Rent, four hundred dollars a month. Food, somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred. Car payment, two hundred fifty. Gas, a hundred, hundred twenty. Health insurance, two hundred. Dental, forty. Clothes, shoes, shampoo, toothpaste, sundries, guesstimate three hundred dollars. Add twenty dollars a month for fun and games, as much to simplify the math as because a living wage should allow some leeway for fun and games. Multiply by four-thirds to account for taxes, and the total is $2040.
Divide by four weeks, then by forty hours per week. $12.75 per hour.
Time spent browsing for beads on Etsy that come up when one searches for 'snowflake', plus time spent processing the purchase. Ignore travel time between the seller and buyer. Add time to put each of the three beads on an eyepin and each of the eyepins on an earhook or jumpring, time to measure and cut the chain and add the clasp pieces on either end, time to put all the information about this particular jewelry set into the spreadsheet, time to photograph the jewelry, time to post the jewelry to Etsy. Each task takes a few minutes, so guess half an hour. So $6.38.
Materials. These three lampworked glass snowflake beads cost $24, which makes me suspect that the maker (an Etsy seller in the USA) is figuring a living wage into zir pricing. The eyepins and jumpring and earhooks and clasp and each inch of chain are a few cents apiece and mostly carry Made in China stickers on the zippy bags, which tells me that Fire Mountain Gems is doing no such thing.
Assume the final product will be sold on Etsy. Etsy takes a cut of twenty cents plus 3.5% of the sale price; Paypal takes a cut of thirty cents plus 2.9% of the sale price. Shipping will be $1.75, and the envelope cost $0.44. Whether sold on Etsy or at a craft fair, a little gift box will be included, and that cost $0.90.
Ten percent of the sale price goes to charity. This is not negotiable. A further fifteen percent of the wholesale price is reserved for profit margin, and retail markup is fifty percent. Industry standard, as best I can figure from Google, is a hundred percent or more.
Plug in the numbers.
Spreadsheet software saves me from having to calculate all this by hand, though if I could convince Excel to let cell A equal 1.5 * cell B which is the sum of a string of cells including cell C which is 0.1 * cell A and just have it loop the calculations until it settles on what cell A needs to contain, it'd be easier. Instead I type in a number for the wholesale price and I let Excel tell me whether it's true or false that (wholesale - sum(all the various expenses)) > (0.15 * wholesale). By the time I've found the lowest number that makes that cell say T, wholesale price is up to $54.
Which makes retail for this earrings-pendant set $81.
No one on this green earth will pay $81 for these. No one's likely even to pay $54.
The price tag on this jewelry set figures in a living wage for two people, and only two: the maker of the beads and the maker of the jewelry. 'Imagine how much higher the price would be if it figured in the living wage for everyone involved in making all the rest of the jewelry pieces-parts as well, not to mention the people who pick the food and sell the sundries, the prices of which are included in any living wage calculation.
At a recent craft fair, someone looked at a $10 item on my table. No retail markup, much cheaper materials, and a rather lower labor cost; nowhere near a living wage for me, and certainly not a living wage for anyone who made the glass pearls or earring findings I used. She looked at that $10 pair of earrings and told her friend, "Jewelry is so expensive these days."
Lately I've been reading Gavin Fridell's Fair Trade Coffee: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Market-Driven Social Justice:
[O]ne need only look at the current basic minimum price for fair trade arabica coffee beans, which at $1.26 per pound is more than twice as high as current conventional coffee prices due to the global coffee crisis [cite omitted]. While this price is high compared to current conditions, when viewed historically the fair trade price is relatively low and consistent with conventional prices. From 1976 to 1989 and from 1995 to 1998, the international price for conventional Brazilian arabica beans was generally close to or well above $1.26 per pound [cite omitted]. It would be untenable, given the historically exploitative conditions under which coffee producers have lived and worked [...], to make the claim that during these years the price of coffee beans was fair. This reveals that the price of fair trade coffee beans is not determined solely on the basis of social justice (which would warrant a price much higher than the conventional one), but is limited to a price that is '(as) fair (as possible)' given the demands of [USAian, Canadian, and European] consumers [cite omitted].A living wage for all requires a price we collectively are unwilling to pay.
This is why we can't have nice things.
--MercuryBlue
The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.
And, of course, that price isn't a "living wage" if you can't find buyers who can afford to pay that much and who are willing to pay that much 80 times a week.
Posted by: Ross | Dec 07, 2011 at 01:48 PM
Living wage also depends on the product. I remember reading somewhere (it has been a while) that the estimated cost of providing benefits and a living wage to lettuce pickers was about $0.10 more per head of lettuce. I would totally do that.
Posted by: Cor Aquilonis | Dec 07, 2011 at 02:23 PM
Living wage also depends on where you live. I live in a studio apartment at the low end of price ranges for my city (not including neighborhoods with multiple murders per year). My rent is precisely three times MercuryBlue's.
Posted by: Froborr | Dec 07, 2011 at 02:42 PM
The point someone made about Black Friday sales applies here too: Price the earrings higher to make a living wage, and some percentage of your buyers won't be able to pay for it, or will only be able to pay rarely. (Or, what Ross said, basically.)
Posted by: PastyAndUnhealthy | Dec 07, 2011 at 02:44 PM
though if I could convince Excel to let cell A equal 1.5 * cell B which is the sum of a string of cells including cell C which is 0.1 * cell A and just have it loop the calculations until it settles on what cell A needs to contain, it'd be easier.
You are aware of the Solver function in Excel, correct?
Posted by: LMM | Dec 07, 2011 at 02:48 PM
I keep trying to figure out how capitalism works, because everything I've been reading suggests that the entire global economy is, in some sense, imaginary. A whole bunch of people -- the ones at the top -- all pretend that any of this makes any sense, but it doesn't, and it's not supposed to.
The only way anything works is, you start out at the bottom of the food chain, with people who don't get paid anything -- slaves, or serfs, or whatever the Third World equivalent is -- while the First World steals all their natural resources, then sells finished products back to them. Everyone else, at each step up the pyramid, wants a living wage for themselves, so things added to at each level get more and more expensive. Until nobody but the 1% (or even the 0.1%) can afford to buy the stuff made by people living in the US.
Plus, everything seems to require purchasing power. But where does the money to purchase things come from, except from jobs. Except that there aren't enough (good) jobs to go around, and there never have been. And they encourage you to think if you don't have a job, it's your own fault: you're lazy, you're stupid, you don't have the right experience, you majored in the wrong thing, etc., etc. You're never supposed to notice that it's a systemic problem, that is affecting ever more people.
I haven't worked at a job in over two years. I can't find anyone who will hire me to do anything. Luckily my spouse has a good job, so I'm not starving in the street. But every day I get more and more requests for money from charities (via snail mail) telling me how bad off everyone else is, and imploring me to give them more money to make up for the shortfall. Silly me, in the beginning I wrote to a few of my favorite nonprofits, telling them I was out of work, and that I would send them money as soon as I had any coming in, but please stop wasting trees by sending more requests. But they kept coming, and coming. Every week there's more charities I've never heard of.
Not one of those charities is interested in me as a person. I'm just a potential checkbook who can send them more money. But I don't have any money to send. I would like to have money of my own. If my husband gets sick or dies, what will happen to me?
Posted by: Laiima | Dec 07, 2011 at 02:48 PM
@Ross and PastyAndUnhealthy: And that creates a vicious circle. Alice can't find enough customers to buy her goods, so she doesn't have enough money to buy Bob's goods, who thus can't find enough customers to buy his goods, so he can't afford to by Carol's goods... And suddenly we have simultaneous surpluses of both goods and labor, also known as a recession. Only empirically supported method to break out is for someone with vast resources or the ability to get away with running up a large debt (preferably both) to buy up a bunch of goods or hire a bunch of labor (preferably both).
Posted by: Froborr | Dec 07, 2011 at 02:51 PM
Yeah. That number MB quoted for rent made me do a double-take. Even when I lived in a low-income high-crime neighborhood, rents in the area were about half-again that much in 2001, and closer to 4 times that in 2011.
Posted by: Ross | Dec 07, 2011 at 02:58 PM
I have nothing of value to add to this excellent post, but I was so pleased to see it. I actually this morning decided that I needed a real winter hat, scarf, and gloves. I glanced around online at some retailers before I remembered that I try to support the artists on Etsy and I zipped over there.
And I seriously did frown at the prices for a few minutes before I started putting together what VERY LITTLE I know about knitting and crocheting and figuring up how long the items I wanted probably took to make. And after I finished my sums, I hit the purchase buttons and didn't look back.
I have the immense privilege that I can do that, of course. As PastyAndUnhealthy points out, not everyone can, and that's a really big problem. But I'd rather my money go to an Etsy artist than to a retailer, for as long as I have that option. I worry about us all, though. :(
Posted by: AnaMardoll | Dec 07, 2011 at 03:14 PM
I keep trying to figure out how capitalism works, because everything I've been reading suggests that the entire global economy is, in some sense, imaginary. A whole bunch of people -- the ones at the top -- all pretend that any of this makes any sense, but it doesn't, and it's not supposed to.
The only way anything works is, you start out at the bottom of the food chain, with people who don't get paid anything -- slaves, or serfs, or whatever the Third World equivalent is -- while the First World steals all their natural resources, then sells finished products back to them. Everyone else, at each step up the pyramid, wants a living wage for themselves, so things added to at each level get more and more expensive. Until nobody but the 1% (or even the 0.1%) can afford to buy the stuff made by people living in the US.
You might be (intellectually, if not emotionally) pleased to know that you've pretty much just described the 'core-periphery' model of surplus transfer, which is one of those funky heretical models that economists use when they want to talk about the way things actually work, instead of the way we pretend they work. (The same is basically true of most Marxist theory, though not so much actual Marxist ideology.) So your observational powers are excellent and not misleading you. Unfortunately, that leads to appreciating just how messed-up we are.
Even that wikipedia page, which is going for 'neutral' and thus implies that core expansion is normal - that is, it pretends that the poorer places regularly get richer from selling to the rich and thus bootstrap themselves up - admits that the only reason the whole thing doesn't fall apart is because of a middle-class buffer. Given the rate at which the richest are pushing themselves above everyone else, the relative difference between the middle- and under-classes is thinning fast. I'm not sure what's going to happen when that breaks down, but I suspect it will be messy.
In my more cynical moments, I think the best we can hope for is that when the dust settles, some fresher economy (India, China, etc) wants to buy all our stuff and we can be on their periphery, and the chain of rising and collapsing will be passed around the world until/unless someone figures out how to stabilise the beast.
Posted by: Will Wildman | Dec 07, 2011 at 03:21 PM
In somewhat related news, there is supposedly an Occupy protest going on today in the street outside my office, but I have yet to see them. Wish I could join them...
