Other countries including the ones we offshore our jobs to, protect their jobs in the interest of keeping their nation strong. Want to work in India, you have to bring jobs with you and hire Indian people.
We have also offshored our manufacturing technology . The future of industrial development will go to those who use it daily. New technology will be theirs as we fall further behind.
In the last part you are wrong once again. Perot was talking about the leveling of wages across the globe with NAFTA, and CAFTA. It is happening. But we will be behind in technology and education when that time arrives.We are becoming a third word nation.
Luci, let’s say you hire me to. Run your business, and I decide that it is in the best interest of all humanity (consistent with my feelings of universal human compassion and cooperation) to liquidate the business and give the cash to a home for wayward alleycats. Let’s assume this is perfectly legal and you have no recourse against me.
You’d be perfectly OK with this, right? And you would be perfectly willing to hire me to run other businesses for you, right? And you’d still invest in other businesses knowing full well that other people may agree with my brand of thought on universal compassion and cooperation, right?
Lets assume you have constructed this absurd concoction for reasons other than a cynical mockery of concepts you haven’t the least understanding of, or sympathy with. Ya gotta believe, and you don’t.
XT asked you, politely and sincerely, for your take on the OP’s premise, and you’re responding with implied insults and - as usual - lots and lots of sarcasm. Aside from the fact that it’s rude to answer a sincere question with sarcasm and insults, it’s also a dodge, and here in GD we get to challenge people on dodges.
No, in all seriousness; what’s your take on it? Without sarcasm of insulting anyone, do you agree that the USA is headed for endless recession, as the OP claims, or do you think the economy will recover as it did in previous recessions, as xtisme seems to be saying?
Nourishment, enlightenment and emancipation for all sounds great to me. Most people agree. But what are your ideas for getting us there?
He did? Really? You mean, up to the point of “ridiculous strawman”, or including that as well? Yours is a very expansive definition of “polite”.
As to your question about recovery versus endless recession, I think both are likely. We will recover, but we will never attain the level of prosperity we had before this recession, because it was bogus to begin with. How many years were we reading about worried economists and investment analyst types pointing out the weaknesses? How many times did you hear the Bushiviks say, well, yes, there are worrisome signs, but the real estate market is going great, everybody is making buttloads of free money? I’m a fucking hippy, and even I knew that was, fiscally speaking, Cloud Cuckoo Land. An economy based on shuffling instruments of credit from place to place and taking a cut? Seriously? I know what I smoke, God alone knows what they were smoking!
We can’t “get that back”, it was never there to begin with. I am convinced, even as we speak, that our major financial institutions are still bullshitting us. They are hoping to hide their weakness long enough to recover. But I am not in a position to estimate with any serious reliability just how awful a mess that is, I doubt anyone can. And they will do everything in their power to prevent us from finding out that Greenspans Cat is dead. And until we know that, we still don’t even know how much trouble we are in!
I am an optimist in intention, and a pessimist in observation. And pessimists don’t get many surprises. Not enough, at any rate.
Right. I don’t have any understanding of such lofty and nuanced concepts as “everyone should cooperate and have compassion for all humans.”
You are the one without understanding of how humans work, as you demonstrate more and more with each post.
Golly! With all that free time, I guess people can bake themselves some cake and enjoy that all day! What a wonderous world it can be!
So let me get this straight; in the Netherlands, getting laid off means usually a drop of 30 percent in income for 2 years. ( The median income is about 1800 dollars net a month). After that, you get a state funded income that is about enough to cover basic needs (affordable housing, cheap car, utitilities and groceries) and is enough to cover all your needs if you don’t have expensive tastes and some frugality and creativity. While you get this, the government gently prodds you to get another job.
How much is the drop in income if you get laid off in the US?
The knowledge work I have done in my career has been completely decoupled from manufacturing, in both the private sector and public.
I have been involved from the early stages with what venture capitalists would call 3 homeruns and a double, all 4 have survived just fine thank you on the value of knowledge alone.
However, I would say that Swiss, German, and other modern manufacturing IS knowledge work when done well - innovation in process and capab ility, ability to design and deliver to more and more precise customers on shorter schedules with better quality. That comes from the knowledge class, not the manufacturing class that people in the US lament as being gone.
There is need for some manufacturing in the US, but probably mostly short runs of new complex products which have not yet reached sales volume to justify the economies of scale from overseas manufacturing. But evn so, the components will be primarily built overseas (but possibly designed and with the resulting intellectual property held by a US company).
Anyways, the bigger issue to me seems to be that our work force has always been short lots of people who were chronically unemployed and unemployable. We have always carried them.
Now, we are pretty much so efficient at what we do, that lots of skills that were once innovative (computer programming e.g.) are not routine, and like all jobs that become routine, someone somewhere will do them well and cheaper somewhere else. That means our efficiency has possibly created lots more people whow will be unemployed or unemployable.
I am not sure I see that changing in the immediate future, or maybe even ever. We maybe simply be so efficientat what we do that we don’t need as many workers as we have.
That is a fundamential problem that requires outside the box thinking to manage - it essentially says lots of people who want to work, and who are not “leisure class” can’t or won’t be able to work through no fault of their own.
I don’t think we are going to expand welfare to support them, and maybe we can’t afford that anyway.
So what do we do?
Don’t know, but one idea that has crossed my mind is a rethinking of the lines of where we draw cash value versus equity value. Clearly right now equity value overall is increasing while cash for individuals is decreasing, whether working or not. Maybe it is time to explore the relationship between them somehow.
If the economy is spinning off equity value, but the people overall are cash poor with no prospects of working for cash, then what do we do?
You’ve touched on a sore spot. More and more, our recurrent bouts of disemployment have affected a better educated worker more accustomed to relative affluence and security. A lot of how much one suffers from unemployment is dependent on whether or not one “knows how” to be poor. More and more people who never expected to have to cope with these issues now have to. And haven’t the slightest idea how.
But, over all, its probably fair to say that for most Americans, the fall is a lot harder than for a Yurpeen. So, I hope you take that into account, perhaps not be so resentful if we are forced to raise your rent.
Some posts make me think there is a huge difference in perception between American classes.
While there is some validity in Maastricht’s observation, the reality is that many Americans feel desperate financially. In many cases this is due to their own imprudence (though that imprudence was encouraged by those still laughing their ways to the banks).
The big news story this week is that those making $1,000,000 per year successfully fought off the efforts of Marxists to force them to make do with only $800,000. And this is due to the recent election, emphasizing “fiscal conservatism” (reducing the federal deficit). As a compromise in their program to reduce the deficit by cutting taxes, those budget balancers have agreed to cut the deficit even further by increasing an entitlement.
Was it Karl Marx who first said “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”? American politics have devolved to the point where one has to laugh, even if these stupidities are a first-time affair.
Mate, come on, you’ve been here for years. Even I have picked up that after something like a year (I guess there is great variation from state to state), in the US your drop-off can be 100%. They don’t have state funded income beyond very basic welfare that itself cuts off.
Not that this justifies the OP’s queer nationalist economic illiterate leftism.
Funny how people always call for “loyalty” and “patriotism” when they want someone to act counter to their best interests. “Healthy for GreedCO” means heathy for GreedCo’s employees, shareholders and people who do business with GreedCO.
Since the OP is coining the phrase “creative destruction”, I assume he is familiar with economist Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter beleived that capitalism would be replaced by a form of socialism. He didn’t advocate this shift, but he was describing trends he observed. Essentially, as capitalist society advanced, the population would increase in education, however automation would lead to less meaningful work for them to perform. This would lead to the growth of an overeducated, underemployed “intellectual” class whose growing frustration and activism would result in more socialist policies.
Sound familiar?
I, for one, certainly hope that doesn’t happen. What would that society look like? A minority of highly educated, highly motivated working people supporting a vast population of people unable to find work or unwilling to work at jobs they felt were beneath them?
Yes,** Le Jacquelope**, we get it. You are angry at the current state of the economy. You’ve only told us about it in at least half a dozen threads on the same exact subject.
The mistake you seem to make is to think that the current economic state is due to misguided policies or “corporate greed” (whatever the fuck that means since corporations have always been expected to behave in a ‘greedy’ manner). What we are seeing is a fundamental shift in the global economic landscape. You have billions of people in developing nations like China and India who are looking to enjoy the same standard of living that we enjoy here in the West. Do you think there is something particularly exceptional about America that we are the only ones deserving of that lifestyle?
Well, now this is an honest and non-sarcastic reply. Thanks.
You posit a really interesting theory, too; the notion that the economy is still built on the sand of financial smoke and mirrors. While I’m not convinced that’s true, let’s assume for a moment it is, or at least partially is. If you believe that, then in fact you and xtisme might be closer than you think. His position - the position, in fact, of most people LJ thinks are “conservatives” - is that the recession was caused not by a lack of productivity, but by financial shenanigans.
If in fact the recession was caused by financial shenanigans, as all evidence suggests it was, then it’s quite reasonable to think recovery is inevitable, even if there’s additional shenanigans to uncover and the recovery will take longer than anyone wants it to. Monetary recessions (most of them are) cause unemployment by damaging confidence and reducing the availability of money; labour and capital goes unused. But inevitably it’ll end; sooner or later the bubble is killed, and the economy will grow based on real demand for products and services. That would mean the OP could in fact be wrong in its implication that the process of creative destruction, which has always resulted in new jobs being created, will somehow not result in new jobs being created this time.
As to whether we’ll get back to where we were, why can’t we? Obviously you don’t want to do it with another real estate bubble, but the economy was growing before the real estate shenanigans began. This is not the first speculative bubble to blow up in our faces, after all; it’s the loudest since 1929, but the same phenomenon’s happened before. Remember the dot-com bubble? Fortunes on fortunes were made and then lost in that collapse, a collapse that was smaller but much stupider than this one. The economy recessed, but it came back, plodding along, growing naturally the way it has for a few centuries now. It came back from all the previous recessions. Underneath the financial flim-flam there’s real economic growth that keeps chugging.
Of course, none of this means than anyone in the debate doesn’t care about people’s well-being or wants people to starve to death, so maybe we can stow that bullshit right away.
I should also point out that the graphs do not show anything having to do with “creative destruction”. What would be far more interesting is a comparison of real GDP overlapped with each period of unemployment. Such a comparison would show a restructuring of the workforce as resources shifted away from obsolete and non-productive businesses into other areas of the economy.
Granted, it would be a bit more nuanced discussion than “DERE STEELIN’ OUR YABS!!!”
Well, based on your description, it wouldn’t mean that at all. It would mean that the majority of people would be wealthy enough to live as they wish to live without having to work. Their education or willingness to work are immaterial. They simply have enough cash liquid assets to meet their needs.
Yes. As usual, our OP starts out with a mistaken premise.
“Creative Destruction” has meant different things over the decades, but it’s most common definition today is what happens when an upstart company “destroys” one of the more established companies because the former has some new technology or business practices that the latter is unwilling or unable to adapt to.
A good example would be DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.). When I was in college (back in the Dark Ages), DEC was the prestige high tech company that people want to work for. They made MINI COMPUTERS and were chipping away at IBM. But guess what? When the PC came along, DEC was undercut by companies like Apple and even IBM. They still had some good business with their VAX machines, but ultimately the dream company of the early 70s got eaten up by Compaq. Compaq! A company that didn’t even exist when DEC was making a name for itself.
I don’t know of anyone other than the OP who uses that term to describe the process of job loss during a recession.
Creative Destruction is what you need to keep an economy from stagnating. Without “Creative Destruction”, you end up with a bunch of lumbering giants that dominate their markets and have no need to innovate.
Anyway, now that I got that out of the way, those of you who are just interested in griping about outsourcing can continue their gripe session unimpeded by facts.
You haven’t twigged onto the fact that the “Creative Destruction” in the OP was dripping sarcasm? I took it a a jab at those who shrug their shoulders when jobs are shipped overseas and say “hey, when industries reinvent themselves, of course jobs will be lost since everything is more efficient.” Apologists for outsourcing are basically calling it global creative destruction.
Efficiency. Bribery, slave labor wages, actual slave labor, little or no health and safety regulations, anti-union legislation. That’s the type of efficiency America can use a little more of, right, John? Right?
Any discussion of the guy who wrote the OP is best kept in the Pit.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I was talking about… :rolleyes:
As has also been noted already in this thread, the current unemployment we are experiencing is largely because we just had the worst recession in 60 years. It has little, if anything, to do with outsourcing. So, no, I don’t take serious a complaint about outsourcing when the data backing up that complaint doesn’t have anything do with outsourcing.
In fact, many of the industries hit hardest in this latest recession, like construction, are exactly the kind of jobs that don’t get outsourced.
I’m a total economic layman so I don’t really know what I’m talking about - but just throwing out a possibility. Since the boom preceeding the recession was at least partly on illusory, fleeting stuff like bubbles and the manipulation of financial instruments, isn’t it possible that it covered up for a potential weakening of the economy as the result of outsourcing? And that this isn’t a recession, but a correction to the new, and weaker nature of our economy as it stands?