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Whats your cut off for rich here? Unless you're including like the broad middle class then these forms of consumption are just such a tiny percent of total wealth/consumption that it's hard to take seriously as anything but resentment that they have nice things.
These things comprise a large part of the consumption of the rich in America. Is it possible you resent the poor for having a genuine moral claim to the resources that the wealthy waste?
They comprise a large part of the consumption of the rich of course, what else would they consume? But a very small amount of total consumption. If you redistributed all the pools and big houses we'd all have a 5 minute time share a year in mansion and get to enter a one in a thousand lottery to have one of flights be private instead of commercial jet. And yeah, I think it's basically fine that the system works out that people who get into a bunch of voluntary, everyone wins and grows the pie contracts get to consume some of that newly created pie. It's not a big deal to me. I think redistribution to a degree is good to a point, we should have some baseline level of consumption that even the least fortunate have access to, good shelter, good food, free time and plentiful entertainment options, but it's just not a big deal to me if the guy who built up a company to provides valuable goods and services gets to debauch it up in a nice big house by his private pool, good for him.
All that even said, your position doesn't even really work out to redistribution, it just shrinks the pie for everyone. The poor get even less in actual terms although maybe a bigger slice in relative terms.
If the wealthiest top 1% of households in America have at least $14mil, and the class as a whole possesses 55 trillion in wealth, then there is necessarily a lot of wealth wasted on things that are not required for the happiness of these 1% of households. And so we can improve a comical amount of lives in America by simply halting immigration. If this wealth were originally compelled to be redistributed annually (because no surplus of workers), we are talking about 1-3 trillion to be distributed. That’s giving the bottom 100 million working Americans (the bottom 60%) between 10k and 30k annually. We are also talking about lower housing costs and lower stress-related healthcare costs. We are also talking about a more efficient economy as the workers are actually able to pick up and move for greater wages (simply not realistic for many working Americans right now, and they can’t bargain if they can’t afford to quit for a couple months). We are also talking about less educational waste as people see that they can live comfortably without a college degree. Then we will see gains in civic participation, with all of its myriad benefits. &tc
It’s a big deal for me that this wealth is wasted because, at the end of the day, we are trading the blood and lives of the poor so that the flooring in a wealthy person’s bathroom is more colorful. We are looking at the mangled corpse of a child in a drunk driving accident, knowing of course that alcoholism and life stress are linked (and in any case treatment costs money), and we are saying “this is just the price we pay so that an investment banker gets a yacht”. This is not a rational trade for the statistically-informed looking at the predictable cofactors of misery. I think this is just allowing the poor to die so that the rich are more comfortable.
So immediately you've moved off the consumption point. The vast majority of this wealth is is frozen assets that don't do anything to consumption.
??? This just seems like free association. Where are you getting these numbers? Where is the redistribution coming from because of preventing immigration? Almost all of higher labor costs are passed on to the consumers which you can basically model as a flat tax, famously a regressive type of tax.
What are you talking about man? You don't need to take months off to find a job. Most people interview for new jobs while working their current jobs.
Ultimately this whole world view you're espousing is a mess. I guess the cleanest way to attack it is just that your conflation between wealth and consumption is founded on misunderstandings and the mechanism you're expecting to connect immigration enforcement to lead to improving people's lives are very transparently you deciding you don't like immigration and working backwards. Almost none of the wealth of the rich is in the consumption of bathroom tiles. It's tied up in little bits of paper, they are for the most part deferring their right to bid up consumption for the average person. They're not buying thousands of pounds of beef and burning it on pyres so that the hard working American has to go without, they're not buying up entire hospitals and cackling as they sit empty or square miles of in demand real estate that they leave empty. They are having negligible impacts on the consumption of your downtrodden American. Further immigrants that come and do the work that your average American consumes are on net increasing the average American purchasing power. They're on the supply side of the equation. Building houses, working agriculture, all the stuff that reduces the cost of living for the average American.
You know that people invest in order profit later. And you know that the category “frozen assets” includes a lot of frivolous waste (large properties, private jets, art, watches, jewelry). And you know that, were these business owners compelled in their business career to pay workers more, the money they put into frozen assets would have went to these workers.
Because you have to pay workers more to retain them; they are more valuable; the owner cannot reduce the QoL and wages as much as possible. Workers can bargain for a greater share in the profit.
This is essentially saying, “Jeff Bezos would keep increasing the price for Amazon if he had to pay workers more so that he magically makes the same amount of profit as today.” This is incorrect and it should be obvious why it’s incorrect. Amazon cannot raise their prices so much that people stop using their services. At a certain point it becomes too high for the consumer to pay. There is a ceiling to the price of Amazon that cannot increase, and if you pay the low wage workers behind Amazon more, eventually most of his excess profit transfers to these workers. Because there’s a cap on the pricing of Amazon.
