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Guest Post: The Future Of Work
Submitted by Chris Martenson, authored by Charles Hugh Smith
The Future Of Work
A growing number of workers are becoming increasingly concerned about the future viability of their jobs (if they have them) and, in many cases, that of their professions. Looking at a future increasingly defined by slower economic growth and higher energy costs, many are asking:
"What is the future of work?"
Given the "recovery’s" stagnant job market and the economy’s slide into renewed contraction, it’s a timely question. To answer it, we must first ask, what’s the future of the U.S. economy?
In broad brush, the Powers That Be have gone "all in" on a bet that this recession is no different than past post-war recessions: all we need to do to get through this “rough patch” is borrow and spend money at the Federal level, and the household and business sectors will soon recover their desire and ability to borrow more and spend it all on one thing or another. We don’t really care what or how, because all spending adds up into gross domestic product (GDP).
In other words, we're going to “grow our way” out of stagnation and over-indebtedness, just as we’ve done for the past fifty years.
Unfortunately, this diagnosis is flat-out wrong. This is not just another post-war recession, and so the treatment—lowering interest rates to zero and flooding the economy with borrowed money and liquidity—isn’t working. In fact, it’s making the patient sicker by the day.
The best way to eliminate the signal noise of official propaganda (“The stock market is rising, so everything’s great for everyone!” etc.) and the high keening wails of Keynesian cargo cultists is to construct a model of the underlying fundamental forces that will shape the future.
The best way to do that is to glance at a few key charts.
Let’s start with debt. Clearly, the “growth” of the U.S. economy since 1980 is debt-based. Debt has exceeded growth by 136%. If debt had risen in tandem with GDP, then total debt would be a mere $22 trillion instead of $52 trillion.
The next chart reflects how every incremental increase in debt has had a diminishing effect on growth. Where $1 of debt once added 70 cents to GDP, now it adds basically nothing, or even reduces GDP.
We hear a lot of euphoric babble about households "deleveraging;" that is, paying down debt and thus setting the stage for the next ramp-up of household debt. But the reality is not quite so euphoric. Compared to the explosion in household debt since 1980, which we might term the debt elephant, the recent “deleveraging” reduction in debt is more like a mosquito.
Next, let’s look at jobs and employment. To make sure we’re getting the full picture, let’s look at several measures of employment as a reflection of the underlying economy.
This first chart looks like a steady onward-and-upward trend of job growth. The “jobless recovery” appears to be a modest bump in the road of ever-rising employment.
By other measures, however, employment hasn’t hit a bump in the road; it’s off the road and sinking into a bottomless bog. Here is the civilian participation rate, which measures how many folks in the civilian population are participating in the labor market in one way or another.
By this measure, the labor market has retraced to the level of the 1981-82 recession thirty years ago.
Next, let’s look at another, perhaps even more telling metric: private payrolls per capita, which is basically a measure of how many jobs there are per capita in the economy.
What this means is that beneath the glitter of a “rising GDP” and “rising stock market,” the economy is producing far fewer jobs per capita.
If we look at the total number of civilians and the total number of jobs, the chart looks even uglier. We are back to the levels of 1970s stagflation, just as women began entering the workforce en masse to compensate for declining household purchasing power.
This next chart is civilian employment per capita, which is similar to the previous chart of private payrolls per capita, but includes all jobs, including public-sector/government employment. Once again it shows that the economy is back to the levels of the mid-1980s, even including the rapid expansion of local and state government payrolls.
Another way to measure the real performance of an economy is capacity utilization -- how much of the potential capacity of the economy is being used. In good times, capacity is added because the existing capacity is running full-tilt. In recessions, there is not enough demand to use the economy’s full capacity, and therefore no reason to add to capacity with business investment.
I’ve drawn some lines to clarify what happened during each primary phase of the post-war era. During the stagflationary 1970s, capacity utilization see-sawed between growth and recession, tracing out a series of lower lows and lower highs. This downtrend reflected the reality that the economy wasn’t growing; it was stagnating, hitting new lows with every downturn, and never reaching its previous high-point during recovery.