Posted by: Froborr | Dec 07, 2011 at 03:23 PM
Thanks, Will. I have actually been reading a lot of stuff about economic boom and bust cycles, and history, and politics. Apparently we have recessions every 10 years or so. But journalists act like each one is unique, and not connected to anything.
I think there's something evolutionary about economic boom and bust cycles. Evolutionary innovation, in a biological sense, happens the same way: during a boom, lots of creative solutions for problems are tried, and lots of organisms (read: people) have chances and choices, so they think things will just keep getting better and better. But what actually happens is, Nature then culls the options that didn't work very well, and then we have a bust cycle, which is a depression or recession. And a lot of people lose those (good) jobs, and start starving, and then they riot for food and jobs, which *also* has been happening for at least 150 years, probably more like 200, but you'd never know about it from journalism!
I'd like to live in a way that doesn't make money the most important thing. That way would not be capitalism.
Posted by: Laiima | Dec 07, 2011 at 03:33 PM
The only way anything works is, you start out at the bottom of the food chain, with people who don't get paid anything -- slaves, or serfs, or whatever the Third World equivalent is -- while the First World steals all their natural resources, then sells finished products back to them. Everyone else, at each step up the pyramid, wants a living wage for themselves, so things added to at each level get more and more expensive. Until nobody but the 1% (or even the 0.1%) can afford to buy the stuff made by people living in the US.
It works provided that, at least some steps along the way, people produce a surplus. It's easiest to view this in microcosm of thought-experiment.
Imagine that a village has two people: A and B. A is a farmer, who will produce enough to feed herself and her dependents. B is an economic philosopher, who doesn't know how to farm but produces entertaining lectures on philosophy.
Now, in a typical year, A will produce a surplus of food. Since a surplus of food is essentially useless to her, she looks for ways to trade this. This being a thought experiment of only two people, her options are limited to entertainment via B's lectures. So, B educates A on the principles of economics (for fun!) and A provides B with food.
Where's the problem? The world doesn't really work like that. We have serfs/peasants/desperate poor because they cannot demand a living wage. Any individual farmer has an extremely poor negotiating position, since they only produce a few bushels/pounds/unit of measurement per year. On the other hand, we have a massively centralized processing system, where large companies (primarily) buy out huge chunks of the world output.
Coffee's a decent example: one coffee grower will produce far, far less coffee than Starbucks buys in a year. So if the individual grower starts demanding a living wage, Starbucks says no[1] and the farmer doesn't sell anything, living wage or not.
In theory, this is where growing associations and ultimately governments step in. If the government of, say, Colombia says that no coffee is leaving the country except at a living wage, then Starbucks has to start negotiating with the country rather than the individual. It's a lot more even that way. Of course, the problem is that governments are run by individuals, and individuals are far easier to persuade/corrupt individually than their constituents as a whole would be.
The same thing applies to most jobs: individuals need their job far, far more than their employer needs the individual. Even if the employee has other jobs lined up (certainly not always a given), the simple transition is harder for the employee than it is for the employer, who may not even notice. This is where labor protections (should, but don't) step in.
Now, capitalism is great at a few things: it pretty much ensures that any buyer can find a seller, and it's great at allocating capital to activities that cause that capital to grow.
I have to use the tortured language for the later because that's also a flaw of capitalism. The simple shorthand of money and accounting means that we have to use book-values and estimates of worth, so at least in the short run investing a dollar in a pyramid scheme seems a better deal than investing a dollar in a factory. In theory, it's up to regulation to ensure that the paper-value of stuff is reasonably related to the actual-value of stuff, but it's obvious that society has fallen down on that job lately.
TL;DR: Capitalism's not that bad, especially when in thought-experiment it's tied to real stuff. When we deal with finance and accounting, that's where we get to confuse fantasy for reality and be rewarded for it.
[1] -- Note I'm using Starbucks as an arbitrary example. I don't actually know their policy on living wages.
Posted by: Majromax | Dec 07, 2011 at 03:37 PM
On the subject of Etsy, I like remembering to buy stuff from there. If we don't really, really need it This Damn Minute, it's as easy and nearly as cheap to order lovely handmade mittens and hats and slippers on Etsy as to buy them from a big box. I manage to buy local on Etsy for many things, too. It's worse than TV tropes, though. I fall in and lose hours or days, and then my favorites list is so big I can't find things again easily.
Posted by: Lonespark | Dec 07, 2011 at 03:38 PM
Apparently we have recessions every 10 years or so. But journalists act like each one is unique, and not connected to anything.
Normal recessions are normal. Those ultimately rely on the economy shifting direction -- some industries are really oversupplied, and some are still growing. Absolutely sucks for the people made redundant, but on the whole the economy continues.
What's new about this one -- at least since WW2 in America and Western Europe -- is that this is a recession was caused by a bubble-bust and credit crisis. Now, it's not a matter of "learn to do X and get a job!", it's "don't get a job" -- because -everyone- is not hiring, and there is no demand for output.
Over the long run, the only way this gets resolved is for bad debts to go away. That can happen through default, inflation, or crippling poverty/reparation payment. Governments have collectively done a lot to keep banks from defaulting (and not paying off their bondholders), so they've taken the debt on themselves and are going to either inflate it away or (more likely) enforce poverty on citizens to pay it off.
Really, Occupy is more moderate than the situation calls for.
Posted by: Majromax | Dec 07, 2011 at 03:41 PM
Laiima - the first book on economics that I ever read was JK Galbraith's A Short History of Financial Euphoria, which was perhaps the best place for someone like me to enter the discipline - 'don't trust these folks; if they're not ruining everything right now, you've got maybe ten years to prepare for the next clusterfrak'.
Your evolutionary analogy is pretty much why I'm not worried about total societal collapse through economic failure - there are so many of us at this point doing so many things that someone is still going to weather the storm and keep going. The future has a tendency to take care of itself; evolution works. My problem with evolution is that before it can work it has to do terrible things to a vast number of people. We really should be able to come up with something better by now.
Posted by: Will Wildman | Dec 07, 2011 at 03:51 PM
I'm reminded of MadGastronomer being irritated with the fact that she couldn't factor proper wages for her staff into the menu prices without driving off customers. The important element here is that the increase in question would mean that the staff WOULDN'T be dependent on tips to get by. Apparently, even if tips were no longer quite as impelled, the customers who DO tip would be driven off, even though the increase would be same as the now-unneeded tip.
It sounds like some people want to be able to be condescending.
And that, in turn, sounds a lot like trickle-down economics. It sounds at times like the way weal (not a typo) goes from top to bottom in that fashion is very much like noble largesse and conspicuous charity, rather than empathy. That's not going to work so well if you have enough archons who measure their worth entirely in their distance from the floor...
I suppose an important part of the problem with the economy is the heavy focus on GDP. Thing is, while that can give you a sense of the median, I don't think it's going to get you the mean, and DEFINITELY not the mode. Indeed, any economy worth the name (it comes from the Greek for "household management") should be looking to the mode first and foremost, and perhaps never the median. Especially with the incipient (if not already manifested) Gilded Age Mk. II, which is going to SEVERELY skew the median away from the mode.
Too often is growth considered inherently right. But first make sure the thing growing isn't managing to choke anything else. With our exit from the Red Queen's Trap of natural privation and predator satiation (this is why you needed lots of babies, there was so little guarantee any given one would survive), we no longer need to generate new humans anywhere near as fast as before. Now we just need to convince our instincts and reflexes of that...{wonders if thirst to generate wealth could be seen as a sublimation of that instinct. And if it could be re-sublimated into creation of artwork, stories, learning of the cosmos, etc.}
Posted by: Skyknight | Dec 07, 2011 at 03:59 PM
It sounds like some people want to be able to be condescending.
Really? I don't doubt this because I trust that MadGastronomer did all the research, but it still shocks me to learn it. I would LOVE to have a "we pay our employees a living wage, please don't feel the need to tip" restaurant -- I always have guilt spasms over the tip.
Posted by: AnaMardoll | Dec 07, 2011 at 04:07 PM
Dang. Posted before I finished the thought.
Was just going to say "And that makes me sad that enough people are opposed to a living wage to not support the restaurant." :(
Also: seconding that Etsy is addictive. My hat-scarf-mitten foray has DOUBLED my wish list in size.
The saddest thing about Etsy though, is seeing my favorite stores sometimes stop posting and close down. :(
Posted by: AnaMardoll | Dec 07, 2011 at 04:09 PM
I have two anecdotes on the subject of people who are more comfortable tipping. Once, at a restaurant in England, I had ordered a delightful meal of fish and chips, and had paid. There were no helpful signs instructing me on the etiquette of tipping in England. I suppose if I'd had a smart phone I would have googled it. I left a tip that was generous by USA standards and left as quickly as I could in case that was offensive. I absolutely knew, at the time, that many countries did consider tipping offensive, but for the life of me I couldn't remember where England fell on that spectrum. I erred on the side of giving more money, rather than less.
The other anecdote is a story in the local paper of a health spa that recently came to a settlement with employees over the past decade. The spa had included tips in its billing, and then the tips had not gone to the employees who would normally receive tips. Adding insult to injury, the employees were instructed to lie about whether they were getting the tips left for them, if a customer asked. "Yes, sir, my employer is not taking the money you specifically meant for me. Thanks for the money!" With a smile.
I do not particularly like tipping as a cultural phenomenon, but at least if I leave money on the table I know it is most likely going to be picked up by the waiter.
Posted by: Wysteria | Dec 07, 2011 at 04:14 PM
Please, please, please understand I write this comment with compassion, care, and respect. My mother strings necklaces as a hobby, and tries to sell them. She's old enough that Etsy and E-Bay are beyond her capabilities, but she's been setting up tables at bazaars for years. The advice I'm offering to you is a lot of what I would say to her, if she would listen, think about it, and remember what I said for more than five minutes.
First, there are some people who would pay $81 or more for a pair of earrings. But those people aren't shopping on Etsy. They're not shopping on Ebay either, or at craft bazaars. Where you sell has a strong influence on what you can sell. (or at least how much you can sell it for)
The bigger worry I have is that you're trying to buy your supplies on Etsy... then sell your jewelery on Etsy. Do you think your supermarket deli that sells fried chicken is buying chickens from the poultry counter in the store? Simply put, you can't buy your raw materials from the same marketplace that you hope to sell your finished goods. Why? Because the other people who are shopping at that marketplace are expecting to buy finished goods at the same price you're buying your raw materials at.
I'm not saying "don't buy your beads from Etsy", or "Don't sell your jewelery on Etsy", I'm just saying "don't try to do both!". Go shopping, and find small, non-chain botiques stores that carry jewelry like yours, priced above your break-even point, and find out how they buy their stock, and if you can sell them some of yours. Or go talk to other (larger) jewlers, and ask where they buy their supplies. You should change where you're buying your raw materials, or where you're selling your finished goods, or both.
