Comment by Retric
22 days ago
Efficiency is why things continue to work as fewer people work. Social programs, bank account, etc are just an abstraction you need a surplus or the only thing that changes is who starves.
22 days ago
Efficiency is why things continue to work as fewer people work. Social programs, bank account, etc are just an abstraction you need a surplus or the only thing that changes is who starves.
Social programs often compensate for massive distortion in the economy. For example, SNAP benefits both the poor and the businesses where SNAP funds is spent on, but that's because a lot of unearned income goes to landowners, while preventing people from employing laborers and starting businesses. SNAP merely ameliorate a situation that shouldn't had arise in the first place.
So, yes, reasons other than efficiency explain why people aren't working, as well why there are still poor people.
Only the relatively tiny homeless population is poor by historic standards. And that’s almost exclusively mental health issues and addiction.
Now we can set arbitrary thresholds for what standard of living every American should have but even knowing people on SNAP it’s not that low.
> Only the relatively tiny homeless population is poor by historic standards.
The cost to participate in society is much greater.
Yeah we do have more cars. But you also need to buy one to go to work.
We have education, but you need 22 years to be employable.
It’s probably not with continuing the discussion if you don’t believe poverty exists as a concept.
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> Efficiency is why things continue to work as fewer people work.
Yes, but it’s not why there are fewer adults in the workforce.
Yes it is, if we still needed 90+% of the population to work or people starved that’s a self correcting system. Less than that work and you have less people.
> if we still needed 90+% of the population to work or people starved
I actually didn’t say that. And the twisting of words is the source of confusing
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