In the late 50s and early 60s scientists and technologists were predicting that technology would enable a 20-hour work week within a couple of decades or so. Our productivity per capita is indeed at an all-time high and growing fast. From the earlier perspective, that meant fewer hours of work per week for most people.
Instead we need two income sources per family to make ends meet, often working 50- and 60-hour work weeks when one family member working forty used to be enough. Simple arithmetic translates this to real, very substantial income reductions for most of the middle class on down and unprecedented wealth for those above the middle class.
Yes, we do have a class system. This is anything but a classless society. All the political talk about class warfare is coming from the wrong side of this issue and is a blatant farce. Far too many of those the elite class is busy eating for lunch are willing suckers for this farce and regard their predators as champions of capitalism on whom their very livelihood depends. So these suckers happily vote for those posing as saviors of capitalism and in doing so, vote themselves into economic oblivion in a blind attempt to protect their masters' carnivorous fangs from any attempt to clean up their cannibalistic games.
So let's look at these two trends we've already experienced for some time now and what the implications are:
1. Per capita productivity is higher than ever.
2. For most, both total per capita income AND income per hour has been systematically decreasing for decades.
By the very nature of this situation, it has to change and change soon, especially considering the rate at which this process is accelerating.
How long do we think this can continue and maintain anything remotely like a viable economy? We can't have all this wealth so concentrated that there is no one to sell to. That is very simply an economic impossibility! So change will come. Only two essential questions remain:
1. How soon will those at the top realize the harm they're doing in the long run to the world and consequently, ultimately to THEMSELVES?
2. How soon will the rest of us quit allowing ourselves to be suckered this way?
Which comes first is crucially important, since the sequence in which these two questions are answered determines how smoothly or violently the change occurs.
Those at the top of the food chain would do well to consider this simple truth. In the big picture, for the foreseeable future we all have to live here. The top of the food chain is literally eating itself out of house and home, since this earth is ultimately the house and home we all share. All of us need to wake up!
P.S. Anyone who still wonders what is really going on, or just plain disagrees with the analysis above, simply needs to follow the money with independent research from publicly available information. All economies essentially do nothing more or less than restructure the environment in some way. That may seem to be an oversimplification to some, but mining, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, information exchange, and even financial activity all amount to nothing more nor less than restructuring the environment, ideally in the service of improving the quality of life on this planet.
There are only two things essential to restructuring anything: intelligence and energy. Any change of any kind in any structure requires energy. If that change is to be economically useful, some intelligence has to direct this energy to achieve the kind of change desired. So we have only intelligence and energy at the most fundamental level of any economy. Financial exchange is just another, very fundamental medium of information exchange. Our current, virtually cashless economy is living proof that this is true, since otherwise it could not exist.
So when we look at the big picture for a socially comprehensive perspective, the transmission and exchange of knowledge, information, and the distribution and employment of energy flow are the natural places to look for prime suspects in the possession of concentrated wealth and the consequent control, both financial and political, that comes with that. Only when we look at this closely can we begin to understand the current state of affairs.
So the energy industry, the banking and financial system in general, and the media, who controls them, and to what ends...these define the key to understanding current affairs. We only need to look closely at how these key economic players interface with political power and the shaping of information in the major media outlets to figure out what's really going on. This is available to anyone who dares to look.
The big problem is that extreme right-wing conservatives absolutely don't want to look. They are by definition those who are least able and/or willing to adapt to inevitable change. They have a rigidly fundamentalist attitude, religious or not, that effectively says, "We have exclusive possession of the eternal truth of how things are." However, we don't have to look at a very big swath of history to understand the inevitability of change even before the industrial revolution, not to mention the current, rapidly accelerating technological revolution.
So it is obvious that change is inevitable. If we give too much power to those least willing to adapt or even capable of adapting, we obviously have a big problem. Sadly, those who most resist adapting are precisely those least interested in actually finding out for themselves what's really going on. They pretend to know already and find great pleasure in listening only to those who tell them what they already want to hear. Some media outlets make huge fortunes on satisfying their myopic desires.