After finally hitting bottom in the 1981-92 recession when Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker vanquished inflation by jacking up interest rates to 18%, the economy entered a 30-year cycle of financialization (deregulation of the banking sector and the rise of debt as the engine of growth), globalization, and technological innovation that fueled a multi-decade trend of rising productivity.
The wheels fell off the financialization and dot-com boom in 2000, and the Federal Reserve and federal government created an even more extreme version of financialization that inflated a gigantic debt/real estate bubble. Like all financial bubbles, this one burst, and once again the Fed and federal government scrambled to inflate another debt bubble.
Since the household sector was tapped out and its primary asset, the family home, had lost a third of its bubble value, the Federal government borrowed $6 trillion to bail out the banking sector and spread trillions of dollars around as stimulus and giveaways like "Cash for Clunkers."
Unsurprisingly, this injection of trillions of dollars did boost capacity utilization. Roughly 11% of the entire GDP is borrowed and spent every year now by the federal government. But just as in the stagflationary 1970s, the decline reached a new low and the subsequent rise never got close to the previous bubble high of 2006.
Now that the economy is rolling over again, capacity utilization is also declining.
None of this reflects a healthy economy. What it does reflect is an economy that has depended on ever-greater amounts of debt to power a diminishing trend of growth, and an economy which creates fewer and fewer jobs with ever-greater mountains of debt.
This is not a bump in the road; it is the exhaustion of the entire model of growth that we have depended on for the past 30 years. Once the debt saturation point has been reached, adding more debt subtracts from the economy rather than adds to it. This is reflected in the decline of employment by every metric: total number of jobs, civilian participation, payrolls per capita, and employment as a percentage of the total population.
We are past the point of debt saturation, and so we need a new model of employment, and indeed of “growth” itself. Sadly, as discussed in a recent report, the Status Quo financial witch-doctors have only prescribed more debt and more unproductive friction.
Unfortunately, as the above charts abundantly illustrate, the patient (the U.S. economy) hasn’t been cured; rather, its condition has gotten worse. The stock market is like a sort of makeup that has been slathered on by the Fed to give the appearance of health, but the internal measures of jobs and income (both declining) show that both the “health” and the “recovery” are illusory.
So, the key question to ask ourselves is: where will the demand for work be in a post-debt, post-"cheap oil" economy"?
In Part II: The Future of Work, we tackle this critical question and provide a framework for potential job seekers/switchers to use in positioning themselves for meaningful and dependable employment in this coming era.
Click here to read Part II of this report (free executive summary; paid enrollment required to access).
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@ Caviar
"Your contracting buying power is the tell."
+ 1. OUR buying power is lower than before. We are not hurting, but we are definitely dpending less. Being more careful about what we buy. My family is just one data point though.
We'll all be pushing brooms soon....but hey, you have a really intelligent sounding point!
Lather, rinse, repeat; until the parabolic curves permeate your dandruff.
You sound just like my boyfriend. Do you also have a man crush on Obama?
>Do you also have a man crush on Obama?
I don't subscribe to the childish left-vs-right mentality.
There are economic policies that lead to life, prosperity, and peace. And others that lead to death, poverty, and war. Obama's policies fall in the latter category.
"There are economic policies that lead to life, prosperity, and peace. And others that lead to death, poverty, and war"
---
ECONOMIC + POLICY... Bwahahahhahahahahahahahah!
Ladies & Gentlemen... we have found a #WINNER in the "create a new oxymoron" contest!
maybe you're making a retorical statement, i dunno. but my take away is that any business activity that depends upon others going further into debt as decision data on whether i should go further into debt...
well, debt saturation doesn't bode well for either the producer or the consumer, but does continue to assist those elements collecting the vig, who we might agree are the problem.
Has anyone actually looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics basket of goods? It's absurd beyond belief. About 40 percent of it is the cost of housing which is based on some amalgam of rents and purchase prices. The gist of it is that with home prices plummeting for the past few years, the declining cost of "housing" has masked a lot of other inflation. So the Federal Government essentially is assuming that some guy whose house has lost 30 percent of its value since he bought at the local market peak in Phoenix will simply sell and then move in order to take advantage of lower "housing" prices? I think the guy in Phoenix will be reluctant to take that massive haircut just to cut his cost of "housing" by a few hundred dollars per month, so no offset of other inflation comes from the decline of home prices.
