From: Carlos Gonzalia (gonzalia@cs.chalmers.se)
Date: Sat Sep 01 2001 - 05:11:46 MDT
>From: Charlie Stross <charlie@antipope.org>
>The social problem: a widening gap between the remuneration of the
>bosses and workers is divisive and encourages social unrest. A lot of
>people don't see how some guy sitting in an office for the 40 hours of
>the week when he isn't on the golf course can be doing something worth,
>say, a million bucks a year, when similar guys down on the shop floor
>are bending metal and producing goods for a fiftieth of that. The root
Yes... And on top of it, in situations as the current one in Argentina,
the guy in the shop floor dealing with a collapsing economy and state
is also tempted to draw a lot of nasty conclusions and act on them:
-"the government says the country is in crisis and we should all strive
hard and tighten our belts... so why is this guy getting even a raise?"
-"recession is cutting on our sales and we see our wages reduced, and
some of my friends went into unemployment... so why is the boss buying
a new luxury house?"
-"we need to pay foreign debt services, so my taxes are going up and
my wages down... but why are these guys being spared by getting even
bigger wages?"
and so on, and so forth...
I'm very much an economic ignorant, for sure... but still I can see
the point that dynamics-generating gaps, differences and the "ruthless
market" are probably essential to get wealth creation going on. What
worries me, and (stealing an old phrasing from a not too old thread in
the list) keeps me up at night is how will we convince these millions of
guys about it, given the blatant inequalities and privileges going on.
It doesn't help that these pseudo-capitalists are all the time saying
"we are the market", either.
I'm getting slowly convinced that something must be done fast to relief
the pressure, because I can easily see lots of things blowing up to let
it out, and it might take us all an awful lot of time to get to the
"bright future" if the backlash gets that worse. Might we even NOT get
to that future, if it gets really really worse? I seem to be having that
one as my recurrent nightmare lately.
Carlos
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