Ова е прв пост од серија постови во кои ќе презентирам тема, градејќи нарација со парчиња од разни текстови кои доколку ве интересира може да ги прочитате во целост.
Денес со помош на софистицирани машини може да се произведе многу повеќе одколку што можеме да конзумираме. Користејќи 3d принтери и генететски модифицирана храна (само пример кој не е поврзан со мојот личен став кон ГМО) може да имаме било што, како и да се ослободиме од проблемот со гладот.
Во оваа средина се создава нов вид на проблем, а тоа е како да се најде побарувачка за потенцијалното изобилие.
Размислете за тоа како денес болести кои се појавуваат како последица на прејадување се почеста причина за смрт од гладот. Големите компании, соочувајќи се со овој нов вид на проблеми се служат со нови начини за да ја зголемат продажбата, или пак да создадат лажен недостиг за да може да продаваат по повисоки цени.
Побарувачката денес е воглавном анемична поради оние кои ги изгубиле работните места во последните години како последица на роботизација и финансиската криза.
Темата на 'изобилие' е често дискутирана и дебатирана од одлични автори, па би сакал да препорачам неколку текстови за оние кои сакаат да прочитаат нешто повеќе со цел да добијат појасна слика за модерниот свет во кој живееме.
Целиот процес е симболично објаснет од тимот FT Alphaville (кои секогаш се меѓу првите кога станува збор за објаснување на модерниот свет) со извор на вода, цитираниот текст е дел од заклучокот (receptacles=пари, receptacles holders=bond holders):
"All this time, however, the water keeps flowing. Water sources become ever more abundant and plentiful. It becomes increasingly difficult for the receptacle holders to constrain water supply and make it appear there is a water shortage. With no water shortage, people depend on fewer receptacles. They begin to realize they don’t need them. Holding receptacles itself becomes a burden. Not only do you get no return, you have to invest heavily in manipulating the water source to make it appear that the receptacles have value. This cost gets greater and greater as the abundance of water increases. This cost is worth it, only if the water one day runs dry."¹
Или пак со зборовите на Роберт и Едвард Скиделски²:
"Making money cannot be an end in itself—at least for anyone not suffering from acute mental disorder. To say that my purpose in life is to make more and more money is like saying that my aim in eating is to get fatter and fatter. And what is true of individuals is also true of societies. Making money cannot be the permanent business of humanity, for the simple reason that there is nothing to do with money except spend it. And we cannot just go on spending. There will come a point when we will be satiated or disgusted or both. Or will we?"
Да продолжиме со примерот со водата. Ова би требало да ве потсети на нееднаквоста (богатите стануваат побогати) која драстично се зголеми насекаде во светот пост-кризата во 2008:
"Inducing artificial scarcity becomes the order of the day.
In a last attempt to retain power, receptacle hoarders divert flows, create dams, destroy capacity, all the while encouraging as much water to go to waste as possible. They even start wars so as to encourage water to be redirected elsewhere, restoring genuine scarcity. For a while people are duped by the false scarcity that’s created, and the value of the water and the receptacles increases. Equilibrium is restored. A few become extremely wealthy."
Еве еден пример за тоа што прават компаниите со вишокот на производи.
"Yet if water abundance is great enough people will look around and see there is no scarcity. They will see they are better off than they have ever been. Eventually, they will understand all the scarcity is artificial. They will also realize they have no need for receptacles, because receptacles have no value. You can live directly off the source. As those with receptacles adjust to the realization that they have no advantage over those with no receptacles, there is a crisis in the old system. Ultimately, however, more people are provided with access to a constant supply of water than ever before, and on equal terms. The crisis is only for those who used to have an advantage in the system."
Сметам дека паралелата со водата одлично го опишува светот во кој живееме. Следат уште неколку цитати од есејот на Роберт и Едвард Скиделски:
"Keynes thought that the motivational basis of capitalism was “an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals.”He thought that with the coming of plenty, this motivational drive would lose its social approbation; that is, that capitalism would abolish itself when its work was done.
"But so accustomed have we become to regarding scarcity as the norm that few of us think about what motives and principles of conduct would, or should, prevail in a world of plenty.
