Hilo sesudo de economí­a polí­tica, anarquismo y empresarios hijosdeputa

Iniciado por Lacenaire, Octubre 27, 2010, 11:30:15 AM

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Lacenaire

Cita de: javi en Diciembre 12, 2018, 01:29:31 PM
Cita de: Gipsy King en Diciembre 12, 2018, 11:08:56 AM
Cita de: javi en Diciembre 05, 2018, 10:45:23 PM
Macron, como anteriores presidentes gabachos, se ha echado atrás en el aumento de los impuestos al diesel a partir de enero, que también afectaba a electricidad y gas, retrasa la medida 6 meses, a la llegada del verano.

Los del chaleco no tienen intención de deponer su actitud, más bien al contrario.

Preveo otros cuatro-cinco años de no hacer nada, ni una sola reforma, se asustarán viendo que el FN suma más y mas, y que llegará uno nuevo al poder prometiendo regenerar la República de arriba a abajo para volver a la salida.

Yo veo a Lepen ya en el Elíseo.

Es muy cachondo porque la promesa de más gasto pone en un brete a la Comisión, que está cebándose sobre Italia, pone malos ojos a España y ahora llegan los gabachos a liarla

¿Y Lepen qué ofrecerá salvo lo mismo que Salvini? Exoculpismo, superavits imposibles, mano dura y tal. Habrá qué ver cómo progresa la economía italiana pero me da que de este ciclo de gobernantes de feria van a salir escenarios mucho peores. Si eso servirá para escarmentar a otros países, no sé. Lo dudo.

PP2000

Cita de: Baku en Diciembre 04, 2018, 07:39:18 PM
A ver si os creíais que lo de la recuperación económica iba a ser para todos.

Pero, vamos, que lo que diga Vox de los negros que nos quitan los empleos y eso.

"Nos quitan los empleos" que no queremos pero soportamos con sueldos congelados, horarios ampliables y jefes odiosos metafóricamente (no se cuantos negros sabrán a al vez arquitectura naval, nivel aceptable de cuántica y me meo en Patillotes en termodinámica estadística)... que la solución en realidad es llevarse la SEAT a Marrakech, PERO A VER SI HAY HUEVOS

Dan

Usan mal la estadística para lo de la natalidad, no hay tanto drama como lo pintan (o no peor de lo que había), pero me resulta curioso ver cómo cohabitan lechalmente en las redes los que piensan que nadie puede hacer que la economía se planifique en mayor o menor medida a la par que protestan porque sus sueldos son una mierda y no pueden multiplicarse, con el punto redondo final de que ay las pensiones, pero que no vengan de fuera.

javi

Es eso que algunos han interiorizado muy bien y van viviendo del cuento vía conferencias o talleres de "los empleos del futuro no se han inventado" (o descubierto), no, qué va, lo mismo decían hace 30 y la mayoría son lo mismo, aunque en inglés que viste más.

Nos han quitado los empleos, pero desgraciadamente no han sido los de la inmigración desbocada. El sector financiero, por ejemplo, desde el inicio de la crisis se ha cepillado miles de oficinas y empleos cualificados.
Running is life. Anything before or after is just waiting

PP2000

Cita de: javi en Diciembre 12, 2018, 10:29:39 PM
Es eso que algunos han interiorizado muy bien y van viviendo del cuento vía conferencias o talleres de "los empleos del futuro no se han inventado" (o descubierto), no, qué va, lo mismo decían hace 30 y la mayoría son lo mismo, aunque en inglés que viste más.

Nos han quitado los empleos, pero desgraciadamente no han sido los de la inmigración desbocada. El sector financiero, por ejemplo, desde el inicio de la crisis se ha cepillado miles de oficinas y empleos cualificados.

