4 ms·

In all industry, the trend goes one way: The wages of working people (including white-collar, I hope, that is the right word) have to go down, and the earnings

In all industry, the trend goes one way: The wages of working people (including white-collar, I hope, that is the right word) have to go down, and the earnings from investments (pure money makes money business) have to climb. There are only very few exceptions: One are lawyers, as mentioned in an other thread, and the other are people that work in the investment business (investment bankers, traders, ...). The reason for the second exception is obvious: their work is needed to make even more money from the money and every trick is played, to have the smartest, best guys getting the job done ... and get it done better and better. Problem is: The whole thing breaks our society. Middle classes are already melting massively in many countries. The possessions of the worlds are concentrating in the hands of very few people more and more. Those people make our laws! The other people become poorer, even in the situation that the overall worlds possessions expand massively. The countries are already so much in dept, that many of them can not pay even the interest. Even the US is so much in dept, that there seems to be no possibility to get ever rid of it. Nobody seems to realize, that while we are talking, investment companies are roaming the world for land, for houses, for companies to buy them, exploit them and throw it away when not needed (and not useful) any more. The wealth of the world gets accumulated in the hand of investment companies and the super-rich. By rising the value of pure money investments, the value of human labor (to a more and more extend even high-paid and high-value labor) is degrading.

