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[Templar Ordo]

In my opinion, we don't need more jobs.
We need to "work" less, and live more - as in concentrating on what you like and what is important.

I've always been of the belief that this sort of society we are living in, is not the highest form of society that humans can achieve.

Not that his solves the issue on topic, but it gives me a sense of calm when I rather work less hours a week, get paid less, to actually do things I want to do instead of just working 9-5 because that's the norm.

[Lyn Farel]

In my opinion, we don't need more jobs.
We need to "work" less, and live more - as in concentrating on what you like and what is important.

I've always been of the belief that this sort of society we are living in, is not the highest form of society that humans can achieve.

Not that his solves the issue on topic, but it gives me a sense of calm when I rather work less hours a week, get paid less, to actually do things I want to do instead of just working 9-5 because that's the norm.

It also depends on the country you live in. Workers here with minimum wage can not work more thn 35h per week. And everyone has access to 5 paid weeks of vacations per year with social healthcare, where most companies also help employees pay their complementary health insurance (well, not all of them sadly :/).

They somehow did that in the past to supposedly decrease unemployment, but it puts so much strain on companies that it's not the miracle solution either, though i'm still glad to have such conditions. Anyway, they could afford it because individual productivity was high enough (just behind the US which are among the most productive in the world), and it actually helped to bolster that productivity even higher to compensate (compared to poor or mediocre productivities like very work intensive hours like in Japan).

Eventually everything to me hints towards a progressive decrease in work hours overall. But how will society adapts to it remains a big question.

The question becomes then, how do we get to there from here. How do we cross that gulf from artificially induced scarcity to manufactured abundance? Because that's the crux of it. We have the tools to start building that world today. We have the resources and the technology,

Faith/trust. Our current economy relies on it, and for another one to prosper, enough people need to have faith in it.
A lot of people that are born into this economy almost see it like it's as much part of the world like gravity, and other economies are quite alien to them, if they've even considered there could be other ones.

The current concept of possession and abstraction of wealth are my biggest issues with our current economy.

Let us not forget that our society as it is now seems to fail to understand that money, by itself, has no value. It only has value for as long as you can use it to buy something. The value of money scales in proportion of the amount of goods available for purchase. Seriously, what the hell? Why are you hoarding all that money for its own sake?

It is not even money or capital that creates value. From what I hear the real value, which means more than 99% of the real capital flowing around is constituted of debt.

Debt generates value. Every time a debt is created, value is created. Without debts every bank would go bankrupt, thus the economy with it.

Heh lol. I am in a situation that made me think of this this morning again. Weirdly, I have a job and earn a bit above the minimum wage with a master degree (which means the minimum wage since I pay standard taxes where minimum wage people do not). So I am looking for somewhere to live, you know, because with my little salary i'm very happy to have, I am supposed to be able to afford by myself my own apartment.

But the lol thing is that even with a salary, you can't find somewhere that is cheap enough for your salary not to choke to death. What is the most ludicrous in that situation, is to earn your life with a job, and still be "homeless" (I do not live in the street lol, i'm grateful to have other alternatives...), because those fucking rents are stupidly expensive, and even if you can manage to pay them, the owners won't let you in because you don't earn 3 times the rent per month. 

Fucked up world.

It's weird like that.  Now that women are in the workplace, rents and housing prices have inflated because people are earning enough money between them.  It really leaves single people, or couples with one stay-at-home partner, out in the cold.  I make about 2300 dollars a month, which isn't anything to sneeze at.  If I lived on my own, I'd be shelling out half of that for a one-bedroom apartment and my Wrangler alone.  Not counting internet, utilities, or food, just rent and car would be about a thousand dollars a month.  God only knows how people with kids manage it.

Even when I was working at Target though and my wife and I were barely making it, I was happy to be in the U.S.  It's not the best place in the world to live, but there are a lot of places that have it way worse.  I spent almost an entire year's free time watching documentaries about failed states and underdeveloped nations.  I'm thankful every day that I didn't end up being born homeless in Haiti.  They've got it worse than anyone I know here.

From what I hear around here it's mostly a problem tied to speculation and not so much to single/couples. It's true it plays a huge role but prices are not rising so much because of the presence of working couples, but mostly due to speculation.

A law passed recently to heavily tax owners selling their estate property less than 20 years after they bought it, to precisely avoid speculation.

[Saede Riordan]

It is not even money or capital that creates value. From what I hear the real value, which means more than 99% of the real capital flowing around is constituted of debt.

Debt generates value. Every time a debt is created, value is created. Without debts every bank would go bankrupt, thus the economy with it.

