SimpleDon
Veteran Member
I spent a lot of time on this response. You edited out some of your intermediate statements but left in my responses to the parts that you cut out. I have tried to restore the sections you cut out of your own prose. The parts I returned are in bold type. No need to thank me.
I also restored the parts of my post that the system reply with quote cuts out.
I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that you are a Malthusian. That you believe that the population is increasing exponentially and that the production of food can only increase linearly.
Your statement above seems to indicate that you believe that the problem is one of over crowding. That you believe we should take this opportunity to let the population decrease.
Once again, the problem of a fertility rate below replacement is the opposite of over crowding. It is a problem of too few people, not too many. Without immigration both the US and Germany are facing a slowly declining population. The same problem, as I said, that Japan is has struggled with for two decades because they allow little immigration.
If you do believe that the US or Germany is now overcrowded and that we should take advantage of the below replacement birth rate to reduce the overcrowding you must make that argument, why you think that either the US or Germany is overcrowded, the problems that you think comes from the overcrowding and only then to discuss how to mitigate the negative economic growth that would result from letting the population decrease. If this is the argument that you are trying to make you seem to have jumped over the first two to concentrate on the mitigation.
If this is not the argument that you are trying to make you must tell us why we shouldn't just increase our immigration to maintain a constant population. Otherwise you seem to be denying that immigration will solve the problem of a declining population or even that it is a problem.
My argument is simple. I don't think that we are in danger of sliding into a Malthusian hell, as we haven't been in any of the 220 years or so since Malthus wrote his book. Your Malthusian obsession with over population and your xenophobia seem to be combining to prevent you from seeing that my argument is about simple math.
Once again, here it is. Tell me which one of these statements in the logic train below that you don't understand or you believe is wrong. Hopefully you will agree with these and we can move on.
In addition I have made the following statements to you and the other Malthusian obsessives and xenophobes here,
I am quite surprised that I got so much push back on such a simple concept.
Three generations is sixty to seventy five years. How long do you want to wait, hoping that things improve? Here is data from Japan, the US and Germany from 1960 to 2015. You don't see any long term trends in this 55 years of data?
Fertility Rates of the US, Germany and Japan
The fertility rate in Israel is the highest in the developed world at 3.1, compared to an average of 1.7 in the OECD countries. And it is due entirely to the birth rate of the haredim, ultra-Orthodox Jews.
The national birth rate includes all of the subcultures in the society. It takes the differences into account, that is, the higher birth rate of the haredim, 6.97 to 8.5, sources differ, is included in the national birth rate of Israel, 3.09. The haredim are 20% of the Jews in Israel and Israel is 75% Jewish. This means that the percentage of haredim in Israel is 0.75 x 0.2 or 15% of the population of Israel currently. (All numbers are 2016, if available.) The fertility rate of the other 85% of Israel is 0.85x + 0.15 * 8.5 = 3.1 or 2.1, the replacement rate. So all of the growth in the Israeli population of 2.0% per year is due to the haredim. The population of Israel is 8.8 million. This means that the haredim are adding 176,000 new haredim each year, 2% of 8.8 million. This means that the haredim are growing at 2%/0.15 or 13.3% per year currently. This means that the haredim will double their current population in about seven years. As the haredim increase the 3.1 birth rate of Israel will increase.
But there isn't anything to this that is not told to us by the birth rate overall and its growth. It doesn't matter if the growth of the birth rate is in a subculture or evenly distributed across the population. I don't understand what point you are trying to make with this diversion into this discussion of subcultures.
I couldn't sort out where the statement from you below fits in. The reply with quote put it after my comment "The US birth rate is lower than 2.099, it is 1.86." but you had already responded to it with the comment beginning "In the first place, that's almost certainly a temporary phenomenon, " which is where I put it above. It seems to be a new comment by you to my "The US birth rate is lower ... ". This is how I treated it in my comment.
No, 1.86 is lower than 2.099, no maybes.[/a little dig]
The birth rate is affected by the cost of living, specifically the cost of raising a child, a point I have already made. The birth rate is not affected by the other factors, it is simply the average number of births for each woman.
