Routers and porn

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

Almost all of the discussions I am hearing about economics and politics seems to center on the various kinds of "lever-pulling" the government can do: tax policy, money supply, interest rates, etc.

While I don't doubt that this lever-pulling has a real impact on economic activiity, it doesn't seem to me to be what the creation of wealth is really about.  We add money to the economy and stocks go up.  Big deal.  It's just an anticipation of inflation -- not the actual creation of actual value.

Conversely, we might reform healthcare and education more aggressively.  Sure.  But it doesn't help to educate people for jobs that don't exist.  And physical wellness, whether we like it or not, is a function of wealth.  Drugs would cost money even if we nationalized pharma.   

If we look back through history, in fact, we will see that wealth has always been created be actual stuff: spices and silk, slaves and cotton, war production and automobiles, highways and consumer goods, routers and porn.

So I'm wondering what it is that the U.S. economy is actually going to produce to create wealth, jobs, tax revenue and human delight.  What will a 24-year-old community college graduate living in Dayton, Ohio be doing for a living four years from now?  Anyone have any ideas?

And can anyone tell me why this is not a more central topic of discussion generally?

Comments

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

I read an interesting story that a large number of Chinese companies are importing white people to sit around and make their company look more international.

I'm seeing a boom in exports right there.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

We already went here, (http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s._p2.html) right?

[verytwistedmind.livejournal.com]

I posted this story in either TP or political cartoons last year. It was a very funny read.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

well, I'd hoped that there would be a breakthrough in several types of renewable energy technologies. That could have created lots of manufacturing jobs.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

It does seem odd that these technologies remain sort of a footnote in our discussion of this country's economic future, doesn't it? Why is that?

[dwer.livejournal.com]

because we're too beholden to the petrochemical lobby. And by "we" I mean "congress".

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I dunno if that's the whole answer, though. You think the cable news outlets are similarly beholden? How about talk_politics?

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Actually education does help us create goods. Goods are also things like technology that can be sold, which is then used to make things with the raw goods that are worth more, such as computers, more advanced cars, and very importantly, systems to process goods with less waste, more efficiency and less cost. Education can be pretty direct at the effect of economy.

Health too, if you have sick people they're not producing, fairly straightforward.

Both are directly beneficial to economy, lets not throw them under any buses, tractors, or ploughs.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Because it takes lots of money to revamp production and infrastructure, which is seen as a gamble for companies that they don't want to make. You have lobbies from all sorts of companies pushing against it. The fact that it's got as far as it has is testament to its importance.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think the cable news outlets are similarly beholden because they belong to the same large multinational conglomerates that the petro lobby does.

I think Americans are trained to mildly ignore it. "Oh, that boondoggle, that'll never work."

Can you tell I'm avoiding a paper?

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

The big thing for the US since the advent of the service economy has been "technological innovation." And don't get me wrong, we do that OK, but a lot of the real innovation comes from other countries taking our research and using it in new and interesting ways. Microchips were made here, and perfected in Japan. Automobiles get designed here, and then perfected in Japan and Germany. A big part of this is our increasing distance from work. Mike Rowe has a good bit about the falling glamor of hard work in American society. Basically his thesis is that hard work is not long hours behind a desk, it's dangerous, physically demanding, and basic. It's the farmer who discovered that his cow's crap could be worth more than the cows that produce it, and makes a life out of shit.

I won't lie: I'm a part of that class that's running from hard work. I never even considered joining the military, which every man in my family had done in the preceding generations. I did work in a factory one summer - and I saw how it was faltering in the face of demand for the cheaper-to-produce products from the company's factory in Mexico City. Much of the remaining work at this plant comes from a patented, relatively high-tech process that the company is loathe to send elsewhere for fear of IP theft. I took a useless liberal arts degree in undergrad. Then I got out of school and worked for two years, and that was, at times, hard work. I cleaned ill-treated rental cars in sub-zero temperatures at 4AM. But still I wasn't really producing anything - I was part of a chain of tools used to produce something, I hope. People rented from us for business, and hopefully they eventually produced something. I'm now in law school, looking towards a career that will likely consist of helping one corporation sort out its ephemeral rights and obligations to another corporation or the government. But at the same time, I recognize that the US needs more productive, rather than simply distributive, jobs. If I'm successful, I'll be paid several hundred dollars an hour (or, my firm will) to take money from one company and give it to another. No creation, no product, just a cost for one and a boon for another. You can't make an economy out of that. Somebody somewhere has to be mining, making merchandise, or selling cars, or whatever. Innovation alone does not an economy make. A new patent may make a lot of money from licensing, but a part of me says that we also need to be creating the item, too. A single patent doesn't generate as many jobs as the grunt work needed to turn that patent into a marketable product.

