On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor

Okay. Please help me understand a scenario where everyone was worse off in the long term because of the redistribution of wealth.

??? "Progressive" re-entered our political vocabulary as a term of self-identification for the anti-war left in 2003. It existed to both distinguish them from pro-war democrats and as a re-branding of what had/has become an incredibly unpopular label: "liberal". I know because I was part of that group. Because it has so many more positive connotations it is increasingly used by high-information left-of-center Americans to describe themselves. And that's why the senate and house don't have "liberal" caucuses-- they have "progressive caucuses."

In that case I apologize for the misunderstanding (when I encounter the term in Less Wrong circles, it's generally being used in Reactionary terms, which are to the best of my understanding rather broader,) but I would say that this is still overgeneralizing the outlook of a minority of liberals.

It shouldn't be particularly difficult to establish a path from Marx to "contemporary welfare state left-liberalism". It would focus on hostility to capital and the need to help the oppressed.

Marx, of course, would barf at contemporary welfare state, but he's dead so we can conveniently ignore all that :-/

Both look fine to me and are not mutually exclusive. Many policies are compromises between different parties so they might not look like especially consequentialist. Consider also that the more media visibility a policy can be expected to get, the less consequentialist it will look, extrapolating from my other comment.

It's absolutely relevant. By Eugine's account, Krugman's opponents were predicting the stimulus would make things worse. Most economists now agree that Krugman's opponents were wrong and the stimulus helped.

Beyond that, I'm a little unclear on what Eugine is saying: "Krugman said things would be worse without stimulus" is ambiguous between "Krugman said things would be worse without stimulus than with stimulus" and "Krugman said things would be worse without stimulus than they were at the time he was speaking." Link to what Krugman statement exactly Eugine has in mind would be helpful. In any case, this is at least semi-relevant.

This is what one tends to hear from Wal-Mart employees and former employees, yes.

Given that Wal-Mart is the biggest private employer in the world and employs over 2m people (source) I think you're wrong as a matter of empiric reality.

If I had a choice between e.g. $3000 monthly for working and $500 for staying at home, it would feel very different from choice between $3000 for working and $0 for staying at home. I could probably translate the "very different feeling" to better position at negotiating either higher salary or better working conditions.

It's not obvious whether I could translate it exactly to $3500, or whether the additional money would be split between me and my employer. Please note that the labor market behaves a bit differently from typical markets, because when you pay people more, their free time becomes more valuable. For example, if you paid me 10 times more money than I make now, a likely consequence would be that I would work for you only shortly, and then enjoy an early retirement. (An effective altruist would keep working, though.) By increasing the market price, the supply can go down. So in some circumstances it could create a spiral of skilled people demanding more money, then leaving the labor market soon, which would increase the salaries of the remaining ones, etc.

Not necessarily. That's why I brought up the example of basic income serving as a permanent strike fund to help employees demand higher wages. Employers can respond by meeting their demands, and/or automating more quickly, etc. Then society can respond to increased automation by increasing the basic income. Or not. I won't talk about society's transition into a gift economy here because that would take too much space.

I know you're trying to paint Basic Income as a subsidy to employers, but it's really not like the Earned Income Tax Credit. At all. I'll continue this in the Luke_A_Somers thread.

in the proportion it was given to workers, it would be a subsidy to their employers.

No. To illustrate, look at the starting point of the aforementioned subsidy to employers: the Earned Income Tax Credit. You can only make use of the EITC once you are employed, so all else being equal, the EITC contributes to the idea: "If you don't work, you starve." I may then feel pressured to work at McDonald's or Walmart. By contrast, Basic Income exists external to the market, serving as a base amount for everyone to live on. Since I don't have to worry about starving anymore, I now have more leverage in choosing if/where I want to work. Any amount I earn on top of the base amount is of my own volition for luxury items not needed for my survival. If I later want more money and my employer resists, I can use the basic income as a strike fund.

Unemployment benefits would be sufficient to obtain these effects without transferring wealth from the taxpayers to the employers.

Three things. First, you seem to be forgetting my earlier point regarding staying power. Even if you rally society today to support your targeted "unemployment benefits" (I put it in quotes because I know you mean it in a welfare context that is wider than merely unemployment compensation), your welfare solution is still at risk of being stigmatized in the future and then cut by politicians. Basic income for everyone avoids this risk, and will have much greater staying power.