Again, this has been shown repeatedly in all real world scenarios. After the 1920s Immigration Quotas. Higher wages after the 1918–1919 Spanish Flu. After the Bracero Program ended. You realize that if your theory was right, you should be able to find a real world example where there was a significant artificial restriction in low-wage labor which reduced the wages of the lowest wage earners? Doesn’t it make you suspicious that this… doesn’t exist? And it has only ever been shown to increase their wages and bargaining power? And shouldn’t this be sort of obvious?
There are two things to this: (1) when low wage earnings are sufficiently high that a laborer can actually quit in between jobs when dissatisfied with his conditions, this is excellent for the bargaining power of their class, as it penalizes companions with a low QoL. Wages are not high enough for low wage earners to do this without risking financial catastrophe. (2) It’s not realistic for a low-wage earner today to pick up and move across the country to wherever they can make more, even if they know they can make more. They don’t have the wealth to do this. It’s expensive to do it, they risk immediate homelessness if it fails, employers will not help them relocate and they may not be able to find someone willing to lease to them.
The frozen assets I'm talking about are bits of paper that say things like "JPMC common stock" on them, compared to which the art and watches are a rounding error. And the effect of reducing the value of the bits of paper changes the capital return curve which makes investing in building out more productive capacity ultimately causing less new jobs to be created. The whole economy shrinks. If putting your money to building new factories doesn't have as good of a return as putting it into less labor intensive areas of the economy then people put their money into those areas instead and factories stop getting built. The economics here are brutal and straightforward. If the workers owned 100% of their companies they'd run into exactly the same problem.
Correct, there is a cap on the price, but you're trying to hold the output itself static. The supply has decreased, so has the demand as the immigrants were on both sides of the transaction. The immediate effect will be reducing the scope of the business, providing less services. If you're amazon where do you cut services first? In the expensive places where rich people live and will pay high prices or the run down towns you're so concerned about? When amazon cuts services jobs leave those towns and the options for the residents reduce. Bezos makes less money, sure and the residents who still have jobs might even get paid more, but the whole pie has shrunk. You're only looking at wages which is only part of the picture and you're trying to hold the rest of the economy in an all else equals way that just wouldn't be equal.
Higher wages followed immediately after by a deep recession where production fell by 30% and unemployment climbed over 10%
These coincided with massive mechanization and electrification of the economy and ended in the great depression. Attributing the gains from the scaling up of the ford assembly line to Immigration Quotas is silly and breaks with your whole theory. The capitalists were getting rich in this period, inequality was rising in this period.
No, because my theory isn't that wages are where we'd see the consumption be curtailed when you shrink the economy. During covid we had big supply shocks because a lot of people were unable to work, this wasn't represented in lower wages for workers, it came in the form of lots of companies closing and jobs disappearing then inflation because in real terms the amount of things to consume were reduced.
This is ridiculous hyperbole. The illegal immigrants with literally nothing to their name do it, that's the thing that you're complaining about in the first place. You can do it for two months rent and a bus ticket. There just isn't this huge class of workers who couldn't save up a couple month's rent in the modern American economy, you're making them up for a sob story. There's a lot of wealth inequality in America but absolute poverty has done nothing but decline.
If you make the bottom workers too poor to buy stocks, then of course most stocks will be owned by the super wealthy. What is this argument intending to communicate? It’s not a preferable outcome for the wealthy to own most of the stocks rather than the poor, neither is it preferable to take wealth that could belong to the poor and place it in stocks. Because when they sell the stocks they waste the profit, whereas the poor can transfer the profit to wellbeing. The question is who gets the wealth as represented in the ownership of stocks. I mean, even the point of GDP is wellbeing, and the point of technology is wellbeing, so if you’re trading suffering for Metric Go Up then you’ve kind of missed the point of why humans are even interested in development in the first place.
No, and it’s important to understand why this is isn’t the case. The demand does not decline commensurate to the decline in supply from the restriction of the labor pool, because the low wage worker does not use Amazon at the high rate of the middle class and wealthy. There are many, many services that are used by the well-off and not used by the poor, and if you have to pay the poor more, you will not see a decline in demand among the lowest income brackets due to the price increase. Fitness centers are a great example of this — a very profitable industry which employs the poor but which the poor infrequently use. What happens if the gyms have to pay their poor employees more? Well, they can’t price the gym membership more — it’s already priced at the highest amount the consumer (middle class and above) is willing to pay. They can’t go out of business, because it’s a profitable industry, eg Lifetime Fitness making the founder half of a billionaire. So what happens? Profit that would go to the owners simply goes to the poor, there is literally nothing else that can possibly happen. And this is how it should be, because the idea of someone becoming a half-billionaire by creating a line of shitty gyms is insane.
