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United States19573 Posts
On November 21 2015 02:00 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2015 01:50 Plansix wrote:
The only problem with that is when landlords jack rent due to a economic bubble(tech, real estate) and it guts the area of its previous population. Then when the bubble burst, the city is left a gap in its tax base and population. Plus urban blight if there are repossessions of homes. Stability for its population long term is a city's a goal and can be more important than obeying the whims of a free market. In theory the bubble should inflate all areas. Rent goes up, the wages of the grocery store employees go up because otherwise they quit/leave, the prices at the store goes up. the tech workers who are making all that money can still afford it. Obviously the market isn't perfectly efficient and it'll take a while for price signals to move throughout the cycle but the alternative is that tech employees whose skills would allow them to leverage very high salaries are unable to use those salaries to get somewhere to live near their job because the market has been artificially saturated by government intervention.
KwQuark's got it totally right here. People being priced out of cities is caused, primarily, by Nimbyism and local governments failing to allow housing to be built. You really cannot fix any other those issues without addressing the underlying reality that 1 million people want to live in a place that has space for 500 thousand. Sure, there are some places where this can't be addressed, like Malibu where the appeal is the space and the exclusivity, but in LA and San Francisco its a self-induced problem created by the local government.
And, the reality is that these city governments secretly like it, their governing models are reliant on ever-increasing government revenues, and gentrification helps the balance sheets not only by increasing revenue, but it also often has the side-effect of reducing expenditures because people on their welfare programs move outside the city limits.
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United States42021 Posts
The place where disadvantaged people get looked over is not on the cutting edge of technology. There aren't genius computer engineers who could revolutionize the world not getting jobs. There are smart kids who would have been brilliant not getting the attention they need from teachers at school, being born in low income areas where the schools suck, coming from broken homes. The problem isn't Silicon Valley, it's schools, colleges, homes.
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Yeah I didn't want to insinuate that there is murder or some sinister plot going on, but that the effects are very real and severe and that "tech bros just being tech bros" severely ridicules the problem. If a significant part of the population in a country has practically no or very little chances to participate in the most prosperous parts of the economy that's a very big failure especially if, "work hard and you can get up the ladder" is kind of the promise that the US is supposed to be about.
And while price capping might not work, there really is no reason to not greatly expand public housing. It's an investment that's almost always guaranteed to pay out and it's just not happening because the demographics profiting from it have no power in politics.
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I agree that the lower middle class getting forced out of cities by rising tech companies isn’t great, especially if it’s a bubble. But that is a problem that each city needs to address and shouldn’t’ be conflated with the start up tech industries weird issue with diversity.
Clutz has it right that the cities need to remove restrictions on construction and targeted at addressing the issue. Price capping is a good short term solution, but those have a habit of not leaving once their time is done.
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United States42021 Posts
On November 21 2015 03:17 Nyxisto wrote:
Yeah I didn't want to insinuate that there is murder or some sinister plot going on, but that the effects are very real and severe and that "tech bros just being tech bros" severely ridicules the problem. If a significant part of the population in a country has practically no or very little chances to participate in the most prosperous parts of the economy that's a very big failure especially if, "work hard and you can get up the ladder" is kind of the promise that the US is supposed to be about.
And while price capping might not work, there really is no reason to not greatly expand public housing. It's an investment that's almost always guaranteed to pay out and it's just not happening because the demographics profiting from it have no power in politics.
Silicon Valley is a symptom though. You might as well say "a lot of people seem to be in very poor health in hospital, we should stop people going to hospital". Silicon Valley isn't not hiring the best people for the job, the best people for the job are predominantly white due to systemic issues that kick in far before we get to Silicon Valley.
Let's put it another way, imagine a world in which every year someone shaved an inch off the height of people from ethnic minorities. A few black people who would have been freakishly tall might still play basketball but the vast majority of players would be white. In this hypothetical world you wouldn't attack the teams for not recruiting more people from ethnic minorities, you would attack the policy of shaving height from ethnic minorities.
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United States19573 Posts
On November 21 2015 03:20 Plansix wrote:
I agree that the lower middle class getting forced out of cities by rising tech companies isn’t great, especially if it’s a bubble. But that is a problem that each city needs to address and shouldn’t’ be conflated with the start up tech industries weird issue with diversity.
