Modern economic systems may end up generating great poverty:
The following ponits may help:
Repetitve, manual, easy flow, clear input → manipulation → output type labor is slowly disappearing, or is getting automated or is being done increasingly in poor countries at least until they remain relatively poor compared to the so called rich (???) west (?). What happens when all countries start reaching survival levels of income which today is between 700 to 1,200 dollars a month ? Note that many countries are starting to come close to this income, Brazil, Russia are not too far for example.
Most labor in modern economies deal with manipulating “information”, which is vague by its very nature, but especially manipulating some kind of aesthetics, entertainment, manipulating and dealing with other people, their minds, like call centers or sales, trying to sell things to people. The more abstract and invisible the item to be sold (and produced) the better. Why have an ipod when the CD was more than good enough ? Why do we have millions of web pages ? Why doesn’t anyone clearly see much difference between Windows Vista and Windows XP) ? etc .etc.
Funny how the hardest things to manipulate is other people’s “minds”, their judgments, their evaluations, hence more stress on workers, since you can’t clearly measure what on earth you are manipulating, you can be hosed for no reason at all. Can I convince that company to “buy” my vague product ? The real product is the convincing, your ability to manipulate that material called “other people’s minds and judgments”. An infinitely fickle, vague, quirky material indeed! A corollary of this is that the real work, manual labor, clear input output type labor gets payed less and less because it is viewed as easier.
The real economy is ultimately based on some really solid fundamentals like WATER, ENERGY, FOOD, HOMES, MINIMUM HEALTH CARE, AND SOME BASIC MANUFACTURED GOODS and BASIC SERVICES LIKE POLICE. The rest is a bunch of fluff, inventions, quirks, finance, things we could do without and really never notice. But the future of work is all in the absurd “FLUFF”.
What will happen is that the real fundamentals will cost more and more, the fluff will be payed less and less, since it is mostly useless. Hence maybe that is the reason health care costs so much ? maybe that is the reasons homes have increased in prices so much ? Energy costs more ?
This will generate widespread poverty, wildly divided class structures, the end of any real wealth. How many people can produce fluff ? Excluding maybe some areas like doctors or dentists (those are fundamentals, maybe lawyers are less fundamental but are part of the quirk system of life) some science - technology guys, the greater bulk of most offices produce huge amounts of useless meetings and fluff.
Granted there are some truths in your points, but economy is a very complex, vague object to allow such generalizations. There is alot of conflict, politics, there are alot of useless things and alot of hidden but very valuable things etc.
Then where does the fluff start or end ? teachers ? books ? culture ? what is valuable ? So the questions go on forever, and then if everyone ends up being paid less and less wouldn’t companies lower prices to sell anyways ?
You may be correct. But then economy is no longer a science, it is a complex, turbulent, dynamic system with no general rules or laws, made up of millions of quirk decisions and feedback loops.
The fact is then that there is no “general good” or no “progress” or no common “objective”. While markets worldwide have maybe a trillion dollars available, they don’t really know what to do with it. Mergers and acquisitions are jokes, it is the best way for money to do nothing at all. It is the transfer of money from one bank to another and doesn’t produce anything.
To fix up the US infrastructure would require about a trillion dollars. Who is going to do it ? Worldwide infrastructure could cost 10 trillion dollars, who is going to do it ? Is it even a goal ? Worldwide GDP is 30 trillion dollars, so it is totally feasable.
Worldwide workforce is more than a billion people, how much of that work really lasts ? Is it not a case of truly low productivity ? IS most work generating nothing at all ? Never ending questions …
Does anyone really understand economy ? Is it just a power struggle between people or groups ?
Worldwide debt is 50 trillion dollars. So it can go up to maybe another 100 trillion dollars, as there are rich countries in Europe or Japan that have Debt to GDP ratio greater than 100 %. But what if this concept is wrong, who will pay off 50 trillion dollars ?
Mergers are not a joke. They are made for “economy of scales”, to do more with less, to combine similar companies, lay off the excess personnel, and make the resulting smaller company (compared to the previous sum of the two) make the same amount of money as the previous two. This is called profit, the resulting operation creates extra money from thin air, only the people laid off pay by not receiving a paycheck anymore, but they were previously useless anyways, and anyways tough luck for them.
Ever wonder why companies usually have 20 to 30 percent excess personnel ? For a possible future profit by hosing them and by creating pressure on those who remain to be more “productive” whatever that really means.
Many mergers an aquisitions do not result in economies of scale. For many, the cost of merging is quite high and reduces profits for years, sometimes forever. We see this all the time. Companies go on aquisition sprees, profits lag, share prices fall, management is overthrown, new managers institute massive divestitures to reinstate profitability, etc etc…
You think this is all scientific and stuff, its not. Its mostly guesswork by people with enormous egos.
Another example of excess capacity. So nothing is really scientific in economy, they are all pseudo-science quirk decisions. Or just examples of the affirmation of raw power. Companies have a billion dollars and don’t know what to do with it. So they buy another company and create a whole bunch of useless activity associated with the acquisition, but that is because they can do it, they have to show that they are trying to do something with their money, but what they create is a bunch of useless activity, power struggles, many “meetings”, and ultimately even make less profit. But that is because the system is rich enough to allow such huge waste.
They all talk about “innovation”, science, research, technology etc. But how many use that billion dollars to create more research ? And why don’t they do it ? Because maybe they know that there is not much else you can get from more research, that maybe research is at the end of the cycle where it could generate new items and profit ? The ipod would be “innovation” ? Wasn’t that once called a record player and stereo ? And indeed the fidelity and beauty of the record player and stereo is why higher than any ipod! So we actually go backwards instead of forward.
