I think that the more robots are used for jobs, the more free money there will be to go around. Right now, we have welfare, food stamps, and all kinds of programs for those in need.. many of which didn't exist a hundred years ago. Only now that there's more to go around, because of the increased prosperity - in part because of the increased productivity, has this been possible. It used to take someone hours to do laundry (and that wasn't long ago). Milking cows, tilling land, building houses has been optimized through machinery to make more free time. It seems to make sense that we have more to go around because of increased productivity. I heard the president ask why the richest nation in the world didn't have free health care. In other words, he expects everyone in this country to receive free benefits because of the collective prosperity. That's a big change in mentality over the last hundred years. As less jobs are needed, I see more money allocated for those who don't do anything.
It's in part due to the way banks leverage their assets but productivity helps to keep it stable. Most people try to own their own home and that's where a huge chunk of long-term debt comes from that people pay off with many years of work and banks take the interest. If they aren't productive enough or the interest rates increase, it collapses as happened in 2008. While some see a system that provides for the lower incomes groups as reprehensible, the alternative as history has shown is far worse:
there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem. Every single person in the US could be mortgage-free with 1-2 years of the national budget. Zero homeless.
The issue isn't about people working or not, it's about a sustainable high quality of life. Driving people into debt, making them work long hours for little pay to promote the wealth of the tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority is not sustaining a high quality of life.
There should be more robots taking over menial jobs that are degrading for a human being. This includes serving fast food, cleaning, garbage collection and factory work. If there are no jobs to keep the remainder, they'd have no choice but to be supported by the state but like I say, with affordable housing it's a non-issue and if employers bring in maximum working hours like in France, there's more job opportunities.
It's in part due to the way banks leverage their assets but productivity helps to keep it stable. Most people try to own their own home and that's where a huge chunk of long-term debt comes from that people pay off with many years of work and banks take the interest. If they aren't productive enough or the interest rates increase, it collapses as happened in 2008. While some see a system that provides for the lower incomes groups as reprehensible, the alternative as history has shown is far worse:
there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem. Every single person in the US could be mortgage-free with 1-2 years of the national budget. Zero homeless.
The issue isn't about people working or not, it's about a sustainable high quality of life. Driving people into debt, making them work long hours for little pay to promote the wealth of the tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority is not sustaining a high quality of life.
There should be more robots taking over menial jobs that are degrading for a human being. This includes serving fast food, cleaning, garbage collection and factory work. If there are no jobs to keep the remainder, they'd have no choice but to be supported by the state but like I say, with affordable housing it's a non-issue and if employers bring in maximum working hours like in France, there's more job opportunities.
I've never bought into the "must own a house" mentality. When people blindly follow crowds on their big life-changing decisions, they tend to make mistakes. One size does not fit all.
I've never bought into the "must own a house" mentality. When people blindly follow crowds on their big life-changing decisions, they tend to make mistakes. One size does not fit all.
Someone needs to own the property you live in and everyone needs to live in a property. The choices are you own something yourself or you rent permanently. Renting is fine up until you retire. After that, if you don't have sufficient savings or private pension you're a burden on the state and you wouldn't want to take handouts for that I assume.
If housing was affordable (under $50k), most people could pay it off within 5-10 years. This would allow salaries to be lower and help businesses. It also makes it much easier to move around because the high purchase prices wouldn't be a barrier.
Someone needs to own the property you live in and everyone needs to live in a property. The choices are you own something yourself or you rent permanently. Renting is fine up until you retire. After that, if you don't have sufficient savings or private pension you're a burden on the state and you wouldn't want to take handouts for that I assume.
If housing was affordable (under $50k), most people could pay it off within 5-10 years. This would allow salaries to be lower and help businesses. It also makes it much easier to move around because the high purchase prices wouldn't be a barrier.
In my case, I am not a "burden on the state", trust me.
I'm sorry… You understand these are 21st century robots; not 1950s die stamps, right?
Have you been in these factories, I have and these machines could run without single human involved, but due to China labor laws, not automated machine can run without and operator involved. There are very few exception and to get the exception you have to petition the government to allow not human to be involved.
It's in part due to the way banks leverage their assets but productivity helps to keep it stable. Most people try to own their own home and that's where a huge chunk of long-term debt comes from that people pay off with many years of work and banks take the interest. If they aren't productive enough or the interest rates increase, it collapses as happened in 2008. While some see a system that provides for the lower incomes groups as reprehensible, the alternative as history has shown is far worse:
there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem. Every single person in the US could be mortgage-free with 1-2 years of the national budget. Zero homeless.
