More Demand will Create More Employment ?

I find it incredible that so many economists and smart people still believe that “More Demand for Goods and Services will Create More Employment”.

This no longer holds:

1. We live in mostly automatic societies - economies where most work is no longer needed, is automated, is optimized and will continually be further automated, optimized; the goal of any organization or company is to decrease, and decrease as much as is possible the number of employees it has, and this is what they will do no matter what;

2. Even if you do need “More Employees”, there are today so many options on the table: build factories in third world countries for people making 100 dollars a month salary; hire temp people for a month or two (heck even a year and then ax them) at low wages (since people have diminishing bargaining power, as being unemployed means your power is ZERO, you must accept whatever the Employer offers), make people work from the Internet (information workers beware), in this way you can choose from a pool of about 500 million people worldwide and choose the cheapest and best (Russian programmers are cheap and good), etc;

3. Even when demand increases, the relationship to Employment is non-linear, meaning that if a factory needs to build 30 % more cars it will not hire 30% more people, but jack up the working hours, working turns, and maybe hire a few temps (more like 3 or 4 % more). The same thing happens in Services and actually in Services most of the work is so phony and unnecessary that if demand increases I wouldn’t be surprised that they can make due with even less people, a negative relationship;

4. What we have today worldwide, in the globalized economy is a huge amount of Work Availability in terms of people that could potentially work, and a much smaller Need for this work, and the Need for this work is constantly going down with automation - computers - optimizations while the Availability is constantly increasing;

5. There is no counter force, no union, no nothing that is on the side of employees, the only thing that is happening is to make employees fight amongst each other for the breadcrumbs that will remain;

6. Services are supposed to create Employment, but only if people value or think the Services are worth the price: many are starting to doubt the real worth of “call centers”, Health Care Thieves of All Kinds, Education and Training towards imaginary jobs and positions that no longer exist, etc.

I find it amazing that in the Developed world there still are so many people “working”, I expect Unemployment to skyrocket in the USA, EU and JAPAN.

The only real solution to all of this is FREE SALARIES, that is what is needed, salaries of 1,000 dollars a month and CHEAP RENTS, rents of 200 dollars a month, no buying homes anymore or Home Ownership myth and crap. And a huge modern BUS transportation system, BUS MASS TRANSIT system (either public or private, doesn’t matter). I honestly cannot see how on earth, with present day technology and optimizations and the present combination of social forces, how on earth Employment is supposed to go up.

Well the winning minority, the ruling class, the companies that are winning and will win, have all the interest in brainwashing the world that they “deserve” their profits, that they “worked hard” for their success, that they “innovated” more than the others, that they won the competition etc. And consequently all of those who are losing out, are losers, didn’t “innovate” enough, can’t compete, etc.

They are actually right, I admire them, they got it right one way or another, it doesn’t matter. I read an economic article that described how some companies are growing and making profits and expanding while others are losing. The real problem is what is the ratio ? Well, out of 10 companies it seems to be something like 3 win and 7 lose.

In the end 3 million people will be in companies and environments that are expanding - progressing and 7 million will be unemployed.

This is the natural inequality that is being generated: there is no common good, only winners and losers, only that this inequality is being amplified, is getting more and more extreme. But everyone is convinced that they will be a winner if only, they “innovate”, or get the right “skill sets”, etc. This is how they are brainwashed and kept in place.

The truth is, suck it up, get used to it, the world will have fewer and fewer bigger and bigger and richer winners and more and more losers.

So all the talk of getting the jobs back, improving education, being competitive is mostly all BS.

So yes, at least guarantee the basics in the form of a free salary and cheap rent for all the millions (eventually billions) of losers worldwide.

I would not go as far as to say most work is no longer needed, we have simply moved from a Secondary (Use raw materials to produce things) economy to a tertiary (service-related) economy. Anyway, increased demand will result in more sales jobs, more cashier jobs, more transportation jobs (they still haven’t designed a computer that can independently drive a rig) and more jobs in many other areas.

Besides, the computers themselves still need to be both programmed and maintained, so while the net result of these things might be lost jobs, it is difficult to assert that every single job, “Lost,” is gone forever.

The ability of a company to outsource is an excellent point that I do not disagree with, of course, I support isolationism, so I would agree. However, for many of the service jobs, it is still necessary to have a physical person working on-site. That is also necessary for transportation and healthcare jobs and it is mostly necessary for education jobs. It’s survival of the fittest, though, that’s for sure. The key is to pick a sector that you think will always need human beings on-site working there and be damn good at what you do.

