(11-18-2018, 11:58 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: It is hard associating productivity with one particular age boundary. You can go back to the tractor and it's lightening of farm labor required and the associated migration to the cities and factories of the Gilded Age. The productivity question has been with us for a long while. It is just that we have to keep adjusting working hours to how much work to be done. The New Deal got it pretty much right in its time, but the numbers have not changed since. The technology has.
Technology as enhancements of productivity can force change in economic relationships. The tractor? The Big One was the mechanical reaper that could replace the toil of several men. That was still horse-drawn. Farmers before a certain time typically had large families just to do the farm work. After McCormick's reaper they could do farming without so many of their own kids. Children got consigned to farm labor later, so they got more schooling, that itself contributing to greater productivity. More young men found their way into industrial labor.
More productivity means more stuff -- and it also means that what stuff is produced becomes less precious. So does the labor that produces such stuff. Treat Marx as an anathema if you wish, but a capitalist order keeps requiring new technologies to prevent the rot that comes from stasis. Capitalism always seems to need one more miracle to defeat the inevitable reduction of the rate of return on capital.
Quote:I do see changing technology as driving the cycles. If nothing else, new elites have new wealth and a need to weaken the old elites to optimize their own profits. The civilizations that win are aligned with the people who have the wealth. The new elites make promises to the People in exchange for power. The new structure has political power adapting to the source of wealth.
That is where democracy comes in. Capitalism without democracy implies the further debasement of workers. Government accountable to the People serves as a check, if imperfect, upon the cruelty and greed of economic elites. Where capitalism exists without democracy, elites take everything possible for themselves, and life gets miserable, verging on the desperate and precarious even in good times. Shake the political system with a crop failure or with military catastrophes, and a proletarian revolution is possible. If the elites decide to repress the revolution they turn to fascism that only intensifies the inequality and suffering... and probably makes a military disaster more likely.
Although the American economic elite (consisting of capitalists, heirs, executives, executives, political operatives, and successful mobsters) are not uniformly cruel, corrupt, and rapacious, seeing the role of all other people solely as people whose destiny it is to make people already filthy rich even more filthy rich, enough are that something must rein them in.
I am not convinced that people are better because they are in a 'new' form of wealth-creation than in an 'old' one.
Quote:Once upon a time, the Robber Barons were a progressive force, removing political power from the hereditary landowners, the nobility, freeing slaves, giving power to the legislative branches, away from the kings. With the submergence of the nobility around the US Civil War and the world wars, they became the dominant and conservative force. They have long since reached the point where they have rigged the system to favor them, where they own the imbalance of wealth.
Those who have class privilege rarely recognize its injustice.
Quote:Democracy favors the workers, however. It is a matter of the workers waking up. We are going to need every dollar to create a sustainable future. We will no longer be able to afford absurd wealth vanishing to the hands of a few.
...especially when the elites demand wealth and power with neither responsibility nor accountability.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.