If you were responding to the idea that I am arguing that it will strain the ability of the fewer workers to support the retirees then the above paragraph makes more sense. Yes, these factors will impact the ability of the fewer workers to be able to support the retirees. When I said that all things being equal I of course meant maintaining the current retirement age and morality age and the current rate of savings If you believe that you are going to change any of these in the twenty or so years that we have before this really starts hurting you are a bigger optimist than I am. I especially am on pins and needles to hear your ideas on lowering the mortality age. Assisted suicide coupled with a ban on anti-depression meds for seniors?
I don't think that you can affect any of the three, especially when you explain that the reason to do it is to soothe your xenophobia.
When anyone, other than you apparently, says all things being equal, they mean if only the factor we are talking about changes.
The birth rate in the US is 1.86. This might be a short term phenomenon as you said (although the US birth rate among all but recent immigrants has been below replacement rate since the 1980's) or it could be a sign of trouble coming toward us. I prefer to err on the conservative side which is to assume a lower than replacement rate for any long term planning. You seem to rely on the hope that things will get better and that the US wouldn't follow every other developed country into a lower than replacement fertility rate.
The Germans have had a lower fertility rate than the replacement rate since the late 1960's. It has recently bumped up to 1.5 in 2016, largely due to the higher fertility rate of recent immigrants, which is 1.95 which is almost the replacement rate of 2.1. The experience of the past is the immigrant fertility rate drops not long after they arrive in Germany, to where they match the native rate in the second generation, probably for the same reasons that the birth rate is low among native Germans, the costs of raising a child are high, the availability of contraception, etc.
The higher rate among recent immigrants is probably largely to do with pregnancies being being put off because of the uncertainty of migrating. The birth rate for recent immigrants is higher than the birth rate in their native countries, which would support this idea.
The Germans have managed to avoid problems because of various immigration programs, which do increase the workers to retirees ratio. They tried guest worker programs, mainly Italians and Turks. Both tended to return home when conditions improved in their home countries. They also welcomed Slavs with German surnames after the Soviet Union collapsed and from other European Community countries after the formation of the EU. Both helped but both ran their course. Temporary measures are, to belabor the obvious, temporary. They decided that what they need are permanent residents who wanted to become Germans.
Okay, I was being more than a little flippant, but this is a pretty serious stretch of an argument that you are making. Women definitely are programmed to have a baby but it is ridiculous to say that enough of them will come to their senses at some future date and have the three or more babies required to raise the country's overall birth rate. The birth rate is what it is right now because the vast majority of women satisfy their maternal instinct by having one or two children. What you are saying is that you hope that this changes at some time in the future but you seem to have no idea how that would happen, at least that you are willing to share.
You are quite right, any sexual preference technology could make the problem worse requiring even more immigration to maintain the population constant.
The only question remaining is why you think that this fact helps your argument.
That is required to determine how much immigration is needed, not what we are talking about here, whether immigration is a valid measure to correct for a declining fertility rate. You are arguing that it isn't, I am arguing that it is.
A declining population is a problem as I repeatedly said because it reduces growth in the economy and leaves fewer workers to pay the taxes to support the retirees. Your repeated efforts to propose alternatives to immigration suggests that you understand that it is a problem. If you don't think that declining or negative economic growth and a declining tax base to support Social Security aren't problems then (1) why bother to offer alternatives to immigration and (2) why don't you just explain why these aren't problems.
I and the Christian Democrats in Germany are saying that these are serious problems. You seem to be trying to have it both ways.
I and the CDU are saying that immigration is the most obvious and best solution for the problems. This is a simple matter of math. If the problem is a declining population adding people to the population solves it. You are saying that you won't accept immigration in any event. This is xenophobia, the irrational fear of foreigners. This is incongruent in the US where the vast majority of the people in the country got here through immigration through the generations.
If the fertility rate falls below the replacement rate the population declines. If that smaller population has a fertility rate lower than the replacement rate the population will be even smaller in the next generation. And so on.
If the reduction in the population is 5% in each generation the geometric decline of the population will be [1, 0.95, 0.9025, 0.857,0.815,0.774, ...] times the starting population, basically (N-1 * 0.95) * Pstart for N being the number of the generation greater than 1.
