the dzan will post in this thread thread

[thewelsh]

now i know this video is not complete (dzan will bring up monopolies for starters), but it makes some great points.

[hondarider525]

Dzan is the type that won't post in this thread just because you titled it that way.

[Fuji]

this video remained pretty neutral until the end, even so the over all facts and information vs opinion stayed pretty clear, good video. (+1)

Only thing I'll say is that its hard to consider that government decisions "aren't voluntary" and "we don't have the right to say no" when we are the ones who voted for our politicians in the first place.

[ZapBulletRider]

Dzan is the type that won't post in this thread just because you titled it that way.

Dzan is the type that wouldn't not post in a thread just because it might be viewed as him being baited into posting and falling into said trap.

[thewelsh]

ZBR: Was not actually meant to be a trap, just my failed attempt at making a creative "political" thread title. I guess I did over do it with the whole monopolies comment. My bad.

Fuji: Well we vote for the people that make the deals, and as you can see they follow their own agenda once in office. You also have deals like social security that we were born into and I think most people can agree in its current state it is not beneficial to us youngins.

[Aaron Peluso]

Unions are killing this country.

[penguinofsleep]

i prefer getting my financial advice from the jewish advisers... ill even start with monopolies.

[Dzan]

This video is a joke. I tuned out when he started saying that employees can just quit their job if they aren't being paid enough. Clearly, the guy's conception of the labor market is childishly naive: employers do not bid on employees at auction, and almost no employees have the ability to just quit and search for a new, better job. Not when household debt is very high and compensation has been more or less flat for the past 30 years. Human beings just want to be treated fairly and get fair compensation for fair effort, they don't want to have to understand game theory in order to determine exactly when to quit their job and search for a new one.

edit: In regards to monopolies. Monopolies are fine. Real monopolies only exist when one company super serves its customers better than any other could hope to do, and their incentive is to continue to super serve their customers. Fake monopolies are granted by the government to companies that have no incentive to treat their customers fairly, like your local cable provider. Fake monopolies bad, natural monopolies are good.

[Dzan]

Fuji: Well we vote for the people that make the deals, and as you can see they follow their own agenda once in office. You also have deals like social security that we were born into and I think most people can agree in its current state it is not beneficial to us youngins.

Read this

[Utah]

I wish I could draw like this... Even my stick figures suck!!

[vicskim76]

Onions are killing this country.

Brings a tear to my eye.

[GnipGnop]

Unions are killing this country.

Umm, no.

[Fuji]

Read this

you gots to be crazy to think SS will ever reach us.

Btw props for using Reuters, they're my home page

[shin-n]

Umm, no.

he didnt mean Canada silly

[Aaron Peluso]

I tuned out when he started saying that employees can just quit their job if they aren't being paid enough.

I thought he said that employers want to pay as little as possible but if employers get greedy and pay too little another employer will come along and offer their employees more.... which is exactly how it works in my experience...

compensation has been more or less flat for the past 30 years.

??? Inflation adjusted average household income has grown dramatically the last 30 years. Inflation adjusted I think its more or less flat for the lower class. So spending power has remained about the same particularly for the lower class. I am not sure how that is very relevant though...

[Dzan]

I thought he said that employers want to pay as little as possible but if employers get greedy and pay too little another employer will come along and offer their employees more.... which is exactly how it works in my experience...

...or they can just find someone willing to work for the lesser amount. This guy's dream world only applies to highly skilled labor markets where there is either a lack of supply of skilled workers, or excess demand. For most people who aren't involved in skilled labor the balance of power is skewed heavily in favor of capital.

??? Inflation adjusted average household income has grown dramatically the last 30 years. Inflation adjusted I think its more or less flat for the lower class. So spending power has remained about the same particularly for the lower class. I am not sure how that is very relevant though...

I should have been hyper-specific. For non-management production workers, which is the majority of the country. I mean, otherwise I would be arguing that there was no GDP growth. Unfortunately if the GDP grows, but low/middle class compensation remains relatively flat that should tell you that wealth distribution is growing more uneven. BUT ANYWAY, the point I was making is that for the average middle class person, their debt to income is significantly higher than in decades past, and thus their ability to take chances on the labor market is restricted.

