Weird that a decline in productivity is interpreted this way. During the recession, productivity increased substantially. The general interpretation I heard for this fact was that businesses were forced to cut roles with marginal productivity because they didn't have a whole lot of excess money and confidence about revenue was low. I heard this from a variety of news sources and economists and never heard another explanation, so I think it is probably the generally accepted explanation.
I guess interpreting things pessimistically is good journalism, but if we're consistent I don't see why we would not apply the same rationale here. Businesses feel more confident about the future now, so they are resuming work that has lower marginal benefit, decreasing productivity relative to hourly wages.
It seems a bit inconsistent to interpret both positive and negative changes in productivity pessimistically. I would expect one to be interpreted positively and one negatively, unless we are currently at some optimum amount of productivity and a change in either direction is bad. I can't think of a mechanism by which this would be the case, so I'm inclined to write off this article.
One explanation would be that people at work couldn't keep going on 60 hour week, so at some point decrease in productivity is unavoidable. That means the businesses will start recruiting to get back on track with 'normal' productivity.
The main reason unemployment stats look that way is because people give up looking for work and are no longer counted in the stats.
Data is not wonderful when it is used to confuse and deceive rather than enlighten. Data becomes a tool of enslavement when a word like "unemployment" takes on an operational definition that does not reflect the public perception.
Its a fact that the data you provided does not take into account 'participation' drop off.
If you want to continue presenting statistics like that, maybe you should find a set of data that encompasses the more obvious problems?
I'm sorry, I had assumed that the onus of proof lay with the person making the original (and countrary-to-popular-belief-and-best-available-statistics) claim that unemployment was still increasing.
Participation, of course, is a tricky beast. Sometimes people stop participating because they're despairing over being able to find a job, but they also retire, or get pregnant, or go back to university or (if immigrants) their home countries.
It is true that non government employment has increased but the decline in the unemployment rate has a lot to do with a decline in the participation rate. One needs to look at the participation rate. Around 125,000 jobs per month need to be created in order to keep up with the increase in population.
What is sad is that people are going to see your post and think that unemployment is actually falling.
When in reality, those statistics have been cooked. Those numbers don't include people who have given up looking, the underemployed, part-time workers, or even suicides.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is part of the problem. Their measurements are deceptive.
There actually is a point about suicides and other problems: During the early 1980s when the Rust Belt was suffering, the rates of divorce, domestic violence, infant mortality, alcoholism, and suicide all went through the roof.
Sadly I blame the UAW, for then and for what's happened to Detroit since, but it still happened. It was grim. Sadly, a UAW like solution solves some problems but creates some bigger ones including just killing off the whole industry it tried to 'organize'.
They also don't account for people who have reentered the job force and are keeping unemployment up. So that criticism swings both ways. At any rate, I suspect people on this board who are interested in economics are aware of the limitations of the BLS's measuring quirks.
At any rate, all the actual data linked in this thread points to the view that unemployment is not at its peak since the great depression. Unless you post something credible to refute that, I'm going to assume that I was right about this point and that your hypothesis is unsupported.
"The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country, yet without producing measurably superior results."
That situation is always easy to obtain: Just do a sufficiently poor job at measuring the results.
The tiny, short-term drop in the quantity he quotes says nothing, not even as much as zip, zilch, zero, about his claim of "trump" and lower productivity for the world. For such a claim, we'd need some data over a longer term and for much of the world and not just for the US. And we'd need more than the data: We'd also need some good candidate explanations. His article has no such and no references to any such.
Instead, with so little data, some of the best data is striking and not in the article:
Look at 'productivity', for the US and the world, in 'information technology'. E.g., it was not so long ago that 1 billion bytes of disk was in a box about the size of a large SUV and would really set you back, and now can get 1 billion bytes in main memory for about $5, retail. For just disk, about $100 will buy about 3 trillion bytes. It may be that of the 1 billion byte boxes, they never sold in total as many as 3000 for 3 trillion bytes. There was a time with reports that FedEx had, in total, 7 trillion bytes of disk. Now that's about $300 in a mid-tower case for about $100, actually, a whole computer with four processor cores for less than $1000. Did someone mention 'productivity'?
