Keynes lived in a time when the working class was organized and exerting its power over its destiny.
We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.
We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.
Keynes lived in a time when the working class could not buy cheap from China... and complain that everybody else was doing the same!
> We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.
I think it has always been that way. Looking through history, there are many examples of turkeys voting for Christmas and propaganda is an old invention. I don’t think there is anything special right now. And to be fair to the working class, it’s not hard to see how they could feel abandoned. It’s also broader than the working class. The middle class is getting squeezed as well. The only winners are the oligarchs.
Does one have savings? Can they afford to spend time with their children outside of working day to day? Do they have the ability to take reasonable risks without chancing financial ruin in pursuit of better opportunities?
These are things we typically attribute to someone in the middle class. I worry that boiling down these discussions to “you work and they don’t” misses a lot of opportunity for tangible improvement to quality of life for large number of people.
If you have an actual job and an income constrained by your work output, you could be middle class, but you could also recognize that you are getting absolutely ruined by the billionaire class (no matter what your level of working wealth)
The words 'have to' are doing a lot of work in that statement. Some people 'have to' work to literally put food on the table, other people 'have to' work to able to making payments on their new yacht. The world is full of people who could probably live out the rest of their lives without working any more, but doing so would require drastic lifestyle changes they're not willing to make.
I personally think the metric should be something along the lines of how long would it take from losing all your income until you're homeless.
Now what?
What about the trust fund kid working part time at an art gallery just because they like the scene and hanging out with artists? Same class?
And on the flip side, are pensioners, the unemployed, and people on permanent disability part of the same class as the dilettante children of billionaires?
We are talking about class, and if we should be making distinctions between groups of people who work for a living based on their wealth, income, and economic stability. I believe there is a fundamental class difference between people who work, but are rich enough to stop working whenever they want, those who can't quite stop working but are comfortable enough to easily go 6 month without a pay check, and people who are only a couple of missed pay checks away from literal homelessness.
Coddling poor people is so severely out of touch with their reality, they most likely resent the hell out of you for it, I know I did.
The original claim was a proposal to increase the resolution of class analysis one degree "higher" than Marx and no longer differentiate between the modern proletariat (working class), bourgeois (middle class), and aristocracy (upper class), in this case proposing to lump together the bourgeois and proletariat because they both have to work or they'll starve to death.
In this world, being born from the orifice of an aristocrat means you never have to work (have meaning, "or you'll die of exposure"). That's a frank reality. If your reaction to being born from a non aristocratic orifice is to shrug your shoulders and accept reality, great, nobody's trying to take that from you.
However you seem to be taking it a step further and suggesting that the people pointing out that this nature of society is unfair are somehow wrong to do so. I disagree. I think is perfectly valid to be born from whatever orifice and declare the obvious unfairness of the situation and the work to balance things out for people. That's not coddling, it's just ensuring that we all benefit in a just way from the work of your grandfather. Cause right now, someone has stolen the value of his work from you, and that's why you (and I) had to work so hard to get where we are today.
If you love that you had to work so hard, fine. I could take it or leave it. Instead of working a double through school I would have preferred to focus more on my studies and get higher grades, find better internships instead of slinging sandwiches. Personally I look at the extraordinarily wealth of the aristocrat class and I think, "is it more important that they're allowed to own 3 yachts or that all the children of our society can go to college?" I strongly believe any given country will be much stronger if it has less yachts and more college-educated people. Or people with better access to healthcare. Or people with better transit options to work. Etc.
And even you strongly disagree with that statement, it is important to have framework within which your opinion of that statement can be analysed.
Satya Nadella doesn't read his emails, and doesn't write responses. He subscribes to podcasts and then gets them summarised by AI.
He turns up to the office and takes home obscene amounts of money for doing nothing except play with toys and pretend he's working.
They are "working", but they are actually just playing. And I think thats the problem with some of these comments, they aren't distinguishing between work and what is basically a hobby.
> What about the trust fund kid working part time at an art gallery just because they like the scene and hanging out with artists?
Its a hobby. They don't have to do it, and if they get fired for gross misconduct then they could find alternative things to pass the time.
What income? Income from job, or from capital? A huge difference. Also a lot harder to lose the latter, gross incompetence or a revolution, while the former is much easier.
I’m willing to bet you haven’t lived long enough to know that’s a more or less a proxy for old age. :) That aside, even homeless people acquire possessions over time. If you have a lot of homeless in your neighborhood, try to observe that. In my area, many homeless have semi functional motor homes. Are they legit homeless, or are they “homeless oligarchs”? I can watch any of the hundreds of YouTube channels devoted to “van life.” Is a 20 year old who skipped college which their family could have afforded, and is instead living in an $80k van and getting money from streaming a “legit homeless”? The world is not so black and white it will turn out in the long run.
https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-to-crack-down-on-rv-re...
I agree with your point. Now doctors are working class as well.
I think progress (in the sense of economic growth) was roughly in line with what Keynes expected. What he didn't expect is that people, instead of getting 10x the living standard with 1/3 the working hours, rather wanted to have 30x the living standard with the same working hours.
Throughout human history, starting with the spread of agriculture, increased labor efficiency has always led to people consuming more, not to them working less.
Moreover, throughout the 20th century, we saw several periods in different countries when wages rose very rapidly - and this always led to a temporary average increase in hours worked. Because when a worker is told "I'll pay you 50% more" - the answer is usually not "Cool, I can work 30% less", but "Now I'm willing to work 50% more to get 2x of the pay".
Can you give a single example where that happened?
