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: 

Average household income after taxes, let’s say 2,000$/month. 

Thus:  the average mortgauge payment can only be as high as to leave room for other things:  thus:

About 700/mo, which leaves about 300 for bills, and then 200 for car, and then 400 for groceries, and then about 100/week miscellaneous and spending.  And after that, usually, the average household has almost nothing to save.  If you want to save, you have to earn more than the average household, otherwise, the ability of most people to pay more than you will raise prices, so that you are forced to pay most of your income on basic living expenses, such as housing, food, bills, etc….

So you will notice that most people are trapped in a ‘vicious cycle,’ in which the average income determines average prices, and determines a very real limit on what you can expect to do, unless you somehow manage to climb out of the trap, and land a very good job, and/or a highly paid spouse, etc., which will raise your household above the national average.

But notice that this system is pretty much inescapable, because by definition, if we raise average income, prices of basic things (food, shelter, transportation) will rise to accomodate that average? 

So how then, do we increase the well-being of the average household? 

I have talked about this in some previous posts:  i have suggested that if we just build bigger average house sizes, then the average person will, de facto, be able to live in a bigger house.  What if the city council did not approve any buildings less than 1,500 sq ft?  Then everyone would have plenty of space.  Demolish the older buildings?  Of course, key also is lowering population, or keeping it stagnant ,so that people do not create more demand for housing… then, we can slowly increase the average house size, so that we can all have room… and housing will be in reach for all… that is how you’d do it, folks, nothing magic.

And, as I have also argued on this site, if we increase average house size, you will increase demand for different household things, like lawn mowers (if you also increase yard size, which I entirely support), and also gardening tools, and fertilizer, and tools of various kinds.  If most men had workshops, they would need to furnish them…etc… and this would create demand.  I argue that much of the US’s economic success is due not just to average household wealth, but also to average house size… which meant that consumers have more room for stuff, and also more need for a wider variety and for larger and more complex stuff… thus driving demand.

Also, though, we need jobs, and I have argued this elsewhere too:  that management must pay a middle class salary and benefits, and this has to be legislated, so that all companies play by the same rules.  This is entirely doable, and will not ruin the US economy, any more than it did during the heydays of the 1980s and 1990s.  This is an essential expense, that all businesses must confront.  And also, education has to be turned back into an industry which supports middle class salaries, instead of being gutted, and taken over by administrators who suck up resources, and provide very little except for makework projects, and fluff.  And the list goes on.

But today I would like to introduce a new element of this theory, which is, that planned obsolescence and what I call ‘Corporate rationing’ cause an entirely unnecessary element of ’leakage’ of household income, which companies argue sustains demand, and thus economic growth, but which I argue, if not ‘leaked’ could be used to buy more interesting things, and thus, increase the average actual wealth (rather than monetary wealth) of each household, when measured in terms of the amount of material goods, and space, and other measures of prosperity, which they have. 

Here are some exmaples of what used to be called ‘planned obsolescence,’ which also cross over to what I call ‘corporate rationing,’ which are entirely unnecessary, and which cause us to waste significant portions of our household income (perhaps 20% of our monthly incomes, when you think about it, perhaps more), on things which are entirely unnecessary, and for which the monopolists (large companies and their political backers) are entirely overcharging us, often to the tune of several hundred percent or more.   

1) vacuum cleaner bags:  why aren’t they resuable?  They could easily be made so they were tough, and reusable, and easily emptied…. but why aren’t they/??? oh, I dunno, because this not only keeps big companies having a steady income stream, but also makes you more likely to buy a new vacuum, when they all agree to stop selling your particular brand of vacuum bags.

2) toner cartridges.  Er, again, why is there not just one or 4 standard types of toner cartridges?  They can be bought in ‘generic’ form for as little as 10 dollars… does HP really need to charge you 50 Dollars for toner???? Real cost:  5-10 bucks, tops. 

3)  Light bulbs.  I hear that one of edison’s bulbs in a fire station in boston is still burning, since 1910… gee, do you think they could make bulbs that didn’t break every 3 weeks, like my Ikea ones do?  How much do you waste per year on light bulbs, which you could buy once in your life, if they were made with the intent to have them last? 

4)  Vacuums, and all other appliances.  Notice how your vacuum breaks every 2 years… gee, do you think that is intentional?  Often, there is this one tiny but crucial plastic part which just happens to snap, rendering the whole thing useless, or else the ‘motor burns out.” hmm… do you think if they were made for nasa, that they would be breaking every 2 years?  And if they were manufactured on a huge scale, do you think they would cost that much more to produce…. not. 

5)  Toothpaste.  Does it really cost proctor and gamble 3 dollars to fill a tiny tube of toothpaste?  In Europe, the tubes are even smaller, and cost more.   Here we’re getting into the question of quantity.  I have noticed, living in Euorope, that a tiny bag of grass seed, say one quart of it, costs like 7 Euros, while in the US you get huge bags for like 7 bucks, wihch have literally 20 or 30 quarts… so in other words, the price of grass seed in the US is literally 20 or more times cheaper than in Europe:  is it truly the case that European suppliers cannot supply bushels of cheap grass seed like they magically can in the US?  Are transport costs that high?  The answer is:  bullshit.  The companies in Europe know that people here have tiny lawns and only need tiny amounts.  If you happen to be a rare rich european with a large lawn, well you’re SOL.  They price things for the average consumer, and they know that since people only need a little bit at a time, they can gouge you for it. 

This brings us back to toothpaste.  Why don’t they sell it in paint can form?  They know that you think it’s reasonable to go through a tube about once a month for a family.  If they sold it in tubes that you needed ot change every week, you would be pissed off, but once a month seems reasonable.  But why not buckets?  then you could just press a lever, and some would come out, and it would keep for 6 months, and they could probably sell you a bucket of the stuff for 5 bucks.  But now, you buy it in tiny tubes for 3 bucks each, and so they have just upped their profits by literally a thousand percent, selling it easily for 10x what they could do, if you expected to buy toothpaste in bucket-sized containers.

This goes with almost everything:  milk, juice:  you will find, when you look into it, that producers routineliy sell things for tens or more times more per unit than it costs to produce.  Does it really cost 1.50 to produce one “milky way”‘s worth of chocolate, esp when milky ways were about 3x that size in the 1970s?  Hardy har har!  It costs mere cents, probably less than 10 to produce and deliver it.

And the list goes on.  If companies were not allowed to monopolize, and thus gouge you, if the laws were set so that companies had to help to maximize the wealth of each household, how much more disposable income could we all have, to go on vacation, add decks onto our houses, biuld a gazebo in the back, install a swimming pool, buy cooler clothes, etc. etc…. so the economy would hardly falter folks, but instead of being tied to incredibly boring, mundane things like toothpaste, potatoes, and vacuum cleaner bags, we, like the rich, could use our monthly income, the same 2,000 bucks we have now on average, to buy much more invididualized, exotic, freeing, liberating, and happy-making things, and all of our living standards… but more importantly… our sense of fulfillment, and happiness, and freedom, and independence, and sense of economic self-determination, would dramatically increase, all without needing to ask for a single penny of a raise!!!

