this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Antiwork
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A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
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Essential Reads
Start here! These are probably the most talked-about essays on the topic.
- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black (1985) | listen
- On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2013) | listen
- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) | listen
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…No? "The economy" isn't dollars and numbers in bank accounts. It's steel and grains and fuel, and how that gets distributed amongst people. Money sitting idle is money that's at least not actively causing harm; Money spent on products and services with actual value means hoarding basic necessities (E.G. buying up all the housing).
Rich people slanting the economy towards spending its finite labour and material resources on building mansions and yachts means that there will be less available, and it will cost more, to grow cops and build housing or provide services and do all the other things we actually need.
Or, to put it another way, I think:
If "rich people spend their time spending all their money", then your living costs skyrocket because of inflationary effects— Because now everyone's working in the megayacht shipyards that the rich people spent their money on, instead of growing crops or fixing roads.
Conversely, if somebody has $100 trillion-gazillion dollars just sitting in a vault somewhere, but they never spend it and none of it ever sees the light of day, while they instead live in a shack spending no more than a couple thousand dollars a month, then for practical purposes it's effectively like that money doesn't exist, right?
Yeah, no. Handing out scraps to salvage your reputation after stealing the entire pie is not what a good person does.
"How that gets distributed amongst people" is dollars and numbers in bank accounts. That's how economics works. Money is just a bunch of IOUs.
The 1600s called, they want their economic theories back.
Hoarding only occurs when there are constraints in supply. Housing is regulated to such a degree that it's very difficult to build new houses. Therefore supply goes down, demand stays steady, prices go up.
In a functioning industry, more demand creates more profit incentive which causes businesses to produce more, bringing prices into equilibrium.
Inflation should also affect wages.
The recent inflation we've seen has been a result of price gouging by businesses. Businesses use "inflation" as a justification for raising prices but not wages. It's not real, it's just massive collusion.
The role of government is to prevent that. And to prevent inefficient or undesirable allocation of labor and money, by taxing and subsidizing and fining and regulating. So the rich want everyone working on yachts and no one working on roads? Government taxes yachts until it's too expensive to maintain them, and government subsidizes road contractors who offer generous payment terms.
The government is not a dictator, they are a referee.
Absolutely not. You clearly know what the velocity of money is so how could you possibly think that? Maybe you just heard the term somewhere.
Money that is removed from the economic cycle is money that is not being used to support it. The faster the cycle goes (the greater the velocity of money) the more good it does. If $20 is circulated only once in a year and only purchased one $20 meal, it only stimulates one meal's worth of demand and only pays 1 meal's worth of wages. If it's circulated twice...
Your problem is you're starting from the position that money is bad, and you're finding arguments to support that. That's not how the economy works. Not to mention the whole "there's only a limited pie of goods" view caused incredible suffering in the 1600s and 1700s when European nations decided they wanted to grab the biggest slice they could.
Actually, I'm starting from the position that there are basic physical constraints on productive capacity no matter what, and while a well-functioning economy might utilize that more efficiently, no amount of dollars changing hands is going to break the laws of physics and just magic a more efficient powerplant or a larger workforce or more arable land into existence (without competing with and detracting from anywhere else).
Duh. But that's not relevant to this discussion.
"A functioning industry" is a subset of "the economy". You seem to ultimately be implying some kind of infinite or free growth, which is sorta fine for modelling just one industry, but resources are very finite on the whole, and increased demand for shared resources by one specific industry, by mathematical definition, leaves less available for everything else.
That is why and how it is possible for businesses in a specific industry to produce more to meet demand, and bring prices (mostly) into equilibrium. (Though note "equilibrium" has nothing to do with affordability, or fairness, as you seem to possibly be implying it does.) It is also why trying to apply this logic to the entire economy as a whole doesn't really fit.
I'm aware of this. I also don't see how it's significant for the hypotheticals/topic at hand.
I think you're moving the goalposts. The discussion you started was about which spending habits for "rich people" would be the least societally damaging, by "benefiting the economy". If you're going to just say "government intervention" to limit the harm, then we may as well just say "wealth tax" and be done with it.
Also, economies with high wealth inequality tend to have ineffective or corrupt regulators already. So suggesting regulations could be used to limit the harm of what you were advocating for in examples of wealth inequality… Seems discombobulated, on multiple levels.