The number of retirees will always be greater than the number of workers and will be getting worse because the number of retirees is dependent on the life expectancy of adults, which should be increasing. However, if you get your way and people are forced to work well into their their seventies and eventually into their eighties the life expectancy of adults would start to drop.
Please, what I said was that if the retirement age stays the same, the problem will get worse. You recommended that we keep advancing the retirement age to avoid having to increase immigration. Those of us who don't have an irrational fear of foreigners, i.e. who aren't xenophobes, believe that this is ridiculous.
Not too surprisingly this isn't what I said. Of course, you can compensate for a lower fertility rate by increasing the retirement age. You could also do it by increasing the work week beyond 40 hours or doing away with holidays and vacations or by reintroducing child labor or slavery. But these are ridiculous things to do because you are afraid of foreigners. Irrationally afraid of foreigners. Except from Norway, I assume.
I would prefer to do the opposite, to decrease the work week and to have people retire earlier, not later. To have more holidays and vacation days and to keep teenagers in school and not working. And to balance this by having lower profits and more immigration. Because I want the rich to have to work hard for their money and to not be able to sit back and enjoy a fat payday by buying politicians and the government, like they did last month.
If the fertility rate keeps dropping and you are compensating for it by forcing people to work longer there comes a point when you have a retirement age that exceeds the morbidity age.
Once again, do you want to be forced to work until you die?
Will your great grandchildren?
The financial sector is doing a lot more than they did years ago. They are driving up the cost of health care. They nearly destroyed the world's economy in 2008 with their invention of trances of mortgage securities. But the cost of just these two things destroys any argument that they are using automation to lower the costs of financial services for us.
I am not asking you to blindly accept my economics, I expect to see reasoned arguments against mine. So far you haven't gotten close. You have introduced repeated demands that my arguments are mathematically incorrect, with no explanation why, just a demand that I show you my work. This is a very simple concept, it doesn't even require any economics. If Germany increases their immigration it will compensate for their fertility rate that isn't high enough to keep their population from dropping. It is even simpler than that, if they have too few people adding more people will correct it.
You are the one who said that I needed a neoliberal economist from the University of Chicago to convince you that adding people to a population increases the number of people in the population. Why you need this is a question best left up to you. I don't see it.
This from a person who claims that adding people won't increase a population.
Once again, I was reacting to your suggestion that I need a neoliberal economist to convince you of the simple fact above. I don't have a great deal of respect for neoliberals and I wouldn't change my opinion even if they backed me by saying that indeed, adding people to any population increases the number of people in that population.
I gave an example of a incompetent policy that they support, that really defines them, supply side economics, that the way to make everybody better off is to give all of the growth from the economy to the rich. They have been saying this for fifty years and have been doing it to the economy for forty years and it hasn't happened yet. But they are willing to keep trying, as we clearly saw with the recent tax bill.
You read this and instead of arguing that the neoliberals are right and giving evidence to support it, you argued that I had to be wrong because I am incompetent. Because I can't separate my theories from theirs and then to claim that their theory is wrong because of my messed up mix.
I gave you an example of their theory, and instead of pointing out how I messed up their theory you ducked specifics and made a leap to the generalization that I am incompetent on the whole subject of economics.
I suggest that you look up the term "ad hominem attack" and commit it to memory. It doesn't bother me in the least, because it is the last refuge of many who are losing an argument. But many people consider it to be impolite.
I have been accused before of not even understanding Econ 101, much less more complex economics. I even presented everything that I understand about not only Econ 101 but about the neoclassical synthesis economics that is our current economics and an explanation of what it would take to have a self-regulating, self-organized free market, the basis of Austrian/Libertarian free market economics.
I exposed my limited knowledge of all of these economics and expected to be dumped on, with people pointing out the many points that I had missed or that I had gotten wrong, especially the people who said that I didn't understand basic economics. But I was disappointed because no one did.