As for the other 60 percent of the BLS basket, plenty of expenses you absolutely cannot avoid have gone way up in the past few years: food, fuel, utilities, among others, but the drop in "housing" costs masks all this. The guy in Phoenix is just screwed. As a bonus, the basket does not include the cost of any form of insurance or education. My health insurance policy cost is now up 54 percent over the last 2.5 years and I have scarcely filed any claims. College tuition, touted as a mandatory cost for the middle class and wannabe middle class, continues a steady rate of doubling about every 9 years. It is not included in the BLS basket of goods. As for pay raises for Mom and Dad, think 3 percent each year.
In short, I AM FUCKING SICK OF HEARING INFLATION IS LOW. THAT IS A HUGE LIE.
The Keynesian experiment is dead.
Offshoring production and profits to create a consumptive populace leveraged by debt is a slow suicide.
Excellent article.
Much too stark and realistic for mass consumption or digestion.
>The Keynesian experiment is dead.
A theory of economics is required in order to interpret historical market data. So, no experiment can disprove Keynesianism.
But Keynes's General Theory is a logical shambles. See Hazlitt's Failure of the New Economics for a thorough debunking.
Common sense is all that is required.
Consumption, like population, is finite.
I think economic theories that are robust can never be proven correct, but they sure can be proven wrong, because history has a good ole time poking holes in them.
I'm not sure I understand how the presented charts paint a jobs picture, quite frankly. The idea that "jobs" are some magical good in the world is pretty stupid, which is no doubt why politicians go on and on about jobs. Like paying some lazy fuckstick a salary to do basically nothing all day is somehow economically productive. The housing bubble created a lot of blue collar type jobs for awhile, but that's done. In the corporate world, there was a lot of dead wood hanging on during the boom economy which is mostly gone now, but the companies seem to still be getting the same amount of work done, go figure on how that is possible.
There remains a lot of leeches sucking the life out of the economy on the top end--all the excecs taking huge advantages in pay as compared to those who do the actual work as well as all the public sector "workers" who have not undergone needed downsizing (like the cops who are all too happy to beat up on the OWS protestors at the command of the oligarch elite).
Lastly, there's the pension problem that we are stuck with for a long time to come, which is a huge boulder attached by unbreakable chain to the economy.
I think I know how we can get back to a sound economy--find a way to blow off the pension obligations and find a way to end the reign of the oligarchs. Both are sucking the life out of the middle class. That should give us some breathing room.
A sound economy will return as soon as money is no longer a political creation, enabling true savings to occur, which will enable demand to recover, as people will have both the desire, and ability to pay for increased goods and services.
Until then, all productivity will continue to be consumed by the unproductive.
There are plenty of jobs. But the carbon based biped have been replaced by machines and silicon based robots. But machines and robots need oil in one form or another for energy. Oil is very very very expensive to produce (million millibars of pressure for million years on fossils). So when existing oil runs out or becomes too dear, there'll once again be demand for carbon based bipeds. Because foodgrains are much cheaper to produce. So basic probalem is that of pricing. We price oil based on what it costs to extract and refine and not on what it costs to actually produce. And think automation is cheaper than human/animal labor. We are in for a very nasty surprise.
This was a great remark! Unfortunately, this diagnosis is flat-out wrong. This is not just another post-war recession, and so the treatment—lowering interest rates to zero and flooding the economy with borrowed money and liquidity—isn’t working. In fact, it’s making the patient sicker by the day.
Hense the " PONZI" LOWWWW valuations!
Anyone shudder to think about what happens on the day that:
The cost of going to work exceeds the pay of said work?
Everyone's line of credit and or credit card is maxed out or curtailed?
Property taxes or rent, utlitites, and insurance cost more than one can make from working?
"Property taxes or rent, utlitites, and insurance cost more than one can make from working?"
That already happened once and our mothers had to go to work. Next, we'll have to commune to make ends meet....But the bankers WILL get their bonuses!
it costs me 10 minutes of walk to come to my workplace (do not know how much energy my body consumes to perform that but it should not cost much at all)
Depends on how fat you are, how fast you walk, & the slope involved...
