[Winstonm]

There is a reason that a world that smoothly runs on free market capitalism can only exist in fiction - and that reason is that as a practical approach its flaws eventually overtake its values and it collapses. Positive outcomes only exist in the imagination of ideologues or novelists.

[mike777]

Winstonm, on 2014-July-02, 08:16, said:

There is a reason that a world that smoothly runs on free market capitalism can only exist in fiction - and that reason is that as a practical approach its flaws eventually overtake its values and it collapses. Positive outcomes only exist in the imagination of ideologues or novelists.

agree but that has nothing to do with my posts, nothing at all.
I doubt any posters want to live in a world without any government intervention, as if that is even possible except in a fantasy. Even the entrepreneur needs private property rights, an independent court system, and wants clean air and drinking water

If your only point is you heap scorn and ridicule on the Entrepreneur , Ok.

In any event as I mentioned I expect many of these "smallish approaches" to fail and that is ok.

--

For the record I can see where govt may need to intervene to control the iatrogenics of modernity but I try and approach it from a risk management base rather than political.

[awm]

I'm not sure how celebrating entrepreneurs is supposed to help. Examining some of the possible motives:

1. Perhaps praising entrepreneurs is supposed to motivate them to create jobs. This has basically been the Republican party's strategy for a number of years now, including giving out tax preferences and other benefits. However, the fact is that business people are not in the business of creating jobs -- they are in the business of making money! Making nice speeches about how wonderful they are, or giving them tax breaks, will not cause them to create jobs; increasing demand for their products will cause them to create jobs. In general this policy of giving praise and benefits to the most successful has proved quite ineffective at lifting the overall standard of living.

2. Perhaps instead, the goal is to encourage poor people to be more entrepreneurial. If this is the point, it suggests that the person proposing the idea does not know very many poor people. In my experience, most poor people are extremely innovative in finding ways to make small amounts of money. They buy and sell at flea markets. They hang out at hardware stores on weekends looking to do odd jobs for people. They sell vegetables on the sidewalk. They come into bridge tournaments with strawberries looking to sell them to hungry players. The problem that poor people face is more commonly a lack of highly marketable skills, combined sometimes with family and/or personal issues that drain resources... not a lack of "entrepreneurial spirit."

[barmar]

awm, on 2014-July-02, 10:23, said:

2. Perhaps instead, the goal is to encourage poor people to be more entrepreneurial. If this is the point, it suggests that the person proposing the idea does not know very many poor people. In my experience, most poor people are extremely innovative in finding ways to make small amounts of money. They buy and sell at flea markets. They hang out at hardware stores on weekends looking to do odd jobs for people. They sell vegetables on the sidewalk. They come into bridge tournaments with strawberries looking to sell them to hungry players. The problem that poor people face is more commonly a lack of highly marketable skills, combined sometimes with family and/or personal issues that drain resources... not a lack of "entrepreneurial spirit."

I don't think the target of this encouragement is extremely poor people. Becoming a drug dealer is entrepreneurial, too.

I suspect it's intended to encourage the next tier above them, who have enough marketable skills that they can create new businesses that will then be able to hire people. The entrepreneur will move up the income ladder, and drag a bunch of other people with him. I suppose this is related to the "trickle down" theory, but since they're also creating new industries in the process, it benefits the entire economy.

[Winstonm]

The problem as I see it is that too many people refuse to acknowledge history, preferring to indulge in ideological comfort over taking difficult action. From Henry Ford's strategic pay raise to his employees to FDR up to Reagan, history is replete with examples of demand driving expansion and growth - when the rich become richer, they do not invest but horde.

A business simply has no reason to expand without increased demand for its products and/or services - so if tax breaks increase owners' incomes, that money is nostly horded in bonds, not much spent, and certainly not invested in expanding businesses.

