part I: Two Economies
The so-called American Dream overwhelmed many. It was a dream, an illusion.
It was not real, but seemed real; it was seemingly
attractive and colorful, but there is no attractive color in the
reality; it was seemingly accessible, but it’s a mirage in reality; it
seemed attainable and achievable, but it’s unattainable and unachievable
in the existing production-distribution structure. The Empire’s present
crisis divulges this reality.
Crisis brings closer the realness many like to
ignore. The Great Financial Crisis (GFC) has torn away the shroud that
covered the unreal American dream.
Now, facts show, it was like a walk towards a
mirage. Now, reality tells, it was an impossible journey. The GFC has
helped understand the American reality, a reality generated by an
advanced capitalist economy.
Now, many questions loom, overwhelm many minds. The
questions expose the real life, the reality in the economy, the theories
upholding and justifying the economy. Many elementary and primary facts
are coming to light that once were ignored by many.
Readings in Macroeconomics (28th edition) tells in
its “Introduction”: “It sometimes seems that the United States has not
one, but two economies. The first economy exists in economics textbooks
and in the minds of many elected officials. It is an economy in which no
one is unemployed for long, families are rewarded with an
ever-improving standard of living, and anyone who works hard can live
the American Dream. In this economy, people are free and roughly equal,
and each individual carefully looks after him- or herself, making
voluntary choices to advance their own economic interests. Government
has some limited roles in this world, but it is increasingly marginal,
since the macroeconomy is a self-regulating system of wealth
generation.” (Eds. Amy Gluckman, John Miller, Bryan Snyder, Chris Sturr,
Dollars & Sense collective, Boston)
After tracing the first economy it adverts: “The
second economy is described in the writings of progressives,
environmentalists, union supporters, and consumer advocates — as well as
honest business writers who recognize that the real world does not
always conform to textbook models. This second economy features vast
disparities of income, wealth, and power. It is an economy where
economic instability and downward mobility are facts of life. Jobs
disappear, workers suffer long spells of unemployment, and new jobs
seldom afford the same standard of living as those lost. And,
periodically, market economies unravel, much like today. As for the
government, it sometimes adopts policies that ameliorate the abuses of
capitalism, and other times does just the opposite, but it is always an
active and essential participant in economic life.” On the basis of
data, Readings in Macroeconomics eloquently exposes both, the first and
second economies.
Advanced capitalist economies, Kurt Dopfer, Swiss
economist, noted in 1976, are one of the best institutions to learn
about bourgeois political economy. The world, especially the capitalist
countries encountering the present crises provide ample evidence of
failure of bourgeois economic thoughts. Failure to analyze present
economic crisis is the full blown capacity of the bourgeois political
economic thoughts.
A fuzzy process
Distance between reality and mainstream economics is
noted by John Miller, professor of economics at Wheaton College. John
writes in the Readings in Macroeconomics: “When economists at the
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private research
organization designated by the [US] Commerce Department as the nation’s
arbiter of the business cycle, officially declare the Great Recession
over, they will likely identify September 2009 as its end date and the
beginning of the economic recovery. But people surely will not believe
the recession is over, despite the NBER’s pronouncement, until jobs
return and their economic well-being improves. And that could be quite a
while.” (“When is a Recession over?”) And, has recovery really
returned? A difficult question. What’s the problem in return of the
cherished real recovery? Another difficult question.
According to the NBER, there were nine complete
business cycles in the US economy since World War II. But “[t]he NBER’s
Dating Committee, currently a group of seven economists, admits that the
dating process is ‘fuzzy’. The committee has no rigid rules for
determining the start or end of a business cycle. The members reach a
consensus after studying a broad array of macroeconomic indicators. In
short, they eyeball the data. The committee’s founders worked with 46
indicators. Today the NBER’s Business Conditions Digest lists around
1,000 measures.” (ibid.)
They, the Dating Committee, study the GDP,
industrial production, employment, real income, trade, several interest
rates, and personal income, the index of coincident indicators that
measures employment, income, output, and sales, and similar many.
“The Great Recession shows how hard it is to date
business cycles. … It takes time for the federal government to publish
official GDP figures. And the committee looks for several indicators to
show that a decline in activity has spread across the economy before it
feels comfortable declaring a recession.” (ibid.)
And, instead of calculation, mainstream sometimes
conduct survey to gather opinion, relies on perception, which is
subjective. To draw conclusion, science does not rely on perception.
The way a section of scholars in poor,
underdeveloped countries imagine – the advanced economies are super
smart and their knowledge machine is efficient – is not the sweet fact.