Think about telephones: I well remember paying monthly telephone bills of well over $100. Not anymore! Think of mobile phones, useful in many trades, e.g., electricians and plumbers, nearly anyone who in their job spends a lot of time in a car: A mobile phone used to be just some radio in, say, a police car; then a mobile phone was about the size of a brick; then a mobile phone would fit in a shirt pocket; now a mobile phone is a quite capable computer, Web browser, video camera, movie player, electronic funds transfer device, etc.
Think about tire life: It used to be that 10,000 miles was good tire life. Now can routinely get 80,000 miles. Better chemistry for better tires!
Cars are safer with more air bags, body designs better in crashes, anti-lock brakes, stability control, various warning systems, etc. So, auto insurance rates should go down, and that's 'productivity'.
Carbon brake disks are coming to cars, and the disks can be guaranteed for the life of the car. "Look, Ma: No more brake jobs!".
Think about car engine life: With all the computer controls, get much less gas and water in the oil and, thus, get much longer engine life.
Think about the changes in house building materials and tools: Now can put up a house for many fewer worker hours. And house insulation: Have much better insulated roofs, walls, doors, and windows, with much less air leakage, for much lower HVAC bills.
Seen a cargo ship lately? They are HUGE, carrying oil, natural gas, or containers, with much better cost per ton-mile.
Bandwidth should count: Kept track lately? Now can put several trillion bits per second on one wavelength, some dozens of wavelengths on one long-haul fiber, maybe 144 fibers in one cable, and several cables along a road, pipeline, high voltage electric line, river, coastline, etc.
Remember the 'T-1 leased line' from Ma Bell? That was 1.5 million bits per second (Mbps) for over $1000 a month. Now for less than $60 a month I have 15 Mbps download speed and 2 Mbps upload speed. For another $65 a month I can get a static IP address, 101 Mbps download speed, and 15 Mbps upload speed. We're talking at least 10 times the data rate for about one tenth the cost for a 'productivity' increase of 100:1, before counting inflation. We were talking about 'productivity', right?
Heck, now robots are cheap enough that even the Chinese are converting from manual assembly to robots.
A guy had some chest pains. In the hospital they did an angiogram, found a clot in a coronary artery, sucked it out, and sent him home the same day. ...
Technology enriches technologists and capitalists, but it actually impoverishes the uneducated masses because they no longer have jobs and cannot afford higher education.
The missing link in your story is that the secretaries and phone operators and librarians put out of work cannot afford retraining and cannot get loans to retrain. So they are converted from middle class wage earners to the ghettoized poor.
Without a social safety net, gains in productivity only benefit a small minority. The middle class is being cannibalized by your kind of thinking.
Yes. A LOT of sales people got replaced by Web sites. And technology also replaced many book store clerks, telephone operators, etc.
In some ways it's a BAD situation.
But, in 'productivity', that is, economic results per dollar, that remains. It's just that increases in 'productivity' don't always mean an increase in standard of living, quality of life, better society, etc.
All I addressed was productivity, not standard of living, 'the social contract', 'financial security', a 'better society', etc.
You are absolutely correct that much of the technology that has increased productivity has hurt a LOT of people. And it is very true that our society needs to do something about this situation.
And, moreover, if count the cost of the 'safety net' for the people put out of work for the technology, then it may be that, with also the cost of the technology, sometimes there is a net loss in 'productivity'.
For another example, Google, Craig's List, etc. are putting out of work a LOT of people in the classified ads departments of newspapers. Heck, the Internet is putting a lot of newspapers and magazines out of business: Newsweek just sold for, what, $1 to someone who wanted to run it as a personal interest instead of a business?
I haven't gotten a newspaper or magazine on paper in years, and last week I finally hauled out three really heavy, big, green plastic bags of old magazines.
Still, in the long term, larger picture, and in the sense of the article, 'productivity' marches ahead. We don't like all the downside, but, still, we don't really want to go back. So, we need to find better solutions for how to move ahead.
Sure, it's too easy to see that too soon we will have to give everyone a basic 'stipend' so that anyone who wants more can work and make much more. Doing this and keeping a 'productive' society will NOT be easy.
Or, what happens when Robots, Inc. makes a robot for $1000 that can do the work of over 90% of the current jobs?
