@james-hanley My question is, how would we know just how long it should take?
Well, first, I'd like to point out that there are really two things I'm saying.
My original point was value-neutral...I was simply pointing out that a large amount of increased manufacturing efficiency was being eaten by delays in price changes. It doesn't really matter if the delays are 'perfectly natural'...if it takes a decade for a manufacturing cost change to ripple out to price, that's a decade in which corporations, not workers or consumers, are the ones benefiting from the increased manufacturing efficiency. It's true even if that's a 100% completely natural part of the free market.
However, I don't actually think it is, because the free market, as currently operating, is extremely...non-ideal? I guess that's the phrase. It has all sorts of abnormalities in it, which cause the delays to be longer.
For the most obvious example, corporations find themselves making decisions based on their stock price, instead of their actual profits. There was an article I read somewhere, can't find it now, that points out that the corporate equivalent of 'point shaving' is expected business practice. Multi-million dollar corporations regularly hit their expected profits exactly to the penny, or are off by less than five cents. This is, of course, impossible to happen by chance. They're manipulating the numbers because the estimates of their profits and hitting them are more important than their actual literal profits!
But while I've said that 'delays are slower than they logically should be' and provided a reason they could (I mean, really, I could just generally wave my hand at how corporations currently operate.), I've still got no evidence that delays actually are slower.
Well, let me think. How about...cheap sunglasses? There is no possible reason for something made out of plastic like that to cost more than $1. We figured out plastics in frickin 80s, and now they're made in China. And yet, there they sit, at $15 or so. Sure, occasionally you come across a $5 pair, but that's still too high, and very rare.
What's going on? Well, that market is dominated by a few people, and the locations sunglasses are sold likewise are too few.
Granted, I'm not sure how to prove this is specifically due to the 'price failing to drop after technological advances', instead of 'small amounts of manufacturers and sellers overcharge due to limited competition'. In fact, it probably would be reasonable to say what I'm claiming is a *separate* issue is actually just part and parcel of the general crapiness of the market nowadays.
Are you looking only at the manufacturing process? Because maybe we haven’t had a great leap forward in reducing the costs of assembling the pieces of a laptop, but we’ve certainly had great leaps forward in the cost of manufacturing bits of memory, or processing speed–that is, we may not be able to produce the same amount at less cost, but we can produce more for the same cost.
It's only 'more' if it sells for more. Which it doesn't really. What is happening in computers is, in a sense, tech inflation. The numbers keep going up, but the thing customers are willing to exchange for it is steady.
And don't get me wrong. The advances are a good thing, and customers benefit from it. But it doesn't increase prices, and is completely separate from the cost it takes to make the things. This is why I keep saying it's a bad example...people hear 'technological advances' and think computers, but we're talking about manufacturing advances.
And I’m missing something on how this would help your example. If we haven’t seen the necessary technological advances to reduce costs, why have prices for consumers dropped so much? I guess I’m again not following you.
We *did* have massive technological advances in manufacturing computers, especially laptops, thanks to people figuring out how to make LCD screens cheaply and reasonable batteries. That was a decade ago. The prices have been on a slow decline since then. 'slow' is the keyword there.
And computers have never been *that* uncompetitive to start with. (You want an electronic device market that's uncompetitive, look at cars. LoJack, the service-less burner cellphone that still somehow costs $700. Christ, that thing has like $20 worth of parts in it.)
As an aside, the fact 'you do not work for your boss' is something I've always thought tinted the 'Why do we think your boss should not be able to order you to have sex with them?' experiment. Of course he shouldn't be able to do that for the same reason he shouldn't be able to order you to paint his house...you are not *his* employee, *he* doesn't pay you. (This logic results in interesting hypotheticals where it makes sense for the *corporation* to tell you to have sex with someone, e.g., having sex with a potential client to get their business. Something that would serve a legitimate corporate purpose. That premise can change the discussion in interesting ways. But that's veering way off topic.)
Anyway, Patrick's right in everything he's described as fact. The job of a boss is to make sure employees can, and do, do whatever they're supposed to be doing towards accomplishing the goals of the organization. I think the best test of managers is two pronged: 1) If one of the employee they manage is unexpectedly absent one day, *can* they fill in for them and do their job? and 2) If one of the employee they manage is unexpectedly absent one day, *will* they fill in for them and do their job?
If the answer to either of those questions is 'no', they're probably not very good managers. They either don't understand what their employees do, or they don't understand the entire premise of *their* job is to make sure someone is doing that thing..and if no one else is, they need to. (Or, possibly, they are good managers and know damn well the job is pointless, so no one needs to do it?)
I think I mentioned this when we discussed that woman who got fired from some job because she was homeless by some random manager, who apparently thought this was an entirely reasonable way to act, despite it not even *vaguely* serving the goals of the business. (I mean, it doesn't serve the goals of the business not even considering the backlash. With the backlash, wow, it *really* wasn't serving the goals.)
However, I think Patrick's a bit unrealistic about what he thinks people can and should do about bosses that don't understand that. Any proposed solution that is 'half of all people should quit their job' is, uh, a non-starter.
Oh, I should admit, with regard to housing, you're right in that idiotic regulations do keep prices a bit higher than they should be, because they interfere with innovation, of which there is a lot. For the most obvious example, pre-fab housing has long run into problems, with stupid outdated rules.
However, I suspect another issue is simply that there's almost no market at all, compared to anything else. Houses are a very rare thing to make, vs. jars of pickles or books or even cars. So changes in the price of newly manufactured houses would be correspondingly slowed down. (And, of course, are drowned out by the dumbass housing bubbles we've decided to have every few decades.)
A better example of the oddity of housing prices might be the fact we literally have six times as many houses already manufactured than potential customers. Seriously, there are 12 million empty houses, and maybe 2 million people who are 'underhomed'. (Either homeless or doubled up.) It's crazy. It's like if Sony had 1 billion Playstation 4s sitting on the store shelves in the US.
And yet, with that nearly insurmountable imbalance in supply and demand, housing prices have not dropped. (They've 'unbubbled', but not really dropped.)
The housing market makes almost no sense at all in any economic model I've ever seen, and I think that's mostly because it's a lot more concentrated than people think. But, regardless of the reason, it makes no sense.
@james-hanley That sounds like the labor theory of value to me. And I disagree with it.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'sounds like', but is seems to be the exact opposite to me. Yes, I'm sorta using the labor theory of value to determine how much stuff objectively costs to create, speaking in terms of 'man-hours'. (I'm unsure of any other way to determine the cost of making things when my entire point is how much labor required has been reduced.)
But I'm pointing out it isn't true, that the actual cost of making things has very little bearing on the price.
You said 'If efficiency makes things cheaper, all who consume those things are vacuuming up the rising efficiency.' I pointed out that lower prices in no way match efficiency gains. Efficiency makes manufacturing cheaper, it doesn't make prices cheaper or wages more. (Or, rather, it takes a long time to do that.)
In a way, it's you assuming the labor theory of value, and I'm the one saying it's not true.
Granted, I'm also saying it should be more true than it is, i.e., we shouldn't have to wait so long for increased productivity to filter to prices. (And while I haven't really said why, this is due to structural problems in the economy. There's not a way to fix that problem by itself. It's a symptom, not the disease.)
Sure, why not? Opportunity costs, after all. Prices get competed down to the costs of production. That includes “normal” profit, although it’s difficult to say what normal profit necessarily is (I think it’s a bit tautological–normal profit is the profit you get when prices are competed down to cost of production…including normal profit). But it also has to include opportunity costs, which isn’t always remembered (in fact I don’t think my econ profs ever explicitly mentioned that). If the returns to the firm go below their opportunity cost, the returns they could get from doing something else, they’ll shift to doing something else.
I don't understand why you think this applies. I'm saying in some ideal free market, if a technological innovation was discovered that allowed manufacturing costs to be cut by 10%, prices of that thing would also drop by close to 10%. Not because of the 'labor theory of value', but simply because how supply and demand works. If the manufacturing costs decreases by 10%, the supply increases by 10%. If supply increased by 10%, prices decrease by 10%. (Assuming steady demand.)
Do you disagree with this? It seems to be exactly what you mean by 'Prices get competed down to the costs of production.'
Now, obviously this process takes time. The entirety of my claim is it really seems to be taking more time than should be expected. Much more time. Because we're not in an ideal free market, not even close. And that is where the rising efficiency goes, not 'all those who consume things'.(1) That might eventually trickle down to the middle class, but it takes a hell of a long time. Which was, again, why I brought this up.
Also, when you consider the technology improvements in that computer, the price is much much lower than 1/10 of what I paid.
Like I said, laptops aren't a very good example. My point is how long technological innovations in manufacturing take to cause a drop in price...and laptops haven't really seen a technological innovation in manufacturing in a while. Hence the price is, as expected, slowly decreasing over this last decade to the 'correct' amount, the competitive amount.
The housing market has all kinds of whack that keeps it from being a proper market.
Well, it stopped being a 'housing market' at all for a while, and turned into the equivalent of the stock market, where the point was to trade abstract pieces of paper where the value was determined entirely by speculation. There might be all sorts of regulations that 'distort' the market, but what broke it was what broke the stock market, a very long time ago, turning it into a zany madcap casino where people own things solely because they think the value will go up, instead of an actual market where people purchase things because they want to own those things. (And, sadly, while people do not need to own stocks, they do need housing.)
Or, to put it back in the context of this discussion, the 'useless jobs' people found another place where they could get access to the super-rich's money, and started playing there also. That place, unlike personal nutritionists and stockbroker, turns out to be a very idiotic place to let useless-job people play.
1) And a lot of the rest, as I said, ends up getting wasted by jobless people building inefficiencies into the system, entire goofy cabals of people that seem to exist for no apparent reason except those people need jobs and they've managed to get people to pay them for something.
We’re at 3 kids a Nurse, nowadays. Are you trying to say that’s MORE than we used to do? Because I’m doubtful.
