Planned Obsolescence, Corporate “Rationing,” and Household Prosperity

Dear Reader.  As you may know, trivium makes a living as an economic historian, that is, someone who attempts to understand why and how material wealth has been created over the course of history:  why some are rich, and others are poor, in other words.  The idea, for trivium, is to understand this, so that we can focus our efforts on maximizing the wealth of the many, rather than (as is now, and has historically been the case), maximizing the wealth of the few who are already rich.   

So spread the word:  I have an idea which if adopted by economists, would focus the efforts of economists and politicians on increasing the wealth of the household, rather than on the wealth of the self-serving ‘me‘ (ala Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul, and Ayn Rand), or the wealth of nations (ala Adam Smith, and classic economic theory).  If you create an economy which maximizes the wealth of the ‘rational individual’ (read:  the one with billions to invest), you end up creating an economy in which massive inequality of wealth seems natural and logical.

But, just as humans began by continually fighting, and by organizing themselves into hierarchies, and by having all sorts of brutal religious and political rituals, and by creating states based on exploitation and violence, but have slowly, in some places, created democratic states in which more people have more access to peace, equality, freedom from fear, freedom from oppression, etc., and have even begun to see this as a fundamental human right…

…so we can now begin to see freedom from economic oppression as a fundamental human right.

This means, that we need to turn our attention towards understanding how economics can serve the needs of the many, not merely the needs of the few, or the elite, or ‘the country’ in general (which de facto means the economic and political elite, since, a) these are usually interrelated, and b) the few hold the lion’s share of the capital in any given country).

My crucial insight on this plain has been the fact that the household is the basic unit, which in a given country, has its income set by the powers that be (employers), so that the household will be able to buy what are considered the ‘necessiites of life.’  In turn, the average household income tends to determine the prices of things:  the average household’s expense sheet will of necessity look like this: 

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Was ’80s and ’90s U.S. suburbia the happiest place in world history?

I think it was.  Having lived extensively in Europe, the U.S. and Canada, hopping back and forth since the early 90s, I can say that U.S. suburbia really smokes the competition.  Canada was not far behind, perhaps Australia wasn’t so bad either, but it always strikes me as being pretty far from everywhere and thus essentially a bit duller.

Let’s look at the possible competitors for ‘happiest place in history.’  Basically, it’s obvious that there is no competition between pre-WWII and post-WWII societies, since before the war in most societies the vast majority of people were miserably poor.  Even if it was happy to be a rich, or middle class, person in this or that country prior to WWII, postwar developments in medicine, (dare I say it) technology, and just general wealth and happiness have made rich and middle-class peoples’ lives much better since then.

So we can indeed restrict ourselves to post WWII, and to the post WWII west, since almost everywhere else was poor, miserable, communist, or some combo.  Japan was ok materially after the 1950s, but doesn’t strike one as being a super happy society.  Too much stricture, too much crowding, not enough space, too much patriarchy, relations between the sexes are strained, women are restricted, men are forced to play tough guy serious roles to prove machismo, not to mention workaholism.  So Japan is out too.  Which leaves us basically post-1945 U.S., Canada, western Europe, and we’re writing out Aus as a probable runner up.

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How angry should you be at the economic system? Is economic discrimination as outrageous as racism?

Last night I Watched DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars,” and was impressed by its grappling with the politics of being a black writer in early 1950s New York.  In the end, Sisko, as Bennie the black science fiction writer, has a breakdown, after seeing a black friend killed by the police for breaking into a car, and then being beaten himself to within an inch of his life, for daring to express outrage at the police brutality.  Later, he is fired from his job for daring to write a science fiction story about a black space captain in the future, and so this all comes together to provoke his mental breakdown, during which he repats:  ”I am a human being!”  The implication that his ideas deserve just as much recognition as anyone else’s:  his story was good, so who cares if it is about black men in positions of authority?  Why do whites need to fear this, or suppress the idea?

The episode was filmed in the late 90s, and since that time the arrival of Obama has made the issues feel much less ‘present-day’ poignant, though of course anyone with humanity can still sympathize in the historical context.  While in the late 90s, the notion of a black man in charge was still a futuristic dream, less so than in the 50s of course by  a longshot, but it was still unfulfilled… today, that sort of poignancy can never be as acute, thanks to Obama.  One of the epic healing salves of the entire American and indeed western culture was his election.  And yet it is striking, one of course has to sympathize with the notion of being discriminated against, being fired, being beaten up, having your friends die, simply b/c you are not the same color as the in-group.  In a paroxyism of rage, anger, and helplessness, which was still mitigated against by his stories which dared to dream of a better future, Bennie collapses on the office floor, and is carried out in an ambulance.

