Visions of a Permanent Underclass
And Other Articles




http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303918804579107754099736882

Visions of a Permanent Underclass
A new book imagines an America of the rich and the 'shantytown' dwellers.

By WILLIAM A. GALSTON
Wall Street Journal
Oct. 1, 2013

In 1958, as millions of American high-school students were beginning their long infatuation with George Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," a major figure in the British Labour Party, Michael Young, published a far more prescient futurist tract. His essay, "The Rise of the Meritocracy" described a year-2034 dystopia in which general intelligence determined the distribution of income and status.

The losers knew that they were failures, and the ideology of meritocracy had eliminated the moral basis of complaint: The losers deserved their subordination and should accept it. In the end, they didn't, and they revolted against a system that insulted their dignity.

Fifty-five years after Young's neglected classic, economist Tyler Cowen has entered the fray with his latest book, "Average Is Over," which analyzes the dynamics behind the rise of what he terms the "hyper-meritocracy." As his point of departure, he takes some well-known trends—growing economic inequality, falling male wages, declining labor-force participation and the rising share of the national product flowing to capital rather than to labor.
Citing the work of economists such as David Autor, Mr. Cowen depicts a polarizing labor market, increasingly hollowed out as middle-skill, middle-wage jobs disappear. The Great Recession, he argues, unmasked the fact that U.S. employers had taken on more middle-wage workers than they needed or could afford. That's why so many displaced workers are being forced to accept new jobs at lower wages—and why so many others have dropped out of the workforce.

The main driver of these disquieting trends is technology—specifically, smart machines that can do (and do better) an ever-rising share of what human beings do to earn their living. As this proceeds, some will win out: people who work with and around smart machines; managers who can organize these people; individuals with high general intelligence who can size up new situations and quickly learn what they need to know; and conscientious subordinates with the key new virtues of reliability and team play. Everyone else will lose out—except the marketers who know how to appeal to the wealthy.

Here is Mr. Cowen's description of our future: "[It] will bring more wealthy people than ever before, but also more poor people, including people who do not always have access to basic public services. Rather than balancing our budget with higher taxes or lower benefits, we will allow the real wages of many workers to fall and thus we will allow the creation of a new underclass. We won't really see how we could stop that. . . . One day soon we will look back and see that we produced two nations, a fantastically successful nation, working in the technologically dynamic sectors, and everyone else."

What would happen to the losers? More and more of them would move to Texas, Mr. Cowen's synecdoche for places with cheap housing and lousy public services. More American cities would become the equivalent of El Paso plus Mexico's Ciudad Juárez —thriving metropolitan areas with "shantytowns" attached. We could even plan for this, says Mr. Cowen: In zones set aside for cheap living, we would build some "makeshift structures . . . similar to the better dwellings you might find in a Rio de Janeiro favela."

Contrary to Michael Young's 1958 prediction, the members of Mr. Cowen's new underclass would accept their lot without much complaint, certainly without revolting against it. Even though they had no prospects for escape, they would enjoy cheap food and cheap fun, and that would be enough to pacify them.

If this were Swiftian satire, Mr. Cowen could retire the Best Deadpan Award. But it isn't. It's a prediction coupled with the injunction that resistance is futile. There's nothing we can do, says Mr. Cowen, to avert a future in which 10% to 15% of Americans enjoy fantastically wealthy and interesting lives while the rest slog along without hope of a better life, tranquilized by free Internet and canned beans.

Bread and circuses is not the policy of a republic, but rather of an empire entering moral senescence. Nonetheless, Mr. Cowen seems untroubled by his hyperpolarized vision.

The kindest description of his stance is moral indifference: "It will become increasingly common to invoke 'meritocracy' as a response to income equality," he writes, "and whether you call it an explanation, a justification, or an excuse is up to you." While  allowing that some might consider extreme socioeconomic inequality unjust, he revives the neoconservative canard that relatively well-off academics lead the charge against such inequality because they envy the status privileges of the wealthy. He seems not to have considered the possibility that his depiction of our future might fill them with justified revulsion.