-t.

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.

Let’s then narrow our timeframe down a bit, since this affected most of ‘the West’ in a similar way.  Let’s look at the U.S.  And again, we’re looking at suburbia, which is where the majority of the U.S. population lived, and to a lesser extent, continues to live to this day.   Yes there have been very poor areas in the US, but we’ll bracket these , since to a large extent they are another world from how most of the U.S. population experienced life; if we can separate Mexico from the U.S. because it is a different country, we can separate U.S. poor regions from suburbia because for all intents and purposes the culture, the economy, everything was so different that it was basically a different country.  The U.S. has thus been, more than most western countries, a country with two separate countries in it; these will grow together in the future, but they started out and remained for most of this period so separate, and so contrasting, as to be two distinct entities.  And, I should add, that the poor areas of the US have been endlessly fascinating for liberals, who have often overestimated their importance socially and economically (these contained through the 90s less than 15 percent of the population); so, let’s deal now if we can avoid stepping on toes with the ‘majority culture’ in the US during this time, and bracket these contrasting regions for discussion elsewhere.

So anyway, to return to our temporal filtering:  which decades are best, between 1945 and 2010?  The 1940s and 50s were cheery, but a bit poor compared to later times, culturally, economically, and a bit conservative.  A nice time to raise kids and have a white picket fence, but still a lot of dullness.  The 60s obviously are where things got better, a lot more wealth; kids really started having fun then.  But I think that this reached a plateau in the later 1970s.  The early 70s were too much Cold War, too much Vietnam, too relatively poor, a lot of things weren’t worked out yet compared with later.

This also raises the question:  happy for whom?  Well:  we are talking about children, teenagers, and young adults.  I think that by your 30s and 40s, you begin a slow descent into the abyss, and your role becomes one of really acting like anchors and role models for the younger people, for whom the taint of mortality is yet very slight, if they are lucky enough and live in a decent material and pyschological setting.  Until we can stop the ageing process, the world really is the oyster of those younger than about 35.  Maybe this is prolonged for you if you don’t have kids and have a very fulfilling career, maybe it’s shorter if you get right into a job and have major responsibilities by the time you are 25.  The world seems more poetic, more epic, things are newer, passions are newer, everything is there for you to explore, and you’re really made genetically to do that, and to respond with maximum posivitity that you will ever do, that anyone will ever do.  And so that is why we are really talking here about youth culture when we talk of happiness.  Older people don’t really filter in.  It’s nice if they can have an older sort of more sedate happy contentment:  but theirs is not the true happiness which can be so much stronger in youth.

So anyway, to return to our decade-by-decade analysis, By the later 70s, however, things really got groovy.  Everyone had cars, everyone’s parents have relatively big houses, and by everyone, I mean, the majority of people in suburbia; one could go for miles around, from town to town everywhere in the U.S. and find this massive prosperity which had never been come close to at any previous time.  And the 1980s, with its MTV, and its youth friendly culture, and its generally optimistic culture, and its movies which were a bit naughty, but which had no gore, no horror.  And everyone still had TVs, and so responded to similar cultural yardsticks; the viewing public was not hopelessly fragmented.  And there were no cell phones, so people had to talk in person if they were physically together, and were either on the phone at home, or else driving to visit their friends.  There was still a ‘glee club’ funness to everything, a sense that you joined groups at school, band, choir, and these things really mattered.  College was the ultimate goal, and mattered, and you expected it to provide you with a good career in the future, and more of what your parents had, or even better.

And, I hate to say it, but hip hop culture, with its horrendous violence, its objectification of women, its banality, its’ dark ages bragadocio, and its utter lack of education and sophistication (what else do you expect from rappers who are all high school dropouts?), had not yet come onto the scene in a big way, it was a niche, until the mid 1990s.   And so suburbia had still that cheery naive innocence of the 1950s and 60s and 70s, and also it had very literate rock stars who read poetry, and who wanted their song lyrics to be poetry, and very literate games like Dungeons and Dragons become pop sensations:  the age was a high point of popular literacy:  alternative music lyrics were never equalled; they were better on averaege, more coherent and more philosophical and more sustained than most 60s and 70s stuff as well which was still finding its way, I would argue.

And in the later 1980s, fashions were so classic, Laura Ashley, polo stuff, there was this sense that everyone in suburbia still had all of the polish and sheen of the edwardian thru-1950s posh people, the elizabeth taylor big white house with picket fence people, the father of the bride household was the ideal, and it was really shared, the whole molly ringwald culture, was really at its pinnacle:  yes, gosh it was white, racially:  but that is not really a crime, when along with whiteness comes education, poise, philosophy, concern, engagement, nobility, non-violence, respect for others, decent amounts of sexual and corporal restraint, a culture which did not routinely celebrate violating of bodies, a culture which had very few gun massacres, etc., oh, and, violent video games were also basically not possible either, until the end of our period, in the later 90s.

And economically, of course, gas was free, and land was cheap, and environmentally, global warming hadn’t started, and Russia was obviously failing and /or failed, and so the cold war was winding down, and over…. so many obvious good measures of how a culture can be good.

So yeah, hands down, U.S. suburbia in these decades was the pinnacle of human society.

Why not Europe?  Isn’t scandinavia and Holland consistently the ‘happiest’ culture in the world?  Having lived here now a lot, I can see that even in their heyday of the 80s and 90s, Europeans had a lot of good things, the British had a lot of good ideas, but there were severe limitations on what European teens could do, and they never had the North American idealism.  Scans and Dutch are very polite, and well socialized, but I think their happiness comes from conditioning, to be respectful and happy.  They run a very orderly society, but they always had tiny houses, little access to nature, and hardly any access to cars.  Having cars and free gas and road freedom made American teens and youth such incredible masters of their own destiny; they could go to the beach, to the lakehouse, drive for hours to the mountains, drive across state, drive to concerts, go to hippie festivals, go to burger king, go to diners at 3 am, all in cars, having wild times, with no parents, and it made them mature, responsible.  And Europeans never had this.  They had bars, early drinking ages, and a more relaxed attitude towards sex and drugs.  So many more of them just smoked a lot of dope, and had a lot of sex, indiscriminately, where north americans had girl/boyfriends.  And so I saw the European youth culture of the late 80s and early 90s, and it was much more cynical, much more listless, much more “why are we here… i guess to smoke and drink and shag.”  to North americans it seemed like something of a paradise, all of it done in this sometimes breathtaking historical backdrop, but in reality, it was done in cramped highrise apartments, and with very little hope of social advancement, little hope that your college degree would get you a good job, probabilities of going on the dole; and in continental Europe there was even more of a german-led post-modernist sense of essential futility.  There were very few stores in Europe (still are), everything from shoes to audio equipment was prohibitively expensive; there were far fewer lake houses, (except in some rural regions), there were far fewer cars, etc., and so peoples lives were and remain much more circumscribed.  This is why the US in the 80s and 90s was even happier than Europe, by a considerable amount:  freedom, freedom to drive, freedom to occupy large houses of the parents with large yards, and swimming pools, lots of public parks, and as yet very few of the cultural and social problems which have since sunk in.

