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Bill Fulkerson

Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding | naked capitalism - 0 views

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    " Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o
Steve Bosserman

How Do We Reclaim Control Of Our Lives When the Economy Looms So Grim? | naked capitalism - 0 views

  • What he found was that—in the absence of a perpetually-growing economy—community and culture are key. He quotes, for example, the historian Juliet Schor’s view of working life in the Middle Ages: “The medieval calendar was filled with holidays …These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking …All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien régime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.”
  • Reading this took me back to a childhood fed by TV programmes like the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, which had informed me that by now robots would be doing all the menial work, leaving humans free to relax and enjoy an abundance of leisure time. So it came as a shock to realise that the good folk of the Middle Ages were enjoying far more of it than we are in our technologically-advanced society. What gives? Fleming explains, “In a competitive market economy a large amount of roughly-equally-shared leisure time – say, a three-day working week, or less – is hard to sustain, because any individuals who decide to instead work a full week can produce for a lower price (by working longer hours than the competition they can produce a greater quantity of goods and services, and thus earn the same wage by selling each one more cheaply). These more competitive people would then be fully employed, and would put the more leisurely out of business completely. This is what puts the grim into reality.”
Steve Bosserman

The wealth of our collective data should belong to all of us | Chris Hughes - 0 views

  • Nearly every moment of our lives, we’re producing data about ourselves that companies profit from. Our smartwatches know when we wake up, Alexa listens to our private conversations, our phones track where we go, Google knows what we email and search, Facebook knows what we share with friends, and our loyalty cards remember what we buy. We share all this data about ourselves because we like the services these companies provide, and business leaders tell us we must to make it possible for those services to be cheap or free.
  • We should not only expect that these companies better protect our data – we should also ensure that everyone creating it shares in the economic value it generates. One person’s data is worth little, but the collection of lots of people’s data is what fuels the insights that companies use to make more money or networks, like Facebook, that marketers are so attracted to. Data isn’t the “new oil”, as some have claimed: it isn’t a non-renewable natural resource that comes from a piece of earth that a lucky property owner controls. We have all pitched in to create a new commonwealth of information about ourselves that is bigger than any single participant, and we should all benefit from it.
  • The value of our data has a lot in common with the value of our labor: a single individual worker, outside of the rarest professions, can be replaced by another with similar skills. But when workers organize to withhold their labor, they have much more power to ensure employers more fairly value it. Just as one worker is an island but organized workers are a force to be reckoned with, the users of digital platforms should organize not only for better protection of our data, but for a new contract that ensures everyone shares in the historic profits we make possible.
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  • A data dividend would be a powerful way to rebalance the American economy, which currently makes it possible for a very small number of people to get rich while everyone else struggles to make ends meet.
  • A data dividend on its own would not be enough to stem growing income inequality, but it would create a universal benefit that would guarantee people benefit from the collective wealth our economy is creating more than they do today. If paired with fairer wages, more progressive taxation, and stricter enforcement of monopoly and monopsony power, it could help us turn the corner and create a country where we take care of one another and ensure that everyone has basic economic security.
Bill Fulkerson

UN Report: Robots Will Replace Two-Thirds of All Workers in the Developing World - 1 views

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    "One social solution that could be introduced is Universal Basic Income-a guaranteed income that is given to all individuals regardless of employment status or economic situation. It is a system that is already being debated, as a host of experts in various industries are pushing for it. In fact, it is already being tested in Finland and other nations. Thus, in the near future, we can analyze its results and, if positive, rework our economic and social structures to accommodate it."
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