Origins of the present Economic Crisis

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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God punishes you by making your dreams come true. The origins of the present day and increasingly future days economic crisis could be summed up in two words EXCESS CAPACITY.

  1. Excess production capacity, high productivity, the ability to produce a lot of goods with very few people has been haunting the economic system for decades and with each new improvement in technology and productive capability, with each new optimization of production, the problem gets worse and worse. Computers were designed to automate labor, now they have virtually wiped out any residual labor that was necessary.

  2. Even without technology, and just with crude factory optimizations and using cheap third world labor, there is simply no way that there will be work for everyone, in fact there is hardly any real work for anyone worldwide as it stands today, and this will just get worse and worse.

  3. Agriculture, manufacturing and most basic services can be done efficiently and very often even much better, the fewer people work in them, especially if those few who work are well trained and efficient.

  4. This creates a huge worldwide supply of EXCESS CAPACITY in the form of TOO MANY PEOPLE needing to work for a living. This living arrangement cannot and will not last very long. The pressure and instabilities of this contradiction will explode.

  5. Most work being invented today consists in virtual, fake work, that should “resemble” the work that was once done in factories but is in fact not producing anything at all and is actually simply depleting natural resources. The “interaction” is the product, the “definition” is the product, financial entities invent abstract words that become a product of the minds of all those “working” in the abstract financial industries.

The solution to this is a completey free handout of all the basic needs to everyone on earth in the form of a basic salary for free, free healthcare and free basic housing. It is funny to see how the US right wing - pro business - pro capitalist government is forced to give billions of dollars in handouts anyways to “save” the failed financial entites and to make believe it needs a huge “defense” sector (which is really a huge communist system disguised as defence spending), else the risk of total worldwide financial collapse.

The truth is work is no longer needed and necessary, everything can be produced with just a small percentage of the population working, there is essentially nothing left to do, so if people just realize that doing absolutely nothing is the most productive activity, we will have finally reached the truth and can organize society according to what its needs really are. Doing nothing is the work of the future, nothing is all that is left, technology has mostly peaked, not many further improvements are possible, all that could be done has been done, very little is left.

But people wouldn’t lead a life of doing nothing, they would always find something to do, the problem is what will they find to do that won’t be damaging ? That’s anyone’s guess, too many people, too many instabilities…

Science and technology are over, three body problems can’t be understood because there is no correspondence between the logic and language we use and the way matter interacts with itself. We can only model it very partially, but it will forever be non-decomposable into a simulation or a formula or into a simple cause and effect description. Therefore biology and cells and the possibility to manipulate biological systems is at mankind’s own risk, he better beware of his huge limitations and not fool himself in being able to really control and manipulate it.

2

IN fact I hope that they just keep on fooling around with “financial products” and don’t enter the territory of “health care”, biotech, “genetic engineering” products. If there is no correspondence between our logic, modeling and descriptions and imagined interactions of simple 3 body systems with what they really are, and simple proteins are much more complicated being many bodied systems, then the intentionality driven research of big pharma, with their need to constrain the “results into a product”, will be giving us increasingly risky pills and products and interactions with our biology that could lead anywhere.

The point is that science doesn’t really exist, there is no such thing as objective science since all science is first something that emerges from a society’s culture, then its economy, then through the intentionalities of said economy, so a company needs to produce “a new product” to solve “a given problem” and all of the science that is done to achieve this is ultimately based on the initial “intentionality” of how it will be used, of the model of research → product → solution → selling of product → profit. So science is greatly delimited by the assumed model and the background intentionality of the science.

In fact science is really telling us for example that if the three body problem can’t be solved, you can’t manipulate biology, end of story, don’t try or else you will be fooling yourself only. Science is really also telling us that the present economic system has reached its maximum evolution and has optimized the resource allocation problem, but by doing this, in the end, it has eliminated work, and millions won’t find work, so said economic system will be forced to change to accomodate this fact. Science is also telling us that the private automobile is doomed ( because of global warming and peak oil) and that the next stage of progress, if it is defined as “the common good”, is a huge increase of public transportation and the use of computers to optimize public transportation.

In short science is telling us that the era of point like single products to sell is ending, and that any further progress in “the common good” is through systems wide manipulations like public transport, free health care and free salaries, free housing etc.

But this goes counter the intentionalities of the private companies that need to “make a profit” and need to get “something for nothing” and need their “money to work for them”.

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#-o

4

Fake work equal big money and those who do real work get pennies. :laughing:

5

Yeah, yeah, isn’t this like the 101th thread about the world spiraling into chaos?

We’ve discussed it enough. The question stands: who’s going to do something about it?

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Beautiful artwork
youtube.com/watch?v=07pLGIgyfjw

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work is no longer needed for the “minimum wage earner” in india or china living on a concrete slab for about one penny per year with air of pure asbestos and stubs where their hands used to be? (slightly exagerating but not entirely)

im a yuppie child, and kind of a communist. i think you may be something beyond. read more please.