Los empleos del futuro hoy son, claramente, hablar de preparar los empleos de los desempleados de mañana (y es un sinvivir de "coaching tours", "gestión de grande en SAP", "gestión de las emociones torcidas a ver si al final follas o al menos generas plusvalía a tu empresa, un poco, pero algo"... y así se pasan las grandes corporaciones media vida... mira, mejor que quitarse a la casta viejuna humana de encima y quebrar inmediatamente después -lo que ahora se llama "core" y antes era "laxpertis" pues ya es...

javi

Este destino no es el futuro, sino que compone nuestro presente, y de esto va también lo que se ha llamado precariedad, que va mucho más allá de los contratos eventuales. Un buen ejemplo es el de esos empleados bancarios que creían que, por haber conseguido un puesto de trabajo en una sucursal, tendrían trabajo para toda la vida, como sus predecesores, y que hoy son agentes comerciales, taxistas o desempleados; o esos profesionales que gozaron de años en puestos decentes hasta que fueron devueltos al paro y ya nadie les contrata; o esos emprendedores que creyeron que podrían labrarse un porvenir gracias a una buena idea y hoy se buscan la vida con chapuzas; o esos jóvenes que están hoy en las facultades y que todavía creen que en el futuro podrán ser algo más que comerciales o que camareros; o esos trabajadores que no se quieren jubilar porque saben que cobrando únicamente la pensión no podrán mantener ni de lejos su actual nivel de vida. Todos ellos pensaban ser clase media, y se han dado cuenta de que simplemente estaban en una época de excedencia de la pobreza.

https://blogs.elconfidencial.com/alma-corazon-vida/tribuna/2018-12-17/pobres-excedencia-clase-media-derecha-izquierda_1708122/

Running is life. Anything before or after is just waiting

Lacenaire

Punto de partida: la maquinización es demasiado rápida para el mercado laboral y deja a mucha gente detrás. ¿Solución? Vamos a formarnos más, mejor, más rápido, para ver si le damos alcance. Aceleracionismo inconsiente.

https://www.elconfidencial.com/alma-corazon-vida/2019-01-09/nueva-clase-social-perdedores_1745778/

45rpm

En este debate suelen ningunear el consumo. Dicen el sapiens productivo va a ser sustituido por la maquina. Supongamos que si. Y quien va a cosumir los productos del robot? Ah, sustitucion progresiva, del tipo que venimos implementando desde la rev industrial. Pues entonces nada nuevo bajo el sol excepto que el Harari vende muchos libros (por otro lado muy entretenidos)

Lacenaire

Steven Pinker's ideas are fatally flawed. These eight graphs show why.
JEREMY LENT 21 May 2018
It's time to reclaim the mantle of "Progress" for progressives.



Steven Pinker giving a lecture to Humanists UK, February 22 2018. Credit: Bhaawest via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

In Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, published earlier this year, Steven Pinker argues that the human race has never had it so good as a result of values he attributes to the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. He berates those who focus on what is wrong with the world's current condition as pessimists who only help to incite regressive reactionaries. Instead, he glorifies the dominant neoliberal, technocratic approach to solving the world's problems as the only one that has worked in the past and will continue to lead humanity on its current triumphant path.

His book has incited strong reactions, both positive and negative. On one hand, Bill Gates has, for example, effervesced that "It's my new favorite book of all time." On the other hand, Pinker has been fiercely excoriated by a wide range of leading thinkers for writing a simplistic, incoherent paean to the dominant world order. John Gray, in the New Statesman, calls it "embarrassing" and "feeble"; David Bell, writing in The Nation, sees it as "a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively optimistic vision of human history"; and George Monbiot, in The Guardian, laments the "poor scholarship" and "motivated reasoning" that "insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend." (Full disclosure: Monbiot recommends my book, The Patterning Instinct, instead.)

In light of all this, you might ask, what is left to add? Having read his book carefully, I believe it's crucially important to take Pinker to task for some dangerously erroneous arguments he makes. Pinker is, after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of global society. He spoke to the world's elite this year at the World's Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he calls "political correctness," and has been named one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World Today." Since his work offers an intellectual rationale for many in the elite to continue practices that imperil humanity, it needs to be met with a detailed and rigorous response.

