David Brooks is a genius at finding a middle road that gently slopes right, tamping down hyperbole and histrionics. He’s long been a personal hero and role model for encouraging cooler heads to prevail. In the case of the occupy movement, however, he’s set up a brilliant, deceptively simply, and false dichotomy. David writes: But the fact is that Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent. If your ultimate goal is to reduce inequality, then you should be furious at the doctors, bankers and C.E.O.’s. If your goal is to expand opportunity, then you have a much bigger and different agenda (NYT). Wait? Furious at doctors? The people who cure us and care for us? Oops. Sometimes deadlines help us focus, other times they just make us rush. I’m fairly confident David would never want to utter the phrase, “society should be furious at doctors.” Nevertheless, the article is an attempt to provoke current and potential new occupiers to question whether or not the cause justifies such sustained efforts, mobilized direct action, and relentless focus on Economic Inequality, which knows no color or other division. Economic Inequality may manifest itself as Red and Blue in some cases, but it’s White all over. Relax, that’s not a racial slur, Caucasians. Mr. Brooks and his 1% paymasters fear nothing more than the efficacy of the full 99%, unpartitioned by superficial politics, race, geography, culture; and that’s precisely what the #occupy movement is all about. Beneath and within the Red and the Blue, the underlying White fabric of all economic injustice is woven of a frayed and decayed fabric, of 19th century industrial capitalism and cotton, dipped and striped a billion too many times in the dye of Any Rand’s sociopathological objectivism, and Made In America by Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, valuing humans as mere cogs to be optimized in the machine. The 99% are not Red, White, or Blue. We are Human Beings of every hue, united against every stain of imbalance and injustice. Setting up a false Red and Blue dichotomy seeks to drive a wedge into the 99%, encouraging the kind of polarization that Brooks claims to oppose every Sunday morning, on an issue that is entirely colorless at it’s core. The usual whipping posts of education and opportunity will not distract the public this time from the astronomical costs and hoarded profits that exacerbate All Inequality, consequent to the one corrupt economic OS this movement is properly focused on upgrading. It’s time for the full system reformat. Delete all partitions. Reboot. Restart.
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The Red, White, and Blue of Economic Inequality
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/capitalismplusplus/~3/bVD06x2Pe7M/red-white-and-blue-of-economic.html
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Economic Democracy is a precondition for Political Democracy
Here's hoping that the MSNBC 'clip-n-curate' feature worked as intended ...
Clip 1: Economic Democracy and Political Democracy.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Clip 2: Wider Context. Peace is an Economic Issue.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
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Billionaires Gone Wild. It Doesn't Work. Isn't Sustainable.
"There's a model of the economy in which the rich create the growth that sustains everyone else ... but I see no evidence in either graph that that's how the economy actually works." - Ezra Klein
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Voodoo Redux: $30B aid to unemployed unaffordable, $650,000,000,000 tax cuts for rich non-negotiable
From the inexhaustibly vigilant pen of Paul Krugman:Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, was asked the obvious question: if deficits are so worrisome, what about the budgetary cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which the Obama administration wants to let expire but Republicans want to make permanent? What should replace $650 billion or more in lost revenue over the next decade?
His answer was breathtaking: “You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.” So $30 billion in aid to the unemployed is unaffordable, but 20 times that much in tax cuts for the rich doesn’t count.
The next day, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, confirmed that Mr. Kyl was giving the official party line: “There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.”How did that policy work out last time we tried it, Paul?Ronald Reagan said that his tax cuts would reduce deficits, then presided over a near-tripling of federal debt. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on top incomes, conservatives predicted economic disaster; what actually followed was an economic boom and a remarkable swing from budget deficit to surplus. Then the Bush tax cuts came along, helping turn that surplus into a persistent deficit, even before the crash.
But we’re talking about voodoo economics here, so perhaps it’s not surprising that belief in the magical powers of tax cuts is a zombie doctrine: no matter how many times you kill it with facts, it just keeps coming back. And despite repeated failure in practice, it is, more than ever, the official view of the G.O.P. SOURCE: New York Times.
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The New Normal for Employment: A Con Job
You see? They can be taught!
The "new normal" for employment doesn't work for anyone except employers an career coaches who are trying to sell how the recession is an opportunity for resourceful people. That's why they both want us to accept depressed salaries and bigger workloads as the new status quo. -- CIO Magazine
Remember this, do we now?
