The capitalists are failing to redeploy capital today. Thats why they have been dumping it into assets for years. They have too much capital and dwindling things they can do with it. AI will skyrocket their capital reserves. There is a poor mechanism for equalizing this since the Nixon years.
> They have too much capital and dwindling things they can do with it.
Yes, we've had full employment for a long, long time. But the idea here is that AI will free up labor that is currently occupied doing something else. If you are trying to say it will fail to do that, that may be true, but if so this discussion is moot.
Please elaborate on the times when a large institution restricted peoples freedom for their "own good." The history of this is extremely clear. Software being involved is just an obscuring detail.
You sure its just the 3.4%? 5% is considered 'full employment' so 3.4 should be some of the best times in history.
How many people are employed but are in a job that barely provides enough money to survive? How many people are working 2 or even 3 jobs just to barely survive? Those people would be counted as 'employed'. You should look at these other groups of people before making judgement.
The rich are about to get a massive tax cut. They cannot possibly spend all those savings on things like food or consumer goods. So where does it go? Assets: Housing, more stocks, antiquities. Any truly rich person will have a diversified portfolio of assets. So what if some of their stocks go down temporarily? They will go back up eventually and the rich can afford to wait out much longer than any normal peon. Its not even a nefarious thing either. If anyone were in their position it would be the prudent thing to do. The most important thing is they have to put this money into something now before it erodes. Buy up all the stocks, buy up all the land, buy up all the vintage collector items, hell even buy up all the retro video games, just do it now.
It's more concentrated than you give it credit: the wealthy overwhelmingly hold their money in business capital (read: stocks) not housing. Housing is predominantly owned by the middle class. Having stocks go up and down is what mostly changes the ultra-rich wealth, and in this case they're going down.
>How precisely do you want to keep a massive edge over a billion hardworking East Asians who now have a lot of capital and know-how at their disposal?
Promote the lie down movement in the short term and let the negative birth rate take care of them in the long term. Thats the only way unless the US somehow gets a magical AGI and robots before China.
"let the negative birth rate take care of them in the long term"
There is a presumption hidden in that sentence: namely, that procreation will always be left up to the people and their decisions. That is far from certain. If anyone has the nerve to actually develop and deploy artificial wombs, it is China. And the resulting kids will be simply pushed onto young people to raise - an authoritarian country won't have to ask anyone.
Having kids is one of the last almost-non-industrialized attributes of human lives, most people are still being born in the same way as they used to in the Stone Age. I wonder how long will that situation last.
>If anyone has the nerve to actually develop and deploy artificial wombs, it is China. And the resulting kids will be simply pushed onto young people to raise - an authoritarian country won't have to ask anyone.
We will have to take that info as it comes. I was working off the info we have today. Their birth rate (as well as the birth rate of most of the world) is horrendous. This was a problem they should have started tackling 20-30 years ago.
You are ignoring the 'Optimus' angle. Maybe Elon's stupid robot can actually do something and he has been whispering this into Trump's ear. That would take care of the labor cost issue. Lets see what happens.
EXACTLY! All the excitement over more and more automation means almost no one will have income to buy anything because almost everyone will be unemployed. So what is the use of producing goods and providing services then, even at lower cost? I don't know.
As for UBI, who is going to provide the money? I've never heard anyone talk about how that is supposed to work. YOUR comment is the first time I have ever heard, well, read, that point brought up. The government can't pay for UBI because there will no longer be a tax base of income earners due to lack of income. Companies can only contribute to the extent that they have customers. I suppose that a super-efficient, low labor economy could be almost entirely export-driven but that assumes the rest of the world isn't in the same situation.
I mean we could start taxing the ultra-rich, who have a greater share of the pool of dollars than they have at any point during history. Pick a number, ooh maybe 200% of the median income, something well below the point where you stop being human and become a giant bag of money pretending to be human, anything above that gets taken away by the state and redistributed to everyone. Rip up all the laws that create ways for people to hide money from taxes. The giant bags of money pretending to be people will scream, and try to make this stop; their money can buy a lot of politicians, and perhaps it will only happen if it’s that or the guillotine.
We could also acknowledge that money is a fiction; money is continually created by the banks under the authority of the government, and money can just be destroyed when it’s taxed instead of thinking it has to “balance the federal budget”. “A dollar” is not tied to any physical store of value but we still love to pretend it is. It’s just a fraction of the overall economic worth of the entire US, and entirely too many of those fractions are in the hands of huge bags of money pretending to be people.
Or we could just ditch “money” entirely. Add things like “lodging” and “food” to the Bill of Rights. There’s probably a lot of problems with this! And a lot of them probably rhyme with the problem that some people just really want to become big bags of money pretending to be people!
You think earning twice the median income (for an American, this means weekly earnings of US $2,278) turns people into "giant bags of money" that are no longer human?
I'm scraping by on less than that in an entire month so maybe the number I pulled out of my ass is a little low.
