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Are Universal Basic Incomes 'A Tool For Our Further Enslavement'? (medium.com)
Douglas Rushkoff, long-time open source advocate (and currently a professor of Digital Economics at the City University of New York, Queens College), is calling Universal Basic Incomes "no gift to the masses, but a tool for our further enslavement."
Uber's business plan, like that of so many other digital unicorns, is based on extracting all the value from the markets it enters. This ultimately means squeezing employees, customers, and suppliers alike in the name of continued growth. When people eventually become too poor to continue working as drivers or paying for rides, UBI supplies the required cash infusion for the business to keep operating. When it's looked at the way a software developer would, it's clear that UBI is really little more than a patch to a program that's fundamentally flawed. The real purpose of digital capitalism is to extract value from the economy and deliver it to those at the top. If consumers find a way to retain some of that value for themselves, the thinking goes, you're doing something wrong or "leaving money on the table."
Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps. Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely.... Soon, consumers simply can't consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone's data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend. To the rescue comes UBI.
The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.... Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords... if Silicon Valley's UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets, first proposed by Institute for the Future's Marina Gorbis... As appealing as it may sound, UBI is nothing more than a way for corporations to increase their power over us, all under the pretense of putting us on the payroll. It's the candy that a creep offers a kid to get into the car or the raise a sleazy employer gives a staff member who they've sexually harassed. It's hush money.
Rushkoff's conclusion? "Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need."
Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps. Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely.... Soon, consumers simply can't consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone's data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend. To the rescue comes UBI.
The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.... Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords... if Silicon Valley's UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets, first proposed by Institute for the Future's Marina Gorbis... As appealing as it may sound, UBI is nothing more than a way for corporations to increase their power over us, all under the pretense of putting us on the payroll. It's the candy that a creep offers a kid to get into the car or the raise a sleazy employer gives a staff member who they've sexually harassed. It's hush money.
Rushkoff's conclusion? "Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need."
tool for enslavement: using emotionally loaded language.
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That is a complete nonsese. Let's say everyone will get $1000 UBI. Does this mean, that they will earn $1000 more of value? NO. It will inflate global prices about $1000 so prices will be (TODAY_PRICES + $1000), so they will gain no value at all. No one.
40+ years and trillions of dollars after Johnson declared war on poverty and here we are wondering how to enslave more generations in poverty with even more expensive schemes.
You are right, instead we should reward them for being liars (PR) or sociopaths (CEOs) or just plain old gun dealers.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Capitalism is theft, plain and simple. Profit is a tax on the labor of others. You should not reward people just because they can fog a mirror while being rich.
You are welcome on my lawn.
UBI is a safety net without the expensive part of qualifying people for different welfare programs. Nothing more or less. It's a more efficient form of welfare, where the costs of the UBI are recovered with higher income and/or sales taxes as incomes increase.
Also, people who don't feel as poor tend to be more mobile. If you're making $10/hr at Mickey Dee's at 40hr/week, you're too busy surviving to go back to school or look for vocational training to better yourself. Take away the immediate need for as much income, and people end up with more options -- this will end up making people MORE productive in the long run.
The world is better off as a whole eliminating the work done by the least productive members of society, even if it means subsidizing them through something like a UBI, which is probably the least terrible form of wealth redistribution, but that's an aside. It fails to consider that as the world becomes more productive, the cost of goods and services decreases, which actually means that it becomes cheaper and cheaper to subsidize someone to a basic level of living. You can even see homeless people with smartphones and internet access these days and that's because they both became incredibly inexpensive relative to what they previously were.
Some people like to complain that as this wealth is created that a disproportionate amount of it goes to the wealthiest people, but it misses the point. It doesn't matter if the wealthiest are getting a disproportionate amount of it as long as everyone is moving up, and if you look at the world, poverty has been declining globally at massive rates. Even in the U.S. which is already wealthy, people are moving up. You often see people complain about the shrinking middle class, but what they fail to mention is that it's because the upper middle class is growing.