Laughing dog made the observation that the neoclassicals gave us the tools to understand the economy, specifically citing marginalism. I agreed, but pointed out that they had used the tools to incorrectly analyze the industrial economy, coming to the conclusion that it was not substantially different from the largely farm based economy of the 18th century classical economists. A mistake that resulted in World War I, The Russian Revolution and the Great Depression, among many lesser problems.
You accused me in that thread of building a strawman to tear down. This was a common complaint. But as I pointed out to someone who said this, possibly not you, that I was just trying to produce a neutral telling of their economics and if you believe that I am not doing it justice I would encourage them to give us a more measured explanation of the way that the economy could self-regulate without the government. No one did.
Since you were one who complained that I was only constructing a strawman you could now point out my strawman constructions in the explanation and provide me with a description of the theory that allows the free market to self-regulate and to self-organize independent of the government. An explanation that doesn't sound like a strawman construction.
But I warn you, the reasoning behind the self-regulating, self-organizing free market is such that many people believe that anyone who relates it is lying or to be forming a strawman because it is so ridiculous.
You have accused me of being too incompetent in economics to discuss it. You have the perfect opportunity to go back to this thread and to expose my incompetence for all to see. It is here, titled "Where I expose my ignorance of elemental economics.
A Friedman fan boy, yes?
I doubt that you would accept any source that I gave you considering your low opinion of my knowledge, so I will let you pick out a reference that you trust. Just Google 'Milton Friedman "as if" methodology' | 'Milton Friedman "as if" theory'. Just be warned that a lot of the links will be from Post-Keynesians like me. Neoclassical economists and neoliberals don't like to discuss this much any more. It makes them look bad.
I am sure that the results of this search will list Friedman's original paper in which he proposed this ridiculous idea. Please read it. He also proposed the even more ridiculous idea that the more assumptions that had to be made about a proposed idea in economics, the closer the idea is to being a fundamental law of economics.
Automation again. The replacement of workers by machines can't do anything but to make the problem worse.
Workers directly pay one half of the payroll tax and the number of workers and how much they earn determines how much the employer pays in the other half of the payroll tax. If you decrease the number of workers you decrease the amount of payroll taxes paid. There is no tax on the machines, no tax on the profits generated by the machines that replace the workers that supports Social Security and Medicare.
Once again you are the one who asked me to provide you with a University of Chicago economist who would support my wild theory that if you add people to a population, that the population gets larger. I didn't believe that I had to for such a simple concept, but you are you and there is where we sit, disagreeing about simple math.
I have an entire series of posts available but never posted here about neoliberalism explained, for example, does it exist and when and where was it created, can we really run the economy without the government, should we really run the government like a business, free trade and comparative advantage, the fallacy of thrift and the dangers of private debt, globalism, the gold standard, supply side economics, neoliberalism and the capture of academic economics, Polanyi's warning to us in the Great Transformation, etc. I really didn't think that anyone here would be interested in these subjects. I have used some parts of them here, wherever I believe them to be appropriate.
As always I have to caution my critics including you that I am a Post Keynesian, and Keynesians to various degrees are explaining the economy that exists right now. Suggesting that it has been tested in time and subjected to a process of evolution that guarantees that it is the best system that can be had, that we change it at the peril of certain failure. Virtually every other school of economics are talking about how much better it would be if the economy could be changed in some way. Most, including the object of your affection Milton Friedman, are proposing to change the economy by removing the government control over it, that an organic free market will spring forth then, a free market that self-regulates. Others have recommended that we abandon capitalism for a system where each contributes according to his abilities and receives according to his needs.
The only difference between the latter and the former is that the latter has been tried and proven to be a disaster. The former hasn't been tried simply because it is nothing but a stalking horse for the idea that we should give the rich all of the real growth in the economy every year. Which is what we have been doing with a very few exceptions since the middle 1980's.
I also restored the parts of my post that the system reply with quote cuts out.
I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that you are a Malthusian. That you believe that the population is increasing exponentially and that the production of food can only increase linearly.
Your statement above seems to indicate that you believe that the problem is one of over crowding. That you believe we should take this opportunity to let the population decrease.