Second, you seem to be under the impression welfare is handed out like free candy. In reality, welfare can be a pain in the butt, whether it's the intrusive paperwork, stressful delays, or the threat of fines and probation. Basic income bypasses this mess.

Third, you keep suggesting "taxpayers" and "corporations" are two separate things, even though corporations pay taxes too. Yes, corporations are quite adept at avoiding taxes, which is why tax reform also needs to be a part of this discussion.

where the employers have the majority of bargaining power.

Why? Most labor markets aren't monosponies.

If per-worker productivity can significantly increased by investing in optimization and automation, then yes, demand for labour becomes more flexible, and increases in labour costs would create more unemployment.

Or if the workers are doing something that adds some value but isn't strictly necessary, e.g., Wall-Mart greeters.

It seems to me that the gains in general efficiency of the economy would compensate for the extra costs of unemployment benefits to more people.

What gains in efficiency? After all automation and other capital investments cost money, and if it was a pure efficiency gain to invest in them, the company would already have done so.

You seem to be confusing being capital intensive with being efficient. These are frequently not the same thing, for example, a company that works with metal when faced with higher labor costs might decide to simply throw out its scrap rather than reprocessing it, this is more capital intensive (the company needs to buy more raw metal) but not more efficient.

it's certainly conceivable that we could adopt an approach to defining "treating well" that isn't entirely relative

Yes, we could. And then some people would get political karma for insisting that this isn't the true definition of treating well, and instead is just a part of conspiracy for oppressing people.

unemployed people are being treated well if their children don't demonstrate significantly higher levels of deficiency-based illnesses (due to malnutrition, exposure, etc.) than the children of their employed people

I can imagine a situation where there are illnesses typically attributed to poverty (and some people get political karma for insisting on the poverty hypothesis), even if material poverty is not the cause. For example, you could give people tons of money to buy healthy food, and yet they could decide to spend it all on junk food and alcohol. You measure their childrens' health, and it becomes obvious the children are not fed properly. This article describes it better than I could.

I agree that it would be great to have an absolute definition of "treating people well", which could be reached, first in one country, and then perhaps globally. But I predict that the closer we would get to it, the more people would insist that it's a wrong definition.

most people have already written their bottom line about whether (for example) the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well

I think that in a long term it's even worse: the bottom line depends on information the people get. In a totalitarian state, you just have to insist that everything is great, and imprison everyone who says otherwise, and after a few years people will believe that it really is great. But if you have freedom of speech, someone will always make political karma by insisting that people should have more (who wouldn't like that?), and that not having more is completely unbearable.

Yvain mentioned that here:

These are real costs, and they are certainly worth taking seriously; nevertheless, the crowds of emigrants trying to get from the Third World to the First, and the lack of any crowd in the opposite direction, suggest the benefits outweigh the costs.

Is it simply that such vacuity is more problematic when it's exhibited by the lower classes, than when it's exhibited by the ruling elite?

This is not as implausible as you might think. In the spirit of Yvain's Versailles-building czar, imagine a king of lousy moral character who likes to go around randomly raping the wives of men. In fact, he does this every week, so in a single year there are 52 men who have had to suffer the indignity of having their wives so violated. Sounds horrible, right?

Now, Wikipedia tells me that the rape rate in the U.S. is around 27 per 100,000 per year. The United States has a population of 320,000,000 or so, which works out to around 86,000 rapes per year. If the aforementioned king came to power in the United States and enacted policy changes which reduced the rape rate by even 1%, he would have paid for himself 16 times over.

What does this tell us? That a society where vast swathes of the population suffer from social pathologies is probably going to be worse than one where a tiny fraction of elites occasionally indulge themselves in transgressions against the common man. I know that, in practice, the most powerful politicians and the richest of celebrities in the U.S. could probably make my life pretty damn miserable if they wanted to, maybe because I somehow pissed them off or because they have sadistic predilections they just randomly decided to satisfy at my expense, and yet, I am not nearly as afraid of them as I am of the members of the underclass I occasionally pass by on the street.

What is causing this disconnect?