If anything is a problem with UBI, it's that humans seem to need some purpose in order to function well and for a lot of people that's a job that they feel gives their lives meaning. Many proponents like to think that most UBI recipients will learn new skills, etc. but I think a large number either won't or there might be a few at the bottom who won't be able do any kind of productive labor that wouldn't be better done by a machine. Even though further industrialization will continue to drive productivity higher and make goods more affordable, people without purpose tend to fall victim to substance abuse or other forms of behavior with similar consequences and outcomes. I think that's going to be the harder problem to crack, because I'm not sure if technology can do anything about it.
This article proposes, instead of the UBI, something called "universal basic assets". Looking online, this seems to be a grab-bag of three things: 1) some form of income redistribution such as UBI, welfare, or progressive taxation, 2) government-provided services such as parks and libraries 3) nongovernment-provided services such as Wikipedia.
How exactly does UBA differ from UBI? Assets #2 and #3 already exist. #2 can be supplemented by adding new government services, #3 cannot be supplemented because it's what individuals choose to provide. As for #1, we all agree that income supplementation is or will become necessary, but in what form? If the income provided is by UBI, then UBA ends up being exactly the same as UBI. If the income is provided by some other means, what makes that means better than UBI?
In effect, the only difference between UBI and UBA is in the clarity of thinking. UBI identifies concrete problems (inequality is rising, some people are likely to end up without any marketable skills, government aid programs are inefficient) and proposes a concrete solution to all of them, with clear benefits and downsides that can be rationally debated. With UBA, in contrast, the thinking is a muddle and the only consistent idea is that capitalism is oppressive so we must look at the world in *some* way that is not capitalism. The 3 components have little in common, and seem lumped together only to provide the illusion that attempts (like UBI) to solve concrete problems are insufficient. As for the actual difficult problems that UBI tries to address, UBA doesn't bother to think about - it has no opinion on whether UBI or welfare or something else is best. Similarly, it does not provide any concrete suggestions for improving #2 or #3, the two other things it claims are
Bottom line: UBA and this article don't seriously attempt to solve any problems, all they do is try to divide the world into Marxist oppressors and oppressed, and sling insults like "slaveowners" at anyone who isn't sufficiently oppressed. This is not a recipe for anything positive in the world.
That sounds like a desperate last-ditch effort to discredit UBI. According to his logic, employment is just another tool to funnel money to Uber and Walmart as well, so we should all quit our jobs right now to stop them.
OTOH, is we actually issue UBI, people won't need to work for Uber until they're too poor to work anymore. They can hold out for a real job that pays what their time and resources are worth.
The premise is nonsense. UBI is a means of distributing wealth in a economy where the marginal cost of producing goods and services approaches zero. It's a means to offer a transition into post-scarcity economy and a means to keep the ones at the lowest position in the pyramid at bay, because any other option would be more expensive. Rather having people who's jobs have been taken by robots grab kalashnikovs and start taking what they want society will chose to give them UBI. Those societies that will not do so when time is due will fail. UBI raises the bottom to which one can sick to something resembling a frugal but dignified life.
Uber and other shared economy services is just a transition from "private owned cars" to "robot cars used as a commodity" by transition over something that resembles taxis but really is nothing other than people doing lowly work that will be replaced by robots within 10 years. The main part about Uber is nothing but a piece of software anyway. I expect something like Waymo cars becoming attached to the Uber API or something like that within the next 5 years.
The Uber drivers of today will then get UBI. Where they don't, they will cause trouble, understandably.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So UBI will basically be like a minimum-wage job today, except with ability to make more money by working more and not lose any benefits you may have. Or have more free time to better oneself and eventually end up doing something either (a) better-paying or (b) genuinely useful to society.
once all the money is collected by those at the top, is it game over, or will they find a way to get more? if at that point they "let" UBI start, where will that money come from?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market. They exchange one thing of value (in the case of Uber, transportation services) for another thing of value (money). Or with their drivers, they trade money for use of the contractor's time and car wear and tear.
Both their customers and their contractors are better off after their interaction with Uber because they all exchange something they value less for something they'd rather have. The customer would rather have the ride, the contractor would rather have the cash and Uber would rather have their cut of the money than keep their app and system of organizing rides to themselves.