Whether by accident or design, Mr. Cowen's book represents a fundamental challenge. To government-hating, market-worshiping conservatives, it poses a question: If this is the consequence of your creed, are you prepared to endorse it? To liberals and progressives: What are you going to do about it? And to all of us: Is this a country you would want to live in?

I know I wouldn't.

I've seen the future—and it doesn't work.






http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/15/1260282/-Republicans-food-stamps-and-the-permanent-underclass#

Republicans, food stamps, and the permanent underclass
Daily Kos
By Dante Atkins
SUN DEC 15, 2013

"Paul wants people to dream again. You don't dream when you've got food stamps."
—Bishop Shirley Holloway, on Rep. Paul Ryan

I know that it's only personal experience, and that personal experience is worthless in the face of the pure reason of objectivism. And yet, my experience has informed me that those who are on food stamps dream of a life where they can buy the types of food they can't afford on food stamps.

It's a defining symbol of the contrast between the leaders of our two political parties and the values that they hold. While President Obama launched a salvo this week to stem the growing tide of economic inequality that threatens the stability of our economy, Paul Ryan and company are busy advocating to take away what little comforts the less fortunate do enjoy. Not satisfied with gutting nutrition assistance for America's poorest, Republicans are also busy blocking any extension of long-term unemployment benefits as part of the very conservative Ryan-Murray budget agreement being considered at the time of this writing.

Even though the Right's rabid base would have no problem starving the poor on the grounds that they are the useless, drug-addicted parasites of objectivist fame, the movement's intellectual leaders know that hurting the poor merely for its own sake is not a popular end to itself, politically speaking. They couch their actions in far different terms.

For this more cerebral and articulate wing of conservatism, dependency is the watchword of choice. Far from wanting to hurt the poor, they say, the effort to take away food stamps and unemployment benefits from those who are most down on their luck is for the ultimate good of the disadvantaged. Government programs, the theory goes, lessen the urgency to ameliorate one's own situation and provide artificial comfort. Users of these programs will then come to rely on them, and to paraphase Bishop Holloway above, cease to dream about a better life. In this logical line, the only solution that will allow the poor to become more than they would otherwise is to take away their food stamps to force former beneficiaries to basically find income somehow or watch their children starve.

Otherwise known as dreaming.

There's certainly room to debate the morality of forcing children to go hungry just to instill some fear into their parents about finding low-wage jobs that are already impossible to get. But surely the Republicans are onto something here, right? A few hundred thousand starving kids might surely be worth the price of ending dependency on the government for food among America's poor, right? Republicans could make that horrific argument if it were true. But the truth is, food stamps don't create dependence, they lessen it instead:

... access to food stamps in utero and in early childhood leads to significant reductions in metabolic syndrome conditions (obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes) in adulthood and, for women, increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in educational attainment, earnings, income, and decreases in welfare participation).

Stop the presses here. It turns out that a child who actually has access to healthy food will be healthier as an adult and more able to achieve a long and fulfilling career! Food stamps are in fact a strategic investment in reducing how much future generations will depend on the government for both financial support and medical care.  But if food stamps are not just a moral thing to do, but also help the economy, increase social mobility, decrease welfare participation and keep future generations from chronic illnesses that cost taxpayer dollars, how could the conservative movement be so vehemently opposed to them?

It makes perfect sense for those whose actual priority isn't the elevation of the economy or the uplifting of the less fortunate. It makes perfect sense as a strategy for reducing social mobility while maximizing the wealth of the investor class. It makes perfect sense as a weapon to get the shrinking and squeezed middle class to resent the impoverished and blame them for their own condition. It makes perfect sense as yet another tool to guarantee that the supremacy of the wealthy remains unchallenged by those not yet desperate enough to work for scraps in a service economy dedicated to providing for the needs of the affluent.

