An economics, investment, trading and policy blog with a focus on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We seek the truth, avoid the mainstream and are virulently anti-neoliberalism.
I remember when there were six garbage men and a driver per garbage truck - the collectors rrunning around lifting the garbage cans and loading the garbage into the truck. Today, I just see the truck with one person (the driver) on board. The rest is done by a mechanical arm - see Automated Garbage Collection
Look. Let's just face the fact that people have been de-landed and now dis-employed with their own stolen purchasing power via the banking cartel and concern ourselves with JUSTICE, not training the unemployed to be better slaves to the system that has stolen from them.
Seriously y, there is a significant subset of jobs in the economy that serve no useful purpose other than keeping people employed so they can get an income. That's make-work no matter how you look at it.
I think we should try to preserve the social ideal that no matter how much work there is to be done, we try to divide it's burdens up as evenly as we can so that everyone is contributing to the best of their abilities. Every society needs to be based on some code of teamwork, solidarity, sharing and mutual obligation. Going down the path of a social division into "workers" and "enjoyers" will lead ultimately to exploitation and serfdom. We already have way too much of that.
This is basic biology and thermodynamics. Every "system" whatsoever evolves exactly because it builds up resiliency in the form of increasingly carried diversity.
Lean systems are fragile systems. Agile systems are systems that carry tremendous diversity AND practice being able to address any unpredictable context with any and all the tools present - but rarely used - in it's toolkit.
There's a REASON why humans hoard. How the heck do we manage to beat that basic logic out of most students?
A universal bailout with new fiat, besides being just, would provide plenty of new resources. But perhaps a redistribution of land and the common stock of large corporations is needed too, to reverse the unjust accumulation of both allowed by the government-backed credit cartel.
If we were to run things like Fuller suggested, I personally think we'd innovate and develop at a much faster rate, we're wasting so much potential in the current structure of society.
Think about someone like Bill Gates never being able to gain access to a computer, how many kids out there are being denied access to the things that they've an innate ability to understand, just because they aren't born to parents with a comfortable income. The majority of people in elite positions are mediocre at best, that's what we have now, the triumph of mediocrity. The real crime is they believe they're special, they don't seem to realise or care that's nothing more than luck.
"Seriously y, there is a significant subset of jobs in the economy that serve no useful purpose other than keeping people employed so they can get an income. That's make-work no matter how you look at it."
"If we were to run things like Fuller suggested, I personally think we'd innovate and develop at a much faster rate, we're wasting so much potential in the current structure of society."
I'm with you on this one.
Speaking of Bill Gates…when he walks into a bar the average and aggregate income increases astronomically but no one is better off unless he buys the drinks.
Clonal: I remember when there were six garbage men and a driver per garbage truck - the collectors rrunning around lifting the garbage cans and loading the garbage into the truck. Today, I just see the truck with one person (the driver) on board. The rest is done by a mechanical arm - see Automated Garbage Collection
Right and the introduction of driverless vehicles (coming soon) will make even the driver superfluous.
The porn industry? Does that need doing? The mainstream news media? Apoloies to porn workers for putting them down at the level of modern journalists but I digress.
Here in the US…continuing education for competency relative to licensing of various services, like construction, etc. Credentialism run amok, the credential is no proof of competence.
Actually that's a feature not a bug.
They're fee-extraction scams designed by legislatures to provide profit-skimming opportunities for their cronies.
Anyone who has ever participated in these programs should know what I'm talking about…there is virtually no learning one couldn't do better on his own, everyone participating (including the presenter) wants to be somewhere else…the sessions start late, finish early with two hours for lunch…they are a joke. There is no test at he end…all one has to do is show up and he's ruled competent…at least by some standard.
Except for work related to feeding, housing, educating, clothing, transporting and maintaining the health of citizens everything else is superfluous and we could live without it.
Take delivery systems like the USPS, UPS, Fedex, etc. Much of this is already digitized and it could be completely digitized eliminating the need for clerks.
For example, there is an automated postal service station at our post office, and people still stand in line waiting for a clerk. The same thing can be done online if you have a printer to print out the label with the bar code.
Same is true of banking, for instance. As online banking takes over, there will be little need for clerks. and you can already get mortgage approval online too.
So there is a few million jobs right there.
Studies have also shown that digitized diagnosis is at least as effective as a physician's visit in many cases. If a prescription is required, it can be automatically transmitted to the pharmacy.
Digital education brings the possibility of quality education to the entire world.