If Uber isn't efficient enough in their part of the transaction, then Lyft (Or Ula, or whoever) will come in and take their market share. So Uber can't profit any more than they can make the whole process more efficient.
The problem with the Walmart example is that the "Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want" never happens. You can still go into any Walmart and pay less for things than any of the "small" shops which may have been around before. They have to compete with places like Amazon, etc... anyway. It also ignores that their employees were on welfare and food stamps _before_ walmart hired them. It's not like they took a lower paying job at Walmart in order to get food stamps.
Really, this guy sounds like he's one conspiracy theory away from climbing into a clocktower somewhere.
The groups which "extract" resources from the economy, rather than help create new ones, are bureaucrats and politicians via taxes. They skim off the top and never return more than they take overall (i.e. the "multiplier" is less than 1), not even including the economic drag of their endless micromanaging rules for everyone to follow.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
No, it doesn't, at least not if set up sensibly. We have a big enough per capita GDP to have everyone above the poverty line, and the human labor being wasted in the complex administration of these programs can be utilized in a more productive way.
Yes, it will be paid out to a wider base, but the average citizen will paying in roughly what they get out, so it's a wash. And we'll get oodles of extra productivity and reduced costs from people being able to afford to take care of themselves, as well as the ability to buy quality goods instead of cheap shit that needs to be replaced all the time.
And UBI opponents always leave off the best part of UBI: It leaves workers in the position to tell their boss to go fuck themselves.
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Why is it not evil to take someones money if the government does it? Because you voted for it? Why can't people just rob the banks? They have insurance for that, no one is a victim right? It's just money!
You are evil, just like the liars and sociopaths you are complaining about... you just happen to be on the opposite end of the spectrum. The desire to take something that was not yours be it through direct violence at your own hand or through indirect violence by voting that another take it for you is envy and is evil!
If you want to stop the these evil people stop giving them the power to do it and convince your fellow citizens of the same and stand up to them in a different way. If you become evil to stop evil... what have you achieved?
Look, Uber can die in a fire for all I care. But unless, for some bizarre reason, UBI recipients are required to give some percentage of their income specifically to Uber, dropping that company into this discussion is so disconnected from the topic at hand that it doesn’t even deserve to be called a straw man.
#DeleteChrome
> This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market.
Except that's exactly what they do: It's called "Profit." Profit is the extracted value in excess of the materials and labor the thing they sold cost. The fact that you are willing to pay in excess of what something is materially worth because its convenient doesn't mean it's not extracting value from you. Just the opposite, in fact.
Note this is not necessarily a bad thing; That profit can be applied to other things, and so the extracted value ultimately recycled back into the economy. It's when people take that extracted value and remove it from the economy that we have a problem...
=Smidge=
This is similar to what happened at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution: Instead of 10 farmers being minimally productive and all eking out a living, one farmer could become highly productive, obtain dollars for the things of value he's producing, and the other farmers go out of business. This has continued till the present day, where we have mega-farms and agribusiness, and few smaller (though still large) farms.
Automation and centralized purchasing centers (web sites) are similarly consolidating value. As a company is able to replace more and more workers with machinery, it does not require assistance in the creation of things that people value. The company - the management - is able to keep it all for itself. Instead of a store requiring 100 people to generate 20 million a year in value, it now only requires 10.
It's the "Consolidation of the Production of Value."
Initially, there's tremendous dislocation. People gotta eat and have shelter and clothes everyday. But it can take decades for new sectors to form which can make use of the displaced workers.
I too started feeling pitchforky when I read the summary. There is, in fact, a tremendous amount of psychopathic malfeasance at the top levels of the economy and government. But, we need to understand what's going on, in order to fairly and justly address it, in order to provide the greatest standard of living for the most people.
At least cab companies are local, pay local taxes and their revenues go back into the community instead of all the profit being shoved off to some douche's new San Francisco campus.
You're ignoring that both sides in the transaction gain from a voluntary exchange. I gain value from paying someone to do something for me because I value my time, or whatever is involved more than I value what I'm paying them to do it. Look up consumer surplus, for example.
