A Simpler Explanation ?

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

A Simpler Explanation ?

Could it be a simple loss of incentive ? If person A cannot make a profit anymore, cannot gain something by “working” or “investing” or any activity, economic activity anymore, cannot gain “an upper hand”, or “win something against another person”, or make a gain, especially a gain against another person or entity, especially a “win” to the detriment of another person, which makes it more “valuable” (since you gain and the other suffers, and it makes you feel better, superior and good and so forth), person A will stop doing, will stop “working”, will stop investing, will stop doing anything, just like the NEETS (not in education or working).

And this can be the real situation of the “Economy” worldwide and in general, it is harder and harder to make investments, work and gain: case in point, if you do find a job anywhere, as soon as you want to do something more, you want something else, like get out of living in your mom’s basement and maybe rent your own small home to rent (for a kid) the cost of renting takes away such a large chunk of your salary that it is just not worth it, it is just not worth it anymore, why work and not have anything left when it all goes away for rent and other obligatory expenses ? So there is no longer any incentive. And so it is with many endeavors, many situations where profits are minimal, because markets are saturated, or can be easily saturated and so forth. You can work and keep on living in your mom’s basement and save some cash and then what ? buy a new car and take some trips and those 20,000 dollars of cash you saved up in 2 or 3 years all goes down the drain anyways, many think it is not even worth working at all anymore, who cares about a few trips and a new car ?

So the economy stops, starts contracting and so on. Bubbles are the only thing that can prop it up, get it going again, albeit for only a temporary period of time, a temporary illusion that so many people can make a killer gain by buying and increasing home prices for example or dot com web sites (like in the period from 1997 to 2002). We need illusions, make believes, bubbles, we need INFLATION more than anything else, inflating prices giving the illusion of making a gain, inflating HEALTH CARE prices to give the incentives to work in HEALTH CARE (and make everyone feel sick and believe they are sick and they will need and make them need ever more health care) or COLLEGE PRICES, bubbles and make believes, a temporary illusion that something normal, something average is all of a sudden worth a lot more, brainwash people and even if it only lasts a few years you will make a killing profit on it and so forth. A temporary falsification of reality, a temporary fairy tale everyone believes in and generates a lot of economic activity that is destined to end, the perfect example is home price inflations and McMansions and everyone buying McMansions on loaned money that will never be paid back again and so forth. Or the “START UP” mythology, everyone starting their own company thinking they will be the new Bill Gates, all these great inventers making it big (how can people believe such BS ? inventing something new and profitable is something that happens once in a blue moon, everything else is a make believe bubble, is an illusion, only one in ten thousand can possibly make it big). Notice people don’t want “NORMAL” don’t want a simple job, a decent salary and low home prices and rents, they all want to be superstars and by wanting this they all become poor slobs in the end, a poorer and poorer society.

But the game ends, these kinds of games end, you can only invent and force so many bubbles in the end, people may start learning their lesson and not buy into all the HIGH REAL ESTATE values and prices anymore and so on (although there is no limit on how stupid and repetitive people are and how much you can fool them and how many times they can fall into the same traps).

The economy did well from 1950 to 2000 only because of a given combination of mutual gains and decently priced goods and a decent amount of work for a lot of people given the technological level of those decades and so forth: that was a quirk, a momentary quirk of conditions that will never come back again (no outsourcing and chinese workers taking your job away and so forth).

So given this situation of economies destined to naturally contract and run out of gas in the long run as all incentives to do anything decrease, the bubbles fade away, the profits become minimum and so on and it becomes harder and harder to gain an upper hand against anyone else at all, what can be done ?

Huge government projects, huge construction projects building trillions of skyscrapers and new homes and new high speed train lines and rockets to Mars, huge public works hiring millions even to do nothing at all all across the world, as there really is very little new possible work needing to be done anyways, free salaries and cheap rents, we must get out of this idea that a profit based, profit seeking economy will get us anywhere anymore and embrace huge consumerism and government led and enforced economies creating huge projects free salaries and cheap rents.

Half of Philadelphia is made up of old crappy homes, tear it all down and build millions of new skyscrapers, cheaply priced luxury apartments and so on and then ten years later tear it all down again and build huge suburbs all over it again, all over again and so on, force development and projects, colonize Mars and so forth.

