Category: Economics Page 19 of 89

When I was a teenager I read The Club of Rome’s “Limits To Growth.” The Club ran consumption, pollution and population numbers thru some simple models to see what would happen. The model misses climate change, so we’re worse off than they expect (much worse off) and some other factors, but the stuff it models has been coming in approximately as expected.

The standard model of progress, often assailed by thinkers like John Michael Greer, assumes that there aren’t significant limits to growth that we can’t substitute out of. Run out of oil? Switch to solar? Run out lithium, figure out another way to make batteries? Run out of water, mass-desalinization? Run out of soil, make soil or grow plankton in water. Run out of fish? Fish farms.

Etc…

But the people who created the model, who championed it, aren’t as optimistic and stupid as their opponents often indicate: the standard future model of people who believe in progress requires space exploitation precisely because we can’t assume we can always find a substitute on Earth for what we lack.

If you want, in other words, to keep GROWTH you must exploit space. Send out the space miners! Harvest solar above the atmosphere. Explore, exploit, grow!

You don’t necessarily have to colonize space in any meaningful way to do this, though the earlier imagineers thought we would: this can be done by robots and telepresence mostly, with a very few actual humans in space.

Note that this side-cuts most of the standard complaints about space colonization: other planets nearby all suck, and are worse for life than Earth (even shitty places on Earth like Antarctica) and space itself is full of deadly radiation and other problems we don’t know how to fully mitigate.

Doesn’t matter if you’re just sending out robots to get stuff (lithium, say) and bring it back.

BUT none of this matters in a larger sense because the real problem isn’t running out of lithium or copper or helium or any other simple substance like that.

It’s destroying the biosphere, climate and ecosphere

Earth’s true wealth is an intricate web of life, from creatures simpler than bacteria all the way up to blue whales, including plants and fungi and insects and a wild variety of creatures we don’t understand or haven’t even discovered.

That, along with Earth’s climate, is what you can only get on Earth, at least within the solar system. That’s what we’re destroying.

So… space exploitation? Why not. It may help deal with some bottlenecks. But it still won’t let us continue GROWTH and the standard progress model, because the real limit to growth is simply that if we go past the Earth’s carrying capacity — which I will say, despite some disagreeing with me — we unequivocally have, we then start destroying that carrying capacity and all the things we must have that only Earth supplies.

Earth is the Jewel, the most important place in the universe for humans, right now. We cannot do without it and what is important about it is not copper or lithium, it is precisely climate and LIFE (ecosystems). Our destruction of those two things is what makes the standard model of progress impossible.

We’ve got a limited resource, created by processes of evolution which take millions of years to work. We are so ignorant we cannot even create a self-sustaining biosphere; we cannot fix what we are breaking.

Anyone and any system destroying the Earth’s climate and ecosphere is thus, then, doing the greatest wrong possible for the future of humanity, and of much life on Earth. Our mass genocide of other species is a slow form of strangling ourselves.

Space can help, but it won’t get us around the real issues. Only true respect for the genuine non-renewable resources we MUST have and which exist only on Earth can create a positive future for humanity and for all the species we have held hostage and not yet murdered, who are unfortunate enough to be trapped on Earth with us.

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The Ugly Reality of America’s Powerful

By Ian Welsh

On April 22, 2021

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It’s been a while since January 6th, and on economic domestic affairs, Biden’s turned out somewhat better than I expected, but nothing’s really changed in terms of his legitimacy:

78 percent of Republicans think Biden stole the US election.

That is a broken country, folks. Fourty-five percent think the January 6th occupation was justified, which seems oddly low; I’d certainly think it was justified — if I also believed the election was stolen. In fact, I’d think it was mild, and that far more than that was justified. In a democracy, stolen elections can’t be tolerated, which is why Gore was wrong to stand down in the face of Bush’s theft in 2000.

What the US has, is a broken media system: There are two sets of facts circulating, and often more, on many issues, and people live in completely different worlds. Most Democrats don’t have any Republican friends, and vice-versa.

The weird bit is that false narratives are driven by facts with ur-truth. “Q” is wrong about the specifics, but not wrong that many American elites are pedophiles. Part of the Q myth is that rich people use a drug made from the pituitary gland of tortured children: That’s not true, but some elites do use the blood of young people (in their twenties) to help rejuvenate themselves.

