As a relief from discussing the sad state of the “science” of economics, and as a mental stimulus, I sometimes like to speculate about the seemingly unanswerable.
This is one of those times.
I hope you enjoy that sort of contemplation.
Here are samples from several articles that at first may seem disparate, but actually lead to an interesting possible conclusion: The universe thinks. From COSMOS:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) machines can be trained to solve puzzles on their own, by learning to recognize rules and patterns in data, rather than by simply following the rules humans program into them.
But often, researchers don’t know what rules the AI have made for themselves.
Peter Koo, an assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, US, has developed a new method – described today in PLOS Computational Biology – that quizzes an AI to figure out what rules it has learned on its own, and whether they’re the right ones.
“If you learn general rules about the math instead of memorizing the equations, you know how to solve those equations.
So rather than just memorizing those equations, we hope that these models are learning to solve it and now we can give it any equation and it will solve it,” says Koo.Koo has developed an AI called a deep neural network (DNN), that looks for patterns in strands of RNA that increase the ability of a protein to bind to them.
Koo’s DNN, called Residual Bind (RB), has been trained with thousands of RNA sequences matched to protein binding scores, and is able to predict scores for new RNA sequences.
As you read further, I ask you to give your thoughts to the word, “network.”
It is fundamental to the process we call “thinking.” “Network,” “web,” “interchange,” “connection,” “entanglement” — they are words used to describe the complex communication system of a brain. From The Guardian:
‘It was like intercepting a covert conversation over the airwaves that could change the course of history,’ says Suzanne Simard.
When Suzanne Simard made her extraordinary discovery – that trees could communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi – the scientific establishment underreacted.
Even though her doctoral research was published in the Nature journal in 1997 – a coup for any scientist – the finding that trees are more altruistic than competitive was dismissed by many as if it were the delusion of an anthropomorphising hippy.
Her moment has come: research into forest ecosystems and mycorrhizal networks (those built of connections between plants and fungi) is now mainstream and there is a hunger for books related to the subject: Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life – about the hidden life of fungi – extend her thinking about the “woodwide web.”
One of Simard’s most thrilling beliefs is that trees can recognize us. “Trees perceive many things.
They know when they’re infected and have an instantaneous biochemical response. When we manipulate trees, they respond.”
“Trees don’t have a brain, but the network in the soil is a neural network and the chemicals that move through it are the same as our neural transmitters.”
She is currently collaborating on research to see whether trees can distinguish us as humans.
A communication network can be composed of any form of communication connection, not just wires. From Mental Floss:
Plants can’t run away, so they have to develop other strategies to stay alive, as James Cahill, an environmental plant ecologist at the University of Alberta, explains in “What Plants Talk About,” a documentary from the PBS show NATURE.
They’ve evolved the use of chemicals to communicate with insects and each other in order to thrive.
1. Plants can call for helpWhen you inhale the sweet smell of freshly mown grass or cut flowers, what you’re actually smelling is the plant’s distress call.
“The scent attracts insects that will eat the pests currently munching on their plant-bodies.
“For instance, the wild tobacco plant can identify a hornworm caterpillar by its saliva.
When attacked by this caterpillar, the tobacco plant emits a chemical signal that appeals to the insect’s enemies.
“Within hours, caterpillar predators like the big-eyed bug show up, ideally driving the pest away.”
2. Plants can eavesdropPlants sometimes respond to another plant’s SOS cry by ramping up their own defenses.
When wounded by a hornworm, sagebrush releases defensive proteins called trypsin proteinase inhibitors (TPIs), which prevent the insect from digesting protein and stunt its growth.
Wild tobacco begins prepping to make these TPIs when it senses a distress call from sagebrush, giving it a head start on defending itself.
3. Plants can defend their territoryThe invasive knapweed plant has roots that release certain chemicals that kill off native grass competitors.
Some plants, however, have formed a defense. Lupin roots secrete oxalic acid, which forms a protective barrier against the toxic chemicals given off by knapweed.
Lupin can even protect other plants in its vicinity.
4. Plants can recognize their siblingsIn an experiment with sea rocket, a plant that often grows close together with its siblings, plants that were grown in pots with relatives had more restrained root growth than plants grown with random strangers.
The plants in the stranger condition grew more roots in order to better compete for food, whereas the sibling plants were more considerate of each other’s needs.
Further experiments showed that sibling plants recognize each other via chemical signals.
5. Plants can communicate with mammalsPlants go out of their way to attract more than just insects.
A carnivorous pitcher plant native to Borneo has evolved to hijack bat communication systems, turning the bats’ echolocation to its advantage.