"Why, despite the surprising accuracy of his growth forecasts, are most of us, almost 100 years on, still working about as hard as we were when he wrote his futuristic essay? The answer is that a free-market economy both gives employers the power to dictate hours and terms of work and inflames our innate tendency toward competitive, status-driven consumption. Keynes was well aware of the evils of capitalism but assumed that they would wither away once their work of wealth creation was done. He did not foresee that they might become permanently entrenched, obscuring the very ideal they were initially intended to serve.
"The irony, however, is that now that we have at last achieved abundance, the habits bred into us by capitalism have left us incapable of enjoying it properly. The Devil, it seems, has claimed his reward. Can we evade this fate? Perhaps, but only if we can retrieve from centuries of neglect and distortion the idea of a good life, a life sufficient unto itself. Here we must draw on the rich storehouse of premodern wisdom, Occidental and Oriental.
"Let us state firmly that we are not in favor of idleness. What we wish to see more of is leisure, a category that, properly understood, is so far from coinciding with idleness that it approaches its polar opposite.Leisure, in the true, now almost forgotten sense of the word, is activity without extrinsic end, “purposiveness without purpose,” as Kant put it. The sculptor engrossed in cutting marble, the teacher intent on imparting a difficult idea, the musician struggling with a score, a scientist exploring the mysteries of space and time—such people have no other aim than to do well what they are doing. They may receive an income for their efforts, but that income is not what motivates them. They are engaged in leisure, not toil.
Како оваа визија е различна од комунизот:
“That is all very splendid,” our critic might retort, “but it is hardly likely that a reduction of externally motivated activity will lead to an increase of leisure, in your high-flown sense of the term. Slackers like us need the stimulus of money to move us to anything. Without it, our natural laziness comes to the fore, leading not to the good life but to boredom, neurosis, and the bottle. Read a few Russian novels and you will see what I mean.
"Such an objection can be met only with a declaration of faith. A universal reduction of work has never been attempted, so we do not know for sure what its consequences would be. But we cannot think them as dire as our critic suggests, or of the central project of modern civilization, to improve the well-being of the people, as empty and vain. If the ultimate end of industry is idleness, if we labor and create merely so that our descendants can snuggle down to an eternity of daytime television, then all progress is, as Orwell put it, “a frantic struggle towards an objective which [we] hope and pray will never be reached.”
"We are in the paradoxical situation of goading ourselves to ever new feats of enterprise, not because we think them worthwhile, but because any activity, however pointless, is better than none. We must believe in the possibility of genuine leisure—otherwise our state is desperate indeed.
"If scarcity is always with us, then efficiency, the optimal use of scarce resources, and economics, the science that teaches us efficiency, will always be necessary. Yet in any common-sensical view of the matter, scarcity waxes and wanes. We know that famines are periods of extreme scarcity, and that good harvests produce relative plenty. Thomas Malthus understood that when population grows faster than food supplies, scarcity grows; and in the reverse case, it declines. Moreover, scarcity, as most people understand it, has diminished greatly in most societies over the last 200 years. People in rich and even medium-rich countries no longer starve to death. All this implies that the social importance of efficiency has declined, and with it the utility of economics.
"The beginning of sanity in this matter is to think of scarcity in relation to needs, not wants. And this is how we do normally think of it. The man with three houses is not thought to be in dire straits, however urgent his desire for a fourth. “He has enough,” we say, meaning “enough to meet his needs.” Flagrant manifestations of insatiability—such as an uncontrollable desire to collect cats or dollhouses—are widely viewed as pathological, not normal. We are all, in principle, capable of limiting our wants to our needs; the problem is that a competitive, monetized economy puts us under continual pressure to want more and more. The “scarcity” discerned by economists is increasingly an artifact of this pressure. Considered in relation to our vital needs, our state is one not of scarcity but rather of extreme abundance.
"Over time, such a shift is bound to affect our attitude toward economics. To maximize the efficient use of our time will become less and less important; and therefore “scientific” economics, as it has developed since Robbins, will be demoted from its position as the queen of the social sciences. It can bring us to the threshold of plenty, but must then retire from its oversight of our lives. This is what Keynes had in mind when he looked forward to the day when economists would become as useful as dentists. He always chose his words carefully: It was as dentists, not doctors, that humanity would come to need economists; at the margins of life, not as a continuous, much less controlling, presence."
