... the interaction of increased productivity with aggregate demand that does not seem to be keeping pace.
Aggregate demand is not keeping up with increased productivity because the majority of the world's population don't make enough money to eat 3 square meals a day much less purchase consumer goods. When all a person's salary is going to food and rent there isn't anything left over for that snazzy puce and mauve digitally controlled FingerPlucking Nose Hair Removal System™ (with the KungFu© grip!)
In the First World, the trans-nats have gone about their merry business destroying local economies and now they're wondering where all the local consumers went that used to purchase their goods.
A regular practice of mine, back when I had a subscription to the Economist, was to check the Productivity Increase Chart in the back pages against the Wage statistics. The only country that regularly matched Productivity Increase and Wage Rate Increase was Sweden. The US regularly had increasing Productivity and decreasing Wages. The other countries listed fell somewhere in the middle.
It doesn't matter when n workers go from making a to 2_a_ number of goods if the price of those goods means there is only a amount of goods that can be sold because nobody else can afford them. A doo run-run-run, a doo run-run
Melo's comment on ceebs' blog leaps to mind. The discussion being about the impact of bio-fuel on food and energy costs combined:
"car eats our food, we can't eat oil.
car wins, game over"
Ideally, if someone could get this line to some of the writers on Saturday Night Live, and should the straight man give it a proper set-up, it could be devastating.
If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.
The Emperor Has No Growth
the opportunities for constructive satire kinda jump off the screen with this one...
what we need are great graphics. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
not always in the mood, but your idea would make a great cartoon.
i was thinking more along the lines of deconstructing the viagrafication of masculinity. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
deconstructing the viagrafication of masculinity.
Laudable goal that! However I fear it would require the purchase of time for public, (pubic?), service announcements. My solution would be to place a 100% tax on all drug advertisements. 25% would go to such counter Pharma advertisments. The remainder would go to Medicade. I don't know how it works over there. Is prime time commercial TV viagrafied? How about running counter adds, how poorly the stuff works, featuring a computer generated "sprite" of Berlusconi? Two birds with one stone? Make that a kidney stone please. Such an ad would be the political equivalent of a kidney stone for good ole' S.B. (Has he got his initials backwards?) If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.
wot's next, thunk i, another one to help remind you to take that one?
who said perpetual motion was impossible?
something else that may amuse you: here in yurp rupert murdoch has kindly provided us with access to the much lauded fox news (we distort, you deride) channel.
it is wonderful enough to see the ollie north show, hannity, and o'reilly, but in the c.5 minutes per 15 devoted to commercials in the usa, we used to get a world weather loop, now we get little nuggets, a ridiculously large proporton of which are about: (sit down before reading further)
natural remedies, solar energy, all kinds of green stories, herbal lore.
go figure...
to imagine the kind of mind that could sit through fox programming interspersed with pharma ads....
can't. go. there.
steven king time The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
if i was living stateside, i wouldn't need to watch fox, it'd be happening right outside the window!
but i would read the economist, not because i think their mission is noble, but because they write the densest coverage.
dense both ways!
frothy fox or turgid economist, pretty much the same agenda... The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
After four decades of working for change on the macro-scale, and failing miserably, I've decided to concentrate on my family, friends, and community. That's where I can be effective. A doo run-run-run, a doo run-run
you are the media you consume.
... which can either be intermediated into newly created financial assets or can be used to bid for existing financial assets.
Creating a new financial asset needs somebody accept a new financial liability.
... and so with a growing share of income diverted away from the income recipients who will reliably spend it on consumption, the difference was made up by creating new wealth assets in the form of extending additional credit to wage earners.
And that is quite obviously sooner or later going to be Ponzi finance, since those entering into the liability side are not receiving the income gains to permit steady-state service of those financial obligations.
Of course, it was the same -onomics when it was Clintonomics before that and Bushonomics before that and Reaganomics before that, but it was under the current Resident that the final target was achieved of, on average, capturing all productivity gains as profit gains. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
This is, of course, the Achilles Heel of Bushonomics, which is to capture all productivity gains as profits, on average, rather than dividing them between profits and wages ...... Of course, it was the same -onomics when it was Clintonomics before that and Bushonomics before that and Reaganomics before that, but it was under the current Resident that the final target was achieved of, on average, capturing all productivity gains as profit gains.
Of course, it was the same -onomics when it was Clintonomics before that and Bushonomics before that and Reaganomics before that, but it was under the current Resident that the final target was achieved of, on average, capturing all productivity gains as profit gains.
Sad but true. Even sadder is that I cannot recall any coverage that actually analyzed that fact, either on TV, including PBS, or in print media that I have followed over that entire time span. All I recall is coverage of the fact that wages have stopped increasing and income distribution has become more skewed.
Our media seems effectively inhibited from "connecting the dots." Even now. Anyone who did effectively connect the dots in the media would certainly be attacked by the RW as "engaging in class warfare." If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.
"The Great U-Turn" was an earlier work that looked at the transition out of the Fordist era into the third era of globalisation (though I am not sure it was widely known as the third era of globalisation at the time that The Great U-Turn was written). Utsukushikereba sore de ii
In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning - New York Times
"There's class warfare, all right," Mr. Buffett said, "but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn't use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. "How can this be fair?" he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. "How can this be right?"Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare."There's class warfare, all right," Mr. Buffett said, "but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn't use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. "How can this be fair?" he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. "How can this be right?"
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
By "well-known", I meant among ETers, since it has been cited here, in this op-ed particularly:
European Tribune - France is not in decline and the last thing it needs is 'reform'
Warren Buffett said that what the wealthy in the US are carrying out - and winning - is class struggle.
Known to the general public, though, I doubt it. When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
Further, the focus during the period of railroadification of the US seems to have been on converting small local monopoly profits in small local markets into national monopoly profits ... and so much of the leverage to increase per unit monopoly rents was on the side of reducing costs through scale economies. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
compared to what and when? The US had some of the highest wages in the world at the turn of the century.
I would expect that skilled workers in "high tech" areas such as electrical generation and distribution, telephone distribution and maintenance, etc. paid well above subsistence levels. The lower end of the labor spectrum was fertile ground for the muck-rakers and for social activists such as Jacob Riis, and Margaret Sanger.
The infamous shirt factory fire in which large numbers of women perished because the doors were locked and the windows barred, Riis's photographs and more was used by the Progressive Republicans, with whom Theodore Roosevelt aligned himself, to pass a series of reforms, including the creation of the FDA and legal actions against the Trusts, resulting in the breakup of Standard Oil, etc. If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.
