Slow Motion Implosion

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Slow Motion Implosion

The present Western economy is slowly imploding. All the subsystyems that were taken for granted in the last few decades are falling apart. There is a simple reason for this: past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Now lets take a look at some of these major subsystems:

  1. Labor - Work - Professional occupation. Now in the last few decades there has been a steady stream of various jobs both old and new and many associated with every new technology that came sequentially online. There was economic growth in terms of a relatively young population coming out of a world war and setting up families, optimism, technology was providing new toys every year, new cars, homes cost WAY LESS either to buy or rent than today, etc. So there was this immaginary pattern of a “technological society”, a “post industrial society” capable of constantly inventing new toys, new markets, and with them new jobs, well paid jobs to manipulate and design and engineer all these new toys. But nobody suspected that this was a ONE TIME QUIRK. That this occured in a window of time within a given evolution of technology, a given era, a given configuration that can never be repeated again. So those jobs that were supposed to keep on coming, now don’t seem to be coming much anymore, if they do come some are not as well paid as expected, others are being done in “developing countries”, etc. So there is already one very important and major subsystem in the West that is slowly imploding and that is jobs. Computers and automation were invented exactly to automate alot of jobs, and they are actually doing a great “job” at this. What jobs do you think there will be in the future ? How many ? Millions ? and at what pay level ? 2,000 dollars a month or 3,000 and where ? in the US, EU and JAPAN ? Do you really think that past performance in this respect is a guarantee of future perfomance ?

  1. Health Care. Healthcare is an odd American subsystem that is kind of out of control, that is a paradox, that no one understands anymore. The only thing that is clear is that the cost of health MUST always rise every year, that doctors and hospitals and health insurance companies have every right to hike up their salaries, their incomes to anything they want. That is nice, it is a shame that it is totally outside of reality. Because there will be fewer and fewer people or companies that can support these prices always going up and up for no clear apparent reason. This is another system that is impoding.

  2. Education - College. This is another American subsystem that follows the laws of constantly increasing costs, without any clear reason behind it. Another system imploding especially since the “return on investment” in education is not guaranteed so much anymore, just look at point 1. above. Why pay top dollars in the hope that the “future” job will pay well ? Are you sure ? what job ? engineer ? doctor ? past performance is no guarantee of future perfomance.

  3. Pensions. As one poster wrote:

"Retirement is actually a very recent concept. It didn’t exist until the middle of last century. It was only possible at all because the working population, for a time, grew larger than the retired population. Once that is no longer true, you can’t support social security, private pensions, or pretty much any other retirement income stream. Instead you just have a ponzi scheme, which is what we are running into now. It’s basic math, not some imaginary ruling class or government plot.

Retirement is still an unthinkable concept for the vast majority of people in the world. You work til you drop, and then hopefully your family takes care of you in your last couple of years. But Americans feel entitled to complain long and loud if we are not provided an easy, breezy path toward doing nothing but playing or sitting on our rears for the last 25-30 years of our lives. That says a lot about how amazingly good our standard of living still is.

There will be people in this country who cannot afford that luxury of doing nothing for decades. Heck, I may be one of them. Guess what? That’s life. And those who want that lifestyle badly enough may need to make some sacrifices to finance it themselves. That’s life too."

I think this guy hit the nail on the head. The point is that this is what is happening with all the subsystems that we took for granted in the last decades. The economy is slowly imploding. There will be growth in third world and second world countries, they will improve their standard of living, but the USA, EU, and JAPAN, along with some others like SOUTH KOREA, CANADA , etc. have hit the wall, it is over, the future is in constantly increasing poverty. Get over it, the 20th century is over.