Their “science” is hazy or mechanism they have is weak. Encountering
this bitter fact will free the scholars from inferiority complex, and
help get rid of vulgar thoughts, ideas and imaginations.
The zero decade
The capitalist economy has taken away an entire
decade from the life of the common persons although it has amassed
unimaginable resources. “After reviewing the feeble expansion and
devastating recession that followed, economist and New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman suggested that we call the first decade of this
century ‘the zero decade’. Job creation for the decade was basically
zero. Zero economic gains for the typical family. Zero gains for
homeowners. And zero gains on the stock market, even before taking
inflation into account.” (ibid.)
A number of poor economies in the South has not
experienced similar zero decade. These poor economies are burdened with
external debt and interest, ridden with corruption and inefficiency,
weak in know how, dictated and tutored by imperial masters, and pressed
by many other problems. Legislature, judiciary, democratic process,
financial measures, education, and many more in these poor countries are
designed and advised by the imperial masters through their
organizations and employees. It’s not a strange reality. It’s the
reality of the world system that feels proud with its inefficiency.
Actually, a part is producing wealth while another is reeling under
crisis, and the wealth is flowing to the sick part that tries to keep it
strong.
Figures strikingly tell the zero-reality of the
mature capitalist economy. Alejandro Reuss, economist and historian,
cites real US GDP figures in 2009 and in 2006. Both were nearly the same
— just under $13 trillion. “The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports
figures of $12.8806 trillion … for 2009 and $12.9762 trillion for 2006. …
[T]he figures for the number of workers employed and the number of work
hours required to produce that output are strikingly different. In
2006, about 138.7 million workers … were employed, compared to only
about 134.4 million in 2009. The total time spent at work, by all
workers … was about 18 billion hours less in 2009 than in 2006.” (“Same
output + Fewer Hours = Economic Crisis?”, Readings in Macroeconomics)
The figures present a cruel fact. “Producing the
same quantity of output in fewer hours means that labor productivity has
increased. There are several possible causes: increased intensity or
pace of work (or ‘speed up’), increased worker skill, improved
production methods, or greater quantity or quality of tools used. During
the current crisis, multiple factors may have been involved. High
unemployment itself reduces workers’ bargaining power. Employers know
that there are plenty of unemployed workers who are desperate for a job.
Meanwhile, workers who do have jobs are desperate to keep them. This
makes it relatively easy for employers to push down wages or demand a
faster pace of work. It may also be that workers’ average skill level
has increased, if for no other reason than that less-skilled workers are
disproportionately represented among those laid of. There may also have
been innovation in production methods and technology that explain part
of this productivity increase.” (ibid.) The “mystery” of prosperity and
abundance of, and also luxury by, a few is buried in this process.
Real life narratives are harsher. Katherine Faherty,
a Dollars & Sense intern, narrates in the Readings in
Macroeconomics: “Seven months after graduating I have secured an unpaid
internship and a part-time job, which puts me in the same boat as many
of my classmates. … My roommate, who has a master’s degree in art
history, has only been able to find an unpaid internship at an auction
house plus a part-time receptionist job. Even without the part-time job,
the Bureau of Labor Statistics would count her as employed because she
goes to ‘work’ at the auction house every day. She is among the hordes
of recent graduates holding unpaid internships that were once the sole
province of college students — a viable route only for grads with family
resources to fall back on. Another friend has been on a constant job
search since March. She moved back into her parents’ house and returned
to her old summer job as a bank teller. Then she took a job at the local
mall so she could make her student-loan payments. She gets a great
discount at her store, but she’s not putting her double degree in
economics and psychology to use. Like almost 32% of workers under 25,
she is “underemployed.” Along with those who want full-time jobs but can
find only part-time ones, underemployed workers are counted as
employed. (“A dismal Time to Graduate”) Then, there comes bonuses of
CEOs. Everyone now knows it. And, then, Jenny McCarthy, a single mother,
posed nude for Playboy in the magazine’s July/August issue. Jenny
finds: “Evan’s tuition was really expensive this year,’ she said on the
Today show, referring to her 10-year-old autistic son.” (A-Line, June
25, 2012) Is it a cruel economy?
This narration is from a land famous for abundance,
opportunity and dream, from a land that has accumulated wealth
unimaginable in human history, from a land that teaches and sermons
others on ways to prosperity. But reality exposes an advanced capitalist
economy. Its age is not 70 years as was the age of the economy in the
former Soviet Union. The advanced capitalist economy’s age is much more
than 70 years. Then, why the old economy fails to ensure affordable and
appropriate tuition for all children?
