A century ago, futurists predicted that by this point in time, technology would produce so much for people that people would only need to work a dozen hours a week. The bulk of time could be spent on the pursuit of knowledge, art or culture. The futurists were both right and wrong. Productivity increases kept pace. Growing the nations crops occupies a mere two ((lookthisup)) percent of the population. Building cars and houses and furniture requires another 10%. Yet after working hours declined for many years, in the past 40 years the hours worked by Americans has started to climb back up. This might be OK if it was what people wanted - if they preferred fulfilling jobs to endless idleness. But far too many of these jobs are awful, soul killing jobs. There are four kinds of soul killing jobs. They seem quite different, but they all have a common cause:
a) Unskilled labor jobs that pay too little to raise a family at a level of material well being set by American pop culture. Restaurant worker, janitor, retail clerk, assembler, etc. The actually act of performing these jobs is not that unpleasant. Personally, I would rather stock shelves at a grocery store than be a corporate lawyer, be brand manager for Colgate, or sell real estate. The soul killing aspect of the job is that the job does not pay enough to follow the American dream.
b) Fulfilling jobs that pay little. The job doesn’t kill your soul, but living in meagerly and knowing that you cannot pay off your student loans and nor raise a family does kill your soul.
c) Decent paying white collar jobs that involve innane beaucracy, mindnumbing tasks, or output that provides no greater value to society. Famous examples from popular culture include “Office” workers at Dundler Mifflin, Dilbert, and Peter from Office Space.
d) Upper middle class and upper class jobs that pay very well but that exact an enormous toll in terms of time and stress. Classic examples include corporate lawyers straight out of school, young doctor’s doing their residency, the VP of Sales at a startup, and investment banker associates.
Surveys report that 55% of Americans aged 45-54 are dissatisfied with their jobs.
So why has work been getting worse when productivty has improved so greatly? Why don’t the manual laborers get paid more? Why do they make less than did in 1960? Why are the white collar sales reps and lawyers so stressed out and working longer hours than in 1970?
The answer is that the rise of manufacturing producitivy and the rise of third world imports erroded the bargaining power of ordinary workers. Thus undifferentiated labor gets paid very little. Differentiated, or skilled employees, are competing against other skilled workers, and thus are in an endless rat race.
Let’s look at a very simple model to understand how it works, and then we’ll discuss how the real world matches this model.
Let’s imagine an economy that has: 5 landlords who each own 10 acres of land, 40 farmers, 1 doctor, 1 company owner who owns an agricultural software program, and 2 software engineers who work for that company. Each farmer can produce 10 loaves of bread from 1 acre of land per unit of time.
Initially, the wages for farmers are quite high. There are more plots of land than all the farmers can farm. If the landlords do not collude, then they will bid up the wages of farmers. If a landlord has an empty plot of land, it is worth it for the landlord to steal away a farmer from another plot of land by offering to pay the farmer 9 loaves of bread - the landlord would net 1 loaf from the plot of land which is better than having it lie fallow.
Wages for the doctor are also quite high - he is the only doctor in town, and thus can set monopoly rates. His only limit on setting the wages is that if he charges too much people will just forgo his services altogether.
The software company owner and programmers also earn high wages because they have a monopoly.
Now imagine that new robotic technology gets invented that allows each farmer to work three plots of land instead of one plot. However, each plot still produces the same amount of bread. Labor productivity increases, but not resources productivity. What happens?
The bargaining power of the farmer is now completely erroded. Instead of the landlords bidding up the wages of the farmers, the farmers will compete against each other to accept the lowest wage. Any farmer not employed will be willing to accept at least subsistence wage just to do anything.
Now, according to more libertarian economic theory, exceess farmers will leave agriculture and go produce some service which the landlords will purchase. Perhaps the ex-farmers go into landscaping or gourmet cooking. Overall, the economy is net better off - before the economy produceed 40 loaves of bread. Now it produces 50 loaves of bread plus landscaping services. However, there is no guarantee that this will play out better for the individual farmers. Imagine that the consumer preferences of the landlord is such that the landlords would much prefer to eat more meat than they would prefer services like landscaping. So the landlords now only employ far fewer farmers. With the expenditures saved, they convert many of the acres from wheat fields into pasture for cows. Now there is not simply not enough caloric output to feed the farmer population. The excess, unemployedfarmers go hungry while scraping by with menial services. The employed farmers earn low wages producing bread, while the landlords eat steak and cheeseburgers every night for dinner.
