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Politics, politics, politics (so long and thanks for all the fish)

DTA said:
three things:
1. and what about those resources in private hands?
2. Have you done the maths does it all add up with the population that we have now and will have in the future?
3.sounds a lot like communism to me - but maybe you will answer number 1 in a surprising way, and I will be wrong.
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It depends what things. Things like water, energy and transport should be nationalised with immediate effect, with some compulsory purchase compensation paid over the long term. That’s just moral. I own 1/70,000,000th of the rain that falls and wind that blows in Britain, it doesn’t belong to US pension firms or the Chinese government. Other things like property empires (beyond personal home ownership) can be taxed medium term out of viability.

The maths don’t matter because it’s relative, not absolute. UBI is paid by whatever proportion of income it takes. Whether it takes 25% or 40% of annual national wealth to fund it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to be affordable because there’s not much else needed beyond it.

It’s post-capitalist, but it’s not communist. It’s just expanding welfare to cover a living wage for all citizens. You can still earn more to live beyond the basic.
 
I've signed contracts today to move a reasonably sized IT Services business from England to Estonia. It has really hurt me to have to do this.

I previously sold off two pretty large companies that I had the majority stake in and, despite lots of advice and offers to relocate to a tax haven and save huge amounts of tax, I remained in the UK and paid the tax as the morally right thing to do (I'd built the companies in the UK so sharing the profit with the exchequer was fair). However, in this instance it is just becoming almost impossible to operate an IT Services company in the UK, especially when a large portion of the income comes from outside of the UK. From conversations I'm having in the industry other medium sized businesses are exploring doing similar.

One thing that the UK IT industry has going for it at present is the FinTech sector. London arguably has the biggest FinTech sector in the World due to that historical combination of a high quality Banking and Finance industry and a high quality IT industry, along with good access to angel investors. Those two building blocks are being eroded though and the UK is becoming a more and more risky place to invest (though I think there will be opportunity for overseas investors to take advantage of the weak pound and pick up companies on the cheap with the aim of taking them overseas to operate in a more stable business environment).
 
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Gutter Boy said:
It depends what things. Things like water, energy and transport should be nationalised with immediate effect, with some compulsory purchase compensation paid over the long term. That’s just moral. I own 1/70,000,000th of the rain that falls and wind that blows in Britain, it doesn’t belong to US pension firms or the Chinese government. Other things like property empires (beyond personal home ownership) can be taxed medium term out of viability.

The maths don’t matter because it’s relative, not absolute. UBI is paid by whatever proportion of income it takes. Whether it takes 25% or 40% of annual national wealth to fund it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to be affordable because there’s not much else needed beyond it.

It’s post-capitalist, but it’s not communist. It’s just expanding welfare to cover a living wage for all citizens. You can still earn more to live beyond the basic.
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Define 'compulsory purchase compensation''? How does one go about nationalising a listed company (that is actually often an overseas company). If you going to pay market rate (share price) then that will cost a huge amount of money (more borrowing?). If you're not going to pay a fair price then be prepared to years and years of court cases along with crashing the pension funds (thus creating a different problem for the population).

'Tax property empires' In what way?
 
Rorschach said:
@Gutter Boy is correct. Not about everything but about the most important thing. If economic growth is the default goal then it's over. Human civilisation that is.
That's it in a nutshell.
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@Gutter Boy is wrong about the main thing. And that main thing being that, he is for all intents and purposes a communist, even if he doesn’t recognise himself as such. More dangerous than that he is a communist with ill thought out ideas.

and I’m saying all that as a proponent of mixed economics- so part socialist. I am a left leaning liberal after all.

Plus communism as far as I know doesn’t have a great record on the environment.
 
Rorschach said:
@Gutter Boy is correct. Not about everything but about the most important thing. If economic growth is the default goal then it's over. Human civilisation that is.
That's it in a nutshell.
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I haven’t read the theory but the premise seems a little simplistic. For example, what about if growth is concentrated in renewables? That our economies became focused on growing energy from sustainable sources. As Danish identified this will be a massive growth area. Yet it’s wholly positive. Humans have to be able to innovate and develop. That is why we’re not chimps. We don’t ruminate an do nothing very well. Moving to more a sustainable existence is a form of growth and positive development is it not?
 
DTA said:
@Gutter Boy is wrong about the main thing. And that main thing being that, he is for all intents and purposes a communist, even if he doesn’t recognise himself as such. More dangerous than that he is a communist with ill thought out ideas.

and I’m saying all that as a proponent of mixed economics- so part socialist. I am a left leaning liberal after all.

Plus communism as far as I know doesn’t have a great record on the environment.
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He has a few zany ideas but he's right about degrowth. We have 3 paths could take from here - growth, green growth, or degrowth (an over simplification but run with it)
Why do you think degrowth is not the way forward?
 
SpurMeUp said:
I haven’t read the theory but the premise seems a little simplistic. For example, what about if growth is concentrated in renewables? That our economies became focused on growing energy from sustainable sources. As Danish identified this will be a massive growth area. Yet it’s wholly positive. Humans have to be able to innovate and develop. That is why we’re not chimps. We don’t ruminate an do nothing very well. Moving to more a sustainable existence is a form of growth and positive development is it not?
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Yes, the concept is fairly simple. The implementation is nothing but simple. But it needs to start with accepting the basic premise that we are overconsuming our way to extinction and we need to change that. The 'we' in this sentence is the rich western world for the most part. We are the greedy pig at the table.
How to get there and how to do it equitably is a whole other ball game, but if you don't accept the basic premise that we've largely exceeded the planet's resource boundaries and we have used up more than our fair share of the carbon budget then these other conversations are largely academic.
 