eru 13y ago
> In all industry, the trend goes one way: [...] If that was true, wouldn't we have had to have a mythical past of zero earnings from investments and 100% of revenue going to labour?
- lotyrin 13y ago
  Early foraging societies maybe? (Before agriculture or systemized bartering, let alone economic specialization or capitalism.)
- MarkPNeyer 13y ago
  that's kind of how it was. there were no earnings from investments when there was no investment; when everybody was working it was workers who took all of the gains because there was nobody else involved.
  - eru 13y ago
    Yes, but grand parent said it's all going in the same direction. Ie 18th century was better than 19th century was better than 20th century.
    - atmosx 13y ago
      ??? In what way was the 18th century better than the 19th????
      - eru 13y ago
        I agree with you, that the 20th century was better than the 19th and the 19th was better than the 18th. Thus I disagree with PythonicAlpha, who said > In all industry, the trend goes one way: The wages of working people (including white-collar, I hope, that is the right word) have to go down, and the earnings from investments (pure money makes money business) have to climb." I guess my argument by contradiction relied too much on the context higher up in the thread.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > Yes, but grand parent said it's all going in the same direction. The original quote seems to pretty explicitly say its a trend across all industries, not a historic trend across all time.
millzlane 13y ago
"Those people" are definitely the problem. All for money and power. It's pure greed. They infiltrate our governments, they corrupt our politicians, they sway popular opinion with their ads and their social media trickery. The own the new stations, and the radio stations. The money is all that drives it. I wanted to say so much more but couldn't articulate my comment well enough. The problem is just like you explain but 10X worst than anyone can see. Those people are a cancer and it will only end with a collapse. Greed with be the fall of human kind.
- madaxe_again 13y ago
  "Those people" are "you people" are "us people". The problem is not that of some vested, grounded elite who rule from high. The problem is not that we have some variety of malevolent overclass or illuminati pulling the strings. The problem is rather that of a culture of greed, which creates and perpetuates the "high" and the "low". By this I do not mean the capitalist system in general, rather the current neo-liberal brand of laissez-faire capitalism to the point of negligence. Hayek was vociferous on the topic of adequate regulation being essential to the sustenance and perpetuation of a liberal democracy - and adequate regulation we do not have - nor can we, with our current sociopolitical frameworks coupled with a furious pace of change. The last time technological progress so outpaced cultural and economic development, we called it the industrial revolution - and the disruption and change in life for most of man was, frankly, mindboggling - never mind the ensuing bloody transition into industrialised society, which still drags on. As long as we continue to crank the same handle on the same sausage machine, the same sausages will continue to come out. You cannot simply remove the elite and expect magic to happen, for that power vacuum will be filled by successive elites, and the labour vacuum will be filled by successive underclasses, until the whole thing comes crashing down due to resource exhaustion and Malthus's revenge. We reside in the same sausage-machine as the Romans resided in, and inherited from the Greeks, from the Hittites and friends, from Sumeria - c.f. Baudrillard & Dick on "The Empire Never Ended". Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... Bloody revolution will simply replace one elite with another, and maintain the status quo, with a few new twists but no real change. Forceful change by the populace (i.e. revolution, but not necessarily bloody) will also be very difficult to enact at this stage, partially as we've allowed our governments and domestic armies (law enforcement) to become sufficiently militarised that any opposition would likely be quashed, and partially as we've allowed ourselves to become so sedated and mollycoddled by our Brave New World that only a minority even perceive that there is something amiss. Our only option is systemic change which comes from within. This can only happen at the volition of those in power, who will be unwilling to give up their own vested interests. Selling future elites down the river, however, is something our governments have done before and will almost certainly do again. Humanity requires a sufficiently large gun to be put to the head of every man, woman and child on this great greasy ball of rock, in order that we might change. That gun may well be here already, in the form of our friend "climatic alteration" ("climate change" is just too polluted a phrase now, just as "global warming" became over a decade ago). We may be faced to change our oil-dependent economies, beyond the superficial relocating of where and how we fetch that oil. We may be faced to change our attitudes to what comprises wealth, and decouple such from consumption of resources. We're still stuck in the "that fat dude must be rich" neolithic mindset. Our own survival instincts are currently working against us. We must make them work for us. Then again, we may not succeed, and we may all end up very extinct.... which isn't the end of the world. Just of us.
atmosx 13y ago
Well history is repeating herself, if middle class disappears, revolution comes guns go out, everybody gets killed we have a third (French?) revolution and so on...
- digitalengineer 13y ago
  Except this time they're ready for the masses.
  - twic 13y ago
