[p2p-research] US/European post-WWII experiences and social safety nets

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Paul,

thanks for that update ...

indeed a difference was that the US infrastructure was not destroyed, but
retooled by the war, and that they could use Europe's reconstruction for its
development ...

but apart from that I seem to remember that growth rates were pretty
consistent throughout most western countries, but indeed europe had to come
from more destruction and that introduced a time lag in prosperity, which
you may have witnessed in the 70's

I'm well aware of disparities in the U.S. but that is the point ... high GDP
hides big differences ... increasingly of course since the mid-eighties,
Europe has introduced the same principles and the same ills .. we now have
the same getto-isation in many european cities ...

Another differences is that perhaps the post-war period may have introduced
more nostalgia for the welfare state, have a little more progressive
undertone than in the U.S. ..

Otherwise, the structural demographics of Europe, i.e. aging and 'scared'
populations, unfortunately support a right-wing trend ... At least in the
U.S., you are still making babies and most immigrant communities seem to
have a socially progressive bent (hispanics, etc.. voted massively for
obama)

Michel

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Paul D. Fernhout <
pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:

> Michel-
>
> Wow, thanks for all the great insights. It's hard to make intelligent
> generalizations about complex societies, and even harder to make them
> between complex societies, and if that attempt at such a generalization is
> not very useful, or doesn't fit the facts, I'm glad to hear it. As I had
> written: "Here is an alternative perspective to reconcile that conflict.
> Perhaps it is too simplistic, but I'll put it down in electron patterns and
> see what people think about it."
>
> Some minor technical quibbles. Growth rate may not mean anything in
> absolute
> terms as far as a big absolute change if the starting amount was small. You
> can have 100% annual growth rate of jobs or wealth, but if you are starting
> very low, the absolute amount may be small for a long time. That's not to
> disagree with your actual point, assuming the absolute starting point was
> significant.
>  "The Golden Age of Economic Growth in Western Europe, 1950-73"
>  http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/wrkwarwec/427.htm
> Even per capita income can be a misleading indicator of prosperity, if
> people are burdened with debts to be repaid, pay high taxes to repay public
> debts or rebuild infrastructure, or in general have less possessions due to
> personal history (like after a war). But per capita incomes seem pretty
> close now (but I'm still not sure about around 1945-1955, when some basic
> social demands about wealth sharing might have been strongest):
>  "The Intangible Wealth of Nations"
>  http://www.reason.com/news/show/35008.html
> Also, percentages can also be misleading in absolute terms. The meaning of
> Belgium's 70% of exports in terms of per-capita income depends on the
> absolute amount of the exports and the number of people in the country. 70%
> of a small amount with a lot of people could still be a very tiny income.
> Again, that is not to disagree with your actual point, because the actual
> per capita incomes are close enough even back to 1970.
>  "Gross national income per capita"
>  http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/spreadsheet/1004853
>
> On your experiences in the USA. The USA is a very diverse place, especially
> because of an increasing rich-poor divide. Many US Americans just avoid
> those desolate and run down areas you mention, given the ability and the
> knowledge. I had a friend in Philadelphia (an architect) who loved that
> city
> (a wonderful city) and had lived there a lifetime, but thought then (late
> 1980s) it was suddenly getting socially colder (maybe from a growing drug
> trade and rising fear). Although one can also ask why the demand for
> escapist drugs was growing; I've said elsewhere the USSR put guards at the
> border to prevent people escaping while the US puts guards on the medicine
> cabinets. You're very right that such scary places exist; maybe we in the
> USA have grown used to them. In general, growing up in a suburb of NYC (in
> a
> biased group of ex-NYC residents who fled that city), I am surprised when a
> US urban area is *not* poor and run down (though there are many). Still, it
> can be hard to assess how functional a community is by the architecture;
> new
> ideas and socially-minded people often need cheap rents. One thing that
> surprised me to notice about Long Island is to learn how often in suburban
> zones, a very poor area was often right next to a very expensive area like
> Wyandanch and Dix Hills (the expensive area presumably drawing labor from
> the poor area, as sort of a historic codependance).