Nepenthes hemsleyan has a concave structure that is specially suited to reflect bat echolocation, helping the bats find the plant.
The bats roost in the pitcher plant, and provide important nutrients by way of the bat guano that gets distributed in the soil nearby.
At this point, you might object that we merely are talking about mindless chemistry — no intent or thinking involved.
The plants don’t intend to communicate, but rather the communication is a natural accident of the trial-and-error process we call “evolution.”
I suggest that intent is irrelevant. We do not intend for our brain to operate the way it does, and all thinking could be described as “mindless chemistry.”
Nor are all our communications intended. A facial blush, a frown, a narrowing of eyes — the list goes on — all communicate without thought.
Rather, the point is that a melding of complexity and communication to some end are exactly the features of a brain.
Plants are said not to have brains, but their complex communications function like brains, and the results resemble thought.
You might object, “What about awareness? Isn’t thinking something more than mere chemical or physical reactions?
Doesn’t thinking require at least some minimal form of awareness?”
Wikipedia: Awareness: The ability to directly know and to perceive, to feel, or to be cognizant of events.
After all, a rock in a river communicates with the river by diverting the stream, but one would have difficulty claiming the rock is thinking about the river or the river about the rock.
I suggest that everything we call “thinking” involves some sort of neural network.
The rock in the river does not constitute a neural network, and intuitively, existence of such a network might be the dividing line between thinking and mere physical reaction. From Treehugger:
SPIDER WEBA Spider’s Web Is Part of Its Mind, New Research SuggestsBy Bryan Nelson, February 18, 2020
Spiders, it turns out, appear to possess an extraordinary form of consciousness that we’re only beginning to understand, and it has to do with their webs, reports New Scientist.
Researchers are slowly coming around to the idea that spider webbing is an essential part of these creatures’ cognitive apparatus.
The animals don’t just use their webs to sense with; they use them to think.
Scientists are discovering that some spiders possess cognitive abilities rivaling those of mammals and birds, including foresight and planning, complex learning, and even the capacity to be surprised.
The crux of these newly discovered cognitive abilities of spiders comes down to their webs. We’re finding that if you take away a spider’s webbing, it loses some of these capabilities.
We now also know that spiders can even distinguish between different types of (web) vibrations.
They know which vibrations are caused by different types of critters, by leaves and other debris brushing past, and even vibrations caused by the wind.
What’s really surprising, however, is what we’re now learning about how spiders use their webbing to actually think through problems.
When a spider sits at the hub of its web, it isn’t just passively waiting for vibrations. It is actively tugging and loosening different strands, manipulating the web in subtle ways.
Research has shown that these manipulations are how to tell where a spider is paying attention. When it tenses one strand of webbing, that strand becomes more sensitive to vibrations.
It’s essentially the equivalent of a spider cupping its ears to hear better in a certain direction.“She tenses the threads of the web so that she can filter information that is coming to her brain,” explained extended cognition researcher Hilton Japyassú, in a report by Quanta Magazine.
“This is almost the same thing as if she was filtering things in her own brain.”
Furthermore, researchers have tested this hypothesis with experiments that involve cutting out pieces of webbing.
When its web gets cut, a spider starts to make different decisions. According to Japyassú, it’s as if the already-built portions of silk are reminders, or chunks of external memory.
Cutting the web is like performing a spider lobotomy.
Spiders both passively receive information from their webbing, and actively manipulate that information by making adjustments.
The brain analogy has to do not only with the web-like appearance, but the information communications running through the web tendrils.
And the web not only provides pathways for communication; the web construction promotes synergy. From Big Think:
Composed of massive filaments of galaxies separated by giant voids, the cosmic web is the name astronomers give to the structure of our universe.
Why does our universe have this peculiar, web-like structure?
The answer lies in processes that took place in the first few hundred thousands years after the Big Bang.
The cosmic web is composed of interconnecting filaments of clustered galaxies and gases stretched out across the universe and separated by giant voids.
Because matter attracts matter through gravity, these discrepancies explain why matter clumped together in some places and not others.
But this doesn’t fully explain the structure of the cosmic web.After the inflationary period (roughly, 10-32 seconds after the Big Bang), the universe was full of primordial plasma clumping together.
As this matter clumped together, it created pressure that counteracted gravity, creating ripples akin to a sound wave in the matter of the universe.
These ripples are the product of regular matter and dark matter.
Information was transmitted along the filaments via gravity, physical pressure, magnetism, chemistry, light, and electric charge — in many ways similar to a brain.
BRAIN SLICE
THE BRAIN
Brains, human and otherwise, are convoluted webs, and that web structure is the secret of their abilities.
