Contrary to the millennial gripes and the 'trophy kids' syndrome, I believe that there's a generation of highly specialized and highly educated people out there whose expertise is going to waste because they are not getting the first important steps to start working on the job. The work gap that most of these people are going to experience is going to have irreparable harm to the product, with regards to all the papers unwritten, projects unstarted, and lessons learned - for all of us.
A few years ago, I believed outsourcing was the main culprit removing the bottom rungs on the career ladder. That was until someone, older than I was, told me: "A career is not a right." That's when I understood that it is a choice by business owners and business managers to only hire pre-trained workers. It is a choice to run at half staff while waiting for a "perfect fit". Despite the large number of skilled, and near-skilled, workers, businesses are choosing to hire fewer workers, all the while bemoaning a skills gap.
This might be the longest period in a while where some fast-spreading illness hasn't killed large numbers of people across multiple demographics.
Usually wars and sicknesses create a significant need to train new workers, but wars on their own aren't doing enough anymore and would only harm the demographics that are suffering anyway.
It's totally horrible for me to say this but a deadly flu pandemic is needed for the health of our economy.
It's totally horrible for me to say this but a deadly flu pandemic is needed for the health of our economy.
If it comes to that, I prefer a French Revolution style class war. Fewer deaths, more gain for each death and in total, thus more efficient. Between 10 million deaths, no correlation between dying and deserving it, and chaos and no reason to believe in political progress, versus 200,000 deaths, a high correlation between dying and deserving it (i.e. higher death rates among the current elite) and the likely deposition of the corporate upper class, I know which one I'd pick.
I'm not sure I agree with your premise-- I don't think society ever needs traumatic death, and I wouldn't want the violent revolution or the flu pandemic-- but if it were true, there's a much better way of getting it, which is to rise up and depose the assholes running the world now.
I think the problem is related to what you are saying but much more prosaic. For the most part, humans are myopic and reactive, and the people who tend to rise in organizations (in peace time) are even more that way than the general population. They make shitty leaders, though, due to their lack of vision. The result is that, when there is progress, such people would rather cut costs (and involve fewer people) than do more. That, in a nutshell, is why Corporate America is so depressing: it's run by mindless cost-cutters, not leaders.
Couple this with the mean-spiritedness of the US society and you have long-term joblessness and, eventually, widespread, cancerous poverty of a kind not seen since the 1930s.
Women got better quality jobs in the 30s/40s not because they were capable (they were) but because there was a shortage of men to do those jobs.
Eventually those in control of a mean, sexist elite were forced to modify their perceptions because of economics.
I'm ultimately just saying that the only thing that will force a mean, privileged elite to modify their perceptions will be economics.
Class war sure would give my sense of vengeance a boner, but I think it's both less likely and much more risky for those who we'd like to benefit from it (at present).
Sorry, I left my tea leaves and tarot cards at home. But French nobility continued through the Revolution into the 19th century and there about ~230 remaining noble families (present day) of which at least 130 were titled and had their titles officially restored in 1852.
So in the most notable instance of class war at least, not everyone got the axe. The point you're asking me to respond to is a separate discussion entirely.
So pg should be content to take his chances come the glorious revolution? I still don't get why you'd have a "boner" for indiscriminate killing of the successful, even if it's "merely" a random subset thereof.
You say in another comment that you're just being "cheeky", but frankly I find your and michaelochurch's comments deeply disturbing. If it's just dorm room BS, perhaps you could find a more appropriate forum.
"indiscriminate killing" means both the successful and the unsuccessful. You're confusing a lot of things here. I mention this in another comment but in no way is anything that I'm saying targeted specifically at people involved in tech startups, in fact, despite how I think many would think of themselves they've all got the same lot as the rest of us.
It's pretty obvious what they do and how they do it. If you think entrepreneurs have a lot of overlap here, I'd hate to think of what you consider being successful in business, because you'd have to either not be looking or be a sociopath. I already mentioned patent trolls as an obvious example of rent-seeking behavior here.
You're fixated on the mechanics of how a class war happens, which isn't even worth discussing because that's predicting the unknowable. Maybe you seem to think it only happens in the way you picture it in your head?
When you have a society that denies quality health care to the majority of its citizens, has a militaristic police force and imprisons large and biased proportions of its population, YOU ALREADY HAVE CLASS WAR. It's happening right now and you don't even realize it.
> When you have a society that denies quality health care to the majority of its citizens
How does it "deny quality health care"? Not giving it away for free isn't "denying"; if you have money or good insurance, you get quality health care. The harsh reality is that health care costs money (in other words, resources), so it can't be free and plentiful.
Saying that a violent revolution is better than a 1918-style flu pandemic is hardly endorsing the concept.
Also, the upper class is not "entrepreneurs"-- most of them are well-connected influence peddlers, which makes them the farthest thing from entrepreneurs-- nor is it the same set as "rich people". (Not all upper class are rich, not all rich are upper class.) The upper class is a closed social network that happens to have a stranglehold on most of society's resources, but there are rich people entirely outside of that network, and not all people in that network choose to become rich (although most do, because it doesn't take them much work).
