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Why Are We Still Working?

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https://newmatilda.com/2016/01/07/why-are-we-still-working/

By Mike Dowson on

January 7, 2016 Why Are We Still Working?

No seriously, why are we still working? Mike Dowson explains in simple terms the great con that keeps you chained to the wheel.

This may be an opportune moment to consider the question. Especially if you’re not actually working.

You may have retired. Perhaps you’ve just left university, considering your options. Perhaps you’re taking a welcome break.

Maybe you have no choice but to take a break. Did you retire early because your job was axed? Has the casual work you depend on dried up? Have you been unable to find a job, despite your qualifications?

Perhaps, as you read this, you’re at work, filling in time, forgoing a holiday. Or at the beach, while the kids play in the surf, watching for emails on your phone.

Of course, it’s obvious why we work. Money. You don’t get something for nothing. And everything is so expensive these days.

If anything, most of us need to work more. Both spouses, extra hours, second jobs. Would anyone, except an idiot, seriously suggest we should all be working less?

Well, actually, yes.

As long ago as 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by now, people in technologically advanced societies wouldn’t need to work much at all. When Keynes said this, advances in technology were yielding extraordinary increases in productivity. The implications seemed obvious. If it took less time to produce what we needed, surely we’d work less.

It turns out that for much of the 20th Century average working hours in developed countries steadily fell. Then, around the 1970s, the trend plateaued. In some countries, it reversed and working hours began to climb again. This occurred at the same time women were entering the workforce in great numbers so total workforce participation also increased.

In Australia, by the new millennium, many full time employees were working more than their grandparents had.

What happened? Did technology fail to deliver the gains Keynes expected?

On the contrary. Technological advancement outstripped even the giddy imaginations of futurists from a century ago. We can grow food, dig up minerals, make fridges and bridges, move things and ourselves around the planet and share knowledge and information much faster with a fraction of the workforce it once took.

But if staggering productivity gains haven’t manifested as lower working hours, where did they go?

Some prominent economists, including some Nobel laureates, have grappled with this question.

Gary Becker observed that our appetite for material goods has expanded along with our ability to produce them. Instead of working less hours, we opted for bigger houses with more gadgets, which we replace more often.

This process has been fuelled by a deluge of marketing, which persuades us to consume things we previously didn’t recognise a need for.

Does that explain it? Anthropologist David Graeber doesn’t think so. If it continually takes fewer human hours to produce these things, shouldn’t we be able to afford them without working more? What are all these working hours producing?

Graeber argues that, although productive jobs have, in fact, been steadily automated away just as predicted, we have also seen a vast proliferation of new jobs that only seem to exist to keep people working.

Consider this. Productivity growth has stalled in Australia. How can this be? Technology hasn’t stopped advancing. The time we should be winning back through productivity gains must be getting reabsorbed.

Productivity returns are highest in capital-intensive industries like mining and manufacturing. As those jobs disappear, either replaced by technology, or lost altogether, the workforce moves into labour-intensive industries like hospitality and professional services. This dilutes the gains in the other industries.

At the same time, unemployment has been trending up since 2008. Young people especially, are out of work. The number of underemployed people, who would work more if they could, is also high. More jobs are casual.

There’s a downward trend in job prospects for new graduates. Some of them settle for part-time work or a free internship. Many find work which is unrelated to primary qualification. That’s now more likely to be in a job without benefits, or multiple such jobs.

There’s another factor. Our lives are now longer relative to our working lives. We tend to start full-time work later, after years of study, and more of life is spent in retirement. Many jobless older people are struggling with the cost of living. Many would work more if they could.

Instead of everyone working less, what seems to be happening is that experienced workers, in professions which are still in demand, are working more, while the young, the old, and those with skills which no longer attract investment have difficulty finding work.

MIT academics Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson refer to this as the great decoupling. For many years, real GDP per capita and median income rose in tandem. Since the 1970s, wages as a percentage of GDP have fallen dramatically, while corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are now at their highest level, despite recurring economic shocks.

To put it simply, labour isn’t as important to growth as it used to be.

There is nothing in the economic outlook or current government policy settings which suggests this trend is going to change.

Automation, artificial intelligence and robotics are encroaching on more human occupations. The Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) has estimated that as many as 40 per cent of the jobs that are left are vulnerable to replacement by technology over the next decade.

No matter how many politicians chant the jobs mantra for the media, more productive jobs are going to disappear.

The terrible irony in this situation is that there is so much that needs to be done.

Among the underemployed graduates I personally know of, there is a psychologist, a soil chemist and a biodiversity specialist. Have we run out of things to do in the areas of mental health, agriculture and the environment?