>
> With the rise of gated communities, it's clear even the affluent in the USA
> are getting more scared of the system they have created and supported;
> however, even gates to keep poor people out who are not employees can't
> stop
> internal community dysfunctions. Example:
> "The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are
> Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids"
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Price-Privilege-Advantage-Generation-Disconnected/dp/0060595841
> "A practicing psychologist in Marin County, Calif., Levine counsels
> troubled
> teens from affluent families, and finds it paradoxical that wealth—which
> can
> open the door to travel and other enriching opportunities—can produce such
> depressed, anxious, angry and bored teenagers. After comparing notes with
> colleagues, she concluded that consumerism too often substitutes for the
> sorts of struggles that produce thoughtful, happy people."
>
> Still, that issue may suggest why people with smaller houses but spending
> money in different ways (or even, not spending any money at all) may be
> happier. :-) So, I still suspect there is more to happiness in Europe even
> with somewhat less material goods than is obvious. More on that book:
>
> http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2005/03/are_rich_kids_more_troubled_th.php
>
> There is also widespread "nature deficit disorder" in the USA,
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_deficit_disorder
> which is ironic given how much empty rural land there is. My relatives in
> the Netherlands is cities may have somewhat more direct contact with
> nature,
> both from nearby nature corridors and from on longer vacations, than some
> relatives in US suburbs seem to have.
>
> I'll certainly agree current unemployment figures in the USA are higher
> than
> reported. And personally, I feel for structural reasons (including
> automation) that most of those jobs lost are not coming back. People may be
> lucky to get the burger jobs you mentioned, which was back when the minimum
> wage still meant something. From:
> "Flipper the burger robot gets ready to take orders"
> http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4156/is_20000604/ai_n13949888/
> "The company's rep was making no bones about Flipper's advantages at the
> trade show: "No insurance, no taxes, no training, no holidays, no
> back-talk,
> no-oo problem!" she trilled. "The robot's time has come"."
>
> Anyway, while then anything in relation to Europe I said may be wrong, I'd
> still wonder if nostalgia for the 1950-1970 period of lots of economic
> growth in the USA is still driving part of the US conservative movement's
> ideology today? One thing I'm trying to get at here is to figure out what
> is
> a historic example of what pro-market advocates imagine is a prototypical
> example of a market economy performing well for most people in it, and then
> to look at whether it is a special case. Anyone have better examples of
> times conservatives claim are good decades for markets and broad
> prosperity?
>
> Thanks again for the informative rebuttal.
>
> By the way, on what your parents did with coal, you might like this
> children's book: :-)
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Railway_Children
>
> --Paul Fernhout
> http://www.pdfernhout.net/
>
> Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
>> Hi Paul,
>>
>> I finally find an area to disagree with you ....
>>
>> First the timing ... the high growth era of Europe coincides with the U.S.
>> and it the opposite of what you say ...  The fifties and sixties were the
>> fast growth periods, and it started slowing down in the mid-seventies,
>> just
>> as in the U.S. ... where working class incomes have stagnated since that
>> time, only compensated by dual working .. (same in Europe)
>>
>> Regarding unions and such, they were much stronger in Europe, before and
>> after the war, and the welfare state was a recognition of that strength
>> ...
>> Yes, Dutch houses and cars were smaller, but Europe at that time also
>> liked
>> the serious social problems that were evident in the U.S. at that time,
>> such
>> as ghetto-ized cities, high crime rates etc... These elements started
>> growing in Europe mostly after the neoliberal period and the unravelling
>> of
>> the welfare state. That distribution is not the result of lack of growth,
>> but the condition of growth, and a social choice, it's just a different
>> choice of lifestyles.
>>
>> I want to give you an another example. If you go to Japan today, it has
>> the
>> highest wages in the world, yet everything is still small ... It does not
>> mean 'less wealth' but different choices, for example regarding
>> distribution
>> ...
>>
>> I think the immigration in the U.S. is largely the effect of the
>> devastation
>> of WWII, despite high growth, it took time to affect everybody, and so you
>> have a window of european emigration to the U.S. which rapidly trickled
>> down.
