I’m enjoying my read of “Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right about Why You Hate Your Job”, by Gavin Mueller. The point about Taylor I had heard on the “Thinking Allowed” podcast episode I mentioned in 2021-07-08 Marvelous Pursuits:
“The son of a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer, Taylor had prepared to attend Harvard and follow in his father’s footsteps into the legal profession. But his nervous disposition caused him to abandon these plans, and instead he apprenticed to a machinist, working his way up into supervisory positions on the shop floor. Taylor’s factory career did not bestow upon him any special working-class consciousness; if anything, it only sharpened his contempt for workers, whom he viewed as stupid and lazy.” – Breaking Things at Work
#Economics
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The rich don’t know how to spend all their money, so interests go down, which allows them to borrow more money, buying assets, and so the circle continues. This wealth gap is our problem.
Boomers may be richer than Gen X and Millennials on average, but only because the top 10% are skew the average. The reality is that we are not in the grips of a battle for generational supremacy – rather, we’re fighting a class war. – Inequality, not gerontocracy, by Cory Doctorow, on Pluralistic
Inequality, not gerontocracy, by Cory Doctorow, on Pluralistic
– Alex 2021-09-01 13:43 UTC
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The quoted statement is outright wrong: https://ofdollarsanddata.com/average-net-worth-by-age-and-education/
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/average-net-worth-by-age-and-education/
Median wealth (unskewed by the top 10%) clearly shows that boomers are a lot richer.
The explanation given is also totally messed up. There’s this common misconception that savings mean money out of circulation like putting it under the mattress. But the rich like Bezos don’t have billions under their mattresses. They mostly own assets like stocks or real estate. If they buy more stocks, someone gets the cash for it, as there are always two sides to a trade. Money can’t flow into stocks, it moves from buyers to sellers.
Even if they have money in the bank, it’s not out of circulation because the banks lend the money to individuals or the governments that then spend it (or buy assets).
So as long as someone does not stack dollar bills in his basement or a deposit box, they money always remains in circulation.
I think the causality for rising inequality is the other way around: Because of sinking interest rates (manipulated lower by central banks), asset values went disproportonately up which benefits the people that own most of the assets. It’s the most obvious with real estate.
Rising interest rates and some inflation would be a great equalizer in that regard, as it benefits wage earners and depresses asset prizes. It happened in the 1970s. Might be coming again soon...
– Peter 2021-09-01 19:09 UTC
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Thanks for that link!
I wonder if inflation will help. It would only help if it devalued assets, no? But how is inflation going to change the value of a piece of land, of a factory, of stocks? Their prizes will rise like everything else. Inflation only helps decrease the value of money in bank accounts, no? And even there, interests will go up.
Sadly I don’t know much about how it was in the 1970s. Perhaps there was less inequality because of higher taxes, is my suspicion.
– Alex 2021-09-01 21:41 UTC
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I think a huge part of this is access to the infrastructure and support. Our infrastructure grew and became much more sophisticated in the last 50 years, but it also became less accessible. You need more knowledge and special devices to make use of it. There are services that make your life and your business easier, but they only come with subscription, and often are invite only. To use a highway you have to own (or lend) a car. To use the Internet you need either a smartphone with a data plan, or a computer and ISP subscription. To use the services of a good lawyer you need to have a lot of money and probably be recommended by one of the other clients of that lawyer. There are all sorts of schools, courses and certificates. There is medical insurance and healthy food. All those things are forms of “pay money to get an advantage and get more money” more or less directly.
– deshipu 2021-09-01 22:00 UTC
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Nominal prices of real assets might still go up. But inflation compresses asset valuations through a rising discount rate, i.e. you need more and more money for consumption and to cover basic needs here and now.
Let’s say you have a house that generates 100k of rental income a year. In Switzerland the discount rate nowadays is around 2%, so the market value of this rental property is round 5 million (100/2*100k). Let’s say there’s 10% inflation and you can increase rents by 10% to 110k. If the market believes that 10% inflation will stay and interest rates go up to 10%, the market value of the property will drop to 1.1 million (100/10*110k).