Brains function because their many trillions of parts send, receive, and store information, coming from within the carrier body, coming from without, and coming from self-created changes, chemically and electronically.
Scientists suggest that some of the brain’s amazing power comes from functioning at the quantum level.
By digging out signals hidden within the brain’s electrical chatter, scientists are getting new insights into sleep, aging and more., By Elizabeth Landau
Janna Lendner is one of a growing number of neuroscientists energized by the idea that noise in the brain’s electrical activity could hold new clues to its inner workings.
The patterns that Lendner, neuroscientist Bradley Voytek and others look for are related to a phenomenon that scientists started noticing in complex systems throughout the natural world and technology in 1925.
The statistical structure crops up mysteriously in so many different contexts that some scientists even think it represents an undiscovered law of nature.
Our bodies groove to the familiar rhythms of heartbeats and breaths — persistent cycles essential to survival.
But there are equally vital drumbeats in the brain that don’t seem to have a pattern, and they may contain new clues to the underpinnings of behavior and cognition.
Consider the brain as a web of massive, complex, chemical and electronic communication among its trillions of parts.
The communications come both in cycles and in signals that don’t seem to have a pattern. In brains, size matters.
On balance, bigger brains yield more — and more complex — communication, which yields more complex thought.
And all this — size, complexity, communication, cycles, electronic noise — describes the universe.
Every cubic inch of space receives communication from every star in the universe. Float in space with a good enough telescope, and you will see every star.
You will sense trillions of photons and neutrinos every second, plus whisps of gravity and magnetism that sufficiently effective sensors could detect at vast distances.
Thus, every one of the many trillions of stars “senses” what every other trillions of other stars are doing.
The information flow approaches infinity. According to physicists, information never is lost. It continues forever.
What does the universe do with its infinite trove of knowledge?
Examine an individual brain and you do not see the consciousness, awareness, purpose, or emotion. These all are imputed from outside.
You see only the physical web structure. And that is all we see today when we examine the universe.
Is it possible that the universe, with its vast web, the context of which our brains cannot imagine, does nothing with its unimaginably huge information flow? Infinite information created, then totally wasted?
All brains have one commonality: From the tree-root, flower aroma “brains,” to spider webs, to the remarkable brains of humans, no brain is a purposeless, stand-alone object. All brains function for a purpose.
And if, in fact, the entire universe is an infinite brain with infinite communication and infinite information, that leaves us with one obvious question.
Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics. Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps: Ten Steps To Prosperity:
Background: The government is paying unemployed people only $300 per week, and (surprise, surprise) some people are reluctant to go back to work at jobs that will cost them money.
The purpose of the payments is to prevent families from falling into poverty, which would also help cause the entire economy to slide into poverty.
The payments themselves, though not enough in of themselves to prevent poverty, do benefit every American, rich or poor, by increasing GDP, narrowing the Gap between rich and poor, and preventing a more serious recession.
So what’s a government now to do about those unemployed people who won’t go back to work? It has several choices.
The government can do nothing different, and let the unemployment payments end at the allotted times. This is the “we’re afraid to do anything controversial, so we’ll do nothing” approach of timid politicians.
The government can stop all payments now. This is the “starve ’em ’til they beg for work” approach that businesses and primarily the GOP want.
The government can set a minimum pay requirement that is high enough to make returning to work financially advantageous. This is the “let businesses pay more because the government is going broke” approach.
The government can eliminate the unemployment necessity, and simply give all people a weekly or monthly stipend. This is the “Social Security for All,” progressive approach.
Calls to cancel pandemic-era unemployment benefits intensified this week as worries over a labor shortage gained steam, culminating in a crescendo on Friday after a wildly disappointing jobs report for April.
South Carolina and Montana announced plans before the report to end the jobless programs at the end of July, after weeks of local reports across the country recounted how restaurants couldn’t fill positions.
After the jobs report on Friday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced its support of stopping the extra $300 in weekly unemployment benefits, citing worker shortages, while Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) introduced a bill to repeal the pandemic unemployment programs.
The Republicans are sure to favor the “starve ’em ’til they beg for work” approach.
The GOP is, after all, the Party of the Rich, and if there is one thing the rich hate it’s for the poor and middle-classes to have more money or power.
It’s all a reflection of Gap Psychology, a state of mind in which the rich wish to widen the Gap between them and the rest of America.
The Gap is what makes them rich (without the Gap, no one would be rich or poor), and the wider the Gap the richer they are.
Interestingly, many of the poor and middle, having been brainwashed by the rich, to favor punishing the poor and middle to favor the rich.
