America Is Running Out of Everything The global supply chain is slowing down at the very moment when Americans are demanding that it go into overdrive. By Derek Thompson
That’s why Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan includes billions of dollars to reshore manufacturing, invest in basic research, and beef up domestic supply chains.
Even if this plan is fully funded and realized, isn’t it just inevitable it’ll all end up overseas again because of the pursuit of profit? Unless the federal gov subsidizes it for the rest of time.
Yeah, there is no market solution to this. This declining rate of profit is one of the key contradictions marx talks about
You can look up "Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall", but it's essentially (very condensed) the hypothesis that more automation makes things less profitable (because added value comes from labor), which is one of the reasons capitalism will inevitably collapse on itself.
Bold of you to assume my ADHD will allow me to look it up.
Jokes aside, can I get an example or scenario where
automation makes things less profitable
This happens? (Easier for me to understand it conceptually that way)
Or you can ignore das ok.
Edited preface: in writing my simplified explanation, I did butcher this a bit. As SadStruggle92 points out below, what's meant by "labor" here is the average labor necessary to produce a given commodity, not the labor of a specific worker. It's the socially-necessary labor-time, the actual basis for the Labor Theory of Value.
IE someone taking three times as long to make something as the average worker adds the same amount of value, rather than three times as much - which, incidentally, is a gotcha a lot of liberals who've never read Marx think they've found in the LTV. The below is only meant as a quick explanation, please read Capital if you really want all the detail.
It's as @Alaskaball said, to decrease costs companies automate more. This means less labor. Since labor is the only thing that can really actually create value, less labor necessary means less value added means less profit.
For example, if a worker makes widgets and produces $100 an hour of value, he might only be paid $20. This is $80 of profit for the owner of the factory. Let's assume that the whole industry is like this, at a kind of cost-profit equilibrium.
Now, there's a technological innovation and that worker is replaced by a machine that only costs $10 per hour to run. For a short amount of time, the owner will make more, but as that automation spreads around to competitors he'll be forced to decrease the sale price to compete, until he can no longer decrease it further (i.e. tends towards no profit, only covering costs of machine).
Or, in other words, machines can only impart the value they hold (investment to buy and maintain them) into products, since they do no labor. Workers alone can produce added value. Honestly, I feel like I'm kind of butchering it, but Capital covers it pretty well IIRC.
What happens when no profit anymore? Market crash? Bailout? Subsidize?
All possible responses, yeah. Marx also had a list of things that help (temporarily) raise the rate of profit, which I'm going to copy from Wikipedia.
- More intense exploitation of labor (raising the rate of exploitation of workers).
- Reduction of wages below the value of labor power (the immiseration thesis).
- Cheapening the elements of constant capital by various means.
- The growth of a relative surplus population (the reserve army of labor) which remained unemployed.
- Foreign trade reducing the cost of industrial inputs and consumer goods.
- The increase in the use of share capital by joint-stock companies, which devolves part of the costs of using capital in production on others.
There's an economist (several, I think, but one that I know of off the top of my head) who's sort of made demonstrating the TRPF hypothesis his life's work. He's got a blog at thenextrecession.wordpress.com if you're interested in seeing modern, real-world data related to this.
Thanks for the explanation and that blog. I'll check it out.
But something's got to give at some point right, where it reaches a breaking point?
But something’s got to give at some point right, where it reaches a breaking point?
Yeah, and there's ways it can be mitigated. That blog has some sort-of-case-studies about it. But the idea of the TRPF hypothesis is that it's eventually not reconcilable and the economy will destroy itself. For example, imagine an economy where no one worked and everything was fully automated. How would it be possible to profit?
I always hesitate to use "inevitable" because it feels like counting chickens before they've hatched. For example, society could destroy itself in a climate apocalypse. :agony-mescaline:
But, like, eventually? Yeah, things should tend towards it.
Also you could end up like last time and have a giant global war over shares of profit. Thereby destroying a ton of aggregate capital and reseting accumulation.
Why do I feel like that's the most likely scenario :deeper-sadness:
Damn theres that too. Insha Allah Xi pushes the button before that happens
monkey's paw curls
He does, but it's the wrong button. :xi-plz:
The growth of a relative surplus population (the reserve army of labor) which remained unemployed.
Isnt it equavilent to the more intense exploitation since it does it by facilitating the more intense exploitation? If so why include it as a separate point?
