The Sharing Economy: Mobilizing Underutilized Assets or Degradation of Quality of Life in Times of Job Scarcity and Income Stagnation?

SOURCE ITEMS

PAUL SOLMAN: A peak efficiency economy, that is, putting idle resources to work, like a car, or your own idle time. Cook a meal for strangers on Feastly or work a freelance gig in your downtime on oDesk or Elance.

And speaking of idle, how about that empty space in your house? The app DogVacay lets you rent it out to bored canines. One of the most popular sharing economy platforms extends that idea to humans, Airbnb, now turning the hospitality industry on its head.

The new ‘sharing economy’ can enrich micro-entrepreneurs but at what cost? PBS NewsHour, October 10, 2014.

—————

Our indicators of leisure quality show that, despite increases in the quantity of leisure over this period (as reported by Aguiar and Hurst [2007 ] and others, and confirmed in Section 5 below), the quality of leisure has decreased for all groups.

Almudena Sevilla Sanz, José Ignacio Giménez, Nadal Jonathan Gershuny, Leisure Inequality in the US: 1965-2003, Sociology Working Papers, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford.

—————

But this is not by virtue of people wanting to work less — it’s by virtue of people being able to work less.

That’s an important distinction: being able to make a living and support your family by working 40 hours a week versus 80 hours a week.

Peter Diamandis, Evidence of Abundance #1: More Leisure, Less Work, Forbes, June, 27, 2014.

—————

Specifically, the allocation of time for less‐educated and highly educated adults started to diverge in 1985 (panel B of Table 6) and was dramatically different by 2003 (panel C of Table 6).
Taken together, the results of Table 6 and Figures 6a and 6b document an increase in the dispersion of leisure favoring less educated adults, particularly in the last 20 years. This corresponds to a period in which wages and consumption expenditures increased faster for highly educated adults.

Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades, Working Papers, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, January 2006.

—————

In economics, capital goods, real capital, or capital assets are already-produced durable goods or any non-financial asset that is used in production of goods or services. … Homes and personal autos are not usually defined as capital but as durable goods because they are not used in a production of saleable goods and services.

Capital (economics), Wikipedia, Accessed 10/11/2014.

—————

Around the world, working-age people with full-time jobs (and therefore weekends and distinct non-work time) are now a minority: According to a new survey of 136,000 people in 136 countries by Gallup, 26 per cent of working people “worked full-time for an employer in 2013.” In India, nearly three of four are informally employed, according to the national statistics agency, either doing day-by-day piecework or buying and selling things.

Doug Saunders, Work? Leisure? It’s all a blur these days, The Globe and Mail, Aug. 30 2014.

COMMENTS

The positive spin on the sharing economy is that people have unused assets they can turn into capital and income. A spare room in the house or a car that is not always in use can be transformed into capital for a business. Non-work time can be turned into work time and thus into income.

But, what does it say about the quality of life when everything you own is seen as capital or potential capital and every waking hour is seen as potential work time? Only a generation ago, being middle class was understood to include owning things just for the pleasure of having and using them and to include having lots of time not a work to spend with family and friends enjoying our spacious homes, our comfortable cars, our hobbies, and our many wonderful toys.

The rise of the sharing economy must be put in the proper context: the globalization of competition for jobs and income, the technological destruction of higher end jobs, the permanent slow down in the growth of global wealth, and the steady increase in the world’s working age population. These forces brought the growth of middle class incomes in affluent countries to a halt over the last several decades, even while costs associated with middle class life continued to rise rapidly – costs for college, good health care, and higher end consumer goods.

The sharing economy seems new to many of us in affluent nations, but it has been a staple of human societies all along. It’s the technologies that Uber, Airbnb, and other sharing economy enterprises use that fool us into thinking the sharing economy is a modern or postmodern model of economic activity. For most of human history, people have engaged in peer to peer economic activities within the small populations their communication and transportation technologies could knit together. For most of human history people have necessarily used every available asset. They have necessarily done work in the places where they live and seen their own time and the time of their children as potential income. They have made almost no distinction between work and leisure. Ironically, what we are now calling a different and promising future is in fact just a continuation of what has historically been typical.