>>
>> Where I think you also wrong on is the role of the military .. Far from
>> being a handicap, the no-military was a boon to Europe, which was export
>> oriented from the mid-fifties onwards, there again, no difference with the
>> U.S., in fact, we are much more export oriented than the U.S. (70% of the
>> economy of Belgium for example)
>>
>> So that the welfare system is the result of desperation from the 'wide
>> gulf'
>> with the U.S. ... really Paul, that is really very U.S. centric,
>> understandable given where you live and the propaganda about America being
>> the greatest and all, but seriously, it is totally offbase ... The higher
>> average of GDP in the U.S. hides many realities, look at all the
>> indicators
>> in terms of health, happiness etc.. and look where the U.S. stand in the
>> rankings .. usually way below the European countries ... (of course,
>> Scandinavia always on top .. and people in Scandinavia have neither big
>> cars
>> nor big villas as recent visits to norway, denmark and sweden confirmed)
>>
>> Europe since the fifties was growing incredibly fast, based on a solid
>> social-democratic social contract, that increased productivity would be
>> rewarded by higher wages. My parents, both orphans and 'not even working
>> class', are testimony to that rapid ascension, from stealing coal between
>> the railway beds and looking for money on the street, they were able to
>> buy
>> a house (with government subsidies) from the early sixties on, sending me
>> to
>> the uni etc.. None of them had more than primary school diplomas ...
>>
>> If that social contract had been followed, the minimum wage in the U.S.
>> would now be $30, as has recently been calculated ...
>>
>> You see, here's a biased european perspective .. I went to the U.S, New
>> Jersey in 1977 .. and what I saw was a overall much poorer U.S.A than what
>> I
>> was accustomed too in Belgium ... what I saw in nearby Camden and
>> Philadelphia was nearly unbelievable to me .. what a decay ... it was
>> barely
>> compensated by the suburbs of New Jersey where I lived. I took my my wife,
>> who dreamed about the U.S., there in 2002, visting the Washington- New
>>  York
>> corridor ...
>>
>> Her first shock came from being bitten by betbugs in a hotel on 42nd
>> street
>> ... bad luck ... it took her 3 years to get rid of the marks ... As we
>> went
>> down to new jersey, I wanted to visit Mount Holly where I went to school
>> ...
>> a shocker, the main street was boarded, a real wasteland ... then we got
>> lost in Philly suburbs ... she was so stressed by what she saw she drove
>> her
>> nails into my hand ... (until blood came out <g>) ... then on to Lancaster
>> county ... dirt in the streets, drunken people everywhere ... thank God
>> for
>> the Amish ..  that was the saving grace ..
>>
>> Need I tell you the story of her discovery of the DC suburbs, where infant
>> mortality is greater than in Mali (and of course, Cuba) ... We went on to
>> the Virginia suburbs .. nice indeed, but also very socially isolated lives
>> ..
>>
>> A little remark about unemployment figures ...  According to experts like
>> Dean Baker, they are undercounted by half in the U.S. ... (and so they are
>> now in Europe as well, they started massively cheating on those numbers
>> starting in the mid-eighties). There might be somewhat more unemployment
>> in
>> Europe, but I don't really think it's that big a difference ...
>>
>> Here's the work I got in 1977 at Wendy's ... clocking in at 7 work to
>> 9:30,
>> clocking out; clocking at 11, clocking out at 3; clocking in  at 5 ...
>> clocking out at 10 .. So, a working day of  14 hours, for which I got paid
>> half at the minimum wage level ... there's ton of those jobs out there ...
>> it's not much better than putting people in elevators in the soviet union,
>>
>> Michel
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 10:43 PM, Paul D. Fernhout <
>> pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>>
>>  I'd always believed (given two Dutch parents, and having visited the
>>> Netherlands several times) that Western Europe overall having a better
>>> social safety net than the USA (more health benefits, more social
>>> payments,
>>> more free education, more public institutions, etc. in general) was
>>> somehow
>>> due to Western Europeans being smarter, more compassionate, more
>>> enlightened, wiser, better educated, having more democratic politics, or
>>> something like that. :-) That feeling has always been a bit at odds with
>>> the
>>> idea a lot of poor but ambitious (or desperate) Western Europeans moved
>>> to
>>> the USA in the past to get a better life (including my parents) --
>>> especially given historically stricter social hierarchies and less
>>> changeable class definitions in Western Europe. How can they both be
>>> true?