The amount of profit for both sides is minimized by the amount of competition for what they are providing.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
No one is taking your money, your paying taxes to have an environment where you can work and earn money. Don't like paying taxes, well it is easy to stop working and paying them. You can also move to a country without taxes such as Somalia or a country with low taxes such as Saudi Arabia and enjoy the freedom that not paying taxes brings.
Do you complain about the grocery store demanding money to allow you to walk out with groceries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'd argue that it's probably less expensive to just let them be sponges
Even after you correctly call some category of people sponges you don't follow through the analogy of what sponges do best - absorb things.
There's an old saying that "idle hands are the devils playground" and if you start to give a bunch of people just enough money to subsist on, you will quickly find they are consuming VASTLY more resources than the poor are today.- in terms of health care, and costs to society at large from greatly increased crime rates all over any city near any UBI communities (and you know there will be UBI communities, AKA projects).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market. They exchange one thing of value (in the case of Uber, transportation services) for another thing of value (money).
The point your ignoring, which the article summary touches on is the concept of externalities. Wal-Mart is heavily subsidized by the government, since a great many of its employees couldn't exist without government assistance. UBI is just government assistance in a different form. It may work out or not. It has the bonus of allowing the end user to control how it is spent and I suppose the negative of allowing the end user to control how it is spent. The actual outcome depends on the end user.
Either way externalities exist in businesses. The most successful are liable to be those that shift the cost to future generations or to others. Want uber to be "fair"? Just make sure the total amount of regulation they face is the same as an ordinary cab driver faces. Do also remember that regulation tends to come about as a result of bad behaviour, so quite often removing regulations has consequences that are significant.
So to answer the question of the article. No, not really. UBI is not slavery. If anything it is the opposite. A person could do what they love, even if it takes awhile to find, cause their basics are met. Of course, whether UBI is feasible is another matter...
That's... beyond untrue. Lot's of government programs produce values that are many times the amount spent on them.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I was with you till you veered into the "guvmint evil" screed. Yeah, what have the Romans ever done for us? Other than roads. And clean water. And and and...
You're ignoring that both sides in the transaction gain from a voluntary exchange.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that they are gaining equally from that transaction. Indeed, chances are pretty good that the corporate entity is gaining a whole lot more from the transaction than the consumer is.
Unfortunately, for many transactions the consumer has little choice. We don't get to choose to simply not eat, for example (and most working people don't really have the option of spending half their day fishing).
What the article writer seems to miss in my mind is that UBI needs to go hand-in-hand with a reasonable minimum wage. UBI shouldn't be a way for government to simply provide cheaper labour for corporate entities -- that's simply corporate welfare. UBI needs to be balanced with a reasonable minimum wage to prevent these sorts of abuses.
Yaz
it would change society drastically. You could live where ever. Right now people go where the jobs are. I'm in a major city and I hate it. I'd much rather live in something about 1/3 the size where I am now. I don't care for night life, don't like traveling and hate traffic. But I'm stuck here because this is where the jobs are and I need money.
Also, lots of folks don't _want_ the poor to have options. I worked for a fast food joint in the 90s and the owner had figured out one of her managers' husband was using the insurance for life saving meds. This was before Obamacare did away with pre-existing condition denials so she was completely trapped at that job. Literally a death sentence for her husband if she ever left. As soon as the owner found out she jacked the manager's hours up to 60+/week (salaried of course). This went on until her husband eventually succumbed to his illness and she quit soon after.
The ruling class are well aware of the value of desperation and happy to exploit it.
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"You load sixteen tons and what do you get Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store"
Presentism; noun. An uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.
Guess what? What you complain about has nothing to do with capitalism. Poverty is the DEFAULT state for humanity, with the average person working 12-16 hour days 6 days a week just to survive. Capitalism in those days merely inherited what existed before it. Technology was primitive, productivity was low and therefore wages were low. It was through their hard work and sacrifice that we have what we have today and via ours that the people of the future have what they have.
Yes working in a coal mine sucked big time in those days. It also sucked working as a feudal serf 200 years before that and it sucked pretty much all the way back to the beginning of human history. People worked 12 hour days in a coal mine and factory because it was better working conditions and better pay than 14-16 hour days on a farm. You will find NOBODY protesting poverty in 1700 for the same reason you won't find people protesting old age today. What's the point in protesting something that there is no solution to?