I have no idea of what the context here is. Did you used to have one? Fifty? What do you conceivable mean?
I wish you'd stop saying thing without any context, just assuming we magically know what you're thinking about.
If the number of nurses per child has increased, that's almost certainly due to other factors.
While computer monitoring may indeed save lives, I’m not sure it actually makes “nights in the hospital” cheaper.
I've been pretty clear I am not talking about 'cheaper'. The medical system is completely screwed up beyond belief in how much it costs, and whether things are more expensive or cheaper is a coin toss.
I'm saying computer monitoring allows the same amount of medical care with less work. Less man-hours.
That isn't actually a disputable statement. In fact, it's patently obvious, almost a tautology. Whether it actually results in less work, or lower costs, is a completely different story, and something I would indeed be dubious about in a universe where a can of Coke costs $13.
Well David, excluding care that’s extended at the end of people’s lifespan strikes me as base stealing since we both know that the vast majority of expense in medical care occurs there. It’s definitely a bit of “other than the gun how was the play Mrs. Lincoln”.
The decision to spend tons of money to extend people's lives is an actual societal change. Likewise, the decision to put older people into care instead of having them leive with the family is a societal change. Such things costs a large amount of money, but it's not due to changing medicine.
If we had wanted to, we could have spent absurd amounts of money trying to extend people's lives in the 1970s, too. We didn't want to then, we do now, apparently.
My assertion is that providing any specific amount of medical care requires much less work than it did in the 1970s. There are indeed some new medical treatments that now are offered that are better than past treatments, and while they could, in theory, require more work than those older treatments...those changes are more than outweighed by the epic reductions of work required for every other aspect of medicine. Seriously, we have computer monitoring. The savings in man-power alone for that...
Of course, the system is so completely screwed up this is impossible to see. But I'm talking actual man-hour of work, not the insane pricing that has happened. Actual man-hours of work, even with the levels of elderly care we provide now, has gone down. (And note by 'man-hours of work', yes, I'm including the man-hours used to acquire resources and produce medical technology and everything.)
But many goods have gotten cheaper. In the 1950s it took the average worker several weeks of work to afford a television. Today, with a much better television (color, high def) it takes the average worker two or three days of work to afford one. My first computer cost $1500 in 1992. That’d be almost $2500 today. It was a desktop with 50 megs of memory. Today I can get a touchscreen laptop with 500 frickin’ gigs of memory for $300–that’s $182 in 1992 dollars, that’s 12 % of what I paid for a computer that doesn’t even begin to compare to what I have now.
I didn't say that prices didn't reduce. I said they didn't reduce proportionally, and were laggy as hell. The question isn't how much it costs to buy, the question is how much it costs to buy compared to how much it costs to manufacture.
Cost of labor to make a television has literally dropped a thousand-fold. (Less people, and they're people paid pennies an hour.) Cost of the parts hasn't dropped quite so dramatically, but it has dropped maybe one hundred fold. Cost of shipping the item has stayed the same...they come across the ocean now, but they're a fraction of the size and weight. Should televisions really only cost a tenth of what they used to cost?
The same thing with laptops, except there you can see an interesting issue. There haven't really been any large technological developments in computers over the past decade that would make them cheaper to make in general...and yet the price keeps slowly decreasing. (Barring weird hiccups like the hard drive shortage.)
Why? Because the price is wrong, it's always been wrong, and the free market does work...eventually. That doesn't mean corporations don't, as I said, vacuum up increases in efficiency until the prices correct, which can take a very long time.
I wish someone would create some sort of chart showing how much corporations actually spent on non-top-level employees in the 1950s, and how much they spend their money on corporate profit and CEO pay and what not. That is where the increased efficiency goes. It doesn't trickle down to lower prices until much later, and then only partially. (Although, as I said, the middle-class fights back with an insulating layer of middle-management and other pointless jobs.)
I don't actually think you dispute much of this, you're just having an issue with my conclusion, that with our technological advances, we should be a certain point. We should be at a 20 hour work week, or even a ten hour work week. If 40 hours was enough to live in 1914, uh, we've made a lot of progress since then, and as I keep pointing out, things don't get more expensive because they're better, which people tend to think is our 'problem'...things get cheaper, at least in costs of production.
So we really can support our lifestyle with very small amounts of work...and yet somehow it costs us a lot more work than that, because there's a huge amount of productivity being sucked out of the system at the top, and out the middle of the system because people need to survive in this completely screwy economy we've built.
(Also, you didn't have 50 megs of memory in 1992, in a $1500 computer. People in 1992 tended to have four megs of memory. Maybe eight.)
That doesn’t happen with all goods, but it does happen.
Except when it doesn't happen at all, like with houses, which have been completely out of wack of the cost of manufacturing them for decades and decades. (Because that market is less competitive than other markets.)
@hoosegow-flask With a basic income you could abolish not only programs like SNAP and TANF, but also the minimum wage, since employers wouldn’t have to provide a “living wage”. It seems to me like it would be a much more voluntary exchange of labor for money if I didn’t need to work to keep a roof over my kid’s head.
Yup. You could get rid of all government assistance.
And you'd also turn the labor market on its head, from a buyer's market to a seller's market. People would no longer be at the mercy of their boss. They run into problems at work, whatever, they just quit and cut back for a few months.
Which is why the people that own everything will never allow it. They'll mutter some nonsense about 'inflation', and idiots, being trained that such a thing is bad, will react in horror. (Of course, they've somehow having manipulated the $1.28 trillion in actual circulation into something like a $11 trillion money supply.)
the super-rich vacuuming up all the rising efficiency of the last century,
This is where I jump ship, for the reason you explicated on my post. If efficiency makes things cheaper, all who consume those things are vaccuuming up the rising efficiency.
But efficiency hasn't made thing cheaper to extent it should have. We've had stagnation and even drops in wages, without a corresponding drop in the actual cost of goods. Companies make things cheaper, but they don't sell them cheaper, or pay workers more...instead, they pass the money on to their CEO as absurd salary, or their stockholders as profits, or the dump the money back into the corporation to increase the stock price.
And, yes, supply and demand and all, if other companies can make it cheaper they will, blah blah blah, but prices and wages are sticky, and for decades have been somewhat off-kilter with the actual cost of producing goods, lagging behind the change by a noticeable amount. A technological advance manufacturing something 10% cheaper gets followed with...no wage increase and a 3% price decrease. And the next company to invent it has a 4% decrease. Maybe in ten years the price has dropped by 10%...while there's been another 10% increase in efficiency.
When the cost of goods have dropped largely, it's usually due to extremely low costs because of offshoring, and even there the drop is not proportional and somewhat laggy. (I.e., a 80% drop results in a 20% price decrease at first.) And there's never, ever, ever a wage increase due to increased productivity.
However, as I pointed out, there has been a pushback by working people to create increasingly useless jobs. So the super-rich haven't actually been able to vacuum everything up, because there's some guy looking around going 'Hey, I can make a ton of money being a banker and managing their money', and he does just that. Or, rather, five guys do that, all overpaid, but if the rich guy doesn't use them, other people will out-compete him in banked-ness or whatever the hell we're paying bankers huge amounts of money to do. (Bankery? Rhymes with wankery?)
But that doesn't mean we wouldn't be better off if we had those people in pointless jobs actually making things and getting paid a reasonable amount to do so, instead of whatever pointless little circle-jerks they're doing.
@chris It’s not just an assertion. I’ve actually outlined the argument in this thread
Chris, you keep doing this in this thread. Saying that you've explained things somewhere, or that if people understood some other theory they'd understand this.
No one understands you. No one understands Graeber. I'm pretty damn far left, and I don't understand you. No one understands why on earth the ruling class would want to pay more of the money they have looted^Wearned to operate pointless positions in their own companies, or, as I was focusing on, the entire industries that appear to provide no actual benefit to anyone, like stockbrokers.
You keep saying there is a reason for this, you hinted at 'social and political' costs if they didn't do it, but, like I pointed out, those guys pay no social or political costs for anything they do. (You know it's true.) They're not going to walk into their yacht club and get booed for trimming some middle-management, the entire idea is surreal.
If the left needs a super-secret decoder ring for other people to figure out what it's talking about, it's making a pretty shitty argument.
Especially since, as I pointed out, the premise of this argument is actually true. It's just being caused by the super-rich vacuuming up all the rising efficiency of the last century, getting the same amount of money while having much less payroll costs. So other people are inserting inefficiency into the system in a somewhat systematic way (Although completely uncoordinated and unplanned) so we don't all starve to death. What this article is talking about is actually happening, and it actually is a condemnation of the system...it's just not a damn deliberate action of the ruling class, it's a reaction to them.
I meant to add that at least now I know that when I start yelling for a general strike, one other person here’s going to be on board ;).
Well, I'll be on board for calling for one, at least. I already own part of the means of production that I work at. I guess we'll get a lot more business during the strike?
But there's basically no way that's going to happen.
@north There’re a lot of chemo drugs, cancer treatments, surgery options and repair options that weren’t available in 1970 that are available now. Some of those can probably be provided cheapishly compared to 1970 perhaps, though probably only if you cut out the cost of developing them.
That's almost exactly the opposite of how it works.
More options makes things cheaper, not more expensive. Surgical techniques get better because they require less work and less recovery. I have a medical condition that used to require surgery basically every five years. The first time I remember that, I was in the hospital for a week. The last time...I was out the same day. It's a combination of technology and just better ideas of how to do surgery.
And there are no drugs that actually cost a lot of money to manufacture. Some of them might seem to cost a lot to develop...but they've always cost 'a lot' to develop, and that amount isn't actually 'a lot' in the first place. It's just we've changed the system where drug companies can profit more for them, so spend a lot of money developing things to profit off of.
That said I am skeptical about your assertion that all that extra cost on it is a consequence of the American medical system. America’s developed sibling countries get better outcomes for their spending; but not -that- much better.