Oh, its even worse then that. The economic mess we are in is really just the tip of the iceberg and it could get a whole lot worse if we don't come to a screeching halt right now and start figuring out a new way of doing things.

To do a bit of explaining, to make it clear exactly why things are much worse then they look on the surface right now, to understand all of this mess, you need to understand one term, its called a derivative. A derivative is any financial instrument which is derived from the inherent value of something else that's tangible. In other words, an ear of corn has value, a barrel of oil has value. If you have a house and a mortgage, that's fine. When you start doing mortgage backed securities, packaging and bundling, that's a derivative.

There are right now, derivatives with a notional value worth over 700 trillion dollars. In other words, if everyone cashed out at once, you would need to have 700 trillion in cash, and of course there isn't that much money.

So you had all of these hedges and derivatives and puts and calls, and in all this, all anyone cared about was making the minimum monthly payment on their credit card bill. In other words, to service the 700 trillion dollars in notional value derivatives, they had to pay a certain amount of cash every month, and God forbid they should all come due. What happened with all of these bailouts, which are now around 12.2 trillion in the US if you add them all up, is the government chasing a 700 trillion dollar derivatives bubble down the drain.

There are only three things only anybody needs to know about the way money works around the world today.

One. Fiat currency. What is money? Its not a resource, its a piece of paper. Its only a symbol, it doesn't equate to anything in the real world, it's fiat, it has no more real value then monopoly money. It's created out of thin air because somebody turned on a printing press. Before 1933 in the US, we had the gold standard. You could go into a bank and get your paper money exchanged for gold coins. In the UK, There was time when the pound sterling actually meant a pound of sterling silver. With rare metal backed currencies, there was only so much gold or silver out of the ground, it was tangible, you couldn't print gold, it was something real. You cannot print more money than there is energy to back it up. It's that simple.

Two. Fractional Reserve Banking. If I were a banker, and you were to bring me in a 10 dollar deposit, I could make 90 dollars worth of loans off of just those 10 dollars in my drawer. It's all calculated on the premise that not everybody is going to come in and want all their cash all at once. That's called a run on the bank, and its what happened at the crash of the 1930s. So, the financial masterminds of this system have calculated the odds, and said "ok, well, under normal conditions, the odds of this happening are very low." So when I lend now a total of 100 dollars based on that 10 dollar deposit, that's money that I create out of thin air. That means that, in order to pay off the loans whoever gets that money has to make more money still to feed it at the bottom to pay the bank, so that the bank can create still more money.

Three. Compound interest. In simplest terms, compound interest is money added into the principle of a loan for the servicing of the loan, giving the lender money for the opportunity cost of lending money out. So the borrower has to make more money to feed money back to the lender so they can lend out more money to make still more money. You know, in both the Bible and the Qu'ran, there are passages forbidding the taking of interest on loans. Of course, the religious right pays no attention to the passage in Leviticus saying not to collect interest while they zero in with a laser guided focus on another passage from the same section of the bible because it justifies their homophobia. Anyway, after all collapse of the credit card bubble and the housing bubble, I think I can pretty safely say that most of us know how compound interest works. The higher the interest rate on your credit card, for those people who had 20-25% cards, that means they're creating that much more money, if they don't pay cash every month.

What I have just described, is a pyramid scheme. We live in an infinite growth paradigm, which requires growth forever. It's not that Bernie Madoff was a pyramid scheme, or Stanford was a pyramid scheme, the entire economy is a pyramid scheme. The whole global economy cannot be sustained, it requires infinite growth.

The human species cannot grow forever. We do not have the resources on Earth for it and our space programs are underfunded and decades behind where they'd need to be to make the difference by going to space. We live on a finite planet with finite resources, and we're using an economic model that requires us to grow forever or the whole system collapses. The entire world is in debt to itself, there is no real money left, its all debt. If all the debts came due every country on earth would be bankrupt tomorrow. Its a very complex problem.

Iceland dealt with it the right way. They reformed their government, threw their bankers in jail, forgave their loans, and are now further into their economic recovery then anyone else. We in the US haven't forgiven the loans, haven't pursued criminal charges against any of the banks, and no one is even talking about the possibility of changing the fundamental issues with the system that led to the crisis, and is leading us towards a bigger crisis. We cannot pay off our loans, there is more debt then there is money and so the loans will never be paid. We cannot make the money we need to pay of the loans because that requires the creation of more debt in order to do. The system is broken in a very fundamental way. We're dealing with a long term structural crisis in the way we arrange our economic and financial systems. It wasn't as big of a deal when we had cheaply and easily accessed frontiers and new resources were constantly being found to tap. But we're beginning to run up against the hard limits of what our planet can provide. We don't even need to pollute the world to screw ourselves at this point. All we have to do is run out of oil or some other vital resource.