I agree that it is a non-linear relationship, but not to the degree that an increase in demand of 30% will result in a net gain of 0 jobs.

I think that the jobs are just moving elsewhere (outsourcing.) I don’t think that the net result is actually that much different. I do agree that we are operating in a globalized economy, but Asian job markets are especially on the upswing due mainly to work done for the U.S…

If the Unions were not unreasonable in the wages/salaries that they demand, the jobs would not have been outsourced in the first place. By the way, don’t think that the top of the Union hierarchy is especially concerned with the status of their workers, they’re mostly concerned in collecting the union dues that pay their own salaries. Higher wages mean higher union dues which means higher salaries for the union hierarchy.

You don’t have to worry about health care as it represents a necessary segment of the overall market. As far as call centers are concerned, I don’t think people doubt the value of them when the cable is out, they need to figure out what is wrong and call Comcast to get a signal sent to their box and Law & Order SVU is on in five minutes…

Except… from my pov, a free salary and cheap rent would make me a winner. I could do whatever I wanted and not worry about a stupid boss or bureaucracy or about wasting my time as a wageslave.

Of course, that won’t happen. All those loser millions would be considered unworthy of welfare by the winner millions. It probably should lead to revolution, but one thing the winner millions have going for them is the way that they manage to either conveniently drug or incarcerate the losers into submission.

But the forces that govern PROFIT, OPTIMIZATION and AUTOMATION will make due with less and less people in sales jobs, cashier jobs, programmers and transporters. The very idea of “innovation” is to do something more efficiently, at lower cost, with more “smarts”, with more “intelligence”, this is why “education” is “so important”, so companies can find ever better ways to do “more with less”, hence in the end “cheaper”, which will one way or another be translated into “less people needed”, “less jobs” or at best jobs being there but “paying less and less”.

Right, and “millions won’t be the fittest”, so they will not be needed. And if those that are “the fittest” and “damn good at what they do” are hired, that means that they are able to one way or another do the jobs of more than one person at the same time, are very efficient, very optimized, otherwise they would be “low productivity” people. Once again, the economy is set up in such a way as to create a smaller and smaller minority of bigger and bigger winners. What are you going to do with the increasing numbers of all of the losers, the unfit, the low productivity slobs ?

Any demand is always unreasonable, capitalism operates on squeezing out as much as possible from workers: in China, their East Coast factories are “starting to cost too much”, they are trying to move to “lower cost” regions or countries like Vietnam. Why ? because instead of 100 dollars a month, the workers now demand 200 dollars a month. Wow, that is quite an unreasonable demand. Anyways you think people are good, not true: economy is only and always a power struggle, a fight, a winner and loser, it is only a power relationship, if there is no counterforce, corporations would pay ZERO to people.

Health Care in the USA is the most criminal organization that can possibly exist worldwide: they are forcing people to pay more and more money when they get sick, when they are in pain. I can’t imagine how on earth such an idiotic system is acccepted by the American people, while in any other country most of health care is free or relatively cheaper. But the USA doctors, lawyers, health insurance bureaucracy has to make 10 times more money than any other place on earth. What a boatfull of crap…

Health Care demonstrates that work is no longer needed, since there are fewer and fewer economic segments to make a profit, then everyone goes into health care (like nurses being paid 60k a year, truly insane anywhere else in the world, most nurses worldwide don’t make more than 20k), the Health Insurance companies need so many workers for something that doesn’t even exist in most of the world, for an activity that is just fluff and sponging off.

I agree there are no solutions: but at least people should “know thyself”, they should know how they have been programmed. Granted man is the infinitely programmable machine, hence societies can be programmed in any possible way in the end: Hilter programmed Germany to induce war and hate jews, and so it was. Pol Pot in Cambodia induced a small army to kill a million people in the name of some Communist Utopia, and so it was, etc. Any other civilization has always programmed their people’s neural networks to associate any possible input or behavior to any other output or behavior and emotional circuits, reactions, etc.

We are programmed to fight, in a subtle way, but to always be in winner or loser mode. The economy is just a giant game of who is now winning and losing, what can I do to win, where do I stand, what is the present status. If things reach some kind of steady state it is called “stagnation”, it is called “socialism”, it is called “no incentive to work”. But in all truth, much of this fighting is a losing proposition to more and more people.

check out:

monstersandcritics.com/news/ … ta-centres

especially:

"San Francisco - Hewlett-Packard is to cut 9,000 jobs from its global workforce over the coming years as it automates its worldwide data centres, the company said Tuesday. However it will add 6,000 new jobs in the new data centres and in expanded technology services
, where it hopes to increase the challenge to rivals IBM and Cisco. "

and later

"The announcement came as HP completes the integration of technology services company EDS, which it bought for 14 billion dollars in 2008. "