[Aaron Peluso]

Yeah people who don't have skills generally don't have the ability to negotiate higher wages, because they have no skills. thankfully, many if not most jobs Transform unskilled workers into skilled workers over time. Of course presuming the worker is upwardly motivated.

I don't know anyone in anything close to unskilled labor who has to quit a job to get a new job.... Don't people just start looking, go to interviews on their lunch break and then quit their old job if they find something better...?

[Aaron Peluso]

I should have been hyper-specific. For non-management production workers, which is the majority of the country.

Also, this doesnt appear to be correct.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm

[Dzan]

Also, this doesnt appear to be correct.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm

That doesn't show a distinction between supervisory or non-supervisory. If we live in a country where management outnumbers workers we are in trouble.

[Aaron Peluso]

so you dont mean production as in production vs service industries?

you are just referring to management vs non-management?

and does your lack of response to the other post mean you agree that people dont need to quit their jobs (take risks) in order to find newer better ones? That was kind of the main point we were discussing...

[SkimNate]

In my experience, I have always quit my job and found a better/more-fitting job.

[penguinofsleep]

edit: In regards to monopolies. Monopolies are fine. Real monopolies only exist when one company super serves its customers better than any other could hope to do, and their incentive is to continue to super serve their customers. Fake monopolies are granted by the government to companies that have no incentive to treat their customers fairly, like your local cable provider. Fake monopolies bad, natural monopolies are good.

roughly what the video i posted said. a real monopoly isn't realistic so we don't have to worry about w/e w/e people think will arise but fake monopolies enabled by government = potential for abuse/bad. however this makes me question how/why we allow monopolies with some things and not others. ex: i see no reason why groups of qualified individuals should not be able to provide cable services.

[penguinofsleep]

...or they can just find someone willing to work for the lesser amount. This guy's dream world only applies to highly skilled labor markets where there is either a lack of supply of skilled workers, or excess demand. For most people who aren't involved in skilled labor the balance of power is skewed heavily in favor of capital.

maybe its just me, but i would imagine after working for 10 or 20 years someone would eventually become skilled at something? ie most jobs out there minus some minimum wage jobs require at least some sort of rudimentary understanding of "something" to do. wouldn't someone acquire skills at said job sooner or later?

that and while some people will work for less, people still need and want enough money to get by, especially after acquiring the above said skills. ie sure maybe one mechanic will fix my car for $55/hr instead of $75/hr, but its not like the market is going to be flooded with ppl doing it for $5/hour just b/c they want to be cheaper. that and i can't think of anyone who would trust a $5/hr mechanic. as far as i know there is not a lack of mechanics or a huge/sudden demand for their services.

that being said, yes the creation of unskilled labor and abundance of minimum wage style jobs in the last 60 years has really shafted a lot of people. not that they are screwed for life, but those first few years acquiring said skills = sucks. and yes, the working and middle classes have been really screwed during the last few decades. imo primarily by inflation, not the textbook definition, but b/c wages have remained relatively stagnant while the price of stuff has increased at a higher rate and also from excessively high taxation.

[Aaron Peluso]

When I looked into wage histories I was surprised to learn that even after inflation compensation among lower fifth has been pretty much steady over the last thirty years. the dollar amount has tripled, but after inflation spending power has actually been flat. for higher wage earners spending power has been increasing.

People always say the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (as if the rich are taking from the poor). However reading this I would say the rich are getting richer and the poor are staying level.

Of course as you point out poor does not mean poor for life as people acquire skills and usually move up the compensation ladder over time. The lower forth today are not the same people as ten years ago, for the most part anyway.


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Tapatalk 2

[Dzan]

When I looked into wage histories I was surprised to learn that even after inflation compensation among lower fifth has been pretty much steady over the last thirty years. the dollar amount has tripled, but after inflation spending power has actually been flat. for higher wage earners spending power has been increasing.