Ideological mind-projection. The writer who hates the English welfare state has somewhat different values from all the Third World people who want to protect their female family members from rape and eat meat once in a while. The writer therefore believes that rather than wanting to be English poor people - with food banks, benefits, and council houses - the Third World people are much better off the way they are.

I think this depends on how you read "I never saw the X." Consider something like "I never saw the death due to accident in England that I see in Tanzania." If you view this as the claim that no one ever dies in accidents in England, then obviously this is wrong. If you view this as the claim that death due to accident is qualitatively different in England and Tanzania, and worse in Tanzania, then it seems sensible.

We're likely to end up in a society where human labor is unnecessary one way or another, simply because of the advance of automation and ultimately AI. We do not have the choice of preserving the "work paradigm" indefinitely — that is, unless we end up in a Bad Ending where the future of humanity is vastly warped or curtailed.

Well, EY says

I sometimes think that futuristic ideals phrased in terms of "getting rid of work" would be better reformulated as "removing low-quality work to make way for high-quality work".

(But the difference might be more about where you draw the line on the map between what you call “work” and what you call “play” than about where you think people in the territory should do in the future.)

My question is: How shall the extinction of labor be distributed? I see no reason to declare that the people who currently own the robots should get to be the ones to move into a post-labor civilization, and everyone else can go to hell.

See here (and followup here).

We're likely to end up in a society where human labor is unnecessary one way or another, simply because of the advance of automation and ultimately AI. We do not have the choice of preserving the "work paradigm" indefinitely — that is, unless we end up in a Bad Ending where the future of humanity is vastly warped or curtailed.

I lack the information necessary to evaluate what is likely, but barring very specific definitions of the word "unnecessary" I don't think it's obvious that it's impossible without massively curtailing the future of humanity. If the importance of the work paradigm exists and is fundamental to parts of human nature we like(1), there are a number of imaginable ways for those to be made necessary even if it could be made unnecessary. While some of these possible futures are dysutopian (Brave New World), not all of them need be.

(1) I'm not sure this is the case. Some sort of act-or-unpleasant-things-happen seems necessary to get a good future, but this may or may not circumscribe the work paradigm.

I understand the desire to make sure people aren't suffering, but can't we think about the suffering of future generations as well?

Paying for people to do nothing incentives doing nothing; fewer people will participate the more comfortable laying around gets compared to actual work. Worse, removing the natural selective pressures against low-IQ / high time-preference people means they will reproduce and leave the next generation with even more unproductive people for every productive person remaining to have to support. With IQ now negatively correlated with fertility, that's a recipe for genetic disaster and societal collapse.

Buying the happiness of our generation's underclass at the expense of who knows how many of their descendants when the system finally collapses under it's own weight is the opposite of compassion; it's just pushing the suffering far enough into the future that you hope you can't see it anymore. If we really cared about making people comfortable, why shouldn't we look for a solution where we promote the traits which lead people to build their own happiness in the long run?

Interestingly, the data for Europe over the past decade actually refutes my hypothesis. As a secondary hypothesis that better fits that and other international data: hours and wages across countries appear to be equalizing as globalization occurs (again, this isn't actually the first time). The richer countries have seen a rise in their full-time working hours, while the poorer countries have seen a reduction. It remains to be seen whether a longer timespan of data would support either of these hypotheses.

However, the effect of partition from a largely full-time economy into an economy divided between statistically distinct classes of full-time and part-time workers (the so-called "precariat") does seem to be occurring.

My apologies.

That graph simply counts all workers, not all full-time workers. The effect I'm describing is not a unitary rise in overall hours but a partitioning of the economy into overemployed (rise in full-time hours) and underemployed (rise in part-time jobs). This matters, because a "total decline" in working hours that matches this model will be felt by the full-time worker as a heavy overtime load and by the part-time worker as a shortage of wages/hours.

Ah, I may have been overly abstract or generalized.