We'll all just assume that you walk "uphill, both ways, through the snow" for nostalgic purposes...
"The cost of going to work exceeds the pay of said work?"
You also have just described what happens when your Energy Supply is at a 1/1 ratio of EROEI.
The Cost of getting the Energy exceeds the net energy gained of said energy"
WTI crosses $100 a barrel.
Peak Oil will kill us because of what you just said. There may be oil left somewheres, but the cost of getting it exceeds the net gain amount.
Kinda like drilling 7000 feet thru ocean and then another 5000 down in rock...
I heard an interview a couple days ago with a small business owner in Italy. She has one employee, pays her 18,000 Euros per year then hands another 38,000 Euros to the government to cover all the costs and benefits tied to that single employee. "Here's one for you and two for them."
"the high keening wails of Keynesian cargo cultists "
quote of the week
alotta alliteration from practical preppy publishers...
Good one Ned. It's more exact analogy than most understand. Keynesians have gone fundamentalist, hysterically pressing forward with the certaintly of selected unquestionable elements of orthodoxy, blind and deaf to environmental feedback. All fundamentalists are essentailly cargo-cultists.
why look for a job when you can just buy the s@p at 1260 and sell at 1245. or hold on is it the other way around? what do they whant us to do again? No buy high dividend stocks and get paid to wait(wait for what?)
Let me say that I am highly disappointed by the faulty and WRONG analysis presented above. Does anyone understand economics?
First the dynamics of increasing debt are well understood; however, what is NOT understood is how debt works. To present a graph of change in GDP/change in Debt and then to call this mathematical formula as an example of diminishing return of $1 debt as having negative correlation is plainly asinine.
What is presented is a SIMPLE fact that Total Debt is not being liquidated while GDP is falling or only increasing. However, $1 in debt spent on consumables or investments WILL always have a positive effect on GDP.
Wtf are you smoking and where can I get some?
So do your Hershey bars still cost a nickle and bottle of Coke a dime, Nancy P.? Mine don't.
Does this mean that if everyone maxes out their credit cards our problems will be solved?
I went looking for an updated version of the MPD chart, and found the original post by its creator, which discusses its deficiencies.
http://financialminorityreport.com/index.php/2010/03/my-thoughts-on-the-...
I agree with your conclusion that the chart doesn't really show the marginal productivity of debt, as IMO, the entire concept of GDP is bogus as related to government borrowing and spending. Then again, one could argue that debt as money makes the calculation impossible, since it pulls forward both future production and consumption.
Even with that though, I still believe it shows we've passed a point of no return in regards to tangible capital depletion, a.k.a. the limits of malinvestment. When the majority of the profits of the S&P500 are from flipping financial paper, rather than producing goods and services, something is very, very wrong.
I am afraid that this chart is not quite accurate because the change in total debt outstanding can't be accurately measured. In fact, much of the debt currently on the books is 'fictional' because it'll never be repaid.
http://tickerforum.org/akcs-www?singlepost=1877131
Not at these levels in a global economy awash in derivatives it's not. This is new territory, and anyone who tells you different should listen to the quavering tone of Bernanke's voice.
$1 in debt spent will always have a positive effect on GDP, unless it is the straw that broke the camel's back and triggers a credit event that wipes your economy away. This comment ignores that GDP isn't the whole pie. It's irrelevant that $1 of debt spending boosts GDP. It's not a perpetual motion machine. There are costs to debt spending, even if you can't see them, otherwise you could spend your way to prosperity. Is that the kind of enlightenment that economics seeks to reveal?
My point is not about merits of debt, I am merely pointing out out that the chart showing inverse correlating between GDP and Debt is just theoretical: it does not exist in the real world.
The future of work? What future?
It's simple, no more specialization. If you can't mend your own clothes, grow your own food, butcher your own meat, plow your own fields, build your own shelters, draw your own water, etc. etc., you are going to fucking die. If you can only do a few of these things and are not lucky enough to live near other like-minded folks you can barter and trade with, you are going to fucking die.
This upbeat analyzation brought to you by: the reality of utter economic implosion. Better luck next economy, folks.