Perhaps some farmers might decide to go into medicine instead, and compete with the doctor to earn higher wages. But this improves impossible, because they need a license, and there is a legal government enforced limit on the number of licenses given out. So the doctor ends up winning - the doctor continues to earn high wages, and now their are unemployed farmers who he can hire to shine his shoes.
Perhaps some farmers decide to go into software and compete with the existing software company. But they fail, because the existing company has a natural monopoly. Software is a write once, but sell many times product. It is very difficult to compete with the built up code base and all the features in the existing system, it is a natural monopoly. A few of the farmers tell the owner of the software company, “Hey, we’ll work for half the rate of your existing programmers, just fire him and employ both of us!”. But the owner refuses. The problem is that the mythical man-month problem means that software output does not increase linearly with the number of programmers. It is better to have two highly productive programmers than 3 moderately programmers. Furthermore, since software is a winner take all market, it is worth paying a premium to get the best of the best, because second place is the first loser. But it does turn out that one of the ex-farmers is exceptionally brilliant and turns out to be a better programmer than one of the existing programmers at the software company. The existing programmer had gotten complacent, was not following up on the latest tools, was a bit burned out. So the company fires the existing programmer and hires the hungry, hard working ex-farmer instead. The programmers make a lot of money due to their unique services, but they must stay at the top of their game to capture the winner take all market.
A few other unemployed ex-farmers realize that if they want to earn a living, they need to convince that the landlords and other people with money that they should spend money on their luxury service rather than on converting their fields to pasture and eating steak. These farmers go into sales and marketing, and create and market luxury products. Some start a coffeeshop with gourmet baked goods and fresh roasted beans. Others start a trendy furniture store with equisitily carved chairs and tasteful wall ornaments. The landlords end up paying for this stuff because they are always competing for status at cocktail parties and need to brag about their new clothes or super-thin smart phone. Thus some of the ex-farmers make good money by creating desired luxuries. But others fail and make nothing. Of the ex-farmers who make money though, they must work very hard to constantly innovate new status symbols, they are competing against each other, the more one person works, the more another must work to keep up. It never ends. Furthermore, a number of the marketers hate themselves because so much of marketing is just junk. Inventing the next breakfast cereal gimmick or advertising jingle is not very fulfilling.
Hopefully, the above model should map pretty intutitively to the modern economy. In the modern economy, labor productivity has increased much greater than natural resource productivity. It takes far fewer man hours to drill for oil or farm a plot of land, but the actual output has barely kept up with population growth. So the net result of automation has been to erode the bargaining power of labor and reduce incomes for undiffentiated labor, while increasing incomes for those who hold positions of bargaining power in the economy.
The specific winners of the modern economy are:
- Those with government protected or government funded jobs. That includes doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc, who have legal barriers to entry to their profession. Government workers, especially federal civil service workers, have seen increased purchasing power and standard of living. Wall St. bankers who have fed off bailouts and 401k policies have done exceptionally well.
- Owners and executives at companies that have natural market power. That includes Waltons with their retail chain that has a monopoly in thousands of towns, and bargaining power to drive down costs. It includes the owners and executives at Apple, Microsoft, or any software company that has won a winner-takes-all market. It includes hundreds of other companies that populate the Fortune 500.
- Those who have specialized, hard to replicate skills - engineers, basketball players, an owner chef at a trendy restaurant, a branding manager with a knack for new concepts, etc. These people are economic winners - but the victory has a price. Almost all of these people must be constantly on top of their game, otherwise their skills will become common, their income comes from the feact that are more skilled than their peers, but their peers are racing to keep up.
