What if today's strikers really are like the miners?

We think this is a very odd comparison by Ken Capstick:

The media damns striking nurses and ambulance staff as the enemy, just as they did the miners

For of course the miners were the enemy. The enemies of Gaia that is. Those coal mines all did need to close. The very same wokes and luvvies who used to collect money for the striking miners now collect to oppose the opening of that Cumbrian mine today. On the simple grounds that Britain has no place for coal mines - and, obviously, no place for coal miners.

Leave all that stuff about Thatcher and Scargill and battles aside. The mines needed to close.

Which is why we think this is so odd:

When mineworkers took strike action in 1984 to save their industry from a government policy aimed at its total destruction, Margaret Thatcher was quick to refer to them and their families as the “enemy within”. As strikes take place across Britain, the government’s response echoes the past.

Whether it be rail workers, train drivers, Royal Mail workers, barristers, postal workers, refuse workers, London Underground workers, air transport workers or our wonderful NHS nurses, the government finds itself determined to force through cuts in wages.

Odd because the comparison being made is, well, which of these groups should now be considered the people we should deliberately put out of work? For that is the comparison with the miners.

It’s possible to muse on this, obviously. Automation might well mean we need fewer train drivers and London Underground workers. The fall in rail travel might mean we need fewer rail workers overall. While we recognise the necessity of lawyers it is conceptually difficult for us to support their fees. Apparently, given those same Gaia concerns as trapped the miners, we should be having many fewer air transport workers as air transport is to become verboeten.

Which is, as we say, most odd. For if we are to consider how the current strikes are indeed exactly like those of the miners then the obvious comparison is with which of these groups should we soon enough stop employing altogether?

Which isn’t what we think Mr, Capstick means but it is what he says.

Ahhh, there we are, our Laffer Curve spotted in the wild

There are those confused enough to deny that the Laffer Curve exists. Which is only the idea that tax rates can be high enough to reduce the amount of tax collected. Note the “can” there, along with the equal point that tax rates can be low enough that revenue can be increased by raising such tax rates. The implication of this being that we’d like to know where we are with any specific tax - the answer will depend upon that specific tax and the structure of the society surrounding it. That peak rate will be lower in a country where people can avoid income tax by leaving the country than it will be where changing residency doesn’t free from the tax system as one example. So too the revenue maximising rate of a transactions tax will be very much lower than that of a consumption tax, both again lower than an income tax. The EU once found that a financial transactions tax of 0.01% was above the Laffer Curve peak while not even we would suggest that’s the revenue raising maxima for a VAT or PAYE.

But rates definitely can be high enough for us to spot Laffer Effects - that is, the withdrawal of labour which may or may not lead to that reduction in total revenue collected:

Rishi Sunak has been urged to lift “bonkers” tax rules on the size of pensions to stem the tide of over-50s retiring early.

Senior Tories have said the Prime Minister should increase or even scrap the lifetime allowance because it acts as a “perverse incentive” to quit.

Number 10 is attempting to reverse a sharp rise in the number of older people choosing to leave the workforce since the Covid pandemic.

Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has been told to come up with ways to incentivise over-50s to stay in and return to their jobs.

The lifetime allowance currently stands at £1,073,100, having been reduced from a high of £1.8 million just over a decade ago. Pensioners are typically taxed 55 per cent on any earnings they withdraw from their pension pot above that amount.

Highly - and expensively - trained and experienced doctors are retiring when there’s still a decade and more of use in them simply because the tax rates are too high. The obvious answer is reduce the tax rates.

So, let’s do that, reduce the tax rates. The simplest method of doing this is simply to abolish the lifetime limit on pension pots. After all, we like people saving. At that macroeconomic level savings will equal investment and no one observant has been complaining that there is over-investment in the British economy in recent decades.

This is not a political point, nor is it some creation of neoliberal phantasies or anything. This is plain and obvious evidence, like a nose upon a face level obviousness. People are withdrawing their labour because the tax rate upon the income from that labour is too high to produce the incentive to work. So, they don’t.

We would add in some little piece of neoliberalism though. Which is an observation about these tax rates faced by these highly paid professionals and which produce this obvious effect. The combination of taxes and benefit withdrawals produces very similar marginal rates amount the poor. Who therefore also don’t supply their labour - or more of it perhaps - into the market. We are not therefore stating that we should ease off on taxing the rich alone. Rather, we’re shouting that we should lower the tax burden on all in order to make us, in aggregate, richer.