In other words, it makes sense for those who wish to create a permanent underclass whose opportunities in life are dictated far more by circumstances of birth than by ambition, intellect or desire for achievement. It just doesn't make sense for those interested in a functional democracy. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his 1936 acceptance speech:

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

Food stamps and unemployment benefits provide the opportunity to make a living, and give their recipients something to live for. There is no argument left standing that eliminating them will ultimately increase the general welfare. At this point, the push to do so is one small part of the relentless drive toward inequality and plutocracy.
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Plutocracy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Plutocracy (from Greek πλοῦτος, ploutos, meaning "wealth", andκράτος, kratos, meaning "power, dominion, rule") or plutarchy, defines a society or a system ruled and dominated by the small minority of the wealthiest citizens. The first known use of the term was in 1652.[1]

Unlike systems such as democracy, capitalism, socialism oranarchism, plutocracy is not rooted in an established political philosophy. The concept of plutocracy may be advocated by the wealthy classes of a society in an indirect or surreptitious fashion, though the term itself is almost always used in a pejorative sense.[2]

The term plutocracy is generally used as a pejorative to describe or warn against an undesirable condition.[3][4]Throughout history, political thinkers such as Winston Churchill, 19th-century French sociologist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, 19th-century Spanish monarchist Juan Donoso Cortés and today Noam Chomsky have condemned plutocrats for ignoring their social responsibilities, using their power to serve their own purposes and thereby increasing poverty and nurturing class conflict, corrupting societies with greed and hedonism.[5][6]

Examples of plutocracies include the Roman Empire, some city-states in Ancient Greece, the civilization of Carthage, the Italian city-states/merchant republics of Venice, Florence, Genoa, and pre-World War II Empire of Japan (thezaibatsu).[citation needed]

One modern, formal example of what some critics have described as a plutocracy is the City of London.[7] The City(not the whole of modern London but the area of the ancient city, about 1 sq mile or 2.5 km2, which now mainly comprises the financial district) has a unique electoral system for its local administration. More than two-thirds of voters are not residents, but rather representatives of businesses and other bodies that occupy premises in the City, with votes distributed according to their numbers of employees. The principal justification for this arrangement is that most of the services provided by the Corporation are used by the businesses in the City. In fact about 450,000 non-residents constitute the city's day-time population, far outnumbering the City's 7,000 residents.[8]

Historically, wealthy individuals and organizations have exerted influence over the political arena. In the modern era, many democratic republics permit fundraising for politicians who frequently rely on such income for advertising their candidacy to the voting public.

Whether through individuals, corporations or advocacy groups, such donations are often believed to engender acronyist or patronage system by which major contributors are rewarded on a quid pro quo basis. While quid pro quo agreements are generally illegal in most democracies, they are difficult to prove, short of a well-documented paper trail. A core basis of democracy,[citation needed] being a politician's ability to freely advocate policies which benefit his or her constituents, also makes it difficult to prove that doing so might be a crime. Even the granting of appointed positions to a well-documented contributor may not transgress the law, particularly if the appointee appears to be suitably qualified for the post. Some systems even specifically provide for such patronage.

Some modern historians, politicians and economists state that the United States was effectively plutocratic for at least part of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era periods between the end of the Civil War until the beginning of the Great Depression.[9][10][11][12][13][14] President Theodore Roosevelt became known as the "trust-buster" for his aggressive use of United States antitrust law, through which he managed to break up such major combinations as the largest railroad and Standard Oil, the largest oil company.[15] According to historian David Burton, “When it came to domestic political concerns, TR’s Bete Noire was the plutocracy.[16] In his autobiographical account of taking on monopolistic corporations as president, TR recounted

’’ …we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.’’[17]

