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The person that wrote this must have taken a page from GW:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/03/31/of-course-walmart-destroys-retail-jobs-thats-the-darn-point-of-it-all/

Lets buy some GW shares so we can elect this guy to the board and have him show them how its done.[/sarcasm]

Hey guys, burning money is a good thing as well. It keeps people warm.

Besides once we have taken it off the customers, its not like they care about what happens to it right?

The author better be careful, though. He might get sued for a copyright violation!

The author has confused "capitalism" with "the economy" as though those terms are interchangeable; and then goes on to conflate being jobless with being able to do something even better, as though it was that damned income-earning that was holding everyone back.

This is not even remotely interesting. The first paragraph betrays the likelihood that the author has never once worked for a living, and likely lives on the same secluded plane of reality that Gwyneth Paltrow does.

Whenever I am back in the first world I do pretty much all of my shopping at these two places. Costco and Walmart own. No doubt about it.

 azazel the cat wrote:
The author has confused "capitalism" with "the economy" as though those terms are interchangeable; and then goes on to conflate being jobless with being able to do something even better, as though it was that damned income-earning that was holding everyone back.

This is not even remotely interesting. The first paragraph betrays the likelihood that the author has never once worked for a living, and likely lives on the same secluded plane of reality that Gwyneth Paltrow does.

The part about going on from a retail job to cure Cancer caught me, also. It's as though he believes everyone who works retail will just be able to go knock on the door of a research lab and get hired.

 azazel the cat wrote:
lives on the same secluded plane of reality that Gwyneth Paltrow does.

Her website is an amazing example of someone who is completely out of touch with reality. It is amazing, really.

Feeling sad? Why, just jet off to Europe for a month with your famous friends and stay in a castle, like we all do.

Some great Headlines written about her site:

Let Gwyneth Paltrow tidy up your colon

Gwyneth Paltrow Recommends The Unattainable Gwyneth Paltrow Lifestyle

It's time to stop fashioning your ketchup-crusted dishrags into clothes and buy this $90 T-shirt from Gwyneth Paltrow *




*Note, it isn't a print shirt, just a plain white t-shirt. Not even made especially unusual, either, just a $90 plain white T-Shirt.

 azazel the cat wrote:
The first paragraph betrays the likelihood that the author has never once worked for a living, and likely lives on the same secluded plane of reality that Gwyneth Paltrow does.

He's an article writer/author and a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute of London. He's also a scandium and other rare earth dealer.

I doubt he's rich, but this entire article seems to make a mockery of whatever degree he has...


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 Ahtman wrote:
Her website is an amazing example of someone who is completely out of touch with reality. It is amazing, really.

What can you expect from someone who'se 'friends' section is actually called 'Elite affiliates'?

 Kovnik Obama wrote:

 azazel the cat wrote:
The first paragraph betrays the likelihood that the author has never once worked for a living, and likely lives on the same secluded plane of reality that Gwyneth Paltrow does.

He's an article writer/author and a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute of London. He's also a scandium and other rare earth dealer.

I doubt he's rich, but this entire article seems to make a mockery of whatever degree he has...

I personally loved the part where he thought one third of 120 was 33, and this fellow is supposedly an economist of some kind?

Wow, y'all actually read the whole thing? I made it to the end of the first paragraph and egressed from that cesspool

 Ratbarf wrote:
I personally loved the part where he thought one third of 120 was 33

Probably one of the less glaring mistakes he made in this gakblog. I mean... He did call Wal-Mart ''a new technology''... He forgot to account for *any* cost of career re-orientation... Or any depreciation of service value...

Basically, his argumentative strategy is :

a) Filling the same need while spending fewer ressources is better.
b) Wal-Mart free human ressources that could be spent on other tasks while providing the same service
c)Costco free 3 times as much ressources as Wal-mart in any given area it inplants itself.
d) Why is everyone bitching about Wal-mart and not about Costco?

 Ratbarf wrote:
and this fellow is supposedly an economist of some kind?

Nah, just a blogger with good relations with a Tatcherite think tank. I can't find any information on his academic formation.

 Ahtman wrote:

Let Gwyneth Paltrow tidy up your colon

I would allow this to happen.

 Fafnir wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:

Let Gwyneth Paltrow tidy up your colon

I would allow this to happen.

Sadly, it isn't the way you would like. It is a $450 tin of, essentially, Colon Blow.

Disappointed... but not entirely dissuaded.

The general thrust of his point is about the trend of labour. He talks about how 80% of humanity used to be farmers but labour-saving technology has reduced that to a fraction.

I don't think (i hope not) that he is literally saying, "lost your job selling Mom&Pop shoes to Wal-Mart? Great now you can cure cancer!"