Part II: Consumption
Consumption has many faces, many interpretations and many implications.
A poor person’s consumption is completely different
from a rich. The rich interpret the issue as their interest defines
while a poor spends whole life simply to arrange a bare minimum with an
output of failure. A section of economists try to gauge level of success
of their design by counting the quantity a poor consumes and comparing
it with the quantity the poor once used to consume. This section ignores
the fact: capital requires consumption by the poor. The poor can’t move
wheels if they don’t consume, and wheel’s movement is required by
capital to generate more profit.
Ignorance, actually immaturity, about persons behind
wheels encourages a section of petty sized nouveau capital in some poor
countries to tell or write: It’s not capital’s business to look after
the quantity or quality labor consumes. A sheer nonsensical statement!
Sense of class interest discourages rascals even from issuing such
statement.
Consumption by the rich is totally different from
that of the poor. There is luxury, indulgence, waste, flouting,
boosting, getting impregnated with newly bought identity of aristocracy
and power. They are completely concerned with their consumption no
matter how big carbon footprint is being made.
The US economy has different types of consumptions:
of the rich, of the poor, capital induced and crisis pressed. In sum, it
discloses aspects of the economy.
Jonathan Rowe, fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute
and a former contributing editor at the Washington Monthly, writes:
“Much consumption today is addictive […] Millions of Americans are
engaged in a grim daily struggle with themselves to do less of it. They
want to eat less, drink less, smoke less, gamble less, talk less on the
telephone — do less buying, period. Yet economic reasoning declares as
growth and progress, that which people themselves regard as a tyrannical
affliction. Economists resist this reality of a divided self, because
it would complicate their models beyond repair. They cling instead to an
18th century model of human psychology — the “rational” and
self-interested man — which assumes those complexities away.” (“The
Growth Consensus Unravels”, Readings in Macroecnomics, 28th edition)
Jonathan died in March 2011. But his voice for the millions struggling
for survival with minimum consumption shall echo.
There are consumptions not essential for human
survival. But the advanced economy needs it for its survival. Jonathan
writes: “Then too there’s the mounting expenditure that sellers foist
upon people through machination and deceit. People don’t choose to pay
for the corrupt campaign finance system or for bloated executive pay
packages. The cost of these is hidden in the prices that we pay at the
store. As I write this, the Washington Post is reporting that Microsoft
has hired Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, and Grover
Norquist, a right-wing polemicist, as lobbyists in Washington. When I
bought this computer with Windows 95, Bill Gates never asked me whether I
wanted to help support a bunch of Beltway operators like these. This is
compulsory consumption, not choice, and the economy is rife with it
today. People don’t choose to pay some $40 billion a year in
telemarketing fraud. They don’t choose to pay 32% more for prescription
drugs than do people in Canada. (‘Free trade’ means that corporations
are free to buy their labor and materials in other countries, but
ordinary Americans aren’t equally free to do their shopping there.) For
that matter, people don’t choose to spend $25 and up for inkjet printer
cartridges. The manufacturers design the printers to make money on the
cartridges because, as the Wall Street Journal put it, that’s ‘where the
big profit margins are.’” (ibid.) The mainstream can’t deny it now.
The pattern – compelling consumers to purchase a
commodity that they wouldn’t have purchased had there an opportunity –
shows capital’s dictatorial power over consumers. It’s an autocratic
power, more powerful than political autocracy. Actually, this
dictatorial power determines power and limits of political authority. In
ordinary situation, consumers can’t escape this “wish” of the seller.
Only an organized initiative of aware consumers can alter the seller’s
tact.
Jonathan exposes more facts as he argues:
“The economy in such cases doesn’t solve problems so
much as create new problems that require more expenditure to solve.
Food is supposed to sustain people, for example. But today the
dis-economies of eating sustain the GDP instead. The food industry
spends some $21 billion a year on advertising to entice people to eat
food they don’t need. Not coincidentally there’s now a $32 billion diet
and weight loss industry to help people take of the pounds that
inevitably result. When that doesn’t work, which is often, there is
always the vacuum pump or knife. There were some 110,000 liposuctions in
the United States [in 2001]; at five pounds each that’s some 275 tons
of flab up the tube. It is a grueling cycle of indulgence and
repentance, binge and purge. Yet each stage of this miserable
experience, viewed through the pollyanic lens of economics, becomes
growth and therefore good.” (ibid.)