However, if those extra profits are collected by the government and redistributed to the bottom say 40% of wage earners, the money drives demand for more product, causing expansion of business, new jobs, and even more profit for the owners. How some people cannot see this simple economic notion is to me baffling. Perhaps it is too simple.

[PassedOut]

barmar, on 2014-June-28, 20:57, said:

And Massachusetts just passed a state-wide increase, from $8 to $11, in $1 increments over the next 3 years.

Unfortunately, in order to get this to pass, the proponents had to back down on automatically indexing it to inflation thereafter. So we'll have to battle this again in 5-10 years.

Yes, the minimum wage should definitely be indexed. To keep the economy moving, it's important to get more money into the pockets of folks who will spend it quickly.

[PassedOut]

mike777, on 2014-June-29, 06:40, said:

Jean-Louis Rheault, wrote,"I have noticed that the more people glorify the entrepreneur as an abstraction, the more they will scorn an actual one they meet."

In real life, I've enjoyed starting and running a few businesses, but I don't recall any scorn being directed my way (on that account anyway ). I'm not sure where your take on this comes from. Have you had such an experience yourself?

[mike777]

awm, on 2014-July-02, 10:23, said:

I'm not sure how celebrating entrepreneurs is supposed to help. Examining some of the possible motives:

1. Perhaps praising entrepreneurs is supposed to motivate them to create jobs. This has basically been the Republican party's strategy for a number of years now, including giving out tax preferences and other benefits. However, the fact is that business people are not in the business of creating jobs -- they are in the business of making money! Making nice speeches about how wonderful they are, or giving them tax breaks, will not cause them to create jobs; increasing demand for their products will cause them to create jobs. In general this policy of giving praise and benefits to the most successful has proved quite ineffective at lifting the overall standard of living.

2. Perhaps instead, the goal is to encourage poor people to be more entrepreneurial. If this is the point, it suggests that the person proposing the idea does not know very many poor people. In my experience, most poor people are extremely innovative in finding ways to make small amounts of money. They buy and sell at flea markets. They hang out at hardware stores on weekends looking to do odd jobs for people. They sell vegetables on the sidewalk. They come into bridge tournaments with strawberries looking to sell them to hungry players. The problem that poor people face is more commonly a lack of highly marketable skills, combined sometimes with family and/or personal issues that drain resources... not a lack of "entrepreneurial spirit."

"Heroism and the respect it commands is a form of compensation by society for those that take risks for others. And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the survival of the economy.
It is also necessarily collective on epistemological grounds-to facilitate the development of expertise." (taleb)

-----------
One smallish approach might be for every country but especially the USA to have a National Entrepreneur Day which is honored and discussed in schools and workplaces with the following message:

"Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you." (Taleb)

Jean-Louis Rheault, wrote,"I have noticed that the more people glorify the entrepreneur as an abstraction, the more they will scorn an actual one they meet

[mike777]

The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World

John Elkington, Pamela Hartigan

http://books.google....epage&q&f=false


This link to the introduction is about 25 pages long.

[mike777]

PassedOut, on 2014-July-02, 11:28, said:

In real life, I've enjoyed starting and running a few businesses, but I don't recall any scorn being directed my way (on that account anyway ). I'm not sure where your take on this comes from. Have you had such an experience yourself?

You forgot to look at the whole post which in part said: ""Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished,...."

I hope you were successful.

[PassedOut]

mike777, on 2014-July-02, 11:59, said:

You forgot to look at the whole post which in part said: "Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished,...."

You left out most of the quote from your post that we are discussing. Here it is:

Quote

"Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you." (Taleb)

I have definitely lost significant amounts of money on a couple of ventures, but not when I've had direct control of the management. And I certainly don't agree with the notion that it is a good idea to risk becoming impoverished.

Probably the closest example of that from real life that I know of is from talking to Constance's dad about the early days of the business he started. He mortgaged his home more than once for short periods (three days to a week) in order to make payroll. But the space program was in full bloom, so he "knew" that he'd get the money shortly from NASA. I guess that if congress had pulled the plug, he'd have been impoverished, but the right bet was that it wouldn't...