Erm, I think you've lost the thread.
The question isn't if they get better outcomes v.s America. The question is if medical care literally requires more manpower and resources to operate our system now than in the 1970s.
It doesn't. (Well, it does, but only because there are more people in total, and a higher percentage of them getting medical care.) Per capita of care provided, no, it doesn't.
And if it does it's in a few outliers, such as extreme elderly care. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't do that, but I would suggest that doesn't really count. That's like including in the average price of telephone system the phone from the international space station.
Normal care for normal people is less work now than in 1970. Care for people that just would have died in 1970 is obviously more work, but I'm not convinced that even cancels out the gains on average, and if it does, it's still pretty close.
Now, because of our idiotic and entirely preventable doctor shortage, the same amount of medical work costs much more than it used to, but that is, like I said, entirely correctable and is not some inherent property of 2014 medicine that requires us to go back to 1970 medicine. In fact, going back to 1970 medicine would not solve that problem.
@chris As left as possible, eh? Socialist? Syndicalist? Anarchist?
Syndicalism. And goddamn 'confiscate all fortunes over one hundred million' leftist. (Although I'm usually not actually promoting those things here.)
For someone so far left, I see you’re not familiar with the context in which he’s discussing these things either. No, it doesn’t sabotage their own profits. It protects them.
Just asserting things doesn't make them true.
There’s a cost benefit analysis going on, it’s just not the one you’re thinking of.
No, it's that secret cost-benefit analysis that's going on that you appear unwilling to explain. You keep asserting there are 'political and social' costs, but will not actually state what they are.
In fact, I'd like some evidence that the ruling class actually worries about any 'political or social cost' from anything they do. Or how the hell they even hypothetically suffer from 'political cost', considering they essentially operate politics.
Oh man, you are definitely not as left as humanly possible if you don’t think it has to do with class ;). Sure it has to do with class. Just not in the way that James seems to be interpreting it (or, it seems, you are).
I didn't say it had nothing to do with 'class'. Almost everything has something to do with class.
I said it didn't have anything to do with 'the ruling class'. The ruling class does not want to have to pay for these make-work jobs. They certainly aren't deliberately setting up a system where they exist.
The make-work jobs exist to pull more money from their pockets. In their ideal world, they'd pay one third of the workers, have the same output, and make even more money. The excessive people on payroll are literally the exact opposite of what they want. It's a stupid hack the system has come up with to keep from dying. It's 'The people that own everything don't want to hire us, let's invent a way to make them hire us'. (Except it's not done on purpose, it's merely the result of a high level unemployment.)
The only explanation I can think of is that you have some entirely different definition of 'ruling class' than what people would assume.
@saul-degraw David, how are you defining a “real job?” What makes a particular job real or not? There are lots of jobs that I would find to be horrible and mind numbingly boring but I do know plenty of people who seem to really enjoy the work. Examples of this include marketing, event planning, and PR. I consider PR to be somewhat close to at least a neutral evil profession. But I know people who really enjoy the work and it seems wrong to me to call their work BS.
I'm not making a moral judgement. They are doing those jobs because they need money. Those jobs exist because they need money. Yes, they are, in a sense, parasites, but they're parasite because the economy is operated by a few dozen rampaging elephants that have entirely devoured all actual food, so being parasites on the elephant is the only way to live, if that metaphor makes sense.
Have a pastoralist-utopian streak and imagine humans living happily in something that resembles the Smurf Village and that sounds rather unpleasant to me. I love social democracy and the welfare state but no commune for me please. I’ll take Brownstone Brooklyn or London.
I think that conception of what 'less work' would be like is one of the most insidious and detrimental ideas of the last century. Certainly in the top 10.
Our standard of living increases because we do things better with less effort. Much, much, much less effort. In fact, if we'd actually gained the fruits of our labor (Instead of having the people who own everything keep getting richer and richer.) over the last century, we already would be barely working. To actually keep civilization running, at current levels, probably takes about one man-hours a day per person. And we could reduce it a lot more if we'd stop playing silly buggers with the huge amounts of time and effort we spend just moving money and rent and imaginary property around.
If there are jobs where one is present for 40 hours but works, oh, 32 of them, one thinks that we could easily have a 4-day workweek with the 8 “wasted” hours spent in the house rather than in the office.
I'm not asking in an attempt to make things more efficient. I'm not operating on the assumption that we would reduce total hours worked in those companies. I don't want that.
I'm asking what would happen if we had twice as many people people working for 20 hours a week. (But they only actually work 16 of them, under this premise.)
Now, the obvious assumption is that they would be paid half as much. Except, the other part of these premise is that there are basically large sections of 'parasitic' jobs that exist solely to get money out of this system that they don't have jobs in. If they do have jobs in the system, wouldn't the system overhead go down? Wouldn't deflation basically level things out to where they are now? And, on top of that, everyone would have a lot more free time?
Or to state my assertion another way: The 40 hour work week was correct for 1900. It should have been slowly decreasing this entire time, and should not be very low. If it had done that, we wouldn't have the sort of pointless make-work jobs we seemed to have filled up the economy with.
Instead, the masters of the universe took our increased productivity gains, and slowly but surely reduced the amount of people participating in the system, instead of reducing each person's individual participation. They did this because if they kept the 'standard' at 40 hours, than they have to pay people enough to survive if they work 40 hours, whereas if the standard drops to 35 hours in 1925 or whatever, than they have to pay people enough to survive on 35 hours.
@north There’s an awful lot of medical technology since the 1970?s that you’d be leaving out in a 1970?s lifestyle.
That's because that's a silly premise. Just like all technological advances, medicine in the modern day should provide more benefits while being much cheaper, resource-wise, to provide. It's not, but that's not because higher standards of living, that's because we let medicine get completely effed up and out of control in the last two decades.
In reality, there's almost nothing actually expensive going on in medicine, and there's absolutely no reason we couldn't provide the full spectrum of 2014 medical knowledge (Or, let's say, 99% of it.), while spending only 1970s-level amounts of per-capita hours doing so.
In fact, I suspect we do only spend 1970 of per-capita hours on it currently. Or less. The reason it costs so much is utterly unrelated to the amount of work being spent on it.
Yeah, people always get the whole 'advancing standards of living wrong'. I probably should write something about that in general.
The needle of a record player alone costs much much more in time and energy to make than the two chips needed to build an mp3 player. And compare the entire VHS and DVD movie distribution, with dedicated stores and rental locations and everything, with how much Netflix costs to operate. (Or, as one famous photo shows, compare the cost of all items in a Radio Shack ad from the 1980s with a smart phone.)
In the past aluminum was incredibly expensive. Incredibly. When it was used to cap the Washington monument 1884, it was more valuable than silver. Then two guys independently invented a new process in 1886 to recover it from ore, using that new-fangled 'electricity', and the price plummeted a thousand-fold.
Within the next twenty years, clothing will repel all liquids. Including sweat. The technology already exists (You can see all sorts of awesome demos on Youtube), and it's basically just a matter of scaling it up. This will save us an epic amount of resources, more than people realize. Much less water and soap for washing, less dry-cleaning, less replacement of clothing, etc. And there will be people in 2034 asking 'Do you want to go back to 2014 technology where clothes got dirty and smelly all the time, and you couldn't just shake out clothes, maybe give them a quick rinse, and wear them again?', ignoring the fact that dirty clothing was much much more expensive for society. It wasn't cheaper.
That is how standards of living advance. Not because we spend more. But because we spend less on the same stuff, or even better stuff, because we know more.
Asking whether or not we'd be willing to operate with a reduced standard of living is a reasonable question...but it wouldn't, it couldn't, be 'a 1970s standard of living'. It would, like I said, be less meat, less food in general, somewhat smaller houses, maybe using mass transit instead of a car...you know, the sort of world that poorer people live in. Poorer people are not listening to LPs.
You know, as someone who is about as far left as humanly possible, I confusingly find myself in agreement with j r and James K.
If Graeber wants to talk about structural issues, he shouldn't say things like 'The ruling class has figured out...' unless there's some actual evidence that this is happening on purpose....which, as has been pointed out, would require them sabotaging their own profit-making, and is a claim that is blatantly counter to the very thing they've been doing for the past two decades of reducing their workforce.
The phenomenon is real, it is worth talking about, and it has basically nothing to do with 'the ruling class'. What is has to do with is the lack of real jobs, so people are forced to invent new ones. Not the 'ruling class', which would happily sit there while we starve to death. It's the middle-class that's been desperately attempting to figure out how to get money from a stone by inventing jobs that aren't very useful, (But needed if your competitors have them) and somewhat succeeding. You need an army of lawyers because that other guy has an army of lawyers, despite the fact you're just writing a basic contract of goods for money and in a sane world could just download a template off a government website. The 'ruling class' hardly wants to spend all their money on the lawyers, it's the lawyers who want them spending all their money on lawyers. It's the stockbrokers who have set up a system where you need stockbrokers. Etc, etc.
And, no, I don't care if 'the ruling class' is some secret code of the left meaning 'a gestalt of society' or now extends to the middle class or whatever and I didn't get my leftist decoder ring. It's nonsense. These jobs are not due to the ruling class, except in the sense the ruling class has made off with all the money and people have made pointless jobs to try to get it back.
I think it’s pretty clear that Graeber’s theory is bullshit.
I think his attribution is bullshit. You can't just handwave why the 'rulers' would be hiring people for pointless jobs, especially when by all obvious perception, they are blatantly trying to do exactly the opposite of that.
However, he's entirely correct. A huge portion of the jobs out there are bullshit. But looking at those jobs he's identified, we see something else entirely: Those jobs were often created by self-sustaining bullshit-industries, usually in an attempt to siphon off funds from the people who actually did things. To redirect money in their direction.