So as I have pointed out, I believe that this period of happiness has crested.  Has Europe overtaken the US?  A bit, but still US suburbia is probably better off, and creates happier people, as a whole, than European middling group-culture.

But why has the US declined from this happiness peak?

1)  hip hop has made everything tainted with violence, banality, and sexual objectification, and just plain meanness.  Whereas before it was cool to listen to ‘they might be giants,’ who are super fun and nerdy, now it is de rigeur to act not only cool, but like you are about to pull your gun out of your pocket and kill people at any minute.  in short:  we have quickly reverted to the dark ages, or the wild west, in the worst possible way.

2)  too much video horror:  has made people inured to scenes of human misery.  kids now are inundated with too much scenes of actual bodies torn apart, killed, mutilated.  this has taken the form of tatooing becoming normative.  this is self mutilation.  and it says that you like torture.  this is why george bush could get away with torturing iraquis.   The US population actually supports and/or does not care about torture now because it sees images of Gaddafi’s corpse every morning.

3)  Video game horror:  same:  video games are so all-encompassing now, they not only have inured us to violence:  the average teen has blown the heads apart, in graphic detail, of thousands of men, and point blank range, seeing fragments of bone and skull and brain explode, faces explode, bullet wounds through the eye, the nose, things that before only soldiers in the deepest horrors of war saw, we are now seeing all the time, and so people are just numb.

4)  Fashion and sex:  with hip hop, has come the slut culture.  women are expected to dress like sluts, quite literally, and idealism, and all of the beauty that goes with waiting, and expectation, and innuendo, are replaced by : fuck me.  It is a barbarous form of sexuality, not ideal, not satisfying, not philosophical, not ‘love’ and not fun, really.

5)  9/11.  It really blew up the whole notion of PC correctness, and global villageness, it totally derailed decades of work on peacefulness, and unity between cultures, which is precisely what bin Laden wanted.  He created hatred, very effectively, and it might take decades for western and islamic peoples to respect and enjoy each other as much as they did on 10/9/01.   Not to mention, flying used to be fun.  As one pilot told me, the 90s were a blast, you were like a cruise director.  Now, it’s like you’re behind the Iron Curtain, every time you go into an airport.  Incredibly boring and stupid.  Thanks, handful of islamist assholes!!!

6)   George W.  He put a huge rift, in the aftermath of 9/11, into European US relations, and Obama did a lot of healing, but there will be bad blood, for a long time.  The big happy family of western culture in the 90s, has been quite torn asunder.

7)  Global warming.  Katrina, Al Gore.  It’s a big bummer.  And the problem is, the main problem is China and India, which are too big for the US and Europe to do anything about, even if they did get the political will.  We’re fucked for the forseeable future.

8)  Global population + de-communization = falling living standards in the West.  Overpopulation became much more of a problem when we realized population was causing global warming.  African population has exploded in the past 20 years, and SE asia, and many other places, to entirely unsustainable levels.  And since the de-communization of China and INdia, their demand for gas, and other resources has gone way up, and now American kids and everyone else has to pay way too much for gas, and their parents can only afford small houses.  Also, they can now not hope to have the same house as their parents, not only due to the global land grab, but also:

9)  The deconstruction of middle class jobs.  The US rich, led by the MBA-educated efficiency revolution, have de-structured the middle class occupations everywhere:  teachers, professors, have their jobs broken into tiny tidbits; there are many fewer full time jobs in industry and business; everyone is part time now, with no benefits, so cannot save, and therefore can’t spend, and so the economy stagnates, and people stay poor.  Until we get back a culture which intentionally creates middle class jobs, we will see an increasing gap betwen rich and poor, and the middle class will shrink, which is has done dramatically in the past decade.  Not to mention, this creates  a sense of hopelessness, since people know that even with super hard work they will not be rewarded with anything except for more super hard work.

In the 1970s and 80s, you went to college and got a relatively cushy job which paid a middle class wage, and you had safeguards which meant you only worked 40 hours.  Now, you work 70 0r 80 hours, and get paid no more, housing has gone way up, food has gone up, and you get no benefits, and you are constantly under threat of being fired.

It’s a bit better in Euorpe now, as I have said, their jobs are more protected, but there is still the problem of a lack of innovation, a lack of idealism amongst the youth, the crowded conditions, and the sense that there is little hope of betterment.

But in general, I think we can conclude that the US created the world’s happiest society in the 80s and 90s, basically the most ideal society ever known in global history.  And I got to live in it.  But now it’s gone, and it doesn’t look like coming back anytime soon.  A big part of this blog’s purpose, however, is to help us figure out not how to ‘bring back the 80s’, but how to improve upon the 80s, so that the new society we create can bring similar or even greater levels of happiness, carefreeness, essential self-respect and respect for otehrs, not only to the suburban kids of a single country, but to as many people in the world as possible.

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.

Now, some of us get lucky, and get good enough jobs, that we have to do relatively easy work, which happens to pay well, and we have limited supervision, or “good masters.”  Others of us get to be bosses, which feels good; others get interesting responsibilities.  Even so, we are forced to do this job continuously, for years and years, usually much more than any of us would ideally want to do, or else we lose it.  Very little chance for routine change, for a decent 3 month break here and there.  And always, there is an upper crust of about .5 percent of the population which basically gets to do whatever it wants, by virtue of inheritance:  the economic nobility.  And there is also the majority, perhaps 90 percent of all adults, who either can’t get a good job, or else are stuck with a crappy one., and the management policies of the last decade have only made that worse, and of course, the 2008 meltdown made all of this even worse.  So we are being foreclosed upon, we can’t rent decent properties, we can’t afford most of the products which are only aimed after all at the top 5 percent or higher of the populace, but can only afford generic wal-mart versions of the basics.

Black people of many stripes have been ravingly angry at the indignities imposed upon black Americans for several centuries, and they have good reason to be.

And, I argue, every single person should be ravingly angry at the indignities imposed upon us all by the property and economic system.  As with the issue of race, these problems cannot be solved overnight.  But they can only be solved if we recognize them as problems.

Before 1860, most black people in the Americas accepted that slavery was perpetual, and just the way the world worked.

Before 1848, most people accepted that the economic system was simply what it was.  That most people were simply subject to indignity and servitude, and had to sacrifice health and well-being in order to earn a starvation wage.   But that started to change.   And there was much anger, and much progress.  It led to unions, to weekends, to 40-hour workweeks, to minimum wage, to child labour laws, to pensions, to retirement ages, to holidays, to sick leave, to maternity leave.  But the US got so wealthy after WWII – largely due to the impoverishment of much of the world in comparison (esp China and Russia, adopting communism, and India, for never being developed), that its people abandoned these paradigms, once they got the basics.  It seemed that there was nothing left to fight for.  And indeed, socialism went too far then, and started to strangle economic growth.