In another form, the sharing economy could offer a promising future. In its present form, it is only another of the many ways in which the world’s middle income people adapt to their ongoing economic decline by undercutting each others’ wages.

The world’s peoples do have to adapt to emerging limits to the growth of affluence, but we should choose to implement new technologies in ways that create real forms of economic sharing not new forms of all against all competition.

Uber, Coops, Falling Standards of Living, and the Future of Work in the World Economy

SOURCE ITEMS

In addition, because Uber drivers are considered independent contractors, they are not entitled to benefits; their relationship with Uber is merely about their use of the company’s app that connects them to riders. As contractors, they have the flexibility to work when they want and as many hours as they choose, but they also have to cover any costs they incur. After adding up those costs, some drivers say, making a profit is nearly impossible.

Luz Lazo, Some Uber drivers say company’s promise of big pay day doesn’t match reality, Washington Post, September 6.

—————

Some 130 million Americans, for example, now participate in the ownership of co-op businesses and credit unions. More than 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, six million more than belong to private-sector unions.

Gar Alperovitz, Worker-Owners of America, Unite! New York Times, December 14, 201.

—————

With nearly half of all services jobs in the OECD at risk of automation, the sharing economy can smooth the disruption caused to displaced workers as they upgrade their skills. Indeed, sharing-economy data can help governments identify those workers at greatest risk and support their retraining. … Those who are displaced will have far better prospects in the more prosperous and inclusive environment that the sharing economy promises to create.

Ayesha Khanna and Parag Khanna, Disciplining the Sharing Economy, Project Syndicate, September 25, 2014.

—————

Was my house cleaner — the one I’d hired through a company that has raised $40 million in venture-capital funding from well-respected firms like Google Ventures, the one who was about to perform arduous manual labor in my house using potentially hazardous cleaning chemicals — homeless?

He was, as it turned out. And as I told this story to friends in the Bay Area, I heard something even more surprising: Several of their Homejoy cleaners had been homeless, too. … Homejoy doesn’t employ any cleaners — like many of its peer start-ups, it uses an army of contract workers to do its customers’ bidding.

Kevin Roose, Does Silicon Valley Have a Contract-Worker Problem? New York Magazine, September 18, 2014.

—————

According to a Wells Fargo/Gallup survey of small-business owners conducted earlier this year, 56% of small-business owners, up from 45% in 2010, are either extremely or very satisfied with being a small-business owner. But fewer owners, 37%, say they feel extremely or very successful as a small-business owner — the lowest figure in a decade.

Coleen McMurray and Frank Newport, Small-Business Owners Satisfied, but Fewer Feel Successful, Gallup, September 30, 2014.

—————

Eighteen percent of all adults worldwide — or 29% of the global workforce — reported being self-employed in 2013. But rather than a positive sign of proactive entrepreneurial energy, high rates of self-employment can often signal poor economic performance. The self-employed are three times as likely as those who are employed full time for an employer to be living on less than $2 per day.

Ben Ryan, Nearly Three in 10 Workers Worldwide Are Self-Employed, Gallup, August 22, 2014.

—————

Self-employment higher than at any point over past 40 years … Average income from self-employment fallen by 22% since 2008/09

Self-employed workers in the UK – 2014, UK Office for National Statistics, August 20, 2014.

—————

Nearly one in three working Americans is an independent worker. That’s 53 million people – and growing. We’re lawyers and nannies. We’re graphic designers and temps. We’re the future of the economy.

About Us, Freelancers Union. Accessed October 4, 2014.

—————

The puzzle goes beyond earnings. Not only are the median earnings of the self-employed comparatively low, they have similar traits to those of salaried workers. … If the self-employed are a good proxy for “growth-creating innovators,” it is both puzzling that their cognitive abilities and noncognitive traits are similar to those of their salaried counterparts and that they earn less.

Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein, Does Entrepreneurship Pay? The Michael Bloombergs, the Hot Dog Vendors, and the Returns to Self-Employment, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, July 2013.

—————

There, and in other countries with less well-developed social security systems and which suffered from large losses in (formal) employment, many previously economically inactive people returned to the labour market, often to take up informal employment in order to make up for the loss of household income.

