Focusing on the redistribution of income and goods is natural for today’s progressives, who tend to emphasize the virtue of equality. One lesson of the Everything Shortage is: You cannot redistribute what isn’t created in the first place. The best equality agenda begins with an abundance agenda.
You might say housing, but I don't think I've heard anyone call for the "redistribution of housing", because that doesn't really make sense. Progressives generally call for universal housing, and redistribution of wealth to achieve that goal.
The general point here is: what good is a right to X during a shortage of X? As in "what good is a right to food during a famine?"
Where the quote goes wrong I think is bringing up progressives as if they're at fault for the current lack of abundance. The situation in the article is one where our attempts to create a massive economic surplus through global free trade have backfired. (Global free trade being a conservative/neoliberal plan where an abundance agenda is pursued by capitalistic methods.) This situation is a reminder that in capitalism, we optimize for profit, and optimizing for profit generally means having very little wiggle room for disruptions to a system. Making sure an abundance is available even during times of disruption is something that likely requires government intervention, not a lack of it.
We need a name for this ideology, the Mad Max mentality? It legitimately reminds me of those monster trucks driving through the climate change wasted landscape with people spitting what little gasoline they have left into the engine. shiny and chrome!
I can easily pay extra or wait out the shortages but if you're just scraping by it's much harder to survive if the shelves are empty.
One zombie pulp fiction author - by the name of Jonathan Maberry - got it right though. In his work they drive quads fueled by ethanol.
The argument here is that without abundance Covid tests don’t make it to the mediocre everything store.
Additionally... I would happily sacrifice paper towels and vinyl for seats if it created more equity... but that's not what needs to happen at all. The article creates a false dichotomy.
An additional, more radical view point would be that the term "redistribution" is misleading as wealth is generated by the worker and then extracted by private owners.
And what do they do with it? They cripple their ability to make things in exchange for short term gains:
> For decades, many U.S. companies moved manufacturing overseas, taking advantage of cheaper labor and cheaper materials across the oceans. In normal times, America benefits from global trade, and the price of offshoring is borne by the unlucky few in deindustrialized regions.
That primarily applies to monopolies like land or ISPs. Most markets work well because there is a reasonable amount of competition and the supply of goods can grow according to demand.
They don't consider that the more likely outcome is them living in squalor while also going to a shitty job which they hate.
No, no, no. That won't happen. Not to them.
Effectively, we are seeing what happens when people stop working. The system starts to falter and honestly it looks like it could collapse.
There are a huge number of inputs going into supply chain breakdowns, and I find all of these takes to be wildly oversimplistic.
Taking a look at even just one aspect, the chip shortage: what you're seeing is a combination of underestimated demand (manufacturers assumed demand would decrease during Covid), bottlenecks in production, factory shutdowns, inflexible scheduling and sourcing, transportation difficulty, increasing demand from both companies/individuals who have shifted to remote and from cryptocurrency attention, etc...
And all of these shortages affect each other too, increasing and redirecting other goods and services, which can form complicated feedback loops. Chip shortages make transportation harder, which makes it harder to manufacture chips.
Employment is certainly a factor, but it's also certainly not the only factor. We are seeing stress fractures in a global system right now. There is no one cause (other than I guess the existence of Covid in general), and there is no single, one policy that anyone, Progressive or Conservative, can pass to fix the problem.
Anyone (Progressive or Conservative) who is trying to sell you the current shortage as simple proof of their ideology is not doing a good job of looking at the issue from a holistic perspective.
Basic income is really complementary to capitalism. It provides a cushion to people on the very bottom, allowing them to stay in the game, and for other people it helps push them out of a subsistence loop and into "maybe I should start a small business" or "Hmm, I've saved enough that I could pay my bills with basic income so I could retrain on this new technology" etc.
The problem with the rich isn't that they earn too much, it's that they spend too little on consumption or investment.
Because announcing there will be shortages is guaranteed to produce shortages.