Besides, I agree with much of what Pinker has to say. His book is stocked with seventy-five charts and graphs that provide incontrovertible evidence for centuries of progress on many fronts that should matter to all of us: an inexorable decline in violence of all sorts along with equally impressive increases in health, longevity, education, and human rights. It's precisely because of the validity of much of Pinker's narrative that the flaws in his argument are so dangerous. They're concealed under such a smooth layer of data and eloquence that they need to be carefully unraveled. That's why my response to Pinker is to meet him on his own turf: in each section, like him, I rest my case on hard data exemplified in a graph.

This discussion is particularly needed because progress is, in my view, one of the most important concepts of our time. I see myself, in common parlance, as a progressive. Progress is what I, and others I'm close to, care about passionately. Rather than ceding this idea to the coterie of neoliberal technocrats who constitute Pinker's primary audience, I believe we should hold it in our steady gaze, celebrate it where it exists, understand its true causes, and most importantly, ensure that it continues in a form that future generations on this earth can enjoy. I hope this piece helps to do just that.

Graph 1: Overshoot
In November 2017, around the time when Pinker was likely putting the final touches on his manuscript, over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued a dire warning to humanity. Because of our overconsumption of the world's resources, they declared, we are facing "widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss." They warned that time is running out: "Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory."



Figure 1: Three graphs from World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice.

They included nine sobering charts and a carefully worded, extensively researched analysis showing that, on a multitude of fronts, the human impact on the earth's biological systems is increasing at an unsustainable rate. Three of those alarming graphs are shown here: the rise in CO2 emissions; the decline in available freshwater; and the increase in the number of ocean dead zones from artificial fertilizer runoff.

This was not the first such notice. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1992, 1,700 scientists (including the majority of living Nobel laureates) sent a similarly worded warning to governmental leaders around the world, calling for a recognition of the earth's fragility and a new ethic arising from the realization that "we all have but one lifeboat." The current graphs starkly demonstrate how little the world has paid attention to this warning since 1992.

Taken together, these graphs illustrate ecological overshoot: the fact that, in the pursuit of material progress, our civilization is consuming the earth's resources faster than they can be replenished. Overshoot is particularly dangerous because of its relatively slow feedback loops: if your checking account balance approaches zero, you know that if you keep writing checks they will bounce. In overshoot, however, it's as though our civilization keeps taking out bigger and bigger overdrafts to replenish the account, and then we pretend these funds are income and celebrate our continuing "progress." In the end, of course, the money runs dry and it's game over.

Pinker claims to respect science, yet he blithely ignores fifteen thousand scientists' desperate warning to humanity. Instead, he uses the blatant rhetorical technique of ridicule to paint those concerned about overshoot as part of a "quasi-religious ideology... laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer." He then uses a couple of the most extreme examples he can find to create a straw-man to buttress his caricature. There are issues worthy of debate on the topic of civilization and sustainability, but to approach a subject of such seriousness with emotion-laden rhetoric is morally inexcusable and striking evidence of Monbiot's claim that Pinker "insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend."

When Pinker does get serious on the topic, he promotes Ecomodernism as the solution: a neoliberal, technocratic belief that a combination of market-based solutions and technological fixes will magically resolve all ecological problems. This approach fails, however, to take into account the structural drivers of overshoot: a growth-based global economy reliant on ever-increasing monetization of natural resources and human activity. Without changing this structure, overshoot is inevitable. Transnational corporations, which currently constitute sixty-nine of the world's hundred largest economies, are driven only by increasing short-term financial value for their shareholders, regardless of the long-term impact on humanity. As freshwater resources decline, for example, their incentive is to buy up what remains and sell it in plastic throwaway bottles or process it into sugary drinks, propelling billions in developing countries toward obesity through sophisticated marketing. In fact, until an imminent collapse of civilization itself, increasing ecological catastrophes are likely to enhance the GDP of developed countries even while those in less developed regions suffer dire consequences.

Graphs 2 and 3: progress for whom?

Which brings us to another fundamental issue in Pinker's narrative of progress: who actually gets to enjoy it? Much of his book is devoted to graphs showing worldwide progress in quality in life for humanity as a whole. However, some of his omissions and misstatements on this topic are very telling.