Global Employment Trends 2014, International Labour Organization.

—————

Already we can see the contours of another economy in the shape of new communitarian movements through which local communities resist and respond to the multiple crises of global capitalism and innovate alternatives to meet economic needs…

Anup Dash, Toward an Epistemological Foundation for Social and Solidarity Economy, Occasional Paper 3, Potential and Limits of Social and Solidarity Economy, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), March 2014.

COMMENTS

From time to time in the history of the capitalist world economy, its magic has faltered and then been restored. This time the magic will sporadically flicker on for a while here and there in the world economy, but it will not be restored. Conditions for a restoration are disappearing and will not come back.

The undoing of key elements of formal wage employment systems has been increasing the financial and emotional burdens on the world’s working people. The growth of these burdens is pushing the world’s communities of working people into a long-term period of economic uncertainties and crisis.

Around the world, formal (government regulated) wage employment systems are faltering. By necessity, the world’s workers are examining a wide range of possibilities for saving, improving, or changing their work life situations. At the same time, large numbers of organizing entrepreneurs are offering up a large variety of strategies, from coops to unions, to entrepreneurial self-employment, to political activism, to disengagement and resistance.

It is probably true to say that most of the world’s working people do not think of themselves as economic experimenters and do not want to be economic experimenters. In lower income parts of the world where formal wage employment systems have always been more promise than reality, most people probably want a formal wage employment system to become a reality where they are and in their lifetimes.

In the higher income parts of the world, most working people who have lost wages and benefits and job security still believe a return to “normal” scenarios of employment is possible and still look to mainstream economists and policy experts to make that return happen.

The world’s working families may not wish to be the inventors of a new world of work, but they face very limited options: nostalgically clinging to the past as the hope for the future; learning to live with less while psychologically acquiescing to the losses; or, struggling to secure employment and income security through means other than standard wage employment.

The possibility of nostalgically clinging to hope for a return to the past is fast disappearing. Acquiescence and inventiveness are really the only two options available. And in the realm of inventiveness, the paths taken include not only coops and various forms of independent self-employment and franchised self-employment, but also a wide range of criminal activities, including violent grabs for economic resources.

The future of work is not predictable in any specific sense, but we can be fairly certain that the spread of systems of formal wage employment that were created in the U.S. and Europe during the 20^th century has come to an end. The belief that the global nation state system will soon produce safe, secure, and well paid (by western standards) jobs for the majority of the world’s workers is no longer plausible.

Other ways for the world’s working people to have safe, secure work at living wages must and are being created.

This Is No Time for Irrational Exuberance about Jobs at Living Wages – We’re in a New World of Work

SOURCE ITEMS

Eurozone GDP still hasn’t gotten back to its 2007 level, and doesn’t look like it will anytime soon. Indeed, it already wasn’t clear if its last recession was even over before we found out the eurozone had stopped growing again in the second quarter. And not even Germany has been immune: its GDP just fell 0.2 percent from the previous quarter.

Matt O’Brien, Worse than the 1930s: Europe’s recession is really a depression, Washington Post, August 20, 2014. Web 9/5/2014.

—————

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 142,000 in August … Manufacturing employment was unchanged in August, following an increase of 28,000 in July. Motor vehicles and parts lost 5,000 jobs in August, after adding 13,000 jobs in July. Auto manufacturers laid off fewer workers than usual for factory retooling in July, and fewer workers than usual were recalled in August. Elsewhere in manufacturing, there were job gains in August in computer and peripheral equipment (+3,000) and in nonmetallic mineral products (+3,000), and job losses in electronic instruments (-2,000).

Employment Situation Summary, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 5, 2014. Web 9/5/2014.

—————

Today’s report also included revisions to first-quarter personal income. Wages and salaries rose by $131.3 billion, revised down from an initially reported $135.1 billion gain. They climbed by $103.6 billion in the second quarter.

Shobhana Chandra, Economy in U.S. Expands 4.2%, More Than Previously Forecast, Bloomberg, August 28, 2014.

