At least productivity has house prices to hang out with
Jfc are textbooks prices even worse than when I was in undergrad? What do things typically cost now? It was awful when I was buying them.
It was 200-300 for me 15 years ago. Worst part is you cannot pirate them because you need the online code that comes with a new book. I recall something dumb happening if you just got it separated from the book.
“Look at that, proof that stagnant wages cause more productivity”
- Our bosses
They don’t actually answer that question. It’s like they’re building to a huge reveal, and then it just stops. Unless I missed it completely.
Edit. Never mind. It’s just a bitcoin pump. What a waste.
I think there’s some hints.
- Administration costs have risen, food quality has gone down*
- Everything has become market based, inflation is built in and required in modern market stability models
- The very wealthy have learnt to extract more of the value share
- Residential land in good places is now scarce and so expensive, where it was abundant and cheap back then (because population has increased)
They seem to think Bitcoin would fix it, but Bitcoin is in the market, and is more volatile than cash
They seem to think gold has stable and intrinsic value
Of course what happened then was computers, they are the biggest productivity multiplier since the wheel, and I wonder, do we the workers deserve that share of our productivity that was provided by our employers’ computers?
*That’s contentious, some people think food quality has gone up, despite obesity rates now vs 1972
Vietnam and feminism. Mostly feminism.
Women joining the workforce in huge numbers increased the labor pool without significantly changing the demand for goods or services. Thats basic supply and demand.
Owner class played the long game on that movement. Boiling a frog.
Nothing wrong with women working. And I’m not saying women can’t work.
All I’m saying is that we’re all complaining about needing two working adults in a household to survive, while simultaneously renting two adult bodies per household to the owner class.
I’m not saying how to fix it. I have no idea how to fix it. A massive strike sounds adequate, at least 35-50% of the workforce. Never going to happen though, because most of them need two incomes. Pretty shitty.
How do you explain the concentration of wealth in the owner class, then? There are plenty of plots showing that in that website.
That’s a separate issue.
Most of the 1% don’t have their value on cash or from wages. It’s all a giant scattered portfolio, funded largely by loans against stocks which make up most of their compensation. Most of the portfolio cannot be easily liquidated, at least not in large amounts, without serious rippling effects in the economy.
The problem comes in being able to place loans against stocks to fund future investments. In theory, it’s a high-risk, high-reward opportunity that’s available to all. It could be a great mechanism for middle-class stock owners to build a comfortable nest egg…but instead what’s left of the middle class has whatever stocks they own in their 401k and if they did have other stocks, the risk is far too great to be palatable to most of them. At the scale of billionaires, though, putting a few million worth of stocks as collateral for a loan to start a new company is practically Monopoly money.
CEO salary is interesting. Most of the big salaries that get people pissed off are in the S&P500. Those salaries are insanely high, far higher than they should be.
It is worth considering, though, that the S&P 500 are some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. It does deserve some sort of an exceptional wage to be responsible for steering those ships. Not hundreds of millions, probably not even tens of millions, but the CEOs are the figureheads of companies directly responsible for the livelihoods of millions of people, not just their employees but entire economies.
Thats an insane amount of pressure, and ought to be well compensated. And CEOs aren’t really there for leadership qualities or whatever they say they are (although some of the celebrity/prima donna CEOs certainly bring their own different breed of value to the companies they represent…people like Musk, Gates, Jobs, etc). They are there to be a person to point to when shit hits the fan. As they say, you don’t pay a hooker for sex, you pay a hooker to be quiet.
In my opinion, I think that a CEOs pay should, generally, be a significant salary proportional to the market-cap of the company, and a large percentage of stocks should not be able to be touched until 1 year following the CEOs departure from the companies.
It’s time for productivity to go down.
What happened 1979? Reagan?
1979 was Jimmy Carter, a Democrat. Reagan did not start until 1980, and while he is famous for breaking the backs of unions, thus crippling their ability to fight back against this trend, he did not actually start it.
Before Carter was Ford and Nixon, both Republicans. Ford pardoned Nixon’s crimes, supposedly to help “heal the nation”.
According to Robert Reich’s “Inequality for All” (free link) - he was the Secretary of Labor under Clinton and previously served under both the Carter and Ford administration so he was very much attuned to what was going on - this trend started due to the rise of corporations, which have super-rights that humans do not have. e.g., taxes on stock dividends were capped at like 13% while payroll taxes can go up to >35%, and while if a human commits a crime they would go to jail, but not so with a corporation. It’s a great racket scheme for the rich to cover themselves in a legal fiction so as to avoid pretty much any responsibility for their actions. Hence why we see so many corporations acting so very boldly to destroy the planet - after all, why not? What’s the worst that could happen to them in return?
I was surprised to learn that Carter deregulated trucking, which devastated wages for truckers, and they never recovered.
Can you clarify what you mean by rise of corporations?
I’m asking since I recently learned they’d existed for hundreds of years by then, at least. My understanding is the British East India Co was the first legit corpo
Robert Reich can definitely explain it better than I:-). Basically any law that further enhances their protection moves them forward - e.g. Citizens United - while other things may pull them back, e.g. Obama raised the marginal top tax rate on dividends.
But corporations can do many things, like corporation A takes out a huge loan, builds a building, then hands it to B, then defaults on the loan, even while the board members of B are the same humans as were on A. Sounds like stealing right? Humans need to eat, breathe, sleep, and pay their debts, but corporations do not, plus have special protections besides. In the USA, a “President” of a legal entity can be held liable for actions taken by either himself or by the company, whereas a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) not as much.
Corporations helped do things not otherwise possible, e.g. didn’t they build the Panama Canal? At the time that was such a huge endeavor that a single normal company could not have done it.
But there’s a balance, and all told that balance has as of late tipped towards enhancing protections for corporations while offering less rights to the humans, i.e. the former has risen and by implication, at the expense of the latter.
Reagan was a couple of years later.
Coincidentally though, Thatcher happened in 1979, and Reagan is just Thatcher with a penis.
But the real answer is likely that after the financial troubles in the 70s and sky high inflation, there was a number of changes in government to try to have and maintain low inflation - things like higher levels of unemployment being tolerated, employer protection laws not evolving to combat companies’ growing anti-union sentiment, fewer and smaller rises in minimum wages.
At the same time, lowering of tax rates on wealthy/high income people meant those people at the top wanted to take more of the pie than ever before, knowing that far less of it would end up being lost as taxes anyway, and that meant less for the workers.
I’m really surprised no one here has mentioned this yet, but a huge factor would have to be globalization and the offshoring of American manufacturing.
It started in the 70’s, with companies like GE and the car manufacturers moving factories to Mexico and later Asia, and with growing supply of imported cheap goods like steel. This really took off in the 80’s and 90’s with deliberate market liberalization and promotion of globalization during the Reagan/Bush and Clinton administrations.
In other words, American workers’ wages were pressured by the extremely low wages of overseas labour.