Ironically, there was a great deal of election fixing, mostly by Republicans. It’s like the old joke from the Iraq war era: “We know they have WMD, we have the receipts!” Biden won despite vast Republican efforts to suppress the vote, but Democrats also suppressed the third-party vote, keeping Green candidates off the ballot wherever they could in a sickening anti-democratic display, and did a great deal during the primary that was anti-democratic against Sanders. It’s not that Democrats don’t believe in suppressing votes; they don’t believe in suppressing their votes, and in general elections, the more people vote, the more Democrats win, unless they’re pesky third-party voters.

The UR-Stories told, then, are true. US elites are evil, anti-democratic, and many are at least pedophile-adjacent (see all the pictures of famous politicians and other rich people with Jeffrey Epstein, including Clinton and Bill Gates.)

Even leaving aside the blood bit, the rich do live off the health of young people: The younger the generation, the poorer they are compared to previous generations. The US economy destroys the health of poor people for the benefit of rich people. Ordinary people, by the time they’re sixty tend to look old; rich people tend to still look young, and keep charging around well into their seventies due to avoiding hard physical labor, eating very expensive food (which is, overall, better for them) and using far superior health care, which they can afford, and the poor and middle class can’t.

The US is an oligarchy where the rich and powerful live longer and are healthier and richer because they oppress everyone else. That’s a fact. The mechanisms of how they do so are boring: Obama immunizing all the bankers and helping them steal people’s homes. Trump’s gigantic tax cut for the rich. The IRS hardly auditing rich people. Laws that make it easy to hide money offshore. Private islands where unspeakable lusts are indulged, and entirely legal use of young people’s blood to feel younger.

Most of this is done out in the open. If you were in the right circles, “everyone knew” about Epstein, but he was protected by the intelligence agencies, presumably because pictures of important people with underage girls are very, very valuable. The laws are passed in the Senate; the Treasury and the Department of Justice bail out and immunize the rich and everyone who belongs to the club is taken care of unless they steal from the club (Madoff) or egregiously embarrass the club by constantly talking up their evil like Martin Shkreli, the so-called “Pharma Bro.” Plenty of other pharma execs have jacked up prices and killed people, including for epi-pens and insulin, but those execs didn’t scream about it to the rooftops.

So conspiracy theories like “Q” are garbage, but they work because the ur-truth is that US and Western elites are, in fact, evil and engaged in hurting and killing ordinary people. It’s just that most of how they do it, Epstein aside, is boring and at scale.

So the US is broken. Republicans think the election was stolen. Back in 2000, an election was actually stolen, and voter suppression and election fixing is routine. Rich people do kill and hurt you for money, and a lot of rich people do seem to like under-aged girls, but certainly don’t need to go to some pizza joint to indulge.

There’s no need for “Q” or most other conspiracy theories (though surely, there are conspiracies). Most of the evil is done in the cold light of day.

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Why Do We Do That?

By Ian Welsh

On April 19, 2021

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So today I stopped by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) and picked up a small bottle of sake.

The teller seemed unhappy, so we chatted for a bit. I told him I’d worked at the LCBO for a couple months about 25 years ago (for the Christmas season), and he opened up a bit.

“Yes, it was a better job then. It was also a better job eight years ago, or three years ago. It just gets a bit worse every year, it seems. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still better than most jobs: we have a pension, and not a lot of jobs offer one any more, but…”

The long and short of it is that every year management tries to take away a little bit of what makes working for the LCBO a pretty good job. It’s still pretty good, but if this doesn’t reverse, one day it won’t be.

This has been going on for decades; a couple generations at least, arguably three to four generations. In the US, working class male wages peaked in real terms in 1968, the year I was born, and I have white hair.

We just keep making life worse for a huge chunk of our population; this is true in Canada, in the US, and in most of Europe.

Our rich are the richest rich in his -— ah, forget it. You’ve heard me say it many times.

And I can tell you the “reasons,” but at the heart of it, I don’t fucking get it. How rich do these assholes need to be? How many private jets and vacation homes and $50k/day hotel room stays do they need? Do they really think their pleasure is worth so much more than billions of people’s suffering? Because much of what they do hits the developing world hard.