Once again, the problem of a fertility rate below replacement is the opposite of over crowding. It is a problem of too few people, not too many. Without immigration both the US and Germany are facing a slowly declining population. The same problem, as I said, that Japan is has struggled with for two decades because they allow little immigration.
If you do believe that the US or Germany is now overcrowded and that we should take advantage of the below replacement birth rate to reduce the overcrowding you must make that argument, why you think that either the US or Germany is overcrowded, the problems that you think comes from the overcrowding and only then to discuss how to mitigate the negative economic growth that would result from letting the population decrease. If this is the argument that you are trying to make you seem to have jumped over the first two to concentrate on the mitigation.
If this is not the argument that you are trying to make you must tell us why we shouldn't just increase our immigration to maintain a constant population. Otherwise you seem to be denying that immigration will solve the problem of a declining population or even that it is a problem.
My argument is simple. I don't think that we are in danger of sliding into a Malthusian hell, as we haven't been in any of the 220 years or so since Malthus wrote his book. Your Malthusian obsession with over population and your xenophobia seem to be combining to prevent you from seeing that my argument is about simple math.
Once again, here it is. Tell me which one of these statements in the logic train below that you don't understand or you believe is wrong. Hopefully you will agree with these and we can move on.
- Without immigration a birth rate below the replacement rate means that the ratio of retirees to workers will increase over time.
- When the ratio of retirees to workers increases it is harder for the fewer number of workers to support the retirees.
- The further the birth rate goes below the replacement rate, the faster the ratio of retirees to workers will increase.
- Increasing the number of working age immigrants we let into the country will reduce the retiree to worker ratio.
In addition I have made the following statements to you and the other Malthusian obsessives and xenophobes here,
- All pension schemes, whether Social Security or corporate defined benefit pension plans or even insurance company pension plans are largely hand to mouth funded plans, the money paid out in benefits is the money taken in concurrently from taxes, employee contributions or premiums.
- All private pension plans are ultimately dependent on the government, if the corporation or the insurance company goes out of business, the government has to step in to fulfill the corporation or insurance company's obligations to the retirees.
- Automation to replace workers won't reduce the impact of the increase in the ratio of retirees to workers because the pension schemes are paid for by payroll taxes or other deductions from workers wages, which will be reduced because fewer workers are earning wages. Automation that reduces the number of workers will make the problem worse, not better.
I am quite surprised that I got so much push back on such a simple concept.
Three generations is sixty to seventy five years. How long do you want to wait, hoping that things improve? Here is data from Japan, the US and Germany from 1960 to 2015. You don't see any long term trends in this 55 years of data?
Fertility Rates of the US, Germany and Japan
The fertility rate in Israel is the highest in the developed world at 3.1, compared to an average of 1.7 in the OECD countries. And it is due entirely to the birth rate of the haredim, ultra-Orthodox Jews.
The national birth rate includes all of the subcultures in the society. It takes the differences into account, that is, the higher birth rate of the haredim, 6.97 to 8.5, sources differ, is included in the national birth rate of Israel, 3.09. The haredim are 20% of the Jews in Israel and Israel is 75% Jewish. This means that the percentage of haredim in Israel is 0.75 x 0.2 or 15% of the population of Israel currently. (All numbers are 2016, if available.) The fertility rate of the other 85% of Israel is 0.85x + 0.15 * 8.5 = 3.1 or 2.1, the replacement rate. So all of the growth in the Israeli population of 2.0% per year is due to the haredim. The population of Israel is 8.8 million. This means that the haredim are adding 176,000 new haredim each year, 2% of 8.8 million. This means that the haredim are growing at 2%/0.15 or 13.3% per year currently. This means that the haredim will double their current population in about seven years. As the haredim increase the 3.1 birth rate of Israel will increase.
But there isn't anything to this that is not told to us by the birth rate overall and its growth. It doesn't matter if the growth of the birth rate is in a subculture or evenly distributed across the population. I don't understand what point you are trying to make with this diversion into this discussion of subcultures.
============== § ==============
I couldn't sort out where the statement from you below fits in. The reply with quote put it after my comment "The US birth rate is lower than 2.099, it is 1.86." but you had already responded to it with the comment beginning "In the first place, that's almost certainly a temporary phenomenon, " which is where I put it above. It seems to be a new comment by you to my "The US birth rate is lower ... ". This is how I treated it in my comment.
