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[Mykl:] This is actually the exact problem in the US at the moment. Money is trickling to the top and not making its way back down. Those at the top are hoarding it, thus keeping it out of, and slowing, the economy. This in turns damages the businesses that they own, because their customers can't afford to spend money that they don't have.
The problem would be largely solved by handing out a bunch of cash to employees, who will use it to go out and spend, stimulating the economy and generating demand (thus improving the outlook of business). It would actually be a win-win, but the cash hoarders can't see beyond having the biggest number in the bank they can (which they'll never spend).
The big thing missed is that due to inflation, hoarding money means losing money. Rather than wonder why businesses aren't hiring people or building up capital right now, Mykl merely suggests that the business give away that money to create a little short term economic activity and something that will be better than the present state of affairs while ignoring that the business has just thrown away its cheapest means to expand and employ more people. Later on in the same thread, we have this gem:
[deimtee:] I think this is actually becoming one of the major problems, especially on the small end of the investment scale. At some point, the economy is producing enough to feed, house, and entertain everyone without requiring anywhere near enough human work to keep everyone employed.
Investing in a new business requires identifying an under-filled need in order to attract customers. It is getting to the point where starting a new business means competing with a giant company, it is just not viable unless you can come up with something that is both truly new and valuable. Not many people can do that, and every time one does there is one less opportunity left. At the same time, big companies are streamlining and using automation and economies of scale to reduce the number of employees.
The solution, of course, was to shrink the labor market, not fix the problems described above.
[khallow:] Deliberately shrinking the labor market won't identify under-filled needs nor create more small and medium sized businesses.
[deimtee:] The labour market is currently over-supplied. This is evidenced by the difficulty young people have in entering it. Raising the retirement age is like eating your seedcorn. By the time those geriatrics are finally knocked off by COVID 2040 or something society is going to hit a wall where no-one knows how to do the jobs. 30 year-olds on unemployment for 10 years are not ideal trainees and no trainers will be around anyway. Early retirement forces the companies to train the next generation now.
Yes we should be massively investing in life-extension, medical research, space, all that stuff. Now what percentage of people do you think can realistically contribute to that sort of endeavor? I would say less than 1% of people have the capability to undertake research at that level.
Notice the insistence on shrinking the labor market even when presented with clear evidence that we need that labor for hard, open-ended problems and to preserve institutional knowledge. In the recent story, Kill the 5-Day Workweek (which was about some business that does 4 day workweeks), we see more examples of this dysfunctional reasoning in action. There's anecdotes about bad bosses, insistence that economies is less rigorous than physics, and lots of fantasizing about all the amazing things you'd do, if your employer was forced to give you one more day off. Let's start with the "bullshit jobs":
[Thexalon:] Counterpoint: A lot of jobs are completely useless and exist for basically bullshit reasons. If you've ever worked in a larger corporation or non-profit, you will have no difficulty identifying a bunch of Wallys or Peter Gibbonses walking around who are accomplishing absolutely nothing but vaguely looking like they might be working. And no, that's not limited to government, because despite what a lot of libertarians seem to think private corporations are not even close to perfect models of efficiency.
To summarize the above link, some clueless idiot doesn't understand a variety of jobs. So those jobs must not have a reason for being and are thus "bullshit jobs". Notice that once the author has failed to understand the purpose of these jobs, he then has to come up with a conspiracy theory for why they exist.
[author David Graeber:] The answer clearly isn't economic: it's moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the '60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
Who here really thinks that Joe Billionaire is going to burn money on that?
Then there's the fantasizing about how shortening the workweek and the amount of work per job won't have any impact on competition from other countries.
[AC1:] A lot of Asian companies still work on Saturday (6 day week ). If going to a 4 day workweek in any way hurts productivity these Asian firms will have an advantage
[AC2:] Ridiculous, and already proven wrong since they are open an extra day already and haven't taken all the business.
"Proven wrong" because those Asian companies haven't eaten entirely our lunch. We still have some left. Funny how half a century of off-shoring can be ignored.
Moving on, it wouldn't be complete without a contribution from the peanut gallery. fustakrakich continues his bid to destroy Western civilization:
[fustakrakich:] Also demand a six hour work day. Make each day a little less tiresome
Here's my take on all this. It's basically a supply and demand problem in the developed world. Due to labor competition from the developing world, developed world labor has lost much of its pricing power. For some reason, most of the above posters think we can get back to higher labor prices by reducing the supply of labor. What's missing from that is that the developing world is still increasing its supply of labor (more from building out trade/transportation infrastructure to populations than from birth rate). Those moves won't actually reduce labor supply as a result.
Instead, let's increase the demand for labor. Rather than rhetorically ruling out the creation of new businesses and such, how about we enable those things to happen. Because plenty of new businesses still happen - indicating the narrative is faulty.
But that would mean acknowledging that protecting labor is less important than nurturing business growth and creation. Who will do that?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday June 23 2021, @07:14PM
Congratulations.
There are quite a few assumptions you're making there. From where I'm sitting, it seems that in the Great Game of Monopoly, we're in the end stages, where a very small handful of people own all the streets and utilities and already have hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane. People like me can't move for paying rent to someone and the money we get for passing Go doesn't cover it.
All that money is sitting in piles at the side of the board and it's going nowhere.
It has become apparent since COVID, particularly in the UK economy, that we have a substantial part of that economy that isn't doing very much of high value at all. It's doing things like cutting hair, pulling pints, polishing finger nails and the like. Oh, and organising weddings.
There is plainly too much labour and not enough good work. We even have a vindictive government whose ideology is to harry the sick and disabled into "work" to beg for a few crumbs merely to exist, rather than admitting that these people as human beings have a right to life and are valuable in ways other than mere money. We have people going for several weeks with no money and no food as a result.
Other people are worked half to death, often putting in many hours per week unpaid just because.
We really need to reconsider our priorities. There's nothing magic or inherently noble about working your fingers to the bone merely to survive as The Man gets rich. It's folly, and it's unnecessary. We need to be working fewer hours, and we need to be investing in our societies, not in a few super-wealthy individuals.
In my not so humble experience and opinion, that's not how it works. The Man cares only about the bottom line, getting something out of his assets/cost base/staff for as little as possible. Institutional knowledge is not even incidental when the work can be outsourced to a body shop of young, exploited, hungry workers with no other option.
I wouldn't go so far as to call you a clueless idiot. That would be rude.
The Man already outsources to Other Countries. Automation is coming anyway.
But Mr Scrooge, it's Christmas!
We are supposedly an intelligent species. We need to use our intelligence to rise above the most simplistic forms of supply and demand. There really is no need for those of us lucky enough to have jobs to work such long hours, and there's no need for the old, sick and disabled to be hounded and harried into working just for the sake of it. Seriously, we need to tap into some of that humanity that some of us allegedly had. Great progress was made in various places in the 20th Century. For example, here in the UK we got a Welfare State and a National Health Service. We got universal healthcare free and the point of use, unemployment, child and disability benefits, sick pay, union rights, all sorts of things, and they're being gradually eroded by people like your good self, who are perpetuating a simplistic and backward narrative. We have a highly partisan right-wing press colluding with our increasingly further-to-the-right politicians. And why? What for? What do you have to gain from a stressed, over-worked, exploited, miserable, tired, ill, hungry society?
Why should we as a species work harder when we can work smarter? It just doesn't make any sense.