Sean,
I regret that my lashing out at Jim caused any trepidation on your
part. You are right that on this issue Jim and I have tangled before. I won't
rehearse that here. I don't think there is much agreement between Jim Devine
and the Sandwichman on any of this, but … they can address that if they care to.
On your second item just below, I believe that getting to a socialist system
must be preceded by cutting hours. In other words, the dependency is the other
way: Unless hours are cut we will not have socialism. The idea of somehow
achieving socialism and then we can cut hours is, to me, utopian. On the other
hand, as working hours are cut, the rate of growth of the economy (GDP) will
slow and investment will move from giant corporations to groups of workers
self-employing and self-directing. That is when socialism (or anarchism)
becomes feasible and will appear desirable to the public.
People writing about slowing growth, zero growth, degrowth, often spell out all
the things, all the infinite number of things that will have to happen to reach
any of those states. Prominent on the list is changing the money system -- end
fractional reserve banking, shut the Fed, etc. Herman Daly has a long list.
So does Gus Speth, David Korten, Bill McKibben, Jim Devine, and almost
everybody else. In my view, simply focusing on and winning cuts in hours,
repeatedly, first, can possibly result in some of the things on their lists
being achieved. Peter Victor, a Canadian, makes a powerful argument for
slowing/stopping growth in his book "Managing Without Growth" and describes all
the complexity and political changes necessary to achieve the objective. And
then he says "The dilemma for policy makers is that the scope of change
required for managing without growth is so great that no democratically elected
government could implement the requisite policies without the broad-based
consent of the electorate. Even talking about them could make a politician
unelectable." (page 193.) But if we simply focus on cutting hours -- which has
been achieved in the USA repeatedly -- other things will follow.
My aside demanding that Jim tell how he knows that aggregate demand is low was
not to deny that it is low but rather to try to make him see the other way to
look at the problem. Rather than low aggregate demand, I asked him to think of
the problem as too many hours of work being supplied. If only Larry Summers
and Jim Devine would think of the problem that way, …. !!! Re low aggregate
demand I wrote comparing the merits of monetary & fiscal policy versus cutting
working time last year. http://www.counterpunch.org/coyle12242010.html.
On income redistribution we hear from both the OWS demonstraters and Obama "tax
the rich." I'm in favor of that but much more efficacious is to take income
away from the rich at the source. Taxing the rich doesn't deal with the
off-shore havens and evasion and avoidance. The way to do that -- not to
ignore your plan below -- is to reduce standard hours of work while maintaining
pay, which would reduce profits and capital gains. So cutting hours is a
powerful income re-distribution lever. Of course we have to fight to maintain
pay. But we have to fight to get anything, so why not aim at a fruitful
future?
Gene
On Oct 7, 2011, at 9:19 PM, Sean Andrews wrote:
> Yikes. That got ugly. I shudder to ask for some clarification as it
> seem Eugene is bent on hurling anything that isn't nailed down, but it
> seems like both Jim and the Sandwichman (whose real name escapes me,
> but who I know has an interest in this issue) agree on a few basic
> things:
>
> 1. the basically short term nature of cutting working hours, in itself
> as a stimulus.
>
> 2. It would be good, in general if all of us had to work less. This
> should be a goal, and would be the ultimate goal under a socialist
> system, but merely cutting the hours in and of itself is insufficient
> over the long term unless there is a socialist system to support it.
>
> Is that about right?
>
> From where I'm sitting it looks like Eugene's basic argument is over
> whether a lack of aggregate demand is really the cause of the crisis,
> but he isn't necessarily arguing that it might actually be a crisis
> based on people working to many hours (although he seems to think
> growth in and of itself is not a good goal either, i.e. there is no
> crisis): just that any attempt to pin down one of the variables (such
> as saying aggregate demand is high or low or just right) is an
> entirely relative concept, completely meaningless when shorn from its
> overall system of interrelations. There's some sort of deep
> epistemological argument which, while it might be relevant to this
> question, seems to me completely tangential. I'm sure he and Jim go
> way back, but I have to say, this little episode of sniping did
> absolutely nothing to clarify the issue for me. Not that this should
> be your goal, but since I opened up this can I worms, I just wanted to
> thank Jim and the Sandwichman for trying to walk me through it.