No, 1.86 is lower than 2.099, no maybes.[/a little dig]
The birth rate is affected by the cost of living, specifically the cost of raising a child, a point I have already made. The birth rate is not affected by the other factors, it is simply the average number of births for each woman.
If you were responding to the idea that I am arguing that it will strain the ability of the fewer workers to support the retirees then the above paragraph makes more sense. Yes, these factors will impact the ability of the fewer workers to be able to support the retirees. When I said that all things being equal I of course meant maintaining the current retirement age and morality age and the current rate of savings If you believe that you are going to change any of these in the twenty or so years that we have before this really starts hurting you are a bigger optimist than I am. I especially am on pins and needles to hear your ideas on lowering the mortality age. Assisted suicide coupled with a ban on anti-depression meds for seniors?
I don't think that you can affect any of the three, especially when you explain that the reason to do it is to soothe your xenophobia.
When anyone, other than you apparently, says all things being equal, they mean if only the factor we are talking about changes.
The birth rate in the US is 1.86. This might be a short term phenomenon as you said (although the US birth rate among all but recent immigrants has been below replacement rate since the 1980's) or it could be a sign of trouble coming toward us. I prefer to err on the conservative side which is to assume a lower than replacement rate for any long term planning. You seem to rely on the hope that things will get better and that the US wouldn't follow every other developed country into a lower than replacement fertility rate.
The Germans have had a lower fertility rate than the replacement rate since the late 1960's. It has recently bumped up to 1.5 in 2016, largely due to the higher fertility rate of recent immigrants, which is 1.95 which is almost the replacement rate of 2.1. The experience of the past is the immigrant fertility rate drops not long after they arrive in Germany, to where they match the native rate in the second generation, probably for the same reasons that the birth rate is low among native Germans, the costs of raising a child are high, the availability of contraception, etc.
The higher rate among recent immigrants is probably largely to do with pregnancies being being put off because of the uncertainty of migrating. The birth rate for recent immigrants is higher than the birth rate in their native countries, which would support this idea.
The Germans have managed to avoid problems because of various immigration programs, which do increase the workers to retirees ratio. They tried guest worker programs, mainly Italians and Turks. Both tended to return home when conditions improved in their home countries. They also welcomed Slavs with German surnames after the Soviet Union collapsed and from other European Community countries after the formation of the EU. Both helped but both ran their course. Temporary measures are, to belabor the obvious, temporary. They decided that what they need are permanent residents who wanted to become Germans.
Okay, I was being more than a little flippant, but this is a pretty serious stretch of an argument that you are making. Women definitely are programmed to have a baby but it is ridiculous to say that enough of them will come to their senses at some future date and have the three or more babies required to raise the country's overall birth rate. The birth rate is what it is right now because the vast majority of women satisfy their maternal instinct by having one or two children. What you are saying is that you hope that this changes at some time in the future but you seem to have no idea how that would happen, at least that you are willing to share.
You are quite right, any sexual preference technology could make the problem worse requiring even more immigration to maintain the population constant.
The only question remaining is why you think that this fact helps your argument.
That is required to determine how much immigration is needed, not what we are talking about here, whether immigration is a valid measure to correct for a declining fertility rate. You are arguing that it isn't, I am arguing that it is.
A declining population is a problem as I repeatedly said because it reduces growth in the economy and leaves fewer workers to pay the taxes to support the retirees. Your repeated efforts to propose alternatives to immigration suggests that you understand that it is a problem. If you don't think that declining or negative economic growth and a declining tax base to support Social Security aren't problems then (1) why bother to offer alternatives to immigration and (2) why don't you just explain why these aren't problems.
I and the Christian Democrats in Germany are saying that these are serious problems. You seem to be trying to have it both ways.
I and the CDU are saying that immigration is the most obvious and best solution for the problems. This is a simple matter of math. If the problem is a declining population adding people to the population solves it. You are saying that you won't accept immigration in any event. This is xenophobia, the irrational fear of foreigners. This is incongruent in the US where the vast majority of the people in the country got here through immigration through the generations.
