If you don't live up in any respect, they're happy to let the next batch of trainees have your job. In fact, they prefer it; those with 5+ years of experience have the most to fear, as they acquire raises and cushier benefits over time, and so are often fired for the same infraction that gets a newbie a write-up.
I suppose that call centers are preferable to warehouses, in that there is little risk of injury, and there are more opportunities to move up or transfer careers. Still, this is one of the human costs of corporate capitalism in general: if you don't have rare or specialized skills, you have no negotiating power, and have to take whatever you can get. And don't even think about uttering the word "union".
But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country.
Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers have jobs than not. It is horribly oppressive for a software engineer to imagine a job where you have to come in on time, but now remember your frustration at closed stores or unavailable phone support/customer service. For stores to be open at normal hours, for people to pick up the phone, for emergency rooms to be open when you need them, somebody has to care about punctuality.
I don't think that's the issue. Whould the cost lowering productivity or making for better social conditions be so high for companies that already make so much profit? And if yes does it have to come from public pressure or enacted laws? Can't a company establish acceptable social practices by itself.
I don't care if my stuff comes in a day later if it can ease up the horror of people working there. There is something to be done in connecting people using the service with the ones making it possible and at what cost. This is just nuts
Actually no. In anything, the socialist states were infamous for people not-working-that-much. The Kronstadt Rebellion and Solidarity had nothing to do with "refusing to work", and all to do with fighting the state power for more freedom.
That said, it's not either corporate capitalism (as described in the article) or USSR. There are plenty of options in between, starting with respect for workers as human beings, and regulations that ensure that treating people as mere cogs is not an option to gain a competitive advantage with. Kind of like we abolished slavery -- we can also abolish unpaid overtime and treating employees like shit. Take a look at Europe. And, no, the reason US has a slightly more advanced economy than, say, Sweden, is not due to harsh working conditions. It's has more to do with human capital, a large unified market PLUS tons of military might abused to ensure cheap oil and resources.
Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers have jobs than not.
Having a job at those conditions or not is not the only two options --we only make them to be. It's like you're saying "it's better than 4000 slaves have an owner to feed them than not".
It is horribly oppressive for a software engineer to imagine a job where you have to come in on time, but now remember your frustration at closed stores or unavailable phone support/customer service.
Yes, people have been taught to behave like spoiled children, and expect others to work for them 24/7. To the detriment of their own working conditions, because you are a consumer for a few hours at most, but you are an employee most of your day.
They offered us shifts in the warehouse when we didn't need 100% utilization on the phones. I never took them up on that, despite that juicy extra quarter an hour.
The absolute worst ones are the out-sourced centers that handle in-bound calls for multiple other companies. Because they have no stake in the long-term outcome and are paid solely by their numbers (cost per call), they have little incentive to train their staff well, pay well, follow through with customers, etc. Working for Comcast and AT&T directly was degrading and Dilbertesque, but they weren't as bad as the outsourced centers or the warehouse environs described in the article.
It took me a while to realize that my work is making other people obsolete and replaceable, but I guess so does a big portion of software and technology in general. But it was surprisingly refreshing to switch off your brain for a few hours and do whatever the scanner tells you to do. Though of course I didn't have any pressure to do more than 1,000 picks a day, that is insane!
This was in Germany though, so the unions and worker's council made sure that the working conditions were more humane than described in the article.
In this case, the people in the warehouse were unable to carry metal in because the delay at the metal detectors would mean they got no break time. The nub of pencil would be ideal.
Oh and I don't just mean the right wing, fun fact, Hillary Clinton was a bigtime lawyer for walmart to help them prevent unions. Walmart even has a swat-like team to respond to possible union formations.
About 12 years ago I was working in a warehouse at -25 C slogging sides of beef at 25 to 50 Kg for at least 10 hours, my record shift was 26 hours. The pay was even less, $10/hr. It had to be -25 in the freezer because there was ice cream in there too and if it didn't leave at -25 it would melt by the time it got to the destination.
The only odd thing about the job was the look I got like I was crazy when I left to work tech support in the city for a dollar an hour less.
This to me actually sounds illegal. I've worked in other industries where significant hoops were jumped through to make it possible to call workers contractors. If I recall one test often used is whether the worker is on a set schedule, which the situation described would utterly fail.
IANAL
Likewise, the meatpacking industry is infamous for its brutal working conditions and low wages. It has bred many low income, working poor communities plighted by gangs, crime, and despair. The solution to righting the industry and its communities is obvious- pay employees real, middle class wages. But the industry has been fighting a race to the bottom, as the wholesalers of meat products will obviously pick the meatpacking company that can sell at the lowest cost. Because better wages would only increase the price supermarkets pay for meat by several cents per pound, one meatpacking company CEO has openly called for imposing higher wage levels across the entire industry (easier than done). The introduction of higher wages would boost local economies and in aggregate that contributes to the nation's prosperity.
The industries are examples of capitalism at its most efficient and of capitalism utterly failing society as well.
I don't know if the industry as a whole has changed, or if the place the author worked is far on the bad end of the spectrum.
"Competition isn't always an impetus to improve. Sometimes it's just impetus to fuck harder."
http://www.amazon.com/21-Dog-Years-Doing-Amazon-com/dp/07432....
That's right; it's an Amazon link. Ironic, I know.
> He looked at me for a long time, "A computer is telling you what to do on the job? What does the manager do?"
> "The computer is the manager. Manna, manager, get it?"
> "You mean that a computer is telling you what to do all day?", he asked.
> "Yeah."
This has always been the nature of these kinds of businesses, and until robots and technology take those jobs away completely (which opens up a whole other can of worms), it will just keep happening
There's no need for this kind of brutal efficiency. It is detrimental to our society and our economy. Workers who develop crippling health conditions and can never afford to retire are a massive burden on our systems of welfare.
However, for those that do, I'm not sure "self-righteous" is the right term. I think the word you were looking for was "non-hypocritical".
Anyway, I think this just shows that the checkout counter isn't the right place for us to exert our ethical standards. When no one's really watching, and the pain is significant, we're weak, atomized individuals. We even know that our individual purchasing decisions mean zero to giant economic forces. So it's rational to just go for the lower price. All progress with labor standards have come about in other ways - journalism, legislation, and unionization.
[1] http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~hiscox/Depelsmacker.pdf
Sadly, customers often act the same way as economists on this issue.
EDIT: Punctuation
In this case, it doesn't seem unreasonable. The pay rate and overtime they get means they make around $40,000 a year. In rural America with no skills other than the ability to walk and use a barcode scanner, that's not bad money. I'm all in favor of educating people so they can work 8 hour days behind a desk, but the reality is that that won't work for everyone. So having jobs available that let people good at manual labor have a decent life doesn't seem that horrible to me. I may be wrong, though.
