Corbynomics: A Dystopia

TrickyTree83

Mistermeaner wrote: »

Honestly I don't know where to start. You rubbish economics as a discipline and also mention austerity (which is a silly name government policy) and mention something about privatization.....

1) please describe austerity in the uk. IMO you have no idea what austerity is if you mention it in the context of the uk. A country where are mother with 2 kids and no job will be housed clothed fed have free education free healthcare as well as accrue pension rights.

2) working on your bizarre statement that economics is garbage and then something about austerity and privatisation....

- please give me examples of wealth generation from government departments

- please give me examples of innovation from government departments

- please give me examples of where the public sector does something better than the private sector

- please give me examples of a country that is operating a model you would prefer

- please explain which industries / sectors should be nationalised and explain (using economics - oh hold on - errrr..... Numbers) as to why this would be beneficial.

- please explain using numbers why and how the government should increase its spending.... How will this benefit the country

I'll bite on this one.

Current economic ideology is flawed.

Success of a modern economy under the current paradigms is measured in percentage growth. So it is by definition exponential if growth targets remain at 2% consistently year on year, i.e. 2% this year is worth more than 2% the year before, and so on. If you graphed the percentage points it would be a steady horizontal line, but if you actually graphed the wealth, population and consumption it would be exponential. This probably helps explain:

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/arithmetic-population-and-energy-lecture/

Exponential growth is a fundamental pillar of modern economics, as is debt creation (also exponential) to fuel it. Without debt the modern economic wheel wouldn't turn (as displayed by the 2008 crash).

Therefore modern economics relies on ever increasing debt, and ever increasing growth on a planet with finite resources. There is a set amount of water, air, wood, land, food, coal, oil, gas, etc... on this Earth and that flies in the face of modern economic thinking. One is an undisputable fact, the other is a human invention that will ultimately fail, although not in our lifetimes (not completely anyway). It is essentially a gigantic ponzi scheme. It must have continued population growth, production growth, wealth growth to feed the top of the pyramid.

I understand this will come across as tinfoil hat stuff. But when it's boiled down to what runs the modern economy, what's required by a successful modern ecomony and the mathematic implications of this set up it should then come across as common sense that it's flawed. Ultimately rendering all of your questions moot since the very ideology doesn't work, none of the 'solutions' proposed by those supporting the ideology can solve the problem.

The west will (at least attempt to) rape the rest of the world before it gives up on these ideas.

Mistermeaner

How does the labour policy of wanting to borrow more vs the conservative policy of wanting to reduce borrowing fit with all of this?

CLAPTON

Moby wrote: »

Still waiting for your evidence Clapton?

what sort of 'evidence ' do you want: people like you probably deny that the IRA bombed Warrington, Birmingham, Brighton, Omagh
after all what actual EVIDENCE do we have?

Any way, you can listen to Corbyn REFUSING (five times) to condemn the IRA bombings on the BBC iplayer link I posted.
You choose to walk in their shoes or reject them.

And you claim to know these people so, if you had any courage, you can ask them.

TrickyTree83

Mistermeaner wrote: »

How does the labour policy of wanting to borrow more vs the conservative policy of wanting to reduce borrowing fit with all of this?

It's moot.

It doesn't matter, Labour or Conservative.

Reducing government borrowing will just prop up the current situation, excessive borrowing (see USA) begins to make people doubt the model. So one will be pushing the model to excess and the other will be attempting to keep it going as long as possible.

Ultimately both will fail.

It's like trying to argue what's better for you, a bullet to the head or a slow poison. Both have the same final result, they just achieve it in different ways.

Malthusian

TrickyTree83 wrote: »

Therefore modern economics relies on ever increasing debt, and ever increasing growth on a planet with finite resources. There is a set amount of water, air, wood, land, food, coal, oil, gas, etc... on this Earth and that flies in the face of modern economic thinking.

Oh look, it's my namesake Thomas Malthus, still faithfully banging the drum about exponential growth in demand on one hand and arithmetic growth in available resources on the other leading to inevitable disaster.