Also another way to increase the rate of profit is establishment of monopolies
Can't all the capitalists just form a cartel and not actually lower prices and compete with each other?
It's like how they can probably make lightbulbs that last way longer but everyone decided not to. Dubai specially ordered longer lasting ones that can only be sold there.
It’s like how they can probably make lightbulbs that last way longer but everyone decided not to.
i don't think that's how it really happens, it's just that you as a consumer can't really see too far beyond the price tag, that would require perfect information that you don't really have (except in extreme cases)
programmed obsolescence is not exactly a conscious choice by all capitalists, it's just an expression of how shit the price system becomes after a certain level of productivity - living in a reality of scarcity, you tend to buy whatever is cheaper because you don't really know how much longer a more expensive choice would last, which makes those products more competitive, which, in turn, forces capitalists to make that choice
it's a downward spiral of waste and overconsumption that everyone is basically forced into just because of how capitalism works
No, the lightbulb thing is definitely real, LED lightbulbs should last forever if they're actually ran to spec.
They design the lightbulbs to overheat the LEDs because they send too much power through them and they die. An LED lightbulb should not be hot to touch but they all are because they don't really care.
This is about the Dubai bulbs, and even veritasium did a video on it
The lightbulb conspiracy is the only one I actually believe in capitalists getting in a room to form a cartel for. That and telecom companies in Canada.
You're right. I'm familiar with the concept of socially-necessary labor-time, but I was trying to do an ELI5 and unfortunately butchered it a bit in the process. I simply meant that labor has to be necessary to add value.
The point being that, if everything is completely automated everywhere, socially-necessary labor-time to produce anything is zero. No labor to be done, no surplus value to be extracted, no profit.
Gonna edit my post to point out it's the average necessary labor that counts, thanks for pointing it out.
Nice and basic, automation and mass-production increases supply, which as you guess makes shit more available which in turn makes it less valuable, which makes the product less profitable, which then drives for more automation to replace expensive workers to cut costs and boost profit, then repeat from the top until the market crashes.
Labor is the only commodity that can be bought by a capitalist at less than its value, because its not sold by a capitalist. This is the source of all profit from capitalist enterprises. When capitalists replace workers with machines, they pay full value for the machines (can't exploit them) so they stop making profits. Also the workers they laid off no longer have money to buy whatever commodities they're selling.
Leofits by nature have to fall over time. Eventuall you will sell a toaster to everyone that needs a toaster. If the market opens up enough there will eb competition meaning you make less. Toasters will fall out of fashion. Parts get cheaper because you have made enough toasters to develop an econony fo scale. In a logistical sense the there is only so much money to be made in any one way. That's why they keep releasing new models of stiff. A hundred other ways I am sure. However if the business logic is to do what makes the most money. And it is. The only actions you can isentivize the market to produce are ones liek what we have already seen.
So if biden spends a billion to make a factory, it will just automate and offshore as those are the actions incentivized by the market.
This is always a good point to bring up with left-leaning folks who are still holding on to the idea that some heavily-regulated form of capitalism might be OK. Even if you manage the gargantuan task of putting even basic limits on capitalism to mitigate its worst effects, those limits are just going to get chipped away again in a few decades at most. Capitalism is corrosive to any restrictions applied to it.
my younger dumbass lib self used to say "capitalism is a raging river and we just have to dam it to make it useful". i guess the analogy while libshit sort of still makes sense if the river is made of sulfuric acid
Also, this is like how they've found that expanding roads doesn't actually reduce traffic, because more people drive as a result.
"Surely we can grow our way out of this growth problem!"
we’re also suffering from a dearth of a shocking array of things—test kits, car parts, semiconductors, ships, shipping containers, workers.
One of these things is not like the other
something something man himself becomes the most wretched commodity
(I know I'm using it wrong, don't @ me, it's a shitpost)
Oh, is this about increasing the birth rate? I just spent several minutes trying to figure out what my comment has to do with sex.
Play innocent all you want, you're on our watchlist now :volcel-judge:
I thought I was making a funny joke about talk-to-the-manager type Americans wanting to simply order more workers so they can more efficiently get refills at Applebees, but I guess I accidentally made a sex joke. :deeper-sadness:
:volcel-judge: :volcel-judge: :volcel-judge: Ignorance of the Volcel law is no excuse for Hornyposting.