Usually it's zero-sum, so that entities (Both human and corporate.) are forced to use them. You need advertisers, because your competitors have them, and thus will take your business. You need lawyers so you aren't tripped up by the other side's tricky lawyers. You need hedge fund managers because otherwise the hedge fund managers run off with the good investment returns.
Now, this seem obvious, but ask the next question of 'Why?', and you actually do hit a conspiracy there, or at least a structural issue there. It's because there are more people than there are useful jobs, and those excess people need some way to get money. Solution? Invent non-useful jobs that manage to suck money out of the useful jobs. It's not a 'conspiracy', it's just a natural product. It's the same reason that fraud has increased.
Useless jobs are because of income inequality, but not between the rich and the poor, but between the poor and the nothing. They are make-work, but not make-work that the rich create...they're make-work that the jobless create. (Although, in reality, the upper-class tend to slide into them, causing everyone below them to slide up. But they exist, fundamentally, due to lack of real jobs.)
So here's the obvious question: What really would happen if we spread out the existing jobs more by reducing the work week?
Modular factory-built housing–perhaps built in lights-out factories–that are assembled on-site could decimate construction jobs.
We don't really need this. We already have all the buildings we actually need right now, and could operate for several decades doing no construction at all.
Of course, we don't actually let homeless people live in the empty houses...
If you could have a 1970 level standard of living, while working only 12 hours a week, would you be willing to accept that in place of a 2020 standard of living while working 37 hours a week?
This is a false choice. Living with a 1970s standard of living right now would not be cheaper than living with a 2020 standard of living. In fact, it would be more expensive. Yes, there's more electronic devices, but we're talking about a total of maybe $200 extra dollars a month (And we've overcharged for that.), and that's more than countered by reduced energy consumption in every aspect of modern life and automation in getting that energy to us.
Life is, indeed, getting better and better, but it's not costing us more to operate at that level. It's not getting better because we're spending more, it's getting better because we have more knowledge about how to do more things in better ways, in ways that cost less than what we used to do. We can't rewind the clock and magically make things easier...that's exactly the opposite of what happens. It's not cheaper to produce a 1985 computer than a iPad, or a 1970 car than a modern car. It's not cheaper to operate a landline system than for everyone to get a cell phone.(As developing countries have discovered.) It's not even really cheaper to give everyone a dumb cell phone instead of a smart phone.
People seem to think that everything keeps costing the same, manpower-wise, and we move forward because we invent new, better things that cost slightly more. That is exactly the opposite of what actually happens. We move forward because we invent processes that let us make things for less, and then we make things better. There's not any circumstances where 'downgrading' makes sense to save money.
There are maybe a few thing that you can ask if people would do without, like the internet maybe, or a car at all. But a better question might be something like 'If you could work only 12 hours a week, would you be willing to live in a city and use mass transit and have cheap internet, instead of spreading yourself all over creation?' Or, perhaps better 'Would you be willing to eat less meet and smaller portions of food?', which is one of the real differences between America's standard of living and other places.
Or maybe it’s because President Obama declared ‘this is what you do at the end of wars’ which may be a surprise to the 30K some-odd troops still in Afghanistan, not to mention the Afghans themselves. (Senator McCain’s repatriation only came after the Paris Peace accords)
Uh, the Afghanistan war is over. We are not at war with Afghanistan any more, and probably should have returned their POWs years ago.
In fact, we did that. We're not holding Afghanistan soldiers anymore. Likewise, Afghanistan has returned any people they have captured already...this guy wasn't being held by 'Afghanistan' (Which we are not at war with anyway.), he was being held by people claiming to be representatives of the rump previous government, or at least members of the same group.
What we're doing there now isn't 'waging war'. It's maintain peace at the request of the Afghanistan government and training their people. It is entirely accurate to say the 'war' is over.
Now, that doesn't have a lot to do with this....this trade is essentially us trading someone who was kidnapped by the Taliban for people who were, uh, kidnapped by us. (Not quite sure what else you call holding people for years for no particular reason.) I'm not sure what sort of surreal moral standard we should hold our own kidnappings exchanges to.
It is “trans woman” not “transwoman.” The logic (such as it is) is that we want “trans” to function as an adjective to “woman,” much as “latina” does in “latina woman.” The claim is that “transwoman” starts to become a gender of its own and divides us from cis women (rather than ciswomen).
Something seems slightly wrong in what you said, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It's probably because 'woman' isn't exactly 'a gender', at least not in my dictionary. (I have no problem with people state their gender as whatever they think best fits, but 'woman' is already a word used to describe humans of the female gender, so it would be pretty confusing for someone to claim it as a gender.)
I see what you mean, though. People don't want 'transwoman' as a distinction from 'woman'. Trans is merely an attribute that a woman can possess, like 'blonde' or 'tall'.
So a better analogy instead of Congressman would be something like 'Chinaman'. Which we don't use anymore, exactly because it makes it sound like a 'Chinaman' is somehow different than a 'man'.
So it would be 'trans people' then to refer to both trans men and trans women. And 'a trans person' to avoid the silly noun usage of 'a transgender'.
While we're talking about grammar, why am I the only person who ever says transpeople as one word?
It seems like a perfectly reasonable generalization from transmen and transwomen (1), no one's ever called me on it or claimed it was wrong...and yet no one else seems to use it.
And @veronica-dire , 'a transgender' feels to me the same way as saying 'a black'. I am aware that some people say that, and apparently it's not offensive...but it sounds offensive to me. (But I'm not black, and thus can hardly take offense.) And I have the same issue with 'an illegal'.
People are not 'a[n] adjective', at least not in my book. They are 'an adjective person'. (Or, if I'm feeling really liberal that day, they're 'a person who is adjective'.)
1) In the same way you have Congressmen and Congresswomen and Congresscorporations, and together they make Congresspeople.
The TERFs appear to be what happens when certain women decide that the way to fix society is to wage war back against men.
At which point they become concerned with trans people. Oddly enough, they seem to be more concerned about 'infiltration' (aka transwomen) than 'defectors' (aka transmen.). Unlike the men, who care about the exact opposites. (Which means...they both object to transwomen, and don't care about transmen.)
But, then again, feminists have always been 'defectors' in a sense, and the history of feminist has always been transgressing the gender barrier, and often literally passing themselves off as men, so 'defecting' has never been possible. So TERFs don't care about that.
There's a civil war analogy here: Men are an entrenched force operating the government. They are the citizens living in cities. Women are operating a guerrilla war in the woods to take it down, they're the rebels.
The government can just ignore the rebels, but can't have the citizens running off and joining the rebels...they're worried other citizens might start thinking the rebels have a point. But they don't really care about rebels that move into cities, reject the rebel way of life, and pretend to be citizens. Sure, occasionally such people step out of line, but they can just arrest them.
Whereas the rebels are worried that the government is sending in informants and whatnot(1), so chooses not to accept citizens who have fled the cities, at least not one who are asserting they are rebels. But they've always infiltrated the cities, and don't care if rebels do it on a semi-permanent basis.
Of course, the actual problem here is that there is not actually a civil war going on, and both sides are wrong to think of it as one.
1) Despite, interestingly enough, this never happening in the entire history of humanity. Seriously. Even in places where it would be reasonable to describe the interaction between men and women as 'all-out war', men have never tried to pass themselves as women to find out their plans or sabotage their efforts. In history, when men disguise themselves as women, it's always to trick other men.
The sort of men who would think of sneaking into a woman's space and sabotaging it or attacking women is exactly the sort of man who never in a million years would consider pretending to be a woman(2), much less actually use surgery and hormones to make themselves physically closer to a woman. Too much of the identify of such men is tied up in their masculinity and gender roles.
2) Of course, transwomen can be evil or violent also, and I'm sure one of them, somewhere, has raped women. But those attackers would legitimately be transwomen, they didn't just decide to become them to get access to women. That's an absurd amount of work to accomplish rape, which is, apparently, fairly easy to do and get away with. I rather suspect such attacks by transwomen would be of the same proportionality as lesbian rapes.
(Personally I think gender identity labels should support full Perl5 regular expression, but I’m a regular freaking gender outlaw!)
While I've never seen Orphan Black, but I'm somewhat aware of the premise, and I suppose all the clones were grown inside surrogate mothers, correct?
If so, if that actually happened, it would address an interesting theory of homosexuality...When people talk about homosexuality being genetic, they actually mean 'hormonal', because hormones are basically the ways that genes influence sexual development. (To simplify, all genes do is flip ovaries to testicles. Everything else is up to that.)
However, the hormones developed internally aren't the only hormones a developing fetus are exposed to, and there have been studies showing that, statistically, a non-firstborn son is more likely to be gay, possibly because the hormones are different in the womb.
Of course, this is incredibly hard to study, even identical twin studies can't help, because they obviously grew up in the same womb even if separated at birth.
But clones? Grown in different women? That actually would tell us something very interesting.
Incidentally, if the anti-gay people are pointing at identical twin studies, they're confused. Identical twins have a moderately higher correlation of having the same sexual orientation than other siblings, which rather demonstrates it is genetic to some extent. Of course, being genetically predisposed to something doesn't mean 'It always happens', which I suspect is their nonsensical issue. (At this point, I think most people have moved past trying to figure out where gay people come from.)
You are correct that the term is 'transgender people', as that is a description of an attribute.
But people who are transgender have, indeed, become transgender. Just the same way they became biologically one sex or the other. It was indeed involuntary, but humans do not start out as transgender, or even not transgender. Trying to make a distinction based on 'becoming' is not the correct objection.
What you actually mean is that 'transgender' is not a verb. If it was a verb, it would almost certainly mean the same as 'transition'...which is already a perfectly good verb. (And the people using it here aren't even using as a verb meaning, they're using it to mean exactly the same thing as 'transgender'. Which is just silly)
Incidentally, if people really want to use 'transgender' as a verb meaning 'transition', I must propose instead 'transgend'. If you're going to invent words, invent cool-sounding ones. 'Next week, Pete is going to start transgending to a woman.'
