/econ/ general

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forgot link:

technologyreview.com/s/519241/report-suggests-nearly-half-of-us-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-computerization/

So, now that nerd rapturists' "muh human productivity multiplierAI" argument has been BTFO over and over again, is there any way that socialism could cause people to willingly settle for less advancement in standard of life and technology in return for most of the population being allowed to go NEET, and break perpetual full employment?

I'm confused what you mean by this. Communism is about free time and nothing else, technological unemployment not being as big an issue as stated doesn't really impact this. A worker today has less time to spend on leisure than a peasant in Czarist Russia.

It's possible than technological unemployment could happen also, as the Oxford report suggest, I just think unlikely.

There's lots to be gained by us taking control of our production, the "higher living standards" aka production for production sake has not got us any closer to the utopia Adam Smith envisioned, and in states where the proletariat has less control of the state the gap in value distribution between proles and bourg has widene just like Marx said.

I should clearify what I mean by Marx's constant of technological unemployment is irrelevant
As laid out in Capital 1:
The fact that as production increases, more value will be laid out in constant to variable capital is correct
The fact that this constant to variable ratio will create a surplus population due to innovation is correct
That this surplus population is necessary for capitalism to function is correct - it must exist to be used by capital when new industries are created.
His view (which he may have abandoned when he formulated creative destruction) that the "compensation mechanisms" would not create new jobs is incorrect.

And that's the one the left focused on the most. It's generally accepte that widespread automation creates short terms unemployment but is fixed in the long run by workers switching between industries. This is exactly as Marx predicts in points 1-3, but 4 is most irrelevant unless the upcoming mass automation is truly unprecedented.

LTV is still scientifically accurate. The classical dichotomy of money is probably the reason why.

If Sraffian price systems have the same correlation with actual price as orthodox LTV, and we don't run into theoretical contradictions with the Sraffian system, why not just use the Sraffian price system for class analysis period? Wasn't Sraffa a socialist, or at least good friends with Gramsci?

I believe we had this discussion last general.

Sraffa's theory was a modified form of LTV.

When I said "full employment", I didn't literally mean full employment, at least not under capitalism. Under capitalism, of course there's always a reserve army of unemployed/underemployed to keep the proles in line.

I'm just contemplating whether culture could be changed in such a way as to tolerate truly massive unemployment in a stable way.

It wasn't Marx's LTV, it was a modified version of Ricardo's.

I don't think we're going to have to tolerate mass unemployment, I think the state will do an adequate job of tenuating whatever stability is lost in the upcoming wave of unemployment.

I wouldn't count on that. Means of production getting more sophisticated is not the same as that technology requiring more labor input in its production.

That's not what it means necessarily. It just means that as production increases, in order to compensate for the increased production you will require more of the available constant capital (whatever the technological development may be), to carry it out and even more to increase it (production on a progressively increasing scale).

Marx traces this in Capital (using statistics showing that the amount of say, looms in a factory was increasing in proportion to the working people of the factory) but I'd be curious if anyone had modern day statistics on this.

I don't get why demand curves are usually drawn the way they are. I don't mean wanting to buy more at lower price, but the way it is curved. In Samuelson, looking at it from left to right it starts as a steep fall, meaning lowering the prices a bit will barely change quantity sold, and at the end it becomes almost horizontal, so that slight changes in price have a drastic influence on how much you sell. Shouldn't it instead end with a steep drop like in this pic, meaning that at some hypothetical quantity people wouldn't want any more even for free?

I thought that Marx talked about an increase of work time going into producing mop relative to the fresh work directly applied in conjunction with the mop when the good is about to be sold, some ever-increasing delay or something like that. Which I don't see happening in real life.

I don't see what you mean by "delay", I mean the fact that the organic composition of capital will become proportionally higher constant than variable. He says nothing about delay. After that he talks about the behaviours of the surplus population. Chapter 25 in Volume 1.

It depends on what Qs and Qd are, you could have the steep drop - you could not.

Also, you usually write a squiggly line on the Y axis where the Qd and P aren't relevant. So if Qd doesn't decrease until $5.00, but then decreases by 5 people every $.50 cents, you'd draw a little squiggly line.

The supply/demand curve is meme tier, I have always failed to see how this could possible carry over empirically because you can't factor time into it.

And how do you know that as a fact? I of course don't dispute that such a shift was happening while Marx was alive, but can you say for sure that this has continued during, say, the past 30 years?

Yeah no shit. But the actual question was about the usual presentation of the demand curve. Should the rule-of-thumb assumption be that at very low price, quantity demanded changes extremely when the price changes a bit, as in Samuelson/Nordhaus, or should the assumption rather be that there is a limit how much people would want at a price of zero?