Marx believed that capitalism was better than feudalism and a necessary stage in human progress. But he was not a capitalist by any means at all.
Instead of just quoting an anecdote you've read somewhere, I suggest you actually study the career of Marx in the First International. In fact, it was there that the seeds of the dogmatism and rigidity that would make Stalinism possible may have first been sown.
You may be thinking of Engels, who did own a factory, wrote much of the material that we call "Marx's," and indeed was probably a much sounder economist than Marx was. He was both a capitalist - by trade - and a communist by creed.
There's some truth to your first statement, although it's limited - it doesn't distort the essential point of the observation.
If you look at the demographics, however, wealthier households are likely to have fewer, not more people in them. If you go per capita, the results are more skewed, not less.
And this is the best of all possible worlds, where Bill Gates is the best of all possible people and the 12 year old in a shoe factory in Indonesia is one of the worst.
Wealth is generated. And then goes where it goes in ways that may have little to do with what we consider "earning" it.
The problem is the rich. I'm as much a socialist as the next, erm, socialist, but the real issue isn't lopping the heads off the top, it's improving the status of the bulk of people. If people are reasonably well-cared-for, have decent opportunties to create rewarding lives for themselves, can get access to housing, education and medical care, and so forth, I really don't care that the richest 1 percent own a space station and a yacht. That would be resentment, not concern for the well being of the many.
So concentrations of wealth are OK to me if the wealth flows. The problem is what I've described elsewhere: a no-win situation where there is no benefit to be had from hiring enough people to generate income.
At a certain point, an economy built around the logic that "if you don't work, you don't eat" may not benefit anyone, even the wealthy.
Cost savings. It's about cost savings and separable sources of value.
People will view getting their hamburger as a distinct value from getting face-time with a person, and pay for each separately. Providing face-time will be the value, not the delivery of a hamburger.
Which, essentially, makes whores, therapists, clowns or a combination of all three, of most of us.
Insofar as women tend to thrive in customer-service people-time situations, I wonder what this will do to the future of gender politics?
There's a certain level at which inflation would occur, but that's only if there's scarcity at the supply end. The concern is radical oversupply/overcapacity and underemployment, caused by mass redundancy and automation. It's sort of a game-theory no-win situation where no company would benefit from hiring anyone (because they have automated most of their functions) and thus there's inadequate wealth to generate demand. It's quite plausible, and it may even be a bit of what we have now.
No, you've got the wrong 80%. He's talking about the bottom 80%.
The bottom 80% of households earn 50.6% of all income. The top 20% of households therefore get the other 49.4%. This gap is recent, according to the article - the differentials were smaller in the 50's and 60's.
Asian language support in (US/European distributions of) Linux has been poor and inconsistent at best. Windows and OS X are far superior in this one regard.
It is also somewhat "unfixable," except in small - individual desktop suites (Gnome, KDE) can fix it, but a lot of general system-wide improvement is unlikely.
Japan views China as its most important future market, more important than the US. Unlike the US, Japanese manufacturers consider their entire global market before begin design and production (the US model is "build now, localize later.") This means that they are going to co-engineer their systems from the beginning.
If you go to that scale, you have to include the places that the jobs are going to, too. And adjust for costs of goods in different places.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a market-fixes-everything faithful. I would far rather the first world intervene on issues of human rights, labor fairness (child labor, for example), and environmental degradation (moving manufacturing to places with less stringent environmental policies). That the export of a few very expensive functions done by very well-paid people to create middle- to upper-middle class jobs in India meets with outcry when the maquiladora zones and Indonesian sweat-shops did not is, to me, outrageous.
No, Jake, the fucking should be of yourself, because what *really* pisses me off is that not only do I seriously suspect that most of the "I want my job back from those horrid Indians" complainers not only had no problems with having other people's jobs exported to sweatshops, they are complaining about job export in the one industry in which the exported labor is actually being treated very well. Their jobs aren't going to children working for pennies a day under the gun, it's going to people who are building middle-class lifestyles for themselves in India. And while it may be a presumption to assume that the individual to whom I was responding was a typical quasi-libertarian who hated unions and regulations and tarriffs, in general it's probably not too hard to presume that he always shopped cheapest, didn't care about boycotts, got Nikes or Adidas or such, didn't care about Naomi Klein, or anything like that. I doubt the words "wage equity" were even in his vocabulary, and I suspect he laughed and the people who talked about it.
Frankly, it would be more sensible to tax the hell out of the sneakers, pants, and electronics goods, and leave the software alone, because the sneakers really are being made with exploited labor.
