Ed,
At 07:43 01/10/2010 -0400, you wrote:
Kieth, you may be right about there being no new consumers goods to lead
the charge of economic growth. The world has flattened out considerably
so that the middle class and even the poorer classes can have the kinds of
status goods that would at one time have been available only to the
rich. However, there is a continuous wave of new versions of existing
goods coming at us -- cars are redesigned annually, TVs have gone through
several transitions and are now going 3d, people walk around poking away
at all kinds of little hand held gadgets, and women wouldn't be caught
dead wearing the same kinds of clothes they wore yesterday.
There's probably never been a time when women haven't had their fashions.
The Indian tribal chief may have had the finest head-dress that anybody
could ever for miles around have but his squaw would have much more fun by
wearing a red feather on Monday morning -- "it's the new fashion, darling"
-- she would say to her friends, who would then rush about in a panic,
throwing their blue feathers of last week away, and search for red
feathers. (Incidentally, I may be proved completely wrong but I somehow
don't think that 3D TV will ever take off. Far too fiddley to wear those
specs. In any case we're all becoming so individualized these days that
we'll all be using our combined phone-PC-TV with a fold-up screen to stuff
into our pockets or handbags.
Two industries have grown enormously to make this possible, advertising
and credit. Mostly I watch news and public interest stuff on TV, but the
other night I watched popular detective based TV show and was astounded
at the amount of advertising on it. Get these new cars, clothes,
appliances, electronic gadgets, foods, etc. or you're simply not with
it! While I didn't time things, I'm pretty sure that time given to
advertising was as long as the time given to the program itself.
Same over here. Whenever I watch a programme with commercials I make sure
that I can switch over to a soccer match while they're on. Or do a crossword.
Well then, how do you buy all that stuff? Why on credit of course. To
load that much junk onto the consuming population requires a huge amount
of money -- money that most people wouldn't have on hand, at least not
immediately. So it's buy, buy, buy even if you can't pay for it
now. And given that we consumers have been taught by advertisers and
politicians to expect the good life to continue, we're pretty sure that
we can pay for it later. Even though many things have come along to show
us the error of our ways, the US subprime housing crisis for example, we
don't seem to learn.
Can we go on this way? Perhaps for a time, but as many people have
pointed out, it really can't last. It's an illusion and the resources
can't be there forever and perhaps not even for much longer. But to learn
to behave differently will take a conversion of some kind, perhaps a
conversion similar to those which wealthy young nobles went through when
they gave it all up and moved to the monastery during the middle ages. Or
perhaps we'll have to live like the communal societies that evolved out of
the Protestant reformation did, Mennonites for example. Everyone worked,
everyone had a place to sleep, everyone ate, but nobody had an advantage
in any of these things over anybody else.
I think something like that could very well happen in future years,
particularly among young people, and particularly among talented young
people. Most, if not all, attempts at utopias have failed but some
monasteries (Benedictines in particular) and the some of the different
varieties of kibbutzim in Israel have good practical rules and still
survive well. Modern evolutionary biology is also teaching us a great deal
about ourselves. Once nuclei of young people with appropriate balances of
skills start trying this sort of arrangement seriously then it could very
well be the pattern of a future society and economy. Interestingly, the
Benedictines were the industrial power-houses and innovators of their day,
and several Israeli kibutzim have become modern businesses.
Now where did I put that cross?
Can't see you with a cross somehow. A shillelagh perhaps?
Keith
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:[email protected]>Keith Hudson
To: <mailto:[email protected]>RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME
DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION ; <mailto:[email protected]>Ed Weick
Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 5:19 AM
Subject: Re: Not a very positive picture
Ed,
Yes, it is indeed becoming very serious. But I can't see how it can be
otherwise, given the present frame of reference of orthodox economists --
and the politicians who rely on them for their ideas.