Rather I think he is talking about the overall shift of humanity from retail into human services and research. This is a generational thing.

Or he is an enormous troll looking for hits.

feeder wrote:
The general thrust of his point is about the trend of labour. He talks about how 80% of humanity used to be farmers but labour-saving technology has reduced that to a fraction.

I don't think (i hope not) that he is literally saying, "lost your job selling Mom&Pop shoes to Wal-Mart? Great now you can cure cancer!"

Rather I think he is talking about the overall shift of humanity from retail into human services and research. This is a generational thing.

Or he is an enormous troll looking for hits.

It was unfortunate that he used farming as an example of a good shift. As someone who grew up on a farm, I am a bit nervous at the thought of food production being controlled by so few, especially when a lot of that percentage is in the hands of big corporations that decide bio engineered crops are the way to go, like Monsanto.

 Ratbarf wrote:

 Kovnik Obama wrote:

 azazel the cat wrote:
The first paragraph betrays the likelihood that the author has never once worked for a living, and likely lives on the same secluded plane of reality that Gwyneth Paltrow does.

He's an article writer/author and a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute of London. He's also a scandium and other rare earth dealer.

I doubt he's rich, but this entire article seems to make a mockery of whatever degree he has...

I personally loved the part where he thought one third of 120 was 33, and this fellow is supposedly an economist of some kind?

He said a third of 100 is 33, which it is.

Reading the thread I expected his article to be some deranged screed, but it was pretty straightforwards and seemed to make sense. I'll try to summarise in two points:

1. on a societal level, labour being spent on necessities (like farming or shopkeeping) is labour that can't be spent on what I'll term luxuries, like curing cancer or anything else nonessential. Note that he does not seem to make any claims that you'll get laid off from your job at your grocery store and immediately go and become a cancer researcher. He's only speaking in very general terms. Note that this is pretty much how society developed in the first place.
2. Costco makes over three times as many sales per employee as Walmart, meaning Costco should by extension be putting three times as many smaller local employees out of business as Walmart per Costco employee. He asks why people are not, therefore, complaining about Costco.

That's about it, really.

 Ahtman wrote:

 Fafnir wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:

Let Gwyneth Paltrow tidy up your colon

I would allow this to happen.

Sadly, it isn't the way you would like. It is a $450 tin of, essentially, Colon Blow.

Super Colon Blow, or the regular Colon Blow?

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:


Reading the thread I expected his article to be some deranged screed, but it was pretty straightforwards and seemed to make sense. I'll try to summarise in two points:

1. on a societal level, labour being spent on necessities (like farming or shopkeeping) is labour that can't be spent on what I'll term luxuries, like curing cancer or anything else nonessential. Note that he does not seem to make any claims that you'll get laid off from your job at your grocery store and immediately go and become a cancer researcher. He's only speaking in very general terms. Note that this is pretty much how society developed in the first place.
2. Costco makes over three times as many sales per employee as Walmart, meaning Costco should by extension be putting three times as many smaller local employees out of business as Walmart per Costco employee. He asks why people are not, therefore, complaining about Costco.

That's about it, really.

The problem is that there is some enormous gaps in his approach of the subject.

''Well quite. That is indeed the point of this entire capitalism/free markets thing. '' This being said after it was shown to him that Wal-mart increases poverty where it implants itself. I mean, how slowed do you have to be to defend capitalism by saying that capitalism lowering wages and cutting jobs is a good thing? It's as if the readers of Forbes are more likely to be upper management then floor-workers... Oh wait...

''Using less labour to perform one specific task frees up that labour to go and perform other tasks. This is good, this is progress. '' But it isn't when you don't have something else to assign that workforce to. Or the time to train them. And during the mean time those people need money. This is the most glaring flaw in his logic.

''And what is it that WalMart actually is? It’s simply a new technology for retailing goods.'' No it's not. Words have specific meanings. ''Next-gen retailer'' isn't one of ''technology''.

''And yes, when the dust has settled there are now fewer people working in retail than there were before WalMart (or Sears Roebuck). And this is good: for there is now labour available to go and do some of the other things that we might like to have done. Find the cure for cancer, tend to the sick, nurse the elderly, take care of the children: whatever.'' And that's the part where he actually says what you claimed he didn't. If he didn't mean it, then he's even more slowed than I thought, considering that statement makes a pretty damn good job at making a mockery of his entire argument.

 kronk wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:

 Fafnir wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:

Let Gwyneth Paltrow tidy up your colon

I would allow this to happen.

Sadly, it isn't the way you would like. It is a $450 tin of, essentially, Colon Blow.