Too bad most of that stuff has either been outlawed or regulated to death. All to protect us from each other, of course! ;-)
While I look forward to the acceptance of the morality of black markets by the general public, I sure don't look forward to their necessity.
I disagree. In some areas of the world, you will be proved right. In others, I think things will go on, but just a bit differently than before. WWI and WWII changed everything for millions of people, but others in different areas of the world, not so much. If you are betting on a return to the Dark Ages and feudalism, I think that's a long shot.
I see us unlocking fusion soon, and unlimited fresh water and energy changes everything.
Unfortunately, I also see a lot of the bad stuff you see, a worldwide unraveling of globalism after an implosion of the financial system, then war. I don't see an exchange of strategic nukes in the cards, just a few well placed EMPs dropped here and there to prove a point, to be accompanied by widespread starvation and death.
You know, the usual stuff, just on a bigger scale, but that's the cost of having 7 billion lemmings this time, more have to be driven off the cliff.
Next time save all your words and just say "technology will save us." Question though, isn't all our problems rooted in our technologies?
Work has always been finding a way to create value for others. It still is. Whether you start a small business manufacturing a special lubricant for musical instruments, or you buy, repair, and sell antique dolls on eBay, you are creating value for others. It's capitalism. Americans are very good at it although too many are in a state of learned helplessness.
Steve Jobs was a master at creating value for others. He dedicated his life to creating the best interface between humans and the digital world. He's the exception, however. The vast majority of us create or work for a small business where we make some small improvement in the lives of others. We measure that value we are able to create by accounting for sales and expenses. That which is left over is newly created wealth.
Americans are very good at it although too many are in a state of learned helplessness.
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No. US citizens are very good at stealing, extorting and farming.
Peak subjugation. Too many chiefs, not enough Indians.
Plenty of work for anyone applying for the Indian part. US citizens and their birth given right over chief positions, not so much.
you make no sense at all. you contribute nothing here.
LOL, I thought it was me. I wanted to junk him but couldn't follow his tortured logic and grammer.
I remember you now AnAnonymous, you're that punk from China right? Hey, how's that sneaker making job going in your worker's paradise, huh? I can't wait to see how the Century of China works out. I bet it will be real fun being broke in a country full of guys after you aborted all the girls due to the One Child policy. That's not what I call paradise.
Vergeltung, Smiddy,
Very good, + 1 to you both.
Steve Jobs was one in a billion (or more), oh well...Where do I sign up to get my 'special' lubricant?
"This is not just another post-war recession"
There is already revolution against corporate going on right now. Anyone else notice it. Wife making own laundry detergent, making our own toothpaste, no more flouride. New recipe for shampoo. Good bye P+G
The solution obviously is more endless wars and thus ballooning military unemployment reservoirs. Has been since the turn of the century actually. The 9/11 terror hollywoodshow and the resulting very desperate war lies should continue to be viewed in this light.
Better that you should die today so that I could live for another day ...
---Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.
The bankster controlled regimes as the article says, have gone "all in" since this time the western economies are on the precipice,but to what end?to perpetuate the ponzi economies that are becoming increasingly unstable as time goes on and peoples disposable incomes are decimated by unemployment and inflation,the further iterations of QE are having an incrementally smaller effect on GDP,hence the sovereign debt models that have supported decades of welfare dependance based on phoney tax revenues from the ponzi economies are now unravelling.
Bernanke is trying at present to lower unemployment from its current 9%(I know it's alot more),but what if the US and most western economies have now structural unemployment far in excess of this level as a result of offshoring etc?This means his policy of zero interest rates will continue for the forseeable future,as he is trying to achieve the impossible - the economies of the US and the rest of western Europe have changed,and changed for the worse,they are not going to get back the level of prosperity and employment once enjoyed as almost a right,and high unemployment might be a permanent fixture.
In that case,how much damage will he do before he and his sucessor realise that they cannot "print" jobs.
The problem is,elitist academics with PhD's and egos the size of Mt. Rushmore don't like to admit they are wrong,when it becomes obvious to even the thickest congressman that ZIRP/QE isn't ever going to work,how long will it be,and how much damage will be done before the message gets to the treasury and the Fed?
