by
Guy Standing
archive/so478
Wolfgang Streeck,
Immanuel Wallerstein,
Stephen Kaufmann,
Ingo Stutzle,
Anthony B. Atkinson,
Geoff Mann,
Yann Moulier-Boutang,
John Hills,
Nick Srnicek,
Alex Williams
inequalities essay
[...] This could be the first technological revolution that is generating more work, even though it is disrupting and replacing paid labour. But it is contributing to the growing inequality of income. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, says he supports basic income as a tool for correcting massive inequality brought about by technology. [...]
might be worth quoting, idk. Source: Economist podcast, May 27, 'The Economist asks: Can the open web survive?'
[...] In the United States in recent years, one frequently has heard this type of justification for the stratospheric pay of supermanagers (50– 100 times average income, if not more). Proponents of such high pay argued that without it, only the heirs of large fortunes would be able to achieve true wealth, which would be unfair. In the end, therefore, the millions or tens of millions of dollars a year paid to supermanagers contribute to greater social justice. This kind of argument could well lay the groundwork for greater and more violent inequality in the future. The world to come may well combine the worst of two past worlds: both very large inequality of inherited wealth and very high wage inequalities justified in terms of merit and productivity (claims with very little factual basis, as noted).
Meritocratic extremism can thus lead to a race between supermanagers and
rentiers, to the detriment of those who are neither.
Since it has to do with knowledge-goods, financialisation appears in a first phase to remove the obstacles that these present to their transformation into goods that are rival, divisible and excludable. But, in the era of the digital, it calls for the creation of enclosures by means of new property rights and digital management rights. These new enclosures have a depressive effect on the intensity and quality of innovation. The alternative strategies consist in the creation of new public spaces and conditions for free public access to the digital commons [...]
[...] The economy is not based on knowledge as such (although society itself is), but on the exploitation of knowledge. With the digital revolution [...] codified knowledge (databases, software) becomes information-goods and public knowledge. Economic models which since industrial capitalism have been based on the sale of them are in serious crisis: digitisation has drastically downgraded the old implementation of intellectual property rights, while the advantages gained in the field of codified knowledge are lasting for less and less time. [...]
There are indications that profits have been increasing as a result of the relative decrease of wages and the increase of low-paid precarious employment. [...] the capitalist relations of production have in the latter decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century been shaped by an increase of socio-economic inequality that benefits capital at the expense of labour. Neo-liberalism has been a political class struggle project aimed at the "reconstruction of the power of economic elites" and "a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal" (Harvey 2007, 19). The relations of production are shaped by a deep class conflict between the interests of labour.
- Liberalization (drop tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, export restrictins, etc.)
- Privatization (sell state holdings, which in many cases are substantial)
- Stabilization (allow currency to float at its "natural" [usually lower] exchange rate)
As this outline of the neoliberal policy package shows, neoliberalism is [...] a description of at least two powerful and intertwined contemporary economic dynamics: globalization and financialization. Neoliberalism can be understood as the historical conjuncture, and political legitimization (via both coercion and consent) of these two processes. Globalization is the integration of the international economy via trade. The original version of liberalism certainly involved globalization, but without the kind of financialization we have today with _neo_liberalism--or at least, back then, finance played a different and subordinate role as investor in productive enterprise.
[...] this definition of neoliberalism is helpful since it allows us to [...] understand the differences between what is sometimes called the "first era of globalization"--British free trade imperialism in the nineteenth century--and what we call globalization today (by which we mean something more specifically neoliberal).
the conditions are those that must be met for receiving an IMF loan
he describes the IMF as one of the most important frontline institutions for neoliberalism
[...] Neoliberalism is not just about getting rid of rules, or "deregulation." Removing tariffs, capital controls, currency pegs, restrictions on foreign ownership, and so forth are all essential elements of neoliberal regulatory programs, abolishing rules that limit firms' opportunity to maximize short-term returns. But states and firms and international institutions need not only to eliminate rules, they must also create new ones, imposing, extending, or deepening regulatory or legal structures where they were previously underdeveloped or nonexistent. For example, countries the world over have established intellectual property rights regimes for everything from medicinal plants to corporate logos, often where no such legal frameworks existed before. That is not deregulation by any stretch of the imagination. Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell were among the first to point out these complexities in "actually existing neoliberalism," which they label "roll-back" (deregulation) and "roll-out" (reregulation). Neoliberalism has always involved both.
the IP stuff especially
In my view, for a historical system to be considered a capitalist system,
the dominant or deciding characteristic must be the persistent search for
the endless accumulation of capital—the accumulation of capital in order to
accumulate more capital. And for this characteristic to prevail, there must
be mechanisms that penalize any actors who seek to operate on the basis
of other values or other objectives, such that these nonconforming actors
are sooner or later eliminated from the scene, or at least severely hampered
in their ability to accumulate significant amounts of capital. All the many institutions of the modern world-system operate to promote, or at least are
constrained by the pressure to promote, the endless accumulation of capital.
[...] fear leads to the search for political alternatives of kinds not entertained before. The media refer to this as populism, but it is far more complicated than this slogan term suggests. For some the fear leads to multiple and irrational scapegoatings. For others, it leads to the willingness to unthink deeply ingrained assumptions about the operations of the modern world-system. Th
is can be seen in the United States as the difference between the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Although educational credential inflation expands on false premises—the ideology that more education will produce more equality of opportunity, more high-tech economic performance, and more good jobs—it does provide some degree of solution to technological displacement of the middle class. Educational credential inflation helps absorb surplus labor by keeping more people out of the labor force; and if students receive a financial subsidy, either directly or in the form of low-cost (and ultimately unrepaid) loans, it acts as hidden transfer payments. In places where the welfare state is ideologically unpopular, the mythology of education supports a hidden welfare state. Add the millions of teachers in elementary, secondary, and higher education, and their administrative staffs, and the hidden Keynesianism of educational inflation may be said to virtually keep the capitalist economy afloat.
As long as the educational system can be somehow financed, it operates as hidden Keynesianism: a hidden form of transfer payments and pump-priming, the equivalent of New Deal make-work setting the unemployed to painting murals in post offices or planting trees in conservation camps, Educational expansion is virtually the only legitimately accepted form of Keynesian economic policy, because it is not overtly recognized as such. It expands under the banner of high technology and meritocracy—it is the technology that requires a more educated labor force. In a roundabout sense this is true: it is the technological displacement of labor that makes school a place of refuge from the shrinking job pool, although no one wants to recognize the fact. No matter—as long as the number of those displaced is shunted into an equal number of those expanding the population of students, the system will survive.
whoa
link this to "learn to code"-style policies & skills-biased technological change