Further facts of the economy are there:
“Americans spend some $5 billion a year in gasoline
alone while they sit in traffic and go nowhere. As the price of gas
increases this growth sector will expand. Commerce deplores a vacuum,
and the exasperating hours in the car have spawned a booming subeconomy
of relaxation tapes, cell phones, even special bibs. Billboards have
1-800 numbers so commuters can shop while they stew. Talk radio thrives
on traffic-bound commuters, which accounts for some of the contentious,
get-out-of-my-face tone. The traffic also helps sustain a $130 billion a
year car wreck industry; and if Gates succeeds in getting computers
into cars, that sector should get a major boost.” (ibid.)
There is demand, and there is supply, and there is
market, actually markets, and there is markets’ dictation, and the
markets are free, free for the seller. Shall there be equilibrium? Shall
there be an opportunity for buyer? There is opportunity, and there is
no opportunity. Power of ownership determines the extent of opportunity.
A person owning a few bucks in a pocket have opportunity and a person
gripping millions or billions have opportunity. The first one has the
opportunity to buy a food item and have no opportunity to buy an
opportunity to buy proper medical treatment, and the second one has the
opportunity to buy many commodities, opportunities, power, influence.
Then, what’s the production process if consumption
is utilization of material benefits of the process? Can everyone utilize
the material benefits? Many, almost uncountable, are excluded. Doesn’t
this type of consumption affect production? Should this sort of
consumption be discarded? Why it can’t be done? These and similar
questions will lead to question the very essence of the economy.
In this market, consumers have to see, have to hear,
listen, have to laugh, have to mould habit, have to buy, consume, have
to be happy until a shock, a crisis, externalities create reaction that
compel consumers to get away from this pattern.
The advanced capitalist economy is vibrant with more activities:
“C. Everett Koop, the former Surgeon General,
estimates that some 70% of the nation’s medical expenses are lifestyle
induced. Yet the same lifestyle that promotes disease also produces a
rising GDP. …The automobile gave rise to car wash franchises, drive-in
restaurants, fuzz busters, tire dumps, and so forth. Television produced
an antenna industry, VCRs, soap magazines, ad infinitum. The texts
present this phenomenon as the wondrous perpetual motion machine of the
market — goods beget more goods. But now the machine is producing
complementary ills and collateral damages instead. Suggestive of this
new dynamic is a pesticide plant in Richmond, California, which is owned
by a transnational corporation that also makes the breast cancer drug
tamoxifen. Many researchers believe that pesticides, and the toxins
created in the production of them, play a role in breast cancer. ‘It’s a
pretty good deal,’ a local physician told the East Bay Express, a Bay
Area weekly. ‘First you cause the cancer, then you profit from curing
it.’ Both the alleged cause and cure make the GDP go up, and this
syndrome has become a central dynamic of growth in the U.S. today. …The
fastest-growing occupations in the country include debt collectors and
prison guards. What would we do without our problems and dysfunctions?
The problem is especially acute for those at the bottom of the income
scale who have not shared much in the apparent prosperity. For them, a
bigger piece of a bad pie might be better than none. This is the
economic conundrum of our age. No one has more than pieces of an answer,
but it helps to see that much growth today is really an optical
illusion created by accounting tricks. The official tally ignores
totally the cost side of the growth ledger—the toll of traffic upon our
time and health for example.” (ibid.)
It’s not a single country-picture. In countries,
rich and poor, this “amazing” picture is at hand. But the economy
teaches not to minutely observe the background of the picture, not to
question the economy. Lessons of economics being imparted also induce
learners’ minds to ignore these facts, to isolate these facts from other
aspects of the economy.
Shall these facts be mentioned while lessons will be
run in class rooms? Shall students be asked to find out similar facts
in their societies? Shall they be asked to find out reasons driving
these practices in an economy, and the factors shaping such an economy?
Even the forward-looking student activists, who unhesitatingly unfurl
flags of rebellion, shall not formulate demand to redesign curriculum
and syllabus so that these issues are raised and discussed in class
rooms of economics, so that instructions rely on up-to-date information
and problems that the Readings in Macroecnomics and similar other books
identify.
People in countries are searching for alternatives. There are
innovations and initiatives. They are not waiting for a section of
over-active student activists in some countries, who are having no time
to question curriculum and syllabus being followed in class rooms as
they are busy in organizing revolution.
“Sooner or later”, Jonathan informed in the Readings
in Macroecnomics, “we’ll need different ways of thinking about work and
growth and how we allocate the means of life. This is where the social
economy comes in, the informal exchange between neighbors and friends.