It struck me, that since this was filmed in about 1998, the race issue has been more healed than perhaps ever before, but that the economic issues underlying the episode have if anything gotten much worse.   Management and administration has everywhere not only gotten stronger, but implemented a policy of systematically squeezing, downsizing, piling on work, reducing salaries, reducing benefits, making every job part-time and short-duration which used to be stable and full time and long term.

And it struck me, that all of us are Sisko/Bennie.

We are all daily subject to indignities, to discrimination, to hierarchical control, dehumanization, prejudice, and institutionalized brutality.  And it is called your job.

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What is the goal of economics?

This is a good question to ask, if only because one can go through many years of economic, financial, and business education, and not hear anyone actually ask this question.  You will hear professors and colleagues go on about the subject of economics, which is usually defined as the movement of goods, and the accumulation of wealth, but usually, you will find that these people are quite keen to avoid any value judgments.  The reason for this, of course, is that they tend to subscribe to some version of the neoliberal, laissez faire, and/or Ron Paulian notion that the goal of economics is to enrich me.  Or enrich the big people, or, enrich a few, or enrich the energetic, lucky, entrepreneurial, and/or crafty.  When pressed, most of them will then justify this science of acquisition with the ‘trickle down’ notion; which unfortunately for those of us who like to be idealistic, does have enough of a historical basis, more than any criticism can really cut down, so that these people can go on smugly creating a science of accumulation for the few.

The real goal of economics, of course, is the enrichment of everyone.  Just like the ultimate goal of medicine is the ultimate immortality of everyone; the ultimate goal of psychology is the creation of perfect sanity for everyone, and the ultimate goal of political science is the creation of a state which creates the conditions for the maximum enjoyment of life, for everyone.  Obviously, some of the social sciences, such as political science, are a bit problematic, since people will have conflicting goals and needs, and wants, but most of the sciences, and humanities, the subjects taught in a university, have goals which are definable as maximizing human happiness.

Let’s put the goal of economics in historical context.  In a hunter-gatherer society, there was little property to be had.  Economists have made the mistake, following political scientists, of thinking that ‘primitive’ societies did not have any unequal distribution of wealth.  Anthropologists have in the past 30 years or so proven quite strongly that almost every human society is hierarchical, and there are pecking orders, just as in almost all bird and mammal groups.  So, there was always an Alpha male, and Alpha female, etc, and even if there wasn’t much property, they got the best stuff:  they got the most food, which kept them strong, sleek, good-looking, and Alpha, and they of course got the most and best mates in the case of men, or the most select mates, in the case of females.  And what little property they had, the chief got the best.  So, the problem with Rousseau’s theory, etc., is that it grossly misread the nature of primitive human society, as it evolved over tens of thousands of years, and millions before homo sapiens.

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Have American standards of living gone into irreversible decline?

There is much hoopla at the moment about the decline of the American middle class.  I know all about it, since I have been close, but not quite managed to grab one of those hallowed academic jobs which would make my life finally comfortable after years of deprivation.   The numbers in the faculty are getting worse by the year; when I began graduate school in the late 90s, about 75 percent of all teaching was still done by full-time faculty, with benefits, but by the time I was a serious contender on the job market, in 2008, this had shifted to 75 percent part-timers.  Now, only 20 percent of teaching at U.S. colleges and universities is done by full-time faculty.  The profession has literally disintegrated out from under me.  We were told by our professors:  hey, the baby boomers are about to retire, so now’s a great time to be on the job market!  As it turned out, the MBA-efficiency people had figured out that they could downsize everything, and pay everyone virtually nothing, for the same work.  Great idea, right!  Except that the U.S. professoriate has been gutted; there are many geniuses with Harvard PhDs now waiting years to get a tenure-track job, if ever.

The real issue here is the disentegration of the American middle class.  It is now far harder to become a professor, something like 4-5x harder, than 20 years ago; so that the Chronicle of Higher Ed is running ads saying “Don’t to go graduate school.”  And the example of the professoriate is typical of a number of other former ‘professions.’  Most of the writing, editing, architecture, creative design, journalism, etc., fields, in which there used to be an ok number of permanent jobs with benefits available, have been similarly gutted.  Same with teaching high school or even elementary school.  Often the only places hiring are inner-city schools where there is no teaching to be done, but one has to be more of a warden than a teacher, and one is literally in danger of one’s life!  Hardly a middle-class lifestyle.  How many business people go into work fearing that their colleagues may pull out a gun… teachers have to put up with way too much stress, especially urban teachers.  And elementary schools on ‘lockdown’ all the time, because the stupid arse NRA has so much leverage, and has convinced half the populace that they will be safer when packing a pistol?  What is that, the wild west?  In England, almost no one has guns, and somehow, they don’t shoot each other.  In the wild west, everyone had guns, and they all shot each other.  The logic there is pretty plain.