Still, the article and I were writing about JUST 'productivity' and not at all about your, justified, concerns about 'quality of life'.
I agree with your analysis I just think your previous comment had an unavoidable political message: the implied message was that there is no problem and intervention is not needed.
Your scenario of giving people a stipend seems politically unlikely. The trend, which shows no signs of abating, is for the American standard of living to simply diminish unrecoverably. This has been happening for 40 years.
The average American's lifestyle is moving toward the average Chinese lifestyle. That trend will continue without political intervention.
Political intervention will not occur as long as the intellectual class (e.g. you and all the people you influence with your adept analysis) remains politically neutral in their spare time.
"the implied message was that there is no problem and intervention is not needed"
No, again, I just addressed the point of the article, 'productivity'. To move on to address the 'social', etc. results from getting more productivity via information technology would have been 'off the subject'. Or, raw productivity remains important.
For your concerns about China, I'm not much concerned. My biggest concern would be that they will be able to compete more for some of the 'world-market' goods such as oil. But, the US doesn't have to be short of oil: We are just awash in shale oil and coal, both of which can be made into gasoline, at roughly present prices. And longer term, with bioreactions, possibly endothermic and driven by electric power from nuclear reactions, we need not be short on energy in any important forms.
For the US 'standard of living' in, say, GDP per person, one decade at a time, I see that increasing at a nice rate and not falling. Yes, GDP per person is an 'average', and taking the average raises some issues: So on the one hand is someone out of work who made $50,000 a year, and on the other hand is someone who gets a vacation for three months in the south of France in a hotel at $2000 a day. So, how to 'average' that?
Or, after $100 million, who would even walk across the street for another $1 million, yet a poor person would crawl across the street for $1000, $100, maybe $10. So with a high GDP per person, we can have more people not willing to walk across a street for another $1 million while we have others stuck with very low fraction of the GDP.
Broadly, a society awash in cheap robots should not have nearly all the humans destitute and on the streets but with really well off humans being served by the robots!
Really, that desirable future needs more, actually MUCH more, economic productivity because the GDP per person now is not nearly high enough.
So, one issue is increasing the GDP per person; another issue is what to do with the increases.
Here's a first-cut, fairly automatic resolution: Currently an information technology entrepreneur can start a business, get a large increase in productivity, keep the revenue and earnings, and put out of work a lot of other people. Well, as people go out of work, the safety net will cost more and taxes will increase. Then the entrepreneur will not deploy the technology unless the revenue can cover BOTH some earnings AND the taxes for the safety net. So, technology that does get deployed will increase productivity enough to pay for both the technology AND the people put out of work. Or, instead of the Google founders being worth maybe $15 billion each and putting out of work thousands of people in, say, newspaper classified ad departments, the Google founders will pay higher taxes and the safety net for the former newspaper workers will improve. Our politics and society might move to such a situation without ever really agreeing that 'technology should pay for the jobs it kills' or some such.
For the politics, I'm against stupid government that makes things much worse, and we've had WAY to much of that. It would be negligent for me not to mention the real cause of the housing bubble that caused The Great Recession: My view is that the bubble was caused by stupid government, by Obama (when he was a Senator), the Black Congressional Caucus, and Barney Frank telling Fannie and Freddie to back junk paper. It was NOT caused in any significant sense by Wall Street, 'complex' financial instruments, AIG, or the bond rating agencies. I do agree with Greenspan that he was a significant cause.
I do want my slice of the pie to get bigger but from making the whole pie bigger, not from taking from someone else, but this desire does not translate very directly into any feasible, effective 'political action'.
Beyond politics, a crucial issue is, yes, good government and, then, MORE, actually MUCH more, economic productivity. Only with more GDP per person can we have the safety net as strong as we want it. Or "The problem with socialis...
It is also possible that the efficiency gains brought by technology allow previously inaccessible services to become accessible to more people, thereby increasing demand for those services.
For example, some types of legal discovery can now be done very well by software. On the face of it, one might think that many lawyers will lose their jobs (as discovery normally requires the attention of many lawyers). However, since the process is now cheaper, companies that could never before have afforded such legal services can now afford them. The lawyers will no longer be doing the actual discovery work, but will instead guide the software.