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Get Rid of Executive Bonuses
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/capitalismplusplus/~3/SJKDnHgjs88/get-rid-of-executive-bonuses.html
These days, it seems, there is no shortage of recommendations for fixing the way bonuses are paid to executives at big public companies.
Well, I have my own recommendation: Scrap the whole thing. Don't pay any bonuses. Nothing. - Henry Mintzberg
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When One Plus One is Less than One
http://capitalismplusplus.blogspot.com/2009/09/when-one-plus-one-is-less-than-one.html
When One Plus One is Less than One, the fundamental postulates and theorems, the relationships that define the entire game, have long since changed in ways that might seem almost completely unbelievable, at first glance. However, when closer inspection, cross examination, and methodical testing each confirm the new relationships, then entirely new methods of operation must immediately begin to take shape as we work together to define a New Normal. We could call this willingness and ability to assess and integrate new information Adaptive Resilience.So with thanks to @johnrobb by way of @changeist via @urbanverse, 2 minutes and 35 seconds for your consideration:
[NICE, ORIGINAL EMBED NOT IMPORTED]
Elizabeth Warren, "With two people in the workforce, [today's families] actually have fewer dollars left over than their one income parents had a generation ago, to cover EVERYTHING. So what we have today is, TWO PEOPLE working full time, flat out, hard bore and they actually have less money to spend than one person working full time, just one generation ago.Harry Kreisler, "And the older system, had a built in backup, this system does not because both are already working. This is a very VULNERABLE family that we have today because of an uncertain job market, healthcare, [unexpected or catastrophic] illness, and so on."Remember the context here, friends. This is from MAY 2007! Long before the MULTIPLE MELTDOWNS of 2008. So families were already on the precipice of existence ALREADY ... LONG BEFORE THIS CRISIS STARTED.Just to clarify, however, let's further remind ourselves that every Econ 101 student knows to ask the fundamental question of economics, "Compared to what?" So, we ask dear reader, what do you suppose is the state of the American family TODAY, as compared to MAY 2007? Better? Worse? The same? We all know the unequivocal answer to that question, and that answer is VASTLY WORSE.But vastly worse COMPARED TO WHAT? American families are vastly worse compared to Teetering on the Very Precipice of Existence in the years just prior to the meltdowns. That can't possibly be a sustainable situation.By all means, I encourage you to keep digging for yourself by viewing the full May 2007 Interview with Elizabeth Warren, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. -
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Modern Work is Mostly a Lie
http://capitalismplusplus.blogspot.com/2009/07/modern-work-is-mostly-lie.html
Modern work is mostly a lie.Especially in the so-called knowledge, information, or entertainment sectors, work has all too often become little more than an arbitrary hierarchy of stupidity fees, ignorance fines, influence peddling, and pathetic popularity plays. It's increasingly an unjustifiable waste of time to set up such pointless and counterproductive relationships in the first place. It's no wonder that increasingly, many of the most intelligent, creative, and educated simply opt out.Forget value judgments about whether this is Good, Bad, Indifferent, a vast Right-wing or Left-wing conspiracy; the fact that more and more modern work is mostly a lie -- tens of millions of make-work duck-n-shuffle experts at looking busy -- is simply a primary symptom of the overwhelming success of 18th and 19th century industrial era capitalism and the attendant cultural anomie typical of the evolution toward postscarcity.Take a typical knowledge work case: a consultant just upgraded six Wordpress blogs to version 2.8.1 in a total of about 20 seconds, thanks to automation, and billed clients for six hours. Why? Because the client has no idea of the level of automation available since the relationship was forged, years ago. The last the client knew, these updates could be "very risky" -- OMG! the website could go down! -- and "take a long time" to make sure hell doesn't accidentally freeze over. Multiply such norms by some X-hundred million similar seemingly insignificantly tiny transactions per day. Each time we engage in these behaviors, believing we are the only ones doing it -- okay, maybe a few others do the same, we exponentially understate to ourselves -- we simply fail to conceive of the aggregate effect.This is standard operating procedure for so-called service providers everywhere: find a client who doesn't know how easy you've made your work, convince them it's even more complicated than they imagined, and start the meter running. We've all seen this a thousand times. It's defended as monetizing the marginal value of efficiency. The thinking goes, "Hey, if the client needs something done and it's of X value to them, who cares HOW we get it done, right? If we're really efficient, that's our paycheck."Well, yeah, sort of. On the other