8

there is no economic crisis

9

bike_seat: there is no economic crisis"

K: Have you no eyes to see? Have you no ears to hear? Have you no brain to reason?
Have you no heart to feel?

It is as clear as the sun rising this morning, we are in a economic crisis.
In fact, it would seem to me, we are in a world wide crisis of epic proportions
which includes the economic, plus the political, the artistic and the scientific.
We are rapidly approaching a singular moment in which history may be changed forever.
We are facing a moment, like the moment whereas we tell time from B.C to A.D, a moment we mark
with a before and an after. We might be able to tell our children and grandchildren what we were doing when the
moment came, the moment that changed everything.

Kropotkin

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Earnings have not kept up with the cost of living for most people in this country. This disparity has been going on for years. Now it has finally caught up with the finances of average people. When adjusted for inflation, the earnings of non-government workers, especially the hourly workers who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, are barely higher than they were in the mid-1970s. The income of a man in his 30s is 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. Per-person productivity has grown considerably since then, but the benefits of those productivity gains have gone to the wealthiest Americans. Most folks have not benefited proportionately.

11

No matter how optimistic you want to be, the facts just don’t match. An economy “grows” and becomes wealthy when it transits from poverty to wealth. Look at Western Europe, Japan, South Korea from 1950 to 2000. In 50 years these places went from poverty to first world, it is the magnitude of change that created growing markets, growing profits, better wages, more consumption etc. Now when that ends, and it has for the EU, Japan and the USA, growth is minimal, markets don’t get bigger and become mostly flat, wages stagnate etc. And there is really nothing at all that can be done about it, the system is saturated, the amount of wealth possible has been reached it can’t increase. In the meanwhile technology, profit driven companies, optimizations, “innovations” finds ways of doing more with less, of using fewer people, of outsourcing, of using low wage labor countries to get the same output.

None of these benefits really go back to the first world countries, except for some items having lower prices like at WalMart. But these lower prices are really not enough for the economies to “start to grow again”. In fact I wouldn’t be suprised if the real growth of EU, USA, JAPAN in the last 20 years was truly zero if not even negative 10 or 20 percent. I know few people who have a “higher standard of living” compared to 20 years ago, some did strike it big, but most have stagnated or gone backwards.

So the fariy tale of the economy will grow again and generate high paying jobs, is false, it will never happen again, what is left are huge debts that no one knows how they will be payed off.

It is the transition from poor to rich that creates growth and opportunity, when that transition ends, it is essentially over, it becomes stagnant. Aside from the fact that those “high paying jobs” are becoming scarcer and scarcer, companies don’t really know what job deserves to be high paying, especially today that so much work is vague, abstract, oblique, interaction oriented, “people oriented” (which means that people judge according to their totally arbitrary quirky feelings and opinions, which are as stable as the wind).

The ones that will find themselves growing will be the countries that will go from poor to rich, India, China, Brazil, etc.

12

You are right, ever since I can remember we have always been in an “economic crisis”. And I can also say that economy is essentially a vodoo science: I have strong doubts that adding numbers together and making statistics of industrial production, unemployment etc. really means anything at all. You can also say that there are 300 million different economies in the USA, each person having a completely different situation compared to another and more importantly each person having a subjective feeling of his circumstances completely different from another, between optimism and pessimism, future plans, goals or non goals. In fact modern capitalism has done a great job of confusing people, of breaking any kind of “class consciousness” by dividing people into a single different “economy” for each person.

The scientific validity of economy is very doubtful and so is sociology, psychology and most soft (human) sciences, by trying to simplify and model many events and items into a rules, or numbers or ideas, we are effectively inventing them, we are not exposing reality but inventing reality and brainwashing people that the invented reality is real. There is no such thing as an “economy”.

13

I agree, there is no crisis, but there is a slowdown which was started by, and could be accelerated by, our shortage of energy supply–just the opposite of EXCESS CAPACITY. Yes, that energy shortage has brought about an excess capacity for production in other sectors due to rising prices that lowers demand.

Drill here, drill now, pay less.

14

The USA will be either forced to become a socialistic - social democratic country or it can guide the process and deliberately reform to become one. It has absolutely no choice anymore. It will become much more similar to scandinavian countries because the present US Capitalist system has tanked, is out of gas, can’t pull it off anymore. The trillion dollars of debt it has will never be paid off anymore, there is no way it can find that kind of money - wealth to pay it off. People in the USA have already consumed all they can, are in debt up to the eyeballs, have a very insecure future with all expenses rising, no more high paying jobs, lay offs etc.

So either they will be forced as in the case of Fannie-Freddie to just hand out billions of dollars, or they will have to adapt a socialistic system that is guided. That means free health care, huge public transportation, basic minimum salary for all, low cost housing for rent, etc.

Capitalism as we have know it is over, is now an obsolete system, has run its course. It is amazing to calculate how much richer the USA could become through so many socialistic programs, it could triple its GDP, by acting with intelligence instead of a failed and old fashion ideology. With this level of technology and population and world, that old fashion capitalism is doomed, over, won’t work anymore.