So, the main point being, that many avenues into the middle class which were once mainstays of the populace, are now closed.  Being a professor is not possible, being a teacher is not possible.  Being an office person is about the only career path left.  And yet downsizing has made this much much more stressful than ever before.  Now, to keep a job, you have to literally work 70 hour weeks?  And get ulcers and the like?  Doing what?  Often, incredibly meaningless, tedious work, for no reasonable purpose.  

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What the ‘occupiers’ should ask for.

What do they want?  The wealthy-owned media will ask.

Well, what do they want?

A problem is that the old Marxist ‘revolution’ model is dead.  A ‘revolution’ which does not involve democracy, i.e., one which is created by a few imposing their will through military means, will inevitably create a dictatorship of some stripe.  Democracy and capitalism are historically (before 20 years ago), entirely linked, and even today, it is my take that China (whose capitalism began with democratic, British-run Hong Kong), will become more democratic as a result of capitalism spreading there.  Thus, one cannot be rid of capitalism; as the chairman of the London Stock Exchange said yesterday, “it is self-evident that capitalism is the best way to produce wealth for the many.”  And this is true.  What this same chairman also said is also true:  the main way to ‘fix’ capitalism is to regulate it, so that it creates the most wealth for the most people.  That’s the key now.  The key is to figure out how, and what, is feasible.

Part of the reason the protesters seem to have ‘no message’ is because we now know that sloganism doesn’t work, that quick fixes don’t work.  What we want, as someone said, is no longer the basics, but the right to a solid middle-class existence.  And that has been written out of US life over the past 10 years.  While the internet boom was on, on one noticed; while their house values were steadily inflating, no one minded that they had to work more and more hours, and that their health plans, and retirement plans were being dismantled by an ultra-pro business government.  But now that the next bust cycle has sprung (which is inevitable in capitalism), everyone realizes that the safety nets they put in place in the 1930s are not just ‘for crybabies’ but in fact the only thing that stands between the average person and a bread line.

But, even lefties are realizing that too much social security breeds complacency.  While the right-owned media is very happy to tell us that teachers and everyone else needs to have a ‘highly competative’ job atmosphere to maximize productivity – you should have no job security they argue, or else you will become a lazy, bad teacher.  And the problem is, they are somewhat right.

So, we need to realize that the happy medium is what is needed.  Duh!!!! How hard is it for a pundit to say, gosh, we need a balance between too much and too little social security?  You never hear _anyone_ say that.  I guess it doesn’t sell papers or ads or something, and/or, really of course much of it is the private ownership of the media, which encourages sensationalism (vs. the so much more balanced, and sane, BBC, CBC, and PBS.).

History is now teaching us that it is legislation which creates the middle class.  The middle class has to protect itself, or else, it will not exist.  Big business does not want or need a middle class, per se; not in a globalizing world.  How do we legislate a middle class?

A)  Have a happy medium bewteen competition and job security and quality of life.

B)  Don’t be afraid of globalization.  Many jobs will stay right here despite the migration of manufacturing.

C)  Elect legislators on a specific platform of ‘maximizing opportunity, happiness, and wealth for the middle class.’  Why can’t we do that?  Well, we can.

D)  Agitate until those legislators can work freely, without their hands tied by a supreme court which is entirely pro-business, and lobbyists, and campaign donation laws which entirely favour a rich few.   (This is precisely what the ‘occupy’ people are doing.

E) Realize that we have to lower population, so that land is cheaper, and housing is cheaper, and so that we can all have our god-given right to property, space, fresh air, sunlight, and a decent slice of earth’s resources, for free, or for very little, like it used to be until the 1950s, about the time that earth reached 2 billion people.  This is the only way to have the middle classes guaranteed a share.  

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Are you good or evil? How do the moral codes of LOTR, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and co. fit into the ethics of real life? Where does religion fit in?

Does good and evil have any meaning in today’s society?  Haven’t we moved Beyond good and evil, according to Nietzsche and many would-be followers?

Many of our most cherished modern myths, including Star Wars, LOTR, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and the like, are based around a fairly obvious confrontation of good vs. evil.  But is real life like that?  When it comes to actual human functioning, many people who will unswervingly root for the good guys find themselves swamped in a morass of relativism, which makes it very difficult to see what is good and what is evil.  It used to be, that the church and religion gave us fairly strict rules on good and evil, and while many of these were fairly useful, others provided a strong framework for abuse–most of the wiser parts of society have realized that this kind of ‘absolute’ guidance, because it necessitates a hierarchical social structure and encourages people to obey rather than to be critical minded, is not really the best path towards personal fulfillment, let alone some notion of what ‘good’ might be.