The issue isn't about people working or not, it's about a sustainable high quality of life. Driving people into debt, making them work long hours for little pay to promote the wealth of the tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority is not sustaining a high quality of life.
There should be more robots taking over menial jobs that are degrading for a human being. This includes serving fast food, cleaning, garbage collection and factory work. If there are no jobs to keep the remainder, they'd have no choice but to be supported by the state but like I say, with affordable housing it's a non-issue and if employers bring in maximum working hours like in France, there's more job opportunities.
I tend to agree with your analysis, however, the issue in the US and I see it all the time. the average person does not want affordable housing, people want that biggest and best house around. In my area I see so many people who are house poor, they buy a house which they can barely afford and have no money left to furnish the house, so they fill it with junk. Around me they keep building bigger and bigger houses, why because their are people willing to buy them and put the risk on the banks and the rest of public. The reason the builders build big homes is the town is unwilling to put in infrastructure in the name of land preservation. They feel if the infrastructure exist, then more homes will be build on the same amount of land, so they trying to buy up land and do not upgrade systems. In the end the land that is left is used to build fewer bigger homes which few people can really afford. But that is okay there is enough people who are willing over extend themselves to have these big homes.
Automation is not a bad things, it just means the populations has to pull themselves up to the next leave and do a higher level job. Today there are no factories in every town or city for the average person to work in. But there are other jobs which required different skills, but again people are not interested in learning new skills they want to keep doing what they always have done. This goes along with this whole minimum wage discussion, these kinds of job were not meant to sustain a household, they are for kids and part time help. For some reason people have an expectation that they should live their entire life off a minimum wage job. Hell even my kids know enough that they do not want a minimum wage job, so they went out and found jobs which paid more and a lot more, but guess what it requires that you actually work hard. The one job my son had they place said they paid more for the job due to the fact they could not get people to do the work, most would quite in a short period of time. My son stay in the job the longest of anyone they hired and the only reason he left was to back to school.
Our societies are in deep, deep trouble. Maybe sooner than we think, most people will not be needed for work. What do we do then, with all the idle hands?
Our societies are in deep, deep trouble. Maybe sooner than we think, most people will not be needed for work. What do we do then, with all the idle hands?
How are you with foot massages.
Indeed, relevant question. Also, how much for a Happy End¿
I've never bought into the "must own a house" mentality. When people blindly follow crowds on their big life-changing decisions, they tend to make mistakes. One size does not fit all.
Someone needs to own the property you live in and everyone needs to live in a property. The choices are you own something yourself or you rent permanently. Renting is fine up until you retire. After that, if you don't have sufficient savings or private pension you're a burden on the state and you wouldn't want to take handouts for that I assume.
If housing was affordable (under $50k), most people could pay it off within 5-10 years. This would allow salaries to be lower and help businesses. It also makes it much easier to move around because the high purchase prices wouldn't be a barrier.
But if salaries were lower, there would be less disposable income, leading to a depression, not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
But if salaries were lower, there would be less disposable income, leading to a depression, not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
Salaries would just be lower by the amount that normally goes on housing so the disposable income would be unchanged, it could even be higher. Some people pay out the majority of their salaries on rent or mortgages:
"Up to 59% of a typical London family's income is spent on rents, a study by housing charity Shelter has revealed."
If they owned cheaper houses, the companies employing them could cut their salaries (and possibly working hours) by 50% and they'd still have more disposable income. The companies could even hire two people on the same 50% salary and make more profit from their work if the working hours weren't cut by half. There are stats here showing outstanding mortgage debt in the US being $13 trillion (that's around $65k of debt per person aged 18-65):
This debt doesn't need to be anywhere near that high if housing was more affordable. The entire GDP of the US is around $16 trillion. People are effectively working to pay off debt to own property that doesn't need to exist. The money lenders won't want to give this up but it's how criminal gangs work. They give you something or do a favor for you and expect the debt repaid over a long time. Money lenders want to tie people into a lifetime of debt and keep people borderline destitute so that there's a level of dependence.
But if salaries were lower, there would be less disposable income, leading to a depression, not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
If anyone tells you we're not in a recession/depression right now, I have news for you... the reason the stock market is up, while the rest of the economy is stuck in mud is because of Fed lending rates and the free cash that is sloshing around, looking for fast returns. That particular party (quantitative easing) supposedly ends in October, so we'll see what happens then.
But if salaries were lower, there would be less disposable income, leading to a depression, not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
Salaries would just be lower by the amount that normally goes on housing so the disposable income would be unchanged, it could even be higher. Some people pay out the majority of their salaries on rent or mortgages:
"Up to 59% of a typical London family's income is spent on rents, a study by housing charity Shelter has revealed."