Is overthrowing the upper class, violently, desirable? No. I'd rather see them peacefully and gracefully decline into irrelevance. They even get to stay rich. It's their belligerence-- that they keep taking more each year-- that gives cause to kill them. It's not what they have, it's the risk (likelihood?) that they'll take more each year, leaving less for the rest. Is overthrowing the upper class morally acceptable? Yes. This is a problem for us to solve, and it may come down to our generation. Violence should be a tool of last resort, but they are already using it against us (if you live in the US, you know about our health insurance system) so we'd already be in second-strike territory. I have absolutely no moral problem with the violent overthrow of the global elite-- they've already earned it several times over-- but in terms of practicality, desire, and preference, if a nonviolent solution can be had, I'd rather it be that.
While they're both the low-hanging fruit and not even remotely on the same "level" we're talking about here, slumlords would be a pretty good trial run.
In fact, some folks in New York have recently gotten the ball rolling on that one.
I also think I should point out that I think your comment points out a couple of biases both about this community and who we think are the wealthy elite in this country.
I think those that have struck rich through entrepreneurship are the extreme minority and the numbers we've seen back it up. In fact most founders lately seem to be either the working-poor or at parity with salaried developers working for established business. Regardless, as a group, they are in no way the kings and policy makers in our society and are barely significant stakeholders.
I think it's much more likely that the "rich and powerful" who influence the direction of our society all engage in primarily rent-seeking activity.
> Between 10 million deaths, no correlation between dying and deserving it, and chaos and no reason to believe in political progress, versus 200,000 deaths, a high correlation between dying and deserving it (i.e. higher death rates among the current elite) and the likely deposition of the corporate upper class, I know which one I'd pick.
While the most famous people executed during the French Revolution were from the aristocracy, the vast majority of people executed were not. Inciting rebellion and food hoarding were the common accusations.
This source[1] puts it as 6.25% "nobles", 2% noblesse de robe, 14% upper-middle class, 10.5% lower-middle class, 6.5% clergy, 31.25% working class, 28% peasants, and 1% unidentified.
I know you say "if it comes to that", but anyone wishing for a real revolution to enable some kind of social justice is deeply misguided. The poor and downtrodden may not be the first against the wall, but they will be there in much, much larger numbers.
They'd be there in larger numbers too with a pandemic due to availability of health care and also the closer proximity that lower-class people are forced to live near each other.
Lower-classes get fucked in greater numbers when there is any social turmoil. They are a proportionately larger group of people. I don't have any numbers to look at but I think it's pretty likely that more than 60% of the French population during the Revolution was working class or peasants...so proportionately they may have fared better, because you have to look at their numbers in the population, not the percentages from who was killed.
Anyway, the long-term social effect was (from where I'm sitting) positive.
> Anyway, the long-term social effect was (from where I'm sitting) positive
The positive social effects of...the Reign of Terror? You might as well throw in the Holodomor, the Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields, The Great Leap Forward, etc etc etc as everything's much better now than it was then. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, amirite?
The entire modern era of our civilization lies in the shadow of the French Revolution. It accelerated the rise of republics and democracies and the spread of every modern political ideology of today. 'Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen' is not only a fundamental document of the Revolution but also the first (Western?) document to define all rights of men to be universal; valid at all times and in every place and pertaining to human nature itself.
> Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen' is not only a fundamental document of the Revolution but also the first (Western?) document to define all rights of men to be universal
And it was published four years before the executions started in ernest. Even if it hadn't been: all revolutions cause birthing pains, but it is fallacious to argue the converse.
The problem is that our economic structure relies on continuous growth. As opposed to moste living systems, who reach a point of equilibrium somewhere.
You know what living entity also relies on continuous growth? Cancer. We're cancer.
How else do you propose removing a large group of people who also have the largest amount of wealth and political influence and a high life expectancy who are purposefully removing economic opportunity from younger, less fortunate generations?
A deadly flu (which is something that used to be and will again be common) seems like the LEAST mean/stupid option to me.
The starting premise is entirely false. I don't propose removing them at all, and I argue that you're wrong across the board.
It assumes that one person's wealth is an impediment to another person's opportunity, such that there is a finite amount of wealth to go around and no more is ever created. Classic fraudulent economic argument.
In 1932 your argument would have held just as much weight then as it does now, and would have been just as false. We're vastly better off and wealthier as a nation across the board than we were then. Wealth is not finite, and one person's success (or failure) does not mean there is less or more wealth to be had. A simple proof of this in action, is the stock market crash of 2009. Trillions were lost by the 1%, and that wealth should have been picked up by the 99% in your theory; it wasn't however, specifically because wealth can created and destroyed, it is not only transferred as your premise assumes. The 1% suffering a 40% haircut on their wealth did not create more opportunities for the 99%, which again your theory proposes to be the case.
You're putting arguments in my mouth. I'm not saying that there's only one economic pie that we all pull from, I'm just not spelling out every single way how a currently powerful class of people is robbing our future.
Sure, wealth gets created, but that doesn't mean you can't have a confluence of conditions that cause an economy/to decline.
Arguing that we're fucking ourselves over long-term is not the same as saying wealth is finite. If my premise is flawed, it's no moreso than your response.
If you want a mean but more creative fix for a large number of society's problems in one go, here's an idea: take the 1000 richest people and split them into teams, Red and Blue, 500 on each. (Don't put immediate family on opposing teams.) Put collars on them that can kill them instantly. After one year, whichever team has fewer people alive will all be killed. (A less vicious version of this is that they lose all their money.)