Why are they such scum? So evil?

Why do we run a society that is just making things worse for so many people (don’t waste my time with the “extreme poverty numbers,” they’re bullshit)? Why do we have more homes than homeless; waste a third of our food and have hungry people? Why are we on track to kill about half of all known life forms on Earth?

Why are we so stupid, evil, and selfish as a species? Why is our leadership made of so many people who could only, truly, improve the world by taking a long jump of a short pier?

I mean, Bill Gates fought hard to keep vaccines under patent. He’s never been a good actor, of course, but, here, he is protecting his interests by hurting people in the middle of a global pandemic, despite having more money than he could possibly need if he lived a million lifespans.

We have a pair of huge problems as humans:

We’re badly led.
Enough of us support terrible leadership for it to just keep happening.

Either we fix those problems, or Earth is going to continue to be Hell for much of the human race and worse than hell for non-human life.

But, emotionally, I still just don’t get these people. The Clintons’, Bushses, Obamas’, Bidens’, Bezos’, Waltons and so on. They just hurt people, hurt people, and hurt people, over and over again. There’s something deeply wrong with them, and with us as a species that these types of people wind up leading us over and over and over again.

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Capitalism and Good Post-capitalism

By Ian Welsh

On April 19, 2021

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Let us revisit the definition of capitalism.

Capitalism, everywhere, is defined by the removal of capital from most ordinary people and the concentration of capital in the hands of a few.

Capital, in this definition, is not money. It is the tools required to feed, house, and cloth oneself.

Medieval serfs, in most areas, had access to capital. They had the right to land to grow food, to take firewood, and so on. They built their own houses, spun their own clothes.

Depending on the time and place, they were healthy and relatively long-lived.

As I have pointed out before, early industrial workers, as a class, were worse off than the serfs and peasants they replaced. They worked longer, ate worse, died younger.

Capitalism is accompanied by enclosure virtually everywhere. The old rights are taken away and the peasants are forced off the land.

“Forced” is the operative word: In both England and China, the land to which they had rights — for centuries — was taken from them. If they won’t go peacefully, armed force is used to remove them. There are many, many stories of peasants in China resisting the government trying to take their land so they can hand it over to other owners.

Many people get “better” ownership out of the process of moving to capitalism. They get a better bundle of rights in terms of “property.” But most people lose their rights to productive capital.

You see this in virtually every developing country. Peasants are forced off the land, whether by law, crashing crop prices caused by unfettered “free” trade (which isn’t “free,” even slightly; Europe and the US massively subsidize agriculture), or by force. They flee to the cities, forming vast rings of slums. They are worse off than when they were peasants, in most cases, but there are no other options.

In most cases, this is done so that their country can concentrate on a few cash crops, plantation style, with a few owners making all the money.

Enclosure.

A citizen in a capitalist economy is distinguished by having no independent ability to feed, clothe, or house themselves. They must sell their labor on “the market” or live miserably and likely even die. (People who live on the street long-term don’t, as a rule, live long term.)

The term “wage-slave” is old, used in the 19th century to talk about what was happening then.

A person who must sell their labor to another, then do their master’s bidding, is not free. Their entire working day is spent doing what someone else tells them to do. Only a very few people, under any capitalist system, have anything close to freedom. The majority of people are slaves in their daily life, free only to sell their labor.

Because most people are undistinguishable, they take the rates offered by the market, and those rates are determined primarily by how tight the labor market is, a factor that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with any one individual worker.

Most workers in the world have miserable lives. Those reading this may have “good jobs.” In China, they make batteries by hand because it is cheaper than using machines. Other Chinese are now hand-pollinating crops.

That’s freedom for you.

People whose lives are lived doing what other people tell them are not only not free, but because their daily life is about obeying orders, they are not used to freedom and are conditioned to expect orders.

Being a wage-slave, taking orders is ordinary to them. It’s what they expect. They don’t know what freedom is because they have never experienced it (coming from a school system which is designed to turn people into obedient drones).

Real freedom is being your own master. It’s been a long time since that described most of the world’s population.

But capitalism, meaning wage slavery, contrary to the propaganda, has not been an unambiguous move towards freedom.

In the 19th century in North America, for example, if land was unused, you could simply go work it and after a few years it was yours.