Setting aside questions about buying and selling marketplaces, there's also the "velocity" factor to consider. Is it better to sell two necklaces at a bazaar for $20, or to only sell one for $40? It's a lot harder to survive on fewer, infrequent, much-higher-margin sales, but it is quite possible with a lot of budgeting. Truthfully, selling at higher costs (with fewer sales) is a perfectly valid strategy if your product is percieved as high-quality. Trying to compete on price always turns into a race for the bottom, and it's a race you will lose! Find the marketplaces where people are spending more, and sell either directly to those customers, or at a reduced price to the vendors selling to them.
Again, my mother makes jewelry, and though I love her, it's very clear that she makes necklaces because she loves necklaces. She loves buying beads and stringing beads, and she makes the kinds of necklaces that she (or another hobbist) would buy and wear. As a hobby, that's wonderful. As a business model, it's... not. My mother isn't a business major, she's a stay-at-home housewife; I don't expect her to know these things.
I don't disagree with your points on the difficulty of engaging in fair trade versus market-competitive pricing, and I think your costing, by-and-large, is sound. Where I think you might be losing your way is where you're purchasing from, and who you're selling to.
Posted by: Rodeobob | Dec 07, 2011 at 04:28 PM
I believe I too am trapped with the spam.
Posted by: Rodeobob | Dec 07, 2011 at 04:33 PM
I do wonder about just how much living wages, fair-trade etc. goods are more expensive in terms of production costs. Jared Diamond wrote about a sustainable forestry initiative where there turned out to be no significant increase in production cost. Once the lumber hit the shelves at the same price as the conventional lumber, it was snapped up. So the price quickly jumped for two reasons. People were trained to think environmental responsibility costs and basic supply-and-demand (high demand with fixed supply).
Labor costs may well be different, but still.
Posted by: histrogeek | Dec 07, 2011 at 04:37 PM
Pthalo and Rodeobob -- you were indeed both in the spam trap. Anyone else?
Posted by: The Board Administration Team | Dec 07, 2011 at 04:38 PM
Really? I don't doubt this because I trust that MadGastronomer did all the research, but it still shocks me to learn it. I would LOVE to have a "we pay our employees a living wage, please don't feel the need to tip" restaurant
I have seen one place in my neighbourhood that does this - I live in a bit of a yuppieish area, I suppose, with two community theatres within (what I consider) walking distance and a lot of small businesses, vegan foods, and funky art galleries, so maybe it's an environment conducive to that sort of thing.
I'm broadly okay with tipping as a 'variable cost' thing. As noted above and previously, if all restaurants always charged tip-included, it's possible that would raise their costs above the price range of some people. If some people tip less and some tip more (i.e., folks like me who can afford it) then more people can eat in restaurants more often and the average income over time works out.
But then again, in the current situation where some people don't tip at all and some tip 'average' and some people tip more, that still probably doesn't come to an average of 20% tips over time, so it would be possible to stabilise servers' income at its current level without raising prices by 20% across the board.
Posted by: Will Wildman | Dec 07, 2011 at 04:41 PM
@Pthalo: First, cost of living differences. I once found a nice shirt in a second-hand store for $10, and I was ecstatic. That's a phenomenally low price for a shirt I can wear to work. (T-shirts, on the other hand... as long as you're willing to be a walking advertisement, which I am for this purpose, you never have to pay for a t-shirt at all.)
Second, because agriculture is the largest industry in the U.S. and has a lot of political clout, it's heavily subsidized. This keeps food prices fairly low, at least relative to other necessities. It also depends what kind of food you buy; processed, high-calorie, and high-fat foods are more expensive than fresh foods or foods with a high nutrient-to-calorie ratio.
For complicated reasons, a biologist friend of mine took a lot of economics classes in college. One day, in a discussion in one of his macroeconomics classes, he asked, "Can we at least agree that the point is for as many people as possible to live as well as possible?" Long pause, and then the class exploded into a debate that rapidly got extremely heated.
Sort of but not really, I think. The thirst to generate wealth is a manifestation of the human drive for social status and recognition, which AFIAK appears to be a drive in its own right. Evolutionarily, it's probably a product of sexual selection (higher status in the ape hierarchy means more mating opportunities), and so in a sense a sort of evolutionary sublimation of the sex drive, but in psychological terms, I don't think it is.
Posted by: Froborr | Dec 07, 2011 at 05:13 PM
By which I mean exactly the opposite: calories are cheap, nutrients are expensive.
Posted by: Froborr | Dec 07, 2011 at 05:14 PM
I'd like to point out that not everyone on Etsy is selling hand-made items. See http://www.regretsy.com/category/compare-and-save/ Other sites like Artfire also have cool handmade objects without so many resellers.
Posted by: Basil | Dec 07, 2011 at 05:14 PM
Damn and blast the fun-Internet-stuff-blocker at work. I assume that's why the comment box isn't appearing there, anyway.
You are aware of the Solver function in Excel, correct?
I am now.
That number MB quoted for rent made me do a double-take. Even when I lived in a low-income high-crime neighborhood, rents in the area were about half-again that much in 2001, and closer to 4 times that in 2011.
That's the lowest rent I can find in the county. Average runs about six hundred dollars. Eight for a good place that I could reasonably split with someone. My calculation's screwed anyway, though, I forgot utilities.
I'm using Starbucks as an arbitrary example. I don't actually know their policy on living wages.
If Fair Trade Coffee is still right, they'll sell fair-trade coffee that one must brew oneself (and possibly grind oneself), but not fair-trade brewed coffee. I seem to recall that they don't pay a living wage to their baristas, either, though I also seem to recall that they do better than, say, Dunkin Donuts.
I appreciate your effort, Rodeobob, but...
Go shopping, and find small, non-chain botiques stores that carry jewelry like yours, priced above your break-even point, and find out how they buy their stock, and if you can sell them some of yours. [...] You should change where you're buying your raw materials, or where you're selling your finished goods, or both.
Tried that. These stores keep ignoring my emails. And most of my supplies come from Fire Mountain Gems, which runs cheap enough that I can sell a pair of earrings for $24 with the same pricing calculation described above, but all the materials come with Made in China or Made in India stickers. This is not conducive to running a socially aware business.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 07, 2011 at 05:47 PM
Very interesting stuff, and I want say many things, but I am preparing for an interview. I actually have two interviews tomorrow, one in person, one over the phone. Yaaaay!!!
I feel like it's better to grow your business or become a richer person, if you're on track to doing that, and then, when you've more or less made it, spread the wealth around. Not that you shouldn't look for opportunities to live your values at every point, but... fair trade goods are one method of less-evil capitalism. Giving some of your profits to charity is another. Supporting local businesses, or unions, or green manufacturing, are others... some of those don't cost more money or time, some do. You need to have one highest priority and be ok with letting the others go.
I mean, you don't need to do that, but I just think you can't be successful unless you're focused, and if you feel successful at one of your goals, you're more likely to keep going.
You can get sugar Coke in the US...it's re-imported from Mexico.
Posted by: Lonespark | Dec 07, 2011 at 07:07 PM
It's something of a score for me to find secondhand shirts in my size (3XT). I found a couple of work shirts someone had let go. I wear them only on weekends because they have that person's name on them. As well as the company logo. A couple of times folks have walked up to me and asked, "I used to know someone at that company!" (Blank look on my part.)
Posted by: Brad | Dec 08, 2011 at 12:37 AM
You can sugar Coke in the US without the whole "import it from Mexico" business if you stock up in the 2-3 weeks before Passover. I find the Ashkenazic definition of "leavened" to be a bit odd, but it does mean that Kosher for Passover Coke and Pepsi don't contain any corn syrup.
Posted by: Inquisitiveravn | Dec 08, 2011 at 01:24 AM
Now, in a typical year, A will produce a surplus of food. Since a surplus of food is essentially useless to her, she looks for ways to trade this. This being a thought experiment of only two people, her options are limited to entertainment via B's lectures. So, B educates A on the principles of economics (for fun!) and A provides B with food.
That's highly unlikely to be an equal exchange, though. B will more likely occupy the position of court jester, because A controls the supply of goods and B is expendable.
The thing is, in this society, farmers aren't A. The one per cent is. We're divided into workers and owners, and almost all of us are workers, and of the remainder, most of the owners don't own very much. The people who own a lot can set the terms to favour themselves, and by golly they do. And one of the terms they set is that they control access to work. In the two-person village, B could theoretically learn to farm - but if A owns the farm and won't let B work on it, or won't let B work on it except on entirely A-favouring terms, then B's pretty much got to dance for A. And that's how we run things here.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:10 AM
That's highly unlikely to be an equal exchange, though. B will more likely occupy the position of court jester, because A controls the supply of goods and B is expendable.
If I gave the impression that the A/B analogy was relevant to anything but a theoretical model of economics, I'm sorry. I tried to bring in the power exchange/market force dynamic in the rest of my post, but you did it a great deal better there in two sentences.
And yeah, capitalism works great between parties of equal power. Less great when there's a power disparity, and we haven't come up with a permanent fix for it yet. (Government's the closest we've gotten, but that seems to require eternal vigilance to prevent corruption or dismantling.)
Posted by: Majromax | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:44 AM
@Wysteria, you will have made somebody very happy in England.
Tipping convention here is that 10% is usual. I might make that 15% if the service has been excellent and I've got the cash.
As I understand it, normal tips in the US run to 20%, or double the UK standard. So if you tipped generously by US standard, you were tipping 2 to 2.5 times the expected amount.
You might have got a slightly different reaction if you'd tried tipping at a pub, where it's more usual [if you've been there a while, and enjoying yourself] to offer the bartender something for zirself when you buy a round. Except in little old-style pubs they'll usually either refuse or take a soft drink now.
Outside of restaurants and pubs it's unusual to tip here; some of the cafe chains have started having "Tips" jars on the counter, but I've never seen anyone but tourists putting more than some spare coppers in there.
Posted by: Slow Learner | Dec 08, 2011 at 04:46 AM
Getting ready for an interview. Any prayers/good wishes/spells etc. much appreciated.
Posted by: Lonespark | Dec 08, 2011 at 06:55 AM
Hope it goes well, Lonespark.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 07:11 AM
Good luck Lonespark!
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Dec 08, 2011 at 07:14 AM
If I gave the impression that the A/B analogy was relevant to anything but a theoretical model of economics, I'm sorry.
Oh, not at all - I'm sorry if I gave the impression you gave that impression! I was just riffing on the theme.
I've linked The Luckiest Nut In The World, an education cartoon about unregulated capitalism, before now, but it bears re-linking:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtlYyuJjACw
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Dec 08, 2011 at 07:16 AM
Good luck Lonespark
Posted by: Mmy | Dec 08, 2011 at 07:33 AM
Best of luck, Lonespark!