I agree with your assessment of the situation. What I would like to see is novel approaches at making it so that resource shortages that can be eliminated are eliminated. Cliché example: We are mere years away, barring opposition from invested parties and given continued funding and enthusiasm, from a fully automated transport and logistics infrastructure. AKA self-driven cars & trucks. (please leave argumentation of those two premises for another discussion - a Greater Wish or the circumstances I discussed in the grandparent would make those premises true for the purposes of this discussion)

Current wisdom is that these things should be left alone and "let the free market sort these things out" - which means, essentially, that we are to let shortages keep happening, because the margins of the free market will keep producing availability issues and shortages even on things where we can match supply to demand with positive net value after taking into account resources diverted from elsewhere (raw materials and human work time are the only relevant ones here once you trim the fat and all humans are fed, I believe).

So to come back to the virtual example of the million dollars, what I'd like to see is less people asking "How do we decide who to heal, cure and provide treatment for?" and more people asking "How do we dramatically increase the abstract availability and supply of medical resources and is there some way to do this without draining human resources from other industries?"

To craft a silly image, imagine an automated cold & flu treatment machine that looks like an ATM, is placed strategically to cover as many people as possible, does some basic automated symptom assessments to make sure it's cold & flu, and provides a printout and some dosage of medication.

Once the setup is done, all that's left is raw materials and human work to maintain the system, the human work is of a non-expert kind so not currently in any kind of shortage, and not planned to be given advances in automation, and the raw materials would be in the same ballpark as that already being consumed. An overall net gain, and the supply becomes directly tied to demand and only capped by raw materials, which in this example I'm led to believe are far more ample than what is needed to meet demand. An ideal scenario, disregarding the ridiculous feasibility issues with this scheme.

All this to say: There's too much Utopia/Reality dualistic thinking, where there are either No Resource Shortages or Limited Resources Which Require Free Markets, and nothing in between. Sure, eventually when you trim enough fat everything comes down to a few key raw resources, which could be abstracted into "money" if you tried really really hard, but those are, in most practical cases I've thought of, not the bottleneck.

Then we weren't looking for a solution to this problem statement, or we failed.

The problem statement I wish were posed is: Currently, there is an attribution of (e.g.) medical resources, where wealthier people have priority and every application of medical resources prevents the application of important resources in some other place, medical or otherwise. Can we change this situation around so that the opportunity cost of any given life-changing attribution of (e.g.) medical resources will always be lower than the returns of this attribution (e.g. productivity of the healed person)?

Naturally, this is intended to be a comprehensive "opportunity cost" calculation where "killing off all elders so that the overall medical opportunity cost of healing young persons becomes lower" is an appropriately taxed option. Still an option, perhaps a repugnant one, but at least one that is properly appraised. If there's currently no known good way to appraise this, then perhaps that might be a good first step?

You're leaving out the possibility of needing to shuffle through a number of doctors to get a competent diagnosis. It's a fairly frequent problem in the US. I don't know how common it is in Germany.

Do you have a source that describes how US millionaires go through 10 doctors to get a correct diagnosis? I think most of the time in Germany what stopping people from going to more doctors isn't financial but the fact that they trust a doctor.

Typo: I think you mean disadvantages.

Fixed.

(How could I possibly know? My country was like this. And the people here lived on average shorter than our evil neighbors. The medicine was completely free of charge, you just couldn't get it, because there was not enough made.)

That means that your country wasn't ruled well. On the other hand if you live in a country like Germany you do have access to all medicine that"s proven to work in clinical trials.

When it comes to drugs the expensive part is research, marketing and other things that aren"t about the production costs of the actual drug.

Back to the original topic, an analysis that concludes that some people will die either way, is simply a realistic analysis.

Yes, but that doesn't refute the case-by-case ummm... case, that we're looking at a deadweight loss of human life in this particular instance. If you don't hold that the economy is Pareto-optimal, then there are improvements we can feasibly make without suddenly causing shortages of medicine.

http://www.gp.org/greenpages/content/volume8/issue3/oped5.php

My first google US hit. Promising. Not only basic income, but coupled with reducing corporate welfare. And the numbers don't seem crazy - $600-$800. I consider probably the majority of the arguments used appealing to libertarians. I didn't expect much common ground at all.

Let's assume something truly basic: a living wage covers housing, food and health insurance. That is, a worker paid a living wage will not starve, will not die of treatable disease for financial reasons, and will not be removed from work via arrest for vagrancy (because they have a place to stay).

Quibbling over definitions won't get us anywhere. Let's talk about the real issue, and if it means we have to taboo "living wage", so be it.