People always say the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (as if the rich are taking from the poor). However reading this I would say the rich are getting richer and the poor are staying level.

Of course as you point out poor does not mean poor for life as people acquire skills and usually move up the compensation ladder over time. The lower forth today are not the same people as ten years ago, for the most part anyway.


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Tapatalk 2

Glad we finally agree.

[Dzan]

roughly what the video i posted said. a real monopoly isn't realistic so we don't have to worry about w/e w/e people think will arise but fake monopolies enabled by government = potential for abuse/bad. however this makes me question how/why we allow monopolies with some things and not others. ex: i see no reason why groups of qualified individuals should not be able to provide cable services.

There were real monopolies. Alcoa was aluminum monopoly until it got smashed by anti-trust laws. After there was forced competition prices for aluminum went... up. WEIRD.

As far as cable it has to do with infrastructure. One company paid to run cable wires all over your town, how fair would it be after outlaying all those production costs for a town to allow their competitors to use their lines? Not very. And you can't let the competitors run lines because then you have millions of lines everywhere and tons of chaos plus its inefficient. So while I hate cable companies, I understand the logic of granting them monopolies. I just wish they used their power for good instead of evil.

[thewelsh]

Here's a video by the same people with the whole rich getting richer thing, basically its what Aaron just said.

[Aaron Peluso]

Glad we finally agree.

!!!!

[Dzan]

!!!!

The thing that bothers me most is that while compensation is relatively flat, productivity is way, way up. So us working stiffs are generating significantly more productivity than ever before, but receive no reward for all the extra wealth generated by that productivity. If productivity was flat too, I would understand compensation being stagnant, but it's not. The implication is that the GDP growth 99.9% of us have been generating is mostly not coming back to us in an appreciable way.

[Aaron Peluso]

I think the guys who generate the productivity increases are primarily the ones that benefit. In the last 15 years or so the bulk of productivity gains have come from people in technology, primarily computing and internet. It does seem as if people involved in those sectors seem to do pretty well on the whole.

Real world example would be if someone designs a POS system that allows one McDonalds employee to do the same work that used to take 2 employees... the person who designs the system sells it to McDonalds for something less than the cost of that additional employee. The remaining employee gets the same pay. The person who designed the system just launched into the top one percent.

That seems about right to me... the remaining employee was not responsible for the productivity improvement, therefore they dont benefit.

[Logan]

I'm kind of a layman in economics, but, unless everyone is getting richer, the "rich getting richer" have to be taking it from somewhere. Is it that theyre driving the middle class people either down or up? ..."getting rid of the middle class" as I hear about in debates?

It makes sense that there will be no middle class if this trend continues; it will be a matter of haves and have-nots with few exceptions in the way of moving up or down. I dislike a financial caste system, but it is kind of forced when it comes to peoples' ambition, work-ethic, natural talents, etc. Not to say a family mold can't be broken, but white trash poor people tend to stay that way, and upper-class rich people tend to keep their money if not expand their wealth. Over time, the seperation becomes larger and larger. Thoughts?

[Dzan]

I'm kind of a layman in economics, but, unless everyone is getting richer, the "rich getting richer" have to be taking it from somewhere. Is it that theyre driving the middle class people either down or up? ..."getting rid of the middle class" as I hear about in debates?

It makes sense that there will be no middle class if this trend continues; it will be a matter of haves and have-nots with few exceptions in the way of moving up or down. I dislike a financial caste system, but it is kind of forced when it comes to peoples' ambition, work-ethic, natural talents, etc. Not to say a family mold can't be broken, but white trash poor people tend to stay that way, and upper-class rich people tend to keep their money if not expand their wealth. Over time, the seperation becomes larger and larger. Thoughts?

Not necessarily. The rich can get richer while everyone else stays flat, which is essentially what happened. The economy grows by say 4% per year, but 3.98% of of that growth goes to the richest .01% so they aren't literally taking from anyone else, they just aren't sharing the prosperity.