Posted by: Froborr | Dec 08, 2011 at 08:20 AM
Worth pointing out that hardly anyone has gotten the memo on this. It's rare for me to meet anyone who isn't absolutely certain that the "standard"
tip is 15%, though 18% has picked up some popularity round these parts since the state sales tax was increased, because most people calculate the tip by tripling the tax.
This makes splitting a check a really awesome fun time.
Posted by: Ross | Dec 08, 2011 at 08:29 AM
There is another fundamental reason you can't get a living wage for craft work - automation. So much today is mass produced on complex, dedicated machinery that can churn out items hundreds of times faster than a craft worker can, and that, once the market has had time to equilibrate, drives prices way down. If you had the level of automation of even a small factory, you could turn half an hour from order to shipment into a couple of minutes or less.
As we advance ever further in the sophistication of our products, the complexity and quantity of the machinery needed to automate its production rises; at the same time, the time and effort for crafting a given item also increases. Worse, as complexity of products increases, the quality of an item that a machine can produce begins to greatly exceed the quality a craft worker can produce in reasonable time.
The really insidious thing about pure, unrestricted capitalism is this: it makes no distinction between end consumer products ("personal property", in Marxist terms) and the machinery needed to produce them at an industrial level of efficiency ("private property"). What that does is to tightly couple one's wealth to one's ability to earn more wealth, in a positive feedback loop - hence, the rich are able to get richer faster than the poor are, and the income gap widens. Also, the investment bar to entry, or staying up to date, gets higher, so not only can the poor not simply "Go Galt," quit their jobs and become factory owners themselves, as some strong libertarians might blithely tell them, but even the bottom end of the "rich" class start to find themselves kicked out of the machinery-owning club and forced down into the skilled but non-private-property-owning middle class; and from there, in time, down into the unskilled working class as machinery makes more and more middle class skills redundant. It is not all of the rich who get richer as things progress; only the upper echelons of even they get to stay in the top (hence why the "top 1%" is now actually far smaller than 1% - but richer per capita than the 1% were, I'd wager).
Whether deliberately or by useful accident, as I have said, capitalist economics does not seem to distinguish between personal and private property. This, unfortunately, is what leads to perceptions of marxism/socialism/communism as immoral or unworkable (and, it must be said, actually does make some interpretations of it unworkable): the conflation of private and public property means that the fundamental leftist principle of "the workers shall control the means of production," i.e. only private property - factories, production lines, farming machinery, etc, the means by which people may make themselves richer - is seized, and the personal property anyone may produce with it, food, clothing, cars, etc, is kept - becomes morphed into the crude scare phrases like "wealth redistribution," "robbing Peter to pay Paul," "the state will take your money and give it to your neighbours" "you won't own anything - even the clothes on your back will be state property" Worse still, many modern variants of soft-socialism or social-democracy (and some of the old Soviet-style states, or "State Capitalists," in some respects), have actually conformed to some of these crude misinterpretations and strawmen - wealth redistribution via progressive taxation, for example, actually strikes me as rather orthogonal to the original principles from which leftism developed.
Many of the people who support "free market" capitalism would say they are proponents of the notion of owning their own business. Even if they currently work gruelling hours in someone else's factory, tradition has it that many will dream one day of scraping enough savings together to start some kind of operation all their own, and probably vote conservative so that the Evil Commies won't take away their chance of one day doing that. This is practically one expression of the American dream. If, you as an individual, own your own business, you can work when you like, own and have access to all the tools and machinery you need to be competitive, and charge what you like on the free market for what you have made - and according to most schools of economics, even Marxism (with one or two subtleties), what you can persuade people to pay you for the fruit of your own labour on the free market is, by definition, fair compensation for that labour.
Note that, in desired practical outcome, the American dream of "owning one's business" is, in the case of the individual, actually exactly the same as the leftist mantra of the worker "controlling" (that is, having free access to) "the means of production." This is because, as the investment bar to owning industrial machinery gets ever higher, and because one cannot make a living wage from any product that is also made industrially by someone else (which, today, is virtually all of them), those ever fewer who actually own the means of production can essentially hold them to ransom - using their ownership, their control, to coerce people into working for them at barely-living wages as the only alternative to having no wage at all. In ultimate effect, they make their workers pay them a non-negotiable fee to work in their factory and have access to their equipment (and if all else remained unchanged but this; if factory owners were required to explicitly rent out the use of their machinery to anyone who needs it, as opposed to cloaking the whole arrangement in an apparent agreement to pay the workers to work for them, the situation might be improved slightly. At the very least it might put an end to the disgusting arguments of sweatshop owners who actually claim benevolency by providing work to impoverished areas, just as soon as the relative price they were charging their workers in the third world to use their machinery per item produced, compared to that in, say, the USA, became apparent). In contrast, if a worker himself either outright owned or otherwise had free access to the necessary means of production to make his product and sell it competitively, he may both work hard and be fairly rewarded for it, without some suit in an office at the top taking a slice just for being there - both the original leftist ideal, and also the original American ideal, before it morphed into "become one of the suits." The catch is that once an individual has owned his business for a while, he starts to think of expanding, and having people work for him - and from there the temptation to become just like his own old boss and start taking a cut from the product of his workers, and work less hard than them, as ransom for the machinery he owns is immense. Collective ownership of private property (not, it cannot be reiterated enough, personal property), was meant to break this ugly cycle of machinery-ransom, and factory owners raking in money whilst doing no work at all, but to keep the ability of anyone to be fairly paid industrial rates, as opposed to craft rates, for their own hard work, which they could then use to purchase more personal property and have a better quality of life, also at industrial, not craft, prices.
There is an unfortunate flipside of this, however. Whilst, in the Marxist/Lefist view, personal property is not the same thing as private property, they are both commodities that have to be manufactured, and private property is becoming ever more expensive. For all the disgusting effects of capitalism allowing a few individuals to accumulate colossal wealth out of all proportionality to the work they have actually done, this in theory makes the commissioning of new means of production easier - instead of the comparative difficulty of persuading a large number of moderately well off workers to pool their surplus labour and build a more efficient machine or design a newer or better product, a single extremely rich bugger can do it on a whim (of course, that can also destabilise and wreck the economy if it happens to be a stupid whim - the relative merits of collective decision making to such autocracy are a whole debate in themselves, especially given the causes of the current global financial mess). Proponents of capitalism, of course, loudly trumpet this apparent benefit - usually couching it in terms of gambling, and saying that because they shoulder all this risk, they are entitled to the huge benefits when it pays off (we'll skim over the fact that often when banks do this, they don't actually shoulder the equivalent risk of losses, because they know most governments don't dare not bail them out, ultimately passing the losses on to the public. It's not unheard of that when big company owners do the same, they keep their own personal gains and let the company and its lower ranking staff take the brunt in liquidation). This, I think, betrays an archaic and negative view of human nature - it's the same argument, in fact, that is made against democracy altogether in favour of dictatorships, either human or divine. It says large numbers of people can never find a way to act in rational concert, and must have order imposed upon them from a handful of rulers.
As capitalism progresses, we've practically reinvented feudalism - most of us live in thrall to the fewer and fewer owners of the means of production, and subject to their whims. The only differences are that 1) in medieval feudalism, the means of production were farmland, not machinery, and so the feudal lords were the noble landowners and not the business owners, 2) the fealty was explicit and not implicit. Whereas then obedience to the lord, and giving him a share of one's work output, was openly espoused and directly physically enforced; today there is no law that says you must work for a capitalist boss and pay him a fraction of what you earn, or fight to protect him, but there are property laws that say the owner of factory machinery can do whatever he wants with it, including refusing to let anyone use it except on an exploitative contract, "freely" signed, and the capitalist classes are quick to deny the power they so wield, saying "you're free to leave, and go somewhere else," comfortable in the knowledge that their system has become so widely entrenched that their workers cannot get a better deal anywhere else, which leads neatly to 3) I believe that pre-industrial feudal lords (and, it must be observed, a not insignificant number of 19th century industrialists - the Greg family, Titus Salt, etc) recognised and accepted that their power over the lives of their serfs carried with it at least some moral responsibility for their wellbeing, and many acted at least somewhat benevolently in return, providing law, justice, military protection (and, in the case of the industrialists, sometimes basic education and medical care) and so on. Most modern capitalists, in denying their de-facto power over the populace, deny any moral responsibility for what happens to it, except that which is forced on them by legislation.
What really got me thinking about this was, of all things, a thanksgiving post I saw recently about the alleged failure of communism in the Plymouth colony in the 1620s. The commonly held view is that when the town was run collectively, and everyone shared the commodities produced, the incentive to work was absent, production fell through the floor, everyone took without giving and eventually starvation set in. When everyone was allocated their own land to work on and allowed to sell their surplus, capitalism reigned and there was plenty, thus proving forever that Communism Is Bad And Wrong and Capitalism and the American Way will always triumph and make everyone happy. But then I realised this isn't quite right. During the collectivist phase, not only were the means of production, the fields, the private property, collectively held, but so were the end products, the food, the personal property. When the land was privately divided, this had the effect of privately dividing the produce, and it is the latter that restored the incentive to work, not the former, when once again, you only got what you made yourself.
From the leftist point of view, this was throwing the baby out with the bathwater - it solved the incentive problem, but dividing up the land also made that land, that means of production, inaccessible to anyone else who came along, except on the terms of its new private owner - paving the way for exploitative employment. It wouldn't have been apparent then, of course, because there was plenty of other fertile, unclaimed land for newcomers - not exactly the situation today. If only the produced commodities had become the exclusive property of their respective producers, and not the means of producing them, the same former benefit might have been had without the latter detrimental effect - and that would have been workable communism, as opposed to the caricature of communism that was Plymouth's collective era.
Perhaps it would have been too difficult then, however - in an agricultural economy, land must be tied up with a particular crop for long periods, making time-sharing difficult to administrate and potential squabbles rife. Perhaps even now, in agriculture, this would be unworkable. You can't have someone digging up the wheat you planted for yourself last week on one bit of a commonly held field because he'd prefer potatoes instead in a few months. Even if the land isn't privately owned, there needs to be some way of allocating it to individual projects for the necessary time to complete them. In an industrialised society, however, especially one as developed as ours, this is less of an issue, because modern industrial tooling operates so damn fast, it may actually satisfy all needs and stand idle for a significant part of its existence - potentially making time sharing between anyone who needed it quite easy. Indeed, an arrangement that at least begins to approach this mechanism already exists in some parts of China - factories run one shift during the day for one company, then let a different company entirely have different workers run the same machines at night to make the same product. Admittedly, as that system goes, I think it's something of a grey or black market. I don't know about the legality, and the night-shift products are frequently low-quality and sold as cut-down or outright knock-offs of the real product. Some are so bad that, even though they are even made on the same machines in the same factory as the genuine item, they cannot but be regarded as counterfeits. However, I do think the principle is sound: collectivisation of personal property or produced wealth may well be disastrous in terms of productivity (and this does, sadly, pretty much force me to conclude that well-meaning but moderate progressive liberals and social democrats, as opposed to strong leftists, may well be doing as much harm as good); collectivisation of private property or the means of production alone could work, and potentially end exploitation and economic inequality without destroying the incentive to actually produce. Then, maybe, everyone can have nice things. Maybe not quite as many as the percentage formerly known as 1% do now, but enough.