Mental illness is widespread. Our food bowl is under threat from climate change. We have a mass extinction on our hands.

What we don’t have, apparently, is sufficient money to invest in making full use of the talent that is available to face these challenges.

Why? What failure of collective enterprise could result in this absurd incongruity?

Capital, like technology, is largely blind to human need. Capital goes where the profit is. If there was profit in healing minds and saving species, some of it would go there. While there is more profit in alcohol, gambling and deforestation, more of it will go there.

People don’t register their desire for a healthy society by shopping for it. Capital doesn’t get that signal through the market. The argument that consumers somehow direct the course of civilisation by choosing dolphin-friendly tuna and “eco” cleaning products is stupid and facile. The factors that most affect our destiny are not options in the supermarket.

If a healthy society is something we want, we have to act collectively. Since few people are active major shareholders, for the time being that task tends to fall to governments.

Whether enacted via direct spending, or by creating incentives for private investment, government initiatives are funded from collective surplus – in other words, tax revenue or borrowing against future earnings increases. Despite political spin to the contrary, our tax is low compared to the OECD as a proportion of GDP.

The great decoupling has coincided with rising inequality. Those with money to invest get rich. Those with only labour to sell miss out. Capital doesn’t like to pay for labour, and it doesn’t like to pay tax either.

But why, if our labour isn’t needed for profit, are we still working?

Faced with a looming crisis in social services, but committed ideologically to low taxation, successive Australian governments used tax concessions to turn superannuation and real estate – where most Australians keep their wealth – into a mini-capitalist alternative to social security.

Of course, this only works while people have jobs that provide super and sufficient income to buy housing. And it doesn’t help the real economy, the place where we apply technological innovation to produce things of real value, especially things we can export.

Nevertheless, one group of people enriched themselves through property investment, pushing up the value of real estate around the country in the process. Another group of people became affluent with nothing more than a job that paid super and a home in a good location.

With commodity revenue pouring in from overseas, it was easy to believe we had discovered some kind of magic prosperity formula. But the surplus generated from commodities mostly wasn’t invested back into productive activity. Instead it was turned into tax cuts and other benefits. These had broad electoral appeal but favoured the wealthy, and encouraged further speculation.

The real estate boom didn’t make the country richer. Nor did it make housing more accessible. It simply transferred wealth from one group of people to another. In the process, it put a basic need out of reach of many, including young people, and diverted investment from the productive economy. It also lured a huge number of Australians into precarious debt.

Contrary to popular opinion, encouraged by unscrupulous politics, we have relatively low government debt, but we now have the largest per capita private debt in the world.

So why are we still working? Because we’re in debt.

Middle-aged people are the ones working long hours. They’re also the ones buying houses. And they’re the ones with the most credit card debt as well.

The generation before them had affordable housing, job security and a real social safety net. They’re not so fortunate, but for the ones after them, a steady job with enough for a deposit has become a kind of Holy Grail, and social security is survival at best.

The current trend points to a time when a young graduate might start adult life with a HECS debt, go into credit card debt on a part-time job and a free internship, and eventually get into massive debt to own a flat her grandparents could have bought with ease.

She might even find a job in financial services, if they haven’t all been automated. It’s the sector that helps wealthy people turn their money into more money. It’s also where ordinary people go to borrow money for a house.

Debt is profitable. Even during the great decoupling, as productive jobs disappear, and real wages fall, it’s proven possible to harness the aspirations of ordinary people for profit, without any of the effort or intelligence required for developing new productive capacity, by simply enticing a greater proportion of personal income into servicing debt.

The mining boom is over. Not that it was ever as important as the miners like to claim. Manufacturing continues its long decline. The banks have been warned they are overexposed.

Whatever combination of policy levers is applied, we need to create the conditions that direct investment into producing things that we and the world need, while caring for our environment and our population. We don’t need to direct it in into unearned private wealth at the expense of our neighbours, our country and future generations.

Our current class of politicians has so far failed to even acknowledge our present circumstances, let alone articulate a credible vision for change. Many of them became rich from property investment. Our Prime Minister is a former banker.

Naturally, the people who’ve done well for themselves are reluctant to sacrifice their advantage. Nevertheless, we have to change the narrative around “wealth creation” from one which is essentially about personal enrichment from gaming the system, to one which is about mutual benefit through innovation and productivity.

Change has come, whether we like it or not. If we respond intelligently, taking advantage of the potential we have developed through our education system, we may very well end up working less, but not in a divided society, with many of us struggling to survive.

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Just quickly (for now) keynesian economics, at least the way its practised in reality, is largely to blame.

