"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." - Goethe
"Arbeit macht frei" (Work makes you free) - the sign at the entrance to Auschwitz concentration camp
My political philosophy is based on the implications of advancing technology, especially automation, and how to maximize its benefits and minimize its side effects. I am for promoting automation, to create more wealth and leisure for everyone.
However, capitalism, left to itself, does not tend to spread the resulting increased wealth and leisure around to everyone. Instead, it uses increased productivity to throw some workers out of work entirely, and devalue the labor of the rest. The result is that businesses' profits go up because of reduced labor costs, business owners walk off with all of the increased wealth, and everyone else cannot afford more leisure. Therefore, I am for limiting inequalities of wealth so that everyone benefits from automation, not just the rich. As I show, reducing disparities of wealth would not only spread the benefits of automation around to everyone, but encourage faster automation and economic growth.
However, U. S. politics has kept heading in precisely the wrong direction, ever since Reagan, toward greater and greater inequalities of wealth. And yet liberals cannot seem to communicate the simple message to voters that if we limited the accumulation of wealth of the super-rich, everyone else would have more. I have come to the conclusion that much of the problem is due to the fact that, ever since FDR, the Democrats have been stuck on the idea of helping people with big government entitlement programs - and the taxes to pay for them. Republicans have managed to trick enough Americans into believing that they will benefit from their tiny token tax cuts for ordinary people that they keep winning elections. They pull a classic bait-and-switch, promising tax cuts for ordinary Americans, implying that they will wind up with more. Instead, their tax cuts go almost entirely to the rich, and they cut those programs for everyone else, so ordinary Americans wind up with less. Therefore, I have become a unique combination, a small-government leftist. I advocate that the Democrats offer massive tax cuts like the Republicans do, but to the non-rich only, the reverse of what Republicans do, rather than a multitude of government entitlement programs as Democrats always do. They would surely win elections with landslides, for a change, and halt the slide toward fascism and massive disparities of wealth that has been going on in the U.S.
Below are essays I've written on the interrelated areas of politics, economics and automation. Essays detailing my ideas of how to reform liberalism so liberals win elections again, and some other miscellaneous essays on politics, are on my politics page. Essays on the technological Singularity (the hypothesized upcoming tremendous speed-up in the rate of technological progress, and automation in particular) and its relation to leftist economics are on my Singularity page. Additional essays about rationalism and purely social political issues are on my rationalism pagebecause they are about science vs. religion. My futurology page also has plenty of political overtones.
Thinking Outside the Box, an overview of my ideas, which are expanded upon in the following essays.
The Case Against Conservative Economics, in which I rip apart the Big Lie that has become the conventional "wisdom" in the U.S., that the more economic disparity, the better.
Slackers of the World, Unite!, in which I advocate that people should be able to have that other thing that automation was supposed to bring besides wealth: leisure.
Marketthink, which points out the backwards way that living in a market system makes people think, across the political spectrum, especially that we should create more jobs.
Self-Destructive Middle-Class Values, which examines in more detail certain aspects of marketthink, such as why most middle class people have to work to afford houses, when most houses are already built.
(written in 2002)
The great thing about Americans used to be that they had a sunny optimism, a belief in technological progress, that life would always get better. Since about the 1960s, that attitude changed. It seemed as if the country had lost its way, had become adrift.
Perhaps the last bastion of the old attitudes was the New York World's Fair in 1964 and 1965, which greatly influenced me as a child. It portrayed a wondrous, ideal high-tech world in the future.
Increasingly during the 1960s, many liberals turned against technology because they saw how it was causing pollution, bringing new threats such as the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear power, being used for warfare, throwing people out of work by automating away their factory jobs. Also, since the 1960s, futurists' predictions, of artificial intelligence, widespread robots and space travel and cities on Mars failed to come true, and the public became extremely skeptical of significant additional technological progress in the future. The pendulum swung too far from one extreme to the other among many Americans, from unquestioning faith in technology to unquestioning rejection of it. (Many liberals also turned away from science to New Age mysticism.)
Meanwhile, businesses and the military, both sectors of society that conservatives favor, continued to use technology and advance it. So we often had the weird political phenomenon of progressives being against progress, and conservatives being against conserving things the way they already are.
At the risk of making a sweeping generalization, there is a consistent error in liberal thought: they blame technology, rather than conservatives who are responsible for misusing the technology. They reject the liberating potential of technology as well as its downside, of freeing people from poverty and giving them increasing leisure and freedom from mandatory work. They throw the baby out with the bath water. In doing so, they have become conservative themselves in some ways, so that now, Americans have a choice between 2 different varieties of conservatism: one that is against progress, and one that is for it, but only to the benefit of the rich. There are few people left who, like me, advocate a 3rd way: promote both technological progress and leftist policies, so that technology is used wisely. As I often say to liberals, "Fight conservatism, not technology!"
Granted, most liberals and leftists are not totally against all technology, there is a whole spectrum of attitudes, and they depend on which technologies are being considered. But environmentalists are usually immediately wary of any new technologies (such as genetically modified organisms), and the most extreme environmentalists want to go back to an imagined wonderful bucolic past. And unions often oppose automation as a way of keeping jobs. Most liberals and leftists just don't give the idea of improving life through technological advance its proper due, but seem to be dismissive of the idea. They instead tend to think in terms of improving life by making changes to society.
Think of all the dystopian science fiction movies that have come out of "liberal" Hollywood, such as The Matrix, The Terminator, and even 2001: A Space Odyssey, which drill home the repeated message that when machines become intelligent, they will run amok and enslave us. Not a single movie has ever shown the idea that the machines will instead free us from "wage slavery". Even when intelligent computers are shown as benign ... somehow the humans all still have jobs. I'd be willing to bet that virtually no one watching those movies notices that they don't make sense. Even Isaac Asimov, my favorite author, who was a liberal, and famous for his stories about benign robots and intelligent computers, got it wrong, and seemed to show the humans as having jobs in his stories. He never seemed to have noticed that that made no sense. As I will show, the possibility that all work will be automated away would be the best possible reason for us to shift to the left politically -- and yet liberals never seem to realize how they undercut their own message by downplaying the idea of automation, or even claiming that it's too dangerous to let the machines become intelligent enough to do our work for us.
Leftists, of all people, usually seem to glorify people working out of economic necessity as a wonderful thing, rather than the main source of unhappiness and lack of freedom in people's lives. Many of them seem to mourn the loss of factory jobs in the U. S. to third world countries and robotization, for instance, as if there was anything desirable about having people spend 40 hours a week for 45 years of their lives, this one moment in eternity that they are alive, in a hellish existence, installing the same bolt over and over again in each item as it passed down the assembly line. Leftism without automation, that maintains that hellish regimented existence, isn't even leftist, it's fascist! Even well-paid wage slaves are still wage slaves!
It's hard to know what to make of the claim of so many people that they love work, and would never retire, and would work even if they won the lottery. Are they really sincere? Is it because their friends are at work, and there's no social activity outside of work because, in this workaholic society, everyone is at work? In that case, end the workaholic society, and they'd be able to see their friends outside of work! Or do they have no interests outside of work, so need it to stave off boredom? Or would they feel guilty admitting that they don't love work? Or are they in deep denial, and maintain their illusion of happiness by never admitting to themselves how desperately unhappy they are? Certainly, there are positive aspects to work: the feeling of accomplishment, and of getting paid for it, but there's no reason that has to be manditory, out of economic necessity.
Neither liberals nor conserviatives have a monopoly on pro- and anti-work attitudes. While most leftists seem to be pro-work, a few, like me, are anti. Most conservatives seem to think most people are anti-work. That is the reason why they think people must be forced to work through draconian economic policies. But some conservatives think most people love working (presumably as a way of claiming that people aren't being exploited). To them I always say, "Congratulations, you're a Marxist!" After all, if most people love workng, then we could have egalitarian policies, and people would still do the work, and the economy wouldn't collapse as it did in communist countries. I tend to lean toward the anti-work side, that people would do SOME of the work voluntarily, maybe 1/4 to half of it.
What we now call conservatism advocates using technology to progress to a better life - but only for the elite. For the rest, technology is used as a club to keep the non-elite down, by automating away work and thereby devaluing workers' labor. Though technology is producing massive amounts of new wealth, that wealth is going almost exclusively to the small group of people at the top. At the same time, what we call liberalism, at least in its more extreme environmentalist variety, tends to advocate a slowdown of progress, and among the most extreme environmentalists, even a reversal of progress from the Industrial Age back to the Agricultural Age. There is something to be said for the idea that, at least within the developed world, we already have enough wealth for everyone, if only it were distributed more equally among everyone, and there is no need to create more wealth. But we certainly don't have enough leisure. And as for the world as a whole, there is still not enough wealth to go around. Billions of people live in poverty in the Third World. Worst of all, so-called liberals have become most conservative in their pro-work attitudes. Rather than advocating using technology to free people from the necessity to work, they fight for the "right to work", for a "living wage", for more jobs - for more toil instead of less.
Now we have entered the Information Age, and attitudes seem to have started to shift in favor of technology again - at least, the Information Age technology of computers and the Internet, as opposed to often-polluting Industrial Age technology. Yet in many ways, attitudes have been too slow to change back in the direction of the sunny optimism that Americans used to have. The 2nd half of the 1900s have still left their mark.
My philosophy springs from thinking about the promise of automation. Automation - or in other words, an increase in worker productivity through the use of computers and other technology - enables workers to produce more goods and services in a given amount of time. It is the key to improving people's economic well-being. As time goes on, we should be seeing increasing wealth, or increasing leisure, or some of both, depending on which people decide they value most. That's not quite the way things have been turning out in this country.
We have certainly seen increasing wealth over the decades. But that wealth has gone to people in inverse proportion to how much they need it. The very wealthiest Americans' wealth has been skyrocketing, doubling every 4 years or so in the last 2 decades. There's nothing wrong with that, in and of itself, but I don't think the most pressing problem of our time is that billionaires don't have enough money. The middle class has seen only modest benefit, of a few percent growth per year, and most of that benefit has gone to the upper middle class, while the lower middle class has stagnated. The poor haven't benefitted at all, in fact, have even fallen behind. That makes automation seem rather pointless. At this rate, no matter how much more wealth is produced, the poor will always be among us. I'm sorry to go against the increasingly mean-spirited conservative trend in this country, but I consider that a problem to be solved -- especially when automation is making it more and more easily solvable all the time.
As late as the 1960's, many social thinkers worried what Americans were going to do with all the leisure they were going to have in the future, due to automation. Remember that? Instead, working hours have been creeping upwards in this country over the last 2 decades, from 40 hours a week to close to 50 now. Of course, in this workaholic society, it isn't fashionable for people to even admit that they would rather do something else with at least part of their time than working, that more leisure would be a good thing, but I've never been a slave to fashion. My ideal would be a society where all work people don't want to do is automated away, so that everyone would have the freedom to do whatever they would most want to spend their time doing (as long as it doesn't hurt others, of course), rather than what they have to be doing. Of course, many people, especially those raised in this workaholic society, couldn't handle that freedom, but I don't think people who want freedom should have to give it up because other people can't handle being free.
The claim could be made that Americans work so much because they want more stuff rather than more leisure, but that's not what polls show. Polls have repeatedly shown that most Americans would gladly get more time off rather than pay raises, and that they view our society as too materialistic. Polls of people's general level of satisfaction in life peaked in 1957, then dropped since then, despite the fact that Americans now live in houses with an average of nearly triple the room per person as back then, and that extra space is filled with all sorts of fun gadgets, many of which didn't even exist then. Psychological studies have shown that when people don't have the necessities in life, greater wealth leads to greater happiness, but that once people have the necessities plus a few luxuries, additional luxuries provide little if any additional happiness. Therefore, one would expect that people would increasingly be choosing to take the benefit of automation in the form of increased leisure rather than increased wealth. Instead, Americans tend to be hurried and harried, juggling the conflicting demands of work, family and sleep, and complain how they don't "have a life". Of course, Americans toward the bottom economically don't even have the luxury of a choice between work and leisure, because they are barely getting by as it is.
Some of the blame no doubt goes to Americans themselves, who apparently rarely spend the time to stop and think about what they really want out of life. But much of the blame goes to corporate America. First, Americans are bombarded by advertising as never before, and the common aim of all that advertising is to get people to buy, buy, buy, to promote consumerism as a way of life. Consumerism seems to have an addictive quality to it. People get their "fix" from each purchase, but the "high" doesn't last long, and soon they need their next "fix". Second, employers usually don't give Americans the choice of working shorter hours. Perhaps that is beginning to change, with the recent sudden decline of traditional inflexible 9-to-5-till-your-65 jobs, and growth of temping, consulting, contracting out, part time, telecommuting and other flexible work arrangements, but it seems that businesses that contract out are increasingly demanding long work hours even from their consultants. Workers usually must take a huge unfair cut in pay in order to work less than full-time, so can't afford to. And even when workers have the flexibility to work less, they cannot afford to, because of conservative policies that are screwing ordinary people and transferring their wealth up to the super-rich. Third, it seems like automation is being cancelled out by the growth of make-work jobs that don't actually produce anything that anyone wants or needs. The more that the production of goods and services are being automated away, the more it seems that people are getting involved in marketing, in the ever-more-frantic effort of everyone trying to talk each other into buying their stuff, and other unproductive activities.
My focus on automation is taking on new urgency, because unbeknownst to most Americans, we may very well be fast approaching that ideal society in which all work people don't want to do is automated away. Many Americans are aware of the astounding growth in the power of computers, how they keep doubling in power, for the same price, every year, but nowadays most people seem to scoff at the idea that computers could develop human-like intelligence, so that they could do any work people do. Back in the 1950's, a few overly-optimistic scientists popularized the idea that artificial intelligence was just around the corner. When it didn't happen, people flipped to the opposite extreme, of being overly skeptical. It turned out that the seemingly most difficult things that people do consciously, such as advanced mathematics, were easy to get computers to do, while the simple things that people do unconsciously, such as walking around without bumping into things, and understanding human speech, and having common sense, were the hardest. But in case anyone hasn't noticed, computers are now starting to do some of those hardest things, as they approach the processing power of the human brain. In fact, as far as the hardware goes, the most expensive supercomputers are about to overtake the human brain in processing power in the next few years, somewhere around 2004 to 2010, depending on which estimate is correct of how powerful the brain is. As far as the software, of getting computers to think something like people do, there are good reasons to believe that humans will figure out much of how their own brains work, and get computers to work the same way, by 2030 at the latest, and quite likely by 2020 -- a mere 15 years from now, or thereabouts. Researchers already have far more knowledge about the brain than most people realize, and have been having increasing success in duplicating its workings in just the past few years.
If we reach total automation with the same work ethic attitudes we have now, that no one deserves something for nothing, that "there's no such thing as a free lunch", and that people should define themselves and their self-worth by their careers, then paradoxically, instead of having a wonderful world as we should, we will have a catastrophe. If people don't deserve to be paid unless they work for it, and if there is no work for pay left, those whose income comes exclusively from working will have no money. In a world of unprecedented plenty, they will starve to death! (Those who get income from investments will be able to live off their investments, so they'll do fine.) Obviously, political attitudes will have to shift to the left in a hurry to avoid that disaster. As I will show, even now, we should be starting to shift to the left, just at a time when we have been shifting to the right. My arguments stand on their own merits even if artificial intelligence and complete automation never come to pass, but they are bolstered if they do.
Much of what I say here is really nothing new, but merely a revival of futurists' predictions and thinking about how society should deal with automation, that died out in the 1960s. Now that we may finally be closing in on artificial intelligence in the next 15 years, our society desperately needs to revive such thinking.
My efforts to understand where liberals went wrong, why American attitudes have shifted so far to the right economically, have led me to switch from being a traditional liberal to a new kind of liberal, one who believes in small government and massive tax cuts (for everyone EXCEPT the rich) rather than giant bureaucratic government programs, as conservatives claim they do (as just another excuse to transfer more money to the rich from everyone else).
First, I am for eliminating make-work, and giant bureaucratic government programs are a giant source of make-work -- that is why civil service unions advocate them, after all, as an excuse to create more jobs for their members. Second, the reason for that proliferation of complex programs rather than a single program to help everyone who needs it is because of the work ethic. The idea behind them is not to help people automatically because they need it, but to force people to work, and only help people deemed worthy exceptions, and there is a separate program for each exception: either because people are elderly and have already done a lifetime of work or because they are disabled (Social Security), or because they are temporarily between jobs (unemployment insurance), or because they are children of the poor (welfare), or other reasons. Help people automatically based on low income, for whatever the reason, with a single simple program of "negative taxes" so that there is a guaranteed minimum income (an idea advocated by conservative economist Milton Friedman and toyed with by President Nixon, back when conservatives were honestly for small government, not just as an excuse to transfer more wealth to the rich), and a giant bureaucracy is compressed into a tiny one. (And incidentally, the problems of Social Security running out of money, people being unable to afford health care and prescription drugs, etc., all vanish.)
I have switched to that philosophy out of true conviction, but I have also done so for tactical reasons. Americans have made it abundantly clear that most prefer tax cuts to government programs, so much so that they vote for Republicans even though they know the rich get almost all of the tax cuts. Republicans have deliberately entangled the 2 separate issues together, of degree of inequality of wealth, and size of government, so that Americans will swallow the bitter pill of greater inequality, because it is wrapped in the sweet coating of token tax cuts for the middle class, and Democrats have been too stupid to untangle the 2 issues. As I will show in my essay "A Serious Proposal, This Time" on my politics page, there is now so much wealth in this country that the 5% of the population earning more than the national average could pay for the entire federal budget, without any increase in the current 40% top federal income tax rate. If Democrats advocated completely eliminating all taxes, local, state and federal, for the bottom 95% of the population, they would surely win elections with the biggest landslides in history. (And hopefully, they would avoid assassination.)
Even more important than whether liberals offer the lower and middle classes government programs, as they have done, or tax cuts, as I advocate, is that the rich should do the paying, not the middle class, the vast majority of voters. In the case of massive tax cuts for the lower and middle classes, the upper class would of course have to be the ones doing the paying, with higher taxes, to make up for the budget shortfalls from those tax cuts. But also in the case of government programs to help the lower and middle classes, the rich should be the ones doing the paying. Most Americans hate paying taxes, even if those taxes go toward providing them with benefits. Have the few rich voters pay the taxes, and they don't have the votes to stop it, whereas if the middle class pays the taxes, the vast majority of voters, they do have the votes to stop it.
For instance, most Americans turned against welfare, and therefore liberalism, because Democrats committed the tactical blunder of having the middle class pay to help the poor. Way back when welfare was started, the argument was true that the rich didn't have enough money to make much of a difference, if used to help the poor, so that it was the middle class who had to pay, but no longer. If the middle class, the great majority of voters, weren't the ones doing the paying, it's likely they wouldn't have turned against welfare as they did. The rich were able to use the welfare issue as a wedge between the poor and middle class, who should have been natural allies against the rich, in order to divide and conquer. Once divided, the rich were able to loot them both, but especially the middle class, which has far more money than the poor. Clueless middle class Americans who voted Republican, expecting to see that money that was going to welfare for the poor back in their pockets, instead wound up with far more money picked from their pockets, going to welfare for the rich, but since they could be so easily confused by various political sleights of hand, they didn't even notice. Republicans talk as if they are allied with the middle class against the poor, but they are really the enemies of both the poor and middle class, and the middle class above all, since that's where the money is. In fact, the people whose taxes have been going up the most under the Republicans have been the merely somewhat rich, those making around 100K to 500K a year. Republicans have been doing so stealthily by allowing the Alternative Minimum Tax to affect those people increasingly, as inflation raises their incomes to the point where it kicks in.
The Democrats seemed on the verge of finally getting it right when Clinton ran for president in 1992. He promised to only pay for new programs by raising taxes on the rich, never the middle or lower classes. Republicans kept screaming that he was lying, and he would actually raise taxes on everyone. Why he would lie about that was never explained, since he had no reason to, and had every reason to promote the clever strategy of only taxing the people with few votes and loads of money. So what happened? Once Clinton was in office, Republicans in Congress blocked him from raising taxes on the rich. So Clinton had the choice of either 1) doing nothing, and telling middle class voters that since he'd never raise their taxes, as promised, the only way they could get programs to help them, other than by raising government budget deficits, was for them to vote out the Republicans in the next Congressional elections 2 years later, or 2) approving those programs anyway, so raising government deficits, and telling voters that the only way to lower the deficits was for them to vote out the Republicans 2 years later so he could raise taxes on the rich, or 3) stupidly falling right into the trap Republicans had set for him, by breaking his promise in order to fund those programs, and thereby seeming to prove the Republicans right that the Democrats could never be trusted to not raise people's taxes. And in the greatest blunder of his presidency, indeed the greatest political blunder of the century, which few people today seem to remember, he chose option 3. It was as if he was deliberately trying to sabotage liberalism. (And perhaps he was, since it has become increasingly clear, as the years have passed, that he was never really liberal in the first place, but that he and his wife work for the same plutocrats that the Republicans do.)
There's an even better reason why the rich should pay for any government programs to help the lower and middle classes: because having the lower and middle classes pay taxes for their own programs is pointless! All that does is take money away, and then give the same money back to them! The only real help is if the people getting help aren't the same ones doing the paying. The only real help is downward redistribution of wealth. Worse than pointless, the Republicans have been able to use pointless tax-and-spend Democratic programs to defeat the Democrats, and thereby institute programs that aren't pointless, but really accomplish something - something bad, that is: upward redistribution of wealth. Initially, the Democrats, starting with FDR, won elections by emphasizing the BENEFITS of their programs (while downplaying the taxes to pay for them). The Republicans finally learned to win elections by emphasizing the TAXES to pay for them (while downplaying the benefits).
Another reason liberals lost power was because they seem to have just rolled over and allowed conservatives to present their one-sided economic arguments in favor of increased disparities of wealth, unopposed, and like any Big Lie, if people hear it enough, they start to believe it. I will disprove the ideas that the public seems to be starting to swallow hook, line and sinker, that the rich deserve ALL of their money, so that none at all should ever be taken away from them (while, on the other hand, money should be taken from the middle class and given to the rich, so the rich will create jobs for them, so they will have to work to earn back the very same money taken from them!), and that greater inequality always leads to economic growth, and greater equality to economic stagnation. The collapse of communism put liberals so much on the defensive that now, there is a continuous ratcheting of economic thought in this country further and further to the extreme right, in favor of greater and greater extremes of inequality. No matter how extreme we go, it seems, there is no end in sight, since anytime any Democrat dares to oppose yet another tax cut for the rich, or even worse, calls for any rollback in their tax cuts, Republicans scream "socialist!" at them. The U. S. wasn't socialist back in the 1950's during the Eisenhower administration, at the height of the Cold War, when the top tax rate for the rich was 92%, or in the 1960's, when President Kennedy lowered the rate to 70%. And after President Reagan lowered it to 28% during the 1980s, we didn't become socialist when President Clinton restored it to 40%. Yet somehow, now that Bush Jr. has lowered it to 35% (he couldn't get the 32% he asked for), Republicans scream "socialist!" at anyone who suggests it be rolled back to 40%. If 40% is socialism, I guess that means that Eisenhower was even more to the left than a Marxist. Pretty soon, everyone anywhere to the left of Mussolini will be a socialist.
Amazingly, I find that liberals, of all people, often argue with me against redistributing wealth downward. It's not that they think that doing so would be undesirable, for they're against the current increasing concentration of wealth. It's that they think it would be futile because wealth would just become concentrated all over again! Many of them have somehow latched onto the ridiculous idea that if you redistributed wealth downward, the economic system would somehow shift in various ways to compensate for it, so that nothing would change. For instance, the rich would just lower wages to compensate, and if more people could afford houses, housing prices would just rise from higher demand until the situation went back to the way it was before. Also, that the rich have some knack for making money (which for self-made rich people is true, but not those who inherited wealth), and if you took all their money away, they would accumulate it all over again. As for the rich just lowering wages, that's something they'd always like to do, and if they had the power, they would. Just the opposite, money is power, and if workers had more, they would first be in a stronger position to demand more, since they could more easily quit if they had enough savings to live on, and their demands weren't met. Redistribute wealth downward, and there is first a magnifying effect! Also, such liberals act as if I would want just a 1-time downward redistribution, rather than a continuous redistribution through highly progressive taxation. Yes, there is a constant tendency for wealth to become concentrated, but highly progressive taxation would be constantly countering that tendency! I always ask, when I hear such stupidity from liberals, how it is that all of this only works one way? Why don't I ever hear conservatives say that it's futile to redistribute wealth upward, because the economic system will somehow just shift to compensate for it? Why do conservatives fight downward distribution tooth and nail if it makes no difference? Is it any wonder that the rich get richer, when so many liberals are so clueless that they're the ones who argue more than anyone against their own liberalism?
I also often notice 2 common sources of confusion that people have about automation and technology. The first is that they automatically equate the word "automation" with robots and artificial intelligence (A. I.). While I hope that increasingly capable robots and intelligent computers will be developed in coming decades - not necessarily humanoid robots - they are not necessary in order to automate away a great deal of work. Remember that in 1776, 98% of Americans needed to be farmers in order to feed the population, barely, while now, just 2% of the population are farmers, and they feed the US and much of the rest of the world besides, lavishly. That gives an idea how much can be accomplished even without the use of robots and A. I.. Rather than raising the abilities and intelligence of machines enough to be able to do the work that people do, people have found ways of dumbing down and routinizing the work enough that even dumb machines can do it. I've read that 70% of the work that Americans now do is so routine that it could be automated away. The problem isn't that we don't have the technology to do it, for greater technology often isn't even needed. The problem is that workers are paid so little that there isn't enough incentive for businesses to do it, because they always have a ready supply of desperate human workers.
The second source of confusion is that while I am a baby boomer, who grew up when there was still talk of "automation" (now almost a quaint word), of technology REDUCING work, I was initially baffled to hear younger people state flat out that technology INCREASES work. What gives? I finally realized that technology can be divided into 4 categories:
1) Technology in the workplace that makes formal work for pay more productive, therefore eliminates work in the sense I mean - which to me is a good thing, if coupled with leftist economic policies.
2) Technology in the home that makes housework more productive - but that people then have to do more formal work for pay in order to buy. The end result is that such technology shifts work from what Alvin Toffler calls "prosumption", or self-directed production for one's own self-use, with no boss to order you around, to formal work for pay - which to me is a bad thing because it makes people less free.
3) Technology nothing to do with making work more productive, that meets previously unmet needs, such as new medical advances, but that people have to do more formal work for pay in order to pay for - which on the balance is of course a good thing.
And 4) Technology nothing to do with making work more productive, that is purely for fun, to meet needs people somehow managed to do without throughout all the rest of human history, such as cable TV, and that is just another consumer item for people to buy, that keeps them working long hours at formal work for pay - which to me, a follower of voluntary simplicity, is on the balance a bad thing.
In fact, I think there's even a political reason why the word "automation" became quaint, and replaced with the term "increasing productivity" in our increasingly far-right-wing country. "Automation" conjures images of work being eliminated entirely, with all its revolutionary leftist implications that the powers-that-be in the US don't want people to think about. "Increasing productivity" conjures the image of there always being people doing the work, no matter how productive they become, with machines just assisting them.
(written in 2002, and repeatedly updated since)
Though I disagree with it, I understand conservative thought well enough. First, if people work hard for their money, they should be free to keep it, and do with it what they want. It shouldn't be taken away from them in order to be redistributed among people more evenly, based on need, but kept where it is based on the fact that they deserve it because they've worked hard for it. Second, the free market is always supposed to work best, to somehow magically produce the most desirable result. And third, if wealth were redistributed more evenly, people would have less of an incentive to work, so less would be produced, so there would be less wealth to go around. The end result would be that the rich would have less money, but the poor wouldn't have any more, so the whole exercise wouldn't even achieve its goal of giving more to the poor. The collapse of communism supposedly proved that. And now, I'll disprove all of those ideas!
Let's first look at the claim that the rich always deserve their money. Are they rich because they worked hard for their money? One of the things conservatives say people should be free to do with their money is give it as inheritances to their children. But if they do that, then there are rich people who haven't worked hard for their money. But let's put that aside for the moment, and assume the rich all went from rags to riches through hard work. Okay, so they earned a certain amount of money, then invested it, and made even more. So that "even more" part WASN'T from hard work. And the way capitalism works, the more money you have, the higher return you tend to make. You can afford to make riskier investments, which tend to earn higher interest rates, because the more money you have, the less risky those risky investments are, to you. Or, as the saying goes: Money makes money. The converse is also true, that the less money you have, the more you lose. When people take out loans, the less money they have, the riskier it is to loan them money, so the higher interest rate they must pay. Now, there are perfectly logical reasons for all of that. But step back and view society as a whole. The overall effect is to magnify disparities of wealth endlessly, beyond any initial reasons for those disparities due to how hard people worked. And inheritances allow those disparities to continue to increase from generation to generation. Of course, throughout history, there has been a mechanism to limit that process: The peasants periodically come after the rich with guillotines. I personally prefer a more orderly, less bloody process.
But let's suppose it's true, as conservatives seem to think, that the rich always deserve their money, have always done something to deserve it, which even implies that the fact that they're rich proves that they deserve to be rich. It is easy to understand why money makes money, so it is both easy to understand, and a matter of historical record, that unrestricted capitalism concentrates wealth. So does that prove that, over time, there is some change in basic human nature going on, that fewer and fewer people are deserving, and those who are deserving are more and more deserving? That's quite a surprise to me. But let's continue. Since it's true that unrestricted capitalism keeps concentrating wealth, then given enough time, the end result of unrestricted capitalism would be that 1 person would own everything on earth. So would that prove that 1 person would have done something so massively deserving that they would deserve everything on earth, and everyone else on earth, without exception, would be totally worthless individuals who deserve nothing?
Often, the rich make money not through hard work, but by taking advantage of automation. Someone invents a new device that does what workers have done, but cheaper. Businesses buy the new device, and throw workers out of work. The workers wind up poorer, through no fault of their own. The inventor winds up richer, as that person should. And the business owners, mostly the rich, wind up far richer, when they haven't done very much, only known to use the new device.
Conservatives claim there is great economic mobility in this country. If so, I have a question. Downward redistribution of wealth is really nothing more than "wealth insurance", which protects against the possibility of winding up destitute. Imagine if you could purchase such a thing, which guaranteed that if you paid a premium if you were wealthy and could afford to pay it, you could never sink below some minimum level of wealth if you fell into bad straits. Sounds like a great deal to me! I bet plenty of people would buy that. So how come no company offers it? Easy: because rich people, the ones who'd have to be paying rather than getting, would never buy it, because they know the odds are minuscule that they'd ever wind up poor, and benefitting from that insurance. But if there were really economic mobility, it would have to be in both directions, wouldn't it? Rich people, by their very act of opposing help to the poor, show that they know that much economic mobility is a lie, because they know they'll never wind up poor themselves.
I haven't even mentioned yet the legalized corruption now rampant in our society, ever since the Republicans became predominant and even the Democrats shifted to the right economically, by which the super-rich get even more money they don't do anything to deserve. Billionaires lobby the government for corporate welfare, with the excuse that it will create more jobs. (Indeed, it will -- and after the money is taken away from ordinary people to pay for that corporate welfare, those people will need to work at those jobs in order to get their own money back!) They play localities off of each other, threatening to take their businesses elsewhere unless localities give them bigger tax breaks than others will. (That is the real reason why Republicans want to decentralize government, so they can do that.) They rig the rules so that they work in favor of the rich, as in the case of Enron, in which the workers weren't allowed to sell their stock as it plunged, but the owners were. Increasingly, companies don't even make or sell anything (in other words, make billions while being completely useless), just manipulate markets and make money off of financial transactions -- also in the case of Enron, in the years before the stock scandal, in which it shook down Californians for billions of dollars by cornering the market in electricity and holding them hostage to power cutbacks.
There are 4 possible ways that a society can determine the distribution of its wealth. (If anyone can think of more ways, let me know.)
The first is luck. I find it hard to believe that people would seriously think that a society in which people's wealth is based on luck would be a desirable one, but maybe that's just me. Americans spend an incredible $300 billion a year on gambling, more than $3000 a year for a typical-sized family of 3, so apparently the idea doesn't bother them, but maybe they never really stopped to think about it. (Of course, bad or good luck from gambling isn't pure luck, since people chose to gamble in the first place.) I would think people would welcome the idea that they should be protected from poverty due to mere bad luck, though no fault of their own, and that people who become rich due to mere good luck have done nothing to deserve it.
The second way is theft, legal or otherwise. People can get money not through random events, but because they did something to cause it. But unlike people who get money by doing something productive to merit it, this way involves simply shifting money from others' pockets to theirs. The entrepreneurial rhetoric now rampant in this country serves the purpose of blurring the distinction between legalized theft and merit in clueless Americans' minds, to the advantage of the endlessly greedy billionaires. Both periods in recent decades that the Republicans were in power (since the Republicans became radicalized, no longer the relatively moderate party of Nixon and Eisenhower) included a financial scandal that quietly transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from ordinary Americans' pockets to the pockets of the people I like to call simply The Billionaires, with hardly a murmur of dissent from most Americans. (Even as this happened, Republicans passed tax cuts for the rich, claiming they deserved yet MORE money, and a majority of Americans continued to vote for them.)
During the Reagan - Bush I era, we had the Savings and Loan scandal, in which Republicans deregulated the banking industry, and billionaires took advantage of the lack of regulation by making risky investments that they weren't allowed to make before. Riskier investments tend to earn more on average, but in exchange, tend to lose more when they fail, and tend to fail more often. They made those investments at no risk to themselves, knowing they couldn't lose because even if their investments went bad, ordinary Americans would have to fork up the money in taxes so the government could keep businesses solvent to avert a nationwide financial crash. When those investments did fail, every ordinary American's pocket was picked for thousands of dollars, and most Americans never even knew it.
Now during the Bush II era, we've had the Enron scandal, but a scandal happened with Enron even before the one that bankrupted the company and made the headlines. The executives at Enron proudly proclaimed that they'd created a new kind of company, an energy company of the future - one which didn't actually produce any energy, as it used to, but merely manipulated markets in order to raise the price of energy, and profited on that. The result was the electric power crisis in California in which the inhabitants of that state were forced either to pay artificially raised prices, or have electricity shortages and periodic blackouts. They wound up having some of both, and tens of billions of dollars quietly shifted from ordinary Californians' pockets to the pockets of The Billionaires. (Enron then lobbied other state governments to deregulate, so they could do to those states what they'd done to California. No thanks.)
And now in Iraq, and also in the Gulf coast after Katrina, we have kleptocracy on a massive scale never before seen by mankind, in which multi-billions of dollars in government contracts simply disappear mysteriously, in projects that never get completed, and no one acts like they care.
Many Americans are so gullible that they think of the profits from such financial shenanigans as being the much-deserved fruits of entrepreneurial hard work and risk-taking. It is as if someone robbed a bank, and then claimed they deserved the money because of all the hard work they put into planning and executing the robbery, and the risks they took of being shot or jailed. Rather than getting angry at The Billionaires for taking their money, they, in effect, blame themselves for not having the entrepreneurial instinct of The Billionaires, and praise them for being such geniuses. It is clear that the main skill involved in making massive amounts of money is in having a complete lack of a conscience.
The third way of distributing wealth is based on merit. Republicans, and even Democrats to a lesser degree, claim in their rhetoric that this is the way wealth should be distributed, but in their actions, Republicans actually promote that wealth be based on luck (in the case of people lucky to be born to parents that give them inheritances) and legalized theft. I have no problem with basing wealth partially on merit, as long as there is work that needs to be done, and people need incentive to do it.
The fourth way is based on need. It seems hard to find Americans who still agree with this sentiment. To me, at least, merit and need are the only 2 legitimate reasons for distribution of wealth, and the 2 are basically in conflict with each other. When the same people who merit wealth also happen to be the ones who need it, there is simply no issue. When they are different people, conservatives tend to favor those who merit it, and liberals (now an endangered species) tend to favor those who need it.
As I just said above, I have no problem with basing wealth partially on merit, as long as there is work that needs to be done, and people need incentive to do it. But whenever people have done nothing to merit wealth, or there is no work that needs to be done, or people don't need incentive to do it, there is no point in basing wealth on merit, so wealth should be based entirely on need.
People who work hard at productive activities that need to be done merit the money. On the other hand, people who make money through investments haven't done very much to earn their money. They keep receiving it even while they sleep. People who make risky investments have done something for their money, take that risk, while those who make safe investments, such as in US bonds or FDIC-insured CDs, have taken hardly any risk. But even for those who have taken a risk, the wealthier they are, the less risk they've taken, since rich people can withstand much greater losses than others. And people who have a wide portfolio of stocks, and keep their stocks for long periods of time, through economic ups and downs (which the rich can more afford to do than those who need to cash in their investments during hard times) actually have little risk from investing. People who receive money on investments have done little to merit it, and the wealthier they are, the less they've done.
Perhaps wage income should be taxed differently than investment income, since wage income is mostly merited and investment income mostly isn't. If wage income is mostly merited, perhaps taxation of wages should be highly regressive, everyone paying the same tax rate regardless of income, in order to reward hard work, rather then the rich paying more. Or perhaps wages shouldn't even be taxed at all, both for those who earn a lot and a little, so that people get to keep all of what they earn. On the other hand, that portion of wealth that comes from investment income should be based almost entirely on need. Therefore, taxation on investment income should be highly progressive. The non-rich should pay no tax at all, with some sort of a standard deduction per person, generous enough that people can live comfortably on investment income alone, but additional investment income above that limit should be highly taxed. Notice that as automation proceeds, people tend to get more income from investments, and less from work. So under this scheme, taxation would automatically become more progressive overall, and that is as it should be. At the point of full automation, taxation would be entirely on investment income, and that taxation would be highly progressive. At that point, there would no longer be any reason for any differences in income among the population.
Actually, I'm not serious about taxing wages regressively. Corporate CEOs' salaries have been rising at 10 times the rate of regular employees' over the past few decades, and I don't think it's because CEOs have been working harder and harder than they used to. Instead, those CEOs are part of a good ol' boy network, and can basically set their own wages. They earn millions even after doing a lousy job and running their companies into the ground. On the high end of the scale, at least, wages should still be taxed progressively, in other words, a lot. So in practice, there is little reason to treat wage income and investment income differently, since they both should be taxed progressively. The rich mostly get investment income, and the non-rich mostly get wage income, therefore, taxing the rich a lot would automatically tax the huge investment income of the rich a lot, along with those enormously inflated corporate CEO salaries, while not taxing the non-rich would automatically not tax the wage incomes of the non-rich, or their relatively small investment incomes either. As far as automation goes, I would simply make the tax structure more progressive as it proceeds.
So in the final analysis, even when merit is justly rewarded, you wind up with a highly progressive tax structure, because so much income in our economy isn't based on merit. And as automation proceeds, the tax structure should become even more progressive, because still less income is based on merit.
Another aspect of conservative thought is the idea that whatever the market happens to do is right, that the market always knows best, so that we shouldn't intervene (at least, when it comes to anything that would redistribute wealth downward; when it comes to corporate subsidies, and limiting competition against existing corporations, conservatives are suddenly all for us intervening). While I think the free market usually works great, a little thought proves that there must be situations where individuals' decisions made to further their own individual best interests collectively lead to inadvertent emergent phenomena that are against everyone's collective best interest, even suicidal.
For starters, as I said above, unrestricted capitalism concentrates wealth, so, given enough time, the end result of unrestricted capitalism would be that 1 person would own everything on earth. All those individual economic transactions that seem so mutually beneficial, and yet add them all up, and the final result would be 1 person owning everything on earth. That doesn't seem like a very positive outcome to me.
Another example: Every tree in a forest grows as tall as it possibly can because if it doesn't, all the trees around it will grow taller, and it will get shaded. But imagine if trees were intelligent. One particularly intelligent tree could say to all the others, "Hey, wait a minute, why don't we all agree to not grow tall? Then we'd all have to make less effort, and in the end, we'd all get the same share of sunlight as we would have anyway!" Conservatives want us to act like the usual unintelligent trees, that just act in their own individual interests, oblivious to the collective worst interest that those individual actions cause. This is an analogy of how we are all trapped in a system where many people must make loads of effort to convince others to buy our products or services or our employers' products or services, while others must do the same to convince us to buy theirs, and even annoy us with their continual advertising pitches, including telemarketing - and everyone must work longer hours in order to pay for the cost of all that effort. If only everyone could agree to just STOP all of that marketing, people would only have to work to PRODUCE what we consume, not market it, and working hours would be much shorter. And in general, companies would sell the same share of products and services as they did before. But I guess people aren't more intelligent than trees - at least conservatives.
Another example: No one in a traffic jam sets out to create one, everyone in one is driving in a way that's best for them, yet they all collectively create one, and the result is the worst one for everyone.
Another example, one reason people say they buy SUVs is because they are safer than regular cars in accidents, because they are bigger. Of course, they increase the safety of people in SUVs at the expense of lowering the safety of people in cars, so this could set off an "arms race" in which people continually buy bigger and bigger vehicles, always trying to have the biggest ones even though EVERYONE can't have the biggest ones simultaneously. And since bigger vehicles get worse gas milage, they consume more gasoline - most of which comes from the Middle East. And some of the money people in the Middle East get by selling us gasoline is used to fund terrorist groups that attack the US. Everyone's individual decision: more safety. Everyone's collective outcome: less safety.
Game theory is a relatively new branch of mathematics that deals with situations where people interact and try to maximize their own benefit. It often shows that, contrary to what free market conservatives claim, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" does not always work to everyone's benefit when each person works toward their own individual benefit. Often, when people try to maximize their individual benefits, the collective result is that everyone is worse off, as I've shown in these examples.
Even when theory predicts that the free market will work to everyone's best interest, sometimes it still doesn't happen.
Consider non-smoking restaurants. Clearly, a sizable portion of the population hates smoking, and wants non-smoking areas in public places such as restaurants. Theoretically, the free market should provide for that want. In an area with no restaurants with non-smoking sections, some smart businessmen should see that there is a tremendous pent-up demand, and open the first such restaurant, even one that's all non-smoking. If it is comparable in all other ways to other restaurants as far as price and quality, it should do a land-office business, jammed with patrons from that sizable portion of the population who have nowhere else to go. Let's say that 30% of the population hates smoking, and the other 70% either smokes or is indifferent to it. Then theoretically, other restauranteurs should see how well that restaurant is doing, and convert their own restaurants to non-smoking, until there are enough such restaurants, 30% of them, that they get as much business as restaurants with smoking. The situation should then stabilize at that equilibrium point.
That's of course what happens in the real world, right? Well, no, that's not at all what happens in the real world. Before the movement to ban smoking in public places, non-smoking restaurants were unheard of. I detest smoking, and used to live in New York City, a place with zillions of restaurants, yet I was not aware of a single one that was non-smoking. If I had been, I would have patronized it all the time, and would not have had to live like a virtual hermit.
When people like me tried to have laws passed to provide non-smoking havens, restauranteurs fought it tooth and nail, saying that they would lose business. Those laws were finally passed in some localities, and restauranteurs found, to their pleasant surprise, that business actually picked up slightly. So people in other localities tried to get the same laws passed, and yet, incredibly, EVEN AFTER THE EXPERIENCE FROM THE ORIGINAL LOCALITIES, restauranteurs still fought them tooth and nail, insisting they would lose business, only to have the same pleasant surprise when those laws were finally passed. And this baffling phenomenon continues to this day in locality after locality across the country, as non-smoking laws spread, and now in other countries. (Aren't there any trade publications that restauranteurs read, so they would know what has happened in those other localities?? It sure doesn't seem like there are.)
Why doesn't the real world go according to theory, in this example? I don't have a clue, aside from noticing that the restaurant business seems to attract a lot of smokers, both restauranteurs and their employees. But regardless of the reason, it doesn't!
I find it interesting how conservatives often deride leftists as being ivory-tower, divorced from the real world in their call for a less capitalist society, yet when it comes to capitalism, conservatives are the ones who are ivory-tower and divorced from reality.
Another possible example of this phenomenon of the market not providing what people want is how social conservatives complain endlessly that the entertainment industry doesn't provide enough wholesome G-rated family entertainment, only sex, sex, sex. As with people who hate smoking, there are a lot of social conservatives in the U. S., who claim to want G-rated entertainment, so why doesn't the market satisfy their huge pent-up demand? They claim it's because of those "Hollywood liberals", but the entertainment industry is a business, and if there is such pent-up demand, smart businessmen should rush in and provide lots of G-rated entertainment and make truckloads of money. Social conservatives claim to love the free market as much as economic conservatives, yet never seem to notice the contradiction when they claim that the free market isn't providing what they want. It doesn't seem to work as perfectly as they claim, does it? But for this example, there is another possible explanation: There is much anecdotal evidence that social conservatives are the biggest consumers of porn, despite their charade of claiming to want G-rated entertainment, and the market provides what they want.
One problem with conservative policies is how they create an unstable equilibrium that takes people away from the point called "ENOUGH" in the philosophy of simple living.
The main point about simple living is that when people are poor, additional wealth tends to make them happier, but as soon as people get out of poverty, additional wealth has little additional effect on happiness, and may even be detrimental to happiness. While most people always want to have more, studies have shown that when they get more, they say themselves that they are no happier. Beyond the point where people have necessities and a few luxuries, the cost of additional luxuries becomes too high, while the additional satisfaction derived from each additional luxury keeps going down. Most people must work increasingly long hours in order to afford more luxuries, but there are only so many hours in the day to enjoy those luxuries. And simply storing and maintaining more and more stuff becomes an increasing problem. Besides, since people's sense of how well off they are comes from comparing themselves to those around them, if everyone is becoming more affluent more or less in unison, then people feel no more affluent. Americans are twice as affluent now than they were in the 1950s, when things such as air conditioned cars and microwave ovens, that we consider necessities now, were considered luxuries then, or didn't even exist, yet Americans actually feel less affluent now than they did then. Religious philosophies are full of warnings that being rich is bad, just as is being poor, and that there is a point in between that is the optimum point. In the philosophy of simple living, that optimum point is called ... ENOUGH.
Many conservatives are both religious and economic conservatives. And yet look at how there is a contradiction in their philosophy. Conservative economic policies that heap money upon the rich while denying any help to the poor tend to pull people away from that point of "enoughness".
Think of someone starting out in adult life without the advantage of inherited wealth. At first, it is an uphill struggle to reach the point of having enough. They are at the point when they have no work experience, so are likely earning the least they will during their life. (I prefer to use "they" in a singular sense as short for "he or she", since English lacks any other word for that.) They must have housing above all, and housing is people's biggest expense. They have a choice of buying a home, with a mortgage and many other expenses, or renting. The poorer (and therefore untrustworthy, from the bank's point of view) they are, the higher the mortgage rate they must accept, and the less likely they can even afford a mortgage, so the more likely they have to pay rent all their life, and have nothing in the end to show for it. Either way, many people can barely stay afloat, just paying for their basic living expenses, much less actually save any money and go ahead financially. Many people these days can't even quite make ends meet, and fall into the trap of running up credit card debt to pay the bills. Once in that trap, it is a bottomless pit, because the more they owe and can't afford to get out of debt, the more usurious the interest rates the credit card companies charge them, and their debt starts snowballing - doubling every 4 years at an 18% interest rate, for example. Many people these days are living their entire lives trapped by credit card debt, the new form of slavery. But for more lucky people, eventually their pay may go up, and they may be able to put away some excess money for the future, enough so they have the security of not living from paycheck to paycheck. After much struggle, they have finally reached the point where they have enough. And then what happens? Their excess money, if invested and earning, say, 7% interest, keeps doubling every 10 years. The more excess they have, the more they can chance making riskier investments, which tend to pay higher rates of interest. Their mortgage is eventually paid up, and suddenly their income is far more than they need. With conservative policies, the more money they have, the more tax breaks for the rich they can get. Eventually, their wealth starts snowballing, out of control -- just when they don't need it all.
(However, I don't want to play into conservatives' hands with the above example. This isn't just an issue of people in different stages of their financial lives, as conservatives like to claim, to try to confuse people into thinking there are no class differences in the US, only differences in wealth due to age. For people born to wealth and privilege, in families with connections, they already start out with snowballing wealth. Our current president is the poster child of people born to such families, who simply CANNOT fail in life, no matter what they do, no matter how inept or stupid they are. He is someone of well-known inarticulateness, who failed at every venture he tried in life, and managed to be rich and powerful anyway. Poor people, on the other hand, usually grow up with all sorts of educational, financial and cultural handicaps which conservatives try to ignore by pointing to the people who manage to make it out or poverty. Conservatives like to point to all the poor immigrants who became successful in the US, but those people came from very different cultures and circumstances than the people in the US inner cities.
Besides, even if disparities of wealth all boiled down to age differences, of young people struggling to make their fortune, and older people who have already made it, why would that be any better? Wouldn't most people prefer to have a transfer of wealth from older to younger, so that they never have to struggle when they are young, in exchange for not having more wealth than they could possibly need when they are older?)
Regardless of whether differences in wealth are due to class differences or age differences, the point is that when people don't have enough money, they tend to have less and less, and have to struggle to even stay in place, while when they have more than enough, they tend to have more and more, even without making any effort. What we have here is what physicists call an "unstable equilibrium". Think of a bowl, sitting in its normal position, resting on the lowermost point at its center. Put a marble in the bowl, and it always rolls towards that lowermost point in the center. Put the marble at that point, and it sits there. That point is called a stable equilibrium. Now turn the bowl upside down so it is like a dome. Put the marble at precisely the uppermost point at its center, and theoretically, it will just sit there. But in practice, that is almost impossible to do. The slightest amount it is away from the center, it will start to roll away from the center, and the farther it gets, the faster it rolls. That center point is still an equilibrium, but now it is an unstable equilibrium.
The bowl is a perfect analogy for disparities of wealth in our economic system, aside from the fact that it is 3-dimensional instead of 2. Think of one side of the bowl as representing poverty, and the other side wealth, with that center point the point of having enough. Starting on the poverty side, in order to get to the center point is literally an uphill struggle. Constant effort must be made even to stay in place, much less go forward. The center point is almost impossible to stay at, even though that is supposed to be the point of maximum happiness (if you believe the philosophy of simple living). Then beyond the center point, effort would actually have to be made in order to NOT go forward. Otherwise, it is a faster and faster effortless ride to ever greater wealth.
The way capitalism works, even with a perfectly neutral government economic policy towards rich and poor (assuming conservatives and liberals could even ever agree on what "neutral" means, which they couldn't), our economy would still have that unstable equilibrium, and disparities of wealth would tend to become endlessly magnified. Conservative policy even increases the slope of the bowl to each side, so that the wealth of different individuals tends to gravitate away from the central optimum point even faster. It would take quite a liberal policy to even counter capitalism's inherent tendency toward great disparities of wealth, so that the upside-down bowl would be flattened out into a disk, so to speak, so that no one's wealth would have a tendency to drift in any particular direction. It would take still more liberal policy to then unflatten the disk into a right-side-up bowl, so that people's wealth would tend to drift toward the point of having enough, rather than toward poverty or excess. Wouldn't that be more desirable that what we have now?
To "frame" an issue means to use craftily misleading language that pushes people's emotional buttons in order to get them to vote the way one wants. Two of the ways conservatives frame the issue of equality vs. inequality, in order to trick people into voting against their own economic interests, are by saying that they're promoting "economic freedom" and "opportunity". They make their philosophy sound so positive, don't they?
But what exactly does "freedom" mean? Conservatives claim that allowing the economic elite to concentrate wealth at the top is "economic freedom". Let's examine that. In a country that isn't free, power and wealth are concentrated at the top. Ordinary people have no freedom, but the elite few have freedom. In Cuba, for instance, Castro is free to do pretty much whatever he wants. But it would be preposterous to claim that Cuba is therefore a free country. You can't judge how free a country is by how free its elite is, only by how free everyone else is, because the elite is always free in all countries. Yet that's just what conservatives' rhetoric says, that once they've concentrated power and wealth among the elite few, they've created "economic freedom" because the elite are free. In reality, they are of course taking away everyone else's freedom. For instance, when most other Americans have less money, they are under more coersion to work for employers, who can then order them around as they please because of the more unequal amount of power between them.
Conservatives get people to focus on the lucky few who make it into the elite by talking about the "economic freedom" they have given them, as if that freedom is for everyone, when of course it is not. Theoretically, anyone could become one of those few, but even if they can, that's not the same as freedom. A country with a dictator is still a dictatorship, even if who gets to be the dictator is chosen by some method that everyone has an equal chance, or is picked based on some sort of merit. So in the final analysis, conservatives' use of the term "economic freedom" is like something out of Newspeak in George Orwell's "1984", in which freedom meant slavery and peace meant war. Their "freedom" is the freedom of the elite to take away everyone else's freedom.
It's the same with "opportunity". Let's suppose that your family is a typical-size family of 3. Imagine if it could have an income of $100,000 a year, every year, and could own a house, free and clear, fully paid for with no mortgage, on a square plot of land 700' (1/7 of a mile) on a side, and could have total net wealth, both from savings and from the value of possessions including that house, of $400,000. I'd sure love to get $100,000 a year, guaranteed, on top of housing costs already having been paid for, and no need to save for retirement. I couldn't even find ways to spend that much money every year. Go on a continuous life-long round-the-world vacation? (Oops, but then there'd be no need for that house, would there? Except to store all the souvenirs, as one of my friends once replied when I said this.) While for the small elite, that would be a step down, for almost all Americans, that would be the American Dream, and then some. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be that wealthy? Well, guess what? This country is so wealthy (although, with conservative policies, you'd never know it) that that's just how much all Americans have, on average. Just consider the fact that this country is already filled with pre-existing houses, that could be passed on from generation to generation, and that new houses have to be built only to house an expanding population, almost half of that due to immigration, and because of rare natural disasters. When you stop to think about it, something is highly fishy about the idea that most Americans have to work and save for decades to buy their own houses. Yet almost no one ever stops to think about it. (I talk about this more in my essay "Self-defeating Middle-Class Values", below.)
Just think of how the super-rich fight tooth and nail to keep inequalities of wealth from being reduced. What's the worst that could happen, the lowest they could fall to? The answer is, to that merely rich average of 400K and 100K a year, if inequalities of wealth were completely eliminated. I'd never even want complete equality, but would only want to eliminate about 1/3 of the current inequalities, so that billionaires would still have 2/3 what they do now, and those at the bottom would get a house plus 33K income for a family of 3, about enough for all necessities.
Egalitarian policies would allow everyone to have that more-than-ample average amount of wealth. Even better than mere "opportunity", they would actually have it, not just the mere potential to have it. The more inegalitarian the policies, the fewer people have the opportunity to have that much, because a few people have hoarded much of it. (Of course, we need some inequality to give people motivation to work to keep producing goods and services, but our extreme disparities of wealth are now far beyond what is adequate to motivate people. Besides, those disparities often have nothing to do with how hard people have worked, but are the result of other things such as inheritances and who-you-know.) In order to create a Bill Gates, with a net worth of $50 billion (or whatever it is at the moment), 100,000 American families have to go from having that average amount of wealth to having zero. And that's just 1 billionaire. Since the top 10% have more than that average, the bottom 90% must have less than that average, and most of them have far less because most of the wealth of the bottom 90% is concentrated near the top, just like all wealth is now. The result is that a large majority of Americans are just getting by, or worse, and have little opportunity to do better. What conservatives mean by "opportunity" is for a small elite to have the opportunity to pile up increasing mountains of wealth, while everyone else has less opportunity because there is less remaining wealth to go around to them.
Think about the dream many Americans have of owning their own businesses and being free from the dictates of employers. In a $10 trillion economy, if every family owned a business, they could each take in an average of $100,000 worth of business each year, and support themselves handsomely. But in this increasingly conservative "winner-take-all" society, that's not what happens. A few giant corporations capture the huge chunk of the business in the country, leaving everyone else with the scraps, which aren't enough for most Americans to start their own businesses in order to live off of the income. (Of course, we would want there to be competition between businesses, so that if they do a bad job, they lose business and get less than that average. That way, they have incentive to do better in providing what customers want. But in our "winner-take-all" society, the winners are only marginally better at it than the losers, yet they get far more business. Just as with disparities of wealth, disparities of how well businesses do are now far beyond what is adequate to motivate people. In fact, how well businesses do usually has nothing to do with how good their products are, but how well they market them. Almost all the motivation is to catch people's attention, and not to make good products.) The more inegalitarian our society, the fewer people have the opportunity to succeed by starting their own businesses. As with "freedom", conservatives' "opportunity" is the opportunity of the elite to take away everyone else's opportunity.
The game of musical chairs is a perfect metaphor for how even a little economic scarcity creates a dog-eat-dog world. 100 people and 100 chairs, and when the music stops, everyone can sit down calmly and at their leisure. 100 people and 99 chairs, everyone rushes frantically to sit down, to not be the one person left without a chair.
The game is also a perfect metaphor for how we are no longer in a time of economic scarcity, and yet conservative economic policies make everyone act as if we still are, and act in the same greedy way as the few mentally ill people at the top, who run this world.
Thanks to technology, there is no longer scarcity, at least in the developed world. And yet people are acting more frantically than ever, as if there were. It is as if 100 people were playing a game of musical chairs, and there were not even 100 chairs, but 200. But a single greedy person among the 100 playing the game hogs 102 of the chairs, by sprawling out on as many as he can, even if he couldn't possibly need anywhere near that many chairs, acting as if there were a scarcity when there was in fact a surplus, in a greediness that could only be a form of mental illness. By that very act of hoarding most of the chairs as if there were a scarcity, he in fact creates one for the remaining people, leaving 98 chairs for the other 99 people. Therefore, he causes everyone down the line to act just as he does, frantically grabbing for chairs, perhaps even trying to excuse his sickness to himself, saying, "See, everyone acts this way; I'm not the only one."
I have an example to show just how badly the increasingly ultra-conservative economics in this country can work.
Jonas Salk was the main scientist who invented the first polio vaccine in the early to mid 1950s. Anyone who says they'd like to go back to the "good old days", when people from the cities escaped to the countryside every summer to try to avoid catching that dread disease that could paralyze a person, obviously doesn't know what they're talking about. No amount of money would have been enough to reward Salk for all the misery and death he has prevented, not to mention all the dread millions or even billions of people had of being the next victim of the disease -- not a trillion dollars, not a quadrillion dollars. Anyone who wants to claim that he, or one of the other scientists who found the cure for one of the dreaded diseases of humanity, is the greatest person who ever lived will get no argument from me.
Now imagine if Salk had been an ultra-conservative like Bush is. Imagine if he had actually demanded to be paid what he deserved! Suppose he demanded whatever the market would bear, say, a price of $1 million per dose of the vaccine. Since very few people could afford to pay $1 million all at once, he would have had to offer to let it be paid on an installment plan, $20,000 a year over the course of 50 years, let's say. They'd have to sign contracts guaranteeing all that future income to him after they got vaccinated. That's even though almost all the cost of the invention was in inventing it initially (and nothing even remotely like that amount of money per person anyway -- I wouldn't be surprised if the whole project to find a vaccine only cost a few million dollars), and each additional dose actually costs only a few dollars to manufacture. The disease was so dreadful that surely he could have extorted that much money from the middle class in the developed world to insure their safety from catching it. So they just would have had to work 100-hour weeks to pay for their immunization plus everything else in their lives. As for the poor in this country who couldn't afford it at all, and the billions in the 3rd world, tough luck. And no point dropping the price so those additional people could afford it, because they have almost no money to spend anyway. There's more profit in selling it at a much higher price to fewer people. (And notice that the more concentrated that wealth becomes, the more that reasoning holds, for all commodities - another bad thing about concentration of wealth. If there are more than ten times as many people making $100,000 a year than there are making $1 million a year, the total income of the people in that range would be greater than for the people in the higher range, so it would pay for companies to charge less but get many more customers, so earn more. (Actually, each income range doesn't necessarily spend money in proportion to their income, but that doesn't affect the basic argument I'm making here.) But if there are more than 1/10 as many people in the ten-times-higher range, their total income would be greater, so it would pay for companies to charge far, far more even though they'd get far fewer customers.) Besides, the last thing he would have wanted would be to completely eradicate the disease, since then the profits from his vaccine would suddenly drop to zero the moment there was no one contagious left to spread it. No, he'd want there to continue to be epidemics, to scare potential customers into buying his vaccine. (Hey, I'm starting to think like an ultra-conservative! This is fun!) Salk died a few years ago, if I'm not mistaken, so at least now that he's no longer around, there's no one left to reward for his efforts. So the price could finally come down to the few dollars each additional dose actually costs to manufacture, right? If you think so, you're still not thinking like an ultra-conservative. Extend the patent protection forever, down to his heirs for an infinite number of generations -- that's the Republican way. He shouldn't just benefit himself, but be able to pass on the benefit to his heirs, shouldn't he?
Of course, the very act of demanding whatever the market would bear would have cut down the very utility of his invention drastically, if most people couldn't afford it, so that maybe only 1 in 10 people on earth would have been vaccinated, and almost all of those people who could afford it at all would have had to slave away most of their lives to afford it. So ironically, the very act of paying him what he deserved would have cut the utility of his invention so much, by making it so expensive, that he would have deserved far less. And all so Salk could have been a quadrillionaire instead of merely getting whatever he got for his invention, when I've never heard anything to the effect that he complained that he was paid too little. Surely he labored away for the good of humanity much more than for the money. Whatever he was paid was obviously enough incentive already for him to invent his vaccine, so dumping another quadrillion dollars on him wouldn't have spurred him to invent it a second sooner.
If this hypothetical situation sounds silly, it shouldn't, because the farther to the extreme right we go, the more it is resembling the real world. My health insurance premium, which was only going up modestly before Bush came to power, has quadrupled in the past 7 years, since he came to power, to $8800 a year. The company sent me a letter saying it's because the cost of healthcare has been going up -- a preposterous lie, because it hasn't tripled in a mere 3 years, even given the outrageous prices that pharmaceutical companies are charging for their drugs in the US. At that rate of increase, my premium would be $1 million a year by the time I'm 65! Instead, my doctor told me that the company reported record profits the year it went up the fastest. So it seems that in the immoral dog-eat-dog business climate that Bush is promoting, the health care field is indeed increasingly extorting all that the market will bear, just as in my scenario. And since it's a case of "your money or your life", people simply have to pay.
My scenario is appropriate in another way, because the Salk vaccine is an example of the peculiar economics of information. Our economic growth is increasingly dependent on the growth of knowledge now that we have entered the Information Age (as opposed to being dependent on machinery, as in the Industrial Age, or land, as in the Agricultural Age). Almost the whole cost of the Salk vaccine was in the initial discovery, almost nothing in the production of additional "copies" (in this case, additional doses of the vaccine). In the case of pure information, once a computer network is in place, the cost of making additional copies is basically zero.
Therefore, with information, there is always the dilemma of what scheme to use to pay the person who produced it. It seems cruel and petty for the person who produced it to refuse to let people copy it, even when they are in desperate need of it, even though the additional copies cost nothing. And it is in everyone's best interest that information on how to be productive be spread as widely as possible. The more know-how that people have, the more that they can produce. It does society in general no good if people keep information close to their chests. And yet the person who labored to produce the knowledge in the first place deserves to be paid, and it is in everyone's best interest that people have adequate incentive to labor to produce more useful knowledge. So, yes, pay people well so that they'll have an incentive to produce more know-how, enough that there's no worry about them having adequate incentive. But how much is enough for anyone, $10 million? $100 million? Don't pay them more than that, because that only slows the dissemination of information by making it more expensive. In fact, if you pay people too much, you are DECREASING the monetary incentive for them to produce more - something you'll never hear a conservative point out! Once a person has all the money they could possibly need, money is no longer any incentive for them, and if they continue to work, it obviously isn't for the money. The more you pay them, the faster they get to that point!
Now let's go on to the 3rd claim of conservatives, that I started this essay with, that more egalitarian societies always have less economic growth, and vice versa. Does the record even show that? Conservatives want us to think about the former communist countries as proof. They definitely don't want us to think about the Scandinavian countries, which are highly egalitarian, yet the most affluent on earth, or conversely, the Latin American countries, which have some of the highest inequalities in the world, yet are economic basket cases. They also don't want us to think about the U. S. during the 1950's, a prosperous period many conservatives idealize, when the top tax rate was 92%, compared to today's 35%. They also don't want us to think about the U. S. leading up to the Great Depression, when highly conservative policies combined with the most rapid productivity increases in history lead to economic collapse when too many people lost their jobs and couldn't afford to buy things.
So why doesn't the record show what conservatives claim, when their reasoning seems sound? Actually, their reasoning isn't sound at all. Yes, if there were complete equality, no one would have any monetary incentive to work. (I'll leave for later the questions of whether there would still be non-monetary incentives to work, or whether we might ever reach complete automation, so that there would be no need for any incentive to work.) But extrapolating what would happen in the middle range based on what would happen at the endpoints is a fallacy of reasoning. The question is, does the curve steadily curve toward higher production the more inequality there is, ALL along its range?
As arch-conservative Henry Ford said, "If I don't pay my workers well, who will be able to afford to buy my cars?" Too bad conservatives now choose to ignore that reasoning. If most people can't afford to buy things, then it doesn't matter whether or not workers have an incentive to work. The companies they work for will have little incentive to produce things if they have few customers! Apparently, after the curve showing amount of production versus amount of inequality rises sharply from zero production at complete equality, somewhere along the way, it peaks, and then starts to fall again when there is too much inequality, due to too little consumer demand. Beyond that peak, the more inequality, the LESS production, contrary to what conservatives think. NEITHER extreme is good.
Of course, giving money to the poor and middle class to spend will only work up to a certain point in the short term, when businesses' production is running at full capacity. Businesses need capital to expand, to buy those labor-saving devices to increase productivity so that its capacity to produce things goes up. The poor and middle class largely use their money to spend. The rich largely use their money for capital, so taking money away from them decreases the money available for capital. But if conservatives can claim that if we give the rich more money, it will trickle back DOWN to everyone else in the form of jobs, I can just as well point out that if we give the poor and middle class more money, it will trickle back UP to the rich in the form of customers' business. Nothing stops businesses from using some of the profits they make from sales of their products for capital. And nothing will spur businesses more to expand than if customers are clamoring for their products, and have the money to spend, but businesses' production just isn't enough to satisfy demand.
During recessions, it is even more important to reduce disparities of wealth than during periods of prosperity. During recessions, the bottleneck that keeps the economy from growing is that people toward the bottom either lose jobs, or fear losing jobs, therefore spend less. Less consumer spending means that businesses shrink, therefore lay off more people, perpetuating the problem. (Unfortunately, as this paragraph is being written, in 2002, we are in a recession, and have a far-right-wing president at the worst possible time, who claims that he is trying to get us out of this recession by giving the rich more money. Any economist who agrees with that policy would have to be either insane, an idiot or a liar. The best that can be said for his policy is that he is running up humongous federal budget deficits in order to give the rich more money, rather that taking money out of the pockets of the non-rich right away, during the recession, so at least it won't do any immediate harm, even if it will do as little good as possible. When the time comes that those deficits have to be paid for by the non-rich (anyone who believes the rich will have to do the paying, I have some swampland in Florida to sell them), that is when the economy will be harmed.)
For more than half a century, most economists have followed Keynesian economics, which says that the way to get out of a recession is for the government to give the population more money to spend, and to get the money by running up government budget deficits, to be paid off later during prosperities. In effect, the idea is to take money from the future and give it to people in the present.
I would add that, the exact opposite of what our current president is doing, the way to get the biggest "bang for the buck" out of those deficit dollars is to give the money to the least wealthy, who use the money entirely for spending, rather than for any saving and investing. During a recession, money that is used for saving and investing either does no good, or is even detrimental. When money is invested in businesses, it is used for one of 3 things: 1) To hire more people, to expand the business. But no business will hire more people just when sales are down during a recession. 2) To buy more equipment, of the same sort as they already have, to expand the business. Ditto what I just said about hiring more people. And 3), to buy better equipment that makes work more productive. Businesses sometimes do this in the hopes of weathering a recession by cutting costs, by eliminating the need for as many workers. But eliminating jobs is the worst possible thing to do during a recession, since that will only make it worse. True, the businesses that make that better equipment will expand, and therefore create more jobs. But if businesses really wind up spending less money by buying labor-saving equipment, that must mean that the number of jobs created by the companies that produce that equipment are fewer than the number of jobs eliminated by that equipment, so that the overall effect is to eliminate jobs. It is better to wait to increase productivity during periods of prosperity than during recessions.
In fact, there is no need at all to run up deficits to get out of a recession, since there is a better way than what Keynes proposed. Instead of taking money from the future to give to people in the present, take money from the rich to give to everyone else. While I generally tell people that I favor an income tax on the rich only, and a "negative tax" on the non-rich, with a marginal rate of around 40% all across the income scale as being a good compromise between giving people incentive to produce, and giving the non-rich the money to consume, I could see having a normal rate of only, say, 30%, during periods of prosperity, and tacking on an extra 10% during recessions only, to pay for extra help for ordinary people, as an emergency measure to get us out of them. That way, during periods of prosperity, people toward the top would have more money to invest so that businesses could buy labor-saving equipment to increase productivity, while during recessions, people toward the bottom would have more money to spend.
Let's examine the idea that we need economic inequality in order to provide people with an incentive to work. There are obviously other incentives to work than money -- and the very same conservative billionaires and multi-millionaires who go right on working disprove their own claim that people need to be deprived of wealth in order to spur them to work. Obviously, they aren't working because they need the money! The quality of the work is of course most important: whether it is fun, or onerous. If we could automate away the onerous jobs, perhaps we'd be left with only work that people would love to do, voluntarily.
So let's take probably the 2 most onerous jobs: janitor and garbage man. I have seen self-cleaning bathrooms in airports that seem to need little routine maintenance, if any. It takes little imagination to come up with a design for a bathroom in which jets of water are positioned so that they clean off all surfaces, without anyone having to do anything more than push a button, even one located outside the bathroom. And as far as garbage men goes, I recently (2007) read an article that communities are starting to buy new garbage trucks that require only 1 person to man, who never comes in contact with the garbage, but uses a manipulator arm to pick up the bags of garbage people place outside their houses. Is it really true that we must insure that there are poor people, so there will be people desperate enough to have the incentive to do those onerous jobs? Or is the converse true, that the fact that there are poor people desperate enough to do them has kept our society from having the incentive to do away with those onerous jobs?
Even given no monetary incentive, people will do a certain amount of work, either because the work is fun, or at least relieves boredom, or because of a sense of duty. I've read that Americans tend to do 1 hour of volunteer work for every 2 hours of additional leisure they have, from which it would follow that Americans would work an average of over 20 hours a week even without any monetary incentive. Lots of people claim that they love working, and would work even if they won the lottery, and would never want to retire -- 80% of Americans, according to a recent poll. Are they all liars?
And even more so than working for others voluntarily, people certainly will work for themselves, to provide for their own needs -- cooking, cleaning, do-it-yourself projects, etc. Futurist author Alvin Toffler claims that, after all the effort that went into creating The Market during the Industrial Revolution, the exchange of goods and services, so that each person specialized on producing one thing, and trading with others for all the other things they need, there is now a counter-trend in the Information Age, of people increasingly doing things for themselves. He calls this "prosumption", from a combination of the words "production" and "consumption", because people produce what they themselves consume. Prosumption was originally done away with because it was inefficient, but prosumption has other, great advantages. It solves the problems of unemployment and economic swings -- think about it! When you work for yourself, you can never be unemployed, and your production and consumption is unaffected by the rest of humanity, only by how much effort you feel like making. And it is generally more pleasant and rewarding to work for oneself, with no boss over you, and produce for one's own needs, rather than having to try to anticipate other people's needs, and to develop a wide range of skills to become self-sufficient in many areas, rather than developing knowledge in just one specialty. Automation frees up people's time in areas where it's infeasible for them to prosume, so they can prosume when it's feasible.
There are actually 2 ways to create economic growth, a good way and a bad way. The good way is to automate away work that humans do, through the use of machinery. The bad way is to squeeze as much work as possible out of humans. Automation is the engine of economic growth -- not hard work, but the doing away of work; not working harder, but working smarter. There are only 168 hours in the week, according to my calculations, and I have it on good authority that human beings need much of that time to sleep, eat and other things. That means that by forcing people to work longer hours and work harder through draconian methods, only a limited one-time increase in the production of wealth can be gained -- and at the expense of such a bad quality of life that it wouldn't even be worth it. On the other hand, automating away work, freeing up people's time so that they have the time to produce more if they so choose, has limitless potential to increase wealth -- or at least, as limitless as computers and other machines have the ability to take over work that humans now do.
Rightist policies of increasing disparities of wealth to force people to work are that bad, limited way to increase economic growth. They may have been necessary in backward societies with little productivity and lots of work to be done, but no longer. But rightists also tend to be pro-technology, and advocate the good way to increase economic growth as well, while leftists tend to be hostile to technology because they know how businesses use it to throw people out of work and increase disparities of wealth, and destroy the environment, and other things. I advocate a 3rd way that combines the best of both: Encourage technology, while at the same time making sure that it is used only for good, not ill. Encourage automation, and spread some of the resulting increased wealth and leisure around to everyone. A good way to encourage automation would be to decrease disparities of wealth, thereby decreasing incentives for people to work. That would make it more difficult for businesses to find employees, thereby give them more incentive to automate away work, thereby increase economic growth! It is not workers who need incentive to work harder, but businesses that need incentive to automate more!
Of course, we'd still need the people to do the automating, more than ever. The one group of people we would still need to give incentive to work hard is those people! But that work is already among the most well-paying, and besides, it just happens to be among the most fun work there is, that many people would probably do whether for money or not. There are plenty of computer nerds out there who just LOVE to do that kind of stuff. (I happen to be one of them.)
The big question people always ask about automation is: What happens to the people thrown out of work? The answer is, that's why we need liberal policies above all. Pay people, at least for necessities, whether they work or not. Then we could automate work away at top speed, without worrying about the dislocations that would cause to workers, or a possible political backlash that would slow automation. And then, people would be able to afford to buy all of the flood of goods and services that increasingly efficient businesses could produce, so that they would indeed produce them. That is a recipe for the fastest economic growth possible.
Automation doesn't simply throw people out of work, for good. The situation is a bit more complicated than that. Automation lowers the cost of goods and services by lowering labor costs. As things get less expensive, those people still working tend to either buy more, or work less. If they buy more, production increases, and people are hired back. If they work less, they free up jobs for other people, and people are hired back. Either way, automation causes temporary dislocations. But it also causes permanent dislocations, because the new jobs created are not all the same as the old ones lost, but require new skills, usually more difficult ones than before, which people can't learn at the drop of a hat, and some people no doubt have no aptitude for at all.
Conservatives must love those dislocations. When workers fear for their jobs, their employers have more power over them, and can keep wages down. Traditional liberals' attitude is, create more jobs - thus negating automation. They just can't seem to bring themselves to take the next logical step: that we should pay people (at least for necessities, at first, only later for luxuries as well) whether they work or not. Because they can't bring themselves to go that far, they instead take the completely mad position that we shouldn't do away with their jobs even if we could, but keep them working at them even if the work is unnecessary, as an EXCUSE to pay them!
People only see the benefits of increased competition, of a dog-eat-dog world where the stakes are high, never notice the downside. They know, of course, how impossible it is in our society to change anything for the better -- no matter what the solution, someone's job is always at stake, and they fight tooth and nail to prevent the solution from being implemented in order to protect it. That not only applies to the case where some industry harms the environment, and workers fight liberals' attempts to stop it in order to protect their jobs. That also applies to the case where conservatives try to cut the size of government, and civil service workers fight for a plethora of giant, needlessly complex government programs that will require an army of civil service workers to administer, in order to protect their jobs, while on the other side, accountants also fight for greater complexity for the same reason. But people consider all of that an inevitable fact of life, never connect the fact that it is a bad side-effect of increasing inequality in order to increase the incentive for people to work.
Traditional liberal and leftist work ethic attitudes are especially curious considering that work is the major source of lack of freedom in Americans' lives. Ironically, just as the first modern democracies were appearing, with new freedoms, the employer-employee relationship developed, and brought a new form of totalitarianism. People only traded repression from government for repression from the companies they work for. Even today, Americans pride themselves on how "free" they are, oblivious to the fact that they spend most of their waking hours in mini-dictatorships. They are in deep denial about how un-free they really are. They apply a double standard, becoming outraged at any hint of government oppression, while at the same time, just accepting the lack of freedom at work as a fact of life. Leftists are always so busy fighting for the rights of workers, including the "right to work", they seem to forget that the best way to assure people's rights is to FREE them from work!
People also don't realize that the cost of the salaries of all the workers needed to get anything done in our economy is like a "salary tax" on businesses and government, a powerful disincentive to produce more wealth that would then be available to give to everyone. Of course, we need the incentive of salaries to get people to do any work they wouldn't want to do if they didn't have to. But the more we pay people a guaranteed income whether they work or not, rather than salaries, the less that "salary tax" disincentive there is to get anything done, and the more the economy is free to soar to new heights.
There are all sorts of wonderful things many people would love to accomplish, such as cleaning up the environment by picking up all the litter, or moving civilization out into space, but which never get done in our economy unless there is a profit to be made, even if they are highly desirable. There are many people who would gladly work on those meaningful things for free on their own time, but they don't have time for such volunteer work because they are too busy working to earn a living at dull meaningless jobs.
The cost of having business or government accomplish those things keeps them from being done. That cost is really almost all in the salaries they'd have to pay all the workers. No paid workers, little disincentive for government or business to do any of those things. No paid workers, and the cost of everything is virtually zero because the portion of the cost of everything that is the salaries of the employees needed to do everything is zero.
The only cost left is in land, energy and material resources (which are really all the same thing, since land contains energy and material resources). But notice that by making space travel affordable, we would be opening up the frontier of the entire solar system, building more land by building space habitats (as I talk about on my page about space colonization), and obtaining resources that would last for thousands of years' worth of population growth. And the way to make space travel affordable is to fire all those expensive technicians whose salaries make space travel so expensive, but let them do the work for free because they love to do it. Fire all the paid workers, and the chains that hold the economy down would be cut, and the economy set free to soar.
Of course, when I say that we should fire all the paid workers, I don't mean, because those people would no longer be working for pay, that they would no longer be paid. People would be paid a guaranteed income whether they worked or not. But wouldn't that amount that we'd have to pay everyone still be a drag on the economy, just like the "salary tax"? No. Unlike the "salary tax", that amount that we would pay everyone would not vary according to how much work they do. Therefore, there would be no disincentive on society for them to do more work. It is just like with any tax that is levied in order to discourage some behavior. For instance, we have gasoline taxes to raise the price of gasoline in order to discourage people from using it. But if, let's say, instead of adding a dollar's worth of tax for every gallon, we had everyone pay a dollar in tax, period, regardless of how much or little gasoline they bought, then that tax would no longer provide any disincentive for people to buy gasoline. It would no longer even make sense to call it a "gasoline tax", since it would no longer have anything to do with gasoline purchases. In the same way, paying people a flat amount, regardless of how much work they do, would no longer be a disincentive for government or businesses for those workers to do more.
While there may still be too much work not automated away yet for the above idea to work, even now, when we do not yet have artificial intelligence and robots with human abilities, the same reasoning applies, in diluted form. Get rid of as many paid workers as possible, and the economy will be partially unbound. Pay people to some degree whether they work or not (while paying people who still work more than those who don't), and the "salary tax" will be diminished. There will first be the fixed "tax" on the economy needed to pay people enough to live, regardless of whether they work or not, but since it is fixed, regardless of how much or little work is done, it is no longer a disincentive for business and government to do more. Of course, while on the one hand, the smaller the differential in pay between those who work and those who don't, the smaller the disincentive for business and government to hire people to accomplish great things such as opening up the space frontier, on the other hand, the less the incentive for people to work, and take those jobs. But there is a great non-monetary incentive for people to be involved in projects to accomplish great things with their lives.
There is some happy medium between having the full "salary tax", which discourages employers from expanding the economy, and having no "salary tax", which gives employees no incentive to work. If we later reach the point where we have intelligent robots that can do all the work, we could then completely eliminate the "salary tax". the economy could grow to, for all practical purposes, infinite size, limited only by the finite resources of the universe, because the cost of accomplishing anything would be essentially zero. We could increase the production of wealth almost indefinitely at almost no cost, simply by ordering the robots to do whatever is required.
Of course, in our increasingly fascist country where far-right economic views are increasingly the norm, you'll only hear about the disincentive for employees to work if the "salary tax" is too low, never about the disincentive for employers to expand the economy if the "salary tax" is too high.
By now, it must feel like I have pulled the ground out from under you, all of your conventional economic assumptions undermined. But I think you'll find that after the initial shock, the soaring feeling is GREAT.
As I said in a previous essay, when I talk about automation, I am not necessarily talking about something as science-fictiony as having humanoid robots do the work. A tremendous amount of work has been automated away since the start of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago, and obviously it was not done with robots. A tremendous amount more can still be automated away without robots and true artificial intelligence, and what I have said so far about automation does not depend on those developments. But if we ever get to the point where we have computers and robots with true artificial intelligence, able to do any work a person can do, it would of course follow that there would no longer be any need for people to have an incentive to work, monetary or otherwise -- as long as those artificial intelligences weren't so humanlike that they demanded to be paid! (I'll talk about that worry in my page on the technological Singularity.)
In fact, it would follow from the fact that people will do SOME work voluntarily that even short of complete automation of all work, there would be some point of sufficient automation, of all work people wouldn't voluntarily do, so that people would need no monetary incentive to do the work remaining. At that point, even if there was complete economic equality, the work would still get done. And approaching that point, we would rapidly need there to be less and less monetary incentive for people to do the dwindling amount of non-voluntary work that still needs to be done. The question is, when will we reach that point?
The answer depends on whether people tend to take the benefit of automation in the form of more stuff, or more leisure. If the former, the amount of work that needs to be done would stay steady, not drop. The more people want more stuff rather than leisure, the slower the drop. Americans are so into consumerism that they appear to be deciding on more stuff much more than more leisure. But surely, at least some people will prefer more leisure to more stuff, especially as automation goes on and people drown even more in affluence. There is already a growing Voluntary Simplicity movement in this country, of people deciding they already have enough stuff to keep them happy, and retiring or semi-retiring early. (I am a part of it, for I live somewhat frugally, and therefore was able to retire at the age of 42.) The more stuff people have, the more people should decide they have enough, though of course there will be people who think that no amount is ever enough. There is no way to tell exactly how this will play out.
The answer also depends on how much, the more that goods and services could be produced by machines, the more people would consider goods and services produced by people to be status symbols. This is already happening. Think of commercials for higher-priced services that say that if you call up, you'll actually get to talk to a person instead of get lost in an (often badly designed) automated phone menu. There is nothing wrong with such a thing happening. People would have a choice, to live their lives in complete leisure, exclusively consuming goods and services that cost nothing, produced without human labor, or to consume expensive hand-made goods, and services provided by real live human beings (such as getting haircuts, massages - or going to prostitutes). In the latter case, on average, for each hour they availed the services of other human beings, they would have to work to provide services to others. No problem there - that's obviously fair. However, there are 2 potential problems. First, widespread non-automated luxury goods and services would obscure from public awareness the fact that all necessary work had actually been automated away. Complete automation of work is the ultimate justification for leftist policies of economic equality, and such non-automated luxuries would obscure that justification. Second, due to pre-existing disparities of wealth, it wouldn't be the case that people would have to work 1 hour for each hour of personal attention they received from others. There would be an elite that would receive such services without having to work to do similar things for others, and there would be everyone else, who would have to perform such services for the elite without being able to afford them themselves. The elite would find some way or other of forcing everyone else to work, despite the fact that they could choose to consume only totally-automated zero-cost goods and services and not have to work. Taxes could be imposed, for example.
The answer also depends on the amount of make-work in our economy. I would suggest that most of the work Americans do is make-work, which accomplishes nothing as far as providing for their needs or wants. What does all that make-work consist of?
Has anyone been to a doctor's office lately? A small army of clerical workers has to deal with insurance companies, and on the insurance companies' side, another army of workers must deal with them -- all in a supposed effort by the insurance companies to keep costs down.
Or consider the army of tax accountants people must use to deal with our insanely complex tax code, and on the other side, the army of I. R. S. employees they do battle with. And consider all the people who work in what is called the FIRE section of our economy (Finances, Insurance and Real Estate), who produce absolutely nothing. The financial field in particular keeps complexifying endlessly as an excuse to give its workers commissions, with layer upon layer of complexity being built up upon previous layers.
Most important, marketing has reached completely mad levels in this country. In addition to TV and radio, it is in more and more places it never was before: on buses, in schools. It threatens to cover every square inch of every available surface. The newspaper is almost all advertising. The mailbox is flooded with mostly junk mail. The computer is flooded with mostly junk email. Then there are billboards, flyers stuck on the front door and car windshield, and even skywriting. You'd think all that would be enough, but no. Even if you tried to get away from it, there's the most obnoxious advertising of all, telemarketing, in which people are interrupted in their homes by advertising pitches out of the blue. Think of all the people involved in vast advertising campaigns to promote products over the virtually identical products of their competitors.
Advertising wars are like any arms race situation, which can generate endless amounts of work on both sides, which accomplishes nothing but neutralizing the efforts of the people on the other side. Lawyers battling lawyers is another example of this, in our increasingly litigious society. Our needlessly complex laws, created by lawyers, that force people to use lawyers, is another example. And of course, military spending is the most obvious example of all.
And it isn't just advertising, but all aspects of marketing that create needless make-work. For instance, supermarkets installed scanners at their checkout counters in the 1970s to speed checkout and reduce the number of cashiers needed. But now, it seems, companies are busy complexifying their pricing schemes by adding endlessly more gimmicks, so that they are becoming what the Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams calls "confusopolies", in which companies can charge almost whatever they want because people can no longer even figure out what the price of their products is! All those gimmicks first slow down checkout, as I have witnessed first-hand on many occasions at supermarkets lately. Still other aspects of marketing include tremendous numbers of man-hours that go into creating just the right packaging that will spur people to buy products, and figuring out their precise optimal placement in stores. Ultimately, we all pay for that, and therefore have to work for it.
Of course, competition is good between companies, when it spurs them to produce better products in order to win over their competitors, and advertising is good when it alerts people to the existence and attributes of products. But advertising today is notable in being devoid of real information about products, nothing but meaningless, seductive imagery. Marketing is a bad thing because the whole idea of it is to make a product sell more NOT by improving it in any real way, but by only improving its superficial qualities. When a product is really good enough, it sells itself.
Just to underscore the pointlessness of marketing, I'd like to point out that people involved in that field must change clients, and when they do, they must sometimes switch to working for a competing company in the same type of industry, especially since they have expertise in selling that particular kind of product. I can't help wondering if they manage to feel that the precious time of their lives was meaningful that they spent trying to convince people to buy from company A instead of company B, only to then later try to convince people to buy from company B instead of company A.
Arms races only stop when they run out of resources. I suggest that we have so many arms races in our society now precisely because automation freed up workers from doing productive things, so are available for all these non-productive things. These arms races first mask from us the true amount that work has been automated away. For example, in 1776, we needed 98% of Americans to be farmers in order to produce enough food for this country -- and even then, just barely. Now, 2% of Americans are farmers, and they not only feed Americans lavishly, but export to much of the rest of the world besides. The only way to stop those arms races is to dry up their supply of workers, by decreasing incentives to work.
(One nightmare scenario I have is that the production of goods and services will be completely automated, so that, you would think, no one would have to work to afford everything they consume. But everyone is trapped in a web of marketing, in which everyone is forced to toil away their lives at talking each other into buying each other's stuff. The cost of goods and services doesn't drop to zero, because of the cost of the salaries of the people doing all that marketing must be included in the price. Therefore, most people must take jobs in order to earn the money to buy those goods and services. And those people take the only jobs left - in marketing. However, presumably, if computers became more intelligent than people, even marketing jobs would be automated away. Intelligent computers would study people's psychology, and come up with even better ways than people could in talking them into doing anything.)
Eliminate all the make-work, and perhaps only half the work Americans do actually produces anything that satisfies their needs (and quite probably even less than half). And as I said above, I've read that Americans tend to do 1 hour of volunteer work for every 2 additional hours of leisure they get, so that even if all work was voluntary, they might work half as much as they do now. Put those 2 ideas together, and it might actually be the case that already, even if all work was voluntary, Americans would do all necessary work. If not yet, we should cross that threshold much sooner than most people would think. Consider only necessities people spend on, not luxuries, and we would reach the threshold still sooner, if not already. While it would be foolhardy to go too far based on such speculation, after what happened in communist countries, we should at least be cautiously shifting to the left, testing the waters to see how much of that harsh incentive to work we can do away with, as it becomes increasingly unnecessary. We should be phasing in a guaranteed minimum income that would provide for necessities. If people want luxuries, they would still have to work for them.
There must be some happy medium where the economy functions best, between great disparities of wealth (to encourage people to work) and small disparities (to give consumers more money to spend, and to reduce the "salary tax" that I talked about earlier, that makes accomplishing many things too expensive due to the labor costs). And as work is automated away, that happy medium must shift in the direction of smaller disparities, both because there is no longer a need to give workers an incentive to work, and because consumers need more money to afford to buy the greater amount of goods and services that can be produced.
Even if I cannot say for sure exactly where the balance point is at any given time, I have shown that as automation proceeds, the optimum balance that yields the maximum economic growth must steadily shift in the direction of equality. The more it shifts, egalitarian policies eventually go from completely unviable to increasingly viable. At the same time, highly inegalitarian policies become increasingly unviable, since they would slow the economy and eventually set off a Great Depression. Large numbers of workers would lose their jobs and not be able to afford to buy anything, causing an economic slow-down that would cause still more workers to lose their jobs, in a vicious cycle.
Certainly at the point of complete automation, if we ever reach that, there would simply be no excuse for any inequality, since there would be nothing people could possibly do to merit it, and since there would be no work for workers to get money for, we would simply have to support them in order for them to survive..
Of course, conservatives have a solution to the problem of how to keep up consumer spending, even as they take money away from most people: by encouraging increasing consumer debt, such as credit card debt and mortgages and home equity loans. In other words, the rich LEND ordinary people money, in the form of loans, instead of GIVING it to them, in the form of higher salaries or government entitlements. In fact, they lend back the very same money that they have taken from ordinary people. The only difference between lending and giving the money is that with lending, they don't let them keep the money. That way, the money is still considered rich people's money, even as ordinary people spend it. This is the insidious connection between the current far-right economic policies and high consumer debt, that most people don't realize. Most people have been led by the corporate-controlled mass media to think that they are 2 separate phenomena that just happen to be going on at the same time, and that consumer debt keeps increasing because loads of people have simultaneously lost their willpower to save instead of spend, in some sort of wave of decreasing moral rectitude. Indeed, part of the reason is that the businesses that conservatives own have bombarded ordinary people with advertisements to spend and run up debt. So if not having the willpower to defer gratification is a moral failing, conservatives have encouraged it. The other part of the reason is because conservatives have taken money away from ordinary people, by cutting government entitlements, lowering salaries through free trade with lower-paid third world workers, running up government debt that creates inflation, and other ways, so the only way conservatives can keep up ordinary people's spending is by having them go into debt.
But while liberal egalitarian policies of giving ordinary people money to keep are a permanent solution to keep up consumer spending, conservative policies that lend ordinary people money temporarily are only a temporary solution to keep up consumer spending. Consumers can only borrow so much before they go bankrupt, and lenders will only lend consumers so much before they fear that they will go bankrupt and not pay them back. At some point, the rich are no longer willing to risk lending those below them more money. When that happens, consumer spending plunges to the low level it would be at without all that borrowing, and even far below it, because consumers have to pay off that massive debt before they can spend on anything else. When that happens, the economy slows and workers / consumers lose their jobs, and lenders become even more nervous about lending anyone more money, in a vicious cycle. Propping up consumer spending with consumer debt is only a temporary solution that will delay the onset of another Great Depression, but make it much more sudden and severe. Under conservative policies, the economy is a house of cards that looks sound, propped up by all that debt, but is ready to collapse at any moment. Usually, some random bad event makes lenders nervous, and starts the vicious cycle rolling. It is no coincidence that the Great Depression started when we had the same sort of far-right policies as we have now, and we are likely to have another one soon (see my futurology page for details).
Indeed, I wrote the preceding paragraphs in 2005, and had 2 letters printed in the Miami Herald on December 10, 2005 and June 12, 2006 warning that Bush's far-right policies could cause another Great Depression, just as Hoover's did, and since 2007, the economy has been on the verge of collapse. The U.S. government has rescued it several times by going farther into debt in order to bail out companies with money it doesn't have -- socialism for the rich -- but that will only make everyone but the rich poorer by increasing inflation, and will merely postpone the coming collapse and make it bigger once it comes.
There are actually 2 ways to avert another Great Depression. The 1st is to transfer all the money that has been redistributed upward back downward, so that consumers have money to pay off their massive debts and to spend without going into debt. That is of course precisely what the powers-that-be don't want, so that has as much chance of happening as I have of reaching Mars with the use of a pogo stick.
The 2nd way of averting another Great Depression is truly horrifying. As presidential candidate John Edwards has said repeatedly, there are now 2 economies in the U.S., one for the rich and one for everyone else. The richer the super-rich get and the poorer everyone else gets, the greater percentage of economic activity occurs purely among the super-rich. In their economy, there is a complete unbroken cycle in which they pay for things such as yachts, the money from those sales makes their businesses profitable, and they get incomes from those profits, which they use to buy things such as yachts. Their economy is actually what I advocate for everyone -- it is truly socialism for the rich, since they get money whether they work or not, from their investments. Their economy does not have the fatal flaw that capitalism has, that ordinary workers only get money when they work, and if there is no work for them, the cycle is broken, and they cannot afford to buy the goods and services being produced. Therefore their economy is immune to economic swings, to the extent that their economy does not interact with the economy for the rest of us. The smaller percentage of their businesses' profits that come from ordinary people's business, the less that the economic swings in the economy for the rest of us impinge on their economy. So what the powers-that-be are probably aiming for is for the super-rich to get so rich, while ordinary people stagnate or even become poorer at a rate slow enough to not spark a revolution, that the portion of economic activity that comes from ordinary people shrinks more and more towards insignificance. For instance, if ordinary people receive 50% of the income in the economy, and the super-rich succeed in driving their wages down by 10%, let us say, then economic activity in the super-rich's economy drops by 5%, which is not very good, a recession. But after the super-rich succeed in driving down the portion of income in the economy that everyone else gets to just 10%, let us say, another 10% drop in wages would result in a mere 1% drop in economic activity, which would easily be made up for by the ever-increasing economy of the super-rich, just a minor blip that would briefly slow down that endless increase. The poorer that ordinary people get, the poorer the super-rich could make them without affecting the wealth of the super-rich by any appreciable amount. Therefore, eventually, the super-rich could drive everyone else to zero income, starvation, without it affecting their wealth, and overall economic activity, at all. Technically, it would not be a Great Depression, nor even a recession, since overall economic activity would keep increasing, even though for 99.9% of the population, it would be far worse than a Great Depression. Of course, the super-rich still need everyone else to produce the goods and services they consume, such as yachts, so they could not drive everyone else to starvation until that work is automated away. After that, thanks to inheritances, the entire remaining population, descendants of the super-rich, would stay super-rich forever after, and we would continue to have the sort of economy I want to see -- but only after that massive die-off of the non-rich.
I can now address the question of what the collapse of communism proved. It did not prove that highly egalitarian economic systems will not work. It proved that highly egalitarian economic systems will not work UNTIL THE LEVEL OF AUTOMATION IS SUFFICIENT. All the countries that communism was tried in were technologically backward, where there was far too much work to be done to expect people to do it voluntarily. On the other hand, the highly egalitarian Scandinavian countries are quite advanced technologically, and they are now the most affluent on earth -- so much for socialism not working. (There is also an exception that third world countries that have abundant natural resources that are easily obtained with little effort can do well under socialism, at least until those resources run out. They had better use some of the money they get from selling those resources to achieve a high degree of automation of other kinds of work, to prepare for that eventuality.) The U.S. is probably the most advanced technologically, and ought to fare at least as well with a high degree of equality, and better still in the near future as we continue to advance.
Where Marxists went wrong was, they were too impatient. Marx's philosophy sprung from thinking about what would happen as technology approached the point of automating away all work. He realized that would throw capitalism into a tailspin, because when all the workers lost their jobs, they would have no money to buy all the products that machinery could produce. But then his followers forgot about how it was TECHNOLOGY that would do that. Instead of waiting for technology to reach the point where there could be a society like they wanted, as they should have, they tried to change society instead, prematurely. They wanted to transfer wealth from the capitalists to the workers in order to avoid that final collapse of capitalism. But there was a problem, because before we reach total automation, we still need incentive for workers to do the work. Therefore, they wanted to change human nature, to create a society in which people would do all the work voluntarily, without the incentive of disparities of wealth. They claimed falsely that human nature was extremely malleable. They wanted to close the gap between the amount of work that needs to be done and the amount people are willing to do by brainwashing people to do MORE, in a totalitarian state, rather than making the work that needs to be done LESS. If they'd only had the patience to wait until enough work was automated away that people would voluntarily do the rest, for fun, rather than because they were brainwashed, untold human misery would have been avoided, and leftist economic policies wouldn't have been discredited, JUST when they are coming to be most needed. With automation, we can achieve something like the society they wanted, DESPITE human nature.
Another problem with Marxists and Socialists has been their inexplicable insistence on micro-managing economies. The problem with capitalism isn't on a microeconomic level, the level involving the prices of individual products and the salaries of individual jobs. For the most part, capitalism does the best job of any known system to set those prices and allocate resources. The only times it doesn't work all that well on a microeconomic level involve what are called social goods, such as clean air and water that no one is charged for. If companies don't have to pay the social costs of pollution, for instance, they have no incentive to stop it. The solution to that isn't to get rid of the free market, but to charge companies and individuals for the true social costs of what they are doing, so they are reflected in the price. (Besides, the command economies of Eastern Europe were the most polluting on earth.) No, the main problem with capitalism is its inherent tendency for the rich to get richer and the poor poorer, but that is something on a macroeconomic level, the level involving the overall aspects of economies. So if the problem is macroeconomic, why the insistence on the microeconomic "solutions" of centrally-controlled economies? If the problem is the increasing concentration of wealth, the best solution is to let capitalism do what it does best, but meanwhile to "level the playing field" in the simplest possible way, by continuously transferring wealth downward, so that there is no inherent tendency for wealth to concentrate upward.
Notice that the ideas I have presented in these articles are very different from traditional socialism. For instance, they do not involve government takeover of all industry, the "means of production" in Marxist terms. That is merely a means toward an end, greater equality, and not the end in itself. Quite the opposite, I am for small government. I would love to scrap our insanely complex tax system, and as Republican Steve Forbes advocated, replace it with one so simple that your tax form would fit on a postcard. The only difference is, I would make taxation much more progressive than he would. The rich in the U. S. now have so much wealth that if they were taxed at a not particularly high rate, 40 or 50% of their income depending on how far government were shrunk, lower than most socialists would advocate, no one else would have to pay any taxes. I would love to scrap all of the complex government entitlement programs and replace them with a single simple program of highly progressive taxation.
Marxists also want to eliminate private property, but while it is more efficient to produce fewer communally-owned products that could be borrowed whenever people need to use them, there are advantages to owning things and not having to share them. So rather than eliminating private ownership altogether, I would want to make private ownership more equal, and, where practical, give people the CHOICE of privately-owned or communally-owned products, and see if people use the communal ones. For instance, let people own their own cars if they wish, though that creates more work producing them all and therefore is more expensive, and creates the duplication of having cars that sit there idle most of the time, and require parking space. But, just as we can either buy books or borrow them from libraries, perhaps we could have the government provide cars that anyone could borrow, so that they do not have to buy their own or use inconvenient public transportation. Have enough of them that, at least for people in non-rural areas, they can find one nearby whenever they need one, and can leave it whenever they return, for someone else to use. Have something very distinctive on the communal cars that make them easy to spot, and have a website that allows people to locate whereever the nearest one is. Have some sort of system that keeps track of who borrowed the cars and what condition they were in when finished with them, to discourage people from destroying them. Or set up an automated system with self-driving cars, something that is just becoming practical, between the use of radar to avoid colliding with objects and magnetic markers in the roads. If those things don't prove practical, at least we could say it was worth a try.
In general, I am pro free market. One of the few things the free market doesn't do well is spread newly created wealth among everyone, so that is why I am for highly progressive taxation. As long as wealth is kept from concentrating upward in the simple, better way that I advocate, of highly-progressive taxation, then I'm for free trade, against affirmative action, against the minimum wage, quite anti-union, at least as far as the way unions have been so far, and against universal government-run healthcare. (Just GIVE PEOPLE MONEY by lowering their taxes, so they can afford healthcare, and institute regulations that stop the current problems with health insurance companies, especially the way that they don't allow people with pre-existing conditions to switch companies, which stifles the competition that would lower their rates.)
The trouble is, leftists are for all those things in a misguided piecemeal attempt to combat inequality, rather than doing it in the most direct way, and the way that would actually win elections for a change: highly progressive taxation in order to redistribute wealth downward.
And while many Socialists like me acknowledge that Socialism works best in advanced countries, and Marx intended on it to start there rather than in backward countries like Russia and Cuba, some Socialists try to deny that the economies of those countries were failures.
The best labels I can use to describe this ideology is pro-automation leftist-libertarian, or socialist-libertarian, or small-government socialist, though those may sound like contradictions to people who think socialism can only be big-government. Amazingly, while I'm not the only one with this ideology (see the links on my main page to several other websites with the same ideology), it doesn't even have a name, so the small group of people who believe in it don't even know what to call it! For short, I like to call it "automation socialism". Automation and socialism go together like yin and yang. Promote automation alone, and the question is, what happens to the workers who lose their jobs? The answer is, institute socialism as well, so they are paid anyway. Promote socialism alone, and the question is, what will motivate the workers to do all the work that needs to be done? The answer is, institute automation as well, so the work will get done anyway.
I am especially against the work ethic of most liberals, labor unionists, socialists and Marxists -- the work ethic is really right-wing as far as I'm concerned. Leftists fight for the "right to work" - what the hell kind of "right" is that?? What other rights are the fighting for? The right to have ice picks shoved into their eyeballs? Workers of the world, unite, as Karl Marx said? Slackers of the world, unite, I say! In my conversations with liberals and conservatives, I find that it is conservatives who more often agree with what I'm saying, that if work is automated away, then of course we'd have to redistribute wealth to help everyone thrown out of work. It is the liberals who often don't "get it". Due to their anti-technological bias, they often refuse to believe that all work could be automated away. They are so used to being workers, they are aghast at the idea of what to do with their lives if they no longer had to work. It is conservatives who are used to the idea of living off of investments, rather than a salary. My only difference with them is, I want that for EVERYONE, not just the rich.
(written in 2002)
In my previous essay, I made the case for automation and the creation and spread of wealth. Now I want to make the case for automation and the creation and spread of that other thing that automation was supposed to produce: leisure.
Up till the 1960's some social scientists still worried what people were going to do with all the leisure they were going to have when computers and robots did all the work. Remember that? Instead, work hours have actually gone up in this country over the past decades. What went wrong?
In the early 1900's, as automated manufacturing churned out more products than people would even buy, causing cycles of unemployment, business leaders made a conscious decision how to deal with the problem. There were basically two ways to deal with it.
The first was to decrease total working hours across the board. When productivity goes up and consumption, therefore production, of goods and services stays steady, total working hours in an economy simply must go down somehow. The choice is whether they should go down in a way that devastates some, in the form of unemployment, forced total leisure at no pay for a portion of the population that is no fun at all, or spread around to everyone as partial leisure with pay that can improve the quality of life. There are two ways to spread leisure around. The first is to shorten the work week across the board. Up till the Great Depression, that was done in this country, and the work week fell from around 100 hours in the 1800's to the 40 hours that became standard in the 1930's. The other way to decrease overall working hours is to keep people out of the workforce entirely during portions of their lives, at pay. Young people have been kept in school till an older and older age the last two centuries, before they enter the workforce, in order to complete their schooling. And the concept of retirement was created, of older people being "put out to pasture" because they are supposedly too sickly to work anymore. The real main reason was because they were keeping jobs away from unemployed younger people.
The second way to avoid unemployment was to use advertising to talk people into buying more and more endlessly in order to keep production up, and that has been the way followed in this country increasingly before the Great Depression, and exclusively since then. I've read that the average American spends ONE FULL YEAR of their life watching TV commercials, when all the time is added up. (Personally, I can think of better ways to spend a full year out of this one moment in eternity that I am alive -- but maybe that's just me.) George Orwell was partially right, only it turned out to be the people living in capitalist societies that are the most brainwashed in history, not in dictatorships. And they are brainwashed not to obey Big Brother, but to buy, buy, buy. Shopping malls can be thought of as enormous devices for attracting people to them, and then extracting money from their wallets. To top it off, this approach can't possibly even work over the long-term, because people need more money to buy more stuff, and can only get it by working longer hours than they did before. Longer working hours then raise unemployment back up again by taking jobs away from other workers.
Thinking about how productivity increases affect unemployment can get very confusing, because there are not just those 2 factors, but 4 factors at work simultaneously, including working hours and consumption as well. People who fear that automation will take away their jobs don't realize that that would only happen if those other factors remain steady. There is an equation that expresses the relationship between Consumption, Productivity, and portion of Time the population spends working overall:
C / P = T
C = consumption of goods and services, in terms of how much working time it takes to produce them
P = productivity, or the amount of goods and services that can be produced in a given amount of time
T = portion of time people spend working
What the equation says is quite simple. Suppose people on average consume 5 "widgets" per day (assuming that's the only thing people consume, that they need to live on, these hypothetical widgets), and it takes them an hour on average to produce each widget. Then the population on average must spend 5 hours a day working in order to produce what they consume. However, this equation isn't very illuminating, because it doesn't split up the portion of time people spend NOT working into the various categories of not working, especially the one I'm most interested in, unemployment.
Suppose some people don't work at all, either because they're not of working age or because they're of working age but unemployed. Then let's modify the equation this way:
C / P = W x E
W = average working hours among the portion of the population that is working, in terms of the proportion of their time those people spend working
E = portion of the population employed
If only half the population works, let's say, then those people working must work twice as long to still produce that same number of widgets for the population as a whole. So in my example, average working hours would be 10 hours instead of 5.
However, since I'm most interested in unemployment, I'm more interested in the portion of the population NOT working, so let's modify the equation this way:
C / P = W (1 - N)
N = portion of the population NOT employed
Finally, let's split up those not working into those not working because they're unemployed, and because they're not of working age:
C / P = W (1 - (U + L))
U = unemployment, the proportion of the total population that is unemployed (despite being of working age)
L = length of people's lives that they are not of working age, as a proportion to total average life span
I've never seen this equation anywhere in my reading. Maybe professional economists consider it too obvious to even bother to mention.
So let's take another example. Suppose people on average consume some quantity of goods and services in a given amount of time (C = 20 widgets per week, let's say). Suppose it takes, for example, 1.68 hours of work per person to produce each widget, so that P = 100 widgets per week, since there are 168 hours in a week. Then the entire population must spend an average of 20/100, or 1/5 of their time working. In other words, C / P = 1/5. That work can be divided among the population in different ways. Since U + L = the portion of the population NOT working, 1 - (U + L) = the portion of the population working. Multiply by W, and you again get the average amount of time the population as a whole spends working, as on the other side of the equation. Supposing people spend 45% of their lives in the range that is considered not working age, before schooling and after retirement, and 5% of the population is unemployed, then half the population isn't working, and half is. The half working must work twice as long to make up for those not working, or (W = ) 2/5 of their time, or 67.2 hours a week. You can play with the numbers and see how shortening working hours even a little can lower unemployment a lot, and how, when productivity increases, in order to keep unemployment from rising, either consumption must be increased, or working hours decreased, by either shortening the workweek or the length of the portion of people's lifetimes in the workforce.
The equation drives home the point that automation need not increase unemployment (even automation too rapid for the economy to adjust to it by increasing consumption), as long as we reduce working hours at the same time. Not necessarily the inflexible way they are doing it in Europe, by reducing a standardized work week across-the-board, but by encouraging the growth of flexible types of jobs such as temping, contracting out and self-employment, so that people who want to work less are able to.
There are 2 provisos (and hopefully not more that I haven't thought of). First, worker pay per hour must rise to keep up with increasing worker productivity, otherwise neither shortening working hours nor increasing consumption will keep unemployment from rising. In the case of shorter working hours, the money workers get must not drop, even though their working hours have dropped; pay per hour must increase to make up for shorter hours. Otherwise, consumption drops because most people have less money to spend, therefore production drops, and therefore unemployment rises, after all. The same with increasing consumption to keep unemployment from rising. Simply increasing consumption without increasing worker pay per hour will indeed create more jobs -- but workers will have to take those additional jobs in order to pay for the additional stuff that they are buying, so increasing consumption won't help keep unemployment from rising.
Second, decreasing working hours has a diminishing effect on reducing unemployment as unemployment approaches zero, because employers refuse to hire people from the "bottom of the barrel", even when they need the workers. Instead, production drops, just as what would happen if unemployment dropped to zero and then working hours dropped still further, and therefore consumption drops as well.
(And what about inflation in all of this? That subject would take me too far afield in this essay, but I guess I can't ignore it, because too many confused people bring the subject up, wondering how changes in the various factors I talk about above would affect the inflation rate. Thinking in terms of dollars, or euros, or whatever currency, only confuses things, because people really want the goods and services that money pays for, not the money itself. It is better to think just in terms of goods and services the economy produces and people get, for that is the real measure of how well off people are. Units of currency are completely arbitrary in value. If someone wants to buy an automobile, and has $20,000, and automobiles cost $20,000, they are exactly as fortunate as someone in Slobovia who has 357 slobos, when automobiles cost 357 slobos. If, overnight, we had 100% inflation, and suddenly automobiles cost $40,000, but banks raised their interest rates (which tend to rise and fall with inflation) drastically overnight so that everyone woke up with twice the money in their bank accounts, everyone would be none the worse. To give a real-world example, Italians were none the worse when they used liras for currency, and approximately 1000 liras equaled 1 dollar, aside from the nuisance of having to write prices with all those zeroes. I don't want to minimize the disruption that inflation causes, but what's really important is people's actual wealth, and not some arbitrary units measuring that wealth.)
Decreasing working hours has another advantage, for it tends to decrease disparities of wealth by raising wages. The shorter working hours are made, the more workers companies must hire to compensate. A glut of workers and a shortage of jobs causes workers to bid each other's salary down in a desperate search for jobs. A glut of jobs and a shortage of workers causes companies to bid salaries up in a desperate search for employees. The higher salaries go, the more that workers can afford to work less, further increasing that shortage of workers. That is why conservatives and businesses fight tooth and claw against shorter work hours. And that is why, up till the Great Depression, shorter work hours was the major goal of the union movement, and they succeeded in bringing working hours down from 100 hours a week to 40 over the course of a century.
Unfortunately, since the law was passed in the US during the Great Depression defining 40 hours a week as full-time, and mandating time-and-a-half pay for overtime in order to discourage employees from using overtime, the law backfired, and working hours have gone back up somewhat since then instead. Time-and-a-half is insufficient disincentive to employers because of the fixed costs per employee, such as fringe benefits, still makes it more expensive to hire more workers rather than to do away with overtime. And time-and-a-half turned out to be a powerful incentive for employees to work longer hours, and to get their unions to fight for more overtime instead of less, stupidly, oblivious to the fact that they were creating a worker glut and lowering wages. Changing overtime to double-time might finally be enough to give employers a disincentive for overtime, but might backfire even worse by giving workers an even more powerful incentive for overtime. I favor a more direct approach, of simply making long work hours illegal, or mandating 6 weeks vacation a year, or - though it would be nearly impossible to make less-intelligent people understand how it would be to their benefit - changing overtime to a tax penalty that employers would pay to the government rather than workers, to avoid that incentive to workers.
The feminist movement in the 1970s was another unintentional economic disaster to ordinary people, for as soon as wives entered the workforce in large numbers, so that working hours per family doubled, they created such a glut of workers that wages plunged in real terms, though that was hidden by the inflation of the period. In no time, wives, who had entered the workforce because they were bored with housework, discovered that they had to work to keep their families afloat financially. Apparently, feminists never stopped to think about the economic consequences of what they were doing. If they had, starting from just husbands working 40 hours a week, and women doing housework, they would have fought to go not to both husbands and wives working 40 hours, but to both husbands and wives splitting those 40 hours, and working 20 hours each, and splitting the housework.
When people are poor, their first priority is more wealth, not more leisure. But many psychological studies have shown that once people are out of poverty, when they can afford all necessities plus a few luxuries, additional luxuries do not make them any happier in the long run. Polls asking Americans how content they are have shown that happiness peaked in 1957, and is lower now than then despite the fact that we now live in houses triple the size as then per person, and that additional space is filled with mountains of gadgets that didn't even exist back then. What were considered luxuries then, such as air conditioning in cars, are considered standard now. Most Americans seem to swallow the advertising barrage hook, line and sinker. While I myself have adopted somewhat of a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity, and was able to retire at the age of 42, it is not my place to tell others how to live. However, it IS my place to advocate that others have the OPTION of living however they want.
Up till recently, when most people worked in standardized 9-to-5-till-you're-65 jobs, they had no option. You either worked at least 40 hours a week, or you didn't work at all. In addition to the advertising barrage, such inflexibility encouraged people to buy more rather than work less, since they had no option to work less anyway. (They could have saved more and retired earlier, but retirement was too far-off a thing most of their lives to provide enough incentive to spend less. In addition, to many people, total retirement is too much of a wrenching extreme in the opposite direction from working 40 hours a week, with no happy medium.) In the last few years, however, we have seen a sudden increase in the number of nonstandard jobs: of temping, contracting out, job sharing, part-time, telecommuting and more. For a while this trend looked encouraging, but the economic downturn, and the far-right economic policies of the Bush administration that favor employers over workers, gave employers the upper hand over their employees. It seems that businesses have been finding ways to demand long work hours even of people with these supposedly flexible jobs. Just as shorter work hours can lead to a worker shortage, which forces wages up, which allows people to increasingly choose shorter work hours, unfortunately the reverse is also true. Lower wages can force people to work longer hours, which leads to a worker glut, which lowers wages.
Besides, people usually pay a price for the new flexibility. The new jobs usually don't have benefits such as health insurance, and often pay considerably less per hour than the equivalent standardized jobs. No doubt businesses are shifting to such jobs not only because they need more flexibility themselves, in this increasingly fickle business world, but because they can then pay their workers less. Liberals, led by labor unions, have responded by trying to block the new flexible jobs -- another case of the stupidity of traditional liberals. They should be fighting instead for equivalent compensation from the new flexible jobs as the old ones. They should be fighting to keep these jobs truly flexible, so that companies can't demand that contractors either work ridiculously long hours or not work at all. They should be fighting so that health insurance companies can't exclude people trying to get insurance on their own due to preexisting conditions, just as they can't exclude them from the group insurance that people get through their employers. Socialists have always advocated shorter work hours (as in Europe, where the work week is now down to around 35 hours and dropping, and most people get 5 or 6 weeks vacation a year, when Americans are lucky to get 2 weeks), but they have always advocated a one-size-fits-all across-the-board reduction in hours. While I am in favor of the U. S. doing that too, for the remaining old-style inflexible jobs, flexibility is better, in combination with progressive taxation that gives employees the upper hand, so that they can use that flexibility to their own advantage.
With the new flexible jobs, automation can proceed without causing great economic pain by throwing people out of work. Let us say that 5% of work is being automated away in a given year. Rather than 5% of people losing their jobs entirely while everyone else works just as long, that 5% will be spread around widely, so that many people will be a bit underemployed temporarily, rather than a few people completely unemployed -- far less devastating. Due to automation, the cost of producing the goods and services people buy will drop. People will be free to choose for themselves whether to continue to work as long as before in order to buy more stuff, or have more leisure to enjoy the stuff they already have. Those who work as long as before and buy more stuff will create more work to produce that stuff, ending that temporary underemployment. Those who choose more leisure will free up the work they were doing for others to do, ending that temporary underemployment.
When I tell conservatives that I want to pay people for necessities whether they work or not, they are usually enraged at the thought of other people getting something for nothing while they have to work. But short of full automation, while there's work to be done, I'm all for having everyone do their fair share of the work, when feasible. But I am for doing so by shortening work hours for those who are working, so that the work is spread among everyone, rather than by keeping working hours as long as they are, and creating make-work to have enough full-time work to go around, as we have been doing. In other words, rather than saying, "If I have to work, the poor should have to!" as those deluded middle-class conservatives say in a fit of self-defeating spitefulness, they should be saying, "If the poor don't have to work, I shouldn't have to!" Those middle-class conservatives who wanted to "get those bums off welfare" never realize that the foot they use to kick the poor is really bent around, and is kicking their own behinds as well. The harsh dog-eat-dog society they create is harsh for them as well as the poor. For instance, when they pull the social safety net out from under themselves, their own wages tend to fall, because their employers know they are in too precarious a situation to do anything about it, since they have no alternative. Just imagine how many people would vote for a politician who proclaimed, "If elected, I promise to make life worse!" And yet that is what conservatism is really all about, with its harsh policies. The trouble is, the middle class is duped into thinking they will get more if the poor get less, but instead, the rich will get more because both the middle class and poor will get less. Besides, those conservatives blame liberals and their welfare state for the fact that some people aren't sharing the work, because they don't have the incentive to. But they should remember that it is the mostly rich conservatives who own the businesses that force some people to work full-time while throwing others out of work entirely. So if working people want to blame someone for people not doing their fair share of work, perhaps they should blame conservatives, not liberals.
However, I added "when feasible" in the above paragraph when I talked about people doing their fair share of work, because the more people who do the work, the more who must be trained, and both training people and people being trained is itself work, and becomes itself a form of make-work as work is automated away. To give a concrete example: If people must do an average of, say, 40 hours a week to produce everything that people consume, then it makes perfect sense for them to spend, say, an average of 5 hours a week training others and being trained, when the time people spend in public school and college toward learning their various professions, and in further training at work, and in teachers teaching, is averaged over the population. But imagine that so much work has been automated away that now people only must spend 1 hour a week working, on average. Now, it is ludicrous to force all people to spend an average of 5 hours training to do an average of 1 hour of work each. Better to spend those 5 hours training, say, only 1 in 5 people to do the work, and for those people to spend an average of 5 hours each to do all the work, and to give everyone enough to live on whether they work or not, but give extra to those who work.
Another problem that might make sharing the remaining work infeasible is if increasingly complex technology creates increasingly complicated work that requires more training for people to do. I'm not completely sure that this is even happening, since computers may be automating away complicated work more than simple work so far. As is well-known with efforts to create artificial intelligence, people have been able to get computers to do with ease what humans find hardest, and can't get them to do at all what humans find easy. However, the newest advances in artificial intelligence that emulate the way the brain works, rather than relying on formal logic that is nothing at all like the way the brain works, should start automating away the simplest work before more complicated work. And there does seem to be a trend toward more complicated work. The common rhetoric in the US is that this is a great thing, for it will make work more interesting - in other words, so wage slaves will be happier slaves. But on the other hand, it is supposed to be people's own fault if they don't get increasing education in order to qualify for those increasingly sophisticated jobs so they can earn higher incomes. This is another case of conservatives using technology to make life worse instead of better, by making it more arduous. An extreme example shows how cruel and ridiculous an idea this really is: Suppose all work were eliminated except for rocket scientists and brain surgeons, those 2 proverbial most difficult professions. Would everyone suddenly have to be either a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon, or starve if they don't happen to have the aptitude? Yes, there's some unfairness in having only those with the aptitude do all the work. So again, pay them more than everyone else. But still, pay everyone else even though they aren't working.
(written in 1998 and updated since then)
Someone once said that the most important assumptions in a culture are the ones the people in it make without even realizing that they are making them. In our culture at the moment, what I call "marketthink" is one of the most important unexamined set of assumptions. If we could be made aware that we are making them so that we could stop, daily life would improve tremendously.
Marketthink is what I call the weird way of thought that life in a market economy causes people to have. It arose during the Industrial Revolution, for good reasons, but now that we are entering the increasingly-automated Information Age, that way of thinking is increasingly counter-productive and detrimental. In order to see clearly what marketthink is, it is necessary to go back to the pre-industrial, Agricultural Age, to contrast it with the way of economic thinking that existed before.
In the Agricultural Age, people largely produced for themselves what they needed. They grew their own food, built their own houses, made their own clothes. There was a small amount of trade between regions, each of which specialized in certain commodities, but it was not integral to the economy. There was a small amount of specialization and trade between people -- the village blacksmith and cobbler, for instance. But those commodities "in the market", that is, produced for trade for other commodities people needed, rather than produced by people for their own self-use, were a small part of what people consumed. If that trade collapsed, and they could not find a buyer for what they produced so that they could trade with others for other commodities they needed, people could simply revert to producing those things themselves, less productively since they were not as skilled as the specialists, or do without those commodities for the while. There was no concept of "unemployment". Since people largely depended on themselves, they did not have to find someone who needed their labor, in exchange for commodities. If they wanted to increase their material wealth, they did not have to depend on others as we do, by producing more for trade and having to find more people to trade with. They simply decided to produce more for themselves, and did so. There was also no clear concept of "money". Money consisted of things valuable in themselves, such as coins made out of precious metals, which could have been melted down and made into other objects as needed. It was no different than any other commodity, such as chickens or goats. It was only made into coins so that it was more convenient for people to know how much of the metal they were getting. The concept of paper money would have only made sense as a promise to give tangible, valuable goods when it was presented. And since most commodities weren't traded in the first place, money, in any form, wasn't often used. Marketthink is so ingrained in people today that it is necessary to go to comic lengths to spell out these differences.
There was, however, a major disadvantage to that kind of economy. When people largely produce what they need for themselves, the amount they can produce is greatly limited. Production is extremely low when people try to do everything themselves. Specializing is more efficient. In order to produce more, they would have needed machinery to automate some of their work away so that their time would have been freed up to produce more. But even if the machinery had been invented back then, they would not have had the tremendous number of specialized skills in order to produce it themselves, or to operate it.
However, if they had somehow magically been presented with machines that produced food, houses, clothing, and anything else they needed, it would have been an unalloyed blessing, unlike in our market economy in which machines would throw some people out of work and deprive them of a source of income. The machines would have produced those products, and they would have been able to enjoy them. They would have had a higher standard of living and would not have had to work for it.
Even if the machines required some amount of work in order produce those products, it still would have been an advantage over no machines at all. They still would have required less work than otherwise. People themselves would have decided for themselves how much work they wanted to put into it. If they wanted to work as hard and as long as before, they would have had a larger amount of stuff to consume, but most likely they would not have wanted to. There is only so much a person can eat. Aside from trying to impress others, there is little point to a larger house, or more clothes than a person can wear at one time. Most likely, they would have decided to have just a little more, to the point where their needs were completely satisfied, and to work much less, to enjoy a life without endless backbreaking labor. If they wanted to impress others, they could have worked more. Either way, the choice would have been up to them, what balance of work and leisure was worth it.
In the Industrial Age, machinery was used to produce more with less labor. A considerable portion of the world had living standards that rose beyond what had ever been possible before. However, most people lived a precarious, unpleasant existence in new ways. In solving one problem, we had created many others. Part of marketthink is the uncritical love of the market system, and the inability to even recognize its problems, or think of them as an inevitable fact of life, or even RELISH the problems as personal challenges to overcome and be proud of overcoming, in a sort of masochism.
The Industrial Age brought something new -- employers and employees. Since it required vast numbers of people involved in vast new projects, all those people had to be organized, someone giving orders, many taking them. Ironically, just as the first modern democracies were appearing, with new freedoms, the employer-employee relationship brought a new form of totalitarianism. People only traded repression from government for repression from the companies they work for. Even today, Americans pride themselves on how "free" they are, oblivious to the fact that they spend most of their working hours in mini-dictatorships. They apply a double standard, becoming outraged at any hint of government oppression, while at the same time, just accepting the lack of freedom at work as a fact of life. People are told when to work, even when there is really no need for the work to be done at a specific time, as is increasingly the case, and how much to work, often forced to work more than they want. Polls have consistently shown that Americans would prefer more time off for less pay . They are told where to work -- at the office, even when there is really no need for the work to be done at a specific location, as is increasingly the case with the new mobile communications. Until very recently, almost everyone had to work standardized 9-to-5-till-your-65 office and factory jobs, regardless of their own unique personal needs or wants. To some degree, they are even told what they can or can't do in their private lives, outside of work. For instance, people are tested for drugs, even if they only use them on the weekend and never show up for work intoxicated. Some people have even been forced to give up risky sports because the health insurer would have refused to accept them. Part of marketthink is accepting all this as the only way things could be.
The Industrial Age brought extreme specialization, which created mind-numbing, monotonous, repetitive, boring work. Most people probably don't stop to think how less onerous work is when it is varied.
The Industrial Age brought a psychological disconnect between the work people did and the satisfaction of their own needs. Work was no longer done to meet people's own needs directly, but indirectly, for trade. When someone does work to satisfy their own needs, there is both the direct psychological reward of satisfying those needs, and the pleasure of doing work out of their own initiative, whichever way they want to do it, at their own pace, without anyone interfering.
The Industrial Age brought The Market. It is important to point out that since The Market means people specializing in producing one thing each, for trade instead of for self-use, the former so-called communist countries had market economies also -- state-run central-command market economies instead of free market economies, but still, market economies. The idea of a non-market economy is completely different and far more radical than the so-called communism of the Soviet Union and other countries. But it is radical only in terms of today's world, for it is actually a return to something like the world before the Industrial Revolution, only this time on a high-tech basis.
One problem with market economies is that they are wildly unstable and precarious, and produce cycles of prosperity and depression. They are subject to mass-psychology fluctuations. If persons A and B make something each other wants, but there is a market slowdown, and B starts making less of what A wants because they THINK A is about to make less, A cannot trade all their goods with B because B doesn't have enough to trade, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then there is no way out of their rut unless they both simultaneously have unwarranted faith that each other will start producing more again, so that the faith turns out to be warranted after all. The same problem is true when market economies are growing for the first time. A market economy is like a house of cards, all the cards supporting each other. The cards could collapse at any moment. And it's difficult to set the cards up in the first place, since all the cards must be standing in order for any to stand. Is this any way to run a world?
A related problem is the interdependence everyone has. In a non-market economy in which people are self-reliant, if they want to improve their lot in life, they simply decide to do it, by working harder to create more, for themself. (I'm using "them" in the singular sense, rather than the awkward "him or her", since English has no other way to express this. If we can use "you" as both singular and plural, why not "them"?) They do not have to first find other people to trade a greater amount of goods they produce in order to get a greater amount of goods in exchange. Also, they do not have to think about what other people might need, that they could trade; it is certainly easier to decide what someone needs themself than what others need, and more satisfying to provide it for themself.
A problem related to that interdependence is that market economies produce marketing, all the pointless work in everyone convincing each other to buy each other's stuff. In a market economy, everyone is always trying to talk each other into wanting more and more, that the other person doesn't really need, so they can sell more and have more themself. The hidden message of advertising is that you should be dissatisfied until you buy their product ... and after you buy it, you should still be dissatisfied, until you buy still more. So while people in market economies HAVE more than ever before in human history, they are dissatisfied more than ever before. Further, that dissatisfaction fuels an escalating cycle of everyone trying ever more frantically to talk each other into buying their stuff, to the point of advertising becoming obnoxious. We live in an advertising-saturated society; we are bombarded by it at every turn. Piles of junk mail, and now junk email. On buses, and increasingly, every last available bit of space, everywhere. Most of the newspaper is advertising. On TV and radio. Leaflets stuck on car windshields. Billboards. Even skywriting. You'd think that would be enough, but no -- even if you try to avoid all that, there is the most obnoxious advertising of all, telemarketing, in which people call and interrupt people in their homes out of the blue with advertising pitches. To some degree, people become oblivious to all of it -- which only leads to cycles of advertisers trying even harder to attract people's attention.
Not only is everyone buying more and not necessarily getting any happier, but they are having to work twice for it. First, they have to work more in order to buy more stuff. And second, the cost of all of that advertising, and everything else involved in marketing, is included in the price of everything, which they must pay. And just as people must pay for all that marketing, increasingly, that is the field they are working in, because that is where the jobs are.
People only see the benefits of increased competition, of a dog-eat-dog world where the stakes are high, never notice the downside. They know, of course, how impossible it is in our society to change anything for the better -- as I've said before, no matter what the solution, someone's job is always at stake, and they fight tooth and nail to prevent the solution from being implemented in order to protect it. That not only applies to the case where some industry harms the environment, and workers fight liberals' attempts to stop it in order to protect their jobs. That also applies to the case where conservatives try to cut the size of government, and civil service workers fight for a plethora of giant, needlessly complex government programs that will require hoards of civil service workers to administer, in order to protect their jobs. But people consider all of that an inevitable fact of life, never connect the fact that they caused such things to happen when they rejected redistribution of wealth for fear that that would kill the incentive for people to work. So instead, we have TOO much incentive, too much competitiveness. In fact, now that there is little real work that needs to be done, killing much of the incentive to work by minimizing the payoff for working would only kill the source of workers for all those useless make-work jobs. With a shortage of workers, companies would be forced to cut back on all their marketing, and use what workers they have for only the essentials: making products that people actually want or need, and attracting customers by making them well instead of by concentrating their efforts into persuading people to buy them. And in addition, killing the incentive to work by "leveling the playing field" would have the added benefit that it would stop workers from obstructing change, since it would no longer make as much difference to them whether they worked or not -- they would get an income either way.
The craziest aspect of marketthink is how it causes people to think in a bizarre backwards way, that more work is better instead of worse. Remember, again, how people in pre-market agricultural societies would have welcomed machines that did away with work they had to do, with no worry about "their jobs being automated away". Since they produced whatever they needed for themselves, anything that made their work more productive would have been a blessing. But in market economies, workers get money to buy things only if they work. Therefore, even people who hate working are terrorized by the thought of not being able to work. Therefore, when new technologies come along that eliminate work, they don't think that's good because they'll be able to produce more with less effort. Since they only get paid if they work, they worry instead that they'll be out of a job. The same psychology applies when people think about other people as well as themselves. What to do about people thrown out of work when work is made more productive? Create more jobs, of course, so they'll be able to work, so we'll have an EXCUSE to pay them! Will this work actually be producing anything that anyone consumes, or will it just be make-work? Who cares! If I have to work, they should have to! Market economies react to automation in a totally dysfunctional way.
That attitude of creating more jobs in turn tends to lead to a right-wing attitude of taking ordinary people's money and giving it to the rich, since those are the ones who create the jobs. But the rich only use some of that money to create jobs, and pocket the rest. The result is that ordinary people are talked into giving their money to the rich in order to get only a portion of it back, and even then only by working for it. Most of the wealth which that additional work produces goes to the rich. If ordinary people had just kept their money in the first place, they would not have had to work for it!
Marketthink prevents people from thinking about increasing our economic well-being in a rational, straightforward way, as people did before market economies. What do people need or want, and how can we minimize the unpleasant effort to produce it? Let's see....
People need housing, food, medical care, transportation and other things. People want entertainment, information. travel and other things.
Besides all the make-work in the medical field, prices are kept artificially high by government regulations that create a lack of competition. With the exception of contageous diseases, libertarians have a point that the free market would keep prices low, if we allowed any number of companies to rush into that lucrative field. Republicans, who claim to be against regulation, show their hypocracy by being all for regulation of that field, to keep prices up. They are the ones who are all for keeping less-expensive drugs produced in other countries out of the U. S., and for insurance companies being able to exclude people with pre-existing conditions, so that those people are stuck at whichever company they are already with, and for them, it is like a monopoly. They are really for the rich, and only against regulation when it suits the rich, all for it when it suits the rich.
And just think how less expensive medical care would be if the A. M. A. didn't deliberately require medical students to take courses such as calculus, that have nothing to do with medicine, but are only required in order to winnow people out, to create an artificial shortage of doctors so that they can charge more. Eliminate those courses, and the cost of their education, that they later have to pass on to their patients, would go down, and their less-arduous educations and shorter work hours would go a long way toward making up for not being able to charge as much.
There has been only one effort to get away from marketthink that I know of. Some economists have realized that the G. N. P. is a poor measure of economic well-being, since many things that are detrimental actually raise the G. N. P. When a hurricane destroys a city and it must be rebuilt, or tobacco use increases the cancer rate and patients must get expensive medical care, or divorces increase people's spending when they go from 1 household to 2, and battle each other with lawyers, the G. N. P. goes up, but that doesn't mean that our society is better off. Such economists have created the G. P. I. (Genuine Progress Indicator) to try to estimate our well-being more correctly. But other than that, marketthink still reigns.
Finally, another aspect of marketthink is the attitude that work for oneself outside of the market, not for pay, is not considered "real". People don't tend to take as much pride in work they perform for themselves, rather than as part of a career. They never stop to consider that if they worked less at formal jobs, they would have more time to do-it-themselves instead of paying others to do it, thus saving the money that they would have lost from working less for pay. And they don't stop to consider how much more pleasant it would be to do-it-themselves than to be part of a network of everyone ordering each other around, and what pride they could take in being capable in a very wide range of things instead of in just one specialty. The most ridiculous example of this is how people have kids, but go off to work, and hire others to raise them in day care centers, and buy things for them instead of giving them the attention they really want, and use the money from working to pay for that day care and all the toys they buy. And then they wonder why their kids don't turn out all right when they get older. And then the insidious cycle repeats in the next generation, since they have been raised to expect pleasure from buying things instead of from relationships with other people, so they go off to work in order to buy lots of stuff -- and never see their loved ones because they are always at work. Granted, it is more efficient for fewer adults to oversee more children at once. So why not have groups of trusted friends who all have children around the same age take turns caring for them? People are so brainwashed by this aspect of marketthink, that only work that gets paid is really work, that most people in our society would probably violently disagree with me, and claim that only work that earns money is meaningful. They use money to keep score, so if they go into the office to a horrible dull job to earn money, and use some of it to pay contractors to fix their roof or something, they think that "counts", while if they work less at their formal job, and repair their houses themselves, they think that doesn't. They do these things even though income taxes and sales taxes create a considerable incentive to do-it-yourself, since when you do so, you neither have to pay income tax on money you earn to buy those services or sales tax on the services you buy.
Once you free your mind from marketthink, you start to notice its craziness everywhere in our society. Examples of marketthink at its craziest:
Even I have trouble freeing myself entirely from marketthink, having grown up in this society. Just the other day, when talking with a friend about whether or not people would tend to work voluntarily to produce goods or services that people consume despite no monetary incentive, I said that they probably would to some degree, but mostly they would just amuse themselves. And then I realized that I'd fallen into the trap of marketthink. Even creating your own amusement is producing value! Why is amusing people considered producing value only when they produce it for others for money, and not when they produce it for themselves? In fact, when people provide for themselves instead of for others, EVERYTHING they do is productive, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it, unless they were masochists.
If people freed their minds from marketthink, they would no longer say, "If I have to work, people on welfare should have to." Instead they would say, "If people on welfare don't have to work, then I shouldn't have to!" Instead of advocating the creation of more jobs, they would advocate the destruction of all the make-work in our economy. Then once all that make-work was destroyed, they would see how little work really needs to be done to create everything that people actually want or need. They would then set about to automate away as much of it as possible that people don't like to do. There would then be so little work left that much of it could be shifted back out of the market, because individuals would have the time to do it themselves. People could still specialize to some degree by exchanging favors with friends, and doing volunteer work for strangers.
There are technologies on the horizon that could enable households to produce what people need for themselves, much more efficiently than in primitive pre-market societies. We could go back to self-sufficiency, but this time with affluence. Such products can be divided into the non-biological, that use parts of simple uniform substances, and biological, chiefly food, that have extremely complicated atomic structures.
As for non-biological objects, there are all-purpose computer-controlled tabletop machine tools called personal fabricators that manufacture objects of any specified shape. They still cost thousands of dollars, but the price is coming down fast, and within the next decade manufacturing should be radically decentralized. This is similar to the way that individuals can now produce professional-quality printing with their computers, and no longer need to have others process their photographs now that they have digital cameras and computers with photo editing programs and computer printers. As I talk about in my webpage on the Singularity, there is even a group of engineers in England who have been figuring out how to alter personal replicators so they produce more and more of their own parts, so that increasingly, they are able to reproduce themselves, the way organisms do, from nothing more than basic materials. As they do so, the price of those devices will plunge toward the price of nothing more than the raw materials. When that happens, they will rapidly spread around the world as people make copies for their friends, in the same way that people now copy music and videos for their friends.
As for food production, if everyone went back to having their own plots of land, robots could do all the farming work, even painstakingly kill every bug by (robot) hand, without the use of pesticides. Robots could perform all other services too, such as cooking and cleaning. Farther out, biotechnology should reach the point in which we could induce cells to grow into just the parts we eat, instead of the entire organism, so that, for instance, we could take cow muscle cells and induce them to grow into slabs of beef. Perhaps that technology could then be perfected to the point that people could produce food that way in their own homes. Still farther out, nanotechnology might create any objects, including food, by assembling them atom by atom to be identical copies of the original, so that people might create any food they want in boxes in their homes, without having to grow or even cook it. Want strawberry cheesecake, throw in a heap of dirt, and it will rearrange the atoms into a piece of strawberry cheesecake, as long as you've thrown in enough that there are enough atoms of each element.
(written in 2005)
Recently, I was talking with someone who is middle class, around retirement age, and said she has more than enough money to retire on. She said she is splurging her extra money on various luxuries she doesn't even have any great desire for, because she has nothing else to do with it. Meanwhile, she has middle-aged children who, like most people nowadays, are struggling financially to afford the American Dream that her generation could more easily afford, despite the fact that there is far more wealth now than then. I didn't ask why she didn't just give it to her children to help them out, but I think I know what she would have said, having talked with many other people and read many books on the subject over recent years.
This country has shifted so far to the right when it comes to economic issues that even people who call themselves "liberal" have economic views that can only be described as fascist. Current-day "liberals" are really big-government libertarians, although that sounds like a contradiction in terms. They are liberal only on social issues. They are for lots of government programs such as Social Security and universal healthcare -- but only if they do not, NOT, NOT do the ultimate no-no, redistribute wealth downward to them or the poor, since they want only "fairness" and want no one to get "a handout". (Meanwhile, they are oblivious to how the super-rich are getting the biggest handouts in the history of the world, at their expense, so that shifting the balance back in favor of everyone but the super-rich would not be making things unfair, but restoring fairness.) They want to pay nice high taxes for all those programs, or else they will feel wracked with guilt. (Meanwhile, taxes the super-rich pay steadily approach zero, or even below zero if corporate welfare is counted as negative taxes.) The result is that those programs don't really accomplish much of anything, just take their money, and then give it back to them, in the form of government services. Such "liberals" are the opposite of libertarian in that they want lots of government programs, but libertarian in that they want no government redistribution of wealth. Unfortunately, their definition of "neutral" as far as redistribution of wealth seems to be "whatever the current situation is" when it comes to the middle class and "somewhat to the right of whatever the current situation is" when it comes to the poor, even though, after 4 Republican administrations (including Clinton), government now redistributes wealth upward overall. Meanwhile, the dwindling moderate wing of the Republican party is truly libertarian, while the increasingly-powerful conservative wing is just plain fascist. So we have a choice in this country of big vs. small government and liberal vs. conservative on social issues, but no choice on economic issues. Now, almost everyone across the ever-narrowing political spectrum is for the most extreme disparities of wealth.
Such attitudes among the middle class often extend even to inheritances and financial aid to their struggling children. They are so obsessed with work ethic attitudes (it never occurs to them to question whether all that work is actually necessary) that they don't want to give their children "a handout" and make them "soft" and "lazy". They hear about how even some billionaires such as Bill Gates have decided to give their children only a tiny portion of their wealth in inheritances. That would be a hysterically funny joke if it were in fact meant to be a joke, because even that tiny portion is millions of dollars. Anyone but a complete financial imbecile would be set for life without ever working, with that much money.
Let's examine those work ethic attitudes of the middle class.
If there is a certain amount of necessary work to be done, then yes, it would be fair for everyone to do their share. Parents just giving their children money would take away their incentive to work. Of course, if the parents really have all that excess money to give to them, and do give it to them, then it really isn't necessary for them to work, because they would actually have the money to live without working, so it's not like their children would become destitute even if they became lazy. The work is only necessary in the broader social sense, that everyone in our society should do their fair share.
However, what happens when middle class people splurge their money on luxuries they don't even have any great desire for, instead of giving it to their children? The money mostly goes to big businesses that provide those luxuries. Within those businesses, very many employees (mostly middle class and below) get a small amount each for working, a much fewer number of stockholders (mostly rich) get a larger amount per person for doing nothing, and a very few super-rich people who own most of the businesses get the largest amount per person, by far. Rather than encouraging everyone to do their fair share of work, they allow the rich and super-rich to be even more idle, and their middle class children then must do the work that the idle rich don't do.
Let's go back to whether all of that work is even necessary.
People's biggest living expense is housing. If people in the middle class didn't have any housing expenses, they could easily amass small fortunes, as long as they weren't complete spendthrifts. At, let us say, $1000 a month that they wouldn't have to pay for a mortgage or rent (an amount that is rapidly becoming ludicrously less than typical, as the price of housing is skyrocketing in recent years), in 20 years they could save an extra quarter million dollars, plus interest. People deep in credit card debt, as so many are these days, typically to the tune of 40K or so, could afford to get out of debt and save having to pay the usurous 20% interest rates that credit card companies charge, so that they would have an additional 8K to save each year. In 20 years, they would have 400K in savings more than they do now, plus interest. There would be additional benefits, since if millions of people had the savings to not be so dependent on their jobs from paycheck to paycheck, they would have the power to collectively demand higher wages in this country. So if people didn't have any housing expenses, they would be far wealthier.
Now, are housing expenses even necessary? If there were no population growth, there would be little need to build new houses, therefore little need to pay for their construction. There is certainly population growth in this country, so we continually have to build more houses. Almost half of that growth is from immigration. The rest is from natives who have more than the replacement number of 2 children per family. Overall, the population of the U. S. is rising by 1% a year, and a bit more than half of that is due to birthrates being above replacement level. Over the course of a generation, about 25 years, that means about a 30% increase in houses over the previous generation. There is also a trend toward smaller households, so more houses per capita, at .6% a year. Put those 2 increases together, and there is a 50% increase in the number of houses needed per generation. (Of course, that trend toward smaller households can't go on forever, but must stop when the average reaches 1 person per household, if not much sooner.) Then there are the houses we have to replace on rare occasions from natural disasters, so that people who live in California and coastal southern states have to pay earthquake and hurricane insurance in order to pay for those rare re-buildings. (I live in coastal Florida, and yet my hurricane insurance, presumably accurately reflecting the odds having the cost of my house being blown down and needing to be re-built in any given year, is not too big a part of my budget, less than $2000 a year.) I presume the number of houses demolished by natural disasters is insignificant compared to population growth and smaller household size. So if the number of houses increases by half again each generation, that means that on average, each person should inherit 2/3 of a house, and only have to pay for the other 1/3. Even better, people who have greater than the replacement level of 2 children per couple should have to pay a tax penalty for the social cost of building more houses, while people who have the replacement level or fewer shouldn't have to pay anything for their houses. Perhaps those who have fewer children should even get a credit, since with a shrinking population, increasing numbers of people could inherit the luxury of 2 houses without having to pay for them. Instead, it seems like the overwhelming majority of middle class people have to take out mortgages to afford their houses, and spend decades working to pay off those mortgages.
Other than those couples who have more than 2 children, there's no reason people should have to pay for housing. After all, this country is full of houses that are already here, already built! Houses do not have to be built anew for each generation. They ought to last for centuries. And the land those houses are on certainly never has to be built. So if no work needs to be done to build all those pre-existing houses, then someone please explain to me why anyone should have to work to afford them! The houses should just pass down in some way from generation to generation. (Granted, not directly from parents to children, since parents are usually still alive and occupying their houses at the time their children are already moving out and needing houses of their own. So let's say from grandparents to children, since, at current lifespans, grandparents typically die around the time that their grandchildren are moving to houses of their own. Or even better, let's just say that the monetary value of those houses should be passed down, to keep things liquid and flexible.)
The fact that people have to pay for housing is highly fishy, when you think about it. The problem is that parents SHOULD by all means pass down money to their children, at least that portion so that their houses, their biggest expenses, are fully paid for, but they often don't. They wouldn't be making their children lazy, since there is no reason for them to have to work for something that requires no work! (Few people directly work to build their houses, of course, but trade other work they do with others in the economy, including those people who build houses. But the principle is the same.) For anything else that requires work, their children would still have to work in order to afford it.
What happens when middle class parents don't pass on their wealth to their children? Well, it doesn't stay in the middle class, and it surely doesn't go to the poor, unless they give it to charities that help the poor. So guess where it goes, by a process of elimination -- why, to the rich, of course. While the details of how exactly it gets there are almost unnecessary, since looking at the Big Picture shows that it must be the case that it goes to the rich, I'll provide those details anyway. As I said above, when people spend it, most of that money goes to big businesses that are mostly owned by the rich. In the case of the person I was talking to, she splurges by gambling, that growing way that the rich use to suck money from everyone below them. Gambling has become a huge, $300 billion a year business in America (that's roughly $1500 a year per adult), and, as a number of people I know do, she goes to casinos (owned mostly by rich people, although some of them have raised Native Americans out of poverty, so have done some good) and thinks nothing of blowing $1000 a shot, calling it entertainment. That's her perogative, but it is deeply sad if she is doing that because she thinks it is better blowing it than giving it to her children, lest they become "lazy".
Even when parents give their money to their children when they die, they have given it to them too late, and have given the rich an excuse to take massive amounts of money from the middle class. As I said above, it's really grandparents who should give their grandchildren inheritances, so that their grandchildren have the money to buy their houses at the time they actually buy them, when they're just moving out from their parents' homes. Otherwise, if the money is passed down to children and then later passed down to grandchildren, the grandchildren get the money when their parents die, rather than when their grandparents die, typically around 30 years later, just when they no longer need it, around the time when they finish paying the (typically) 30-year mortgages that most people take out in order to buy their homes. When people have to take out 30-year mortgages (even though there is enough money in the family to pay for the houses, but it's in their parents' hands), the bank charges them interest, while their parents get interest on the money. Typically, the bank charges them at least 2% more interest than their parents get by having the money in the bank. That 2% difference over 30 years nearly DOUBLES the cost of the house. The bank gets the difference, almost the entire cost of a house, and therefore the rich people who own the bank get the difference. People finally inherit the money for a house from their parents just around when they've finished paying that interest, and they've already lost it all. So in fact they haven't actually inherited the house, the bank has, and the bank is mostly owned by rich people. The money they eventually inherit from their grandparents' house when their parents die only helps them by paying them back the value of their house after they've already paid the bank double the value of their house, so in the end, they've "merely" had to pay out the value of their house, rather than double the value.
The middle class is hemorraging money, and it's flowing to the super-rich. Partly, that hemorraging is due to the class warfare that the super-rich are waging against everyone else. They now solidly control the government, and are busy reducing the taxes they pay to zero or below, and, once the resulting budget deficits have to be paid for, they will make everyone else do the paying. But also partly, that hemorraging is due to self-destructive middle class attitudes. When people in the middle class pass their wealth on to their children, or even better, their grandchildren, they are keeping it within the middle class, and, whether they know it or not, fighting against the class warfare going on. While lately the middle class has been losing the class warfare politically, passing their wealth to their children and grandchildren is something they can do to fight the war on an individual basis, that doesn't require winning elections. (By the way, I'd say that the poor should also pass on their wealth to their children, but of course, they don't have any wealth to pass on.)
The other major way that the work ethic is destroying the middle class is that the middle class thinks in terms of getting money by having a job. As the saying goes, you'll never get rich that way. The rich get richer because they think in terms of getting money through investments, and starting businesses that they then take a part of the profits to pay others to run. Either way, they do not think in terms of getting money by working, because most of the money to be made in our economy is not made by working.
Considering how perfectly the middle class work ethic plays into the hands of the super-rich, it is an interesting question how much they had a hand in deliberately encouraging such an attitude, perhaps in a million subtle ways: in politicians' speeches and political ads, in sitcoms, at the jobs the middle class must work at. While this country has always tended toward such attitudes, it is a growing phenomenon only of the past few decades, as this country has turned so far to the right, that even self-described "liberals" talk about how no one deserves "a handout". There may be "no such thing as a free lunch", as right wingers like to say (at least, not until we have total automation), but some things in life are actually free, including the most expensive things, far more expensive than lunches, such as houses that get passed down from generation to generation. Our right-wing corporate-owned media want you to feel guilty about that, so that you will not take "a handout", and the rich will thereby get that handout instead.
Go to politics page, which details my ideas for how to reform liberalism so that liberals win elections again.