Don’t worry?!
from Daivd Ruccio
Liberal mainstream economists all seem to be lip-synching Bobby McFerrin these days.
Worried about automation? Be happy, write Laura Tyson and Susan Lund, since “these marvelous new technologies promise higher productivity, greater efficiency, and more safety, flexibility, and convenience.”
Worried about the different positions in current debates about economic policy? Be happy, writes Justin Wolfers, and rely on the statistics produced by government agencies and financial firms and the opinions of mainstream economists.
Me, I remain worried and I have no reason to accept mainstream economists’ advice for being happy.
Sure, new forms of automation might lead to higher productivity and much else that Tyson and Lund find so alluring. But who’s going to benefit? If we go by the last few decades, large corporations and wealthy individuals are the ones who are going to capture most of the gains from the new technologies. Everyone else, as I have written, is going to be forced to have the freedom to either search for new jobs or deal with the fundamental transformation of the jobs they manage to keep.
When it comes to separating fact from fiction, aside from the embarrassing epistemological positions liberals rely on, where are the statistics that might help us make sense of what is going on out there—numbers like the Reserve Army of Unemployed, Underemployed, and Low-wage Workers or the rate of exploitation.
You want me not to worry? Analyze what’s going to happen to workers and the distribution of income as automation increases and calculate the kinds of economic numbers other theoretical traditions have produced.
Even better, let workers have a say in what what and how new technologies are introduced and change economic institutions in order to eliminate the Reserve Army and class exploitation.
Then and only then will I be happy.
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Real-World Economics Review Blog 
Smoke a weed, another road to happiness.
What we are about to find out is what the world will be like when the billionaires run it. We can start with the U.S. for our first glimpse which includes lower or no taxes for the wealthy, deregulation of any rules that prevent accumulation of profits for the wealthy and peonage for the rest of us. Once finance uses AI to vacuum up all the assets for the rich, the rest of us will be left with very little.
What do you mean .what will the world be like when the billionaires run it, when even my uneducated old mates are aware that extreme wealth rules the world for their benefit now.
like every common man over 50 is subject to losing their job with little or no openings at similar skill levels even the promise of cross training for older employees only works for a minority of people
how please how do these people survive??? no social security no medicare
In 2018, there will be more millennials than boomers in the voting-age population. The problem, as you’ve already heard a million times, is that millennials don’t vote enough. Only 49 percent of Americans ages 18 to 35 turned out to vote in the last presidential election, compared to about 70 percent of boomers and Greatests. (It’s lower in midterm elections and positively dire in primaries.) The millennials are out to change this. As a cohort they’re tired of being screwed. Per Shaun Scott, the author of Millennials and the Moments That Made Us, “We can either do politics or we can have politics done to us.” Millennials are intent on doing politics. They intend to force change, so they can have decent jobs and places to live and a non-Dickensian old age. An equitable future that reflects their values and their demographics. With 70 million members they will be fully in charge of the nation by 2030. They will get what they want, or they will take down the entire nation and rebuild it. Our children are about to save our asses mostly from ourselves.
How about reshuffling the gains and benefits? We all enrich Google, Uber, Amazon and co, whenever we use their communication channels. We , that is billions of people, do it all the time. They , that is the big data firms, then go on and manipulate these data, sell them to big firms, etc.
and get superrich that way. But we, all of us, are feeding them all the time and work for that purpose. Only, we give our data for free.
Now let’s take back a good deal of the benefits they make through us and use that as a collective fund. That way, we can probably provide enough money for a decent version of basic income.
Is that an idea,
I think there’s plenty of reason to worry. Capitalism in the form of the “for-profit corporation” is undermining democratic government and what used to be taken-for-granted moral principles in an epidemic for the US. An example from 2015 in the NY Times.
Drug Goes From $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
By ANDREW POLLACKSEPT. 20, 2015
Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.
The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?” said Dr. Judith Aberg, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She said the price increase could force hospitals to use “alternative therapies that may not have the same efficacy.”
Turing’s price increase is not an isolated example. While most of the attention on pharmaceutical prices has been on new drugs for diseases like cancer, hepatitis C and high cholesterol, there is also growing concern about huge price increases on older drugs, some of them generic, that have long been mainstays of treatment.
Although some price increases have been caused by shortages, others have resulted from a business strategy of buying old neglected drugs and turning them into high-priced “specialty drugs.”
There was a time in the US when such actions would have been more than just an outcry from MDs. It would have prompted hearings in Congress, condemnation in churches, and general popular outrage and movements to punish the company. Donald Trump, et al, are cheaply purchasing US democracy and popular sovereignty. And the American people have lost their minds and their sense of direction.