7 ms·

Why must the money come from future labor? Money can be saved and invested. Let them eat their capital and not their young.

kome 2y ago
investment is literally future labor expectations. and a risk. in case of crisis the gov routinely starts bailouts and save the financial markets with interest rate operations or open market operations. those operations have deep re-distributive implications. don't think they are free.
- KK7NIL 2y ago
  > investment is literally future labor expectations. and a risk. This is simply Marxist crap and outright untrue. > in case of crisis the gov routinely starts bailouts and save the financial markets with interest rate operations or open market operations. those operations have deep re-distributive implications This is a rather new phenomenon and not at all necessary for profitable private investment. It's really completely irrelevant to the discussion.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > This is simply Marxist crap Not only but also. Adam Smith counted labour this way, along with capital and natural resources. Until we're all rendered unemployable by AI[0], there's still human labour doing stuff in the system — the bedrock foundation for all the rest. [0] 2^(1 + roll a D4) years? I expect it to be relevant on the timescale of me reaching pension age, but between Scylla[1] and Charybdis[2] I'm not at all certain. [1] smoke-and-mirrors marketing [2] exponential growth
- dsheets 2y ago
  If you redefine everything as deriving value from labor and labor alone, OK. Government intervention is not a given, is not universal, and its impact on labor isn’t unique. There are other investment vehicles besides equity and other ways to take value from past into future that are neither garnishing the wages of children and grandchildren (most current state systems) nor investing in artificially inflated markets. Just as a thought experiment, consider if all state pension contributions were just used to immediately purchase gold on the open market that was then put into a vault labelled with the year of birth of the contributor. Please explain how this (obviously naive) strategy is dependent on future labor. As far as I can tell, this system would be completely market-based and future labor would likely benefit as their “gold” might be cheaper as there would be less demographic demand.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > If you redefine everything as deriving value from labor and labor alone "Alone" seems to be an unnecessary addition for the problem to exist. And until the AI really can take all our jobs, it's not a redefinition, labour is one of several pillars alongside capital, though specifics vary depending on your school of economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production > Just as a thought experiment, consider if all state pension contributions were just used to immediately purchase gold on the open market that was then put into a vault labelled with the year of birth of the contributor. Please explain how this (obviously naive) strategy is dependent on future labor. As far as I can tell, this system would be completely market-based and future labor would likely benefit as their “gold” might be cheaper as there would be less demographic demand. Consider this experiment on an island with just yourself. You bury the gold. You reach pension age, and stop working. You dig up the gold. You now have gold. What do you spend it on? There's nobody offering services, regardless of how much you offer, therefore cost of goods, services, and other assets has a divide by zero error and inflation is asymptotically infinite. Similar arguments work when the working population shrinks even if not becoming literally zero: unless technological improvements happen faster than the workforce shrinks, which is complex because tech affects different products at different rates, shrinking populations cause your model to get inflation even with gold as a currency.
    - dsheets 2y ago
      In your simplification, you have removed everything that isn’t labor (i.e. demand for commodities) as well as labor. It is unsurprising that working to bury gold is a bad investment in this scenario. Instead, you should have invested in a farm and some robots. Sorry, there’s no free lunch if you can’t steal it from younger generations. Edit: you’ve revised history and now added a bit about “similar arguments” and inflation. The answer is simple: yes, you might get back less real value than you put in. Yes, there might be inflation. This is fine and normal and would be preferable to the present system and is not dependent on future labor in the same way as direct redistribution. There are no guarantees. ‘Enforcing’ guarantees is a recipe for disaster as we are now seeing unfold.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Building a machine that does useful work is not "future labour". That kind of automatic production by machine is absolutely dominant today, none more so than in software.
  - intelVISA 2y ago
    Indeed it's future reduction, an equal or better output with less labor required.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

kome 2y ago

investment is literally future labor expectations. and a risk. in case of crisis the gov routinely starts bailouts and save the financial markets with interest rate operations or open market operations. those operations have deep re-distributive implications. don't think they are free.

KK7NIL 2y ago
> investment is literally future labor expectations. and a risk. This is simply Marxist crap and outright untrue. > in case of crisis the gov routinely starts bailouts and save the financial markets with interest rate operations or open market operations. those operations have deep re-distributive implications This is a rather new phenomenon and not at all necessary for profitable private investment. It's really completely irrelevant to the discussion.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > This is simply Marxist crap Not only but also. Adam Smith counted labour this way, along with capital and natural resources. Until we're all rendered unemployable by AI[0], there's still human labour doing stuff in the system — the bedrock foundation for all the rest. [0] 2^(1 + roll a D4) years? I expect it to be relevant on the timescale of me reaching pension age, but between Scylla[1] and Charybdis[2] I'm not at all certain. [1] smoke-and-mirrors marketing [2] exponential growth
dsheets 2y ago
If you redefine everything as deriving value from labor and labor alone, OK. Government intervention is not a given, is not universal, and its impact on labor isn’t unique. There are other investment vehicles besides equity and other ways to take value from past into future that are neither garnishing the wages of children and grandchildren (most current state systems) nor investing in artificially inflated markets. Just as a thought experiment, consider if all state pension contributions were just used to immediately purchase gold on the open market that was then put into a vault labelled with the year of birth of the contributor. Please explain how this (obviously naive) strategy is dependent on future labor. As far as I can tell, this system would be completely market-based and future labor would likely benefit as their “gold” might be cheaper as there would be less demographic demand.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > If you redefine everything as deriving value from labor and labor alone "Alone" seems to be an unnecessary addition for the problem to exist. And until the AI really can take all our jobs, it's not a redefinition, labour is one of several pillars alongside capital, though specifics vary depending on your school of economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production > Just as a thought experiment, consider if all state pension contributions were just used to immediately purchase gold on the open market that was then put into a vault labelled with the year of birth of the contributor. Please explain how this (obviously naive) strategy is dependent on future labor. As far as I can tell, this system would be completely market-based and future labor would likely benefit as their “gold” might be cheaper as there would be less demographic demand. Consider this experiment on an island with just yourself. You bury the gold. You reach pension age, and stop working. You dig up the gold. You now have gold. What do you spend it on? There's nobody offering services, regardless of how much you offer, therefore cost of goods, services, and other assets has a divide by zero error and inflation is asymptotically infinite. Similar arguments work when the working population shrinks even if not becoming literally zero: unless technological improvements happen faster than the workforce shrinks, which is complex because tech affects different products at different rates, shrinking populations cause your model to get inflation even with gold as a currency.
  - dsheets 2y ago
    In your simplification, you have removed everything that isn’t labor (i.e. demand for commodities) as well as labor. It is unsurprising that working to bury gold is a bad investment in this scenario. Instead, you should have invested in a farm and some robots. Sorry, there’s no free lunch if you can’t steal it from younger generations. Edit: you’ve revised history and now added a bit about “similar arguments” and inflation. The answer is simple: yes, you might get back less real value than you put in. Yes, there might be inflation. This is fine and normal and would be preferable to the present system and is not dependent on future labor in the same way as direct redistribution. There are no guarantees. ‘Enforcing’ guarantees is a recipe for disaster as we are now seeing unfold.
HPsquared 2y ago
Building a machine that does useful work is not "future labour". That kind of automatic production by machine is absolutely dominant today, none more so than in software.
- intelVISA 2y ago
  Indeed it's future reduction, an equal or better output with less labor required.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]