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As unions decline, inequality rises

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Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#321

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #310
acdha wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close. That rich person had servants, could go on lengthy vacations, etc. and most likely they had substantial passive income. The key thing to understand is the difference in how precarious those situations are: that affluent suburbanite has some shiny things but their cash flow is much higher than their wealth. A TV in every room is a rounding error on the $11k/year each of those new cars costs on average,…

The rich people of the past had no internet, cars, air travel, or much health care by modern standards. The average 2022 American is vastly better off materially. What they had was social status, and I think that's more what you're talking about. Social status is incredibly important for humans, so I understand focusing on it. But since it's pretty much a Zero Sum Game, nothing much changes there.

>The rich people of the past had no internet, cars, air travel, or much health care by modern standards. The average 2022 American is vastly better off materially.

No, while rich people in the past had no iPhones or internet, they had something far more valuable than that: income generating businesses and appreciable assets like land, housing, gold, fine art, jewelery, etc.

And no, the average American is vastly poorer now as housing, stable well paying jobs, healthcare and education, are now massively out of reach for the average joe than they were a few decades ago. Having iPhones and internet doesn't make up for these.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#322

Post by runarberg »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #281
edent wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The traditional view is that "The workers control the means of production". Suppose you built a successful small company but, suddenly, every employee quit at once. Could your business carry on the next day? Could it survive until you hired and trained replacements? If the answer is "no" then you have made the case that employees both deserve to share in the business's success and will probably be incentivised by co-…

Neither view will do. The company can't succeed without the workers. The company also can't succeed without capital. Both deserve to get a cut of the rewards.

This neglects the reality that loans exist. In an ideal leftist world your local credit union redistributes wealth by collecting pepole’s savings from the community and hands them out as loans for slightly higher interest rate. That interest rate is the “cut” of the rewards. If an enterprise goes bankrupt and is unable to pay back the loan, there is usually some kind of insurance the credit union has to prevent going under with it.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#323

Post by ebiester »

Swizec wrote: post #220
subpixel wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a hundred years ago, a bunch of immigrants from places like Germany or Spain or Italy could arrive in New England (including New York City), perform manual labor, provide for their families on one income, and pool their additional money to _build whole buildings_ as social or fraternal clubs. That really puts things into perspective for me.

"provide for their families" was also a much lower standard than it is now. Back then having a good life (for immigrants at least) didn't mean a large house in the suburbs and 3 cars, it meant an entire family of 5 sharing 1 bedroom and walking everywhere. A pair of jeans was a multi generational investment. If your family could afford one bicycle, you were living large. This was unimaginable wealth compared to what…

The whole point of civilization is that generation to generation, our standards of living should increase.

Instead, they are regressing. If we are comparing to 100 years ago, we sure should have been doing better! If we compare to 50 years ago, there are some key ways where we have regressed within the United States.

The key here is that when we are speaking of standards of living, we are speaking within some narrow contexts. In the developing world, standards have blossomed. Within the United States, the GDP has continued to grow but the value hasn't spread equally.

I can say that in the lower 50% of people in the US, the standard of living has markedly decreased. For 50-80%, it's mildly increased. For the top 20%, it's doing just fine, but it's never been a better time to be wealthy as the pathway for compounding growth on wealth has never had so many tools.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#324

Post by runarberg »

nec4b wrote: post #286
edent wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The traditional view is that "The workers control the means of production". Suppose you built a successful small company but, suddenly, every employee quit at once. Could your business carry on the next day? Could it survive until you hired and trained replacements? If the answer is "no" then you have made the case that employees both deserve to share in the business's success and will probably be incentivised by co-…

Can you build a house without a carpenter? If not, is he entitled to a part of your house even though you paid him to build it?

This is a silly question, so silly in fact that I suspect it is only intended as reductio ad absurdum (which can be a fallacy if based on a false or inadequate premise).

A carpenter is entitled to the fruits of their labor, which can adequately be provided with money.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#325

Post by KevinGlass »

klipt wrote: post #279
Swizec wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"provide for their families" was also a much lower standard than it is now. Back then having a good life (for immigrants at least) didn't mean a large house in the suburbs and 3 cars, it meant an entire family of 5 sharing 1 bedroom and walking everywhere. A pair of jeans was a multi generational investment. If your family could afford one bicycle, you were living large. This was unimaginable wealth compared to what…

Being able to "walk everywhere" is itself a kind of luxury nowadays, because there are limited walkable cities in the US and they have all become very expensive. It's often actually much cheaper to live somewhere in the suburbs where you can't walk everywhere, because everything is designed around cars.