- Owners of critical natural resources. Shareholders of Exxon-Mobile, Russian plutocrats, and Saudi Shieks have all done well in the last 40 years. Not all natural resource owners have done great - farmers have been squeezed by consolidated buying power of the Monsanto, Walmart, and thus have not been able to capture the value of their land.
- Owners of property in a city that has money flowing in from either government connections or natural monopoly. If you bought a house in 1970 in New York, Palo Alto, Cambridge Massachussetts, Washington DC you made out very, very well. If you owned a great commercial real estate location you did even better.
- Unionized workers employed for a rich organization that is obligated to bargain with the union. University janitors have done well because universities cannot pick up and move to to China. Most universities see themselves as progressive, and so they cannot suffer the repuation hit of breaking the union by firing everyone. Contractors who work in a city that requires all contracts to be fulfilled by union labor have also done well. But unions for manufacturing companies have not done well, as the companies simply pack up the machines and move elsewhere to find cheaper labor. Nor do unions work for companies with low margins or low profits, such as Sears or K-Mart.
The biggest losers from automation are the unidifferentiated masses of workers:
- Franchise owners and small time business owners who own a business just like a dozen others in the surrounding area.
- Any sort of unskilled or semi-skilled laborer
- All forms of semi-skilled white collar work, such as phone support or bookkeeping or retail clerking.
- Any worker or property owner who lived in a city with economic base that was from companies who did not have a sustainable natural monopoly. IE, anyone living in the rust belt.
- Graduates who cannot break into a protected profession, or came in after the barrier to entries fell. Being a tenured professor is a sweet gig. Many people entered grad school with the hope of being a professor, the supply exceeds the demand, and most have ended up struggling with low paying, low job security positions as adjuncts. Lawyers also ended up with too many candidates just as demand was shoring up as computers replaced much of the more manual work involved in discovery.
The in between people are those who make good money in differientiated labor but have to work very hard to keep their position. Whether those people are winners or losers really depends on how much they like their job and like working hard to compete.
Many of these economic losers are also social losers due to the increasing emphasis that if you don’t go to college you are a loser. Growing up I remember watching the Cosby show and ABC’s TGIF sitcom lineup. A major theme for all the shows was whether the dopey older brother would go to college or not. The success or failure of his life depended on him going.
Let’s look at how the problem affects the entire income spectrum.
At the very bottom, some people simply cannot find jobs at all. Ex-cons straight out of prison have difficulty finding jobs anywhere, even at fast food jobs. There is such a surplus of labor employers can simply blanket screen out those with a criminal history. Also people with a very rough cultural upbring, those who can talk and act only in a street tough way, have great difficultly finding a job in an economy in which employers care how workers look and act in front of customers.
These people at the bottom might go hungry and end up homeless. They might get some sort of help and finally get a job, and scratch out a life at the margins. Or they might turn back to a life of crime.
Next up are those in the very bottom of the working class. These folks work as cooks, janitors, cleaners, clerks, security guards, manual laborers, landscapers, or taxi drivers. In the 1960’s an unskilled laborer could easily find a manual labor job, such as manufacturing or dock worker, work 40 hours a week, and earn enough to raise a family at that income. Today, that is not possible. An example worker - let’s call him Jimmy the Janitor might earn about $12 an hour or $24k a year. Eight percent of that income will go towards the government pension and retirement healthcare plan. That leaves $21,600 in income. In my metro, a small 2 bedroom apartment (which means two kids to a room) in the cheapest area within commuting distance will cost $1,200 a month. Cheap food with a minimum of protein and vegetables would cost $4 a day per person. We’re already down to $1,400 a year left in the budget and have not bought gas for heating, electricity, transporation, appliances, vacation, household supplies. And forget about healthcare - the cheapest plan in the private market costs $10k. An ordinary worker cannot afford to raise a family on one income. They only get by working longer hours, having multiple people working, relying on grandparents for child care, living with extended family and packing more people into the house, forgoing healthcare, forgoing luxuries, and living with extended family.