If they owned cheaper houses, the companies employing them could cut their salaries (and possibly working hours) by 50% and they'd still have more disposable income. The companies could even hire two people on the same 50% salary and make more profit from their work if the working hours weren't cut by half. There are stats here showing outstanding mortgage debt in the US being $13 trillion (that's around $65k of debt per person aged 18-65):
This debt doesn't need to be anywhere near that high if housing was more affordable. The entire GDP of the US is around $16 trillion. People are effectively working to pay off debt to own property that doesn't need to exist. The money lenders won't want to give this up but it's how criminal gangs work. They give you something or do a favor for you and expect the debt repaid over a long time. Money lenders want to tie people into a lifetime of debt and keep people borderline destitute so that there's a level of dependence.
You're living in cloud cuckoo land.
The reason property is so expensive is because that is the value the market has placed on it. You can't just propose arbitrarily lowering prices, as though that is some malleable construct.
If suddenly millions of people could afford much bigger houses, you would create a huge imbalance in the economy which would end in disaster. You can't beat poverty by making things cheaper unless you're a communist state; if you reduce prices against the market, you simply make everyone poorer.
The reason property is so expensive is because that is the value the market has placed on it. You can't just propose arbitrarily lowering prices, as though that is some malleable construct.
It's supply and demand, same reason diamonds are so expensive. Same reason wages are so low in poorer countries as there's an oversupply of workers. The way to lower demand and prices is to increase supply. If a not-for-profit produced inexpensive houses for low income earners, it takes away the demand for higher priced property forcing them to lower prices. We saw this happen in 2008, nobody had any money to buy houses so demand fell and house prices collapsed.
If suddenly millions of people could afford much bigger houses, you would create a huge imbalance in the economy which would end in disaster. You can't beat poverty by making things cheaper unless you're a communist state; if you reduce prices against the market, you simply make everyone poorer.
Lowering prices raises quality of life, not the other way round. How would raising prices tackle poverty? Let's say that there came a day when everyone could pay off their mortgage in 10 years, explain how that makes everyone poorer. By definition, more people are better off. The people worse off are the minority who can't sustain the insane prices on high-end properties because the demand is lower. It doesn't take away the demand entirely because people will still want nicer homes.
The disaster you're describing is where you completely remove an incentive for doing a better job, which promotes laziness. In other words if everyone gets an equal reward for unequal contribution then it ends in disaster. That's never what I'd suggest. I simply promote a differently weighted reward distribution that lowers the reward for the small minority to raise the quality of life for the majority.
That term is not well-defined. Every successful system is a balance between free enterprise and welfare, there is no successful implementation that is wholly one or the other.
What is unnecessary is human suffering. Take these examples:
"He and his three older siblings had a normal middle class upbringing until his father lost his job when Carrey was 12 years old.
He said: 'My father lost his job when he was 51 and that was the real "wow", the kick in the guts.
'We lived in a van for a while, and we worked all together as security guards and janitors. I quit school at age 15 to begin working to help support my family as a janitor. I'd have a baseball bat on my janitor cart because I was so angry I just wanted to beat the heck out of something.'
He added that working 'an eight hour day in a factory' after school left him wanting to 'bash somebody's head in'.
And he said it knocked his confidence so much that he went from being a 'straight-A student to not wanting to know anybody's name, and not wanting to make a friend.'"
The link above shows a few famous people who reached a point where they were living out of their cars. Some people get a sick sense of pride when they hear about rags to riches stories like that as though it's the only way to breed success but it's not. People from privileged upbringings have gone on to be just as successful as those without.
Comments
It's in part due to the way banks leverage their assets but productivity helps to keep it stable. Most people try to own their own home and that's where a huge chunk of long-term debt comes from that people pay off with many years of work and banks take the interest. If they aren't productive enough or the interest rates increase, it collapses as happened in 2008. While some see a system that provides for the lower incomes groups as reprehensible, the alternative as history has shown is far worse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
Imagine if nearly 1/4 of the US population died from hunger. It's not as if people supported by the state live in luxury, they get by on the basics.
If houses could be built cheaper like this little hobbit house:
http://www.gizmag.com/low-impact-hobbit-home/20058/
there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem. Every single person in the US could be mortgage-free with 1-2 years of the national budget. Zero homeless.
The issue isn't about people working or not, it's about a sustainable high quality of life. Driving people into debt, making them work long hours for little pay to promote the wealth of the tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority is not sustaining a high quality of life.
There should be more robots taking over menial jobs that are degrading for a human being. This includes serving fast food, cleaning, garbage collection and factory work. If there are no jobs to keep the remainder, they'd have no choice but to be supported by the state but like I say, with affordable housing it's a non-issue and if employers bring in maximum working hours like in France, there's more job opportunities.