Great quote there. That's really a key to being happy in any job. Her description of this job doesn't sound all that bad you get exercise and paid above minimum wage plus overtime.
It cant happen and wont happen, but this downward spiral of competing to the floor can only be stopped if the entire world sets minimum standards of employment. Even them places like the US and EU will need to revise down, while the likes of India and China will have to revise up!!!
Best bit, is we all cause this, no, we demand it when we are purchasing. Free shipping, lowest price for highest quality, etc.
Are "we" willing to pay more to get less, so that people don't get exploited? Nope...
Unions in the US also have government restrictions on what they can do. As one example, the Taft–Hartley Act prohibits a number of union actions, restricts First Amendment rights (eg, union offers must sign non-communist affidavits), and expressly allows a company to fire supervisors which support union rights.
The title of this essay uses "Wage Slave." The point is that "maximizing value" is not necessarily aligned with human rights. Is it your view that those two principles never be out of alignment, and if not, what happens in that case?
They didn't outsource to a temp agency, instead they had their own HR department. The starting pay was far above average for similar jobs with other companies and they readjusted for cost of living increases every few years, and the employee discount was wicked.
It's interesting to read about perspectives from employees of other warehouses, it sounds like I had it good.
Yes?
Then you weren't a slave.
I have been selling for the past 5+ years. They put a review on my account and when I called them to find out some more information about it, I was met with a call center rep in India who gave me absolutely no help.
They don't actually have call support for marketplace sellers. You have to email them. When you do, you get mostly automated responses.
After this ordeal, I finally left them for good. I still can't believe people are giving Amazon this much money (most categories are between 8-16% commission) to sell their goods (plus $40/month if you have a pro-account).
It's a slap in the face when you can't even talk to someone when you have any sort of account issue. On top of this, Amazon doesn't even abide by the same harsh rules they expect all of their 3rd-party sellers to follow.
If, at some point in the future, so many tasks get automated so quickly that there aren't enough jobs for the majority of this planet's featherless bipeds, we might finally get a chance to rethink the age-old rule that a person must work in order to survive. Work might become something that you only do because you like it, or because you want a higher income than whatever the default is. I only hope that outdated ideologies won't get in the way of such a paradigm shift.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
Still, this article disturbs me and I will be making more effort to shop locally (I am lucky to live in a massive city however, where I have access to most things a short metro ride away).
WAG, but I'd wager that each of those machines would cost $500k.
That means 100 million in immediate outlays. WAG 2: fuel/electricity/maintenance is $200/month, and you need a team of 20 engineers to watch over them at $10k/engineer/month. So recurring costs come to $400k.
Which brings us to: 100M/1.3M = 77 months, or between 6 and 7 years.
That, however, doesn't take into account the opportunity cost of the initial $100,000,000 outlay. That brings it up to around a decade.
So, a decade to break even.
What you do do is arrange inventory based on sales, size, and packaging. Looking to minimize the travel of each picker and reduce the chance of injury. You also install conveyors and similar to make moving inventory around simpler.
The "competitiveness of a company on the global market" isn't the be-all, end-all. The phrase itself belies your point: if we as a society wanted to, we could place tariffs equivalent to the cost of providing a humane workplace for packaging workers, while also requiring our own companies to do so. This would eliminate the competitive edge issue, while also allowing other countries to engage in free trade with us if they pass laws protecting their own laborers from workspace exploitation.
We simply choose not to, for certain values of we (read: members of the finance capital rentier class that dominates American political discourse).
Which is not to say that all unions are well-behaved. My time as a Teamster was both instructive and discouraging. They had secured a lot of provisions that I don't think should have been allowed to stand. For one, joining the union was a condition of employment. If that requirement didn't violate the principle of free labor markets, it at least cut close to the line. And they eradicated all traces of meritocracy; the only thing that could ever be rewarded was seniority. That was deeply discouraging for a new employee, and from the company's perspective it ensured that the highest-paid employees were also the least productive, by virtue of having spent the most time observing that hard work would never be met with any reward aside from itself.
However, we should not throw the baby out with the bath-water. Unions should be allowed to exist; history is rife with practical examples what happens if you don't do so.
And frankly, the potential problems posed by unions can naturally be addressed by the free market itself, if only we'd let it. If a company's compensation structure becomes unsustainable due to more efficient competition from another company, then it is absolutely OK to simply let its more efficient competitors out-compete it. That remains the case regardless of the cause of the unsustainable compensation structure.
Those people are subsidizing your low prices by taking 800mg of advil a day to be able to get a paycheck and deferring the health disaster they will have in a few years without insurance.
If you do not have unions or government regulation, big business sets the rules and you end up with that story and in the bigger picture, the criminal health care system that plagues this nation.
I find it absurd that the answer for the USA is to pull us down to the lowest level of workforce conditions elsewhere in the world to remain "competitive". The only people who win in a race to the bottom are the ones on top enjoying their 2nd vacation home purchase while everyone else working for them rents.
It might be that historically the diversity of the US is partly responsible; where there is wide social and cultural variation among both employers and employees then the establishment of a consensus about what working conditions are fair and reasonable becomes more difficult. If you've grown up and started your career in an atmosphere of tough working conditions and demanding expectations, then as an employer you're going to have similar expectations of the people you hire. To someone who has grown up in a more collaborative or cooperative situation designed to insulate colleagues from external pressures, the demanding productivity goals of the former context may seem irrational or oppressive. Perhaps there is some correlation with the variety of household income situation experienced growing up - marginal (waged) or fixed (salaried) economic inputs are likely to influence perceptions of appropriate output.
The issue with unions, as most people in America view them, is that they became to powerful themselves. This allowed them to make demands that would ultimately lead to their organizations becoming hamstrung and unable to rapidly adjust. Hence business look at them as the plague.
The issue as I see it is that business, labor, and consumers need to understand the concept of "moderation". Consumers do not need an abundance of cheap crap. Businesses shouldn't focus solely on short term profits. Unions should seek to protect their workers and not pry as much money as they possibly can out of their employer.
I still live in a 'union town' (Boston) so perhaps it is different elsewhere, but they certainly push their influence well beyond the scope of worker rights in this city.
It being discovered that you didn't vote on the union line or otherwise 'play ball' with their political or public stance will get you booted from the union. Which in some trades around here makes you unemployable unless you relocate. In other words, they use scare tactics to push their agenda.
Unions had a time and place. There were absolutely deplorable conditions of work in the US for a period of time and unions were a proper solution. Today they just lay the basis for overly cushy jobs and political corruption.
