by
Ryan Avent
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[...] warehouses are potentially a source of vast amounts of employment for less-skilled Indians (of which there are hundreds of millions). Yet the falling cost of simple robotics and the increasing power of computing means that many of those jobs may never be created. Instead a very small number of highly skilled Indian programmers may earn a good living writing code to control the robots who travel the great aisles within these warehouses, moving around goods shipments that might otherwise have been handled by human workers.
he recognises this but doesn't go into the positive implications of this (assuming we can sort out the distributional problems)
[...] Advanced economies cannot turn poor countries into rich ones, and we lack a foolproof recipe for poor countries seeking to make themselves rich. What can be achieved and has reliably been achieved, is the process of helping residents of poor countries to become rich by welcoming them into places with strong social capital.
Mass immigration has always been the obvious, pie-in-the-sky solution to wide gaps in incomes across countries. [...]
the lack of consideration of power dynamics / unfair distribution of goods & resources is ASTOUNDING, like actually shocking
- if immigration is a solution, it's a reactionary and clearly unsustainable one, and yet he somehow seems to endorse it
Secular stagnation slowly undermines support for the existing economic order, and while it is possible that governments will eventually settle on benign solutions to the problem, it is more likely that prolonged secular stagnation will lead to a broad backlash against global economic integration, and a costly turn inward.
he is right, but never does he stop to think that maybe the existing economic order needs to be overturned
We might not care so much about these inequities if the digital revolution were reducing the costs of all the many things the typical household wants to buy, from steak dinners to adequate housing to a top-flight university education. But cost reductions have so far been highly uneven: massive for some things, such as digital entertainment; completely absent for others, such as homes in nice neighbourhoods.
And so stagnant wages end up mattering an awful lot. Low pay for the great mass of workers is distributionally unfair. It undermines support for the market-based economic system that enables sustained economic growth. Low pay also reduces the incentive to invest in technologies that boost the productivities of less-skilled workers, or which substitute [...] it is an enormous problem; continued productivity growth is ultimately the route to lives of greater comfort for all of humanity: it is how humanity contrives to produce more from less, so that all can have more.
this is the crux of the problem right here
ofc, he never gets anywhere near the real solution; he just wants to keep up the illusion
the last line is good but he doesn't say how we can get there!!
[...] Many of the world's richest cities are choked by inadequate infrastructure. Given rock-bottom interest rates, it seems absurd that places like New York, London and San Francisco aren't receiving extraordinary new investments in that infrastructure [...]
perhaps it's the prevailing political/economic ideology which discourages government investment in public services???? just a thought
capitalism does not allocate resources efficiently & we KNOW this, does he honestly not
The rich world could shepherd the global economy towards that ideal outcome by allowing lots more immigration from poorer places. Immigration would enable richer places to 'export' their strong social capital to poorer places (by bringing large shares of the populations of poorer places into countries where strong social capital dominates). That would naturally deepen social and financial capital per human worker. Global savings could also be mobilized to invest in additional infrastructure in the rich countries accepting new workers. The appetite for safe, rich-country government debt is nearly insatiable.
I mean the rich world SHOULD allow lots more immigration but not for this reason, this is a dumb fucking reason
also he touches on overaccumulation here but never really gets into it (it's just assumed as a shallowly-analysed background phenomenon)
[...] In labour organizers' dreams, that cooperation becomes a class consciousness--a solidarity--which would provided a coherence to a labour political agenda. [...]
so he seems to support organised labour to some degree (esp at a centralised level, so they dont resort to insider/outsider divisions and protectionism)
[...] it is easy for all the participants in the economy to convince themselves that their participation is what matters, that they are the authentic creators of value, that their effort is what ought to be rewarded most handsomely. And everyone has a point. But while we can rely on economics to do some of the work of sorting out who deserves what, we are kidding ourselves if we think the invisible hand can be trusted to handle the whole job. Left alone, the invisible hand is simply the thudding fist of the powerful. [...]
this is a good paragraph and almost had me convinced that he got it
but ofc if he REALLY got it, he wouldn't have said a lot of other stuff he did about between-country inequality or structural change
[...] The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn't rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.
That is not a radical statement. People take what they can take, and it is only the interplay of countervailing forces and the tolerance of the masses that limits that impulse--that works to create institutions that limit that impulse.
[...] People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the creation of economic value, a very large chunk of which the founder can them capture for himself.
ugh this glorification of entrepeneurs are "very brilliant" even while pointing out the degree of luck
[...] Is there any reasonable story available which explains how it is that poverty in developing countries, or in the ghettos of disadvantage in rich countries, is a necessary part of the system that provides us with smartphones and luxury cars and enriches a relative handful of executives and financiers? Is it really the case that one can't be got rid of without threatening the system that provides for us the other?
Of course not. The worst inequities of industrial history were never a necessary accompaniment to the march towards greater prosperity. [...]
I mean yes, this is necessary under capitalism to some degree
like who is assembling these smartphones? or mining the minerals needed for all electronics? getting to a fairer distribution of responsibilities & wealth requires changing the balance of power capitalism, which, in some sense, is threatening "the system that provides for us"