Wow, I really got carried away with this one. It was supposed to be a one-and-a-bit paragraphs kind of deal.
Posted by: Tom | Dec 08, 2011 at 08:54 AM
Sorry, everyone, that post really was obscenely large - I just couldn't stop writing, somehow. I think I should perhaps look into setting up my own blog instead of dropping occasional boulders on other people's.
Posted by: Tom | Dec 08, 2011 at 09:57 AM
Tom, that was fascinating! It makes much more sense than the stereotypical right wing explanation of left wing thought, which is what I have previously run into. I'd respond in further length, but this is one of those posts that needs further digestion before I have thoughts about it.
Posted by: Wysteria | Dec 08, 2011 at 10:48 AM
Since when is agriculture the largest industry in the US? It certainly isn't in terms of fraction of workforce employed, last time I checked.
Hrm, hrm, it depends. If you count only physical products, this is undoubtedly true, although there are things which are changing this up a bit--3D printers, for instance. Not as efficient as full-scale industrial tooling, but still capable of making things quite rapidly and (more importantly) for a far smaller capital cost or time investment.
If you count non-physical products, services, software, etc...? No, no I don't think this is true. Or if it is, in many cases the "industrial tooling" is available free, to everyone (eg., Emacs and gcc--you can, theoretically, write a program to do whatever you like at no cost but time to yourself, using the same tools plenty of computer firms or other major software producers use).
This is rather implying that the suits don't actually do anything, which I don't think is actually true. As an analogy, compare to a military--a purely democratically organized military might be perfectly effective under some situations, such as defending the homeland (eg., the well-known POUM militias from the Spanish Civil War), but in many other respects are dreadfully inferior. There are many perfectly sound and logical reasons why a military might want to deny its members knowledge of what it is going to do next (operational secrecy, for instance, or the difficulty of communicating for larger forces in active wartime conditions), or why it might not want to put much planning capacity in the hands of its privates and corporals, who are often not privy for, again, perfectly sound and logical reasons to what the overall situation is, and likely are not aware of what the actual goals of the war are (something properly set by politicians, but there you go: how many politicians will you find in a trench, so to speak?)
Similarly, there may be perfectly sound reasons why workers shouldn't be allowed free access to the means of production, with someone else dictating what they produce, or at any rate agreeing on what needs to be produced before hand and then doing it. The agricultural example you point out where growing crops takes several months, so anyone growing crops on communal land needs "their" little plot where they're growing potatoes or wheat or barley or what not is a good example of that--there needs to be some management, meaning there needs to be some process by which everyone agrees somehow that they need to grow potatoes, wheat, and barley, rather than lettuce, carrots, and tomatoes (or vice versa). A similar situation can obtain in manufacturing, where it can be quite costly to bring machinery down or switch it from producing one thing to another thing. Given my own experiences, I'm a bit skeptical of people just sitting down and doing that without at least some form of management (in the sense of debate moderators or similar people, at the least). Even the best democracy has some sort of leadership and management, after all.
That's true in the US as well, actually. I read about it a while back in the context of generic products (particularly generic foods)--often, generics are produced by the exact same machinery, using the exact same ingredients, and by the exact same people as name-brand products, but of course are generally cheaper. Brand X only sells so many pickles, for instance, but Brand X, Y, and Z sell far more, enough that your pickle-processing plant can work continuously rather than standing idle and wasting money (with upkeep etc.). And Brands X, Y, and Z have to pay only 1/3rd (or maybe less) as much to have their pickles processed by sharing. Perfectly sensible in a completely capitalistic way of looking at it.
Posted by: truth is life | Dec 08, 2011 at 11:04 AM
Beh, I just finished a rather large post and it vanished. Is there any chance it fell in the spam trap, TBAT?
Posted by: truth is life | Dec 08, 2011 at 11:19 AM
@truth is life: Yup, you were in the spamtrap -- you have been freed
Posted by: The Board Administration Team | Dec 08, 2011 at 11:28 AM
Oh look I have a comment box at work again.
There is another fundamental reason you can't get a living wage for craft work - automation.
Can't automate creativity, uniqueness, custom work, or the personal touch.
collectivisation of personal property or produced wealth may well be disastrous in terms of productivity (and this does, sadly, pretty much force me to conclude that well-meaning but moderate progressive liberals and social democrats, as opposed to strong leftists, may well be doing as much harm as good)
How so?
As for the rest of your post...I'm getting the impression that nobody except me and a handful of other people actually thinks it's possible for literally everyone to get at least a living wage. And I find that unacceptable.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 11:38 AM
Since when is agriculture the largest industry in the US? It certainly isn't in terms of fraction of workforce employed, last time I checked.
I don't know if it's shifted much lately, but I think agriculture represents less than 5% of US GDP, maybe around 3%? I have a small book somewhere, You Can't Eat GNP, 'inspired' by some official's offhand remark that the collapse of the agricultural sector in the US wouldn't have serious economic implications.
The size of any industry is going to depend on how you define its parameters (should garments made in majority with plant fibres be considered an 'agricultural product'?) but it's safe to say that actual plant-things-grow-things-harvest-things agriculture is a very small industry, even though it is vastly more important to day-to-day survival than some much larger industries.
Posted by: Will Wildman | Dec 08, 2011 at 11:54 AM
@MercuryBlue: I'm getting the impression that nobody except me and a handful of other people actually thinks it's possible for literally everyone to get at least a living wage. And I find that unacceptable.
I am getting the same impression and I too find that unacceptable.
Posted by: Mmy | Dec 08, 2011 at 11:56 AM
@MercuryBlue: I'll cop to that. It is not possible for literally everyone to get a living wage.
But the entire concept of "You are paid a wage for your work and it is from that wage alone that you are empowered to live" is one which we *chose* to impose on ourselves as a society, and we are allowed, as a society, to choose otherwise.
Posted by: Ross | Dec 08, 2011 at 11:56 AM
When the family company has tried to look into government job creation programs, we've run into a problem related to the instruments of production (this is mildly tangential, but I'm trying to brainstorm a blog post for Slacktiverse-proper, I hope no one minds). We're a knowledge-based company, publishing/media, in the US - we work with a few different companies with printing presses and a few different ebook companies. Our instruments of production are people sitting at computers. The government would be happy to assist us in building a factory or buying a huge machine, but it seems to be stuck in some other century when we would like a loan to hire people. It doesn't consider 'buying someone's time to sit at a computer and write stuff' an investment. I suppose part of that might be that those sorts of jobs are too easy to outsource, once funded - a factory is built where a factory is built, and moving it is as far as I know cost-prohibitive unless you are a multinational corporation - whereas a person sitting at a computer can sit at a computer in Beijing just as easily. Anyway, in my experience, the US government wants to help their citizens afford the instruments of production.
I am curious what we all mean by living wage. I am getting the impression that it means a variety of different things to different people.
Posted by: Wysteria | Dec 08, 2011 at 12:15 PM
Was it here that someone mentioned the study about minimum wage, where they calculated how many minimum-wage jobs it takes to live in particular parts of the US? I can't find the link, but I remember hearing about it.
Posted by: sarah | Dec 08, 2011 at 12:16 PM
It is not possible for literally everyone to get a living wage.
So how do you propose keeping the world from having people who are hungry and/or homeless and/or working nonstop to keep from being either?
Okay, I've just gone to Wiki to arm myself with facts, and apparently the world gross product is $60 trillion as of 2005, and population about 7 billion as of today, and try as I might I cannot make that come out to more than eight-point-fiveish thousand dollars per person.
I'm feeling ill.
I am curious what we all mean by living wage. I am getting the impression that it means a variety of different things to different people.
For me, it's all the necessities met, with education and savings for retirement and savings for emergencies and savings/spending for fun counted as necessities. Living wage goes up as household size does, obviously, so I want the minimum wage at a forty-hour work week to be enough to meet the necessities for a household of two.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 12:19 PM
Tom:As we advance ever further in the sophistication of our products, the complexity and quantity of the machinery needed to automate its production rises; at the same time, the time and effort for crafting a given item also increases. Worse, as complexity of products increases, the quality of an item that a machine can produce begins to greatly exceed the quality a craft worker can produce in reasonable time.
And in many cases, the product is literally impossible to hand-craft, or even hand-fix. The perfect example of this is cars. Cars have almost never been hand-crafted and have nearly always required some sort of machinery. However, they have been able to be hand-fixed, which is why independent repair shops make up a major number of small businesses (I have a lot of them in my neighborhood, especially). However, now that cars are getting more and more computerized, you need more and more complex equipment to even find out what is fundamentally wrong. (The Volt is said to have more code in it than a jet fighter.) That equipment is quite expensive. In addition, I suspect that much of what is in the computer systems is proprietary information, so the original manufacturer can choose to even make that information available to a manufacturer of an analytical computer system. If they don't choose to make that information available, then anyone with that car literally must go to the dealership to have it fixed. The most frustrating thing is that I don't know how to solve this problem. Telling manufacturers to stop making better cars isn't a solution, but neither is putting a bunch of mechanics out of business. That's a case in which creativity doesn't matter - no one cares what creativity the mechanic put into it, as long as your car is fixed. I think that's true of a lot of areas that were once done by hand, but aren't exactly "crafts" as we think of them.
if factory owners were required to explicitly rent out the use of their machinery to anyone who needs it, as opposed to cloaking the whole arrangement in an apparent agreement to pay the workers to work for them, the situation might be improved slightly.
Forming co-ops where people can pool their money to buy machinery is one area that a lot of people have been moving towards, especially since the recession. You're seeing it especially with machinery that is just expensive enough that it's way too expensive for one person to own but not too bad if 10 people share it, like die-casting and electronics. You also see it with office space for small business and non-profit incubators. A copier seems like a very simple need, but it's way too expensive for a two-person business to own. It's good because it allows for innovation and small businesses not having to rely on someone else investing in them.
I believe that pre-industrial feudal lords (and, it must be observed, a not insignificant number of 19th century industrialists - the Greg family, Titus Salt, etc) recognised and accepted that their power over the lives of their serfs carried with it at least some moral responsibility for their wellbeing,
There's an interesting book about the Guinness family (The Search for God and Guinness) talking about how the Guinness factory did that for their workers. There were a lot of problematic things in that book, but it was interesting to see how much more the owners cared about their employees than other folks at the time and even now.
Even if the land isn't privately owned, there needs to be some way of allocating it to individual projects for the necessary time to complete them.
Otherwise known as community gardening? Seriously, it's not that hard to have commonly owned land, as long as you have some sort of consensus-agreed upon plan in place beforehand.