—————

Almost 21 million people are victims of forced labour – 11.4 million women and girls and 9.5 million men and boys. … Almost 19 million victims are exploited by private individuals or enterprises and over 2 million by the state or rebel groups. … Forced labour in the private economy generates US$ 150 billion in illegal profits per year.

Facts and Figures, Forced labour, human trafficking and slavery, International Labour Organization, Web 9/5/2014.

—————

Comparing the first half of 2014 with the first half of 2007 (the last period of reasonable labor market health before the Great Recession), hourly wages for the vast majority of American workers have been flat or falling. And even since 1979, the vast majority of American workers have seen their hourly wages stagnate or decline…

Elise Gould, Why America’s Workers Need Faster Wage Growth—And What We Can Do About It, Economic Policy Institute, August 27, 2014. Web 9/5/2014.

COMMENTS

The U.S. is deeply tied to the rest of the world economy and the world economy is plagued by contradictory national economic policies, geopolitical instability, extreme weather conditions, and rising prices. These are chronic conditions that will continue to prevent the world economy from achieving a steady rate of economic growth high enough to grow jobs and incomes.

Slow economic growth combined with high levels of global income and wealth inequalities can only produce a steady stream of domestic and geopolitical disasters. Slow economic growth is probably a permanent feature of the 21^st century world economy, so we have to learn to live with it. We can, however, do a lot to reduce economic inequalities.

Are We In An Employment Bubble? Employment Growth in the U.S. Is Fueled By Debt Bubbles and Speculation Bubbles

SOURCE ITEMS

In most U.S. post-war business cycles, recessions were followed by above trend growth in output and employment. After the last three recessions, however, output and employment growth were sluggish. … This paper shows that each of the last three recessions coincided with a collapsing bubble in a category of private fixed investment: commercial real estate (1990-91), internet equipment (2001), and housing (2008-09).

From the Abstract, John Edwin Golob, Investment Bubbles and Jobless Slow-Growth Expansions: A Tale of Three Recoveries, Social Science Research Network, April 5, 2013.

—————

We have highlighted the two major subprime lending booms we’ve seen in that period — the subprime mortgage lending boom from 2003 to 2006, and the subprime auto loan boom from 2010 to 2014. … It appears that the key to boosting spending in the U.S. economy is subprime lending.

Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, Subprime Lending Drives Spending, House of Debt, June 13, 2014.

—————

Investors have grown hungrier for higher-yielding assets in far-flung parts of the world, even if they’re more volatile, as yields on junk bonds have fallen to new lows.

Lisa Abramowicz, Wall Street Clashes Over Emerging-Market Bonds as UBS Says Sell, Bloomberg, July 9, 2014.

—————

“It definitely feels like investors are getting overexuberant, and you can stay in overexuberant conditions for a while,” said Fred H. Senft Jr., director of fixed income and equity research for Key Private Bank in Cleveland. “But when it turns it will turn quickly and it will turn very ugly.”

Bob Ivry, Complacency Breeds $2 Trillion of Junk as Sewage Funded, Bloomberg, July 8, 2014.

COMMENTS

Households can take on more debt as their wealth increases. With more borrowed money, households can purchase more goods and services. Thus, we can get job growth from wealth growth.

But there is a hitch. The wealth growth that fuels job growth can be real or imaginary. When wealth growth is imaginary (speculative wealth bubbles), the new jobs created are unlikely to last. We saw this very dramatically in the housing bubble that preceded the financial crisis of 2008.

U.S. job growth in that era floated on a chimera. It crashed with the evaporation of the chimera.

Millions of people bid up home prices by buying them with the intention of holding them briefly and then reselling them for profit. But this could only work if, somewhere down the road, all of those speculatively purchased homes could be sold to families who wanted to buy them as homes, not investments, and who would pay the higher prices and could pay those higher prices with jobs and real incomes that would endure year after year for decades.

As everyone knew, job and income growth in the U.S. had already been compromised by outsourcing, growing competition from companies in low wage parts of the world, and other changes associated with globalization. There was no reason to believe the future of real job and income growth in the U.S. would be better, so there was no rational basis for housing speculation.