If you can't even understand the past you have no hope in forming useful thoughts about the future.
it's got nothing to do with laziness. Most folks just aren't that capable. That was fine when we had farm jobs and later factory jobs. We've done away with most of those, and we're starting to see the effect.
That said, folks can and will amuse themselves. And given birth control they won't even breed out of control. Heck, give the birth control for free and start sex ed early and you'll have trouble getting them to have enough people to sustain a population. People breeded a lot because they needed farm hands. Take that need away and they'll control themselves.
Well it appears your argument is they're just stupid. So what's your savior answer going to be?
You're spouting puritanical nonsense that got jammed in your skull when you were too young to have mental defenses against it. Look around the world at how people behave when they're under constant pressure. Poor people make consistently worse decisions and mistakes. Pressure doesn't make diamonds, it makes garbage more compact.
So, when a native makes the same statement when they've left the reservation. Or bands that are extremely successful, and haven't fallen into the "free money" claptrap state the same, it's obviously my problem and not a common sentiment? Gee it's almost like you're fundamentally ignorant of what's actually going on.
Om, nomnomnom...
Yeah...except what Wally World does is bleed the people making the products they sell dry until they have to be made in sweatshops to produce a product at the price Wally World wants...Huffy ring any bells?
I hear this line of BS from anti walmart and anti-corp. crowed all the time. But what we never hear from you is the follow through or the alternatives. The popular version is that of a 8 year old child putting together a $100 sneakers for a few dollars a day. What you never mention is the alternatives for that child. Instead you sit there on your high horse passing out judgement from on high.
Here are the options for that child putting together those sneakers Lets see they can go in to the sex trade, where a add deal of them wind up. Getting used dozens of times a day for nothing more than scraps. Then again they could just simply starve on the streets, or any number options, most of them not better than the sex trade.
Most of them are glad to have that job for a few dollars a day. The options for them are far worse.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Indeed, chances are pretty good that the corporate entity is gaining a whole lot more from the transaction than the consumer is.
Nonsense. If I buy a pair of socks from amazon, I gain a hell of a lot of value; I save the many hours of labour which would be required for me to go out and sheer a sheep, turn the wool into yarn or thread, and then weave the yarn into a pair of socks. Whereas Amazon gains maybe a dollar.
That fact that amazon might sell 10 million pairs of socks and get 10 million dollars of "value" as a result doesn't change the fact that in each individual transaction the consumer benefits far more than the seller. This is the very foundation of trade. The whole point of buying stuff is that you get more value from buying it than from producing it yourself. If the seller ends up richer than you it's not because he's getting more value from your transaction; it's because he's conducting a hell of a lot more transactions.
You will find NOBODY protesting poverty in 1700 for the same reason you won't find people protesting old age today. What's the point in protesting something that there is no solution to?
I find SENS Research Foundation attempting to find solutions.
Perhaps the better option is for these 8-year-olds not to exist in the first place because the parents had access to condoms, IUDs, hormone treatment, or other means of birth control.
Ironic. California indian's are reported to have spent 4 hours a day meeting their needs, and in a virtual paradise.
This has been true for the last 50,000 years in human society.
If you render yourself logistically irrelevant... your political agency will wither to a similar irrelevance.
I strongly encourage those attracted to the idea of something for nothing to appreciate that a society that doesn't need you... won't miss you.
And whilst the current society for a lot of reasons won't push that line... probably not throughout all your life times... it may well in your children's or grand children's life times.
The agency we have now is a result of past generations logistical utility to the society. Go through the periods of time and find periods where people had more or less agency and you'll find that people had more personal logistical utility to the society.
The two variables correlate very strongly.
If you render yourself a net drain on society... then society will not prioritize your concerns. And if a situation comes up where the society can solve a problem by giving you less... it will... because there's no negative consequence to giving you less.
if you were doing something then giving you less would have a negative effect on whatever you were providing. But if you provide nothing... then there's no downside to shaving that to the bone.