Super Colon Blow, or the regular Colon Blow?

No way it's Super Colon Blow. A graham of Super is gonna be at least 600 bucks. Anything less than that is probably some cheap gak cut with Metamucil. Colon Blow dealers are notorious for ripping people off like that.

I don't think the article was all that troublesome.

I mean, he's just pointing out something that should be pretty basic knowledge - businesses aren't there to create jobs. They're there to figure out how to do a better job with less resources. While that can mean job cuts in the short term, ultimately having less people working to deliver the same product, and having those people retrain and move in to other economic sectors is what economic growth is.

And yeah, it sucks for people who lose their jobs. Just like it sucked for British people when the tradition of open field agriculture ended and the farms were enclosed, forcing those people to look for work in the cities. It definitely sucked for those caught in that transition, but that drove the industrial revolution, and without it we wouldn't have the modern world.

Now, that doesn't mean that job loss should just be viewed passively by government. Everyone of those newly unemployed people is a part of society, and also a potential worker who can add to the economy. In terms of both social policy and the public good it is good to get them working again, either by helping them develop new skills, or by helping them locate to a place where their skills are needed.

But this idea that we should somehow just stop companies doing things better, because that means job cuts... I agree with the guy in the blog - that idea is just plain wrong.


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 Kovnik Obama wrote:
''Using less labour to perform one specific task frees up that labour to go and perform other tasks. This is good, this is progress. '' But it isn't when you don't have something else to assign that workforce to. Or the time to train them. And during the mean time those people need money. This is the most glaring flaw in his logic.

Well, if you're going to work with the assumption that job lost from the economy will never be recreated elsewhere, then your complaint makes sense.

But your assumption flies in the face of 400 years of economic history. Seriously, they put up those enclosures in Britain and forced a massive portion of the population out of their lives as subsistance farmers... and yet the UK didn't just produce 400 years of inter-generational poverty as those people and their ancestors never ever worked again. They moved in to new industries. This is not only a thing that's possible, it's a thing that happens to almost all of those displaced worked, every single time.

''And what is it that WalMart actually is? It’s simply a new technology for retailing goods.'' No it's not. Words have specific meanings. ''Next-gen retailer'' isn't one of ''technology''.

No, 'technology' is used in that sense in economics and economic history. When dealing with how economies grow, there are three broad categories of drivers of growth - population growth, capital growth, and technology. That last category is broad one, dealing with any kind of innovation that leads to people doing more with less resources.

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:

2. Costco makes over three times as many sales per employee as Walmart, meaning Costco should by extension be putting three times as many smaller local employees out of business as Walmart per Costco employee. He asks why people are not, therefore, complaining about Costco.

The issues of eliminating retail jobs is ancillary, what angers people is Walmart's treatment of its employees. Notably, the average Walmart employee makes ~12 USD/hr and the average Costco employee makes ~17 USD/hr. That this guy chose to ignore that is, at best, lazy journalism.

 sebster wrote:
I agree with the guy in the blog - that idea is just plain wrong.

So it seems that what he is saying isn't so bad, and that it is more of an issue that he doesn't know how to write for an audience.

jobs being lost is never a good thing....who was allowed to even write this?

 Scorpionov wrote:
jobs being lost is never a good thing....who was allowed to even write this?

Someone who knows more about the subject than you, apparently. It's quite simple: the reason a job is good is what it produces (an income for you, and outputs for your employer and their customers), not the job itself. Jobs lost to increased efficiency are thus a good thing, if the lost income is replaced by another source.

Think of a post-scarcity utopia where robots do the work so you don't have to. Does it really matter if you don't have a job, if the work is still being done and you're still getting paid?

This is great news!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 dogma wrote:
The issues of eliminating retail jobs is ancillary, what angers people is Walmart's treatment of its employees. Notably, the average Walmart employee makes ~12 USD/hr and the average Costco employee makes ~17 USD/hr. That this guy chose to ignore that is, at best, lazy journalism.

Another major issue is the cost-shifting they do onto the taxpayer, as an inordinate percentage of Walmart employees are on welfare, food stamps, and other social programs - taxpayers subsidize their profit-taking.

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Scorpionov wrote:
jobs being lost is never a good thing....who was allowed to even write this?

Someone who knows more about the subject than you, apparently. It's quite simple: the reason a job is good is what it produces (an income for you, and outputs for your employer and their customers), not the job itself. Jobs lost to increased efficiency are thus a good thing, if the lost income is replaced by another source.

Think of a post-scarcity utopia where robots do the work so you don't have to. Does it really matter if you don't have a job, if the work is still being done and you're still getting paid?

Wait, why am I still getting paid if the robot is doing my job?