Dude. The
MVinMV=PQis multiplication. it's literally commutative. You're actually right that I'm not fully as well-versed in economic theory as I could be, but assuming that basic algebra works the same in economics as it does anywhere else in the universe, reducing the velocity of money is literally, by mathematical definition, indistinguishable from reducing the supply of money.If it's circulated twice, then it still pays for only one meal, which now costs $40 instead of $20— Because it turns out you only had enough people planting crops to make one meal in total.
(If it were circulated twice in the food sector but not in other industries, then you might be able to buy one and a half meals for like $30 per, by retooling more of the economy for food production, at the cost of reducing supply and probably increasing cost in other industries— But if it's uniformly circulated twice in every sector, as is closer to what you're suggesting, then there's no profit incentive to retool anyway, so literally all you're doing is creating inflation.)
Qremains effectively constant, becauseQis bound by the productive capacity of the economy, as limited by basic physics (barring external factors like demographic and technological change), so onlyM,V, andPcan really change in the short term.Saying "support it" and "faster the cycle" is entirely allegorical and metaphorical in this context, and doesn't even pretend to have any rigorously formulated or defined meaning. So I can't really respond to it directly. But the anecdote you followed it with is unsubstantiated and apparently basically nonsensical, and the personal insinuation you made right before it seems to fly in the face of the basic algebra it's referring to.
Again: Money isn't real. Steel and wheat and turbines are real. You can't just magic' up "more good" by making more money spin around in a circle; All that will accomplish is to make each unit of money worth less, because it still has to map to the same amount of goods and services in physical reality.
Productive Capacity ≠ Imperialism!!!
Trying to equate the two is just bizarre…
I started writing a response because your tone sounded like you knew what you were talking about,
But really, what you're asserting would probably require breaking a couple laws of thermodynamics, and also seems to be directly contradictory to the basic mathematical formulation and economic description of what you're talking about.
…Ah, fuck it.
Fifth Grade called. They want you to redo the bit on multiplicaiton, so you won't try to claim
(nM)V ≠ M(nV).Though I will caveat that as modern national economies aren't closed systems either, rich people in those nations "spending all their money" may well actually help their countries as a whole too, just in less of the "benefiting the economy" way you were suggesting and instead in more of the "incredible suffering" way that you ironically tried to condemn.
Bruh
More efficient powerplants
Larger workforce
More arable land
Literally all of the things that you claimed are impossible are being done, and they're being done because people are investing in them.
No they're not. Only in a few highly specific areas are we even close to possibly ever running out of required materials, and when that gets close to happening, money (ie profit incentive) will spur innovation to alternatives.
Dude, I'm directly responding to what you're saying. I'm not bringing up any new issues here.
And you seem to be COMPLETELY misunderstanding what we're talking about.
No, I simply said that spending money was less harmful than hoarding money. Best of all would be giving that money away (or having it taken via taxes). I specifically said that.
That's so stunningly wrong I'm not even sure how to begin to address it. You're still stuck on this idea of a single limited pie of resources, where you have to pull from one sector to get benefits in another. That's not how the economy works, and I don't know how long I can keep telling you that.
See, you almost got it...you touched on it, but then didn't stop to consider. You just dismissed the central facet of modern economics as an "external factor".
Investment prompts technological change. That is the entire point. Greater velocity of money, more investment, more technology, more efficiency, better quality of life.
Every Economics 101 textbook starts with a similar example.
In Florida, the climate is good for growing oranges.
In Kansas, the climate is good for growing corn.
In Washington state, the climate is good for growing apples.
Now what if Florida wants apples? Well they can barter with Washington. But what if Washington doesn't want oranges? Well maybe they can do a 3 way trade with Kansas. But what if Washington doesn't want corn either? Enter money, a fungible IOU that Washington can exchange for cars, water, labor, anything. Everyone gets that.
But the secondary point of that analogy is this: the climate in Florida is not great for growing apples. If Florida tried to grow their own apples, they would have fewer apples AND fewer oranges. If Florida focuses solely on growing oranges, and Washington focuses solely on growing apples, we end up with more apples AND more oranges. This demonstrates that money (and investment) facilitates specialization and technological advancement. Thus, yes, infinitely producing more goods and better quality. It's an upward spiral.
Without money, Florida would try to grow apples, and Washington would try to grow oranges, and everyone's life would suck just a little more.
