At least productivity has house prices to hang out with
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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I've never been a fan of NTR...
And it could be worse. They could be soaring as high as textbooks.
Jfc are textbooks prices even worse than when I was in undergrad? What do things typically cost now? It was awful when I was buying them.
It was 200-300 for me 15 years ago. Worst part is you cannot pirate them because you need the online code that comes with a new book. I recall something dumb happening if you just got it separated from the book.
Yeah some shift the pages a bit so you can’t buy the online portion separately and have it line up with a previous year’s version even though there is almost no difference in content. At least that’s how it was when I went to undergrad, sounds like about the same time you did.
Text book prices are part of the compensation package for University professors. It's no surprise their price has risen, since wages aren't keeping up
Oof...
“Look at that, proof that stagnant wages cause more productivity”
- Our bosses
I like that they bring up all these informations, just to conclude, that neo-liberalism would be the solution (instead of the problem).
They don't actually answer that question. It's like they're building to a huge reveal, and then it just stops. Unless I missed it completely.
Edit. Never mind. It's just a bitcoin pump. What a waste.
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Vietnam and feminism. Mostly feminism.
Women joining the workforce in huge numbers increased the labor pool without significantly changing the demand for goods or services. Thats basic supply and demand.
Owner class played the long game on that movement. Boiling a frog.
Nothing wrong with women working. And I’m not saying women can’t work.
All I’m saying is that we’re all complaining about needing two working adults in a household to survive, while simultaneously renting two adult bodies per household to the owner class.
I’m not saying how to fix it. I have no idea how to fix it. A massive strike sounds adequate, at least 35-50% of the workforce. Never going to happen though, because most of them need two incomes. Pretty shitty.
How do you explain the concentration of wealth in the owner class, then? There are plenty of plots showing that in that website.
How do you explain the concentration of wealth in the owner class, then?
Shortage of guillotines.
That’s a separate issue.
Most of the 1% don’t have their value on cash or from wages. It’s all a giant scattered portfolio, funded largely by loans against stocks which make up most of their compensation. Most of the portfolio cannot be easily liquidated, at least not in large amounts, without serious rippling effects in the economy.
The problem comes in being able to place loans against stocks to fund future investments. In theory, it’s a high-risk, high-reward opportunity that’s available to all. It could be a great mechanism for middle-class stock owners to build a comfortable nest egg…but instead what’s left of the middle class has whatever stocks they own in their 401k and if they did have other stocks, the risk is far too great to be palatable to most of them. At the scale of billionaires, though, putting a few million worth of stocks as collateral for a loan to start a new company is practically Monopoly money.
CEO salary is interesting. Most of the big salaries that get people pissed off are in the S&P500. Those salaries are insanely high, far higher than they should be.
It is worth considering, though, that the S&P 500 are some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. It does deserve some sort of an exceptional wage to be responsible for steering those ships. Not hundreds of millions, probably not even tens of millions, but the CEOs are the figureheads of companies directly responsible for the livelihoods of millions of people, not just their employees but entire economies.
Thats an insane amount of pressure, and ought to be well compensated. And CEOs aren’t really there for leadership qualities or whatever they say they are (although some of the celebrity/prima donna CEOs certainly bring their own different breed of value to the companies they represent…people like Musk, Gates, Jobs, etc). They are there to be a person to point to when shit hits the fan. As they say, you don’t pay a hooker for sex, you pay a hooker to be quiet.
In my opinion, I think that a CEOs pay should, generally, be a significant salary proportional to the market-cap of the company, and a large percentage of stocks should not be able to be touched until 1 year following the CEOs departure from the companies.
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I know what would fix it, the French method. Fix that shit real fast.
It's time for productivity to go down.
I go down productively all the time, does that count?
What happened 1979? Reagan?
1979 was Jimmy Carter, a Democrat. Reagan did not start until 1980, and while he is famous for breaking the backs of unions, thus crippling their ability to fight back against this trend, he did not actually start it.
Before Carter was Ford and Nixon, both Republicans. Ford pardoned Nixon's crimes, supposedly to help "heal the nation".
According to Robert Reich's "Inequality for All" (free link) - he was the Secretary of Labor under Clinton and previously served under both the Carter and Ford administration so he was very much attuned to what was going on - this trend started due to the rise of corporations, which have super-rights that humans do not have. e.g., taxes on stock dividends were capped at like 13% while payroll taxes can go up to >35%, and while if a human commits a crime they would go to jail, but not so with a corporation. It's a great racket scheme for the rich to cover themselves in a legal fiction so as to avoid pretty much any responsibility for their actions. Hence why we see so many corporations acting so very boldly to destroy the planet - after all, why not? What's the worst that could happen to them in return?
I was surprised to learn that Carter deregulated trucking, which devastated wages for truckers, and they never recovered.
Oh, I never knew that - he was before my time, thanks for sharing that :-).
Carter has become something of a sacred cow among progressives. His post-presidency had shown him to be a wonderful human being, but there's lots to criticize about his time in office.
Can you clarify what you mean by rise of corporations?
I'm asking since I recently learned they'd existed for hundreds of years by then, at least. My understanding is the British East India Co was the first legit corpo
Robert Reich can definitely explain it better than I:-). Basically any law that further enhances their protection moves them forward - e.g. Citizens United - while other things may pull them back, e.g. Obama raised the marginal top tax rate on dividends.
