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Real Nice Economy You Got Here. Be A Shame If Someone Broke It
This clip of Harold Daggett is popping up all over twitter. The immediate aesthetics are comical; the accent, the glasses, the jewelry. If it looks like a mobster and sounds like a mobster....
There's enough discussion on the Presidential Race in the VP debate threads. The CW angle here is how the image of the "American Union Man" has always been 99% hagiography. They have been lionized in Bruce Springsteen songs and other pop culture kitsch since the 1990s at least, but the hard economics stopped working in the 1970s. Unions are a tax on everything downstream of them. Functionally, it's racketeering and extortion. They owe their bewildering continued existence to the fact that they function as a bedrock reliable voting bloc with lockstep leadership control .... until now?
We had the teamsters refuse to back any candidate earlier. Your modal longshoreman is almost certainly a Trump voter. But Trump despises Unions. So ... what's happening?
US ports are actually some of the least efficient in the world because of this point-blank refusal to adopt automation, IIRC they were next to Tanzania on the leaderboard. China and Japan are far ahead.
However, we do need to consider a balance between automation and human labour renumeration and leverage. I doubt any of us have worked in a port. Few of us are professional artists or actors, I suspect. I imagine many here would be much more sympathetic to extremely highly-paid software engineering or finance jobs getting axed and replaced by AI.
It may well be that a reasonable balance for ports vs port workers involves this thug and his hangers-on being sent off to prison for economic wrecking, mass sackings and prompt automation. But similarly reasonable balances may be imposed on unruly, arrogant tech-bros by the rest of society. Some level of working-class unity (interpreted broadly to mean all who derive most of their earning from their wage) may be appropriate here. What happens when we automated the dock workers, automated the factory workers, automate the retail workers... who will be left to go on strike when they automate us? And then where is our leverage to negotiate anything in the future?
There was a Liu Cixin short story about an Ancap civilization enforced by AI NAP killbots where one capitalist ended up owning all the parks, all the water and air after winning a completely fair free-market competition. Everyone else was confined to desolate hive cities, rasping away in filthy reprocessed air until their machines failed, unable to step a few metres away and enjoy the beautiful landscape. It is all private property. I am a NVIDIA shareholder and feel somewhat insulated by all of this... but many are not. Who is to say that someone or something won't decide 'oh these little people who bought shares pre-singularity didn't really contribute, off to penury with them! Print out another billion clones of us!'? We need leverage to negotiate and getting into a habit of discarding leverage may not be helpful, despite obvious good reasons to do so.
Good.
Good.
Productivity is the source of wealth. Holding productivity back in pursuit of rents is how you get extended (ie. century long) periods of economic stagnation.
What does happen when they automate all the farm work? Where will we go?
-- Farm laborer, 1860, when 70% of the population worked in agriculture.
Productivity is the source of wealth. What happens when we, individual human beings without exceptional skills (and eventually them too), are no longer productive in any job? It's going to happen sooner or later, likely sooner.
When we are no longer productive, all we have are legal/moral claims to wealth that is fundamentally controlled by others. That's a precarious position to be in!
Competing states are absolutely advantaged by higher productivity but you and I aren't states or economies or large firms.
I suggest you read about the microeconomic term "comparative advantage".
Comparitive advantage only holds true in very limited circumstances that, quite frankly, simply do not exist in the real world; perfect interchangability of goods produced, infinitely elastic consumer demand for the goods in question, no risk in sudden changes in demand, and limited parties.
Hypothetically arguing that because America can produce wheat, and Japan can produce cars, so who cares if the Detroit auto industry collapses because "Comparative Advantage baby!" ignores that Detroit can't just immediately shift to production of wheat;even if they could, what happens when excess production pushes prices so low that it's simply not worth it to employ them as farmers; what happens if another country can grow wheat more efficiently (and these all just barely scratch the surface of the actual problems with Comparative Advantage)
Nah, there's plenty of work that extends the concept to much more robust circumstances. And most of the time, when they're talking about limitations, it's like, "Yeah, gains from trade are still obviously positive and a major factor, but it's a bit trickier to make mathematically-precise statements that also work perfectly for predicting observational data, since there are all sorts of things like trade barriers and other refinements." This is throwing out all intuition gained for some strained belief that some fourth-order term that is mathematically-difficult to solve in closed form is going to actually magically reverse the sign of the result.
A claim literally no one has ever made.
Good news! We went from a world where some 90+% of people were employed as farmers to a world where ChatGPT tells me that the global figure is about 28%, but regions that are hardest hit by comparative advantage are down to 1-2%. I'm sure I would hate to live in one of those areas where it's down that low; those places probably suck from all the unemployment, starvation, etc.
That's literally the question of comparative advantage. Are you just worried about going beyond the two-country model in Econ 101? I'm pretty sure that even in Econ 301, they do multi-country models.
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