Clutz has it right that the cities need to remove restrictions on construction and targeted at addressing the issue. Price capping is a good short term solution, but those have a habit of not leaving once their time is done.
Well, price capping actually contributes to long term crises, like what exists in NYC and the West coast. And real estate is all about long term thinking, there really is no place for a short term plan. It not only discourages new development (even if you guarantee new buildings won't have caps, because they correctly don't believe such promises, and real estate is a very long term investment), it also discourages proper tenet-landlord relations in the existing housing.
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On November 21 2015 03:32 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2015 03:17 Nyxisto wrote:
Yeah I didn't want to insinuate that there is murder or some sinister plot going on, but that the effects are very real and severe and that "tech bros just being tech bros" severely ridicules the problem. If a significant part of the population in a country has practically no or very little chances to participate in the most prosperous parts of the economy that's a very big failure especially if, "work hard and you can get up the ladder" is kind of the promise that the US is supposed to be about.
And while price capping might not work, there really is no reason to not greatly expand public housing. It's an investment that's almost always guaranteed to pay out and it's just not happening because the demographics profiting from it have no power in politics. Silicon Valley is a symptom though. You might as well say "a lot of people seem to be in very poor health in hospital, we should stop people going to hospital". Silicon Valley isn't not hiring the best people for the job, the best people for the job are predominantly white due to systemic issues that kick in far before we get to Silicon Valley. Let's put it another way, imagine a world in which every year someone shaved an inch off the height of people from ethnic minorities. A few black people who would have been freakishly tall might still play basketball but the vast majority of players would be white. In this hypothetical world you wouldn't attack the teams for not recruiting more people from ethnic minorities, you would attack the policy of shaving height from ethnic minorities.
I think that hypothetical is a really good way to put it. It also dovetails nicely into the problem of university admissions and professorships, though there is another wrinkle there in that the "shaving height" (choice of a career in academia or a field in general) can depend heavily upon an individual's own culture. If a person's culture promotes "height shaving" that results in their culture being underrepresented in some fields how do we address that ethically? Changing their culture?
The most obvious example of this is gender disparity in nurses and doctors, where it's not clear if we should "fix" that more women want to be doctors than men-if we make it so that any woman who wants to be a doctor has an equal shot as if she were a man, can we say we're done?
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On November 21 2015 03:05 Plansix wrote:
The sections of the tech industry have its own problems with the totally lack of diversity, especially with new companies like twitter. It wouldn’t be an issue if they also were not so weirdly hostile about it every time someone points it out. I need to find that weird quote from the CEO of twitter getting mad about people criticizing a panel about women in tech made up of all men.
But that isn’t ethnic cleansing. That is just tech bros being tech bros.
I'll take people complaining about lack of diversity in the tech industry seriously when they start complaining about lack of diversity everywhere else, and when diversity means more than just "we think too many white men are doing the job" (the funny part being asians are almost just as prevalent in the industry).
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I bump into almost just as many Anands as Johns in my line of work (CS Research). But gender is definitely lopsided. I've read articles about how nerd culture is the new male dominance thing, and I mostly agree, but I don't think it's just Silicon Valley that should do something about it. Schools, parents and Hollywood have all been peddling the engineer=man cool aid for forever. Change is slow.
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Although touted as a way to protect youth, the global war on drugs has done far more harm than good to young people, needlessly jailing them and making addictive substances even more dangerous, according to a report released Friday.
Count the Costs, a global coalition of drug-reform advocates, said the 50-year punitive- and enforcement-based approach to drugs has placed control of the trade in the hands of organized crime and criminalized many users.
The report identified seven overall costs from this approach, including the undermining of human rights, promotion of stigma and discrimination, and the waste of billions of dollars on drug law enforcement.
As part of these overall trends, the report said the war on drugs has harmed youth by spurring the rise of violent criminal gangs, jailing young people’s parents, and leaving millions of people with criminal records that can limit opportunities for the rest of their lives.
“This war, while declared in the name of protecting young people from the ‘drug threat,’ has ironically exposed them to far greater harm. The war on drugs is, in reality, a war on people,” the report said.
Count the Costs’ analysis comes as many U.S. states have started to rethink the effectiveness of drug prohibition, especially when it comes to cannabis.
