This explain everything

[Sauron]

Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian

blah blah blah

Hey coward - answer the question: why do you still live in the socialist/communist/leftist paradise of Italy?

[Vivisectus]

a sane person(aka non-leftist) recognize that is better to live with 3$ in a world where everyone make 3000$ than with 2$ in a world where everyone make 1$

LOL whut - it is better to have 1/3000th of the average wage than 200% of an average wage? How is that economics study going for you genius?

[Sauron]

Originally Posted by EinWhinyPlagarian

people aren't doing that for a simple reason:

Except they *are* doing it. People do it all the time.

Are you stupid or something? Your parents tell you lies to get you to settle down and behave, so you think other people will also believe lies?

free people are more likely to help their neighbours

half-slaves not

More stupidity by the kid living in his parent's basement.

Comparison of international rates of charity shows no correlation between taxation rate and % of income donated to charity.

[ZEZOZE]

Originally Posted by Sauron

Wrong. Demand creates jobs and new products.

well no. demand is demand and that greed could be satisfied by a rich man with a factory full of robots.

demand does not create new products. that doesn't make sense. the marketing department creates new products to create a demand.

[Sauron]

Originally Posted by ITSOZAZ

well no. demand is demand and that greed could be satisfied by a rich man with a factory full of robots.

Well, wrong. Even if the products had zero mfg cost and appeared magically - like from one of your mushrooms - someone still has to market, ship, sell, service and support those products. Unless you're going to assume that it's robots all the way down, then jobs are going to be created.

demand does not create new products. that doesn't make sense.

Yes, that is exactly what happens. Whether it makes sense to *you* or not is, quite frankly, irrelevant.

the marketing department creates new products to create a demand.

Wrong.

[ZEZOZE]

nope. you're wrong.

[Sauron]

Originally Posted by ITSOZAZ

nope. you're wrong.

Great.

AML is offline and I'm stuck here with an Excitable Bong Boy who wants to pick an argument.

[ZEZOZE]

i'm not picking an argument. i already won it.

cheerio, mate!

[erimir]

Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian

so you admit that obamamism/liberalism/socialism/communism or whatever you want to rebrand the term after every genocide and failure is all about envyness

a sane person(aka non-leftist) recognize that is better to live with 3$ in a world where everyone make 3000$ than with 2$ in a world where everyone make 1$

I think you'll find that most humans are based on "envyness."

Surveys asking a variation on that question find that most people would prefer to be the richest relative to everyone else rather than richer than they are now in absolute terms, but poorer than everyone else.

Human psychology naturally involves status and hierarchy, and acclimation, and as it turns out, people who perceive that they are at the bottom of the pile are less happy than ones who feel that they are above the average (of people they interact with, not of all people everywhere).

[ChuckF]

Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian

envyness

This explain everything

[seebs]

Actually, you're just plain wrong about the $3 vs. $2 comparison. See, a dollar isn't an amount of wealth, it's an amount of money. What matters to you in terms of survival or attaining your goals is not the number of money, but the stuff you can get for it. Inflation and deflation both change the value of money, and all they really come down to is a measure of the amount of money in circulation against the amount of stuff in circulation.

So if everyone but you earns $30 a month, and you earn $3 a month, you have 1/10 of what they can afford. If they spend 10% of their money on housing, and 10% on food, then you don't have enough money to have both housing and food. But if everyone but you earns $1 a month, and you earn $2 a month, the prices of food and housing and all those other things will be lower in dollars; if people spend 10% of their money on housing, that means they're spending 10 cents, and your $2 will go a very long way.

This isn't a question of opinion; this is a very, very, well-established fact.

But of course, there's another layer; the layer of perception of wealth. Here is where we get stuff like your idiotic denominator neglect, and it's also where we see comparisons. And yes, it's where we see people who feel poor because they have less than someone rich... And yet simply changing the framing makes people feel better.

So a lot of them do, because unlike you, they have wealth which they created through effort, and can derive pleasure from making that money do what they want done.

Are you familiar with the Oingo Boingo song Capitalism? The thing that makes it funny is that you're indistinguishable from the "middle class socialist brat" the song was written about. That your ludicrous fantasies of an impossible world revolve around your imagined wealth instead of imagined equality change nothing.

At the end of the day, the people you are trying so hard to hold in contempt produce more than you do, work harder, and are happier. And until you get out of the habit of blaming them for your own despair, you're not gonna get better.

