Free trade, automatization and how it affects common people

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

If the only thing you're good for is menial labor, you've put yourself in a position where your time isn't worth that much, and no law setting a higher minimum price on that time is ever going to make anyone voluntarily purchase it. Your labor's value is limited by what a free market would voluntarily pay for it, and even if government forces employers to buy it at a higher rate - coercing them into involuntary action, eroding their liberty - that's what it is worth.

Automation will soon hit 'highly educated and skilled workers' as well. https://youtu.be/t4kyRyKyOpo?t=17m9s Assigning the 'worth' of an individual based on their skills will soon be an obsolete modality. Can society adapt it's values in time? I have little faith in the average individual. Exceptional persons will have to exert tremendous amounts of influence in order to MAKE society change.

As for the market. It is utterly doomed. When production and distribution is nearly fully automated, the entire concept of capitalism becomes more of a burden than a tool for resource allocation. In the interim, we will need a negative income tax and government regulations to immutably couple the generation of wealth with the benefit to society which that service brings.

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deathflower wrote:

People are paid less in developing countries for the SAME job in developed countries. Businesses are the ones cheating the system by paying people less, going to poorer countries that need the money. You can find desperate people willing to work for peanuts in poor country. It isn't cheating, it is unfair. Life isn't fair.

Developing Countries want more jobs, they have to lower labor cost. Developed Countries want more jobs, they have to lower labor cost which they aren't willing to do. Asking poor countries to raise labor cost that will cost them to lose jobs isn't practical, it is against their self interest. Chasing businesses away isn't gonna create jobs.

Emphasis mine.

You can't really complain about not having a job which you willfully declined when offered. So the pay is low - what of it? People are just letting themselves get underbid.

I'm assuming, of course, that democracy works and the labor laws of a country are roughly representative of the sentiment of its people. But ask yourself: what right do you have to tell another man in your country that he cannot legally price-match those peanuts in order to keep the jobs local?

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SkyCore wrote:

we will need a negative income tax and government regulations to immutably couple the generation of wealth with the benefit to society which that service brings.

Spoken like a true man of the people... if those people are thieves.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Spoken like a true man of the people... if those people are thieves.

How will the market work if what SkyCore says turns out to be true? The market is already today struggling a lot with looming deflation. Do libertarians have a solution for this problem?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Emphasis mine.

You can't really complain about not having a job which you willfully declined when offered. So the pay is low - what of it? People are just letting themselves get underbid.

I'm assuming, of course, that democracy works and the labor laws of a country are roughly representative of the sentiment of its people. But ask yourself: what right do you have to tell another man in your country that he cannot legally price-match those peanuts in order to keep the jobs local?

You don't. You move to a richer country and your wage doubled.

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Xavderion wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Spoken like a true man of the people... if those people are thieves.

How will the market work if what SkyCore says turns out to be true? The market is already today struggling a lot with looming deflation. Do libertarians have a solution for this problem?

It's not a problem. The idea that automation destroys work assumes that we'd utterly run out of productive things to do.

I do think we might have a bit of a recreation bubble currently. People might be a little too content to sit on their butts and enjoy content instead of looking for meaningful activity. Don't worry though, like overpopulated deer, a homeostatic equilibrium will come about. Even slobs clean house when it gets bad enough.

Now, do libertarians have a way to save all the deer? Nope. The artificially sustained is not always sustainable.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

It's not a problem. The idea that automation destroys work assumes that we'd utterly run out of productive things to do.

I do think we might have a bit of a recreation bubble currently. People might be a little too content to sit on their butts and enjoy content instead of looking for meaningful activity. Don't worry though, like overpopulated deer, a homeostatic equilibrium will come about. Even slobs clean house when it gets bad enough.

Now, do libertarians have a way to save all the deer? Nope. The artificially sustained is not always sustainable.

So when all utilities, food, housing, transportation, communications is fully automated you would still demand that everyone have a job or else they dont get fed?

.

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MrSmiley21 wrote:

I'm for the populist approach when it comes to trade. Where the said country puts the economic interests of its own workers & citizens before that of not only corporate interests, but the interests of other countries as well. Like there is no viable reason from the interests of American workers why we should have free trade with Mexico for example.