[mike777]

I have definitely lost significant amounts of money on a couple of ventures, but not when I've had direct control of the management. And I certainly don't agree with the notion that it is a good idea to risk becoming impoverished.

Probably the closest example of that from real life that I know of is from talking to Constance's dad about the early days of the business he started. He mortgaged his home more than once for short periods (three days to a week) in order to make payroll. But the space program was in full bloom, so he "knew" that he'd get the money shortly from NASA. I guess that if congress had pulled the plug, he'd have been impoverished, but the right bet was that it wouldn't...
[/quote]

Passed Out, I thank you for taking a risk with your own money to be an entrepreneur.
I thank you if you ever created a job for someone who needed one.
I thank you if you ever gifted some of your profits to help someone who was living in poverty.
I thank you if you ever gifted some of your profits to help someone who was hungry.
I thank your father in law for creating jobs, creating something of true value, for making payroll which helped many stay out of poverty and hunger.

thankyou.

[PassedOut]

If the US had a stronger safety net to cushion the impact of entrepreneurial failures, we would see a lot more folks try to bring their ideas to market. Perhaps that is what you had in mind by advocating a stronger negative income tax.

At some point we will have to face up to the fact that there simply won't be a job for every qualified person. Instead of continuing the race to the bottom that we are in now, we will have to find a dignified way to make sure that everyone shares equitably in the good and services we produce. I strongly believe in the value of incentives to increase productivity and efficiency, but we just have to find a way to do that without relegating the folks around us to a dismal existence. And we will need to make sure that everyone is a potential customer!

[mike777]

I guess I am borrowing Francois Jacob's idea which is called bricolge in French.

Definition of BRICOLAGE


: construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand; also : something constructed in this way


Origin of BRICOLAGE

French, from bricoler to putter about
--------------

The nature of optionality or trial and error or to tinker when it presents small errors and large gains. looking for what Helene might call positive asymmetries.

Thus a smallish multi approach to reducing poverty and hunger, worldwide not just for the USA/

[FM75]

blackshoe, on 2014-June-21, 17:41, said:

In an article on global warming, British MP Matt Ridley pointed out that according to even RCP 8.5, an IPCC scenario that he describes as "very, very, implausible," by the end of this century "The per capita income of the average human being in 2100 is three times what it is now. Poverty would be history." Okay, so the average income is three times what it is now. Does that really mean poverty will be eliminated? Or is "poverty" a relative state that will always exist, being, basically, the bottom of the income ladder?

Seriously? How long do you expect the species to exist? Forget about the fact that the sun will die.

Prediction about the future is hard. (Yogi Berra and others before him.) But this one is easy. Eventually the income ladder will flatten out at 0 (pick your currency).

[yunling]

From the eyes of people who live on earth 20,000 years ago, poverty is already history

[blackshoe]

yunling, on 2014-July-04, 09:06, said:

From the eyes of people who live on earth 20,000 years ago, poverty is already history

Why is this a sad thing?

[blackshoe]

FM75, on 2014-July-03, 16:56, said:

Seriously? How long do you expect the species to exist? Forget about the fact that the sun will die.

Prediction about the future is hard. (Yogi Berra and others before him.) But this one is easy. Eventually the income ladder will flatten out at 0 (pick your currency).

At the rate we're going? Maybe another century — unless we get off the planet.

[barmar]

blackshoe, on 2014-July-05, 16:57, said:

Why is this a sad thing?

I suppose it would be sad if society used a comparison with the stone age as an excuse not to try to solve the problem of modern poverty.

[billw55]

blackshoe, on 2014-July-05, 16:58, said:

At the rate we're going? Maybe another century — unless we get off the planet.

A century is just a blink of an eye. Barring a fast extinction event, humans will exist long past that, even when heading for slow extinction.

Civilization might be another question.