You know, stop taxing people so much that they stop working.

Porsche has just solved climate change for us

Or at least a very large chunk of the climate hange problem is solved.

As Steiner explained, the e-fuel plant will use wind power to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is then combined with carbon captured from the air or industrial sources to synthesize methanol, which in turn can then be converted into longer hydrocarbons to be used as fuel. The synthetic e-fuel is a direct drop-in for pump gasoline,

As we’ve been saying for some time now if we can have cheap green hydrogen then we are indeed done. True, there then has to be some Stinks work but nothing difficult. If we’ve hydrogen and CO2 then we can make methanol, gasoline, aviation fuel and, obviously, methane. All of which will be net zero carbon.

The synthetic e-fuel won't be exactly cheap—Steiner thinks at current prices, it works out to around $8 per gallon ($2/L),

We’d not want to run the world’s airfleet on something at that cost but we most certainly could do. And it would almost certainly be cheaper to do so than to junk everything we’ve already got and start using Zeppelins instead. Most of Europe has been paying €2 a litre recently and while it’s a dent to the pocketbook internal combustion engines are still cheaper than electric cars right now covering all running costs.

This also largely solves the battery problem. We know how to stock, store, transport and use at our leisure - gain dispatchable energy from - such chemical constructions.

So, we’re done. As long as all of those laws banning ICEs, banning gas boilers and all that are rescinded.

This also shows us exactly why we should deal with the problem through the carbon tax, not through planning and the government picking of losers. We desire to use the solution to the problem which does that solving at the lowest cost. Which is why we use the - suitably adjusted - price system. To work out which is doing the solving at the lowest cost.

Our intuition here - intuition being a posh word for lightly informed guess - is that at these prices this solves aviation and comes close to dealing with cars. But doesn’t sort out the house heating problem. But that’s OK, this is the first plant, the pilot one. As we keep being told about solar, windmills and all the rest, it’s the building of them in volume that reduces costs. So we’ve still that to look forward to.

That gender pay gap wholly and entirely explained

On single sentence here aids in explaining the gender pay gap:

They started living together only two weeks before Sonny was born, and got married when he was 14 months old; they now have four more sons. At about the time they became a couple, Richard and his bandmates formed the Feeling. “I definitely felt a massive drive to up my game,” he says.

“They” include Sophie Ellis-Bextor which gives us the opportunity to parade our age and dodderiness. We’ve been around to see that whole cycle of “Who?” “Rising talent” to “Established star” and back to “Who?” again. In fact, we’ve been around long enough to recall the scandale bénin concerning Ms. Ellis-Bextor’s brother.

This does mean that we’ve also been around long enough to note that often enough there’s a gendered reaction to the arrival of children.

As the TUC says:

Fathers working full-time get paid a fifth more than men with similar jobs who don’t have children, according to a new report published by the TUC

That’s before accounting for age, education and so on - higher ages are associated with a greater probability of being a father of course. But the effect is still there when all of those other factors are accounted for.

The report shows that dads who work full-time experience, on average, a 21% ‘wage bonus’ and that working fathers with two kids earn more (9%) than those with just one.

The findings are in stark contrast to the experience of working mothers, says the report. Women who become mothers before 33 typically suffer a 15% pay penalty.

That mothers have that pay penalty is just one of those standard scientific facts:

Mothers tend to receive lower wages than comparable childless women. This ‘motherhood wage gap’ has been reported in numerous studies.

The possibly excessive period of child helplessness - even for mammals - among humans means that we’re, largely enough, descendants of those who pair bonded. That appears to have effects among us now over who does what.

At which point Occam’s shaving kit comes into contention. We would like to explain this world around us and the simplest explanation is often the best. It is possible to explain the entirety of the modern world’s gender pay gap with just these two points. Fathers get paid more, mothers get paid less. Not men get paid more, women less, but that event of parturition leads, on average and across the society, to slightly different behaviours among men and among women.

This isn’t inevitable, if men and women acted differently - say, there was an entirely equal distribution of primary child caring on average across all couples - then the effect would disappear.

We can also muse on whether we should change this, how we would and even whether we could. But it’s still true that a significant part of that gender pay gap is simply that the arrival of children incentivises men to up their game. Yea, even bass players.