Expand that waaaaaaaaay out to the modern day. We have highly specialized facilities for producing car steering wheels that are the best dang car steering wheels that the world has ever seen. They produce them in the most efficient manner that the world has ever seen. Why? Money. Investment. You have a phone in your pocket that is more powerful than a computer that took up a whole room in the 1970s. Money. Investment. The average lifespan (covid excepted) has been steadily trending up for decades. Money. Investment.
Spending money is a good thing.
That's...not how physics works either. I don't know if I have the energy for THAT conversation though.
You're just repeating irrelevant basic theory that everybody already knows, which has nothing to do with your particular assertion about rich people spending their money, while merely pretending it's relevant so you sound like you know what you're talking about. And you're doing so entirely anecdotally, without any substantive principles, math, reasoning, or empirical basis to back it up, while talking down as if you're spitting some great truth.
Oh, and you're conflating technological progress with supply and demand, which, while technically related (in that it can be affected by supply and demand, like everything else), is not governed by the same laws, is not the same topic, and is in no way guaranteed (...and is not prominently featured in, like, any serious/major school of macroeconomic thought). Oh, and you're conflating primary sector output limits as the sole possible bottleneck for productive capacity, which at no point did I assert, and which is plainly ridiculous. And frankly, I don't feel like wasting the energy to pay attention in the rest of your tautological and bloviating rambling to check what else you're mixing up, but from a quick skim, it looks like you also try to completely change your narrative from "demand" to "technology", while twisting semantics to pretend you were never talking in the first place about what you were actually saying.
Frankly, if you can't even explain that weird part where you just ignored and directly contradicted basic monetary theory and its constituent mathematical laws while insulting me personally, I don't know why you would expect anything else you say about this to be taken seriously.
I linked to— What, five pretty rigorously studied basic economic and mathematical theorems, principles, formulae, etc., so far, to substantiate everything I've said. And you haven't even addressed a single one of them— Instead, you've just been blindly bloviating about "how the economy works", insultingly calling things "stunningly wrong", and ranting about "how long [you] can keep telling" me about something where you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
Read the fucking manual. I even linked you to some encyclopaedic summaries. And stop talking about something you clearly have no idea about and have zero interest to actually engage in good faith on or do any serious referencing on, as if you're some authority on it.
This is actually a subject on which my knowledge is quite incomplete, and I would have liked to be exposed to more, if you had anything to offer other than the economic equivalent of confused and angry fairy tales. But I think my disgust at this interaction now outweighs anything I might have hoped to gain from it.
This is useless.
Oh shiiiiiit someone went to www.dictionary.com
"bloviating" lol
You're just linking to shit that you have zero understanding of. You clearly have not studied any of this, even the "econ 101" that I mentioned. I don't know why you're arguing so hard in favor of this position that you've cooked up solely in your own brain.
You're seriously suggesting that efficiency increases don't feature prominently in any serious school of macroeconomic thought.
You don't even know what "anecdotally" means.
I don't think you're trolling, per se, but something akin to compulsive lying. You're saying things that are completely wrong, though plausible sounding to someone who's never considered the topic in-depth, and covering up these untruths with a flurry of five dollar words...why? To save face? You're linking to stuff that's moderately advanced economics but is only understandable in the context of a basic understanding of how the economy works, which you refuse to acknowledge.
For example, Pareto efficiency. If you just googled stuff that you want to grab to support your core idea of "there are limited resources and increasing one thing requires decreasing another thing", then the overview/description/summary sounds, initially, like something akin to what you're talking about. ie, "Pareto efficiency is when it is impossible to make one party better off without making another party worse off." Cool, you googled, you found a thing, you copied, you pasted. Great.
But you fail to understand that Pareto efficiency is a snapshot of a given economic sector (or economy). It's not an eternal state. If a factory produces widgets and bobs, it may reach pareto efficiency producing 50 widgets and 10 bobs per hour. A technological improvement may come along that enables it to produce 65 widgets and 15 bobs per hour, still in a state of pareto efficiency. It's not saying that the factory can only EVER produce 50 widgets and 10 bobs. It's saying that at that moment with the given possibilities, 50 widgets and 10 bobs is the maximal output. It's a constant moving target. Pareto efficiency does not deal with the fact that profit incentive will drive research into more efficient production of widgets and bobs. It is not a way of explaining the circulation of money within an economy, or the function of investment vs savings.