The Sherman Antitrust Act had been enacted in 1890, with large industries reaching monopolistic or near-monopolistic levels of market concentration and financial capital increasingly integrating corporations, a handful of very wealthy heads of large corporations began to exert increasing influence over industry, public opinion and politics after the Civil War. Money, according to contemporary progressive and journalist Walter Weyl, was "the mortar of this edifice", with ideological differences among politicians fading and the political realm becoming "a mere branch in a still larger, integrated business. The state, which through the party formally sold favors to the large corporations, became one of their departments."[18]

In his book The Conscience of a Liberal, in a section entitled The Politics of Plutocracy, economist Paul Krugman says plutocracy took hold because of three factors: at that time, the poorest quarter of American residents (African-Americans and non-naturalized immigrants) were ineligible to vote, the wealthy funded the campaigns of politicians they preferred, and vote buying was "feasible, easy and widespread", as were other forms of electoral fraud such asballot-box stuffing and intimidation of the other party's voters.[19]

The U.S. instituted progressive taxation in 1913, but according to Shamus Khan, in the 1970s, elites used their increasing political power to lower their taxes, and today successfully employ what political scientist Jeffrey Winters calls "the income defense industry" to greatly reduce their taxes.[20]

Post World War II[edit]

In modern times, the term is sometimes used pejoratively to refer to societies rooted in state-corporate capitalism or which prioritize the accumulation of wealth over other interests.[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] According to Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to U.S. President Richard Nixon, the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government."[29]

Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else,[30] says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are shared by society.[31][32]

You don't do this in a kind of chortling, smoking your cigar, conspiratorial thinking way. You do it by persuading yourself that what is in your own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody else. So you persuade yourself that, actually, government services, things like spending on education, which is what created that social mobility in the first place, need to be cut so that the deficit will shrink, so that your tax bill doesn't go up. And what I really worry about is, there is so much money and so much power at the very top, and the gap between those people at the very top and everybody else is so great, that we are going to see social mobility choked off and society transformed.

— Chrystia Freeland ,  NPR

When the Nobel-Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote the 2011 Vanity Fair magazine article entitled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%", the title as well as the content pointed to evidence that the United States is increasingly ruled by the wealthiest 1%.[33] Some researchers have said the US may be drifting towards a form of oligarchy, as individual citizens have less impact than economic elites and organized interest groups upon public policy.[34][relevant? – discuss] A study conducted by political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern University), which was released in April 2014,[35] stated that their "analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts." that Gilens and Page do not characterize the US as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" per se; however, they do apply the concept of "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey A. Winters[36] with respect to the US.





Oligarchy: Jeffrey A. Winters: 9780521182980: Amazon.com ...
www.amazon.com › ... › Non-US Legal Systems

Amazon.com
These variations yield four types of oligarchy: warring, ruling, sultanistic, andcivil. Oligarchy is not displaced by democracy but rather is fused with it. 




Oligarchy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oligarchy (from Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía); from ὀλίγος (olígos), meaning "few", and ἄρχω (arkho), meaning "to rule or to command")[1][2][3] is a form of power structure in which powereffectively rests with a small number of people. These people could be distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, education, corporate, religious or military control. Such states are often controlled by a few prominent families who typically pass their influence from one generation to the next, but inheritance is not a necessary condition for the application of this term.

Throughout history, oligarchies have often been tyrannical (relying on public obedience and/or oppression to exist) though others have been seen as relatively benign. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich,[4] for which the exact term is plutocracy. However, oligarchy is not always rule by the wealthy, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group, and do not have to be connected by either wealth or by bloodlines - as in a monarchy.