The threat of unionization, combined with PR issues with customers learning about how workers are treated, will probably cause companies to fix these issues pretty soon.
Corporations are the way that contracts can exist between parties without relying on the location or livelihood of individuals. Corporations are the reason you can sue, 40 years after the fact, the organization that polluted the river that brought about your colon cancer.
The Taft-Hartley Act was fucking retarded, but that isn't anymore reason to create further law against corporations (besides banks, since the fractional reserve system is moronic and introduces huge risks into the system.
I wasn't directing my comment at the article I was answer the person's question: Why are there negative sentiments against unions. The reason is that many of us have dealt with them at one point or another and they artificially aided by government law. All of them.
Most CEOs are not.
This is preposterous. The "downward spiral" as you call it is already slowing, as can readily be seen by many US companies "reshoring" jobs now that China's labor costs have risen so dramatically.
India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, etc., are all following suit because as demand for labor in those places increases, so does the price of that labor. No government intervention necessary.
I doubt anyone would be surprised if Amazon is investing in such technology.
The value of domestic manual labor simply isn't that high anymore except in hard-to-outsource cases, and unless we change our society to involve more wealth redistribution, those who can only perform manual labor will not enjoy a similar standard of living to those with greater leverage.
Canada, is another story we really need to keep them happy: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c1220.html
We export half as much stuff to China: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html
And Ethiopia is next to nothing: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c7740.html
You'd find their backwards, less competitive economy to your liking.
I'm a red-blooded American, so I prefer as few regulations as necessary. But maybe -- just maybe -- we can copy a few of the things that those wacky krauts are doing.
I wouldn't be surprised if that led to a less antagonistic labor/management relationship.
They pushed for paid holidays, medical leave, safety, etc.
In the european country where I live, unions made all of this possible until the 1970s. Since then, unionization got less and less prevalent and now that the economy is gloomy at best, corporations are lobbying hard to relax worker protections. Unions are nowhere to be seen and workers are left alone to suffer.
Unless you can make something generalized enough to do _other_ (profitable for the rental robot owners) tasks outside the BlackFriday/Xmas shopping season, you've still got the same problem (though more power to you if you can make that problem become the robot rental industry's problem instead of yours…)
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110614005178/en/Kiva...
> "Sounds like an opportunity for a standardized, flexible industrial robot platform geared towards rentals."
This would work if different businesses have significantly different seasonalities - but on the aggregate in North America this is not true. Amazon gets the same Xmas rush as Wal-Mart, along with Target, Macy's, and whatnot. The number of businesses whose rush season is out of sync with Xmas is quite low. In fact, on the whole, retail basically rises and falls all at once throughout the year.
> "Why not go one step further and have elastic fulfillment centers?"
AFAIK Amazon already does this :) Look up "Fulfillment by Amazon".
So they do! It looks really expensive, though. Like more than $2 for a t-shirt. I wonder how that compares to doing it yourself at scale.
with the obvious suggestion here that Amazon might be best-poised to get into this
You mean if they had to pay some sort of compensation for work related injuries? Too bad only 50 US states have workers comp laws.
No, it's illegal for corporations to collectively bargain to set workers wages. On the flip side, if employees unionize, it's illegal for the employer to refuse to do business with them.
The management within a company (considered as a class, rather than as a singular entity "the company") does indeed bargain collectively with the workers of that company. That doesn't imply they collude with the management of other companies.
I'm not sure what the consequences of that are, exactly. It does mean that it's very hard to get teams within the same company to bid on you, because they will collude to avoid that.
So I think you missed his point. I'm not sure that changes the truth of your main point, which is that the government supports employee unions and discourages corporate ones.
Though the illegality of corporations bargaining collectively doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and the illegality of suppressing unions doesn't mean that doesn't happen either. And it's pretty clear who has more leverage in the labor market: corporations. Replacing a worker is annoying but the corporation can usually afford to do without for a few months, whereas losing your job for even a short while can be devastating.
This effect leads to an effective monopsony situation for most employers.
But I've digressed from my main point, which is that while you're correct, I think what he actually said is much more interesting than the boringly wrong point you replied to. What effect DOES it have that the management of a company is united, and the workers generally divided without a union?
If that's what he meant, I have no dispute. But, like you say, I can't see how that matters.
And it's pretty clear who has more leverage in the labor market: corporations. Replacing a worker is annoying but the corporation can usually afford to do without for a few months, whereas losing your job for even a short while can be devastating.
I don't think this is clear. Losing your job for a while can be devastating if you haven't planned for it, but the same is true of an unprepared company losing a valuable employee. Some empirics are necessary.
Also, it's only an effective monopsony if workers are incapable of searching for other work while they are employed.
edit
Bam. Average $5,000,000 an install. http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/18/founder-stories-mick-mountz...
or less than three months labor costs, given my poor estimate. (granted this install might be orders of magnitude larger)
you think the same thing when you see an Oracle instance that cost tens of millions and think you could have done it with postgres. what these retailers are really paying for is reliability, redundancy and support - having a big brand co. to call when something goes wrong.
that isn't to say that there isn't a mysql/pgsql style opportunity within warehouse automation and supply chain management - it is just that it isn't likely that Wal-Mart and Amazon would be your customer. Similar development and deployment cycle as with mainframes and servers - what was once the territory of only large companies and governments is now an accessible technology and competitive advantage amongst small and medium businesses as well
The most interesting aspect of supply chain management to me is the concept of a completely outsourced warehouse - where it is cheaper to have a specialized company manage and run your inventory and supply chain as part of their larger infrastructure (and economies of scale etc.) rather than building your own warehouses and system. Amazon became very very good in this field because an outsource style solution didn't exist at the time and they had no choice other than to do it themselves, but you could imagine that an Amazon being started today would not have its own warehouses and would not be writing long letters to shareholders trying to justify hundreds of millions in capital expenses in order to automate warehouses and bring down margins.
Amazon and Diapers could automate end-to-end because they had fixed product sizes and packaging. A lot of other retailers like Wal-Mart are attempting to paletize their goods for this reason. It is very expensive to completely automate end-to-end with retailers who have a broad inventory (which is why the vertical online retailers such as Diapers and Zappos did so well, they could lower margins with an easier to manage supply chain).
I used to follow Amazon stock and filings. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on automation in their initial warehouses. They spent so much on the servers that run software controllers that the RedHat stock got a big bump when it was announced that they were the partner implementing it (Amazon made up a double-digit percentage of RedHat revenue).
I remember headlines of Amazon investing ~$100M into updating single warehouses. A lot of time was spent analyzing the outlay and returns - it was definitely a long-term investment rather than something you can immediately identify as being more cost-effective in the short term.