That too is part of Gap Psychology, the desire to come closer to those above you in the social structure, by agreeing with them.
Voting for a right-winger essentially says, “I admire rich people, and though I myself am not currently rich, I aspire to be rich, and in some twisted way, my voting against the poor moves me closer to being rich.”
“While there are certainly people that needed access to increased unemployment benefits during the heart of this pandemic, we should not be in the business of creating lucrative government dependency that makes it more beneficial to stay unemployed rather than return to work,” Marshall said in a statement on Friday.
While $300 per week is hardly “lucrative,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce most definitely wishes to avoid a “government dependency” by creating a business dependency, in which people are so desperate they will take any job, even at starvation wages.
That is, rather than giving the government power over people’s lives, the U.S. Chamber wants business CEOs to have power over people’s lives.
As to which is the more benevolent rule might be subject to debate.
All the government wants is your vote and your acquiescence. The business CEOs want your sweat labor and your money. Which is more onerous?
What’s to blame for the disheartening job performance in April, though, has no consensus among economists.
After payroll gains missed by over 700,000 — 266,000 jobs were added last month versus estimates of 1 million — a firestorm on Twitter ignited among economists and analysts, who largely agreed that tightness in the labor market existed, but argued over the culprit.
The so-called “culprit” is quite obvious. Too many jobs pay too little.
Despite right-wing wishes, people are not stupid enough to accept a job paying $300 a week (or even a tad more), especially considering the kind of unpleasant jobs those generally are), when $300 are available for not subjecting oneself to unpleasant jobs ruled by unpleasant supervisors.
Complicating matters is that the jobs recovery is not occurring in a vacuum, but amid a public health crisis that introduces multiple variables.
While there is no single measure for workforce shortage, increased work hours and wages are considered some of the signs that indicate employers are struggling to fill jobs and the labor market is tightening, according to Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute.
Apparently, employers are not struggling enough to make their jobs more attractive, preferring to save money by letting the unemployed struggle.
“If employers really can’t find the workers that they need, they’ll respond by ramping up the hours of the workers,” Shierholz told Yahoo Money.
Rather than hiring more people at improved wages and working conditions, employers prefer to work people to death, even if this requires paying overtime wages.
One clue to unemployment is provided by a story that has been typical even well before COVID:
Pauline Rojas’ high school in San Antonio is open.
But like many of her classmates, she has not returned and has little interest in doing so.
During the coronavirus pandemic, she started working 20 to 40 hours per week at Raising Cane’s, a fast-food restaurant, and has used the money to help pay her family’s internet bill, buy clothes and save for a car.
Rojas, 18, has no doubt that a year of online school, squeezed between work shifts that end at midnight, has affected her learning.
Still, she has embraced her new role as a breadwinner, sharing responsibilities with her mother, who works at a hardware store.“I wanted to take the stress off my mom,” she said.
“I’m no longer a kid. I’m capable of having a job, holding a job and making my own money.”
“There are so many stories, and they are all stories that break your heart,” said Pedro Martinez, the San Antonio schools superintendent, who said it was most challenging to draw teenagers back to classrooms in his overwhelmingly Hispanic, low-income district.
Half of high school students are eligible to return to school five days a week, but only 30% have opted in.
Concerned about flagging grades and the risk of students dropping out, he plans to greatly restrict access to remote learning next school year.
And thus, the Gap between the rich and the rest widens, and it is the lower-income groups who help widen it, not only with their votes but with their personal life decisions.
We discuss, in Ten Steps to Prosperity (See below), this common, seeming paradox, of children and their families rejecting even free college, to work: (SeeStep 5. Salary for attending school.)
It demonstrates why unemployment is a multi-faceted situation, having disparate reasons that cannot be addressed by just one government action.
Lack of good schooling can doom otherwise bright children, our nation’s greatest asset, to lives of wasted potential and abject failure — a great loss to America and a threat to our international leadership. Returning to the original article:
Average hourly earnings for workers in labor and hospitality also increased to $17.88 in April, up from their pandemic low of $16.92 in July and are higher than their pre-pandemic level of $16.90 in February 2020, according to data from the Labor Department.
Some economists pointed to the increase as a sign that employers are competing with the enhanced unemployment benefits, specifically the extra $300 a week that the Chamber of Commerce said “results in approximately one in four recipients taking home more in unemployment than they earned working.“
What a disgrace for America: While corporations and their executive leadership pocket record salaries and perks, 25% of the workforce makes less than $300 a week!
Shierholz noted that the wage increases in some sectors may not be robust enough.