    I'm sure they thought that the last few times too.
    - userulluipeste 13y ago
      No, they didn't! Forces available back then were too human-dependent, and a real inherently-human risk of treachery of changing sides have always been a concern for the leading circles. Nowadays there can be built automatic (i.e. reliable) self-sufficient and self-defending domains that would require a major external force to be brought under control. Just masses of people won't do it anymore.
      - VLM 13y ago
        "automatic (i.e. reliable)" I was in .mil. That word pairing is unfortunately an oxymoron. Reliable if you have a large army of non-elite skilled techs and contractors providing support, while totally unconcerned about what their system is doing to their friends and family back home. Even a sociopathic orphan would have to be concerned about how everyone else would likely treat quislings aka himself. Historically you really don't want to be the quisling, they historically tend to get worse treatment than the actual bad guys. MAYBE you could pull it off if you went all multicultural and made sure groups never fought against their own people. Maybe. The first week would, indeed, be pretty rough on "the masses". Then again if the average lifespan of an elite is 80 years, lets say 40 remaining years on average, that means life will be pretty good for about a week and then they die having thrown away 39 years and 51 weeks of life. They're not dumb enough to try that unless pushed into a corner (perhaps literally, by rioters?) with a predicted lifespan under a week. Then a lifespan of a week or so starts sounding like an upgrade. Who knows, maybe the horse will speak after all (weird fable reference). All you need is one domestic "wedding party" incident and next thing you know, its the modern equivalent of the claymores getting turned backwards into the compound and set off. If you think combat drones would be effective against a favella, imagine how much better they'd work against a landed estate when one techie gets pissed off and changes a few things. Its hard to keep 999 people happy with a management style of "iron fist and no quarter". Street gangs can only pull off 9 or so and attempting 99 is a recipe for factional fighting and an elimination of the organization that allowed one guy to be in charge of so many. It just doesn't scale. There are ways to implement an authoritarian regime, most of the successful ones historically did not find domestically created and applied technology to be a primary part of the strategy. Tangentially on the borders something or other helped or maybe made some activity more profitable, but not as a pillar of the strategy. "Just masses of people won't do it anymore." You need masses of people to fight when the other side also has masses of people. Think Germany in the 20s/30s when huge right wing groups were fighting huge left wing groups, before the right rose to power over the left and wiped them out. When the ratio is 1:100 or 1:1000, one side can have all the drones they want, but if the other side has one angry guy with a sniper rifle, they win. Rephrased, a war of attrition is a great battle strategy if both sides are roughly evenly matched, but when its 1:1000 or so, attrition is no longer a wise strategy, in fact its about the dumbest strategy I can think of. We have the neocons acting as quislings because they're dumb enough to think they'll get better treatment under the new regime if they're good little quislings today. But that's not going to happen to 30% or whatever it is of the population when it hits the fan, so that illusion will evaporate relatively quickly. Under realistic bad conditions, just aren't enough quislings to require masses of non-quislings to oppose them. The threat to the apparent future American "regime change" isn't a crowd of hundreds of hippies occupying a park, but one angry dude with a sniper rifle. If one thing defines Americans its being ridiculously heavily armed compared to most other civilians, and the guy who buys a "scoped deer hunting rifle" and keeps it in his basement is much more of a deterrent than a hundred hippies waving signs in a protest march. An armed society is a polite society, so there is at least some hope for a peaceful future. As an optimist I always hope humans will be smart enough to avoid the kind of stupid violence I see in history, and I often end up disappointed, especially when they're money to be made off violence (and I'm not talking about videogames, but the real thing). I'm not a fan of what I see on the horizon, but I'm not going to pretend to be blind just because I intensely dislike it and hope it can be averted.
vellum 13y ago
There are only very few exceptions: One are lawyers The lawyers don't think so. http://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2014/01/aba_legal_education.html http://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/20... "The predicament of so many students and so many recent graduates who may never procure the employment they anticipated when they enrolled in their law schools is a compelling reality that should be heeded by all who are involved in our system of legal education http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/09/18/associate-salaries-essentially-flat-since-2007/ http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/09/18/associate-salaries-essen... overall slack demand for legal services by deep-pocketed corporate clients has confidence slipping among law firm leaders
- PythonicAlpha 13y ago
  Maybe I should have clarified: Patent lawyers ;) I think, there is just a difference between high earning lawyers and those that are not. It is difficult to get into a position, where the high rates are earned. But I think, it is at least more likely, that you can earn real big money as lawyer (without starting an own company) than as a programmer.