Понатаму, уште еден пост од FT Alphaville, овој пат за како би изгледал светот по-надминување на недостигот (post scarcity).³
"It’s an environment that we have argued requires a new paradigm for the world. A transition towards a steady-state where money has no choice but to depreciate because its role as a store of value has been made redundant due to the general abundance of goods in society, brought about by technological innovation and efficiency. In a post-scarcity environment there is no need to delay or hurry purchases, or to even have a store of value. You use only what you need.
Receptacles=Money
"Consider our analogy of water. If water is scarce and finite, and you have to travel miles to the nearest water source, and the man who has the greatest number of receptacles to store that water is richest. Those without receptacles — stores of water — go without.
But in an environment where springs flow unconstrained for everyone — anywhere, anytime — no-one needs a store of water at all. Water is freely available.
Yet in the transition from water scarcity to water abundance, a funny thing happens. As water becomes more and more abundant disproportionately across the population, the man who is nearest to the water source and has the most receptacles becomes the richest.
He thus has an incentive to store and hoard as many receptacles as possible, to prevent the water being distributed evenly — a situation in which he would lose all of his advantage.
Of course, if the water is so abundant that people don’t need access to receptacles at all (it becomes free flowing everywhere), then only the fear of future scarcity can make his receptacles retain value.
Even if the much-discussed scarcity never arrives, the man with all of the receptacles suddenly has an interest in inducing artificial scarcity, or at the very least the fear of scarcity.
"Let’s presume two fundamental truths. 1) Technology and innovation lead to ever greater efficiencies. 2) Efficiencies give us the means to create ever more goods with the resources at hand.
"Thus the number of goods in society is growing all the time.
Дефлација (паѓање на цените) се јавува поради тоа што за константна количина на пари во економијата ако има повеќе производи, нивната цена опаѓа.
"As the number of goods available to the population rises, it is fair to say that the supply of money must rise if “price stability” is to be maintained. If credit/money fails to rise, or is constrained, while the number of goods continues to rise then deflation must be the consequence — because goods begin to surpass the amount of credit that’s available to purchase them.
Опишаната ситуација им одговара на богатите поради тоа што им се зголемува куповната моќ и.е. стануваат побогати.
"So what is deflation really? According to the above logic it is a situation where the lucky few who do have access to safe stores of value see their purchasing power increase — as more goods become available for the monetary units they hold — while the unlucky majority without access to safe stores of value are frozen out of the system entirely, since there aren’t enough units to go round. Wealth essentially becomes concentrated in the hands of the few, unless government intervenes to supply more credit/money into the system (usually by going into spending mode itself).
"Even with government intervention, however, the surplus of products itself does not go away, nor the means to produce the surplus products. However, rather than give goods away for free or have people work for nothing — a situation which would restore equilibrium at a cost to the wealthy few — artificial scarcity is introduced to the system instead. The least efficient factories are closed down, while producers destroy or retain product from the market. Goods go to waste and people go without.
"A period of concentrated “destocking” ensues, as manufacturers attempt to induce scarcity. This is what is arguably still happening now. Just think of all that unused housing inventory, all those commodity stockpiles, all that spare capacity, all those bankruptcies forcing capacity to go unused.
"This is why wars can help. The surplus product that the system cannot pay for because of a lack of credit is redirected to the war effort and/or a collective national purpose. Goods stop going to waste. Genuine scarcity is reintroduced to the economy, matching the number of credits. Balance is restored as scarcity is re-introduced.
Начини со кои се служат компаниите за да креираат недостиг:
- Too many commodities = stockpile surplus in dark inventory.
- Too many garments, clothes and retail goods = create fashion to make old product seem outdated.
- Too many pharmaceuticals = create patents to reward inventors.
- Too much free music = create copyright laws to restrict free access.
- Too much free media = enforce paywalls and subscriptions.
- Too much food = convince society to constrain itself by making thin beautiful. Destroy food rather than give it away for free.
- Too much free energy = stop subsidising it, let inventory go to waste, bankrupt it.
