5 ms·

At some point, we will have to consider protectionism. There is a lot of downward pressure on wages with ai, offshoring, etc. If there was a drastic decline in

• bdcravens 2y ago
  Perhaps, but many times it's a normal cycle to shrink after periods of growth.
• impossiblefork 2y ago
  Haven't you always been happy to try protectionism? It's not a stupid thing, it's part of why the US is rich, but I don't think it'll solve these problems with increased effective labour supply due to AI. But a straightforward way to do it is to reduce the length of the work week. There are some problems with that-- the war and the international competition, but I think at least we Europeans wouldn't be opposed to a four day work week, and if you instituted it we'd probably quickly follow. This would then ensure that people would need to hire more people to get the same work done, and the result would be that real wages would increase, with this increase being at the expense of profits. However, this will also involve a bit of a problem due to the present situation, namely with corporate debt. With the increase in interest rates from 1% to 5.5%, there's two possibilities, assuming that interest rates will be held at this level for a long time: a risk-free income stream asset have to drop in price to 1/5.5, the dividends have to go up 5.5 times, or a mixture of these two; and neither has happened yet, and a change to a four-day work week would be an additional thing of the same sort. So would be hard to institute across the whole US at this moment, and I think it would be hard to institute also once the adjustment has happened.