So if you have varying inventory and demand cycles it is less cost-effective to automate supply chain. There is also the part where you need to integrate with backend systems - SAP, Oracle, Sage, etc. which again involves consulting time and multi-million dollar projects.
From this story, it sounds like this warehouse as a very broad inventory. For eg. one bin contains batteries mixed with DVD's etc. which isn't suitable for robotic system since all they do is grab the basket, knowing what is inside it, and bring it to the packaging conveyor. It sounds like they already do this for the most popular products, and it is the rarer products where having a dedicated area for its stock just isn't feasible. This is also why Wal-Mart went straight into investing billions into RFID rather than the barcode scanning model used by Kiva.
IIRC, just the automation robot hardware market alone is ~$3B p.a, and online commerce with goods is ~$30B p.a, so already 10% of revenue is being invested back into hardware alone, which gives you an idea of costs and limitations. It may be a market that is ripe for disruption, since the deployment model seems to be similar to how large backend enterprise systems are implemented with Oracle, IBM etc. there doesn't seem to be any solution at the low to medium end of the market, although that is part of Kiva's pitch as well (they have standardized robot and bucket sizes).
The whole area is really interesting, I have tons of bookmarks on another laptop if you want me to send them to you. I looked into it some years ago as part of just analyzing tech companies and their margins (my main takeaway was narrower inventory, vertical market = better margins and better automation, and that it gets very expensive for broader inventories). To find more, a good starting point is the companies that sell the hardware and implement the systems such as Kiva: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva_Systems. They must have a good PR department because their customers and implementations have been written about a lot in Wired, the WSJ, NYTimes etc. as the future of warehouse automation, for eg.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_ai_essay_airevoluti...
This post is almost content free and to the extent it has content, it's somewhat inaccurate. Unions are just one part of why globalization saves costs. Worse, it's an inaccuracy committed for the sake of injecting politics.
Its just that those other comments are infused with politics which match the dominant frame of thought on HN.
The OP may not have had the subtlety as other posters, that doesn't mean that there isn't value to be taken from his point, which can be discussed further:
--------------
China is eating jobs because it can afford to undercut labor prices around the world. That is their competitive advantage, and it makes their country better and stronger for it.
While their work conditions degrade human beings but that IS better than what was there before.
Countries like India lose jobs to China, because their workforce is better and the final products cheaper. American jobs at the bottom of the pyramid are at risk because they competition at that level is fierce.
How would you employ people at the bottom of the pyramid, who don't have the jobs/education/ or ability to get into tech, while giving them decent working conditions and the chance to go up the ladder?
I can't say much without violating some NDA or another, but I'd check that assumption. Industrial robotics are anything but cheap, and remember, you're stacking them up against near-minimum wage laborers who have little to no benefits and you only pay for them when they're utilized.
At least on farms/agriculture, we get a chance to be outside with nature, and stay healthy/fit (even though it is much harder work). What have we got to show for modern day cubicles? :(
At one time (just 20 years ago), your statement would have been fairly accurate. People still walked beans to get weeds, baled square bales of hay and straw (on hot summer afternoons, with indoor barn temps reaching 110+), manhandled livestock, and had to do a lot more manually with equipment.
Those days are fading, though.
The present and future of crop farming are GMO crops (with spray resistance traits, or plants producing their own pesticides/herbicides) and (near future) UAV-style robotics for tractors and combines operated from the house (or corporate HQ).
Livestock farming does remain more hands-on. However, a lot of confinement ops are automated to ensure proper and timely weight gain and less stress. And before people start complaining about confinements, many of those are popping up due to regulatory requirements based upon head count.
Times they are a changin'.
i m a stern believer that people has to produce value. And until a person can produce value merely by living, people will have to work to survive. Value right now is measured by money, and money has a limited capability in measuring things that are very subjective (how do you measure the value a nice person brings to a community?).
But i dont believe there ever will be a day when a person can live without outputting an iota of value as measured by the standards of the day. At least, not until we have a source of free, and unlimitd energy.
1) Will there ever come a day when people can produce value merely by living? That really depends on what "value" is, and as you said, the standards of the day may differ from ours. Under some circumstances, merely being a consumer might be enough to contribute to some overall good. If energy becomes cheap enough, even a tiny benefit might be enough to offset a person's energy consumption.
2) Should we let a human being's survival be taken hostage to whether or not he or she produces what other people perceive as value, provided that there is leftover capacity to give them a free ride? This is more of a moral question, and your answer may vary according to your ideological commitments.
2) The real question is, whether the left over capacity could be put to better use, instead of keeping alive those not pulling their weight (when they could've). Would science and tech be that much more advanced because there'd be money to put into research and development? Would infrastructure be better because money isn't "wasted" on people who otherwise make no contributions? Sure, morally, you gotta help those in need. But a line ought to be drawn - people who could otherwise have worked, shouldn't be given free handouts just because the enocomy of the country _could support them_.
Millions of people are already doing just that, and have been for decades, with the assistance of various government programs.
Is there a point where we can safely assume that everyone that has work is glad about it to a point where they won't need more than what the government provides for free?
People talk here about people pulling their weight, but from all of my customers the only people won't be so easily replaced are the creative designers, songwriters, etc.
The rest, law firms, translation specialists, server admins, myself(web developer)... are in jobs that i imagine to have atleast digital competition if not completly replaced in the next 100 years.
So what do we do when suddenly the majority is out of work? There will be a point when creating major patentlawsuits won't keep lawyers busy anymore, where feeding everyone won't keep farmers and production workers busy...
What does pulling your own weight mean, if all the necessary jobs for keeping society running are gone or done by robots? Not everyone can be a waiter for people that are into restaurants with human waiters. Not everyone can be a cutting edge scientist.
My best prediction is that we'll become a very inward faced society, taking care of each others emotional needs will be our main task in such a future. To say it simple, you'll finally visit your parents more often as you've promised.
The 60% of the people that derive income from gov't handouts are leeching off those who do actually work - tell me how that is fair? Disabled people/old people are dependants, but they not a majority, and as for children, they _will_ create value when they grow up. I m talking about abled bodied people who choose to get a gov't handout instead of doing work to sustain their own life. The world would be better off if those people weren't given handouts.
Russia: huge human capital. Check. Large unified market. Check. Tons of Military Might abused to ensure cheap access to ressources. Check. Oh wait, I can do the same thing for China, too.
Of course those are NOT the only factors to predict how rich people are going to be. The economic system is the only KEY differenciator to build an economy. That should have been obvious by now, after we had so many great examples in the 20th century. Let's not spread the old false myths around.
Are you kidding? Socio-cultural values, religious beliefs, natural resources, foreign policy, domestic policy, monetary systems, infrastructure, none of these things matter at all?