Why did it happen anyway? A good explanation is too many investors with too much money chasing too few real investment opportunities. Two decades of tax cuts for corporations and their wealthy owners (supply side economics) had pumped up the supply of investment capital far beyond the ability of the world economy to absorb it in productive ways. In addition, years of importing goods and services from China had turned China into holder of vast amount of investment dollars.

The problem for people with vast amounts of money is that they can’t spend most of it on consumer goods and services and they can’t just put it in a mattress. They have to invest it. When there is too much money for the existing investment scene, they have to invent new investment opportunities. A whole industry grew up just for the purpose of inventing investment instruments with pretty faces and questionable (sometimes nonexistent) substance. Front and center was the packaging of imaginary housing wealth.

Optimism about the economic scene is rising in the U.S. these days. Are we sure it is not rising on the surface of another speculative bubble? The relevant fundamentals have not changed since the early 2000s: The wealthy have even more wealth; taxes on corporations and the wealthy are still very low; neither U.S. nor global consumer demand are taking off.

Debt in the U.S. is growing again – but on what economic basis? That is the key question. Best bet: the job growth we are seeing now should not be trusted.

STEM Education Falls Short: The Problem is Too Few Jobs, Not Too Little Education

SOURCE ITEMS

According to new statistics from the 2012 American Community Survey, engineering and computer, math and statistics majors had the largest share of graduates going into a STEM field with about half employed in a STEM occupation. Science majors had fewer of their graduates employed in STEM. About 26 percent of physical science majors; 15 percent of biological, environmental and agricultural sciences majors; 10 percent of psychology majors; and 7 percent of social science majors were employed in STEM.

Census Bureau Reports Majority of STEM College Graduates Do Not Work in STEM Occupations, U.S. Census Bureau, July 2014.

—————

Since cohort-wage profiles display a similar pattern, these findings appear to fit with a strong increase in demand for cognitive tasks in the 1990s followed by a decline in the 2000s.

Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand. The Declining Fortunes of the Young since 2000, American Economic Review, 2014

—————

The labor force is anticipated to grow by 8.5 million, an annual growth rate of 0.5 percent, over the 2012–2022 period. The growth in the labor force during 2012–2022 is projected to be smaller than in the previous 10-year period, 2002–2012, when the labor force grew by 10.1 million, a 0.7-percent annual growth rate.

Labor force projections to 2022: the labor force participation rate continues to fall, Monthly Labor Review, December 2013.

COMMENTS

We now live in a world economy in which economic processes and trends are global. Global economic growth is constrained and will continue to be into the foreseeable future. As a consequence, current patterns of investment, domestic and global, will not generate a sufficient number of jobs to produce anything near global full employment at living wages.

Economic activity in the U.S. does not constitute a separate economy, so U.S. economy policies cannot produce full employment and high wages in the U.S. while the rest of the world is stuck with high rates of unemployment and low wages. Investment follows profits. Profits are maximized by producing in low income places in the world economy and selling in high income places. Unfettered transnational flows of capital and commodities combined with preventing low-skill working people from easily crossing national boundaries in search of work gives the world’s investors the legal framework with which to manage the world’s labor supply to their advantage.

1st Quarter 2014 Economic Decline: Not Unique and Not Due to Idiosyncratic Factors

SOURCE ITEMS

Gross domestic product fell at a 2.9 percent annualized rate, more than forecast and the worst reading since the same three months in 2009, after a previously reported 1 percent drop, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. It marked the biggest downward revision from the agency’s second GDP estimate since records began in 1976.

Jeanna Smialek, U.S. Economy Shrank in First Quarter by Most in Five Years, Bloombert.com, June 25, 2014.

—————

A combination of shrinking business inventories, terrible winter weather and a surprise contraction in health care spending drove the first-quarter decline, which is the worst since the first quarter of 2009, when the economy shrank at a 5.4 percent rate.

…

But the economy was hit by an unlikely combination of negative forces that conspired to turn what seemed set to be another quarter of so-so growth into a considerably more gloomy experience.

Neil Irwin, Economy in First Quarter Was Worse Than Everybody Thought, New York Times, June 25, 2014.