To what end? The longer I watch this story unfold the more convinced I am that our super-smurt leaders simply want to retain power, period. The economy, jobs, debt, stimulus, blah blah blah is all completely secondary to exercising raw power. If they can figure out a way to consolidate power through epic economic destruction, they will. I think that's the the overarching reason why they scramble left and right to keep up the guise of recovery. Complete devastation is an unknown, so it can't be allowed.......yet.
The PhD's know they are doing wrong, but they need the money. Greenspan's comments before entering the Fed and in retirement should put that question to rest. They are corrupt, not stupid.
Chump is right. This is about power, nothing more. We are stalling and buying gold, not fixing the unfixable. When our debt based system collapses, he who has the gold, has the power. It's that simple. You don't have to look much further than post Soviet Russia to see what's coming. In such a scenario, you either have money and power, or you don't. If you are self sufficient, so much the better for you, but money and power is all that will matter, and that money will be gold.
Time to start a small 'core' cable position here @ the 23.6 fibi just below the 50 sma. It's the lessor of 2 evils, and it has been beat down by every MONKEY in the trading business. I like the R/R topside with a stop just below the 10-11 candle ( daily).
here's my chart, it says debt is money. as long as the growth of new debt equals old debt, then money remains constant. if debt growth slows then money disappears. right now you see M1, the money supply is parabolic, but the velocity of money is running inversely. so you can create debt (make a loan to someone to buy a house). that person buys a new house, and workers are paid, but more importantly they take on new debt themselves. so debt grows and money grows.
but when that person buys an existing house that debt cannot grow, you are merely swapping assets. the stock market is all about buying existing homes, and occasionally IPOs, but lately not much.
if we can't grow debt, then money will shrink, which is evident from the chart of money supply vs money velocity.
when the velocity of something goes to zero, whether its electricity or water, that thing disappears, the lights go off, the tap goes dry. if at that point all you can do is roll the existing debt over, you haven't solved anything. you have paid the mortgage on a house with no electricity and no water.
Anyone shudder to think about what happens on the day that:
The cost of going to work exceeds the pay of said work?
Everyone's line of credit and or credit card is maxed out or curtailed?
Property taxes or rent, utlitites, and insurance cost more than one can make from working?
Took me 102 weeks, withdrawing my 401K (maybe a blessing in disguise), and about a bazillion interviews to get the job I have had for a year now. My new job is a 1.5 hour commute, amd I took a 15-20% paycut from my last job (and they don't have beer on Fridays), all while Mr Massachusetts takes their 25% cut. I get benefits that barely meet the MA state requirements (after my company made me wait 6 mths, thank you RomneyCare), and they don't match my 401K (which we all know are scams, anyways). But i have to be "grateful" just as my company posts profits, but I don't get a raise or bonus.
There are stories like this around the country. You think the OWS crowd is mad? Just wait until the rest of the proletariat wakes up. "Pitchforks to Asses" will be the new slogan, if these greedy dickheads don't listen to us and fix shit.
Good news is, I am 6 mths away from paying off all my debt by age 30. I am probably in the 25% percentile of those in my peer group (22-30) of being debt free. I cannot wait to pay it all off and finally be somewhat free of serfdom.
Anonymous says it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCX8RBGZSTg
Well said.
Many families are already at the point where work costs more.
They would be stupid to not take advantage of any food stamp or welfare programs; especially when working simply sends money to the FED, the banks, and the Government so they can send it overseas or into their bonus pool.
we need a new model of employment,
I don't think it's acceptable in our modern civilization to consider changes to the structure of society. At least not in the USA.
As a species, the absolute best we can do is to put as many as possible of the 7 billion people on the planet into servitude to the 40,000 or so who own everything.
What else could we aspire to? Is this not the pinnacle of human endeavor and achievement?
Peace on Earth? Better standards of living? Construction of infrastructure that might benefit all? Cleaner environment or better education or scientific exploration?
What good is any of that stuff?
I know, lets take everything from those 40,000 and distribute it evenly to the rest of us. Hmmm, not enough to go around. Ok, lets take it and keep it and make everyone a pauper, then we can dole out scraps as we wish. Of course people will want out, so we'll need a wall and a strong military....
There could be a way for that reply to be stupider, I guess.
