Interest rate targeting uses an unemployment buffer to keep wages and therefore prices under control. Poverty for those in work is entirely part of the plan. To fix the poverty problem you need to fix the structural viewpoint and return to the Beveridge condition - everybody must have an alternative living wage job offer available to them so that job competition works properly in favour of people. There must always be more jobs available than people that want them, not slightly fewer.
But that then runs into what Kalecki called "The Political Aspects of Full Employment" - a recommended read if you haven't already: https://mronline.org/2010/05/22/political-aspects-of-full-em...
Truly a 'wicked problem' - tied up with the concept of power
* You need very high import taxes, so goods have to be produced with local labour
* If truly automation were to become pervasive, that needs taxing
* You probably need restrictions to prevent money from crossing borders too easily
* You can't have open borders
(or)
* You have to strongly respond to illegals working (or legalize them, while still killing those illegal jobs), because they'll destroy the bargaining power of others
(this is, incidentally, why for 90% of history leftists and communists were strongly against immigration, and the right was pro-immigration. Even today, the right is still in favor of (limited) immigration, that doesn't seem to have changed much. But I sometimes wonder if it isn't the case that Trump won because a significant portion of the left electorate voted for him because of the labour competition due to immigration and tolerating of illegal immigrants and illegal immigrants' labour)
Its a kind of thing like the average number of hands per population is less than two. Seems counter intuitive, but when you think about it, it does make sense. One shouldn't relay on the expected value of people having two hands, for global population it's a tad lower.
People not looking for a job aren't included in that 5%, to be considered unemployed you have to be working less than 2 hours a week and looking for work.
More importantly that figure doesn't include the underemployed, those working at least 2 hours but looking for more.
Even at 5% unemployment, your condition can be satisfied. For example, jobs might be unfilled because the candidates are unwilling to move. The candidates might be unqualified... shall we hire a random person as a brain surgeon? There could be a dozen job openings per person, and still the unemployment rate remains above zero.
As you move toward 0% unemployment, you push harder and harder against the problem of unsuitable workers. Reaching 0% is a bit like traveling at the speed of light: it is an unreachable goal, with difficulty rising dramatically as you get close.
Or, if the dogs are intelligent, they could split those 19 bones to 20 pieces...
The reason 5% is considered full employment is there will always be a number of people who are unemployed because they are between jobs, for instance their partner has moved or they are rejoining the workforce after pregnancy or even looking for their first job.
Let's assume you are talking about sharing, as that's what the original point was about. Specifically the sharing of 19 bones among 20 dogs, by dividing up the bones.
Assumign by 'naive' you mean wrong, are you saying that it is simply a more optimal situation for one dog to go hungry?
Does the one dog always go hungry, or does one dog (but a different one each time) go hungry?
Do we just let the one dog go hungry each time intentionally, so that in future no dog goes hungry? What if then one day there are only 18 bones for 19 dogs? Do we let that dog die too?
What if a group of 18 dogs is required to take down an animal that provides enough bones, but we let the two other dogs die because sharing is naive?
Well, that pretty fundamentally calls into question rather a lot of all the principles civilisation is founded upon and which permeate nature, even (nature!).
So you better provide some amazing scientifically backed proof of that statement. No, Atlas Shrugged is not scientific proof.
You still haven't made a point.
Is the intelligent action the action that is most likely to benefit the group?
Is a group of 20 fed dogs stronger than a group of 20 dogs where one goes hungry and becomes a weak or unstable element?
Seems like you're just trying to somehow rally against equality and/or sharing, by associating them with naivité, like you have some knowledge others do not, because you don't like those words, rather than trying to actually discuss the concepts they represent, specifically in this context, properly.
The dog can die. It isn't my problem.
(On a more serious note, I fully expect automation to simply lead to automated armies defending the rich from the poor, rather than relieving any suffering anywhere. Productivity increases have not lead to (proportional) wage increases, have not lead to (proportional) reductions in working hours. The internet has not lead to information-driven utopia, but instead ad-serving dystopia. Automation will also fall to the deathly grip of capitalism, as does everything else.)
Interesting. We definitely have negative interest rates in some places by now. Now waiting for the income subsidy.
This may differ by country, but you typically only show up in the numbers if you were fired. After all, if you quit your job, you aren't involuntarily unemployed, which is what the numbers are supposed to measure.