There are some promising trends. One is the return to the traditional
village model in housing. Structure does affect content. When houses are
close together, and people can walk to stores and work, it encourages
the spontaneous social interaction that nurtures real community. New
local currencies, such as Time Dollars, provide a kind of lattice work
upon which informal nonmarket exchange can take root and grow.” (ibid.)
Carlos Perez de Alejo, co-director of Third Coast
Workers for Cooperation in Austin, Texas, informs: “In the midst of
mounting economic insecurity, fueled by widespread unemployment,
foreclosures and budget cuts, many people are seeking alternative models
to business as usual. From community gardens to bartering networks,
grassroots efforts are sprouting up across the [US].” (“Embrace the
Cooperative Movement”, Austin American-Statesman, Oct. 26, 2010)
In the US, according to Carlos, more than 29,000 cooperatives are
operating in nearly all sectors of the economy. There are more than 130
million members in these cooperatives. Under the shadow of the ongoing
economic crisis, many people have got organized in worker cooperatives
owned and controlled by the people. By providing stable jobs and higher
wages worker cooperatives have an impressive track record. The movement
in the US has become increasingly organized. In May 2004, members of the
worker co-op community founded the US Federation of Worker
Cooperatives, a national membership-based organization “of and for
worker cooperatives, other democratic workplaces, and the organizations
that support the growth and continued development of worker
cooperatives.” Membership in the Federation has grown 25% per year.
In the face of crisis and hardship people are
creating their spaces. Of course, there are limitations. Possibilities
of set backs are there also. Fundamental questions are yet to be
identified and resolved. But it’s a part of a process. People learn in
their way whatever the dominating economy dictates. These lessons
encourage, energize and strengthen people’s initiatives.
Part III: The “Insignificant” trillions of dollars
One of today’s undeniable facts is women’s labor almost all over the world are underpaid and unpaid.
Now-a-days many are asking: “[Are] housewives paid
[with] wages? By the government? That may seem outlandish to some, but
consider the staggering amount of unpaid work carried out by women.” The
International Wages for Housework Campaign, a network of women in Third
World and industrialized countries, demands unwaged work that women do
are to be recognized as work in official government statistics, and this
work be paid. Lena Graber and John Miller discuss the issue in their
“Wages for housework: the movement & the numbers”: “Producing
credible numbers for the value of women’s work in the home is no easy
task. Calculating how many hours women spend performing housework […] is
just the first step. The hours are considerable in both developing and
industrialized economies.” (Eds. Amy Gluckman, John Miller, Bryan
Snyder, and Chris Sturr, Readings in Macroeconomics, 28th edition)
As example of hours spent by women in household work
Lena and John refer to a set of data related to the issue. In
Australia, 2 hours and 27 minutes were spent for child care per day in a
household by a woman in 1997. In the UK in 2000, it was one hr. and 26
min. while in Nepal the time spent for the same purpose in 1996 was two
minutes more than that of the UK. In Norway, it was 42 min. in 2000
while in Japan it was 24 min. in 1999. Time spent for food preparation
was: Australia – 1 hr 29 min., Norway – 49 min., the UK – 1 hr. 8 min.,
Nepal – 5 hr. 30 min. Time spent for water and fuel collection in Nepal
was 1 hr 10 min while in Norway it was 1 min. Time was also spent for
cleaning and shopping. The total time spent was: Australia – 3 hr. 39
min., Japan – 3 hr. 34 min., Norway – 3 hr. 56 min., the UK – 4 hr. 55
min. The sources of this information were: www.abs.gov.au/ausstats;
www.unescap.org/stat (Japan); www.ssb.no/tidsbruk_en (Norway);
www.statistics.gov.uk/themes/social_finances/TimeUseSurvey;
www.cbs.nl/isi/iass (Nepal). A number of data were not available. The
data cited are not comparable between the countries referred here
because of difference between the economies and time period of data
gathering. However, the data provide a picture of women labor
deprivation. All the economies cited here are capitalist and all but
Nepal are advanced capitalist countries.
Citing the International Labor Organization Lena and John say: In
1990, women carried out two-thirds of the world’s work for 5% of the
income. In 1995, the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report
estimated that women’s unpaid and underpaid labor was worth $11
trillion worldwide, and $1.4 trillion in the US. The share of the
advanced economy is more than one-tenth.
Paying women the wages for the household work, the
economists argue, “would go a long way toward undoing these inequities
and reducing women’s economic dependence on men.” The UN 4th World
Conference on Women developed a Platform for Action in 1995 that called
on governments to calculate the value of women’s unpaid work and include
it in conventional measures of national output, for example, in GDP.