The fact that everything is designed around cars is one of the invisible nooses around the neck of America. When you look around and notice that everything is covered in cars, that's hard to unnotice. All those cars, roads, parking lots, highways, box stores, mile of sewer and water pipe, cost a staggering amount and are going to start costing a lot more to maintain over the next decade as systems age out and need replacement or maintenance. Not to mention the cost of demolishing the country we spend the previous 300 years constructing. The vampiric system of automobilism has made everything much more expensive for everyone.

Living in a semi-crowded city, near your family and friends, should be the default, cheap option. Instead we've wasted about 10 trillion dollars pave the entire continent. Possibly the most expensive mistake ever made in history.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#326

Post by scarmig »

nightski wrote: post #266
scarmig wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argument for the meme: Labor unions don't challenge the core structure of capitalism; even when they're working, they mostly serve to give a slightly bigger piece of the pie to workers. And in practice, they are hijacked by a certain bureaucratic caste that mostly optimizes for stability and self perpetuation. They become integrated with state sponsorship, which will never allow for substantive change. For instance,…

Nothing is stopping anyone from forming a worker coop in the US. Yet few do. Have you ever considered this?

1) That was a statement of arguments about whether or not a worker co-op driven economy is superior to labor unions, from a pro-labor perspective. Stating an argument doesn't mean endorsement of it; that's the entire point of steel manning.

2) To the extent I buy either argument, I don't think it's subtle that my sympathies lie with the criticisms of an economy of worker driven co-ops.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#327

Post by Spooky23 »

Aunche wrote: post #170
Spooky23 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really need to squint at the sun to conclude that. As money interests have become more politically powerful, it’s harder and harder for employees to organize. You can get fired at Walmart if 4 people are caught talking to each other. It’s easy to rag on unions, but usually that’s a surface complaint ignoring the factors causing it. Even globalization is an example. There’s nothing etched in stone that says we nee…

>Even globalization is an example. There’s nothing etched in stone that says we need to have child labor mining in Africa for rare earth minerals to make iPhones. This is a concern troll. If you really cared about child labor abroad, you would unequivocally support globalization as parents don't want their kids to be slaves and more jobs in these countries gives parents more options. Child labor and slavery is caused…

Tell me how globalization has improved conditions in the Congo?

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#328

Post by [deleted] »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #255
scarmig wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marx didn't predict that capitalism wouldn't generate wealth. On the contrary, he believed it was the most economically revolutionary structure the world had yet devised and would create untold wealth. That's entirely consistent with the world we see. To be very specific, where he fell short was predicting a secular decline in the rate of profit. This wasn't a crazy error--most early economists also believed it--but…

He's referring to marx belief in the "tendency for the rate of profit to fall" which is literally objectively wrong and the opposite of it is accepted within economics. This is the accepted explanation, which implies that the rate of profit rises over time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okishio%27s_theorem Btw, marx predicted that capitalism is inevitably destroyed due to tendency for the rate of profit to fall. I b…

[deleted]

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#329

Post by haberman »

awinder wrote: post #274
haberman wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me, how is one supposed to engage with the "argument" that their personal experience and resulting belief is a "propaganda driven falsehood." That's not an argument, it is pure name calling, and doesn't even make sense as this person seems to be basing their beliefs on direct experience from their own professional life.

By: 1. Not labeling people who disagree with you as “part of a professional managerial class” / people who don’t want to work (propaganda) 2. Actually citing personal experience (just saying you have personal experience isn’t a debate/argument)

> Not labeling people who disagree with you as “part of a professional managerial class” / people who don’t want to work (propaganda)

I see, you get to label others with pejoratives like "propaganda", but others are not allowed to respond in kind with labels of their own. Seems a bit one-sided.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#330

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

edent wrote: post #307
nec4b wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you build a house without a carpenter? If not, is he entitled to a part of your house even though you paid him to build it?

I would say that, yes, a carpenter is entitled to a share of the profits. They used their labour to build something which appreciates in value. Traditionally, it has been too hard to track fractional ownership of an asset and calculate a share of profits. And most workers prefer cash up front rather than waiting for a payday which might not materialise for decades. I'm not going to go full blockchain/NFT on this idea…

Could you make the argument that the carpenter should be given the option to be paid in equity or in cash, if both parties agree to it? Is there any argument against giving people the option to choose the sort of compensation risk profile that works best for their individual situation?
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