Making money cannot be the permanent business of humanity, for the simple reason that there is nothing to do with money except spend it. And we cannot just go on spending. There will come a point when we will be satiated or disgusted or both. Or will we? ... Keynes thought that the motivational basis of capitalism was "an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals." He thought that with the coming of plenty, this motivational drive would lose its social approbation; that is, that capitalism would abolish itself when its work was done. But so accustomed have we become to regarding scarcity as the norm that few of us think about what motives and principles of conduct would, or should, prevail in a world of plenty...How Much Is Enough? What Is It For? "It was the shift to a market-based philosophy of growth that inflamed the insatiability of wants -- by abandoning any interest in the social outcome of growth. The market was bound by the rule of law, but there was no longer any moral, political or cultural restraint on the individual pursuit of wealth. Keynes's notion of satiety had no place. Such a system cannot work according to plan. It is both economically and morally inefficient. The Anglo-American system of the past 30 years, dominated by the financial-services industry, has been retained for the benefit of a predatory plutocracy that creams off the riches in the name of freedom and globalization. So, what intellectual, moral and political resources still exist in Western societies to reverse the onslaught of insatiability and redirect our purposes toward the good life?"
Why, despite the surprising accuracy of his growth forecasts, are most of us, almost 100 years on, still working about as hard as we were when he wrote his futuristic essay? The answer is that a free-market economy both gives employers the power to dictate hours and terms of work and inflames our innate tendency toward competitive, status-driven consumption. Keynes was well aware of the evils of capitalism but assumed that they would wither away once their work of wealth creation was done. He did not foresee that they might become permanently entrenched, obscuring the very ideal they were initially intended to serve... The irony, however, is that now that we have at last achieved abundance, the habits bred into us by capitalism have left us incapable of enjoying it properly...
If scarcity is always with us, then efficiency, the optimal use of scarce resources, and economics, the science that teaches us efficiency, will always be necessary... scarcity, as most people understand it, has diminished greatly in most societies over the last 200 years. People in rich and even medium-rich countries no longer starve to death. All this implies that the social importance of efficiency has declined, and with it the utility of economics... the problem is that a competitive, monetized economy puts us under continual pressure to want more and more. The 'scarcity' discerned by economists is increasingly an artifact of this pressure. Considered in relation to our vital needs, our state is one not of scarcity but rather of extreme abundance.
Consider a typical new American household established in 1995 with the head aged 20 and with the spouse earning 36 percent of the income of the head (part-time work). Such a household could accumulate the savings necessary to retire at age 55, with a pension paying 60 percent of its peak life-cycle earnings, by putting aside 14.7 percent of annual earning from the year that the couple enters the labor force. That pension would permit retirees at age 55 to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living, with a real income that would rank them among the richest quarter of households today.(relevant datum 1: Fogel is a Nobel Prize-winning economist.)
By putting aside an additional 9.4 percent of income the household can buy high-quality medical insurance that will cover the entire family -- assuming the couple has two children -- until the two enter the labor force and will also cover the parents' medical needs between the time they retire and age 83 (assumed to be the average age of death in their generation). Saving an additional 7.8 percent of income will permit parents to finance the education of their children for 16 years, through the bachelor's degree at a good university.
The point of the example is that prospective real resources are adequate to finance early retirement, expanded high-quality education, and an increasing level of high-quality medical care (Assuming that US medical expenditures will increase to about 20 percent of GDP by 2040). The typical working household will still have 68 percent of a substantially larger income than is typical today to spend on other forms of consumption. Current levels of food, clothing and shelter will require a decreasing number of hours of work during the family's life cycle -- dropping to about 300 hours of work annually for the typical household by 2040. Families nearing retirement will face several new options: increase their rate of accumulation of consumer goods and housing; increase spending on travel, entertainment and education; further reduce their hours of work; or retire earlier than age 55.
I can't tell you what game this was because I didn't have it, but at one point there was a game with a "Somebody's Coming" mode. A hotkey paused the game and popped up a tiny word processer fullscreen that had just enough muscle to edit a business letter or something else that size. Hit the hotkey--shazam, you're working. Attn. Mr. Henneberger, concerning that shipment of widgets that had the very high return rate...A number of games had this feature. Wikipedia discusses, and a cursory Googling indicates that the idea is coming back into vogue with browser plugins and whatnot.
Larry Ellison, billionaire CEO of Oracle, has struck a deal to buy to buy 98% of the 141-square-mile Hawaiian island of Lanai. The Maui News reported that the asking price for the property was between $500 million and $600 million.(Big Time!) I've got to make it show, yeah
[Lanai] has long been controlled by billionaire David Murdock—who also controls Castle & Cooke and who is known for closing the island's original pineapple plantations to make way for development. The island boasts resorts and golf courses.
Mr. Ellison is the third-richest person in the U.S., according to Forbes, with a fortune estimated at more than $30 billion.
He isn't shy about spending his money. Mr. Ellison has bankrolled a sailing team. . . owns several opulent houses, including a traditional Japanese-style estate in Woodside, Calif. . . and is known for purchases including a yacht large enough for a basketball court, a fighter jet, and a tennis tournament. More recently he has sought to buy a professional basketball team.
I disagree. The market is not a construct. It is natural and efficient. It's basic principals can not be rescinded so you should stop trying. Price always effects supply and demand, unless you would like to construct a scenario when it doesn't.It's a nice little creed you've got there, one you could put right next to the Nicene Creed or the Apostle's Creed. The difference, though, between your Creed and those other two is that every last sentence of yours is provably wrong.
