Guys, I’m beginning to think Jmullaney is a troll. No one is that clued out.
I can’t believe that anyone even moderately educated would suggest that if Angolans don’t like their line of work they should just move. And he wonders why more Angolans don’t just buy houses…
Have you heard of boat people? These are people who are trying to move out of poverty and into a capitalist world. They want it so bad that they are willing to risk death on the ocean for it. They risk a very high probability of either death or return to their country (with punishment), for a shot at living as a poor person in the U.S.
The reason people in places like Angola don’t move is because they can’t afford to. Going places costs money. They have none. A $50 train ticket is completely out of reach for billions of people. Would you like them to walk to Iowa? Gonna be a bitch of a swim.
I’m going to assume you’re just amazingly sheltered, but most of the people in the world make less money in a year than you spent on the computer you’re reading this message on.
I have no idea where you’re going with this. Your beliefs around the difficulty of a peasant farmer’s life are completely and totally in error and you’re proceeding from false assumptions right across the board.
You were one of two people who brought this up. In spite of myself, I laughed. I guess you’ve never heard of the Enclosure Acts of the 18th century, whereby British landowners tossed the peasantry off the land because it was much more profitable to raise sheep. Wool was a staple of the new industrializing economy. The peasantry migrated to Manchester, London, and the New World out of desperation, not the pursuit of wealth. I think this is evinced by the number of immigrants to Canada from Britain, who opted for cheap farmand rather than life in rapidly industrializing Toronto.
But even without a peasant class, there is a precedant for this in the United States, as well. In the 1930’s and the 1940’s, bank foreclosures lead to large numbers of farmers losing their land, and forced to find work in an increasingly brutal economy. This period of American history is well-documented by historians, as well as by the writers of the time. For the psychological effects and well as the financial effects of this loss of land, try reading John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
I was being a bit facetious, but the life of the urban poor is no picnic either. Since we’re bringing our childhoods into this, I’ll tell you most of the young people I knew were alcoholics or in gangs. Most of their parents were destitute. The situation of the urban poor is usually blamed on laziness, but most of these people had turned looking for work into a full-time job. There were no jobs to be had. Unless you were willing to enter the vibrant world of street crime, the only things that passed for jobs in my town were at the naval base, at the factories, or as a clerk in a store. And jobs at these places rarely opened up.
If we were to institute a deregulated capitalist economy with no social programs, my hometown would go from the low-level violence of knife fights and muggings to all out war. Things are that desperate there. There are pressure-cooker places like that all over Canada, and I’m certain there are more in the United States.
I can only imagine what it must have been like for peasant (or in the U.S., a former farmer) entering such a foreign world as city life. And knowing that their lives depended on dehumanizing and agonizing work that could be cut out from under them if they ever so much as talked back to an employer. If you don’t believe the conditions in factories and cities were horrific in this era, I can quote extensively from the Sadler Commission Report, commissioned in 1832 by the British government, into the abuse of workers and especially child workers in factories, and quote from some of the rules posted in factories at the time.
Of course, we don’t really have to imagine what it would be like. We have only to go a factory in an industrializing, third-world country to see what our ancestors must have gone through. Children get beaten in those places. Wages are ridiculously low. Employment is maintained through sheer desperation.
I’d never heard this before, and contradicts some of the economic historians I’ve read. Still, if it is true, most of the rebellions I mentioned were during Marx’s lifetime, and I would guess that if the statistics you mention were accurate, it was resistance by workers, not largesse on the part of the owners, that secured these.
Excuse me. I said, began to gravitate. Which meant that the fascist and communist parties moved out of the fringe and into the mainstream. Very few actually fell to either extreme ideology, for which we can consider ourselves lucky.
Economists, both those that support the mixed economy and those who are against it, are generally motivated by ideology. I don’t consider economics a science. Economic history is our best guide. Our most prosperous years – by which I mean the ones where the wealth was the most shared and the gap between the rich and the poor the smallest – were from the end of the Second World War to the early seventies, a period that matches almost exactly Keynesian policies such as a mixed economy, social programs, and the Bretton Woods accord. Soon after these things began, one by one, to unravel. The gap between the rich and the poor increased, unemployment increased, a cuts to vital programs like health, welfare, and education have left most of the population with fewer options.