While the human factor cannot be eliminated in all cases, it can be reduced while increasing efficiency and effectiveness.
With full automation and robotization, the human factor would only be substantially reduced, and leisure could be greatly increased.
Leisure doesn't mean that people will just be goofing off. Humans are naturally creative and will spontaneously find their niche. Some will be among those one in 10,000 that fuller is talking about wrt to innovation. But there is a lot more to creativity than than, and not all contributions are material. In fact, the most important things are not "things."
A great deal of the argument for liberal economics lies in creating leisure for the creative class on which innovation and culture are based. The argument for slavery in ancient times rested on this, for instance. It was believed that one a few had the discipline and talent to make such contributions, and everyone else was just fit for menial tasks or the lower ranks of the military.
In ancient Greek, the birthplace of liberalism and "democracy," the few were called "aristoi," the Greek term aristos meaning "best" and only they were free, i.e., at leisure. This applied only to men of property. The work was done by slaves and tradespeople, and Aristotle argued that slavery was "natural" as the natural state of the lower classes.
Existence is a gift. Breath is a gift without which Nothing else is possible.
The means of existence also a gift.
What we do with our 70 laps (on average) around the sun the gift we gift ourselves. Our 'Dreaming' as my aboriginal brothers say.
Most people leave, 'asleep', no clue as to who they are or why they came. Empty-handed we come and go: that's despite all of our 'success, excellence, education' defined to us by somebody else, and swallowed unquestioned.
Maybe there's a clue. I think this is the real foundation of Bucky's protest.
'What you are looking for is already inside of you'. The universal advice for people who wanted to be human and more than a social robot.
It's Mothers day in Australia:
"Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron the pants, to braid the hair, to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the children for school, to pull the vegetables and start the walk to market, to run to catch the bus for the work that is paid. I don't know when most women sleep" ...!
[Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 15 (1986)].
We have been 'inventing' jobs over the last century just to keep people busy.
Try to think about how the vicious circle of crime-police-justice system keeps employed a HUGE part of the population (directly and indirectly) and how that system has been growing over the last century. The same for all the FIRE sector which has grown way more than any efficient economy needs it to be. All these things combined account maybe for more than 70% of the employment directly and indirectly and the fact is that most of these could be reduced a lot if we fixed some underlying economic problems we have also manufactured due to misunderstanding of modern money.
We are 'producing jobs' we don't need to keep the whole thing from collapsing. Still since Internet happened the future is a little bit more bright, like the different crowd-funding initiatives, or the whole expansion of open source.
There will be always things to do, but this is not to be confused with the old concept of 'labour', and necessary things to do that most people don't want to do. That is going away, and going away rather fast.
Thats Peterson's Allied Waste trucks that spill the shit all over the alley and then the driver just takes off because he is on a strict schedule...
Or better yet his trucks run down the road around here with shit flying out of them down the highway... then here in MD we have this moron "adopt a highway" program where they try to get businesses to get "volunteers" to go out periodically and pick up Peterson's shit that his trucks have leaked out all along the highways...
The whole thing needs to go back to the way it was..
"Privatize" refuse collection and processing which has been going on for thousands of years ... AND FUCK THAT ALL UP while he's at it by designing a collection system that smells like ass all summer and spills garbage all over the local environment for moron volunteers to pick up for him for free...
It's not like some mysterious oppressive authority has been going around making people work at meaningless jobs. People constantly create various kinds of work to employ themselves and others, and when the work they do produces something of value to someone besides the producer, the producer can exchange the value they have created for stuff other people already have. If they build a more-or-less permanent way of life out of this sphere of enterprise their work becomes a "job".
People are creative and industrious on the whole, and always looking for something new to make. The fact that there are many unemployed people right now who lack the means to earn a living through their contributions is a perverse anomaly that only emerges under systems in which a relatively few number of people have been able to consolidate the ownership of the resources and capital that are used in lucrative forms of production.
is a perverse anomaly that only emerges under systems in which a relatively few number of people have been able to consolidate the ownership of the resources and capital that are used in lucrative forms of production. DK
Yes, through usury (mathematically unsustainable) and credit creation (theft on behalf of the banks and the so-called "creditworthy"), a few have come to dominate the many.
And the pathetic response from the victims? "Jobs! Jobs! Let us slave for you, oh exalted ones!"
"And the pathetic response from the victims? "Jobs! Jobs! Let us slave for you, oh exalted ones!""
We don't know what to do under the current system...there are fewer and fewer jobs to seek and the ability of the masses to think critically has been trained out of us. We are conditioned to compete for jobs that are offered to us. If none are on offer we're screwed.