It may be stupid, but it is history...I'm not advocating it.
Nutjobs in charge:
Non-profit group linked to Homeland Security promotes absurd fear of non-existent threat of terrorism By Madison Ruppert Editor of End the Lie: http://12160.info/profiles/blogs/2649739:BlogPost:707870
Globalization and technology sayeth Addison and Bonner.
Some people just never seem to learn… Stanley Milgram’s shocking experiments of the 60’s and their conclusions still hold as true today as back then and maybe are even more relevant now! http://www.experiment-resources.com/stanley-milgram-experiment.html Just keep on pressing the button because everything’s going to be just fine…
the unemployment increased by 140 000 in Spain LAST MONTH alone, in a country of 40 million. Unheard of...and its not going to stop...we will have 25% overall unemployment in Spain in 2012, 30% for the under 30 segment; thats like Africa today.
Effin crude futures @ 102.36? Mom can I have 10$ to buy gas for the " weed whacker"?
Those M/E sovereigns are sure to be diversifying in Asia and Europe. A euro bounce possibly?
1. Population growth - there are simply Not nor will there Ever Be enough jobs for everyone to work. Automation and increased productivity etc -
2. If we look at the % of GDP that the financial sector accounts for - it used to be less than 10% - now it's hitting 40% - so 30% of the GDP is False Papered Fraud Amounts.
That makes the true GDP around 11 trillion NOT then15 trillion - thats Fantasy Land used to pump bonuses.
Before the US developed bureaucratic socialism in the 1930s, there was never any long term unemployment; more commonly, there were labor shortages. That is why so many immigrated to the US.
The only way we can create jobs is to substantially decrease taxes imposed on Corporation and increase peronal income taxes on the rich. We don't need more rich people in this country, what we need is more work and to get work is to have more business and corporations. The rich can leave if they dont like the taxes imposed on them, however, they can continue their business here as low corporate taxes will attract more business.
!!
I have worked 25 years with a graduate degree in the sciences, paid for all of my college expenses. I would gladly step out of the way to own a farm, grow food for myself and others and live debt and stress free. Bet you there are plenty of those jobs out there. But I am programmed to pay the mortgage, pay for the kids' college and put away for a retirement that might turn out to be one big lie. This is my problem.
Rich isn't having "things", it's not being a slave to "things". We have been brainwashed. Nothing beats a cold beer after a long day of work, watching your kids play sports, hunting or just walking in the woods. I chased a dream with no end in sight and I am tired of running. Don't tread on me.
with respect, why not consider unplugging from the amrkn "dream" (the one Carlin says you have to be asleep to believe in)?
you understand you've been "brainwashed" - sit down with your family and have a long, hard talk - or a series of them, if it's been a while since you did this, and you need to bring them up to speed - about the reality of where we're all headed. . . best to do this than indulge them in the fantasies anyhow. . .
"walking in the woods" is still free for now, as is playing sports, etc. - stop running to lose ground, cash in, get the farm - you'll be doing a better job of providing for your family going forward.
best wishes.
we have a chance that we wont be in future. according to group of people
Excellent stuff. Note how the increasing public sector "employment" coincides with declines in the private sector. The EPA, for example, is creating dead zones all over the US where no development can economically take place; in general, its efforts have produced negative GDP growth for little or no benefit. But federal statistics treat every penny spent by the EPA as GDP, since they measure inputs not output.
The future of work? I'll tell you what the future of work is; the same as the past. Millions of lunkheads constructing buildings and other shit we do not need.
"The future of work". In a land where the young unemployment is hitting 40%, the McDonalds is King.
I'm reminded of what happened in Europe, 1914, to the youth of that generation. Then again in 1939. Before anyone forgets, about 1/3 of young men were lost in 1914 warfare of the central players [UK, France, Germany]. Of course, back in 1914, the war was only going to last until Christmas, and killing off a percentage of your youth was considered healthy for them.