Additionally, the case of Amazon, if the low wage class as a whole makes more money then they are more likely to use Amazon. Because all of the speculated (but incorrect) price increase of Amazon is, literally, just going to pay the poorest workers.
As per above, if the low wage class is earning more, than they will use more of Amazon’s services. Right now they use much less of Amazon. They would use more if they are paid more. All of the cost increase goes to the wages of low earners while the cost is shared equally among all the classes. In your theorized example, lower, middle, and higher class may have to spend an extra $1 on a package, and that $1 goes only to the lower class wages, which means that Amazon will actually make more in low wage areas than before. It’s just that middle and upper classes pay more, which they should. But in actual reality, Amazon is already priced as high as they can make it for the middle class and higher class. If they could price it higher, they would have already. Any cost of labor increase will affect Amazon more than it affects, say, CostCo, or any other warehouse-style model.
That’s because of the addition of a surplus of workers the following year. This proves my point. The recession began after the period were looking at.
You just have to look at the areas most affected by immigration disruption: https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/research-working-papers/immigration-disruptions-and-the-wages-of-unskilled-labor-in-the-1920s/
The mechanization came after. (Also, there was still too much immigration in this period, from Mexico and Canada.)
The illegal immigrants have their own illegal immigrant job network and sometimes illegal housing network. And even if they didn’t, the argument “but the poorest people in the hemisphere live on the streets until the find a job” would not be a compelling option for Americans who do not want to risk homelessness. And remember that the illegal makes more in “wealth” because of the difference between their purchasing power here and of their family back in, say, Guatemala.
Do you have any clear evidence you can present that restricting the pool of low wage workers makes their lives worse off? Literally every study shows them having greater wages and QoL when this happens.
I'm differentiating consumption from wealth and this is a really important distinction you keep ignoring so I'll go into detail. Consumption is more directly related to the actual output of the economy and better takes into account things like inflation. If the wealthy were spending their share of production on competing with the poor for consumption it would spike inflation up and actually have impacts on how the poor live. If they instead reinvest it in building out more capital capacity then it raises the total supply of things to consume produced by the economy reducing the cost of living for the workers.
Imagine a Dickens sweatshop owner that reinvests the profits of the garments his workers produce in sewing machines vs uses it to buy the clothing produced. In the 'buying the output' case his employees have less clothing to go around for themselves, in the reinvesting case not only is the owner not bidding up cost of the output but actively growing the output through capital investment so there are more clothes to go around for everyone.
The rich are not meaningfully consuming enough beef that their differential wealth has any impact on the worker's ability to buy beef for themselves, same for housing, same for most of the expenses the poor must deal with.
I think it'd be great if the poor could own more stocks, we have several government programs like IRAs and 401ks to give them some tax advantage towards this goal. But consumption wise we should be basically indifferent to who is holding on to the bits of paper.
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If they can't increase the price any further without losing the margin and the rich and middle class will not pay more then they will reduce scope of business. This is the option they have that you consistently miss and it's very important. You don't seem to be willing to recognize that the pie could just actually shrink. Amazon does not have some fat margin on delivery. They already almost certainly lose money on many rural delivery routes.
I asked before to define terms here, what percentage of people are "the rich", which percentage are "the poor"? It just does not parse as true to me that poor people don't go to the gym unless you defining the poor as like a very specific group of rural people who don't go to the gym for reasons other than cost savings.
Lifetime fitness may not go out of business but that's hardly the only gym company. There are many lower margin and local gyms that run much leaner margins. Restrict labor supply and the marginal leaner gyms, the type the poorer people use, goes under first.
My argument has never been that wages don't rise, it's that they're not the whole picture. Wages may rise for some subset of workers, another subset gets laid off and the pie shrinks. After the 1920s wages rose AND the economy went through massive restructuring due to mechanization AND inequality increased AND it ended in the great depression. You can't just isolate the one measure of wages from the whole rest of the economy.
Under your theory this shouldn't cause a recession, it should cause wages to go down, not production which should increase. But production decreased sharply. It doesn't fit your model any way you turn it. Yes, restricting supply of labor in the short term, before the consequences play out, increases the wages of labor. But firms quickly find equilibrium, they retract from less profitable markets and cut number of employees. These employees find themselves back in the labor market reducing the demand squeeze and then wages fall again. Maybe the wage line remains higher than before the squeeze, maybe it doesn't. But total production shrinks so the total amount of stuff in the economy to consume decreases and on average the workers get to consume less stuff.
As I already pointed out, covid, by forcing many to stay home from work, greatly restricted the supply of labor. The result was a massive amount of job loss and inflation.
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