2

A few points: there is no sense in making “ethical judgments” of a system that has excess capacity and can easily support millions of people not doing anything for decades. Economy and how technology has evolved is not a morality game, is not supposed to “reward hard work” and “punish not working”, it is just an automatic system that plays out according to increased “productivity” and “efficiency”, thereby eliminating as many jobs as possible ultimately. The economy gains more and more by having less and less people really working and fewer and fewer working very effectively, optimized and automated. And in fact the future is in less work and more automation. Work is obsolete, not needed. What is needed is a system that gives free salaries, cheap rents and mass transit to most people if any level of consumption in the West - US, EU and JAPAN is to be maintained.

The whole idea of increasing productivity and increasing “profits” means and can only mean less people working, less pay for the work that is done, and ultimately increasing poverty. Those that will work will either be forced to do the jobs of more people at the salary of one person or will be in a highly optimized and automated organization.

There will be fewer and fewer “high paying” jobs because it will be harder and harder to justify paying anyone more than less. And less is a race to the bottom, especially when you have doctors and engineers in India and Brazil working at much lower pay levels than in the US, EU and JAPAN. Engineers in Brazil are at 400 to 1,000 dollars a month, in India maybe 300 to 700 dollars a month. Who will you hire ?

3

But if you think about it, by saying this, by describing what is happening, you actually enforce what happens, you actually make it happen, you are actually commanding that it happens. A bit like a self fulfilling profecy, but even more subtle. If all the propaganda for decades has always been towards “optimizing”, “downsizing”, “increasing efficiency”, “getting rid of the old pension systems”, “getting rid of the old job for life”, “flexibility”, “always changing jobs and skills”, “always going back to school to start a new career”, “cutting labor costs” etc. you are actually declaring this is what must be done, this is how millions of people’s minds must be programmed to think. So people think that this is OK, this is for the common good, that this is progress, that the economy is going forward to all these new high profit modes of existence.

No one ever doubts that maybe this is all wrong: for example you can hear often, “the average price of a home is now 200,000 or 400,000 dollars”, etc, “the rents are now 1,000 dollars a month or 1,500 dollars a month”, “my health care bill was 100,000 dollars”, etc. When did these prices start to greatly exceed the minimum wage level ? why didn’t anyone notice ? Oh, it is OK ? So everyone hears the propaganda say that this is OK, and these prices keep on rising.

Other examples: “company X laid off a few hundred workers”, “Labor costs must go down”, “unions must be busted because they killed GM”, “pension benefits are killing the US industry, so don’t give them out anymore”, etc.

It is all a subtle operation of brainwashing people what to think, of taking away as much as possible to the general working population without them even noticing it, a constant breach of all the old contracts. But what happens reinforces even more what happens, makes it right, justifies it even more.

4

Funny is that what your are saying EXPLICITLY, namely free salaries is what all the billionaires, CEOs, health care price hikes, rents and house costs have been doing IMPLICITLY: they have been asking for free money, they have been asking for ever more money to do nothing and getting it by the billions. So you are right, since the system will not guarantee any increase in jobs or salaries for the vast majority of workers, then it must simply give out a basic salary, cheap rents and mass transit to at least keep the consumer economy going.

Excess capacity is so high that this can be easily achieved, actually must be achieved as there is absolutely no other alternative.

5

The imaginary world of “Economic Growth”. There is this idea that economies should always be growing, should always be furnishing new jobs, “high paying” jobs, new technology, etc. Well this is completely outside of reality. Economies grow only within a window of time, when they go from being poor to rich, like JAPAN between 1950 - 1980, or South Korea, or the USA betwen 1950 - 1990 etc. Afterwards economies become simple steady state systems, everyone has their house and car and any old job and YOU JUST LIVE. But somehow this is wrong, this is some kind of SIN, we need constant growth, economies must always grow and expand and consume ever more: in a natural organism constant growth is Cancer, the organism dies, but in econonmy it is supposd to be healthy.

