Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label economic distortion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economic distortion. Show all posts

Sunday, June 18, 2023

Balanced Reporting

... my ass.

NYT runs a long report on the fucked-up-edness of the world economic structure, and forgets that journalism can be straightforward and honest without being poisonously neutral about the extremely shitty consequences of an economy that delivers practically all the benefits to the Ownership Class while leaving everybody else to scramble for table scraps.


Ya mean to say that if you deliver enormous wealth and power to a few people without regard to making sure they don't abuse their privilege, they'll prob'ly end up being total assholes about it by using their wealth and power just to get more wealth and power?

Gosh - whoodathunk it.

And don't forget to look for the part that rationalizes Trump's "populism".


Why It Seems Everything We Knew About the Global Economy Is No Longer True

While the world’s eyes were on the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and China, the paths to prosperity and shared interests have grown murkier.


When the world’s business and political leaders gathered in 2018 at the annual economic forum in Davos, the mood was jubilant. Growth in every major country was on an upswing. The global economy, declared Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, “is in a very sweet spot.”

Five years later, the outlook has decidedly soured.

“Nearly all the economic forces that powered progress and prosperity over the last three decades are fading,” the World Bank warned in a recent analysis. “The result could be a lost decade in the making — not just for some countries or regions as has occurred in the past — but for the whole world.”

A lot has happened between then and now: A global pandemic hit; war erupted in Europe; tensions between the United States and China boiled. And inflation, thought to be safely stored away with disco album collections, returned with a vengeance.

But as the dust has settled, it has suddenly seemed as if almost everything we thought we knew about the world economy was wrong.

The economic conventions that policymakers had relied on since the Berlin Wall fell more than 30 years ago — the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency — look to be running off the rails.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the ceaseless drive to integrate the global economy and reduce costs left health care workers without face masks and medical gloves, carmakers without semiconductors, sawmills without lumber and sneaker buyers without Nikes.

The idea that trade and shared economic interests would prevent military conflicts was trampled last year under the boots of Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

And increasing bouts of extreme weather that destroyed crops, forced migrations and halted power plants has illustrated that the market’s invisible hand was not protecting the planet.

Now, as the second year of war in Ukraine grinds on and countries struggle with limp growth and persistent inflation, questions about the emerging economic playing field have taken center stage.

Globalization, seen in recent decades as unstoppable a force as gravity, is clearly evolving in unpredictable ways. The move away from an integrated world economy is accelerating. And the best way to respond is a subject of fierce debate.

Of course, challenges to the reigning economic consensus had been growing for a while.

“We saw before the pandemic began that the wealthiest countries were getting frustrated by international trade, believing — whether correctly or not — that somehow this was hurting them, their jobs and standards of living,” said Betsey Stevenson, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration.

The financial meltdown in 2008 came close to tanking the global financial system. Britain pulled out of the European Union in 2016. President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on China in 2017, spurring a mini trade war.

But starting with Covid-19, the rat-a-tat series of crises exposed with startling clarity vulnerabilities that demanded attention.

As the consulting firm EY concluded in its 2023 Geostrategic Outlook, the trends behind the shift away from ever-increasing globalization “were accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic — and then they have been supercharged by the war in Ukraine.”

It was the ‘end of history.’

Today’s sense of unease is a stark contrast with the heady triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It was a period when a theorist could declare that the fall of communism marked “the end of history” — that liberal democratic ideas not only vanquished rivals, but represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”

Associated economic theories about the ineluctable rise of worldwide free market capitalism took on a similar sheen of invincibility and inevitability. Open markets, hands-off government and the relentless pursuit of efficiency would offer the best route to prosperity.

It was believed that a new world where goods, money and information crisscrossed the globe would essentially sweep away the old order of Cold War conflicts and undemocratic regimes.

Really? What a buncha fuckin' idiots (I get to say it that way because I used to be one of those fuckin' idiots - now I'm a different kind of fuckin' idiot)
Unfettered Free-Market Capitalism can be labeled a lot of ways, but "democracy-promoting" isn't on the list.
Have you seriously never been in a company meeting where somebody disagrees with some new policy decision, and says something like, "Well I didn't vote for that", only to have the boss come back with "This isn't a democracy, dummy" ?
Jesus H Fuq - we have to recover some sense of reality or we're just going to keep volunteering to get hosed by these fuckers.

There was reason for optimism. During the 1990s, inflation was low while employment, wages and productivity were up. Global trade nearly doubled. Investments in developing countries surged. The stock market rose.

The World Trade Organization was established in 1995 to enforce the rules. China’s entry six years later was seen as transformative. And linking a huge market with 142 countries would irresistibly draw the Asian giant toward democracy.

China, along with South Korea, Malaysia and others, turned struggling farmers into productive urban factory workers. The furniture, toys and electronics they sold around the world generated tremendous growth.

The favored economic road map helped produce fabulous wealth, lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and spur wondrous technological advances.

But there were stunning failures as well. Globalization hastened climate change and deepened inequalities.

In the United States and other advanced economies, many industrial jobs were exported to lower-wage countries, removing a springboard to the middle class.

Policymakers always knew there would be winners and losers. Still, the market was left to decide how to deploy labor, technology and capital in the belief that efficiency and growth would automatically follow. Only afterward, the thinking went, should politicians step in to redistribute gains or help those left without jobs or prospects.

Companies embarked on a worldwide scavenger hunt for low-wage workers, regardless of worker protections, environmental impact or democratic rights. They found many of them in places like Mexico, Vietnam and China.