I'm sorry… You understand these are 21st century robots; not 1950s die stamps, right?
It's in part due to the way banks leverage their assets but productivity helps to keep it stable. Most people try to own their own home and that's where a huge chunk of long-term debt comes from that people pay off with many years of work and banks take the interest. If they aren't productive enough or the interest rates increase, it collapses as happened in 2008. While some see a system that provides for the lower incomes groups as reprehensible, the alternative as history has shown is far worse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
Imagine if nearly 1/4 of the US population died from hunger. It's not as if people supported by the state live in luxury, they get by on the basics.
If houses could be built cheaper like this little hobbit house:
http://www.gizmag.com/low-impact-hobbit-home/20058/
there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem. Every single person in the US could be mortgage-free with 1-2 years of the national budget. Zero homeless.
The issue isn't about people working or not, it's about a sustainable high quality of life. Driving people into debt, making them work long hours for little pay to promote the wealth of the tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority is not sustaining a high quality of life.
There should be more robots taking over menial jobs that are degrading for a human being. This includes serving fast food, cleaning, garbage collection and factory work. If there are no jobs to keep the remainder, they'd have no choice but to be supported by the state but like I say, with affordable housing it's a non-issue and if employers bring in maximum working hours like in France, there's more job opportunities.
I've never bought into the "must own a house" mentality. When people blindly follow crowds on their big life-changing decisions, they tend to make mistakes. One size does not fit all.
Someone needs to own the property you live in and everyone needs to live in a property. The choices are you own something yourself or you rent permanently. Renting is fine up until you retire. After that, if you don't have sufficient savings or private pension you're a burden on the state and you wouldn't want to take handouts for that I assume.
If housing was affordable (under $50k), most people could pay it off within 5-10 years. This would allow salaries to be lower and help businesses. It also makes it much easier to move around because the high purchase prices wouldn't be a barrier.
In my case, I am not a "burden on the state", trust me.
In my case, I am not a "burden on the state", trust me.
No just to us, hahahhahaha, I kid, I kid.
I'm sorry… You understand these are 21st century robots; not 1950s die stamps, right?
Have you been in these factories, I have and these machines could run without single human involved, but due to China labor laws, not automated machine can run without and operator involved. There are very few exception and to get the exception you have to petition the government to allow not human to be involved.
It's in part due to the way banks leverage their assets but productivity helps to keep it stable. Most people try to own their own home and that's where a huge chunk of long-term debt comes from that people pay off with many years of work and banks take the interest. If they aren't productive enough or the interest rates increase, it collapses as happened in 2008. While some see a system that provides for the lower incomes groups as reprehensible, the alternative as history has shown is far worse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
Imagine if nearly 1/4 of the US population died from hunger. It's not as if people supported by the state live in luxury, they get by on the basics.
If houses could be built cheaper like this little hobbit house:
http://www.gizmag.com/low-impact-hobbit-home/20058/
there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem. Every single person in the US could be mortgage-free with 1-2 years of the national budget. Zero homeless.
The issue isn't about people working or not, it's about a sustainable high quality of life. Driving people into debt, making them work long hours for little pay to promote the wealth of the tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority is not sustaining a high quality of life.
There should be more robots taking over menial jobs that are degrading for a human being. This includes serving fast food, cleaning, garbage collection and factory work. If there are no jobs to keep the remainder, they'd have no choice but to be supported by the state but like I say, with affordable housing it's a non-issue and if employers bring in maximum working hours like in France, there's more job opportunities.
I tend to agree with your analysis, however, the issue in the US and I see it all the time. the average person does not want affordable housing, people want that biggest and best house around. In my area I see so many people who are house poor, they buy a house which they can barely afford and have no money left to furnish the house, so they fill it with junk. Around me they keep building bigger and bigger houses, why because their are people willing to buy them and put the risk on the banks and the rest of public. The reason the builders build big homes is the town is unwilling to put in infrastructure in the name of land preservation. They feel if the infrastructure exist, then more homes will be build on the same amount of land, so they trying to buy up land and do not upgrade systems. In the end the land that is left is used to build fewer bigger homes which few people can really afford. But that is okay there is enough people who are willing over extend themselves to have these big homes.