>>>
>>> Here is an alternative perspective to reconcile that conflict. Perhaps it
>>> is
>>> too simplistic, but I'll put it down in electron patterns and see what
>>> people think about it. (Maybe I still have the taste of Brink Lindsey's
>>> "The
>>> Age of Abundance" of the Cato Institute in my mind, which I am indirectly
>>> trying to get rebut. :-)
>>>
>>> After WWII, around 1945, with the rest of the world's industrial
>>> manufacturing infrastructure in ruins, the mostly-untouched USA was the
>>> dominant economic producer in the globe, with huge export market
>>> potential.
>>> Also, no other country able in a position to produce for US internal
>>> markets
>>> (beyond supplying raw materials). That was an extremely advantageous
>>> situation for many US workers compared to most other workers in the rest
>>> of
>>> the world (then or now). It was a situation that lasted at least into the
>>> 1970s in a big way, and aspects of that advantage still remain today
>>> (even
>>> with parts of the USA in crisis currently).
>>>
>>> So, the USA had a lot of internal demand for workers for market
>>> production,
>>> relative to other industrial economies without such advantages. With so
>>> much
>>> competition for workers, US companies gave generous benefits and salaries
>>> to
>>> many workers due to supply and demand issues. The demand for workers was
>>> so
>>> large that it seemed to even make sense for all parents to work and put
>>> their kids in institutionalized daycare and for women to joint the
>>> workforce
>>> in huge numbers and leave all other social functions like caring for the
>>> elderly to business concerns. Even deciding how to vote could be given
>>> over
>>> to business interests, like newspapers, with workers so busy making good
>>> money. It also made sense to import a lot of workers into the USA
>>> (illegally, if needed). It made sense to let private fortunes build
>>> public
>>> resources (whether universities or libraries or copyrights or patents on
>>> new
>>> ideas). Despite earlier labor union sentiments from earlier unionization
>>> victories, this increasing jobs-based prosperity resulted in a growing
>>> widespread propertarian-libertarian sentiment across the USA that the
>>> free
>>> market provides for most people (if they are able-bodied and not "lazy"),
>>> and private charity would help the rest. And, within the USA, that
>>> sentiment
>>> really did made sense for a couple of decades in many ways. That economic
>>> prosperity from 1950-1970 has been the basis for lots of conservative
>>> media
>>> and economics ever since as a dominant sentiment in the USA, not just
>>> among
>>> the wealthy, but among people who materially benefited from these trends
>>> historically.
>>>
>>> Obvious to a modern reader, that conservative sentiment ignores long term
>>> issue now obvious like the social effects of child-rearing being
>>> institutionalized, the external costs of an unregulated free market like
>>> pollution, the hidden suffering of the poor, the effects of a neglected
>>> and
>>> decaying public infrastructure like railways, the socially corrosive
>>> effects
>>> of a military-industrial-schooling-prison complex and a huge rich-poor
>>> divide, the effects on the rest of the world of US industrial-imperial
>>> policies, the implications of advertising persuading voters, and so on.
>>> These are all non-obvious long term problems the USA is now having to
>>> wrestle with, but which were not so obvious in the 1950s.
>>>
>>> In contrast with the prosperous post-war USA my parents move to, Western
>>> Europe for decades after WWII had less ability to create good jobs. This
>>> was
>>> due to a damaged physical infrastructure in part. But it was also due to
>>> the
>>> comparative advantage the USA had to sell stuff cheaper (more paid-for
>>> infrastructure, economies of scale, more military might to keep markets
>>> open
>>> and keep supply regions supplying stuff cheaply). Western Europe might
>>> have
>>> created jobs, but they did not pay as well, and in general Western
>>> European
>>> workers were materially poorer as individuals. (I saw that first hand in
>>> a
>>> trip to the Netherlands in the 1970s with smaller cars, smaller houses,
>>> and
>>> so on, even as socially people there seemed to have more fun.)
>>>
>>> So, within the USA, there appeared to be not much need for most people to
>>> think about unions or social equity, because until at least the 1970s,
>>> the
>>> link between having a job and the right to consume worked well enough for
>>> most people in the USA. But, in Western Europe it was a different
>>> situation.