And if it weren't for the preponderance of the libertarian "I got mine, fuck you" meme by the same demographic that blocked universal health care and sought to have social programs gutted, I would probably be a little nicer to those "down on their luck" (I got laid off, too, if that's any consolation. I retooled and got it together, with a bit of a drop in pay, but partially because I actually had business skills and not jut IT skills. It's amazing how much you can offer people when not burdened with an overwhelming sense of entitlement.)
Assuming that the wages in the third world continue to rise, we will get to export goods to them. The idea - perhaps not realistic - is equity. Ultimately, however, there ability to export goods depends on someone's ability to import them.
Additionally, there is plenty of industry to go around still. Biotech is huge, and it doesn't look like that will be offshoring any time soon. And if you'll forgive me going a bit sci-fi here, there are two industries which we have almost a duty to pursue, as part of the future of the species: longevity, and space travel. It would be nice if we could get some of the smart, smart people who used to write ERP software to start thinking about these sectors. I want to live long enough to see my great-great-grandkid living on Mars, goddamn it.
It says that even he didn't believe in this argument until he was on the wrong end of the stick. Since he's largely making a moral plea, rather than a straightforward logical argument, that pretty much takes care of his "argument." From a Kantian perspective, he never considered this a universal principle, and implicitly sanctioned a different universal principle (that lower-priced goods were more important than domestic jobs.)
Being self-interested is fine, but after all, that's what the managers and corporate share-holders are doing. And, more to the point, one can be self-interested without being a hypocrite. The hypocrisy is claiming that this is wrong or immoral now after having approved of the very same process when it benefitted them.
Then why did the manufacturing jobs leave and the service jobs stay? If manufacturing were really cheaper here from a total cost of goods perspective, why don't we see more of it here?
This is correct, but it will not happen - the US labor movement is as nationalistic as they come. And US companies who negotiate with organized labor using lawyers with pens in the first world, use paramilitaries with guns in the third world.
No, that's a small difference. In fact, it takes infrastructure to move software jobs overseas, and most imported manufacturing goods are being taxed minimally if at all. (I.e., NAFTA, Mexico and the parts in your car; the components in your computer; the stereo on your shelf. Not really subject to significant tarriffs - compare the prices here with the prices in Taiwan or Japan sometime.)
There's a huuuuuuge problem with that. It's called utility value.
Your first 20,000 goes to pay for food and housing. Your second 20,000 goes for clothes and transportation. Your third 20,000 goes for less important things - if you're making 200,000 a year, your last 20,000 may even go for a piece of jewelry.
That means that 40% of the income of someone who makes 20,000 is worth far more, in terms of the utility value to that person, than 40% of the income of someone who makes 200,000. For the former, it's the difference between having medical care at all or not, perhaps between having a home at all or not. 40% of the income of someone (in the same area) making 200,000 a year is the difference between them getting a Land Rover and getting two.
So what's fair? That everyone's first 20,000 not be taxed at all, the next 20,000 be taxed at a low rate (since that money is worth somewhat less to them, and the same to the government/public), the next 20,000 somewhat more than that.
Which is more or less the logic of progressive taxation.
(There's also the issue, with a flat sales tax, of the fact that the rich are far less likely to spend all their money than the poor are, so even from a percentage perspective, it hurts the poor more than the rich.)
Someone in India can live off of $5000 a year, but an American can't even pay rent and utilities with that in a year.
If no one can their rent in America, the rent will go down.
What's incredible is that I'm not a libertarian, I'm not a free-market laissez-fairist. Yet, I think it's less appropriate to consider protectionist, government intervention for this issue than for, say, environmental protection or public health. But all the old IT libertarians who were more than willing to see laid-off steel and textile workers' families struggle without medical coverage and have their welfare cut in the interests of lower taxes are now crying a river.
And the fact is that the IT people have more options. Most of them have college degrees and business connections - they are in far better position than the blue-collar workers whose jobs left over 20 years ago.
Your complaint will have much more integrity if you go through your closet and find no clothes made in Thailand, China or Indonesia; if you go into your garage and find a ca not made in Mexico; if you look on your entertainment rack and find goods made in the first world, not in the third.
Otherwise, you're just being a self-serving hypocrite who is happy to enjoy cost savings for jobs exported in every other industry except your own.
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Marx believed that capitalism was better than feudalism and a necessary stage in human progress. But he was not a capitalist by any means at all.