[Joshua Adams]

Originally Posted by ITSOZAZ

i'm not picking an argument. i already won it.

cheerio, mate!

Of course demand is required to create jobs. Let's think it through.

Suppose President Obama mails a company a check for $50,000. What do they do with it? According to right-wing fantasy, this is a right and proper move for Obama because that money will be used to hire someone. But, this isn't necessarily true. A business will choose to use that money to hire someone (i.e. create a job) if they expect to be able to extract enough profit from the putative employee's labor to offset the cost of hiring. But the only reason you need labor is to create products or services. And you can only sell those if there's demand. If there's no demand, and they hire someone anyhow, the products will sit unpurchased, the services unused, and that $50,000 will more or less go down the drain. It would have been better for them to just pocket the check instead of hiring anyone with it, or invest it with another corporation. Because their bottom line comes out better that way than if they'd hired someone. And, apparently, that's exactly what happens when the government gives businesses money in the form of tax breaks, without doing anything to spur demand.

I'm no businessman, but this is all, as far as I know, well-known common sense. I may have stated a few things wrongly in a nitpicky way, but I'm sure others here can corroborate the general point with evidence.

So, demand. I'm not sure how much truth there is to the assertion that marketing can create demand out of thin air (it sounds plausible on its face, but I wouldn't expect it to have a huge, wide-ranging effect or anything). But, there is a way that demand can reliably be created: put money into the hands of people who don't have much of it. In other words, redistribution. This goes back to what I was saying before about the decreasing marginal utility of money. Rich people do create demand, of course, but crucially they do not create demand in proportion to the amount of money they have. A billionaire does not create a thousand times the demand of a millionaire. At some point, it kind of levels off, and before that, the growth slows considerably. One may be very wealthy, but he derives no extra benefit from purchasing excess food, or television sets, or what have you. He'll buy good food, a big TV, a very nice house (or a few houses), a nice sports car... yes, he'll spend more than a poor person, for sure. But he won't spend as much as if you divided his money up among 10 people, or (if his wealth is sufficiently large), 100. Because those 10 or 100 people won't share food and TVs and so forth, they'll all want to have their own.

Nobody proposes to do exactly that, but the principle holds. Take some of the rich man's excess, and give it to someone(s) at the subsistence level, and suddenly, more things will be bought. Demand will go up. Businesses will want to sell things to these people who suddenly have spending money, and they will need labor to bring their products to market. Really, everyone wins. At least until the robot revolution.

So, while businesses may speculatively be able to artificially create demand by hiring marketing people, this seems to be a gamble at best, and only benefits that specific company. So giving money to businesses and hoping they spend it that way doesn't seem like a great plan on the whole. It makes much more sense to increase the purchasing power of those who currently can't afford to buy much of anything beyond the necessities, since we can all but guarantee that they'll buy more things then. They'll be happier, businesses will be happier (and not just the one with the government grant to market a specific new gizmo). Everyone wins except spiteful asshole libertarians, so basically it's the best of all possible worlds.

[chunksmediocrites]

Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian

In a egualitarian country everyone is keep down at the same level at the worst idiot,drunk-addicted,heroine-abuser double IQ high school dropout useless idiot

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you talking about nations with the least income inequality, or the lowest Gini coefficient, that have policies in place to keep income inequality low?

Low income income inequality in at least the social democracies mostly translates to a condition where you can make a living and live comfortably, support a family, achieve educational goals, and not have to worry about medical bills bankrupting you. And the people there poll as pretty happy, generally. This in part may be because their crime rates are low, their employment levels are high, and the ratio of have-nots is pretty small. They pay a lot more taxes, but at the same time have infrastructure, education, health care, and social safety nets- for everyone.

This doesn't preclude people from rising on their ability or merit; there is plenty of tech design, innovation, doctors, and scientists coming out of these nations. So that's hardly a society that has egalitarian goals equaling being "kept down at the same level as the worst".

Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian

yeah we don't have equality of opportunities but this is a feature of capitalism not a bug(why should I work more to pass more wealth to my sondaughter if inheritance is abolished?

Why would a libertarian or an anarcho-capitalist want to pass any wealth to their offspring? Surely their offspring must live or die on their own merits in Meritocristan? Passing on wealth sounds like goddamn freeloading! I assume a libertarian burns all their wealth or is buried with all their toys so no one else can play with them.

Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian

...the fact there are rags to riches stories like J.K. ROWLING prove a thing .. you have ZERO excuses if you are not rich because you can do it and I can give you a long list of people amassing a vast amount of wealth starting with nothing.....