I realize that my example targets a highly-paid group and that litigation is perhaps not the kind of thing anyone gets excited about, but this is what popped into my head first. You can apply this thinking to other fields.
Technology sometimes leads to job losses but it also leads to new jobs. It's not much consolation to people who lose their jobs - and how to redirect talent on a large scale seems to be an unsolved problem - but in the long run, if done right, tech improvements can improve all the lives of many people.
"but it actually impoverishes the uneducated masses because they no longer have jobs and cannot afford higher education."
Minimum wage laws mean it is illegal to pay someone a fair wage for menial work. Ergo, the uneducated no longer have jobs. The work must still be done, but as it is illegal to hire a person we automate the process.
Higher education is free. Libraries, Internet, ... MIT has all curriculum on line for free, along with many other schools. Certification is what's expensive, and so long as people are willing to commit to stupid huge loans the prices will keep going up.
As an instructor I am astounded at the percentage of students who just will not do the work. It's not that they cannot afford retraining - there is a host of funding options, and if you're paying list price you're doing it wrong - it's that they want certification without education.
The safety net is being abused. Between outlawing viable poverty and wanting benefits without effort, only a small minority are willing to be productive and gain the benefits thereof.
Stop making this a moral issue. Did 20th century behaviourism teach you nothing? The human stock is only as good as the stimulation it receives.
The reason people have trouble learning is because they are victims of mass culture. When a child is raised on corporate propaganda from age 1 how do you expect him or her to be intellectual?
You phrase these things in moral terms and indicate that the failure lies with those in poverty. But we intellectuals discovered long ago that those in poverty behave in predictable, controllable ways.
Garbage in, garbage out. The public schools have become corporate propaganda systems and the Universities have lost all sense of public duty.
The poor can't educate themselves. They need an enlightened class to protect them (using government) from the powerful forces of propaganda.
You sit in your ivory tower and blame the victims, when you have no idea what it's like to be raised by a television and modern public schools bought and paid for by special interests.
Children are impressionable and stupid. Your classes have to compete for attention with the greatest propaganda machine the world has ever known: the U.S. corporate media.
Or it's the "message" in "the medium is the message".
But heavily it's the old tried and true of the humanities culture, 'drama' as in 'formula fiction', especially as in the 1000 year old 'morality' plays.
So, I'm reluctant to believe that more of the 'humanities' culture will have a solution.
Or, with high irony, in main results, if not in all intentions, the 'humanities' are a great enemy of humans!
Yeah that appears to happen when you inflate the money supply yet continue to measure in productivity using cash paid in devalued funny money. Prices in funny money are inflating by over 30% a year right now so of course salaries have to go up to prevent the hapless workers from starving. Productivity is doing great though in terms of real money such as gold, where the cost of labor has dropped significantly.
The article conveniently avoids discussing that and distorts other relevant information. For example, when they say "The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country, yet without producing measurably superior results.", it is pretty misleading since it suggests results are comparable despite the high spending. It should instead read "while producing measurably inferior results compared to nearly all modern economies".
26 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 48.6 ms ] threadI guess interpreting things pessimistically is good journalism, but if we're consistent I don't see why we would not apply the same rationale here. Businesses feel more confident about the future now, so they are resuming work that has lower marginal benefit, decreasing productivity relative to hourly wages.
It seems a bit inconsistent to interpret both positive and negative changes in productivity pessimistically. I would expect one to be interpreted positively and one negatively, unless we are currently at some optimum amount of productivity and a change in either direction is bad. I can't think of a mechanism by which this would be the case, so I'm inclined to write off this article.
Previously, jobs were being shed and productivity was rising.
Now, jobs are still being shed and productivity is declining.
Oh, and it's not the highest since the Great Depression either -- there was a spike to 10.8% in 1982.
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_&...
Isn't data wonderful?
Data is not wonderful when it is used to confuse and deceive rather than enlighten. Data becomes a tool of enslavement when a word like "unemployment" takes on an operational definition that does not reflect the public perception.
Participation, of course, is a tricky beast. Sometimes people stop participating because they're despairing over being able to find a job, but they also retire, or get pregnant, or go back to university or (if immigrants) their home countries.