I used to buy a sum total of six rolls of TP in 2019 (I use a bidet, so this is mainly for guests).
Right now I have a box of 24 in the house with two used all through 2020 + 2021 (no guests, that's why).
So that's 22+ rolls which I have taken off the market without utility, which is because the week I went looking for TP it wasn't there and you could order in bulk instead.
They pulled the lever on the trolley problem, therefore it is their fault, but not pulling is also a choice with damage.
Ruining institutional trust by patronizing and lying seems like much worse long-term damage than toughing out a TP shortage.
And WTF is this "new economics" bit? I never heard anything about that, either from government or non-fringe media sources. Links, please.
Most of the supply chain experts are predicting that it will be years before this is unwound. Years.
It's talked about quite often and it's most significantly the idea that government doesn't have to worry about spending money it doesn't have. The formal form is usually called Modern Monetary Theory.
I still disagree with that theory, clearly giving everyone more money is going to raise prices, but it's not quite as ridiculous as you make it sound.
Lots of people have been talking about how modern monetary theory (MMT) means that the USA can 'print money' (increase the money supply) without fear of inflation.
Because the inflation being referred to being transitory was from the central bank's monetary policy, but the inflation we're seeing for many things is from supply-side constraints. The why of a thing happening can be just as important, if not more so, than the what happened.
People were expecting demand-pull inflation ("too much" economic activity), but we we're probably seeing is the cost-push variety:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation#Keynesian_view
See for example Shipping being >4 times higher than the base line of January 2019:
* https://www.oecd.org/economic-outlook#GDP-growth-projections...
The same thing can have multiple causes, some of which many be more easily predicted and/or modelled.
Also, this begs the question for what is considered "transitory": 3 months? 6? 12? Other?
The fact of the matter was that inflation was expected because of the spending surge, but that 'transitory' meant that it would be 12-18 months, some using the spending of the Korean War (as compared to the Vietnam War spending):
> The Korean War started when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950 and ended with an armistice in mid-1953. As displayed in the following figure, US inflation soared in late 1950 but returned to around 2 percent in 1952 and 1 percent in 1953.[3]
* https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/in...
* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/opinion/covid-biden-econo...
Are you claiming these shortages are permanent? I see no evidence of that, since already things which were scarce or costly have returned (wood, toilet paper, etc.).
It's still more likely these shortages will subside as workers return (a decent amount of the shortages are Delta shutting down production lines).
If this was obviously the case then why didn't you make a ridiculous amount of money speculating in the stock market or other markets?
Also, let's be fair, most of the "critical reporting" under Trump was not "The administration forecasts x% economic growth, but experts disagree" variety, it was more like "Wait, did the president just tell people to drink bleach, or was it supposed to be a joke, in which case which part was a joke and which wasn't?" variety.
Nonsense. Certainly, the outrageous statement you mentioned was critiqued, but relatively mundane ones were too, such as the president's prediction of vaccines before the end of 2020 (correct), the president's desire for low interest rates, the president's desire for tariffs, the president's desire to end wars, etc.
Many many articles were written directly critiquing boring parts of Trump's economic policies.
Here's a 'fact check' from the New York Times when Trump announced he wanted lower interest rates:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/economy/trump-in...
For example, here is Trump's statement:
> Because of the faulty thought process we have going for us at the Federal Reserve, we pay much higher interest rates than countries that are no match for us economically. In other words, our interest costs are much higher than other countries, when they should be lower. Correct!
There is only one 'fact' mentioned here, which is that our interest rates are higher than other countries. The times admits this is true. It says:
> It is true that the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates nine times since 2015, leaving the federal funds rate, its main policy tool, at 2.25 to 2.5 percent. That is, indeed, far higher than rates in advanced economies, including the eurozone and Japan, where some policy rates remain in negative territory.
It then goes on to 'fact check' the opinion based parts, and instead of disputing fact, it excuses the feds actions.