This is outside of reality, it won’t happen and simply can’t happen, it is an ideology, a kind of punishment ideology, everyone must punish everyone else because they are not increasing “productivity”, they are not allowing the “ECONOMY TO GROW”. And everyday you hear another economist, like a PRIEST, tell us that we are not “growing”, we are not working “hard enough”, we are not “advancing technology” enough to create growth and high paid jobs. I mean how absurd can you get, is it only me or doesn’t anyone else see how completely absurd these ideas are, how completely outside of reality all this is ?

And in fact the only thing that grows is our desire to punish people over some basic need we have. So economic growth can be achieved by simply assigning the value of your house from 100,000 dollars to become instantly a million dollars, wow what “economic growth” you got there ! Same with that heart operation that should cost a few thousand dollars now costs a million dollars! what a way to go, way to grow, a REALLY advanced economy, WHERE TECHNOLOGY AND GROWTH IS MARCHING ON.

This is all absurd and outside of reality, to sustain even a simple steady state economy you need to consume more than anything else. Consumption is the most important factor, not the punishment, moralistic, guilt ridden ideology of “working harder”, “advancing technology”, “competing against others” etc. Consumption is what really counts and to just keep consumption steady you need to give out free salaries, cheap rents and mass transit. Production is the easy part, technology has already made production easy, we have excess capacity in all productive endeavors, what needs to be propped up is consumption, and we need to get rid of this “punishment” ideology of economic growth, and productivity, where the common worker is always guilty of never doing enough.

6

Language is always a “command language”, an attempt at programming people to think in a certain way, an attempt at creating some imaginary causes and effects that within the minds of people, and by constantly repeating the mantra, become real, become real causes and effects, because people want it and make it that way, hard circuit it that way, invent it, make what is imaginary real.

Since any delimited item or unit of information can become real by just delimiting it, defining it, any association of any item with any other can become a “cause and effect”, even though it is imaginary, or until someone decides that the cause and effect “is wrong”, or “no longer valid”. Subprime loans where reality, were real, and had all the reality and acceptance as any other of all the faith based units of our mind and language. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t true anymore, someone decided to disconnect a “cause and effect”. All “causes and effects” are ultimately imaginary.

7

Another take on what may be happening. Of course cause and effect my get confused in the end, or is it the final breakdown of cause and effect through “free willonium” minds, acting and reacting and mixing causes and effects in any order, or maybe we think things happen even when nothing really happens except the same old continuous cycles of up and down and constant change that really changes nothing at all. What we want and say causes what happens and influences what we want and say and think that causes another event and so on forever.

8

Housing worldwide exposes the deception of progress: you often hear that if cars made the same progress as computers in the last 30 years, then they could travel hundreds of miles for a few pennies and the cars would cost only a few hundred dollars. This is true, but why doesn’t anyone ever compare housing, real estate to the “progress” of computers ? why doesn’t anyone ever say if houses made the same progress of computers they would cost only a few thousand dollars ? some would say because houses are limited by land: this is NOT TRUE, because if you wanted to use only 10% of the land area of only one country in the world like the USA, there would be enough homes for 50 billion people, especially if you use modern apartment constructions like those used in Europe, 5 stories high, etc. So what gives ? Why isn’t there any progress in the technology of “houses” ? It is not like the technology can’t progress like a fusion reactor or the cure for cancer, heck civil engineering today can do anything it wants at any cost ! because houses is the instrument used to repress the lower classes, it is used to exploit those that can’t afford to buy and have to rent, and have to be under the dictatorship of landlords.

So what is all this talk about “progress” ? what progress ? and be sure that if homes did became cheap, which they could become easily, something else would become very expensive such as healthcare. And by the way, hasn’t medicine, that is both science and technology progressed at all ? Shouldn’t we say that if medicine progressed like computers, healthcare should cost only a few hundred dollars a year ? Oh, I see, another corporate interest, of insurance companies and doctors that have found a way to strangle the weak. So why don’t the economists just cut the crap about “progress”, the “trickle down” effect, advanced economies, etc. when the truth is that people will do anything to squeeze others on any basic need.