Your inferences from history might have value if we had a reliable World Simulator, where we could change and control variables at will and observe the results. But we don't; extrapolating any kind of simple narrative from history pretty much guarantees you're at least partially wrong. Reality is complex, and is under no obligation to work in ways that make intuitive sense to us talking monkeys.
Religious beliefs. Huh ? Japan, China, same as previous point. Totally different from Europe or US. But otherwise pretty successful countries. Where's the correlation between economy and religion?
Natural resources. Japan has no access to natural resources on their land. Singapore has no resources. Luxemburg has no resources. Switzerland has no resources. Holland has no resources. Funny how all those countries have rather healthy economies.
Foreign policy Agree on that one. But policies which do not support free exchange of goods tend to do rather badly. Cuba, anyone?
Domestic policy Domestic policy in China and in the US are totally different - you will find very few common points there. That does not seem to impact significantly their economic success, at least on the short term.
Monetary systems You have a point there, but since all countries have abandoned the Gold standard for long, basically we are all on fiat currency currently, no matter in which part of the world you live in. Money is now paper everywhere, it's hardly a differentiator.
Infrastructure Infrastructure usually derived from an economic system. It's when you have a growing economy and growing needs that you worry about infrastructures. Building roads and airports when people are starving is useless.
So, not many of the things you mentioned matter at all, I'm afraid. But feel free to prove me wrong.
We've had our inquisitions here, but I think people tend to recognize them and call them what they are pretty quickly. See Eleanor Roosevelt's very public comments about McCarthyism.
Though, on a libertarian point of view, I agree that freedom makes sense in all aspects of life, not only in economic affairs.
It's very easy to confuse an absence of persecution, with an absence of people who agree with you being persecuted. That just shows that you're on top and your enemies are on the bottom. Ie, all's right with the world.
Of course Eleanor Roosevelt didn't like McCarthyism - it was an attempt to persecute people like her. Eleanor Roosevelt was the alpha queen of the purge of the "isolationists." Not to mention the McCarthyites, who got purged pretty good themselves. You'll note that there's not a lot left of them. There's a lot left of Eleanor Roosevelt, however.
It's true that America doesn't generally shoot the people it purges, work them to death by forced labor, etc. We don't need to. Our methods are much more efficient than that.
Russia is only about 100-110 million people. One third of the US. So the "large unified market" is much smaller, as is the "human capital" pool, by which I don't mean people, but scientists, inventors, etc. And the military might that Russia has and uses to gain cheap access to resources is so smaller compared to the US it's not even funny. Plus, Russia is recovering from both the USSR state bureaucrat dictatorship AND the US/IMF BS doctrines imposed on the during the Yeltsin era.
Oh wait, I can do the same thing for China, too.
Well, unlike Russia, China DOES have all that. And China is doing rather well. It's on the up and up, and already poised to a larger economy that the US. So, if anything, this supports my argument.
Wait, what? Does the US pay less to import oil or steel than Sweden or something?
Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days. The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article21325...
or:
The Carter administration – the most “idealist” of the post-World War II presidencies in terms of its rhetoric – openly acknowledged in National Security Directive (NSD) 63 (and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) the need to ensure “the availability of oil [from the Middle East] at reasonable prices.” Carter’s administration announced that any “attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States. It will be repelled by the use of any means necessary, including military force.” This policy of targeting unfriendly governments that reside in regions tangential to the Middle East was further reinforced in other official policy documents. In discussing U.S. policy, the Reagan administration explained in NSD 27 the need “to ensure the U.S. access to foreign energy and mineral forces” as a key aspect of “national security” priorities. Carter established a similar concern in NSD 63, discussing U.S. interest in dominating Middle Eastern oil as also extending to the “horn of Africa.”
(...)
Policy motivations – simply put – have long been driven by concern with dominating Middle Eastern oil supplies by force, and with support for repressive, U.S.-friendly regimes in geographic areas (such as North Africa) that are tangential to the Middle East. With regard to oil concerns, President George H. W. Bush articulated U.S. policy toward the Middle East, explaining in National Security Directive 26 that: “Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to United States national security. The United States remains committed to its vital interests in the region, if necessary and appropriate through the use of military force, against the Soviet Union or any other force with interests inimical to our own.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/24/what-the-establishmen...
or this:
The original comment was, basically, an assertion that oil a globally traded commodity where prices are set for the entire market, and the price paid for any given barrel is the current market price, which will be precisely the same for all market participants (not counting the impact of taxes, subsidies, and differences in regulatory climate. (Is this true? Hint: The answer is "yes".)
Not only did your comment and links not actually disprove this assertion (not surprising, given that it's rather obviously true), but nothing you said even really disagreed with it, which leads me to believe you're not even a troll, just clueless.
Every single example you gave could well lead to lower oil prices for both American and Swedish consumers; none of them could plausibly lead to lower oil prices for American consumers but higher ones for Swedish consumers. Want to play again?
None of your links address the question I actually asked.
If Iraqi oil is fully exploited, I agree this will result in lower oil prices. But oil prices are set by the global market - the price Sweden pays = global price + shipping cost, same as the US.
The only issue with labor of course is the so called 'managing' aspect of it, which covers things like quality of life. Robots don't have and will never complain about, while being able to do tasks at a level that most humans wont ever be able to.
Not for long.
"The China Business News on Monday quoted Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou as saying the company planned to use 1 million robots within three years, up from about 10,000 robots in use now and an expected 300,000 next year."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-...
Engineer does not solely mean "one who creates software".
An 180 lb person speed walking at 5 mph burns 650 Calories/hr. That's 80¢/shift in electricity.
But that's not the big savings. Humans need lights and air-conditioning – robots don't. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdd6sQ8Cbe0#t=5m40s
I think your assumption is way off. For one each machine works 3 times as long as a person (24 hours a day vs 8).
At the same time though, it shows that as long as you have people who have no option, you can use them to easily produce more value than robots at similar costs. Which is what the Mother Jones article is basically about.
Also, its worth remembering that those robots are also going to be used for capacity expansion, while keeping cheap tractable labour.
TLDR: Improving standards of living will make robotics more competitive, unless there are sufficient people who have no other option but to compete with machines.
Other wise, they're a hacker ;-)
Society has sent men to the moon, photographed galaxies billions of light years away, put millions of transistors inside a square inch of sand = we ought to be able to provide better opportunities for the unfortunate.
