And for modern society:
Microsoft says it will cut up to 18,000 jobs next year to “streamline” its business. Microsoft now employs 125,000 people.
In an era of increasing technological advances, the logical endpoint is a few humongous companies raking in hundreds of billions a year with a handful of employees. When more and more can be done by fewer and fewer, the profits will go to an ever-smaller circle of executives and investors.
But the rest of us won’t be able to afford to buy what these companies produce because we’ll either be unemployed or serving the wealthy in menial jobs paying almost nothing. The old economic model was mass production by many, mass consumption by many.
Will the new one have to be production by a few, redistribution to the many?
--
Robert Reich
Actually, originally, when the clear path forward for humankind and history was seen as the industrialization of the world, of work, of our society and our lives, it was assumed that we would, as a people, as a group, as nations, have fewer and fewer people work but still get a living wage.
Absolutely true. There were books written on it, pointing the way.
It was the only thing, they thought, at the time that made any sense.
How foolish and naive we were.
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One of Microsoft's many problems is open source--Almost everything you'd pay for from Microsoft has a free, legal equivalent open source program, and the semi-exceptions are mostly Visual Basic and .net. Android is based on open source, Linux can replace Windows for most uses and is free--and the license it is released under prevents it from being exploited. I use it at home almost exclusively, with the biggest exception when I have to update a GPS.
I would think that open source software and the whole open source gift culture would be something you'd support...except that if it really does take over, it would wipe out Microsoft, forcing them to lay off even more workers.
When more and more can be done by fewer and fewer where businesses must compete with each other, less work is required to maintain the same standard of living. At what point should we have frozen progress--when 10% of the population was farmers, or sometime after labor saving inventions made more and more food able to be grown by fewer and fewer farmers? When a refrigerator was a luxury? When a microwave was a luxury? When a computer or an internet connection was a luxury?
Now? All the previous gains were legit, but now we've reached a peak, and more efficiency will suddenly have a different result?
You missed my point.
What should happen, and what has been proposed but that isn't happening and that likely won't happen, given humankind's propensity for greed and selfishness, is that corporations should exist for the people and the nation and world, instead of for the few executives at the head of such companies.
It's a "share the wealth" thing.
Instead of a few people making many, many millions and having and keeping billions, locked away, the wealth would be distributed.
I doubt you'll ever get that.
I can hope, however.
This would neither stop nor even impede progress.
We aren't any more greedy or selfish now than we were in the past. Corporations are a way for ownership to be split, so the benefits can be shared by ordinary people...like the thousands of retirement funds that own bits of Microsoft.
And we apparently have a very different idea of wealth. Wealth is things that make lives better or more interesting--education, food, health care, entertainment etc. Pieces of paper in a vault aren't wealth, they merely represent a way to make it easier to spread wealth--If I need glasses, I don't have to find an optician who happens to need a network. Locked in a vault, money is useless--and locking it in a vault doesn't change the amount of good things available to ordinary people.
Corporations should exist for their owners--for the people who risked their money to invest. If they aren't, why invest? Allowing people to get rich by fulfilling the needs and wants of others, or by owning a small portion of a corporation that does that is responsible for a huge amount of human progress--even if the motives are considered greedy.
Unfettered capitalism? That's a joke, we have Crony Capitalism where regulations are written by and for favored corporate interests, deliberately made complex, with selective enforcement. VP Chaney and Halliburton wasn't a coincidence.
Are your various statistics including transfer payments? Turns out a lot of poverty stats don't include welfare or other aid when calculating income--it makes inequality seem higher and more frightening.
I care little about income inequality, what matters to me is increasing the absolute standard of living of the poor. Most poor people in the US can afford food, air conditioning, a microwave, smartphone, etc. If you want to convince me that the US is worse, use absolute measures of living standard.
What does "highest percentage of people living below 50% median income" mean in plain English? This sounds like another of those stats where eliminating the incomes of people earning too much money would make it "better".
I agree that eliminating incomes of people earning too much money is a stupid solution...my point is that the statistic is equally stupid, since the stupid solution would help the statistic.
And you don't know what it means but use it anyhow?
It isn't the tax cost of welfare payments (both corporate and personal welfare included here) that bother me most, it is the side effects of creating perverse incentives. Working and producing useful things (even if just hamburgers) should be rewarded, manipulating the tax system or welfare system should not. When the difference in living standard of working isn't much better than not working (or as it is sometimes now, worse in the short term) many people won't work, so there are less goods available to everyone.
Share the wealth by force is generally disastrous. Compare the prosperity of countries based on economic freedom--there is a very, very strong correlation--and the scandinavian countries the left loves to use as an example are small, and relatively free economically. Even comparing the absolute living standard of the poor vs economic freedom--there may be a bigger difference between top and bottom, but the bottom is higher in economically free countries.
When you say you're more concerned with disparity than standard of living, you are effectively saying "It's better for the poor to be worse off as long as the rich aren't too far ahead".
Hell no. I want everyone to get more, even if it is distributed unevenly.
You say "Share the wealth by force is generally disastrous."
That is patently untrue.
First, a wildly unequal wealth structure as we have today is one of the things that helped lead us to the Great Depression. It's documented.
Second, when we had higher taxes on the wealthy and on wealth--from the 40's to the 60's, at least--we had the highest increase in the middle class and the most growth, also, in our economies, ever.
But you call that "disastrous."
Then you say: "When the difference in living standard of working isn't much better than not working (or as it is sometimes now..."
But it isn't. There is not a small difference between working a job in America compared to being on welfare. Welfare, first, is nearly non-existent. Second, what it does pay is extremely small, period. And it only lasts 6 months, if that? And that's about the same to you? You're assuming Right Wing dogma and statements and opinion as fact. It's just not that way at all.
Your statement:
"When you say you're more concerned with disparity than standard of living, you are effectively saying 'It's better for the poor to be worse off as long as the rich aren't too far ahead.'"
I never once said, here or anywhere else, that I'm more concerned with disparity than standard of living. I also have no idea where you got that. It was foreign to me when you wrote that. I went back and read and confirmed I wrote no such thing.
I'm extremely familiar with people of the Right Wing attributing statements and positions to me falsely. It's one of their tactics. I'm surprised and disappointed it's yours, too.
I would in no way even suggest that "It's better for the poor to be worse off as long as the rich aren't too far ahead."
That's just absurd.
Most of the stats you post are about relative poverty, not absolute poverty. You don't talk about starving, you talk about inequality of outcomes. You don't use the exact words "It's better for the poor to be worse off as long as the rich aren't too far ahead."...but virtually everything you say on the subject translates to that. And apparently Americans who are eating but can't afford overpriced Nikes are more important than third world people whose best hope for not starving is making Nikes.
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