hand, that's a complete make-work sham, isn't it? This is why so much of modern work is mostly a lie, perpetrated by small cliques who myopically believe they are the only ones getting away with this game, who are collectively addicted to and fearful of any change from the status quo, and who implicitly agree to cover for one another's fiddling about in cubicles all in the name of keeping the job trance intact. The job trance holds that a Calvinist industrial era hourly wage slave J.O.B. is the only conceivable moral Justification Of Being. This is not an indictment of the hapless humans enshrouded in this stultifying, anachronistic systemic miasma; rather, this is an indictment of a systemic group think that has failed to declare and deploy the productivity dividends born of the past two centuries of accelerating progress. This is to expose the obsolete, old world Centralized Capitalist organizing principle that is failing to serve us all as humans, as a community, as a nation, moving forward.In the entertainment industry case, everyone knows that the job or the part seldom goes to the best qualified or most talented applicant or audition. That's not An Efficient Market Objectively Allocating Resources, that's a popularity pecking order that is arbitrarily -- and often capriciously -- allocating resources that reinforce the dominant Central Capitalist Party Monarchy. Those who think that they see that game and can one day become king themselves, fully buy in and defend the monarchy, even though it's strictly against their own best self interest. Modern work is mostly a lie. That's why more and more of the brightest and best qualified people opt out. It's one of several off-balance-sheet explanations of why U6 total unemployment is already above 16.5% and empirically indicative of the growing Structural Unemployment that has steadily, relentlessly overtaken us in recent decades.Still need convincing? Maybe conjuring the Bloomberg brand will reopen a singed synapse or two:“We are going to have a huge pool of unemployed, second only to the Great Depression,” said Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics in New York. “It will be a big public-policy problem.”We're clueless about how to handle surpluses -- the most dangerous of which is cognitive surplus -- and the Old World Centralized Capitalist Party Bosses began embezzling our exponential productivity dividends long ago by providing myriad creative ways to soak up the first hints of the sociologically volatile stuff.But change kept accelerating faster and faster and faster and faster. Faster than ever dared imaginable by my very own great grandparent share croppers.So Industrial Era capitalism worked. It succeeded. It blew the doors off of history. It will continue to work and succeed for other civilizations that need to make that phase state transition from agrarian to industrialized. But it's utterly obsolete for America and today it is our existential obligation to define what comes next -- Postscarcity Agalmics. If we fail, then one industrial locomotive after another will simply run off the end of the same iron rails of fear and inertia we've run off.As a recent New Scientist article put itSo will we cling to scarcity just so that we can keep capitalism? Or will capitalism have to evolve into some new kind of digital economics? The question underlines many things - from music piracy to the woes of the newspaper industry to Google's efforts to scan all the books in the world. (via @agalmacist)
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Snark and Anger at Las Magus
http://capitalismplusplus.blogspot.com/2009/05/snark-and-anger-at-las-magus.html
Alchemists have always been a sham and a farce. Financial alchemists -- las magus, to abuse both poetic license and spanglish -- are the bottom of the barrel of the breed.Which leads to our question, have you ever wondered why the tone in this blog, along with growing numbers of others, is increasingly snarky and angry at the very core of free market capitalist convention? Why is Free Market Socialism emerging as the most likely, most credible evolutionary step forward, from here?Obviously, both ideologies hold Free, Fair, Open, and Transparent Markets, central; however, unless you are ready to conceed that a small handful of irrelevant, underemployed, disenfranchised malcontent bloggers and tweeters have actually succeeded in steering the entire public debate toward Free Market Socialism and other Mixed Economic models, you'll have to conceed that plain old boring Empirical Analysis warrants the Snark, Anger, and Activism. In either case, as a defender of the status quo 19th century industrial wage slavery capitalism meme, you lose. You're just increasingly out of touch with present economic reality.And when level heads like Barry Ritholz concur with data-driven sentiment that further supports a secular bull market for Snark and Anger, you become utterly irrelevant. Obsolete.Case in point: while sharing the Back Story to Bailout Nation, Ritholz wrote:The more I researched and wrote, the more it was apparent we were witnessing the greatest heist ever made. By the last section of the book, history’s biggest transfer of wealth — from the taxpayer to the Banksters — was taking place. Trillions were being shifted from the responsible to the reckless, from