United States

Some contemporary authors have characterized current conditions in the United States as being oligarchic in nature.[10][11] Simon Johnson wrote that "the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent," a structure which he delineated as being the "most advanced" in the world.[12] Jeffrey A. Winters wrote that "oligarchy and democracy operate within a single system, and American politics is a daily display of their interplay."[13] Bernie Sanders (I-VT) opined in a 2010 The Nation article that an "upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country."[14] The top 1% in 2007 had a larger share of total income than at any time since 1928.[15]In 2011, according to PolitiFact and others, the top 400 wealthiest Americans "have more wealth than half of all Americans combined."[16][17][18][19]

French economist Thomas Piketty states in his 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that "the risk of a drift towards oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism about where the United States is headed."[20]

A study conducted by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University, and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, was released in April 2014,[21] which stated that their "analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts." It also suggested that "Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise." Gilens and Page do not characterize the US as an "oligarchy" per se; however, they do apply the concept of "civil oligarchy" as used by Winters with respect to the US.

Most recently, Jeffrey Winters has posited a comparative theory of "oligarchy" in which the wealthiest citizens – even in a "civil oligarchy" like the United States – dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth- and income-protection.[22]

Gilens says that average citizens only get what they want if economic elites or interest groups also want it; that is, economic elites and interest groups are influential.[23]






http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-president-puts-income-inequality.html

Hullabaloo
by David Atkins
Wednesday, December 04, 2013

The President puts income inequality front and center: "the defining issue of our time"

One of the primary critiques of the left against the President is that his speeches are so rarely backed up by actions. But even so, when a sitting President gives a landmark address on a topic so infrequently tackled as income inequality, one can't help but applaud and notice. From the speech:

“But we know that people’s frustrations run deeper than these most recent political battles. Their frustration is rooted in their own daily battles, to make ends meet, to pay for college, buy a home, save for retirement. It’s rooted in the nagging sense that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them. And it’s rooted in the fear that their kids won’t be better off than they were.

“They may not follow the constant back-and-forth in Washington or all the policy details, but they experience, in a very personal way, the relentless decadeslong trend that I want to spend some time talking about today, and that is a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead. I believe this is the defining challenge of our time: making sure our economy works for every working American. That’s why I ran for president. It was the center of last year’s campaign. It drives everything I do in this office.

“One might ask why the President has made certain policy decisions that negatively affect the middle class while benefiting the financial sector, if this is the case. But that a President is willing and able to come out and publicly say something like this in the post-Reagan era is itself a singular victory and an acknowledgment that something is deeply wrong with the economy. It is likely to be the issue that drives the Democratic presidential primary for 2016 as well.”

Greg Sargent has a few other important points of note:

Obama described the decline in economic mobility as a direct consequence of inequality — as opposed to arguing that lack of mobility is itself the problem — and as the product of trends that are decades in the making. He cast the need to ensure that “opportunity is real” for our children as "the defining issue of our time."

And, crucially, Obama described the overall problem as the result of the rich pulling away from the rest. He noted that the share of the country’s wealth is increasingly going to the top while tax cuts for the wealthiest have cut into investments that benefit the rest, emphasizing that this has made it harder for poor children to escape poverty. Meanwhile middle class incomes have stagnated thanks to technological advances and declining unions. Result: The “basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed.”

“The speech was not just about the top one percent, or about the middle class, or about the poor,” Smeeding says. “It was about the three of them together. It was about all three parts of the distribution — the whole thing.”

It is somewhat frustrating that inequality gets so little attention today that the speech is noteworthy. After all, the position of the middle class been eroding for decades now, even as the incomes of the wealthy have skyrocketed and their effetive tax rates have decreased.

The time to have started this important conversation was 20 years ago. Today, the facts of inequality and global economic trends of mechanization and deskilling mean that we now need to be having conversations about what a light-labor economy begins to look like.

Still, a major presidential address on income inequality is a good start. The key now will be to see what legislative actions follow from the President's words. One place he can start would be raise wages for workers employed through federal government contracts with private companies through executive order.




http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2011/12/transcript-thom-hartmann-what-happened-notion-leisure-society-1-december-11

Transcript: Thom Hartmann:
What happened with the notion of a "The Leisure Society?" 1 December '11 - See more at: http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2011/12/transcript-thom-hartmann-what-happened-notion-leisure-society-1-december-11#sthash.uX8MPQfQ.dpuf

This week, Democrats want to pay for a tax cut for working-class people with a 3 percent increase in income taxes on people who have earned over a million dollars a year, and the tax would only kick in on the one-million-and-first dollar.