Will this be done ? No, all the economic politics worldwide are doing the exact opposite, firing government workers, closing factories (no profit, no work) everything is contacting, there is no future, all in punishment mode. The end result will be greater and greater poverty for all. Now keep on saying that people are lazy slobs and must be fired, go on keep on saying that we don’t need to pay taxes (since taxes pay other people) and they are robbing “your hard earned money” and all other kinds of BS, keep on saying they need more “education and training” more “innovation” and research to “create jobs” when no one on earth really even understands any of how all this BS can be connected to new jobs and job creation when more innovation and reserarch and education’s principle and major goal is to eliminate jobs and automate work, is to kill jobs so that greater profits can be made for the fewer and fewer enterprise owners and so forth.

TURD

2

This also explains the obsession on “GROWTH”, on the GDP growing, on growth and expanding of all kinds of things, this obsession with numbers getting bigger, the “INVESTMENT” obsession, the idea tht something has to grow automatically, always, it must grow, it either grows or it contracts, either up or down, either you are winning or losing and so forth. The graphs with the lines all going up and so forth, all the meetings of corporations with all of those graphs showing a line going up, always up up and away.

But this is obviously not realty, reality cannot obviously really operate like this: you have periods of “growth” and periods of contraction, ups and downs, growth is not natural or automatic or a given and if you are not growing it doesn’t mean you are dying and sick and so forth.

But this growth concept is really a proxy for “profit”, for gain, for “I am winning more” and so forth, the idea that something can’t stay still but must generate a profit, a return, it has to go up no matter what: and this is what happens, in the form of inflation, growth in the end is forced by its own obsession, only nothing real grows, only inequality (and the creation of new power structures, new strong guys against weak losers) and prices of basics where you can squeeze people, so the health care prices grow and inflate forever, same with homes and college costs and this is really the sign of a dying society, people must squeeze each other to death since they can’t come to terms with a different outlook and accept free salaries, cheap rents and that work is no longer necessary since a technological economy got rid of work once and for all.

But people obvioulsy love inequality since they all think they are “better” than the poor loser…

TURD

3

That was from:

instantsingularity3.blogspot.it

instantsingularity1.blogspot.it

tardy head teddy boy

4

Yes, but there is also ‘need’, if we don’t work we don’t survive etc, even if that is largely a fallacy these days, if no one worked we’d all starve.

Not everyone in the system are in it for either of those reasons. Most of us, somewhere along the lines thought about all that and just carried on. It means nothing to me if someone has more than I do, but I do understand as you say, how competitiveness is a drive.

People only consider that kind of capitalism VS communism, but communism philosophically seeks only to provide for ones >needs< and not for ones wants and desires. I see no reason why there couldn’t be a social order like communism but one which works for gain and want and not just for our needs.

That probably needs capitalist drives, but that’s only because people are sometimes competitive to an idiotic degree. On the other hand, most mornings I don’t want to get out of bed, and that’s got nothing to do with politics nor philosophy.

It probably all comes down to culture and taught behaviourisms.

The machine we live in, can turn with far less work than capitalism pushes for. All we are mostly doing is creating wealth for others esp the rich.

Ever noticed how lazy tribal peoples are, you don’t have to work on the fields all years round etc to get what we require.

_

5

This is usually where I come into play in conversations like this. You give me a unique perspective of the economy and I learn from it and incorporate it into my overall picture. I love figuring out the why of things and the why in this comes from peoples own psychology, as it does in most other things within society. Man, at his root, wants to be loved and accepted, but we adapt to almost every situation. We think of adaptation in terms of positive aspects. We adapt to a situation and overcome it. We hardly stop to think that there could be harmful modes of adaptation, as well.

We are gullible and naive and really want to be able to trust each other at the same time as not trusting each other because we can’t trust our selves; (generalizing, not speaking of all people). At the root of our adaptation, though, whether bad or good, lays the key to our survival because it means we can endure some pretty bad stuff and still survive. We learn to shut off certain parts of our selves to do so. Many of us throughout history have failed to turn those parts back on after their particular storm was over.

We grow and we make mistakes and we’re punished for those mistakes, many of us never bothering to question whether the mistakes are really mistakes or why we’re being punished. I’m thankful for the fact that my parents taught me how to think for myself and when they stuck me in a corner, they had me stay there until I could tell them what I did wrong. I’ve had to teach myself that many people in the world didn’t get this same opportunity.

I’m sorry for the seeming deviation from topic, but I assure you it all correlates; because to understand the root of men is to understand what drives and motivates them. We want to do well and we want to put hard work in and we want love, but when so many people get discouraged from that, which has happened due to rampant negativity caused by power struggles, unnatural deaths caused in the fashion of brutal murders, etc. all stemming from a source of ignorance where people failed to accept the loss of a loved one. The Bible even tells us an early story of this through it’s own narrative of Cain and Abel and their parents, Adam and Eve; which I will post in another thread shortly after this. It becomes merely a matter of seeing it from a psychological perspective to see how much luxury and being spoiled can have such an adverse affect on all mankind.