Posted by: storiteller | Dec 08, 2011 at 12:23 PM
For me, it's all the necessities met, with education and savings for retirement and savings for emergencies and savings/spending for fun counted as necessities. Living wage goes up as household size does, obviously, so I want the minimum wage at a forty-hour work week to be enough to meet the necessities for a household of two.
I think it helps to realize that a living wage and even most of the things you mention above (education, decent health care, retirement) are relatively new concepts in history. They are all good, important concepts that should come into reality, but because they are new, they won't necessarily ever fit into the existing system. We ultimately have to change the system somehow.
Posted by: storiteller | Dec 08, 2011 at 12:29 PM
[[There's an interesting book about the Guinness family (The Search for God and Guinness) talking about how the Guinness factory did that for their workers. There were a lot of problematic things in that book, but it was interesting to see how much more the owners cared about their employees than other folks at the time and even now.]]
I've never read the book, but it reminds me of Aaron Feuerstein, the CEO of Malden Mills in MA. When the factory burned down in the '90s, he kept his employees on payroll because he felt that he had a responsibility to his workers. It bankrupted him, though.
Malden Mills is still around--they're the developers of Polartec. I know my mom's bought fleece from them when they have sales.
Posted by: sarah | Dec 08, 2011 at 12:36 PM
Truth is Life, I apologise - I oversimplified the "suit" thing. It actually varies enormously - some literally do nothing except own the company, and have middle-management henchmen do all the "suit work" management for them. Others produce intellectual property (and that's a colossal debate all in itself) or otherwise improve the efficiency of the company by good management. I wouldn't be surprised if a noble handful, here and there, even take a turn on the shop floor in between bouts of office work. But that itself is symptomatic of a fundamental problem that you've highlighted: non-tangible yet useful work, unlike physical labour, doesn't follow conservation laws. If you do a fixed amount of work to make one physical thing, then sell that thing on the open market, you've been fairly compensated the value of your labour - just about everyone agrees on that definition, even Marxists. What, however, if you do a fixed amount of work to create valuable information, which can then be duplicated any number of times and sold to any number of people, at negligible extra effort? How on earth do you arrive at a fair price for that? If the information created increases the efficiency of other people doing physical labour, i.e. by planning their shifts for them or something, similar problems arise. The capitalist solution is to declare the whole thing a non-problem and let individuals charge whatever they can get away with for however much labour they're actually inclined to do; hence the wide disparity, which encompasses everything from worker-collectives where the workers themselves get to say how much their managers are worth, right up to people who may seldom even set foot inside their own company premises. I find this solution morally inadequate, but I'll admit I'm not entirely sure yet how a better one might work.
Posted by: Tom | Dec 08, 2011 at 12:42 PM
When discussing the potential for the economy to feed/cloth/provide health care for everyone, I like to step back from the largely shared-imaginary numbers that is GDP and break it down by physical items, like food. I know we grow enough food to feed everyone in the world - starvation charities like to quote that one all the time. I don't know if we make enough clothing/roofing-materials/shoes for everyone, but something like 5 billion people have cell phone access, so my impression is that things can be produced quickly on that scale in a relatively short period of time, if we're motivated. Cell phones have only been around, what, a decade and a half?
(Health care tangent: I think there's potential to replace a certain amount of primary-care needs with retail clinics paired with doctor-programmed computers, just as these days far fewer lawyers can do far more law (1 lawyer and a computer, rather than 1 lawyer and 150 paralegals/junior lawyers - which sucks for law school graduates, by the way!). This is not to say that I don't appreciate how much nicer health care is with people, but in terms of scaling quickly to 7 billion, I would trust mass-producing computers more than I would trust training enough doctors.)
On feudal lords: I know I end up feeling a bit feudal when it comes to my family's small business. When people employed with us have financial or health issues, I end up heading into the business account books to see if we can afford to do something about it.
Posted by: Wysteria | Dec 08, 2011 at 12:46 PM
Okay, I've just gone to Wiki to arm myself with facts, and apparently the world gross product is $60 trillion as of 2005, and population about 7 billion as of today, and try as I might I cannot make that come out to more than eight-point-fiveish thousand dollars per person.
I'm feeling ill.
The Gross World Product wiki page says the GWP was estimated at $10,500 per capita in 2008. That's not a great estimate of actual world 'production', though - there's simply too much off the books, too much subsistence farming, too many rough estimates in trying to compare countries, etc.
Posted by: Will Wildman | Dec 08, 2011 at 12:50 PM
Still not a US living wage, though, Will. Which just shows how very badly skewed in favor of the US et al wealth distribution is.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 01:01 PM
MercuryBlue, it may make you feel slightly better to remember that the amount that can be bought with a certain amount of money varies significantly with location. On 8500 USD PA in the USA, I imagine you'd be very uncomfortable indeed. On the same amount in, say, Shanghai (and Shanghai is expensive by Chinese standards) as long as you're a person of simple tastes and don't mind buying the same stuff the locals do, you could probably live in reasonable comfort.
It'd get considerably easier if you pooled resources with not just a spouse, but whole other families. In pre-industrial Europe, it was common for two or more families to live in a single household, so significant were the economies of scale and combined income.
Perhaps we need to learn how to be social creatures again. As income and purchasing power have increased, so have both the means and the desire for ever greater privacy and isolation. In feudal times, entire communities would sleep around a single fire in the great hall of the lord. In the 18th century, you'd see several families of all income ranges but the very highest making up a single household. In the 19th century, many of the working class still crammed multiple families into single rooms. In the early 20th century, one family per house was becoming normal, but it'd still not be uncommon to find two or three generations of the same family sharing that house - your kids might stay with you well into young adulthood. In the late 20th century, kids moved out as soon as possible after becoming legal adults; parents and grandparents also lived separately.
In the last decade, kids in the UK have noticeably started to remain based in their parents' dwellings until well into their 20s again - I shouldn't be surprised to learn if the same thing is happening elsewhere in the North America and Europe. And I wonder if all this privacy isn't bad for us as a society anyway. Anecdotally, social responsibility seems to be at an all-time low - perhaps it would do us some good to get a bit closer to each other again. I wouldn't be the first to make this suggestion. To those readers of Asimov here, does the name "Solaria" mean anything to you? Too much privacy seems to breed dysfunction.
Posted by: Tom | Dec 08, 2011 at 01:36 PM
Which just shows how very badly skewed in favor of the US et al wealth distribution is.
No kidding, yikes. I just contemplated trying to live on $8500 per capita here, and.. I'm pretty sure I would actually die, from not being able to afford housing in an area that likes to have 40+ degree (F) temperature swings in winter, and lows well under the freezing point, and feet of snow, even assuming I put my money toward medicine and warm clothing first and food second, that leaves no room for work clothes, gas, having pets or rent.
Tom, that is a fascinating boulder you've left, and I need to read it a few more times, but I'm pretty sure I have some basic disagreements with some of your assumptions and just need to tease them out.
I am also not sure how one can morally apply a price to someone who has created, not just an idea, but a system. I am one of those evilly-evil "non-producing" workers - I test software. I do not generate anything except for mounds of documentation on things that either work or don't. The company I work for runs a system that provides a service to a large number of people (not an uncommon situation these days) and our former CEO retired a while ago, because he made a lot of money designing a system that successfully provides a service that a lot of people like.
Is that moral? Our CEO drove the very existence of the system, which is not a clone of someone else but an innovation (as is not uncommon, either). Designed it, built it, put massive amounts of time and sweat and thought into it.
How do you compensate someone for years of their life?
Posted by: Sixwing | Dec 08, 2011 at 01:45 PM
In the last decade, kids in the UK have noticeably started to remain based in their parents' dwellings until well into their 20s again - I shouldn't be surprised to learn if the same thing is happening elsewhere in the North America and Europe.
I'm almost twenty-three and living with my parents because I cannot afford the $400/mo I cited above for rent, never mind the $200 for food. Not compared to rent of $100/mo and food of whatever I want that my parents won't buy. I'm hardly the only US twentysomething in this situation. And, honestly, it's gonna take some pretty convincing evidence to show me that once I'm capable of financial independence, I'd be better off not exercising it.
Clearly I haven't read enough Asimov, or at least not recently enough. Explain 'Solaria', please.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 01:50 PM
Wealth distribution is undoubtably skewed to a horribly degree - I'm just saying that the GWP isn't a great measuring tool for it in conjunction with the US living wage, because the US is functioning in a different way from a country like Bangladesh. We have no reason to assume that, if every country in the world were sufficiently developed to provide the necessities (as you defined earlier) for every person in the world, the 'living wage' calculation would bear much similarity to a 2011 US living wage. Comparisons between countries are done by purchasing power parity, but that's a much rougher estimate than it seems. As Wysteria says, it makes more sense to set cash aside and start with goods (and work in services). It's also substantially harder to work that way, thus people don't often do it.
Posted by: Will Wildman | Dec 08, 2011 at 01:53 PM
The Gross World Product wiki page says the GWP was estimated at $10,500 per capita in 2008.
That's per capita, not per worker, which makes the numbers slightly better. (Your average family of four would be earning $42k annually, not $21k, and each individual would have a retirement / disability / maternity pension of $10.5k.)
Still, that's not much, especially once you consider taxes.
Posted by: LMM | Dec 08, 2011 at 01:56 PM
Still, that's not much
More so when you consider that actual economic equality is something that's going to be utterly impossible to put into practice. $10.5K at forty hours a week fifty weeks a year is $5.25 an hour, and there's very good reasons why minimum wage is above that, and even better reasons to raise minimum wage further still.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:01 PM
First interview, the in-person one downtown, went great and was fun.
Second interview, by phone, any minute now. And I just got back home, so the timing is either perfect or infuriating, but I'll go with perfect.
Posted by: Lonespark | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:01 PM
Change the rules. Society is edging ever closer to reaching the conclusion that "the new normal" is for about ten to fifteen percent of people to be unemployed. I say we embrace that.
The thing it means, which no one -- least of all the people trying to tell us that "ten percent unemployment is the new normal" -- wants to accept is that if you give up the idea that "everyone can work", you ALSO have to give up the idea that "everyone ought to work".
That whole "He who will not work should not eat" thing is a moral judgment based on the actual real-world necessities of a preindustrial civilization where you literally needed a majority of your population to be literally making food in order for there to be enough literal food. But that's no more the world we live in than the economic models of perfectly rational actors that underwrites modern capitalism. My job is very important, but if it went away tomorrow, even if the worst possible consequences were to come out of it, there wouldn't be any less food to go around or any less of the means of transporting it. (Though, because we live in a complexly-coupled world, there would be all kinds of upheaval and privation resulting from all the other disruption to the system. But in terms of end-states, whoever ends up running your polity, they're still going to have to *eat*) We are desperately, forcefully using public policy to rigidly enforce pre-industrial morality.
