- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Supply must be reduced, and you either do that by reducing the workforce by 20 % or you reduce the working hours of the workforce by 20 %. Those are the alternatives here.
And I hardly think you want your management to work 20 % less during the crisis of the century. That they are often grossly overpaid is another issue.
And the quity holders not taking a haircut? Have you by any chance noticed how share prices have developed since the crisis began? Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
The justification, in the capitalist system, for downturns is precisely that it forces overpaid and underproductive parts of the political economy - and these days, the most obviously underproductive and overpaid part of the political economy is the management class - to take a haircut. If this haircut fails to materialise, then capitalism isn't working as advertised.