Change is coming alright. In a bad way, at least to begin with. Exactly how it will go down is anyones guess, but the stuff has hit the fan in a few countries already and china can no longer hide that it has a huuuge problem on its hands.

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well, i've worked pretty fucking hard at my life for the last 25 years and now at 46, after letdowns, tertiary ed, loving myself so i can love others, i'm nearly ready to 'retire' to my patch of a few acres in the bush. here i will sustain myself and the petal as best we can without intervention - and then i can finally ask myself

......."Was it worth it"?

I'm not going to sidestep the issue Paradox - yes, i have slaved away at menial tasks for 1/2 of my existence but these menial tasks have finally began to afford me time to carve out the place i want to be.

Is it wrong?

Am i a fool.

Do these short shorts look good on me?

Are we travelling o/s next year?

is my garden perfect?

The research is all well and good, but i finally feel ready to move into my new skin, so my standpoint is that, as long as you prioritise, set your parameters for change, the paradox that is our human existence will inevitably show it's true self and i can at that point, answer your excellent question.

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Those short shorts are fucken grossing me out mate. Too much on display I say! :wacko::wink:

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Mike made some good points in that article.

Enslavement to debt has become a cradle to the grave scenario these days and that debt carries over post mortem to the surviving members of the family. It really is a system of enslavement where chains and shackles have been replaced by numbers in cyberspace. Money on a grand scale doesn't even exist any more it's not backed by gold reserves or tangible physical means, it's just numbers in cyberspace.

The points about tax shelters regarding property investment (paraphrasing) really strike a chord with me. My mrs watches the block and I overheard that if someone was to purchase one of the units up for sale at the estimated price at the time before the auctions (they actually sold for a higher price) then they would have an approximate tax deduction of 75 thousand dollars in the first financial year. So we have a scenario where a millionaire can purchase a luxurious property and claim more back in tax than someone on newstart will get in 5 years.

An that's just one of the kickbacks available to people with the capitol to invest in these tax shelters.

It's hardly an equitable situation.

So given the context of the article what alternatives can you see Paradox ?

We've seen collectives come and go with mixed success but greed and other restricting factors like inflexibility seem to be an Achilles heel for those type of arrangements. Do you think it needs to be a collective approach or something instigated by individuals?

Edited by Sally

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^ anyone who aquired negative geared investment homes in the last few years for tax purposes is going to be lucky if they can offload the property at a small loss when the bubble goes.

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I dont think work is the problem. A workforce that generates wealth to be funnelled through a rigged financial system into the pockets of the scant few already-insanely-rich freeloaders is the problem.

In other words, fiat currency, and its behind the scenes manipulation, is the yoke that keeps us struggling to pay for our spot in debt prison (collectively or individually).

Gold is the only answer that seems to make sense.

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i agree thunder.. 'work' isn't the issue, work is a fundamental aspect of life & entirely necessary to create anything worthwhile in life.

Perhaps 'jobs' is a better word.

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Gold is the only answer that seems to make sense.

Also things like bartering... access to competing, usable, sanctified fiat currencies.... i would like to endorse bitcoin but even though it isnt rigged or manipulable (as far as we know) it is fiat and has cons to go with its pros.

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So given the context of the article what alternatives can you see Paradox ?

well i can only speak for myself. I've been fundamentally skeptical of this whole system since i first was even capable of comprehending the world around me so i've basically spent my entire life deliberately cultivating values & desires & a basic game plan that in large part falls outside of that paradigm (as well as generally fucking around like a retarded turkey from time to time of course). At least as much as i feel is possible & appropriate.. It's most likely impossible & unrealistic to be entirely outside of this beast.

IMO the best alternative is to construct your reality from the ground up from day one with the full intention of simply not ever falling into that trap & being true to your own intelligence that is screaming at you that this whole system is a blatant scam, no matter how strong the social pressures are to succumb. i've got more than my fair share of emotional scares that come from consistently refusing to live up to the somewhat alternative yet predominantly conventional expectations of the tight knit small community i grew up amongst.

cultivating skills & attitudes that will allow you to be adaptable & prosperous without falling for all that bollocks & then use those skills to manifest the life you actually feel is right to live. For some that might mean cultivating a state of mind that has little desire for material excess. For others it might mean developing the skills & perspective that will allow them to build their own empire without being crippled by debt. For some maybe it's a bit of both or something entirely different altogether.. like i was saying in another thread, with a bit of creativity & hard work i believe there are innumerable ways that someone might be able to do that, it just takes inspiration & tenacity. For some maybe it means buying into the system to a degree & playing their cards right so that they can limit the degree to which it will dominate their life & they can opt out at some point.. None of that will ever be easy..