I'll quote this list again because it applies perfectly. Bolding is my own.

I guess our entire philosophy about money kind of revolves around this premise -- that there is no poor or working class, but only people who have chosen to not buckle down to the task of getting rich (and thus deserve whatever salary, insecurity or poor work conditions they get). So there should be no talk about improving the lives of the non-rich, since any of them can simply choose to elevate themselves out of that group, right?

Seriously, now. How much time do you really have to spend off your goddamned yacht to see that this isn't true? You don't even need to leave the dock -- there's a guy standing right there who you pay to fix your boat's engine. You know that 1) you absolutely need guys like him and 2) he will never get rich doing what he does. He could be great at his job, he might be the Michael Jordan of mechanics, he might work 100 hours a week -- it doesn't matter. Sure, if that one guy somehow also has the head for management and finance and the networking skills, he could maybe open his own chain of yacht repair shops. But they can't all do that.

So "anyone can get rich" isn't just untrue, it's insultingly untrue. You can't have a society where everyone is an investment banker. And you can't have a society where you pay six figures to every good policeman, nurse, firefighter, schoolteacher, carpenter, electrician and all of the other ten thousand professions that civilization needs to survive (and that rich people need in order to stay rich).

It's like setting a jar of moonshine on the floor of a boxcar full of 10 hobos and saying, "Now fight for it!" Sure, in the bloody aftermath you can say to each of the losers, "Hey, you could have had it if you'd fought harder!" and that's true on an individual level. But not collectively -- you knew goddamned well that nine hobos weren't getting any hooch that night. So why are you acting like it's their fault that only one of them is drunk?

I'd add to this that not only is a vast underclass a built-in functional requirement of capitalism, but what is also required is about 4% unemployment, at least. On the occasions unemployment has dropped below that level, capitalism's alarm bells go off and the unemployment rate is induced to rise. So how that gibes with your view that "if one is not rich, they have only to blame themselves" speech, I don't know.

Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian

(no matter how you put it: it is morally wrong coerce Bill Gates at gun-point to pay for your college END OF STORY)

Morally wrong how? You just got done saying life wasn't fair, and that some people are just better at what they do than others. What if I'm simply better at "forcing" Bill Gates at "gun-point" to pay for my college education, than he is in avoiding my use of force?

Your morality play is one of convenience and artifice. Poor people? In your model, they can either prosper or die, life isn't fair. Pollutants? If you don't like mercury in the air, then don't live in- or within several thousand miles of- China, India, or the US! You see this stance as entirely moral.
But Bill Gates taxed to fund education for people poorer than he is? People that may even be the future skilled and educated workforce he requires to write his software, design his hardware, market his products? Why that's a moral outrage! Regulating mercury emissions in any way other than through the invisible hand of the free market? Why, that's massively immoral!

[Stormlight]

a sane person(aka non-leftist) recognize that is better to live with 3$ in a world where everyone make 3000$ than with 2$ in a world where everyone make 1$

Oh dear lordy me. Extraordinary! Lolconomics.

[But]

Originally Posted by Sauron

Yes, that is exactly what happens. Whether it makes sense to *you* or not is, quite frankly, irrelevant.

Wrong.

How much of all demand is manufactured should be quite difficult to find out, but it's a multi-billion dollar industry by itself. ITS1111 of course, as usual, has the gears of the mechanism in the wrong order and should lay off the weed for a while. It makes everything fuzzy and general in high doses.

[Sauron]

Originally Posted by But

How much of all demand is manufactured should be quite difficult to find out, but it's a multi-billion dollar industry by itself. ITS1111 of course, as usual, has the gears of the mechanism in the wrong order and should lay off the weed for a while. It makes everything fuzzy and general in high doses.

What Bong Boy hasn't figured out yet is that creating a product won't create any jobs, unless there is sufficient demand to justify mass production of the new product. Five guys in marketing hobbling together a mock-up of a new product is not going to cut it. There has to be pre-existing demand at levels sufficiently high enough to warrant the investment in production. That is why one of the functions of marketing is to figure out what customer wants/needs are. <--- Also known as customer demand analysis. Then with that information, go in an design (or alter) a product to meet the demand.

Demand is creating the new product, or setting guidelines for altering the existing product. All Marketing is doing is (hopefully) an accurate assessment of demand requirements as they translate into product features. As well as - again, hopefully - correctly gauging the level/intensity of demand. Both will be needed before approval is given to proceed to the next stage.

