SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the picthfork-futures-accelerate-to-new-highs dept.
Nick Hanauer, a self-described "plutocrat" says history shows that the current economic and governmental situation can't last, and the USA should should get busy changing before the system breaks down.
From the memo to his "Fellow Zillionaires":
I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:30AM
Did you? It seems to me he directly addressed some of things you accuse him of not seeing.
[citation needed] TFA cites two cities where raising the minimum wage has increased prosperity for everyone - the rich and poor alike. Please give us your couterexamples.
I'm not really sure I understand your argument here. Yes, money could be viewed as an abstraction for trading labour for labour. But it sets the exchange rate for that exchange, and that exchange rate is currently badly out of balance. Is one hour of Mr Website-Startup-CEO's labour really intrinsically worth 1000 or a hundred thousand times more than one hour of Mr Would-you-like-fries-with-that's labour? 50 years ago it wasn't. Nowadays, the rich would have you believe that it is. That's the question being asked by the article.
You also fail to address TFA's counter argument, that if nobody can afford to pay high wages, how is the economy able to support more millionaire CEOs than ever before?
Nobody is saying that it is. In fact, TFA explicitly says that campaigning for the minimum wage on the basis of fairness is pointless. You can view a more fair, more just society as a side effect of stimulating the economy. Whether you think that's a welcome or unwelcome side effect depends entirely on whether or not you're a sociopathic turdgobbler.
He says in TFA that he has started dabbling in politics.
Again, nobody is arguing for a completely fair distribution of benefits.
This is a possibility in the future, yes. Not the only possibility, but definitely one we need to look at. It's a different issue though.
Plenty of new jobs are being created. Look at SpaceX, there are creating a whole new industry out of thin air. They are employing people, and paying them too. The "race to the bottom" of outsourcing makes it hard to sustain decent wages in an economy where every is blind to everything but price, but you have to convince your customers to value things other than price. Of course, that's a lot easier if your customers aren't struggling to survive on a less-than-living wage...
Then create new jobs. New classes of simple jobs that a plumber or a car repairer or a streetsweeper could retrain to do. Use your imagination. If people had spare money to spend on luxuries instead of putting everything they earn into rent and dried noodles, then the economy would be able to support all sorts of delightfully frivolous services that just aren't economically viable today.
Thing about economics is, it's not about where the money is, it's about how money flows. Money is a strange thing, when it flows, it grows. As long as it's moving about, new businesses and industries and jobs are emerging and the economy grows to encompass things that didn't even exist before. Look at the internet. If you could go back 50 years and tell people that their grandkids would one day be taking out contracts and paying dollars per month for a bunch of imaginary 1s and 0s they'd lock you up.
Conversely, when money stops moving, it shrinks. What we are seeing now, and what the author talks about, is more and more money being diverted in to great big stationary pools, where it stagnates. The uber-rich are hoovering up an ever-increasing slice of it but they simply can't spend it all. A rich man has one mouth, one stomach, one dick, one body. So the rich guy buys a fleet of supercars and a hundred overpriced suits and a yacht and a jet and 5 houses and the remaining 99% of his 6 billion dollars go into his giant swimming pool full of gold coins ^H^H^H savings and investments. There, the money does nothing useful except gravitationally attract more money to itself. As the moneypile gains mass it influences more power, which means that the labour exchange rate I mentioned above becomes more and more disproportionate. The poor people have to work harder and harder for less and less, just so some guy can add an extra zero to his bank balance that he will never spend. As the author says in his article, one guy with ten million dollars will spend less than ten guys with a million each, who spend less than a thousand guys with 10K each. Yes, you need some disparity in wealth to motivate people to work, but would you really work any harder for 10 billion than you would for 1 billion? Or for 10 million? If you answered yes, are you sure that's sane?
But more importantly (because this isn't about fairness, remember) all that money sitting in his savings account can't be used by his customers to buy his products. What's he going to do, buy more of his own stuff? Pretty sure he's already got plenty of whatever it is he makes. Meanwhile, the world is going to shit outside his gated community, and he's wondering why nobody's queueing up to buy his $1600 chocolate-powered bluetooth-enabled rocket ipoodles any more. He can't understand why it's harder and harder to employ well-educated people (poor people have less time and resources for education) and why crime is going up (more poverty==more crime) and why his workers are always taking time off sick (can't afford decent healthcare) and the roads and infrastructure are going to shit... It's a cycle, a feedback loop, an ecosystem. It's all connected. You screw with the balance and it will come back to bite you. If I were a hippy I'd call it Karmic or holistic or something and not be far wrong.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:34PM
Then create new jobs. New classes of simple jobs that a plumber or a car repairer or a streetsweeper could retrain to do.
So your solution is make-work jobs? How about we set up a factory with two sides: on one side, people busy assembly wooden shipping crates. Then these crates are moved to the other side, where a different team of workers disassembles these crates for recycling. The wooden pieces are then moved back to the first side, where they're used to assemble wooden shipping crates. Repeat ad infinitum.
You think people should spend all their time and effort doing this?
This is why we need to just enact the Basic Income scheme.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:16PM
I have a better idea. Convince customers that paying a bit more for goods and services that were made by people just like them is better than paying less for machine-made goods. It would be awesome for PR if a corporation publicly advertised that they were employing more people at better wages.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:30PM
Convince customers that paying a bit more for goods and services that were made by people just like them is better than paying less for machine-made goods.
Ok, how do you propose that humans build microprocessors which have features only tens of nanometers large? No one has that level of fine motor skill.
Lots of things are made by automation these days because the quality is far superior to human-made stuff. You want to go back to hand-knitted fabrics, so we can all look like serfs from the Medieval days?
When has charging more for something of lower quality ever worked as a general rule? It might work for a few markets when you're catering to rich people who like to show off, but in general places like Walmart thrive because they have the lowest prices.
And finally, why should people spend their lives doing boring, monotonous work that a simple robot could do much better? How is that improving human dignity? It's not. We should all be benefiting from the labor of robots and automation (as long as we keep them dumb so we don't have a Butlerian Jihad). We should be spending time enjoying our lives and doing creative things, not toiling away at mind-numbing jobs just so we can survive. We have the technology to do this now; we should be enjoying the fruits of this technology we've built.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:36PM
You need not be so pessimistic. There's plenty of areas we could put more people into if society deemed it worthwhile. Care of the elderly and children for example. More people to keep our cities/town clean, more frequent garbage pickup, more people to fix the various decaying infrastructures we have etc. Hell, even relatively trivial things like home cleaning would be doable if we all had more cash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @08:18AM
He wasn't suggesting that jobs should be created purely for the sake of creating job, but to do things others would find beneficial. Take a look around, around where you live and where you work. Do you really not see things people could be employed to do, or is the environment you live and work in perfect already?
Although that said, it may be beneficial to impose a maximum work week along with a minimum wage, this would help distribute the available work more evenly and give people more free time which they could use to take care of their health (e.g. exercise and get a bit more sleep) or learn something, this would lead to healthier, happier workers who are less likely to need to take time off sick.
I don't think we are quite ready for a basic income scheme just yet, there is still plenty of work that needs doing, though someday, probably in the not too distant future it will be necessary. That isn't to say that people who are unemployed shouldn't get a basic income, but they should be trying to get work if they can work and can't support themselves.