So you have finite energy and you have a financial paradigm which demands infinite growth and we're rapidly approaching the point of human history where the infinite growth paradigm collides with something that is more powerful than money is.

[Elmund Egivand]

When I was reading your essay about how the economy works, Saede, I had a hard time understanding how any of this is supposed to work. None of this made any logical sense as a properly functioning economic system. Then I read down further and I realised, that's exactly why it isn't working!

[Vic Van Meter]

When I was reading your essay about how the economy works, Saede, I had a hard time understanding how any of this is supposed to work. None of this made any logical sense as a properly functioning economic system. Then I read down further and I realised, that's exactly why it isn't working!

To be fair, it isn't the monetary system that isn't working, it's that we've evolved, as a society, to view employment, housing, food, and so on as basic human rights, which in a way they are.  Back before we decided that poverty was a societal problem, it was thought that poverty was just what you deserved for not working.

This makes it a problem because money is meant to be a standard unit of value, which isn't a problem either.  We use completely arbitrary measures for everything else, so a dollar is essentially a portion of the estimated worth of the United States.  When our debt rises, we print more money to compensate.  If you guess just right and you print exactly enough money to meet the calculated growth of your country's GDP, nothing happens.  When you print more, the same dollar is worth less because it's worth a smaller percentage.

I'd say your biggest problem is the stock market and what it represents.  The problem is that a company isn't allowed to just float in place, it has to not just make a profit, but make a continually increasing profit to pay new investors.  Otherwise, their stocks don't rise in value, they just sit their accruing their tiny bit of the profit of the company.  So if your company makes a bigger profit, but it's not big enough to meet investor expectations, you can still be in trouble.

Which is why you randomly see people laid off.  They have to make that profit and growth quota.

Unfortunately, the system does work for a specific purpose, it's just not meant to benefit the little guy.  The more money you have, the easier it is to make.  People who have a ton of money and invest it may find it impossible to ever run out.  If you don't have money, all these problems we're talking about are omnipresent.  However, once you have a lot of money, it's exceptionally easy to make more.

Unlike a lot of people, I'm not sure the system is completely non-functional or fundamentally flawed.  It's just that the switches and levers that should equalize wealth aren't being pulled, because they're operated by the more affluent in society.  If they wanted to, they could equalize the wealth gap tomorrow at the expense of stock market profits simply by removing tax loopholes, highly grading the income tax, killing the sales tax, instituting a high minimum wage, and essentially shutting down the stock market.

There's a larger debate on not just whether that's possible or if we'll even want to do that, but whether it's fair.  It does become a question of whether it's a crime to be rich and whether some people deserve to be impoverished.

I don't have the answers for that.  However, the system is incredibly flexible and can, if we need it to, work to fix the problems we have.  It's just that the people who have control of those systems don't think of it as a problem to have downward pressure on wages and employment at the bottom.

[orange]

If they wanted to, they could equalize the wealth gap tomorrow at the expense of stock market profits simply by removing tax loopholes, highly grading the income tax, killing the sales tax, instituting a high minimum wage, and essentially shutting down the stock market.

Removing tax loopholes 

Highly grading the income tax  not having the tax brackets stop at under $500k and including capital gains (maybe I misunderstood)

Killing the sales tax  While I understand it reduces the cost of items to consumers, I think there is a need for a sales tax on none essential items.  I still want someone buying a McLaren sports car to pay heavily for it.

Instituting a high minimum wage 

In a global economy, this creates all kinds of complexities.  If I am running a company based in the US and I want to manufacture an item, I have a few choices.  I can build a factory in the US that has 100 people providing the labor (at said higher minimum wage). I can build a factory in Mexico, China, or India that has 100 people providing labor (at a fraction of the labor cost of the US).  I can build an automated factory in the US and pay a maintenance team to keep it up and running (cost may vary versus the other two options).

So, unless we are imposing a not insignificant tariff on goods made in places like China or India, in order to enable an American based company to compete, then this is a hard one for me to simply back.  I think there are plenty of reasons to impose such a tariff on Chinese made products beyond providing a competitive market for US based industry, for example a lack of environmental regulation in China.

essentially shutting down the stock market    I think the stock market has an useful purpose.  However, that purpose is now a secondary to the derivatives market and constant need for growth demanded by uninterested shareholders.  Initial Public Offerings are important and useful in my opinion, as it provides a mechanism to borrow against the company to increase the company's productivity.  The problem is the need for quarter to quarter growth demanded by those who are not making investments, but rather buying and selling in the margins.  Perhaps the introduction of a law reducing the rate of sales would be beneficial for everyone outside of those who make their paychecks as day-traders.  Something like having to retain shares for 6 months to a year, making it more of an investment.


The Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy is actually about the transition from hypercapitalism to a new society.  They have events which drive the need for change beyond recognition that things are bad.  However, I think it may provide a potential model to at least look at for the future - extensive Coops that are member owned, size restricted, management is hired in vs owning the Coop.  Larger projects/products, require a Coop of Coops to get it done.

Understanding what the end-goal is, for example, an environmentally-compatible, egalitarian society, then understanding what steps can enable a transition to that society is critical.  A revolution, while likely to achieve the goals short-term, seems to fail to achieve the goal, simply replacing one oligarchy with another.   Somehow we have to transition from the 3-months (economic), 2-year (political), thought processes to achieve change.

[Vic Van Meter]

If they wanted to, they could equalize the wealth gap tomorrow at the expense of stock market profits simply by removing tax loopholes, highly grading the income tax, killing the sales tax, instituting a high minimum wage, and essentially shutting down the stock market.

Removing tax loopholes 

Highly grading the income tax  not having the tax brackets stop at under $500k and including capital gains (maybe I misunderstood)

Killing the sales tax  While I understand it reduces the cost of items to consumers, I think there is a need for a sales tax on none essential items.  I still want someone buying a McLaren sports car to pay heavily for it.

Instituting a high minimum wage 

In a global economy, this creates all kinds of complexities.  If I am running a company based in the US and I want to manufacture an item, I have a few choices.  I can build a factory in the US that has 100 people providing the labor (at said higher minimum wage). I can build a factory in Mexico, China, or India that has 100 people providing labor (at a fraction of the labor cost of the US).  I can build an automated factory in the US and pay a maintenance team to keep it up and running (cost may vary versus the other two options).

So, unless we are imposing a not insignificant tariff on goods made in places like China or India, in order to enable an American based company to compete, then this is a hard one for me to simply back.  I think there are plenty of reasons to impose such a tariff on Chinese made products beyond providing a competitive market for US based industry, for example a lack of environmental regulation in China.

essentially shutting down the stock market    I think the stock market has an useful purpose.  However, that purpose is now a secondary to the derivatives market and constant need for growth demanded by uninterested shareholders.  Initial Public Offerings are important and useful in my opinion, as it provides a mechanism to borrow against the company to increase the company's productivity.  The problem is the need for quarter to quarter growth demanded by those who are not making investments, but rather buying and selling in the margins.  Perhaps the introduction of a law reducing the rate of sales would be beneficial for everyone outside of those who make their paychecks as day-traders.  Something like having to retain shares for 6 months to a year, making it more of an investment.


The Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy is actually about the transition from hypercapitalism to a new society.  They have events which drive the need for change beyond recognition that things are bad.  However, I think it may provide a potential model to at least look at for the future - extensive Coops that are member owned, size restricted, management is hired in vs owning the Coop.  Larger projects/products, require a Coop of Coops to get it done.

Understanding what the end-goal is, for example, an environmentally-compatible, egalitarian society, then understanding what steps can enable a transition to that society is critical.  A revolution, while likely to achieve the goals short-term, seems to fail to achieve the goal, simply replacing one oligarchy with another.   Somehow we have to transition from the 3-months (economic), 2-year (political), thought processes to achieve change.

I'm just saying, the tools exist to fix the issues right now.  Just that those are switches no one wants to flip for those exact reasons.

That's actually why I kind of like the concept of the Eurozone and hope we can move in that direction.  Having a unified set of labor laws and having those laws form the basis of joined economies would be nice.  It's not going to happen anytime soon, but it would be nice if everyone had the same minimum wages, taxes, and whatnot.  I'm very post-nationalist.

I suppose you have to start at the bottom, though.  Before we fix our situation, we'd need to make sure people in Africa aren't subsisting on less than a dollar a day and with no access to any kind of education.

[orange]

Well, sometimes the most wealthiest among us put their wealth into doing amazing things.

Bill Gates Talks to TIME About the Three Myths of Global Aid

Look at the numbers. If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, most countries were very poor. India, China, Africa, everyone but the West was living on less than $2 a day per capita. But the curve is shifting and incomes are rising and now most of those countries have $5- to $10-a-day-type incomes. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s per person not per family and the key thing is purchasing power, which can be quite high on $10 per day in a country in which things cost much less. Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That’s not possible on $1 a day.

[Aldrith Shutaq]

Quick, everyone become artists! The machines won't have souls for at least another 50 years! That's just enough time to get rich and retire!

[kalaratiri]