I say all this as a father loves his children... as brother cares for his brothers... etc etc... Don't fall into this, people. It is a death pact.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Typical answer that I would expect from you people. You always are the first to pass blame but never one to actually suggest something useful.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Sure, all that is true in a competitive market. The thing, is the first you learn at Business School is that competitive markets are for suckers. What you really want is a monopoly, and there's plenty of ways to achieve one. Patents, network effects, regulation, brand recognition, high cost of entry to the market - there are lots of ways to achieve a monopoly, or at least a near monopoly.
There are plenty of companies that are value extractors. Healthcare, telecommunications, pharmaceutical and finance are rife with value extractors - companies that find a niche where they can extract far more value than they actually create. That High Frequency traders on the stock exchange - able to profit by being a little bit faster than everyone else, or being able to flood the exchange with bogus trades. The apologists will say that they "create liquidity" but in reality they have just found a way to extract value that someone else would have otherwise enjoyed.
"Poverty is the DEFAULT state for humanity, with the average person working 12-16 hour days 6 days a week just to survive."
Oh my brother, you are woefully misinformed about history.
The horrific living conditions you describe are typical of the urban proletariat in the mid-19th century. 19th century capitalism can be seen as one of the all-time nadirs of human civilization. Such conditions were not at all typical of previous eras in European history. Peasants, serfs, and even most literal slaves in antiquity did not work nearly so much nor in such bad conditions.
The brutal living conditions of this new urban proletariat - a social grouping that had not existed a hundred years prior - appalled men of all classes. It directly inspired movements of anti-capitalist resistance such as communism, socialism, and the corporatist forbearers of fascism.
You might enjoy reading _The Great Transformation_ by Karl Polanyi for a detailed history of the development of capitalism and it's attendant poverty, squalor, & misery. Note that Polanyi would probably be described as "rightist" in contemporary American politics, illustrating again the bogusness of the left/right dichotomy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
It's when people take that extracted value and remove it from the economy that we have a problem...
Yeah, like in the form of savings accounts. It sucks when people behave in a fiscally responsible fashion..
And yes, savings accounts remove money from the economy in the exact same way that some fat cat billionaire removes the money from the economy by putting it in his bank account.
A million people saving a thousand dollars is no different than a billionaire adding another billion to his bank balance.
Except in the former example, people become much more financially secure and upwardly mobile. If you have a nice cushion built up you can risk leaving one job for another.
The people with no savings whatsoever are the most vulnerable. They'll put up with damn near anything to keep a job. Unfortunately our entire system, right now, is built on the majority of the people spending everything from every paycheck. A bunch of people who suddenly start saving will throw a wrench in the entire economy.
Except Amazon didn't shear the sheep either. It bought the socks, took your order and paid someone to deliver them to you. And you paid them more than it cost them to do that. That is called profit.
Doesn't matter. He didn't have to source the socks, negotiate a sale price for a quantity of 1 (pk), arrange delivery, etc.
Amazon handles all of this, for billions of transactions. Each person served pays a tiny bit of "markup" to save themselves time. It would take each person far more time to visit individual retailers for individual products than the value of the extra money they give to Amazon to do this for them.
Conversly, Amazon can only remain in business, by collecting this tiny markup, from millions of transactions. It specializes, in a sense.. It serves as a central distribution point. Same as any other general retailer.
There's a reason Farmer's Markets exist. It would be a huge pain in the ass to drive to Farm A for eggs, Farm B for bacon, and Farm C for milk. A central location is much preferred. Items A,B, & C can all be purchased within a few feet of each other. Reducing time and effort, on the part of the consumer, to obtain these items.
In exchange for access to a much larger target market, the farmers pay the distributor a percentage of their profit.
I guarantee you that the amount the farmer's pay is far less than the cost for them to distribute the products themselves. If it wasn't, they'd distribute the products themselves.. Nobody pays for anything that they think is worth less than the money they are handing over. Who, in their right mind, would do that?
Should you attempt to do so, you will be coercively prevented by armed agents of the state, on the basis of private pooperty.
That is, unless you are a member of the vanishingly small group of self-sufficient farmers who post on Slashdot.
The fallacy of "because someone doesn't do something, they can't do something"
This person is perfectly able to purchase land in the country and raise sheep. They choose not to. Perhaps it's because their current employment is far more profitable than being a sheep farmer who raises sheep to produce wool for one pair of socks.