If you do this, you have artificially created an irreparable cleavage in the elite. You will suddenly have unprecedented social mobility in the world (and, likely, full employment) as Red vs. Blue recruit the smartest people they can (and pay them handsomely) for their existential struggle. I can't say that this will improve the world. It may cause more problems than it solves, but it will shift power and wealth to talented people in a way that would otherwise never happen.
Conspiracy theories are a massive oversimplification of what actually goes on, but elites would rather collude. If you don't give them an immovable enemy within themselves, then their enemy becomes us (and that's not a fair fight). Obviously, this Red/Blue thing is an impractical fantasy, but it may provide insight into why the world seems to demand that wars (despite their being extraordinarily destructive and seemingly utterly undesirable) happen.
> Conspiracy theories are a massive oversimplification of what actually goes on, but elites would rather collude. If you don't give them an immovable enemy within themselves, then their enemy becomes us (and that's not a fair fight). Obviously, this Red/Blue thing is an impractical fantasy, but it may provide insight into why the world seems to demand that wars (despite their being extraordinarily destructive and seemingly utterly undesirable) happen.
Thank you for explaining this in a way that won't cause the kneejerk hate-response from people. This is exactly it, but I'm a jerk and like to phrase things in ways that provoke.
Things would be better if only we destroyed some existing value.
If you applied the same logic to the whole world, it would mean billions dead, because hey, what good are those 600 million Chinese living on $2 a day. Any time an argument begins with: hey you know what we need, a billion dead people - you know immediately the argument is false.
If you have vast under-utilization of labor, there are numerous obvious solutions to that problem that don't involve millions dying.
Failure to recognize the argument. I'm not advocating mass death as the "cure". I'm saying "you know, traditionally, lots of people dying ahead of their life expectancy had an (typically healthy) impact on the economy and since that's not happening right now, that's having an impact too."
> "populations will grow far above reasonable levels"
This theory was considered state of the art in 1798 (when Malthus proposed it) and refuted by 1838 (when Verhulst came up with a better model, which fits actual population data much better).
Populations do occasionally grow "far above reasonable levels" and then crash, but this requires pretty extreme circumstances. The best example I can think of is the Kaibab Deer population -- various human decisions (killing off predators, changes to hunting policies, changes to livestock grazing policies) caused the deer population to explode over the course of 20 years, and the deer population crashed a few years later as it overshot what the environment could sustain and caused substantial damage. That population curve is more or less A-shaped, with a steep climb and steep dropoff.
Populations in general don't behave that way. Most populations of most organisms we know of have an S-shaped curve, with a steep growth phase and then a leveling out phase that involves very little "overshoot" and very little "catastrophic resolution". (Human population looks to be following exactly such a trajectory, and is on course to level off somewhere in the 9-12 billion range.)
I find it frustrating that your argument, as mean-spirited as it is fallacious, can get traction just by being both those things simultaneously.
The fall of the USSR initiated a period of privation that involved a significant population decrease through starvation. This event did nothing to improve their economy, indeed it hobbled it.
You are correct that some wars have helped economies improve. Protip: it's the massive economic reorganization rather than the death that does that.
Edit: it is true that in Europe, the black death eventually resulted in considerable economic growth but that was an utterly different economy and the changes were on the order of hundreds of years, not decades.
Edit2: Re: regarding the randomness of disease: the deaths involved in wars have generally fallen on the less well off, at least in the times modern warfare (Post US civil war and the machine gun). Contrawise, the deaths involved in the collapse of the USSR were fairly widespread and uniform because most previously existing enterprises became unviable and so many otherwise skilled laborers and professionals were left unpaid.
The problem with what you're saying is that it didn't affect everyone pseudo-randomly like a highly infectious disease does. Certain classes of people thrived and got filthy-fucking rich off the fall of the USSR and most of that had to do with how much power they had from the outset.
The whole point of the "deadly plague" comment is that it kills kings and paupers alike.
You are correct that some wars have helped economies improve. Protip: it's the massive economic reorganization rather than the death that does that.
War creates demand for labor which means that people doing the work have leverage. (See: my note about dividing the 1000 richest people artificially into "Red" and "Blue" teams and putting them into war.) Without it, the world seems to be run by yes-men and visionless cost cutters (do the same damn mediocre thing with less resources) than people with the leadership and creativity to actually advance the world.
It seems to be a pretty dismal fact of humanity that the only thing that prevents social cancer (i.e. the emergence of a parasitic, non-producing, and aggressively self-enriching elite that causes increasing dysfunction in the society, while labor's leverage approaches zero) is the existential threat to a society posed by major war. I wish it were otherwise. I wish we were a species that could mobilize around solving cancer or clean water in the way we are able to mobilize around killing people.
The problem is that, during peace time, the good seem to become complacent and bad peoples' superior ability at social ascendency and ingratiation puts them into positions of leadership (see: the rightward lurch of American politics after 1980, and the increasing mean-spiritedness of Corporate America beginning around that time). Eventually, the social rot reaches an "overflow" point where the dysfunction of one society or more causes violent conflict. Then there's war, which makes good and bad people warlike both.
Wars don't always make economies improve, of course, and war is pretty much the worst thing imaginable. However, to this point, humanity hasn't come up with anything else that gives the disenfranchised enough leverage to shock society out of a cancerous state.
I really hoped that Silicon Valley would show the world a way out of that idiotic cycle, but the actual behavior that is in it, thanks to the VCs turning it into Hollywood for Ugly People, has rendered that impossible.