Now how much richer can you possibly get ? 14 billion dollars ? not enough ? not good enough ? Maybe it is the return on investment that must always go up no matter what that provokes companies to always “move it” so to say. If you stay still you don’t want to fight, hence constantly change and constantly create a new game, as fast as possible, to see who wins and who loses. This merging and accumulation of capital can continue indefinitely, until trillion dollar buyouts are performed, until a handful of entities own the entire world. Great, they deserved it, they “worked hard” for it. The fight is also based on how much pain I can inflict so as to feel so much more of a winner. So no free salaries or cheap rents, but homeless and sick without “medicaid that costs so much to the poor taxpayers”. Actually the more poor there are, the more I am powerful and winning, the more millions and billions suffer the more I am great and a winner. This is the real underlying philosophy and psychology of all of this Free Market and Capitalism BS. But maybe this is the underlying program of our civilization, our present state civilization seems to always end up in similar programs, no matter what. That is why the neural circuits of humans must be modified, the Instant Singularity must be forced on all, and Free Will must be killed.

check out:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=172275

Many, don’t want to fight anymore because they know the game is rigged in favor of the previous winners, hence they are only being used as a tool and fooled into believing they will be the “Next Bill Gates”.

The “solution” is as you stated, “know thyself”.

The ultimate economy is based on the actual functioning of the individual. By knowing yourself, you know how much anything is worth to you. By everyone knowing that, an economy not only forms, but is exactly suited to handle everyone’s actual needs. By everyone meeting their actual needs (including the need to not be bored), the nation/world is also meeting its actual needs (by definition).

As it is today, more demand will merely increase the wealth of a few, shift the power a little, and otherwise change nothing. Social engineering assures it.

You almost make it sound like a conspiracy, but what you are failing to consider is that this deliberate thing that you propose would not work to benefit the owners of these companies whatsoever. First of all, if nobody works then nobody can afford to buy the things that are being produced so much more efficiently which defeats the purpose of producing them at all.

Secondly, you have to understand that economic social inequality is onbly sustainable to a certain (unknown) point, but once that unknown point is reached, the masses will fight back and they will take over. Then, rinse and repeat, of course…

I don’t quite agree with the extent to which you believe that this occurs. When I say, “Damn good,” you know, a damn good truck driver makes his deliveries on time (usually), doesn’t drive illegal unless he absolutely has to, and doesn’t have any at-fault accidents. He’s listening to the AM traffic channels and not to Classic Rock as he goes through big cities so that he can dodge traffic jams to get his frieght there on time.

That’s all that I mean by, “Damn good,” not superhuman, but competent.

Besides, it takes as long to transport something somewhere as it does to transport it there, so there’s no real, “Doing the work of two people,” involved.

I disagree, the employer/employee relationship existed long before collective bargaining.

You want to know what the Unions do?

If you’re a shit security guard and three incidences have happened in the last month that you could have stopped the Union will fight to keep them from firing you, not because they love you, but because the company might decide not to replace you which would mean less union dues. If you’re a terrific security guard, it’s still a collectively-bargained contract, so the only raise you will ever get will be contracted, unless you get promoted to non-Union management.

In what should be the real world, if you’re a shit security guard you get fired, and if you’re terrific you get more money. You know, there are hotels that are Union (Believe it or not) and the people that occupy my position at those hotels don’t make what I do.

An employer also gets what he pays for, as do the people that buy the product from that company. If he pays shit, then the workers are shit, but someone will typically underbid you on the open job market. The key is to convince the employer you are worth more than that person. There are dozens that have come in here and applied for my exact position with their ASKING PRICE being a few grand less per year than I make, yet I’m retained and they’re not even interviewed, why?

Well, yeah, that’s why you don’t have to worry about them ever going away!

Is that the worldwide average? Including Uganda and stuff like that? 20k in Uganda, for example, would probably be the equivalent of a few hundred thousand over here assuming you are meaning American money. By the way, the activity is not fluff and sponging off, you think it is a doctor that continuously monitors all of a patient’s vitals, takes care of the babies in the newborn intensive care unit, administers all of the medicines? Hardly. If anything doctors should be paid less; they don’t spend 1/5th the time with a patient a nurse does.

The general trend is towards less and less power to workers and more power to employers. The very fact that you can ax so many jobs demonstrates how vague and useless they are. Anyone can decide to ax any job just because, because the power relationship between employers and employees is 100 to zero as of today. Just like in the conservative states where any employee can be fired “for no reason at all, just because”.

