Smasharoo wrote:
If I build a machine that allows a single person to bale 100 bales of hay in the same time and with the same effort that it would take him to bale 1 before, and can run that machine for a cost over time which is less than the difference in productive gain, then I have increased actual real efficiency, without reducing the amount I'm paying anyone.
So, just to sum up, if you build a machine that produces 100 bales of hay in the same time that it took 1 person to produce 1 bale of hay, but still pay that 1 person $20/hr and the machine costs $1500/hr to run, you've simply made more profitable hay! Until the 99 unemployed former hay balers kill you for food.
No. The former hay balers move on to jobs building things which the former manual labor based economy could not build, like cars, and radios, and televisions, and computers, and cell phones. And yes, the owners of the production of those *also* make a larger share of the profits. The point being that the entire labor force can build more stuff in total.
The theory I'm debunking is the zero-sum theory which assumes that greater wealth at the top requires more poverty at the bottom. But that's clearly not the case. If the pre-industrial economy produced 100,000 units of production, and contained 10,000 people, each person has a 10 unit "share" of the economy if it were shared evenly. Since production efficiency isn't going to increase over time, we can absolutely state that if a small percentage gains more of units of productive "wealth", then that comes at the expense of the share of wealth held by the rest.
But if industrialization allows us to multiply the ratio of productivity, then this changes, right? Now, perhaps that same 10,000 people can produce 5 million units of production. Even if we assume that every single dollar of that increased productivity ends out in the hands of that same small percentage, resulting in a dramatically larger gap between rich and poor, the rest of the workers are no worse off. They may get a smaller percentage of the pie, but the pie has grown such that their piece is just as large as it was before.
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Fuck you're bad at math.
Quite the opposite. I understand the math just fine. You, on the other hand, are insisting on looking at ratios of portions of a whole and ignoring the actual numbers involved. But at the end of the day, what affects your economic outcome is not how much you earn in relation to how much the richest people earn, but how much you earn in relation to the cost of a loaf of bread, or a gallon of milk, and how comfortable you can live on what you make. I'm frankly confused about this incredibly competitive way of looking at outcomes. It's nonsensical.
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Economists do. People who develop theories to explain facts then test them and look at the results do.
Yes. But the principles you're arguing aren't really coming from economists and the numbers. They're coming from sociologists and their theories about what the numbers mean. Economists and their number crunching can tell us how large the gap between rich and poor is, but those numbers don't tell us whether that's a good thing or bad thing. Other people, with far more political motivations, are the ones who leap in to do that.
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You should stay as far away from actual data as possible. You don't understand it, and it just puts you in the sad position of coming with wilder and wilder excuses why the data doesn't fit what your theory predict.
Lol. Sure Smash. I call this one the "attack the other guy for not understanding the subject matter cause I don't have any other response" tactic. You do it well, too!
How about instead of insisting that I just don't understand, you actually explain in clear English how it can possibly be that someone earning X amount of money is made poorer if someone else makes more money than he does even if the costs of the things he buys stays the same? Can you do that? Because that's what the entire "gap between rich and poor" argument is based on.