About 600,000 slaves were imported into the U.S., or 5% of the 12 million slaves brought across from Africa. The great majority went to sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil, where life expectancy was short and the numbers had to be continually replenished. Life expectancy was much higher in the U.S. (because of better food, less disease, lighter work loads, and better medical care) so the numbers grew rapidly by excesses of births over deaths, reaching 4 million by the 1860 Census. From 1770 until 1860, the rate of natural growth of North American slaves was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that of England. [11]That said, there was still a great deal of cruelty and killing of slaves, and gross human rights abuse -- and human rights (freedom of marriage and family formation, protection from violence and sexual assault, etc) are as much a part of quality of life as food. Freed slaves did not ask to return to slavery -- and a great many slaves risked their lives to escape it before the Emancipation. People don't run away from good situations.
"Imagine a world in which most people worked only 15 hours a week."The elephant in the room here is population growth. Does the 15 hours a week cover raising a couple of kids? Then why not work 30 hours a week and raise a couple more? It's obviously unsustainable, and one of the reasons it hasn't played out as Keynes imagined is that there are so many more people than there used to be.
Since an excess was never assured, life or death was dependent on who had the bigger club or who had something to trade. A daughter for a cow. Price; one daughter = one cow. There's your market. A straight up even trade only determined by the market and its two participants, with each caveman convinced they got the better end of the deal, with both being right.So we agree then. Market conditions only obtain in situations where there is abstract formal equality between participants, and those situations are devilishly hard to set up and maintain.
We live in an age of combinatorial innovation. There have been other such periods before: In the 19th century, standardized mechanical parts -- wheels, pulleys, belts, and gears -- were combined and recombined to create new innovations. In the 20th century, the components were internal combustion engines, electricity, electronics, and (eventually) microelectronic chips.The End of Finance As We Know It
Today, a substantial amount of software development on the web involves connecting standardized components in novel ways. The Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database, and the Python programming language are prominent examples: the LAMP components that serve as basic building blocks for much of the web. Once your application is developed, the cloud computing model offered by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others changes fixed costs for data centers into variable costs for data services, lowering barriers to entry and increasing the pace of innovation.
Just as the mechanical innovations of the 19th century led to dramatic changes in our way of life, the still-evolving computing and communication innovations of the early 21st century will have a profound impact on the world's economy and culture. For example, even the smallest company can now afford a communications and computational infrastructure that would have been the envy of a large corporation 15 years ago. If the late 20th century was the age of the multinational company, the early 21st will be the age of the micromultinational: small companies that operate globally...
The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been funding autonomous-vehicle research at engineering schools for more than a decade, and that research has produced several highly functional prototypes that are now being commercialized.
Why should cars sit idle for 22 hours a day -- as most do -- when they could be robotic taxis, plugging themselves into an electrical outlet when not needed? Driverless cars could revolutionize transit and housing patterns; with traffic jams a thing of the past, their owners could enjoy an extra hour a day for work, conversation, or entertainment (or maybe just sleep).
And cars are only the beginning. Among other things, cheap robotics will have a huge impact on medicine. Many routine operations can now be conducted by robots, making for less invasive and less error-prone procedures. The technological challenges facing such innovations can be overcome. The real barriers to their deployment are cultural, legal, and regulatory...
Over the past twenty years or so we've seen a remarkable change in the way a lot of business is conducted... their economics completely upturned by the interconnectivity of the internet, cheap, distributed processing power and the power of peer review. Yet this hasn't impacted the financial industry in anything like the way it might have... Now, though, the race is on to disintermediate the middle men: the financial industry is on the cusp of a revolution, and most of the intended victims haven't got a clue that they're already an endangered species.cf. The Resilience Approach & A Proposal for A New Way to Stabilize the National Economy
Disintermediation – the idea that supply chains between producer and consumer can be shrunk to reduce costs and improve responsiveness – has been the mantra of the internet age... One of the miracles of this process is they can provide ways of people signalling feedback... This is the effect of free-market economics writ large: competition between multiple vendors, assessed by customers with their feedback determining popularity and commercial success. Screw your customers and the world will know about it: try and defend yourself using corporate bullshit on Facebook or Twitter and you'll simply fan the flames. But there's one digital industry which is noticeably absent from this revolution: finance.
As Robleh Ali, Andrew Haldane and Paul Nahai-Williamson relate Towards a Common Financial Language the problem is that there is no equivalent of html for financial products. This lack of standardization lies behind the ability of higher cost producers to flog inappropriate product to gullible and behaviorally compromised consumers. This is a market where the Law of One Price doesn't work because it's virtually, and deliberately, impossible to compare like for like... If a financial product has to be defined using a common language format you can't use weasel words to indicate that it's somehow better than the cheaper, more applicable product from just down the road...
As the paper describes, non-standard open network financial products are already out there and working: "With open access to borrower information, held centrally and virtually, there is no reason why end-savers and end-investors cannot connect directly. The banking middle men may in time become the surplus links in the chain..." The future of finance is going to be written in the language of technology.
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There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
See also, "Quitting the Paint Factory"
Stupid work, keeping me from reading up on idleness.
posted by kingfisher, his musclebound cat at 5:57 AM on June 22, 2012 [15 favorites]