The economics of almost everything | Daniel Markovits, Martin Wolf, Madeleine Pennington

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4 ай бұрын

Daniel Markovits, Martin Wolf and Madeleine Pennington rethink fundamental principles in economics.
What is the meaning of productivity today?
Watch the full debate at iai.tv/video/the-economics-of...
"Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything" claimed Paul Krugman. Throughout the twentieth century productivity, the average level of output for each hour worked, improved dramatically across the developed world. A greater increase than in the previous 2000 years. Driven by life changing technologies, such as electricity, combustion engines, and phones, living standards increased sevenfold. But since the 2008 financial crisis, despite computerisation and the internet, productivity growth in many countries has been low, static or even, in the case of Japan, falling.
Might the 20th century's extraordinary growth prove to be a unique event? Is tech itself the problem, seemingly creating solutions but in fact encouraging pointless activity? Or is the mistake to focus on productivity in the first place, and should we instead change how we value our activities and our time?
This debate was sponsored by Theos.
#philosophydiscussion #economics #productivity
Chief Economics Commentator for the FT Martin Wolf, Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits and Head of Research at Theos, Madeleine Pennington debate whether the 21st century will prove to be unique.
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Пікірлер: 37

@TheInstituteOfArtAndIdeas 4 ай бұрын

What are your thoughts on the meaning of productivity today? Let us know in the comments! Watch the full debate here: iai.tv/video/the-economics-of-almost-everything?KZbin&+comment

@DiscipleOfHeavyMeta1 4 ай бұрын

If productivity is the objective, we're hardly perceiving any rewards.

@DiscipleOfHeavyMeta1 4 ай бұрын

@@rorymatthews Of course, but, it's not 99.9% of the population.

@MADmaxazillion 4 ай бұрын

A huge problem with productivity for the sake of productivity is that it is at the expense of wealth. Most businesses destroy wealth in order to make money. Realistically, the only productivity of value is food production and shelter production, everything else is a waste of resources and is only done so that a self appointed elite can get a free ride. It's enforced by a mythology that if you don't work then you don't deserve to eat, but in a post agricutural society food production becomes so easy relative to hunting and gathering that most people won't need to work. So what's the solution? Well that is what sports, art and philosophy are for. Plant crops, sit around and play while the crops grow, maintain their health as needed, then harvest, enjoy the bounty, preserve some for tomorrow, and repeat. It's not that complicated. But the political and religious establishments won't have it. They need us slaving away, making garbage to sell so they can extract as many wealth tokens as possible so they never have to do anything. What a great system!

@SlickSimulacrum 4 ай бұрын

Productivity is not the goal, profits are the goal. And in the highly financialized world of capital, money has become nothing more than a tool to accumulate all physical wealth in the world. Money is just the power they can use to take everything from us. Productivity declines as they accumulate more and more. Innovation risks their hold on wealth, so it is left behind. The slow process of capitalism realizing the declining rate of profit as accumulation breaks down the cycles. Where those who have taken the whole pie are now in the process of re-feudalizing society. ---- Imagine what a nit wit piece of trash you would have to be to defend this steaming sh*tpile. Right-wing = garbage.

@ywtcc 4 ай бұрын

The problem with productivity is how economists measure it. If you go by amount of money earned per hour worked, that's pretty close to what an economist thinks is productive. If anyone in your management team thinks the employee with the biggest paycheck that is doing the least amount of work is productive, you need to fire that manager. It's a measure that's more likely to produce the opposite result than what common sense, or an English literate understanding of productivity will lead you to. The English word for the kind of "productivity" economists imagine: greed. Ultimately, it's because this kind of productivity should never be applied to some subset of a monetary base - it's completely inappropriate beyond that. So, keep in mind that when economists are defending productivity at any level other than the monetary base, they're making excuses for rent seekers and parasites.

@DiscipleOfHeavyMeta1 4 ай бұрын

@@ywtcc I don't think it's something as basic as pure greed, but you're right on everything else.

@richardharvey1732 4 ай бұрын

Hi I AI, this starts with one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard!, the idea that all those people with an income of less than two dollars per day are not productive is just plain stupid!. In sub-cultures where money is not part of their lives it cannot be used to measure productivity. Actually money cannot ever be used as an objective metric because it does not even exist!. To establish some form of objective metric would have to begin with finding some deciding if the metric should be physical or conceptual, by this I mean that either quantity of physical material or by volume of energy gained, given that energy and mass are interchangeable without loss. Any other metric based on human cultural assumptions fails completely on any objective test, all styles of measurement remain subjective and highly variable, he actually understands this from the start by talking about income differentials that have equivalence. Cheers, Richard.

@locman6228 4 ай бұрын

productivity is leveling out because business management is filled with leadership that is status quo focused. Innovation is looked upon as a fond idea.

@ywtcc 4 ай бұрын

I try to adopt a broad definition of productivity. I start with the idea of a cost / benefit analysis of some process. Then, I say productivity is benefit per unit cost. This is a broader definition than what's presented in economics, in which monetary productivity is what's measured. The economic is a powerful analysis, to be sure, but I don't think it's the final one. If you think of the economy as an aggregate of many independent agents, then it's easy to see how these agents engage in monetary productivity and non monetary productivity in varying degrees at different times. For one, I intend to retire at some point, and engage in very different kinds of productivity for as long as I can! Perhaps we should be thinking about cultural productivity, democratic productivity, and social productivity when monetary productivity becomes less demanding.