During the industrial revolution it was definitely not what happened. In the late 1700s laborers typically averaged around 80 hours per week. In the 1880s this had decreased to around 60 hours per week. In the 1920s the average was closer to 48 hours per week. By the time Keynes was writing, the 40 hour work week had become standard. Average workweek bottomed out in the mid 1980s in the US and UK at about 37 hours before starting to increase again.
That never was the case (except for short periods after salary increases).
And this is not a question where there could be any speculation: in those days there were already people collecting such statistics, and we have a bunch of diaries describing the actual state of affairs, both from the workers themselves and from those who organized their labor - and everything shows that few people worked more than 50 hours a week on average.
Most likely, the myth about 80 hours a week stems from the fact that such weeks really were common, but it was work in the format of "work a week or two or a month for 80 hours, then a week or two or a month you don't work, spend money, arrange your life"
There is also agriculture, which employed a significant part of the population in the past. There, on average, there was usually even less than 40 hours of productive work, it's just that timing is of great importance there, and there are bottlenecks, and when necessary, you have to work 20 hours a day, which is compensated by periods when the workload is much less than 6 hours a day.
Take the Philadelphia carpenters' strike in 1791, where they were on strike demanding a reduction in hours to a 60 hour work week. The strike was unsuccessful. In the 1820s there was a so called "10 Hour Day" labor movement in New York City (note that at this time people worked 6 days a week). In the 1840s mill workers in Massachusetts attempted to get the state legislature to intervene and reduce their 74 hour workweeks. This was also unsuccessful. Martin Van Buren signed an executive order limiting workdays for federal employees to 10 hours per day. The first enforceable labor law in the US came in 1874, which set a limit of 60 hours in a workweek for women in Massachusetts.
All the free money dried up and the happy clapping Barney the Dinosaur Internet was no more!
No need for AI. Troll farms are well documented and were in action before transformers could string two sentences together.
right?
pact of steel?
anyone?
I will not go into specifics because the authoritarians still disagree and think everything is fine with degenerative debauchery and try to abuse anyone even just pointing to failing systems, but it all does seem like civilization ending developments regardless of whether it leads to the rise of another civilization, e.g., the Asian Era, i.e., China, India, Russia, Japan, et al.
Ironically, I don’t see the US surviving this transitional phase, especially considering it essentially does not even really exist anymore at its core. Would any of the founders of America approve of any of America today? The forefathers of India, China, Russia, and maybe Japan would clearly approve of their countries and cultures. America is a hollowed out husk with a facade of red, white, and blue pomp and circumstance that is even fading, where America means both everything and nothing as a manipulative slogan to enrich the few, a massive private equity raid on America.
When you think of the Asian countries, you also think of distinct and unique cultures that all have their advantages and disadvantages, the true differences that make them true diversity that makes humanity so wonderful. In America you have none of that. You have a decimated culture that is jumbled with all kinds of muddled and polluted cultures from all over the place, all equally confused and bewildered about what they are and why they feel so lost only chasing dollars and shiny objects to further enrich the ever smaller group of con artist psychopathic narcissists at the top, a kind of worst form of aristocracy that humanity has yet ever produced, lacking any kind of sense of noblesse oblige, which does not even extend to simply not betraying your own people.
That there's any cultural "degenerative debauchery" is an extraordinary claim. Can you back up this claim with evidence?
"Decimated," "muddled," and "polluted" imply you have an objective analysis framework for culture. Typically people who study culture avoid moralizing like this because one very quickly ends up looking very foolish. What do you know that the anthropologists and sociologists don't, to where you use these terms so freely?
If I seem aggressive, it's because I'm quite tired of vague handwaving around "degeneracy" and identity politics. Too often these conversations are completely presumptive.
What's the sense in asking for examples? If one person sees ubiquitous cultural decay and the other says "this is fine," I think the difference is down to worldview. And for a pessimist and an optimist to cite examples at one another is unlikely to change the other's worldview.
If a pessimist said, "the opioid crisis is deadlier than the crack epidemic and nobody cares," would that change the optimist's mind?
If a pessimist said, "the rate of suicide has increased by 30% since the year 2000," would that change the optimist's mind?
If a pessimist said, "corporate profits, wealth inequality, household debt, and homelessness are all at record highs," ...?
And coming from the other side, all these things can be Steven Pinker'd if you want to feel like "yes there are real problems but actually things are better than ever."
There was a book that said something about "you will recognize them by their fruit." If these problems are the fruit born of our culture, it's worth asking how we got here instead of dismissing it with "What do you know that the anthropologists and sociologists don't?"
I also wholeheartedly disagree that, vaguely, diversity has something to do with the reduction of material conditions, or gay people, or whatever tf, so I wanted to allow the op the opportunity to be demonstrably wrong. They wouldn't take it of course, because there's no evidence for what they claim, because it's a ridiculous assertion.
The reasons things are they way they are today are identifiable and measurable. Rent is high because mostly because housing is an investment vehicle and supply is locked by a functional cartel. Homelessness is high mostly because of a lack of universal healthcare. Crime is continually dropping despite what the media says, and immigrants commit a lower crime per capita than any other demographic group - but the jails remain full because the USA engages in a demonstrably ineffective retributive justice system.
I'm so tired of conservatives walking around flinging every which way their feelings as facts. Zizek has demonstrated the potential value of a well considered conservative ideology, and unfortunately today all we get from that side is vague (or explicit) bigotry.
The OP didn't just claim that there's cultural degeneracy happening (which again, they didn't definite very well), they blamed real-world outcomes on it. That's a challengeable premise.
Capitalism arrives for everyone, Asia is just late for the party. Once it eventually financializes everything, the same will happen to it. Capitalism eventually eats itself, doesn't matter the language or how many centuries your people might have.