Interesting Links for 25-06-2013

[andrewducker]

• Housing report critical of government short termism (tl;dr: BUILD MORE)
  (tags: uk housing )
• What's going on with the EU's farming subsidies?
  (tags: europe farming )
• Basic income versus the robots
  (tags: robots GuaranteedIncome )
• Stephen Fry writes about Loneliness
  (tags: stephenfry loneliness )
• This is how I learn to use new tools
  (tags:

Comments

[andrewducker]

Isn't that the definition of post-scarcity economics? When the mass of people have access to enough of the means of production that they do not need to perform any work?

Of course, if everyone had ten times as much money as now, we'd all be spending ten times as much on housing, as the price of housing is set by a bidding war for resources whose scarcity has nothing to do with production costs.

And anything requiring human input will scale up in price, because individuals will want more impetus to produce.

So we'd end up with things that are mass producable being incredibly cheap (as they largely are now) and anything that requires human effort being significantly more expensive (as they largely are now).

Hmm - if we all had that much money saved up, what are we doing with it to stop inflation eating away at it? Pensions have enough problems finding safe places to avoid inflation, I hesitate to think where we'd need to put enough money to keep 50% of the population living off of the interest.

I think that approaching that situation will need a radical change in economic thinking.

[danieldwilliam]

I suspect you’re right.

I was trying to think about how to model and it all got very recursive and my brain basically stopped.

Yeah - I think we’re in to post-scarcity economics but in a strange way.

Stuff = cheap.

My own time = cheap.

Other people’s time =/= cheap. (Unless you have an interesting project.)

So if I just want to bumble about having stuff, that’s easy. If I want some services that require human input then I have a choice of hiring someone who is expensive to do it for me or learning the skills myself in all that free time I have.

The reason I’m so excited about this question is that I think a citizens’ income is the right answer in the end but the transisition looks difficult and messy to me. I think it’s easier to do from a position where the plurality or a small majority of people hold enough capital to live off the interest with some mega-rich and large but not overly large body of people who are working and have some genuine aspiration of accumulating or inheriting enough capital to live on (or as we used to call it, a pension). The alternative is that we try to do a citizens’ income from a position with some mega-rich people and everyone else being a wage slave. The latter strikes me as a recipe for bloody revolution.

I would guess the productive capacity you would have to own is that sufficient to supply 3 times the material needs of one average person. 1 third of which goes to you, one third goes in taxes to pay for centrally provided goods and services, 1 third to exchange with people who don’t have accumulated capital to live on (i.e. young people) for services from humans.

[nancylebov]

Of course, if everyone had ten times as much money as now, we'd all be spending ten times as much on housing, as the price of housing is set by a bidding war for resources whose scarcity has nothing to do with production costs.

On the other hand, might a richer society have a higher proportion of very good places to live?

[andrewducker]

We'd be able to make it out of nicer stuff, certainly. And it would have better stuff in it.

[danieldwilliam]

I think so.

There are factors like the quality of the individual housing unit. As Andrew says we could make them out of nicer materials with nicer better stuff in. We could make them cheaper to live in with energy efficient design and appliances.

A richer society should also improve the local area. Better local schools, libraries, shops, museums and transport links would mean we all wouldn’t be trying to cluster round the good ones. Richer societies might imply safer localities, even in less well-off areas - less street crime and vandalism.