Can we drop the pointless definitional agreement and just find a study specifying what wage-level is necessary to keep people from dropping very preventably dead or being arrested for vagrancy?

Except the investments tend to be in things like corporations that are themselves taxed.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24065108/wealth-gap-widens-richest-1-percent-earn-biggest according to this capital gains bumps it up to 22.5 percent.

You assume that private and state ownership are always separate. In a non-democratic system of governance, the state is not, in my view, a public enterprise accountable to the public, at least not to the extent that the demands of the public determine its actions on a practical level. The Chinese Communist Party are primarily concerned for their party's survival; the Public Good matters only insofar as it concerns that. The members of the CCP are very much a distinct class of people--not members of the public themselves, much less worried about what the average Chinese person thinks of them (again, beyond making sure that that person doesn't want to overthrow the CCP altogether).

"And as I mentioned in the other post, I can't see how public ownership and public-goods motive can work with market mechanisms."

...Really? It actually seems quite simple to me.

Presumably, I have some idea of what constitutes Public Good (as I mentioned in the other post). I don't need to be an altruist to think that other people deserve the Public Good as much as I do; most people have an innate sense of fairness, even if it's calibrated differently from person to person. If I have some vision of how the world is "supposed to be"--which I think most people do, even if only a very rough idea--and I firmly believe in it, and I also have an ownership claim to the means of production and will thus be rewarded myself for my efforts, then presumably I will work to provide that Public Good for myself and others. If anything, this would force people to have a very refined vision of the Public Good, to ensure that whatever public ownership group they join is one producing their particular version of the Public Good, their desire to see that vision realized enhancing their efficiency in attempting to reach it.

Now, if lots of people agree with my vision of the Public Good, lots of them will join me in producing it. If it's a particularly materially-intensive vision of the Public Good, it will remain more expensive, and democratized ownership may make it inaccessible due to a lack of concentration of resource ownership. E.g., if a socialized and democratized MoP group aims to provide each of its members a private jet, we're unlikely to succeed as this is a very materially-intensive product to award to individuals; it's therefore unlikely that such a group would exist for long as none of its members would be able to benefit from being part of a group with that specified purpose. This is an example of the market acting on such an ownership structure and operation to eliminate things which are materially expensive or impossible. As the ownership of the means of production is fully democratized, no one person or group would have anymore say over the purpose of the operation of the MoP than any other person, guaranteeing a more equitable distribution of resources.

But don't think of this sort of process as simply referring to material Goods; it can extend to social Goods as well.

Take, for example, a racist vision of the Public Good. If I decide my vision of the Public Good excludes black people, I'm denying myself both their labor and, more significantly for this discussion, their claim to ownership of the means of production. This will make it more expensive for me to produce whatever other things are part of my vision of the Public Good, making it difficult, if not impossible to implement; such an exclusionary group would, again, dissolve because of low demand for that particular vision of the Public Good

By contrast, there would be many other groups for whom race is no concern for their conception of the Public Good, and the members of such socialized MoP groups would benefit from being egalitarian by including all potential sources of human labor and all sources of claims to the ownership of the means of production, reducing the costs of producing whatever else....This is the market acting on this type of ownership structure and operation to foster things which are highly-socially desirable, as determined by the existence of high demand.

my definition of socialism is public ownership of the means of production, operated for public good (however that ends up being defined)

OK, so the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, and China until twenty years ago or so -- all were/are socialist countries, right? On the other hand, countries like Sweden or France were never socialist -- correct?

its only real goal--production of public good

The expression "public goods" has specific meaning in econospeak, I assume you're not using that but just talking about goods for public consumption.

But I'm still confused. The (more or less free) markets do indeed signal to the producers what to produce. The mechanism by which they do that is price. Desireable goods command high prices and so create the incentive to make more, while goods not in demand are not sold and their manufacturers either switch production or go out of business.

Given the state ownership of the means of production and the absence of the profit motive I wonder how will the market mechanism operate. After all in USSR and similar countries the "market" existed -- people bought things in stores and paid money for what they bought. It's just that the signals from this market were ignored -- nobody cared about them.

What exactly would make state-owned companies with no profit motive care about prices or demand?