At one point, Pinker explains that, "Despite the word's root, humanism doesn't exclude the flourishing of animals, but this book focuses on the welfare of humankind." That's convenient, because any non-human animal might not agree that the past sixty years has been a period of flourishing. In fact, while the world's GDP has increased 22-fold since 1970, there has been a vast die-off of the creatures with whom we share the earth. As shown in Figure 2, human progress in material consumption has come at the cost of a 58% decline in vertebrates, including a shocking 81% reduction of animal populations in freshwater systems. For every five birds or fish that inhabited a river or lake in 1970, there is now just one.



Figure 2: Reduction in abundance in global species since 1970. Source: WWF Living Plant Report, 2016.

But we don't need to look outside the human race for Pinker's selective view of progress. He is pleased to tell us that "racist violence against African Americans... plummeted in the 20th century, and has fallen further since." What he declines to report is the drastic increase in incarceration rates for African Americans during that same period (Figure 3). An African American man is now six times more likely to be arrested than a white man, resulting in the dismal statistic that one in every three African American men can currently expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. The grim takeaway from this is that racist violence against African Americans has not declined at all, as Pinker suggests. Instead, it has become institutionalized into U.S. national policy in what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.



Figure 3: Historical incarceration rates of African-Americans. Source: The Washington Post.

Graph 4: A rising tide lifts all boats?

This brings us to one of the crucial errors in Pinker's overall analysis. By failing to analyze his top-level numbers with discernment, he unquestioningly propagates one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: that "a rising tide lifts all the boats"—a phrase he unashamedly appropriates for himself as he extols the benefits of inequality. This was the argument used by the original instigators of neoliberal laissez-faire economics, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to cut taxes, privatize industries, and slash public services with the goal of increasing economic growth.

Pinker makes two key points here. First, he argues that "income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-being," pointing to recent research that people are comfortable with differential rewards for others depending on their effort and skill. However, as Pinker himself acknowledges, humans do have a powerful predisposition toward fairness. They want to feel that, if they work diligently, they can be as successful as someone else based on what they do, not on what family they're born into or what their skin color happens to be. More equal societies are also healthier, which is a condition conspicuously missing from the current economic model, where the divide between rich and poor has become so gaping that the six wealthiest men in the world (including Pinker's good friend, Bill Gates) now own as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the world's population.

Pinker's fallback might, then, be his second point: the rising tide argument, which he extends to the global economy. Here, he cheerfully recounts the story of how Branko Milanović, a leading ex-World Bank economist, analyzed income gains by percentile across the world over the twenty-year period 1988–2008, and discovered something that became widely known as the "Elephant Graph," because its shape resembled the profile of an elephant with a raised trunk. Contrary to popular belief about rising global inequality, it seemed to show that, while the top 1% did in fact gain more than their fair share of income, lower percentiles of the global population had done just as well. It seemed to be only the middle classes in wealthy countries that had missed out.

This graph, however, is virtually meaningless because it calculates growth rates as a percent of widely divergent income levels. Compare a Silicon Valley executive earning $200,000/year with one of the three billion people currently living on $2.50 per day or less. If the executive gets a 10% pay hike, she can use the $20,000 to buy a new compact car for her teenage daughter. Meanwhile, that same 10% increase would add, at most, a measly 25 cents per day to each of those three billion. In Graph 4, Oxfam economist Mujeed Jamaldeen shows the original "Elephant Graph" (blue line) contrasted with changes in absolute income levels (green line). The difference is stark.



Figure 4: "Elephant Graph" versus absolute income growth levels. Source: "From Poverty to Power," Muheed Jamaldeen.

The "Elephant Graph" elegantly conceals the fact that the wealthiest 1% experienced nearly 65 times the absolute income growth as the poorest half of the world's population. Inequality isn't, in fact, decreasing at all, but going extremely rapidly the other way. Jamaldeen has calculated that, at the current rate, it would take over 250 years for the income of the poorest 10% to merely reach the global average income of $11/day. By that time, at the current rate of consumption by wealthy nations, it's safe to say there would be nothing left for them to spend their lucrative earnings on. In fact, the "rising tide" for some barely equates to a drop in the bucket for billions of others.