Republicans, of course, are opposed, they want to pay for the tax cut for working people by firing thousands of working people - federal employees, driving up unemployment and making the economy really, really bad for Obama in the 2012 elections.

But what's really amazing is how timid a proposal this is by the Democrats, and how insane the Republican response is.

Taxes effect behavior - especially millionaires' behavior - but not in the way that you've been spoon-fed by billionaire front groups like the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, Reason Foundation, Fox News, or the Wall Street Journal.

Just take a look at recent history.

In a 1966 article - TIME magazine looking ahead toward the future - and what the rise of automation would mean for average Americans, what the article was about. It concluded:

By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With Government benefits, even nonworking families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of $30,000-$40,000.

Now, that was in 1966 dollars, it would be like $100,000, $120,000 a year now.

How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem.

... wrote the article. The premise was simple - with better technology - companies would become more efficient - they'd be able to make more things in less time.

Profits would skyrocket - and Americans would bring home higher and higher paychecks - and all the while working less and less.

So by the year 2000 - back in 1966 looking forward - things would look like this: [clip from the introduction to the Jetsons]

We would enter what was referred to as "The Leisure Society".

And the only problems facing America would be - just how the heck everyone would use all that extra leisure time!

What kind of things would people get into when a nation has lots of money and lots of free time on their hands?

And as we know today - we WISH that was our biggest problem.

Turns out - predictions about the leisure society were dead wrong.

As this chart shows - productivity (here, now it shows) DID increase significantly during the 1960's. This actually starts from 1947 up to 2000 - mostly thanks to automation and better technology.

Unfortunately - wages didn't. And neither did leisure time.

In the 1950's - before that TIME magazine article predicting the leisure society was written - the average American working in manufacturing put in about 42 hours of work a week.

Today - average working people put in in manufacturing about 40 hours of work a week.
Meaning despite the fact that productivity has increased 400% since 1950 - Americans are only working - on average - 2 hours less a week.

Just two hours less - that's it. Think about the math for a second:

If productivity is four times higher today than in 1950 - then Americans should be able to work four times less - or just 10 hours a week - to afford the same 1950's lifestyle - when a family of four could get by on just one paycheck - own a home - own a car - put their kids through school - take a vacation every now and then - and retire comfortably.

That is the definition of the Leisure Society - ten hours of work a week - the rest of the time spent with family - with travel - with creativity - with whatever you want.

Oddly though - most Americans today can't get by working 40 - or even 50 hours - a week. In fact - 20% of our country - one fifth of us - lives in economic insecurity - meaning they can't afford all of life's essentials like healthcare, transportation, and food.
So the question is...how did this happen?

Why - despite the fact that automation DID drastically increase productivity - why did the Leisure Society never emerge?

What went wrong?

For the answer - we should ask this guy.... [photo of Ronald Reagan] Because it's HIS tax cuts which are the reason why we all don't live in the Leisure Society today.

In 1966 - when the TIME article was written - the top income tax rate was 70%.
And what that effectively did was encourage CEOs to keep more money in their businesses - to invest in new technology - to pay their workers more - to hire new workers and expand their companies. After all, what's the point of sucking millions and millions of dollars out of your business if it's going to be taxed at 70%?

Thinking that way - if suddenly businesses became WAY more profitable and efficient thanks to automation - then that money would flow throughout the business - raising everyone's standard of living - increasing everyone's leisure time.

But when Reagan dropped that top tax rate down to 28% - everything changed. Now - as businesses became more profitable - there was far more incentive for the CEOs and senior executives - to pull those profits out of the company - and pocket them because suddenly they were paying an incredibly low tax rate. And that's exactly what they did.