We were told, successively, that the problems were the oil crisis, inflation, government bureaucracy, government deficit, tariff barriers, and income taxes. So we set about destroying these things one by one, and none of it helped any of our economic problems. I think we should be honest with ourselves. We messed with Keynesianism when it was working very well.
I can hear the sharp intakes of breath. The words “GDP,” “GNP,” and “record profits” are already escaping the lips of neo-liberals and globalizationists all over the message board. Well, GDP and GNP are meaningless statistics from a human perspective. A so-called “primitive” society that obtains all its wealth through barter may eat well enough, but it wouldn’t have a GDP to speak of. On the other hand, Nigeria over the last 20 years has seen its GDP rise through urbanization and industrialization. Its child mortality rate is going up, and its life expectancy is going down. While this does not necessarily say industrialization and urbanization are to blame (though I believe they are) it shows GDP and GNP are poor indicators of the quality of people’s lives. As for “record profits,” we have to ask whose record profits.
Germany was paying reparations, and already was in an economic crisis. It didn’t fall to fascism, though, until after the global depression that began in 1929.
Italy, naturally, is missing from your comment. They were not paying reparations, of course, having been on our side in the First World War.
Um, excuse me. I guess you missed the riot in Seattle.
The booms and busts of capitalism can and do happen. We’re just finally coming out of a bust that started mid-Seventies. If we haven’t felt the effects so badly as in the 1930’s, it’s because banks were better regulated and social programs were in place. The globalizationists and laissez-faire capitalists want to remove these protections.
As for unemployment being lower than ever, that’s news to me. It was only a year or two ago that Canada’s unemployment rate dipped below 10%. When I moved to Quebec in 1995, 1.2 million people in a province of 7 million were on welfare or unemployment insurance. And in Canada, the definition of unemployed is very strict. It doesn’t include seniors, even those who have little other income. It doesn’t include the homeless, who are growing in number. It doesn’t even include people who have stopped looking for work. That means that 2.7 million people (at that time) between the ages of 18 and 65 were actively looking for work and not finding it.
And yet all 2.7 million people still had homes. How did they accomplish that miracle? Because since the 1930’s, Canada has refused to let the unemployed slip into starvation. We’ve had welfare. We’ve had unemployment insurance. Laissez-faire capitalism threatens that security.
As for standards of living rising around the world, I return to my earlier example of Nigeria. GDP and GNP does not equate to a standard of living. People making a dollar a day in a factory, instead of farming for sustenance, are not buying BMW’s. They are buying food they could have otherwise farmed, if that were still an option for them.
But what disturbs me most is your statement that there’s been no upheaval in the West. In Canada, it is now common for police to repress by force any peaceful political protest against globalization. What makes the media is only the tip of the iceberg.
Last year, I was covering a student protest for my paper. It was a small protest, a strike against corporate involvement in the university and globalization in general. There was no vandalism and no violence, just a lot of slogan-chanting.
Then the police showed up. They said they were enforcing a city bylaw against using a megaphone. That must be why they sent out ten riot cops. The riot cops were not wearing any identification, as required by law. They threw one student into a car because he wasn’t running away fast enough. They broke another’s kneecap with a baton. Two students were dragged off to jail.
The day before, a teenager got beaten at a protest on the same subject, 4000 students strong. He was vandalizing a police van, so it’s a little less horrific. But vandalism shouldn’t merit violence.
You might think I’ve gone off on a tangent, talking about police brutality. But the reason people are protesting is because our elected officials seem more interested in serving the lobbyists from the corporations than they do in serving us. The general consensus among Canadians is more health care, more social programs, and more tariffs. We vote for people who promise us these things. These same leaders turn around, and cut these things even deeper. Why would they do this unless they were serving interests besides our own?
The protests have been even larger in Europe. I assure you, there has been plenty of upheaval, and it looks like there will only be more in the future.
Hamish:
I should preface this by disassociating myself from Sam Stone. I don’t think child labor is a good thing or in any way justifiable under any circumstances at all, and to argue otherwise is just wrong. The notion that people left the farm of their own free will is likewise remarkably ill-informed.
However, a little perspective on this quote:
Here in the U.S., unemployment is scraping record lows. Rates this low haven’t been seen since the sixties.