You can’t do that now.

Capitalism is about taking the ability of the many to provide for themselves and putting it into the hands of a few. The argument is that this transfer allows for the creation of more goods and services than would be possible otherwise.

But we don’t need more — let alone the vast amount of surplus we are creating. We waste a third of the food we produce. We deliberately build “planned obsolesence” into the manufacture of goods. We are vastly overproducing past our needs, and because we distribute goods through corrupt market mechanisms, many people still don’t have enough to get by, let alone enough for a good life. We could easily provide for them if what we produced were more evenly distributed and not made to break down so we can make more.

Imagine a world with no planned obsolesence, in which everyone has a small garden (indoors gardens are easy to do now, and one pilot study found 10X yields from a basement garden with LED lights), everyone has basic maker tools, and every community has a few facilities capable of creating large appliances.

We can print buildings on 3D printers now (they could have been made well, prefab, long ago).

Freedom is the ability to make your own choices, daily, about what you do with your time and your abilities, without losing everything. It is the ability to support yourself.

Feudalism was no joy. But capitalism removed even more economic freedom than feudalism did. You don’t have to believe me, believe the people who lived at the time, who violently resisted the changes. They weren’t idiots, they weren’t fools; they knew their lives were being changed for the worse. That it worked out for some of their descendents means little: A century of technological improvement accounts for much of that.

Post-capitalism, if it is any good, will restore the ability to grow and make what they need to the people. Not like feudalism, but a craft-based, hunter-gatherer society. Work 20 hours a week to meet the essentials, spend the rest of the time as you wish and choose how and when to work those 20 hours.

Making the Rich and Powerful Work for Everyone

By Ian Welsh

On April 12, 2021

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The philosopher John Rawls suggested that the only ethical society is one which we design before we know what position we will hold in it. If you don’t know whether you’ll be born the child of janitor or a billionaire, black or white, you may view social justice differently than when you know that your parents both went to Harvard or Oxford.

Rawls’s point is just in the sense that though none of us choose our parents, very few of us are able to see the world except through our own eyes. What I am going to suggest is something different: A society works best if it treats people the same, no matter what position they hold. This is hardly a new position. The idea that everyone should be treated equally is ancient and many a war has been fought over it. But despite a fair bit of progress, we don’t really understand what equality means, how it works, and why it works.

Let’s have an example. Based on international testing, at the time of this writing, the Finnish education system is arguably the best in the world. Its students do better than those of any other nation.

What is interesting about the Finnish school system, though, is this: When they decided to change how it worked, they did not set out to try and make it the best in the world. Instead their goal was to make it so that everyone was treated the same. Their goal was not excellence, their goal was equality. Somehow, along the way, and very much to their surprise, it also became arguably the best school system in the world.

There are a number of reasons for this, the main one being a well-established fact: People who are treated as lesser don’t perform as well and are less healthy–even after you take into account other factors.

But another reason is that if you are rich or powerful, you can’t buy your child a better education. Testing results between schools are not made public and the very few private schools are not allowed to use selective admissions. In a system where your child will be treated the same as every other child, you must make sure that every child receives an excellent education, otherwise your child may not receive one.

Let’s engage in another thought experiment. In the United States, airport security is extremely intrusive. Recently, new procedures for physical examinations were put in place which include touching the genitals (I’ve personally experienced it and it definitely included genital contact, albeit with my clothing on.) Most security experts consider this to be security theatre, along with such things as taking your shoes off and the new 3D scanners. They believe that the two most important improvements in airline security were locked cockpit doors and passengers knowing that if they remain passive and allow hijacking, they could all wind up dead.

Coincidentally, the 2000s have seen an explosion in the use of private jets. The most powerful, rich, and important people no longer fly on the same airplanes as the hoi polloi and, as a result, they do not go through the same security screenings.

Do you think that if the most important people in the US had to endure the same security as ordinary Americans that it would be as intrusive as it is? How many billionaires would have to be groped before something was done?

While we’re on the subject of private jets, consider the following: A private jet still has to use a runway. If a private jet is using the same public airport you are, it takes up a take-off or landing slot. Next time you’re waiting for a take-off slot, or wondering why your flight is delayed, think on that. Less than ten people on a private jet are holding up over a hundred people on a passenger jet.

