125 comments on I Dream of GINI - Wealth (In)equality after Resource Depletion
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125 comments on I Dream of GINI - Wealth (In)equality after Resource Depletion
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When all work is done by manual labor, every person tends to have value, based on the manual labor he or she can perform. The person tends to feel a sense of accomplishment for having "made" something as well.
Once most of the physical work is done by fossil fueled machines, manual labor has much less value. The world is sorted into different classes of people--the few who design the machines; the few who finance the machines; the few who plan and organize what the machines do. The many people who would have done manual jobs in the past are no longer really needed, except for minimum wage jobs. Everyone who participates in the system sees so little of the total, that they feel little sense of accomplishment, when they have completed their piece of the total. The Gini coefficient becomes quite high.
Over time, I think we are going to substitute time and labor for energy/money. Part of this will be due to resource constraints, but I think we have reached level in aggregate (at least in US), where substituting time will actually be healthy for us - we are too cognitively overloaded and habituated to immediate larger reward that comes from optimizing dollar return on time - it is making people restless and anxious...
I'm a bit worried that the expectations of the masses based on the promises of an economic recovery will be unfulfilled, leading necessarily to civil unrest and much worse.
I spent a rather depressing afternoon at a local "Green Fair" today. I talked with a lot of overly (in my view)optimistic people who seemed sure that the great economic recovery is just around the corner. Interestingly enough not one of the vendors of so called green products had ever heard of the concept of peak oil and had not the slightest idea how it might affect their lives.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the current crop of kleptocrats in the Obama administration fail to deliver on their promise of a higher ratio of services rendered to fruits stolen because of their simple inability to do so. I strongly suspect that the downtrodden commoners will be most decidedly unegalitarian in their anger.
It depends, perhaps, on just what those expectations are. From what I see, the evidence is that people do not generally expect the level of wages and income and employment to be back where they were in 2007; most people I talk with realize that money will be tighter and the good times will be somewhat muted.
As for civil unrest, this is highly unlikely to come from the unemployed. It is far more likely to come from groups of people with bizarre and twisted "issues" (like the so-called birthers or tea-baggers). While it is true that there is a lot of violence in the society, most people just want peace and a sense of security--and leave the protests to fringe groups. And if society collapses, as some expect, and particularly the energy and food distribution systems, people will be far more likely to spend their time finding food and energy than in protesting or venting their anger.
I'm sure the sheep will go peacefully to the slaughter,as they always have.
Epochal change has never been achieved by a consensus among the sheep.Wolves are necessary for this task.
The current hierarchy are not wolves - more like rats.Like rats they will survive,in greater or lesser numbers,but their place is in their holes.Part of our present problems is that the rats have climbed to higher ground.A positional reset is in the offing.
>Epochal change has never been achieved by a consensus among the sheep.Wolves are >necessary for this task.
Hmm...what about the French/Russian/American revolutions? Humans aren't sheep and have a breaking point, even the downtrodden ones among us.
Ah, the 'counterexamples'. All organised by people just outside, or constrained to the lower levels of, the existing elites -- with a few key players already inside those elites. Of course, the revolutionaries enlisted the support of the 'downtrodden'.
Precisely! However I still believe that the problem is that unrest will follow because the masses are still being sold a basket of unfulfillable promises. They are being led to believe that their happiness depends on "THINGS", which they unfortunately will no longer be able to have. I hope that you are right that people only want a sense of security and peace, however it is the massive inequality of the few that have, compared to the majority that already do not, that has tipped the balance towards unrest historically.
I grew up in a simpler poorer society myself and agree with Nedge's perspective in Gail's most recent post up top "Life After the Crash: Lessons from Kenya". The reason they are happier is they do not have false expectations, we on the other hand are living in delusion and can't by definition be happy under these circumstances.
Unfortunately what you say about protest being left to fringe groups does not jive with the tremendous increase in the average Joe's going out and purchasing all the guns and ammunition they can find right now. Go talk to some gun dealers, business is booming (no pun intended), like never before. They can't keep guns and ammo in stock. I'm sure they think it will bring them peace and security and lot's of happiness. Me I'm just a little worried but I still refuse to have a gun of my own... well except for my spear gun for fishing.
Dear Nate
Were Plato and Aristotle considering slaves and women in their populations? Having read abit of the classics, I suspect not. I greatly fear that we see a recurrence of widespread slavery and a deterioration of women's rights as people attempt to shift some of the tedious, dirty and dangerous jobs that machines powered by fossil fuels do onto other people.
Good question. I hadn't thought of that and don't know the answer.
Plato and Aristotle came out of the conservative part of greek thought, after 5th Century Athens, which essentially defined the world we live in today, emerged. They are important because of Christian influence, especially Aristotle, as he was incorporated into church dogma.
They were part of the "Reagan Revolution" of Greece, after its creative downfall.
They were undemocratic elites, who advocated slavery and suppression of women.
Aristotle got just about everything wrong, although Plato's image of the Cave was brilliant.
Gail -
This sort of stuff has its origins at least as far back as Babylonian times, when it became apparent that the scribe who recorded the product of the laborers for the king had a much sweeter deal than the guy actually grunting it out. It soon became recognized that the closer you are to the money, the more likely you are to get some of it. Next came abstract money, then banking, and thence the mess we have today. This whole thing could almost be neatly wrapped up in a two-minute South Park episode.
By the way, I think it should be obvious that the reason that New York state has such a high disparity is solely because of New York City, a place that represents one of the world's greatest concentrations of wealth. An upstate dairy farmer has as much in common with an affluent New Yorker as I do a Martian.
Again, this gets back to my contention that political boundaries are totally artificially and arbitrary demarcations that have no basis in the reality of what actually transpires. One could get totally different results merely by drawing a whole different set of line on a map. Data accumulated on a state-by-state basis generates all sorts of artifacts.
I'm not certain that I understand your point, but it doesn't seem entirely right.
I look at the numerous manual jobs that are done now by people around me: (1) people who mow lawns and trim trees--these are certainly needed and are not necessarily minimum wage; (2) people who use the large machines are certainly in a sense doing manual labor; (3) plumbers work with their arms and hands--and given their wages, are both needed and definitely not minimum wage; (4) animal control officers and police, who often must run and chase offenders; (5) construction people certainly do manual labor, and not for minimum wage and are definitely needed--try paving roads sometime; (6) there are many, many people who work in the office by day, then labor in their gardens or tool sheds by night, doing manual labor for pleasure.
There are numerous manual work jobs that are both needed and high-wage--and many people actively delight in manual labor.
It is somewhat true that we regard brute force manual laborers as somehow "lower" than skilled workers, who are also often paid more. But there are numerous jobs that require both manual work and skills (try climbing up 100 or more steps to maintain a 3 MW wind turbine).
A few years ago I heard about illegal immigrants who would hang drywall. They were paid $40/day for 10 hours of work which was less than minimum wage. I consider hanging drywall to be construction work.