Change is inevitable and is happening faster than ever. We must adapt and we will. How smoothly we do that is strictly a function of how adaptable we are at the collective scale of international, and now global, society.
(See http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf for bottom-line information on financial/political control issues
AND
http://www.cjr.org/the_research_report/news_deficit.php? for information on the level of typical American understanding of both domestic and global news
AND
http://www.wanttoknow.info/johnperkinseconomichitman for a glimpse into how we cynically use economics in our foreign policy tactics.)
AND
http://www.wanttoknow.info/johnperkinseconomichitman for a glimpse into how we cynically use economics in our foreign policy tactics.)
Dear Robert,
ReplyDeleteIf I read your Blog right you seem to suggest that the "Rich" are the ones that syphon off more then they should. Well, you might call me a useful Idiot, when I come to the devense of the so-called rich,since I belong to the lowest income Class. The Rich btw btw. are the real job Creators and risktakers.
You did not mention the one institution that usually syphones off a lots more then the producers, and that is BIG Government, through multiple Taxation. The breakdown of the per Gal. Gas Price shows that more clearly then anything else.
The Problem therefore is not Big Business, but BIG Government.
At the begin of this Republic we started off on the right footing, when Government had the characteristics of being a servant to the people. But too many examples exist now especially during the last century, that show that Republics, turn into Democracies, they degenerate into popularisms, and they inevitable turn into Dictatorships or tyrannies. Popularism is when our party-system creates out of control welfare spending by making promises to the electorat, that ultimately will lead to bankruptcy. Europe shows this clearly and of course the US.
In the first century of the USA the Federal Governments share of the GDP was less then 2%. This country started out with small Government and no Income Tax. Mainwhile the Servant turned into a Master, turning the citizens increasingly in overtaxed slaves.
Reduction of Big Government is the first step, towards Freedom and general Prosperity.
You might call conservatives "extreme Right Wing", but at least they are marching in the right direction (smaller Gov.), while all those so sophisticated liberal socialist Economist marching like fools in the wrong direction right over the cliffs. Beware of the false Pipe Pipers.
Corrupt government is a much bigger problem than big government. The current crop of Republicans is putting up a smoke screen yelling about big government while promoting a perspective that coddles and maintains corrupt government. This is not to mention that Republicans have NEVER reduced the size of government despite all their loud rhetoric on the subject. See this from a conservative source:
Deletehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/republican-presidents-never-reduce-the-size-of-government/
Dear Klaus,
ReplyDeleteApparently you're not doing your arithmetic. I've boiled this whole issue down to its most fundamental factors. Just as importantly, I've not made some absolute, arbitrary judgment about any particular rich people or their taxes. I've simply compared the current situation to the past from the perspective of the big picture, not little isolated pieces that we can have different opinions about.
I'm not just spouting liberal views here as you seem to do with conservative views, carbon copies of all the same old arguments. I'm all over the political spectrum, depending on the particular issue. You can't really classify me very easily because I don't just buy other people's views.
You see, I've compared current quality of life of the middle class with that of a few decades ago in real terms, with inflation completely out of the picture (which is itself actually a hidden tax). We used to get by decently, even buy modest homes, etc., with single-income families and often that single income was typically based on a 40-hour work week. Now we typically need two incomes and often ridiculous hours to make ends meet.
At the same time, we have seen top level executives with incredibly high salaries and lots of tax loopholes, so that as Warren Buffet, whom I admire both for his honesty AND his well-earned wealth, has stated, he pays less tax in proportion to his income than his secretary does. But we don't even have to talk about taxes here. That just complicates the issue.
All we need to do is look at how much work it used to take to get by on and how much it takes now and attempt to reconcile that with simple arithmetic to higher than ever productivity PER CAPITA. When you divide record high individual productivity into a substantial reduction in real income per person, we're producing vastly more value for someone and getting vastly less value as compensation compared with the not very distant, fully capitalist but much fairer past.
So you figure it out. That money is going somewhere. We don't have to get into details about taxes or anything else to see that. We can also see the financial gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us getting increasingly larger. If you've ever been to a third world country, that's a starkly obvious and extreme characteristic of those countries. A few people skim everything off the top and the rest of the population has to put up with pretty pitiful and often downright painful lives.