>>> Western Europeans were confronted with high quality cheap exports
>>> flooding
>>> in from the USA; they were confronted with an inability to create new
>>> markets abroad easily due to a reduced military; they were confronted
>>> with
>>> an inability to keep supply colonies by lack of military might; they were
>>> confronted by an obvious wealth disparity with people in the USA; they
>>> were
>>> confronted with lingering uncertainty about war and destruction, they
>>> were
>>> confronted with new technologies like automation and better design
>>> spewing
>>> out of US American private laboratories that were responding to a US
>>> labor
>>> shortage. So, out of desperation, Western Europeans demanded of their
>>> governments that what little wealth that there was in Western European
>>> society should be shared more equally, and that some of the wealth should
>>> go
>>> into building shared public institutions that would be good communal
>>> investments (getting the most public value for the least dollars compared
>>> to
>>> redundant private ownership of books or art or music). And Western
>>> Europeans
>>> got it -- whether limits on working hours in France, or socialized
>>> medicine
>>> in the UK, or government controls on land speculation in the Netherlands.
>>>
>>> Since Western Europe was rebuilding after a terrible war, these ideas got
>>> built into the very infrastructure, both socially (laws, customs, norms)
>>> and
>>> physically (museums, libraries, public roadways and railways, affordable
>>> urban housing, parks, and so on). After the 1970s, Western Europe had
>>> started to grow again significantly, and so produced more locally, and so
>>> could once again defend internal markets against US imports, and so could
>>> start dominating external markets and supply regions again, But, oven
>>> then,
>>> aspects of this communal social sentiment remained that wealth should be
>>> shared to some degree and invested in public endeavors for broad
>>> benefits.
>>>
>>> So, while Western Europe has continued to enjoy some more equitable
>>> wealth
>>> distribution since the 1970s as well as a social safety net, in the USA
>>> real
>>> wages for most workers have remained about the same while the rich get
>>> richer and the social safety net frayed from lack of attention (prison in
>>> the USA becoming the main social safety net). And the US citizens find
>>> the
>>> whole thing totally confusing, of course, since nothing inside the USA
>>> seemed to change much economically. Globalization (offshoring US jobs in
>>> manufacturing and services, seen from a purely US worker perspective :-)
>>> in
>>> that sense has been happening to the USA for forty years, even as the
>>> trend
>>> has accelerated in the last ten with the internet. This may be a great
>>> idea
>>> for the rest of the world, but it is tough on US workers who built much
>>> of
>>> their prosperity on relative global advantage. So, the US sees stagnant
>>> (now
>>> falling) real wages as well as increasing unemployment.
>>>
>>> Today, with improved design, increasing automation including robotics and
>>> AI, these trends towards less employment or lower wages will affect the
>>> entire world eventually. It may still takes a decade or two for the rest
>>> of
>>> the world to produce locally for pent-up demand though. But unemployment
>>> issues are already leading to riots in places like Greece by educated
>>> people
>>> in the 20s, given  people in Western Europe may have higher expectations
>>> about social equity, whereas more US Americans will just sit around
>>> bewildered, since everything worked so well for so long, and workers were
>>> promised a service economy to make up for all the jobs lost in
>>> agriculture
>>> and manufacturing. But the world only needs so many local nail salons.
>>>
>>> And in the rest of the world, the poor see some local growth, so they
>>> expect
>>> that trend to continue, unaware of this equation:
>>> "Paid_Jobs = (Demand - (Stockpiled_Supply - War)) / (Automation *
>>> Good_Design)"
>>>
>>> But even *China* is spending a lot of money working towards artificial
>>> brains:
>>>  "The China-Brain Project Building China’s Artificial Brain Using an
>>> Evolved Neural Net Module Approach "
>>>  http://www.citeulike.org/user/hukkinen/article/4621176
>>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_de_Garis
>>>
>>> From that (oversimplified?) history, it would seem Western Europe may
>>> respond very differently than the USA to the crisis of increasing
>>> abundance.