Now what?

On this idea of climate funding, climate reparations

One of today’s insistences is that the rich nations - you and me effectively - must pay up to the poorer countries for climate change. Amounts vary. Some say $100 billion a year and rising in order to pay for the expenses that climate change will visit upon the poor. Others are talking trillions to cough up for reparations for this and that. And, well, there’s a certain problem with that idea.

We know very well that some countries aren’t going to gain such cash. Assume - just for the giggles - that the trillions per year are offered up. It’s still true that North Korea isn’t going to get a cheque because that would just mean more missiles being fired over Japan.

Hmm, OK. But what’s the cut off point of who doesn’t get the money? That’s where it gets interesting.

Agreed, we’re somewhat out of sync with the zeitgeist on this, the only reason we know of for continued national poverty is bad government. Others differ on that. And yet, well, there are some that wouldn’t gain cheques under even the most liberal of such regimes. Or at least should be some.

This is a decade old and more but:

Equatorial Guinea has become the richest country, per capita, in sub-Saharan Africa since the discovery of oil and natural gas reserves in the 1990s, yet the majority of its people remain extremely poor. Despite its increased wealth, the realization of the rights to food, health and education has declined. These retrogressions are documented in CESR's statistical analysis of the country's economic and social rights outcomes relative to its resources. According to official UN data, GDP per capita is over US$26,000, yet almost two-thirds of Equatoguineans still live on less than US$1 a day. Access to health and education has deteriorated as the country's economy has boomed. The proportion of children dying before age five has risen in the last 15 years and is now higher than some of the poorest countries in the region.

There are rumours - rumours mind! - that the oil money goes to the Presidential family and little further. There have been mutterings that earlier Angolan governments might have done something like that, maybe. A daughter of a previous President of that country has been declared, more than once, to be the richest woman in Africa for example, owning many Portuguese assets. Burma’s a military dictatorship again isn’t it? So no money for them.

And so on and so on:

Eskom, the state power provider, was hollowed out by plundering and mismanagement under much of the rule of the African National Congress (ANC).

Sending money off to either prevent or even make up for climate change does rather depend upon the idea that the money sent off will either prevent or make up for climate change. So, which places are poor enough that they need or deserve such but also well enough governed that they’ll make good use of it?

One of us was at a university talk shop just recently and we were told that COPwhateveritis had decided that $8 billion was about the right sum for South Africa. Well, OK and maybe. But who believes that if Jacob Zuma were still in power then the $8 billion would do much useful? Or if Mugabe were still deciding on what to do with however much Zimbabwe were to be awarded?

Entirely true, there are places doing well from a standing start. Bangladesh has been growing at 6 and 8% a year for a couple of decades now - Pakistan not so much. It’s not obvious that a place growing at 6 and 8% a year can usefully absorb much more outside cash and the places that are still at that startline quite possibly wouldn’t use it well.

It’s obvious that even if the cash is stumped up then some won’t get it on the grounds of incompetence, venality or plain barking madness. Which does lead us to that very interesting rumination.

OK, who?

It's always necessary to analyse the correct system

This is one of those claims that we object to:

At the heart of the malaise is the declining “energy return on investment” (EROI) of fossil fuels. This refers to the amount of energy delivered in relation to the amount expended to obtain it. When we first drilled for oil, we pursued sweet crude near the surface; at this stage, we got 100 barrels back for every barrel expended in the extraction process. Today, EROI is falling as we expend ever-greater energy in fracturing rocks and refining complex materials such as tar sands. Now, we only get five barrels back for every barrel expended, restricting the amount of net energy available to society — and placing fundamental constraints on every other aspect of life.

Therefore we must pull in our horns and accept a straitened future standard of living because it’s just obvious, innit?

The thing is it’s not - not in any useful sense - a useful analysis nor a limitation upon that future.

One attack is that looking purely at energy is the wrong part of the system to be analysing. We’re interested in what we get out of the energy, not the amount of it. Given that energy consumption to GDP - GDP being that measure of value add - has been falling this past few hundred years then we’re gaining more value from each unit of energy. We’re suffering - suffering - increased returns on energy that is.

The other is to confine ourselves to that energy on energy thing as the engineers would have us do. The correct response is to point out that we do this all the time. The Royal Navy is really very, very, interested in that last litre of jet fuel used in each flight off its decks. On the grounds that it’s the last litre used which performs that all important task about flying, making the number of landings equal the number of takeoffs. The Royal Navy also uses tonnes of fuel to make that last litre available at the time and place that it is used.