For instance, nonsupervisory workers in leisure and hospitality still make less than $21,000 a year after wage increases, according to Shierholz, or about $10 an hour.
“While there’s definitely signs of isolated and temporary tightness in the labor market,” Shierholz said, “a lot of the huge complaints that we’re seeing really are about businesses being frustrated that they can’t find workers at extremely low wages.”
If your business can’t survive even at slavery-level wages, you had better reassess your business model. Or maybe, just maybe, you should go out of business and not rely on poverty dependency to populate your workforce.
The number of women in the labor force fell by 64,000 in April, while the number of men increased by 493,000, Michael Madowitz, an economist at American Progress, pointed out to Yahoo Money.
“If there is a labor shortage, it’s all about women,” Madowitz tweeted on Friday after the jobs report.
Well, perhaps not exactly:
Scant difference between total unemployment (red) vs women unemployment (blue).
In Summary The purpose of a government is not to increase business profits or to maximize the wealth of the very richest among us.
Nor is the purpose of government to maximize employment.
The sole purpose of government is to protect and improve the lives of the people — all the people.
And since the majority is composed of people, whose lives most need improving — the poor and middle classes — government should focus on helping them rather than on punishing them for not accepting menial labor at starvation wages.
Unemployment is not a disease to be cured by punishing the victims, as the right-wing politicians wish.
Unemployment is a failure symptom of a Monetarily Sovereign government, despite having infinite financial assets, fails to use those asset to address in its primary purpose: To improve the lives of the people.
Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics. Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps: Ten Steps To Prosperity:
We are not born with governments and businesses. We create them. But why?
Why do people voluntarily allow themselves to be ruled by others? You might believe it is not necessarily voluntary, particularly in the case of dictatorial governments.
But there always are vastly more ruled than rulers, and if government was not what the ruled wanted — if government was a burden — they have the numerical power to rid themselves of this device.
Sometimes this happens. Sometimes the governed rise up and free themselves of dictators. And when they do, what happens?
They form another government.
So what is the purpose of this institution that virtually all humans and even some animals have adopted.?
It has persisted for millennia, so it clearly has an evolutionary advantage.
While one can list several specific purposes, there is one general, overall purpose of government:
The purpose of government is to improve the lives of the people.
Government is a form of mandated cooperation. Having a government says two things:
Cooperation is more efficient than working individually, and
Cooperation works better when there is leadership
So we give up our individual freedoms and rights to reap the benefits of cooperation and leadership. In that sense, businesses are very much like governments.
We form businesses because specialization is more efficient than the “jack-of-all-trades” who most often is “master-of-none.”
To accomplish this efficiency, businesses are formed as legal mini-governments, complete with rulers and the ruled.
Governments tell people what to do and what not to do, and the people allow this because it improves their lives.
Business owners and managers tell their people what to do and what not to do, and the people allow this, because it improves their lives.
The purpose of business is to improve the lives of the people.
That said, it is crucial not to confuse purpose with goal. While improving the lives of the people is the purpose of government and business, it is not the goal of government and business.
The goal of government and business is to improve the lives of the leaders.
The leaders accomplish this goal via several methods.
In analyzing government and business, we not only must consider purpose and goal but also, method. Governments essentially balance two methods: Providing benefits and applying force.
The benefits — food, clothing, shelter, medical care, entertainment — lead to acquiescence among the populace.
Government force — laws, police, military — does the same. Either way discourages action against the leaders.
Businesses also balance two methods: Providing benefits and force. The benefits are promotion, salary, and perks, while the force is demotion and firing.
Again, business and government use similar methods — the carrot and the stick — to reach their goals.
Keep the purpose, the goals, and the methods of business and government in mind as we discuss the following articles.
Yves here. Glad to see someone is calling out the Republican “You need to keep them hungry so they’ll turn up” approach to labor management.
Corporate profit share of GDP has been record highs for years, which means nearly two times the level Warren Buffett deemed to be unsustainably high in the early 2000s.
Time for corporate owners to pay a decent wage.
By Kenny Stancil, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
The U.S. Chamber of Congress blamed last month’s weak employment growth on the existence of a $300 weekly supplemental jobless benefit and began urging lawmakers to eliminate the federally enhanced unemployment payments that were extended through early September when congressional Democrats passed President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan.
“No. We don’t need to end [the additional] $300 a week in emergency unemployment benefits that workers desperately need,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in response to the grumbles of the nation’s largest business lobbying group.
“We need to end starvation wages in America.”
“If $300 a week is preventing employers from hiring low-wage workers there’s a simple solution,” Sanders added. “Raise your wages. Pay decent benefits.”
