Why Crisis Will Never End (I Felt Creative Today)
§1. The flaw is by design, folks: the technological advances (and the moving of the production in countries with cheap labor and no rights for the employees) makes it necessary for the economic growth to be continuously accelerated, otherwise huge unemployment would happen. The problem is, the kind of economic growth the capitalist paradigm needs is definitely unsustainable…
§2. For people in the Asian (or South-American) countries who benefit from the foreign investments in production facilities, the globalization seems to be a good thing. For once, their wages are increasing, and some of them can have the feeling of being part of a “middle class”. However… prices are increasing too, specifically because more people can afford to buy more. This is catastrophic for the other ~80% of the local population whose wages have not increased. In the long run, this is catastrophic even for those “new middle-classers” when they lose their jobs: they can’t survive with the same amount of money they could have lived years ago, because the prices are not anymore at the same level, and they can’t live from the agricultural activities as they did before! This is what happens when the development is not natural — and it’s wasn’t natural for China and India…
§3. As for the Western civilization, the mere fact that people at the other end of the world can work 16 hours a day for a fraction of what a Westerner receives as a payment only means that most of the social gains that took place since 1848 are about to be lost. Preserving long holidays, short workweeks (40 hours or less) and all the usual benefits makes a Westerner too expensive as compared to an employee from Asia or South America. So we have to choose between unemployment and a historical regression — modern slavery, actually.
§4. Even if we like to believe we’re living in a society of information and abstract services, value can’t be created out of nothing. Added value does not result from the stock markets, nor from the innovative “financial schemes”. To quote the end of an article:
We need to understand that actually making things is what drives an economy. America became an economic powerhouse because we made things here. China is an economic powerhouse because they make things there.
How could the “developed countries” live only from “services” — and what services? IT and financial, or pizza and haircuts? —, when the actual production of goods happens in other countries? How can they reach a balance, what can they export to compensate the huge imports of goods? We’re heading the disaster!
§5. These short statements only reflected the obvious. However, how come that all those Nobel-prized fucking economists can’t see the obvious?
Now, how could I apply for a Nobel prize when can I cash my Nobel in Macroeconomics?
Jul 29, 2009 at 13:45
Real value added comes from production, I think this is what you're actually saying, and this is a general truth, that as a statement was I believe put in few words by Marx himself.
No production in a society means no value. What you don't do you don't see, what you don't see you can't conserve, and there goes progress. There's no progress in doing nothing. Spinning money didn't help progress. Gimmicks and gizmos are no progress.
What we are living now is a consequence of greed. Everybody, and that includes the shameless economists that received the Nobel proze and had the cheekiness not to decline it, everybody knew where US was heading and why, everybody knew what was coming for a number of decades now, and they were grabbing advantages without caring for the consequences.
This society is not healed, as you can see in recent events they are only hiding the garbage from direct sight with their strategies, so we're bound to repeat the experience and go lower and lower until we understand that unless we do things, we don't have anything. Fancy cars and overpriced houses never solved long term problems. Let's see how the spinning money will feed us in the next couple of years…
Aug 27, 2009 at 21:09
Here's a little article on economy and production, in romanian:
http://www.gab.ro/2009/05/cresterea-economica/
Aug 27, 2009 at 21:18
Corect, dar unde este interpretarea politico-ideologică a problemei?