Posting more than a year later.
There’s still negative return on investment from AI
Imagine what the economy would look like if they spent 30 billion on wages.
This is where the problem of the supply/demand curve comes in. One of the truths of the 1980s Soviet Union’s infamous breadlines wasn’t that people were poor and had no money, or that basic goods (like bread) were too expensive — in a Communist system most people had plenty of money, and the price of goods was fixed by the government to be affordable — the real problem was one of production. There simply weren’t enough goods to go around.
The entire basic premise of inflation is that we as a society produce X amount of goods, but people need X+Y amount of goods. Ideally production increases to meet demand — but when it doesn’t (or can’t fast enough) the other lever is that prices rise so that demand decreases, such that production once again closely approximates demand.
This is why just giving everyone struggling right now more money isn’t really a solution. We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.
Of course, it’s only profitable to increase production if the cost of basic inputs can be decreased — if you know there is a big untapped market for bread out there and you can undercut the competition, cheaper flour and automation helps quite a bit. But if flour is so expensive that you can’t undercut the established guys, then fighting them for a small slice of the market just doesn’t make sense.
Personally, I’m all for something like UBI — but it’s only really going to work if we as a society also increase production on basic needs (housing, food, clothing, telecommunications, transit, etc.) so they can be and remain at affordable prices. Otherwise just having more money in circulation won’t help anything — if anything it will just be purely inflationary.
There are more empty homes than homeless in the US. I’ve seen literal tons of food and clothing go right to the dump to protect profit margins.
Do you have any sources to back up the claim that we need to make more shit?
sigh
Dustin’ off this one, out from the fucking meme archive…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ
Millenials:
Time for your third ‘once-in-a-life-time major economic collapse/disaster’! Wheeee!
Gen Z:
Oh, oh dear sweet summer child, you thought Covid was bad?
Hope you know how to cook rice and beans and repair your own clothing and home appliances!
Gen A:
Time to attempt to learn how to think, good luck.
Wait for Gen X to pop in as usual and seek attention with some “we always get ignored” bullshit.
