Good post Harry. Only one thing. Your comment about governments and 1001 incidents of bungling does not suggest a solution. Its the decadent private sector that pollutes the public sector with too much money for faux projects and wastefulness called incorrectly competition. Government loss of funds in R and D in Science and the Humanities is minimal when compared to the waste of dollars in the business wars that we call the marketplace. The only thing the private sector does better thus far has been distribution but the speed of information is cutting seriously into that advantage. The problem is a poor systemic understanding of how to balance vertical and horizontal management structures. We tend to have one or the other but are incapable of fusing the two into a serious efficiency that is good for all and based in plenty rather than scarcity. In the past, vertical structures were inefficient and had to be authoritarian to sustain because the control of information was poor due to complexity and human limitation. In the past the horizontal management structures, like private sector capitalism, won the day in distribution of goods and individual motivation based in scarcity and personal economic danger. I believe we are beginning to imagine another possibility.
With computers, and the internet, we have a new way of looking at all of the concepts of distribution, including the concepts of what can be truly owned. In the old format the vertical structure was necessary as a balance to the horizontal for the sustenance of quality and standards. The old economy was based on a warlike competition (kill the competition Barrons Economics), and the idealization of scarcity as economic energy. I believe this will have to change. We will have to give up the lie that the market creates quality. In truth it does that for one group, a little for a second and not at all for those on the bottom. The market requires losers. The market only creates quality if mass production has enough scarcity to justify its creation. If not, then it isnt created and the market fails. Ask all of the men and women with a rare disease where there is not enough market to justify paying for the research for a cure. Or ask all of the men and women with genital herpes or the men with prostate cancer who are not touched by the standard treatments. The standard treatments reach enough people that further research is simply not economic and we get a large portion of the population suffering in misery as well as birth defects for the children of such parents of a disease of choice. (meaning sexual or anal) In my fifty years of teaching I have seen people die from such market logic on more than one occasion. Some of them were fantastic young artists like the great American baritone William Parker. Our Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Its all about scarcity and cost effect which in my mind is simply immoral. Another example is energy. Everyone says that solar power is too expensive when the truth is the reverse. Sunlight, like sand on the beach, is free. It isnt economical, i.e. productive, because theres too much of it to make it worth using. Only communists (extreme vertical authoritarian governmental structures) will make the investment to create a cheap solar cell. Once its made it makes all of the jobs and money created by the scarcity of energy, redundant. Its so cheap as to be un-economical. Its also a true Libertarians dream of sustainability apart from their neighbor unless they want to hook into the grid. You can choose cheap energy but not with Exxon, Mobil or BP. These companies have to prove the scarcity by drilling in such dangerous places as the Gulf of Mexico miles down in spongy rock or in the formidible Bering Sea off Alaska or they have to destroy the Catskill mountains in order for America to drive their cars. Energy companies make their money on scarcity and your having no choice available to you. Its possible that Henry George will rise again as these things are examined. It is also possible that a new way of thinking will emerge that makes all of the past seem too hopelessly rigid to survive. The Net is horizontal but the vertical aspect of the internet, (standards and their enforcement) is hopelessly mired in our cultural stereotypes. We are afraid of the vertical systems as, the people who benefitted from them in the old Soviet System and escaped, are as well. Yet the educational level of the serfs coming to America in the 19th century was higher than our own citizens educational level today relative to the science and culture of the day. The Soviet Émigrés win the jobs hands down when competing against market trained American students, in every sector that Ive looked at, from computer technology to opera singing. The teaching of Form-al education has to return but the forms will be far more sophisticated than the ways of talking we are currently using. Robotics alone will require a larger human sensorium, if humans are to compete, and the complexity of the information rich world will create a whole new child taught by this new information rich environment. But most of all we will have to learn to build our economics on an environment of plenty rather than scarcity and human whim. I find this hopeful, REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Harry Pollard Sent: Monday, May 23, 2011 1:38 PM To: 'Keith Hudson'; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] 28% homeowners owe more on mortgage than home worth Not entirely, Keith. The biofuels madness reminds me that Those whom the Gods would destroy . . . . . If the US returned the corn fields to food, the global corn food crop would increase by 14%. Subsidies and other government largesse are responsible for rising farm land-values. I remember the Duke of Westminster got 3 million pounds over 10 years, but perhaps he needed the money. The Economist had a bit about the UK subsidies to farms. Apparently land