>>> I saw that when I had a French roommate in graduate school at Princeton
>>> in
>>> the 1980s. We were talking technology and economics, and I asked, what
>>> would
>>> happen if one person made a big machine that could produce anything for
>>> really cheap. (I had read an RA Lafferty story "In Our Block" about a
>>> related theme, of a block of a city with visitors who essentially had
>>> nanotech and could print huge metal pipes or cardboard boxes in tiny
>>> sheds
>>> as they were being loaded onto the truck, with very cheap prices for
>>> anything you wanted.)
>>>  http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com/RAL/MT/arcanum.html
>>>
>>> My French roommate said essentially that the owner of such a machine
>>> would
>>> just be taxed, so everyone could buy what was produced. I disagreed from
>>> a
>>> US perspective, suggesting the owner letting everyone starve as the
>>> economy
>>> crashed seemed more likely to me than. I see now, he was coming at this
>>> from
>>> a Western European perspective of recent history he had grown up in -- in
>>> practice, that is what he saw, the huge machinery of a market coming to
>>> life
>>> as it rebooted after WWII, and taxes and other social regulations made
>>> that
>>> market work for everybody, even given difficulties from US competition.
>>>
>>> Ultimately, as long as we have markets and centralized wealth, some sort
>>> of
>>> tax (on income or wealth or both) and other social controls is needed to
>>> make such a system producing cheap abundance work for most people. As one
>>> person pointed out recently on Slashdot, why is it that the USA in many
>>> ways
>>> had the most general abundance (and hope) when the marginal tax rate on
>>> the
>>> highest incomes was 94%?
>>>  http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php
>>>
>>> But, higher taxes are the opposite of current US sentiment as reflected
>>> in
>>> US politics. This is in part a conflict between aspirational millionaire
>>> wannabees versus people's actual interests (as brought up on the p2p list
>>> by
>>> me recently, using terminology from Michel's reply).
>>>
>>> Still, even if the USA gets a better social safety net or a basic income,
>>> the more abundance people have, the more they can use that abundance to
>>> do
>>> local manufacturing outside the market with 3D printers, local gardens,
>>> and
>>> so on. So in the long term, we will see even more upheavals even with
>>> high
>>> taxes and a basic income or health-care-for-all in the USA (which seems
>>> to
>>> be going down in flames again).
>>>
>>> Naturally, politics, economics, demographics, and history are more
>>> complex
>>> than this. I'm just seeing how much explanatory power and predictive
>>> power
>>> I
>>> can get from this one theme of different responses to post-WWII
>>> situations
>>> of the USA vs. Western Europe. :-)
>>>
>>> Is this the kind of thing that is obvious to a Western European but has
>>> taken decades for a US American to see? :-)
>>>
>>> Still, this may well not fit all the facts, so people can feel free to
>>> disagree with citing unemployment figures and so on (although it is hard
>>> to
>>> judge just from unemployment figures aspects about wages or the nature of
>>> the workplace). There were certainly other compounding issues -- a lot of
>>> young men dead, especially in Europe, which meant more jobs per capita
>>> for
>>> everyone else, lower expectations for jobs and living conditions in
>>> Europe
>>> after the war, and so on. There are historical issues too, like in the
>>> Netherlands about religion and capitalism going back centuries that I am
>>> ignoring. Those facts and many others would complicate thinking about
>>> European unemployment figures (which are surprisingly low at some times).
>>> After a burst of rebuilding, Europeans struggled more with unemployment
>>> at
>>> various times, but got it under control, even if it is going up again.
>>> Clearly, European unemployment generally was brought down in the 1960s.
>>> Still, I'd suggest that, had European women moved into the full-time
>>> workforce in huge numbers like in the USA (most Dutch women don't work
>>> full-time when they have young kids), and had there been lots of
>>> immigration
>>> like in the USA, and had working hours not been limited like in France,
>>> then
>>> European unemployment would have soared much higher. European
>>> unemployment
>>> was contained, but only by social controls (or norms, like parents taking
>>> care of their own kids) that were different than in the USA. So,
>>> different
>>> economies can be hard to compare, especially, when, as in the case of
>>> Western Europe, there has been social pushback to the worst aspects of
>>> them.