Instead of just quoting an anecdote you've read somewhere, I suggest you actually study the career of Marx in the First International. In fact, it was there that the seeds of the dogmatism and rigidity that would make Stalinism possible may have first been sown.
You may be thinking of Engels, who did own a factory, wrote much of the material that we call "Marx's," and indeed was probably a much sounder economist than Marx was. He was both a capitalist - by trade - and a communist by creed.
There's some truth to your first statement, although it's limited - it doesn't distort the essential point of the observation.
If you look at the demographics, however, wealthier households are likely to have fewer, not more people in them. If you go per capita, the results are more skewed, not less.
And this is the best of all possible worlds, where Bill Gates is the best of all possible people and the 12 year old in a shoe factory in Indonesia is one of the worst.
Wealth is generated. And then goes where it goes in ways that may have little to do with what we consider "earning" it.
Spending less. Smart.
Further reducing demand in a period of oversupply. Pure economic genius.
Erm, I meant for that to start "the problem *isn't* the rich."
The problem is the rich. I'm as much a socialist as the next, erm, socialist, but the real issue isn't lopping the heads off the top, it's improving the status of the bulk of people. If people are reasonably well-cared-for, have decent opportunties to create rewarding lives for themselves, can get access to housing, education and medical care, and so forth, I really don't care that the richest 1 percent own a space station and a yacht. That would be resentment, not concern for the well being of the many.
So concentrations of wealth are OK to me if the wealth flows. The problem is what I've described elsewhere: a no-win situation where there is no benefit to be had from hiring enough people to generate income.
At a certain point, an economy built around the logic that "if you don't work, you don't eat" may not benefit anyone, even the wealthy.
Cost savings. It's about cost savings and separable sources of value.
People will view getting their hamburger as a distinct value from getting face-time with a person, and pay for each separately. Providing face-time will be the value, not the delivery of a hamburger.
Which, essentially, makes whores, therapists, clowns or a combination of all three, of most of us.
Insofar as women tend to thrive in customer-service people-time situations, I wonder what this will do to the future of gender politics?
There's a certain level at which inflation would occur, but that's only if there's scarcity at the supply end. The concern is radical oversupply/overcapacity and underemployment, caused by mass redundancy and automation. It's sort of a game-theory no-win situation where no company would benefit from hiring anyone (because they have automated most of their functions) and thus there's inadequate wealth to generate demand. It's quite plausible, and it may even be a bit of what we have now.
No, you've got the wrong 80%. He's talking about the bottom 80%.
The bottom 80% of households earn 50.6% of all income. The top 20% of households therefore get the other 49.4%. This gap is recent, according to the article - the differentials were smaller in the 50's and 60's.
You're right, the auto industry is a big exception.
Asian language support in (US/European distributions of) Linux has been poor and inconsistent at best. Windows and OS X are far superior in this one regard.
It is also somewhat "unfixable," except in small - individual desktop suites (Gnome, KDE) can fix it, but a lot of general system-wide improvement is unlikely.
Japan views China as its most important future market, more important than the US. Unlike the US, Japanese manufacturers consider their entire global market before begin design and production (the US model is "build now, localize later.") This means that they are going to co-engineer their systems from the beginning.
If you go to that scale, you have to include the places that the jobs are going to, too. And adjust for costs of goods in different places.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a market-fixes-everything faithful. I would far rather the first world intervene on issues of human rights, labor fairness (child labor, for example), and environmental degradation (moving manufacturing to places with less stringent environmental policies). That the export of a few very expensive functions done by very well-paid people to create middle- to upper-middle class jobs in India meets with outcry when the maquiladora zones and Indonesian sweat-shops did not is, to me, outrageous.
No, Jake, the fucking should be of yourself, because what *really* pisses me off is that not only do I seriously suspect that most of the "I want my job back from those horrid Indians" complainers not only had no problems with having other people's jobs exported to sweatshops, they are complaining about job export in the one industry in which the exported labor is actually being treated very well. Their jobs aren't going to children working for pennies a day under the gun, it's going to people who are building middle-class lifestyles for themselves in India. And while it may be a presumption to assume that the individual to whom I was responding was a typical quasi-libertarian who hated unions and regulations and tarriffs, in general it's probably not too hard to presume that he always shopped cheapest, didn't care about boycotts, got Nikes or Adidas or such, didn't care about Naomi Klein, or anything like that. I doubt the words "wage equity" were even in his vocabulary, and I suspect he laughed and the people who talked about it.