Apart from the necessary supply of increasingly cheap fossils fuels, the
industrial revolution (that is when the idea of "economic growth" emerged
and GDP has been worshipped) depended foremost on the mass production of
what were originally hand-made luxury items enjoyed by the land-owning
rich of the agricultural era. Despite what Marx and Engles said about the
increasing impoverishment of the factory workers they were, in fact,
prospering all the way through the 19th century and most of the 20th. As
each new consumer product, hitherto expensive (cotton clothing, porcelain
pots, curtains for the windows, bicycles, etc) became cheaper in
successive swathes then, with hard saving at each stage -- the
professional middle-class (see Samuel Pepys diaries), then the
middle-class, then the working class -- became a cornucopia flowing
downwards, and a whole population working hard and aspiring upwards. (The
life of the agricultural peasant was often very grim with occasional
years of starvation but he didn't have to work anywhere near as hard as
the industrial worker except at seed-times and harvesting. In England he
had 50 or 60 Saints' Days a year for jollifications and, during the worst
times at the height of the feudal state he could take two or three months
off as a soldier fighting for his local lord of the manor without
affecting the basic economy.)
There have been no new consumer products since about 1980 -- only
improved versions, or make-overs or embellishments. And what "new"
products there are supposed to be come in very very quickly from huge
mass production factories somewhere in the world. The whole economic
growth machine has broken down. It has only been maintained since WWII by
increasing inflation and, since the 1980s, by hugely increasing available
credit (allowed by governments even though the banks were breaking every
traditional rule in the book)..
There are actually two problems to be solved. One is inflation and the
other is a substitution of something else for the status hitherto given
by what consumer goods one is able to buy (at the expense of destroying
the community which is the only true bestower of personal status).
The problem of inflation could be solved easily -- in theory -- but the
status one will require a major re-adjustment of the way we live and
work. A tall order? Maybe, but a major re-adjustment from agriculture to
industry took place relatively recently in man's history, and there's no
reason in principle why another new re-adjustment shouldn't occur. But
the major new (energy) industry that will be required as a preliminary
has yet to emerge and that will be the crux of it as the existing sources
of energy become increasingly expensive.
I'm in little doubt myself that a major biological energy system will
develop in future years and that we will see the re-emergence of smaller,
more satifying communities again. But this will be a long time hence and
this old man has become very philosophical in his declining years --
senile ones, too, very possibly.
Keith
At 10:07 30/09/2010 -0400, you wrote:
From yesterday's Washington Post.
Ed
----------
As 44 million Americans live in poverty, a crisis grows<?xml:namespace
prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
By
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/katrina+vanden+heuvel/>Katrina
vanden Heuvel
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
It's clear that the Great Recession battered those on the bottom most
heavily, adding 6 million people to the ranks of the officially poor,
defined as just $22,000 in annual income for a family of four.
Forty-four million Americans -- one in seven citizens -- are now
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/16/AR2010091602698.html>living
below the poverty line, more than at any time since the Census Bureau
began tracking poverty 51 years ago. Shamefully, that figure includes
one in five children,
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angela-glover-blackwell/poverty-in-black-white-an_b_721124.html>more
than one in four African Americans or Latinos, and over 51 percent of
female-headed families with children under 6.
These numbers are bad enough. But dig deeper -- as <?xml:namespace
prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"
/>Georgetown University law professor Peter Edelman has been doing for
nearly 50 years in his battle against poverty -- and the story told by
these figures is even more staggering.
Edelman points out that 19 million people are now living in "extreme
poverty," which is under 50 percent of the poverty line, or $11,000 for
a family of four. "That means over 43 percent of the poor are extremely
poor," said Edelman, who served as an aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy
(D-N.Y.) and in the Clinton administration before resigning in protest
over welfare reform that shredded the safety net. "That's over 6 percent
of the population, and that figure has just been climbing up and up."
Edelman says that the number of people living at less than two times the
poverty line ($44,000 for a family of four) is equally significant.
"Data shows that's really the line between whether or not you can pay
your bills," said Edelman. "That has reached 100,411,000 people. That's
33 percent of the country. That's the totality of the problem -- whether
you call it poverty or not."
For too long we have accepted the narrative -- promoted by well-funded
conservative think tanks -- that claims people who are struggling are to
blame for their troubles, and at the same time we don't have effective
anti-poverty policies. So tackling the problem is seen as wasteful.
"So many people think it's their own fault," said Edelman. "They don't
see the structural problem in our economy."
But with so many in poverty, that narrative has become harder to sustain
during the Great Recession, and so renewed work is being done to take on
poverty and its structural underpinnings.
[If you want to read more, go to:
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/28/AR2010092802356.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/28/AR2010092802356.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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