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Corporations in the Age of Inequality

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Re: Corporations in the Age of Inequality

#51

Post by simonh »

dukeluke wrote: post #10
Sone7 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm sure CEOs had other perks in the past. This refutes precisely none of my criticism of the article. As to your other two questions, I completely fail to see how they affect my argument, and I don't want to get off track. To reiterate the criticism I was making - basing your entire article on the claim that the difference between average pay in companies is at fault for "the majority" of inequality, while maki…

In a global economy, workers have no leverage. If a group tries to form a union, the work goes elsewhere. Globalism exploits the fact that there are people willing to work for $1/hr, and leads to many of the problems of capitalism predicted by Marx and friends in the early 1900s. As long as globalization is allowed to continue, inequality within the US will just grow worse.

In terms of driving down third world poverty and lifting hundreds of thousands of people out of hand-to-mouth existences globalization is unbelievably effective. A large fraction of the rural poor in China are now skilled workers. Factory laborer wages in China have rocketed in the last 15 years just as the number of such laborers has also shot up. The massive expansion of IT companies in India is sucking huge amounts of money into the Indian economy while driving down the costs of services in the West.

So it depends on what you think is most important. Yes many manufacturing jobs have moved out of the West, yet overall unemployment in the Western world is not particularly high. In the US it's fallen by half in the last 5 years to historically fairly low levels and job vacancies are at an all time high because businesses are having difficulty finding skilled or experienced workers. the real problem in the actual jobs market is training and education, not de-industrialization.

The anti-globalization narrative is utter claptrap peddled by a 70's soviet-era industrialist view of the world where all we had to do was put everybody in factories and we'd everything would be fine. Actually, it wasn't true back then either, hence the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The globalization equation has nothing to do with transfers of wealth from Western world labour to Western world fat cats. It's mainly about transfers of wealth from Western world labour to eastern world labour. The solution isn't to reverse that trend and impoverish foreigners. It's to climb our economies up the value chain and capture more global wealth. We have been doing that, but we're just not doing it fast enough.

Re: Corporations in the Age of Inequality

#52

Post by simonh »

nercht12 wrote: post #37
Sone7 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globalization is not the enemy. Centralised globalization with a handful of megacorps dominating the global economy is fucking awful however. Protectionism is at best a short term solution that comes with a host of other problems. The major threats to our existence are global problems like climate change and nuclear arsenals. Fighting against all globalization will only divide us. I believe that the best leverage wor…

>> I believe that the best leverage workers of the world can have is the ability to live a decent life without the threat of starvation or extreme poverty. This dream is attainable, and worth planning for and building towards as a species. What do you mean by "ability"? Opportunity? I don't see how any particular economic status of anyone can be guaranteed with regards to what you're saying. How I see it: The rich ge…

> The rich get richer and the poor, poorer.

How do you explain the massive transformation of China from a backward rural basket case, to a dynamic modern manufacturing led economy in which industrial employment and industrial labour wages have both rocketed in the last 20 years?

That has come at a cost. Manufacturing really has transferred from the West to the East. Yet the West doesn't have mass unemployment and job vacancies for skilled workers are at an all-time high in the West.

The problem is that low skilled jobs have gone East and the West is moving up into high value services jobs, but our training and education systems have adapted too slowly to bring our worker pools along for the ride. The answer is not to turn back the clock, it's to ride the economic wave and up-skill our labor pool because too many people in the west are being left behind in unskilled jobs, when actually there are plenty of skilled job vacancies available compared the the actual number of unemployed.

Re: Corporations in the Age of Inequality

#53

Post by DarkKomunalec »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #49
DarkKomunalec wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/14/college-costs-media... Healthcare: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/03/health-care-costs-_... Housing: http://www.jparsons.net/housingbubble/ - compared to the rise in wages, this cost increase has been much more moderate, but it's still an increase. All while productivity has grown: http://blogs.reuters.com/macroscope/2012/05/04/the-u-s-produ...

Nope. College enrollment has never been higher. Your source claims it is less "affordable", but clearly far more people can afford it. Weird. http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/colleg... http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Enroll... Your second article says health care is more expensive than other countries, not that fewer people consume it than some past period. Looking at real r…

It takes a special kind of logic to look at rising prices, stagnant wages, and conclude that things are better.

Oh, no, wait, you didn't say better/worse, you said 'goods that we have less of'. So even if people bankrupt themselves over a broken leg, or go into decades of debt for a home or education, everything is just peachy! Even better, actually, since we can add credit availability to the list of things we have more of! http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-credit-card-...

There's also more jobs: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2012/ted_20120731a.png ! Gone are the dreary days when you were set for life by your 2nd job - these days you could find yourself looking for a new job any moment - how exciting!

Edit:

Oh, and there's more prisons, too! https://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/overviewincarcerati...

I guess I stand corrected, we have more of everything, and shouldn't complain, even if corporation's obscene wealth allows them to buy politicians and regulatory agencies. Who cares how concentrated power and wealth are, as long as there's enough bread and circuses.

Re: Corporations in the Age of Inequality

#54

Post by dukeluke »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #39
nercht12 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means you're taking from one to give to another, which eventually results in the former being as worse off as the latter was, so the sum total of your "humanitarian effort" ultimately amounts to zero. But that's a guess.

That's actually not true. The number of people living in absolute poverty (for various definitions of it) has gone down drastically. http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ourworl... http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Images/84796-11797610... https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/... Really, the only issue seems to be a loss of status (not goods and services) by some rich white…

We haven't just lost status. We've lost leverage and loyalty too. Globalization has made the demand for lower class labor in the US drop to the point where the uneducated cannot do well anymore. In a balanced economy, there's a demand for everyone, yet in our outsourced service economy, only the highly educated do well. The opioid epidemic isn't here because of a loss of status.

