I'm getting terribly sloppy. The maroon coloured sentence refers of 1901.
----- Original Message -----
From: Ed Weick
To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION'
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 3:41 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] The new Keynes would be desirable today
We mustn't overlook the rural/urban population split. People living "on the
land" have historically been far better able to look after themselves than
people living in cities. According to Statscan data, only 37% of the
population of Canada lived in an urban setting; 63% was rural. By 1951, this
had changed to 62% urban and 38% rural, probably reflecting wartime migration
to jobs in cities. By 2011 this had changed to 81% urban and 19% rural. Urban
people cannot look after themselves as well as rural people can. They need
jobs at a good rate of pay, and the income gap between rich and poor would be a
much more important thing to them than to people in the country. However,
things are changing. The growth of cities has led to an increasing intrusion
into rural lands by activities needed to support city populations -- e.g.
isolation of water resources, deforestation, power generation, fracking,
pipeline construction, etc.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: Arthur Cordell
To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' ; 'Ed Weick'
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 11:40 AM
Subject: RE: [Futurework] The new Keynes would be desirable today
I think that in the "old days" there was little information about the
income gap. And where it was seen it was often accepted as "the way it is".
Times have changed. Income gaps are the stuff of daily talk and acceptance of
the gap has dried up.
Arthur
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 11:29 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; Ed Weick
Subject: Re: [Futurework] The new Keynes would be desirable today
At 14:00 05/04/2013, you wrote:
(EW) It's no longer the volume of money that's at issue, Keith, it's the
distribution of wealth as represented by assets, money or whatever.
(KH) Agreed. But where I have the greatest difficulty is persuading people
of the facts of the matter. The true picture is not quite as it seems.
Excluding the last 40 years -- when the dollar went off gold (1971) and
inflation of the dollar started to become rampant -- the wealth differential
between the elite and the motley had never been more benign. Go back another
half-century and we find that the new elite (mainly the new industrialists)
were much wealthier relative to the ordinary worker. Go back a few more
centuries and we find that the elites of those days (usually army generals)
were even more wealthy and powerful. Returning from the earliest civilizations
to the present, note that elites (and their governments) have become steadily
larger. Once the banks have been sorted out (and we may take it that several
other power groups at the top, besides politicians, are still sore at bankers
and their recent earnings and criminalities and won't rest content until
they're put in their place) then what will take shape next? An even larger
elite of various specialized power groups, I suggest. And also, if the past is
any guide, the elite will be wealthy but not as much as now.
.
Keith
Modern advanced economies are stuck because millions of people who would
spend if they could don't have the means to do so. Modern economies really
have become divided into the 1% (or 20%) that holds much of the wealth and the
1% (or 80% if you like) that has little of it on a per capita basis.
Redistribution via the tax system or however is necessary, but it can't happen
because the 1% not only holds wealth but political power as well.
Canadian news reports have recently had some interesting stuff on them
about the large amounts of money the wealthy send from Canada to banks in
places like the Cook Islands to avoid taxation. That definetly needs to be
fixed.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Hudson" < [email protected]>
To: "RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION" <
[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 7:17 AM
Subject: [Futurework] The new Keynes would be desirable today
> The ultimate in central bank experiments -- even beyond Bernanke's --
> occurred this week when the newly appointed Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe
and
> his willing sidekick, BoJ Governor Kuroda, have begun to print new money
so
> that there will be twice as much of it flowing in and around Japan's
> economy in two years' time.
>
> It's Japan's latest attempt to get out of the economic depression it has
> been suffering from ever since 1990 -- when it had a standard of living
> that we had just about reached when 2007 crashed around our ears. Unlike
> the US or the UK, Japan hadn't tried money-printing (quantitative
easing).
> According to my own hypothesis (economics is driven by status), Japan is
> not really suffering from a depression but from an entirely natural
> steady-state in which most consumers are pretty full up with all the
> consumer goods he will ever need or has the time, energy and skill to
> enjoy, given that some might need replacing from time to time.
>
> What Bernanke (US Fed), King (UK BoE) and, now, Kuroda (BoJ) are trying
to
> do is to boost the spending power of their country's consumers so that
> they'll all go to the shops and spend. This is demand-side economics as
> preached by Keynes for most of his life after repudiating Adam Smith's
> "invisible hand"and the supply-side economics of J-B Say ("supply creates
> its own demand" -- that it's only when a consumer sees a new product and
> desires it very badly that he'll then work and save extra hard in order
to
> buy it.).
>
> It was only in the last year of his life that Keynes realised he'd been
> wrong. After a difficult meeting of Directors of the BoE in 1946 in which
> the problems of the UK economy had been discussed Keynes confessed to a
> fellow Director, Henry Clay that he couldn't rely on his own ideas to
help
> get Britain out of the terrible post-war mess it was in but he would need
> Adam Smith again.
>
> Keith
>
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