The middle class are being squeezed because traditional middle class jobs are being either outsourced (factory work) or chipped away at (teachers, nurses, police officers). The same time, their share of the burden of taxation rose relative to everyone else in the last 30 years.

And whats funny is people say that unions aren't necessary anymore, but the traditional middle class jobs are the very jobs that need unions the most. Teachers unions, for example, are derided as among the worst offenders (read: good at protecting their members' interests) by the anti-union types. and teachers are in dismal shape in most states! Could you imagine how awful teachers would have it without it? The erosion of the middle class goes hand in hand with the erosion of union power.

[Dzan]

I think the guys who generate the productivity increases are primarily the ones that benefit. In the last 15 years or so the bulk of productivity gains have come from people in technology, primarily computing and internet. It does seem as if people involved in those sectors seem to do pretty well on the whole.

Real world example would be if someone designs a POS system that allows one McDonalds employee to do the same work that used to take 2 employees... the person who designs the system sells it to McDonalds for something less than the cost of that additional employee. The remaining employee gets the same pay. The person who designed the system just launched into the top one percent.

That seems about right to me... the remaining employee was not responsible for the productivity improvement, therefore they dont benefit.

I would agree with that, but historically productivity has been tied to compensation since the industrial revolution began (and probably even more iron clad before it) so I find it rather odd that since about 1976 they essentially de-coupled.

Also, if your explanation were true, and productivity gains were the result of technology there would have been an unusal spike in productivity. But everything I see indicates that productivity has been increasing at a steady pace since WW2, not in spikes related to breakthroughs.

[Aaron Peluso]

Not necessarily. The rich can get richer while everyone else stays flat, which is essentially what happened. The economy grows by say 4% per year, but 3.98% of of that growth goes to the richest .01% so they aren't literally taking from anyone else, they just aren't sharing the prosperity.

The middle class are being squeezed because traditional middle class jobs are being either outsourced (factory work) or chipped away at (teachers, nurses, police officers). The same time, their share of the burden of taxation rose relative to everyone else in the last 30 years.

And whats funny is people say that unions aren't necessary anymore, but the traditional middle class jobs are the very jobs that need unions the most. Teachers unions, for example, are derided as among the worst offenders (read: good at protecting their members' interests) by the anti-union types. and teachers are in dismal shape in most states! Could you imagine how awful teachers would have it without it? The erosion of the middle class goes hand in hand with the erosion of union power.

Tenured teachers in CA are in awful shape? Declining compensation? Please tell me more...

[Aaron Peluso]

I would agree with that, but historically productivity has been tied to compensation since the industrial revolution began (and probably even more iron clad before it) so I find it rather odd that since about 1976 they essentially de-coupled.

Also, if your explanation were true, and productivity gains were the result of technology there would have been an unusal spike in productivity. But everything I see indicates that productivity has been increasing at a steady pace since WW2, not in spikes related to breakthroughs.

I dont know about the history of ties between salary and productivity going back to the industrial revolution but I suspect that such a macroscopic perspective could easily fail to account for significant "outside" factors (such as the development of labor unions).

I did fact check your assertion that productivity has been stable since WWII. Doesn't appear to hold water upon initial check...

According to BLS:

1996-2005 = 29.1 percent increase in productivity (roughly the computing and internet boom)
1986-1995 = 15.1
1976-1985 = 13.8

1976	3.3
1977	1.6
1978	1.3
1979	-0.4
1980	-0.3
1981	1.4
1982	-1.1
1983	4.4
1984	2.0
1985	1.6
	13.8
1986	3.1
1987	0.3
1988	1.6
1989	0.8
1990	1.8
1991	1.5
1992	4.0
1993	0.6
1994	1.0
1995	0.4
	15.1
1996	2.6
1997	1.5
1998	2.9
1999	3.3
2000	3.4
2001	2.9
2002	4.6
2003	3.7
2004	2.6
2005	1.6
	29.1
2006	0.9
2007	1.5
2008	0.6
2009	2.3
2010	4.0
2011	0.4