Absolutely right. War demands men of merit at the helm. When the risks of incompetence include utter annihilation, parasites are routed rapidly.
In addition, war demands investment in the most rational enterprises at the state level. The biggest of which? Science and technology (Manhattan, Apollo, etc.). There is no time or resources for consumerism and advertising. The civilization that is the most efficient, and invests most rationally, will win. Compare this with modern publicly funded research, which is receiving cut after cut and appears doomed to stagnation and decline.
Contrast a president like Eisenhower with Obama based on political platform, policies enacted, and individual merit. Absolute night and day, and a concise yet poignant case study on the decline of American society.
Back that shit up. Welfare in many ways is a wage subsidy for large employers like Walmart and McDonalds. Some other forms of welfare only buy things like baby food and diapers to make sure infants are cared for. Lots of people on welfare work full time and lots of other people are on welfare because they have a disability that prevents them from working.
What should folks with severe cerebal palsy do? Should they just die already to make you happy?
Every hard look into the idea that there are mostly "welfare queens" milking the system has come back to show it's bullshit. Plenty of the most needy people (in really poor states like Georgia) can't get any kind of assistance because of attitudes like the one you posted.
Georgia has fewer than 4000 (out of 10 million) residents receiving welfare and is 33rd in median income. Keep in mind that the state's income figures are being propped up by Atlanta, which only has half of the states' residents. In Savannah, many restaurants are closed on weekends or only open at all on weekends; that's how little economic activity there is in the state.
> What should folks with severe cerebal palsy do? Should they just die already to make you happy?
I didn't say that, I'm all in favor of helping the truly needy, but are they really the majority? Are sick/disabled people really where most welfare goes? I don't have numbers for it, but it's hard to believe it; people in genuine need (because they're unable to work for health reasons) can't be more than 1-2% of the general population, and I feel it should be cheap to take care of them.
Regarding Savannah, if there's so little economic activity there, the solution is to take measures to boost activity, not keep everyone on welfare. What happens when the money runs out?
EDIT: Also, please keep it polite. I will not be intimidated out of my opinions, and will not "back that shit up".
Not just this, war also happens when an ideology that the elite uses as its lodestone suddenly loses moral or ethical superiority or relevance (or just fails to serve the social needs of the people). Shorn of their ideological fig leaf for resource manipulation, their central membership affirming rituals, etc, the nomenklatura at issue decide to switch teams or get outhustled by the new new class (with apologies to Djilas). Cf, the Roman empire in Diocletian's era, post Tito Yugoslavia, political "Islam" in any number of countries, the Baath party in Syria and Iraq, etc.
>That's when I understood that it is a choice by business owners and business managers to only hire pre-trained workers. It is a choice to run at half staff while waiting for a "perfect fit".
I would say that it is entirely the prisoner's dilemma. It benefits everyone to have a supply of well-trained workers. However, if you can skimp on training by hiring workers that other companies have trained, you can an advantage. But when everybody does so, suddenly you can't find any "perfect fits".
It makes perfect sense from any one company to refuse to hire non-perfect fits, but it is ridiculous for every company to do so.
Yep, once company trains you thoroughly, they have to spend even more money retaining you because you may jump ship.
Good old days of lifetime employment where loyalty was two-way street had its benefits.
Because of this mutual distrust, it's too hard to retain good employees these days. Irony is that, most good employees are completely wasted in corporate environment anyway.
The new era is becoming more entrepreneur encouraged. Totally agree good employee in corporate is a completely waste of life. People just need time to transition their mind from good old 70's. There is no more evil Soviet Union, the middle class is a merit on your own, a right than a welfare. Those grown up from last century aren't used to it but will be soon.
>>Irony is that, most good employees are completely wasted in corporate environment anyway.
The biggest problem with the loyalty system was the contributions were in no way equal. Some employees contributed a lot and some nothing, yet both got equal rewards. The system was unfair.
The same continues till today's date. The benefactors are different. The system in large set ups is still by and large very unfair.
This is classic socialism with manifests in various forms.
And the result is obvious too, good people gravitate where rewards are in proportion to their efforts. Bootstrapping, start ups, side projects etc. A thing to note is like the hard working consider large set ups to be unfair to them, the system considers start ups/bootstrapping/side projects unfair to them. Because the assumption is some people must always sacrifice their lives for the larger good. The opposite behavior is called selfishness, greed etc
This is why, although I don't do it, I don't have a problem with folks lying on their resume in order to be that perfect fit. If you can fool an employer into hiring you (and can fake it pretty well once you're in the building) you deserve that career.
Regarding the millennial gripes and trophy kids syndrome, funny, because this week I just read my school's magazine covering this. Not that I am agreeing with the writer, but interesting read.
I think there is more than just job numbers. Are the unemployed people facing risk of losing home? The average age? Average skill? State they live in? How much is government doing? People say free market small government, I think that's BS because during election both sides will propose the government to create X number of jobs by fixing national infrastructure. And the market can't bounce up on its own. A lot of jobs can be created when the state and the federal government begin fixing the bridges and damns. You don't get those without government. On the other hand, yes, private sector should try to hire more here not outsource. I don't dispute that.
It's shocking that nobody mentions minimum wage increases as at least part of the cause here. When in some places the starting wage can't be lower than $10/hr, of course it's going to be challenging for college or high school students to get an employer to take a risk on them.
