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Business news summarized a MarketWatch article thusly: "One reason growth is not faster is because technology is helping customers more than companies." As a technocrat, I thought that was the whole idea.
"Two roads diverged," Robert Frost wrote in what is perhaps the most popular poem of all time, "The Road Not Taken." Frost's opening words keep playing in my head every time an economic indicator is released, a global macro forecast is revised, or financial markets take a tumble. In all cases, the bulls and the bears find enough ammunition to support their diametrically opposed views on the U.S. economy.
Rarely have two roads diverged so dramatically for so long. It took six years for mainstream economists to come around to the notion that no, this is not your grandfather's economy; and no, real economic growth isn't going to accelerate to 3% next year, the perennial forecast. Trend economic growth of 3% or 4% is a thing of the past, constrained as it is right now by anemic productivity and labor-force growth.
Even the 2.1% average growth [in] real gross domestic product since the Great Recession ended in June 2009 is a source of controversy. The economic bulls maintain that the price of information technology is being overstated, which means real GDP and productivity growth are being understated. For this group, the low level of both jobless claims and the unemployment rate is telling the true story of a robust economy that isn't being captured by the statisticians.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday May 01 2016, @06:19PM
Listen, you stupid motherfucker: much as you want to lump me in with the idiot SJWs and naive privileged college-club socialists, it's not gonna happen. My view on this is that we need a blend of capitalistic and socialistic policies; anything else ignores human nature with predictably fatal results. Sorry, but you don't get to pull that strawman on me and ignore what I'm saying.
The rest of your post is so incredibly poorly-researched, fallacious, and strawmanning I'm not even going to dignify it with a point by point response, which is my usual habit. You're both evil and willfully ignorant, as I said a perverted Calvinist who'd rather see people suffer ans die in misery than get "something they don't deserve."
We'll see how effective your money and your guns are in getting you out of hell in a few decades...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2016, @12:14AM
His problem is that he doesn't even see the world in greyscale, which is why he'll never understand why we need a UBI. He can't distinguish UBI from our current welfare system that effectively discourages people who are dependent on it from seeking work because their benefits are worth more than they could possibly make in an entry-level position. That's perverse.
Every now and then I hear about somebody who's interviewed well at work but declined our offer because we couldn't pay them enough. If they accepted the job we were offering, they would have lost their cash benefits, food stamps, subsidized housing, and medicaid. I imagine this story plays out more than I would ever have a chance to hear about it.
But I don't need to convince you; it sounds like you already get it. Our Calvinist friend can't distinguish UBI from New Deal from European socialism from 5 year plans and labor camps in Stalinist Russia and Mao's China. There isn't even greyscale. There is only black and white, and anything that's even has a hint of what he's decided is evil mixed in is automatically evil, reality be damned.
UBI is my personal favorite answer to the realities you've identified, but it's not the only one.
I'm trying to remember where I saw the headline about some economist who said (probably cynically) that we'd be better off paying 90% of the remaining workforce to just stay at home and smoke pot all day. We'd be better off if most people would just get out of the way of the people who *actually* want to contribute and have the skills/knowledge/experience to do so. Of course we can't kill them, no matter how much I want to at the end of a work day of dealing with people whose only talent seems to be keeping a chair warm and playing a game of telephone with other telephone players. Nobody creates anything anymore. Nobody produces anything anymore.
I'm just thinking out loud waiting for the final economic collapse that will happen likely before 2019. All those telephone game jobs will evaporate because they contribute no real value, if anything negative value. It doesn't necessarily need to end in doom and gloom. Maybe I'm being too hasty by predicting 2019. But people will be starving while the social security office is swamped by desperate people who have fallen off the unemployment cliff trying to claim whatever disability they can. Starving people don't generally sit around doing nothing all day, especially when they have children to feed as well.
I just wonder what the TANSTAAFL! crowd will do. #1 thing they do wrong is shout "TANSTAAFL!" and conclude that because, yeah, somebody has to pay for the lunch of the guy who didn't "earn" it that, therefore, he shouldn't have it. Best invest in popcorn. Doomsday preppers are beginning to look less crazy every day to me.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday May 02 2016, @01:21AM
Christ, I hope I'll be in Canada or Germany before THAT dunghill hits the national windmill. It's a long shot but there's a friend who does blacksmithing and needs a web/linux/computer person (and hell, we can two-fer, blacksmithing and computer services!) who says he can get me over there on a work visa if need be.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...