Looks like he just ponied up 50k

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/gol...cid=spartanntp

I don’t agree that the money rich people save and invest goes into a non economic stimulating black hole. Ultimately, that invested money matriculates down to capital investment which raises productivity.

Matricle down economics.

Hank Stram would be so proud.

I didn't say it goes into a black hole. It goes into investment accounts, runs around financial accounts, gets lent to people to buy homes, stocks, whatever. But like Asher said, velocity of money. Poor people spend it all quickly and for the most part those people spend it quickly. Your thesis sounds almost like nothing matters at all ever. It makes no difference how, why, or when people spend money at all.

I think it matters in a better or worse sense. For example, in lieu of doing what we’re currently doing, if every year we took $1T from rich people they were going to invest and instead gave it to poor people to spend, I think the economy would be worse off say 10 years down the road than if we kept doing what we’re currently doing. I'm guessing you think otherwise?

Well, I'm more just wondering why market fundamentalists are so sure of themselves than asserting anything. I think I'm a Keynsian and would say, purely for the benefit of the "economy", unemployment is quite low now and if anything there's too much demand for labor. For the "economy"'s sake I'd enact that policy heavily during recessions and not especially right now.

For general human welfare I'd take money from the rich and give to the poor, but during booming economic times I might focus more on improving infrastructure and building things that serve the general public like public housing, social services for the homeless, libraries, public schools, national parks and stuff like that.

Sadly John21's opinion is shared by prominent GMU professors. I can't remember if it was Bryan Caplan or Tyler Cowen that basically says we should give as much money as possible to rich people because they allocate it more effeciently than poor people.

We could take that trillion from rich people, invest it ourselves, and then hand the return back to everyone equally. No reason why rich people have to be the ones who receive the return even if you believe we need more investment.

Who cares? Almost all of the returns of that extra productivity have gone to the owners of capital. Have you tried paying rent with productivity?

I don't understand why a high velocity of money is definitely a good thing in the long term.

Even if a rich person put his money in a mattress there would be that much less money chasing products and services making them less expensive for the rest of us; there would be that much less money chasing investment opportunities making those opportunities cheaper for the rest of us.

Also, folks are talking about "economic activity" as tho more is better but I think we have to define "economic activity" to determine that, and then we can see if the subject matter meets that definition. I think you would find a lot of agreement if you said productivity is always good, but a group of people trading goods between themselves isn't "good" outside of the satisfaction each has by acquiring what he wants, but there is no increase in goods.

"Productivity" isn't all created equally either. What actually builds the wealth of a nation is the production of corn. I'm using that as a metaphor, but if you've read Adam Smith you know what I mean. You can have everyone producing stuff and services all day every day and have 90% of people living in shacks and 10% in mansions or you could have the same thing and have everyone living in a nice regular house. It's a problem if your economy fails to keep people busy despite there being a lot of needs unmet, but a lot of the rest of it is about who benefits from the productivity.

You realize these aren't real economists, right? Like, they aren't doing science here by rejecting empiricism. I mean it's literally "I independently confirmed it by thinking about it" bros.

Cowen recently published a book (an interesting one, IMO) that makes the argument that we ought to consider long-run economic growth to be the most important socio-political goal because of compounding returns (with caveats about sustainability and some concept of negative liberty and human rights). I'm not sure he would agree that giving rich people as much money as possible was the best or only way of increasing growth rates, but if it was he'd probably prioritize it. I'm not sure I've seen him take a very strong stand either way on the question of what marginal tax rates should be, although I've seen him cite research both in favor and against much higher rates in his blog. He's not a progressive by any stretch, but he doesn't strike me as being stridently ideological about this topic.

I don't think that's a particularly accurate portrayal of Cowen. One reason his blog is worth following is that they link to a tremendous amount of actual empirical research, a lot of it pretty interesting. I don't know much about Caplan.

Yeah, there's no right answer with all this. The situation is not much different than a business owner deciding between giving employees a raise/bonus or retooling the factory to increase productivity.

I agree, but I’m a productivity nutter.

The primary reason why the average worker hasn’t benefited as much by productivity increases is because of rising real estate prices that suck up all the gains in income. Factor that out (mostly the increase in land value) and the graphs and charts look a lot different. The proponents of increasing income redistribution talk a lot about “affordable housing” but I haven’t heard what they plan to do about all those extra dollars bidding up housing costs.

I think the problem with real estate in expensive areas is something deeply structural - some kind of end stage capitalism thing. People have enough of pretty much everything, but real estate, especially in high demand areas is limited. What to do but fight over the real estate? What to do other than keep working more and more, higher productivity and never fewer hours so that home buyers can still compete. As long as there's real estate to fight over we can never really have a post-scarcity society. At some point everywhere will just have SF/NYC prices. And I don't know what people will be doing for all that money, but it'll probably be middle management BS or I guess inventing new ways to do the same thing on the internet and refactoring a lot of code.

Real estate sounds like a tempting thing to blame (and I'm not down playing it as a problem) but as we can see a future approaching where increasingly more of the wealth generation comes from increasing less human labour it becomes pretty obvious that the problem is how we redistribute that wealth.

If we want the best future than concentrate on a) advances in science & tech and b) distribution of wealth.

I think we have about as much foresight into what people will be doing in 50 years as people from 150 years ago could imagine what we’re doing today.

He is literally a Koch pawn.

Speaking as a guy who still talks to truck drivers every day for work... 2.5M good paying jobs are going to go up in a puff of smoke the day automated trucks arrive... and that day isn't that far away. I say this as one of the people who will probably get rich off of it.

I never hear an actual plan for dealing with this from conservatives other than 'retraining'. LOL they aren't enough good paying job openings in the US to fill those truckers... And they don't have the skills for those jobs any more than the manufacturing employees robots just replaced did. Trucking is going to go dark on a much faster schedule than manufacturing did too.

EDIT: And I double dog dare any of you comparatively lazy ****s to claim that these truckers need to not be 'lazy'. Most of these guys work 14 hours a day for two to three weeks at a time living out of a semi truck before coming home for 4-5 days. Many of them have only done this for their entire adult lives. This was the ideal job for reliable introverts of average intelligence for all of living memory, and at no point have we communicated to these people that they need to do anything but drive a truck.

It is kind of funny how non sequitur the solutions are. Productivity has been rising but workers' wages havent kept up.

Free up restrictive zoning laws!

Wait what?