According to the Chamber’s analysis, the extra $300 unemployment insurance (UI) benefit results in roughly one in four recipients taking home more pay than they earned working.
In response to that claim, Sanders’ staff director Warren Gunnels said: “If one in four recipients are making more off unemployment than they did working, that’s not an indictment of $300 a week in UI benefits. It’s an indictment of corporations paying starvation wages.”
The problem: Government believes that the more benefits government gives to workers, the more likely the government’s goal — improving the lives of the political leaders by acquiring votes — will be reached.
Business believes that keeping salaries low will improve business’s goal of improving the lives of business leaders by increasing profits.
Today, Government benefits to the people are high enough that going to work provides little marginal benefit for many people.
The Republican proposed method is for the government to stop paying benefits, so that workers will be starved back to work, and business profits will keep increasing.
The Democratic proposed methodis for businesses to pay more — enough to tempt workers to forego government benefits, but this may reduce profits.
While both goals are different, and the methods may seem incompatible, the solution is mind-numbingly simple: Do both.
Rather than the current either/or of government benefits coming instead of business benefits, as unemployment compensation does, pay government benefits in addition to business benefits.
This would come under the heading:
Medicare for All, Social Security for All, Free College for All, etc.
A wage of $300 per week is at poverty levels. It is a starvation wage. It is an “abandon all hope” wage.
How a multi-billionaire, a person whose wealth measures up to $170 billion could countenance such a wage, is beyond cruel.
Do these people lack all sense of sympathy and empathy? Are they made of compassionless stone?
Well, yes. Compassion comes from Latin, and means “co-suffering,” as in “I feel your pain.” But how many of us really do feel someone else’s pain?
Keep in mind, the goal of business is to improve the lives of the leaders, and the leaders are certain that keeping costs down, which leads to keeping salaries down, will improve profits and thereby improve their lives.
“Raise your wages and benefits or flip your own damn burgers and sweep your own damn floors,” Gunnels added.
Other progressives like former labor secretary Robert Reich and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also chimed in.“We do not have a shortage of willing workers in this country,” Morris Pearl of the Patriotic Millionaires said in a Friday afternoon statement responding to the Chamber. “We have a shortage of employers who are willing to pay workers enough to live.”
“Claiming that today’s disappointing jobs report is a result of expanded unemployment insurance is nothing more than a cruel tactic to pressure the administration into helping companies that they represent to continue to underpay and exploit their workforce,” Pearl continued.
“Our leaders are supposed to be helping to increase wages for low paid workers, not helping employers to keep wages down.”
“Instead of blaming struggling workers,” Pearl continued, “large corporations that do not pay their employees a liveable wage… should take this moment to self-reflect.
Maybe—just maybe—paying their workers more than starvation wages would incentivize workers to reenter the workforce.”
Yes, this is all true, but it ignores the true goal of business: Profits that enrich the leaders.
One might argue that paying workers more will make the workers bigger consumers who in buying more will enrich companies, but that too ignores reality.
If Company “A” pays its workers more, those workers may spend more, but not necessarily with Company “A.”
If Ford raises wages, nothing says those newly enriched workers will, out of the goodness of their hearts, buy Fords.
The public has as little compassion as do the business executives. The people who formerly were myriad small-business customers, but now are Amazon customers, have proved that.
Loyalty is something honored more in the breach.
Writing for Jacobin earlier this week, Sandy Barnard noted that another overlooked factor is the increased morbidity rates among food and agricultural workers, which increased more than any other occupation during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Is big agriculture supposed to have such guilt that workers immediately are given raises? Dream on.
“Living, breathing people… have decided they do not want to risk their lives for $7.25 per hour and no health benefits,” Barnard wrote.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) responded to the Chamber’s call for an end to enhanced unemployment benefits by arguing that “the interests of big business are at war with the interests of the working class.”
And that is the fundamental problem. It is a war, with one side winning and the other sides losing.
The solution is for all sides — government, business, and the populace — to win.
Government can win — win votes, that is — by providing benefits.
Business can win by paying enough to attract workers — while remaining profitable. The populace can win by receiving benefits from both sides, from government and from business.
There absolutely will be no long-term solutions that involve either business, government, or the people losing.
The only intelligent solution is for all sides to get what they want, or at least to get enough of what they want. See the Ten Steps to Prosperity, below.
Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics. Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps: Ten Steps To Prosperity:
When I was in elementary school, way, way, way back in the 1940s (!), common knowledge was:
Drinking water during physical activity causes cramps.
Applying heat to sore muscles prevents stiffness.