Malthusianism has been discredited for over a hundred years (ever more efficient use of our resources plus the fall in the birth rate as a population rises from subsistence means the hypothesised problem has never become reality) but stubbornly clings on to life among a certain breed of misanthrope who think the Stone Age ended when we ran out of stone.

(My username is ironic, if anyone's wondering.)

There is no such thing as current economic ideology. We started off with the claim that economics is "astrology". In other words, that because an economist cannot say for certain whether A or B will happen, they know nothing. This is, of course, rubbish. If I toss a fair coin I know that it has a 50% chance of landing heads and 50% tails - but I have no idea which of those it is going to land. This is still useful information if, for example, there's a bet riding on it. Or if the outcome of the flip will dictate my strategy for the upcoming cricket match. But the anti-economics brigade say "Ha! If you can't say which side it's going to land then you're useless!"

What they are doing is denying that there is a future which we can model and make predictions for. If you refuse to acknowledge that the future can be modelled then you can stuff yourself with crisps because no-one can say for certain that you'll get fat. You can rack up a massive overdraft because no-one can say for certain that your bank will charge you. You can print a billion pounds of banknotes because no-one can say for certain that it will cause inflation, impose controls on prices because no-one can say for certain that it will cause shortages, raid companies with windfall taxes because no-one can say for certain that investment will flee the country. Anyone who tries to tell you that actions have future consequences, well, that's basically astrology, innit.

CLAPTON

ruggedtoast wrote: »

Apparently Jeremy Corbyn met the Queen, who was once photographed next to Jerry Adams, and also he once put the phone down in an interview with a journalist repeatedly accusing him of being an IRA sympathiser.

I wonder if Clapton has ever been a journalist.

you can listen to Corbyn on the BBC iplayer and draw your own conclusions.

TrickyTree83

Malthusian wrote: »

Oh look, it's my namesake Thomas Malthus, still faithfully banging the drum about exponential growth in demand on one hand and arithmetic growth in available resources on the other leading to inevitable disaster.

Malthusianism has been discredited for over a hundred years (ever more efficient use of our resources plus the fall in the birth rate as a population rises from subsistence means the hypothesised problem has never become reality) but stubbornly clings on to life among a certain breed of misanthrope who think the Stone Age ended when we ran out of stone.

(My username is ironic, if anyone's wondering.)

There is no such thing as current economic ideology.

A well written piece of prose that is just wrong.

No such thing as economic ideology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_ideology

I'm sure you recognise some of the names of those economic ideologies.

Malthusian wrote: »

Malthusianism has been discredited for over a hundred years (ever more efficient use of our resources plus the fall in the birth rate as a population rises from subsistence means the hypothesised problem has never become reality) but stubbornly clings on to life among a certain breed of misanthrope who think the Stone Age ended when we ran out of stone.

Discredited for over a hundred years. At the start of which when oil was plentiful, the age of oil was just starting, the world population was 1.6 billion and medicine was just gathering pace compared to modern medicine. World population now stands at over 7 billion, each person consuming resource, each item they consume requiring resource to produce it and transport it. All made possible by cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, unless we can come up with a replacement for plastics, and free and abundant energy the situation you claim is discredited and by inferrence not possible will quite obvioulsy come to pass. If you want to continue to perpetuate this myth that finite resources can never run out under a paradigm of ever increasing consumption I hope you don't drag anyone else along with you on this deluded ride.

cells

TrickyTree83 wrote: »

I'll bite on this one.

Current economic ideology is flawed.

Success of a modern economy under the current paradigms is measured in percentage growth. So it is by definition exponential if growth targets remain at 2% consistently year on year, i.e. 2% this year is worth more than 2% the year before, and so on. If you graphed the percentage points it would be a steady horizontal line, but if you actually graphed the wealth, population and consumption it would be exponential. This probably helps explain:

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/arithmetic-population-and-energy-lecture/

Exponential growth is a fundamental pillar of modern economics, as is debt creation (also exponential) to fuel it. Without debt the modern economic wheel wouldn't turn (as displayed by the 2008 crash).

