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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @06:22AM (14 children)
There's something I think many people don't really appreciate.
Let's take every single item sold in a year, every single service, every single "thing". Add up its commercial value to get a gross sum of all the money generated. And now let's divide that evenly between everybody. What would it be? Many who don't know what I'm describing might expect this answer to be millions of dollars, after all - how else can we have people with tens of billions of dollars? In reality, it's of course nowhere near. All I've described is the GDP/capita. It's currently only $65,298. That is with the endless games, worthless products and services, and a literally life-or-death coercion to bring that figure as high as you possibly can. Yet it's only $65k, comparable to the average salary of a plumber.
Now imagine you dropped all coercion, got rid of all of these "worthless" jobs, and so much more. What would it be? Suffice to say dramatically lower. And the things you mention as "free" are not free. They're driven by extensive labor, companies, and support. Last year the UK spent about $4,400/person on healthcare. And in your ideal world where nobody is forced to work, this number would likely *go up*. The reason is that a lot of the jobs that you're paying for in that $4,400 are things people don't want to do. But they do them, because they need to put food on the table. Give them the option of no longer having to even bother with that, and they could happily go home and spend time pursuing their own interests, with their family, etc. You're going to need to really bring up the $$$ their to get them go back to what they were doing.
And that effect trickles around everywhere. That food on the table, which we're now somehow supplying? Exact same story. The global wealth starts to collapse at the same time that it becomes more expensive than ever to get people to actually do things. Can you guess what happens when you combine these two things? You don't need to look far for examples. It's not like the people that took over places such as China or what would become the USSR were secretly plotting to become tyrants. They believed what they were saying, what you are saying, and thought that the only thing between comfort and equality for all, was a little bit of elbow grease and rearranging of society. And they acted on it. And in both nations, both of which were previously relatively thriving, they created dystopias where in both tens of millions of people would end up dying of starvation. And in both, as the coercion to work and produce was removed, they found people suddenly stopped working and producing. And so the government was left to take over the previous coercive role of the market leading to dystopic authoritarianism.
In a nutshell, our wealth is a facade. It is little more than a reflection of our economic system. The efforts to take our wealth as a granted and use that "reform" the economic system fail because the wealth and the economic system are one and the same.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @12:16PM
You have needs that are particular to you. Hence, it is reasonable to expect that you do something about those needs that are particular to you.
This is one of the key aspects of the making things worse of the title. There is no point to making it more expensive to actually do useful things, but that's the effect of so much of the labor regulations, taxation, corruption, etc that is out there. And then many proponents of these policies will just double down rather than consider that labor, just like any other market-based good or service, experiences traditional supply and demand behavior. Make labor more expensive to procure and you'll get less employment. Meanwhile remove roadblocks to hiring people should, as in the rest of the world, result in a surge of employment.
I see you haven't bothered to define wealth. Sure, we could define it as our economic system, but we already have the label "economic system", we don't need more such labels. Instead, wealth is typically defined as an accumulation of an asset we value. Here, we quickly see that wealth has an existence independent of economic system. The key wealth of most people is their potential to create value - such things as their education, work skills, and capital that allows them to do jobs, etc. Skills and education don't change, if the economic system changes, for example. The same goes for hard assets. A vehicle or building won't cease to exist just because a different economic system is employed. Using those assets may become more or less difficult depending on the economic system, but the use of the asset in itself is independent of economic system. If you drive from point A to point B, the action doesn't change no matter the economic system.
The bottom line is that economic systems are about doing things, distributing resources, and providing things of value. Different systems and other infrastructure can change the relative difficulty of these things or what we consider valuable, but they don't change us or our needs, much less the assets we use. Sure, most of our current wealth might disappear with relatively modest destruction of technical infrastructure (say in some sort of extreme solar event), but it's not our economic system that creates meaning behind wealth.
And the bottom line is what we do with that wealth rather than the wealth itself. Just because the economic system can change (and often does, this is not a rare problem) to render some wealth worthless at some future time doesn't mean that wealth shouldn't have value now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @03:26PM
No plotting necessary, it's who they are. Mao was a fat, smelly, pedophilic psychopath. Lenin was a syphilitic and a sociopath.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday June 24 2021, @05:49PM (11 children)
Relatively thriving? Do you know how many were starving in Russia in 1917? Do you have a clue?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @06:39PM (4 children)
Russia was ill prepared to enter WW1, the economic cost to an impoverished country was devastating. Then along came the sociopaths [fee.org] to make things worse.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday June 25 2021, @03:22PM (3 children)
From the linked article, Professor Yuri N. Maltsev apparently makes some good points and important observations, but spoils it towards the end with this unsubstantiated piece of conjecture and opinion:
It seems that the learned professor has trouble with making distinctions, with nuance, and has allowed his very negative personal experience from times past to cloud his judgement.
Of course he's scared of anything with "socialism" in the name: he lived in the USSR. But he fails to understand the difference between the different applications of the word.