If the other countries do the same everyone will be worse off overall. Prisoner's dilemma and all that.

Also, Mexico hasn't fucked US as much as many said (NAFTA being a disaster is false, also, many manufacturing jobs were moving to Mexico before that deal, and manufacturing jobs went up immediately after the treaty). See this graph.

Two things that bother me is that manufacturing jobs are overrated (there are other jobs in the service industry that could easily replace them in earnings) and that automatization is more guilty than NAFTA. Tell that to Trump though.

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DalaiLama wrote:

The problem is that currently, the largest companies aren't being held accountable for their actions, and nation backed enterprises are escaping scrutiny and oversight. The competition aspect can be good for consumers, until almost all the competition is driven out of the global market for a given product, and the remaining handful of companies form a hegemony and determine what prices and conditions all consumers will receive.

You mean like US subsidizing agriculture and making hard for other countries to use their comparative advantage in farming? Yeah, that kind of thing sucks, still, I think the benefits outweight the costs. It's question of pushing the countries that do this stuff (i.e.: almost everyone). Free trade deals can be modified to allow that (the corporate part that everyone talks about is actually somewhat overrated, or so reddit economists have told me, still, I wouldn't dismiss those concerns).

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DalaiLama wrote:

The benefit to third world nations of lower prices labor is a brief bubble that will collapse with more automated manufacturing. A robot that costs 150,000 could average out to under $2.00 an hour over 10 years and have zero health care costs.

More reason to let those manufacturing jobs go there and at least allow some grow.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Free trade sounds great, and between two or more countries with roughly equal respect for human rights, there isn't a problem with it which I can see. The problem is: not all countries are equal in that respect. And every privilege granted by law or collective bargaining to the labor force puts that labor force at a competitive disadvantage with those which do not grant that privilege.

Rich countries can afford more protections to labor (think of things like EITC and trade assistance) so some assimetry is not necessarily an unsurmontable problem. New treaties include some labor and enviromental provisions so there is somewhat of an answer to this.

Also, some would argue that US doesn't protect labor enough and they are having an unfair advantage (many in Europe are opposed to free trade deals with US because it would make their food regulations go down, for example).

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Xavderion wrote:

Regarding free trade, I basically agree with everyone else. I was a proponent of full free trade once because I believed that the cheaper costs resulting from the (essentially) slave labor of 3rd world countries would result in very low prices of goods for us consumers. What happened instead is that prices went down only a bit while the owners pocketed all the profits. So yeah I'm in team Bernie/Trump.

For automation, I'm a bit of a "futurist socialist" in that regard. I think the luddite fallacy isn't valid anymore considering the progress in AI over the past couple of years. There will be way more jobs destroyed by automation than new jobs created due to the productivity increase. Automation will be replacing mental and even some of social labor and that's basically all us humans got. That's why I think some kind of negative income tax will be inevitable in the future.

There are people making video cats for a living (and many other weird jobs). I don't think that threat is credible right now. A lot of stuff cannot be automatized anyway, not at least if there is creativity involved.

Also, there is a trade off between labor rights and growth. This is an ethical dilemma for you to think about: questionable labor conditions beat no job. By trying to protect a few people in developed countries and avoiding "slave" labor in third world countries you can actually made everyone worse off. Think about how much a computer would cost if they weren't made in the third world and what effect would have everywhere to not have cheap computers.

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I think bringing growth to the third world is somewhat necessary. I'm a consequentialist, I can tolerate some ethically questionable stuff to obtain the best results possible. I think that is harder to opress people that prosper. China scares me less than North Korea (the communist party in the first one will have problems if they cannot mantain some prosperity, I expect China to go the same path than Chile eventually).

I've seen how useless are tariffs in my country so I'm not a big fan.

This is not different ethically, than, let's say, abortion.

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Assigning the 'worth' of an individual based on their skills will soon be an obsolete modality. Can society adapt it's values in time?

We just Donald j trump it and assign our literal personal worth based on our feelings that day; am I rich and respected and important enough to make society flow around me or The Most rich and respected and basically the shoulders on which society sits?