We need Free Salaries, Cheap Rents, Free Health Kare, Free Mass BUS transit systems, pass the word all you right wing thugs.

A lot of people are good enough, but there are not enough jobs anyways. Don’t go into small details of single cases like hotels, etc. everyone is right and everyone is wrong, etc. The major pattern is that the ruling class plays off the little guys each against each other and keeps them in place fighting each other.

Even if people don’t buy here (US) they buy in another part of the world, in those parts that are growing, so this has no effect on pressuring employers: look at the big picture, when they talk about competition, tax breaks, research, innovation they are saying and referencing millions of office workers worldwide and large corporations and government workers, not your local hotel. And they are basically saying, you don’t deserve more because you didn’t innovate, you cost too much, you are not competitive, etc. Very easy to attack workers on this, since it is impossible to measure, and any measure will always show workers are at fault.

They never say CHEAP RENTS, CHEAP HOME PRICES, MASS TRANSIT so as to help people consume their money on goods and really make the economy grow.

If your wife is your “sole” employee, you won’t be giving her the BOOT.

LOL

=D> =D>

The myth that small companies will generate the jobs we need. I can’t believe how idiotic all of these economists and politicians worldwide are in believing this BS. our economy is now worldwide and is the hands of fewer and fewer mega monopolies that have an iron fist stronghold on almost all of the economic segments: the Germans have a stronghold on luxury cars, Audi, BMW, etc. the US Silicon valley has a stronghold on Microprocessors and Computers and Software, Data centers, Internet etc. there is WalMart, Samsung (South Korea) on LCD TVs, etc. But the small companies will grow and hire the unemployed: the small mom and pop shop on the corner, that guy will hire more people, he is our hope (not the fact that WalMart ate all of his business), the US spends 200 billion dollars a year on Research equivalent to 5 million scientists a year pay, but a 1,000 smartass new inventors will bring up new companies with some great new invention and they will hire 1,000 employees, they will buy a few wires and transistors at radioshack and in their “garage” invent the next breakthrough 16 core CPUs against Intel.

Now in what kind of insane fairy land do all these people live ? How can they truly believe in all of this BS ? How come everyone drinks the cool aid ? Even if it were true these small companies could hire a million people at most, at the expense of a million people in New York or JAPAN or EU. But the fact is it is not true, it is just another ideological device of the right wing thugs, to fire employees from big companies, tell them to become inventors, and then blame it on them for not inventing the next big thing and not hiring other employees fired from the big companies.

Big organizations and companies and governments worldwide are the only ones that are really able to hire so many millions of workers, but the economists always play the little guys against each other: the small business owner against his crappy employees, it is always the fault of the “unions”, the no tax breaks for the small guys that would hire. In reality the tax breaks are only for the big guys, the small guys can’t hire anyways.

This is another example of rigged ideology and brainwashing, the small company myth, so everyone expects miracles from small people and small companies. The truth is we need big companies hiring millions with high pays, health care, and mass transit bus systems, cheap rents for high quality homes, not BS.

A million cars were sold in the US in August, with that money they could have set up 200 bus systems in each of the 50 most important urban areas of the US and started some kind of mass transit.

[b]Another myth is manufacturing: manufacturing must come back to the US (or JAPAN or EU). It is not going to happen, it is cheaper to manufacture in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc. They can pay 200 dollars a month, in the developed world you can’t even pay the gas to get to work with that.

But they insist on taking manufacturing as the model, it is false: the developed economies are service, therefore all the ideology of manufacturing is false, like competition, productivity, etc.

And in the 3rd world there are millions of people available, it is easy to set up any kinds of factories anywhere, and it will take 30 years for them to get to 800 dollars a month salary.

And at best, manufacturing and factories can hire maybe 30 million people worldwide, what are you going to do with the other 100 million unemployed slobs ?[/b]

[b]The fact is, when there are few jobs around, the workers are forced to accept whatever they can find at any price and condition otherwise they end up homeless and in the streets. You make it seem as if workers are rich and can afford to choose and quit. Well in many cases that is no longer true, and will increasingly become less and less true.

Your small outfit won’t hire hundreds or thousands of people, but all of this right wing ideology is created for people like you, the little guys attacking other little guys, because of the joy to boot other people, because of the instinct to beat up someone. You are just a tool in the hands of the right wing thugs, they are referencing large organizations worldwide, large corporations, government workers, all those millions of people that everyone has been brainwashed to hate because they exist, because they should just drop dead and starve since they don’t deserve anything since they are not Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and haven’t risked and become a billionaire. But the right wing thugs have a very precise intentionality and goal: that of booting them all, taking away all of their “entitlements”, their “health care”, their “rights”, the monopolies want it all, and they want everyone fighting everyone over breadcrumbs while they steal all the wealth and concentrate it in fewer and fewer hands.