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Why Don’t you get a Real Job?”
@james-hanley
My question is, how would we know just how long it should take?
Well, first, I'd like to point out that there are really two things I'm saying.
My original point was value-neutral...I was simply pointing out that a large amount of increased manufacturing efficiency was being eaten by delays in price changes. It doesn't really matter if the delays are 'perfectly natural'...if it takes a decade for a manufacturing cost change to ripple out to price, that's a decade in which corporations, not workers or consumers, are the ones benefiting from the increased manufacturing efficiency. It's true even if that's a 100% completely natural part of the free market.
However, I don't actually think it is, because the free market, as currently operating, is extremely...non-ideal? I guess that's the phrase. It has all sorts of abnormalities in it, which cause the delays to be longer.
For the most obvious example, corporations find themselves making decisions based on their stock price, instead of their actual profits. There was an article I read somewhere, can't find it now, that points out that the corporate equivalent of 'point shaving' is expected business practice. Multi-million dollar corporations regularly hit their expected profits exactly to the penny, or are off by less than five cents. This is, of course, impossible to happen by chance. They're manipulating the numbers because the estimates of their profits and hitting them are more important than their actual literal profits!
But while I've said that 'delays are slower than they logically should be' and provided a reason they could (I mean, really, I could just generally wave my hand at how corporations currently operate.), I've still got no evidence that delays actually are slower.
Well, let me think. How about...cheap sunglasses? There is no possible reason for something made out of plastic like that to cost more than $1. We figured out plastics in frickin 80s, and now they're made in China. And yet, there they sit, at $15 or so. Sure, occasionally you come across a $5 pair, but that's still too high, and very rare.
What's going on? Well, that market is dominated by a few people, and the locations sunglasses are sold likewise are too few.
Granted, I'm not sure how to prove this is specifically due to the 'price failing to drop after technological advances', instead of 'small amounts of manufacturers and sellers overcharge due to limited competition'. In fact, it probably would be reasonable to say what I'm claiming is a *separate* issue is actually just part and parcel of the general crapiness of the market nowadays.
Are you looking only at the manufacturing process? Because maybe we haven’t had a great leap forward in reducing the costs of assembling the pieces of a laptop, but we’ve certainly had great leaps forward in the cost of manufacturing bits of memory, or processing speed–that is, we may not be able to produce the same amount at less cost, but we can produce more for the same cost.
It's only 'more' if it sells for more. Which it doesn't really. What is happening in computers is, in a sense, tech inflation. The numbers keep going up, but the thing customers are willing to exchange for it is steady.
And don't get me wrong. The advances are a good thing, and customers benefit from it. But it doesn't increase prices, and is completely separate from the cost it takes to make the things. This is why I keep saying it's a bad example...people hear 'technological advances' and think computers, but we're talking about manufacturing advances.
And I’m missing something on how this would help your example. If we haven’t seen the necessary technological advances to reduce costs, why have prices for consumers dropped so much? I guess I’m again not following you.
We *did* have massive technological advances in manufacturing computers, especially laptops, thanks to people figuring out how to make LCD screens cheaply and reasonable batteries. That was a decade ago. The prices have been on a slow decline since then. 'slow' is the keyword there.
And computers have never been *that* uncompetitive to start with. (You want an electronic device market that's uncompetitive, look at cars. LoJack, the service-less burner cellphone that still somehow costs $700. Christ, that thing has like $20 worth of parts in it.)
On “Comment Rescue: Workplace Culture”
As an aside, the fact 'you do not work for your boss' is something I've always thought tinted the 'Why do we think your boss should not be able to order you to have sex with them?' experiment. Of course he shouldn't be able to do that for the same reason he shouldn't be able to order you to paint his house...you are not *his* employee, *he* doesn't pay you. (This logic results in interesting hypotheticals where it makes sense for the *corporation* to tell you to have sex with someone, e.g., having sex with a potential client to get their business. Something that would serve a legitimate corporate purpose. That premise can change the discussion in interesting ways. But that's veering way off topic.)
Anyway, Patrick's right in everything he's described as fact. The job of a boss is to make sure employees can, and do, do whatever they're supposed to be doing towards accomplishing the goals of the organization. I think the best test of managers is two pronged: 1) If one of the employee they manage is unexpectedly absent one day, *can* they fill in for them and do their job? and 2) If one of the employee they manage is unexpectedly absent one day, *will* they fill in for them and do their job?
If the answer to either of those questions is 'no', they're probably not very good managers. They either don't understand what their employees do, or they don't understand the entire premise of *their* job is to make sure someone is doing that thing..and if no one else is, they need to. (Or, possibly, they are good managers and know damn well the job is pointless, so no one needs to do it?)
I think I mentioned this when we discussed that woman who got fired from some job because she was homeless by some random manager, who apparently thought this was an entirely reasonable way to act, despite it not even *vaguely* serving the goals of the business. (I mean, it doesn't serve the goals of the business not even considering the backlash. With the backlash, wow, it *really* wasn't serving the goals.)
However, I think Patrick's a bit unrealistic about what he thinks people can and should do about bosses that don't understand that. Any proposed solution that is 'half of all people should quit their job' is, uh, a non-starter.
On “Why Don’t you get a Real Job?”
Oh, I should admit, with regard to housing, you're right in that idiotic regulations do keep prices a bit higher than they should be, because they interfere with innovation, of which there is a lot. For the most obvious example, pre-fab housing has long run into problems, with stupid outdated rules.
However, I suspect another issue is simply that there's almost no market at all, compared to anything else. Houses are a very rare thing to make, vs. jars of pickles or books or even cars. So changes in the price of newly manufactured houses would be correspondingly slowed down. (And, of course, are drowned out by the dumbass housing bubbles we've decided to have every few decades.)
A better example of the oddity of housing prices might be the fact we literally have six times as many houses already manufactured than potential customers. Seriously, there are 12 million empty houses, and maybe 2 million people who are 'underhomed'. (Either homeless or doubled up.) It's crazy. It's like if Sony had 1 billion Playstation 4s sitting on the store shelves in the US.
And yet, with that nearly insurmountable imbalance in supply and demand, housing prices have not dropped. (They've 'unbubbled', but not really dropped.)
The housing market makes almost no sense at all in any economic model I've ever seen, and I think that's mostly because it's a lot more concentrated than people think. But, regardless of the reason, it makes no sense.
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@james-hanley
That sounds like the labor theory of value to me. And I disagree with it.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'sounds like', but is seems to be the exact opposite to me. Yes, I'm sorta using the labor theory of value to determine how much stuff objectively costs to create, speaking in terms of 'man-hours'. (I'm unsure of any other way to determine the cost of making things when my entire point is how much labor required has been reduced.)
But I'm pointing out it isn't true, that the actual cost of making things has very little bearing on the price.
You said 'If efficiency makes things cheaper, all who consume those things are vacuuming up the rising efficiency.' I pointed out that lower prices in no way match efficiency gains. Efficiency makes manufacturing cheaper, it doesn't make prices cheaper or wages more. (Or, rather, it takes a long time to do that.)
In a way, it's you assuming the labor theory of value, and I'm the one saying it's not true.
Granted, I'm also saying it should be more true than it is, i.e., we shouldn't have to wait so long for increased productivity to filter to prices. (And while I haven't really said why, this is due to structural problems in the economy. There's not a way to fix that problem by itself. It's a symptom, not the disease.)
Sure, why not? Opportunity costs, after all. Prices get competed down to the costs of production. That includes “normal” profit, although it’s difficult to say what normal profit necessarily is (I think it’s a bit tautological–normal profit is the profit you get when prices are competed down to cost of production…including normal profit). But it also has to include opportunity costs, which isn’t always remembered (in fact I don’t think my econ profs ever explicitly mentioned that). If the returns to the firm go below their opportunity cost, the returns they could get from doing something else, they’ll shift to doing something else.
I don't understand why you think this applies. I'm saying in some ideal free market, if a technological innovation was discovered that allowed manufacturing costs to be cut by 10%, prices of that thing would also drop by close to 10%. Not because of the 'labor theory of value', but simply because how supply and demand works. If the manufacturing costs decreases by 10%, the supply increases by 10%. If supply increased by 10%, prices decrease by 10%. (Assuming steady demand.)
Do you disagree with this? It seems to be exactly what you mean by 'Prices get competed down to the costs of production.'
Now, obviously this process takes time. The entirety of my claim is it really seems to be taking more time than should be expected. Much more time. Because we're not in an ideal free market, not even close. And that is where the rising efficiency goes, not 'all those who consume things'.(1) That might eventually trickle down to the middle class, but it takes a hell of a long time. Which was, again, why I brought this up.
Also, when you consider the technology improvements in that computer, the price is much much lower than 1/10 of what I paid.
Like I said, laptops aren't a very good example. My point is how long technological innovations in manufacturing take to cause a drop in price...and laptops haven't really seen a technological innovation in manufacturing in a while. Hence the price is, as expected, slowly decreasing over this last decade to the 'correct' amount, the competitive amount.
The housing market has all kinds of whack that keeps it from being a proper market.
Well, it stopped being a 'housing market' at all for a while, and turned into the equivalent of the stock market, where the point was to trade abstract pieces of paper where the value was determined entirely by speculation. There might be all sorts of regulations that 'distort' the market, but what broke it was what broke the stock market, a very long time ago, turning it into a zany madcap casino where people own things solely because they think the value will go up, instead of an actual market where people purchase things because they want to own those things. (And, sadly, while people do not need to own stocks, they do need housing.)
Or, to put it back in the context of this discussion, the 'useless jobs' people found another place where they could get access to the super-rich's money, and started playing there also. That place, unlike personal nutritionists and stockbroker, turns out to be a very idiotic place to let useless-job people play.
