06-02-2016, 11:33 PM
(06-02-2016, 06:58 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(06-02-2016, 03:58 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:Your last paragraph explains why I feel that today's society could never cope with a 1930s style Great Depression. For no other reason that material expectations have shot way up since that times. It would no doubt require that many sacrifice some if not the bulk of their technology, and without that most folks under 40 especially would feel like fish out of water. But poverty is considerable more hidden than it was in earlier times, and over the past couple of decades many large cities such as Chicago have gentrified so much that in most of the city poverty is very severely hidden from most public view.(06-02-2016, 10:18 AM)Mikebert Wrote: [Galen]That spike in 1980 was the Hunt brothers trying to corner the silver market which wouldn't have happened under a gold or silver coin standard.
[Mike]Exactly. That was my point, you cannot extrapolate the value of a 1964 minimum wage of 0.96 oz silver to today using the market silver prices. You can using one of the inflation indices like the CPI. The point is, under a gold standard the ratio of the CPI and the POG is range bound with the former rising above the latter during wars and then falling back to the baseline afterward.
Even more, the economy is very different. The American economy was very different from what it is now. 52 years ago (it has been that long since the US Mint coined silver for dimes and quarters) the basis of the American economy had far more emphasis on tangible goods. If we wanted information we bought it in the form of printed material. One needs no longer buy this
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19942?ms...e_stranger
(Candide) as a dead-tree edition. Electronic representations have become much more inexpensive than paper, ink, and binding. I have not bought a public-domain book since I found Project Gutenberg a few years ago.
Figure also that electronic innovations have made some of our entertainment devices far cheaper. How cheap? A 25" diagonal TV is now rather small... but there was a time when having a 25" diagonal color TV truly impressed all but the snobs. Of course that 25" diagonal color TV may have had "French provincial" cabinetry, generally not available today. Get your own d@mn cabinet, which is still very expensive because it itself is a "dead tree edition". Encyclopaedia Britannica last published a print version set several years ago.
The early-industrial stuff like furniture, TV dinners (they are still sold, but not as such anymore because "TV" no longer impresses people), Waterford crystal, refrigerators, automobiles, stoves, and stereo speakers (the latter are not high-tech devices) have risen in price with inflation. Blank-check economics, the norm for much in American life, works as exploitatively as one would expect.
Of course raw labor has become incredibly cheap. People can live on the minimum wage, but they would have to be stuffed like sardines into decrepit trailers or apartments. Poverty is the pervasive American nightmare, and we all fear it almost as much as the Grim Reaper. Maybe even more.
Depressions bring the end to business practices and technologies at the end of their run. At times it is the recent high-flying scammers who prove themselves obsolete when they are still new (especially in the Degeneracy in which they form); at times it is venerable technologies and organizations whose time of demise comes when further infusions of capital dry up. Maybe a creditor recognizes that the land booked at 1930s prices is worth more than the store or manufacturing outlet atop it, and maybe it is best that the operation work as a going concern so that it can sell off its stuff. When it can't sell the stuff the creditor takes over, closes the firm, demolishes the decrepit operation, and redevelops it.
Get an Android ® device for about $50 and you can get Project Gutenberg, which consists of a huge assortment of public-domain books from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to Finnegan's Wake. Wi-Fi is available almost everywhere, and it does much that the mail service, the phone company, a record company, a bookseller, and the cable company used to do. If your tablet costs less than a carton of cancerettes and contains access to a nearly-unlimited library, think of all that you need not buy.
I miss being able to browse through bargain book dealers and maybe come up with a close-out or two. That is over. I haven't bought a public-domain book for a long time, and the only reason for me to do so is to have one as an objet d'art. Archaism can be beautiful.
We see the dematerialization of information.
The technology that we are losing is old technology -- books, landline phones, recorded media, and cable television -- and old ways of doing business, like shopping malls and department stores. But does it really die or does it end up at Goodwill or Salvation Army for sale cheaply to people who are willing to rely upon outdated technology like VHS tapes and records of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass?
It is possible that we are entering a high-tech version of feudalism, something in which much of the productivity goes to the ostentatious splendor of irresponsible elites? If history is really cyclical, then we might be headed back to some era in which elites could expend huge amounts of outrageously-cheap labor, maybe as liveried servants. Maybe we will find employers treating their workers as if serfs as established in Nazi Germany.
Or could we be entering a new era in which commodity fetishes die except as expressions of pathological thought?
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.