Bezos makes ~8mil an hour according to some quick Internet searches and that sure is way over the "giant bag of money pretending to be human" threshold IMHO. The idiot-in-chief is worth ~$5mil and he sure is way over that threshold too.
Hahahaha. Wait. Are you serious? Elon has been promising all kinds of things AI that are "just around the corner" for at least a decade now. It's always in the next year or two. There is no chance they cracked autonomous robots with those puppet bots they were showing off not long ago.
Look at all the braindead moves this administration has already done and we aren't even 6 months in. Maybe they actually believe his stupid robot can actually solve their problems. All we can do is sit back and see what happens.
>The calculus is pretty complicated. Economies of scale become a factor - is one large global factory more efficient than separate regional facilities? Also income disparities; Americans can more afford to pay a 25% premium on a good than most of the rest of the world can; so maybe you just make Americans pay more. Or, maybe you do both, have a world-wide facility and a American facility, but still charge Americans the tariff premium, and pocket the 25% as profit instead (steel producers model; also pickup trucks); this works well in conjunction with the USA's low business taxes.
25% margins are huge. Sounds like that margin is someone else's opportunity....which is exactly what the Administration hopes will happen.
There is an opportunity here: Cozy up to Trump, have him give you a ton of government money and spin up a company that will take those margins.
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know.
If the US is planning on stopping the thing that made them OK in the first place, why do you think they would be OK after?
That’s also before you get into the fact that stopping immigration into the US doesn’t make those people disappear * , they’ll immigrate to other countries or stay home may very well cause some countries with a declining population to stop or reverse that trend
* Not en masse anyways, that’s come later as more of a final solution
Thats why I put "OK" in quotes. It remains to be seen if the immigration moves will kill the 'get out of jail free' card the US and few other countries have had. These trends don't change overnight so we have to wait and see. At this time though their population pyramid is pretty good compared to their rivals. It might take years of continued decline to finally destroy the good thing they had going. Meanwhile China had 20+ years to rectify their problems and now its too late.
It doesn’t remain to be seen, we know the fertility rate for America isn’t high enough to maintain replacement rates without immigration. Here’s one article but you can find many with google https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2024/3/22/us-de...
The current admin is saying they are going to stop immigration. I don’t find it comforting or plausible if you’re telling me that we have to wait and see because they might fuck up one step of their plan and that’ll make the other steps less painful
How do you think economic turmoil is going to affect the birth rate in the US and how do you justify labelling a birth rate that's been below replacement for 18 years as "OK"?
We're already seeing the effects. Many people don't feel secure enough in their finances, or confident enough in the future they'd be bringing children into to have kids. As far as I can tell things will only get worse long before they even have a chance to get better.
I wonder if the baby boom depends on who wins the war. If people are happy about the outcome, their finances are improving, and they are full of hope for the future it'd be easy to start families. If people aren't happy with the outcome, if they are suffering, if they have to live under more restrictions or a worse economy I doubt as many people will be comfortable bringing children into the world.
Please brother, don't make me imagine a world war with nukes. The whole world is going to collapse, It would take us atleast three century back and it would be the darkest chapter ever.
I think there are some really smart people in the world. We can use them to create beautiful discoveries. Seriously, it sends me shivers thinking of a world war, but it may happen, and I have no control over it. I have to just watch the world wither away.
I'm in that group. The thing is China already crossed that rubicon 20+ years ago. So the US only really needs to outlast China in this regard. It will create problems of its own and pro America people like Peter Zeihan argue that large generations create more large generations. Boomers -> Millenials -> Gen Alpha. I dont fully buy this though.
Their population pyramid looks good though compared to China:
>how do you justify labelling a birth rate that's been below replacement for 18 years as "OK"?
The US being a nation of immigrants has this unique selling point of attracting people to make up for their woes such as birth rate. Unless we see millions of citizens getting deported, the people "voluntarily" relocating don't move the needle in this metric.
I might die on this take.
But you guys really think birth rate is some magic.
India has an overpopulation issue. In India, we literally have more people than jobs.
So you guys could just tap into India.
China is also similar, except it has outgrown its master. So I can understand the mistrust.
But america put tariffs on India as well which is just ... funny.
Also if america really falls into a recession (60% chance, like I mentioned in my other comment), how much do you think the US would be doing "OK"
I think what the US is right now, is failed democracy. I mean, I used to hate my government, but it was because of their political views/ I just felt that a tiny change in the Indian system is needed (like Media , incentives for middle class), I have hope in India. India can truly change if need be.
I don't think quotes are the appropriate modifier to adjust for the damage from draconian and short-sighted immigration policy. Past tense use of the verb is probably more appropriate since countries are issuing do-not-travel warnings against the US (for the first time ever?). This administration is arrogant fools all the way down. I hope the messages sent by the electorate in 2026 and 2028 are loud enough and the brain drain is still reversible.
The point of the quotes was that we wont see the outcome of these decisions until years from now. Which is why today it is still OK but its like the car speeding and then jumping off the cliff. Will it reach the other side or fall to its doom? Too early to tell, we are still watching.