the prudent to the incompetent. It was infuriating — and you will see as the book progresses my initial academic tone gets replaced with greater snark and anger.Keep in mind that The Reckless and Incompent referenced above are the same people that Mssrs. Kudlow, Forbes, Draper, et al, would likely refer to as the "Best and Brightest of Capitalism" off of whose backs government should dismount. Of course, when government gets off the backs of the criminals, then that same lot blames the government (us, You and Me) for not being on their backs. I used to think apologists for that circular argument were just stupid; now I realized that they are both stupid and malicious. Not stupid because they don't see their own logic as circular; but stupid because they think that We The People don't see right through it. The origins of the deeply rooted maliciousness -- toward themselves and others -- which seeks to further skew such an insanely skewed system simply escapes all rational explaination.Disclaimer: I'm fairly confident that this blog takes exception to several of Mr. Ritholz's specific financial and policy perspectives and I'm equally confident that Mr. Ritholz would not likely give this blog the time of day. However, such speculative dissonance only serves to further strenthen the case for justifiable Snark and Anger directed at Las Magus: those thousands of alchemical scumbags, along with their posses of millions of boot-licking, ass-kissing, Office Space suck-ups that systematically fired the upstanding for "not fitting in with the team" as such teams twisted entire corporate cultures into the image of their own skewed and twisted makers.All I'm suggesting here is that when diverse, data-driven perspectives come to agree, that's usual an area worth noticing. In this case, the Unsustainable Resources Skews that typify our increasingly obsolete 19th century industrial capitalism more than merit the Snark and Anger.So shall we too remain, until the song no longer remains the same.
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Geithner on Salary Caps
http://capitalismplusplus.blogspot.com/2009/05/geithner-on-salary-caps.html
Fine, then don't call them salary caps if Forbes, Draper, & Co. keep squealing and whining. Call them 20x Rational Restraint Ratios that ensure all stakeholders and VALUE CREATORS participate proportionately in the returns earned by their Shared Fate labors while simultaneously Richly Rewarding innovation, investment, and market savvy.
Why are such ratios essential? Regular readers already know the answer to that question, but we'll add here that primarily, ratios -- in addition to a whole suite of interrelated policies -- help to assure that that the economic circulatory system continues to operate in a sustainable manner. Cash clots kill and economy, just as surely as blood clots kill a body. Moreover, it is also physically, mathematically, existentially impossible for any individual human's contribution to the race to be worth billions or trillions of times more than any other human being. It's empirically impossible. We each only have 24 hours in a day and none of us is AGI-Posthuman-Enhanced just yet. Even then, it will ethically impossible in the land where it continues to be asserted that All Are Created Equal, with Certain Inalienable Rights, including Liberty and Justice for All.
Let's also briefly address the entitlement issue one more time. These economic blood clots do not have a "right" to exist. Nor do pathological hoarders have a "right" to indulge their mental illness, just because it's intertwined with cash. In fact, that entanglement makes their mental illness even more damaging to society.
Compulsive hoarding is a DSM-IV illness . Maybe it is genetic, and that might partly explain why insane levels of wholly unsustainable skews of untold wealth run in genetic lines. Mental illness attached to money is still mental illness. Literally, there are just a few thousand very sick compulsively hoarding human beings acting as blood clots within the flailing American economy. Just because the object of their hoarding can be hidden away in offshore accounts, doesn't make it any less hoarding. Just because everyone understands the value of cash, that doesn't mean that the Marginal Psychological Value of cash doesn't encounter an inflection point somewhere in the $100M range.
Everyone knows that there is a point at which the slips of paper lose ALL MEANINGFUL VALUE and the game devolves into a seventh grade playground pissing contest. Even the skewed-up hoarders themselves acknowledge this: watch, listen, and learn.
So go ahead, try to explain to me a Healthy Human Psychological Profile that NEEDS more than $100M in Personal Assets while neighbors are Giving Away Their Children just to survive. Healthy human beings consider the health of the village within which they were enabled to acquire so much. Of course they OWE the community; because without the community, there would be no context within which to play out this compulsive cash hoarding illness.
This unsustainable, skewed wealth hoarding is just psychologically sick and morally revolting. We've said that this is going to get personal and as unemployment rates continue to grow, the demands to Publish The List of the top 1000 most fiscally sick and sadistic are only going to grow.