Re: Corporations in the Age of Inequality

#55

Post by notacoward »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #33

> In an increasingly winner-take-all or at least winner-take-most economy, the best-educated and most-skilled employees cluster inside the most successful companies, their incomes rising dramatically compared with those of outsiders. US median income is $52K, software developer is maybe 100K, so around double. But to make that you have to live in an area with a much higher cost of living, and the various governments…

> But to make that you have to live in an area with a much higher cost of living

No, you don't. Many choose to, but there are plenty of $100K developer jobs in cities with reasonable cost of living.

Re: Corporations in the Age of Inequality

#56

Post by yummyfajitas »

DarkKomunalec wrote: post #53
yummyfajitas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. College enrollment has never been higher. Your source claims it is less "affordable", but clearly far more people can afford it. Weird. http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/colleg... http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Enroll... Your second article says health care is more expensive than other countries, not that fewer people consume it than some past period. Looking at real r…

It takes a special kind of logic to look at rising prices, stagnant wages, and conclude that things are better. Oh, no, wait, you didn't say better/worse, you said 'goods that we have less of'. So even if people bankrupt themselves over a broken leg, or go into decades of debt for a home or education, everything is just peachy! Even better, actually, since we can add credit availability to the list of things we have…

Scroll up. You compared us to Somalia. In Somalia, they don't have all these things.

I'm not sure how you believe it's possible that consumption is up while compensation is stagnant and prices are higher. Could you explain - with numbers - how you propose that standard accounting identities are violated?

Re: Corporations in the Age of Inequality

#57

Post by DarkKomunalec »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #56
DarkKomunalec wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a special kind of logic to look at rising prices, stagnant wages, and conclude that things are better. Oh, no, wait, you didn't say better/worse, you said 'goods that we have less of'. So even if people bankrupt themselves over a broken leg, or go into decades of debt for a home or education, everything is just peachy! Even better, actually, since we can add credit availability to the list of things we have…

Scroll up. You compared us to Somalia. In Somalia, they don't have all these things. I'm not sure how you believe it's possible that consumption is up while compensation is stagnant and prices are higher. Could you explain - with numbers - how you propose that standard accounting identities are violated?

>I'm not sure how you believe it's possible that consumption is up while compensation is stagnant and prices are higher.

I cited sources with statistics, not my personal beliefs.

But to answer your question - the accounting is explained by an increase in debt (see the businessinsider article I linked earlier), and by the fact that what's spent on education/housing/healthcare, isn't spent elsewhere.

And I'm well aware we're better off than Somalia - that was my point. We don't have to wait until we're not before we start complaining. Should we do nothing but feel guilty we live in decent countries, until there's no-one who's worse off?

Re: Corporations in the Age of Inequality

#58

Post by AnthonyMouse »

notacoward wrote: post #55
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #33

> In an increasingly winner-take-all or at least winner-take-most economy, the best-educated and most-skilled employees cluster inside the most successful companies, their incomes rising dramatically compared with those of outsiders. US median income is $52K, software developer is maybe 100K, so around double. But to make that you have to live in an area with a much higher cost of living, and the various governments…

> But to make that you have to live in an area with a much higher cost of living No, you don't. Many choose to, but there are plenty of $100K developer jobs in cities with reasonable cost of living.

There are plenty of $80K developer jobs in cities with a $20K lower cost of living.

If there were actually enough jobs in Texas and Tennessee for everyone in San Francisco to live there with lower expenses but the same salary, explain why most of those people don't do that. Note that things like "cost of finding a new job if you lose yours" are components of cost of living.

Re: Corporations in the Age of Inequality

#59

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mantas wrote: post #40
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Globalization is not the enemy. The problem is there are two kinds. The classic one, and the one you can easily defend, was just eliminating tariffs. Don't discriminate against foreign businesses; treat them the same as local businesses. But there is another one that generally gets called "harmonization", and that's the one that kills everything. Because what it means in practice is the undemocratic international e…

The classical one does quite a bit harm too. Western/1st/etc world (used to?) treat workers well. The rest of the world didn't. Once tariffs are eliminated, all countries join the rat race to the bottom. How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia? Naturally the conditions equalise. The good ones get worse, while bad ones adopt…

> How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia?

In theory the idea is that they're not supposed to -- if you have unskilled work with no geographical restrictions, you do it where there is the lowest labor cost, and then everyone benefits by paying lower prices. Meanwhile western countries do the higher paying jobs that require a skilled workforce and the unskilled workers in western countries either do service jobs that do have geographical requirements or go to school and become skilled workers.

One of the things that's been killing us on that front is the broken welfare system that puts high marginal rates on lower income people through benefits phase outs, which makes it so that middle class people can't afford to hire lower income people to do service jobs, because 80% of the money goes to the government in benefits phase outs. Which means those people become unemployed, and the higher unemployment rate pushes down unskilled wages, erodes the tax base and increases the total cost government is paying out in benefits to the unemployed.

Re: Corporations in the Age of Inequality

#60

Post by [deleted] »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #58
notacoward wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But to make that you have to live in an area with a much higher cost of living No, you don't. Many choose to, but there are plenty of $100K developer jobs in cities with reasonable cost of living.

There are plenty of $80K developer jobs in cities with a $20K lower cost of living. If there were actually enough jobs in Texas and Tennessee for everyone in San Francisco to live there with lower expenses but the same salary, explain why most of those people don't do that. Note that things like "cost of finding a new job if you lose yours" are components of cost of living.

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