Rorschach said:
Yes, the concept is fairly simple. The implementation is nothing but simple. But it needs to start with accepting the basic premise that we are overconsuming our way to extinction and we need to change that. The 'we' in this sentence is the rich western world for the most part. We are the greedy pig at the table.
How to get there and how to do it equitably is a whole other ball game, but if you don't accept the basic premise that we've largely exceeded the planet's resource boundaries and we have used up more than our fair share of the carbon budget then these other conversations are largely academic.
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So growth is a misnomer to some degree. As we actually need growth of more sustainable activity and products.

Like many economic theories it may have come from Marx - identifying that capitalism always looks for growth and has boom and bust.

But isn’t growth in essence human advancement? If you can make a case for this, then we need growth (not stagnation) to advance and become this more sustainable society/economy etc. going backwards is not advancement and isn’t viable. Degrowth then seems somewhat flawed.
 
SpurMeUp said:
So growth is a misnomer to some degree. As we actually need growth of more sustainable activity and products.

Like many economic theories it may have come from Marx - identifying that capitalism always looks for growth and has boom and bust.

But isn’t growth in essence human advancement? If you can make a case for this, then we need growth (not stagnation) to advance and become this more sustainable society/economy etc. going backwards is not advancement and isn’t viable. Degrowth then seems somewhat flawed.
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I think you just need to substitute the word 'growth'...it has to many capitalist and economic connotations.
 
SpurMeUp said:
I haven’t read the theory but the premise seems a little simplistic. For example, what about if growth is concentrated in renewables? That our economies became focused on growing energy from sustainable sources. As Danish identified this will be a massive growth area. Yet it’s wholly positive. Humans have to be able to innovate and develop. That is why we’re not chimps. We don’t ruminate an do nothing very well. Moving to more a sustainable existence is a form of growth and positive development is it not?
Click to expand...
With the other situations facing us right now, ie energy security and trying to plough a new furrow outside the EU, you'd think becoming a world leader in the innovation, development and deployment of renewables would be a gift of an opportunity.
 
SpurMeUp said:
So growth is a misnomer to some degree. As we actually need growth of more sustainable activity and products.

Like many economic theories it may have come from Marx - identifying that capitalism always looks for growth and has boom and bust.

But isn’t growth in essence human advancement? If you can make a case for this, then we need growth (not stagnation) to advance and become this more sustainable society/economy etc. going backwards is not advancement and isn’t viable. Degrowth then seems somewhat flawed.
Click to expand...
If you conceptually break from the fact that economic growth as defined by increasing GDP is how we measure if we are advancing as a species then you can look at progress in any number of different ways.

However, in this conversation, we are talking about economic growth. Degrowth as a concept is way more nuanced than just no more growth. It is growth in certain industries in certain economies that need it, and a reduction in other areas and economies. Badly named maybe but don't judge a book...

edit:
If anyone is interested in this crazy degrowth thing then there's a whole pile of recent articles in this thread on it
https://twitter.com/x/status/1592816423805812736
 
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Rorschach said:
If you conceptually break from the fact that economic growth as defined by increasing GDP is how we measure if we are advancing as a species then you can look at progress in any number of different ways.

However, in this conversation, we are talking about economic growth. Degrowth as a concept is way more nuanced than just no more growth. It is growth in certain industries in certain economies that need it, and a reduction in other areas and economies. Badly named maybe but don't judge a book...

edit:
If anyone is interested in this crazy degrowth thing then there's a whole pile of recent articles in this thread on it
https://twitter.com/x/status/1592816423805812736
Click to expand...

I would say that its not growth but the speed of the growth and the push for growth to get faster.
There are certainly areas where growth/improvement need priority, green tec, food production, etc, but do we really need better TVs, faster broadband, rockets to space. Those are what the average punter is being sold, meaningless crap sold as progress.

If your quality of life didn't change, no better or no worse, for the next decade but it helped 10 less fortunate families to get to the same level as you wouldn't it be worth it?
 
glasgowspur said:
I would say that its not growth but the speed of the growth and the push for growth to get faster.
There are certainly areas where growth/improvement need priority, green tec, food production, etc, but do we really need better TVs, faster broadband, rockets to space. Those are what the average punter is being sold, meaningless crap sold as progress.

If your quality of life didn't change, no better or no worse, for the next decade but it helped 10 less fortunate families to get to the same level as you wouldn't it be worth it?
Click to expand...

If companies stopped the built to fail policy. Then we'd all be better off.
 
glasgowspur said:
I would say that its not growth but the speed of the growth and the push for growth to get faster.
There are certainly areas where growth/improvement need priority, green tec, food production, etc, but do we really need better TVs, faster broadband, rockets to space. Those are what the average punter is being sold, meaningless crap sold as progress.

If your quality of life didn't change, no better or no worse, for the next decade but it helped 10 less fortunate families to get to the same level as you wouldn't it be worth it?
Click to expand...
That is certainly a large part of it. The relentless pursuit of profit for the few has us primed from birth into believing that having more stuff will somehow fill some gaping hole in our lives. We've bought fully into every story capitalism has told us, and now it threatens our very existence. We either face the problem or we will continue on our death spiral.
 
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