In the last two years, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia have legalized the recreational use of marijuana. Two dozen other states have in recent years approved medical marijuana use to treat a host of ailments, from cancer-related symptoms to glaucoma.
Chief among the concerns raised in the report is how laws against drug use and possession help increase the potency of substances.
Source
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On November 21 2015 03:15 KwarK wrote:
The place where disadvantaged people get looked over is not on the cutting edge of technology. There aren't genius computer engineers who could revolutionize the world not getting jobs. There are smart kids who would have been brilliant not getting the attention they need from teachers at school, being born in low income areas where the schools suck, coming from broken homes. The problem isn't Silicon Valley, it's schools, colleges, homes.
Qwark you hit the nail here. If parents don't push children from a YOUNG age to prioritize learning, education and going ABOVE AND BEYOND the mediocre US school system, they won't be anything other than average. You can't depend on the school system if you are parents.... it caters to the lowest common denominator.
But many parents are messed up themselves. They don't see the value of education. They are lazy, afraid of responsibility, blame everyone except themselves, fall into addictions, etc, etc... everything but raise their kids right. Or maybe they are trying their hardest, but their partner left early (I'm looking at you men). Single mom's struggle to put food on the table, let alone have time to push their kids.
Then when no-one is there to raise their kids, their kids turn to the same sick, warped and depraved society that guided them to their own lofty heights (sarcasm).
OK rant over. TLDR... it comes down to families. The erosion of the family unit and irreponsibility of parents is the root of societal decay.
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On November 21 2015 02:09 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2015 01:51 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
So if they can't afford the rent where they currently live they will somehow be able to afford to move and commute maybe even further back and forth from work? No. If your job doesn't pay enough for you to live on then you either increase income or reduce costs. Increasing the commute does neither. That'd be a very bad solution. They should move to a city where they are not trying to outbid people far richer than them for housing. I'm not rich enough to live in London. However I do have one neat trick I use to get around the inevitable poverty this fact would cause. It's called "not living in London" and so far it's working out pretty well. I combine it with "not working in London" for maximum effectiveness. When enough people use this trick jobs in London start struggling to get applicants because people would much rather live and work somewhere where they get more money in their pocket after living costs. Lack of supply forced employers to offer a London wage, roughly 12% higher than comparable positions outside of London.
What makes you think that you should be able to move wherever you want just because you have more money than the people already living there?
Your blithe attitude towards housing is based on assumptions that people can and should just move "wherever the jobs are" or "wherever they can afford to live" without regard to history, family, friends, social circle, or culture. Part of the reason that the "traditional values" that conservatives love are fraying is the fact that young people are just expected to uproot their entire lives and move wherever they can find a job that pays them enough to live on.
On November 21 2015 14:07 ElMeanYo wrote:
OK rant over. TLDR... it comes down to families. The erosion of the family unit and irreponsibility of parents is the root of societal decay.
See above. The root of the erosion of the family lies in neoliberal policies that have destroyed the ability of middle and lower class people to set down roots in a community, find time for the reproduction of their family units, and encourage "traditional values" because they are always working shitty-paying jobs, swamped in debt, and never accumulate any equity.
Kwark would have people move to the suburbs so they can spend even more time commuting to and from work and less time with their families.
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United States42021 Posts
On November 21 2015 14:13 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2015 02:09 KwarK wrote:On November 21 2015 01:51 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
So if they can't afford the rent where they currently live they will somehow be able to afford to move and commute maybe even further back and forth from work? No. If your job doesn't pay enough for you to live on then you either increase income or reduce costs. Increasing the commute does neither. That'd be a very bad solution. They should move to a city where they are not trying to outbid people far richer than them for housing. I'm not rich enough to live in London. However I do have one neat trick I use to get around the inevitable poverty this fact would cause. It's called "not living in London" and so far it's working out pretty well. I combine it with "not working in London" for maximum effectiveness. When enough people use this trick jobs in London start struggling to get applicants because people would much rather live and work somewhere where they get more money in their pocket after living costs. Lack of supply forced employers to offer a London wage, roughly 12% higher than comparable positions outside of London. What makes you think that you should be able to move wherever you want just because you have more money than the people already living there? Your blithe attitude towards housing is based on assumptions that people can and should just move "wherever the jobs are" or "wherever they can afford to live" without regard to history, family, friends, social circle, or culture. Part of the reason that the "traditional values" that conservatives love are fraying is the fact that young people are just expected to uproot their entire lives and move wherever they can find a job that pays them enough to live on. Show nested quote +On November 21 2015 14:07 ElMeanYo wrote:
OK rant over. TLDR... it comes down to families. The erosion of the family unit and irreponsibility of parents is the root of societal decay. See above. The root of the erosion of the family lies in neoliberal policies that have destroyed the ability of middle and lower class people to set down roots in a community, find time for the reproduction of their family units, and encourage "traditional values" because they are always working shitty-paying jobs, swamped in debt, and never accumulate any equity. Kwark would have people move to the suburbs so they can spend even more time commuting to and from work and less time with their families.