Once again, we are back to the economics of scale. It is wholly unprofitable to produce the wool to create socks for a single person. It's far more efficient if 1 guy produces the wool for ten thousand socks. Cost per unit drops through the floor when compared to the cost per unit in the former scenario.
Humans have been specializing for the last ten thousand years (at least). A fisherman fishes... He doesn't farm, he doesn't raise sheep. He fishes for the whole village.. Conversely, the wheat farmer grows wheat.. For everyone.. And so on and so forth.
The fisherman trades (or sells) a tiny bit of his catch to one person to obtain wheat.. Wheat that would cost him far more to grow on his own. He'd have to take time away from fishing to grow the wheat..
Just another example where people trade money or goods to obtain other money or goods in a transaction that is worth way more to them than to the other party.. The other party has to rely on the economics of scale to be profitable... Sell wheat to a whole lot of people.. Sell fish to a whole lot of people..
To read the original post carefully, he is saying that the progress of capitalism has left us slaves to a small number of corporate overlords. I have to say, that's true.
We let this happen because we enjoy having Amazon figure out what we want to buy, and make it easy for us to pull the trigger. Same with Uber. It's not really that bad, and also not that different from what is historically normal.
Now, enslaving overlords aren't what they used to be. They have learned a lot of lessons from historical episodes like the French Revolution, the mass unemployment in Britain of the 1920s, the early Great Depression in the US, and many others. The lesson is captured in what someone upthread referred to as "pitchforkiness," and others refer to as the frog-in-hot-water syndrome: Don't let the slaves get too uncomfortable.
It's incredibly good to be in the quiet ruling class of a prosperous, hopeful world. It really sucks to be the unquestioned despot of masses of people who feel that life is going the wrong way for them. Talk to billionaires and centi-millionaires (which I do), and you'll realize they totally get this.
What is happening now is that the lessons of noblesse oblige are steadily being unlearned by the newest class of oligarchs, who like most people 35 and younger, are astonishingly ignorant of history. I actually date this movement to the Enron blowup, and the less-celebrated concomitant event, the destruction of its auditor Arthur Andersen & Co. I remember boardroom conversations at that time about the significance of this episode: that the relatively few people with true power have lost any ethical sense, and we all had better start getting it back.
Guess what? We haven't, and it's gotten much worse since then.
In terms of basic economics, this is showing up as deflation. Not in the textbook monetary sense, but in the fact (mentioned by many posters here) that it's getting noticeably harder for ordinary middle-class people to afford many economic goods that were easily within reach in more prosperous times. This is a really big and separate topic (it intersects with the disastrous aftermath of the 2008 GFC). But for present purposes it represents the lever by which the truly powerful are exerting their control.
The extreme example of this is the situation in Silicon Valley. You'd think the C programmers making $240K/year and the data scientists literally making up to a million, have it made in the shade. So why are they constantly obsessing over real estate? They have plenty of money, but there's not enough for them to buy with it. That's a new kind of deflation (which many people mistake for inflation), and something like it is happening across all sectors of the economy, and in nearly every country. That's what we have to be worried about, because our economic overlords aren't doing anything about it.
Among many other more important things, this led to the rise of Donald Trump, who achieved nothing more (or less) than recognizing it and giving it a name. We're rather lucky that he's a feckless idiot. A more capable individual, more plugged into the true economic power structure of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Tencent, Alibaba, etc., could wreak tremendous harm.
FYI people didn't work 12-16 hours on a farm on a regular basis, the industrial revolution made people work longer hours than before.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ma...
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog...