If the fertility rate falls below the replacement rate the population declines. If that smaller population has a fertility rate lower than the replacement rate the population will be even smaller in the next generation. And so on.
If the reduction in the population is 5% in each generation the geometric decline of the population will be [1, 0.95, 0.9025, 0.857,0.815,0.774, ...] times the starting population, basically (N-1 * 0.95) * Pstart for N being the number of the generation greater than 1.
The number of retirees will always be greater than the number of workers and will be getting worse because the number of retirees is dependent on the life expectancy of adults, which should be increasing. However, if you get your way and people are forced to work well into their their seventies and eventually into their eighties the life expectancy of adults would start to drop.
Please, what I said was that if the retirement age stays the same, the problem will get worse. You recommended that we keep advancing the retirement age to avoid having to increase immigration. Those of us who don't have an irrational fear of foreigners, i.e. who aren't xenophobes, believe that this is ridiculous.
Not too surprisingly this isn't what I said. Of course, you can compensate for a lower fertility rate by increasing the retirement age. You could also do it by increasing the work week beyond 40 hours or doing away with holidays and vacations or by reintroducing child labor or slavery. But these are ridiculous things to do because you are afraid of foreigners. Irrationally afraid of foreigners. Except from Norway, I assume.
I would prefer to do the opposite, to decrease the work week and to have people retire earlier, not later. To have more holidays and vacation days and to keep teenagers in school and not working. And to balance this by having lower profits and more immigration. Because I want the rich to have to work hard for their money and to not be able to sit back and enjoy a fat payday by buying politicians and the government, like they did last month.
If the fertility rate keeps dropping and you are compensating for it by forcing people to work longer there comes a point when you have a retirement age that exceeds the morbidity age.
Once again, do you want to be forced to work until you die?
Will your great grandchildren?
The financial sector is doing a lot more than they did years ago. They are driving up the cost of health care. They nearly destroyed the world's economy in 2008 with their invention of trances of mortgage securities. But the cost of just these two things destroys any argument that they are using automation to lower the costs of financial services for us.
I am not asking you to blindly accept my economics, I expect to see reasoned arguments against mine. So far you haven't gotten close. You have introduced repeated demands that my arguments are mathematically incorrect, with no explanation why, just a demand that I show you my work. This is a very simple concept, it doesn't even require any economics. If Germany increases their immigration it will compensate for their fertility rate that isn't high enough to keep their population from dropping. It is even simpler than that, if they have too few people adding more people will correct it.
You are the one who said that I needed a neoliberal economist from the University of Chicago to convince you that adding people to a population increases the number of people in the population. Why you need this is a question best left up to you. I don't see it.
This from a person who claims that adding people won't increase a population.
Once again, I was reacting to your suggestion that I need a neoliberal economist to convince you of the simple fact above. I don't have a great deal of respect for neoliberals and I wouldn't change my opinion even if they backed me by saying that indeed, adding people to any population increases the number of people in that population.
I gave an example of a incompetent policy that they support, that really defines them, supply side economics, that the way to make everybody better off is to give all of the growth from the economy to the rich. They have been saying this for fifty years and have been doing it to the economy for forty years and it hasn't happened yet. But they are willing to keep trying, as we clearly saw with the recent tax bill.
You read this and instead of arguing that the neoliberals are right and giving evidence to support it, you argued that I had to be wrong because I am incompetent. Because I can't separate my theories from theirs and then to claim that their theory is wrong because of my messed up mix.
I gave you an example of their theory, and instead of pointing out how I messed up their theory you ducked specifics and made a leap to the generalization that I am incompetent on the whole subject of economics.
I suggest that you look up the term "ad hominem attack" and commit it to memory. It doesn't bother me in the least, because it is the last refuge of many who are losing an argument. But many people consider it to be impolite.
I have been accused before of not even understanding Econ 101, much less more complex economics. I even presented everything that I understand about not only Econ 101 but about the neoclassical synthesis economics that is our current economics and an explanation of what it would take to have a self-regulating, self-organized free market, the basis of Austrian/Libertarian free market economics.