I have. I currently live in a town where, due to the recession, a large percentage of people are living on social welfare. The thing is that a shockingly large number of them (that I know personally) have no ambition to do anything else. Some of these have been on welfare for five years already. I mean, why work when the government will just give you money, right? Another shockingly large number of young couples are having children because they see the extra child benefit money - someone that I know personally who already has two children under the age of four and wants a third one recently said how much easier their life would be with the social welfare benefits of a third child... I'm not sure if they ever considered that 1) children get significantly more expensive as they get older and 2) how unfair it is to the children to bring them into a low income family. But thats besides the point: my main point is that I do, unfortunately, know people who are happy to get handouts and have no ambitions to change any time soon.
The trade-off of course being that the more growth we experience, the better quality-of-life gets for everybody in the future. On the one hand, everything is way better for most everybody than it was 200 years ago- on the other hand, like that did a whole lot of good for the dirt-poor of 200 years ago.
As for #2, the thing with social policies that they have long-term effects on a much larger scale. For example, one could plausibly argue that a robust "safety net" encourages people to take adventures, making it easier for kids from poor families to innovate even if they know that 90% of startups fail. This allows the society as a whole to benefit from the small number of startups that actually do succeed. Handouts, in that case, would be a sort of investment.
Also, this thread is about a hypothetical future society where there is a surplus of human labor due to automation. If you're going to pay people to carry out meaningless tasks that are not necessary in the first place, what's the difference between that and just giving them a handout?
Or so goes the argument. It's harder to prove that in reality. Also, if you care deeply about fairness between individuals, as in your other comment, I can understand why you might object to certain types of handouts.
Also I would have to say that number 2 bakes in a position which imposes a morality and value system onto others, and singularly undervalues the complexity and edge cases(sets/groups/communities) present in the human condition.
Also its worth keeping in mind that social safety nets (i assume thats what you are referring to) may keep some people who don't pull their weight, but also keep alive people who would never had a chance to do so.
How can you have a capitalist economy without consumers to signal prices? I think I just don't understand your point here. Consumers obviously create value to my mind, because the knowledge of what they're willing to consume is itself valuable. How do you understand differently?
Science fiction aside, even if you can produce everything 10-100x more efficiently than me, it is still worth us trading.
Now, you might want to change the subject to talk about oil company profits, but I'm not sure why you'd want to, because that makes even less sense. It's frankly ludicrous to suggest that American prosperity is in some way linked to the fact that ExxonMobil is headquartered in Texas rather than Canada or Europe. It's a publicly traded multinational corporation!
Sure it paid $15 billion in income tax in 2009, but none of it was in the US. Think that number would be higher if they were incorporated offshore? (Hint: No.) Yes, it pays dividends, but it does so regardless of whether those shareholders are citizens of the country it is headquartered in. Think the ratio of dividends paid to Americans versus Swedes would change if ExxonMobil moved offshore? (Hint: No.) And since this "isn't about the price of oil", we don't need to even ask if prices at the pump in the US would change if they moved offshore. (Although, obviously, they wouldn't.)
So I'm curious: The original post was talking about how America is richer than Sweden 'cause the American military is used to do something relating to oil. You say it's not about the price, but about oil company profits. Okay. Even if we accept that the US military has done wonders for the bottom line of ExxonMobil...how does Joe Bloggs become better off because a nominally American oil company is making a higher profit this year? Answer: He doesn't. So maybe we need to look a little further.
(And that's not even touching on the idea that military might is exogenous - this thing that some lucky countries have, and others don't.)
I wasn't suggesting that this was about American prosperity. I was suggesting that this is about who's lobbying Congress to do what and with what money.
Religion affects how people vote. Voting affects foreign policy. Foreign policy affects international trade. And on and on.
For a more concrete example: American capitalism isn't composed just of our currency and the laws on the books regarding incorporation, property, etc. It includes our belief systems about capitalism: the American Dream, Horatio Algers, Ayn Rand, "greed is good", the invisible hand, build a better mousetrap, and on and on. It includes the moral values of consumers, who might make a purchasing decision based on whether it has a green label, or says "Made in the USA". It includes the expectations of workers regarding conditions: Chinese workers put up with the conditions at FoxConn, whereas most Americans would quit or strike (for now, anyway).
> But policies which do not support free exchange of goods tend to do rather badly.
I challenge you to give me an example of a society that engages in a completely free exchange of goods. Even proto-libertarian countries like Switzerland still outlaw trade of certain things (drugs, organs, humans), levy taxes of some kind, and socialize some economic activity (health care, public safety). The only countries that do not are those without a functioning government, in which case trade cannot be free, because there is nothing stopping someone from taking what they want by force.
That said, I agree with the notion that societies do better when they allow people to become rich. But I take umbrage with the idea that our flavor of capitalism is inherently the best one, and the only other alternative is to become Cuba.
As for the free movement of goods, I know there is no country in the world following pure free market policies. Therefore it is also unfair to judge free market based on the numerous imperfect application of its principles. Note, however, that we do have examples of societies working well without central government, such as the early days of the "Wild West" societies in the US. Those societies were basically growing at an exponential rate at the time with an ongoing flow of immigrants, while managing to self-control and police themselves. The book "The Not so Wild Wild West" explains this point very well, if you are interested to read about this.
One last thing. Obviously not every country has to follow either free market or end up like Cuba, however there is a clear trend: when a society decides to indulge in welfare and collectivism, it almost never goes back and ends up going bankrupt and ruining everyone. I do not know how familiar you are with the current situation in Europe, but over the past 30 years you could see the trend of massive public debt (fueled by government intervention in all aspects of private life) growing and growing over time. And now you get Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, close to bankrupcy. Hardly a coincidence.
At some level, private property is an invention of the State. Without that, the property belongs to whoever can defend it, and whoever has the most guns wins.
This becomes even more significant with the advent of intellectual property, also an invention of the State. There are many digital examples of "everything belongs to everyone" that are going extremely well, and luckily with zero government tyranny required. Meanwhile, the patent system is a mixed bag at best: sometimes promoting/reward innovation, sometimes inhibiting/punishing it. I don't know how this balance should be struck between sharing and ownership, but I know that the way we're handling it now is deeply sub-optimal.
The concept of ownership and the ways in which we trade are social constructs, the economic "rules of the road". They are malleable, not inherent, and we can rewrite those rules however we wish to manage externalities such as worker safety or environmental damage. Obviously, if it is done poorly (or disingenuously), the results will not go well. But we take for granted the times when it does go well.
> The book "The Not so Wild Wild West"
I'll look into this. I'm definitely a proponent of the social contract occurring at a more local level, where people are actually people instead of numbers in a database. But I'm skeptical that it is enough sustain this thing we call civilization. Just because people can be rational and altruistic does not mean they will.