Canada, and Western Europe, have more social programs than the U.S. For the last quarter century, with some years as exceptions, unemployment in the U.S. has generally been lower than in these countries. It seems to me that there is a correlation between the number of transfer payment schemes and how heavily people are taxed for them, and the rate of employment. The more heavy the taxes for social programs, the higher the unemployment, and therefore the greater the need for these self-same programs. It’s a trap. The U.S. was saved from this by having two strong parties that check each other’s worst impulses. I’ve travelled around enough (and lived for a long time in NYC, another half-socialist, single party state) to know that unless you have a brake on the demand for social programs, you will cause your economy to stagnate.
This is simply common sense, and can be confirmed by just looking around and seeing who’s prosperous and who’s not. Western Europe has been struggling for years to get its economies off the ground, but those countries just can’t seem to lower their unemployment rates, no matter what crazy scheme (like the Euro) they come up with. As much as I hate to say this (being an almost lifelong, yellow-dog Democrat who hated Reagan with a passion), Western Europe needs a good dose of someone as right-wing as Reagan to shake them up.
If only such a person didn’t come with the inevitable heavy baggage of xenophobia, nationalism, and war-mongering…
High tariffs won’t get you anywhere. They benefit the mediocre business owner, and end up converting the economy that uses them into a backwater because of the lack of competition. If high tariffs could give a people prosperity, Mexico would be the richest country in North America. Even Japan, in part because of how it protected and still protects its economy, has been stagnant for 10 years now. It’s possible that we are witnessing the conversion of that economy into a backwater, as crazy as that sounds to say.
Capitalism won’t fail for the simple reason that it lets you keep what you earn, and pass it on to your children. This is the nut of it, a very simple core concept. No need to resort to crazy theories or justifications of child labor or rural impoverishment. The simple truth is that any system that lets you keep what you make will always be favored by the vast majority of people, and will ultimately win out because those who live under it will accumulate wealth over the long term that will dazzle the rest of the world. Which is a pretty decent summary of the economic history of the U.S.
The redefinition of “unemployment” to exclude people who are not looking for work (due to depression, homelessness, vagrancy, etc.) “Officially the level [in the industrialized world] in the early 1990s [was] some 30 million. In reality it [was] closer to 40 million. Authorities have disguised the full extent of the crisis by repeatedly redefining the term ‘unemployment’ to keep the numbers down.” (J.R. Saul, The Doubter’s Companion)
The replacement of long-term secure jobs with short-term unsecured ones. “The American improvement had depended on a willingness to ignore the lowering of employment standards and the use of part-time labour to count as full-time labour. To put it bluntly, in the 1930s, women who took in washing to get by were not heralded as job-creation success stories, but our service-industry economy measures differently.” (J.R. Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards)
Yeah, those factors and the fact that there are jobs available everywhere.
It seems like every gas station, convenience store and fast food joint are hiring. I realize that this isn’t exactly hard evidence, but given that there are enough economic statistics available to prove either side of the story, I’ll choose the ones that don’t run counter to what I see everywhere. I won’t say that the official unemployment rate isn’t artificially low, just that there are more entry-level jobs available than I have ever seen before. And that seems like a good thing to me.
Ahem, have you looked at European economic statistics? The above is overly dim.
Western European economies appear, with some moderate liberalizations in the past decade, to have begun a transition to higher growth. Unemployment has come down since the mid-1990s, growth is up, with modest changes in the welfare state. We don’t need to adopt the exagerated libertarian view point (I mean really, people voluntarily moving off the farm?).
Empirically, as opposed to ideologically, it seems modest changes helped things along. Could higher growth be achieved with more changes? Probably. But Europeans seem to largely like the trade offs they presently have. Everything has both positive and negative externalities, its a matter of ‘taste’ in the economic sense as to what you select from the menu.
to understand our economists you have to combine mark twain with adolf hitler.
twain said “there are lies, damn lies and statistics”
hitler said “if you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big lie”
economists have put these together and come up with “if you’re going to tell a lie hide a BIG statistic”
what happened to DEPRECIATION OF DURABLE CONSUMER GOODS?
what happened to the depreciation of 70,000,000 cars manufactured in the 50’s? ran across that number accidentally on a TV program. what does planned obsolescence do for GDP and employment. but of course consumers aren’t supposed to concentrate on NET WORTH.