OK, a fair criticism of the "toy" model, which was simplified to make the point. There are always multiple choices of productivity and wage level, and big moves (more than doubling employee productivity, while simultaneously quadrupling the cost of labour) usually can't happen quickly.

Back in the real world, I did a quick look at the economic evidence, and was surprised. The latest evidence base is that the minimum wage has surprisingly little effect on anything. It seems to have no discernible effect on employment levels - see here - but it has no clear net impact on training levels either - see here.

One problem is that minimum wages tend to be varied only marginally, so it is hard to see a big effect. However, the UK provides a more dramatic experiment, where minimum wages were abolished in the 1990s, then re-introduced a few years later. Some UK assessment here on employment and on training. Again, not a big impact in either case, though training levels apparently did increase among groups affected by the minimum wage. This suggests the toy model is not totally daft.

Someone downvoted your reply, Nornagest, which I really can't understand: I upvoted it myself.

The parent is now at -2; one more down and it will disappear from view, and we will get a heavy tax for continuing.

What is happening here? Are we just not allowed to have discussions on this forum about the possible economic gains and costs of minimum wage or minimum income policy?

It's an interesting point, though you seem to be assuming that the minimum income would be offered completely unconditionally, with no requirement to seek employment, and no penalty for refusing it. Real world benefit systems tend to come with strings, as this is far more popular than giving permanent handouts to people who could work but just don't want to.

Many people's ethical intuitions about using incarcerated inmates as a captive work force vary depending on the language used and the specific rules governing it.
Many Americans, for example, would agree that slave labor is evil but support UNICOR.
So I'm not quite as convinced as you seem to be that this sort of thing isn't worth specifically addressing.

I don't claim that's necessarily a reasonable reaction, but you certainly ought not be as surprised by it as you are signalling here.

OMG, you essentially agree with me but don't like your reading of what you think I am signaling about the unreasonable reactions?

What are your priorities here?

Is being surprised at this sort of deep meta- wierdness also not to your taste? If so feel free to interpret my feelings as appalled, disappointed, or frustrated if that seems to you more appropriate.

I have to concur with Ms Lebovitz here; what do you mean living off the commons?

Talking about enclosure strongly implies farming/herding on public land, but that seems like an unlikely argument for you to make. What common goods have been privatized by Walmart in this situation, and how were people living off of them before?

What do you mean by living off the commons?

Wal-Mart is the entity withdrawing this worker from subsistence on the commons

That doesn't resemble any reality I'm familiar with.

It's worse than this. [...]

I think what you go on to describe is part of what I meant by "[doesn't] work[] well for anyone other than the favoured few". Indeed, the identity of the favoured few changes over time -- though typically the really favoured are quite safe for a good while.

AI is far more beneficial than capitalism.

AI, at the moment, isn't anything. (Or, rather, it's a term that's sometimes applied to a wide variety of things, mostly beneficial but nothing to do with what we both mean by AI in this context.) If and when "real" AI arrives, it has the potential to do either a lot more good than capitalism or a lot more harm or both.

AI is a blank optimization process

No. "AI" as such doesn't say what's being optimized, but any actual instance of AI will be optimizing for some specific thing(s) (or acting in some specific ways, or whatever; it might be an optimization process only somewhat metaphorically). A genuinely blank optimization process wouldn't actually do anything.

I agree that more details of the merit function are built into the term "capitalism" than into the term "AI". But I bet that a randomly chosen merit function is a lot worse than capitalism's. Capitalism isn't a cosmic force that hates you any more than AI is. You're just (if I may repurpose an aphorism of Eliezer's) in possession of dollars it can use for something else.

If you're reasonably content with social democracy then I don't see how you can both hold that capitalism is intrinsically disastrous and hostile and agree with Žižek that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. The end of capitalism might look like turning everywhere into Sweden. That might be difficult to achieve, but it's not harder to imagine than the end of the world.

We seem to have drifted rather a long way from the original point at issue, namely whether being politically on the left requires one to be "anti-capital". I haven't seen anything so far to change my opinion that it doesn't. Opposed to some important features fo neoliberal financialized capitalism, by all means. Opposed to capital (especially in the sense in which that's naturally contrasted with "labour"), not so much.