Television, T-shirts and tacos were cheaper than ever, but many essentials like health care, housing and higher education were increasingly out of reach.

The job exodus pushed down wages at home and undercut workers’ bargaining power, spurring anti-immigrant sentiments and strengthening hard-right populist leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France.

In advanced industrial giants like the United States, Britain and several European countries, political leaders turned out to be unable or unwilling to more broadly reapportion rewards and burdens.

Nor were they able to prevent damaging environmental fallout. Transporting goods around the globe increased greenhouse gas emissions. Producing for a world of consumers strained natural resources, encouraging overfishing in Southeast Asia and illegal deforestation in Brazil. And cheap production facilities polluted countries without adequate environmental standards.

It turned out that markets on their own weren’t able to automatically distribute gains fairly or spur developing countries to grow or establish democratic institutions.

Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said in a recent speech that a central fallacy in American economic policy had been to assume “that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently — no matter what our competitors did, no matter how big our shared challenges grew, and no matter how many guardrails we took down.”

The proliferation of economic exchanges between nations also failed to usher in a promised democratic renaissance.

Communist-led China turned out to be the global economic system’s biggest beneficiary — and perhaps master gamesman — without embracing democratic values.

“Capitalist tools in socialist hands,” the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said in 1992, when his country was developing into the world’s factory floor. China’s astonishing growth transformed it into the world’s second largest economy and a major engine of global growth. All along, though, Beijing maintained a tight grip on its raw materials, land, capital, energy, credit and labor, as well as the movements and speech of its people.

Money flowed in, and poor countries paid the price.

In developing countries, the results could be dire.

The economic havoc wreaked by the pandemic combined with soaring food and fuel prices caused by the war in Ukraine have created a spate of debt crises. Rising interest rates have made those crises worse. Debts, like energy and food, are often priced in dollars on the world market, so when U.S. rates go up, debt payments get more expensive.

The cycle of loans and bailouts, though, has deeper roots.

Poorer nations were pressured to lift all restrictions on capital moving in and out of the country. The argument was that money, like goods, should flow freely among nations. Allowing governments, businesses and individuals to borrow from foreign lenders would finance industrial development and key infrastructure.

“Financial globalization was supposed to usher in an era of robust growth and fiscal stability in the developing world,” said Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But “it ended up doing the opposite.”

Some loans — whether from private lenders or institutions like the World Bank — didn’t produce enough returns to pay off the debt. Others were poured into speculative schemes, half-baked proposals, vanity projects or corrupt officials’ bank accounts. And debtors remained at the mercy of rising interest rates that swelled the size of debt payments in a heartbeat.

Over the years, reckless lending, asset bubbles, currency fluctuations and official mismanagement led to boom-and-bust cycles in Asia, Russia, Latin America and elsewhere. In Sri Lanka, extravagant projects undertaken by the government, from ports to cricket stadiums, helped drive the country into bankruptcy last year as citizens scavenged for food and the central bank, in a barter arrangement, paid for Iranian oil with tea leaves.

It’s a “Ponzi scheme,” Ms. Ghosh said.

Private lenders who got spooked that they would not be repaid abruptly cut off the flow of money, leaving countries in the lurch.

And the mandated austerity that accompanied bailouts from the International Monetary Fund, which compelled overextended governments to slash spending, often brought widespread misery by cutting public assistance, pensions, education and health care.

Even I.M.F. economists acknowledged in 2016 that instead of delivering growth, such policies “increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion.”

Disenchantment with the West’s style of lending gave China the opportunity to become an aggressive creditor in countries like Argentina, Mongolia, Egypt and Suriname.

Self-reliance replaces cheap imports.

While the collapse of the Soviet Union cleared the way for the domination of free-market orthodoxy, the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation has now decisively unmoored it.

The story of the international economy today, said Henry Farrell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is about “how geopolitics is gobbling up hyperglobalization.”

Old-world style great power politics accomplished what the threat of catastrophic climate collapse, seething social unrest and widening inequality could not: It upended assumptions about the global economic order.

Josep Borrell, the European Union’s head of foreign affairs and security policy, put it bluntly in a speech 10 months after the invasion of Ukraine: “We have decoupled the sources of our prosperity from the sources of our security.” Europe got cheap energy from Russia and cheap manufactured goods from China. “This is a world that is no longer there,” he said.

Supply-chain chokeholds stemming from the pandemic and subsequent recovery had already underscored the fragility of a globally sourced economy. As political tensions over the war grew, policymakers quickly added self-reliance and strength to the goals of growth and efficiency.

“Our supply chains are not secure, and they’re not resilient,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said last spring. Trade relationships should be built around “trusted partners,” she said, even if it means “a somewhat higher level of cost, a somewhat less efficient system.”

“It was naïve to think that markets are just about efficiency and that they’re not also about power,” said Abraham Newman, a co-author with Mr. Farrell of “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.”

Economic networks, by their very nature, create power imbalances and pressure points because countries have varying capabilities, resources and vulnerabilities.

Russia, which had supplied 40 percent of the European Union’s natural gas, tried to use that dependency to pressure the bloc to withdraw its support of Ukraine.

The United States and its allies used their domination of the global financial system to remove major Russian banks from the international payments system.

China has retaliated against trading partners by restricting access to its enormous market.

The extreme concentrations of critical suppliers and information technology networks has generated additional choke points.