It's very rare that any marketing department creates brand new demand out of thin air. Generally what you see is existing demand for some other existing product being siphoned off and directed toward the new product.

For everyone else's benefit. It's all wasted on Bong Boy, though.

[ZEZOZE]

Originally Posted by Joshua Adams

So, demand. I'm not sure how much truth there is to the assertion that marketing can create demand out of thin air (it sounds plausible on its face, but I wouldn't expect it to have a huge, wide-ranging effect or anything). But, there is a way that demand can reliably be created: put money into the hands of people who don't have much of it. In other words, redistribution.

i appreciate your well thought out response, but you lose me here. we create all sorts of things out of thin air. redistribution satisfies demand, it does not create it. you seem to be talking about a way to eliminate demand (which is fine with me), not how or why it is created. that same insatiable appetite for what's right by the masses is the same instinct that drives the few. demand is about greed. i mean...just look at the word! greed is a concept that is marketed to. it a concept borne out of what is natural...like thin air.

maybe i'm wrong, but i don't think you had an argument with me. but i still think you managed to make a point.

but then i'm often wrong.

[seebs]

Originally Posted by Sauron

What Bong Boy hasn't figured out yet is that creating a product won't create any jobs, unless there is sufficient demand to justify mass production of the new product. Five guys in marketing hobbling together a mock-up of a new product is not going to cut it. There has to be pre-existing demand at levels sufficiently high enough to warrant the investment in production.

This is a gross oversimplification. Sufficiently innovative products can create new categories of product, which exist in new markets that were not preexisting.

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by seebs

This is a gross oversimplification. Sufficiently innovative products can create new categories of product, which exist in new markets that were not preexisting.

But for a new product and market to get off the ground, there must be a pre-existing need or desire that product fulfills or a problem that product resolves or claims to...ie: demand

Some companies seem able to create demand out of whole cloth, Disney for one, Apple is pretty good at it too.

[ceptimus]

Occasionally, something completely new comes along. The Rubik cube was a good example. People had no idea that they wanted such a thing until it was invented and shown to them.

The internet is another example. People weren't exactly clamouring for it thirty, or even twenty years ago.

[LadyShea]

In general people want/like/need challenges, entertainment, diversion, and information (amongst other things). So they may have not have known they wanted any specific product like the Rubik's cube (which is really just a type of puzzle which isn't new) or Internet, but there is still pre-existing demand in desires/needs/problems.

Why I mentioned Disney though, is that I can't think of even a general pre-existing demand for disparate movie Princesses being put together into one brand and creating a multi-million dollar market for it.

[lisarea]

There is a kind of punctuated equilibrium to consumer demand. Disruptive technologies, and on a smaller scale, killer apps.

Those are pretty much unpredictable, though. They rely on so many different factors that you can't really push or predict them accurately. It just depends on the zeitgeist or something; and if you try to start something a little before the public a little ahead of time, or with the wrong use case or interface or marketing strategy, a technology or other innovation that might have taken off otherwise can fizzle and die.

[LadyShea]

Disruptive technologies

What does that mean? It's the third time I've seen it in a few weeks and I don't understand

[lisarea]

It's an innovation that, effectively, creates a new market demand. Basically, the technology fundamentally changes the way people do things, rather than filling an extant need. Sometimes they replace an older technology, sometimes they create a whole new way of doing things.

So a broadly disruptive technology might include something like VHS players, which created a new demand for consumer media, supplanting to some extent other entertainment options, including broadcast TV and movie theaters.

On a smaller scale, various types of media tend to disrupt existing types. VHS -> DVD -> streaming content, or vinyl records -> 8 tracks -> cassettes -> CDs -> digital music formats. Things like that.

It doesn't even have to be anything new. Digital music players had been around for a while before the iPod was introduced, but the iPod was really the disruptive technology probably because of timing and design factors.

[seebs]

Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma looks at this.

Multitasking is a good example. Back in the 1980s, I regularly got into arguments with MS-DOS users who insisted that it was useless for a computer to be able to run multiple applications at once, because that's stupid; you can't use multiple applications at once!

When multitasking became widely available, new kinds of programs became possible, and then once those programs existed, demand came into being.

Basically, it's hard to create demand for something people wouldn't have wanted, but it's easy to create demand for something they currently don't have any desire for, because people rarely desire things they can't conceive of.