I think that I should be able to move anywhere where there is a guy with a house wanting to sell that house to me. That's pretty much the foundation of western capitalist society.
Friends, family, history, social circle and culture etc all have value. And if you want to work an extra 20 hours a week to afford easy access to them then be my guest. But if you don't that's not suddenly my obligation to subsidize. People make choices with how to allocate the resources available to them, if they allocate them badly that's on them. Hell, if we're going to start subsidizing shit that people can't afford, helping people get into expensive houses they couldn't afford on their minimum wage job just so they can be closer to their church would be damn near the bottom of my list. I'd rank things like paying a living wage to adults who become full time carers for their parents with dementia etc. Resources are not infinite and a forced government reallocation of a finite supply of housing to reserve it for the people the market deems are using the housing in the least efficient way at the expense of those who would generate far more value from it seems like the opposite of a good idea.
Government making more housing, sure. Government zoning more land or hell, even forced purchases of privately held and unused land for house building, I'll back that. But the government deciding that where you can afford to live isn't decided by how much money you have but rather how many friends you have in the neighbourhood? That's insanity.
they are always working shitty-paying jobs, swamped in debt, and never accumulate any equity.
They are working shitty jobs and swamped in debt because of the widespread failings in financial literacy in American society which are constantly reinforced by a culture that thrives on mindless consumerism. Government subsidy of economic suicide is not helping people. The reason you can't afford to buy a $2,000,000 house on a $20,000 income is not because capitalism isn't bad or the market is greedy or the banks, it's because $2,000,000 is a very high number. I moved from south east England to New Mexico, it took me less than a year to get a down payment together that would have taken ten in England. And I don't make shit. Sure, I have to fly back to England for weddings, Christmas and so forth and sure, I have to skype my family. But I still come out far ahead doing those things compared to how much harder I would need to work in England to have the same financial position. I was given a choice, option A, much higher income in real terms but deal with time differences, distance, travel a few times a year and Americans or option B, lower income in real terms by so much that to make up the deficit would force huge sacrifices to be made in my personal life. At no point did I demand the government give me option C, subsidizing my needs for friends, family, history, social circle and culture by taking limited resources from people who could get more use out of them and giving them to me unearned.
Kwark would have people move to the suburbs so they can spend even more time commuting to and from work and less time with their families.
But no, I probably just hate the poor and want poor kids to be unable to see their parents who commute 4 hours each way because I told them that they couldn't afford a house. That's literally what I want. Want to accuse me of hating blacks too? I already got told I was in favour of ethnic cleansing.
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On November 21 2015 14:13 IgnE wrote:
Your blithe attitude towards housing is based on assumptions that people can and should just move "wherever the jobs are" or "wherever they can afford to live" without regard to history, family, friends, social circle, or culture. Part of the reason that the "traditional values" that conservatives love are fraying is the fact that young people are just expected to uproot their entire lives and move wherever they can find a job that pays them enough to live on.
You are too harsh on Kwark here. I think we are all on the same side.
The general idea here is that without parents pushing their children towards education (no matter what their economic background), the concept is that education is the key to progress.
In the US it is possible to achieve the highest levels of education regardless of economic background. Look at Ben Carson. Here is a man who grew up in a poverty-stricken background. Yet his mother was wise enough to understand that her children's future was dependent on education.
She made them read when all they wanted to do was watch TV. Look at the result! Carson became the #1 neurosurgeon and ended up chief at John Hopkins, the foremost childrens medical institute here in the US. And now running for president.
Look at your life, people. Did your parents push you towards good grades? Do you recall any memories of your parents 'on your case' about your grades or your performance in school? Did you even have parents who did such a thing?