Other posts in this blog have talked about that, however.  The main point today is that, yes:  you should be pissed, you should be angry, you should be furious, that you, a potentially noble human being, every bit as potentially noble as the billionaire senator in the news, has been forced by a poorly designed, or sub-optimally functioning system, to live a cramped life, spent mostly in the same office, in fear of paying the bills, of losing your little bit of property, unable to see your family, or else, heck, in some economic comfort, but nonetheless forced to do much less living and creative things than you would otherwise be able to do, simply because the powers that be have encouraged you to forget it, to not worry, to not be angry, to not be indignant, in short to take it.

A friend described the Occupy movement as an ‘evasion of personal responsibility.’  Was it the responsibility of 10-year-old children in factories in 1910 to go to work in highly unsafe conditions?  Is it your responsibility to endure the sexual advances, or the mental abuse of your boss, simply to be able to not be evicted and have your family starve in the streets?  Hell, no!

Do we become communists, or socialists?  No, because as argued elsewhere on this site, this strangles the economy.  The economists and policymakers are right about that.

But do we have a right to make the occupational system geared to maximizing the potential of the maximum number of people?

Hell, yes!

Is it our duty do to so?

Hell, yes!

So feel the anger, the righteous indignation, of the oppressed.  But don’t respond with violence:  respond by coming up with a way to maximize your potential, and the potential of the many.  We can start by creating a political body, whose goal is to maximize fairness in the workplace.

Yes, work will have to be shitty sometimes, it will necessarily be difficult.  Things have to be done that no one really wants to do.  Fine, I understand this.  But it should always be fair, to the extent possible.  Sadistic bosses, sadistic hours, sadistic workloads, short-term contracts, administrations who consciously carve up good jobs into numbers of shitty ones so that they can pay less than a living wage, those things are all contrary to our collective dignity, and must be fought back against.

Most of all, don’t be fooled by the doublespeak of the administrators, of the 1 percent, into thinking that you have to take whatever indignity they shell out, simply because ‘that’s the way it is.’  This is never true.  It can almost always be made better, without making other things worse).  You can improve the system other than by voting with your feet.  You can demand that jobs are good.

To end with an example of what we face and must change.  Each university, for example, used to have hundreds of full-time professor jobs, and a few administration jobs.  Now, they have dozens of administration jobs, a very few full-time professor jobs, and most courses are taught by part-time short-term contract people with no rights or benefits, and who must cobble together contracts from semester to semester, earning a starvation wage and having no healthcare benefits, let alone retirement pension.  This is absurd, and vile.  Same with public school teachers, and every other brand of government and private sector job.

This can be reversed.  But we need to start a dialogue.  And the first step is realizing that injustice exists, and that, yes, it is worth being pissed off about.  This is your life.  Will it be a noble one, or will you allow the few to create a system which gives them all the benefits, and you none, even though you are just as talented, and dedicated, and hard working as them?

-trivium.

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.

Given this natural propensity for humans to live in hierarchical societies, when they underwent the agricultural revolution, it is no surprise to learn that this simply multiplied the already-existing system.  Before, chiefs got most of the good stuff, and after the agricultural revolution, guess what?  Chiefs got most of the good stuff.  Now they called themselves kings, and lived in cities.  And they had retinues of nobles, whom they fed well, and gave estates to, who would act as armed thugs to back up their power.  And priests who utilized the group’s common mythology to justify the same system, and give it ‘divine sanction.’

And it’s been that way ever since, basically.  Agricultural society, up until 1800, was based on the same hierarchical system; and then when the industrial revolution created massive new levels of wealth, the same thing happened;  a few chiefs claimed all of the good stuff.  Was it any different, after 1800, in industrial society, than it had been prior to that, in ‘feudal’ society?  Well, the entrepreneur in Europe had been evolving since about 1050, descended from a classical trader, who could be found thorughout the Islamic and Indian and Chinese worlds.  In Europe, though, he got some advantages (especially low interest rates, and access to credit instruments, and private property rights), which enabled him to outshine his non-European cousins.  Thus, some ‘common people’ (non nobles and priests), managed to accumulate much money in medieval and early modern Europe, eventually spawning the Industrial Revolution.

Arguably, the accumulation of property by the entrepreneur is fundamentally different to the inheritance and conquest of property by nobles (and priests).  But it is also quite the same:  They both assume as system in which a very few manage to accumulate monopolies, and arrogate an awful lot to themselves.  But, say the pro-neoliberal apologists, the difference was, the entrepreneur _makes_ wealth, creates new wealth from scratch.  Whereas the older feudal classes did not.  And this is true:  much of what we have today is the result of this entrepreneurialism.  So, there is no alternative to this system known to history:  most wealth beyond very subsistence levels, has been generated by entrepreneurs.  The problem is, of course, that the system is highly flawed, because it seems to be built upon a ‘feudal’ notion of highly stratified wealth levels.  Is there no way around this?

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, intellectuals thought that the way to make the economy look more like the ideal was to radically remake it.  Marx and all versions of this were based on this notion.  However, in recent decades further research and experience has revealed that radically changing the economy simply won’t work:  it seems to lead almost inevitably to totalitarianism, for various reasons.

So the only way open to us seems to be to change things from within.  And yet we have begun from such a ridiculous premise, it seems.  With such ridiculous property laws.  Again, the problem is, radical remaking of these seems to fail.  There are a lot of real-world limitations, limiting factors, built into the existing western property laws, which are the result of centuries of trial and error, and rationalization.  Unfortunately, they exist, because they do overall as good a job as anyone has ever been able to come up with.  There are alternative ideas being tried all the time, and the system is slowly being tweaked by more responsive democracies into something like an increasingly ideal ‘mixed system,’ of ‘friendly capitalism.’

This is all well and good, but, it is also important to remember the goal:  and to remember that this should be the driving consideration of economics.  What would an economy look like, if it hadn’t been based on hierarchical principles?  How could economies generate wealth without being based on these?  What would the historical evolution of an egalitarian, or at least more-egalitarian economic system look like?  These questions have not even been asked.  They seem so elementary, it might seem frustrating for students to come up against economists who can say little more than this.  But I am putting these questions here to say that this is the frontier of the discipline.  The frontier of economic history.  We really don’t know much beyond this.  And if it seems like these questions are too fundamental, that it is embarrassing that they have not long ago been explored, well, that is because during the 20th century, economics was so polarized, betweeen neoliberals (who aimed only at selfish accumulation) and Marxists (who were so egalitarian that they did not want to study the real economy at all, and only wished to destroy the system), that this obvious middle ground did not get explored.

It is time to start exploring it.  Some ideas have been posted in other posts here, i.e., in ‘An Ideal Economy.’  But the questions right now need to be framed, and to reach a wider audience, if we are going to generate interest in the problems, and begin to encourage research which can help to answer them.

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.  

And labouring and manufacturing, also, were the first to go, in the 70s and 80s.  I guess we should have seen it coming:  if we allow the blue collar jobs to go, it’s that much easier for the white collar jobs to follow.  Now, I dont’ really advocate socialism per se; Britain through the 70s became incredibly stagnant with everyone on the dole.  It does make people lazy.  But there has to be some incentive to go into the middle class, via a pathway which provides meaningful, healthy, sane work, which is not brutal, dehumanizing, etc.  There are indeed very few of these paths left, and they are getting smaller.