How often do people get fired? I remember reading numbers of every 20 years on average (don't have the source handy, I'm afraid), but let's call it every 10 years to make it conservative.
In a situation of true full employment, with a plethora of employers looking for employees, at least low to medium skill workers should be able to find a new job basically immediately -- within a week perhaps. Let's be conservative again and call it two months.
This means people are unemployed for two months every 10 years on average, which translates to ~1.7% frictional unemployment. That's way less than the 5% number you cite.
In fact, several industrialized nations saw unemployment rates below 1% for some time between the Second World War and the 1970s. In other words, achieving well below 2% unemployment rate is absolutely realistic.
If you convert the delta to the 5% number you cite to the US workforce, you get about 5 million people. 5 million people who are suffering simply due to political ideology.
On a more political level, I think it's important to keep in mind that the current situation (where people misleadingly talk about full employment even for unemployment rates much higher than 2%) is very beneficial to employers, because it greatly strengthens their bargaining position. Now add the fact that the majority of funding for economics think tanks is aligned with employer interests, and it's clear why the public discourse may be somewhat skewed and biased towards accepting inhumanely high rates of unemployment.
Once there are only 19 dogs left, the number of bones will simply be reduced to (slightly more than) 18, because the prevailing ideology is that there must be 5% unemployment. (This is greatly simplified, of course, but that's the gist of it.)
Eventually you'll stop being lucky. And in any case, it's not always the same dog who gets unlucky. So yes, it is your problem, or at least it will be.
You don't 'give away' resources, they are transformed into other resources. Would you give up the ability to own seven cars for the knowledge that you'll never live under a bridge, no matter what? Many people would.
We are a social species that attained our dominant position on the planet through co-operation.
Then you'll get used to share your 5% , after some time he'll want to have 6.75% and you'll think- well , compared to 5% additional 1.75% is nothing for my safety! After some time other dogs will start to look with keen eyes on lazy dog lifestyle.
Considering the number of times this has happened in human history, any ideas of kingly invincibility you may have are unlikely to be realistic.
I know you've chosen this because you think it's a reductio ad absurdum counterxample, but really, if the market is desperately short of brain surgeons, you might think it would create more, cheaper places at medical schools.
Medicine is a uniquely restrictive market, hemmed in by legal protections and a labor guild system, but some version of this dynamic is operating in many sectors of the American economy: Companies refuse to pay for training, then whine that they can't find suitable candidates.
All complex life on earth exists because of cooperation. Competition drives some feature drift, but the biggest step changes happened because of the increase in complexity made possible by cooperation.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It's the nature of any gamble, and life certainly is one.
This is revisionism and ignores the whole "internationalism" vs "socialism in one country" debate. It also fails to recognise the history of nativist (far-)right anti-immigration parties and lefty anti-borders activists.
We're discussing the US here, and for the US this is not correct: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#unemployed
So no, I think not revisionist at all.
The example I've come across was of musical chairs. If there are 3 seats and 10 people, no matter what, some people will be out of luck.
I find it strange reading all the "get an education" or "don't have babies out of wedlock" attacks. If everyone in the country got PhDs, we still have the same level of poverty. If everyone married and then had babies, we'd still have the same level of poverty.
Lets say every american went to medical school and become doctors. You know what we'd have? A lot of doctors in poverty. If everyone became a software developer like me, we'd have hordes of poor developers.
The dominant economic system ( quasi mercantilistic capitalism with some social protections ) today pretty much guarantees poverty for a portion of the population. It's structurally systematic. The system is designed for income inequality and no matter what, we will have few extraordinary wealthy and lots of people in poverty. This is the dominant trend with a few blips ( the burgeoning of the middle class post ww2 US, but that was an anomally ).
If everyone had PhDs then those PhDs would be able to produce many more goods and services than exist now.
If everyone was doctors, then healthcare would be plentiful, and nobody would suffer from not having access to healthcare.
If the world was full of software engineers, then we would have a plentiful amount of software.
This is easier to consider by thinking about the opposite situation.
Imagine if we got rid of all of the doctors, software engineers, and farmers? What would happen?
We would quickly lose access to all of our healthcare, new software and then all of our food.
What am I saying people should do?
Conflict is adverted, and every dog continues to work together, as they all feel like participants in a mutually beneficial relationship between themselves as individuals, and the group as a whole.