So I say give it up. You started this discussion by pricing out:
So let's break the assumption that if it costs you $2040 to live, you need a job that provides you with $2040. As a first-stab oversimplification, consider this alternate scenario. How about at the beginning of the month, the government just gives you a card, something akin to the debit cards that come with HSA and FSA health insurance programs, or like a food stamp card. The card can only be used to buy certain kinds of goods and services. You can use it to buy food, say, and clothing. Toiletries and household cleaning supplies even. You can pay your rent with it. You can pay for health care with it. Maybe it even pays for internet service. There might be some limitations on it, like a monthly maximum for each category of good or service. Maybe you can't use it for luxury food items, or it only pays half the rent if it's over the median for the area. Maybe it will pay for restaurants only if the restaurant's menu meets certain nutrition requirements. Let's say that the card ends up only covering $200 of the $300 you estimate for sundries. Do all your math again, and this time let's even assume that the tax rate is increased to 50%. Now, instead of making $2040 as a "living wage", you only need to bring in $980. That's less than half as much. Make it an even thousand and you've doubled your "fun" budget. And what's more, you;ve got security, because even if you brought in $0, you'd still have the card, so if nothing else, you know you'd have food, clothing, shelter and health care.
Already, I can hear numerous objections to a plan like this. "Where will the government get the money to pay for it?" The government is still bringing in tax money -- would it be enough? Well, yeah; the government gets to decide how much they are going to pay. If the takings are slim this year, the government says to your landlord, "Sorry; you're only getting $300 a month this year." "Aha!" says my imagined interlocutor, "But then the landlord will not be making any money, and he will decide to get out of the landlording business in favor of something more profitable!" Really? How's he going to finance that? The fact that government rent payouts have gone down is a matter of public record. Who'd buy the building from him? And do you really think that all landlords will jump ship because of an industry-wide payment-downscaling (a downscaling that will hit EVERY industry that does business that involves The Card, remember)? Banking is more profitable than growing wheat in the world we live in, so why are there any wheat growers left? Of course, this process of reducing-payment will ultimately mean that things that used to have a prices of $10 might later have a price of $9. If this becomes inconvenient, the government could do one of those other things the government is allowed to do , and print more money. We could call that "inflatening" or maybe some similar word.
"But those government controls will stifle growth! Rich people won't invest their money!" Hm. That's a good point. To which I think the answer is: Who cares? If everyone's getting their basic needs met, who cares if the economy grows very slowly? So long as it grows fast enough to keep up with real demand, what good comes of growing the economy any faster? We need an ever-growing economy in this world because we keep on needing fewer people to meet the real demand, so we need to force economic growth in order to drive up demand and justify employing an ever-increasing number of people. Outside of that, the only point of economic growth is to put money in the pockets of people who already have a lot of money. But in this imaginary scenario we don't need to keep everyone employed all the time, so what's wrong with leaving the economy where it is? Heck, what's wrong with needing a slowly decreasing number of people doing actual work? If right now, it takes 75% of the population working to produce enough goods and services to meet the needs of 100% of the population, then an employment rate of 85% gives us a whole 10% "extra" production that can be devoted to making peoples' lives better -- and that 10% of workers can be engaged in making and doing things like making art, entertainment, luxury items, jewelry. If the next technological improvement renders 10% of formerly "needs" workers redundant, the worst case scenario is that those 10% end up jobless, but still have their needs met. If half of them can get a job doing something in the "making the world better" sector, then we only have a 5% increase in unemployment, and a 5% increase in "making the world better", and that's AWESOME and we still don't have anyone whose needs aren't being met. "But a constantly-growing economy is the only way wealth can trickle down to the poor!" Yeah? How's that working out for you?
"Aha! But what if the growth is so slow that it doesn't keep up with population growth? What if businesses stop hiring people to make and do things that people NEED? What if the rich people just take their money and sit on it because they can't make a significant profit. Whatcha gonna do then?" Ouch, you got me there. I forgot that rich people would rather sit on their money, slowly starving to death, than to get only a modest return on their investments in agriculture and real estate. "They would! Rich people are dicks like that!" Well then. I imagine that those empty factories and unclaimed apartment buildings will go for pretty cheap at the estate sales of dead millionaires who starved to death.
"But people won't work! People are naturally lazy and would rather just suckle at the government's teat than do real work!" Really? Really? Everyone? Close enough to everyone that the system would collapse? Sure, you might have a hard time getting people to do unpleasant, soul destroying laborious tasks for a joke of a wage. But, um, well that's kinda the point.
"But even in your magical socialist wonderland, someone's still got to clean the floors! Without the threat of going hungry, people would only ever do the fun jobs like art and lapidary and accountancy!" People will do what the market will bear. I'm pretty sure you could find enough people who'd be willing to put in a few hours a week mopping the floors in exchange for a couple of extra bucks they could use during their free time. You might have a hard time getting one person to work at one joyless, soul-crushing job forty hours a week for the rest of their life, but it's not exactly like that's working out for people now. Instead of one full-time janitor, you can fulfil Newt's dream and get six high school kids working part time for date money. ANd don't forget, in the here-and-now, there's people who've lost their jobs who can't risk taking a low-paying part-time unskilled labor job because it would look bad on their resume if they ever tried to get back into their own field. Take away the "Or else you will be homeless" stick and make it normal and the problem goes away. We can even be a society where hardly anyone has a full-time job -- maybe only the people who do high-demand work that requires high levels of skill and training -- but almost everyone has some kind of job. Or maybe only half of almost everyone. It'd be awesome if it were commonplace for one or both parents to be able to take a few years off work to take care of the kids.
I'm not going to pretend that my solution is perfect, or that it wouldn't be vulnerable to abuse, or that it's the actual right solution or even an actually feasible one. But I hope I've demonstrated at least the concept that most of these cages we have fenced ourselves into are of our own choosing, and that means we could choose to do something very different. All the real impediments are a series of interconnected fictions. Everyone doesn't need to work all the time, economies don't need to grow all the time, and we don't NEED to be a civilization where we dismiss out of hand any solution that doesn;t make a profit
Posted by: Ross | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:01 PM
How does one lose track of one's point in a two-sentence post? My point was that some people will always be making more than that average and some will always be making less, and that average is way too little. Even though Tom's right that the cost of living differs place to place.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:02 PM
I am with Ross and his walls of text. My husband makes the same point at length to anyone who listen. But how the hell do we get anywhere near there?
Posted by: Lonespark | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:07 PM
if you give up the idea that "everyone can work", you ALSO have to give up the idea that "everyone ought to work".
THIS. This times a billion.
Posted by: Tom | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:10 PM
From the Robots novels. The Solarians were the first wave of space colonists to leave the Earth, using massive amounts of robotic labor to compensate for the natural shortage of personnel you would expect in a frontier situation (you didn't need janitors, or for that matter farmers, since you could use robots instead). As a result, all of the humans are in relatively well-off positions, rather than grunt laborers, and combined with the immense amounts of space available on an unsettled world naturally go off and build massive mansions with the huge robotic labor force, rather than crowd together in cities. It gets to the point where every Solarian expects to have a massive estate and huge personal robotic labor force, and not have to actually physically work with other Solarians; as a matter of fact, they become quite unwilling to have physical contact with each other in any context.
They do pretty well, but then the humans who stayed behind, who do live in huge, crowded cities and don't use robots do better, expanding way out into the galaxy and eventually setting up the Galactic Empire of the Foundation novels.
Posted by: truth is life | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:15 PM
In my ideal world, the basics are done by robots and people get involved with work strictly for value-adding activities - creative design, art, music, literature/education, services like nursing and massage therapy where being around another person matters a great deal. Roombas will solve everything, basically.
Posted by: Wysteria | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:16 PM
@truth is life: double post -- would you like TBAT to remove one of them?
Posted by: The Board Administration Team | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:16 PM
Ross: Good idea, well thought out. I'm with Lonespark, though: how can it be implemented?
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:17 PM
til: Oh yeah, them.
Roombas will solve everything, basically.
I was just reading something the other day. Person addressing Roomba: NO, R. DANEEL, YOU MAY NOT EAT THE COMPUTER CORD. I think that's a direct quote.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:18 PM
@TBAT: Yes, please. I could have sworn I only hit the post button once. Typepad why do you hate me...
@Ross: You've essentially reinvented the classical dream of utopians. Since...I dunno, the mid-19th century at least (ie., when Communism showed up), people have been talking about how advancing technology/productivity would mean that everyone could meet each other's needs on four hours of labor a day, or something like that. Hasn't happened so far, but that doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing.
Posted by: truth is life | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:18 PM
MercuryBlue: I say that to my cat all the time. It's nice to know that some things never change, no matter how much we live in the future.
Posted by: Wysteria | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:24 PM
Re. Asimov: I can't do the books justice with a brief description, but Solaria is a human-colonised planet in Asimov's Bailey-Empire-Foundation universe. It features in two of his novels, separated by many millennia. It becomes more and more like an Objectivist's paradise; though I'm not sure if Asimov ever paid any attention to Rand or her direful writings, it certainly looks as if he's imagining what her kind of world would be like, with human beings becoming ever more removed from one another, and ever more obsessed with privacy, personal freedom, self-sufficiency and material independence. By the time of the first book it appears in, "The Naked Sun," most of the inhabitants met have picked up some serious neuroses, and struggle to function when the visiting off-world detective (who comes from an Earth which has progressed to the opposite extreme, described in "The Caves of Steel," and has different neuroses of his own as a result - I never said there was no such thing as too little privacy) places them in more socially direct situations than they'd consider civilised or acceptable. By the time of its second appearance, in "Foundation and Earth," the entire population would easily qualify as dangerous psychopaths by any current measure. It's a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit.
Posted by: Tom | Dec 08, 2011 at 02:36 PM
Still not a really intelligent comment, but I am crossing the streams.
Here are beautiful pendants made by an independent artisan (who presumably makes a living wage, because I've been watching him for quite a while) of the Pelican in her Piety.
Posted by: Sixwing | Dec 08, 2011 at 03:17 PM
Perhaps we need to learn how to be social creatures again [i.e. live in multi-generational households]..... And I wonder if all this privacy isn't bad for us as a society anyway. Anecdotally, social responsibility seems to be at an all-time low - perhaps it would do us some good to get a bit closer to each other again.
I'm not convinced that social responsibility is tied to living in multi-generational households, or even that those sorts of social arrangements are feasible in this economy. As a (semi-)professional scientist, I haven't lived at home full-time since I was fourteen. Doing so would have required me sacrificing both educational [1] and job opportunities [2]. I think the same goes true for most white-collar positions: being a professional requires leaving home. Multi-generational households worked mainly because it was assumed that people would live in the same place all their lives. It works great when you live on a farm, but not so great when you want a career rather than a job.