Graph 5: Measuring genuine progress.
One of the cornerstones of Pinker's book is the explosive rise in income and wealth that the world has experienced in the past couple of centuries. Referring to the work of economist Angus Deaton, he calls it the "Great Escape" from the historic burdens of human suffering, and shows a chart (Figure 5, left) depicting the rise in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, which seems to say it all. How could anyone in their right mind refute that evidence of progress?



Figure 5: GDP per capita compared with GPI. Source: Kubiszewski et al. "Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress." Ecological Economics, 2013.

There is no doubt that the world has experienced a transformation in material wellbeing in the past two hundred years, and Pinker documents this in detail, from the increased availability of clothing, food, and transportation, to the seemingly mundane yet enormously important decrease in the cost of artificial light. However, there is a point where the rise in economic activity begins to decouple from wellbeing. In fact, GDP merely measures the rate at which a society is transforming nature and human activities into the monetary economy, regardless of the ensuing quality of life. Anything that causes economic activity of any kind, whether good or bad, adds to GDP. An oil spill, for example, increases GDP because of the cost of cleaning it up: the bigger the spill, the better it is for GDP.

This divergence is played out, tragically, across the world every day, and is cruelly hidden in global statistics of rising GDP when powerful corporate and political interests destroy the lives of the vulnerable in the name of economic "progress." In just one of countless examples, a recent report in The Guardian describes how indigenous people living on the Xingu River in the Amazon rainforest were forced off their land to make way for the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex in Altamira, Brazil. One of them, Raimundo Brago Gomes, tells how "I didn't need money to live happy. My whole house was nature... I had my patch of land where I planted a bit of everything, all sorts of fruit trees. I'd catch my fish, make manioc flour... I raised my three daughters, proud of what I was. I was rich." Now, he and his family live among drug dealers behind barred windows in Brazil's most violent city, receiving a state pension which, after covering rent and electricity, leaves him about 50 cents a day to feed himself, his wife, daughter, and grandson. Meanwhile, as a result of his family's forced entry into the monetary economy, Brazil's GDP has risen.

Pinker is aware of the crudeness of GDP as a measure, but uses it repeatedly throughout his book because, he claims, "it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing." This is not, however, what has been discovered when economists have adjusted GDP to incorporate other major factors that affect human flourishing. One prominent alternative measure, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), reduces GDP for negative environmental factors such as the cost of pollution, loss of primary forest and soil quality, and social factors such as the cost of crime and commuting. It increases the measure for positive factors missing from GDP such as housework, volunteer work, and higher education. Sixty years of historical GPI for many countries around the world have been measured, and the results resoundingly refute Pinker's claim of GDP's correlation with wellbeing. In fact, as shown by the purple line in Figure 5 (right), it turns out that the world's Genuine Progress peaked in 1978 and has been steadily falling ever since.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/jeremy-lent/steven-pinker-s-ideas-are-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why


Sobre la supermierda del optimismo pinkerista.

javi

La que ha liado Bernie con un tuit:

https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1096064897467715584

The Walton family makes more money in one minute than Walmart workers do in an entire year. This is what we mean when we talk about a rigged economy.


Y la mayoría de respuestas son del tipo:

The Walton family began a business, invested blood, sweat & tears to be sure & now employ tens of thousands. The demonizing of entrepreneurship is a MAJOR flaw & stab at the american dream. What is "rigged" about this? We will lose again with this & other foolish statements.

Tras un rato, reconozco que no mucho y como asá, no he visto uno que se pregunté cómo se ha pasado de una relación entre el peor y mejor pagado, que bien podría ser a comienzos de los 80 de 1 a 20 al 1 a 100 (cuando no más) que existe ahora.
Running is life. Anything before or after is just waiting

Lacenaire

Yo es que no concibo ya, no me entra, que la gente pueda ser tan rematadamente limitada para no entender que ciertos grados de desigualdad no se explican, porque atenta contra la lógica más elemental y el sentido común, por el mérito individual.

