How Screwed is the World Economy?

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Bingo! Du bisst sehr klug mein alte. Darwinian selection is what will keep the system honest in the long run.

ruveyn

This was a problem with the eastern European economies under soviet rule: I worked with some engineers of the former GDR after the fall of the wall. I must say they were certainly not less clever or educated than their West-German colleagues. But: If a company in West-Germany had one secretary, they had five and because they could not get fired, so they simulated work.

One worked in Leipzig for the rail and told me that they declared at least ones a day documents as "secret" (engineering stuff of railway stations and lines ...) just to have an excuse to send two secretaries (because you couldn't trust just one) to Berlin with a shopping list to buy in Berlin items you could not get in Leipzig. So two secretaries were de-facto fully employed to ease the results of the system of low productivity, which they made by this way even worst.

This is not a problem of Marxism. Inefficient working behaviours do need to be addressed. But in a truly Socialist society where the accumulation of wealth is not the goal, goods and services are produced on a needs basis. So it is entirely plausible that workers may only need to work lets say 10 hours a week. I am not an economist so I am not going to attempt to explain the inner workings of a socialist economy any more than I can explain the workings of a Capitalist one.

(I have spent 3 days trying to come to terms with the arguments over the labour theory of value, the best I can come up with is there appears to be a misinterpretation of Marx -not helped that he died before the first serious criticisms of his theory were published. According to Steve Keen -associate professor of economics at the Uni of Western Sydney - some of this misunderstanding was understandable due to papers emerging later in the 20th century and some were just wilful misrepresentation's. Keen by the way identifies as a Post Keynesian Economist. There are many others that share this view)

Getting people to pull their weight is important, however that does not mean everyone must stand at a machine and produce 100 widgets per day, there are many occupations that are vital to a society and yet have no measurable worth.

The constant rolling out of 'people are by nature lazy and unless they have a major stake in something they will not value it' is really annoying. It is often used to define the faults of the Eastern Bloc and by default communism. The Eastern bloc was a totalitarian dictatorship with a major disconnect between the rulers and the rest of the population, of course in a situation like this if you give someone a permanent job they will find the best way to do as little as possible. This behaviour in no way defines Socialism

The need is unlimited - Marx rejected Lassalle's idea of unlimited needs which are growing with the possibilities of a society as "petit bourgeois"; my opinion is that Lassalle was by far the less deep thinker, but had much better idea about the nature of the human mind.



The human greed, even not present in all of our species, is one of the main motor of human progress. Why some the very rich one do still a lot of work to get richer? Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto (and later too) some high songs on globalisation. Why, do think, the East India Company has been founded? Why railway line were build? Why the computer became a appliance in the most households and did not stay in laboratories? Human greed!



The development of an non-homogeneous workforce was after Marx developed his theories.

Last edited by Dussel on 08 Mar 2009, 9:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

No, the Labour Theory of Value predates Marx. Even Adam Smith held to it. The issue is not that Marx was misinterpreted, but that the labour theory of value is simply wrong and modern Marxists have not adjusted their ideology to account for this. And a marginalist theory of value really makes socialism look quite stupid.

I don't have time to respond to the rest of your post right now.

By the way, why are you even bothering to defend Marxism so insistently? You're just a leftist pragmatist, you don't have any stake in whether Marx was right or wrong.

WTF

I couldn't resist... I've finally found a worse insult for you than "commie bastard."

You bastard! I have been f*****g ropeable for the last five minutes

Am i the only one thinking that instead of being a bad thing, the recession is merely going to put us back before the abuse had begun? Because you know, what good is all that economic growth if there was only one thing supporting it? =/

Well if you think that all we are going through is a gentle correction then you are correct. If on the other hand you believe that we are facing a depression worse than the 30's then no, we are in for major trouble.

Most governments are trying to tell their populations that this will all be over by mid next year. From what I have read and heard this is complete garbage.

This is only a vague guess but I suspect the problem has deeper roots than the thuggish behavior of the financial sector of the developed nations. What is going on is a total re-alignment of human labor management throughout the world. The developing world led by China and India are taking over both production of manufactured goods and science and design and development and the work force in developed countries suddenly are forced to compete with cheap labor which is just as competent as they are. There seems to be a fundamental blindness in developed countries that does not recognize that the market consists of well paid labor and when labor cannot purchase what industry produces the system collapses. This is a major change and may take decades to resolve.

Call me a pessimist, but I think we're in for the long haul. If I had to guess, I would say unemployment would peak in early 2013 (probably at around 20%) and not come back down to pre-recession levels until about the end of the next decade (2018?).

That agrees with what I am hearing from non politically aligned economists.

So we're looking at great depression number 2 huh? Joy...
Let's just hope we don't fall right into world war 3 to bring us out of it.
On the plus side, this means that thirty years from now, historians will look at bush jr. the same way they look at herbert hoover, so that's good

I am an optimist. Maybe 20 years from now. Be prepared for a lengthy dark night.

ruveyn

I think Herbert Hoover was much more accomplished than W. Bush. Hoover didn't fail at everything he did. He because president on his own accord, not his father's. He actually helped feed people during WWI, and was a successful businessman. Nothing Bush did was a success.

I also don't think that Hoover caused the Depression. He didn't help it much, but he didn't cause it.