countrychick
Posts: 83
Joined: 11/30/2006
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ORIGINAL: subfever
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Tecnhological change is what continues to advance us as a society, hence we have better technology for growing food, better medicines available, more reliable transportation systems, etc. Oh so we can use Keynes to advance our idea but not actually use the rest of his works.. so what is it? Is he a legitmate source or not? Keynes advocated the usage of fiscal and monetary policy to help keep the markets from fluctuating wildly. The private sector should prevail but governments can step in to use their policies to help control the market inefficiencies. Didn't they just argue against using interest rates to help control the markets? And the arguement the present against it, cotton harvesting, you'd like to be the one then that harvests cotton by hand in order to keep the world running along? The next statistics they provide are entirely relative, what about people finding jobs in other sectors other than manufacturing and agriculture? There are huge technology sectors that have arisen as well as pharmaceuticals and so on. I'm only at 30minutes in..
Unfortunately, your understanding of it is woefully dismal.
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Good grief... what brought on this irrelevant diatribe?
The "irrelevant diatribe" that you refer to is illustrating what happens when all people have the right to use a resource equally. You can't possibly think that if everyone in society had the option to use as much of X (whether X be gasoline, food, etc) that they wouldn't attempt to exploit it? Again, another example, cheap food in North America. We have come to rely on cheap food in this part of the world and look at obesity rates in the US and Canada compared with other places around the world. They are alarmingly higher because we have access to cheaper food.
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Had you watched the presentation in its entirety, you would know that one of the first steps is taking a worldwide assessment of what we have to work with.
A world wide assessment of what we have to work with? Lets get serious, you want every country in the world to work together to assess exactly what resources they have? We can't even agree on trade regulations let alone letting anyone who wants to use a resource have at it! Firstly, mined resources are constantly being discovered, and who is going to provide the necessary tools and labour to map out all the resources in the world? Next, technology is constantly advancing! Even in the last 100 years there have been significant technological improvements, I use agriculture as an example because its what I know best, but we've moved from doing everything with horses and by hand to using complex machinery that is more efficient and takes less time to harvest more and more land or milk more cows or whatever the case may be. In the last 10 years we've seen GPS navigation become a serious advantage for farmers as they can now plot out their land and the tractor will basically drive itself from end to end of a field without being more than a few inches off a straight line. And beyond all of that is the various political borders that one must deal with, I dont think any country in the world is going to entirely agree on one particular system of resource allocation, why should Canada for example allow the rest of the world to use its oil if we aren't getting anything from them in return? And don't tell me its going to be some sort of exchanging oil for bananas with country x, oil for mangos with country y and oil for computers with country z. Have you looked at trade documents recently? They are hugely complicated based on a monetary system. The amount of effort and work required to explain exactly what each item is worth with regards to another is uncomprehendable. As in the costs (and even if you want to exclude monetary and call it time) will be beyond what the switch to this type of economy is worth, indeed the reason we moved to a monetary based economy was due to the fact that transaction costs become prohibitively high as the amount of goods one can barter for increases.
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Don't want to pay, or can't afford to pay?
Interesting that you take a part of this only. Where is the proof? And I believe if you took more of the quote I did say that people are continually wanting to pay less and less for a good. If we look at the relative prices, or prices as a percentage of a persons income, years ago it would have been very difficult for the lower ends of the North American population to afford to pay for a car. Now we've got better technology and can produce cars cheaper so that everyone can have the opportunity to own a vehicle (that is everyone who is willing to work and contribute to society) The quality that this video seems to be implying is that a car wouldn't break down for 50 years.. Where is this technology? Do you have it hiding in your room? We can't simply decide tomorrow oh we're gonna make a car that doesn't require any maintenance, it takes years and years of research and development to even get to the hybrids and electrical vehicles we are now seeing. And who is going to provide the resources and labour to do this research? I'm sure you're not going to do it out of the goodness of your heart.
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And your degree in economics qualifies you to emphatically assert that technology will never advance to this stage? Interesting.
Mmm perhaps not, but even a house needs basic maintenance and they last for hundreds of years. Even with new technology things still need to be maintained..the types of technology that you're going to need to make things last for hundreds of years without ever being cleaned or fixed up don't currently exist and I'd like to see you create them, then sure I'll believe you but at this point in time we're no where near this level.
And if you want to play like that, what qualification do you have to assert that technology can reach that stage? Perhaps you're an engineer in which case kudos to you. But then you clearly have no concrete understanding of even basic economics so what qualification do you have to be exclaiming how wrong the system is?
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And is there any particular reason why technology can't solve these problems? Robots are replacing factory workers all the time.
Which is something that the video seems to be against.. technological unemployment they term it.. see below..