>>>
>>> Maybe my essay here should be extended to be more about social forces
>>> affecting unemployment (even when unemployment number are low)? For
>>> example,
>>> in the USA, everyone being expected to go to college has helped keep
>>> unemployment lower (creating jobs for professors and keeping people out
>>> of
>>> the labor pool). In theory, cradle-to-grave schooling could absorb any
>>> amount of excess workers (a trend we see all too much of in the USA
>>> already). So, at some point, we need to talk more about living conditions
>>> than about unemployment figures. Or, to quote John Taylor Gatto who often
>>> talks about how schooling is interwoven with economic assumptions:
>>>  http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
>>> "Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an
>>> abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First
>>> you
>>> have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system;
>>> in
>>> systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system
>>> needs;
>>> the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep,
>>> live,
>>> and die there."
>>>
>>> Even the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the face of pressure by a USA
>>> with
>>> all those relative advantages in the global market, takes on a new twist,
>>> leading to questions like, if the USA lasted a bit longer than the USSR,
>>> does that really prove anything about economics or the sustainability of
>>> a
>>> market approach that relies on captive markets and captive supply
>>> regions?
>>>
>>> In general, what I am suggesting is that most of mainstream economics one
>>> hears about in the papers is about a very special case, the situation of
>>> the
>>> first few decades of a global economy rebooting after a huge war, as seen
>>> from the perspective of the main untouched industrialized survivor of a
>>> global conflict. And so, when the rest of the world looks to mainstream
>>> economists for advice (as opposed to, say, looking to advocates of peer
>>> economies or gift economies or a basic income in a market-economy), the
>>> mainstream economic advice is going to be a very rough fit. EF Schumacher
>>> saw an aspect of this in the 1970s with Small is Beautiful. Aspects of
>>> mainstream economics will be true (since the market can produce wealth,
>>> ignoring external costs and long term erosion of natural capital) but
>>> other
>>> aspects of the market, like how the wealth gets distributed, are likely
>>> to
>>> be very wrong (even if they worked OK sometimes like in post-WWII USA).
>>> Essentially, pointing to strong growth in 1950-1970 in the USA as an
>>> example
>>> of mainstream markets working well (as Brink Lindsey does), and
>>> suggesting
>>> how everything before or since then anywhere else in the world is a
>>> special
>>> case, or the consequence of bad policy interfering with markets, is a
>>> weak
>>> theoretical position. :-)
>>>
>>> One might call that last statement a strawman argument, of course, given
>>> mainstream economics has more nuance than that (and Brink Lindsey does
>>> not
>>> talk much about the rest of history or the globe, he just ignores that).
>>> I'm
>>> sure that statement is too broad.
>>>
>>> But, I'd still suggest, that small historical window of the USA 1950-1970
>>> is
>>> at the core of celebrating markets in the modern age, especially as other
>>> countries have tried to emulate the USA's success in that period by those
>>> same methods and failed (given much of the reason the USA succeeded was
>>> relative advantage). They have found it difficult to make much economic
>>> progress at all without all the sorts of social controls. These are the
>>> social controls that many people in the USA decry because, based on
>>> historical experience in the USA, such controls appeared to be not needed
>>> for a time and can have specific negative effects on the functioning of
>>> markets (limiting productivity sometimes, even as most people might be
>>> better off because they get a bigger share of a smaller pie). That time
>>> period is, I'd suggest, an experience at the heart of the US Conservative
>>> movement -- that if only we could get the USA socially back to the 1950s,
>>> everything would be good again (for white males with jobs). But I'd
>>> suggest,
>>> with increasing automation and better design, with the internet making
>>> more
>>> effective peer production and a gift economy, things will never be the
>>> same
>>> as the 1950s again (short of another global war, which would likely be
>>> much
>>> worse than WWII given the power of post-scarcity weapons these days).
>>>
>>> So, while all countries can learn from each other, the USA may do better
>>> to
>>> look at other countries for models of dealing with abundance and
>>> unemployment than other countries may do looking to duplicate the USA's
>>> recent history. And in any case, advancing technology changes the
>>> landscape
>>> for everyone.
>>>
>>> --Paul Fernhout
>>> http://www.pdfernhout.net/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> p2presearch mailing list
>>> p2presearch at listcultures.org
>>> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>



-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090730/1d7020f2/attachment-0001.html>