common wealth and collective power

June 4, 2019 2:22 AM

Bernie Sanders' plan to empower workers could revolutionise Britain's economy (among others') - "Giving employees a stake in firms would reshape power: this could be the start of a transatlantic challenge to neoliberalism."

In place of an extractive and unequal economy, the fight is on for one that is democratic and sustainable by design, rooted in new models of ownership.

Although the details of Sanders’ plans are still to be decided, the outlines are clear. The policy would require businesses to transfer a percentage of their shares annually to a fund controlled by employees. The fund would then pay a regular dividend to workers while giving them a powerful voting bloc in corporate governance. Growing over time, the funds would be a new way of socialising the economy from the inside out.

Reshaping ownership would give people a stake and a say, helping democratise their workplace. Analysis for Common Wealth, a left-leaning thinktank – which I am director of – focused on designing ownership models for the democratic economy, showed that with a 10% stake in the largest US corporations, the average dividend payment per employee would be $2,725 (£2,160) per year. Of course, there are sharp differences in profitability between different companies and sectors. Getting the design of how the dividend is distributed will be crucial to ensuring the policy does not worsen inequality. And that also means ensuring that society as a whole – not just workers – gets a share of collectively produced profits. But done well, it can transform private, corporate wealth into common wealth.

also btw :P

• Money is Law - "Traditionally, the state is defined by whatever party has a monopoly on violence, be it the military or the mafia or the mob. But an entity with a monopoly on money can achieve the same persuasive capacity... When you have the ability to loan out infinite amounts of money, you can enslave a population with no violence at all. See also: The entire banking industry."
• National Facebookism - "We work so hard for attention. That can be the proof-of-work that generates GlobalCoin."
• Inflation - "In Cuba, health care and education are Free, and toys and food are expensive... the Socialists are smartest of them all. Baumol was right[1] — Healthcare and education are overpriced because the opportunity cost of labor is high. Cuba gets it. By running an authoritarian commie state, they don’t waste human resources on politics and media and bankers and other parasites. That frees up a lot of manpower for people to become doctors."
• Scalable Communism - "China's rolling out a nationwide social credit system that assigns scores based on things like littering and helping old people. A handy app helps citizens identify nearby deadbeats so they can be properly shunned. We may not have the cognitive capacity to remember a nationwide network of amici, but computers do!"

A 600-Page Textbook About Modern Monetary Theory Has Sold Out - "MMT argues that governments in control of their own currencies, like the U.S. and Japan, aren't constrained in the ways standard economics says they are. They may risk stoking inflation or running out of resources if they spend too much -- but they can't go broke."[2]

At Westminster College in Utah, John Watkins said he’s adding the new MMT textbook to his syllabus next semester. A professor who’s been teaching macroeconomics for three decades, he says the field could use more intellectual diversity.

“Most macro texts copy each other,’’ he said. “So many professors have been schooled in mainstream economics, so they likely will continue teaching ideas that have little or no relevance to the world.’’[3]

Mitchell, the textbook’s co-author, said there’s growing interest outside of academia too. Investors and politicians are reaching out.

He’s been invited to the U.K. Labour Party’s annual conference, and “I’m now giving workshops to the financial community,’’ he said. “They’ve suddenly realized this is something they need to understand.’’

After Neoliberalism - "By contrast, the third camp advocates what I call progressive capitalism, which prescribes a radically different economic agenda, based on four priorities. The first is to restore the balance between markets, the state, and civil society."

Slow economic growth, rising inequality, financial instability, and environmental degradation are problems born of the market, and thus cannot and will not be overcome by the market on its own. Governments have a duty to limit and shape markets through environmental, health, occupational-safety, and other types of regulation. It is also the government’s job to do what the market cannot or will not do, like actively investing in basic research, technology, education, and the health of its constituents.

The second priority is to recognize that the “wealth of nations” is the result of scientific inquiry – learning about the world around us – and social organization that allows large groups of people to work together for the common good.[4] Markets still have a crucial role to play in facilitating social cooperation, but they serve this purpose only if they are governed by the rule of law and subject to democratic checks. Otherwise, individuals can get rich by exploiting others, extracting wealth through rent-seeking rather than creating wealth through genuine ingenuity...

This brings us to the third priority: addressing the growing problem of concentrated market power. By exploiting information advantages, buying up potential competitors, and creating entry barriers, dominant firms are able to engage in large-scale rent-seeking to the detriment of everyone else. The rise in corporate market power, combined with the decline in workers’ bargaining power, goes a long way toward explaining why inequality is so high and growth so tepid...