The irony of it all is that if things do get really bad the poorest and weakest among us (by current standards) will be the best prepared to cope...from the middle class there will be much wailing and knashing of teeth.
I think we should try to preserve the social ideal that no matter how much work there is to be done, we try to divide it's burdens up as evenly as we can so that everyone is contributing to the best of their abilities. Every society needs to be based on some code of teamwork, solidarity, sharing and mutual obligation. Going down the path of a social division into "workers" and "enjoyers" will lead ultimately to exploitation and serfdom. We already have way too much of that.
This is good, Dan. I hope I live to see even a small semblance of that ethos as a functional reality.
There's actually an interesting an apt situation that's developed in farming owing to the disappearance of the family farm with the rise of agribusiness. Small farmers work hard and love what they do and are totally bummed by being forced to seek employment elsewhere, usually in cities or burbs, which is where the non-farm jobs are. They hate this, and I have seen grown men cry.
"and when the work they do produces something of value to someone besides the producer"
Yeah, we are particularly great at creating problems and then creating solutions for the problems (that's where a lot of the value comes) we created in the first place. From that dynamic is from where a lot of the service jobs in 20th century come from, and in part it has been propelled by misunderstanding of money and funding to solve real problems.
However, you can do that so many times (specially when private sector lacks the funding -credit- to run bubbles). The current situation is the NORMAL situation if jobs weren't created and propelled using financial bubbles. That situation must not be solved returning to the old model but by seeking new ideas, and looking at the idea of 'digging holes just to fill them for the sake of it' is not the way to go.
31 comments:
I think we might have to wait for the robots for that to happen.
There are jobs to do, many of which aren't particularly pleasant, and someone's got to do them.
I make this argument to friends and acquaintances frequently and they act like I'm nuts...which I may be...but I'm not wrong.
"There are jobs to do, many of which aren't particularly pleasant, and someone's got to do them."
Well, then a lot of them aren't getting done because here in the USA we have about 25 million un- or under-employed workers.
Hence things aren't going so well.
I remember when there were six garbage men and a driver per garbage truck - the collectors rrunning around lifting the garbage cans and loading the garbage into the truck. Today, I just see the truck with one person (the driver) on board. The rest is done by a mechanical arm - see Automated Garbage Collection
So much for a JG, huh?
Look. Let's just face the fact that people have been de-landed and now dis-employed with their own stolen purchasing power via the banking cartel and concern ourselves with JUSTICE, not training the unemployed to be better slaves to the system that has stolen from them.
Seriously y, there is a significant subset of jobs in the economy that serve no useful purpose other than keeping people employed so they can get an income. That's make-work no matter how you look at it.
I think we should try to preserve the social ideal that no matter how much work there is to be done, we try to divide it's burdens up as evenly as we can so that everyone is contributing to the best of their abilities. Every society needs to be based on some code of teamwork, solidarity, sharing and mutual obligation. Going down the path of a social division into "workers" and "enjoyers" will lead ultimately to exploitation and serfdom. We already have way too much of that.
This is basic biology and thermodynamics. Every "system" whatsoever evolves exactly because it builds up resiliency in the form of increasingly carried diversity.
Lean systems are fragile systems. Agile systems are systems that carry tremendous diversity AND practice being able to address any unpredictable context with any and all the tools present - but rarely used - in it's toolkit.
There's a REASON why humans hoard. How the heck do we manage to beat that basic logic out of most students?
It's justice that prevents and reverses exploitation.
justice only occurs if people have the resources to pursue it
A universal bailout with new fiat, besides being just, would provide plenty of new resources. But perhaps a redistribution of land and the common stock of large corporations is needed too, to reverse the unjust accumulation of both allowed by the government-backed credit cartel.
If we were to run things like Fuller suggested, I personally think we'd innovate and develop at a much faster rate, we're wasting so much potential in the current structure of society.
Think about someone like Bill Gates never being able to gain access to a computer, how many kids out there are being denied access to the things that they've an innate ability to understand, just because they aren't born to parents with a comfortable income. The majority of people in elite positions are mediocre at best, that's what we have now, the triumph of mediocrity. The real crime is they believe they're special, they don't seem to realise or care that's nothing more than luck.
"Seriously y, there is a significant subset of jobs in the economy that serve no useful purpose other than keeping people employed so they can get an income. That's make-work no matter how you look at it."
Like what, for example?