eru 13y ago

> In all industry, the trend goes one way: [...] If that was true, wouldn't we have had to have a mythical past of zero earnings from investments and 100% of revenue going to labour?

lotyrin 13y ago
Early foraging societies maybe? (Before agriculture or systemized bartering, let alone economic specialization or capitalism.)
MarkPNeyer 13y ago
that's kind of how it was. there were no earnings from investments when there was no investment; when everybody was working it was workers who took all of the gains because there was nobody else involved.
- eru 13y ago
  Yes, but grand parent said it's all going in the same direction. Ie 18th century was better than 19th century was better than 20th century.
  - atmosx 13y ago
    ??? In what way was the 18th century better than the 19th????
    - eru 13y ago
      I agree with you, that the 20th century was better than the 19th and the 19th was better than the 18th. Thus I disagree with PythonicAlpha, who said > In all industry, the trend goes one way: The wages of working people (including white-collar, I hope, that is the right word) have to go down, and the earnings from investments (pure money makes money business) have to climb." I guess my argument by contradiction relied too much on the context higher up in the thread.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Yes, but grand parent said it's all going in the same direction. The original quote seems to pretty explicitly say its a trend across all industries, not a historic trend across all time.

millzlane 13y ago

"Those people" are definitely the problem. All for money and power. It's pure greed. They infiltrate our governments, they corrupt our politicians, they sway popular opinion with their ads and their social media trickery. The own the new stations, and the radio stations. The money is all that drives it. I wanted to say so much more but couldn't articulate my comment well enough. The problem is just like you explain but 10X worst than anyone can see. Those people are a cancer and it will only end with a collapse. Greed with be the fall of human kind.

madaxe_again 13y ago
"Those people" are "you people" are "us people". The problem is not that of some vested, grounded elite who rule from high. The problem is not that we have some variety of malevolent overclass or illuminati pulling the strings. The problem is rather that of a culture of greed, which creates and perpetuates the "high" and the "low". By this I do not mean the capitalist system in general, rather the current neo-liberal brand of laissez-faire capitalism to the point of negligence. Hayek was vociferous on the topic of adequate regulation being essential to the sustenance and perpetuation of a liberal democracy - and adequate regulation we do not have - nor can we, with our current sociopolitical frameworks coupled with a furious pace of change. The last time technological progress so outpaced cultural and economic development, we called it the industrial revolution - and the disruption and change in life for most of man was, frankly, mindboggling - never mind the ensuing bloody transition into industrialised society, which still drags on. As long as we continue to crank the same handle on the same sausage machine, the same sausages will continue to come out. You cannot simply remove the elite and expect magic to happen, for that power vacuum will be filled by successive elites, and the labour vacuum will be filled by successive underclasses, until the whole thing comes crashing down due to resource exhaustion and Malthus's revenge. We reside in the same sausage-machine as the Romans resided in, and inherited from the Greeks, from the Hittites and friends, from Sumeria - c.f. Baudrillard & Dick on "The Empire Never Ended". Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... Bloody revolution will simply replace one elite with another, and maintain the status quo, with a few new twists but no real change. Forceful change by the populace (i.e. revolution, but not necessarily bloody) will also be very difficult to enact at this stage, partially as we've allowed our governments and domestic armies (law enforcement) to become sufficiently militarised that any opposition would likely be quashed, and partially as we've allowed ourselves to become so sedated and mollycoddled by our Brave New World that only a minority even perceive that there is something amiss. Our only option is systemic change which comes from within. This can only happen at the volition of those in power, who will be unwilling to give up their own vested interests. Selling future elites down the river, however, is something our governments have done before and will almost certainly do again. Humanity requires a sufficiently large gun to be put to the head of every man, woman and child on this great greasy ball of rock, in order that we might change. That gun may well be here already, in the form of our friend "climatic alteration" ("climate change" is just too polluted a phrase now, just as "global warming" became over a decade ago). We may be faced to change our oil-dependent economies, beyond the superficial relocating of where and how we fetch that oil. We may be faced to change our attitudes to what comprises wealth, and decouple such from consumption of resources. We're still stuck in the "that fat dude must be rich" neolithic mindset. Our own survival instincts are currently working against us. We must make them work for us. Then again, we may not succeed, and we may all end up very extinct.... which isn't the end of the world. Just of us.

atmosx 13y ago

Well history is repeating herself, if middle class disappears, revolution comes guns go out, everybody gets killed we have a third (French?) revolution and so on...

