This is a great article about Universal Basic Income. This eliminates a lot of other welfare and workfare and allows people to do things like volunteer with old and young people, dedicate themselves to an artistic discipline, do advanced academics, etc. There is just not going to be that much low-end work in the near future with automation and robots. This allows people to dedicate their lives to compassion activities and self-development. It is very humanistic. It is the next step in division of labor, which is what civilization is based on. The old economic systems were based on scarcity. The emerging systems are based on abundance.
The problems with supply and demand when there is abundance is that scarcity has to be artificially “generated” in order for profits to be made and people wind up starving in the 3rd world and the disequilibrium leads to social chaos and war. One bad drought and you get the Arab Spring and then ISIS.
It gets fairly obscene with over consumption of meaningless crap and over development in the already developed northern countries and economic strangulation in southern countries.
There is so much over accumulation of money in the north that rich folks in Japan have to pay the banks to keep their money, i.e. negative interest rates, or it has to be offshored or “car washed” to keep it out of the normal economy to avoid taxation by the greedy billionaires and prevent inflation which lowers its value.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/02/state-handouts-for-all-europe-set-to-pilot-universal-basic-incomes

Excellent criticism and assessment of Krugman’s most recent positions.

This president has been a bitter disappointment to me, and I voted for him twice. His failures include 1) rising inequality and the social destruction that goes with it 2) Too big to fail banks being even bigger today 3) a lack of urgency in global warming proposals 4) expanding the never-ending wars in the Middle East 5) sky-rocketing medical costs and substandard medical care for all but the wealthy 6) lobbying still very much alive and the
revolving door between corporations and government still spinning at a rapid pace. (Didn’t this president promise to close Washington to lobbyists when he came into office?)

Nice slam on Krugman!! That guy is pathetic… I guess I’m not going to read his book now. :)

I appreciated Professor Wolff’s explanation of markets. I’ve always been fuzzy on the term actually, likely because it’s been willfully made that way to suit the interests of the business elite. Even going back to my university days in Business Admin classes (may as well have just not gone to college at all considering how much a Business degree is worth), many terms struck me as either academic or vague, and ‘markets’ was one of them. It’s amazing just how much BS is taught in business schools.

Prof. Wolff says that markets are merely a means of distribution. I don’t disagree with that. However my understanding is that this term was merely a glammed-up word for those who buy. Markets = consumers, essentially. Either way, I do agree with the professor that ‘markets’ do not call the shots all the time, they are not nor should they ever be deified into absolution, as if it’s inherently some inflexible law of commerce. Companies create needs, or at least convince you of these needs, then satisfy them. Or, more cynically, they create problems then sell the solution. That’s not reactionary to ‘markets’ which is taught in business schools, it’s very proactive and more common than university business professors care to acknowledge.