In the middle class and upper middle class things are a bit better. But earning the middle class salary requires finding ways to differentiate oneself from the mass of labor. Let’s take the example of Clark the Chef. Clark might have a slightly above average IQ. After earning a typical college degree such as “business” or “communications”, his options of jobs end up being stuff like sales associate, starbucks barista, cook, administrative assistant, customer support representative, marketing assistant, etc. Most of these jobs do not may much more than the lower working class jobs. Clark must spend a few years working his way up - moving from customer support to quality assurance or to manager, or going to grad school and finding a job as a government beareaucrat. As a result, it might not be until Clark is 30 when we finally has enough income and savings to raise a family. In order to raise children into the middle class, he will have to spend more money on a home in a good school district, extracurriculars, and on college. If he sends kids to a bad school district, he risks having his children make the wrong friends and falling into the criminal underclass. Thus Clark must work hard to maintain his middle class position. He must compete against other young guns aiming to take his position as Branch Sales Manager or whatever he does. By historical standards, Clark lives a great life. But it is a lot worse than it could be, and a lot worse than thinkers in the 1960’s would have predicted.
Upper middle class people find better, higher paying, usually more fulfilling jobs. But they must delay children even longer in order to attend grad school or to rise up the ranks. The expense of student loans and good schools, plus housing in a location near their school, adds up, and they must work hard to maintain their jobs in order to keep up with expenses. Furthermore, they end up in a social network of similiarly achieving people, and must maintain their income simpley to maintain friendships. If you fall back into lower middle class, you will not be able to afford to attend the weddings of your friends and family.
Solutions
Lowering the Cost of Living
Most commentators about the problem of stagnating wages focus on how to grow the economy. Growing the economy is hard and unpredictable. But lowering the cost of living is easier.
A fair portion of the cost of living comes from parents who want to avoid neighborhoods where they stand chance of either getting bugged, assaulted, bullied, or have their kids fall into gangs. Housing laws prevent communities from restricting sales of houses on any criteria other than price. So the only way to guarantee a community that is safe and filled with people of civic values is to live in an expensive area. The existing owners of communities restrict the construction of new housing in order to prop of real estate prices and keep out the riff raff.
The counter measures needed include:
- Any community that has a lower density than the surrounding average will get fined for restrictive zoning laws and for disallowing new construction.
- Communities can have limited ability to restrict who can rent or buy a home. For instance, a town can have an ordinance that any person wishing to move into the city must serve several three hour community service sessions. Such a restriction can provide a basic filter for community involvement and concientiousness.
- Crack down on crime. This deserves its own set of essays. But through better policing, constant foot patrols, requiring single parents to live in a convent, I think the crime rate could be dramatically reduced.
- Re-optimize the transporation system around cheap, small commuting cars. Fit more cars on the road to allow for quicker commutes, plus save drivers thousands of dollars in car costs and in gasoline.
- Limit home mortgages to 3X the income of the highest earning personi n the family, with a maximum loan duration of 20 years. If people are allowed to stretch themselves to far too buy homes, then it bids up the price of housing, and all families must have two earners in order to afford housing.
- Reduce healthcare costs by eliminating arbitrary limits on the number of providers entering the profession. Right now there is a hard cap on the number of doctors who can enter medical school or obtain a residency each year. Instead, all doctors and providers should be required, as part of their privilege of licensing to provide enough training and apprenticeship to meet demand. Furthermore, apply anti-trust rules to hospitals and insurance companies that have consolidated to drive up prices.
Supporting Parents
Raising children provides a good for the next generation. If no one had children, the existing generation would starve to death in their old age because there would be no one to tend the crops, maintain the roads, run the utilities, etc. It does not matter how much money old people saved in stocks and bonds, if no children existed, the money would be worthless. Capital - property, stocks and bonds - is only valuable with labor to work it. Those who produce children create a benefit for all future retirees, but this benefit is not caputured by the parents of the children. The parents pay tens of thousands each year to raise their kids, but the tax dollars those kids pay in the future goes to parents and non-parents alike.
Thus I think is fair to give all parents some sort of subsidy to defray the costs of raising children. The subsidy could be pure cash or a voucher to pay for healthcare or housing.
(( childsubsidy)) The subsidy would be limited to the first two or three kids in the family. The subsidy might be adjusted based on the overall birthrate.