Minimum wage, even at $10, is low enough that most of us could eat the loss of a couple of months of it out of our own wages easily enough. I find it hard to entertain the idea that it composes a significant portion of the risk for a company with reasonable money coming in.
The things they can screw up in terms of projects and resources if not managed correctly, it seems to me, represent far greater risks. Someone seriously messes up there, you can stand to lose a lot more than a few thousand pounds.
Barry Ritholtz, a Wall Street asset manager, posted links to a set of research papers on minimum wage recently [1].
The first paper in the bunch (co-authored by Alan Kreuger who is mentioned in the Economist article) compared employment in fast food restaurants between western New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania after NJ raised its minimum wage.
Employment grew slightly faster in New Jersey. This appears to contradict the notion that increasing minimum wage reduces employment.
Can you point to empirical research that supports your position?
Sorry I don't believe this. If it is true that we are close to maximum employment, there would be more pressure for wage inflation and more overall inflation. In places other than the bay area (which is its own world) inflation is really low nowadays. If you take into account various promotions, many prices are actually lower than last year.
And other than in the STEM fields, there is pretty much no wage inflation. If job growth increases and wages increase, I guarantee you we will see many people entering the work force. No-one likes poverty.
Did you not comprehend the portion of the article which outlined a supply side problem? You don't see higher wages in that kind of scenario, you see a steady diminishing in the market.
This is the Economist, and this is the party line. The economy was destroyed due to a demand crisis that we haven't even made an attempt to recover from yet. Crying about a supply problem is silly.
It's like when they complain about the graying of America, and how there will be too many seniors to too few workers - and in the next breath about permanent structural unemployment. Both not enough and too many workers, depending on the argument they're trying to make.
Talking about unemployment numbers without talking about how they are routinely massaged, and the calculations changed, is either stupid (for the journalist not knowing about it) or evil (if the journalist does and is merely trying to toe a line).
See shadowstats.com for instance - they (the BLS) have changed the way unemployment (and many other stats such as CPI) are calculated over the years, and are no longer very accurate.
Every time I read an article about our supposedly improving unemployment picture, I try to figure out if the author is ignorant or malicious, because it's the same story with every article. As though the 6.6% number were even remotely real.
13.5% U6 unemployment [1]. Down 5.x million full-time jobs [2] since the recession began (which even ignores population expansion and the expectation that we should have more full-time jobs now). Records on poverty, food stamps and SS disability fraud. A continuing plunge in the labor force participation rate [3] that makes it look like we're knee deep in a depression. We routinely drop a city the size of Pittsburgh out of our labor force.
There has only been a recovery in asset prices, and that's strictly due to the Fed's QE programs [4] massively artificially suppressing the real cost of debt (which you can see in real-time effect when there's talk of, or an actual tapering to the QE program).
Are you trolling or just woefully underinformed to be throwing around the words "conspiracy site"? The computations were changed in a major way during the Clinton administration . http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1995/10/art3full.pdf
Something I've noticed is that companies have a level of technical morale that is not quite the same thing as general morale. If general morale is how much people like the organization and trust its moral decency, technical morale is the sense that the people and products are of high quality. They're correlated but not the same thing. General morale is a group's self-esteem (although, when low, it becomes us-versus-them against the leadership) and technical morale is its self-efficacy.
Technical morale is also very slow to recover, and I think the U.S. has lost it over the past 30 years. People don't assume that others are capable. Rather, the prevailing assumption is that an as-yet-undetermined person is lazy, stupid, and incapable. People have this vague sense that things don't work as well as they used to; I don't know if that's actually true.
On the matter of how they view each others' competency, groups tend to be either in a state of trust-density and trust-sparsity (a "group Bozo Bit") with no middle ground, and we've flipped that switch a long time ago.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadUsually wars and sicknesses create a significant need to train new workers, but wars on their own aren't doing enough anymore and would only harm the demographics that are suffering anyway.
It's totally horrible for me to say this but a deadly flu pandemic is needed for the health of our economy.
If it comes to that, I prefer a French Revolution style class war. Fewer deaths, more gain for each death and in total, thus more efficient. Between 10 million deaths, no correlation between dying and deserving it, and chaos and no reason to believe in political progress, versus 200,000 deaths, a high correlation between dying and deserving it (i.e. higher death rates among the current elite) and the likely deposition of the corporate upper class, I know which one I'd pick.
I'm not sure I agree with your premise-- I don't think society ever needs traumatic death, and I wouldn't want the violent revolution or the flu pandemic-- but if it were true, there's a much better way of getting it, which is to rise up and depose the assholes running the world now.
I think the problem is related to what you are saying but much more prosaic. For the most part, humans are myopic and reactive, and the people who tend to rise in organizations (in peace time) are even more that way than the general population. They make shitty leaders, though, due to their lack of vision. The result is that, when there is progress, such people would rather cut costs (and involve fewer people) than do more. That, in a nutshell, is why Corporate America is so depressing: it's run by mindless cost-cutters, not leaders.
Couple this with the mean-spiritedness of the US society and you have long-term joblessness and, eventually, widespread, cancerous poverty of a kind not seen since the 1930s.
Eventually those in control of a mean, sexist elite were forced to modify their perceptions because of economics.
I'm ultimately just saying that the only thing that will force a mean, privileged elite to modify their perceptions will be economics.
Class war sure would give my sense of vengeance a boner, but I think it's both less likely and much more risky for those who we'd like to benefit from it (at present).