He presented no statistics at all, you presented statistics that are clearly entirely ignoring a important figure.
Neither of you seem to be at all interested in seeking the truth, each just advancing their own personal agenda.
meh.
When in reality, those statistics have been cooked. Those numbers don't include people who have given up looking, the underemployed, part-time workers, or even suicides.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is part of the problem. Their measurements are deceptive.
Sadly I blame the UAW, for then and for what's happened to Detroit since, but it still happened. It was grim. Sadly, a UAW like solution solves some problems but creates some bigger ones including just killing off the whole industry it tried to 'organize'.
At any rate, all the actual data linked in this thread points to the view that unemployment is not at its peak since the great depression. Unless you post something credible to refute that, I'm going to assume that I was right about this point and that your hypothesis is unsupported.
"The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country, yet without producing measurably superior results."
That situation is always easy to obtain: Just do a sufficiently poor job at measuring the results.
The tiny, short-term drop in the quantity he quotes says nothing, not even as much as zip, zilch, zero, about his claim of "trump" and lower productivity for the world. For such a claim, we'd need some data over a longer term and for much of the world and not just for the US. And we'd need more than the data: We'd also need some good candidate explanations. His article has no such and no references to any such.
Instead, with so little data, some of the best data is striking and not in the article:
Look at 'productivity', for the US and the world, in 'information technology'. E.g., it was not so long ago that 1 billion bytes of disk was in a box about the size of a large SUV and would really set you back, and now can get 1 billion bytes in main memory for about $5, retail. For just disk, about $100 will buy about 3 trillion bytes. It may be that of the 1 billion byte boxes, they never sold in total as many as 3000 for 3 trillion bytes. There was a time with reports that FedEx had, in total, 7 trillion bytes of disk. Now that's about $300 in a mid-tower case for about $100, actually, a whole computer with four processor cores for less than $1000. Did someone mention 'productivity'?
Think about telephones: I well remember paying monthly telephone bills of well over $100. Not anymore! Think of mobile phones, useful in many trades, e.g., electricians and plumbers, nearly anyone who in their job spends a lot of time in a car: A mobile phone used to be just some radio in, say, a police car; then a mobile phone was about the size of a brick; then a mobile phone would fit in a shirt pocket; now a mobile phone is a quite capable computer, Web browser, video camera, movie player, electronic funds transfer device, etc.
Think about tire life: It used to be that 10,000 miles was good tire life. Now can routinely get 80,000 miles. Better chemistry for better tires!
Cars are safer with more air bags, body designs better in crashes, anti-lock brakes, stability control, various warning systems, etc. So, auto insurance rates should go down, and that's 'productivity'.
Carbon brake disks are coming to cars, and the disks can be guaranteed for the life of the car. "Look, Ma: No more brake jobs!".
Think about car engine life: With all the computer controls, get much less gas and water in the oil and, thus, get much longer engine life.
Think about the changes in house building materials and tools: Now can put up a house for many fewer worker hours. And house insulation: Have much better insulated roofs, walls, doors, and windows, with much less air leakage, for much lower HVAC bills.
Seen a cargo ship lately? They are HUGE, carrying oil, natural gas, or containers, with much better cost per ton-mile.
Bandwidth should count: Kept track lately? Now can put several trillion bits per second on one wavelength, some dozens of wavelengths on one long-haul fiber, maybe 144 fibers in one cable, and several cables along a road, pipeline, high voltage electric line, river, coastline, etc.
Remember the 'T-1 leased line' from Ma Bell? That was 1.5 million bits per second (Mbps) for over $1000 a month. Now for less than $60 a month I have 15 Mbps download speed and 2 Mbps upload speed. For another $65 a month I can get a static IP address, 101 Mbps download speed, and 15 Mbps upload speed. We're talking at least 10 times the data rate for about one tenth the cost for a 'productivity' increase of 100:1, before counting inflation. We were talking about 'productivity', right?
Heck, now robots are cheap enough that even the Chinese are converting from manual assembly to robots.
A guy had some chest pains. In the hospital they did an angiogram, found a clot in a coronary artery, sucked it out, and sent him home the same day. ...
The missing link in your story is that the secretaries and phone operators and librarians put out of work cannot afford retraining and cannot get loans to retrain. So they are converted from middle class wage earners to the ghettoized poor.