> when a society decides to indulge in welfare and collectivism, it almost never goes back and ends up going bankrupt and ruining everyone
There is an element of truth to this; many European entitlements go too far and cost too much (as has often happened with American unions as well). But I don't buy that social programs are inherently inefficient; there are many things that matter which don't show up on balance sheets. Stress, health, environment, social bonds, self-determination, respect: these things all matter to a society's quality of life and its bottom line, but are very hard to measure or draw profit from.
Also, we must look at the other side of the historical coin: turn-of-the-century America, where industry held all the bargaining power, and the whole family had to work 60+ hour weeks in dangerous factories with no human rights protections. Or, workers who lived in "company towns", in a life one step away from indentured servitude. I have a hard time not seeing strong similarities between Amalgamated Warehouse Whatever and the Dickensian hellscape of a century ago (or Foxconn, for that matter).
I suppose I just don't like dogma: MARKETS GOOD, GOVERNMENT BAD. The common thread between democracy and capitalism is to lessen the corrupting influence of power by distributing it: one person = one vote, and every person wielding their own power over buying and selling. But there is no system that is immune from manipulation and corruption; the incentive to game the system and maximize one's own power to the detriment of others will never go away. If we want to prevent tyranny, we have to constantly evolve ways to distribute power again, whether it takes the form of markets, governments, communities, or new organizational patterns we haven't thought of yet.
You forget that Cuba has had to work with a heinous embargo imposed upon them for decades. And that it does much much better, society wise, than the devastation, poverty, drug cartel rule, and foreign intervention that goes on in other Latin American countries, of not "socialist" persuasion.
when a society decides to indulge in welfare and collectivism, it almost never goes back and ends up going bankrupt and ruining everyone.
I'm not sure about that "clear trend". The US has a huge national debt, people living in the streets, 30 million people eating in public kitchens or with coupons, and 2 million people in jail? I've also been to Mississippi, Alabama and South Dakota among other states. There are places that are worse than third world areas. If it wasn't for the dollar imposed as a worldwide exchange metric from better times, the ability of the state to print inflated money, and the country's diplomatic might, anyone would call the country a failure.
I do not know how familiar you are with the current situation in Europe, but over the past 30 years you could see the trend of massive public debt (fueled by government intervention in all aspects of private life) growing and growing over time. And now you get Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, close to bankrupcy. Hardly a coincidence.
Hardly NOT a coincidence. Countries on the top echelons of the European and world economy have had (and still have) far more extended welfare than Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain. Think Sweden, Denmark, Holland, etc. This has nothing to do with welfare, and a lot to do with corrupted government spending (a la Latin America), bribes to give overpaid state contracts to specific companies, bureaucracy etc. Plus, Germany controlling the Euro fiscal policy in a way benefiting the top-tier economies, to the detriment of smaller countries.
In fact, if you confuse welfare state with the near bankruptcy of those countries, how is the opposite working for, say, California?
Not sure how this fits with the geographic based theories on climate vs. behavior.
Your argumentation continues in the same vain.
But he didn't said that Socio-cultural values have to be THE SAME for economic success.
He said that socio-cultural values are a FACTOR for economic success, which is a quite different thing.
For example, regarding cultural values: Japan has different values from the US, and China too. That doesn't mean that those kinds of values (Japan/China and US values) are not ALL suited for a successful economy, and a country with a different set of values (say, Mexico) wouldn't do as well.
So, the correlation of social values to economic success (which no economist/sociologist really argues against btw), is not that only ONE kind of value system can produce economic success, it's that different value systems do either well or bad on economy.
Same for religion, etc.
Natural resources. Japan has no access to natural resources on their land. Singapore has no resources. Luxemburg has no resources. Switzerland has no resources. Holland has no resources. Funny how all those countries have rather healthy economies.
Funny, how all those countries have different KINDS of economies. Natural resources is a huge factor for China or US like economic success. Not for Singapore (= a corporate hub), not for Kayman Islands (= a tax shelter), etc. That said, Japan without easy ACCESS to natural resources, on the other hand, would have been a complete failure.
> And you know what changed ? Their economic system.
By the way, that's where America was like 100 years ago. People need to work hard to get to high standards of living, in case you did not notice.
Economic ignorance encountered here can be stupefying.
Also, I wouldn't say that things like:
* Forcing foreign businesses to partner with a Chinese company if they want to do business in China.
or
* Kicking people out of their homes (with no compensation) to make way for construction/development (e.g. Chinese Olympic Stadium).
Necessarily jive with a capitalist society.
LOL. They were "miserable in the countryside" because their old way of living and farming was not a priority anymore for the central government, that needed city workers to build the country's industry. So, in essence they gave them incentives to come to the city, and they also made it so they the old village system wouldn't work, stopped subsiding, redirected resources, etc. It's a centrally planned economy, it's not a "coincidence".
The sweatshops
--and no quotes needed, those are real sweatshops, and 99% of the HN readership wouldn't stand an hour there (we're people that are even annoyed by browser popup windows and such first world problems), and yet some consider them as fit for the Chinese people--,
don't provide them "a better life than what they had", they just make it so that they are kept alive, by eating, and sending some money to their families back home. The "better life" they are "provided" is working 14-hours at best in hellish conditions, then sleeping till the next day, and drinking themselves to oblivion on weekends. Yeah, slightly better than dying of starvation, if those are your only two options.
Incidentally, that was the way the old English industrial revolution thing started. They forced farmers to work in the factories, in similar hellish conditions.
"While the average life expectancy all around Europe increased, that of the average factory worker decreased. There were "almost no safety devices on machines, accidents were common.' (Wallbank, 490) Edwin Chadwick's 'Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population of Great Britain' penned in 1842 provides a terrifying look inside the workplaces of the period. 'That the annual loss of life from filth and bad ventilation are greater than the loss from death or wounds in any wars in which the country has been engaged in modern times. That of the 43,000 cases of widowhood, and 112,000 cases of destitute orphanage relieved from the poor's rates in England and Wales alone, it appears that the greatest proportion of deaths of the heads of families occurred from the above specified and other removable causes; that their ages were under 45 years; that is to say, 13 years below the natural probabilities of life as shown by the experience of the whole population of Sweden.' (Chadwick, available online at: http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/history/chadwick2.html)
No matter what you think of China's economy, it is leaps and bounds better than what it was 20 years ago and provides a dramatically superior quality of life for its citizens.
utility functions are not linear.
Now you say "I wasn't suggesting that this was about American prosperity." Which I think means you agree with everyone in this branch of the discussion except batista (who's the only one who asserted that it was about American prosperity). shrug In any case, I agree with you. Just another textbook example of public choice theory, of the sort you'll hear about endlessly if you hang out at Ron Paul rallies.
And Yes, Living is better than dying of starvation. I don't know how one can even argue with that. If you live you can get married, have a family and children, and expand your overall satisfaction that you achieved something in the end.