You can’t just throw money at research. You must find the right things to study with the right people, etc. It is a complex activity. Threads like this show the impossibility of finding “general” laws in all things economic. Some mergers work some don’t, some work is useless, some is not etc. (and then useless compared to what or for who ? the guys being paid for the work are happy to get paid). You won’t find general laws or ideas guiding an acitivity which is human based and therefore based on culture, value systems, politics, power, aesthetics etc.
For example, your average young, single, metrosexual twat, who most likely has a fluffy job; is living in a rented inner-city apartment, and is most likely spending 80% of his wages on fluff. What if that’s what it’s all about ? . . . The reason why a lot of jobs are meaningless is because they don’t have to have meaning, because 80% of the wages paid to such workers goes right back into circulation anyway.
Have jobs simply become machines which convert humans into fluff consumers ? . . . A wallet farm ?
It all adds up until it adds up. Is a chair necessary, or a bed, or a table ?No, but it is more comfortable to have them. Then necessary according to what measurement ? Almost anything could be defined either as necessary or as fluff, very vague indeed.
Anyways, your city man is probably spending more than 50 % on rent I think, and on insurance and bills and other “obligatory”, not optional expenses.
Food, water, some kind of clothing or protection from extreme heat or cold. A small cave for protection and a stick. If they get sick they die, tough luck, that is what nature wants. If they get bored, tough luck, they will just deal with it, and try to sleep as much as possible. If there is any other kind of inconvenience, they will just have to ignore it, or suffer it through, but they will spend 99 % of their time looking for food and water and just doing nothing at all. A simple life, the life god wants us to lead, no culture, no thoughts, very little language, no optionals.
Also, I don’t see how they could ever get bored. They’d have that one child, and go on to have several more. There would be a constant need for home improvements, and lots of time spent on their permacultural farm. Of course this all depends on them having studied (prior to their shipwreck) the survival skills and farming methods of our ancestors; knowledge and skills perfected over thousands of years, which has only been swept aside in the last hundred or so. Swept aside by those who wish to be the ’ The Daddy ’ to more than their fair share.
P.S. - I’ve just noticed a major flaw in my potential paradise: The only way they could exist beyond a second generation would be via incest. This would surely dampen/mutate any hopes for their future. I suggest one additional stranded couple . . . . . so that makes four people.
I am just guessing. But I think we are far removed from such a situation, you may want to se the movie Cast Away (2000) which depicted such a situation. We always see things through our own culture, but there have been many different primitive cultures that decode and live in the world very differently from us. We take many things for granted, the passage of time, the way our mind - language decomposes reality into little boxes etc. Those primitve human - apes just laughed all the time or just hunted, they thought very little I think, I don’t know.
I remember reading that some primitive groups found in South America or Africa pretended to read books when they saw the white man read books. And they would laugh and express many different emotions just making believe they read. Really insane from our point of view, but maybe they were really reading them in their own absurd way. But don’t buy into the myth of the primitives having some secret formula or worldview, I just think they are more similar to animals and rocks but there is no reference to really measure any civilization as being more or less advanced.
Oh yeah, that two-hour-long FedEx commercial / Tom Hanks star vehicle. It was OK.
Perhaps, but I think you’re taking this back a lot further than me. Using and understanding language is but one skill, and in many ways, a skill which reduces other more innate (and more important) skills such as raw sense perceptions / reactions.
What do you think they were laughing at ?
To me it’s obvious; they were laughing at the white man (and rightly so); they were also trying to assist the white man by showing him how stupid he looked, and how useless his limp-wristed skills would be in the ’ real ’ world . . . Satirical humour in physical form.
They did have, and still have today, a " secret formula or worldview " - a formula which is very hard to document as it is in constant flux . . . just like nature.
The white man’s view that ’ Every day can and should be a good day ’ is totally out-of-step with weather and the seasons.
It’s also worth remembering that in the rainforest, there are no seasons . . . The equilibrium zone.
I wonder if[size=117] that’s [/size]what we’re constantly trying to manufacture? . . . Have we all strayed too far north ?
Modern society is already poverty stricken and bankrupt. Any society that wallows in luxury at the expense of other’s starvation and deprivation does not deserve the word civilized.
Consumerism is not the wise use of excess capacity, it is capacity diverted from raising the entire world up to make complacent enough slaves to support this monstrous ideal of capitalism.
All alternatives to this “monstrous capitalism” have always been much much worse. Look at all the “communist” experiments and see how they ended up. Romania, Cambodia, North Korea, Russia etc. Look at the “National socialism” alternatives, Fascism, Hitler etc.
Look at the beautiful Islam experiment of Iran. Everywhere you look there has never been any alternative that didn’t turn into a nightmare. This capitalism is probably the most we will ever be able to achieve without killing each other off in insanity, wars and poverty.
[b]The amount of man-hours it took to produce any goods was divided many times after the industrial revolution.
Poverty should be impossible today, but it’s not, why?
Because there’s allot of stupid waste and unreasonal inequality in civilization.
All forms of money are fantasy-debts.
The real and literal production of humanity is higher than ever.
Waste on luxury is a big problem. Accurately, a symptom of the retarded.
People tickle themselves and secretly they all want death, though so cowardly that they fear death and thus forget about it. The end result is loss of one’s senses of health, strength, improvement and repair. Their luxury is the main tool they use to destract themselves from the fact that they want to die. But, when the luxury is all gone, they get depressed and eventually they feel suicidal? Why? They have lost their souls and thus become empty leeches. Especially in America.
Their soul was lost when they suppressed and misjudged their wild origins and direct instincts.[/b]