Only a handful of countries including Trinidad &
Tobago and Spain have passed legislation mandating the new accounting. A
number of countries including Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, the
Dominican Republic, India, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Tanzania, and
Venezuela have undertaken extensive surveys to determine how much time
is spent on unpaid household work. (ibid.)
There are different approaches to put value to the
household work: output-based evaluation, input of household production,
opportunity cost based calculation, specialist-replacement method. These
techniques produce quite different results.
“In Canada, a government survey documented the time
men and women spent on unpaid work in 1992. Canadian women performed 65%
of all unpaid work, shouldering an especially large share of household
labor [….] (Men’s unpaid hours exceeded women’s only for outdoor
cleaning.) […] In Great Britain […] unpaid labor hours are high for an
industrialized country […], far greater relative to GDP. […W]hen valued
using the opportunity cost method, unpaid work was 112% of Britain’s GDP
in 1995! With the specialist-replacement method, British unpaid labor
was still 56% of GDP—greater than the output of the United Kingdom’s
entire manufacturing sector for the year. In Japan […] women perform
over 80% of unpaid work […] The Japanese Economic Planning Agency
calculated that counting unpaid work in 1996 would add between 15.2%
(generalist-replacement method) and 23% (opportunity-cost method) to
GDP. Even at those levels, the value of unpaid labor still equaled at
least half of Japanese women’s market wages.” (ibid.)
“While estimates vary by country and evaluation
method, all of these calculations make clear that recognizing the value
of unpaid household labor profoundly alters our perception of economic
activity and women’s contributions to production. ‘Had household
production been included in the system of macro-economic accounts,’
notes Ann Chadeau, [a researcher with the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development] ‘governments may well have implemented
quite different economic and social policies.’ For example, according to
the UNDP, ‘the inescapable implication [of recognizing women’s unpaid
labor] is that the fruits of society’s total labor should be shared more
equally.’ For the UNDP, this would mean radically altering property and
inheritance rights; access to credit; entitlement to social security
benefits, tax incentives, and child care; and terms of divorce
settlements. (ibid.)
The Great Financial Crisis has aggravated the
situation. Burden on women has increased. It has spread outside of
households. “Since the Great Recession began in December 2007,” writes
Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress,
in the Readings in Macroeconomics, “there [in the US] has been a sharp
rise in the number of married couples where a woman is left to bring
home the bacon because her husband is unemployed.” The reason is “men
have experienced greater job losses than women over the course of this
recession, losing three out of every four jobs lost.” (“Women
Breadwinners, Men Unemployed”)
In 2009, share of families having unemployed men
while women held job rose sharply compared to 2007. In the first five
months of 2009, 5.4% of working wives had an unemployed husband at home
compared to an average of 2.4% over the first five months of 2007. In
terms of number about 2 million working wives with an unemployed
husband. (ibid.)
The hardship in household increases as family budget
gets strained “since women typically earn only 78 cents for every
dollar men earn. In the typical married-couple family where both spouses
work, the wife brings home just over a third — 35.6% — of the family’s
income.” (ibid.)
If the issue of unpaid household work is set aside
temporarily for the sake of putting “things simply” the hard fact that
comes up is of “giving” women labor less money compared to men, and
asking, actually compelling, women labor to take larger burden.
A single area can be cited as example of hardship.
Heather writes: “[M]ost families receive health insurance through the
employers of their husbands. So when husbands lose their jobs, families
are left struggling to find ways to pay for health insurance at the same
time they are living on just a third of their prior income.”
The hardship increases when the family has child.
Heather provides data: “Families with children have been hit especially
hard hit by unemployment. Among working wives in families with a small
child — under age six — at home, 5.9% have an unemployed husband.
[…T]here are 1 million working wives with children at home, but an
unemployed husband.”
Heather moves further with hard data that provides
harder aspect of life during the period: “There has also been a sharp
rise in the share of families where both the husband and wife are
unemployed. Between the first five months of 2007 and of 2009, the share
of married-couple families with both spouses unemployed rose to 0.5%
from 0.1%, meaning that one in 500 families is struggling with dual
unemployment. The share of families with a child under age 18 with both
parents unemployed is 0.6%, meaning that one in 165 families with
children have both parents looking for work.”
These facts show the cruel face of the economy that
is concerned only with profit. The hardship of women labor can be gauzed
fully if necessary labor time and surplus labor time are considered.
With less wage women labor has to survive, make arrangement for survival
of family members, work unpaid in household. But she isn’t allowed to
produce less. This is an economy that at times even cares not to wear
mask of humanity.