>
> In an off the cuff sort of way, I thought it might be a better way of
> talking about redistribution: if bankers didn't want us to try to cut
> their hourly pay, maybe they'd be better if we simply limited the
> number of hours (or days) they could work. I keep hearing about how
> the really big wigs make more in an hour or two than the bulk of the
> citizens make in a year. When there is talk of raising taxes, the
> claim is (I believe made by a prominent econ blogger last year) that
> they would simply start working less--as if this is some great tragedy
> (Oh no! the finance guy isn't working today!) Well perhaps the better
> approach (if only for the purposes of argument) would be to say, "hey
> big bankers: take a vacation!) As you get to a certain income
> threshold, you're only allowed to work 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 hour a day
> or only a certain number of weeks r days per year. This would allow
> for job sharing between hedge fund managers (you know, so that about
> 300 people could manage the hedge fund over the course of the
> year--just stop in for a day, make their wage [equivalent to the
> median US household annual income] and then spend the rest of the year
> puttering around the garage with model airplanes or entertaining at
> children's parties.) Most of it's run on computer models now anyway.
> How hard can it be? Hell, you could probably afford to pay for most
> of the job sharers to go to classes in finance for a few weeks before
> their day on the job--needing to pay teachers, unless Khan Academy
> already has a video on that. Do this for all the "professions" that
> are able to make that kind of money, and eventually you'd go a long
> way towards expropriating the expropriators--but you wouldn't take a
> dime of their money.
>
> I'm kidding, obviously, (though it could by a witty piece of #OWS
> theatre) but it does seem like the idea of work sharing discussed here
> is suspiciously focused on low wage blue collar work. There are
> plenty of college grads out there who could probably do a bang up job
> shuffling money around (or working as doctors or lawyers or presidents
> of the united states) and might like to do it part time for half or a
> quarter of the average pay (assuming, of course, they had benefits)
> What if all the work sharing was in the upper end of the income
> spectrum, but to an ever increasing degree--or better yet, people at
> the top had to do some of the work at the bottom as well in order to
> get their median wage. It seems like it would go a long way to not
> only beginning a kind of redistribution, but also destroying the myths
> of the protestant ethic.
>
> On a more serious note, as I write this out, some of it sounds a bit
> like what Andre Gorz discusses in first chapters of "the critique of
> economic reason," where he talks about "the unequal distribution of
> the savings made in working hours [by technological innovation"
> because there is, in effect, a dual economy.
>
> "an increasingly large section of the population will continue to be
> expelled, or else marginalized, from the sphere of economic
> activities, whilst another section will continue to work as much as,
> or even more than, it does at present, commanding, as a result of its
> performances or aptitudes [he's being generous here, as I was above by
> saying the rich work a lot--another reason to destroy that protestant
> myth. Nevertheless, assuming it is true...] ever increasing incomes
> and economic powers. Unwilling to give up part of their work and the
> prerogatives and powers that go with their jobs, the members of this
> professional elite will only be able to increase their leisure time by
> getting third parties to procure their free time for them. Therefore
> they will ask these third parties to do in their place all the things
> everyone is capable of doing, particularly all labour referred to as
> 'reproduction.' And they will purchase services and appliances which
> will allow them to save time *EVEN WHEN PRODUCING THESE SERVICES AND
> APPLIANCES TAKES MORE TIME THAN THE AVERAGE PERSON WOULD SAVE BY USING
> THEM. They will thus foster the development, across the whole of
> society, of activities which have no economic rationality - since the
> people performing them have to spend more time doing them than the
> people benefiting from them actually save - and which only serve the
> private interests of the members of this professional elite, who are
> able to purchase time more cheaply than they can sell it personally.
> These are the activities performed by SERVANTS, whatever the status of
> the people who do them or method of payment used.
> [. . . .]
> The unequal distribution of work in the economic sphere, coupled with
> the unequal distribution of free time created by technical innovation
> thus leads to a situation in which one section of the population is
> able to buy extra spare time [the rich have to do this because they
> are working so much in order to make their indulgent wage] from the
> other and the latter is reduced so serving the former." (6)
>
> I feel it is sort of an unorthodox way of looking at it, but maybe
> I'm not familiar enough with orthodoxy.
>
> sean
>
> On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 13:16, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Eugene Coyle wrote:
>>> I decided to take a few minutes and reply to your post. But it is
>>> such a fatuous mess that I was unable to continue with a response.<
>>
>> I interprete such insults as saying more about the insulter than about
>> the insultee.
>> --
>> Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your
>> own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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