1) And a lot of the rest, as I said, ends up getting wasted by jobless people building inefficiencies into the system, entire goofy cabals of people that seem to exist for no apparent reason except those people need jobs and they've managed to get people to pay them for something.
On “What Do We Really Want?”
We’re at 3 kids a Nurse, nowadays. Are you trying to say that’s MORE than we used to do? Because I’m doubtful.
I have no idea of what the context here is. Did you used to have one? Fifty? What do you conceivable mean?
I wish you'd stop saying thing without any context, just assuming we magically know what you're thinking about.
If the number of nurses per child has increased, that's almost certainly due to other factors.
While computer monitoring may indeed save lives, I’m not sure it actually makes “nights in the hospital” cheaper.
I've been pretty clear I am not talking about 'cheaper'. The medical system is completely screwed up beyond belief in how much it costs, and whether things are more expensive or cheaper is a coin toss.
I'm saying computer monitoring allows the same amount of medical care with less work. Less man-hours.
That isn't actually a disputable statement. In fact, it's patently obvious, almost a tautology. Whether it actually results in less work, or lower costs, is a completely different story, and something I would indeed be dubious about in a universe where a can of Coke costs $13.
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@north
The decision to spend tons of money to extend people's lives is an actual societal change. Likewise, the decision to put older people into care instead of having them leive with the family is a societal change. Such things costs a large amount of money, but it's not due to changing medicine.
If we had wanted to, we could have spent absurd amounts of money trying to extend people's lives in the 1970s, too. We didn't want to then, we do now, apparently.
My assertion is that providing any specific amount of medical care requires much less work than it did in the 1970s. There are indeed some new medical treatments that now are offered that are better than past treatments, and while they could, in theory, require more work than those older treatments...those changes are more than outweighed by the epic reductions of work required for every other aspect of medicine. Seriously, we have computer monitoring. The savings in man-power alone for that...
Of course, the system is so completely screwed up this is impossible to see. But I'm talking actual man-hour of work, not the insane pricing that has happened. Actual man-hours of work, even with the levels of elderly care we provide now, has gone down. (And note by 'man-hours of work', yes, I'm including the man-hours used to acquire resources and produce medical technology and everything.)
On “Why Don’t you get a Real Job?”
@james-hanley
I didn't say that prices didn't reduce. I said they didn't reduce proportionally, and were laggy as hell. The question isn't how much it costs to buy, the question is how much it costs to buy compared to how much it costs to manufacture.
Cost of labor to make a television has literally dropped a thousand-fold. (Less people, and they're people paid pennies an hour.) Cost of the parts hasn't dropped quite so dramatically, but it has dropped maybe one hundred fold. Cost of shipping the item has stayed the same...they come across the ocean now, but they're a fraction of the size and weight. Should televisions really only cost a tenth of what they used to cost?
The same thing with laptops, except there you can see an interesting issue. There haven't really been any large technological developments in computers over the past decade that would make them cheaper to make in general...and yet the price keeps slowly decreasing. (Barring weird hiccups like the hard drive shortage.)
Why? Because the price is wrong, it's always been wrong, and the free market does work...eventually. That doesn't mean corporations don't, as I said, vacuum up increases in efficiency until the prices correct, which can take a very long time.
I wish someone would create some sort of chart showing how much corporations actually spent on non-top-level employees in the 1950s, and how much they spend their money on corporate profit and CEO pay and what not. That is where the increased efficiency goes. It doesn't trickle down to lower prices until much later, and then only partially. (Although, as I said, the middle-class fights back with an insulating layer of middle-management and other pointless jobs.)
I don't actually think you dispute much of this, you're just having an issue with my conclusion, that with our technological advances, we should be a certain point. We should be at a 20 hour work week, or even a ten hour work week. If 40 hours was enough to live in 1914, uh, we've made a lot of progress since then, and as I keep pointing out, things don't get more expensive because they're better, which people tend to think is our 'problem'...things get cheaper, at least in costs of production.
So we really can support our lifestyle with very small amounts of work...and yet somehow it costs us a lot more work than that, because there's a huge amount of productivity being sucked out of the system at the top, and out the middle of the system because people need to survive in this completely screwy economy we've built.
(Also, you didn't have 50 megs of memory in 1992, in a $1500 computer. People in 1992 tended to have four megs of memory. Maybe eight.)
That doesn’t happen with all goods, but it does happen.
Except when it doesn't happen at all, like with houses, which have been completely out of wack of the cost of manufacturing them for decades and decades. (Because that market is less competitive than other markets.)
On “What Do We Really Want?”
@hoosegow-flask
With a basic income you could abolish not only programs like SNAP and TANF, but also the minimum wage, since employers wouldn’t have to provide a “living wage”. It seems to me like it would be a much more voluntary exchange of labor for money if I didn’t need to work to keep a roof over my kid’s head.
Yup. You could get rid of all government assistance.
And you'd also turn the labor market on its head, from a buyer's market to a seller's market. People would no longer be at the mercy of their boss. They run into problems at work, whatever, they just quit and cut back for a few months.
Which is why the people that own everything will never allow it. They'll mutter some nonsense about 'inflation', and idiots, being trained that such a thing is bad, will react in horror. (Of course, they've somehow having manipulated the $1.28 trillion in actual circulation into something like a $11 trillion money supply.)
On “Why Don’t you get a Real Job?”
@james-hanley
But efficiency hasn't made thing cheaper to extent it should have. We've had stagnation and even drops in wages, without a corresponding drop in the actual cost of goods. Companies make things cheaper, but they don't sell them cheaper, or pay workers more...instead, they pass the money on to their CEO as absurd salary, or their stockholders as profits, or the dump the money back into the corporation to increase the stock price.
And, yes, supply and demand and all, if other companies can make it cheaper they will, blah blah blah, but prices and wages are sticky, and for decades have been somewhat off-kilter with the actual cost of producing goods, lagging behind the change by a noticeable amount. A technological advance manufacturing something 10% cheaper gets followed with...no wage increase and a 3% price decrease. And the next company to invent it has a 4% decrease. Maybe in ten years the price has dropped by 10%...while there's been another 10% increase in efficiency.
When the cost of goods have dropped largely, it's usually due to extremely low costs because of offshoring, and even there the drop is not proportional and somewhat laggy. (I.e., a 80% drop results in a 20% price decrease at first.) And there's never, ever, ever a wage increase due to increased productivity.
However, as I pointed out, there has been a pushback by working people to create increasingly useless jobs. So the super-rich haven't actually been able to vacuum everything up, because there's some guy looking around going 'Hey, I can make a ton of money being a banker and managing their money', and he does just that. Or, rather, five guys do that, all overpaid, but if the rich guy doesn't use them, other people will out-compete him in banked-ness or whatever the hell we're paying bankers huge amounts of money to do. (Bankery? Rhymes with wankery?)
But that doesn't mean we wouldn't be better off if we had those people in pointless jobs actually making things and getting paid a reasonable amount to do so, instead of whatever pointless little circle-jerks they're doing.
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@chris
It’s not just an assertion. I’ve actually outlined the argument in this thread
Chris, you keep doing this in this thread. Saying that you've explained things somewhere, or that if people understood some other theory they'd understand this.
No one understands you. No one understands Graeber. I'm pretty damn far left, and I don't understand you. No one understands why on earth the ruling class would want to pay more of the money they have looted^Wearned to operate pointless positions in their own companies, or, as I was focusing on, the entire industries that appear to provide no actual benefit to anyone, like stockbrokers.
You keep saying there is a reason for this, you hinted at 'social and political' costs if they didn't do it, but, like I pointed out, those guys pay no social or political costs for anything they do. (You know it's true.) They're not going to walk into their yacht club and get booed for trimming some middle-management, the entire idea is surreal.
If the left needs a super-secret decoder ring for other people to figure out what it's talking about, it's making a pretty shitty argument.
Especially since, as I pointed out, the premise of this argument is actually true. It's just being caused by the super-rich vacuuming up all the rising efficiency of the last century, getting the same amount of money while having much less payroll costs. So other people are inserting inefficiency into the system in a somewhat systematic way (Although completely uncoordinated and unplanned) so we don't all starve to death. What this article is talking about is actually happening, and it actually is a condemnation of the system...it's just not a damn deliberate action of the ruling class, it's a reaction to them.
I meant to add that at least now I know that when I start yelling for a general strike, one other person here’s going to be on board ;).
Well, I'll be on board for calling for one, at least. I already own part of the means of production that I work at. I guess we'll get a lot more business during the strike?
But there's basically no way that's going to happen.
On “What Do We Really Want?”
@north
There’re a lot of chemo drugs, cancer treatments, surgery options and repair options that weren’t available in 1970 that are available now. Some of those can probably be provided cheapishly compared to 1970 perhaps, though probably only if you cut out the cost of developing them.
That's almost exactly the opposite of how it works.
More options makes things cheaper, not more expensive. Surgical techniques get better because they require less work and less recovery. I have a medical condition that used to require surgery basically every five years. The first time I remember that, I was in the hospital for a week. The last time...I was out the same day. It's a combination of technology and just better ideas of how to do surgery.
And there are no drugs that actually cost a lot of money to manufacture. Some of them might seem to cost a lot to develop...but they've always cost 'a lot' to develop, and that amount isn't actually 'a lot' in the first place. It's just we've changed the system where drug companies can profit more for them, so spend a lot of money developing things to profit off of.
That said I am skeptical about your assertion that all that extra cost on it is a consequence of the American medical system. America’s developed sibling countries get better outcomes for their spending; but not -that- much better.
Erm, I think you've lost the thread.
The question isn't if they get better outcomes v.s America. The question is if medical care literally requires more manpower and resources to operate our system now than in the 1970s.
It doesn't. (Well, it does, but only because there are more people in total, and a higher percentage of them getting medical care.) Per capita of care provided, no, it doesn't.
And if it does it's in a few outliers, such as extreme elderly care. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't do that, but I would suggest that doesn't really count. That's like including in the average price of telephone system the phone from the international space station.