China manufactures 80 percent of the world’s solar panels. Taiwan produces 92 percent of tiny advanced semiconductors. Much of the world’s trade and transactions are figured in U.S. dollars.

The new reality is reflected in American policy. The United States — the central architect of the liberalized economic order and the World Trade Organization — has turned away from more comprehensive free trade agreements and repeatedly refused to abide by W.T.O. decisions.

Security concerns have led the Biden administration to block Chinese investment in American businesses and limit China’s access to private data on citizens and to new technologies.

And it has embraced Chinese-style industrial policy, offering gargantuan subsidies for electric vehicles, batteries, wind farms, solar plants and more to secure supply chains and speed the transition to renewable energy.

“Ignoring the economic dependencies that had built up over the decades of liberalization had become really perilous,” Mr. Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said. Adherence to “oversimplified market efficiency,” he added, proved to be a mistake.

While the previous economic orthodoxy has been partly abandoned, it is not clear what will replace it. Improvisation is the order of the day. Perhaps the only assumption that can be confidently relied on now is that the path to prosperity and policy trade-offs will become murkier.

Friday, September 16, 2022

Speaking Of Martha's Vineyard


As I recall it, historically, this has been one of the main harbingers of some pretty bad shit headed our way.

When doctors won't take a job in your town because they can't afford housing, something is badly out of balance. And if you leave it to "natural market forces" it will definitely fix itself eventually, but when it does, it'll probably look a whole lot less like the ebb and flow of the tides, and a whole lot more like Mt St Hellens.



(pay wall)

In Martha’s Vineyard, even the doctors can’t afford housing anymore

Essential workers can’t afford to stay on the island, putting basic services in jeopardy


The stacks of chicken broth and shelf-stable milk were dwindling as the food pantry entered the last minutes of the day and a 63-year-old woman in a Boston Red Sox mask hurried through the door.

Sharon Brown, the pantry director, greeted the woman at the front desk. As Brown logged the details she needed to collect into her system, the woman’s story unspooled: After 18 years of living on the island, her rent had suddenly shot up.

“I couldn’t believe it. Doubled!” the woman said. “I’ve never seen things this bad.”

“This summer was the worst summer ever,” Brown agreed.

What Brown didn’t say out loud was that she knew this story well. That she and her 14-year-old son had moved three times since June. That in two weeks, when school began, she had no idea where they were going to live. Finding an affordable year-round rental on the Vineyard had become next to impossible.

“Well,” Brown began, “if you know anyone who has a year-round...” Her voice trailed off.

The Red Sox fan considered for a moment before shaking her head.

“I don’t,” she said. “But I’ll keep an ear out.”

This is the part of Martha’s Vineyard most people never see. An island known for its opulence and natural beauty, a playground for presidents and celebrities, it is kept afloat by workers for whom America’s housing crisis is not an eventuality. It’s here.

Even before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) this week made a political statement by sending two planes full of asylum seekers to the summer haven, the dearth of affordable housing on the Vineyard had pushed its year-round community to a breaking point.

Schools have struggled to staff classrooms. Indigenous people whose families have lived on the island for centuries have been forced to leave their homeland. Firefighters and government workers can’t afford to stay in the communities they serve. People juggling two, three, even four service-industry jobs say they live each month knowing they are one rent hike away from moving into their cars or tents or onto a friend’s couch.

And then there’s Brown, who serves the island’s neediest, including its growing population of seniors.

DeSantis move to fly migrants to Martha’s Vineyard stokes confusion, outrage

This hollowing out is nothing new in cities like Los Angeles, New Orleans and Austin, where short-term rentals and investor home buyers have overtaken razor-thin housing markets and destabilized whole neighborhoods. But on an island where commuting means setting sail over temperamental waters, the Vineyard’s housing crisis is also an existential one.

“We’re hemorrhaging people who are our infrastructure, who hold this community up,” said Laura Silber, the coordinator of the Coalition to Create the Martha’s Vineyard Housing Bank, which led a successful effort this year to win support for a new fund for affordable housing. “If you don’t have municipal workers, if you don’t have teachers, if you don’t have emergency workers, if you don’t have someone to help families who are struggling and run the food bank, how does a community keep functioning?”

Nowhere to ‘shuffle’ to

In the winter, the 96-square-mile landmass of Martha’s Vineyard settles into stillness. The tourism industry’s grip on rental properties loosens, and the families who live here year-round rotate into more spacious winter homes for around six months. Only about half the island’s homes remain occupied all year, according to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.

As the Vineyard thaws, what locals refer to as the “island shuffle” kicks into high gear. They pack up and move from those winter homes into summer rentals, where payments are made by the week and housing can mean anything from a shack with no kitchen or flushable toilet to a camper van or a room in someone else’s home. Cars with license plates from places such as New York, New Jersey and D.C. jam the island’s two-lane roads. Bars fill with bodies, crowds clog the beaches, and the Vineyard’s lone airport becomes the third-busiest in New England.

“Because the island shuffle is so ingrained in the culture of the Vineyard, we didn’t recognize it for what it was — housing insecurity — because it was just part of life,” Silber said. “Now there’s nowhere left to shuffle to.”

Brown found a steady winter rental when she moved to the island five years ago. Summers were tougher, she said, but usually she could find someplace to last her and her son, Carron, through the busiest months. Now, they are moving every few weeks — sometimes staying in a house for only a few days.