So what needs to change? Unions need to start bidding against the world, not against the last contract. Our attitudes towards work need to loosen. Companies need to start reinvesting in the US workforce. The problem is that all of these things need to happen at the same time for any one of them to have a long-term impact. There are some signs of life. Intel, which had said that the cost of opening new manufacturing in the US was as much as $5 billion more than most other places in the world (mostly due to worker's rights regulations and environmental policy) has apparently backpedaled, and is bringing their new 23nm process to the US. Ford has made a profit on mostly union-sourced labor over the past 6 quarters, without direct monetary support from the government. Windows 7 is a success, Facebook is profitable, video games developers are making money in an increasingly fractured and competitive marketplace, and Hollywood has hit upon 3D for its next big ticket price upgrade. But real, sustained long-term industries - renewables, base-level construction inputs, technological components - haven't seen much growth in the US that wasn't led by government investment. I'm worried. But then I'm also hoping that the US can continue to ride its high until I'm old enough and rich enough to weather whatever storm comes along, and after I die, well, have fun sleeping in the bed we've made.

TL;DR: Manufacturing and product creation is a necessity. We need more of it, and labor, business and society need to work together to promote it.

Re: Can you tell I'm avoiding a paper?

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

This was delightfully substantive. Try not to make it a habit, wudja?

What's the paper on?

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

I can confirm that first-hand.

Re: Can you tell I'm avoiding a paper?

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

The power of the federal judiciary to order the release of Gitmo prisoners into the US (specifically, as opposed to just release wherever the State Department can find them a home) as a component of the habeas corpus writ.

[mijopo.livejournal.com]

A Michigan woman recently sold a letter from obama for $7000 (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131002541) Seems to me that we should just have famous people create memorabilia. that and bullshit, as discussed in the story xforge linked to, look like promising areas of wealth generation to me.

Re: Can you tell I'm avoiding a paper?

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

Cool topic -- and clearly worthy of avoidance.

To me personally, the term habeas corpus has always smacked of athropophagy. But I'm not a well person.

Re: Can you tell I'm avoiding a paper?

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

We'll put it this way: SCOTUS decided that habeas corpus in the Constitution is the same as the habeas corpus of the late 18th Century, when the US formally incorporated UK common law. So much of the research has been trolling through 17th and 18th century British legal decisions and comparing them to a statute from the 1640s. Then relating it all back to Gitmo.

Re: Can you tell I'm avoiding a paper?

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I assume you have an ample supply of reasonably high-grade heroin to get you through this.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

So I'm wondering what it is that the U.S. economy is actually going to produce to create wealth, jobs, tax revenue and human delight. What will a 24-year-old community college graduate living in Dayton, Ohio be doing for a living four years from now? Anyone have any ideas?

Keep in mind that we're in a really weird time right now. Five years ago, Facebook didn't exist. 10 years ago, "social networking" wasn't even a thing. The kid entering college right now may have jobs available to him when he graduates that aren't even thought of yet.

The problem is the mentality that you share here:

If we look back through history, in fact, we will see that wealth has always been created be actual stuff: spices and silk, slaves and cotton, war production and automobiles, highways and consumer goods, routers and porn.

Yes, wealth used to be "actual stuff." No more - we're now an economy that peddles more than things, but instead peddles services, ideas, and other fanciful ideas that my grandfather would likely have scoffed at. We're a society that favors innovation over interchangeable parts, and there's work to be done to acclimate the economy again to this.

We'll get there, though.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Because it's not viable, and may never be viable.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, colonialism had all kind of unfortunate impacts....though Dubai's a great job market for people whose only qualification is that. /half snerk half jeer.

[ninboydean.livejournal.com]

Are you implying sir that wealth is created by labor? What a blaspheme.

Re: Can you tell I'm avoiding a paper?

[ninboydean.livejournal.com]

The problem isn't unions. Its the corporate bureaucracies coupled with advanced financial instruments such as derivatives which are overshadowing production.

Karl Marx pointed out that the production process was simply a hindrance to the capitalist - if he could, he'd forego the whole process of transforming his money into products and back into money, and go straight from money-to-money.

And this is what derivatives and securitizations seek to accomplish. By investing in bets for and against different firms, commodities and nations, capitalists can make a lot more money than they ever would by producing commodities.

Why hold your breath for their investment?

Re: Can you tell I'm avoiding a paper?

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

ONE of the problems is unions. And of course you betray your argument with it - "By investing in bets for and against different firms, commodities and nations..." There must be a productive element somewhere if we're to be wealthy, rather than inflated on paper, and even the paper-inflation relies to a certain extent on real commodities.

Re: Can you tell I'm avoiding a paper?

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Thought this (http://www.examiner.com/geopolitics-in-national/u-s-needs-to-actually-make-things-to-compete-the-global-economy?sms_ss=reddit&at_xt=4cd3d4c0dfc4350a,0) on point, figured I'd throw it out there as well.