Insolation means that we face no overall shortage of energy. Any shortage is simply of having it switchonable right here, right now, when and where we want it and where it will add value.

Which is the same point as the first of course - it’s the value we gain from the use of the energy that matters. We’re perfectly happy to use energy to make sure we’ve energy when and where we can use it that it adds value.

Of course, this is also the mistake that so many make about renewables, windmills and solar and so on. It’s not the total amount of energy we can have that matters. It’s whether we can have it when it actually adds value that does - like, a cold winter’s night when the wind ain’t blowing.

It’s value that matters in economics, not anything else.

We can judge a policy by the methods necessary to implement it

Jason Hickel has another entry in his listing of reasons why we should all be poorer so that we can be socialist. Abandon the idea of us all getting richer and we can indeed be those socialists.

Don Boudreaux chastises usefully on a number of points. The most obvious of which is that if we need to reduce - if, note - resource consumption then capitalism and markets are the best known manner of doing that. No one looking East from the Brandenburg Gate in 1989 thought that actually existing socialism was light on or efficient with resource consumption.

We offer a slightly different method of measurement. Hickel says that, actually, all would be richer by having this less. From which we’d take the logical position that, since humans like being richer then and therefore there would be no compulsion necessary in Hickel’s schemes.

Ah:

But these models typically focus on a single country and fail to take into account cross-border dynamics, such as movements of capital and currency. For example, if markets are spooked by low growth in one country, some companies might move their capital overseas, which could adversely affect the original country’s currency and increase borrowing costs. Conditions such as these posed severe financial problems for Argentina in 2001 and Greece in 2010. International cooperation for tighter border control of capital movements needs to be considered and the effects modelled.

Everyone must be prevented from even having the possibility of opting out of this new scheme. Which does lead to us at least assuming that Hickel thinks some to many would do so. That is, there’s no point in advocating a manner of preventing people fleeing the new utopia unless there is a belief that people will indeed flee the new utopia. Or, even, that even the proposers agree that it won’t be a utopia because some to many will flee it.

And if they don’t believe it would be a good thing then why the heck should any of the rest of us?

If only Andy Beckett understood the economic statistic he's trying to use

In one of Paul Krugman’s exceptional essays we are informed of a great, grand even, truth:

The question here is not why Lind got these numbers wrong. It takes considerable experience to know where to look and what to worry about in economic statistics, and one should not expect someone who does not work in the field to be able to get it right without some guidance. The question is, instead, why Mr. Lind felt that it was a good idea to make sweeping pronouncements about this subject, when he clearly was unwilling to invest time and energy in actually understanding it.

Economic statistics can indeed tell us interesting things. But we’ve got to understand the economic statistic to understand what is being told to us. At which point, Mr. Beckett:

What might life be like in Britain if most people’s wages were more generous? One answer is more like life in many other rich countries. According to the United Nations, the share of our gross domestic product that goes to employees is lower than in France, Germany, Italy, Australia, South Korea, Canada, the US and half a dozen other, often more successful, capitalist nations. This “labour share” has fallen in Britain in most years since the late 1970s, when the great counterattack began against unions and decent pay for the many. The absence of this broad-brush but telling indicator from everyday debate in Britain is a sign of how much our politics is shaped by essentially rightwing assumptions.

Well, no, not really. From his own source we can see that the Swedish labour share is lower than that of the UK. In fact, the labour share in all of those supposedly highly desirable Nordics is lower. Which is a bit of a blow for those wanting to use the labour share of the economy as an advertisement for something like the Nordic social democracy of course.

The underlying problem here - and it’s an entirely common one on the British left - is failing to understand what the labour share actually is. GDP is, by definition, all production, or all incomes, or all consumption. Everything that is produced is consumed, incomes are the link between the two. So, if we measure all incomes we can see how much of the economy flows to capital, labour and so on. That’s fine.

But in detail we need to allocate across four different sections. The capital share, yes. The labour share, yes. Then there’s “mixed income”. Here the problem is the self-employed and so on. We’re never really sure how much of the independent workman’s income is from his labour and how much from his capital. So, we count it separately. The UN numbers being used here mix those two, the labour share and mixed income, an error which obscures rather than illuminates.