Therefore modern economics relies on ever increasing debt, and ever increasing growth on a planet with finite resources. There is a set amount of water, air, wood, land, food, coal, oil, gas, etc... on this Earth and that flies in the face of modern economic thinking. One is an undisputable fact, the other is a human invention that will ultimately fail, although not in our lifetimes (not completely anyway). It is essentially a gigantic ponzi scheme. It must have continued population growth, production growth, wealth growth to feed the top of the pyramid.

I understand this will come across as tinfoil hat stuff. But when it's boiled down to what runs the modern economy, what's required by a successful modern ecomony and the mathematic implications of this set up it should then come across as common sense that it's flawed. Ultimately rendering all of your questions moot since the very ideology doesn't work, none of the 'solutions' proposed by those supporting the ideology can solve the problem.

The west will (at least attempt to) rape the rest of the world before it gives up on these ideas.

Lots of empty statements cobbled together to try and make a silly story believable

The aim of the economy is to maximise wellbeing. To a large extent this means to maximise wealth but not fully (eg we reprocess waste at a cost rather than dump it in the ocean)

A modern economy does not need growth or exponential growth however we have for all of modern history seen growth and exponential growth. This will in my view continue until we reach a sufficient point where wealth is virtually unlimited.

The idea that the physical world is limited is an empty statement with regards to ecoboic growth as economic growth doesn't mean a continual increase in consumption of goods. The UK is a much richer and stronger economy than 25 years ago yet we use less fossil fuels bow than then.

cells

TrickyTree83 wrote: »

A well written piece of prose that is just wrong.

No such thing as economic ideology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_ideology

I'm sure you recognise some of the names of those economic ideologies.



Discredited for over a hundred years. At the start of which when oil was plentiful, the age of oil was just starting, the world population was 1.6 billion and medicine was just gathering pace compared to modern medicine. World population now stands at over 7 billion, each person consuming resource, each item they consume requiring resource to produce it and transport it. All made possible by cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, unless we can come up with a replacement for plastics, and free and abundant energy the situation you claim is discredited and by inferrence not possible will quite obvioulsy come to pass. If you want to continue to perpetuate this myth that finite resources can never run out under a paradigm of ever increasing consumption I hope you don't drag anyone else along with you on this deluded ride.

But we humans don't destroy anything we mearly move atoms around. Energy is a solved problem in the form of nuclear reactors be it the sun via PV panels or conventional LWRs

Longer term it's quite likely we will see a melding of mind and machine. In which case anything you desire or want or can imagine is just a electrical feeds to the neurons in your mind.

But most importantly of all we don't need to project hundreds or thousands or millions of years into the future. One generation is the beat we can or should do because the world and technology changes so much that making predictions beyond that is silly

TrickyTree83

cells wrote: »

Lots of empty statements cobbled together to try and make a silly story believable

Lets ignore the attack and focus on the facts.

The aim of the economy is to maximise wellbeing. To a large extent this means to maximise wealth but not fully (eg we reprocess waste at a cost rather than dump it in the ocean)

We reprocess waste due to the ecological damage it does in either procuring additional resource (i.e. aluminium) or by filling landfill/dumping. Our global economy has reached a point where in quite a few cases it's actually more efficient and cost effective to recycle than it is to harvest the resource from new. As scarcity increases, so does cost.

A modern economy does not need growth or exponential growth however we have for all of modern history seen growth and exponential growth. This will in my view continue until we reach a sufficient point where wealth is virtually unlimited.

A modern economy absolutely needs growth, it's a fundamental of it. Without increasing demand and production and consumption it's impossible to service increasing debt.

The idea that the physical world is limited is an empty statement with regards to ecoboic growth as economic growth doesn't mean a continual increase in consumption of goods. The UK is a much richer and stronger economy than 25 years ago yet we use less fossil fuels bow than then.

Economic growth inside the reality of an increasing population size and thus increasing consumption does mean increased use of resources. Of those resources used by the average human being some as I'm sure you'll agree are non-renewable/non-recyclable which inevitably means they either need to be replaced with a suitable substitute until that can be replaced or the process wil eventually end.

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