What's it going to be this time? Smart money says three films spell it out: "Relentless" [for the 2.0, even though the 3.0 are here already], "Metropolis" for the grunts and "Contagion" to wipe a slate clean without the downturn of nuclear contamination (Japan, as ever, is doing its own thing here & opting for country-wide sterilisation on their own terms - not that the anime / hentai freaks were breeding anyhow). Smart bears will notice that the kill off in film "Contagion" is only 1/4. That's about right for a new economic dawn - otherwise you're in Bubonic Plague territory, which no-one liked. And yes, you'll note that one of those films is much older than the others. Human progress = drugs now (for the proles, provigil, nuvigil to allow focus, 18 hours without sleep and killing off imagination; for the non-proles a whole cornucopia of smart drugs), targeted type IV genetically modified viruses and... that old, old, old chestnut of "keeping the grunts in the place they need to be" via a femme fatal - if you need a lesson on what Lady Gaga is, you should look up a FT interview hosted by Stephen Fry she did to market her to the UK elites - she ended by pouring pink rose petals over the room. Do your own Google-Fu to learn what that means, and yes, such symbolism is how its played.
In other news, if you've not already caught the memo - the financial world has succumbed to what we call "The MMO disease". Mudflation and a pyramid flux of electronic capital upwards [hello 0.1%] trading ingame currencies along meta lines, ignoring the fact that the base line is no longer working [in MMO terms, this is new players - hint, WoW is dying]. And yes, little chipmunks, MMO's are a great source of modeling financial markets - what the holy fuck did you think that CCP [Crowd Control Productions] funded by General Catalyst Partners in Iceland was really doing? If you don't wiggle your nose at the names by now, then you're not playing right [hint: Mr Grossman, vulture funds, $100 mil from Congo - what a "luckily apt" name; its called a 'punch line']. Better yet, Zynga and FB are seeing decreasing uptake, due to a really simple equation: if you don't increase real world wealth, then you hit saturation point, because no-one new is joining the online revolution. This month, 3..7 million people (and triple that of pirates) went single player to Skyrim, a world where they could make a difference... alone.
Sure, we'll try and farm it out - but in 30 years, we've not seen a massive upturn in BRICs like we should... because we've been draining them dry and keeping poverty real to make Ipods. Shall we remember how many regime changes we manufactured? First person to disagree, and pipe up with some Libertarian bollocks about "trickle down" and "they could have if their Darwinian will-to-profit wasn't crippled by social costs" obviously doesn't remember Russia going from "one man takes a gun, next man takes a clip, one man takes a gun, next man takes a clip, if a man dies with a gun, pick it up" to "Here's our new line in modern tanks that beat everything but Panzer IVs and we just made x50 times the amount you've made"... in three years. Or we could cite the India garments trade where cotton production [subsidised to the tune of approx $2 bil a year in the USA] is locked into product buying by the majors? i.e. USA subsidises cotton - forces companies to buy their cotton if said companies want to sell back to the states, and then demands [to the 0.01 cent, and no, that's not a joke, at 14 hour shifts and $3 / day wages] that each pair of jeans / T-shirt etc costs 0.13 cents, and retails for $4 so the USA proles don't get uppity?
That's not Capitalism, that's state enforced mafia work. Empire at play. And people point to India and claim... "Growing economy". Yep, because call centres and garments for the West are a functioning economy. Not to mention code farming. And that's to a country with nukes - the rest are merely resources waiting to get their infrastructure and cities bombed back into the third world. If you want a hint: name a country that succeeded in the Industrial Revolution without Empire - it is called Germany, and look where the last two attempts to break out & join the club lead.
All this bullshit about countries unable to get out of poverty - hint: 1.3 billion people living in the West, getting fat, and making sure their slice of the pie isn't harmed. There's 7 billion people, and the "best minds" of the TPTB are coming up with gems such as "Well, Africa is a write off, we should encourage Asia to educate women and increase birth control"1.
And they're hungry now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7WJHdE0__I&feature=related
There is, of course, another way.
But I'm here for the junks.
Is Martenson everyone's pimp?
Why can't Charles Smith just submit the story himself?
Doesn't Martenson have chickens to herd in his front yard?
Let's put an end to pimping.
There's a lot to do:
Clean up Fukushima, Gulf of Mexico, etc.
Alternative energy.
Health for all.
Housing for all.
Those 4 tasks could keep everyone working for a long time IF our priorities were straight. And that is a big effen IF.