At the platonist, we assert that in fact, good and evil are every much as important in ‘real’ or ‘daily’ life as they are in our modern fairy tales:  this is why we cherish these fairy tales so much.  We all instinctually know what is good and what is evil (as Plato taught):  much of this is due to the fact that some rules of ‘good’ behaviour are better evolutionarily.  Other aspects of this are not so easily explained by behaviouralism (though as a scientist I can’t really commit to anything genuinely ‘platonic’ as a cause of this).

What then is the practical definition of good and evil?  We might start with the Satanic Bible, which unequivocally states that being selfish is the essence of evil.  Ayn Rand and the Satanic Bible both attempt to make a virtue out of selfishness, which quickly ends up creating a rather illogical moral code that no serious philosopher can endorse.   With this as a basic guide, we can quickly create a slate of questions that can test our personal goodness and evilness.

1)  Are you most driven by empathy for others, or by selfishness?

2)  Does your work involve duping or exploiting people for personal gain, is it mostly neutral,  or does it involve helping people?

3)  Do you think that it is OK to dupe or exploit people for your gain, because the ‘system’ justifies it?

4) Do you, essentially, have hope that the human condition can be bettered, or do you essentially despair?

5)  Do you follow a creed or lifestyle because it gives you personal power, or do you follow a belief system which is genuinely based on a desire to see more good done for more people, whatever may be your role in the process?

6)   It is ok to wish physical comfort for yourself:  you cannot do good things or be good without it.  But, do you desire money simply as a means to personal comfort and actualization, or do you desire it to gratify base desires, such as gluttony, or to dominate others in terms of ‘showing off’ your superior physical possessions, or to dominate others psychologically or physically (i.e., to be a head honcho, to hire and fire people, to be a landlord in the sense that this gives you power)?

7)  Is your political philosophy predicated on your desire to see your own ‘in group’ remain, or come into, power, at the expense of ‘the other’?  Or do you seek to ensure your ‘in group’s comfort and safety, while seeking to exploit and profit from ‘the other’ as little as possible?  (Too much altruism, i.e., extreme tree huggers who would eradicate humanity to save this or that other species,  is a form of despair and so is also, technically, evil.)

8)  Do you believe in humanism? or some form of authoritarianism?  If you believe in humanism, then you will try to maximize the happiness actualization of the maximum number of people.  Your only enemies then are those who wish to do ill under the guise of their despairing, egomaniacal, or authoritarian beliefs.  If you believe in authoritarianism, then, in some way or another, you believe that certain groups of people should be discriminated against, or exploited,

9)  Do you believe that love is essentially egalitarian/shared, or essentially hierarchical/authoritarian/exploitative?

10)  Do you believe that friendships are essentially egalitarian/voluntary, or essentially authoritarian/dominance-based?

11)  When you argue, can you admit that you are wrong?  Good people realize they are fallible.  Evil people are so concerned with appearing to be right, so worried about losing dominance, that they will even argue with their wives over the composition of waffles, when their wives are obviously right and they were wrong.  This is perhaps the greatest failing that otherwise good people have in real life:  it’s a true test, of whether you can be more like Qui-Gon Jinn, or more like Darth Maul.    

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The basic human motivators. Competition, dominance, and sex in an ideal society.

So it’s an ongoing project here at the Platonist, to come up with the ground rules for what would ideally become a book, setting out a Grand Unified Theory (if we may), of how to create an ideal economy, politics, and society.  This is essentially an update of Plato’s Republic, moving beyond earlier utopian or dystopian literature and taking into account what we’ve learned in the last few decades, since advances in the social sciences have been tremendous, and very inspiring if you know where to look.  This is especially true  in our advances in the theory of egalitarianism, and the discursive elements of this, since Foucault.  And of course our ‘system’ has to move beyond being a system, since one thing we’ve learned is that imposing systems doesn’t at all work.  What we would suggest in this rewriting of the Republic, would be a series of concrete policies that would be designed to maximize happiness, through existing democratic and legal institutions, and maximize opportunity, for those who would want it, without imposing anything on anyone (since this would never be better than our current system–freedom is key).  In essence, we’d be continuing the current and ongoing explorations in the social sciences, whose goal, we would argue, is to find ways to help us to live better.  To explain what has worked, and why, and what hasn’t, and why, with the aim of furnishing us with wisdom to make the right choices, ones that are of course naturally obvious.  For example, it’s quite obvious now that democracy works better than any true monarchy or one-man rule, for a whole host of reasons.  This was not so obvious 300 years ago.  This is the sort of thing, only using newer discoveries, that we are aiming to highlight here.  Economics, in particular, is a rich field for this, since  the marxist-capitalist conflict of the 20th century arguably blinded most economic thinkers by turning them into partisans, instead of scientists.  Economics has been dominated too much by polemics, and not enough with the business of maximizing happiness and opportunity.  It is still in the hands of the anti-marxist, pro plutocratic elite, and we need to reclaim economics from them –  - real economics, scientific university economics.  The book ‘prosperity without growth’ is part of this new trend.  It is happening.