A good simple way to measure the progress of the american middle class is to look at the physical shape of suburbia:  the architecture.   The architecture of my hometown illustrates this trend perfectly.  In the 1890s, everyone lived in town houses.  The poor in row houses, the middle class in slightly better row houses, and the rich in urban mansions, with a bit  of grass around them.  Then, in the 1920s, the rich got cars, and began to move out to the country, along the main arteries of communication with other towns.  Then, after 1945, the baby boomers returned from the war and demanded, and, for the first time in history, got, little houses on little suburban lots with white picket fences and cute drapes.  Average size about 1100 square feet. (110 sq meters).   Then, in the 1960s, the upper middle classes began to multiply, and we got housing developments of suburban houses, which in the 1920s were only for the rich.  And in the 1970s, everyone went crazy, and you could get 1,500 sf houses on 1/3 acre lots for 45k – enough so that almost anyone with a manufacturing job, or any sort of entry-level professional job, could afford.  This continued through the 1980s, though then the manufacturing people began to lose their incomes.  But things stayed ok, until the 1990s, when population pressures began to decrease lot sizes.  They went from 1/3 acre, to 1/4 acre, to 1/5 acre, and down to about 1/6th of an acre.  The houses were much bigger, say 2,200 sf., but the lots were the size of the 1950s suburban houses.  And a lot of townhouses started to be built, to accomodate the growing underclasses, who weren’t keeping up with the american dream.  Teachers started finding things more difficult; etc.  But the internet boom came and saved everyone; everyone got into the housing market… and then it went bust, just after W was elected.  It’s probably his fault- – really, his election was a huge blow to the liberal leaning tech industry, and it caused a selloff, which ended the dotcom boom.  And so everyone then plied their money into real estate, and we got a housing boom.  If you had a house before 2003, you were great, but if you didn’t, now it started to hurt.  If you didn’t get in now, houses were balooning out of reach, and people’s salaries were about the same they had been in the 1980s, with houses about triple that.

So then comes the 2008 bust, and those with houses are often saddled with mortgages which are too much for them to afford, and or far more than their house is worth.  And then the professions are being disintegrated by managers, who have decided that the only people worth paying are the CEOs, and they spread propaganda though Fox news to brainwash everyone into agreeing with them.   Even doctors as assaulted by HMOs, though they seem to have survived for the time being.

And the sign that the middle class is in steep decline is not just that they are getting smaller suburban houses, or having to move into town houses, both of which are true, but that an increasing number of what 20 years ago would have been comfortably professional people are now being prevented from getting any full-time, decently paid job at all, and are thus forced to rent until they are in their late 30s or 40s.  Houses are now only for the rich, and/or for the hyper-exploited who will put up with hyper-stress jobs in business.

Why did it happen?  In part, yes, the US is no longer the capitalistic behemoth next to a shrunken communist China and USSR and impoverished India.  It is no longer the commander of the majority of global resources.  But things don’t have to be this bad.  There can be a middle ground, even if one is not the biggest fish.  The Dutch and the English and other Europeans were once the global leaders, and they have managed to keep pretty high standards of living, which could be mucy higher with slightly better policies.

So the time has come then, to suggest solutions.  If I were king, what would I suggest?

1)  Lower population.  Economists scream holy terror, but this drastically increases living standards for everyone, especially in terms of housing and land ownership.  That is a great start for building a middle class.

2)  Simply make laws reinstating the norm through the mid-1990s, which was that ‘professions’ have to mean middle-class jobs with beneifts.  Right now, there is no reason to go to college:  why bother, when you will be just as badly off as people who don’t bother?  The disintegration of the professoriate, and journalism, and other professions is not due to any inexorable march of technology, like the managerial pundits like to propagate.  It is all due to policy.  Managers wish to slash the jobs, breaking them into part-time pieces, to scatter at the poor.  And the laws allow this to happen.  The laws, friends, have to be changed, and the professions regulated.  Will this cause a slowdown of the economy, if the part-time jobs are stitched back into full-time jobs again?  That’s what the right would say.  How about this:

For decades, the engine of the American miracle economy was the American middle class.  THey had good jobs, with good benefits, and thus disposable income.  NOw, no one has jobs anymore, b/c they have all been broken into pieces.  Thus, no one can spend.  So the american economy goes into the shitter, b/c no one can buy cool stuff at Target, let alone anywhere more exclusive.   So the point is:  yes, deregulation is good for business, but so is a middle class with disposable income.  If no one spends, businesses will fail anyway.  So there is a balancing act here, folks.  Let’s try and put some of the pieces back together.  Allow teachers and professors to have dignity, and decent working conditions, and, goodness, a bit more money.  Notice that while the middle class has gotten poorer, CEO pay has skyrocketed?  It has literally made up for all the savings from white collar jobs.  So yes, the pay has just gone from the many, to the one.  Not cool!  And not economically viable, either, despite what the myopic economists’ models might say about it.

3)  Create another set of regulations, which maximize economic production, while also maximizing the amount that the average income can buy.  Many policies, such as planned obselescence, force people to buy a new dishwasher and TV every 3 years, when they don’t need to do this; food is way more expensive, in many instances, than supply and demand would dictates.  This income could be used instead on vacations, cooler more interesting gadgets, etc., which are not necessities and thus improve everyone’s quality of life.

That’s it in a nutshell; the rest of the details on these policies have been spelled out elsewhere in this blog.  If we keep our eye on the goal, we can definitely improve our collective lot (b/c we are in this economy together, after all), within our own lifetimes, quite dramatically.  Good luck!

This line of argument runs that, it is each person’s responsibility to better his or her situation, not by ‘complaining,’ but by ‘doing.’  I.e., work hard, and/or if the situation is stinky, leave and find another situation.  By ‘voting with your feet,’ workers will teach bosses that they cannot get away with certain abuses, and over time the worst of these will disappear.

This line of argument, it will be noted, has become most common amongst those citizens of the U.S. who:

a)  Are the unwitting beneficiaries of a unique confluence of economic factors which made it extremely easy for American citizens to earn a decent middle-class living during the 63 years between 1945 and 2008, but which will perhaps never again favour US citizens so much (these conditions included a very developed US, and a very poor India, China, Africa, and Russia, and a socialist Europe. – which made the US by default an economic powerhouse, with a unique ability to command and produce resources – like the Dutch and English in earlier centuries, who had advanced economies and few competitors but which then lost this advantage and melded into relative mediocrity.)

b) Are ahead of the IQ, education, and starting social network curve, and thus can always find a better-than-average-paying job with relatively little effort and/or luck.

c) Have ‘paid their dues’ buy buying into the system – working long hours, sacrificing many dreams and goals outside of work life, sacrificing many quality of life issues, but receiving in return a better-than-average remuneration, which gives them a decent amount of capital and ‘stuff’ to protect.  Thus both ‘survivors bias’ (meaning they are already good at/accustomed to working within the system), and also ‘sour grapes’ bias – i.e., the very real element of jealousy for those who haven’t had to make such sacrificies, inspired even by the thought that anyone might have their cake without having to make the same sacrifices– play heavily into their opinions.

d) And/or, have been influenced by a highly professionalized corps of demagogues, who in the US are overwhelmingly funded and maintained by the economic elite, whose primary purpose is to find ways to sell the agenda of the economic elite to the masses, by appealing to and systematically inflaming their commonest fears of ‘the other.’  This strategy has over the past 20 years worked incredibly well, and created an army of Limbaugh-zombies, who are highly suspicious of science and logic, and who, hypnotized by Rush’s admittedly skillful demagoguery, will now systematically vote against their own best interest, and that of the global community, virtually in lock step with the agenda of the corporate elite… gee, how did that happen?  Isn’t it strange that the will of a large block of the working classes should correspond almost exactly with the agenda of the ultra-rich?  Gosh… some coincidence, eh?

