Comments on Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism: You Don't Get to Be Pharoah by Working Hard Buildi...

What will happen to all this when the cheap fuel r...

2007-01-20T09:19:00.000-08:00

What will happen to all this when the cheap fuel runs low, as it surely will and perhaps in just a few decades?

Will need for labor-intensive skills then become resurgent? Will we have value for farmers, carpenters, animal husbandrists, and the like, instead of engineers whose claim to value rests solely on managing complex machinery driven by abundant inexpensive fossil fuels?

Technology is not energy.

Kevin,Would one of the forces at work be the laws ...

2007-01-19T11:56:00.000-08:00

Kevin,

Would one of the forces at work be the laws of supply and demand? More supply of techinal labor but not necessarily more demand thus leading to a decrease in wages.

zfppfjeHalf the people in this country have IQs of...

2007-01-17T04:36:00.000-08:00

zfppfjeHalf the people in this country have IQs of less than 100. They're not going to go to college, or be managers, or engineers, or doctors. They're going to be blue-collar.

At one time in the past they were highly-paid. Not any more, though. The ways things are going they're all going to be on welfare.

it seems that the sacred geometry that governs the...

2007-01-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

it seems that the sacred geometry that governs the pyramids is making a comeback in many observational forms. The ideas of the hard-assed management class taking on the elite's gruntwork in exchange for better peonship is right on. But there is no way that things can come to a crashing halt unless we stop doing the work, or alter the benefits of the work to serve other masters. We ought to be our own masters, but what does that mean as far as responsibility distribution and the capability to get things done?

Being an ardent reader of Rand, one has to feel that we can do better. However, the student of chaos theory knows that the order that comes from true chaos is a more natural order. If the remnants of the prior structure are used to brace the descent, then we only get a morph, not the true cycle that we need. In other words - greater anarchy breeds 'higher order' by forcing mutualism - as part of survival of the fittest, so to speak.

Using nature to model function may be more optimistic than using economics, but the math behind both concepts is the same math. It leads me to believe that there are other disciplines that also use the same mathematical concepts that are only a rotation away, to use a symmetry term. Group theory is a very powerful tool for prediction, but the inputs into the system must be technically correct. I fear that we should introvert our work in order to not allow the system to chew it up and spit it back at us denuded. That seems to be the realm of thought we have to deal with. Down the road when we pick up the pieces, we will find pockets of independent thought that can collaborate in novel ways. The same old, same old is getting too old.

I really appreciate this idea you're pursuing late...

2007-01-16T08:36:00.000-08:00

I really appreciate this idea you're pursuing lately where tech progress is arbitrarily pursued along centralized, rather than decentralized, lines. Also, thanks for highlighting Baegant's great blog - I always love finding out about new, like minded bloggers.

I just posted about this at Julian Sanchez's site....

2007-01-16T03:30:00.000-08:00

I just posted about this at Julian Sanchez's site. Once it appears, it will tell people something about how time scale issues affect interactions between rapid change and a - so to speak - "relatively fixed" lump of labour.

Another issue that you and Joe Bageant are getting at without spelling out is the Fallacy of Composition. Wikipedia doesn't give any vivid ordinary experience illustrations, though. It's what's wrong with the Homer Simpson scheme to make all cars easy to find by putting markers on all of them. If everybody stands up at a contest to see better, what happens?

This also ties in with Tragedy of the Commons/Prisoners' Dilemma issues. I analyse a lot of these issues at my publications page, though I don't spell out all the mathematics (lucky you!).

Anyway, we can see either globalisation or technological improvement as being involved - or both, since there is nothing mutually exclusive there - with a deeper cause driving them, i.e. the external costs that favour downsizing/not hiring in the first place. I've suggested a first step involving the Professor Kim Swales approach of an employer tax cut to offset the pressures the other way - "Pigovian", in the jargon.

I came up with that independently, but Swales's existence proves I am not ipso facto an isolated crank. But I see a longer term progression involving a modern analogue of Chesterton/Belloc's Distributism, with people owning their own resource bases.

It's important here to use technical terms precisely. Technically, we aren't talking about government subsidies for business capital, at least in most cases. Tax breaks work like subsidies in terms of the magnitude and direction of the incentives they produce, but - and this is important to the Swales plan - they don't involve funds flows let alone cash flow from the government.

They do not require funding, just resourcing in an opportunity cost way. With the Swales plan, everything is tightly enough integrated, and the gains to teh economy are such, that if you start with the right sort of tax base already in place the way Australia has then you get immediate valuable results. These show up either as employment, or in being able to slacken off artificial employment stimulation.

What I don't think I spell out anywhere is the interaction with other economies. Essentially, there is no additional cost to the Swales plan, but it might make it more explicit what is already happening: industry migrating verseas. Now, it is doing it to get lower tax rates, but with the tax cuts driving employment it would appear to be the fault of no longer allowing downsizing to help the bottom lines of firms.

The actual way round it - ideally - is to have sufficiently small government, and sufficiently few corporations, that there is no material tax benefit from the few emigrating, and little cost if they do. Failing that, the best short term measure is to commute their corporation tax obligations for a proportion of shares. Then if the firms emigrate, the revenue keeps coming back.

But we are getting into a whole other area here, with sinking fund type problems, an area that is like a viable Social Credit scheme. So I'll stop before I bore too many people.

Mirabile dictu, I seem to have sufficient energy to contribute, these last few days!