A similar emergency has hit in resort towns, beach communities and rural destinations around the country, from the Hamptons to Aspen, Colo., and Jackson Hole, Wyo. The more remote the place, the deeper the crisis.

On Martha’s Vineyard, policymakers have chronically underinvested in affordable housing and allowed investment properties and short-term rentals to proliferate unchecked. The island, experts said, is more than 10 years late to confront its housing crisis, and it is not moving fast enough to narrow the gap.

Between 2010 and 2019, the amount of housing on the island grew by over 4 percent, according to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission. But any progress was eaten up by the vacation-rental market. In the same period, the Commission found, the number of units occupied year-round dropped by more than 8 percent.

The arrival of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020 made things worse. Affluent remote workers flocked to the island’s salty air and tree-lined neighborhoods. Some who already owned property moved in full-time, depleting winter-housing options. Others bought up old homes and new builds, driving the median cost of houses up to $1.3 million as of April, according to the State House News Service. In the past year, home prices rose 33 percent.

“We can’t build our way out of this,” said Silber, from the housing bank coalition. Instead, the Vineyard, she said, must recapture housing that has been lost to the investment and short-term rental market rather than leaning exclusively on new development on the environmentally fragile island.

Even doctors can hardly afford to live here. Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, the largest employer on the island and home to its only emergency room, has for months been operating with a quarter of its staff jobs left unfilled. In January, CEO Denise Schepici offered 19 jobs to doctors, nurses and other workers ahead of the busy summer months, during which the island’s population swells from roughly 20,000 to 100,000 and emergency calls skyrocket.

Each was turned down.

“How do you recruit when rents are doubling from $3,000 a month to $6,000 a month, which is what happened to one of my nurses living in a one-bedroom apartment?” Schepici said.

None of the changes advocates have called for — zoning laws altered to protect year-round housing stock, long-term funding streams for affordable development and short-term-rental regulation — have been enacted island-wide. Earlier this year, the Vineyard’s six towns voted to approve a housing bank, a place to store money collected off of large real estate deals that would fund affordable housing. But the island can’t create such a fund until the state moves to give local municipalities the authority to impose real-estate transfer fees.

“How do you recruit when rents are doubling from $3,000 a month to $6,000 a month?”— Denise Schepici, CEO of Martha's Vineyard Hospital

Last session, the legislature failed to pass a measure to do so. But state lawmakers have vowed to push one through this year.

“We’re surrounded by water. There aren’t a lot of options for expanding outward,” said Jim Feiner, a real estate broker and chairman of the housing committee in the town of Chilmark who advocated for the adoption of the housing bank. “We need to start being proactive instead of reactive if we want our community to survive.”

Employers step in

To keep the lights on, many businesses on the Vineyard have been forced to confront the housing crisis directly.

“We’ve had to get creative,” Schepici said.

For the hospital, that has meant leasing about two dozen dormitory-style bedrooms at a cost of about $3 million a year to offer subsidized housing for workers. Much more, though, is needed. The hospital is in the process of purchasing property in Edgartown with room enough to house nearly 50 workers and their families, but it will be more than two years before anyone can move in.

“You know, I didn’t come here to build real estate,” Shepici said. “I came here to run the hospital.” Schepici said. But for a wide range of businesses on the island, the choice is stark: House workers, or there won’t be any left.

Island native Jeremiah Roberts, 28, lives in a loft owned by his employer, Larkin Stallings, who provides housing to several year-round workers at the Ritz, a dive in downtown Oak Bluffs.

Roberts, who has been working since he graduated from high school, juggles a side hustle and a fledgling music career with two full-time jobs running his own landscaping company and manning the bar at the Ritz. He works days and nights, he said, so he can stay on the island to help his aging mother. He wants to avoid the fate that has befallen so many of his peers: Those who left rarely returned. Those who stayed have struggled to move out of their parents’ homes and make a life of their own.

The loft costs him $1,400 a month, a nearly extinct price point during the high season, when rent can go for more than that per week.

While the arrangement helps sustain Stallings’s business, he acknowledged that the setup creates a power imbalance.

“If [Roberts] leaves the job, he loses his apartment. He doesn’t have the freedom to move around,” said Stallings, who also serves as the vice president of the Martha’s Vineyard Community Services board. “Even though I offer it, I really don’t think this employer-based housing is a good solution.”

Moving every few weeks

When Brown was recruited to work as a chef at a hotel on the Vineyard, she was also told the job came with a place to live. But she quickly realized the accommodations wouldn’t work for her and her then-10-year-old son.

“I was in there with these kids, 20-somethings, who were smoking and drinking and staying up until 2 a.m.,” Brown said. “I had to start looking for something else.”

Brown and Carron, now 14, have not lived in one place for more than 11 months. Asked how many times they have moved since arriving on the Vineyard, Carron needed two hands to count.

“After a while, the moving starts to get annoying,” he said recently, as he prepared to depart yet another house, bags lumpy with clothes at his feet. “But you get used it.”

In her lowest moments, Brown thinks about boarding the ferry to the mainland and never looking back. She tried it once, after losing her kitchen job during the pandemic. She and Carron felt miserable.

“After being on the island for three years and not hearing people shooting, not hearing police cars every day, when we went back to that, it was a nightmare,” she said.

Last year, Brown was asked to return to run the island’s food bank, combining her experience in kitchens and as a social worker in Delaware. Seeing it as divine intervention, she said yes.