Can you find me a NYT 'fact check' for the Biden's administrations claims the inflation is transitory? Of course not, because for a democratic president, the NYT extends the privilege of not fact checking one's opinions
You almost answer your own question, but mistake cause & effect.
They weren't reporting critically, it just happened that their preferred (leftwing) political option was out of power. They were lying against Trump / for Democrats, just like they're now lying for Biden. The only difference is, who's in power.
Because that's what they do. They define reality.
When it comes time to convince people that the shortages and inflation are normal and will always be there (and were always there in a "we've always been at war with Eurasia") way, they'll do just that.
>This is a far cry from the critical reporting of the 2016-2020 years.
2016-2020 didn't have critical reporting either. It had hysterical partisan crap, with a big bias against Trump with ridiculous stories proped up to inifinity because it made good bucks (and because Trump was championed by middle/working class/flyover state people - basically everything esteemed and hip journalists, academics, and pundits on the upper middle class - or aspiring to be there - despise).
The same partisan bias proped up Biden (a long-time lame "professional politician", forever an insignificant mediocrity, and now barely functional due to age, that was touted as some kind of political messiah by the media).
The people who own these news networks are literally the people that populists position themselves against.
The campaigns against populists (Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders) are usually successful. In the case of Trump, they weren’t. I think what we are seeing now, where the news has basically just given up and semblance of even trying to be an indicator of true things which are happening in the world, is that elites are trying to course correct.
Like it or not 2019 was the best year that the working class and low income have had in the US for a very long time. Real wage growth was record high, unemployment was record low. It was an incredible time (if you don’t see this: please try to diversify your fried groups. The people in the country who usually get forgotten about we’re happy and hopeful in a way they haven’t been in a long time).
So why are the news people lying? Because they want people to forget that, and they really need to be right about their idea that electing an elderly, senile, corrupt, career politician is the solution. So they just lie about it.
Edit: when you guys downvote this can you please just give at least some kind of explanation? I really wish some of you could have seen the level of hope that the poor and working class had for the first time in a LONG time, and what this lying and gaslighting has done to them. It’s horrible.
You responded to me, but I 100% agree with you!
I remember in Marin county, my gym had hired a guy with down syndrome because they didn't have enough employees -- unemployment was so low. My local safeway had resorted to hiring extremely disabled people to help with checkout. There was at least one paralyzed lady doing checkout and a guy without hands as well. For those individuals, such an opportunity would be very difficult to come by (I know ADA exists.. but let's be honest).
> So why are the news people lying? Because they want people to forget that, and they really need to be right about their idea that electing an elderly, senile, corrupt, career politician is the solution. So they just lie about it.
Absolutely. If we saw sustained real wage growth the way we were beginning to see with Trump, people wouldn't have to rely on debt to finance their lives, which would mean a reduction of asset opportunities for the upper class. They couldn't stand that.
No it's not. It's a system whereby the powerful tell working class and low income common folk to be angry at things like immigrants, minorities, other countries, etc. so their anger goes elsewhere. A more modern alternate form involves convincing people to be angry at things that don't exist, like Satanic pedophiles harvesting adrenochrome or 5G chips in vaccines, so people expend their limited energy fighting windmills and diving down rabbit holes that lead nowhere.
Here's a good rule of thumb: if you are angry at someone about a condition such as high costs or unemployment, ask yourself if the people you are angry at have the power to act as decision makers in control of any of the decisions that led to that condition. If the answer is "no" you are angry at the wrong people.
That's not populism because it involves thinking, and populism is mindless.
If the dominant viewpoint on FB was the opposite viewpoint a la every other social media outlet, we most likely wouldn’t be having these discussions about FB right now, or at least not anywhere near this degree.
Same here.
Several years ago I went through a period of bringing in 1/8 of my previous income over a stretch of two years. I had to tap into deep savings to stay afloat. In that stretch, I realized how much money was wasted on things that had absolutely no positive impact in my living situation.