Now I find myself in a quandary: I'm in favor of abolishing the police, but I also think hornyposting is annoying.
The volcel police meme is technically a form of communal self-defense against being a horny weirdo :bean-think:
A lot of economist talk simply refers to human workers as "bodies."
Have to obscure the essential nature of exploitation in capitalist production somehow, otherwise people might start getting funny ideas
Also, like, test kits for what? Electronics? Covid? Drugs? Pool water?
Screaming LMAO GOTEM as I die in nuclear fire. :posadist-nuke:
lmao. though I was thinking more of a "please metaphorically nuke us with communism".
That's exactly what I'M saying. :posadas: :possadist-ufo: :hexbear-posadist: :xi-plz: :nuke: :posadist-nuke: :posad: :communism-will-win:
doing the fortnite dance as my skin slowly slides off my bones onto the floor
Next-day deliveries are becoming day-after-next deliveries.
MUH NEXT DAY TOILET PAPER
No I gotta order everything in one disposable cardboard box, so I can waste unimagineable amounts of water and yell at minimum wage employees.
saw this article during an anger-scroll through r/lockdownskepticism. Most comments: "See! We told you lockdowns didn't work!" Yeah, this is definitely because of lockdowns, not, like, a global pandemic that has overwhelmingly affected workers and which many countries continue to refuse to appropriately deal with.
My favorite comment:
And I bet this article did not say "lockdowns" or vaccine mandates or mask mandates or super unemployment benefits. The media willfully created the covid hysteria, supported lockdowns, but won't admit that government policy they incited are causing this!
You would be correct. Nary a word about lockdowns , vaccine mandates or mask mandates.
This just in! Mask mandates have destroyed the global supply chain!
Also I love Americans who have like pretty much no restrictions at this point, but continue to act as if they're being forced at gunpoint to remain in their homes. Like, you want to go out to eat so bad, just do it, don't whine about a fake lockdown.
Cmon I love hexbear but like half of what we do here is just post shit for each other to get mad at together
Yeah, but it's supposed to stay in the_dunk_tank so it's easy to avoid.
It does bleed over, but IIRC I've seen mods remove stuff for being in another comm when it was dunk_tank material.
yeah there are definitely good vibes on this site. i do have to be careful to take breaks often though or i will just start making myself mad, especially from the_dunk_tank. going through r/lockdownskepticism once every couple of months isn't too bad, I already get all those arguments from my friends anyway
i do have to be careful to take breaks often though or i will just start making myself mad, especially from the_dunk_tank
I'm going to shill the megathreads. You ever post in the megathreads? Good vibes in the megathreads.
i gotta get back into the megathreads. i used to exclusively look at the megathreads when we were on the subreddit, but now on the new site i rarely look/post in them
Yeah the dunk tank is bad and imo should only exist to quarantine that type of thing to one comm
Yeah the dunk tank is bad
Look some people like poisoning their brain with the worst takes imaginable
the_dunk_tank is necessary to keep use of the :agony: set of emoji at peak ideal frequency
They'll spend the next 20 years acting like that one-time unemployment boost was a permanent UBI.
vaccine mandates or mask mandates
Dear god, they're idiots. But yeah, @CopsDyingIsGood is right, not recommended to do this to your own blood pressure.
Quote : " Many of these materials have to be imported from or travel through East Asia. But that region is dealing with the Delta variant,"
Speak : Its not like we dont have the Delat varient , its just that we dont "Deal" with it...
America reportedly "all out of ideas" after "asking for the supply chain's manager" gambit fails to produce much needed treats
More on these shocking developments after a word from our sponsors
Just love the chef's kiss at the end of quoting Ezra Klein and "Supply-Side Progressivism".
"Maybe instead of trying to redistribute scarce resources, we increase the supply for everyone. Which is why socialists and progressives should push for YIMBYism and reduced zoning regulations to allow a greater housing supply" - Ezra Klein, pretty much
Liberals just love this Voxism of "What if we try to solve problems of capitalism and markets with more neo-liberalism! And we will say this is progressive and left wing since we are baselessly asserting it will improve things and solve problems."
:porky-scared-flipped: "THE MARKET WILL SOLVE THIS", I scream to no one as the angry masses beat down my front door and trample me to death.