"If we were to run things like Fuller suggested, I personally think we'd innovate and develop at a much faster rate, we're wasting so much potential in the current structure of society."
I'm with you on this one.
Speaking of Bill Gates…when he walks into a bar the average and aggregate income increases astronomically but no one is better off unless he buys the drinks.
Clonal: I remember when there were six garbage men and a driver per garbage truck - the collectors rrunning around lifting the garbage cans and loading the garbage into the truck. Today, I just see the truck with one person (the driver) on board. The rest is done by a mechanical arm - see Automated Garbage Collection
Right and the introduction of driverless vehicles (coming soon) will make even the driver superfluous.
"Like what, for example?"
Really? You can't think of an example?
The porn industry? Does that need doing? The mainstream news media? Apoloies to porn workers for putting them down at the level of modern journalists but I digress.
Here in the US…continuing education for competency relative to licensing of various services, like construction, etc. Credentialism run amok, the credential is no proof of competence.
Actually that's a feature not a bug.
They're fee-extraction scams designed by legislatures to provide profit-skimming opportunities for their cronies.
Anyone who has ever participated in these programs should know what I'm talking about…there is virtually no learning one couldn't do better on his own, everyone participating (including the presenter) wants to be somewhere else…the sessions start late, finish early with two hours for lunch…they are a joke. There is no test at he end…all one has to do is show up and he's ruled competent…at least by some standard.
Except for work related to feeding, housing, educating, clothing, transporting and maintaining the health of citizens everything else is superfluous and we could live without it.
Like what, for example?
Take delivery systems like the USPS, UPS, Fedex, etc. Much of this is already digitized and it could be completely digitized eliminating the need for clerks.
For example, there is an automated postal service station at our post office, and people still stand in line waiting for a clerk. The same thing can be done online if you have a printer to print out the label with the bar code.
Same is true of banking, for instance. As online banking takes over, there will be little need for clerks. and you can already get mortgage approval online too.
So there is a few million jobs right there.
Studies have also shown that digitized diagnosis is at least as effective as a physician's visit in many cases. If a prescription is required, it can be automatically transmitted to the pharmacy.
Digital education brings the possibility of quality education to the entire world.
While the human factor cannot be eliminated in all cases, it can be reduced while increasing efficiency and effectiveness.
With full automation and robotization, the human factor would only be substantially reduced, and leisure could be greatly increased.
Leisure doesn't mean that people will just be goofing off. Humans are naturally creative and will spontaneously find their niche. Some will be among those one in 10,000 that fuller is talking about wrt to innovation. But there is a lot more to creativity than than, and not all contributions are material. In fact, the most important things are not "things."
A great deal of the argument for liberal economics lies in creating leisure for the creative class on which innovation and culture are based. The argument for slavery in ancient times rested on this, for instance. It was believed that one a few had the discipline and talent to make such contributions, and everyone else was just fit for menial tasks or the lower ranks of the military.
In ancient Greek, the birthplace of liberalism and "democracy," the few were called "aristoi," the Greek term aristos meaning "best" and only they were free, i.e., at leisure. This applied only to men of property. The work was done by slaves and tradespeople, and Aristotle argued that slavery was "natural" as the natural state of the lower classes.
Existence is a gift. Breath is a gift without which Nothing else is possible.
The means of existence also a gift.
What we do with our 70 laps (on average) around the sun the gift we gift ourselves. Our 'Dreaming' as my aboriginal brothers say.
Most people leave, 'asleep', no clue as to who they are or why they came. Empty-handed we come and go: that's despite all of our 'success, excellence, education' defined to us by somebody else, and swallowed unquestioned.
Maybe there's a clue. I think this is the real foundation of Bucky's protest.
'What you are looking for is already inside of you'. The universal advice for people who wanted to be human and more than a social robot.
It's Mothers day in Australia:
"Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron the pants, to braid the hair, to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the children for school, to pull the vegetables and start the walk to market, to run to catch the bus for the work that is paid. I don't know when most women sleep" ...!
[Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 15 (1986)].
We have been 'inventing' jobs over the last century just to keep people busy.
Try to think about how the vicious circle of crime-police-justice system keeps employed a HUGE part of the population (directly and indirectly) and how that system has been growing over the last century. The same for all the FIRE sector which has grown way more than any efficient economy needs it to be. All these things combined account maybe for more than 70% of the employment directly and indirectly and the fact is that most of these could be reduced a lot if we fixed some underlying economic problems we have also manufactured due to misunderstanding of modern money.