Part IV: Productive Investment? No
Inequality and capitalism are indivisible. Today,
even proponents of capitalism don’t deny it. In the US as in other
capitalist countries, increasing inequality is undeniable. The Empire is
now residence of deep inequality.
Joseph Stiglitz observes: “America has the highest
level of inequality of any of the advanced countries – and its gap with
the rest has been widening. In the “recovery” of 2009-2010, the top 1%
of US income earners captured 93% of the income growth. Other inequality
indicators – like wealth, health, and life expectancy – are as bad or
even worse. The clear trend is one of concentration of income and wealth
at the top, the hollowing out of the middle, and increasing poverty at
the bottom. (“The Price of Inequality and the Myth of Opportunity”,
Project Syndicate, June 6, 2012)
“Economic inequality”, James M. Cypher, professor of
economics at California State University, Fresno, writes, “has been on
the rise in the United States for 30-odd years.” (“Slicing up at the
long barbeque”, Readings in Macroecnomics, 28th edition, Eds. Amy
Gluckman, John Miller, Bryan Snyder, Chris Sturr)
The inequality gives a lot of money, unimaginable,
in total trillions of dollars, to a few. At the same time questions
born. Does that huge money brings in any or produces something good?
Answers to the questions reveal the type of activities the advanced
capitalism is carrying out. At the same time, with the ultimate output
the economy can claim legitimacy or can forfeit its rationale for
existence.
James provides the answer with a number of facts.
“[T]he big money has not gone into productive investments in the United
States. Stripping out the money pumped into the residential real estate
bubble, inflation-adjusted investment in machinery, equipment,
technology, and structures increased only 1.4% from 1999 through 2005 —
an average of 0.23% per year. Essentially, productive investment has
stagnated since the close of the dot-com boom. Instead, the money has
poured into high-risk hedge funds. These are vast pools of unregulated
funds that are now generating 40% to 50% of the trades in the New York
Stock Exchange and account for very large portions of trading in many
U.S. and foreign credit and debt markets. And where is the income from
these investments going? Last fall media mogul David Geffen sold two
paintings at record prices, a Jasper Johns ($80 million) and a Willem de
Kooning ($63.5 million), to two of “today’s crop of hedge-fund
billionaires” whose cash is making the art market “red-hot,” according
to the New York Times. Other forms of conspicuous consumption have their
allure as well. Boeing and Lufthansa are expecting brisk business for
the newly introduced 787 airplane. The commercial version of the new
Boeing jet will seat 330, but the VIP version offered by Lufthansa
Technik (for a mere $240 million) will have seating for 35 or fewer,
leaving room for master bedrooms, a bar, and the transport of racehorses
or Rolls Royces. And if you lose your auto assembly job? It should be
easy to find work as a dog walker: High-end pet care services are
booming, with sales more than doubling between 2000 and 2004. Opened in
2001, Just Dogs Gourmet expects to have 45 franchises in place by the
end of 2006 selling hand-decorated doggie treats. And then there is Camp
Bow Wow, which offers piped-in classical music for the dogs (oops,
“guests”) and a live Camper Cam for their owners. Started only three
years ago, the company already has 140 franchises up and running.
According to David Butler, the manager of a premiere auto dealership
outside of Detroit, sales of Bentleys, at $180,000 a pop, are brisk. But
not many $300,000 Rolls Royces are selling. “It’s not that they can’t
afford it,” Butler told the New York Times, “it’s because of the image
it would give.” Just what is the image problem in Detroit? Well, maybe
it has something to do with those Delphi workers facing a 40% pay cut.
Michigan’s economy is one of the hardest-hit in the nation. GM, long a
symbol of U.S. manufacturing prowess, is staggering, with rumors of
possible bankruptcy rife. The best union in terms of delivering the
goods for the U.S. working class, the United Auto Workers, is facing an
implosion. Thousands of Michigan workers at Delphi, GM, and Ford will be
out on the streets very soon. (The top three domestic car makers are
determined to permanently lay of three-quarters of their U.S.
assembly-line workers—nearly 200,000 hourly employees. If they do, then
the number of auto-workers employed by the Big Three—Ford, Chrysler, and
GM—will have shrunk by a staggering 900,000 since 1978.) So, this might
not be the time to buy a Rolls. But a mere $180,000 Bentley—why not?