A bit of reflection will reveal that this line of argument, however, is based on the following fallacious assumptions:

1- The economy is inevitably ‘darwinist.’  It assumes that the system is essentially as fair as it will ever get, because the economy is naturally a ‘survival of the fittest’ type system.  Libertarians like to assume that ‘nature’ inevitably requires people to struggle against one another for a piece of a very limited pie.

The problem with this is, that as I have argued elsewhere, there are many, many laws in place which make everyones’ lives so much better than they would be in a darwinist situation, and many of these have been won by long-term struggling and protest, and also by legislation.  For example, it is illegal to own your own rocket launcher.  The reasons for this should be obvious, but true libertarians suggest that we should all own them, if we wish.  This would very obviously create a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog world, in which nothing could get done.  So, the philosophy is flawed, fundamentally.  No other proof need be offered.  The point of democratic protest is to stir legislators to do the right thing.  In a totalitarian system, the point of it is to instill democracy, which will be more responsive to the will of the people.

2-  They assume, therefore, that there can never be anything wrong with the economy, or ‘the system.’  It just is, and as Pope wrote:  ”Whatever is, is right.”   So I ask them in response:  if you were a 19th century British factory worker, with children ‘allowed’ to work 80 hours/week, in factories with no safety features so that they died of ‘fluffy lung’ disease when they were 16, would you still have no right to protest?  Or if you were a low-caste Indian worker today, in which landlords ‘loan’ you your rent payments at extortionate interest so that you have to sell them your daughters (which happens on a grand scale), would you have no right to protest?  If your congress will not tax the top 1% at the same rate as the middle class, do you have no right to protest?  If MBA-admin people have systematically turned your profession from full-time to part-time contract-only work, while simultaneously increasing their own salaries, and those of their ever-expanding crony-networks, would you have no right to protest?  This line of argument boggles the mind.

3- The libertarian tea-partier types therefore assume:  It is not your responsibility to change the system if it is bad, except by choosing another work situation.   But again, in a democracy, is it not your responsibility to change a bad system?  Or even in a non-demcoracy, do you not have a moral obligation to change the system if it is exploiting people?  The wealthier American libertarian is so isolated from history, and the rest of the world, that they have no idea of how easily systems can get incredibly unfair.  And, sadly, even those who are exploited in the US, have fallen so prey to the Fox news and co. propaganda of the billionaires, that they have been brainwashed into supporting a system which could very easily be much less harsh on them (i.e., something closer to a European social system).

My same facebook friend who argues that OWS is an ‘evasion of personal responsibility’ is very active in local government.  He has a hometown, a network, and he votes for his own economic interests (i.e,. votes against any tax increases for his wealth bracket, etc).   Is it not the duty of those who are at the other end of the spectrum, who have fewer skills, less IQ, or are less able to submit themselves to a corporate regimen to also vote in their own best interests? This includes making a system in which the rules of the game allow for the most access by the most people, and the fewest loopholes for those who would exploit the system.  And I think that paying much less taxes, as a billionaire, is exploiting the system:  you have congress in your pocket.  That is plainly exploitation.

The economic system is hedged by laws.  It is not ‘pre existing’; it is not ‘natural.’  It is composed of them, it can only work because of the federal reserve, and hundreds of other systems built up over hundreds of years, which keep the economy running smoothly.  It also consists of safeguards, safe housing regulations, safe work regulations, insurance regulations, etc,. etc,. which are designed to keep the system from being horribly exploitative, as it is in India and Mexico.  The libertarians, would wish to live in a society which is just like India and Mexico today:  as long as they are the wealthy few who live in barbed-wired houses with a staff of armed guards.  If we had no regulatory safeguards, that is precisely what our society would look like.  I really am amazed at how my libertarian friends can possibly not see this?

So, in conclusion:

1.  The economic system is not just ‘work and wages’, but the laws which determine this relationship, its causes and effects, at almost every level.

2.  It is our duty to change these laws to make life as good for the many as we can – this means balancing quality of life with maximizing per capita income.

3.   If you have no truck with government (because you are young, poor, unconnected) , it is your duty to protest, to raise awareness and pressure on government, when it is clearly following the interests of the economic elite at the expense of the obvious interests of the non-elite.

4.  Those who bah-humbug the protestors tend to be either

a) well endowed with assets and thus have a vested interest and a survivors’ bias in preserving the status quo,

b) jealous of the idea that others might not make the same quality of life sacrificies that they have,

c) Lacking social empathy in general, or a code of morality which obliges them to make sacrifices to improve the common good.  Often, they have convinced themselves that they are improving the common good by ‘paying taxes,’ which is rather ironic; or if not this, they argue that they are improving the common good by working in and preserving an economic system which ‘creates the most jobs’

- not realizing that these jobs would be as exploitative as those in Indonesia and Nigeria, China, and most of the rest of the world, were it not for generations of protesters who have won the right to such things as weekends, running water, windows, and heat in all rental homes, pension plans (now a thing of the past), a basic concern with workplace safety (who cares about toxic emissions inside the factory?), the right to sue in cases of sexual exploitation (gee, would you like to be a nineteenth century serving maid?), and countless other, rather obvious when you think about it, improvements.

Recap:  Again, the only thing that makes the US a better place to work than Indonesia (with its seas of child labourers, and human trafficking, etc., etc.,), is its laws.  Yep.  Regulation.  That means, a legislature which responds to the will and needs of the many.  This is what won us Social Security, Equal Rights for non-whites, and anything else which keeps the system in the US from chewing up and spitting out the many, as it did before the 1930s (police routinely called in to shoot striking workers, etc. –  read some labor history, folks!!!).

Without protest, congress and other legislations will inevitably tend to serve the rich, who are their biggest campaign financiers (and who can most easily run for and win office, esp. in a system which is now designed to highly favour the rich, and the corporately sponsored).   Voting is the ultimate weapon, but the only way for those who do not control the media – i.e., the non rich, to send a message to fellow voters, is to demonstrate.

