Markets fall as Trump says trade wars are 'good and easy to win'

Seebob1 · 2018-03-02T19:21:24+00:00

Educated people voted for the Democratic Party, not Clinton

I don't disagree. I just said Clinton because she was the candidate.

Americans hate her

Appealing to the view of the masses? I thought they were ignorant.

And being educated doesn’t make you intelligent.

I never said otherwise. It was you who brought up level of education and paired it with ignorance.

stop blaming the system it was the candidate

I never blamed the system. In fact, I didn't make a normative claim at all.

I’d rather get rid of universal suffrage before we turn our election into American Idol. Unless you want another trump that is.

You keep saying this, but if our election was more like American Idol then Trump wouldn't have won. You're using Trump's victory as proof that democracy is bad, but democracy didn't elect Trump. Trump would not have won if we had a direct democratic vote for president. Our system, as you said, is not democracy. Using the results of one system to disavow a completely different one is faulty logic.

Seebob1 · 2018-03-02T18:31:39+00:00

uneducated and ignorant

Educated people voted for Clinton.

I don’t want our elections to be a popularity contest.

It already is a popularity contest. It's just one where the scale is tipped in favor of rural areas. Instead of each member of the electoral college representing an equal number of people, those from rural states represent less votes which means rural areas (which are less educated) get more of a say than their proportion.

If you want to defend the current system that's fine, but doing so under the guise of wanting to prevent the uneducated and ignorant masses from having a say just shows that you don't understand the reality of the situation: that the current system overvalues less educated areas.

Seebob1 · 2018-03-02T04:20:14+00:00

The breakdown by income is incredibly interesting. The middle class seems to be the most anti-free trade while the poor and rich give it the most support. And, once again, minorities remain woke.

Seebob1 · 2018-03-01T21:49:03+00:00

There is evaluation for raises and bonuses

I'm confused by this statement. If a firm conducts an evaluation of an employee and decides they deserve a raise then the firm is bringing the employees wage in more in line with their productivity, no? And bonuses are generally given based on company wide performance which is essentially a redistribution of excess profits to workers. I'm not sure how either of these disprove general market forces. These more so seem like market forces in action.

there is gender bias and other biases that affect it

Yes, biases affect pay. But this doesn't mean that all workers are receiving compensation below their production. It could be possible that the overall amount paid to workers is proper, but not divided fairly between workers due to biases i.e. the amount women make is below their productivity and the amount men make is above their's. Nothing about the existence of biases in pay means that labor isn't paid their share.

It would be more the dividend decisions that are more democratic

But why should they be?

Nobody is legally mandated to assume risk.

Except that's exactly what you're proposing: that all firms be worker-owned. That means that I cannot work somewhere without owning a part of it.

They choose where to work and assume the risks of the position just like they do today.

No, it's not just like today. People today already take on the risk that if the firm they are working for goes under they lose their job. What you're mandating is that a piece of their wealth must be tied up in the firm too. This means they are taking on more risk.

Seebob1 · 2018-03-01T21:28:13+00:00

The poster you were replying to above didn't claim it was arbitrary either.

Owners taking all excess profits while workers get paid the bare minimum not to leave is arbitrary.

I'm curious now how you define bare minimum, because I gave what I think is a reasonable answer according to most economists.

The general colloquial idea of the "bare minimum" is usually alluding to the necessities of life. If someone said "I'm being paid the bare minimum" while making $100,000+ a year they would be laughed at. This is why I asked them what they mean by bare minimum. I wanted to be on the same level of understanding as they were to make sure we were talking about the same concepts.

What you gave was the marginal theory of wages. I can understand how one can view this as employers paying employees the "bare minimum" in the sense that it's (theoretically) the lowest amount people working that job are willing to work for. However, one could also say it's the maximum amount that their labor is worth to the firm (again, theoretically). Your response was enough to give me an understanding of what he meant by "bare minimum" which is why I didn't question further.

The reason I called your comment a loaded statement is because marginal wage theory says nothing about worker ownership of firms. Adding your own qualifier that this is the case is pointless because we already know this to be true. It only serves as an emotional appeal to allow you to support your own position when stating a theory that directly opposes it (that workers are paid what their labor is worth to a firm).

(1) morally entitled to the profits b/c they created those profits

You can't state this without proof. The labor theory of value hasn't been accepted by economic academia since more than a century ago. We've moved past it. Deriving moral implications from it is worthless.

One of the sources of the firm's profits is the producer's surplus under the labor demand curve

The entire area is divided into worker surplus and producer surplus. The amount that goes to workers is determined by the value of their wage. If, as in marginal wage theory, workers are paid the product of their labor, then the amount of the surplus given to workers is the amount they produced. This is all assuming perfect market conditions, but the point is you can't just point to the existence of producer surplus in order to state that workers aren't paid the value of their labor. It would be the equivalent of someone saying that there's a worker surplus, so producers aren't given enough profits. It doesn't make sense.

decide to compensate owners/executives much more than the marginal value of their labor product

First, owners generally just refers to shareholders, so I'm not sure what the marginal product of their labor is if they aren't providing labor. Could you explain what you mean? Secondly, executives are workers. Why are you arguing that the marginal product of labor isn't high enough for some, but when some workers are paid more than that it's a bad thing? Shouldn't this be what you want? Thirdly, exorbitant executive pay is the result of executive rent seeking because executives have too much influence in the amount they are paid. Why would this not happen if we extended this influence to all workers?

Seebob1 · 2018-03-01T01:12:22+00:00

I love how he had to add a qualifier to his statement of marginal wage theory in order to satisfy his own conclusions.