Now look at your life.... are you drifting without a purpose or goal? The reason is because your PARENTS didn't instill in you these values when you are young. I'm not talking when you were 12 or 13. I'm talking 3 or 4. This is when it begins.
When you become parents... take this to heart. Your children are the next generation. They CAN be better... you WANT them to achieve more than you did. Push them and don't blame your parents. EXCEL them and move them to a better future than you had.
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On November 21 2015 14:43 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2015 14:13 IgnE wrote:On November 21 2015 02:09 KwarK wrote:On November 21 2015 01:51 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
So if they can't afford the rent where they currently live they will somehow be able to afford to move and commute maybe even further back and forth from work? No. If your job doesn't pay enough for you to live on then you either increase income or reduce costs. Increasing the commute does neither. That'd be a very bad solution. They should move to a city where they are not trying to outbid people far richer than them for housing. I'm not rich enough to live in London. However I do have one neat trick I use to get around the inevitable poverty this fact would cause. It's called "not living in London" and so far it's working out pretty well. I combine it with "not working in London" for maximum effectiveness. When enough people use this trick jobs in London start struggling to get applicants because people would much rather live and work somewhere where they get more money in their pocket after living costs. Lack of supply forced employers to offer a London wage, roughly 12% higher than comparable positions outside of London. What makes you think that you should be able to move wherever you want just because you have more money than the people already living there? Your blithe attitude towards housing is based on assumptions that people can and should just move "wherever the jobs are" or "wherever they can afford to live" without regard to history, family, friends, social circle, or culture. Part of the reason that the "traditional values" that conservatives love are fraying is the fact that young people are just expected to uproot their entire lives and move wherever they can find a job that pays them enough to live on. On November 21 2015 14:07 ElMeanYo wrote:
OK rant over. TLDR... it comes down to families. The erosion of the family unit and irreponsibility of parents is the root of societal decay. See above. The root of the erosion of the family lies in neoliberal policies that have destroyed the ability of middle and lower class people to set down roots in a community, find time for the reproduction of their family units, and encourage "traditional values" because they are always working shitty-paying jobs, swamped in debt, and never accumulate any equity. Kwark would have people move to the suburbs so they can spend even more time commuting to and from work and less time with their families. I think that I should be able to move anywhere where there is a guy with a house wanting to sell that house to me. That's pretty much the foundation of western capitalist society. Friends, family, history, social circle and culture etc all have value. And if you want to work an extra 20 hours a week to afford easy access to them then be my guest. But if you don't that's not suddenly my obligation to subsidize. People make choices with how to allocate the resources available to them, if they allocate them badly that's on them. Hell, if we're going to start subsidizing shit that people can't afford, helping people get into expensive houses they couldn't afford on their minimum wage job just so they can be closer to their church would be damn near the bottom of my list. I'd rank things like paying a living wage to adults who become full time carers for their parents with dementia etc. Resources are not infinite and a forced government reallocation of a finite supply of housing to reserve it for the people the market deems are using the housing in the least efficient way at the expense of those who would generate far more value from it seems like the opposite of a good idea. Government making more housing, sure. Government zoning more land or hell, even forced purchases of privately held and unused land for house building, I'll back that. But the government deciding that where you can afford to live isn't decided by how much money you have but rather how many friends you have in the neighbourhood? That's insanity. Show nested quote + they are always working shitty-paying jobs, swamped in debt, and never accumulate any equity. They are working shitty jobs and swamped in debt because of the widespread failings in financial literacy in American society which are constantly reinforced by a culture that thrives on mindless consumerism. Government subsidy of economic suicide is not helping people. The reason you can't afford to buy a $2,000,000 house on a $20,000 income is not because capitalism isn't bad or the market is greedy or the banks, it's because $2,000,000 is a very high number. I moved from south east England to New Mexico, it took me less than a year to get a down payment together that would have taken ten in England. And I don't make shit. Sure, I have to fly back to England for weddings, Christmas and so forth and sure, I have to skype my family. But I still come out far ahead doing those things compared to how much harder I would need to work in England to have the same financial position. I was given a choice, option A, much higher income in real terms but deal with time differences, distance, travel a few times a year and Americans or option B, lower income in real terms by so much that to make up the deficit would force huge sacrifices to be made in my personal life. At no point did I demand the government give me option C, subsidizing my needs for friends, family, history, social circle and culture by taking limited resources from people who could get more use out of them and giving them to me unearned. Show nested quote +Kwark would have people move to the suburbs so they can spend even more time commuting to and from work and less time with their families. But no, I probably just hate the poor and want poor kids to be unable to see their parents who commute 4 hours each way because I told them that they couldn't afford a house. That's literally what I want. Want to accuse me of hating blacks too? I already got told I was in favour of ethnic cleansing.
