Mike, how do they register Network marketers? They are self employed and their income goes up and down. They are not salespeople hired but sell goods and stimulate large amounts of income but are not eligible for unemployment insurance so are they registered in the budget office figures? I know a large number of network marketers. Are they listed as unemployed in the figures?
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of michael gurstein Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2011 11:51 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: News Alert: Economy Showed No Job Growth in August; Unemployment Rate at 9.1% I'm currently doing some work looking at economic measurement/statistics and one extremely interesting thing that has come out is that the official National Accounts/GDP figures are currently not including virtually all of the Internet related economic activity--Google, Yahoo, Facebook, much of Amazon and so on! <http://www.bcg.com/documents/file62983.pdf> http://www.bcg.com/documents/file62983.pdf The specifics of this are rather complicated (too complicated for me anyway) but this is the subject of some concern -- hence what I'm doing this bit of work on -- but of more particular interest is what this might be doing to overall economic analysis. My first cut (tentative) observation is that the GDP figures for the US and to a lesser degree most of the OECD countries have been significantly undermeasured. This I think means a couple of things--the relative gap between GDP levels (and growth levels overall) between OECD countries and non-OECD countries is probably considerably less than has been estimated to date and thus the wealth gap between rich and poor countries has grown rather more than what has been estimated (and may mean that countries like Korea that have forged ahead with the Internet may have jumped substantially in their economic ranking), but also and this is of particular importance -- these processes are true within countries as well. So, the high unemployment levels in the US should not be attributable to an overall economic stagnation but rather to a widening gap between employment levels and overall levels of economic activity i.e. the Internet economy is having a lot more impact than is visible from the stats probably to the level where the overall economic reactor has to this point gone critical and something needs to be done and done quickly--there is now an accelerating disjunction between economic growth and job creation! Finally, and not incidentally, the gross relative position of the US and China may not have shifted as much as has been assumed but in the real world of course this doesn't really matter since if one starts counting the Internet economy in GDP figures the differences will simply reflect a huge amount of economic activity in virtual (and largely non-employment generating) goods and services. One final observation/speculation--it is possible that this undercounting is an explanation for the lack of radical political fall out in the US from the high unemployment/economic stagnation--a significant portion of the population either directly through work/servicing the virtual economy or indirectly through stock/dividends etc. from this virtual economy are in fact doing quite well from the US's overall leadership in these areas and what in fact is happening is not an overall increasing gap between the very rich and the rest but rather a gap between those among the non-very rich who are able to benefit from the virtual economy and those who aren't--which probably diminishes the numbers of those who are hurting severely from the current economic conditions quite significantly if selectively. Anyway, these are some speculations -- and I'm not an economist so this isn't my natural area of speculation/analysis... M -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2011 1:27 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: News Alert: Economy Showed No Job Growth in August; Unemployment Rate at 9.1% At 14:34 02/09/2011, Arthur wrote: Subject: News Alert: Economy Showed No Job Growth in August; Unemployment Rate at 9.1% Breaking News Alert The New York Times Friday, September 2, 2011 -- 8:46 AM EDT >>>>snip Now that America has recorded no new employment in the past month, perhaps the 9% figure can be regarded as the entree into long-term depression, or a steady-state economy. Take you pick. It doesn't really matter what it's called. Either way, and unlike most of the last 250 years, there is no current list (repeat list) of uniquely new consumer products enjoyed by the rich. Previously, such a list was available to be selected from by the masses, one by one, as wages grew. The lack of a list of wonderful new goods means there is now no powerful motivation to drive the economy. Demand in the last 20 or 30 years has only been spuriously created by almost infinitely available credit in what amounts to a conspiracy between governments and the banking sector to keep the machine going at a spanking pace to satisfy them both. After all, each new technological era so far has had its own characteristic level of unemployment. There is no reason why a new one should be any different. Flint technology probably had around 0% or 1% unemployment; seed (and animal breeding) technology, say 2% or 3%; machine technology, around 5%; computer-driven technology 9%. And today's economy is still only partially computer-driven. If we consider that automation still continues to make big inroads into production, transportation and retailing then maybe (to follow the previous exponential growth pattern) unemployment might proceed way beyond 9% to 20%, 30% or even more in the coming decades. Maybe politicians in the advanced countries are straining at the education-jobs relationship the wrong way round. Maybe the really interesting, fulfilling, usually well-paid jobs are already catered for. This certainly seems to be the picture. The prosperous middle class that newly arose in the 19th century, living within and between the middling and the poor, has now become an almost distinct meta-class of around 20% of the population in the top dozen or so of the advanced countries. The children of this meta-class, mostly educated in private schools who, later, tend to marry one another almost exclusively after meeting in elite universities, already populate almost all the decision-making jobs in business, the media, politics, academe, judiciary, armed forces and the important governmental bureaucracies such as the treasury and the central bank. Even in the sciences, which is still the most penetrable by the talented of the hoi polloi, almost half of research scientists are already from the meta-class. Even in China, the most meritocratic form of government that exists in the modern world, we can already discern the increasing appearance at Politburo level of the of offspring of the previous communist nomenklatura . Actually, despite the present high fashion of democracy via the ballot box (via talent shows on television by necessarily handsome and socially engaging candidates), America & Co are already changing to something much more akin to the older Chinese and Indian caste systems. Both civilizations had a meta-class -- the Mandarins and the Brahmins. As they had systems which lasted for centuries perhaps they shouldn't be sneezed at as examples. If this isn't convincing then we ought to pay attention to modern evolutionary biologists who tell us that there is incontrovertible evidence that rank ordering is deeply instinctive in almost all mammalian species, and particularly so in the primates -- which includes ourselves of course, having almost identical genes to the chimps. So there we are. Perhaps the advanced countries are already overpopulated for reasons other than hunger or shortages of investment or resources which affect the rest of the world. Obligingly, the non-meta-classes of the advanced world are already doing their best to adjust to automated times by not breeding sufficiently. The indigenous populations of all the advanced countries are due to decline, some of them precipitously, in the foreseeable future. As for the meta-classes, well, perhaps they won't need to breed strictly at a rate of two children per woman in order to replenish themselves at source, as it were. There are always plenty of highly talented children of the masses, if selected early enough and given fast-track promotion before the state education system dumbs them down. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/08/
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