My "Hybrid Turning" Theory

[beechnut79]

(05-18-2018, 02:52 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: America around 1930 was much more agrarian than it is today. Nit industrial workers also had it harder and expected to work harder and longer to solve economic problems first of business owners and bosses before solving their own problems. America was more raw in its economics, with fewer things that it could give up just to scrape by.

People can make it do or do without. But what they do without takes away someone else's income stream, whether that income stream goers to some fat-cat or to a marginal worker in a service or retail business,

How a political system reacts to an economic meltdown reflects the moral character of that leadership and its wisdom, and what we now have is  the worst possible. Corruption and an ethos of profits first are the essence of Trump economics. The GOP goes along.

Were there a meltdown of the character of the early 1930s, there would be more things that people could give up -- the service and leisure sectors. Golf, an expensive practice of the middle class, was one of the easiest things to give up. Instead of golfing, people found that they could take hikes or watch TV. At a worse point, they give up cable TV and watch broadcast channels instead. Satellite radio? They can find a broadcast of NPR or (gaak!) Rush Limbaugh on free-to-receiver radio. They can cut back on spending on live sports, theater, and amusement parks.

Whatever people thought were expensive, like travel and cable TV, they can make cutbacks. They can even send fewer greeting cards. Most people have collected large numbers of prerecorded disks of music and video, and they may return to those. Dust off old books and to to the library instead of paying for overpriced best-sellers? Of course.

It's the service sector that gets hit first now. People might eat out less, but they still need some food. If they still have jobs, they will commute. If they commuted fifty miles one way to a job that they lost, then they will look for lower-paying work locally... and end up commuting less.

Maybe people can even cut back on rent from moving from high-rent places where the intellectual action is and the best-paying service jobs are (like California and the urban Northeast) to lower-cost places in which to live.The assessment that some urban wrecks in the Rust Belt are grim, dreary, joyless worlds (ask me about much of the Rust Belt) ignores that on the difference between paying more for rent in California than one can earn doing oil changes or changing tires in some places in which there is nothing to do as entertainment except watch TV as entertainment is enough to make one think of moving to some economic Hell where one can survive on much less. I know people who have done such -- going from the white-collar world to the gritty area of bare necessities.

But back to the sort of leadership that we have. Donald Trump is an execrable leader, someone who thinks that the ideal world is one whose focus is the enrichment and indulgence of his class of plutocrats. That fits a Marxist stereotype of capitalism, and as we all know, Marxist rhetoric has no attraction unless the social order fits Marx' depiction of a capitalist plutocracy under the rule of crass exploiters -- that profits are everything and people are nothing but tools of the plutocrats. The VP who is set to succeed him believes in a more theocratic order compatible with plutocracy -- that the Common Man can satisfy himself with the promise of pie in the sky when he dies so long as he suffers adequately for the Master Classes of ownership and the managerial elite.  

Note well that Donald Trump ran with the use of the vague but vapid slogan "Make America Great Again".  So it is for someone like Donald Trump (the arbiter of the meaning of such a phrase) to establish what it means. Back to the "Good Old Days" 00 but for HIS social class of profiteers -- lower taxes, lower wages, little regulation, and a higher share of income going to economic elites. There will be less reliance upon education and more upon toil under harsh conditions. Sure, there will be more work -- if wages plummet enough, there will be more work available. For Mike Pence, who may be President in the event that bad habits kill the President, it means that the authoritarian family 'informed' more by theological promises of a better Hereafter than by economic rewards in This World.

It is a raw deal, the sort that a political order can maintain only if it goes authoritarian and is able to rig the political process to preserve the current share (actually non-sharing) of power.

For more on the "more work" syndrome I would like to invite you to check out the new thread I began just yesterday titled "Why Technology Failed to Produce More Leisure". About a half century ago we were all but promised that the new technology then still looming on the horizon or at best still in its infancy would lead us toward a world of shorten work hours and increased leisure. Instead, since around 1980 we have mostly gone in the opposite direction.