Bottom line: Ayn Rand and Aldous Huxley were both wrong. The road to postscarcity is not an avenue that Parades Satanic Sloth, escorted by a Panoptic Police State; it is a road toward the fulfillment of the penultimate Promise and Triumph of Industrial Capitalism.
So let us not lament that something is lost. Celebrate instead the success of human ingenuity and perseverance that has brought us so far. WE DID IT! Huzzah! Freedom from Want and Poverty can be ours through new ways of participation and inclusion on the human stage. No caps, no limits to the potentials for humanity.
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Concerto for Squealing Piggies and Harried Hoarders in “F” Major
http://capitalismplusplus.blogspot.com/2009/05/concerto-for-squealing-piggies-and.html
Big man, pig man, ha ha, charade you are You well heeled big wheel, ha ha, charade you are And when your hand is on your heart … You're nearly a good laugh Almost a joker With your head down in the pig pen Sayin’ "keep on diggy’in" Pig stain on your fat chin What do you hope to find? When you're down in the pig mine You're nearly a laugh You're nearly a laugh But you're really a cry … -- Roger Waters, on Animals We can be confident that we’re making progress when the turrets of the Grand Old Pedantic party are reduced to loading up histrionic emotional pejoratives as their last bastion of defense: “The assumption that the pursuit of self-interest within the rules and conventions of society will also promote the public interest may be succeeded by a mushy collectivist pseudo-altruism, in which jealousy and envy are given a free ride …” Right. It’s jealousy and envy, not empirical observation of Unsustainable Resource Skews which are functionally equivalent to massive blood clots lodged throughout the global economic circulatory system. Note to the non-empirically minded: if you clot up 42% of your vital bodily fluids, into any 1% of your body; or, if you clot up nearly 70% of any resource into 5% of any system; that, my friend, is unsustainable unto immediate herky-jerky death. I don’t know how that makes you feel, emotionally, but presiding physician’s recorded Time of Death is just another cold, analytical statistic. After all, if I might mirror an astonishingly articulate miscarriage of fact by our good friends at FT, “There is a risk that empirically dubious but emotionally attractive interpretations, which enshrine wild west, every man for himself, bar room brawl capitalism; and which call for a rapid return to the failed status quo, could gain ground.” Which is merely to say: First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they attack us, then they copy us, then we win. Same as it ever was. “Victims of your own success, unite! You have nothing to lose but your Unsustainable Resource Skews.”
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Maladaptive: America's 'Financial Oligarchy'
http://capitalismplusplus.blogspot.com/2009/04/maladaptive-america-oligarchy.html
Click to listen to today's Fresh Air from WHYY: In his article "The Quiet Coup" in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly, former (2007-2008) International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson says that U.S. suffers from "financial oligarchies." Unless the U.S. breaks up its financial oligarchy, Johnson -- now a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management -- warns that America could face a crisis that "could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression -- because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big." [ SOURCE: NPR ]
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Free Will: Predictably Irrational
http://capitalismplusplus.blogspot.com/2009/01/free-will-predictably-irrational.html
Industrial Era capitalism is inundated with irrational reliance upon irrational conventions and assumptions in the context of a post-information society.For instance, it's incontrovertibly obvious that NOBODY possesses anything even remotely resembling "Full Information," yet conventional economic theory is utterly dependent upon hosts of such irrational presumptions.In real life economic behavior, Ariely explains, "You rely on our own past behavior, to dictate your next behavior, without clearly thinking about it, until it just becomes a habit."When we do this over and over again with an entire economic system founded upon absurd and irrational assumptions such as Full Information and an achievable equilibrium, we are clearly setting ourselves up to FAIL time and time again.Dan Ariely quotations:"There's a level of compensation that actually undermines and replaces the original motivation; and that I think is a very very dangerous place.""One of the ways [companies capture the heart and soul of employees] is to obfuscate payment, by paying people monthly. Cash eliminates the long term bond between people.""You simply cannot contract motivation.""When people talk about markets, it's like voodoo belief: The Markets will fix things."Ariely says that when he meets entrepreneurs, they generally want to Improve The World and big cash payoffs from some other source to do something that they don't care about generally have little or no effect. My own observations and experience over the past 35 years completely validates this perspective."I actually believe that very little of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurial activity is happening because of economic incentives; I think we have these incredible drives for meaning and help and it's not about [cash] incentives."
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