Frankly, it would be more sensible to tax the hell out of the sneakers, pants, and electronics goods, and leave the software alone, because the sneakers really are being made with exploited labor.
And if it weren't for the preponderance of the libertarian "I got mine, fuck you" meme by the same demographic that blocked universal health care and sought to have social programs gutted, I would probably be a little nicer to those "down on their luck" (I got laid off, too, if that's any consolation. I retooled and got it together, with a bit of a drop in pay, but partially because I actually had business skills and not jut IT skills. It's amazing how much you can offer people when not burdened with an overwhelming sense of entitlement.)
That's somewhat absurd, you know.
Assuming that the wages in the third world continue to rise, we will get to export goods to them. The idea - perhaps not realistic - is equity. Ultimately, however, there ability to export goods depends on someone's ability to import them.
Additionally, there is plenty of industry to go around still. Biotech is huge, and it doesn't look like that will be offshoring any time soon. And if you'll forgive me going a bit sci-fi here, there are two industries which we have almost a duty to pursue, as part of the future of the species: longevity, and space travel. It would be nice if we could get some of the smart, smart people who used to write ERP software to start thinking about these sectors. I want to live long enough to see my great-great-grandkid living on Mars, goddamn it.
Cheaper as in speech, or cheaper as in beer? Most of my software as is cheap as it gets.
It says that even he didn't believe in this argument until he was on the wrong end of the stick. Since he's largely making a moral plea, rather than a straightforward logical argument, that pretty much takes care of his "argument." From a Kantian perspective, he never considered this a universal principle, and implicitly sanctioned a different universal principle (that lower-priced goods were more important than domestic jobs.)
Being self-interested is fine, but after all, that's what the managers and corporate share-holders are doing. And, more to the point, one can be self-interested without being a hypocrite. The hypocrisy is claiming that this is wrong or immoral now after having approved of the very same process when it benefitted them.
Then why did the manufacturing jobs leave and the service jobs stay? If manufacturing were really cheaper here from a total cost of goods perspective, why don't we see more of it here?
It could be worse. You could be replaced by a small script written by an overpaid under-seas programmer.
This is correct, but it will not happen - the US labor movement is as nationalistic as they come. And US companies who negotiate with organized labor using lawyers with pens in the first world, use paramilitaries with guns in the third world.
No, that's a small difference. In fact, it takes infrastructure to move software jobs overseas, and most imported manufacturing goods are being taxed minimally if at all. (I.e., NAFTA, Mexico and the parts in your car; the components in your computer; the stereo on your shelf. Not really subject to significant tarriffs - compare the prices here with the prices in Taiwan or Japan sometime.)
There's a huuuuuuge problem with that. It's called utility value.
Your first 20,000 goes to pay for food and housing. Your second 20,000 goes for clothes and transportation. Your third 20,000 goes for less important things - if you're making 200,000 a year, your last 20,000 may even go for a piece of jewelry.
That means that 40% of the income of someone who makes 20,000 is worth far more, in terms of the utility value to that person, than 40% of the income of someone who makes 200,000. For the former, it's the difference between having medical care at all or not, perhaps between having a home at all or not. 40% of the income of someone (in the same area) making 200,000 a year is the difference between them getting a Land Rover and getting two.
So what's fair? That everyone's first 20,000 not be taxed at all, the next 20,000 be taxed at a low rate (since that money is worth somewhat less to them, and the same to the government/public), the next 20,000 somewhat more than that.
Which is more or less the logic of progressive taxation.
(There's also the issue, with a flat sales tax, of the fact that the rich are far less likely to spend all their money than the poor are, so even from a percentage perspective, it hurts the poor more than the rich.)
What's incredible is that I'm not a libertarian, I'm not a free-market laissez-fairist. Yet, I think it's less appropriate to consider protectionist, government intervention for this issue than for, say, environmental protection or public health. But all the old IT libertarians who were more than willing to see laid-off steel and textile workers' families struggle without medical coverage and have their welfare cut in the interests of lower taxes are now crying a river.
And the fact is that the IT people have more options. Most of them have college degrees and business connections - they are in far better position than the blue-collar workers whose jobs left over 20 years ago.
Your complaint will have much more integrity if you go through your closet and find no clothes made in Thailand, China or Indonesia; if you go into your garage and find a ca not made in Mexico; if you look on your entertainment rack and find goods made in the first world, not in the third.
Otherwise, you're just being a self-serving hypocrite who is happy to enjoy cost savings for jobs exported in every other industry except your own.