So we're clearly moving increasingly in that direction unless you can show me something about the FUNDAMENTAL and VERY SIMPLE MATH that I've somehow got wrong. If you choose to ignore this simple math and get lost in the trees so you can't see the forest, then we're wasting our time with this discussion. This is not a simple matter of buying into some particular political philosophy and so, since we all have a right to our opinions, that's the end of it.
No, on the contrary, reality has a stubborn way of haunting us if we ignore it for very long. So many ignore that having a right to an opinion DOESN'T MAKE IT WORTH ANYTHING AT ALL! You can believe water boils at 32 degrees F and freezes at 212 degrees, but don't expect your attempts to build a steam engine based on this opinion to work.
So, Klaus, this is not rocket science, and it's NOT an arbitrary matter of opinion. The power elite in this country, not rich people in general, but the POWER ELITE, have taken over our country. They snow you with their propaganda and you swallow it. That's what I meant by "posing as the saviors of capitalism". No, we've had capitalism for a long time in this country and it has never served our citizenry in such a blatantly inequitable, absurdly unfair way as it is doing right now.
Since World War II, or MAYBE I should say after the Korean War, all our wars have been wars of choice and not necessity. It is well known that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a setup by the U.S. government to excuse getting into Vietnam. Any objective reading of history in the future will show that, never mind the current political confusion and false patriotism concerning it. We've done the same in Iraq based on WMDs that didn't exist. There are Bush insiders who said they KNEW at the top levels that there were no WMDs. General Powell was extremely angry when he found out how he had been duped into making that speech at the U.N.
ReplyDeleteBut again, these facts are less clear and simple than the bottom line arguments I'm presenting in my blog. We could talk about the top 0.01% of the U.S. population that sits at the top of the arms industry. They make as much as TEN TIMES the profits and sometimes more during war as they do in peaceful times. This is true even of military glove and boot manufacturers! They have powerful lobbyists. War is a racket and we pay for it with the lives of our youth and collateral damage around the world that creates and abets terrorism, makes their recruiting easier, etc. And guess what! These terrorist recruits have the same kind of blind convictions and fall for the same FUD-based recruiting techniques many of our Christian fundamentalists fall for with regard to voting their political orientation.
But these are also facts that some will find ways to argue with, right or wrong. The simple math in my blog above is NOT something that can be argued with. It is based on clear facts in the public domain and the arithmetic consists in real incomes simply divided by individual productivity for both then and now.
Laissez-faire capitalism clearly doesn't trend toward free markets, but rather toward huge economic dictatorships called monopolies. Laissez-faire ignores that the power elite have NEVER in all of history acted in saintly ways. Unregulated markets ARE NOT self-regulating. Recent events proved that even to the economic hardliners at the FED who used to believe that and later confessed before congressional hearings that they were wrong.
So why in the world would you think unethical and even criminal activity somehow fails to apply to the rich and powerful? They've ALWAYS used religion and nationalist/"patriotic" propaganda to sway public opinion toward their own narrow interests. The Egyptian pharaohs were doing that, for heaven's sake! Thomas Jefferson and other of our founding fathers warned us about it back in their time, too.
The Republican zeal for deregulation ignores that overly concentrated economic power married to political influence is just as capable of distorting markets and making them very UNFREE as any central planning committee in a communist economy. And they use essentially the same propaganda techniques as they always have: FUD, and acronym for "fear, uncertainty, and doubt".
Just look at Faux Muse! They blatantly employ FUD all the time. Such propaganda sources first justify and stoke their followers’ fears, then soothe them, make them feel part of a powerful clan, and also give them some kind of "other" to target with their hateful fears. This is not hidden! It's right in your face all over their rhetoric. It’s an emotional appeal to very primitive instincts! There is a tremendous amount of money and power to be gained from politically manipulating the kind of people vulnerable to these tactics, whether as a preacher, an “infotainer”, or a politician.
We all need to WAKE UP, and more and more of us are. I'm an incurable optimist, Klaus, and I boldly predict that you will find out in no uncertain terms and VERY SOON just how wrongheaded all the views you parrot are.