your response misses the entire point. (That there are a lot of people who are simply GIVEN a windfall by fate.)
Who? Lottery winners?
In a manner of speaking. Lottery winners in the game of life. Some people are BORN into wealth. Some people MARRY into wealth. Some people LUCK into wealth.
As an example of what I am talking about, what did any member of the Kennedy Clan ever do to earn their hundreds of millions of dollars? (Excluding the patriarch who built the fortune of course.)
But the patriarch did build the fortune, and then it was his to do with as he pleased -- marry away, invest, give away to his idiot relatives, whatever. What have the Kennedys done with that wealth since then? Invested it fairly well, apparently, since it's still around today. Fate was mostly a bystander -- and often unfriendly.
I draw a distinction between those who EARNED their wealth, and those who did nothing or very little and acquired it anyway.
Well, we all did nothing before we were born, yet we fortunate souls alive in 2010 came into the world inheriting a mountain of productivity increases such that the large majority of us lives better in nearly all respects than the richest 1% did even just 100 years ago. So none of us truly "earned" our wealth ab initio.
Anyways, legacy wealth doesn't seem to be a big threat to the Republic. The government usually takes half of it, the heirs can easily squander the rest if they're incompetent. I've seen it happen often enough.
n*kBolt*Te = B**2/(2*mu0) and B^.25 loss scaling? Or not so much? Hopefully we'll know soon...
Economist Joseph Stiglitz: Put Corporate Criminals in Jail
Leading Quote: "An institutionalized system of skewed incentives allowed Wall Street bankers and other corporate executives to gamble with America's wealth and then get away largely scot-free after the house of cards came tumbling down, plunging the U.S. into the worst economic crisis in decades and destroying trillions of dollars of wealth worldwide.
That's the analysis of Joseph Stiglitz, an internationally renowned economist and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics. (His latest book, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, is just out in paperback.)"
All of that sounds like the boards of directors did a good job keeping the compensation for the executives in line.
Quote: "Meanwhile, the astonishingly disproportionate influence of the big banks and corporations on the American political system has allowed powerful executives to exert their will on the U.S. government at the expense of the people, Stiglitz said."
I remember one report in Canada that said more people became wealthy from the lottery than any other source in a year. Another report said you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than winning the lottery. That must mean you have an even better chance of being struck by lightning than getting rich by working for a living.
choff wrote:I remember one report in Canada that said more people became wealthy from the lottery than any other source in a year. Another report said you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than winning the lottery. That must mean you have an even better chance of being struck by lightning than getting rich by working for a living.
They should carry that study a little further and tie it up to academic/extracurricular effort/results. Because it is a reasonable sanity/reality check that most people don't excel at school; or milk their educational (academic and otherwise) period for all it's worth. That would genuinely put things in context.
The Kennedy Clan Patriarch made his fortune by arbitrage. But there was no luck (well not much) involved.
The US Government Prohibited alcohol. Joe just bought low in Canada and Europe and sold high in America.
Once drug prohibition ends we will see similar rehabilitations of other ill gotten fortunes.
One has to wonder though why prohibitions always seem to enhance the fortunes (economic and political) of leftists. You would think the right would look at the history and figure out a way to do nothing through government.
But you have to admit it is a neat system. The right are the enablers and the left the profiteers. Stupid enables evil.
What a country!
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Quote: "Meanwhile, the astonishingly disproportionate influence of the big banks and corporations on the American political system has allowed powerful executives to exert their will on the U.S. government at the expense of the people, Stiglitz said."
The only way to reduce this sort of thing is to reduce the size and power of government. The libertarian solution.
Nothing. The only thing government does well. If it can do it at all.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Quote: "Meanwhile, the astonishingly disproportionate influence of the big banks and corporations on the American political system has allowed powerful executives to exert their will on the U.S. government at the expense of the people, Stiglitz said."
The only way to reduce this sort of thing is to reduce the size and power of government. The libertarian solution.
Nothing. The only thing government does well. If it can do it at all.
The government is a necessary evil, But as Washington said, it is a "Dangerous servant and a Fearful Master."