I want to live in civillisation, where there is a decent, basic level of provision for the young, old, sick and less fortunate. To a first approximation, this is "socialism."
None of us exists in isolation. I don't want to live in a Libertarian society where I have to constantly worry about what will happen if I break my leg, who might be pointing an assault rifle or bazooka at me, that I might have to pay a fee to walk down the street, and so on. I don't mind paying a fair amount of tax for good, free and the point of use public services. I want free and fair multi-party elections. I want a diverse range of opinion in the media. I want freedom of expression, the right to life, the right to health, the right to justice and the protection of the law. I want peace and the right and opportunity to get on with my own life.
Ideally, I want a democratically elected head of state too, and a government elected by a system of proportional representation.
I recently moved back to my birth country of Scotland. Scotland seems to be going forward, unlike England. If we are lucky, we might get independence and we can take full responsibility for our own futures.
I've put my money where my mouth is, and I'm determined to see it through.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 30 2021, @07:09PM (2 children)
No, it's not. It covers a vast range of possible approaches from outright feudal paternalism through welfare capitalism.
Socialism involves the society-level (which is to say, de facto government) control of society's resources. Even where there's a bureaucratic fig leaf around notional private ownership and management, it's subordinated to corporatist (which refers to society as a whole, not corporations) policies that effectively hobble private control. (The nazis rather liked this approach, which is how they ended up getting businesses to do the things that they wanted done. Nominally, you had a business, but if you wanted to keep nominally having it, you did what the guys with the sharp fashion sense and bad attitudes told you to do.)
If you think that socialism is a precondition for a social safety net, I can see how you would kind of like socialism, but they're really not the same thing. In fact, you can have socialism without the safety net. Venezuela is currently experiencing what it's like when the nominally socialist safety net wears thinner than fishnet hose.
In effect, socialism turns everyone outside the government into serfs who do not control the bulk of their own economic activity. I'm assuming you're not on board with that. But maybe you are, anything's possible.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 01 2021, @05:53PM (1 child)
No, that's one extreme form of Socialism. I consider myself a Social Democrat [wikipedia.org]. Many Americans and British people nowadays would call me an unpatriotic undemocratic Marxist who hates his country.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @09:30PM
If you're not socialising control over resources, by definition you're not engaging in socialism. There are many ways of doing this; enforcing corporatist decisions through the organs of nominally independent operations is only one example. But if you have individual enterprise and the ability to tell the authoritarian busybodies to get stuffed, you don't have socialism. Again, by definition. As close as we get to edge cases are where certain limited elements of personal choice are permitted within a broadly constrained environment. There are other sources, but we can start with the first line from wikipedia on the topic:
What you call yourself has very little bearing on the definition.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @03:28AM
But they were just peasants. In khallow's ideal feudalistic society they don't count.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 25 2021, @07:04AM (4 children)
1917 was in the middle of WW1. Famine and even starvation is a common occurrence during wartime, to this very day. Famine and starvation during peace time is not. The starvations under the social economic systems of the USSR and China were driven not by outside factors, but by their own internal economic decisions.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday June 25 2021, @03:08PM (3 children)
Yes, you can pick and choose events and dates from history. The Russian Revolution didn't happen over night. Russian peasants, ordinary people, had a miserable existence for a very long time (hundreds of years). The revolution was an act of desperation. No one is trying to claim that the USSR was any sort of utopia, it quite clearly was not, and Stalin was an evil sociopath.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 30 2021, @07:35PM (2 children)
Not so fast.
The population of Russia was pretty unhappy, and had been turbulent for quite a while, partly owing to monumental mismanagement (which led to events such as the Potemkin mutiny). This is true, and well-documented. The population was also under particular pressure as a result of involvement in WWI. This, too, stands up to scrutiny.
However, to paint the revolution as some sort of spontaneous act of a broken, desperate people is to ignore the very clear and deliberate moves on the part of people like Lenin, who were basically politicians - which is to say, power-hungry grifters with a plausible cover story. Russia had already emancipated the serfs, had already unwound a lot of feudal privileges, had already done a lot of reform of the government and justice system. They could have continued along those lines with a lot less misery and starvation, except for the bit where folks like Lenin wanted to be the top bananas. You don't get there by incrementalism, so a few eggs had to break for the sake of power.
As the saying goes, the name of the game is power, and it is a game which, in the end, is without rules. Which is why Stalin got to ask the question, when posed with the pope's protests: "How many divisions does the pope have?"
Maybe we can get Sturgeon to lead a people's spontaneous revolution against the wicked impositions of Lunnon.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 01 2021, @05:58PM
Didn't I say it was hundreds of years in the making? The Russian peasants were suffering badly in Catherine the Great's day.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 01 2021, @06:00PM
Yes, they probably could, but like you say the politicians took them for a ride. A bit like Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Farage and Trump.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].