The pantry serves roughly 2,000 people a month, many of them seniors, low-wage workers, immigrants and families with children. More than a third of the Vineyard’s full-time residents are 65 years or older, according to Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, well above the national average of one in six.

Brown sees her work as a calling. She shows up even on her days off, puts in produce orders from home while her son watches TV, and answers work calls well after dark. One elderly woman, a longtime client, calls Brown each night to pray together before bed.

On Brown’s weekly food deliveries, she has fed people living in tents in the state forest and in cars parked overnight in beachside lots. One senior client, Brown said, spends her summer months living in a chicken coop out back so she can rent out the main house and “make what she needs to tide her over for the rest of the year,” Brown said.

Yet Brown still sees the island as a sanctuary, a place where her son can run around with friends or bike on his own to the beach. A place where she doesn’t have to worry as much about the terrible things that happen to Black boys in America — street violence, state violence or worse. Here, her son is free to be who he is: a soft-spoken ninth-grader who helps seniors with their groceries and volunteers at the food bank after school, who loves video games and rolls his eyes when his mom tells him to stop watching YouTube videos with so much swearing, then quietly complies.

“I ask him every time we’re about to move again: Are you sure you want to stay here?” Brown said. “And he says yes.”

By the second week of August, it was time to move again. Brown had been subletting a small Victorian cottage at the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association in Oak Bluffs for a month and a half, the maximum allowed by the community’s board of directors. When she asked for an extension, the board said no.

Despite posting pleas on social media, putting her name on affordable-housing wait lists, and exhausting her network of friends, colleagues and even clients at the food bank, Brown’s only housing option was to accept a weeklong plant-sitting gig at a friend’s house. The week after, she planned to take Carron on a 10-day road trip. It was more than a vacation. It was a way to buy time: If they stayed, they might have nowhere to live.

As Brown planned their journey — a stop to visit family in Maryland, their trip to Universal Studios — their return date ricocheted in her mind.

“I have to pray that something will be ready by then,” she said.

Saved by an act of charity

The limited supply of available housing has pit islanders against islanders, individuals against businesses.

In the spring, Lori DiGiacomo, 61, discovered her landlord was putting his Vineyard Haven house and the detached in-law unit where she had lived for six years on the market. A company that intends to turn it into workforce housing scooped it up for more than $1.5 million.

"The first thought that went through my head was, ‘I’m going to lose my housing,’ " said DiGiacomo, a kindergarten teacher who has taught the Vineyard’s children for nearly 20 years. “Then I realized: I’m going to lose my people; I’m going to lose my tribe; I’m going to lose my sense of place.”

Vineyard Haven was where she raised her child and built a life, working as a house cleaner, artisan and waitress on top of her teaching job. It was where she fed the neighborhood cats, where she imagined herself being as she aged, where she planned to retire and welcome her adult daughter home for the holidays.

Instead, DiGiacomo began to apply for teaching licenses in other states. She took to Google, sending a query into the ether: “Where to move at 60?” But then, she said, her school’s principal reminded her that if she can hold on for five more years, her pension payout would increase by around 75 percent.

“I wasn’t really thinking practically until I sat down and did the math,” she said.

After DiGiacomo was featured in a June Martha’s Vineyard Times story on the island’s attrition of teachers, a concerned reader offered her a one-year lease on the 300-square-foot basement apartment attached to her house.

“The only reason I have housing right now is because of the charity of one person, as opposed to a system that’s actually working,” DiGiacomo said.

DiGiacomo spent the final weeks of summer shedding pieces of her life. She rehomed her cat, gave away her dining room table, sold her Tiffany-style lamp and a framed photo of chickens. All the while, she recited a George Carlin-inspired mantra — “It’s just stuff” — between steadying breaths.

“This is where I want to be. This is my home,” said DiGiacomo, whose lease expires next summer. "Hopefully, God willing, I might just be able to stay.”

A prayer and a reprieve

Brown was in Florida when her landlord called with news. The Camp Meeting Association had approved the appeal for a six-week extension.

Brown was awash with relief. This meant she and Carron could move back to the Oak Bluffs cottage and ride out the end of the season. It meant a steady place to live — until October.

As she and Carron loaded the car once more with clothes stuffed in trash bags and her set of purple suitcases filled to the zippers, she repeated a promise he had heard before. One Brown isn’t sure she can keep.

“Don’t worry, baby,” she said. “We’ll find a year-round soon.”

Wednesday, March 04, 2020

Faux Nobility

Eventually, Capitalism comes down to rich people spending less time doing the actual work, and more time concocting a reasonable-sounding rationalization for being self-centered rent-seeking assholes.



Veronika Tait, PhD - Psychology Today:

Republicans and Democrats explain wealth in different ways. In a survey by Pew Research Center, participants were asked why a person is rich. The majority of Republicans said a person is rich because they worked harder, whereas most Democrats said that it was because they had advantages in life. On why a person is poor, most Republicans attributed it to a lack of effort, whereas the overwhelming majority of Democrats said it was because of circumstances beyond control. So which is it?

Recent findings show that only half of today’s 30-year-olds earn more than their parents. However, 90% of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents. Rather than the ‘rags to riches’ fairytale so many of us want to believe in, opportunities vary widely depending on the occupations of one's parents. Researcher Michael Hout found that social mobility is far from the norm.

Some may argue that the current generation experiences lower ambition and greater entitlement compared to generations past. However, the data indicates that millennials earn 20% less than baby boomers did at the same stage of life, despite achieving higher levels of education. While business leaders work hard, it’s difficult to defend the jump in the ratio of pay between a company’s CEO and their average worker at 30:1 in 1978, skyrocketing to 299:1 in 2014.