The fourth key item on the progressive agenda is to sever the link between economic power and political influence. Economic power and political influence are mutually reinforcing and self-perpetuating, especially where, as in the US, wealthy individuals and corporations may spend without limit in elections. As the US moves ever closer to a fundamentally undemocratic system of “one dollar, one vote,” the system of checks and balances so necessary for democracy likely cannot hold: nothing will be able to constrain the power of the wealthy. This is not just a moral and political problem: economies with less inequality actually perform better.

Neal Stephenson Explains His Vision of the Digital Afterlife - "I saw someone recently describe social media in its current state as a doomsday machine, and I think that's not far off. We've turned over our perception of what's real to algorithmically driven systems that are designed not to have humans in the loop, because if humans are in the loop they're not scalable and if they're not scalable they can't make tons and tons of money... I think the only way to get good content out of the internet is by having humans in the loop."[5]

Guest speaker Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, issued the class of digital natives a different challenge: "to consume technology more consciously and ethically."

"In our society today software companies, along with the consumers, have constructed an ecosystem that makes it easy to get what you want. The problem is, after spending a few hours clicking around you might end up saying, 'Oh man, why did I waste all that time?' You might realize it's not getting you any closer to what you really need — peace, love, equality, fairness, a healthy environment — and what's worse, every one of your clicks is not just wasting your own time, they're also serving as recommendations to all your peers," Norvig said.

It's up to young people, he said, to not only become the next generation of engineers and scientists, but "to make the right ethical choices, to build the system we want for our society," he said.[6]

Watch Chief Justice John Roberts's commencement speech at his son's New Hampshire school - "From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don't take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you'll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they're going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes."[7]

A Tale of Two Surveillance States - "According to Mona Patel of Brooklyn Legal Services, the landlord may have another motive that's just as sinister as displacement: data harvesting. 'The tenants in these two buildings are being exploited for their data,' said Patel. 'This is a new technology that hasn't been, as far as we know, tested in a residential complex. We haven't seen any validation studies proving it will accurately work for people of color. It almost feels like the tenants are the study.' Nelson Management is not the Chinese Communist Party. And Atlantic Towers is not Xinjiang. But in both places, minorities are being surveilled with nascent technology and subjected to an organized effort to control their behavior."

Henry George: The economist to watch in the 21st Century - "I am sitting here diving into a brand new copy of a book – Progress and Poverty – that was written 140 years ago, in 1879. And it occurred to me I should write you about it because the ideas in this book are as relevant to the 21st century as any other school of economic thought. The author is Henry George, a political economist and journalist who was influential in the late 19th century. And although Georgism isn't getting a lot of buzz in the business press right now, this book I am about to re-read has sold millions of copies since it was written. And that's because its themes resonate."

It’s an economic school of thought that is very pro-capitalism in that it holds that individuals have every right to profit from the value of what they produce themselves. But the economic value derived from rents is not the property of individuals but belongs jointly to all members of a community.

Now, back when Henry George was alive, the term “rents” meant land and natural resources... In the 21st century, where the lion’s share of the income in advanced economies is derived in the services sector, it’s not just physical property that matters, but also intellectual property. In fact, IP is the crucial issue in the trade dispute between China and the United States. IP is the singular most important issue regarding drug costs, due to the “rents” drug companies derive from their patents. And IP is what makes the dominant technology companies in the US prodigious money-making machines.

Put simply, the Georgist Revival must think about the extraction of rents in a broader context than just from land. More and more, rents are now extracted from ideas... I want to talk, not just about rent-seeking, land value capture, and intellectual property, but also about monopolies, oligopolies and monopsony power. I am also interested in the concepts of rent extraction, profit and externalities because this is related to the climate change debate. And finally, given the collapse of the center of the political spectrum – and the increasing polarization of electorates around the world, I am interested in the income and wealth inequality aspects of Georgist ideas as well.

"To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment." --San Francisco, March, 1879[8]

posted by kliuless (2 comments total)

Would totally revolutionize (see what I did there) the workers committee to investigate the establishment of a committee to consider how to institute a committee to mediate the conflict between competing committees committed to deciding which committee considers the bike shed color.
posted by sammyo at 4:39 AM on June 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

Elizabeth Warren has a corporate governance proposal (from back last August) requiring companies to have 40% of board members be elected by employees.
posted by Anonymous at 5:29 AM on June 4, 2019