No part of society will continue to work properly if the powerful and rich have no interest in its doing so. There are three parts to this:

If there is a public system, there cannot also be a private system which can be used to opt out of the public system.
If there are limited resources, whether those are airplane flight slots at airports or medical care, then no one can be allowed to use either wealth or power to jump the queue, nor must they be allowed to use more resources than those without power or money.
Any part of the economy where there is a monopoly or an oligopoly must either be publicly run or must be heavily regulated for quality, level of profits, and reinvestment.

(Ian-a fundamental article, originally published March 31st, 2015. As it will be unfamiliar to most current readers, re-upped.)

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American Suicide Numbers Dropped Last Year

By Ian Welsh

On April 8, 2021

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So, we kept being told Covid was causing increased suicides and it turned out not to be true.

I suspect this means is that American bosses are so shitty that a pandemic combined with massive economic problems is preferable to working with them in close quarters.

One of the great problems with “capitalism” is that businesses break people and aren’t stuck with having to clean up the mess they made. This is particularly noticeable, lately, at Amazon, who, in at least one case, kept an ambulance outside its warehouse because it knew enough workers would collapse and need it. Or who schedules its delivery drivers so tightly they shit in bags and piss in bottles and get UTIs.

Walmart built its business on underpaying workers and sending them to get government benefits; meaning, it wasn’t actually paying for the cost of its labor. By doing so, it wiped out businesses who did pay the cost of their labor.

Capitalism, for most of its history, has required not paying either cost of its labor practices (the human damage it does) or the cost of the resources it is permanently destroying (most recently, we are on track to kill about 50 percent of all known living species, which have both monetary and non-monetary value).

A system which throws off that much damage is obviously deranged and its “gains” are obviously unsustainable. Humanity has a limited set of resources off of which it has to live (including an ecosphere) and no, “technology” cannot replace them all. We don’t even understand the interactions of a properly functioning ecology enough to create a simple one in a biosphere; we can’t fix, or heal, what we break, any more than companies who compel employees to suicide can bring them back.

None of this is particularly necessary. Our problem is that we are STUPID. Capitalism has obvious problems that we refuse to acknowledge or deal with. We need a new way of managing our economy, one which also manages ecology and resources like, oh, THE Amazon.

This is not going to be possible if we base economic decision-making on supply and demand as we currently understand them. Nor is it going to be possible with the version of democracy or one-party states through which we have been running our society. (Nor is green fascism a solution, since fascism bottlenecks decision making.)

Money, based on debt, of which our society runs huge chunks around for almost all of our history, will also have to be completely re-thought because money has a strong tendency to reward people who abuse at scale, and always has.

None of this is impossible, though we’ve left it too late, so we’re going to eat the bitter fruits of our actions. I suggest, among other things, working to be sure that those with the most power, rather than using that power (money is power) to avoid the consequences of their actions, are forced to gorge on what they have done.

Letting bygones be bygones is a very large mistake when the bygone is multi-species genocide.

Only Zero Covid Worked and Everyone Knows It

By Ian Welsh

On April 6, 2021

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Vietnam has a population of 96 million and 34 Covid Deaths.

America has a population of 328 million and 550,000 Covid Deaths.

Australia has a population of 25 million, and 909 deaths.

The UK has a population of 67 million people and 127,000 deaths.

South Korea has a population of 52 million, and 1,752 deaths.

Germany has a population of 83 million, and 77,136 deaths.

Now here’s the thing, this has been known for at least six to eight months.

You shut down everything except actual essential services until cases are essentially at zero. You track and trace. You quarantine travelers. Any outbreaks afterwards, you shut down the area, HARD.

You can avoid mass lockdowns ONLY if you track and trace furiously at the start, with immediate traveler quarantine, and local quarantines as necessary, along with a mask mandate and other such policies. (See, Taiwan.) Never let Covid get out of control, and no widespread lockdown is necessary.

This works.

Taiwan, population 23 million, 10 deaths

New Zealand, population 5 million, 26 deaths.

Sweden, population 10 million, 13.5K deaths.

So, any government which had the capacity to do this and did not, after the first wave proved it worked, essentially chose to kill a huge number of people who didn’t need to die. Mass negligent homicide, at best.