Another myth is the myth of “Risk Taking”: they took risks and made it big, you didn’t take risks and deserve to be unemployed. Another insane idea, that everyone should be taking risks, and betting all their money on the totally idiotic invention they made in their garage (since millions of scientists and engineers worldwide are “too stupid” to have figured out your new cool invention). So the guilt complex is reinforced, the victim blames himself, the rich get richer. [/b]

Even if people don’t buy here (US) they buy in another part of the world, in those parts that are growing, so this has no effect on pressuring employers: look at the big picture, when they talk about competition, tax breaks, research, innovation they are saying and referencing millions of office workers worldwide and large corporations and government workers, not your local hotel. And they are basically saying, you don’t deserve more because you didn’t innovate, you cost too much, you are not competitive, etc. Very easy to attack workers on this, since it is impossible to measure, and any measure will always show workers are at fault.

Actually small business owners are the best bet. They also tend to pay higher salaries then corporations. If more people were educated in filling so many niches and how to control money, large corporations would have to compete. they will always need employees. Automation can only do so much. Co-ops work great too. One person cannot stand alone. the many can shoulder what one cannot. people need to learn finances and cooperation.

People love to express and exercise their power, they love to decide the life of their employees and lay them off, boot them, they are programmed to fight and beat up people with this capitalist, free market mythology of “competition”, “productivity”, “hard work”, “deserving more than the other slob”, etc.

It won’t work in the long run, too many losers, too many people in a world where “competition” and “optimization”, and the race to the cheapest wage is becoming dominant. We need large corporations, organizations and governments hiring millions of people, even if they have nothing to do, since automation is taking away all the work that was once done in factories and offices. The only thing left is power struggles, status relationships, every encounter is a status challenge, there is no “common good”, only fights.

The world of labor is still stuck in the 1940s and 1950s when the factory and manufacturing and the “8 hour workday” was dominant, but this model is over, advances have essentially eliminated all work, it is all gone, deal with it.

By using the logic of productivity of factories and manufacturing, these economists then shift it to all economic endeavors and pretend that all the forces that improve manufacturing improves also services such as more overtime, less pay, harsher working conditions, more flexibility etc. Services have nothing at all to do with “productivity”, “competition”, in fact services operate better when there are less of them and less need of them, we don’t need more Health Insurance companies with all of their office workers wasting time, we don’t need more banks selling ripoff financial “products”, and especially:

[b]WE DON’T NEED MORE RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY THAT IS KILLING THAT LITTLE WORK THAT IS LEFT. BY AUTOMATING EVERYTHING AND OPTIMIZING EVERYTHING, THERE WON’T BE ANYTHING LEFT TO DO IN THIS FAIRY TALE ECONOMY.

We need:

1. FREE SALARIES OR BIG COMPANIES HIRING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AND GIVING THEM ALL THEIR BENEFITS LIKE PENSIONS, HEALTH CARE, ETC. JAPAN, FRANCE AND MANY OTHERS HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR DECADES ANYWAYS.

2. CHEAP HOUSING EITHER RENTS OR PAY, LIKE 100,000 DOLLARS FOR A 2 BEDROOM HOUSE ANYWHERE WHETHER MANHATTAN OR OKLAHOMA (OR 200 DOLLARS A MONTH RENT).

3. MASS TRANSIT SYSTEMS WITH BUSES, HIGH QUALITY BUSES AND INTERNET CALLED MASS TRANSIT NETWORKS.

[/b]

I will expose all the deceptions:

[b]Another myth is this idea of “competition” in the global economy, against other nations. Now 80 % of the economies of the USA, EU and JAPAN are services, therefore local, have nothing to do with competition in the industrial sense, like in manufacturing. But the ruling class and all their economists and politicians like to shift ideas valid in manufacturing in to the realm of services, brainwashing everyone that in their local - service job they are competing in a global economy against the Chinese and South Korean tigers, therefore they have to be “flexible”, decrease their “salary”, otherwise they are not competitive. But this is a lie and deception, global competition has nothing at all to due with 80 % of the service jobs.

We need heavy taxes on homes, so these home prices and rents collapse, we need 1% a year tax, so house of 200,000 must pay at least 2,000 dollars a year. No upper limit required. With that money the government can hire millions of young people in research and innovation, but for the common good and not for corporations and capitalists.

[/b]