Finally, the decision to demonstrate is hardly ‘goofing off’ or avoiding work.  It often entails a serious personal sacrifice, for personal safety, for reputational safety, for economic security.  It takes, in short, balls.  (or balls-ettes).  Much more balls, I would argue, than it takes for you to report to the same job you have had for the last decade, and which provides all the creature comforts one could want, in exchange for a sacrifice of time and life quality which has long since become routine.

Well, one reason why the American right (and thus the global corporate elite) is paranoid about any notion of world government is that it represents the possibility of having uniform global labour laws.  Now, friends, global corporations thrive, and make most of their dough, on exploiting legal loopholes which arise between different countries.  It’s interesting, because while feudalism thrived on having many local legislations, capitalism is seen as having broken down this feudal mentality.  But now we see that the global companies are actually happy with the current fragmented world system, insofar as it gives them major tax shelters, and also, employment loopholes.

Thus, when unions in the developed world got too strong, they moved to the third world, where they can exploit the workers much more handily, for much less dinero paid.

Some day, however, it is more or less inevitable that we will come up with some global labour laws – kind of like global bills of rights.  This is simply too logical, too scientific, for it not to happen; unless we really do experience a return to the dark ages, but even then, at some future point, we’ll emerge again, and people who are sensible will realize that this is the only sensible way to do certain things.  Now I have stated that I think that local and regional government is best at many things, and that I think any global government should be federal.  But the only way for people to avoid exploitation, truly, is to have a global set of labour laws.  This means, that there will be universal rules for workweeks, for vacations, for minimum wage, and for working conditions.

Imagine:  universal rules for working hours, minimum wage, working conditions, maternity leave, etc.  So that if companies try to avoid them in one place, they will have to abide by the same laws elsewhere.  This, friends, would not spell the death of capitalism.  Far from it.  In fact, global capitalism could support all 2 billion of us (on this as the ideal global population, see other posts) with us working very few hours per week, at a lovely high living standard to boot.  Economists know this, but they are trained in business schools run by big corporations, and so aren’t the sort to broadcast it.

In Western Europe, they have fairly uniform laws regarding labour; and somehow, capitalism hasn’t died here.  MOst people are employed, and employed well enough.  If things are very expensive here, as I have argued elsewhere, this is primarily due to other reasons besides labour laws (including too many monopolies, small houses, and too-strict business-opening requirements).

So, imagine a world where you could enact generous and proper labour laws, and the companies wouldn’t be able to just say, “Ha!  We’re closing our factory… how do you like that, suckers?”

Proper labour laws.  What are these?   Gosh, how about, where everyone has a God-given right to work at a job which is suited to their abilities, and which maintains them in as much dignity as they can support, and which gives them time for things outside of work, while also ensuring that their company can get things done relatively efficiently?  Surely that sort of life-work balance isn’t that hard to come up with…. or to implement… it’s just that the corporate elite screams to high heaven if anyone gets the slightest notion in their heads that any concession at all over their 80 hour work-slave environment which they have forced most of us into nowadays, and so nothing at all gets done, because as soon as any legislator dares limit any workplace abuse, s/he is pounced upon the next day by the army of rightwing attack dogs which the elite pays in order to keep enough people’s anger directed at the people’s would-be champions, in the form of 24/7 ‘news’ diatribes.

No wonder we can’t get anything done in the US; but the Euros for the most part have their heads up their own collective cultural asses too much to look at the big picture, either, and so we find very little idealism over here, or effective movements for change.  It could be done; but we need to educate effective, actual economists, who are actually left-leaning, insofar as they support raising the living standards and lifestyle standards of the majority.  If we start to get these people being produced, we will find many more people beginning to talk about global labour laws.  Of course, we’ll need Arab and Chinese and African and Indian springs, and Latin American ones as well, but that doesn’t seem so impossible as before, or so far off… and then, armed with our army of compassionate economists, we can work with the lawyers who keep democracy afloat (see my article on the judiciary and the dark ages), to forge a truly compassionate, and yet totally functional and effective, global capitalism, which maximizes the living standards of all.

Not a bad idea, really?

This has a number of hidden effects that I don’t think that many economists plug into their primary equations.  In Holland, the houses are really small indeed, almost everyone lives without appreciable yards.  We stayed in the townhouse of this wealthy yuppie couple with a baby, and they had literally no garage, and one single storage closet.  The dude’s only tool area was one single toolbox stored in the cupboard where the brooms and cleaning stuff were stuffed.

So the point is that this dude cannot de facto be in the market for lots of dudely stuff, such as wheelbarrows, lumber, metal poles, chainsaws, giant tool benches, riding mowers, and a whole host of other things which for decades every middle-class American male took for granted as being part of his lifestyle.  Just think of all the things which the average American consumer buys  to fill up their garage space, their toolsheds, etc.  All of these things there is a huge market for in the U.S., and this in turn stimulates the economy.

In Europe, they literally do not  have space for more than a few smallish carpets, a few lamps, one or two framed pictures,  etc., and so there is little market for this, meaning that buying things, even for an uppery middle-class couple, is a relatively rare event.  Because normal household goods are de facto luxury items,  every single household thing is ridiculously expensive.  This is why anywhere outside of Ikea, you pay through the nose for these things.  There are no ‘discount’ furniture places in Europe; no deals, no bargains.  Everything is full price, all the time, think department store prices at best, absolutely not on sale, ever.  And outdoor lawn things are only for the super rich, and so they are accordingly luxury items, priced 3-4x what they are in the states.  Even fencing over here is astronomically expensive.  Our chicken wire was a Euro.33/foot for 50cm high stuff (it was 12 Euros for for 3 metres!!!!).  That is crazy.  And so the economy here is stagnant, in part because no one buys stuff, because they have no space for it, which ensures that no one makes anything, and therefore the prices are super high, so no one buys anything!!

So, the point being, another plank in our ideal economy should be:  everyone should have big homes and yards.  This keeps people in the market for more stuff, to fill their space, and besides, this gives them space to do, say, hobbies!!!!  YOu can’t have a pottery kiln in holland, or a metal shop, a machine shop, a garage even for your sports car, space for your boat, etc.  One of the great, hidden, obvious advantages of the US is that until the 1990s, so many people had space, the middle class had space that is, and plenty of it, to pursue whatever hobby they wanted.  Manufacturers saw this demand, felt it, and so they created products which were priced so that the middle class could pursue sailboating, music studioing, art studioing, and all those sorts of things which make life interesting and also make for a vibrant and varied economy.  Over here, there are no sewing stores even   – my wife has to pay 18 Euros for a yard of fabric!  No joke.  There are no discount women’s hobby stores, etc.  You always pay full price and then some, all the time.  This makes European life much much more dull than American life – there is no real way for middle class people to pursue many hobbies, both through lack of space, and through exorbitant prices.  So between this and the monopolistic rigid way of regulating business, this helps to keep the European economy sluggish.  The answer then:  lower population density, build big houses, and force developers to stake out big yards, like they had in the US in the 70s.  No family should have less than 1/3 of an acre.  This way, the lessening demand from lowering population will be more than made up for by individual citizens with more to spend, and more space to fill up!!!

-t.

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.  