You are making excuses for a rentier class that has been sucking the wealth from the urban poor for decades before resorting to the trite "if they can't afford to live there then they should move." The question you should be asking is who owns the city? Who has a right to the city? This "subsidizing" talk always already presumes that somehow the people who own the city also get to decide who lives in it. I am saying that rent ceilings, "subsidized" housing, and the like aren't only about wealth redistribution to "those who can't afford it" they are a political statement about who has a right to the City and everything that entails. Of course resources aren't infinite, but that doesn't mean the rich always get to have the choice lots while shuttling everyone else off into ghettos, urban, suburban, or otherwise.
And no one cares about your penny-pinching. Let's set aside the fact that just like everyone cannot be "above average" everyone cannot adopt a Kwarkian fiscal policy without the economy crashing because of deficient demand. You bring up how you are going to be a millionaire by the time you are 40 every time this topic comes up while living in bumblefuck eating ramen and you basically sound like a white Clarence Thomas lecturing everyone about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. I know you don't understand this, but it's often a rational decision to stay in the Bronx paying various forms of rent instead of moving to the suburbs.
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United States42021 Posts
I'm mostly just amused that you think the economy would collapse if everyone was more like me due to the lack of consumerism (although the idea that I only eat ramen is pretty funny, I eat out a few nights a week). If everyone was more like me in their reluctance to squander the hard earned yield of their labour for crap we would live in a world where the 10 hour work week would be the new standard for the minority of people who still had to work. There is no shortage of wealth, just really poor allocation. Turning poor allocation of wealth into government policy doesn't solve shit.
I'm pretty sure you just don't have a working understanding of capitalism. It would survive a population willing to put a $ value on immaterial things such as time with their kids and buying those instead of oversized trucks. Capitalism is like evolution, it has no ideal model in mind that it steers you towards, it's simply a mechanism. An anti-consumerist capitalist society in which people shunned disposable possessions in favour of leveraging their marketable skills to obtain ever greater amounts of leisure time, or time with their family, or education, or whatever, would be no less capitalist. Capitalism doesn't care whether you work 60 hours or 6 hours in a week, it's consumerism that does.
Also you have an obsession with the suburbs. You keep insisting I want to ship the poor out to the suburbs.
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Yup if everyone was more like you we would just all sit collecting annuities eventually.
"The hard earned yield of their labor." That's going to the capitalists.
And lol that capitalism doesn't care whether we work 60 or 6 hours in a week. The population is already willing to put a $ value on immaterial things. The US economy is increasingly a service economy. That doesn't change the dynamics of the circulation of capital and its need to keep the hours high and a surplus labor population ready to take up the jobs if an overworked soul protests.
The amount of time we work is exactly what capitalism cares about. It runs on labor power which is sold in chunks of time nowadays. Pretending that at some point everyone will have the money to buy enough leisure time that they only have to work 6 hours a week is the height of absurdity. But then you seem to think that capitalism can survive a truly "anti-consumerist" movement, so that speaks for itself. Struggles over time are fundamental to the capitalist mode of production. John Stuart Mill remarked on it in his time, and Marx further elaborated the point. I haven't said anything about an "ideal model that capitalism is steering towards." You seem to be trying to paint me as some kind of dialectical materialist with an outmoded teleology, but you also have this strange faith that capitalism can survive without growth.
Hence that remarkable phenomenon in the history of modern industry, that machinery sweeps away every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working day. Hence too the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument for reducing labour-time suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital's disposal for its own valorization.
Albuquerqe is a suburb.
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United States42021 Posts
If we were content living with the standard of living from just a few decades ago we could already exist on a 6 hour week. Instead every member of society now attempts to purchase goods that were luxuries beyond imagining in their grandparents generation. They spend the first few hours of the first day of the week earning enough to put meat and potatoes on the table and the rest on car payments, cable tv and paying a legion of Chinese workers to make shit for them. And that's fine, if that's what they want to do then so be it. They are trading their time for the things they want, which is their prerogative. But if they wanted to work a 6 hour week and spend the other 34 caring for their family they could just as easily buy that with their time.