Normal care for normal people is less work now than in 1970. Care for people that just would have died in 1970 is obviously more work, but I'm not convinced that even cancels out the gains on average, and if it does, it's still pretty close.
Now, because of our idiotic and entirely preventable doctor shortage, the same amount of medical work costs much more than it used to, but that is, like I said, entirely correctable and is not some inherent property of 2014 medicine that requires us to go back to 1970 medicine. In fact, going back to 1970 medicine would not solve that problem.
On “Why Don’t you get a Real Job?”
@chris
As left as possible, eh? Socialist? Syndicalist? Anarchist?
Syndicalism. And goddamn 'confiscate all fortunes over one hundred million' leftist. (Although I'm usually not actually promoting those things here.)
For someone so far left, I see you’re not familiar with the context in which he’s discussing these things either. No, it doesn’t sabotage their own profits. It protects them.
Just asserting things doesn't make them true.
There’s a cost benefit analysis going on, it’s just not the one you’re thinking of.
No, it's that secret cost-benefit analysis that's going on that you appear unwilling to explain. You keep asserting there are 'political and social' costs, but will not actually state what they are.
In fact, I'd like some evidence that the ruling class actually worries about any 'political or social cost' from anything they do. Or how the hell they even hypothetically suffer from 'political cost', considering they essentially operate politics.
Oh man, you are definitely not as left as humanly possible if you don’t think it has to do with class ;). Sure it has to do with class. Just not in the way that James seems to be interpreting it (or, it seems, you are).
I didn't say it had nothing to do with 'class'. Almost everything has something to do with class.
I said it didn't have anything to do with 'the ruling class'. The ruling class does not want to have to pay for these make-work jobs. They certainly aren't deliberately setting up a system where they exist.
The make-work jobs exist to pull more money from their pockets. In their ideal world, they'd pay one third of the workers, have the same output, and make even more money. The excessive people on payroll are literally the exact opposite of what they want. It's a stupid hack the system has come up with to keep from dying. It's 'The people that own everything don't want to hire us, let's invent a way to make them hire us'. (Except it's not done on purpose, it's merely the result of a high level unemployment.)
The only explanation I can think of is that you have some entirely different definition of 'ruling class' than what people would assume.
@saul-degraw
David, how are you defining a “real job?” What makes a particular job real or not? There are lots of jobs that I would find to be horrible and mind numbingly boring but I do know plenty of people who seem to really enjoy the work. Examples of this include marketing, event planning, and PR. I consider PR to be somewhat close to at least a neutral evil profession. But I know people who really enjoy the work and it seems wrong to me to call their work BS.
I'm not making a moral judgement. They are doing those jobs because they need money. Those jobs exist because they need money. Yes, they are, in a sense, parasites, but they're parasite because the economy is operated by a few dozen rampaging elephants that have entirely devoured all actual food, so being parasites on the elephant is the only way to live, if that metaphor makes sense.
Have a pastoralist-utopian streak and imagine humans living happily in something that resembles the Smurf Village and that sounds rather unpleasant to me. I love social democracy and the welfare state but no commune for me please. I’ll take Brownstone Brooklyn or London.
I think that conception of what 'less work' would be like is one of the most insidious and detrimental ideas of the last century. Certainly in the top 10.
Our standard of living increases because we do things better with less effort. Much, much, much less effort. In fact, if we'd actually gained the fruits of our labor (Instead of having the people who own everything keep getting richer and richer.) over the last century, we already would be barely working. To actually keep civilization running, at current levels, probably takes about one man-hours a day per person. And we could reduce it a lot more if we'd stop playing silly buggers with the huge amounts of time and effort we spend just moving money and rent and imaginary property around.
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Erm, It should have been slowly decreasing this entire time, and should now be very low.
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If there are jobs where one is present for 40 hours but works, oh, 32 of them, one thinks that we could easily have a 4-day workweek with the 8 “wasted” hours spent in the house rather than in the office.
I'm not asking in an attempt to make things more efficient. I'm not operating on the assumption that we would reduce total hours worked in those companies. I don't want that.
I'm asking what would happen if we had twice as many people people working for 20 hours a week. (But they only actually work 16 of them, under this premise.)
Now, the obvious assumption is that they would be paid half as much. Except, the other part of these premise is that there are basically large sections of 'parasitic' jobs that exist solely to get money out of this system that they don't have jobs in. If they do have jobs in the system, wouldn't the system overhead go down? Wouldn't deflation basically level things out to where they are now? And, on top of that, everyone would have a lot more free time?
Or to state my assertion another way: The 40 hour work week was correct for 1900. It should have been slowly decreasing this entire time, and should not be very low. If it had done that, we wouldn't have the sort of pointless make-work jobs we seemed to have filled up the economy with.
Instead, the masters of the universe took our increased productivity gains, and slowly but surely reduced the amount of people participating in the system, instead of reducing each person's individual participation. They did this because if they kept the 'standard' at 40 hours, than they have to pay people enough to survive if they work 40 hours, whereas if the standard drops to 35 hours in 1925 or whatever, than they have to pay people enough to survive on 35 hours.
On “What Do We Really Want?”
@north
There’s an awful lot of medical technology since the 1970?s that you’d be leaving out in a 1970?s lifestyle.
That's because that's a silly premise. Just like all technological advances, medicine in the modern day should provide more benefits while being much cheaper, resource-wise, to provide. It's not, but that's not because higher standards of living, that's because we let medicine get completely effed up and out of control in the last two decades.
In reality, there's almost nothing actually expensive going on in medicine, and there's absolutely no reason we couldn't provide the full spectrum of 2014 medical knowledge (Or, let's say, 99% of it.), while spending only 1970s-level amounts of per-capita hours doing so.
In fact, I suspect we do only spend 1970 of per-capita hours on it currently. Or less. The reason it costs so much is utterly unrelated to the amount of work being spent on it.
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Yeah, people always get the whole 'advancing standards of living wrong'. I probably should write something about that in general.
The needle of a record player alone costs much much more in time and energy to make than the two chips needed to build an mp3 player. And compare the entire VHS and DVD movie distribution, with dedicated stores and rental locations and everything, with how much Netflix costs to operate. (Or, as one famous photo shows, compare the cost of all items in a Radio Shack ad from the 1980s with a smart phone.)
In the past aluminum was incredibly expensive. Incredibly. When it was used to cap the Washington monument 1884, it was more valuable than silver. Then two guys independently invented a new process in 1886 to recover it from ore, using that new-fangled 'electricity', and the price plummeted a thousand-fold.
Within the next twenty years, clothing will repel all liquids. Including sweat. The technology already exists (You can see all sorts of awesome demos on Youtube), and it's basically just a matter of scaling it up. This will save us an epic amount of resources, more than people realize. Much less water and soap for washing, less dry-cleaning, less replacement of clothing, etc. And there will be people in 2034 asking 'Do you want to go back to 2014 technology where clothes got dirty and smelly all the time, and you couldn't just shake out clothes, maybe give them a quick rinse, and wear them again?', ignoring the fact that dirty clothing was much much more expensive for society. It wasn't cheaper.
That is how standards of living advance. Not because we spend more. But because we spend less on the same stuff, or even better stuff, because we know more.
Asking whether or not we'd be willing to operate with a reduced standard of living is a reasonable question...but it wouldn't, it couldn't, be 'a 1970s standard of living'. It would, like I said, be less meat, less food in general, somewhat smaller houses, maybe using mass transit instead of a car...you know, the sort of world that poorer people live in. Poorer people are not listening to LPs.
On “Why Don’t you get a Real Job?”
You know, as someone who is about as far left as humanly possible, I confusingly find myself in agreement with j r and James K.
If Graeber wants to talk about structural issues, he shouldn't say things like 'The ruling class has figured out...' unless there's some actual evidence that this is happening on purpose....which, as has been pointed out, would require them sabotaging their own profit-making, and is a claim that is blatantly counter to the very thing they've been doing for the past two decades of reducing their workforce.
The phenomenon is real, it is worth talking about, and it has basically nothing to do with 'the ruling class'. What is has to do with is the lack of real jobs, so people are forced to invent new ones. Not the 'ruling class', which would happily sit there while we starve to death. It's the middle-class that's been desperately attempting to figure out how to get money from a stone by inventing jobs that aren't very useful, (But needed if your competitors have them) and somewhat succeeding. You need an army of lawyers because that other guy has an army of lawyers, despite the fact you're just writing a basic contract of goods for money and in a sane world could just download a template off a government website. The 'ruling class' hardly wants to spend all their money on the lawyers, it's the lawyers who want them spending all their money on lawyers. It's the stockbrokers who have set up a system where you need stockbrokers. Etc, etc.
And, no, I don't care if 'the ruling class' is some secret code of the left meaning 'a gestalt of society' or now extends to the middle class or whatever and I didn't get my leftist decoder ring. It's nonsense. These jobs are not due to the ruling class, except in the sense the ruling class has made off with all the money and people have made pointless jobs to try to get it back.
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I think it’s pretty clear that Graeber’s theory is bullshit.
I think his attribution is bullshit. You can't just handwave why the 'rulers' would be hiring people for pointless jobs, especially when by all obvious perception, they are blatantly trying to do exactly the opposite of that.
However, he's entirely correct. A huge portion of the jobs out there are bullshit. But looking at those jobs he's identified, we see something else entirely: Those jobs were often created by self-sustaining bullshit-industries, usually in an attempt to siphon off funds from the people who actually did things. To redirect money in their direction.
Usually it's zero-sum, so that entities (Both human and corporate.) are forced to use them. You need advertisers, because your competitors have them, and thus will take your business. You need lawyers so you aren't tripped up by the other side's tricky lawyers. You need hedge fund managers because otherwise the hedge fund managers run off with the good investment returns.