I'm sure patent trolls consider themselves entrepreneurs too.
If someone is a greedy asshole at the expense of others, I have no problem advocating putting them up against the wall.
And how does a "class war" distinguish them?
So in the most notable instance of class war at least, not everyone got the axe. The point you're asking me to respond to is a separate discussion entirely.
You say in another comment that you're just being "cheeky", but frankly I find your and michaelochurch's comments deeply disturbing. If it's just dorm room BS, perhaps you could find a more appropriate forum.
tl;dr: tech entrepreneurs are not the 1%.
Again, how do you expect the "class war" for which you have a "boner" to distinguish between entrepreneurs and "rent seekers"?
It's pretty obvious what they do and how they do it. If you think entrepreneurs have a lot of overlap here, I'd hate to think of what you consider being successful in business, because you'd have to either not be looking or be a sociopath. I already mentioned patent trolls as an obvious example of rent-seeking behavior here.
You're fixated on the mechanics of how a class war happens, which isn't even worth discussing because that's predicting the unknowable. Maybe you seem to think it only happens in the way you picture it in your head?
When you have a society that denies quality health care to the majority of its citizens, has a militaristic police force and imprisons large and biased proportions of its population, YOU ALREADY HAVE CLASS WAR. It's happening right now and you don't even realize it.
How does it "deny quality health care"? Not giving it away for free isn't "denying"; if you have money or good insurance, you get quality health care. The harsh reality is that health care costs money (in other words, resources), so it can't be free and plentiful.
Also, the upper class is not "entrepreneurs"-- most of them are well-connected influence peddlers, which makes them the farthest thing from entrepreneurs-- nor is it the same set as "rich people". (Not all upper class are rich, not all rich are upper class.) The upper class is a closed social network that happens to have a stranglehold on most of society's resources, but there are rich people entirely outside of that network, and not all people in that network choose to become rich (although most do, because it doesn't take them much work).
Is overthrowing the upper class, violently, desirable? No. I'd rather see them peacefully and gracefully decline into irrelevance. They even get to stay rich. It's their belligerence-- that they keep taking more each year-- that gives cause to kill them. It's not what they have, it's the risk (likelihood?) that they'll take more each year, leaving less for the rest. Is overthrowing the upper class morally acceptable? Yes. This is a problem for us to solve, and it may come down to our generation. Violence should be a tool of last resort, but they are already using it against us (if you live in the US, you know about our health insurance system) so we'd already be in second-strike territory. I have absolutely no moral problem with the violent overthrow of the global elite-- they've already earned it several times over-- but in terms of practicality, desire, and preference, if a nonviolent solution can be had, I'd rather it be that.
OK. Name some names. Who has cause to be killed by your standard solely because they "keep taking more"?
In fact, some folks in New York have recently gotten the ball rolling on that one.
I think those that have struck rich through entrepreneurship are the extreme minority and the numbers we've seen back it up. In fact most founders lately seem to be either the working-poor or at parity with salaried developers working for established business. Regardless, as a group, they are in no way the kings and policy makers in our society and are barely significant stakeholders.
I think it's much more likely that the "rich and powerful" who influence the direction of our society all engage in primarily rent-seeking activity.
While the most famous people executed during the French Revolution were from the aristocracy, the vast majority of people executed were not. Inciting rebellion and food hoarding were the common accusations.
This source[1] puts it as 6.25% "nobles", 2% noblesse de robe, 14% upper-middle class, 10.5% lower-middle class, 6.5% clergy, 31.25% working class, 28% peasants, and 1% unidentified.
I know you say "if it comes to that", but anyone wishing for a real revolution to enable some kind of social justice is deeply misguided. The poor and downtrodden may not be the first against the wall, but they will be there in much, much larger numbers.
[1] http://www.jstor.org/stable/1881548
Lower-classes get fucked in greater numbers when there is any social turmoil. They are a proportionately larger group of people. I don't have any numbers to look at but I think it's pretty likely that more than 60% of the French population during the Revolution was working class or peasants...so proportionately they may have fared better, because you have to look at their numbers in the population, not the percentages from who was killed.
Anyway, the long-term social effect was (from where I'm sitting) positive.
The positive social effects of...the Reign of Terror? You might as well throw in the Holodomor, the Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields, The Great Leap Forward, etc etc etc as everything's much better now than it was then. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, amirite?
I think that's pretty damned positive.
And it was published four years before the executions started in ernest. Even if it hadn't been: all revolutions cause birthing pains, but it is fallacious to argue the converse.
You know what living entity also relies on continuous growth? Cancer. We're cancer.
A deadly flu (which is something that used to be and will again be common) seems like the LEAST mean/stupid option to me.
It assumes that one person's wealth is an impediment to another person's opportunity, such that there is a finite amount of wealth to go around and no more is ever created. Classic fraudulent economic argument.
In 1932 your argument would have held just as much weight then as it does now, and would have been just as false. We're vastly better off and wealthier as a nation across the board than we were then. Wealth is not finite, and one person's success (or failure) does not mean there is less or more wealth to be had. A simple proof of this in action, is the stock market crash of 2009. Trillions were lost by the 1%, and that wealth should have been picked up by the 99% in your theory; it wasn't however, specifically because wealth can created and destroyed, it is not only transferred as your premise assumes. The 1% suffering a 40% haircut on their wealth did not create more opportunities for the 99%, which again your theory proposes to be the case.