All those new profits thanks to automation that were SUPPOSED to go to everyone - giving us all higher paychecks and more time off - went just to the top 1% - to just about 345,000 millionaires. ... everyone's wealth has pretty much stagnated since the Reagan tax cuts - except for the top 1%. This is the other 99% 

Thanks to Reaganomics, our national focus shifted from how we can be more efficient, make things better, and create a middle class - to - "how can I as a CEO suck as much money out of whatever sector I work in - from manufacturing to healthcare to communications?" That became the mantra - "how can I suck that money out".

So, yeah - the Leisure Society did come to America after all - but only the 1%ers enjoy it.
And until we roll back the Reagan tax cuts and restore the equilibrium that came with tax rates that built this nation through the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and seventies - the time of America's middle class's fastest and most solid growth in history - then the Leisure Society will never be a reality for the average American.

Roll back the Reagan tax cuts now. That's The Big Picture.






Light Labor Economy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXQrbxD9_Ng

Andrew McAfee: What will future jobs look like?
Published on Jun 20, 2013

Economist Andrew McAfee suggests that, yes, probably, droids will take our jobs -- or at least the kinds of jobs we know now. In this far-seeing talk, he thinks through what future jobs might look like, and how to educate coming generations to hold them.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more.

Find closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at http://www.ted.com/translate


TED TALK COMMENTS:


jumpstart55million
1 month ago
The rules that dictated the world of old are going to be useless in the future world to come. Now is the time to start thinking outside of the dam box. And this doesn't just apply to the scientist, innovators, and people in the tech fields. This applies to everyone.

Steve Waterhouse
2 months ago
A guaranteed minimum wage will only create a temporary respite for the poor. What we need is to recreate the ladder of jobs that lead from there to the top. 


Vincent Goossens
2 months ago
Jobs are obsolete. We are automating jobs faster than we are inventing new kinds of jobs. You can't have middle management and such when your factory has no workers. What you need is a guaranteed minimum income (aka Basic Income), paid for by the (then gigantic) income of factory owners, engineers, and maintenance personnel.
This will keep the ball running by giving poor people the opportunity to partake in the free market, and gives individuals the opportunity to start their own small local/green/artisan/authentic/community care/... businesses to make money in addition to their basic income. 


marcopolo3001
1 month ago (edited)
So you would have society reintroduce redundancy and slow automation in spite of accelerating technological change, just so it can appear people are still working for a living? I haven't heard a more preposterous statement! 


creamone
6 months ago
I agree with technology and automation freeing man from drudgery, repetitive, mundane jobs to be able to think and create, but I disagree with the continued old world thinking of how to conduct society overall. The same old have's and have not approach, the same GDP based society which is unsustainable. How about freeing up man from jobs completely and ending this competitive based, me and against you society where we are competing for almost everything. 

Why not use our technology to free man entirely for we can create a cooperative society where we all come together for the common good of society. Applying the Scientific method to enhance everyone's lives with the technology we have. Why continue being slaves to the machines when we can make the machines slaves for us. 

With no labor, economics of all kind would be a thing of the past. Money would be a thing of the past. It would be rendered obsolete. Our technology will make way for the resources we need to house and feed everyone on the planet Earth. It's time we give people access to resources and the necessities of life. Time to think out the box and stop going in circles with these old systems of the past like Communism, Socialism, Free Market and Capitalism. 

I'm not advocating a utopia which means state of perfection but I am advocating something better than the same old same old with all the inherent problems it brings. Time to upgrade society for a brighter sustainable future for everyone.


Peter Lai
3 months ago
I don't think our technology is at a point where such a system could become a reality.

Who knows when technology will be so advanced that it will disrupt our economic system and render it useless. 50 years? maybe in 1000 years?