If we keep these goals in mind, then our policymakers and economists and lawyers can come up with the deetails.  The system is complicated, but its goals can be quite simple, quite clear, and quite attainable, if only we have the chutzpah to realize this and not stop until we have remade society to work for us, the 99 percent.

And is Michael Moore a hypocrite for standing with the 99 percent.  What utter hogwash.  He has only made millions by agitating for the 99 percent.  Yahoo editorials, go find a less vile point of view to publish.

And I can state with confidence that until the early 1990s, europeans ate better than americans, or at least, many europeans did.  American food was fairly monolithic:  hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, spaghetti, and a bit of chinese food and some mexican thrown in to boot.

But then, the urban food revolution came to north america (both the u.s., and canada, that is), and by the mid-1990s, there was no cuisine that you couldn’t get ahold of in any urban centre or college town.  Thai was cool for a while but quickly became old hat.  Ethiopian, Kazakh, Indonesian, Yemeni, you name it, you could find a restaurant selling it.  And then, people started wanting to do this at home.

First came the garlic and spice revolution.  By the early 90s, people were using whole buds of garlic (i.e., 12 cloves) in their meals.  Through the mid 80s, all the recipies in your mom’s cookbook had the following spices:

-pinch of salt

-pinch of pre-ground pepper, 3 years old.

-1 bay leaf or 1/4 tsp dried oregano, 5 years old minimum.

Remember those days?  Vegetables were boiled until they fell apart under their own weight, catchup and mustard went with 50% of what you were served, and butter was the only accompaniment for vegetables.  But through the 80s, mexican food slowly took hold; spiciness became cool; Taco Bell went a long way towards making mexican totally normative in american cuisine.  After that came nachos at the pub, and some pubs raced to see how spicy they could make them.  Then came the chicken wing craze.  At the same time, alternative culture began to embrace vegetarianism, and so indian and asian food came in, which often had so many spices that you completely forgot that you weren’t having meat.  Creative uses of tofu made it tastier and crispier than most people’s roast chicken, and Thai cuisine’s use of peanut butter and coconut milk was to die for.

This combined with the 70s health food craze to create dishes that had a lot of vegetables, and the fresher the better.  By the mid 90s, raw foodism came into the scene, and lots of little bistros opened up in which you could get really creative sandwiches piled high with roasted peppers, eggplant, interesting cheeses, sprouts, cool garlickey dressings.  By the 2000s, Panera spread over much of the US, and for less than 5 bucks, you could get a gourmet sandwich that was quite good for you as well.  Gourmet bread became widely available.

Cookbooks came out in droves, which supported this new cuisine.  Co-ops opened which sold all sorts of exotic ingredients that could be found in these cookbooks, dozens of kinds of grain from quinoa to spelt, both whole and ground into flour.  Any cheeze you could imagine was available in these specialty stores.  Also by the early 2000s, the organic movement swept these ‘hippie stores’, and many people began to insist upon the green and healthful benefits of organic food.  This combined with the new exotic food movement, and became such a market force that mainstream grocery stores, quite reluctantly at first (since organic food is seen as being a ‘liberal’ and ‘environmentalist’ fetish, and therefore highly suspect by good republicans who wish to destroy the planet as fast as possible), began to operate their own organic sections, to compete with the independent organic-food-and exotic ingredient stores.

Then chains like wegmans began selling gourmet bread, organic food, and exotic ingredients as a central part of their marketing strategies.  Not only this, but the liberal urbane clientele began to demand that their grocery stores did not look like factories, those horrible sterile places with dirty white tile floors, dirty white tile ceilings, and flourescent lights.  Stores began to open up sections that were tastefully done with low halogen lighting, natural wood floors and shelving, and often featuring interesting natural lighting options.  Consumers demanded better environments, and when alternative stores with nice environments started doing well, mainstream chains noticed, and changed their policies.

Thus, I would argue that the hip and urban 25% of americans eats very well, another 25% is affected by this movement for the better, and the other 50% is probably just as happy to eat frozen fish fingers and catchup as ever.

Because the signs of this continuing older tradition are everywhere in the US, i.e., macdonalds, and most grocery stores, most europeans can go to the US and think that things there are just as bad as ever.  But that is to miss the whole urban subculture which now, I would argue, eats better than almost everyone in europe.

The dutch, as i have said in other posts, still eat like it’s the 1960s, and the belgians have some nice restaurants, but in many ways don’t fare much better – outside of their favoured traditional cuisine.  What is missing here is the 90s exotic food movement, and the nouvelle grocery stores.  Stores are still in the 60s and 70s, still lit by flourescent lights, and offer very little choice.  This is largely because there is such a strong monopoly in these sectors, that alternative stores and restaurants can’t open up, and so tastes don’t change.  While France has some very good cuisine, it is still all just french.  Same with italian, though italian food is so incredibly good, so often, that one can forgive them.  No one beats the italians.  England, due to proximity with canadian and american culture, has opened up to embrace many non-traditional types of food, and so is better.  Germany also is a bit better than the low countries or much of france.  Barcelona is very very good at experimenting, and has great restaurants, as does the basque region, but much of spain is still staunchly traditional and it is difficult to get good ingredients.

In short, as I have noted elsewhere, the more closed, more monopolistic nature of shopping and restaurants and book sales on the continent, means that innovation comes here much more slowly.  Also there is a stronger tendency to cling to ‘national’ cuisines as a part of national identity.  While this is cute in some ways, it also means that eating here when you are used to the world, is rather boring quickly.  Perhaps north americans can be faulted for ‘consumerizing’ exotic foods, just like everything else.  But I think that in this case freedom to choose, and to experiment, and really to be exuberant, spicy, and fun, is much more interesting than simple loyalty to ‘national’ cuisine (although this is perfectly fun and should be encouraged – but one can have one’s national cake and eat others too!).

And I must also add, that since the introduction of the Euro, continental european restaurants have become far far more expensive.  It used to be a few francs to eat at many nice French places, and dutch places were dirt cheap.  Now, it costs you minimum 20 Euros to eat out per person, and that’s not even with wine.  To have a decent meal, you need to drop 30 euros per person.  And minimum wage here is like 8 Euros per hour.  How anyone can afford this, I dunno.  Many people just order take out, which is a bit cheaper.  But there is no such thing in the low countries as getting a pizza even for less than 12 euros/person.  It’s highway robbery and disgraceful.  In germany you can get pizzas, good ones, much better than belgian or dutch ones, for only 7-8 euros, because they have less restrictive restauranting laws.  So that’s a start; but still, Europe has a long way to catch up to the american eating culture which has really revolutionized eating and food culture and environmentalism and multiculturalism in the u.s. and canada, for anyone who cares to participate, and who has an once of curiosity in their bones, just in the past 20 or 25 years.  And let’s mention design also:  most places in europe have stores which are far behind as far as looking cool and interesting… there is something, then, to laissez faire regulation…. to a degree!  (I am all for keeping green spaces, and for reigning in many labour abuses, and environmental abuses, etc – but my point is, there has to be middle ground that can shake things up here a little bit, no?).