Capitalism does not care what you buy. Capitalism rewards the extraction of gold from one part of the world and the burying it in vaults in another. Capitalism does not care if you work, how hard you work or for how long. It doesn't care if there is growth, although it typically results in growth. Capitalism is the name for the system built on people making what they believe to be rational choices about how to allocate their labour. Choosing to sell 50 hours of your labour a week is capitalist. Choosing to sell 0 hours of your labour is also capitalist. The part that makes it capitalist is the part where you value your own labour and choose whether or not you wish to sell it.
Consumerism is no more the inevitable result of capitalism than humans are the inevitable result of evolution. And just as evolution would keep on ticking without humans, capitalism would keep on working without consumerism. It's a mechanism, nothing more.
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Hey look I totally agree that if we were content with what we had we could work a lot less. We can probably maintain our current standard of living to an approximate degree with 15 or 20 hours of work a week already, if we had the political will and the social organization. That's all well and good and fine. I share your values. It's your analysis of the world as it is, and as it could be, that is lacking.
Can you explain what you mean by your use of the term "capitalism?" You seem to think that the private property regime, or the set of laws that govern trade, or something like that, is "capitalism." Capital is a process; it circulates. It does care if there is growth. If there is no growth, the circulation stops. It does care if you work. If you don't work then the production of surplus value stops (and you probably die because you are cut off from the means of your own production without the wage). If you don't buy it can't complete the loop, and circulation stops.
Consumerism is the particular, historical result of capitalism in our society, on our planet, wherein capital found particular ways to overcome specific barriers it encountered to its own reproduction. The idiosyncrasies of its present form are up for debate but I personally think you are vastly underestimating the likelihood of a "consumerism" emerging from a variety of alternate timelines. You are operating under false assumptions if you think 1) capitalism in its current form can continue without consumerism or 2) a zero-growth economic system where people worked 20 hours a week and didn't care about production for the sake of production and accumulation for the sake of accumulation was, in any sense of the word, capitalism.
Capitalism is not "the name for the system built on people making what they believe to be rational choices about how to allocate their labour." That's some kind of liberal ideological tripe that you were spoon-fed by the technocratic school system. The way you phrased it almost sounds like some kind of bottom-up rational design by the workers about how to allocate labor, rather than a top-down, profit-driven mode of production that is about the reproduction of capital. It's almost got a quaint, aspirational quality; individuals deciding how best to use their labor. There's no mention of the worker alienating his labor from himself. The Kwarkian worker, being deprived of the means of his own reproduction (i.e. land to grow food), has a choice whether to sell his labor or not. Never mind that for most people the choice is sell your labor or die.
And let it be known everyone. You can put meat and potatoes on your table in your house that you own working 6 hours a week at the median wage. It's the car payments and ipod that are putting you at over 40 hours a week. But since you can't live in the city you are going to have find some other way than a car to get around in your suburban area.
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Republican operative Liz Mair is planning a "guerrilla campaign" aimed at knocking Donald Trump out of the GOP presidential race, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.
Mair, a former online communications director at the Republican National Committee who also worked on behalf of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's presidential campaign earlier this year, has formed Trump Card LLC "to defeat and destroy" Trump's candidacy, according to the report.
“In the absence of our efforts, Trump is exceedingly unlikely to implode or be forced out of the race,” said an internal memo that the Journal obtained.
“The stark reality is that unless something dramatic and unconventional is done, Trump will be the Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton will become president.”
News of the recently formed group comes a day after the super-PAC supporting Ohio Gov. John Kasich, another GOP presidential rival, announced $2.5 million for TV, radio and other ads over two months targeting Trump in New Hampshire, where the real estate tycoon maintains a solid lead.
Another group, the economic think tank Club for Growth, has already hit Trump with $1 million in ads in the early-voting state of Iowa.
The moves underscore growing concern among Republicans that Trump's bid for the GOP presidential nomination, which at first was considered a long-shot, has moved closer toward becoming a reality as he leads national polls with less than three months before the first votes are cast in the 2016 race.
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EPT