- and -

With ideals of meritocracy reinforced in American culture, it is tempting to assume that those who are wealthy have worked hard and fairly earned their affluence. But that wouldn’t tell the whole story. One study from 2017 found that 60% of wealth is inherited rather than worked for. There are also stories of executives exploiting workers, such as Jeff Bezos, who recently purchased the most expensive home in California and whose workers reported peeing in plastic bottles because they could not use the bathroom during their shift. 

Some advantages had by the successful are less visible. For example, I worked hard to receive academic scholarships and ultimately earned a Ph.D. in Social Psychology with no debt. However, it would be unfair for me to not also acknowledge my own privilege at play in my accomplishments. My parents never handed me a wad of cash, but they did raise me with clean water and sanitary living conditions, adequate nutrition, a stable environment, a strong support system, quality healthcare, and a lack of childhood trauma.

Evidence suggests that simply having wealth, whether earned or by luck, increases one’s justification for it. Also known as
the Just-World Fallacy, those who are on top of the social ladder, that is, those with money, power, and influence, believe the world is just. Those in the middle think the world is somewhat just, and those at the bottom believe the world is unjust.

Researcher Paul Piff cleverly demonstrated this by giving some participants a clear advantage in a game of Monopoly such as giving them extra money. When he asked participants why they (inevitably) won, they described how they had made smart decisions, and downplayed their privileged position.

Those who believe the world is just, that is, believe you get what you work for, are more likely to justify inequality and victim-blame. If those who are wealthy are automatically seen as good, it is assumed that the poor must have done something to deserve their misfortune.

Sarah Kendzior:"When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who struggle to live."
 

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Econ 100


Quick one from Dr Orvel Trainer, Chairman Economics, Univ of Northern Colorado, 1973

(updated and paraphrased)

You're hangin' out with some friends, and someone suggests you all pitch in and order a pizza, which is going to be 3 or 4 bucks each.

By the time the delivery guy rings the bell, you're really hungry. So you make a mad dash for the door, pay for the whole thing yourself, and sit at the kitchen table enjoying your pizza while pushing everybody else away.

This does not make you a capitalist taking advantage of your opportunities as they present themselves.

This makes you an asshole.

Wednesday, February 05, 2020

Let's Do Some Pie


Wealth inequity is the surest way for rich people to fuck themselves out of being rich.


Over time, wealth (and the power that always goes with it) migrates upwards.  More and more money and power are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, until just a very small number of plutocrats are running the whole show.

In order for that to work, less and less money and power has to be shared by more and more people, until folks come to understand that they've been left with nothing more to lose.

That's when the man on the white horse rides in, riles 'em up and they crash the plutocrats' party in the most unpleasant ways - all in the name of goodness and patriotism and Making America Great Again.

To be sure, there's a righteousness about trying to even things up - trying to get equilibrium back into the thing. But when a system is as badly out of balance as it is in USAmerica Inc, people get desperate. And desperate people do some pretty crazy (ie: stoopid) things - like following the wrong guys who talk them into doing some really fucked shit.


Trump is the deceiver.

If I ignore what I consider the silliness of people who believed in gods and demons and a geocentric universe, and look to the basic human circumstances that seem to prevail no matter the place or time, I can get pretty cozy with the warnings of a mad monk in a cave 1800 years ago, trying to suss out why so many rich people act like such dicks, and why it's so easy for them to sucker so many normal everyday otherwise-clear-thinking folks.

It is a wonderment.

BTW - looking at Trump as that false messiah helps explain the fucked up "logic" of American Evangelicals.

And also too - the parallels with Nazi occultism are getting really freaky.

Friday, January 17, 2020

The Root Principles

I'm a Capitalist because god's a Capitalist.



Capitalism is a close analog for how the world actually operates.

I have to establish a cycle of spending and profit and investment in order to stay alive.

I have to take in a quantity of calories sufficient to fuel the work I have to do as I go out and get my next meal.

That's the basic premise, and it works very well, but that's not all there is to it.

Unfortunately, way too any of us believe that is, in fact, all there is to it.

I'll forego most of the weird permutations and complicating factors, and just stick to me as an individual self-contained unit.

I think that part of my analogy makes perfect sense, but it lacks one vital consideration: Recognition of the absolute need for appropriate regulation - cuz god built regulation into everything.

Like I said before, I need fuel. Blood Sugar is a pretty basic fuel, and it's one thing I get plenty of from the food I eat. I have to have it so I can do the work.

So blood sugar is a mighty good thing, unless I get too much of it. So god gave me a pancreas to regulate my Blood Sugar levels. Without that regulation, I die.

I need a way to regulate my body temperature, so I have a hypothalamus.

I need to regulate my circadian rhythms, so I have a pineal gland.

I need to regulate my breathing and my heartbeat and my eye-blink and a whole metric shit-ton of other things so that all my different systems are functioning in a way that fits all the pieces together so I can go out and do the fucking work and sustain not only myself but everything else I need to sustain myself.

OK. So all of that micro thing leads in to all of this macro thing -



From Scott Galloway - Professor Of Marketing, NYU Stern:

Yet most successful capitalist systems acknowledge that without rule of law, empathy, and redistribution of income, we lose the script. The purpose of an economy is to build a robust middle class. We have, traditionally, elected leaders who cut the lower branches off trees to ensure other saplings get sunlight. There is less and less sunlight. It’s never been easier to become a billionaire, or harder to become a millionaire.