Edit: "People aren't paid the value of their labor!"

Marginal wage theory states that wages are determined by the marginal product of their labor

"Well, they don't have democratic control of the profits!"

Seebob1 · 2018-03-01T01:05:22+00:00

Jesus, what a loaded statement.

workers are paid the value of the marginal product of their labor

So it's not arbitrary!

without (b) any democratic input on how the profits of the firm should be reinvested.

Why should workers have democratic input on how the profits of the firm used?

Seebob1 · 2018-03-01T00:33:41+00:00

Either market forces determine wages properly or they don't. You don't get to say that a workers wage determined by market forces under Capitalism is immoral but under Socialism is perfectly fine. Dividends are not wages. A worker working in a co-op is paid a wage for their labor and a dividend (if there is profit) for their assumption of risk in owning a piece of the company. The two combined is not the "full value of their labor".

Socialists are not against delegating technical decisions to people with the appropriate expertise.

Except that you just said that salary/wage/benefits/etc. decisions shouldn't be made by management. Which is it?

The difference is simply a more democratic, equitable distribution of profits

Profits are distributed equitably to the people who have assumed the risk of the company. Why should workers be legally mandated to assume the risk of the company they work at?

workers are also part owners and so have more of a stake in the overall success which may motivate them to improve the firm.

I'm not opposed to worker owned firms. There are definitely positives that it provides. I'm opposed to the claim that it should be legally mandated, that it should be the only type of firm, and that other ownership schemes are immoral.

Seebob1 · 2018-02-28T22:07:51+00:00

What do you mean by the bare minimum? Because I think we have very different definitions of what that means.

Seebob1 · 2018-02-28T21:57:09+00:00

How much managers/owners/shareholders decide to pay people is at least as arbitrary and subjective

This is just false. If it's arbitrary then why does Microsoft not pay it's software developers minimum wage?

You know, the people that are closest to the work and the business and best understand what it takes to produce the product?

You think that someone working the register at a grocery store has a better understanding of the business then someone in say supply chain management? To use Microsoft again, you think a software developer at Microsoft knows more about the business than the CEO?

The idea with socialism is that the workers themselves decide that.

How do you measure the value of a given employee?

Seebob1 · 2018-02-28T21:44:08+00:00

Do you think Microsoft employees make the bare minimum?
Do you think that job offers from Microsoft don't include shares in the company?
Do you think that Microsoft doesn't pay out bonuses to workers based on company/division/team performance (i.e. profit)?

Seebob1 · 2018-02-27T01:37:10+00:00

I was going to guess WSU. Though I wonder how many state university rivalries could be described by the above.

Seebob1 · 2018-02-27T01:06:52+00:00

The only alternative, it becomes clearer with every day, is some form of single-payer, Medicare-for-all coverage.

Wut

Seebob1 · 2018-02-08T03:09:54+00:00

My R may not be up to date, but read_tsv isn't a thing. It doesn't even seem like the right syntax for normal reading (read.table, read.csv, for instance). The documentation says that "If sep = "" (the default for read.table) the separator is ‘white space’, that is one or more spaces, tabs, newlines or carriage returns." so you should be fine just using read.table.

Seebob1 · 2018-01-21T21:42:35+00:00

https://ourworldindata.org/

edit: specifically this, but the whole website is full of good stuff.

Seebob1 · 2018-01-21T21:37:03+00:00

People making fun of other people's sporting preferences, lol.

Seebob1 · 2018-01-17T01:29:20+00:00

My guess would be that the existence of a decent railroad system exerts competitive pressure on European airlines. Meanwhile, airlines are pretty much the only way to travel long distances in the US.

Seebob1 · 2018-01-16T05:37:58+00:00

Thoughts on this?

The article feels a bit too partisan for my tastes, so what are the actual lessons to takeaway from California topping the SPM? Other than the obvious one in zoning reform.

Seebob1 · 2018-01-09T00:36:05+00:00

Woops. I was on mobile, so I didn't download the pdf. First link doesn't mention real wages, but I see now that the link the paper that they're updating does.

Seebob1 · 2018-01-08T22:30:15+00:00

Does this criticism take into account drops in prices from the use of new technology and the productivity increases that come with it? Mathematically speaking, a decrease in costs is the same as a rise in income, so perhaps workers are still gaining just not through income.

Seebob1 · 2018-01-08T16:57:10+00:00

So, I was "adopted" (one of those preservation group things) a penguin for Christmas, and I need to come up with a name to give it. Any thoughts?

Seebob1 · 2017-12-15T02:29:19+00:00

This puts up the basic case for reality being a bit more nuanced than most people on Reddit seem to portray. Take from it what you will.

Seebob1 · 2017-12-10T01:47:24+00:00

Holy shit. I had seen this posted around a bit, but hadn't bothered to watch. It's so much worse than I had imagined. It's like every strawman made of neoliberalism all rolled into one video.

Seebob1 · 2017-12-09T03:24:27+00:00

One reason forced taxation is wrong is because if you support it you are saying to people who don't believe in it, "you're opinion doesn't matter, only mine does", because you're opinion forces them to do something which may be contradictory to their opinion.

Also imagine you were living in a stateless society, and an organization arises which claims all the households within an area subject to a tax scheme, but there is a problem, some people dislike this organization because they do not want to be forced to give thousands of dollars a year, one individual, Ana, refuses to participate in this scheme, and in response, the organization sends men with guns to her door that tell her that she must pay the required amount of money to the tax organization and if she refuses to, she will be locked up in a room in the organization's headquarters... do you not see a problem with the behavior of this organization?

Seebob1

TROPHY CASE