Without a social safety net, gains in productivity only benefit a small minority. The middle class is being cannibalized by your kind of thinking.
In some ways it's a BAD situation.
But, in 'productivity', that is, economic results per dollar, that remains. It's just that increases in 'productivity' don't always mean an increase in standard of living, quality of life, better society, etc.
All I addressed was productivity, not standard of living, 'the social contract', 'financial security', a 'better society', etc.
You are absolutely correct that much of the technology that has increased productivity has hurt a LOT of people. And it is very true that our society needs to do something about this situation.
And, moreover, if count the cost of the 'safety net' for the people put out of work for the technology, then it may be that, with also the cost of the technology, sometimes there is a net loss in 'productivity'.
For another example, Google, Craig's List, etc. are putting out of work a LOT of people in the classified ads departments of newspapers. Heck, the Internet is putting a lot of newspapers and magazines out of business: Newsweek just sold for, what, $1 to someone who wanted to run it as a personal interest instead of a business?
I haven't gotten a newspaper or magazine on paper in years, and last week I finally hauled out three really heavy, big, green plastic bags of old magazines.
Still, in the long term, larger picture, and in the sense of the article, 'productivity' marches ahead. We don't like all the downside, but, still, we don't really want to go back. So, we need to find better solutions for how to move ahead.
Sure, it's too easy to see that too soon we will have to give everyone a basic 'stipend' so that anyone who wants more can work and make much more. Doing this and keeping a 'productive' society will NOT be easy.
Or, what happens when Robots, Inc. makes a robot for $1000 that can do the work of over 90% of the current jobs?
Still, the article and I were writing about JUST 'productivity' and not at all about your, justified, concerns about 'quality of life'.
Your scenario of giving people a stipend seems politically unlikely. The trend, which shows no signs of abating, is for the American standard of living to simply diminish unrecoverably. This has been happening for 40 years.
The average American's lifestyle is moving toward the average Chinese lifestyle. That trend will continue without political intervention.
Political intervention will not occur as long as the intellectual class (e.g. you and all the people you influence with your adept analysis) remains politically neutral in their spare time.
No, again, I just addressed the point of the article, 'productivity'. To move on to address the 'social', etc. results from getting more productivity via information technology would have been 'off the subject'. Or, raw productivity remains important.
For your concerns about China, I'm not much concerned. My biggest concern would be that they will be able to compete more for some of the 'world-market' goods such as oil. But, the US doesn't have to be short of oil: We are just awash in shale oil and coal, both of which can be made into gasoline, at roughly present prices. And longer term, with bioreactions, possibly endothermic and driven by electric power from nuclear reactions, we need not be short on energy in any important forms.
For the US 'standard of living' in, say, GDP per person, one decade at a time, I see that increasing at a nice rate and not falling. Yes, GDP per person is an 'average', and taking the average raises some issues: So on the one hand is someone out of work who made $50,000 a year, and on the other hand is someone who gets a vacation for three months in the south of France in a hotel at $2000 a day. So, how to 'average' that?
Or, after $100 million, who would even walk across the street for another $1 million, yet a poor person would crawl across the street for $1000, $100, maybe $10. So with a high GDP per person, we can have more people not willing to walk across a street for another $1 million while we have others stuck with very low fraction of the GDP.
Broadly, a society awash in cheap robots should not have nearly all the humans destitute and on the streets but with really well off humans being served by the robots!
Really, that desirable future needs more, actually MUCH more, economic productivity because the GDP per person now is not nearly high enough.
So, one issue is increasing the GDP per person; another issue is what to do with the increases.
Here's a first-cut, fairly automatic resolution: Currently an information technology entrepreneur can start a business, get a large increase in productivity, keep the revenue and earnings, and put out of work a lot of other people. Well, as people go out of work, the safety net will cost more and taxes will increase. Then the entrepreneur will not deploy the technology unless the revenue can cover BOTH some earnings AND the taxes for the safety net. So, technology that does get deployed will increase productivity enough to pay for both the technology AND the people put out of work. Or, instead of the Google founders being worth maybe $15 billion each and putting out of work thousands of people in, say, newspaper classified ad departments, the Google founders will pay higher taxes and the safety net for the former newspaper workers will improve. Our politics and society might move to such a situation without ever really agreeing that 'technology should pay for the jobs it kills' or some such.