You've got to be kidding. There are often many alternatives to a given kind of transportation: walk, run, own bike, rent bike, horse, hitchhike, motorcycle, moped, bus, subway, *move to closer location*, decide that the trip wasn't worth whatever they're charging, etc., etc. You're not going meta enough in your options. In the West, except in rare cases (that IMHO should be reduced to the absolute minimum necessary for the bare survival of the government and citizens), you can say "no" to anyone's offer. That's what freedom is and ought to be. There should in effect be no "offer you can't refuse". If there seems to be, either someone is coercing you, or you already had agreed to it as an implication of another agreement that you voluntarily signed/agreed to, e.g., the fine print. Unfortunately, under the guise of the so-called public good, etc., we're passing laws that limit our freedom in various ways. For example, in NYC I can't just put a taxi sign on my car and start looking for clients. All kinds of regulations, medallions, etc. Maybe it would not be wise for some random New Yorker to get into my random car for a cheap ride (e.g., I could be a criminal, etc.), but I could work to convince the person it would be fine by developing a reputation (brand), etc. Totally without government interference. As I understand it, the development of taxi regulations was basically a gift to the established cabbies to limit competition, with the "benefit" of less congestion and less rifraff, thus a bloody guild! Finally, you have no right to a taxi or Uber: they are not literally your slaves nor you theirs.
We would like to see numbers supporting your claims. It does not bode well that your exposition starts with "My guess..."
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Quite so, but modern capitalists love to use the 19th Century 'dark satanic mills' as the bar to measure everything to prove no matter how badly you are being treated now, you should be grateful to the "job creators".
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Even then, except for those at the top, life was still very much hard work, as just about everything was created by hand, and whilst specialisation helps a bit, it only helps a cerrain amount. I'd argue that what led the mass of people to significantly better their lives as the exploitation of energy and mineral sources, combined with mechanisation and automation, along with a relative shortage of labour to fully exploit that automation, combined with improvements in governance.
You've got to be kidding. There are often many alternatives to a given kind of transportation: walk, run, own bike, rent bike, horse, hitchhike, motorcycle, moped, bus, subway, *move to closer location*, decide that the trip wasn't worth whatever they're charging, etc
Because your alternatives are so practical for most people after decades of fucking up our cities due to zoning.
"Hmm...I can't afford an Uber....I know! I'll buy a horse!! Or dig my own subway!!"
Oh go fuck yourself. At least I'm actually doing something. How many kids do you sponsor? I"m willing to bet its 0. You sit around behind your computer screen passing out judgement on everyone else. How about getting off your ass and doing something instead of bitching about what every else is doing?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Certain parts of of the "religious right" along with a great many others are a bunch god damn idiots. Sorry I bit your head off earlier. I actually do understand what you are trying to say.
Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. In a ideal world it would be but we have to work with what we have. Societies and religious "right" don't change over night. So many people don't really understand how many problems are caused by dogma.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Really? You don't say? I know you really don't understand this but in many ways you are part of the problem. You probably are not even aware of it.
You say things things, education, welfare, and assured housing like they are an option. You base your answers on a western point of view. Where the ideal of being "poor" means you might have to live in government housing or eat from a soup kitchen. You really have no concept of poverty. Having nothing.
In these places there is no welfare, no hope of education, and most certainly no assured housing. There is simply no money for this. Survival means lasting to your next meal.
You can not offer the same opportunities and benefits where they do not exist. Sometimes these "shitty" factory jobs are all they have. The difference between a chance to make their lives better and starving to death.
You have to understand the way things are before you can start talking about the way they should be. The "shitty" factory jobs are not perfect solutions but in many cases that is all there is. An they do help. Many times once the factory gets established the area starts to go up as more money comes into the community. Then wages do in many cases start to go up. $2 a day doesn't sound like much to a westerner, but in many places that is a living wage.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Redistribution of land & productive capital. =)
Doesn't work. It has been tried many times in history. You only have to look at places in Africa to see the results. Communism never works. It looks good on paper and sounds good in theory but it has never worked on a large scale in real life.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
This is not subsistence survival. Living on the streets, picking through trash for your food is. The jobs these factories bring is a entry point. $2 a day may not sound like much by western standards but in many of these countries it is a living wage. That is what these people need, not more hand outs.
As more money comes into the community then while the parents work children can go to school. There will be enough money for this to happen. As more money comes in to the community then there will be more left over for government services. The schools and other social safety nets that we take for granted. With the schools will come the education that is needed and only then will poverty start to diminish.
You can't just wish these things in to existence. It takes a stable society for them to exist. An a stable society demands that people have enough money to meet basic survival needs. An for that to happen, you have jobs.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.