When the pandemic came around, I was blessed in keeping a stable job and continued to earn a comfortable wage, yet I found myself going back to a simpler mindset.
And you know, I’ve been a lot happier. For example, I used to eat out all the time because I never had time to cook. Once that changed, what became one of my favorite meals was (apparently) a depression-era staple. Go figure.
We’re so conditioned that in order to be good Americans, we have to be good consumers. The problem is, it’s gotten to an extreme level, and now we’re seeing how our out-of-balance lifestyles are actually problematic. Sure, there’s been ample profit, but these habits exact other costs we don’t see until it’s too late.
I had a strangely opposite reaction during Covid: Recognizing that local restaurants would struggle, we doubled or tripled our usage of restaurants, plus a bump in tip on top. This was takeout, of course, but they would normally be dine-in experiences).
We still lost a couple of our favorite restaurants to closures but on a whole, the town came through pretty well.
If someone shares that they installed a bidet, I thinking asking which model is a pretty reasonable followup.
I was thinking that, too, before I bought the $38 Amazon special referenced in other comments below. To get heated water, I'd have to run wiring and an outlet, and...oh, screw it, try it without the heat and if it's not acceptable I'll buy a better one and do the electrical work.
phhhhht, it's fine, and I'm glad I didn't go to the trouble. It's a nice-to-have, but not worth tearing apart drywall to run wiring, IMO. OTOH, if you have an outlet in a convient-to-reach location (e. g., under the toilet), then YOLO.
It looks kinda like this but with a curvier handle:
https://www.amazon.com/Handheld-Toilet-Adjustable-Pressure-F...
You don't need a fancy motorized electric thing (I don't trust cleaning all those little nozzles and angles). I started using this after I stayed with a Muslim friend in Morocco years ago. I had no choice but learn, and now I'm hooked. My partner thinks it is gross, tho. /shrugs/
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A0RHSJO/ref=ppx_yo_dt...
No idea how they do it in Japan.
What has changed is the queues and the pricing. The shortages we are feeling are the gaps that have surfaced between when retailers trigger reorders and when they are replenished. They grew accustomed to being able to do that just-in-time as forecasted inventory went to 0, but the added delays have made this much harder.
Additionally, the shipping prices have made many things simply uneconomic to ship. I saw an analysis on the difference in cost recently for a grill: prior to the pandemic, shipping from China to LA contributed $5 to its price, with shipping costs up 8x, that's now $40. Rather than fulfill orders at negative margins, many people are simply waiting for lower prices after the holidays. It's not that they're being held up in transit, these things aren't being shipped to begin with.
In some cases, an incredibly aggressive supply chain and payment schedule can actually create financing for a company. Aswath Damodaran's corporate finance class mentions one of the major alkaline battery producers as an example. At any point, they only have 2 days worth of production in inventory, and they require payment within ~7 days from clients, while their own suppliers are paid after 30 days. That means at any point, they are holding about 20 days of revenue worth of cash without paying any interest.
I have a few supermarket chains within reasonable shopping distance. The higher end one seems to be low in stock of a few staple items.
The more mid-tier grocer has no shortages that I saw.
My guess is they warehouse things differently.
Perhaps it’s time for the US to finally stop doing that.
news report of 10 days for tankers to unload cargo in california too
I have no idea why and I didn't question it. They said they ordered 200 and they got 14 of them. I only needed 6.
Edit: What's wrong with asking a simple question?
But the OP sentence is like a sudoku. 2 3/8 is ambiguous. It could be 2 pipes or a measurement. If you read all the way to the end you see that he bought 6 pipes so it must be a measurement.
This would be a great test for an AI language comprehension system though. Perhaps you are an AI?
Yes. I needed some simple parts for a home repair job I'm doing. In the before times I would have been able to find them all at one Home Depot, in abundance. I had to go to three Home Depots, two Lowes, and one Ace Hardware to find everything I was looking for.