Me gusta de todas formas plantear siempre el mismo experimento mental: tomar por un lado la lista Forbes de los más ricos e influyentes y por otra un listado de los mejores en sus respectivos campos, así reconocidos por sus pares y autoridades académicas: científicos, artistas, pensadores, artesanos, técnicos, juristas, etc. Y compulsarlas.

Coincidencia 0.

ushap

Si por algo destaca la clase política española, incluido toda esa ristra de nuevos partidos presuntamente rupturistas  (antisistema se ha llegado a catalogar alguno de ellos), es que son auténticos mediocres, unos populistas de mierda y unos lenguaraces que pierden gran parte de su tiempo insultando al resto de sus contrincantes.

Algunos aún confían en que esta vez sí, esta vez VOX va a marcar una diferencia. Y no, para nada, tiene toda la pinta de que van a convertirse en otra mierda populista más. ¿Por qué me atrevo a afirmar tal cosa? Porque tras leer ayer el comunicado oficial del banco de España, ningún político ha estimado oportuno hoy hablar de las afirmaciones vertidas en tal comunicado, supongo que porque están demasiado ocupados con auténticas gilipolleces, algunas de ellas tan inconstitucionales como el esperpento del "procés catalanista". Sin amplias mayorías esas promesas de VOX son irrealizables e incluso, en el hipotético escenario que no fuera así, que lograran contar con esos apoyos, estaría por ver si finalmente habría un plan de viabilidad mínimamente serio para afrontar reformas de enorme calado, como podrían ser el cambio de modelo de estado (eliminando o reduciendo autonomías) o las normas que afectan a la defensa de la pluralidad democrática.

Total, que ni VOX, ni PP, ni ciudadanos, ni unidas podemos (y resto de confluencias), ni tan siquiera algún partido friki, han comentado hoy nada de ese comunicado que emitió ayer el Banco de España, presupongo que por orden directa de su gobernador actual, el "independiente" Pablo Hernández de Cos. Y recalco lo de independiente porque a priori no debería ser señalado como un simple peón más del PSOE, el partido que nos gobierna y que ha batido todos los récords de real decretos; más bien lo contrario, porque a este economista no se le conoce pasado político y fue nombrado además por Mariano Rajoy. Por eso mismo, entiendo menos ese comunicado que comienza con una afirmación que, desde mi punto de vista, me recuerda demasiado a aquella otras afirmaciones que se escuchaban por 2008: " la economía y la banca españolas está resistiendo muy bien gracias a la política de rigor y seriedad del Banco de España:

A partir de los datos conocidos entre enero y marzo, el organismo detecta que la proyección de crecimiento de España mejora mientras que la de la eurozona empeora. En una nota difundida este lunes, el banco solo lo justifica por "elementos idiosincrásicos" que ejercen "un efecto positivo a corto plazo". Según los expertos, la recuperación del empleo y los salarios, una política fiscal expansiva, el escaso ahorro, el aumento del crédito al consumo, la recuperación de la construcción, unos tipos de interés reales negativos y el abaratamiento del petróleo contribuyen a este impulso añadido. Sin embargo, advierten de que esta diferenciación no durará siempre.

He vuelto a revisar algunos datos, como el número de contratos indefinidos, el número de ventas de vehículos, la suma total de consumos eléctricos, la tendencia bajista de indicadores clave como el PMI y el CLI,  etc, etc,... y todos parecen indicar que viene otra recesión internacional y que la economía española no se va a librar, porque además, dentro de esos elementos "idiosincrásicos" hay bastantes ejemplos que representan grandes debilidades de nuestra economía. Pero bueno, a estas alturas, tengo claro que a ninguno de nuestros políticos le preocupan estos asuntos sesudos, tal vez porque no tienen ni puta idea de como arreglar algunas de las patentes debilidades de nuestro sistema productivo. Así que, votéis lo que votéis, estamos condenados,... por lo tanto, a follar, a follar,... siempre con consentimiento, of course.

Agarkala


k98k

Nos vamos a meter una guaya a finales de año como muy tarde curiosa.