I exposed my limited knowledge of all of these economics and expected to be dumped on, with people pointing out the many points that I had missed or that I had gotten wrong, especially the people who said that I didn't understand basic economics. But I was disappointed because no one did.
Laughing dog made the observation that the neoclassicals gave us the tools to understand the economy, specifically citing marginalism. I agreed, but pointed out that they had used the tools to incorrectly analyze the industrial economy, coming to the conclusion that it was not substantially different from the largely farm based economy of the 18th century classical economists. A mistake that resulted in World War I, The Russian Revolution and the Great Depression, among many lesser problems.
You accused me in that thread of building a strawman to tear down. This was a common complaint. But as I pointed out to someone who said this, possibly not you, that I was just trying to produce a neutral telling of their economics and if you believe that I am not doing it justice I would encourage them to give us a more measured explanation of the way that the economy could self-regulate without the government. No one did.
Since you were one who complained that I was only constructing a strawman you could now point out my strawman constructions in the explanation and provide me with a description of the theory that allows the free market to self-regulate and to self-organize independent of the government. An explanation that doesn't sound like a strawman construction.
But I warn you, the reasoning behind the self-regulating, self-organizing free market is such that many people believe that anyone who relates it is lying or to be forming a strawman because it is so ridiculous.
You have accused me of being too incompetent in economics to discuss it. You have the perfect opportunity to go back to this thread and to expose my incompetence for all to see. It is here, titled "Where I expose my ignorance of elemental economics.
A Friedman fan boy, yes?
I doubt that you would accept any source that I gave you considering your low opinion of my knowledge, so I will let you pick out a reference that you trust. Just Google 'Milton Friedman "as if" methodology' | 'Milton Friedman "as if" theory'. Just be warned that a lot of the links will be from Post-Keynesians like me. Neoclassical economists and neoliberals don't like to discuss this much any more. It makes them look bad.
I am sure that the results of this search will list Friedman's original paper in which he proposed this ridiculous idea. Please read it. He also proposed the even more ridiculous idea that the more assumptions that had to be made about a proposed idea in economics, the closer the idea is to being a fundamental law of economics.
Automation again. The replacement of workers by machines can't do anything but to make the problem worse.
Workers directly pay one half of the payroll tax and the number of workers and how much they earn determines how much the employer pays in the other half of the payroll tax. If you decrease the number of workers you decrease the amount of payroll taxes paid. There is no tax on the machines, no tax on the profits generated by the machines that replace the workers that supports Social Security and Medicare.
Once again you are the one who asked me to provide you with a University of Chicago economist who would support my wild theory that if you add people to a population, that the population gets larger. I didn't believe that I had to for such a simple concept, but you are you and there is where we sit, disagreeing about simple math.
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I have an entire series of posts available but never posted here about neoliberalism explained, for example, does it exist and when and where was it created, can we really run the economy without the government, should we really run the government like a business, free trade and comparative advantage, the fallacy of thrift and the dangers of private debt, globalism, the gold standard, supply side economics, neoliberalism and the capture of academic economics, Polanyi's warning to us in the Great Transformation, etc. I really didn't think that anyone here would be interested in these subjects. I have used some parts of them here, wherever I believe them to be appropriate.
As always I have to caution my critics including you that I am a Post Keynesian, and Keynesians to various degrees are explaining the economy that exists right now. Suggesting that it has been tested in time and subjected to a process of evolution that guarantees that it is the best system that can be had, that we change it at the peril of certain failure. Virtually every other school of economics are talking about how much better it would be if the economy could be changed in some way. Most, including the object of your affection Milton Friedman, are proposing to change the economy by removing the government control over it, that an organic free market will spring forth then, a free market that self-regulates. Others have recommended that we abandon capitalism for a system where each contributes according to his abilities and receives according to his needs.
The only difference between the latter and the former is that the latter has been tried and proven to be a disaster. The former hasn't been tried simply because it is nothing but a stalking horse for the idea that we should give the rich all of the real growth in the economy every year. Which is what we have been doing with a very few exceptions since the middle 1980's.