The uber-wealthy paid a tax rate of 70% in the fifties, 47% in the eighties, and 23% at present — a lower tax rate than the middle class. Taxes on the poor and middle class have largely stayed the same. We’ve exploded the debt so rich people pay less tax. If money is the transfer of work and time, we’ve decided our kids will need to work more in the future, and spend less time with their families, so wealthy people can pay lower taxes today. If that sounds immoral, trust your instincts.

It feels as if something has changed. Gerrymandering, money in politics, lack of a shared experience among Americans, social-media-fueled rage, and an idolatry of innovators have led to a faustian bargain: the innovators (lords) capture the majority of the gains, and the 99% (serfs) get an awesome phone, a $4,000 TV, great original scripted television, and Mandalorian action figures delivered within 24 hours. Everybody gets a taste of the innovators’ nose candy and can buy shares in Amazon. Everyone has heard about someone whose daughter works at Google and bought her parents a house.

The biggest losers of the decade are the unremarkables. Our society used to give remarkable opportunities to unremarkable kids and young adults. Some of the crowding out of unremarkable white males, including myself, is a good thing. More women are going to college, and remarkable kids from low-income neighborhoods get opportunities. But a middle-class kid who doesn’t learn to code Python or speak Mandarin can soon find she is not “tracking” and can’t catch up.

  • I have intimate experience with being unremarkable:
  • Graduated public high school with a 3.2 GPA and 1130 SAT (85%).
  • Admitted, on appeal, to UCLA, academic probation 4 times, subject to dismissal twice, 2.27 GPA. 
  • Landed a job at Morgan Stanley in Fixed Income Group. (How? I interview well and lied about my grades.)
  • Admitted to UC Berkeley Haas (yes, with a 2.27 undergrad GPA).
  • Have started several businesses since graduation; most have gone sideways or failed.
My wins were businesses that sold for between $28 million (Prophet) and $160 million (L2). The firm that was sold for $160 million, my VCs didn’t want to sell, as they felt there was an opportunity to go “bigger.” This is emblematic of our lottery / Hunger Games economy, where the gestalt is to go big or die trying. This creates a small class of uber-winners and many more people who wake up at 40 with no economic security or prospects. It’s “go big or go home.” Deaths of despair are skyrocketing, and the innovation ecosystem feeds it.


We have to understand - and never fucking forget - that once in a while we have to step in and rescue Capitalism from the Capitalists.

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

A 2-Minute Hate

The slave trade.


We get caught up in the ideology, sometimes to the point where some of us can't quite figure out that hating slavery isn't supposed to translate to hating the slaves for having been enslaved.

I'm left with the sense that we're indulging ourselves in a little Blame-The-Victim exercise as we try to resolve our internal dissonance.

Anger turned inward is depression, and that feels bad.

Anger turned outward is aggression, and that feels better. 

Friday, October 12, 2018

A Disney Princess



Real life Disney Princess Abigail Disney talks about tax cuts and the fact that inflation and the cost of servicing our national debt are rising faster than the increases in wages and employment.

The economy is booming - but not your part of the economy.


SuperYachtInvestor.com

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Something To Remember

Median Net Worth in USAmerica Inc last year was about $80,000.

Average Net Worth was about $180,000.

There are about 550 billionaires, and something like 10 million millionaires up in this joint.

Some basic arithmetic makes it pretty easy to imagine how fucked up American Wealth Distribution has become.

Bill Gates walks into a soup kitchen, and the average net worth of the people in that room goes up into the hundreds of millions.

But you've still got Bill Gates and about 100 stone broke homeless people.

This is not a particularly rich country when 99% of the people are doing all the work while the other 1% get all the goodies.


Friday, January 26, 2018

The Buzz Man


You've heard it before, and here it is again:

Of all the wealth generated in the world last year, 82% of it went to the Top 1%.
None of it - NONE OF IT - went to the bottom 50%.


And there's a very good rundown of what's been happening in the Mueller investigation, and the bit about the use of bots and American social media.*


Buzz Burbank - News & Comment:




*BTW -

Why Fake News Targeted Trump Supporters - The Atlantic from last year.

(I think this guy's conclusions are a bit silly, because we know that moving even a low percentage of voters makes a huge difference)
Here's the study

Abstract: 

Though some warnings about online “echo chambers” have been hyperbolic, tenden- cies toward selective exposure to politically congenial content are likely to extend to misinformation and to be exacerbated by social media platforms. We test this prediction using data on the factually dubious articles known as “fake news.” Using unique data combining survey responses with individual-level web tra c histories, we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news website from October 7-November 14, 2016. Trump supporters visited the most fake news web- sites, which were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. However, fake news consumption was heavily concentrated among a small group — almost 6 in 10 visits to fake news web- sites came from the 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets. We also find that Facebook was a key vector of exposure to fake news and that fact-checks of fake news almost never reached its consumers.

Happy Friday!

Monday, October 23, 2017

Today's Tweet



Along the lines of: Bill Gates walks into a soup kitchen, and the Average Personal Wealth goes up to several hundred million dollars, but you've still got a room full of homeless people plus Bill Gates.

Fun with arithmetic.