Eventually Creamone, eventually.
But at the moment, we have to make do with what we have.



creamone
3 months ago
+Peter Lai I beg to differ Peter. I challenge you to watch on YouTube "The Awakening" by Douglas Mallet or "Will Work For Free" by Sam Vallely. These documentaries will get you up to speed of what is technically possible at this moment. Our technology at it's current state can render our Free Market Capitalist system obsolete if used for the good of society. The real problem holding us back is our ideologies, our traditions, our politics, our religions, our governments. Our values must change in order to see real change.

Our Science and Technology is up to par and always improving yet Society is stagnant because of the reasons I have given. 



And so they talk on and on. Personally I don't think all jobs will be automated. You just can't automate a school teacher (of course you could set up a classroom of nothing but computer lessons....) or a computer technician. A computer can't program itself. Some jobs just require human interaction to work at all. I can imagine a library without books (that has already happened) but there still has to be at least a few librarians to guide people to using the new technology that has replaced the books. Most businesses will want secretaries to deal with the paperwork and meet the public – that is if they still have a storefront for the public to visit. If everything becomes faceless and accessible only on the Internet like so much of the job hunting world is now, though, who knows?

The comment by Peter Lai above mentions a YouTube entry called “I Will Work For Free.” I think the point about people being willing to work for free is really possible, as people need to produce some product and communicate with others, whether or not they have a job. It can be a garden or a blog. It can be a local non-profit activity that helps the community. It can be free tutoring at the public library for those who can't afford to pay anyone to do that for them. (See Peter Lai's last comment.)

That presupposes that our society has compensated for the joblessness and utter poverty of those who are not wealthy – in this society that is now moving toward such an extreme division of financial means in our population-- by providing all the basic needs of those who aren't rich plus enough cash money to keep our economy going with some trade.

Of course somebody will still have to be policemen, librarians, factory and mill workers, teachers, salesmen, computer technicians, soldiers, etc., as society has basic needs to keep it moving forward. In other words, there will still be jobs that are not done by robots and computers, just not as many. One experiment that has been suggested within the last 20 years or so is job sharing. Instead of having one person who works 40 hours a week or more, have three people who work 20 or under. So some people would probably make a salary, though it would be small. Others could write e-books, play elaborate games and tournaments for entertainment, gamble for fun and profit, and use drugs and alcohol for recreation. Some of us who are lazier than others might read endless e-books, for education or just to pass the time, and even lazier or heavily depressed people will just stare into space.

Of course, if this were to come true as a cultural reality, the prevalence of mental health problems would escalate wildly, so there would have to be enough anti-depressant drugs and psychologists to treat everyone. No one can have a truly healthy level of self-esteem unless they do something useful. I think people can do without being in competition with others if they are busy, but we do tend to identify ourselves according to what we produce for society.

Many people who have time on their hands might go voluntarily into the poor parts of town and help people in whatever ways they can. There should be nonprofit organizations to guide these would-be volunteers to areas where there are needs. Maybe they would even get to know people with darker skin than theirs and learn to like, respect and be cooperative with them.

Maybe that kind of vision would work for people who resemble bonobos more than chimpanzees, but it probably won't for those who are aggressive and highly competitive. Of course, if everyone's needs were actually met, maybe competitiveness would become so ridiculous that people would start to get along better. Maybe we could have philosophical societies to discuss all kinds of subjects, and all play chess and scrabble together in the park.

The problem with this picture is that in the real world here in the US today, people with leisure fit into two categories, people who don't need to work because they are already wealthy and people who can't find a job. The Unemployment rate did go down recently to 5.9%. The jobs probably won't be great jobs with high wages, though, unless this month is a lot better than the last batch of new jobs. I have a Social Security pension for as long as they last – that's until the Republicans take over the Senate as well as Congress and Social Security is stripped of its funding by a law allowing the use of the payroll taxes for private retirement trusts. Personally, I am worried by the trend we are pursuing now with the ever increasing divide between the wealthy and the poor, squeezing out the Middle Class who used to be a moderating influence on politics.