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At least productivity has house prices to hang out with
I’ve never been a fan of NTR…
And it could be worse. They could be soaring as high as textbooks.
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.
Yeah some shift the pages a bit so you can’t buy the online portion separately and have it line up with a previous year’s version even though there is almost no difference in content. At least that’s how it was when I went to undergrad, sounds like about the same time you did.
Text book prices are part of the compensation package for University professors. It’s no surprise their price has risen, since wages aren’t keeping up
Oof…
“Look at that, proof that stagnant wages cause more productivity”
- Our bosses
I like that they bring up all these informations, just to conclude, that neo-liberalism would be the solution (instead of the problem).
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.
How do you explain the concentration of wealth in the owner class, then?
Shortage of guillotines.
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.
We’re past the point of asking for ethics, I don’t think you interpreted the guillotines remark correctly.
It’s all a giant scattered portfolio, funded largely by loans against stocks which make up most of their compensation.
Yep. A solution is a tax on registered securities. Any individual holding more than $100 million in registered securities owes 5% on that excess value, per year.
Most of the portfolio cannot be easily liquidated, at least not in large amounts, without serious rippling effects in the economy.
Nah. They don’t have to liquidate their holdings. We’ll go ahead and do that for them. We’ll take 5% of each of their positions each year. Transfer them to an IRS liquidator, who will sell them off over months, years, decades if needed, in small quantities, no more than 5% of traded volume per month.
I know what would fix it, the French method. Fix that shit real fast.
It’s time for productivity to go down.
Already on it, sir
I’M DOING MY PART!!
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I go down productively all the time, does that count?
What happened 1979? Reagan?
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.
spoiler: productivity is cheating on wages with CEO wages
“our company is making tons of profit, it must be because of the CEO, let’s give him more money”
Reganomics my ass. Somebody call Doc Brown, I need to go instigate a paradox real quick.
Universal basic income
Yes.
In a post scarcity economy, it only makes sense. It would be better for everyone, even nature I bet.
It would give people options to pursue the career they enjoy.
Should have started in the industrial revolution, clearly should have started in the petroleum/corn age, and stupidly far behind in the computer age.
Imagine all the brilliant scientists/artists/engineers/etc stuck in a dead-end jobs just because food & rent.
We could have a new Renaissance, but we are owned.
but we are owned
:(
It makes sense in any economy, which has enough material to provide the basics to everybody. We indeed could do it today, even though we have material constraints as we can see with the climate crisis for example.
… among many other things.
Productivity increases were probably from computers. My job has been replacing hundreds of processing staff with computer software. Lately it had been moving the last paper processes to electronic and consolidating as much data as possible
I think my industry (data capture and processing) has had x100 productivity increases. I doubt the same has happened in more physical work
Put another way, people aren’t more productive, systems are
The key takeaway here is that we need to be less productive - c’mon everyone, she’s counting on us! 🙃
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Yes, productivity is up. Yes, wages are stagnant. But we are loads wealthier. In some ways…
We have access to goods and services and foods and everything, that was unthinkable in 1980. Y’all young people would shit live kittens if you were thrust into 1982. GenZ literally could not function being warped back into those days. And for that matter, I’d be pretty fucked in 1960, but times weren’t as different. If that makes sense?
The young have had their future stolen. Millennials got the idea quickly and GenZ is certainly getting it. My kids are GenA, don’t know how I’ll talk to them about all this.
Here’s the thing: Y’all can’t buy a home any longer. So you whine about landlords and rent and capitalism and how ownership shouldn’t be an investment. Sour. Grapes. You lost and cry about the luckier of us being evil.
No. You got shut out of what used to be a fair(ish) system. You worked and saved and bought a home, you slowly gained modest wealth until you retired. Sounded good to me.
Anyway, it’s all fucked up for the young. I’m so sorry. Doing what I can for my kids, and it ain’t much.
But if anyone tries to sell you a simple solution or slogan or meme, tell them to fuck themselves. It’s complicated and you won’t fall for easy solutions. You’ll fight the good fight.
We have access to goods and services and foods and everything, that was unthinkable in 1980. Y’all young people would shit live kittens if you were thrust into 1982. GenZ literally could not function being warped back into those days.
What are you talking about other than computers? Because if it’s just that I think we’d manage.
Sounds like someone’s got a case of the Stockholm’s Syndrome.
So what you’re saying is, we no longer live in a fair system and it used to be fair(ish), better. That suggests it’d have been easier to live in the 80’s.
What is your point?
I get your intial point was that life is more convenient now, but you have done nothing to substantiate the claim that we wouldn’t manage in the 80’s. Only thing that comes to mind is shipping things from abroad via Internet, but that’s only really for side hobbies in my experience, I could focus on other, local things instead. Everything else I feel would just be varying degrees of “less efficient” and/or have alternatives.
We could probably do some things to reduce housing cost, make houses less attractive for investors. But the root cause is the increased population