15

We’ve been sliding down the slippery socialist slope since the 1930’s.

Have the socialists run up the trillions of dollars budget and debt and then blame it on the capitalists. Typical. It’s always been the leftist’s #1 strategy, see what you weaknesses are (myriad in this case) and then accuse them of it first and loudest (i.e. pull the media’s strings real hard).

More pessimistic doom and gloom that’s been the left’s staple for as long as I can remember.

We’re paying the price for (?semi-?) nationalizing them in the first place.

Is that why it’s gradually spreading it to Russia, China etc.?

Who is John Galt?

16

Right wing ideology is very clever: repressed people can hardly wait to put their hands on those who are weaker than themselves and repress them with even more violence since they can’t fight the dominating class. Also there is the great attraction to a simple cause and effect mechanism to explain why “things aren’t going well”, it is easier to focus the blame on some external enemy, especially if the enemy is an illegal immigrant, or a weak third world person, or someone “who doesn’t want to work” and is “lazy”, etc. Anyways someone who is weak and you can beat up. Those who vote right wing have been brainwashed by all this foolishness that “they don’t want to do the hard work” that is necessary to make the economy “grow”, that is why may salary can’t increase. In doing so they lose track of the real enemy and make the victims blame other victims and make the poor fight between themselves.

The real enemy is three basic things:

  1. Rents are too high compared to minimum wage, rents have to go back to being not more than 50 % the minimum wage, not more than 400 to 500 dollars a month. This can’t be done because the “landlords” want free money, they want the rents to be equal to or exceed the minimum wage which is what has happened worldwide.

  2. Technology has eliminated work, less and less work is needed for a given fixed output, hence there will be less and less work, especially high paying jobs, no matter how you roll the dice, no matter how optimistic you want to be, no matter how many “innovations” or new “high technology” industries there could possibly be. And watch out for those innovations and high tech industries, they will just wipe out even more jobs!

  3. Beware of the coming Health Care bubble, beware of the millions of fake jobs being created in the health care industry to make money from people who get sick. This will be the next mega-bubble.

17

Change it around like this:

All people are violent and repressed and can hardly wait to put their hands on those who are weaker than themselves and repress them with even more violence for any or no reason at all. There is the great attraction to a simple cause and effect mechanism to explain why “things aren’t going well”, it is easier to focus the blame on some external enemy, which can be the “ruling class”, “the third world”, the “gas station”, “Irak”, or a million other items that can become a punching bag. People don’t even care if they are brainwashed or if they are right or wrong, as long as they can find someone to blame it on and beat someone up.

The idea is to create a stratified society with so many micro “ruling classes” each one thinking they deserve more than the lower class. Everyone thinks they deserve more than another person, or are worth more, or simply just want more, so there is no solution. IN the end it is always a power struggle between individuals, when you take all the metaphysics of the “common good”, or “the economy” etc. away, it is just a fight between two people who deserve and don’t deserve anything being that how you define deserving and how you define equality and inequality is arbitrary, remember ancient tribes didn’t have no concept of more or less, there were just power relationships (that they didn’t perceive or recognize as such, hence there weren’t even power relations).

18

somebody read orwell (he was correct)

-Imp

19

With regards to the coming Health Care bubble I read this insane piece:

“I have come to realize that while doctors and medical technology have an important role to play in healthcare, they do not hold the ultimate secrets to health. Taken together, factors such as the food we eat, whether and how we exercise, the way we give voice to our feelings, the attitudes we hold, and the quality of the environment which we live are far more important to the quality of health we experience than even the most sophisticated medical technologies. It had been liberating to see that health comes from learning to live in vibrant harmony with ourselves, with the natural world, and with one another.”

Totally wrong on all levels.

  1. There is no secret to good health, 90 % of the time you just casually get sick, end of story, nature has its own ways, we think we can control it, we think we are in charge, this is totally false.

  2. The need to create a clear cause and effect relationship to good health so you can be brainwashed that you “did something to be in good health”, “you deserve your good health”, those who get sick “deserve to get sick, they didn’t do the good things I did”: food, exercise, FEELINGS, ATTITUDES, etc.

What a bunch of total bullshit. Totally arbitrary subjective undefined, unscientific in all ways, to create a simple cause effect mechanism. How insane, HOW TOTALLY WRONG!

  1. vibrant harmony, etc, again all totally fluff, arbitrary, and what is worse reinforces the “blame the victim” mentality, reinforces the idea that health “is not a right”, that “you have to deserve it”, “work for it”, “work for a company that provides it”.

No wonder this health care bubble will explode and be much worse than the housing mess, only the USA sustains such false ideas, such a perverse, punishing ideology, that has its agenda to make the insurance companies rich, poor brainwashed people …

20

So most people get sick “just cuz”. That’s absurd. Not knowing the proximate causes and there not being any at all are completely different beasts. I accept that many of those causes are beyond one’s ability to control (i.e. genetics, pollution levels of one’s immediate environment, etc.) But to suggest that it’s all just a big crapshoot is disingenuous.