Tag: productivity

Unexpected: Studies Suggest That Rather Than Killing Jobs, AI Could Revive The Middle Class + More

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

We’ve certainly been talking a lot about the “AI Doomers” who insist that AI is all too likely to destroy humanity. However, even people who aren’t fully on board with the existential threat of AI do often say that, at the very least, it’s going to destroy jobs for most people, potentially creating huge problems. For years now, people have been arguing for universal basic income, in large part, because they think that automation and AI will take away everyone’s jobs. I mean, it was a core plank of Andrew Yang’s silly run for President.

Studies Suggest That Rather Than Killing Jobs, AI Could Revive The Middle Class

Related:

[2017] “Another kick in the teeth”: a top economist on how trade with China helped elect Trump

David Autor believes both these things to be true: one, that Donald Trump’s diagnosis of trade with China as the source of woe for countless American workers was both accurate and a crucial part of his appeal on his march to the White House. And two, that Trump’s plan to help those workers by cracking down on trade is likely to backfire.

How much did Trump-era tariffs on China cost Americans? New US findings confirm ‘self-inflicted harm’

Is there a famine in North Korea in 2023?

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

On February 15, 2023, at a meeting of the ROK National Assembly Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee, Unification Minister Kwon Young-se stated that the DPRK’s food situation was deteriorating, and that Pyongyang had requested assistance from the UN World Food Program. At the same time, the minister acknowledged that “the situation in the North does not seem to have reached the point where people are dying of starvation, something similar to what was observed during the Arduous March” of the mid-to-late 1990s, when the death toll from food shortages and disease reached 600,000 people. In later reports, the ministry described the food shortage situation in the DPRK as “serious,” noting that there have been reports of deaths from starvation in some parts of the country. However, these deaths are not widespread.

Is there a famine in North Korea in 2023?

There Is No Such Thing As Wage-Driven Inflation

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

Few know the name of Walter Heller, one of the first Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers, and an adviser to President Kennedy. In 1968, however, he was a giant in economics who published in all the top journals. Fresh from his years in the Kennedy White House, he was invited to debate the relative importance of fiscal and monetary policy with another giant in economics, Milton Friedman, in a small book published by W.W. Norton & Company. Rarely do such debates interest more than a few thousand individuals. This is an exception, as a decade later PBS invited Heller and Friedman to debate their views on inflation.

There Is No Such Thing As Wage-Driven Inflation

Related:

Debunking: “If You Raise The Minimum Wage, It Will Cause Inflation”

Neo-liberal Macron government in France pushes 2023 budget without parliamentary vote + French Labor Unrest Illustrates Worsening Economic Crisis Within the EU

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The austerity-ridden budget was approved without a vote on after the government involved a controversial provision of the constitution. Earlier, left-wing MPs had passed several amendments to the government’s proposals

Neo-liberal Macron government in France pushes 2023 budget without parliamentary vote

Related:

French Labor Unrest Illustrates Worsening Economic Crisis Within the EU

While Fighting Workers, Railroads Made Over $10 Billion in Stock Buybacks

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

“Our research shows just how far railroad executives will go to funnel record profits to their shareholders—even if that means stagnant wages, inhumane attendance policies, and throwing our supply chain into further turmoil,” said one Groundwork Collaborative analyst.

While Fighting Workers, Railroads Made Over $10 Billion in Stock Buybacks

H/T: Unorthodox Truth

Everyone pays the cost as the rich keep spending

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Everyone pays the cost as the rich keep spending

Meanwhile, the Biden White House is doing what it can to buffer inflationary pain for working people. It has been releasing strategic petroleum reserves in a partly successful effort to lower prices at the pump, extending pandemic-era caps on some student loan payments and pushing for antitrust action in areas where corporate concentration (which has grown hand in hand with financialisation) may be responsible for some inflationary pressure.

But more changes are needed. The success of corporate lobbyists in overturning efforts to roll back carried interest loopholes are shameful. Student debt forgiveness — no matter how generous it is — will not change the fact that the cost of four years of private university in the US (an elastic cost that can be bid up indefinitely by the global rich) is nearly double the median family income. Housing markets continue to cry out for major reform.

I suspect it will take a younger generation to push through these sorts of systemic changes. They simply don’t have as much asset wealth to protect.