All manufacturers, regardless of label, get their cast-iron parts from the same place in China. This isn't for price; we're talking about different brands that range in price, for this tool, from $500-$2800. The top of the top end is what I purchased, because I had extra money due to no travel during covid. It is built in America with American parts, except the cast-iron; it still has Chinese cast-iron.
The reason was because of environmental regulations.
So, if we do shift manufacturing back, we need to either be cool with shit-tons of pollution, or be searching desperately, now, for solutions to that pollution.
To be clear, I desperately want more made in America goods. The quality is just better. From woodworking - Pony clamps were made in Chicago, Il, and are still the best clamps your money can buy. Now they're made in the clamp factory in China and the quality shows that shift.
Can’t print toilet paper or paper towels but random I need a hook to hang something, or a fitting for a pipe that’s not under load, tons of stuff on thingiverse.
It's been really good for printing brackets and things and simple replacement parts
Also, last year, I wasn't able to get filament for about 3 months due to the pandemic.
At no point was it hard to buy a 1KG spool of PLA as far as I know.
Independently of what the "left" or the "right" is telling you, It's not hard to understand that if you rely on foreign workers to do certain jobs and they leave, you'll have a (temporary?) problem.
From my point of view, anyone saying that brexit isn't to blame for any of the shortages is just as wrong as those who blame brexit for everything.
A problem can have more than one cause.
The rest of Europe is dealing with the pandemic, we are dealing with the pandemic and brexit.
If they actually manage to pass either stimulus things are going to get really bad. There's not enough supply or labor for the bipartisan "bridges and roads" bill. There's not anywhere near enough labor for the partisan social bill.
If they actually pass it, given the way government runs, they'll overpay for everything to get supply, which costs extra, but worse it's going to take supply (both material and labor) away from regular businesses and people.
Actually there is enough labor. What there isn't is a fair (inflation and productivity adjusted) wage for that labor.
>but worse it's going to take supply (both material and labor) away from regular businesses and people.
Isn't that a desirable trait? Shouldn't people pay more for things if they really want them? Why can't we let the "market" handle this?
That would imply there are people sitting around doing nothing waiting for higher wages. But that's not the case, there simply are not enough employees right now.
> Shouldn't people pay more for things if they really want them?
You just need to give the economy some time to catch up, and let supply catch up to demand.
> Why can't we let the "market" handle this?
Because the government is not the regular market. They are able to outbid others, and cause shortages that don't help anyone.
I should have made this clearer: I'm not saying never pass this funding, rather, just wait a little for the supply chain to catch up.
[0] https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...
People normally spend a lot of their disposable income on travel/bars/dining/concerts/experiences/other similar categories that don't involve a lot of imported goods per dollar spent. Last year they shifted a lot of that spending to stuff, and when much of the population does that.....that buys a lot of stuff.
Anecdotally, among most people I know, that balance of how they spend their disposable income still hasn't returned to it's pre-pandemic state.
Seriously though, I'm glad I don't need a car, computer, or home repair. Friends in tech are telling me 50-100 week lead times on parts. (Like the Intel NIC article on HN last week.)
Anecdotally, since the early 2000's I have had trouble finding contractors to do small home improvement jobs (under 50k). For at least two decades, only big jobs get bid, the rest require handymen. Not that I have a problem with handymen, just that they often shouldn't handle jobs that really require a team. So it feels like the comment about construction has never really been alleviated in my experience. It's like airlines and baggage fees: they told it is was due to 9/11 and fuel costs, and were only temporary, yet they persist.
I've noticed plenty of products that I used to order on-demand now having multi-month lead times - like my contacts. My doctor gave me ten lenses, but said I might not see my annual order of lenses arrive for six to eight weeks. I guess I'll get used to readers :)
I have the impression a long awaited crisis is finally coming. Remember the stock market going up and up and the busloads of many invested in tech and ML?