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An in a system without money, this won't be any problem, will it?
So what is the system using? How do I get my hands on such a lightbulb? Mr. Lightbulb maker is going to give me one out of the kindness of his heart? Why the heck should he? I'd like to know exactly what you're proposing to replace this monetary system. For example, say I work creating cars.. Mr. Lightbulb only needs one car but I need 20 lightbulbs for my house, does that mean one car = 20 lightbulbs? What if another car maker comes along and needs lightbulbs too? Mr. Lightbulb already has a car so now the second car maker just doesn't get to have lightbulbs in his house? So hypothetically car maker 2 could go to say a butcher, trade his lightbulbs for hundreds of pounds of meat and trade that to Mr. Lightbulb? But Mr. Lightbulb doesn't have a big enough freezer for all of that meat? And what if the butcher also wants lightbulbs and has already traded Mr. Lightbulb for the meat? Transaction costs quickly add up, and no not monetary costs as I'm sure you'd be apt to point out, but the time it takes for car maker 2 to run around and find out what Mr. Lightbulb actually wants, who is supplying it and how to trade one car for 20 lightbulbs, it could end up he has to find a bicycle, 50lbs of meat, one vacation to Florida and an engagement ring for Mr. Lightbulb's fiancee, but he only has one car, so the number of trades that would be made would be enormous, thus making the transaction cost ridiculously high. This is why a monetary system works! It allows us to buy the things we need using the money that we earn.
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Creating duplicity and increased waste/pollution.
So you're saying a monopoly is better? Because be damn sure that a monopoly will increase the costs to consumers..there are simple graphs in any intro microeconomics course to show you this, I'm sure you could also find them online. A monopolistic firm has no incentive to lower its costs to people or to become more efficient because they can charge a much higher price than necessary.
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Isn't it nice that profit would be a relic of the past in a resource-based economy?
So what do people get out of their hard work? a pat on the back? and oh you Ms. Brain Surgeon you get to have exactly the same access to resources that this gal over here sitting at home and doing nothing makes?
You're assuming that all people are the same. And they are not. Some people are out only for themselves, others care for other people. Example completely uneconomically related, men. Some men are looking for women that they can care for and provide mutual pleasure to. Others are out only to get their dick sucked and move on. In that simplist of cases you wouldn't be able to achieve total consensus on the way the world should work.
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In my opinion, usury is immoral and serves to enslave the poor and enrich those already on top of the food chain. Of course, those indoctrinated into the status-quo tend to disagree. They tend to kiss the hand that enslaves them.
Its immoral to charge someone a higher rate because they are a riskier investment? That's just good sense. Not doing that is actually much of the cause of the housing market crashing (see subprime mortgages to people who couldn't pay them back).
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Then you're saying that we're not suffering the biggest contraction since the Great Depression?
I'd say sure we're suffering a huge recession, but in the presentation that I watched they advocated some kind of doomsday contraction that would send the world spiralling downwards, I'm just not seeing that at all, things are rebounding.. but then maybe these folks only really concentrated on the US instead of the whole world. And sure if you'd like to limit this discussion to the US and close up its borders and make it a self-sufficient economy then yea it might work but as we've seen time and time again, increasing trade allows for greater welfare.
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Good grief... did you watch the right video??? They couldn't be more diametrically opposed to your statement.
They were against technological unemployment.. they went at it and attacked it..saying that machines are continuously putting people out of work and creating unemployment. This is simply not the case, if it was then half of the US should be unemployed and I believe the percentage isn't even at 1/4? I know here in Canada we're around 8% but yet hundreds of thousands of jobs have been replaced by robots, if technological unemployment were really true shouldn't we see much much higher rates of unemployment?
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Unfortunately, your understanding of it is woefully dismal.
Oh come on now, you arbitrarily say my understanding is woefully dismal? Again I'd like to know what education you have in this field beyond this video, or if you've done any of your own independent research? You seemed to skip over that nicely.. And even if every single economic thought out there today is wrong, at least people are trying.. you instead are just saying that they are wrong because it doesn't fit your idea of how everyone in the world should be equal. I'm here trying at least to see your side of the arguement and providing valid reasons that have been tested through empirical research. I've watched part of your video and yet you haven't done any real understanding of the economic system beyond saying its bad.
Besides all of this, say this plan, eliminating money and working a barter type system, say there is some elaborate way of making it work. Who administers it? How do you keep that person from becoming greedy and keeping the best things for themselves and leaving the rest to fight over the remainders?
< Message edited by countrychick -- 3/19/2010 12:00:09 PM >
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RE: Food for Thought - Moving Towards A Resource-Based ... - 
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