Now, this seem obvious, but ask the next question of 'Why?', and you actually do hit a conspiracy there, or at least a structural issue there. It's because there are more people than there are useful jobs, and those excess people need some way to get money. Solution? Invent non-useful jobs that manage to suck money out of the useful jobs. It's not a 'conspiracy', it's just a natural product. It's the same reason that fraud has increased.
Useless jobs are because of income inequality, but not between the rich and the poor, but between the poor and the nothing. They are make-work, but not make-work that the rich create...they're make-work that the jobless create. (Although, in reality, the upper-class tend to slide into them, causing everyone below them to slide up. But they exist, fundamentally, due to lack of real jobs.)
So here's the obvious question: What really would happen if we spread out the existing jobs more by reducing the work week?
On “What Do We Really Want?”
Modular factory-built housing–perhaps built in lights-out factories–that are assembled on-site could decimate construction jobs.
We don't really need this. We already have all the buildings we actually need right now, and could operate for several decades doing no construction at all.
Of course, we don't actually let homeless people live in the empty houses...
If you could have a 1970 level standard of living, while working only 12 hours a week, would you be willing to accept that in place of a 2020 standard of living while working 37 hours a week?
This is a false choice. Living with a 1970s standard of living right now would not be cheaper than living with a 2020 standard of living. In fact, it would be more expensive. Yes, there's more electronic devices, but we're talking about a total of maybe $200 extra dollars a month (And we've overcharged for that.), and that's more than countered by reduced energy consumption in every aspect of modern life and automation in getting that energy to us.
Life is, indeed, getting better and better, but it's not costing us more to operate at that level. It's not getting better because we're spending more, it's getting better because we have more knowledge about how to do more things in better ways, in ways that cost less than what we used to do. We can't rewind the clock and magically make things easier...that's exactly the opposite of what happens. It's not cheaper to produce a 1985 computer than a iPad, or a 1970 car than a modern car. It's not cheaper to operate a landline system than for everyone to get a cell phone.(As developing countries have discovered.) It's not even really cheaper to give everyone a dumb cell phone instead of a smart phone.
People seem to think that everything keeps costing the same, manpower-wise, and we move forward because we invent new, better things that cost slightly more. That is exactly the opposite of what actually happens. We move forward because we invent processes that let us make things for less, and then we make things better. There's not any circumstances where 'downgrading' makes sense to save money.
There are maybe a few thing that you can ask if people would do without, like the internet maybe, or a car at all. But a better question might be something like 'If you could work only 12 hours a week, would you be willing to live in a city and use mass transit and have cheap internet, instead of spreading yourself all over creation?' Or, perhaps better 'Would you be willing to eat less meet and smaller portions of food?', which is one of the real differences between America's standard of living and other places.
On “Three Questions About The Bergdahl Deal Answered”
Or maybe it’s because President Obama declared ‘this is what you do at the end of wars’ which may be a surprise to the 30K some-odd troops still in Afghanistan, not to mention the Afghans themselves. (Senator McCain’s repatriation only came after the Paris Peace accords)
Uh, the Afghanistan war is over. We are not at war with Afghanistan any more, and probably should have returned their POWs years ago.
In fact, we did that. We're not holding Afghanistan soldiers anymore. Likewise, Afghanistan has returned any people they have captured already...this guy wasn't being held by 'Afghanistan' (Which we are not at war with anyway.), he was being held by people claiming to be representatives of the rump previous government, or at least members of the same group.
What we're doing there now isn't 'waging war'. It's maintain peace at the request of the Afghanistan government and training their people. It is entirely accurate to say the 'war' is over.
Now, that doesn't have a lot to do with this....this trade is essentially us trading someone who was kidnapped by the Taliban for people who were, uh, kidnapped by us. (Not quite sure what else you call holding people for years for no particular reason.) I'm not sure what sort of surreal moral standard we should hold our own kidnappings exchanges to.
On “Conservatives and Transgender Community: A Time for Understanding”
It is “trans woman” not “transwoman.” The logic (such as it is) is that we want “trans” to function as an adjective to “woman,” much as “latina” does in “latina woman.” The claim is that “transwoman” starts to become a gender of its own and divides us from cis women (rather than ciswomen).
Something seems slightly wrong in what you said, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It's probably because 'woman' isn't exactly 'a gender', at least not in my dictionary. (I have no problem with people state their gender as whatever they think best fits, but 'woman' is already a word used to describe humans of the female gender, so it would be pretty confusing for someone to claim it as a gender.)
I see what you mean, though. People don't want 'transwoman' as a distinction from 'woman'. Trans is merely an attribute that a woman can possess, like 'blonde' or 'tall'.
So a better analogy instead of Congressman would be something like 'Chinaman'. Which we don't use anymore, exactly because it makes it sound like a 'Chinaman' is somehow different than a 'man'.
So it would be 'trans people' then to refer to both trans men and trans women. And 'a trans person' to avoid the silly noun usage of 'a transgender'.
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While we're talking about grammar, why am I the only person who ever says transpeople as one word?
It seems like a perfectly reasonable generalization from transmen and transwomen (1), no one's ever called me on it or claimed it was wrong...and yet no one else seems to use it.
And @veronica-dire , 'a transgender' feels to me the same way as saying 'a black'. I am aware that some people say that, and apparently it's not offensive...but it sounds offensive to me. (But I'm not black, and thus can hardly take offense.) And I have the same issue with 'an illegal'.
People are not 'a[n] adjective', at least not in my book. They are 'an adjective person'. (Or, if I'm feeling really liberal that day, they're 'a person who is adjective'.)
1) In the same way you have Congressmen and Congresswomen and Congresscorporations, and together they make Congresspeople.
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The TERFs appear to be what happens when certain women decide that the way to fix society is to wage war back against men.
At which point they become concerned with trans people. Oddly enough, they seem to be more concerned about 'infiltration' (aka transwomen) than 'defectors' (aka transmen.). Unlike the men, who care about the exact opposites. (Which means...they both object to transwomen, and don't care about transmen.)
But, then again, feminists have always been 'defectors' in a sense, and the history of feminist has always been transgressing the gender barrier, and often literally passing themselves off as men, so 'defecting' has never been possible. So TERFs don't care about that.
There's a civil war analogy here: Men are an entrenched force operating the government. They are the citizens living in cities. Women are operating a guerrilla war in the woods to take it down, they're the rebels.
The government can just ignore the rebels, but can't have the citizens running off and joining the rebels...they're worried other citizens might start thinking the rebels have a point. But they don't really care about rebels that move into cities, reject the rebel way of life, and pretend to be citizens. Sure, occasionally such people step out of line, but they can just arrest them.
Whereas the rebels are worried that the government is sending in informants and whatnot(1), so chooses not to accept citizens who have fled the cities, at least not one who are asserting they are rebels. But they've always infiltrated the cities, and don't care if rebels do it on a semi-permanent basis.
Of course, the actual problem here is that there is not actually a civil war going on, and both sides are wrong to think of it as one.
1) Despite, interestingly enough, this never happening in the entire history of humanity. Seriously. Even in places where it would be reasonable to describe the interaction between men and women as 'all-out war', men have never tried to pass themselves as women to find out their plans or sabotage their efforts. In history, when men disguise themselves as women, it's always to trick other men.
The sort of men who would think of sneaking into a woman's space and sabotaging it or attacking women is exactly the sort of man who never in a million years would consider pretending to be a woman(2), much less actually use surgery and hormones to make themselves physically closer to a woman. Too much of the identify of such men is tied up in their masculinity and gender roles.
2) Of course, transwomen can be evil or violent also, and I'm sure one of them, somewhere, has raped women. But those attackers would legitimately be transwomen, they didn't just decide to become them to get access to women. That's an absurd amount of work to accomplish rape, which is, apparently, fairly easy to do and get away with. I rather suspect such attacks by transwomen would be of the same proportionality as lesbian rapes.
(Personally I think gender identity labels should support full Perl5 regular expression, but I’m a regular freaking gender outlaw!)
I support (.*) people.
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While I've never seen Orphan Black, but I'm somewhat aware of the premise, and I suppose all the clones were grown inside surrogate mothers, correct?
If so, if that actually happened, it would address an interesting theory of homosexuality...When people talk about homosexuality being genetic, they actually mean 'hormonal', because hormones are basically the ways that genes influence sexual development. (To simplify, all genes do is flip ovaries to testicles. Everything else is up to that.)
However, the hormones developed internally aren't the only hormones a developing fetus are exposed to, and there have been studies showing that, statistically, a non-firstborn son is more likely to be gay, possibly because the hormones are different in the womb.
Of course, this is incredibly hard to study, even identical twin studies can't help, because they obviously grew up in the same womb even if separated at birth.
But clones? Grown in different women? That actually would tell us something very interesting.
Incidentally, if the anti-gay people are pointing at identical twin studies, they're confused. Identical twins have a moderately higher correlation of having the same sexual orientation than other siblings, which rather demonstrates it is genetic to some extent. Of course, being genetically predisposed to something doesn't mean 'It always happens', which I suspect is their nonsensical issue. (At this point, I think most people have moved past trying to figure out where gay people come from.)
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You are correct that the term is 'transgender people', as that is a description of an attribute.
But people who are transgender have, indeed, become transgender. Just the same way they became biologically one sex or the other. It was indeed involuntary, but humans do not start out as transgender, or even not transgender. Trying to make a distinction based on 'becoming' is not the correct objection.
What you actually mean is that 'transgender' is not a verb. If it was a verb, it would almost certainly mean the same as 'transition'...which is already a perfectly good verb. (And the people using it here aren't even using as a verb meaning, they're using it to mean exactly the same thing as 'transgender'. Which is just silly)
Incidentally, if people really want to use 'transgender' as a verb meaning 'transition', I must propose instead 'transgend'. If you're going to invent words, invent cool-sounding ones. 'Next week, Pete is going to start transgending to a woman.'
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.