digitalengineer 13y ago
Except this time they're ready for the masses.
- twic 13y ago
  I'm sure they thought that the last few times too.
  - userulluipeste 13y ago
    No, they didn't! Forces available back then were too human-dependent, and a real inherently-human risk of treachery of changing sides have always been a concern for the leading circles. Nowadays there can be built automatic (i.e. reliable) self-sufficient and self-defending domains that would require a major external force to be brought under control. Just masses of people won't do it anymore.
    - VLM 13y ago
      "automatic (i.e. reliable)" I was in .mil. That word pairing is unfortunately an oxymoron. Reliable if you have a large army of non-elite skilled techs and contractors providing support, while totally unconcerned about what their system is doing to their friends and family back home. Even a sociopathic orphan would have to be concerned about how everyone else would likely treat quislings aka himself. Historically you really don't want to be the quisling, they historically tend to get worse treatment than the actual bad guys. MAYBE you could pull it off if you went all multicultural and made sure groups never fought against their own people. Maybe. The first week would, indeed, be pretty rough on "the masses". Then again if the average lifespan of an elite is 80 years, lets say 40 remaining years on average, that means life will be pretty good for about a week and then they die having thrown away 39 years and 51 weeks of life. They're not dumb enough to try that unless pushed into a corner (perhaps literally, by rioters?) with a predicted lifespan under a week. Then a lifespan of a week or so starts sounding like an upgrade. Who knows, maybe the horse will speak after all (weird fable reference). All you need is one domestic "wedding party" incident and next thing you know, its the modern equivalent of the claymores getting turned backwards into the compound and set off. If you think combat drones would be effective against a favella, imagine how much better they'd work against a landed estate when one techie gets pissed off and changes a few things. Its hard to keep 999 people happy with a management style of "iron fist and no quarter". Street gangs can only pull off 9 or so and attempting 99 is a recipe for factional fighting and an elimination of the organization that allowed one guy to be in charge of so many. It just doesn't scale. There are ways to implement an authoritarian regime, most of the successful ones historically did not find domestically created and applied technology to be a primary part of the strategy. Tangentially on the borders something or other helped or maybe made some activity more profitable, but not as a pillar of the strategy. "Just masses of people won't do it anymore." You need masses of people to fight when the other side also has masses of people. Think Germany in the 20s/30s when huge right wing groups were fighting huge left wing groups, before the right rose to power over the left and wiped them out. When the ratio is 1:100 or 1:1000, one side can have all the drones they want, but if the other side has one angry guy with a sniper rifle, they win. Rephrased, a war of attrition is a great battle strategy if both sides are roughly evenly matched, but when its 1:1000 or so, attrition is no longer a wise strategy, in fact its about the dumbest strategy I can think of. We have the neocons acting as quislings because they're dumb enough to think they'll get better treatment under the new regime if they're good little quislings today. But that's not going to happen to 30% or whatever it is of the population when it hits the fan, so that illusion will evaporate relatively quickly. Under realistic bad conditions, just aren't enough quislings to require masses of non-quislings to oppose them. The threat to the apparent future American "regime change" isn't a crowd of hundreds of hippies occupying a park, but one angry dude with a sniper rifle. If one thing defines Americans its being ridiculously heavily armed compared to most other civilians, and the guy who buys a "scoped deer hunting rifle" and keeps it in his basement is much more of a deterrent than a hundred hippies waving signs in a protest march. An armed society is a polite society, so there is at least some hope for a peaceful future. As an optimist I always hope humans will be smart enough to avoid the kind of stupid violence I see in history, and I often end up disappointed, especially when they're money to be made off violence (and I'm not talking about videogames, but the real thing). I'm not a fan of what I see on the horizon, but I'm not going to pretend to be blind just because I intensely dislike it and hope it can be averted.

vellum 13y ago

There are only very few exceptions: One are lawyers The lawyers don't think so. http://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2014/01/aba_legal_education.html http://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/20... "The predicament of so many students and so many recent graduates who may never procure the employment they anticipated when they enrolled in their law schools is a compelling reality that should be heeded by all who are involved in our system of legal education http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/09/18/associate-salaries-essentially-flat-since-2007/ http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/09/18/associate-salaries-essen... overall slack demand for legal services by deep-pocketed corporate clients has confidence slipping among law firm leaders

PythonicAlpha 13y ago
Maybe I should have clarified: Patent lawyers ;) I think, there is just a difference between high earning lawyers and those that are not. It is difficult to get into a position, where the high rates are earned. But I think, it is at least more likely, that you can earn real big money as lawyer (without starting an own company) than as a programmer.