Swimming in the summer causes polio.
We all knew these things to be true, while we looked back at previous generations and smirked at the people who believed in witches and a flat earth.
In the near future, generations will look back at us, and snicker at some of our beliefs, as expressed in the following AP article:
We see that the article was written, not by some uninformed amateur, but by the Associated Press’s Economics Writer.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Treasury Department says it will employ measures to avoid an unprecedented default on the national debtthis summer, but officials say those measures could be exhausted “much more quickly” than normal given the unusual circumstances of the global pandemic.
The national “debt” is the total of deposits into Treasury Security accounts. When you invest in a T-bill, T-note, or T-bond, you open a T-security account.
This account most closely resembles a bank safe-deposit box into which you deposit money. The money never leaves your box until you take it, just as the dollars never leave your T-security account until you take them.
The Treasury will continue to initiate the types of bookkeeping maneuvers it has used in the past to keep the government from breaching a level that would trigger a default on the massive national debt.
The Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and Congress all are agencies of the federal government. Among them, they have created all the rules regarding federal finances.
Those “bookkeeping maneuvers” are under the absolute control of the federal government. Nothing can “trigger a default” unless the federal government wishes it.
“In light of the substantial COVID-related uncertainty about receipts and outlays in the coming month, it is very difficult to predict how long extraordinary measures might last,” Brian Smith, Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary for federal finance said.
They are not “extraordinary” measures. They simply would be bookkeeping adjustments. The federal government created its byzantine bookkeeping system to suit its unique needs, and this system arbitrarily is changed whenever the federal government wishes to change it.
No set of circumstances ever can force the federal government to “default” on any of its financial obligations.
The government has been able to borrowenormous sums of money to finance trillions of dollars of support during the pandemic because the limit on borrowing has been suspended. But after July 31, the limit will return to whatever debt level exists at that time.
The federal government has the infinite ability to create its own sovereign currency, the U.S. dollar. In the 1780s, the federal government created from thin air, an arbitrary number of U.S. dollars and gave each dollar an arbitrary value.
Since then, the government arbitrarily has created trillions of U.S. dollars, and has given those dollars arbitrary values.
Having this infinite ability eliminates any need to borrow dollars. And indeed, the U.S. federal government does not borrow.
T-bills, T-notes, and T-bonds do not represent borrowing. They are deposits into accounts, the purposes of which are:
To provide a safe parking place for unused dollars, which helps stabilize the dollar, and
To help the Federal Reserve control interest rates which helps to control inflation.
The government does not touch the dollars in those accounts. It does not use those dollars to pay its debts.
To pay off the misnamed “borrowing,” the government simply returns the dollars in the accounts.
The so-called debt “limit” too, is an arbitrary number, that Congress can (and many times has) increased at any time it wishes.
The national debt subject to the limit now stands at a record $28.1 trillion. That amount covers debt the government owes to itself in the form of commitments to Social Security and other government trust funds. The amount of the debt that is held by the public currently totals $22.1 trillion, an amount slightly higher than 100% of the entire economy and heights not seen since the huge borrowing the government did in the 1940s to finance World War II.
The fact that deposits into T-security accounts exceed Gross Domestic Product is relevant of nothing. This is known as the Debt/GDP ratio, which though often quoted, has no meaning whatsoever.
It predicts nothing, and it evaluates nothing. It does not indicate the past, current, or future health of the economy.
It is no better an economic measure than would be the number of runs scored by the Chicago Cubs in the 2nd inning of their next game.
Borrowing has soared in recent years to finance huge budget deficits that reflected increased spending on domestic and military programs in budget deals then-President Donald Trump reached with Congress and also to cover the costs of Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut approved by Congress in December 2017.
The federal government does not borrow, and so called “borrowing” does not finance federal spending. The federal government finances its spending by creating dollars, ad hoc. The more it spends, the more dollars it creates.
Spending is the federal government’s method for creating dollars.
In its infinite wisdom, Congress created rules that require the issuance of T-securities to equal in value the net total of federal government deficits (the excess of spending vs. income).
Because these rules are obsolete (if they ever had any value), the government, rather than eliminating the rules, instituted a “cheat.” One branch of the government (the Federal Reserve) creates from thin air, dollars to deposit into T-security accounts, to satisfy the needs of a useless rule.
Thus, the Federal Reserve owns about $6 trillion of U.S. “debt.” If need be, the Federal Reserve could own all of U.S. “debt,” or the entire “debt” system could be eliminated.
Over the past year, the higher deficits have reflected the trillions of dollars the government has spent to provide support during the pandemic-triggered recession. In the latest package, President Joe Biden got Congress to approve $1.9 trillion in March to provide $1,400 payments to individuals and other types of support for individuals and small businesses.