For the politics, I'm against stupid government that makes things much worse, and we've had WAY to much of that. It would be negligent for me not to mention the real cause of the housing bubble that caused The Great Recession: My view is that the bubble was caused by stupid government, by Obama (when he was a Senator), the Black Congressional Caucus, and Barney Frank telling Fannie and Freddie to back junk paper. It was NOT caused in any significant sense by Wall Street, 'complex' financial instruments, AIG, or the bond rating agencies. I do agree with Greenspan that he was a significant cause.
I do want my slice of the pie to get bigger but from making the whole pie bigger, not from taking from someone else, but this desire does not translate very directly into any feasible, effective 'political action'.
Beyond politics, a crucial issue is, yes, good government and, then, MORE, actually MUCH more, economic productivity. Only with more GDP per person can we have the safety net as strong as we want it. Or "The problem with socialis...
For example, some types of legal discovery can now be done very well by software. On the face of it, one might think that many lawyers will lose their jobs (as discovery normally requires the attention of many lawyers). However, since the process is now cheaper, companies that could never before have afforded such legal services can now afford them. The lawyers will no longer be doing the actual discovery work, but will instead guide the software.
I realize that my example targets a highly-paid group and that litigation is perhaps not the kind of thing anyone gets excited about, but this is what popped into my head first. You can apply this thinking to other fields.
Technology sometimes leads to job losses but it also leads to new jobs. It's not much consolation to people who lose their jobs - and how to redirect talent on a large scale seems to be an unsolved problem - but in the long run, if done right, tech improvements can improve all the lives of many people.
Minimum wage laws mean it is illegal to pay someone a fair wage for menial work. Ergo, the uneducated no longer have jobs. The work must still be done, but as it is illegal to hire a person we automate the process.
Higher education is free. Libraries, Internet, ... MIT has all curriculum on line for free, along with many other schools. Certification is what's expensive, and so long as people are willing to commit to stupid huge loans the prices will keep going up.
As an instructor I am astounded at the percentage of students who just will not do the work. It's not that they cannot afford retraining - there is a host of funding options, and if you're paying list price you're doing it wrong - it's that they want certification without education.
The safety net is being abused. Between outlawing viable poverty and wanting benefits without effort, only a small minority are willing to be productive and gain the benefits thereof.
The reason people have trouble learning is because they are victims of mass culture. When a child is raised on corporate propaganda from age 1 how do you expect him or her to be intellectual?
You phrase these things in moral terms and indicate that the failure lies with those in poverty. But we intellectuals discovered long ago that those in poverty behave in predictable, controllable ways.
Garbage in, garbage out. The public schools have become corporate propaganda systems and the Universities have lost all sense of public duty.
The poor can't educate themselves. They need an enlightened class to protect them (using government) from the powerful forces of propaganda.
You sit in your ivory tower and blame the victims, when you have no idea what it's like to be raised by a television and modern public schools bought and paid for by special interests.
Children are impressionable and stupid. Your classes have to compete for attention with the greatest propaganda machine the world has ever known: the U.S. corporate media.
Or it's "the great wasteland".
Or it's the "message" in "the medium is the message".
But heavily it's the old tried and true of the humanities culture, 'drama' as in 'formula fiction', especially as in the 1000 year old 'morality' plays.
So, I'm reluctant to believe that more of the 'humanities' culture will have a solution.
Or, with high irony, in main results, if not in all intentions, the 'humanities' are a great enemy of humans!
Yeah that appears to happen when you inflate the money supply yet continue to measure in productivity using cash paid in devalued funny money. Prices in funny money are inflating by over 30% a year right now so of course salaries have to go up to prevent the hapless workers from starving. Productivity is doing great though in terms of real money such as gold, where the cost of labor has dropped significantly.
The article conveniently avoids discussing that and distorts other relevant information. For example, when they say "The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country, yet without producing measurably superior results.", it is pretty misleading since it suggests results are comparable despite the high spending. It should instead read "while producing measurably inferior results compared to nearly all modern economies".