The fourth is “taxes upon consumption and subsidies to production”. This is a vital part of making the calculation add up to 100% of GDP. This is also what makes the capital share not, repeat not, the inverse of the labour share. If we increase the VAT take - by, say, putting VAT on food as at least one of the Nordics does - then we will likely reduce the labour share (it’s difficult to see how that would affect the capital share). If we reduced the feed in tariff on electricity from solar panels we would - likely - increase the labour share.

A large part of the decline in the labour share over the decades has been in the rise in this portion of national income as measured by, umm, income. The capital share is, in fact, about and around the post-war average - that late 70s decline was the abnormality, not the other decades. VAT is double and more the rate it used to be for example and the New Green Deal or whatever it’s called hasn’t exactly decreased subsidies to production over the years.

Sure, economic statistics tell us all sorts of interesting things. But it is necessary to understand the statistic to be able to extract the useful information. Bit of a pity that not everyone bothers to do that really.

To put this in a more jovial manner. We’d pay good money to watch Mr. Beckett explain to Polly Toynbee why he insists upon using a number which disproves her decades long insistence that “We must be more like Sweden.” We might even try to sell tickets to watch that, ghastly neoliberals that we are.

The Online Safety Bill endangers Sex Workers

The Online Safety Bill, which is currently making its way through the House of Commons, aims to crack down on harmful content online. Since the initial introduction of the Bill, an amendment clause has been added which now includes ‘inciting or controlling prostitution for gain’ as content that tech companies must aim to eradicate. Despite the ostensibly sensible nature of the amendment, which aims to eliminate sex trafficking from the online world, it is likely to have adverse effects on the safety of consenting sex workers. This is because companies aiming to avoid fines are under immense pressure to introduce measures in line with these regulations, such as the removal of any sex work advertising, ultimately leading to the exclusion of sex workers from online platforms.     

The evidence to suggest this legislative move is dangerous to sex workers is not only anecdotal; one only needs to look at the impact of FOSTA/SESTA in the US which, like the Online Safety Bill, had similar anti sex trafficking aims. 

FOSTA/SESTA is a piece of legislation that combined the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) with the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA). It made it illegal to knowingly assist or facilitate sex trafficking online. It also undermined Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which protects online services against civil liability for the actions of their users) to exclude sex trafficking laws from its immunity. According to the 485 members of Congress who supported the law, FOSTA/SESTA would make the US safer by bringing an end to the sex trafficking market.

Since FOSTA/SESTA was passed in 2018, its impacts have been subject to in-depth analysis which have highlighted its flaws  A paper by The Fordham Law Review outlined the impact of the legislation on the sex trafficking market. It concluded that FOSTA/SESTA was ‘neither a necessary nor a productive step in abolishing online sex trafficking’, explaining that rather than eliminating the trafficking market, it has merely shifted location, moving away from US servers. Moreover, it has become more difficult for law enforcement to tackle and locate trafficked people, as online platforms which often collaborated with law enforcement were forced to shut down. It is worth noting that before FOSTA/SESTA was ratified, the US Department of Justice authored a letter to Congress expressing its concerns that the bill would make it more difficult to investigate trafficking cases.

Moreover, FOSTA/SESTA has forced the sex work industry away from the safety and anonymity of the internet and into more dangerous situations. There are 3 main reasons why this is the case:

1. The online sex market provides workers with tools to screen potential clients. Craigslist and Backpage, which existed prior to FOSTA/SESTA in the US, provided client vetting services. The UK equivalent that is still running is SAAFE, which allows sex workers to vet clients, and it also has a question space where sex workers can chat amongst themselves about dangerous clients and providing general advice to stay safe. A 2019 study from Baylor University estimated that, in the 8 years Craigslist Erotic Services was active, the female homicide rate decreased by 17% as a result (from 2002 to 2010). Unfortunately, when pushed from this space, sex workers have to find customers on the street quickly in isolated and discreet spaces, without much time or tools to assess them, out of fear of being caught by law enforcement officers. This makes them much more vulnerable to violence from their clients. According to a study in San Fransisco of one hundred and thirty street sex workers, 82% reported being physically assaulted in some way, with 55% of these assaults being committed by a client. 