I have been in China and I have seen and talked with the people who choose to lead that life, and for me this is very clear that they are better off. Feel free to believe whatever the evenings news tell you about the horrible conditions at Foxconn and other companies alike, they will still keep queuing for a job there, no matter what you think of them.
I also feel that the difference between communism and democracy is that in one I'm given a dollar, and in the other I'm given a vote. Do I use the dollar to buy the vote or vice versa?
I however agree when you say that intellectual property is an invention of the State, because that is precisely where it originates: the granting of monopoly to an individual by the hand of the King. There is no natural root in intellectual property.
> workers who lived in "company towns", in a life one step away from indentured servitude
Again, please put this rhetoric in perspective, not in the eyes of a 21st century person from a developped society, but in the eyes of a person of that time, who had the choice between staying in an enpoverished countryside, potentially victim of starvation and malnourishment, and the perspective of having a stable, paid job in a factory. People were NOT stupid. They made the choice of "more gains", not less. They ended up richer and in better position than where they started. They progressed on the social ladder. The very same story is happening with all these workers in China, queuing outside of Foxconn to get a good and sustainable job, compared to the Nothing they had in the countryside.
> The common thread between democracy and capitalism is to lessen the corrupting influence of power by distributing it: one person = one vote
Totally agree with the decentralization of power, but democracy is a poor tool to reach that goal. You elect high ranking officials who are above the laws. Who are all RICH, without exception. Who have immense powers over other individuals. And who can use violence to force their laws on you, or make you go to war and lose your life if they decide to do so. Government is, by itself, a huge body of asymmetrical power against individuals. You do not "choose" it, when you are born you are already, automatically, subject to it.
When you buy some goods, however, every dollar you spend is a vote for a product, a company. Should that company screw up, you will not buy it again. Its reputation will worsen. It will lose customers. It may go bankrupt. It is, actually, at the mercy of the decentralized power of customers who AGREE to buy it everyday or on a regular basis.
Governments (almost) never go bankrupt. Instead, they will tax you to death, they will take your property and declare it theirs (like when they forbid possession of Gold). And they will use violence to punish you and put you away in prison if you do not comply. And you will have no way out, but to leave the country (if you can).
Governments CAN be useful, but I think in most developed countries they have gone way further than what their initial role was supposed to be. That's a vast subject, anyway.
...in which case, there is no ownership of property. Someone else can just come along and take it.
Honestly, embracing this kind of "natural law" does make sense to me, as it's least internally consistent, but I don't see it as synonymous with calling the cops because someone takes something that a legal document says is "yours".
> Government is, by itself, a huge body of asymmetrical power against individuals. You do not "choose" it, when you are born you are already, automatically, subject to it.
> When you buy some goods, however, every dollar you spend is a vote for a product, a company. Should that company screw up, you will not buy it again.
I sense some cognitive dissonance here. So when it comes to politics, people are always stupid, picking tall wealthy men with good hair and no conscience; but when it comes to spending decisions, people are always smart, based on their rational self-interest.
Now, I'll concede that capitalism has a faster, tighter feedback loop: you generally don't have to wait 2-6 years to change your mind. (Why there has been no public advocacy for rethinking the concept of only voting periodically, I have no idea.)
That aside, I see the same phenomena in both arenas of human decision-making. People are mostly smart, left to their own devices, but they are sometimes irrational with both voting decisions and purchasing decisions. Moreover, there is a strong incentive in both arenas to manipulate those decisions, and the industries we have developed around this goal have become extremely efficient: electioneers, marketers, public relations, and all other sorts of "compliance professionals".
In my mind, the question is not whether democracy is good, but whether it is possible. I have yet to conceive of a social structure in which the smart and/or rich cannot play the game at the expense of the foolish and/or poor, whether it plays out at a political rally, or a corporate boardroom.
Let's not play the "they chose it" or "at least they were fed" argument for those situations. Having to choose between starvation and working as a wage-slave in horrible conditions, as they had, is not really a choice at all.
It's just employees of the time TAKING ADVANTAGE of people that had no other option than giving in to them, and the laws et al permitting them to do so. It is only slightly better than the "choice" slaves had, i.e that of working for their masters or getting killed.
People were NOT stupid. They made the choice of "more gains", not less. They ended up richer and in better position than where they started. They progressed on the social ladder.
Yes, working to your bone and getting paid peanuts is "more gains" over dying of starvation. Nothing to write home about, though.
I wouldn't call it exactly "progressing on the social ladder" either. Those people were dirt poor, they died dirt poor, and their children were dirt poor also, usually working on the same dead end conditions. With the occasional success story.
And those people knew the were getting a raw deal. That's how the labour movement was established, that's why people fought for the 8-hour day. And those people were also many times killed, by private guards and even the national guard, ever lending a hand to the rich men of their day, when they asked for fairer treatment.
One of my most vivid memories was visiting the Ludlow site in Ludlow, Colorado, and hearing of the story of the Ludlow Massacre, one of many. Here it is:
I disagree. They did not die as poor as they started off. They were able to save a little, raise children and some of them did get education. This is the result of wealth creation. Life expectancy increased. They WERE better off.
By the way, facts and studies on the subject do not corroborate your theories:
"According to estimates by economist N. F. R. Crafts, British income per person (in 1970 U.S. dollars) rose from about $400 in 1760 to $430 in 1800, to $500 in 1830, and then jumped to $800 in 1860. (For many centuries before the industrial revolution, in contrast, periods of falling income offset periods of rising income.) Crafts’s estimates indicate slow growth lasting from 1760 to 1830 followed by higher growth beginning sometime between 1830 and 1860. For this doubling of real income per person between 1760 and 1860 not to have made the lowest-income people better off, the share of income going to the lowest 65 percent of the population would have had to fall by half for them to be worse off after all that growth. It did not. In 1760, the lowest 65 percent received about 29 percent of total income in Britain; in 1860, their share was down only four percentage points to 25 percent. So the lowest 65 percent were substantially better off, with an increase in average real income of more than 70 percent."
And this one too:
"Other evidence supports the conclusion of slow improvement in living standards during the years of the industrial revolution. Crafts and C. K. Harley have emphasized the limited spread of modernization in England throughout most of the century of the industrial revolution. Feinstein estimated consumption per person for each decade between the 1760s and 1850s, and found only a small rise in consumption between 1760 and 1820 and a rapid rise after 1820. On the other hand, according to historians E. A. Wrigley and Roger S. Schofield, between 1781 and 1851, life expectancy at birth rose from thirty-five years to forty years, a 15 percent increase. Although this increase was modest compared with what was to come, it was nevertheless substantial."
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandth...