Posted on 12/10/2012 10:48:27 AM PST by ksen
All data I’ve seen is that the rich get richer fast, and the poor get richer slower.
Leftists find the disparity in the speed with which people become better off to be a problem. They are the polity of envy. They exploit difference in economic outcomes for votes, saying they will steal from the rich and give to the poor. They even know this kills the goose that lays the golden egg. But the poor respond well to the envy argument.
Conservatives find the disparity in the speed with which people become better off to be normal. We are the polity of individual success. We want each person to be able to be the successful wealthy person, so that we create as many golden geese as possible. The poor who aspire to The American Dream can listen and respond well to our arguments about success and growth.
Leftists know their program destroys, and they pursue it because it concentrates power in their hands. Conservatives know our program creates, and we pursue it because it allows individuals to prosper with less government.
The only thing standing in the way of Conservatism winning is The Politics of Envy.
Is it any wonder that among the Ten Commandments is:
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house.”
The problem isn’t that machines are a more efficient producer, it’s that government keeps people from playing their strong suit. Technology is great at producing large quantities with enough notice. People who are allowed to produce can do better custom work in a shorter time. Big business uses government to keep that from happening.
Well, the problem is that most of the big ticket items people want are “positional” goods in some way - i.e. the most expensive versions of them are the most valuable, and the more people bid on them, the more expensive they get. Best examples of those things are houses and education. So if income gains are disproportionately higher at the top end of the spectrum, then the richest can out-bid everybody else for the high-profile things everybody wants, which triggers the politics of envy you describe.
At least as to housing, the answer seems to be to increase the housing stock, which means reducing zoning regulations and construction limitations. Environmental laws are an issue in some places, but the core issue are NIMBYs and other people who have a knee-jerk hatred of density - enviro laws are just one tool among many for NIMBYs.
I am going to be perfectly up front with you and tell you that I am approaching this from a liberal/progressive viewpoint. That's why I'm interested in what conservatives have to say on this subject because I want to know if you even see a problem where I see something that will be a huge problem down the road.
All data I’ve seen is that the rich get richer fast, and the poor get richer slower.
The data I've seen agrees that the rich are getting richer faster especially over the last 30 or so years. But I have seen no data showing that the lower 90% have been able to better their situation at all and in fact have lost ground if you look at constant dollars. Of course there are individual cases of people rising from the lower-middle classes to the upper-class but in aggregate that just hasn't been happening.
Leftists find the disparity in the speed with which people become better off to be a problem. They are the polity of envy. They exploit difference in economic outcomes for votes, saying they will steal from the rich and give to the poor. They even know this kills the goose that lays the golden egg. But the poor respond well to the envy argument.
In my case at least it's not about envy at all. It's about seeing productivity gains going through the roof while the wages for the workers providing that productivity has actually declined in inflation-adjusted $$'s. What happens when technology improves so much that you only need half the workers you do now to produce just as many goods and services as you do now or even more? What do you do when half of the workers are systemically unemployable? Barring credit cards or other debt instruments how do people keep consuming enough to keep the economy afloat?
Have you seen GE’s “Robots on the Move” TV add? This might be it. I’m behind a firewall and can’t watch.
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/12/04/robots-on-the-move-ge-tv-commercial/
I know that obesity is epidemic, and the average pairs of shoes among the lower classes exceeds 10 per child in a local school.
These kids lack nothing materially, but lack a good parental role model.
Food is free. Housing is free. Healthcare is free. They have as many video games as possible. They have their 0bama phones. It’s really a stunning thing to see.....
.....if you don’t mind that nobody goes to work, hasn’t for two generations, and probably won’t for the next several generations either.
If that’s what you mean by “positional” or “not being able to better their circumstances,” well, then, you’ve got me.
Wow. You really are coming at this from a leftist/economically ignorant perspective. You talk about wages at the lower end of the economic spectrum. However, you completely miss the real point: increased productivity increases supply, which makes goods cheaper. In other words, it pushes the supply/demand curve down so that more people can buy more with less. A prime example is big screen TVs. Even every welfare leech in the ghetto has one. Or two. Or three.
Now, government regulation has slowed that trend from spreading across some market spaces, for example in energy and vehicles. Despite that, nearly anyone can buy some cheap vehicle and the total power (as measured in terms of energy and energy embodied in goods and service) available to each person in this nation is more than has ever been available to any other population in the world ever.
Suggest you read The Bell Curve. It was portrayed by leftists and media (to repeat myself) as a racist screed, when that was not its purpose at all.
15 years ago its authors pointed out that the split in income is not occurring so much between owners of capital and workers, as your article states, as between two different groups of workers.
Those are:
1. Low IQ, low education, low skill workers. This group is in increasingly large supply relative to demand. Both because of massive legal and illegal immigration in this category, and because demand has gone down due to the automation you reference. Due to the law of supply and demand, this group’s income has stagnated or fallen. As these trends continue and increase, this group gets larger.
2. High IQ, high education, high skill workers. This group is in increasingly low supply relative to demand, as they are the people who can solve the problems necessary to keep production moving forward. Therefore their wages have increased dramatically as employers compete for their services.
The authors predicted these trends would move forward and accelerate, which is exactly what we are seeing today. In past periods of industrialization and automation, workers were absorbed into other fields. This may yet happen in this one, but I wouldn’t bet on it. We are probably seeing the start of a long-term decline in the demand for workers.
This is THE question of the 21st century, and neither conservatives or liberals are even acknowledging it. Conservatives think everything would be ok if people just worked harder, and liberals think all would be well if the government just took more from the rich and gave it to the poor. That the only problem Group 1 has is that they don’t have enough money.
What is being ignored is that there is no productive role for Group 1 any longer. Every year or two another IQ point falls out of the economy.
Having no productive role to play in society is devastating far beyond dollars. When the nomadic Indian tribes were confined to reservations, their economic standard of living went up, at least after the first few years. (Can’t have very much “stuff” at all when you have to haul it all around on horseback with you.)
Indian men had a respected and important place in their society as warriors and hunters, protectors of their people. After being confined to the reservation, there was a massive decline in all aspects of their social and mental health, which has largely continued to this day. Most people don’t do well when all they do is consume. They need a purpose to their life provided by a respected and needed role in society. Women deteriorate less dramatically than men, since they have an obvious built in role as raiser of children.
We see exactly similar demoralization in the American and British underclasses today. And it doesn’t seem to matter all that much whether they are maintained at barely above subsistence level or well above that point. It’s the absence of a role or purpose that is destructive.
So what do we do with the increasing number of people who are redundant from an economic POV?
Heck if I know, but I wish we were at least talking about the problem.
Here's the problem in a nutshell. The workers aren't providing that productivity. The productivity increase is almost entirely the result of capital investment in equipment, with the workers becoming more and more superfluous.
If the workers were working harder or smarter, or with greater skill, and were actually causing that productivity increase, then they would have a "right" to capture a large share of that increase. But they aren't, because their contribution to productivity is going down, not up.
ksen is a liberal troll.
Quite possibly. But that doesn’t mean that the questions he asks are inherently unworthy of a response.
I’m not a liberal troll, and I think a society where a larger and larger share of the income is creamed off by a small group is in the long run not going to be a healthy one.
I strongly suspect ksen and I would differ on what, if anything, should be done to address this issue, and by whom. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue.
I reject “positional” as a $10.00 Socialist Code Word for envy.
Anyone who accepts the concept of “positional” loses the argument to the Socialist by definition. There is no coming back and winning having accepted that precept.
If the workers were working harder or smarter, or with greater skill, and were actually causing that productivity increase, then they would have a "right" to capture a large share of that increase. But they aren't, because their contribution to productivity is going down, not up.
That is the problem being brought up in the OP. What does society do when technology makes most of our workers superfluous? Or does it do anything and just let social darwinism take its course?
I can afford anything I want: I’m rich. I’m not envious of what they have, I’m pissed that they never had to work for it.
The liberal part is right. I haven't started the trolling part yet, but I could if you want me to! ;)
But it’s not about envy as in, “Hey, that guy can buy a yacht while I can’t!”
It’s more like, “Oh god, how am I going to afford food, braces, education, etc. for my kids when all the jobs that used to provide a good wage are gone!?”
Keeping in mind that (excepting the non-working-intergenerational-welfare-cases) “the poor” are roughly equal to “the young.”
Virtually all people identified as “the poor” become “the rich” 30 years later. Economic mobility remains the hallmark of America.
It would be interesting to adjust the numbers for the young Hispanics who comprise a huge proportion of the new youth in America. If one were to exclude those low-skilled, high volume people, would one still find the high economic mobility? I suspect so. And even among young Hispanics, there is good social mobility (I see it incidentally on the street).
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