So no, I'm not going to address each of the things you linked, because you don't understand them. You're just grabbing stuff with verbiage that seems to support your core argument. You're like a dog latching on to the words "treat" and "walk".
What I'm trying to do is explain to you the central ideas underpinning economic theory. Not a specific theory, but ALL economic theory. Your core premise is incorrect, so your understanding of different theories dealing with different aspects of the economy will be incorrect. There's no point discussing those things because we haven't gotten past step zero: the fundamentals of how an economy works.
Moved goalposts:
What you were originally talking about was higher velocity and demand directly and immediately stimulating higher production in presumably linear proportion with no downsides. Double the velocity, get double the goods, which is just plainly nonsense.
What you're now pretending you were always talking about is higher demand stimulating technological change which then later increases the efficiency of the economy, allowing more goods to be produced overall. Double the demand, maybe 50 years later get 15% more goods, which is not the same.
If you had started out with the second position, then that would be mostly fine. "Rich people should spend their money in ways that will stimulate innovation to benefit us all later on" is somewhat reasonable! But you didn't go with that. At first, you didn't even specify, and then you went with this weird take implying a much more direct relationship than is physically and technologically possible between velocity and output. So naturally, I responded to that, the near-term monetary effects of which would likely not be good for most people.
Regurgitating irrelevant basics everybody already knows:
Insults:
I love how blatant it is that you had to look this word up, and then had to project that onto me (thrice, in five sentences!) to protect your ego.
Delusional grandstanding:
"I'm not even going to try to defend my point because you're too stupid to understand it, so instead I'm just going to yell at you about irrelevant-but-technically-correct stuff to save face with insults thrown in every now and then."
Lmfao.
Bullshit:
I debated whether that's the right word. Anecdotal evidence is usually at least factual, just not relevant or representative. Your various allegories aren't even consistently factual. But the basic fallacy fits, of simply telling a story with little to substantiate or even define its implications.
MV=PQ, andVdoesn't usually changeQ. If you wanna go with a different or longer-term perspective, then that's fine, but you have to qualify it or clarify it.Productive capacity has bottlenecks. If you want your point to be that more available capital can stimulate technological change to increase it, then that's fine. But that's not what you were saying, until I showed your original point was not defendable.
At this point, you've demonstrated specialization, but not technological advancement.
At the point where I linked to Pareto efficiency, I literally was talking about a snapshot of the economy in any given moment.
But it is also the equilibrium (or, more accurately, the equilibria), roughly, in a functioning economy. This is one of the other things I referenced you to, which you've conveniently decided is beneath your all-knowing-ness to stoop to the level of acknowledging.
Strawmans:
…This one, which you keep repeating, is especially dishonest, because my original reference to "stealing the entire pie" wasn't even about productive capacity at first, but was replying to your opinion that private philanthropy absolves systemic inequality.
I claimed, as a rough rule, that they cannot be simply magic'd into existence by monetary policy/effects alone, which is what you were suggesting.
I don't know what to make of how you've now folded the entire fields of nuclear physics, electrical engineering, demography, etc. under "Money Good!". Like everything in a market economy, they're affected by and require an appropriate degree of investment. That doesn't mean you can just dump more cash into the economy to get miracles back.
You're seriously pretending raw materials, and not, you know, labour or tech for processing those materials, are the main bottleneck for productive capacity.
(And yes, capital also counts, and technology can indeed advance. But it's nowhere near the all-consuming force you're portraying it as, nor guaranteed.)
The sad part is that the basic point you now seem to be reaching for, underneath all the bullshit and vitriol, isn't even wrong. If you're willing to take the immediate social and monetary chaos of trillions of dollars of "rich people"'s money being dumped into and taking over the system, then sure, maybe in the long run it might stimulate technological advancement that will benefit everybody.
But you're so cocky, aggressive, and incapable of forming a coherent point that it's taken you thousands of words to fail to explain that, while apparently directly contradicting both economic theory and the basic math it's defined in, all while making an ass of yourself.
…Block, and move on, perhaps. Or just ignore, maybe .... It's hard for me to understand that sometimes people don't use words to examine the truth, but instead use words to disrupt it for their own ego, pride, or power.... Well, fuck this.
And suddenly, I'm less afraid of LLMs, because no matter how delusional and insidious and oblivious those statistical inferences may be, I'm reminded again that humans like you are already way worse.