The President and Congress simply passed laws that create spending. No law was made regarding the funding of this spending, because no law was necessary. Federal spending creates its own funding.
Treasury officials did not specify what measures it will employ if Congress has not acted by the July 31 deadline to either raise the borrowing limit or simply suspend the limit for a period of time.What Treasury essentially uses book-keeping maneuvers to avoid a debt default. They basically entail withdrawing money invested in government accounts such as the fund that covers government pensions. The money is always replaced with any lost interest once the debt limit standoff is resolved.
There is no real “debt.” There is no real burden on the government or on taxpayers. It’s all arbitrary juggling of the books. The government owns the books and all the laws. It can do whatever it wishes.
Congress has never railed to deal with the debt limit by the deadline although in 2011 the standoff between Republicans and the Obama administration was so prolonged that Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, downgraded a portion of the country’s AAA credit rating for the first time in history.
Standard & Poors made fools of themselves. At one point several U.S. corporations was given a higher credit rating than the U.S. government. Consider what would have happened to these corporations had the U.S government defaulted. The corporations’ money and their credit rating would have become worthless, or near so.
No domestic entity can have better credit than the U.S. government.
Treasury said it expects to borrow $463 billion in the current April-June quarter which will be part of its plans to borrow $2.28 trillion for the full budget year, which ends Sept. 30.The $463 billion represents a significant jump from the government’s initial estimate three months ago that it would need to borrow just $95 billion in the current quarter. The change was attributed to passage of the most recent virus relief bill of $1.9 trillion in March.The government ran up a record $3.1 trillion budget deficit last year, reflecting the COVID relief spending and a drop in revenues caused by the recession. Private economists believe the deficit for the current budget year will be even higher, possibly hitting $3.3 trillion.
Those budget deficits are nothing more than the number of dollars the federal government plans to add to GDP.
GDP = Federal Spending + Non-federal Spending + Net Exports
The more the federal government spends, the greater is GDP, the primary measure of the economy.
Those who oppose federal spending are knowingly or unknowingly opposing economic growth.
Unlike you and me, and unlike your state, county, and city, the federal government does not use revenue. In fact, the federal government destroys all income it receives.To pay its bills, the federal government creates new dollars, ad hoc.
Put these facts together:
The only way to cut federal “debt” is to cut federal spending and/or to increase federal taxes.
By formula, cutting Federal Spending cuts GDP
Increasing taxes cuts Non-federal Spending, which cuts GDP
Therefore, the math is absolutely clear: Cutting the federal debt cuts GDP.
Those who try to reduce the so-called federal “debt” are, in fact, sabotaging the American economy. There is no way to reduce the federal debt, or even to keep it level (aka “balance the budget”) without forcing America into a recession (if we are lucky) or a depression.
This is demonstrated by history our history of debt reductions:
1804-1812: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 48%. Depression began 1807.
1817-1821: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 29%. Depression began 1819.
1823-1836: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 99%. Depression began 1837.
1852-1857: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 59%. Depression began 1857.
1867-1873: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 27%. Depression began 1873.
1880-1893: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 57%. Depression began 1893.
1920-1930: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 36%. Depression began 1929.
1997-2001: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 15%. Recession began 2001.
When federal debt growth declines, we have recessions (vertical gray bars), which are cured by increases in federal debt growth.The Myths Future Generations Will Laugh About
The federal government is too big
The Debt/GDP ratio is too high
Federal spending is “Socialism” (Socialism isn’t federal spending. It’s federal ownership and control over business).
The deficit or debt should be reduced
We should have a federal “balanced budget.”
The federal government is spending beyond its means.
Federal taxes “pay for” federal spending
Personal finance or state/local government finance are like federal finance.
Limits on federal deficit spending are “prudent.”
We don’t need additional federal spending.
We can’t afford programs that benefit the middle and lower-income groups (Elimination of FICA, Social Security for All, Medicare for All, Free College for All, Food and Housing supplements).
The federal government should not “bail out” the state governments.
All of the above are indicators of economic ignorance, equally ignorant to not drinking water when you exercise.
P.S. No sooner did I finish writing the above article than I came across this 100% hunk of bullshit:
Lord, have mercy.
…………………………………………………………………………
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
[ Monetary Sovereignty, Twitter: @rodgermitchell, Search: #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell ]THE SOLE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT IS TO IMPROVE AND PROTECT THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE. The most important problems in economics involve:
Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics. Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps: Ten Steps To Prosperity:
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 