Automation is not a bad things, it just means the populations has to pull themselves up to the next leave and do a higher level job. Today there are no factories in every town or city for the average person to work in. But there are other jobs which required different skills, but again people are not interested in learning new skills they want to keep doing what they always have done. This goes along with this whole minimum wage discussion, these kinds of job were not meant to sustain a household, they are for kids and part time help. For some reason people have an expectation that they should live their entire life off a minimum wage job. Hell even my kids know enough that they do not want a minimum wage job, so they went out and found jobs which paid more and a lot more, but guess what it requires that you actually work hard. The one job my son had they place said they paid more for the job due to the fact they could not get people to do the work, most would quite in a short period of time. My son stay in the job the longest of anyone they hired and the only reason he left was to back to school.
The devil will make work for them.
I probably shouldn’t ask what that is.
But if salaries were lower, there would be less disposable income, leading to a depression, not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
Looks like you're already shooting straight to the correct answer.
Salaries would just be lower by the amount that normally goes on housing so the disposable income would be unchanged, it could even be higher. Some people pay out the majority of their salaries on rent or mortgages:
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-20943576
"Up to 59% of a typical London family's income is spent on rents, a study by housing charity Shelter has revealed."
If they owned cheaper houses, the companies employing them could cut their salaries (and possibly working hours) by 50% and they'd still have more disposable income. The companies could even hire two people on the same 50% salary and make more profit from their work if the working hours weren't cut by half. There are stats here showing outstanding mortgage debt in the US being $13 trillion (that's around $65k of debt per person aged 18-65):
http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/releases/mortoutstand/current.htm
This debt doesn't need to be anywhere near that high if housing was more affordable. The entire GDP of the US is around $16 trillion. People are effectively working to pay off debt to own property that doesn't need to exist. The money lenders won't want to give this up but it's how criminal gangs work. They give you something or do a favor for you and expect the debt repaid over a long time. Money lenders want to tie people into a lifetime of debt and keep people borderline destitute so that there's a level of dependence.
If anyone tells you we're not in a recession/depression right now, I have news for you... the reason the stock market is up, while the rest of the economy is stuck in mud is because of Fed lending rates and the free cash that is sloshing around, looking for fast returns. That particular party (quantitative easing) supposedly ends in October, so we'll see what happens then.
You're living in cloud cuckoo land.
The reason property is so expensive is because that is the value the market has placed on it. You can't just propose arbitrarily lowering prices, as though that is some malleable construct.
If suddenly millions of people could afford much bigger houses, you would create a huge imbalance in the economy which would end in disaster. You can't beat poverty by making things cheaper unless you're a communist state; if you reduce prices against the market, you simply make everyone poorer.
Capitalism works.
It's supply and demand, same reason diamonds are so expensive. Same reason wages are so low in poorer countries as there's an oversupply of workers. The way to lower demand and prices is to increase supply. If a not-for-profit produced inexpensive houses for low income earners, it takes away the demand for higher priced property forcing them to lower prices. We saw this happen in 2008, nobody had any money to buy houses so demand fell and house prices collapsed.
Lowering prices raises quality of life, not the other way round. How would raising prices tackle poverty? Let's say that there came a day when everyone could pay off their mortgage in 10 years, explain how that makes everyone poorer. By definition, more people are better off. The people worse off are the minority who can't sustain the insane prices on high-end properties because the demand is lower. It doesn't take away the demand entirely because people will still want nicer homes.
The disaster you're describing is where you completely remove an incentive for doing a better job, which promotes laziness. In other words if everyone gets an equal reward for unequal contribution then it ends in disaster. That's never what I'd suggest. I simply promote a differently weighted reward distribution that lowers the reward for the small minority to raise the quality of life for the majority.
That term is not well-defined. Every successful system is a balance between free enterprise and welfare, there is no successful implementation that is wholly one or the other.
What is unnecessary is human suffering. Take these examples:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/07/11/stars-who-were-once-homeless/slide/jim-carrey/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1346063/I-wanted-bash-someones-head-Jim-Carrey-gets-emotional-reveals-familys-poverty-heartache.html
"He and his three older siblings had a normal middle class upbringing until his father lost his job when Carrey was 12 years old.
He said: 'My father lost his job when he was 51 and that was the real "wow", the kick in the guts.
'We lived in a van for a while, and we worked all together as security guards and janitors. I quit school at age 15 to begin working to help support my family as a janitor. I'd have a baseball bat on my janitor cart because I was so angry I just wanted to beat the heck out of something.'
He added that working 'an eight hour day in a factory' after school left him wanting to 'bash somebody's head in'.
And he said it knocked his confidence so much that he went from being a 'straight-A student to not wanting to know anybody's name, and not wanting to make a friend.'"
The link above shows a few famous people who reached a point where they were living out of their cars. Some people get a sick sense of pride when they hear about rags to riches stories like that as though it's the only way to breed success but it's not. People from privileged upbringings have gone on to be just as successful as those without.