The main complication we Americans need to understand...

[dkf]

The first of those developments has been the steady entry into the world economy of successive waves of new export-oriented economies, beginning with Japan and the Asian tigers in the 1980s and peaking with China in the early 2000s, with more than two billion newly employable workers.  The integration of these high-savings, lower wage economies into the global economy, occurring as it did against the backdrop of dramatic productivity gains rooted in new information technologies and the globalization of corporate supply chains, decisively shifted the balance of global supply and demand.  

In consequence, the world economy now is beset by excess supplies of labor, capital, and productive capacity relative to global demand.

 This not only profoundly dims the prospects for business investment and greater net exports in the developed world — the only other two drivers of recovery when debt-deflation slackens domestic consumer demand.  It also puts the entire global economy at risk, owing to the central role that the U.S. economy still is relied on to play as the world’s consumer and borrower of last resort.  

http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_way_forward

[Vincardog]

1. The main complication we Americans need to understand is that EVERY TIME the taxes on the top

drop below 50% the rich act irresponsibly with all that money and create bubbles of bad speculative "investment".
WE are being sold a corporate model of how things work.
That model requires unending growth to be successful.
What the model disregards is the quality of life.
WE need to worry less about what is a good business model and more on what makes a HUMAN life more worth living.

[nineteen50]

2. That has always been

The concern about capitalism. With the last stage before
fascism being financial capitalism.

[opihimoimoi]

3. The main comp was letting them GOPers grab POWER....it was all over after that....

only ray of sun is Truth emerging

[leftstreet]

4. Once Americans 'understand' these 'complications,' what should they do?

:shrug:

[RandiFan1290]

5. Tax cuts for the rich!

Dismantle Social Security and Medicare!

[dkf]

8. That is the quandary, isn't it?

It's just that the situation seems so much more complicated than just us. Did it take American Corporations to do this or was it the inevitable result of the coming of age of the rest of the world? Could we really expect that Asia would have stayed backwards and never emerge? Maybe once Japan started to surge, it was only a matter of time before other countries started down the same path.

It used to be where we wanted to educate students from around the globe so they would go back to their countries and use what they learned. That is what Obama's father tried to do. But now that we've unleashed the labor from so many people all around the world we see the result of what happens to our workers.

Someone must have seen this coming. I wonder what the central planners behind all this think the end game is.

But it's not just an American problem. It's a global problem with global implications and possibly global instability.

I'm getting a headache thinking about it.

[jwirr]

17. At first when Japan emerged I thought it was funny that we did not

see that they would be as good at this game as we were. Not laughing any more. And it was those students that did take it back with them.

What really scares me is that all of this global labor is going to lower the bar on the standard of living in all countries eventually. Our way of life is already threatened and it does not help that the rich are not willing to do anything to help. Not even a European style safety net for health care.

My brother worked for an animal feed company called Mormons in the 1960s and went to a seminar in Salt Lake City. At this seminar they told the class that the age of manufacturing was over for the USA and that we would now be an information society. I am not sure what they meant by that but I think that was some of the ideas of our central planners.

IMO we are headed for a society very similar to that of my youth in the 1940s only urban instead of rural. And being urban is going to make it harder. At least I hope we are not heading back much further.

[Uncle Joe]

6. I believe they should also add government subsidized sustainable energy development to

the Pillar 1 solution.

Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, dkf.

[dkf]

11. Yeah it beats me why that wasn't priority 1.

It's something that needs to be done.

[SixthSense]

7. There's no such thing as "excess supplies of labor"

There is simply unutilized labor. You cannot tell me that any person exists whose labor can be considered "excess", that no matter how he labors he cannot contribute some value to the world. It's an absurd formulation which begs the question who the intended audience of the piece is.

[dkf]

9. What is funny is that we make the unemployed search 24/7 for jobs that don't exist.

Instead of letting them tutor kids or clean up schools or something actually productive like retraining.

[leftstreet]

10. You don't think people who tutor kids or clean up schools should be paid?

Interesting

[dkf]

12. We can't even pay for teachers.

But people who are getting unemployment are getting funded anyway. Better they contribute than not.

[leftstreet]

13. Ah. I figured this was about Obama's forced volunteer labor program

Good luck with that

Business gets a $$ incentive to 'retrain' workers for jobs you claim we don't even have. No wait, you said we need janitorial and education workers. wut?

[dkf]

14. If I was unemployed for a few years I hope I would be doing something like this.

I would much rather be given the opportunity to help out my community than spend futile hours, days, and months on end looking for a job that doesn't exist.

That would drive me nuts.

But that is my preference and I understand where some might feel they Are being taken advantage of, but to each their own right?

[leftstreet]

16. There are no jobs. There are plenty of jobs (for volunteers). Wut?

:shrug:

[Spider Jerusalem]

15. Japan? More like the '50's and '60's.

Japanese industry built up to the point where they were in an excellent position to take a tremendous amount of market share from domestic US companies in car sales, when Detroit didn't adjust rapidly enough to the '70's oil shocks, and in consumer electronics; that didn't happen overnight or come out of nowhere, it was the result of decades of infrastructure investment and development of a class of highly trained and efficient industrial labour. And China? That you can trace back forty years or more; China has been slowly growing and modernising since Mao and the Great Leap Forward, and the seeds of its present position were sown by Richard Nixon opening relations with Communist China in the early 1970's.

And I'm not really sure that maintaining a model of high consumer demand is a good thing or really workable over the long term; it quite honestly seems like the height of stupidity considering that a growth-oriented economic model is going to hit a wall sooner rather than later in a world of finite resources (and we're already living with the consequences of unfettered growth and consumption; climate change? which isn't yet as bad as it will be).

[saras]

18. It's time for the consumer economy to end. There is no hope of ever making it sustainable.

The problem with letting "jobs" rise to the top of the agenda is that the old system is genuinely incapable of ever creating them again. That era is over, until such time as we abandon automation and technology.

We really need to come up with a better concept than corporations and jobs to manage the world's resources. But there's little or no historical evidence that societies change that radically. They are generally just replaced by other societies and values.

Does anyone remember that the Portuguese once ruled the high seas? Does anyone remember what their culture was like, or what their values were?