2. Sex workers are able to work independently in the safer environment that the internet facilitates rather than for a pimp who often exert control over sex workers and inflict violence. A US Department of Justice article found that the power and control pimps possess over sex workers often resembles an abusive relationship, and sex workers who work for a pimp share similar experiences to women who survive domestic violence. This includes being subject to psychological, sexual and physical violence and often being unable to leave the relationship due to financial or other forms of control. In San Francisco, crimes relating to pimping more than tripled in 2018 after the introduction of FOSTA/SESTA, with sex workers reporting that ‘former pimps have come out of the woodwork offering to ‘manage’ their business since they were now rendered unable to find client online’.

3. By being off the streets, the chance of police violence against sex workers decreases. In a 2022 London-based BMJ study into the effect of police enforcement on violence and mental health about sex workers, it was found that 42% of street based workers experienced violence from police, in comparison to 7% of off-street sex workers. It is worth noting that statistics around police violence against sex workers may be underreported as many sex workers hesitate to report police violence out of fear of criminal charges or further abuse. 

It is for this reason that criticism against the new amendment in the Online Safety bill is justified. The increased risk it will bring to consenting sex workers, based off the evidence from the effects of similar legislation in the US, gives critics credible scope to argue for the retraction of this amendment. If in the US, FOSTA/SESTA had increased violence against sex workers but had achieved its aim in reducing sex trafficking cases then indeed, it would be up to the government to balance the tensions between the safety of sex workers and sex trafficking victims. However, this is not the case, and FOSTA/SESTA has not only led to increased risks for sex workers but has has negligible impact on reducing sex trafficking rates. The government should seriously consider repealing this amendment to the Online Safety Bill.

The buggy whip makers would like a word with the childrens' authors

Buggy whip makers are a standard economic shorthand for those who lose their jobs owing to technological advance. The buggy whip makers would like a word with the childrens’ authors:

A Tech Worker Is Selling A Children's Book He Made Using AI. Professional Illustrators Are Pissed.

Ammaar Reshi told BuzzFeed News that he has received death threats and messages encouraging self-harm on social media.

The argument being used?

One critic is Anupa Roper, a children’s book author based in the UK, who said she had a “sinking feeling in the pit of [her] stomach,” when she saw Reshi’s tweet. “I’m thinking, Is it really that easy to create something that I had to pour my heart and soul into?" Roper said.

Well, perhaps it is. If it is, isn’t that great and wondrous? We can now have more childrens’ books with the use of less human labour.

Fellow UK children’s author Josie Dom refused to download Reshi’s book. “I don’t feel he deserves to earn any money from the book, because he has not actually put much work into it,” she said. However, based on reading the sample pages on Amazon, Dom said, she is “concerned that the use of AI in creating stories will create a proliferation of poor-quality stories, both on the writing and the illustration side.”

That’s a bit Marxian really - as little labour has gone into it therefore it must be worth not much.

“I totally understand as an artist if you see this as an existential threat to your livelihood. This makes absolute sense.”

It is indeed understandable just as was that a century and more back. Who will buy my buggy whips if this new-fangled car thing is allowed to proliferate?

We’ve a couple of reasons we don’t in fact worry about this very much. One is that the AIs and ‘bots have been coming for the sector where some of us make our living for well over a decade now. Financial reporting used to have a bread and butter sector of producing a quick precis of a corporate report. That’s now all automated, the children of economic writers go crustless as a result. Thanks for all that support we got from childrens’ authors.

A second is that it’s not in fact all that much of a threat. As with economic writers at the top of their game so with childrens’ authors now. There have long been hundreds of millions out there who can type, very few who produce something which will capture the attention of a child or a politician, to the extent there’s a useful difference. Adding more typists doesn’t change this.

But the really important point here is imagine that the AI can in fact produce childrens’ books - or economic commentary. This will indeed displace those who currently do those things. Which is good, this makes us all - in aggregate, there are those wounded in the process - richer. For now we are able to enjoy economics, or bedtime reading, without having used human labour to gain it. That labour can then go off and produce something else that we can also consume. We get to consume that new production and also that economics, that Goodnight Moon as well. We’re richer.

This is, in fact, what all economic advance is about - using less human labour to produce what we all may consume. The entire point of technological advance is to destroy jobs - those jobs that are a cost of the production.

Actually, that’s a point. One of us has at least 10 million words out there on the internet. How much do you need to be able to train ChatGPT in a particular style……hmmmm….