But corporations can do many things, like corporation A takes out a huge loan, builds a building, then hands it to B, then defaults on the loan, even while the board members of B are the same humans as were on A. Sounds like stealing right? Humans need to eat, breathe, sleep, and pay their debts, but corporations do not, plus have special protections besides. In the USA, a "President" of a legal entity can be held liable for actions taken by either himself or by the company, whereas a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) not as much.
Corporations helped do things not otherwise possible, e.g. didn't they build the Panama Canal? At the time that was such a huge endeavor that a single normal company could not have done it.
But there's a balance, and all told that balance has as of late tipped towards enhancing protections for corporations while offering less rights to the humans, i.e. the former has risen and by implication, at the expense of the latter.
That makes perfect sense! I 100% agree with you and Mr Reich (love his YouTube channel as well) on the need for striking some kind of balance.
We need a set of checks and balances just for corporations!
Even if we were to assume for the sake of argument that corporations were the best thing since sliced bread - which in some ways they legit are, e.g. see how powerful computers have gotten in the hands of American LLCs, and there seems little doubt that such a pace of innovation would have occurred elsewhere in the world? but even so, setting that aside - the many special exemptions that have continued to be granted to them seems to have lost the balance that they may once have enjoyed.
Like, when will their wealth eventually trickle down to the rest of us mere humans? Even their own human CEOs are as nothing compared to those giant monolithic entities, able to engage with the world underneath the umbrella of special protections granted to them by governments, which their human board members could not accomplish either on their own or collectively without those special exemptions - that's just the whole point of forming a LLC to begin with.
And the American taxpayer continues to subsidize them, so yes we get even more powerful computing devices (in our pockets, on our wrists, on our faces, inside our very brains!?:-P), but on the other hand, most millennials and younger who do not already have a home have lost hope of ever owning one?
So yeah, as the OP graphic illustrated, "productivity" went up but "wages" (unlike stock dividends) did not, depicting the rise of corporations that use stock rather than Oxygen as the air that they breathe, and correspondingly that occurred at the expense of the mere human, who must rely on "dolla dolla bills ya'all" to be able to purchase goods & services. And there the ultra-wealthy have the most advantages (by design) as they can sacrifice the tiniest percentage of their stock portfolio to be able to purchase a car (or private jet, helicopter, humongous boat, whatever), whereas the mere human must scrimp and save for literally DECADES just to live somewhere where rain does not fall onto their heads as they sleep. It's not fair - which is fine, nobody who thinks about it for even a moment wants it to be even (why should someone who never works get paid, whereas someone who expends great sacrifices and efforts get similar reimbursement in return - that would be the true unfairness, from a ROI perspective) - but more to the point, it's nowhere near as balanced today as it once was, say, back in the 50s, 60s, and early to mid 70s. We used to exist side-by-side with corporations, whereas today a tipping point has been crossed and now we are becoming their slaves.
Reagan was a couple of years later.
Coincidentally though, Thatcher happened in 1979, and Reagan is just Thatcher with a penis.
But the real answer is likely that after the financial troubles in the 70s and sky high inflation, there was a number of changes in government to try to have and maintain low inflation - things like higher levels of unemployment being tolerated, employer protection laws not evolving to combat companies' growing anti-union sentiment, fewer and smaller rises in minimum wages.
At the same time, lowering of tax rates on wealthy/high income people meant those people at the top wanted to take more of the pie than ever before, knowing that far less of it would end up being lost as taxes anyway, and that meant less for the workers.
I’m really surprised no one here has mentioned this yet, but a huge factor would have to be globalization and the offshoring of American manufacturing.
It started in the 70’s, with companies like GE and the car manufacturers moving factories to Mexico and later Asia, and with growing supply of imported cheap goods like steel. This really took off in the 80’s and 90’s with deliberate market liberalization and promotion of globalization during the Reagan/Bush and Clinton administrations.
In other words, American workers’ wages were pressured by the extremely low wages of overseas labour.
spoiler: productivity is cheating on wages with CEO wages
"our company is making tons of profit, it must be because of the CEO, let's give him more money"
Reganomics my ass. Somebody call Doc Brown, I need to go instigate a paradox real quick.
No need to, someone always already did. We're just in the timeline that goes back so it can't change this one. Everyone else gets the benefit.
Screw you Asafum-UN420:69 you're in the nice universe with no runaway capitalism!
Universal basic income
Yes.
In a post scarcity economy, it only makes sense. It would be better for everyone, even nature I bet.
It would give people options to pursue the career they enjoy.
Should have started in the industrial revolution, clearly should have started in the petroleum/corn age, and stupidly far behind in the computer age.
Imagine all the brilliant scientists/artists/engineers/etc stuck in a dead-end jobs just because food & rent.
We could have a new Renaissance, but we are owned.
but we are owned
:(
It makes sense in any economy, which has enough material to provide the basics to everybody. We indeed could do it today, even though we have material constraints as we can see with the climate crisis for example.
... among many other things.
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The key takeaway here is that we need to be less productive - c'mon everyone, she's counting on us! 🙃
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