But perhaps those who decry the trend can find at least symbolic hope in
the new boom in yet another luxury good. Private mausoleums, in vogue
during that earlier Gilded Age, are back. For $650,000, one was recently
constructed at Daytona Memorial Park in Florida—with matching $4,000
Medjool date palms for shade. Another, complete with granite patio,
meditation room, and doors of hand cast bronze, went up in the same
cemetery. Business is booming, apparently, with 2,000 private mausoleums
sold in 2005, up from a single-year peak of 65 in the 1980s. Some cost
“well into the millions,” according to one of the nation’s largest
makers of cemetery monuments. Who knows: maybe the mausoleum boom
portends the ultimate (dead) end for the neo-Gilded Age.” (ibid.)
What happens in a society with this type and level of consumption by this sect of persons? Krugman has an answer.
“Should we be worried about the increasingly
oligarchic nature of American society? Yes, and not just because a
rising economic tide has failed to lift most boats. Both history and
modern experience tell us that highly unequal societies also tend to be
highly corrupt. […] And I’m with Alan Greenspan, who […] has repeatedly
warned that growing inequality pose a threat to “democratic society”.
(Paul Krugman, “Graduates versus Oligarchs”, New York Times, Feb. 27,
2006)
A sharper tone tells: “[…] America looks more and
more like a class-ridden society. […] Our political leaders are doing
everything they can to fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone
who complains […] as a practitioner of ‘class warfare’.” (Paul Krugman,
“The Death of Horatio Alger”, The Nation, Jan. 5, 2004)
Destiny of this journey is not a happy place for the
advanced capitalist society. Krugman asks: “Where is this taking us?
Thomas Piketty, whose work with Saez has transformed our understanding
of income distribution, warns that current policies will eventually
create ‘a class of rentiers in the U.S., whereby a small group of
wealthy but untalented children controls vast segments of the US economy
and penniless, talented children simply can’t compete.’ If he’s right –
and I fear that he is – we will end up suffering not only from
injustice, but from a vast waste of human potential.” (ibid.) The
economy is sowing seeds of class conflict as it destroys human
potential.
There is poverty, there is poor along with the rich.
There is debate also on identifying the poor. Ellen Frank, who teaches
economics at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, writes: “The
poverty line is widely regarded as far too low for a household to
survive on in most parts of the United States. For one thing, as
antipoverty advocates point out, since 1955 the proportion of family
budgets devoted to food has fallen from one-third to one-fifth.”
(“Measures of Poverty”, Readings in Macroecnomics, 28th edition,)
There is an opposite view. “Poverty calculations
also have critics on the right. Conservative critics contend that the
official poverty rate overstates poverty in the United States.” (ibid.)
The fact that comes out is: Methodology is not even
spared of class interest. Conservative interests like to deny existence
of the poor. An ostrich policy is preferable to the interests instead of
resolving the problem of poverty. And, interests make them incapable of
resolving the problem. It’s an inherent limitation.
There is need to revise the poverty line. Scientific
approach requires this. It will be easier to propagate conservative
class interests without a proper measurement method; but that will
ultimately hurt the interests although the interests with short sighted
view prefer immediate profit. Jeannette Wicks-Lim, assistant research
professor at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University
of Massachusetts-Amherst, writes: “Without revising the official poverty
line to reflect the actual costs of families’ basic need, the key
statistics we use to understand economic deprivation in the United
States will not only undercount the poor, but it will do so by a larger
margin every passing year.” (“Lies, Damned Lies, and Poverty
Statistics”, Readings in Macroecnomics)
The poverty line controversy also reveals another
fact: State of scientific knowledge in an advanced capitalist economy,
signs of a moribund society.
Stiglitz describes the state of the society:
“America likes to think of itself as a land of opportunity, and others
view it in much the same light. But, while we can all think of examples
of Americans who rose to the top on their own, what really matters are
the statistics: to what extent do an individual’s life chances depend on
the income and education of his or her parents?
Nowadays, these numbers show that the American dream
is a myth. There is less equality of opportunity in the United States
today than there is in Europe – or, indeed, in any advanced industrial
country for which there are data. […] In a country where money trumps
democracy, such legislation has become predictably frequent. […]
Inequality leads to lower growth and less efficiency. […] The Great
Recession has exacerbated inequality, with cutbacks in basic social
expenditures and with high unemployment putting downward pressure on
wages. […] America has become a country not “with justice for all,” but
rather with favoritism for the rich and justice for those who can afford
it […] America can no longer regard itself as the land of opportunity
that it once was. (“The Price of Inequality …”, op. cit.)
The “story” is almost endless as it’s of a vast
empire. However, the story helps understand capitalism, its present
state, its limitations, and the need to have a new economy that shall
not breed and increase inequality.