At some point the bubble had to explode. The COVID-19 crisis was an unexpected black swan which is acting, belatedly, both as a retardant and as a trigger for the global, systemic, financial and economical crash that usually happens once a decade.
I actually think repair and remanufacture is a great place for growth in this area. It's a lot easier to enter than full-blown factory production, AND it will help a stuff-rich society get some real utility out of all that crap sitting around in storage units, closets, and landfills.
Maybe I'm just in a good mood but I'm actually kind of excited for this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/us/abbott-covid-tests.htm...
not really a global supply chain issue is it
What is in them? Guessing, specialty paper, plastic, reagents, probably plastic &/or cardboard packaging... machines to make them if the production line didn't previously exist?
If theyr'e all local/regional, it'd be great, but if there's just that one missing component...
I hate that I've grown so cynical, and I don't know what to do with this hate, to be honest. It's not healthy, I'm certain of that.
> One possibility is that Americans adopt a sustainable, ascetic, and homespun lifestyle that reduces our dependency on goods that activate the global supply chain. If you can seriously envision such a world, I envy your gift of imagination.
> The best solution to the Everything Shortage is to have a policy to make more of just about everything.
Well, is it? The pandemic will pass but the various environmental crises created by the “more of everything” policy probably will oblige reduced consumption in some form.
Most US industries will be given significant bail outs from Main Street, while Main Street itself is left to fend for themselves on meager public support pillars (if they even manage to get through to a person that is able to help them).
I think COVID-19 was a test of our global supply chain and we have failed. If a virus mutates and is even slightly worse than COVID-19, then we are truly fucked.
There is no shortage of anything. True shortages are determined by nature, not by the economic manipulations of financiers and globalists, which means that most of the shortages are the consequences of policy decisions not natural events.
Take something such as the shipping shortage. During their Covid crisis a lot of shipping capacity was taken of the markets. Some companies actually destroyed some of their ships.
18 months later there is a shortage of shipping capacity, alleged. I don't think I am that bright, but if whole loads of shipping capacity are taken of the market in what is bound to be a temporary downturn, is it surprising that there will be shortages?
Lets take the truck driver shortage in the UK. The UK benefited from cheap labour from Eastern Europe as a result of Brexit, which led many qualified British drivers to give up the job because the pay was shit. To be honest even the cheaper labour from Eastern Europe considered it to be shit. Then you have Brexit followed by Covid, and many of the drivers from Eastern Europe have seen that the grass is not so green on the British side and don't see themselves coming back.
As for the truck drivers there about tens of thousands of fully qualified HGV drivers who simply not interested in the job. There is no shortage of HGV drivers, there is a shortage of employers who are willing to pay decent money not just in the short term, but in the long term to get the qualified drivers to commit. Funny how the media never mentions that. Truck drivers need to take a medical to get on the road, and even the NHS doctors who are supposed to be doing them are not doing them anymore. Funny how that never gets mentioned by the media.
In effect industry should stop blaming the govt for their own questionable pay policies. The country of zero hour contracts is feeling a labour shortage. Surprise!!
Then you have gas shortages. Remember Nordstream and Nordstream II, which the US government did its best to sabotage? Well Germany needs more gas and it isn't fully up yet. Are US gas companies ready to fill the gap?
Then of course you have this manufactured pandemic. Just because there is a new illness around doesn't make it a pandemic, a definition which was changed by WHO in order to serve a global agenda. The "developed" world adapted a "treatment" policy which involved taken painkillers and hoping that the disease would not develop enugh to warrant hospital admission. Even then they cooked the definitions to allow every positive test to labelled as actual disease even if there are no clinical symptoms, and use it as an excuse to warrant economic lockdowns.
Announcement of shortages isn't about real shortages. It is simply a way of priming consumers to expect higher prices in the future, as though demand has risen when it hasn't.
It is time the general public stopped being hoodwinked by mainstream media who are simply the mouthpieces of Big Finance which has not taken over Govt in the Western world.