While most parents who kids provide a benefit to society, unmarried parents or separated parents who cannot provide their children a decent home provide a cost to society. Those kids too often grow up to be criminals or degenerates. As a requirement of receiving the subsidy, single parents would have to live with both a male and female blood relative in the household. Those who did not have such a relative, would need to live in a sort of convent, with oversight from a master and matron of the house, with authority to keep a curfew for both the mother and the children, and to enforce house rules and prevent strangers from staying over.
Jobs For Everyone
- job of last resort
- if the unemployment rate of a city is more than 40% greater than the national average, that city is allowed to enact protectionist measures.
The National Union and Resource Wealth Sharing
- Profits from God-given natural resources or from unearned externalities should be shared.
- Profits from monopoly or quasi-monopolies should be shared.
Both sides of the political spectrum have a poor response to this problem.
The left proposesa a) everyone should go to college b) taxes should be increased to pay for healthcare, infrastructure, and education c) the government should create more pro-union laws.
Increasing taxes to pay for universal healthcare would have an immediate positive effect. Workers would get healthcare reducing out of pocket expenses, and the money comes from those with high incomes, ie, high bargaining power.
Spending on infrastrcuture might work … if it was spent well…
Spending on research might work if you completely overhauled the grant system …
But the other policies will do nothing and may even have a negative impact.
Yes it is true that college educated workers earn more. But in my study this comes down several reasons:
a) Many professions have legal requirements barring entry without a degree. These requirements are almost always unncessary - the board could instead require passing a series of tests and completing an apprenticeship, classroom time is quite unncesscary. The effect of these requirements is to create barriers to entries and raise wages.
b) People attending and graduating college have a base level of intelligence, conscientiousness, and parental assistance. These same attributes will help the graduate earn a higher income once out in the world.
c) College assimilates people into a social network of achievers. If you are in sales, attending college will make it easier to sell to the smarter, college attending, executives at the more lucrative sales positions. The college network can also be used to find jobs.
d) Since college graudates are on average smarter and better acculturated than non-graudates, and since IQ tests and any test that looks like an IQ are banned for employment hiring, lazy large corporations will just restrict themselves to hiring on college campuses and adopt blanket rules requiring a degree for advancement.
e) In some cases the college might actually teach a skill that improves the productive output of the economy, such as engineering or medicinal practice.
For the vast majority of attendees, the benefit to attending college is a relative leg up - a credential to pass an arbitrary barrier of entry or a way to set oneself apart from the low status masses. Paying for everyone to enter college will have no effect on the net output of the economy, it just creates jobs for liberal professors and adiminstrators at the expense of the tax payer.
If the government is to subidize education it should only subsidize degrees in fields that have a reasonable hope of increasing productivity - engineering and medicine - for instance. There is zero reason for subsidizing degrees in communications, “business”, marketing, history, or sociology.
What about unions? The good thing about unions is that help equalize bargaining power between large employers and common workers. Otherwise the large employer can squeeze the worker and pay a low wage not because the worker does valueless work, but because the worker is more expendable.
The bad thing about unions is that they often go well beyond increasing pay to creating absurd work rules and to promote the benefit of the insiders. For instance the police union in Camden fought efforts to get police out of their desks and onto the streets doing actual patrols. Teachers unions fight working past 2pm, despite an economy where everyone else works until 6PM and needs a place to keep the kids. All unions want to eliminate any sort of merit pay and only pay incumbents. And most unions would rather have 10 people employed at $20 an hour than 20 people employed at $10 an hour.
The other problem with unions is that they can only benefit the portion of the workforce that works in highly profitable companies. Sears and Google both earn around $40 billion in revenue. But Sears has 300,000 workers and zero profits. Google has 30,000 workers and $10 billion in profits. Pro-union laws would help the 30,000 workers at Google, but do diddly squat for the 300,000 workers at Sears - there are no profits to distribute to the workers. Thus the bulk of the workers see no benefit.