THE MARKET WILL SOLVE THIS”, I scream to no one as the angry masses beat down my front door and trample me to death
actually the market has solved that one it's called hired thugs
Sorry the market has decided that the masses will trample the bourgeoisie
Maybe instead of trying to redistribute scarce resources, we increase the supply for everyone
but the resources are scarce though
yeah but ... like ... what if we just innovate some new resources into existence?
stupid commies not knowing that you can wish things into existence
The only instance I'm aware of "supply side" solution to health care is Cuba though. They've deliberately oversupplied the market with Doctors, and send their surplus overseas. The problem with health care is for every supply, there is a requirement for some type of skilled professional to either QC the product or interpret the result. Even with the examples of at-home COVID tests and prescriptions- there's a shortage of Pharmacists, Pharm techs, and production techs.
there’s a shortage of Pharmacists
I might just be ignorant here but doesn't a pharmacist get something off a shelf
Pharmacy techs are the ones who get stuff off shelves and who usually hand you drugs which is a 3 year diploma. They also do other stuff but are overseen by a pharmacist.
Pharmacists need to know more about drug interactions than doctors do and usually a pharmacy only has one or two pharmacists total, who usually own the pharmacy but sometimes don't. Which is some sort of undergrad plus 4 years of pharmacist school that you test into like law or medical school.
It's like how nurses do most of the medical stuff at hospitals but you still need doctors.
It's incredible how almost everything in this post is wrong. It's a four year degree, you'd have to go back a century for pharmacists to own their own pharmacies, nurses do nursing, not "medical stuff" - and most of this has to do with legal liability for malpractice.
Doctors and pharmacists have professional degrees and are held liable for mistakes. Nurses and pharmacy techs are held to a dramatically lower standard, usually they only get fired unless they're stealing drugs.
the insane amount of schooling and barriers to entry are as much about weeding out people who will steal/abuse the powerful drugs they have access to by making it a hard to get and therefore a high paying job.
Oh OK I did think that the fact there were exams meant there was more to it than grabbing something behind you
Maybe instead of trying to redistribute scarce resources we simply distribute them equitably in the first place, instead of handing them all to a handful of pedophile lizard oligarchs?
the bizarre thing is he doesn't even need to make these poorly reasoned appeals to socialists. lord knows we're not a huge constituency. i think he just likes the aesthetic and wants to be an internet cool kid.
Well, I think he is appealing to standard liberals. The whole project of Vox is to launder Neo-Liberalism and "Market based solutions" as "woke" and progressive. Like, for example, I remember an early article about how great charter schools are because then a hypothetical Black family could have the choice to send their child to a charter school that focuses on Black history and culture, if there were enough Black families desiring that that the market would allow it. It is continuing the Clintonian project of having very far right neo-liberal politics that favor an affluent PMC person in the suburbs, while telling themselves that the are moral and progressive.
hitting Klein in the head with a bat labeled "problem solver caucus"
"cApItAliSm iSn'T A zErO-sUm GaMe!" they shriek despite all evidence to the contrary.
unemployment insurance and several rounds of stimulus have allowed laid-off workers to be picky about jobs, instead of desperately lunging for the first paycheck available. That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. But [...]
The stimulus checks were like $2k or whatever, wasn't it? Why do they still bring that shit up? Holy shit. People really talk like that. Even that plus, what? $600/w in unemployment was it? 33k is just under median wage in 2019. That's depressing because that's not a comfortable amount of money. Honestly America should just stop having an economy based around giving the world <$16/hr for serving treats to boomers and gambling on which company serves them treats the best. That's all I can take away from this.
Feels like it tbh. I keep seeing more and more empty shelves. Gas station yesterday was completely out of regular.
But what if i suddenly need 500 bouncy balls and a pallet of fake vampire teeth? What will I do?
Pretty sure those are still available. It's just shit people actually need.
Next-day deliveries are becoming day-after-next deliveries.
Oh, the humanity
Dunno. Either status quo of shortages, the system corrects itself somehow, or the supply chain degrades further leading to more intense shortages.
2020s are going to be roaring indeed
we need emoji for how time is a flat circle :marx-goth: FIRST TRAGEDY THEN FARCE BABY
at my grocery store they keep putting back estimates for certain key products to be available further and further (now we are at Q2 2022). it's not all food, just certain stuff. wait until the climate related crop shortages start filtering in