Sure, wealth gets created, but that doesn't mean you can't have a confluence of conditions that cause an economy/to decline.
Arguing that we're fucking ourselves over long-term is not the same as saying wealth is finite. If my premise is flawed, it's no moreso than your response.
If you do this, you have artificially created an irreparable cleavage in the elite. You will suddenly have unprecedented social mobility in the world (and, likely, full employment) as Red vs. Blue recruit the smartest people they can (and pay them handsomely) for their existential struggle. I can't say that this will improve the world. It may cause more problems than it solves, but it will shift power and wealth to talented people in a way that would otherwise never happen.
Conspiracy theories are a massive oversimplification of what actually goes on, but elites would rather collude. If you don't give them an immovable enemy within themselves, then their enemy becomes us (and that's not a fair fight). Obviously, this Red/Blue thing is an impractical fantasy, but it may provide insight into why the world seems to demand that wars (despite their being extraordinarily destructive and seemingly utterly undesirable) happen.
Thank you for explaining this in a way that won't cause the kneejerk hate-response from people. This is exactly it, but I'm a jerk and like to phrase things in ways that provoke.
Things would be better if only we destroyed some existing value.
If you applied the same logic to the whole world, it would mean billions dead, because hey, what good are those 600 million Chinese living on $2 a day. Any time an argument begins with: hey you know what we need, a billion dead people - you know immediately the argument is false.
If you have vast under-utilization of labor, there are numerous obvious solutions to that problem that don't involve millions dying.
You said: "It's totally horrible for me to say this but a deadly flu pandemic is needed for the health of our economy."
Mass death is needed for the health of our economy, is what that says. Emphasis on needed and for the health of our economy.
1) populations will grow far above reasonable levels and extremely far above sustainable levels.
2) this WILL get resolved.
This theory was considered state of the art in 1798 (when Malthus proposed it) and refuted by 1838 (when Verhulst came up with a better model, which fits actual population data much better).
Populations do occasionally grow "far above reasonable levels" and then crash, but this requires pretty extreme circumstances. The best example I can think of is the Kaibab Deer population -- various human decisions (killing off predators, changes to hunting policies, changes to livestock grazing policies) caused the deer population to explode over the course of 20 years, and the deer population crashed a few years later as it overshot what the environment could sustain and caused substantial damage. That population curve is more or less A-shaped, with a steep climb and steep dropoff.
Populations in general don't behave that way. Most populations of most organisms we know of have an S-shaped curve, with a steep growth phase and then a leveling out phase that involves very little "overshoot" and very little "catastrophic resolution". (Human population looks to be following exactly such a trajectory, and is on course to level off somewhere in the 9-12 billion range.)
The fall of the USSR initiated a period of privation that involved a significant population decrease through starvation. This event did nothing to improve their economy, indeed it hobbled it.
You are correct that some wars have helped economies improve. Protip: it's the massive economic reorganization rather than the death that does that.
Edit: it is true that in Europe, the black death eventually resulted in considerable economic growth but that was an utterly different economy and the changes were on the order of hundreds of years, not decades.
Edit2: Re: regarding the randomness of disease: the deaths involved in wars have generally fallen on the less well off, at least in the times modern warfare (Post US civil war and the machine gun). Contrawise, the deaths involved in the collapse of the USSR were fairly widespread and uniform because most previously existing enterprises became unviable and so many otherwise skilled laborers and professionals were left unpaid.
The whole point of the "deadly plague" comment is that it kills kings and paupers alike.
War creates demand for labor which means that people doing the work have leverage. (See: my note about dividing the 1000 richest people artificially into "Red" and "Blue" teams and putting them into war.) Without it, the world seems to be run by yes-men and visionless cost cutters (do the same damn mediocre thing with less resources) than people with the leadership and creativity to actually advance the world.
It seems to be a pretty dismal fact of humanity that the only thing that prevents social cancer (i.e. the emergence of a parasitic, non-producing, and aggressively self-enriching elite that causes increasing dysfunction in the society, while labor's leverage approaches zero) is the existential threat to a society posed by major war. I wish it were otherwise. I wish we were a species that could mobilize around solving cancer or clean water in the way we are able to mobilize around killing people.
The problem is that, during peace time, the good seem to become complacent and bad peoples' superior ability at social ascendency and ingratiation puts them into positions of leadership (see: the rightward lurch of American politics after 1980, and the increasing mean-spiritedness of Corporate America beginning around that time). Eventually, the social rot reaches an "overflow" point where the dysfunction of one society or more causes violent conflict. Then there's war, which makes good and bad people warlike both.
Wars don't always make economies improve, of course, and war is pretty much the worst thing imaginable. However, to this point, humanity hasn't come up with anything else that gives the disenfranchised enough leverage to shock society out of a cancerous state.
I really hoped that Silicon Valley would show the world a way out of that idiotic cycle, but the actual behavior that is in it, thanks to the VCs turning it into Hollywood for Ugly People, has rendered that impossible.
In addition, war demands investment in the most rational enterprises at the state level. The biggest of which? Science and technology (Manhattan, Apollo, etc.). There is no time or resources for consumerism and advertising. The civilization that is the most efficient, and invests most rationally, will win. Compare this with modern publicly funded research, which is receiving cut after cut and appears doomed to stagnation and decline.