The conversative response to the problem of soul sucking jobs is equally inadequate. Resposne include:
The rich deserve their wealth, and they should be able to keep it, the money should not be redistributed. Wealth flows to those who create the most value
The vulgar libertarians will even make this argument with regards to Wall St. bankers, completely ignoring that these bankers earn their money not through creating wealth but via profiting from risks and getting bailed out during the failures.
More reasonable libertarians agree that Wall St. should be liquidated, but that entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg earn all the wealth they earn.
My rebuttal is, well, “He didn’t build that.” I get value from logging into Facebook and seeing pictures of my friends, checking on event notifications, and reading status updates. Producing this value required an enormous chain of production. The base technology of networking and computing had to be produced by engineers at Bell Labs, HP, and thousands of other computers. Lines of fiber optic equipment had to be strung across the country. Assemblers in China and Korea had to put together the computer and monitor I use to actually view facebook, and to run the servers that Facebook is hosted on. And of course the actual code to run Facebook in 2012 was not written by Zuckerberg but by engineers hired since then.
So why does Zuckerberg earn thousands times more than the Facebook engineers writing the actual code, the open source developers creating linux, the fabricators at Intel making his chips, the assemblers in China building his servers? Because of bargaining power. Zuckerberg caputured ownership over the one point of the value chain that was a natural monopoly - the social network. He owns the database of users and the intellectual property around the domain and the software. Everyone else in the value chain is competing, assemblers in the Chinese factory are expendable, engineers at Facebook must compete for their job. But he owns the natural monopoly so he makes the billions.
I should point out that Zuckerberg did a tremenous job building a team and pushing the product forward - he beat the competitors such as Friendster and MySpace completely on the merits - by executing better. But many people executed fabuously well during Facebook’s rise, the extent of his fortune is due to the natural monopoly.
So does Zuckerberg deserve his billions? Well, instinctively I find it repugnant to change the rules of the game after it has been played. A lottery winner does not deserve their millions in the sense of cosmic justice, but they played by the rules and won it fair and square. To take the money away because they did not deserve it.
But I do believe it would be sensible to both a) take steps to prevent monopolies and b) when monopoly really makes sense, to spread out the profits from monopoly rents across the entire value chain.
The other rightwing response to the problems of soulsucking jobs are, “If right wing policies X, Y, and Z were done, the economy would be so much better that wages would be higher and the distribution would not matter.”
Perhaps next year fusion power will finally be invented.
Let’s look at the case of a typical low skilled worker in my metroarea ( Greater Boston ) who is trying to raise a family of four. His wage might be about $12 an hour working as a janitor, restaurant cook, or taxi driver. Eight percent of that income will go towards the government pension and retirement healthcare plan. That leaves $21,600 in income. The cheapest housing in the area will cost $1,200 a month for two bedrooms. Cheap food with a minimum of protein and vegetables would cost $4 a day per person. We’re already down to $1,400 a year left in the budget and have not bought gas for heating, electricity, transporation, appliances, vacation, household supplies. And forget about healthcare - the cheapest plan in the private market costs $10k. An ordinary worker cannot afford to raise a family on one income. Forty years ago, the factory could raise a family. Now it is only possible with government subsidies and the wife working too.
Now could conservative policies create an economic boom that raises standards of living for our janitor?
A substantial portion of the janitors income goes to natural resources. Food requires land, water, oil, and various mined phosphates. Housing requires lumber, copper, and other materials. Perhaps relaxing zoning laws would make housing a bit cheaper, but that would have a much bigger affect on home prices in ritzier subburbs, not in places where the rent is already $1,200 a year (Furthermore, making the city denser reduces quality of life for many people).
There is no economic policy I know of that would guarantee a drop in natural resource prices. Even if you had the optimal research and innovation policy, there is no guarantee of finding the next green revolution or making fusion work or building algae fuels. Even if you took action to restore the competitiveness of American industry, that would require currency depreciation which would drive up the prices of resources in the short term, and in the long term, would probably only result in keeping pace with China, not restoring dominance.
5-10% of the GDP stolen by Wall St, the deficit, reduces prices some.