Maybe marry a rich person? That must be the easiest option available.. though thats hardly gonna be easy either..

But you know.. all that probably isn't very helpful to someone who is already neck deep with a family to support & a fuck tonne of bills piling up.. i really don't know the answer in that situation.. except perhaps hope that you may have married an open minded person with a sense of adventure & a willingness to take a risk. If you do have that then perhaps it just takes some years of very careful preparations, inspiration & tenacity & a leap into the unknown..

I can't really give much advice though i don't think. Following your own truth is pretty damn subjective. All i know is my own reality & the fact of that reality has always made it clear that taking the debt laden wage slave route has never been an option for me. something deep in me has just never let me fall for it. But i'm far from got it all worked out believe me.. i will always speak whats on my mind if i feel like it but i'd never pretend to preach like i think my perspective will be the answer for anyone else or even whether my own path is just another big self delusion.. The truth is i will probably never be wealthy by any stretch of the imagination but thats all fine with me, otherwise i'd put my mind to it & go & get rich. The way i see it, having what you desire is only a matter of how much you really want it. simple as that. if you really want something, you'll do what it takes to get there.

The overriding elephant in the room in all of this though is that it seems probable that, like thunder has been saying, we're really starting to see the beast changing in what it seems will be extreme paradigm shifting ways for better or worse.. probably worse.. much, much worse.. but you never know.. Probably the best advice is to just strap in & do our best to enjoy this crazy ride into an unknown thats probably far beyond what any one of us is capable of imagining..

i really don't know what else to say.. maybe when i come out of whats been a strange week of dark cynicism for me i might have something more interesting to add to the convo

Edited by paradox
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Two of my favorite kurt vonnegut quotes:

“Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”

[Kilgore Trout had written a novel call the Big Board.] It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.

These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market quotations and comodity prices along one wall of their habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth. The creatures on Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on Earth, and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they were returned to Earth.

The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course. They were simply stimulants to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo--to make them jump up and down and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or to feel as contented as babies in their mothers' arms.

The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And religion got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded them that the President of the United States had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl.

It worked. Olive oil went up.

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Do you think it needs to be a collective approach or something instigated by individuals?

like i said above, i have some emotional scars from my early attempts at communicating & finding solidarity with the broader community when it comes to these kind of topics haha From a young age i realized that for me the best route was to simply follow my own instincts regarding these things with the integrity that comes from knowing i'm trying to be honest with myself about my path.

i think the collective aspect of these things is something that will happen naturally when individuals act in accordance with there own truth. Until individuals have figured out within themselves how to do that & actually do that as individuals, then i think the collective approach will be somewhat conceited & probably bound to fail.. but who am i to say. thats just my perspective right now

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Even if we had automated everything and robots fucking everywhere we would still need certain work done on a professional level. Like education, all types of care and stuff, but besides that some people are just put here to do a certain thing, and regardless of the profit or gain they obtain from their work, they will probably still do it anyway.

Teachers gunna teach, carers gunna care, farmers gunna farm, artists gunna art

Where we go astray sometimes is when we start with the question "What's going to get me rich quick if I do it?"

as opposed to "What do I really want to do, that is sustainable, and that will contribute and give me satisfaction as well?".

Maybe.

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I dont think work is the problem. A workforce that generates wealth to be funnelled through a rigged financial system into the pockets of the scant few already-insanely-rich freeloaders is the problem.

IMO that pretty much sums up the entirety of the above tl;dr article (in my defense, I did read half of it). The reason we're still working is because our society is rigged to keep us working thanks to that unbelievably and disproportionately powerful and wealthy bunch of folks at the top who benefit from it being that way.

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Yea,

and opting out of fiat somehow is the only way to exit the casino.

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Someone tried to create a gold-backed currency a few years ago. A certain moammar gadaffi. Hillary happened to him.

Edited by ThunderIdeal

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Kennedy tried to cut the international bankers out of the loop too and instigate a state controlled currency system backed by silver reserves but we all saw what happened to him.

As I lean up against the far side of the Rothschild pillar I can see the same mechanisms playing out as they have for hundreds of years (just like they did in the Napoleanic wars), the only difference being they were reactive in the past now they are instigated like chess moves played 6 moves in advance. Questions about the value of currency and the ups and downs of stock markets and regional economies are all a foregone conclusion.

As Australian stocks plummet we can rest assured someone is waiting in the wings to buy them for a song, but sell sell sell before it's too late.

We're all puppets in one big ponzi scheme.

History never repeats, I tell myself, before I go to sleep.

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