For the future economy to work, we need to get rid of our unhealthy fixation on what work and jobs mean to our self-worth. Paul Mason, a British economist and journalist, offers a lot of refreshing ideas in his book "Postcapitalism", but the main thrust is that capitalism is creaking under its own weight, and that we need an alternative. Mason says we need to move towards a "postcapitalist" economy, where working for money loses its centrality, where goods, information, and intellectual property are shared, and where economic actors collaborate in new ways, whether it's credit union-type financial institutions or co-operative-type retailers. http://www.fastcoexist.com/3056483/welcome-to-the-post-work-economy
I have it on the very strong authority of economically knowledgeable Marketists that this is impossible. On the other hand, if we survive the age of trumpery, it's also inevitable.
This book has received distinctly mixed reviews - a thoughtful one here in the left-wing New Stoadsperson: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture...sm-dreams-big-its-theories-tend-towards-vague And another from the right-wing Speccie: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/08/...market-for-books-saying-capitalism-is-doomed/ Mason, who is now an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn and writes a column in the Grauniad, was economics editor of Channel 4 and is some sort of crypto-Marxist. His sole commercial experience seems to be in the media industry, which may explain his- in my opinion rather wild - extrapolations from that business to everything else. To cut a long story short, I think it's crap.
What garbage. The bottom line for this book is: Nothing. He doesn't like the current system, but doesn't have an alternative. So it is useless. Capitalism remains the worst system except for all of the others. Speaking of garbage, that's what will be piling up on the curb after the first week of people no longer having to work crappy jobs. Worse than the book the article is about is the article itself. It starts off with a bold claim: That claim is linked to another article in the same site, and it's a clear lie. You can actually see it in the graphs they show while they say opposite things about them! Utter crap. I didn't bother with any of the rest of it after starting off so badly.
The concept of "what work and jobs mean to people" has almost nothing to do with capitalism. People who volunteer their time get as much (if not more) satisfaction from their work as people who get paid to do it. Some of the more satisfying things I have done have been as a volunteer. He's conflating a whole lot of things here. Removing capitalism from the equation does not mean we move to a "post-work" economy. IP and information sharing happens now (google "open source") and does not depend on the removal of work or capitalism. Today many people do not base their economic decisions primarily on "working for money."
I quite agree. The way I read his utopian idea was that money would be replaced by various other forms of peer-peer exchange of goods and services, enabled, in some nebulous way, by IT. He seems to me to have extrapolated from the fact that, in his industry (media), people do this with music and video, to a totally fanciful world in which people do the same with everything: houses? cars? petrol? railways? washing machines? health? It all derives, I suspect, from a fashionable leftie hatred of "bankers" and ignores the essential role that money plays in providing a common, convertible and universally accepted means of exchange. We get this a bit on the left in the UK: people who think getting rid of money is a solution to the problems they think they have. It's a sort of leftover from religious Puritanism and quite bonkers, as it would make everything about ten times harder than it is today.
Although I agree with you that work is going nowhere, and is more likely to increase in its impositions rather than vanish, the claim there is accurate. Real wages would be the after tax and after inflation, exchange value received and available to spend - and they have indeed been flat for the bottom 2/3 of the economy or so, since the 70s if not before. Two touchstone examples: The median 40 hour job wage once bought the median house, 20% down and a thirty year mortgage, 30% of income to housing. Now it doesn't rent the median 2 bedroom apartment at that criterion, in most markets. The minimum wage was originally stipulated to be the minimum that allowed a working man with a full time (40 hr week) job to support a wife and two children - food, clothing, and shelter. To match that requirement now, the minimum wage would have to be greater than the median hourly wage in most markets.
your never going to find a zero slope trend line in real life. a 9/40 slope is very much flat then not considering costs, inflation and taxes.
I prefer more precision. "Haven't increased much in 40 years" would have been better. The click-through article actually calls it a decrease though. And they lied about inflation in the article: it was in fact accounted for in the data. Economic doomsayers would never make that "mistake" (in quotes because an error in their favor is almost never accidental) on the income side: "Incomes are double what they were 40 years ago!" They'd only make it on the cost side: "Cost of living is double what it was 40 years ago!"
I screwed up the Federal standard work week - it was 44, not 40, at the time. Beyond that, I'm not sure it's true. It's a calculation I did for myself, working back from when I noticed that the minimum wage in 1968 (I was looking up the year when things started actually dropping in the US, which turned out to be 1982) actually met the poverty line for the standard household. You can start here: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html The relevant chart doesn't go back to 1938, but you can extrapolate using the other chart above it. There's an optical illusion created by the "poverty line", which has been calculated back from the nominal rate of inflation - this is deceptive, in that basic support costs have risen faster than inflation for a while now (you didn't need a phone to get an ordinary job in 1938, you didn't need to buy all your food and clothing retail, rural dwellings did not need indoor plumbing, etc) . A better idea than "percent of the poverty line" is had by noting that the minimum wage (.25 @ hr X 44 hr week - $570 @ yr), at a time when you could buy a new house for $3900 (seven year's income at minimum wage), would rent a standard family size apartment, there was nothing for sales tax or fees for stuff (5-10% of the income of the poor now), and so forth. The guy isn't going to be hanging out at the bar much, but he can pay the bills.
