The answer to economic problems -- and it's not more jobs.

immoderate

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Fri Feb-29-08 04:37 PM
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The answer to economic problems -- and it's not more jobs.

Edited on Fri Feb-29-08 05:23 PM by IMModerate

I was invited to watch the recent lunar eclipse by a friend I know from a local meetup. He's an amateur astronomer and has a serious telescope. During the umbra phase of the eclipse we switched to looking at Saturn and got into a discussion of economics. (OK, I know this is excruciatingly nerdy. :P) We found we had a confluence of some radical economic ideas that he calls "automation socialism."

So he sent me a link to a blog of a friend of his, who shares our theories, and I thought it might interest some at DU. The basic premise is that in our time, productivity increases, but work decreases. And the benefits of production go to fewer people. In short, there's not enough work to go around. (That's my slogan.) Here are some excerpts from the blog:

Edit: Testing the limits: Suppose all the work could be done by machines. How would we make a living?

<snip>

But we really shouldn't be trying to increase wages or to make people dependent on wages, what we should be doing moving to a situation where the share of capital ownership is more evenly distributed, where every individual is "a capitalist". As automation and computerization, etc., play a larger and larger role in production, individuals have to share ownership of the "means of production". That is the single and only possible solution to the long term economic problems that will be faced in a progressive and technologically advancing economy. The road that some places in Europe have taken, especially France, has been to limit the advancement of technology in order to preserve the role of the worker, thereby limiting profits and productivity. This does preserve a more equal distribution of wealth, but it also limits economic growth and the creation of new wealth.

In America we have taken the opposite tract; we have allowed and encouraged the advancement of technology and productivity, but we have completely left the worker out of the loop and thus all of the rewards have gone to a relative few capital owners. This is why we find ourselves in an economic predicament today and until this fundamental problem is addressed the American economic is going to continue to suffer the problem of increasing productivity while the working classes aren't able to drive demand for goods because they have too little income.

There really is no reason why an economy in which productivity is increasing should have any type of recession. The only reason we are having economic problems is because the fruits of the labor of workers is not being paid to those workers, and because the fruits of capital ownership are not being shared by the population. Over the past 30 years the cost of education and skill acquisition has gone up dramatically. Worker knowledge and productivity has gone up dramatically, and mechanical efficiency has gone up dramatically. That all means that we can produce more with less effort today then we could in the past, and workers have been key to these4 advances, even shouldering the higher cost of education themselves, but there has been zero payoff to workers. All of the fruits of these advances over the past 30 has gone to capital owners, and capital ownership has remained largely consolidated in the hands of a small few. Thus, those small few have reaped the rewards that have been created by millions of workers in America and around the world.

<snip>

The key to remember is this. As long as productivity is increasing, there is no real reason why any economy should ever go into decline. The only reason for an economic decline during a period of increasing productivity is an improper distribution of the fruits of productivity, such that all of the fruits go to one small group, thereby leaving the other group unable to sustain or improve their standard of living, in spite of the increasing capacity of the economy to enable such progress.

more...

I may have some differences about implementing these ideas. For instance, one of them is mandating a twenty hour work week. But in any case, I thought there would be some interesting reactions here. (Or it might sink like a metallic asteroid.:shrug:)

--IMM