The same basicly happens to other income streams from assets like stocks. You can see it in the linked chart below: During the inflationary 1970s, U.S. stock market value to GDP (GDP is basicly the income of the entire economy) was very low. And with falling inflation (and interest rates manipulated by central banks falling even more), the stock markets value to GDP rose as the disount rate went down.
– Peter 2021-09-03 18:58 UTC
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Thank you for that explanation. Interesting!
– Alex 2021-09-03 19:26 UTC
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Thus, the starting point of the Mowgli Suite is this: before any human is an independent being, they are a helpless baby and small child reliant on others to learn the language, skills and beliefs that enable them to navigate the world. Furthermore, all those who keep a baby alive were once babies themselves, so there is no ‘original’ self-reliant individual. There are only people kept alive by social networks, which always *precede* individuals. – Money through the eyes of Mowgli, by Brett Scott
Money through the eyes of Mowgli, by Brett Scott
– Alex 2021-09-16 06:56 UTC
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On Mastodon, I recently wanted to summarize what I felt was relevant about the Luddites for us today and quoted the following:
Breaking Things at Work is an innovative rethinking of labour and machines, leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially threatened knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance-evading truckers driving across the continental United States. Mueller argues that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their spread wherever possible. – Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job, by Gavin Mueller, from the book’s blurb
As for the technology Mueller is talking about:
What they have perfected are technologies of domination, surveillance, and atomization, keeping workers isolated, monitored, and tethered to the inhumane rhythms of a machinic edifice. Always low prices depend on always low wages. High-tech capitalism … has selectively deployed automation and other technologies precisely in order to intensify exploitation. – Emergency Breaks — Real Life, a review of the book by Erik Baker
Emergency Breaks — Real Life, a review of the book by Erik Baker
Sadly, I still haven’t finished the book. My current understanding is that Mueller is arguing against people who think that technology will “save” us because it has always been used and will inevitable be used to exploit people. There is no divorcing of technology and capitalism. This is, fundamentally, why the Keynesian vision of the 15 hour week still hasn’t arrived: when the factory work is made more efficient, it’s not that the workers get to work 20h instead of 40h. Instead, half of them get fired, the rest work just as hard as before, and the owner pockets the gains. More or less.
Keynes was drawing on a long tradition but offering a new twist. The idea of a utopian golden age in which abundance replaces scarcity and the world is no longer ruled by money has always been with us. What was new in Keynes was the idea that technological progress might make utopia a reality rather than merely a vision. – The golden age, by John Quiggin, for Aeon
The golden age, by John Quiggin, for Aeon
@Sandra says she thinks universal basic income (UBI) can provide for this.
I want to be very careful that we don’t drop our eye from the ball which is to end exploitation and create a fair and, above all else, lazy world. – Breaking Things at Work, her reply on Idiomdrottning
Breaking Things at Work, her reply on Idiomdrottning
Yes indeed! I’m just not as optimistic about the promise of tech to deliver this to us. I understand the benefit of dentistry and medical care, for sure. But perhaps humans can be extremely lazy without tech, too. I’m not entirely sure that we need to be for or against tech, as long as we realize that capitalism is going to use tech against us. I guess I’d be arguing to using tech in playful, small-scale ways, and to be sceptical about using tech in capitalist production. To end exploitation, we need to reform the current economic system and we still don’t know how to do that…
Marshall Sahlins, author of Stone Age Economics, discovered that before Western influence changed daily life, Kung men, who live in the Kalahari, hunted from two to two and a half days a week, with an average workweek of fifteen hours. – Humans once worked just 3 hours a day. Now we’re always working, but why? A review of Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, for Big Think
Anyway, I think it’s a difficult topic, but one worth thinking about. How useful is technology, in theory, and in praxis, and what tech exactly are we talking about?
– Alex 2021-09-16 12:45