There's also a lot of privilege associated with advocating for multi-generational households. Saying we don't need as much privacy as we currently have is great when the worst thing you're concerned about is eating your meals with other people or being woken up by your little niece or nephew. If you go against social norms, though, things are a lot worse. Imagine being QUILTBAG in a non-QUILTBAG-friendly household. Now imagine that your partner's family isn't QUILTBAG-friendly either -- and that there's no way that, even combined, you two could earn enough money to live on your own until you're in your mid-40s, if ever. (And, even then, how could you move out when your parents depend -- in part -- upon your income?) Imagine if your family disapproved of your partner's race or religion or personality -- and had veto power since there's no way you could move out. Heck, my problems are minor compared to most of the above ones, but I for one appreciate privacy -- I'm pretty kinky but there's no way I'm going to try bondage if I could be interrupted by my parents at any time.
I'm not convinced that multi-generational households lead to social responsibility, either. After all, the pre-modern era was not known for its safety nets (one reason for multigenerational households!), nor for a low crime rate or a balanced income distribution. Nor was it known for its tolerance of minorities. (I think one reason for decreased "social responsibility" -- e.g. a decreased desire to pay taxes -- is the fact that minorities are treated (ostensibly) better now than they were in the past: taxes aren't just going to go to 'my' kind of people anymore.)
Do I think there's a lot of things that are pathological about the current American household? Yes, of course. Our society's emphasis on car-dependent suburban housing tracts is stupid and unsustainable. We'd be far better off discouraging sprawl and building denser housing tracts, if not apartments, condos, and brownstones. Our streets are too wide and overengineered in ways which favor driving rather than walking -- which in turn discourages community. (Walmart, as the bloggers at Strong Towns have pointed out repeatedly, is a symptom, not itself a disease.) Our love of zoning makes it nearly impossible to live without a car -- which means in turn that people spend hours a week driving from place to place alone. Regulations make it difficult to have (legal) granny flats or boarders in many communities. But multigenerational households won't solve these problems.
[1] My last two years of high school were at a boarding school which offered better educational and social opportunities than my local school; the college I attended -- several states away -- was better than the options locally; and it would have been impossible for me to obtain a Ph.D. in my field at a even semi-respectible university at a location less than two hours away. And, no, when you're a graduate student in the hard sciences, two hours is far too great a distance to commute daily.
[2] Remember what I said about my Ph.D.? That goes equally for postdoctoral positions -- and for jobs in academia. As far as industry (or government) positions go, my hometown is actually halfway decent, but the chances of getting an offer from any company in the area are pretty low.
Posted by: LMM | Dec 08, 2011 at 03:24 PM
I'm one to talk given the above comment (though I did trim it down significantly once I realized how big it was!), but could we *please* avoid the walls of text? I don't know about anyone else, but if I have to scroll down more than twice to read a comment, I stop reading.
Posted by: LMM | Dec 08, 2011 at 03:27 PM
So pin the minimum wage to the consumer price index.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 03:46 PM
I like Ross's idea as well.
I wouldn't mind more communal living, but I'd want it to be with friends rather than family.
Also, there's the whole That Guy Who Can't Take The Damn Trash Out issue.
Posted by: Izzy | Dec 08, 2011 at 03:56 PM
@MercuryBlue: Without some additional price controls, that would basically cause a constant inflation feedback loop. Which means that any money you had banked would become effectively worthless.
Which sounds like it might be okay on the assumption that the people it hurts least are those who spend every dime they earn, but actually, the capitalist classes don't have their money in banks, but rather in investments, which would appreciate at no less than the rate of inflation, so really it would only hurt people who are able to save enough to try to build a safety net buyt not enough to buy into the capitalist class.
Posted by: Ross | Dec 08, 2011 at 04:00 PM
Bah. BAH I SAY.
There has to be a way to make this work.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 04:02 PM
"More communal living" sounds really good to me on paper, but as an introvert who gets twitchy in crowds and parties and needs to lock himself away somewhere dark and private for a few hours ever day, it kinda makes me buzz with discomfort.
Posted by: Ross | Dec 08, 2011 at 04:02 PM
I've done communal living as an introvert. It worked out pretty well, but I also had my own room, so I could, if I wanted, lock myself away for a while. Communal living doesn't mean always being around people, at least as we defined it.
Posted by: sarah | Dec 08, 2011 at 04:05 PM
For anyone in the area (or anyone who knows someone in the area) Virginia Tech is on lockdown after two people were shot. The shooter is still at large.
Posted by: Mmy | Dec 08, 2011 at 04:10 PM
@mmy: oh, goodness. Hasn't VA Tech been through enough?
Posted by: sarah | Dec 08, 2011 at 04:31 PM
The (geographically) closest of my friends lives 700 miles away. My friends--all of whom grew up in this area--live scattered across a three-thousand-mile radius from me, and from each other.
To quote one of them, "Gee, for living in supposedly the most mobile society in history, it's almost like where we live is determined by impersonal economic forces beyond our control."
Honestly, there really should be nothing on earth but arcologies connected by high-speed trains, farms, and wilderness. One arcology per major landmass may have an airport. Preferably lots of wilderness, within walking distance of the arcologies. That's my ideal world. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any method of getting there from here that's feasible and morally acceptable.
Posted by: Froborr | Dec 08, 2011 at 04:47 PM
LMM, the very point that I was musing on was whether that by learning to be more social creatures, we need to learn to be tolerant of one another. It's precisely our ability to isolate ourselves, to withdraw from society or form cliques, that allows bigotry and intolerance to fester and become entrenched (though that works both ways, of course - forming a strong, tight-knit subculture generally seems to be the first step to any minority group overcoming discrimination and gaining social acceptance).
The common cry of the homophobe is that if only homosexuals would keep to themselves, there'd be no problem, but you and I both know that's not the case. As every homosexual who ever lived prior to legalisation knows, and many thereafter, doing as they ask and keeping stumm doesn't make the bigotry go away, or even diminish - it's still there, just as strong as it ever was, ready to explode the moment you slip up. Bringing it out into the open, demanding fair treatment and having the bigots learn how to deal with it was the only way. I can't imagine you'd want to share a house with a bigot, naturally, but I can't help but wonder that if the general social arrangement were a bit more communal, if people were a bit more used to sharing space with those of different stripes, there might not be considerably fewer bigots in the first place. As public awareness has grown, acceptance has slowly but surely grown - couldn't a similar mechanism work domestically?
(I'm thinking aloud with this one - feel free to eviscerate these musings as you see fit)
Posted by: Tom | Dec 08, 2011 at 04:54 PM
if people were a bit more used to sharing space with those of different stripes
You were talking about multigenerational family households. Families are, by and large, composed of people with the same racial identity, same economic stratum, etc etc so forth. And living in close quarters with different people has done jack to reduce sexism.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Dec 08, 2011 at 05:31 PM
I'd really like to live in a European city, just from the perspective of not having to have a car.
It was one of the things I enjoyed about Munich: with a bike and a train ticket, I could get anywhere. Cars were only needed for long holidays in Austria.
*is wistful*
Posted by: Deird, who would move if there were jobs over there | Dec 08, 2011 at 06:51 PM
Yeah, the trams are good - but the thing about Melbourne is, it sprawls. We might be a small city population-wise, but we take up more than our fair share of space.
So... I could catch the train, if I wanted to go into the city centre.
Or I could catch the tram, if I was already in the city centre.
Or I could catch the bus, if I wanted to go somewhere very close and had half a day to get there.
Or I could own a car.
My trainline ends at my house, the trams end a good deal further in, and the bus system is kinda crap. And bikes in Melbourne take forever.
Posted by: Deird, who is needlessly complaining | Dec 08, 2011 at 07:39 PM
Irrelevant, false, false, and overrated.
You can't automate creativity, yes. (You can make computers rather impressively imitate existing works, but that's not true innovation...) But you don't need to. You have someone come up with what you want to create, and then have machines to create it. They just do the grunt work.
It's easy to automate uniqueness. You can have all manner of random-seed procedural generation systems to get a different result for each seed.
For custom work, you need merely input the specified design into the machine. Not all machines can be adjusted in this way, true, but 'some machines don't' is a long way from 'it can't be done'.
'The personal touch' is simply a bevy of flaws, imperfections and errors. Sometimes this is quaint, but I don't want it in most things I'm going to buy.
From what I know, hand-crafted things tend to fall into two categories - cheap, because the maker doesn't have the resources to drive demand, or massively overpriced, because it's marketed to snobs who want the maximum amount of resources expended on the product.
Well no. This is because about half the world is (relatively speaking) booming and enjoying increasingly high standards of living, while the other half is in dismal shape economically. If the prosperity and productivity of those portions was brought up to the standards of the rest of the world, then the GPP would correspondingly increase, thus allowing the overall per-capita GPP to be brought up to adequacy. Alternatively, you could simply reduce maximum standard of living, which would cause the cost-of-living to settle into a lower range... but this is about on par with the idea of reducing the population to fit.
I was thinking of computers, actually. People hand-craft cars (although admittely this usually means 'the machine that shaped the steel/fiberglass/resin was controlled manually'), but it is literally impossible for a human to make a microchip by hand. Likewise with things like carbon nanotubes and the like.
Lots and lots of advanced materials science? You'd need some way of actually building the damn things, since they'd probably end up needing to be double-digit kilometers tall, especially if you want something more like 'crystal spire' than 'hive city'. I question the idea of having wilderness within walking distance. The things are gonna have a pretty huge footprint... you can only cram so many systems inside (you need air recirculators, for instance, docks for resources to arrive...)
And why only one airport per continent? It'd be a pretty useful thing to install in each arcology, so you can easily get out into distant points in the wilderness. Or failing that, why any airports? You could simply build rail lines across the ocean - if you have the capacity to build that level of arcologies, you can do that.
Perhaps it would be better as 'one spaceport/orbital ascender/stargate per continent'.
Conversely, as time goes on, the efficiency and speed of transportation is likely to increase. For a sufficiently advanced society, that 700 mile trip might be minutes (or even seconds, if we allow for more far-out advances) away. Combine this with telecommuting, and this means that settlements can be more distributed, because the physical location of something matters less and less.
Posted by: Base Delta Zero | Dec 08, 2011 at 07:42 PM
Dude, at my awesome fun interview, I learned more about Hubway. Bikes anytime you want them! For a fee, so far, and in limited locations, but soooo awesome. And I learned about it from one of the people who works there, who said riding in from the train is easy and encouraged.
Posted by: Lonespark | Dec 08, 2011 at 07:44 PM
Bikes anytime you want them! For a fee, so far, and in limited locations, but soooo awesome
*pines some more*
We have something like that, but because bike helmets are compulsory here, they don't get used much. (How many people do you know who carry a bike helmet everywhere just in case they unexpectedly need to use a bike?)
Posted by: Deird, who actually does like her city, despite appearances | Dec 08, 2011 at 08:12 PM