Tuesday, September 05, 2017

Sleight Of Hand



Vox, Matthew Yglesias:

Donald Trump took time out of his busy schedule of disaster tourism and tweeting about the media to deliver a speech in Missouri on Wednesday about a seemingly far-less entertaining topic — comprehensive tax reform.

An overhaul of the tax code would, Trump promised, “bring back Main Street by reducing the crumbling burden on our companies and on our workers.”

Meanwhile, Paul Ryan’s been touring the nation waiving around a vaguely postcard-shaped piece of paper that he believes Americans will be able to use to file their taxes once the simplification nirvana of tax reform is enacted.

Congress is facing a crowded September full of “must pass” bills to keep the government open, replenish FEMA’s Harvey-depleted coffers, and avoid a debt ceiling crisis. But when those deadlines are in the rearview mirror, tax reform is the next Republican policy priority. And while achieving the sort of comprehensive reworking of the tax system that Trump is talking about is extremely difficult, the stars are far better aligned for Republicans to pass something than they were on the disastrous effort to replace the Affordable Care Act.

My take-away, as always:

Rich people will throw us a few tasty ribs, knowing we won't notice (or we'll deliberately ignore) the simple fact that they're eating the whole fucking pig.

The obvious musical accompaniment:


Everything old is new again - especially the part about how a few uber-dicks will always fuck it up for the rest of us if we're not very watchful.


Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Cornered

Christopher Cantwell - Alt-Right, Smug-White, Fucking Nazi Ass-Wipe - the guy they spotlighted in that VICE piece on HBO a few days ago.

It's the Age Of Poor Poor Pitiful Me.


Something that just got clearer: these jagoffs talk trash all the time about how "all those people" are getting everything for free, and they're a burden to society, and honest tax-paying Americans always have to pick up the tab, and blah blah blah.

But Cantwell's not bitchin' because somebody else is gettin' the goodies - he's bitchin' cuz he's not gettin' the goodies.

There's a lot of weirdness rattling around in my brain about all this - economic pyramids, and wealth disparity, and Maslov's Hierarchy, and the downward pressure of that Supply Side crap, and what always happens when there's too much power in too few hands and too many people with nothing more to lose.

The kicker is - I wasn't expecting Cantwell to be so scared. You don't cry like that if you're not scared.  And that's quite the odd little wrinkle.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

What They Say



Repubs - the ones with most of the money and power - love to lead the bitch session about Dems and Libruls who're busy spending "Other People's Money".  What they always conveniently neglect to mention is that the reason it's "your money" is that they don't contribute much at all, and they're always busy pimping us into helping them pay even less while getting a bigger and bigger share of the benefits.

All the little grey areas and loopholes in our ridiculous Tax Code; an economy increasingly tilted in favor of wealthy people - none of this happens if we stop allowing guys like Donald Trump to play us for suckers.  

   

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

That's Pretty Fucked Up, Right There



And the binary thinking "on the right" means that if you're talking about Wealth Inequality, then what you're really after is to upset the natural order of things and to turn USAmerica Incorporated into a Bolshevik nightmare and make Jesus cry.  Cuz everybody knows Capitalism is god's way of separating the good smart people from the poor stupid people.

Uh - no, actually.  We're talking about not returning to the glory days of the 18th century, when the king could do no wrong; when the noble class owned everything and collected rent from anybody who worked for a living, and "justice" was all about the aristocracy keeping the commoners in line by meting out punishment that included branding, whipping and partial hanging.

In this country today, tell me how it's fair and equitable to fill the prisons to overflowing with people making minimum wage while the real crooks on Wall Street and the Rentiers in the executives suites can buy their way out of any jam at all because they have the money and the connections.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

A Question

If it's wrong to steal the wealth from rich people in order to make poor people less poor, then it's just as wrong to steal the labor from poor people in order to make rich people richer.

Having believed that first part while purposefully ignoring the second part is what haunts me about my own career history, and what leads me to believe that the flirtation with economic justice we've indulged in since the 1930s is all but over.  We're sliding back into the old ways of doing things and so we need to call our system by it's more suitable name: Kleptonomics.

I've had a bad feeling when thinking about the downward pressure on real wages and earnings here in the US over the last few decades.  It's almost as if somebody wants us to feel guilty about our success in order to make us more willing to do more and to accept less in return for it; while workers in other countries are portrayed as making "great strides" and how they're humble and so they're grateful for whatever crumbs the noble job-creators are willing to let fall from their tables; and so "why can't you spoiled rotten Americans just take whatever we give you and shut up about it?"

While we're being distracted by game shows and disaster porn and attention whores, the real meanings and merits of Socialism and Capitalism are being flipped and perverted until we have no idea what any of it means at all.

In confusion there is opportunity - somebody benefits while the credit and the culpability are shifted to those who least deserve them.

It all sounds way too conspiracy-theory-ish, but y'know, I may be paranoid but that don't mean nobody's out to get me.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Doing The Laundry

From Rolling Stone Magazine, by Tim Dickinson:
Are Romney's tax dodges legal? It's impossible to say for sure, given how little he has disclosed. But tax experts note that there are plenty of red flags, including an investigation by New York prosecutors into tax abuses at Bain Capital that began on Romney's watch. "He aggressively exploits every loophole he can find," says Victor Fleischer, a professor of tax law at the University of Colorado. "He's pushing the limits of tax law beyond what many think is reasonable." Indeed, a look at Romney's finances reveals just how skilled he is at hiding his wealth – and paying a fraction of his fair share in taxes.
 The more I learn about this guy, the smaller he looks.