We are 'producing jobs' we don't need to keep the whole thing from collapsing. Still since Internet happened the future is a little bit more bright, like the different crowd-funding initiatives, or the whole expansion of open source.
There will be always things to do, but this is not to be confused with the old concept of 'labour', and necessary things to do that most people don't want to do. That is going away, and going away rather fast.
Yeah Clonal...
Thats Peterson's Allied Waste trucks that spill the shit all over the alley and then the driver just takes off because he is on a strict schedule...
Or better yet his trucks run down the road around here with shit flying out of them down the highway... then here in MD we have this moron "adopt a highway" program where they try to get businesses to get "volunteers" to go out periodically and pick up Peterson's shit that his trucks have leaked out all along the highways...
The whole thing needs to go back to the way it was..
rsp,
Yeah there's Peterson's legacy for you:
"Privatize" refuse collection and processing which has been going on for thousands of years ... AND FUCK THAT ALL UP while he's at it by designing a collection system that smells like ass all summer and spills garbage all over the local environment for moron volunteers to pick up for him for free...
Great legacy in business...
It's not like some mysterious oppressive authority has been going around making people work at meaningless jobs. People constantly create various kinds of work to employ themselves and others, and when the work they do produces something of value to someone besides the producer, the producer can exchange the value they have created for stuff other people already have. If they build a more-or-less permanent way of life out of this sphere of enterprise their work becomes a "job".
People are creative and industrious on the whole, and always looking for something new to make. The fact that there are many unemployed people right now who lack the means to earn a living through their contributions is a perverse anomaly that only emerges under systems in which a relatively few number of people have been able to consolidate the ownership of the resources and capital that are used in lucrative forms of production.
is a perverse anomaly that only emerges under systems in which a relatively few number of people have been able to consolidate the ownership of the resources and capital that are used in lucrative forms of production. DK
Yes, through usury (mathematically unsustainable) and credit creation (theft on behalf of the banks and the so-called "creditworthy"), a few have come to dominate the many.
And the pathetic response from the victims? "Jobs! Jobs! Let us slave for you, oh exalted ones!"
"And the pathetic response from the victims? "Jobs! Jobs! Let us slave for you, oh exalted ones!""
We don't know what to do under the current system...there are fewer and fewer jobs to seek and the ability of the masses to think critically has been trained out of us. We are conditioned to compete for jobs that are offered to us. If none are on offer we're screwed.
The irony of it all is that if things do get really bad the poorest and weakest among us (by current standards) will be the best prepared to cope...from the middle class there will be much wailing and knashing of teeth.
I think we should try to preserve the social ideal that no matter how much work there is to be done, we try to divide it's burdens up as evenly as we can so that everyone is contributing to the best of their abilities. Every society needs to be based on some code of teamwork, solidarity, sharing and mutual obligation. Going down the path of a social division into "workers" and "enjoyers" will lead ultimately to exploitation and serfdom. We already have way too much of that.
This is good, Dan. I hope I live to see even a small semblance of that ethos as a functional reality.
There's actually an interesting an apt situation that's developed in farming owing to the disappearance of the family farm with the rise of agribusiness. Small farmers work hard and love what they do and are totally bummed by being forced to seek employment elsewhere, usually in cities or burbs, which is where the non-farm jobs are. They hate this, and I have seen grown men cry.
"and when the work they do produces something of value to someone besides the producer"
Yeah, we are particularly great at creating problems and then creating solutions for the problems (that's where a lot of the value comes) we created in the first place. From that dynamic is from where a lot of the service jobs in 20th century come from, and in part it has been propelled by misunderstanding of money and funding to solve real problems.
However, you can do that so many times (specially when private sector lacks the funding -credit- to run bubbles). The current situation is the NORMAL situation if jobs weren't created and propelled using financial bubbles. That situation must not be solved returning to the old model but by seeking new ideas, and looking at the idea of 'digging holes just to fill them for the sake of it' is not the way to go.
Tom,
There are many among us who WANT to do the real work... no strings attached.
rsp,
Small farmers work hard and love what they do ... Tom Hickey
I don't doubt it, especially with modern farm equipment! And a return to family farms seems the Biblical ideal:
1 Kings 4:25
So Judah and Israel lived in safety, every man under his vine and his fig tree, from Dan even to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon.
Micah 4:4
Each of them will sit under his vine and under his fig tree, with no one to make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.
Zechariah 3:10
‘In that day,’ declares the Lord of hosts, ‘every one of you will invite his neighbor to sit under his vine and under his fig tree.’”
Post a Comment