@SlickSimulacrum 4 ай бұрын

Your head is super glued in isn't it?

@ywtcc 4 ай бұрын

@@SlickSimulacrum It's screwed on pretty good. I have a broader view of the sciences, and don't take kindly to certain fields that have such a hard time contextualizing themselves. Especially when it's coming from a field of financial advisors and social engineers that are apparently entirely unfamiliar with the concept of science in the first place.

@rd9831 4 ай бұрын

Some people are more equal than others.

@timkoprivnik9875 4 ай бұрын

great short debate!

@marcusfava9141 4 ай бұрын

Great stuff! Only criticism is the full video should be on youtube. As you can not listen to it with the screen off/in your pocket while walking/being productive from the browser.

@TheDynamicmarket 6 күн бұрын

wages haven't been rising with productivity for decades everywhere. it is a conflict between labour and capital.

@fardeenkhan2889 4 ай бұрын

We need a society where on local grounds there are some bodies like watchtowers produce economical incentive for those individual by creating positive - sum strategies who are working for the well being of the society_like a literally digital rating system that are not aware of how it takes things into accounting or positive sum for people. Though this need of more centralization / some randomization / game theory concept for the watchtowers how they rate the local environment... So then for humans productivity can just not be measured in labour but in terms of coordination+ alignment + positive social input.

@nessuno3048 4 ай бұрын

We can have a society that tries to increase in a very imperfect, unjust and uncertain way security, wealth and few other things or a society which pretends to pursue abstarct moral values that evil people never respect.

@progyandas9650 4 ай бұрын

Paul Krugman is a neoliberal economist , productivity has been going up for five decades in the west ....the debate should be structured around stagnant wages and boosting public infrastructure.

@SlickSimulacrum 4 ай бұрын

Productivity has only been going up if your metrics are a joke. If you consider rentier practices to be productivity, you are an imbecile. and yes, Krugman is an imbecile. All neoclassicals are imbeciles. Just look at who they give awards to, and then read a little of the sh*tpiles that they think are great works... Ripping off the global south isn't "productivity" either. That's just slavery, neocolonialism, and imperialism. How many children had to starve today so you could have a latte before going to a job that produces nothing, and serves no purpose for society? *rhetorical --- You're not even close to the mark for the level of systemic change required. And I haven't even added climate change to the list of problems looming. *Once we add that it becomes almost impossible to do anything but go huddle in a corner and remain motionless out of dread. Without taking down the entire system of ruling class, and redistributing not only wealth, but the productive powers as a whole. The world and human condition is just walking off a cliff with no rope, and no parachute. Localized productivity where applicable, balanced trading where there are no winners and losers. (Mutual Benefit) If you cannot erase all competition from the national and international arena, by erasing all the hegemons who maintain said competitive behaviors of winners and losers, (almost all humans are going to die) How naive you are to think that wage equity and public infrastructure are going to save you from anything... It is a million times worse than you could ever imagine. --- We're at a point now where if you're still sitting at the capitalism v socialism debate, we're already dead. --- I'm under no illusion that there is enough political or economic literacy in the populous to make any such change possible. I'm under no illusion to think that we aren't already completely f*cked. Maybe in the next 10 years you and the majority of the illiterate will become enlightened enough that I become optimistic again. I'm not holding my breath. Public infrastructure is against the interests of those who already own almost everything, and would like to own the rest. They will be responsible for killing humanity.

@ywtcc 4 ай бұрын

The debate should be about how someone could measure an entirely parasitic, rent seeking institution as being productive. This is the problem with money as a means, end and the oracle of all truth style economics.

@progyandas9650 4 ай бұрын

@@ywtcc That's a good point as well .

@BillyViBritannia 4 ай бұрын

GDP is only relevant if you think the world is fundamentally locked in this zero sum game between nations. It makes no sense to measure a global GDP... What are we going to compare it against, the economy of the martians? And yet it makes total sense to think about the global well being of humans. GDP and quality of life are not even remotely comparable qualities.

@nandfednu3502 4 ай бұрын

humanity is in the inefficiency, if we were efficient we would be automatons

@user-wd3gt9dw5z 4 ай бұрын

❤❤❤❤

@gregmellott5715 4 ай бұрын

The bottom line legal effect of ownership is to simply try to clarify ~accountability~. The headache comes when it leads the 'owners" seek empowerment for keeping a system at a "deemed" standard (weather personally derived, or demanded by a system of governance) while impacting the potentials of other's management attempts, for what ever reason. Then walls go up in many forms to protect something deemed most necessary, and often limiting the relationships ~needed~ to generate healthier states at all the levels that life might best be exercise that. Community is lost in a ~see~ of dreams because it cannot find a footing in physically notable reality. No doubt our soul desires toward seeking expressions of God's nature. Honestly though, such will only happen in the fullness of God's potentials that includes that One's infinity; and thus is not substantively possible within view that physical senses are deemed to be the dominant last word. Our present potentials rather only allows us to express an ~uplifting vision~ of what that could be when we are returned to the source of it all that enables our souls to truly fly as they really wish in God's wholesome nature.

@gbickell 4 ай бұрын

The big problem is that most economic theory that moves government and a lot of people is from the mid-1800s. Based on that dogma, there is going to be little to no progress in addressing human needs or wants because continued growth in production is unrealistic and we need a more effective way of distribution of wealth. One way is through tax. There are others and they might require a serious rethinking of just what political economy means. The only one talking sense is the guy on the right. The fella on the left is talking rubbish or in other words, 'management speak'.