is acquired not to grow things but to apply for a subsidy and there is a brisk trade in drinking from the cash cow. In the US farm subsidies run into the billions. The Sugar quota alone which quietly makes Americans pay 2-3 times the world price of sugar has raised land-values in the north-east so high that farmers cant afford land to grow soya (which is desperately needed). The idiots grow subsidized rice in Californias central valley where summer temperatures reach the 100s. One scientist calculated that the water lost to evaporation was sufficient to supply all the water needs of the city of Los Angeles. Meantime, US rice undercuts unsubsidized rice from elsewhere and probably puts real farmers out of business. The farmers of the central valley get artificially cheap water through their government granted water rights. We pay some 200-300 times as much for water as they do. Their artificially cheap water is why, as you drive through the central valley in the hot summer, you see irrigation machines spraying water through the air, rather than using drip irrigation or something more economical. This points to the difference between us over Malthusianism. You adopt the reasonable view that we are banging against the limits of survivability. I think that if the 1,001 instances of government bungling were ended we would still have a very large cushion between us and starvation and its interim shortages. Proper use of the land is essential to our survival and completely changing the allocation of resources over to the free market would work wonders. However, land doesnt have a free market. The idea of collecting land-values has, as a principal effect, the turning over of land to the control of the free market price mechanism. Proper allocation of land by the free market can efficiently take place while the controlled economy people are still choosing a committee chairman. At the moment, across the globe, land is beset by monopoly ownership, speculation, hoarding, and vicious rents that keep generations of peasants in thralldom, along with its corollary low production and little innovation. The community collection of land-rent would end this tragic situation. However, if one merely looks at the consequences of the present mess, it is easy to become a Malthusian (with its complete lack of any solution other than megadeaths). As you know, Ive suggested it would be Better to collect Rent and throw it in the sea, than not collect it at all. Although the Rent could be used to support the infrastructure of the city with no taxation a pretty good thought much more important are the economic consequences of the collection. So, think less of the income from Rent collection and more about the effect it will have on our economic well-being. Harry ****************************** Henry George School of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 (818) 352-4141 ****************************** From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2011 12:49 AM To: [email protected]; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] 28% homeowners owe more on mortgage than home worth Harry, At 02:26 19/05/2011, you wrote: Its land values falling that is responsible for the drop, not home values. Harry True, but not quite. At present, good agricultural land is going up in value because of world over-population and the growing of biofuels. In fact, if you were to do a cross-sectional walk through a major city in most advanced countries, land price would drop as you entered the suburbs and proceed through most parts of the city where the bulk of the population live. Land prices would then rise steeply as you came to small pockets in some living/retailing/restaurant/office parts of the inner city where the rich spend most of their time. This is where I strongly agree with you Georgists. We won't have any sensible system of taxation until land values are directly taxed. The rich -- with the notable exception of Warren Buffet! -- always want to reflect their wealth in the precise locations where they live and work. Even rich criminals with incomes that are unknown to the tax authorities need to show their status publicly. Rich people know that they already pay over the odds when they buy goods and services, so even they wouldn't want to try and evade land taxation by living in a hovel because it would reduce their status. Instead, and motivated by popular envy, we have become stuck in a system of personal taxation which is punitive to the entrepreneurial (and also to the middle-class family man these days) and easily avoidable by the very rich who employ clever accountants and lawyers. Keith ****************************** Henry George School of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 (818) 352-4141 ****************************** From: [email protected] [ mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> ] On Behalf Of D and N Sent: Friday, May 13, 2011 7:35 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] 28% homeowners owe more on mortgage than home worth http://www.cnbc.com/id/42955097 CNBC - U.S. home values fell in the first quarter at the fastest rate since late 2008, real estate data firm Zillow said on Monday, suggesting that a bottom will not be seen until 2012 at the earliest. Zillow said its home value index fell 3 percent in the first three months of the year from the previous quarter, and was down 8.2 percent year-over-year. The number of homeowners under water or, those who owe more on the mortgage than their house is currently worth amounted to 28.4 percent of single-family homeowners, representing a peak since Zillow began calculating the data in 2009. ..... Almost all of the 132 markets covered by Zillow saw home value declines. Only Fort Myers in Florida, Champaign-Urbana in Illinois, and Honolulu, Hawaii, managed quarterly increases. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/05/
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