Healthcare … bargaining power of the providers …
This leads us to the final argument of right wingers, which is basically, screw ’em, if they cannot find a wage high enough to raise a family on, then they should not raise a family.
I believe government policy should be neither dysgenic nor eugenic. If it has to err on one side should be slightly eugenic, but not to the extent of not allowing the bottom 30% of society to reproduce.
Also, this problems affect not just the lower working class. The upper middle class is in a rat race of competing against other members to stay in the working class …
Right now a wage is $12 and eggs are eggs, milk, pasta, gasoline, car, appedecetomy, heating gas, home construction, home price
Basic problem is that the producitivy of resources is not increasing. No guarantee we can find more oil. Re-optimize transportation around 3-wheel enclosed electric scooters could save money. Change zoning laws. Reduce barriers to entry in medicine. But still considerable natural resource expense - lumber for housing, gas for heating, protein. Still a natural monopolist tax.
-- $15 an hour assembler in a factory in 1970, buy a house in a decent neighborhood, have a car, put plenty of meat on the table for a wife and three kids, go on vacation, take your kids to the amusement park, the movies.
-- Lower expectations, worker harder, get married. First, not possible for all people. Second, why? why? Why?? why force everyone to go through the rat-race?
-- Social darwinism.
- Minimum cost of living policy ( 3-wheel scooters,
Also, people will feel stretched due to not keeping up the Jones. Sumptorary laws???????
Sears $41 billion in revenue, 293,000 employees. Google, $38 billion revenue - 30,000 employees
Lower the Cost of Minimum Living for the Poor and Middle Class
- Re-optimize the transporation system around 3-wheeled vehicles - Healthcare-lite plan - Dorm living - Luxotica - Open source version of any business necessity software
- Charter Schools, Community Controlled Schools, Can Exclude Students - Zoning laws - exclude based on culture rather than income -- arrests, divorce, references (employer, teacher, landlord), concientiousness - must show up for 4 stints of community service, inspection - If density of the community is less than neighbors, then must not have prohibitive zoning. - Crime - Neighborhood cleanup
The National Union and Resource Wealth Sharing
- Profits from God-given natural resources or from unearned externalities should be shared - Profits from monopoly or quasi-monopolies should be shared
Cities with unemployment rates more than 2% higher than the national average can implement a tariff or import restrictions or bans on sales of goods.
Second order Effect - Jumping off the Rat Race
First order effect.
Open Idenity Platform -- Can subscribe to a person’s email address changes, postal address changes. -- Can subscribe to any sort of Groups or Apps a person belongs too -- Circles (friends, coworkers, for sharing information)
-- Matches the post office records, credit card companies, hospitals -- ID number to be used rather than a social security number -- Security number - changes every day at 4AM Eastern. Get your number by calling, going online, getting a paper copy of the next year’s number, IPhone. -- Secure messaging API - SSL,
((livingstandards)) Note that a person working one of these positions could raise a family with material standards of living that match the standards of 1930. But every time that person or their wife or kids watches a commercial or TV show or talks with friends they will see the vast gulf between themselves and their peers, and feel despair. The opporunities for such a person are to either put off reproduction, be a cad, or live a life of stress and despair.
Young readers, tips:
a) If you have to take out more than $30k in student loans for undergraduate then go to a state school or get a scholarship. You can always do a one year masters later to boost your pedigree if you need it.
b) Learn a technical skill - computer programmer or accounting are good ones.
c) If you do not have a technical skill, try and find a federal governnment job. Do your homework and try to find an agency that has reasonably interesting work.
d) Being a doctor or dentist is still a good choice, but only if you are really sure you want it, because the payoff only comes a decade down the road.
e) Never take out loans for grad school unless you have done your homework and you know the schooling will pay off. Really, medical school and a top 10 law school are the only schools worth it.
f) If you do not have a technical skill, find a government job in a place with a lower cost of living - school teacher in Austin Texas
Too many Americans wake up every morning to go to a job that slowly kills their soul.
There are at least four variation of the soul killing job, but the
Paycheck-to-paycheck
Dundler Miffling
Dilbert
Upper middle class who must keep up with the rat race
Executives under stress