Contrast a president like Eisenhower with Obama based on political platform, policies enacted, and individual merit. Absolute night and day, and a concise yet poignant case study on the decline of American society.
IMHO it's not just the elite that's getting parasitic and non-producing (how many people are on welfare these days?)
What should folks with severe cerebal palsy do? Should they just die already to make you happy?
Every hard look into the idea that there are mostly "welfare queens" milking the system has come back to show it's bullshit. Plenty of the most needy people (in really poor states like Georgia) can't get any kind of assistance because of attitudes like the one you posted.
Georgia has fewer than 4000 (out of 10 million) residents receiving welfare and is 33rd in median income. Keep in mind that the state's income figures are being propped up by Atlanta, which only has half of the states' residents. In Savannah, many restaurants are closed on weekends or only open at all on weekends; that's how little economic activity there is in the state.
I didn't say that, I'm all in favor of helping the truly needy, but are they really the majority? Are sick/disabled people really where most welfare goes? I don't have numbers for it, but it's hard to believe it; people in genuine need (because they're unable to work for health reasons) can't be more than 1-2% of the general population, and I feel it should be cheap to take care of them.
Regarding Savannah, if there's so little economic activity there, the solution is to take measures to boost activity, not keep everyone on welfare. What happens when the money runs out?
EDIT: Also, please keep it polite. I will not be intimidated out of my opinions, and will not "back that shit up".
I would say that it is entirely the prisoner's dilemma. It benefits everyone to have a supply of well-trained workers. However, if you can skimp on training by hiring workers that other companies have trained, you can an advantage. But when everybody does so, suddenly you can't find any "perfect fits".
It makes perfect sense from any one company to refuse to hire non-perfect fits, but it is ridiculous for every company to do so.
Good old days of lifetime employment where loyalty was two-way street had its benefits.
Because of this mutual distrust, it's too hard to retain good employees these days. Irony is that, most good employees are completely wasted in corporate environment anyway.
The biggest problem with the loyalty system was the contributions were in no way equal. Some employees contributed a lot and some nothing, yet both got equal rewards. The system was unfair.
The same continues till today's date. The benefactors are different. The system in large set ups is still by and large very unfair.
This is classic socialism with manifests in various forms.
And the result is obvious too, good people gravitate where rewards are in proportion to their efforts. Bootstrapping, start ups, side projects etc. A thing to note is like the hard working consider large set ups to be unfair to them, the system considers start ups/bootstrapping/side projects unfair to them. Because the assumption is some people must always sacrifice their lives for the larger good. The opposite behavior is called selfishness, greed etc
http://issuu.com/ccnycampus/docs/february_2014/9?e=9281508/6...
I think there is more than just job numbers. Are the unemployed people facing risk of losing home? The average age? Average skill? State they live in? How much is government doing? People say free market small government, I think that's BS because during election both sides will propose the government to create X number of jobs by fixing national infrastructure. And the market can't bounce up on its own. A lot of jobs can be created when the state and the federal government begin fixing the bridges and damns. You don't get those without government. On the other hand, yes, private sector should try to hire more here not outsource. I don't dispute that.
The things they can screw up in terms of projects and resources if not managed correctly, it seems to me, represent far greater risks. Someone seriously messes up there, you can stand to lose a lot more than a few thousand pounds.
Employment grew slightly faster in New Jersey. This appears to contradict the notion that increasing minimum wage reduces employment.
Can you point to empirical research that supports your position?
[1] http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/02/minimum-wage-research-p...
EDIT: Mis-stated paper finding, fixed.
And other than in the STEM fields, there is pretty much no wage inflation. If job growth increases and wages increase, I guarantee you we will see many people entering the work force. No-one likes poverty.
It's like when they complain about the graying of America, and how there will be too many seniors to too few workers - and in the next breath about permanent structural unemployment. Both not enough and too many workers, depending on the argument they're trying to make.
See shadowstats.com for instance - they (the BLS) have changed the way unemployment (and many other stats such as CPI) are calculated over the years, and are no longer very accurate.
13.5% U6 unemployment [1]. Down 5.x million full-time jobs [2] since the recession began (which even ignores population expansion and the expectation that we should have more full-time jobs now). Records on poverty, food stamps and SS disability fraud. A continuing plunge in the labor force participation rate [3] that makes it look like we're knee deep in a depression. We routinely drop a city the size of Pittsburgh out of our labor force.
There has only been a recovery in asset prices, and that's strictly due to the Fed's QE programs [4] massively artificially suppressing the real cost of debt (which you can see in real-time effect when there's talk of, or an actual tapering to the QE program).
[1] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/full-time-vs-total-employment...
[3] http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
[4] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-06/sp-and-without-qe
http://stefanmikarlsson.blogspot.com/2014/01/were-not-seeing...
The CPS, which the unemployment stats use, was redesigned in 1994; the last time it was changed was 1967.
If I really wanted to debate with you I would point out the birth/death rate adjustments... but you are acting rather trollish. plonk
Technical morale is also very slow to recover, and I think the U.S. has lost it over the past 30 years. People don't assume that others are capable. Rather, the prevailing assumption is that an as-yet-undetermined person is lazy, stupid, and incapable. People have this vague sense that things don't work as well as they used to; I don't know if that's actually true.
On the matter of how they view each others' competency, groups tend to be either in a state of trust-density and trust-sparsity (a "group Bozo Bit") with no middle ground, and we've flipped that switch a long time ago.