And then, there IS that flip side I just evidenced where those who have suffered least in their lives cause others to suffer most. When the first cities of man emerged upon the earth and natural leaders of men arose who had suffered more in their lives and become knowledgable, they realized they had power. Depending on their own experiences in life from the formative stages within the womb to their adulthood, they would choose to either let that power corrupt them or to cement their will in place, dig their feet in and adamantly refuse to lose sight of the greater good.

That first taste of being treated better than other people can be overwhelmingly intoxicating. Everyone loves to be the center of attention. The simple fact is, gentlemen, that if each of us had exactly what we wanted, none of us would be here speaking on these forums. We would not have learned to be personally responsible for our selves and though we remain in different parts of the journey, we’re all trying to make the same journey.

How this interacts with the economy is pretty simple: people want more than others and others to have less than them so they can continue to be in that position we all want to be in. Being denied something tends to make us want it more, though, so even that doesn’t deter it from continuing on the path. And, it’s rather simple; we’re raised on tales of success and we try to be that success without understanding all that it entails. Many promises were made about society when it began and it sounded great. If not for the greed of men, we could have a great bustling planet full of loving energy that actually coincides with nature instead of working against it. We could have been so much greater than we are right now if we had found that balance at least 2,000 years ago.

People wanting more than others does something, though, to the people who realize their equality. When it is argued and the other person allows their ego to raise themselves up at the same time as insulting and dragging down their rival and it creates an often vicious circular argument where each person then tries to prove their own merits and each person looks like they’re trying to destroy the other. Richness of life in various degrees. Those who have thought of themselves as worthless have often found shallow ways to make themselves feel better instead of taking that path to understanding themselves, and what this does is creates a need in everyone to prove themselves and then to expect constant reward for their work because they have that insecurity in them.

And still, they try to believe in the promises of a defunct society and they begin to care less and less and to want more and more; not realizing that in their system, if the working class wants more, the price of everything else has to go up to match supply and demand. When people have more money to spend, it stands to reason that those in charge of their own business want to receive that money, and when you take into account the employees they have to hire to be able to keep up with the supply and demand of a bloated population, paying those higher wages, you can see the vicious cycle of it.

We saw it earlier in the 19th century with the Great Depression. 20 years ago, when I was seven years old, I looked up to my parents and told them we were going to see a Depression worse than that. We are now in the midst of that Depression that they try to call a recession, as prices skyrocket because they refuse common sense. The world’s currency has become debt and leverage. We’re told from birth that we’re free and that we have unlimited choices and as we grow we realize the faulty nature of it and yet still choose to believe we live in the land of the free; for at least we seemingly have it better off than other slaves in the world. We’re not slaves at all, just down on our luck millionaires who are looking to rise again shortly.

This power struggle causes a lot of losers who, until they lose, were just as much wanting to be a part of the system as any other. Once they start losing, they realize just where society fails and it’s not them on the other end and it is selfish at first, but it eventually becomes an understanding of other people if they pursue those chains of thought. There IS no longer any incentive to work in the economy, because it has become so cutthroat; same as politics. People are despairing and losing hope and faith in their fellow man. This is the worst winter in over ten years at the least; and so many other natural disasters in the past year and money is tight. People are being pressed into a corner.

It’s like migratory birds getting ready to head south for the winter: They’ll gather together and take short little test flights here and there to gauge the group and this will last for hours, some times day, and then, instinctively, the majority of the birds will know when it is time to go and take off and there will be straggles and some will be left behind. When faced with the grim reality of his plight, man will shed off the binds of bad adaptation or he will die. It truly is a world of survival for those most able to adapt and in seeking to separate our selves from the very nature of the world around us, we have only found our selves more bound by it.

But, this luxury and technology has had its benefits; don’t get me wrong. It’s created a world of people who can both think and do, even against the wishes of those in power. And, of course we lose incentive. We were tricked into believing this system could work and we could see how it could work and then… We shot ourselves in the face because we stopped fighting. We forgot that death and pain weren’t optional and we started becoming greedy for life even through our hated of it. The bad part is that every time this happens, there comes a war.