All true. But obviously the Europeans know something’s amiss, because people who are happy with what they have don’t go off trying loony ideas like the Euro. At least that’s how I feel about that particular economic experiment.
1 - Unemployment has always been defined as those people looking actively for work. No redefinition involved.
2 - Self-employment has also, because of #1, always been in the statistics also. No different measurements needed.
FYI, the below is from http://www.bls.gov. It’s probably what people like yourself have in mind when they talk about the “real” unemployment rate. Apparently this wasn’t calculated before 1994 (which would mean the government is giving out more rather than less data these days, wouldn’t it?), and on this basis, the unemployment rate has still fallen by more than 45% since the beginning of 1994. Pay particular attention to that last column - the one labelled Ann, for Annual. Notice how that’s been consistently declining? Not exactly the sign of a system in crisis, is it?
U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers
Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey
Series Catalog:
Series ID : LFU2520
Not Seasonally Adjusted
Series Title : Special unemployment rate (new) U-6
Age : 16 Years And Older (null)
Class of Worker : N/A
Ethnicity Origin : N/a
Industry : N/A
Occupation : N/a
Race : N/a
Sex : N/a
Status : Civilian Labor Force (Null)
Data:
Year Jan … Feb … Mar … Apr … May … Jun … Jul … Aug … Sep … Oct … Nov … Dec … Ann
1990 No data available for this year.
1991 No data available for this year.
1992 No data available for this year.
1993 No data available for this year.
1994 12.8 . 12.2 . 11.9 . 10.9 . 10.6 . 11.3 . 11.1 . 10.4 . 10.0 . 9.7 … 9.7 … 9.7 … 10.9
1995 11.1 . 10.5 . 10.3 . 9.8 … 9.8 … 10.4 . 10.4 . 10.0 . 9.7 … 9.3 … 9.6 … 9.7 … 10.1
1996 10.8 . 10.7 . 10.3 . 9.7 … 9.5 … 10.0 . 10.0 . 9.3 … 9.0 … 8.8 … 8.9 … 9.2 … 9.7
1997 10.4 . 10.0 . 9.6 … 9.0 … 8.5 … 9.2 … 9.0 … 8.6 … 8.3 … 7.9 … 8.0 … 8.2 … 8.9
1998 9.3 … 8.9 … 8.9 … 7.7 … 7.6 … 8.4 … 8.5 … 7.8 … 7.6 … 7.3 … 7.2 … 7.3 … 8.0
1999 8.5 … 8.2 … 7.9 … 7.4 … 7.1 … 7.9 … 7.7 … 7.2 … 7.0 … 6.7 … 6.8 … 6.9 … 7.4
2000 7.8 … 7.6 … 7.4 … 6.7 … 6.8 … 7.3 … 7.3 … 7.0
I valiantly attempted to get the above to line up, but as you can see, I didn’t quite succeed.
Unemployment has been minimized slightly by two revisions:
1 - Reagan started counting the military as part of the labor force, so as to show more people as employed. Given that they are 1 million more or less, and that the labor force is 141 million at last count, this had only a small effect.
2 - Large numbers of people, mostly minorities, have been thrown in prison because of our drug laws. These should at least be liberalized, although I think legalization is the only way to go - but we could open another thread on this issue. This amounts to a net of 700,000 being deleted from the labor force since 1980 - the prison population was about 300,000 that year and is around 1 million today. Once again, given the size of the labor force, a small effect. This is more of a moral issue than an economic one.
So the notion that people might voluntarily leave a peasant farm is an ‘exaggerated libertarian viewpoint’?
I suppose those peasant farmers dying in small boats trying to escape poverty are a figment of my imagination?
And there WAS a mass migration of people into factories at the start of the industrial revolution. Sure, some of them may have been put in no-choice situtations by some unscrupulous factory owners, but unless you can show historical evidence of huge gangs of thugs scouring the countryside and forcing people into slave labor I will still maintain that the vast majority of them went willingly, because they saw a chance to improve their lives.
