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Thursday, June 28, 2018

Joshua Bateman — Why China is spending billions to develop an army of robots to turbocharge its economy

  • Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for a robot revolution in manufacturing to boost productivity.
  • Wages in China are rising, and it's becoming harder to compete with cheap labor.
  • An aging population in China also necessitates automation. The working-age population, people age 15 to 64, could drop to 800 million by 2050 from 998 million today.
  • Chinese robotic growth is forecast to exceed 20 percent annually through 2020.
Interesting article to read in full.

China's socialist ideology commits the elite to dealing with inequality in a way that capitalist ideology doesn't. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as it develops. I suspect that China will recognize that it is a demand problem long before the West does.

CNBC — The Edge
Why China is spending billions to develop an army of robots to turbocharge its economy
Joshua Bateman, CNBC contributor

5 comments:

  1. China's socialist ideology commits the elite to dealing with inequality in a way that capitalist ideology doesn't. Tom Hickey

    What part of capitalist ideology requires or even allows government insurance of privately created liabilities?

    Indeed, government insurance of privately created liabilities was given to us by Progressives, not to save capitalism but to further corrupt it.

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  2. If "capitalists" had their way, only private institutions would be permitted to create money. It's called "free banking."

    Free banking is a monetary arrangement in which banks are subject to no special regulations beyond those applicable to most enterprises, and in which they also are free to issue their own paper currency (banknotes). In a free banking system, market forces control the supply of total quantity of banknotes and deposits that can be supported by any given stock of cash reserves, where such reserves consist either of a scarce commodity (such as gold) or of an artificially limited stock of "fiat" money issued by a central bank. In the strictest versions of free banking, however, there either is no role at all for a central bank, or the supply of central bank money is supposed to be permanently "frozen." There is, therefore, no agency capable of serving as a "lender of last resort" in the usually understood sense of the term. Nor is there any government insurance of banknotes or bank deposit accounts.[1]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking

    There is a well know quote, misattributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws."

    The original quote is "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws! and the source has not been discovered."

    Interestingly, it is apparently based on a prior quote, "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws." It is attributed to Andrew Fletcher.

    https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/7887/did-rothschild-say-this-famous-quote-if-yes-what-did-he-mean-by-it

    "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws," is very close to, "Let me make the narrative of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."

    Gaining social, political and economic control is about controlling both the money and the narrative, and thereby the state apparatus. This is the basis of neoliberalism as capture of control through the political process "democratically."

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  3. If "capitalists" had their way, only private institutions would be permitted to create money. It's called "free banking." Tom Hickey

    Except for deficit spending by the monetary sovereign, that's already the case. And it's Progressives we can thank that the corresponding liabilities that banks create when they create deposits are largely a sham toward the non-bank private sector. Therefore we can thank Progressives for the damage banks can do.

    As for "free banking", that sounds more like a definition of corrupt government since only government should issue fiat and it should be inexpensive. Also hypocritical since it is government taxation and government enforcement of contracts that gives value to money.

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  4. Except for deficit spending by the monetary sovereign, that's already the case. aa

    Well, asset purchases by the Central Bank can also create bank deposits, I should add, but though the Central Bank is not a private institution it does serve private interests such as asset owners.

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  5. There is, therefore, no agency capable of serving as a "lender of last resort" in the usually understood sense of the term. via Tom Hickey

    Well, the millions who lost their homes had no lender of last resort, did they? So why should banks? Because the payment system must work through them? Well, that's simply fixed - allow all citizens to have debit/checking accounts at the CB and abolish all privileges for the banks so citizens will not have any unjust incentive not to use their accounts at the CB. Then we shall have an additional but inherently risk-fee, 100% liquid at all times payment system that completely bypasses the payment system that must work through banks.

    Now can anyone point me to an article by Warren Mosler, Stefanie Kelton, or any other prominent MMT advocate that proposes such a payment system?

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