"Yet it is logical that eventually the dam will bust. All these goods will flow onto the market for free. Once they do, only those offering “quality” will be able to justify any charges at all. And even these will gradually become deflated as the system becomes ever more efficient at making quality product. And when that happens money itself will die, because who needs to save for their old age, if over the time the system is going to provide ever more “stuff” you need for free or almost for free.
Ќе продолжам со неколку извадоци од Pieria, каде темата исто така е екстензивно покриена и се вклопува во нивните генерално про-социјалистички ставови за справување со невработеноста.
Најпрво постот на Том Страјтхорст⁴,⁵ кој исто така има пишувано на темата во LA Review of Books. Тој е одличен и лесно прифатлив автор кој пишува за деликатни теми на многу едноставен начин. Неможам доволно да ви го препорачам неговиот есеј за неговата посета на Авганистан по падот на кулите близначки.
Да продолжиме со темата. По финансиската криза каматните стапки во повеќето од развиените земји се блиску до нула со цел да се охрабрат луѓето да земаат кредити кои ќе бидат вложени во активности кои ќе ја подржат економијата. Меѓутоа, многу неинтуитвно, кредитирањето по кризата се намалува, и покрај историски најефтините кредити.
"Interest is the cost of money, the price required to bring the desires of savers and investors into equilibrium. And today, even at near zero interest rates, savers are accumulating cash faster than firms want to put it to use. That is why the economy remains stagnant."
Кога компаниите не веруваат дека може да продадат повеќе, немаат причина за инвестирање. Исто така во новата 'интернет' економија има многу помала потреба од капитал:
"Today, the Internet plays a similar role to railroads 150 years ago: a transformative technology that ties us together and will make us all much more productive. The difference is, it hardly requires any capital. How much money does it take to start up a Facebook or Twitter? A bit of office space, some servers, working capital to pay start up workers, almost nothing compared to the cost of building a steel mill. Recently, Apple floated a $17 billion bond, not in order to fund capital improvements but rather to pay its shareholders a dividend. The deal made sense: at these low interest rates, who wouldn’t want to borrow, but it epitomises a momentous shift in the purpose of capital markets.
"The interest rate can be thought of as the marginal return of capital. Low interest rates, then, suggest capital is not as valuable as it used to be. But of course, neither is labour. Losing your job from the 1940s to the 1970s was not that big a deal. If you were laid off at one plant, you could go across town and find a job at another. Today, the American median male real wage is lower than it was in 1973. In part that reflects the decline in union power but it also demonstrates a reduced demand for workers. Charles Bukowski, the poet laureate of low life LA, managed to rarely be out of work, despite rarely almost never showing up on time and being drunk when he did. Employers would eventually cotton onto his ways and fire him but a few days later another would happily hire him. Try being that useless today and holding onto a job. Back in Bukowski’s day, the supply of labour did not outstrip demand for it. Even drunks and layabouts could get hired. No more. Today, employers hold the whip hand, as do borrowers relative to savers. The railroads and steel mills of the second industrial revolution were both capital and labour intensive. The computer and Internet firms of today are not. Both labour and capital are growing redundant.
"This suggests policymakers need to rethink deeply held prejudices. Today, it is consumer demand, not labour scarcity or lack of capital that is the bottleneck of growth. In such a situation, we might need to consider separating the link between work and consumption.
"Technology has made both workers and capital more productive, and so less necessary. Today, we can produce more than we did when labour and capital were more scarcer. This should not frighten us. Making more stuff with fewer inputs cannot be a bad thing, even if it causes pension funds to earn lower returns, even if it eradicates previously good jobs.
"C is declining because workers face stagnant wages and would prefer to pay down debt rather than accumulate more. I is declining because manufacturing firms have more productive capacity than they need and the service firms of the future don’t require that much capital.
И заклучокот, кој би требало да ви звучи многу логично ако внимателно го прочитавте целиот текст:
"Government spending, on education, on infrastructure should rise. Perhaps the best solution to our interminable economic travails would be to provide all citizens with a basic income. The current economy needs consumers more than it needs workers. A basic income not only would provide a vital safety net, it would provide demand, which unlike capital or labour, is in short supply today.
За сите што сакаат да прочитаат повеќе ставив плус два текста од Pieria во фуснотите.
Серијата на овој тип постови ќе продолжи со тоа што ќе ви дадам време прво да ви легнат поентите од овој пост.