Pldennison: Did I give you the impression that I approved of Child Labor? Child Labor is terrible, and I fervently wish that every kid could grow up with a good education and enough time for play. I really do. But the fact of the matter is that in the poorest areas of the world then and now, children worked simply because the only alternative was to starve to death.
If you want to end Child Labor, work for a world in which everyone is rich enough that they’ll never have to send their kids out to bring home the bread. And Capitalism is the best system we have for creating wealth for everyone, workers and capitalists alike.
Sigh, no your simplistic characterizations of the transition to industrial economies in the 19th century was. It’s bizzaroworld visions of history like this which give capitalism a bad name. (Well that and the odd abuses.)
Sam Stone: Was Pdennison supposed to be me up there?
If so, I really did get that impression. Sorry.
Re child labor: It’s one of those evils, like prostitution or burglary, that is an indicator of bad economic times at a particular time & place. It should be criminalized and its perpetrators dealt with harshly, in proportion to the fact that prostitution is considered “victimless”, while burglary does have a victim, and its practitioners dealt with somewhat more harshly. People who practice child labor should be dealt with more harshly still: right up there with kidnappers, I’d say.
Re unemployment figures: I have to be honest here, and say that I just read a column in Barron’s which states that both the figures for discouraged and for part-time workers who want full time jobs were revised sharply downward between the end of 1993 and the beginning of 1994. I would quote, but that’s probably disallowed by some copyright law somewhere. The bases for the revisions were as follows:
For part-time workers: attempting to figure out who was truly being forced to work part time, the BLS added the question “Last week, could you have worked full-time if the hours had been offered?”. Adjusting for the answer to this question (apparently a lot of people said no), the BLS revised downwards by 25% the number of part-timers who wanted full-time work.
For discouraged workers: two questions added:
1 - “Last week, could you have started a job if one had been offered?”
2 - “Did you look for work at any time in the past 12 months?”
Answers to these questions cut the number of discouraged workers in half between the end of 1993 and the beginning of 1994.
Interestingly, according to the article, (Economics Beat, the Barron’s of October 2, with the title, “Prosperity Favors Gore; For Bush a Ray of Hope”) 45.1% of the respondents who said they wanted a job in 1994 but hadn’t looked for one, said in 1995 that they actually didn’t want a job at all.
Personally, I think this adds to the accuracy of the figures I quoted above. Grist for the mill though…
Sam Stone: Was Pdennison supposed to be me? If so, I did get that impression, and since it appears to have been wrong, sorry.
However, just a suggestion: moderation in the defense of liberty is no vice either, you know.
I was referring to your exagerated views, and simplistic straw men. Given the manner of response to other posters, I don’t see much value in debating the finer points of the process of industrialization and complexities of rural to urban migration.
But there is a continuum of pollution. You don’t have to have the aim of eliminating pollution, but you can regulate or tax with the aim of minimising it.
In the absence of other factors, a factory doesn’t care about the future cost to the rest of society from the crud it throws out. Its aim under a totally free market is purely to maximise profits, so it will use the most cost-efficient materials available. Everyone else has to pick up the cost of the pollution. My point is that this cost has to be recognised and charged to the factory so that they are forced to factor it in to their calculations as to what the most cost-efficient materials are.
Basically turn it into a direct variable cost of production.
I don’t want to get too bogged down in pollution here (oho!) - it was only an illustration of the wider point: capitalism is made up of a series of micro-systems all seeking to optimise their little part. Our aim, whether it be through regulation or otherwise, ought to be to ensure that these series of micro-optimisations coincide in a macro-optimisation. A free market does not guarantee this.
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In other news - jmullaney, having got out of the rut of explaining to Dal Timgar why his one trick is rather tedious, this thread now seems to be turning into an explanation to you alone of… of… well - I’m not sure what it is we’re trying to explain to you. Why don’t you summarise your position and start another thread? I for one look forward to being able to clarify a few issues without worrying about increasingly large hijacks to what should be about the problems with capitalism.
But pollution isn’t an on-or-off issue. The aim of regulation doesn’t have to be to eliminate, but it should be to minimise within reason.