At any rate, one of the fundamental stumbling blocks to any would-be set of principles for improving the way things work (since surely there are quite a few problems we have yet to address as well as we could if only we worked it through) is the fact that we’re still pretty much hardwired for hierarchy as I have said in another post – i.e., we still carry strong tendencies to act according to pack and troop principles, which got us through our millions of years living as beasts.  These instincts aren’t however often so great for creating an egalitarian, maximum-opportunity society.  Psychologists and anthropologists have now identified a lot of these, but let’s spell them out here, so that we can get them out in the open, and grapple with them as we discuss and shape our economic and political wish list.

1)  The desire to be cool.  This used to be called ‘honor.’   It’s probably our first instinct, once we move beyond toddlerhood, and stays with us until senility.  You want to have the people immediately around you like you, and act positively towards you.  This is because in primate troop society, this meant you were  ’alpha.’  Everyone fawns over you, does stuff for you, laughs at your jokes.  This translates into personal power.  The Fonz snaps his fingers, and people do stuff for him.  (Jeff Winger in “Community” being an updated version of the same).

2)  The desire to be sexy.  

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The Owl vs. the Dove: Why do our bosses make us get up so early? Why does our economic system discriminate against those who function better later in the day?

Research is now finally beginning to confirm what some of us have known since teenagerhood:  some people have an innate proclivity to go to bed late and get up late, while others are programmed to go to bed early and get up early.  One can see the evolutionary advantages to a given tribe if you have people of both types on hand:  this way, you always have someone on watch.  They say that the ‘owls’ (those who incline to stay up late and get up late) are programmed for their afternoon ‘nap’ about 2pm, while the doves are programmed to have theirs about 12:30 or 1 on average.

Speaking as a certifiable owl, one of the most horrible things about almost every job is that it forces you to get up far too early.   It has gotten a bit easier for me as I have gotten older and have required less sleep:  as a late teen (when most people require their peak amounts of sleep at up to 9 or even 10 hours) it was absolutely brutal to get up for high school, which the administrators had perversely set up so that it began earliest, while elementary school began latest.   Thus high school started at 7:20, meaning we all got up at 5am!!!, while elementary school didn’t start until 9.  I have also seen studies saying that they should reverse this order:  elementary kids tend to get up early (which I also did:  I was up at 5 and 6 when I was 6-10 years old), while high school kids really want, naturally, to stay up late and get up late (this whether you are a dove or owl – you still have tendencies to do more sleeping in and staying up at that point).

Even though I need a bit less sleep now (8 hours to be fully functional, rather than 9 as a teen), the hours that almost every job forces you to get up at are entirely inhumane.  It should definitely go into the global declaration of human rights that people have a right to enough sleep, and therefore the right not to get up at 4:30 if they want to.  These days, however, it seems that insanely early waking hours are almost entirely unavoidable.

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Do shorter work weeks make things more expensive in Europe? (Which part of socialism lowers standards of living?)

So people in North America, and in Europe I think, tend to assume that things are more expensive in Europe because of ‘socialism.’ This assumption is held by just about everyone, from the average bumpkin all the way up to the policymakers in the halls of power themselves.  The problem is, that the term ‘socialism’ encompasses a whole host of different policies and variables, across the spectrum of human society – from politics, to education, to economic regulation in a wide range of areas. I think that we owe it to ourselves, as interested parties, to break down this monolithic and really rather useless label ‘socialism,’ and see which parts of it, in particular, might be responsible for making things more expensive in Europe (which in general they are).

Now, most of us assume that the main, number one, numero uno reason why things in Europe are expensive is because those darn Europeans are so lazy. They take off six weeks of vacation per year, and often times they only work, gasp, 40 hour weeks, or even 36 hour weeks! They get generous terms for maternity and parental leave, and the list goes on. American workers would very much like to believe that this is why Europeans live in tiny houses, and pay tons for gas, food, electronics, clothing, and in short don’t have nearly as much ‘stuff’ as North Americans do.

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