You see, we all know it; we can feel it if we allow our selves to. It buries itself in our subconscious because we are all connected. These holidays are going to be more special than they have been in a long time; full of love and warmth again as people are made to suffer and feel pain and realize they still have each other. They will move as one though some will straggle and some will be left behind. People are going to learn to live again; not all of them, but enough; and come next year of maybe the year after, in 2015; it’s going to come to a head and once again we will have the chance to decide the course of the future of all men. I have very strong faith that we will make the right decision this time. We live in an age where history unfolds in front of us and so many people are made to think and to be smart that they can’t avoid it. New warriors arise that don’t fight physically but with words and thoughts and there is a direct example in the world of the internet today of the sheer difference in strength between people who base their foundations on love and respect and personal responsibility and those who don’t.

We all see it, and we get disheartened when we see the bad side of people win; we lose hope; and yet in this day and age, when the bad side of people win, it’s only a death of the spirit that we experience and the spirit can always be reborn. I leave the world of man for the men who thinks it matters. I embrace nature as it is the guiding force in our lives and the overall master to which we answer; it’s power is greater, it’s understanding complete; it’s love and compassion and savage beauty without compare. It becomes a matter of how we choose to ground ourselves and instinctively and for adaptation purposes, I have chosen the strongest. Except, it’s lonely, so I teach others. Selfish reasons, admittedly exist and yet I do love people and want to see them succeed so we can share and be equal to each other with the richness of our lives.

You can’t place monetary value on that and that’s why society and economy is doomed to failure. There never was any incentive to take part in society other than to try to cheat pain and death and we only found it a thousandfold waiting for our selves in our own minds. There’s more incentive to simply learn the appropriate way of fitting into nature and allowing our selves to be who and what we are and not to be afraid or worried of it because it will all be ok. Through worrying and feeling fear, we make that stuff happen; we have created our own dark reality. It’s time to lighten the load a little.

6

idioticidioms
Cardinal rule; don’t use more than a paragraph or two on the internet, it hurts our minds :stuck_out_tongue: . Though I don’t know why as we can all read far more in books. :confused: #-o

Interesting post but perhaps here a more concise and direct approach would give us a grip on your perspective. Thanks anyway. :slight_smile:

7

The Final Solution.

The point is that there is no future for anyone if the governments worldwide don’t start huge projects, projects building homes, hiring millions upon millions even to do nothing at all, it doesn’t matter, what counts is that those hired get cash and can consume and buy stuff from the other parts of the economy, etc., projects building high speed train lines across the world, rockets to Mars, hiring by the millions, all kinds of projects, etc. Cheap rents, and free salaries, cheap rents so that real estate doesn’t drain huge amounts of money from the consumer economy especially in Europe JAPAN and the developing countries like Russia, Brazil, India, China, Indonesia etc.

This is the only thing that can create “Economic Growth” and Development and Distribution of wealth to all of the other 100s of millions of unemployed slobs worldwide. But we live in an era where everyone wants to beat up everyone else, everyone is seen as a liability towards everyone else, no one deserves anything since they are considered all lazy layabouts (everyone considers everyone else worthless and non deserving and guilty for being alive), all lazy welfare queens and kings who “don’t want to work” and so forth. All in punishment mode. No one deserves anything, only if they invent some great Startup do they deserve anything: there is this obsession with having to deserve it, with having merit, with being better than the other slob and so forth: a totally obsolete, old fashion idea, that no longer operates in a technological economy, a technological economy operates on automatic drive, it is all automatic, the personal talent is meaningless, it is all about large scale networks and structures, large scale networks of transportation and electricity and energy and economies of scale and so forth.

This crazy idea that the market will create jobs by itself, that everyone should invent their new job everyday, everyone is an entrepreneur and inventor, (in other worlds it really means that everyone is left to their own devices and good luck with that which also means we don’t give a crap about millions of unemployed and poor people worldwide, they may just go and fly a kite, they “deserve their unemployment since they are not trained enough”) that the economy will automatically create jobs if the enterprise owners are left alone “to hire” is totally flawed and doesn’t work: the jobs the developed world has are more than 50 % due to government money one way or another since they would never be enough jobs for everyone, not even by a long shot: just think of how much is dumped into education jobs, health care, the military and so forth, the financial fluff industry and so forth, all indirectly government money, all indirect money: nothing natural or automatic here, it is all forced expenditures since nothing is natural and automatic anymore.

So then just be honest and demand the governments to dump trillions upon trillions into hiring millions and creating large scale projects, the invisible hand of the market will only kill ever more jobs and make everyone poor in the end. The FED should dump their trillions of dollars into this instead of handing over all the printed fairy tale money to banks and the rich.

TURD