A factory doesn’t care about the cost of pollution to society as a whole. It doesn’t care about the quality of life cost, nor does it care about the monetary cost. Its aim is to maximise profits and this involves using the most cost-efficient products it can. The trouble arises if cost-efficient to the factory is in discord with cost-efficient to society. The aim of regulation, taxes or any other system ought to be to turn society’s hidden costs into a direct variable production cost that the factory must factor into its calculations when determining what the most cost-efficient input is.
But I don’t want to get too bogged down in pollution (oho!) It was only supposed to be illustrative of the wider point.
Under an unfettered capitalist system, each individual micro-system seeks to optimise itself. Our goal in setting government policy ought to be to ensure that these micro-optimisations coincide with the macro-optimisation of society as a whole - both economic and sociological. There is nothing in an unregulated capitalist society to guarantee that this will be true - your local maxima need not be the global maximum.
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In other news - jmullaney, having finally got ourselves out of the rut of explaining to dal timgar why his one trick was rather tedious, we seem to have got stuck explaining to you about… about… well… I’m not sure what we’re explaining to you. Why not summarise your questions about economics - and from what you’ve written (“print less money”??), I can assure you that they are questions - and start a new thread. I for one look forward to being able to explain concepts further to you without worrying about hijacking what is supposed to be a discussion on the problems with capitalism.
But pollution isn’t an on-or-off issue. The aim of regulation doesn’t have to be to eliminate, but it should be to minimise within reason.
A factory doesn’t care about the cost of pollution to society as a whole. It doesn’t care about the quality of life cost, nor does it care about the monetary cost. Its aim is to maximise profits and this involves using the most cost-efficient products it can. The trouble arises if cost-efficient to the factory is in discord with cost-efficient to society. The aim of regulation, taxes or any other system ought to be to turn society’s hidden costs into direct variable production costs that the factory must factor into its calculations when determining what its most cost-efficient inputs are.
But I don’t want to get too bogged down in pollution (oho!) It was only supposed to be illustrative of the wider point.
Under an unfettered capitalist system, each individual micro-system seeks to optimise itself. Our goal in setting government policy ought to be to ensure that these micro-optimisations coincide with the macro-optimisation of society, both economic and sociological. There is nothing in an unregulated capitalist society to guarantee that this will be true - your local maxima need not be the global maximum.
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In other news - jmullaney, having finally got ourselves out of the rut of explaining to dal timgar why his one trick was rather tedious, we seem to have got stuck explaining to you about… about… well… I’m not sure what we’re explaining to you. Why not summarise your questions about economics - and from what you’ve written (“print less money”??), I can assure you that they are questions - and start a new thread. I for one look forward to being able to explain concepts further to you without worrying about hijacking what is supposed to be a discussion on the problems with capitalism.
But pollution isn’t an on-or-off issue. The aim of regulation doesn’t have to be to eliminate, but it should be to minimise within reason.
A factory doesn’t care about the cost of pollution to society as a whole. It doesn’t care about the quality of life cost, nor does it care about the monetary cost. Its aim is to maximise profits and this involves using the most cost-efficient products it can. The trouble arises if cost-efficient to the factory is in discord with cost-efficient to society. The aim of regulation, taxes or any other system ought to be to turn society’s hidden costs into direct variable production costs that the factory must factor into its calculations when determining what its most cost-efficient inputs are.
But I don’t want to get too bogged down in pollution (oho!) It was only supposed to be illustrative of the wider point.
Under an unfettered capitalist system, each individual micro-system seeks to optimise itself. Our goal in setting government policy ought to be to ensure that these micro-optimisations coincide with the macro-optimisation of society, both economic and sociological. There is nothing in an unregulated capitalist society to guarantee that this will be true - your local maxima need not be the global maximum.
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In other news - jmullaney, having finally got ourselves out of the rut of explaining to dal timgar why his one trick was rather tedious, we seem to have got stuck explaining to you about… about… well… I’m not sure what we’re explaining to you. Why not summarise your questions about economics - and from what you’ve written (“print less money”??), I can assure you that they are questions - and start a new thread. I for one look forward to being able to explain concepts further to you without worrying about hijacking what is supposed to be a discussion on the problems with capitalism. I can’t resist asking though – if your country is essentially one big floodplain, then what are you supposed to do? Abandon it completely? Even if you think that this is the ethical thing to do, who’s going to accept you as an immigrant?
