Your depressing charts for the day

[giandujakiss]

I can't even repost them all, it's just too much. But what it comes down to is, we have extraordinarily high unemployment, corporate profits are at an all-time high, income inequality in the US outstrips countries like Iran, class mobility is at an all-time low, hourly earnings have not increased in 50 years (adjusted for inflation) while CEO pay has increased 300%, CEO pay is now 350 times the average worker's (up from 50 times from 1960-1985), all of this represents a dramatic change from most of the 20th century when lower-wage earners captured most of the earnings growth, taxes on the highest earners are nearly the lowest they've ever been, and the Fed continues to essentially subsidize the banks by keeping interest rates low (so the banks don't pay depositors interest), while the banks use their cash to buy Treasuries instead of making loans.

The only thing missing from the charts is, of course, the effect of the decline of unions on wage inequality.

Comments

[harpijka]

Your summary of the situation is chilling, all the more so because I observe the same socio-economic process in course in our part of Europe.
I don't understand how it came to that. Why nobody fought it efficiently.
As I understand, the political class in the US are rather well-off, also the Democrats; in my country most of the politicians aspire rather than belong to the economic elite. What bothers me is whether this economic divide you write about is a natural, sad, but natural socio-economic process or it's a process pushed forward by business and/or political lobbies...

[giandujakiss]

Honestly, I don't know. I do know that I don't believe a society can sustain itself this way - these are conditions that set up revolution.

[ratcreature]

I think part of it is this moronic "full time" work fixation, that still persists even though mechanization and productivity gain through computers and everything is extreme now in almost all sectors that you just need much less labor to produce all the necessary stuff, and growth via "service" sectors that rely on humans can only do so much. So you need little labor, which ought to be a good thing, because naturally most humans don't actually like to work all the time, but work hours have not decreased, so we didn't go from eight hour days to five hour days as a standard with equal pay, to spread the productivity gain and the wealth it created around. Instead the profits were all pocketed by the owners of the means of production, either directly or indirectly by "financial services" who skim off things by lending to businesses if they are more or less honest (though I guess the banks get really rich by their money generating ponzi schemes that they eventually unload on the public once they collapse). Meanwhile labor has become cheap because it is abundant, because everybody still needs to work eight hours or more to make a living wage. So really, IMO, this whole "work hard" ideology just has to go. Nobody should have to "work hard" to make a decent living, after all we have the promised robots and computers who already do that, so why should we still have to as if it was the 18th century?

[harpijka]

You are both right. What I don't understand is why people still vote those whose pay is, as you quoted, giandujakiss, "350 times the average worker's".
Or they don't vote at all.
Are most of us really so stupid?

[ratcreature]

Well, I think the problem that politicians don't manage to improve the situation, and that voting doesn't seem to do much, has two main causes.

First, even with the best intentions, the leverage of national politicians within the system of current global capitalism is limited, because capital can endlessly threaten to withdraw financial wealth and/or the means of production elsewhere in the case of large, global businesses, or be crushed by competitors from other places with more "business friendly" circumstances (in the case of small and medium business that can't or won't escape measures a government enacts). So as long as there is no coordinated effort to break this kind of blackmail that plays one people against another, but instead countries continue to compete for capital's favor via low tax rates, low labor costs, low environmental standards and so on, things can't improve. As an obvious example, no government could afford to just make a law to declare a five hour work day in their country, even if 80% of the electorate would be in favor of such a measure, because it would create enormous capital flight.

And second, most political (and economic) systems on all levels don't do enough in their setup to curb the human tendency towards cronyism (i.e. that small groups of people whom we know well and exchange favors with seem so natural to us that they always form if not actively fought), which probably worked well at some point in our past, but is rather disastrous in the current political environment, when a politician ought to represent the interests of thousands of anonymous people who voted for them, not those of the few well connected ones whom they knows and who do them favors. So with representational democracies that are so indirect you end up with all kinds of corruption and lobby influences and so on that distort the theoretical representation, and that is magnified in extremes by wealth differences buying influence. But I think the underlying problem is actually not wealth inequality or a moral failing, but with indirect, representational democracy as a system. (But then if I had to sort myself ideologically I'd probably pick something like anarcho-socialist as a label, so it's not like I believe in the parliamentary-style democracies as the best kind of systems.)

[kore]

Jesus.