It also turns out, to the surprise of no one with two brain cells, that Zero Covid produces better economic results than reopening repeatedly and allowing multiple waves.

What Zero Covid doesn’t do, however, is make the rich much, much richer while everyone else suffers. US billionaires increased their wealth 44 percent; 1.3 trillion, over the course of the pandemic until March.

That is SWEET. Forty-Four percent in about a year. Holy shit. This last year has to be one of the best times ever to the filthy rich.

Each US Covid death was worth $4,268 to America’s billionaires.

Is it any wonder that Covid was allowed to reign largely unchecked?

What a great time to be a billionaire! And it isn’t even over yet!

Edit: Article corrected to include the strategy which works with no or limited lockdowns.

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Has the Era of Ordinary Americans Thinking They Are “Pre-Rich” Ended?

By Ian Welsh

On April 2, 2021

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Nice statistic here:

Buried in the new Morning Consult/Politico poll is an eye-popping statistic: Voters by a 2-to-1 margin prefer a $3 trillion infrastructure bill that includes tax hikes on $400K+ and corporations over one that excludes those tax hikes.

For most of my life, tax-cuts were the mantra of the generation and tax-raises were automatically bad. These tax cuts went overwhelmingly to the rich, but Americans, Canadians, and Brits were all for it.

As many observed, it seemed they believed that one day they would be rich, and therefore that high taxes on rich people were bad.

Now, that seems to have changed, and I suspect it’s that Americans have finally got it through their thick heads that no, most of them will never be rich, and moreover the reason they’ll never be rich is because the people who already are, are kneeling on their necks (fortunately, just on their windpipes, not a full blood choke. Well, for most people the rich are only on their windpipes — most.)

This changes things. Certainly many politicians want to do what the rich want done, because the rich will take care of them, their families, their friends, and their mistresses and boy-toys, but there are always some who are more interested in power and winning, and if the rich don’t offer the best path to victory, they’re perfectly happy to stick a shiv in them and display the bleeding body for the masses.

Yup, that’s where we are. The Pandemic, with the rich getting massively richer while the working class died, was evicted, and generally suffered so that the wealthy and upper middle class could sip delivered lattes in their houses while tapping delicately into their computers, having Zoom meetings, and feeling sorry for themselves may well have been the straw that finally broke the back on the delusion of being “pre-rich.”

We aren’t all in this together, and we never were. It’s been class warfare for as long as humans have lived in “civilizations” (and often enough, before). Some people benefit by hurting other people. Since about 79/80, the rich have been clearly winning the class wars, driving their enemies before them, and thrilling to the lamentations of their men and women.

It’s been glorious! The modern rich are the richest rich to have ever existed, richer than in the Gilded Age. Shitting in golden toilets is nothing; these people travel the world in yachts the size of a village or on private jets, between their half dozen mansions or hotels which charge $50K a night, whose entrance you or I would never be allowed to see.

All while overseeing economies which have broken the backs of the poor and middle class and are on track to kill half the world’s species and over a billion humans.

Clarity having arrived at last, it’s time to break the rich even more than the Great Crash, Great Depression, and marginal tax rates of 94 percent did. Slap on the wealth taxes, raise the marginal tax rate on income more than 10x median to 99 percent, tax corporations, disallow share buy backs, kick foreign money out of real-estate markets, tax empty homes, create a wealth tax on anything more than 30x median, and slap an estate tax on anything over the same; your kids don’t get to rule over everyone else because you were rich. (Yes, yes, put in an exemption for actual family (small) farms and actually family (small) businesses.)

Drive the rich to the edge of extinction, into utter despair. Thrill to the lamentations of their men and women.

And don’t feel bad about it, they’ll just have to get by with, say, three or five times the median per year.

What a horror. They might only live three to five times better than most people ever do.

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The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Economics Page 19 of 89

Why Progress Always Required Space Travel

The Ugly Reality of America’s Powerful

Why Do We Do That?

Capitalism and Good Post-capitalism

Making the Rich and Powerful Work for Everyone

American Suicide Numbers Dropped Last Year

Only Zero Covid Worked and Everyone Knows It

Has the Era of Ordinary Americans Thinking They Are “Pre-Rich” Ended?