The argument I have made on these lists for a number of years is that
this is all
related to value. What one decides to value
and pay money for. Today in the U.S.
they have decided to pay the money they used to pay for the commodity
milk,
for stocks and bonds instead. (see my post about Rukeyser)
There are all kinds of theoretical stories about why they do this, but
to an artist
who has read many myths about why something is valued this just seems
like just one
more human "story" for the purpose of satisfying someone's need for
power and wealth.
e.g. an operatic part at the Metropolitan costs tops $19,000 per performance.
While the
same part in Vienna can double that. Why is it worth more in
Vienna than here? It
has nothing to do with its inherent value as a major part of a great
work of art. It has
to do with the story that the Citizens of Vienna have about the place
of art in the
propagation of their quality as both a culture and a people and the
place that the work
occupies in communication with their history and the lives of their
ancestors. It is
not commodities but ontologies. They value "being"
more highly than bread. Or as my
French doctor say about Americans "We live to work while the French
work to live."
Here we value the idea of the market, the official state religion in
the U.S., over the idea
of bread and so we even enslave the growers of wheat by keeping the
price of bread far
below the cost of growing it for the advantage of the stock "market".
The practice of the
State Religion.
We keep the farmers in their place by creating export farms in places
like Guatemala
that will "out compete" our farmers. We even start wars
in those places to keep the "communists" out while we dis-organize their
family and religious culture and their
native arts and crafts while organizing them into cheap American style
farms. Their only
way of getting "even with the Gringos" is to shit on the berries and
send e-coli north, which they do regularly. The Gringos do
not have e-coli in their list of war weapons, unless by
an official terrorist group, and this is not official
but individual terror. Note that it is irrelevant
what we believe about terror or war or commerce
or weapons of mass destruction if we are
sitting on the toilet seat trying to save our bowel. but it is all
about the story of value. And what is "valuable' in that story
is what is paid for, no matter what it is. Even though the
e-coli does not share our ideas.
This is why the great Oscar Wilde stated that true art was "valueless" and that, if it had "value" then it couldn't be art. Real art is concerned with synergy. It is the psycho-physical pursuit of expressing the "idea" of "value" in a medium. It it does not transcend and supersede what is deemed "valuable" then it is not art but commerce or worse, derivative.
In the traditional Western thought system, Art is the opposite of Science because both are in a race to express Reality in the most holistic terms or theoretical terms. Science limits itself to words and numbers while Art contends that it must involve all systems of human endeavor or it cannot explore the Whole. Science starts from the outside perceptions with Art beginning with the Idea or Theory. That is why all of this talk about jobs and the future is really, in the opinion of the great 19th century artists and theoretical scientists, dialogue with self and self love i.e. masturbation. If you become enmeshed instead in the search for Truth (note that I did not use the article "the") then everything takes its proper place and love is possible between individuals.
Goodnight sweet..........
Ray Evans Harrell
Tom Walker wrote:
Another peculiarity of Samuelson's argument is that he assumes EITHER
redistribution of the NEW hours resulting from increased demand when those
hours reach some unspecified threshold OR, *fallaciously*, that the
increased demand magically arrives (presumably at the aggregate level?) in
"job lumps" rather than in incremental hours. "A careful examination of
economic history" would show that firms respond initially to demand for
increased output by extending the hours of existing employees. It is only
after a indefinite period of time -- when the number of hours demanded have
passed a certain threshold and when employers are convinced that the
increase in demand will be sustained -- that these overtime hours get
redistributed into new jobs.So not only does work-sharing _not_ imply a "fixed amount of work", in order
to have any impact on employment fiscal and monetary economic growth policy
_must_ assume a redistribution of hours."But from the point of view of the economy as a whole, the lump-of-labor
argument implies that there is only so much remunerative work to be done,
and this is indeed a fallacy. A careful examination of economic history in
different countries shows that an increase in labor suply can be
accommodated by higher employment, although that increase may require lower
real wages. Similarly, a decrease in the demand for a particular kind of
labor because of technological shifts in an industry can be adapted to --
lower relative wages and migration of labor and capital will eventually
provide new jobs for the displaced workers."Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
