Very well said, that makes a lot of sense to me. We’ve immediately implemented a profit sharing program in Jellybeantopia, all production over 100 jelly beans will be equally divided among the remaining eight people. Owners still get their expected return on investment (plus a little more), and the workers could get triple income, if they work harder.
That’s right, any problem can be solved by just working harder.
You had to have been pretty shitty at computer science to graduate before about 2000 and have to take “any job”. Possibly “any job… in computing or IT” but not “any job” unless you really, really sucked at it.
I graduated in 1996 with less than stellar grades, and ended up with a small company IT job as a database developer/jack of all trades. Hardly “any job”, although it wasn’t my ideal job (or so I thought at the time) of working at something more technical/infrastructure oriented in a highly technically educated workplace. I still made good money, and have parlayed it into a reasonably successful career since then.
The point is that they had the freedom to choose IT and try and get a job in it; they weren’t railroaded into a trade school track in high school, they weren’t screwed by the lack of their family connections or money (by and large anyway), and they weren’t told what to study or what kind of job they could get.
Just because they chose computer science and turned out to be worthless at it doesn’t mean they’re unfree in some way; they had the freedom to continue on that path or do something else… again, without any restrictions.
Income inequality has nothing to do with poverty. If I am a millionaire and my neighbor is a billionaire then there is huge income inequality but no poverty. The only reason anyone brings up income inequality is envy. Big Green Envy!
The reason people bring up income inequality is not envy, but rather the fact that increasing income inequality is direct evidence of a shrinking middle class and lowering social mobility.
Recently, the Dow has been hitting record highs, and yet by many metrics the lower and middle classes haven’t seen times this hard in decades (see: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-12-09/harvard-study-finds-the-rent-is-too-damn-high ). In other words, the guy working two shit jobs to support himself and his family is not necessarily ‘envious’ of the CEO who makes ten times more in a year than he will in a lifetime, he’s more concerned with his own survival and the ability to maximize his children’s opportunity in life. Some might argue that an individual working a dead end job(s) deserves poverty for making sub-optimal life choices, but when a clear societal trend of high unemployment and under-employment exists, it doesn’t make sense to tell millions of people that they just need to work harder and/or all get better jobs. At some point you have to acknowledge systemic problems.
Turning back to the original topic at hand, I think that poverty (or at least relative poverty) can be and ought to be mitigated in developed nations. Scandinavian social democracies provide a solid example of how such a program can work reasonably well within the constraints of a capitalist system. In the United States, I feel pendulum has swung too far in the direction of unfettered free-market zeal and we’re really starting to feel the negative effects of those policies. For some specific examples of this, I would cite the deregulation of the financial sector leading to the housing bubble and resulting recession, as well as the continued dismantling of public education and social safety net programs contributing to a more and more permanent lack of social mobility.
Just my two cents.
So yeah.
Extreme poverty is disappearing. The last few decades have seen enormous strides in health, education, food security, and quality of life in general. Not long ago, “Asia” was as synonymous with poverty as Africa is today, and now that idea seems kind of absurd. Africa is not far behind.
Relative poverty, though, is still an issue. Once you get past “enough for food and basic healthcare,” the real damage that poverty causes is social-- and that is still a real problem. Relative poverty can cause social immobility and a lack of hope, which are damaging to both individuals and society.
A good example of this was the bubble. Though income inequality increased, most people were doing better, as unemployment fell and salaries at even the bottom increased. No one cared that Gates was making a fortune as long as they did well.
If the rich stopped screwing everyone else they’d have a lot less vitriol aimed at them.
Wanting what is and was all along rightfully yours to begin with, is not envy; rather, it is justice.
This is envy dressed up for church. “If you’ve got it and I want it, it’s mine.”
You can’t base a viable economic system on the Toddler’s Rules of Possession, but that doesn’t stop people from trying.
Regards,
Shodan
Why is it rightfully yours?
There was fraud in the housing bubble. Writing a half million dollar mortgage to a hobo off a railroad car, giving it a “AAA” rating and then selling it to a pension fund is a crime. Occupy Wall Street was, in part, a call for these crooks to be AT LEAST be fired from their jobs, maybe even prosecuted and thrown in jail. There are limits to greed in the USA, so “unbridled greed” typically starts with a criminal act.
What I, myself, have made. I busted my guts 20 years for a little acreage out in the country, so it is mine (and the bank’s, but whatever). Now I contribute my “fair share” to common good … public schools, roads, fire protection, common defense, $625 a square foot Italian marble for the Governor’s bungalow on Cape Cod.
The secret I learned right away is that I wasn’t getting anywhere swinging my hammer, the REAL money was in directing others where to swing their hammers.
The problem with Occupy Wall Street is that it really failed to incite meaningful, permanent change on most of the topics that it stood for. So while we got a few prosecutions out of the housing bubble mess, it took huge protests in multiple cities over the course of weeks and months in order to finally draw attention to these crimes. After the Occupy protests were stamped out, attention has once again faded away ( http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/another-batch-of-wall-street-villains-freed-on-technicality-20131204 ). The current political environment that favors deregulation and decreased oversight only encourages these kinds of criminal behaviors. I can only think of a handful of lawmakers that even bother to make a strong stand against white collar crime and the unfettered financial wizardry that makes the variety of fraud that triggered the recession quite easy. This is despite the huge financial impact of white collar crimes in general.
I believe he’s referring to the collective trend over the past several decades where labor has gained paltry increases in wages while management has seen soaring profits ( http://anticap.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/fig2_prodhhincome.jpg ). This would indicate that he (and most working class people) have been screwed out of fair compensation for the labor provided to businesses.
I suppose the alternative moral explanation for the data would be that millions and millions of Americans have simply been swept up by an inexplicable epidemic of laziness, and that they don’t really deserve higher wages. Or perhaps CEO’s and management types have become more valuable to their companies than their laborers by several orders of magnitude since the 1970’s. I’m sure someone will along soon enough to morally justify the data though some impressive logical gymnastics.
Perhaps you can hand out this list of rules to the homeless and the struggling poor, in order to demonstrate to them how childish they’re being for wanting a more level playing field in life. It’ll be great. You’ll zing them really good and then you can walk away all cool and look like a badass. 
Those are the only alternatives, right? Well, the famous excluded middle strikes again!
I’m highlighting the absurdity of the belief that hard work is the sole determinant of one’s economic success, and that other social and economic forces are negligible in comparison. Explicitly applying this logic to the data on depressed wages over the last few decades makes that idea sound ridiculous.
If there’s another explanation out there, I’m listening.
There are many explanations between your two extremes actually. Myself, I’m fond of the simplest explanation being that automation and expert systems are one of the reasons labor hasn’t gotten more of the pie in the last few decades. Basically, to turn it around, why do you think labor SHOULD have ever increasing wages in the face of the stark fact that, at least on the manufacturing side, the increase in productivity hasn’t come from anything that labor has brought to the table, but instead is due directly to increases in efficiency, automation and expert systems which has allowed a single person to do the job that used to take many, many people to do a few decades ago?
This is a fair point. Automation has been around since the industrial revolution and won’t be letting up at any point in the foreseeable future. Any sort of unskilled labor is directly threatening by increasingly sophisticated methods of automation. To answer your question of why labor should see increasing wages despite a lesser role in production, the alternative is that vast swaths of the population will eventually be unable to make a living wage in the face of ever-increasing automation. Even in the service economy, advances in technology are beginning to erode away unskilled positions ( http://news.cnet.com/mcdonalds-hires-7000-touch-screen-cashiers/8301-17938_105-20063732-1.html ). The march of automation guarantees that we’ll eventually be faced with the question of how to deal with large groups of unskilled individuals with no suitable employment. It’s not feasible for every person to be a manager. Eventually, as a society, we’ll need to come to terms with a future where employment is not possible for everyone, and to create solutions accordingly.
In the meantime, I would point towards Germany and their prevalence of unions as to how a modern manufacturing economy can be successful while still paying their laborers a good wage (How Germany Builds Twice As Many Cars As The U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice As Much ) . I would further argue that even accounting for the effects of automation, there still exists a disparity between the value produced by labor and the share of wages they receive, although there is plenty of room for debate to what extent. The dismantling of organized labor in the US has allowed for undue leverage by management to keep wages low, even beyond the effects of market forces and technological advances. Things like Right-to-work laws and other anti-union policies have made it so that workers scarcely have any power at all in negotiating wages. Attempts to unionize or even openly speaking in favor of unions are grounds for termination at places like Wal Mart and the like, where the reason for termination can be explained away as “poor performance” with no further justification required. Labor has been gutted in America and I would argue that this is every bit as central to the problem of depressed wages as automation is.
No, that would be silly. It was addressed to the folks who want to base their economic system on class envy.
Unless you don’t object to having the government kick you out of your residence and hand it over to some homeless guy on the assumption that you stole it from him by paying the mortgage or rent.
Regards,
Shodan
[QUOTE=Model Citizen]
This is a fair point. Automation has been around since the industrial revolution and won’t be letting up at any point in the foreseeable future. Any sort of unskilled labor is directly threatening by increasingly sophisticated methods of automation. To answer your question of why labor should see increasing wages despite a lesser role in production, the alternative is that vast swaths of the population will eventually be unable to make a living wage in the face of ever-increasing automation. Even in the service economy, advances in technology are beginning to erode away unskilled positions ( http://news.cnet.com/mcdonalds-hires...0063732-1.html ). The march of automation guarantees that we’ll eventually be faced with the question of how to deal with large groups of unskilled individuals with no suitable employment. It’s not feasible for every person to be a manager. Eventually, as a society, we’ll need to come to terms with a future where employment is not possible for everyone, and to create solutions accordingly.
[/QUOTE]
And yet we’ve had increased automation for well over a century now, and the dire predictions of folks like the Luddites haven’t exactly come to pass. So, you believe that labor should get an increase in wages just because this will leave ‘vast swaths of the population’ to be ‘unable to make a living wage in the face of ever-increasing automation’? Not that this has come to pass in reality, but again I ask you…why? Basically, labor is a trade in which business trades money and benefits for a persons labor at an agreed upon rate. But you want business to just give labor something extra (a ‘living wage’) not because it’s earned, but because you feel that it should be so. Is that correct?
Sure…and the US is still successful (our manufacturing is more productive than it’s ever been in history) despite the fact that our labor costs are higher than many other countries as well. We (in the US) get this because of special circumstances…and so do the Germans, do to their position in the EU, as well as the fact that they manufacture premium and value added products and services and thus can charge a premium for them. That’s how they can afford to pay a premium for their labor, above it’s actual market value…as do we in the US.
So, it’s your contention that systemic poverty is intractable because organized labor in this US has been ‘dismantled’? And that labor in the US is being paid below it’s actual market value, even taking into account automation and modern expert systems and the like??
I don’t think he would say anything that silly, since during the heyday of the US labor unions the poverty rate was much higher than it is today. (Cite.)
Regards,
Shodan
The poverty rate was cut in half during the heyday of the labor movement, from 22% down to 11%.