—————

That’s one of the findings in a report published today called “Risky Business,” commissioned by some of America’s top business leaders to put price tags on climate threats. For example, by the end of the century, between $238 billion and $507 billion of existing coastal property in the U.S. will likely be subsumed by rising seas, and crop yields in some breadbasket states may decline as much 70 percent.

Tom Randall, Climate Forecast: A Heat More Deadly Than the U.S. Has Ever Seen, Bloomberg.com, June 24, 2014.

COMMENTS

Economists and other experts continue to describe economic bad news as temporary and to predict a return to “normal”. This is wishful thinking. The world we once knew is now on its head: frequent encounters with combinations of economic growth stopping events is the new normal.

Extreme weather is not temporary: we are well into a new weather world that is changing everything about what can be expected for growth in the world economy.
Reduced health care spending is not a surprise: any way you cut it, in the U.S. a huge part of health spending is funded by the federal government; cut federal spending and you cut health care spending.
Declining consumer spending is not temporary: consumer incomes have been stagnant or falling for decades, the labor force participation rate has been falling for decades, and neither trends in union membership nor trends in government wage protection and employment policies suggest that wages will rise and labor force participation will rise.
Geopolitical upheavals like the current insurgency in Iraq are here to stay: rising income and wealth inequalities have produced a world filled with hundreds of millions of people who are big losers; they are all looking for ways to reverse their fortunes.

The Growing Skills Shortage: A Real Problem or A Politically Expedient Invention

SOURCE ITEMS

Employers have long complained that graduates do not have the skills they need.

…

A study released in November by Eurofound, the research arm of the European Union, showed that despite the recession, almost 40 percent of companies reported difficulty in finding workers with the right skills, compared with 37 percent in 2008 and 35 percent in 2005.

…

The issue peaked last summer, when PayPal’s chief executive in Ireland, Louise Phelan, stoked controversy by acknowledging that the company had recruited from 19 other countries for 500 positions in its operations center in Dundalk because of a lack of foreign-language skills among Irish nationals. This summer, Fujitsu, which employs 800 people in Ireland, revealed that it had had to hire most of its Ph.D.-level experts from abroad.

Liz Alderman, Unemployed in Europe Stymied by Lack of Technology Skills, New York Times, January 3, 2014.

COMMENTS

What is the right wage for a business facing stiff global competition: the lowest wage, of course! Note the last paragraph above. Apparently, PayPal and Fujitsu did get the workers they needed.

Let’s try another interpretation. The high tech jobs are created mostly in very large corporations. Those corporations recruit workers globally, regardless of where their operations are located. Note this paragraph from the same story:

“Multinational technology and social media companies kept investing, lured by Ireland’s ultralow 12.5 percent corporate tax rate and an English-speaking work force.”

It’s a possibility that corporate CEO’s are extremely unlikely to say to a host country like Ireland, “We like your low taxes here, but we can import cheaper workers from other countries — and we will.” Isn’t it very likely that the real issue for corporate leaders is that the hourly wages of educated workers in more affluent countries are not the lowest wages they can pay and still be successful?

My bet is that CEOs present the issue as a labor supply problem (skills shortage) as political cover and to shift the cause of high unemployment (even for well educated workers) onto the workers themselves and away from the corporations that are making the actual hiring and firing decisions. My bet is that the world economy actually has plenty of well educated and skilled workers, but the world’s corporations are producing too few jobs to employ them all. They just won’t ‘fess up.

What is really in short supply are jobs that pay decent wages by North American and Western European standards. Too much supply (of skilled workers) in a world of too little demand = falling wages. (Note the concessions the Boeing workers in Seattle, WA just made to keep their jobs!)

A Gathering Consensus About the Limits to National Economic Policy?

SOURCE ITEMS

Despite the subsequent decision of the Group of 20 in 2009 on the need for rules to supervise what is now a globally integrated financial system, world leaders have spent the last five years in retreat, resorting to unilateral actions that have made a mockery of global coordination. Already, we have forgotten the basic lesson of the crash: Global problems need global solutions. And because we failed to learn from the last crisis, the world’s bankers are carrying us toward the next one.

Gordon Brown, Stumbling Toward the Next Crash, New York Times, Published: December 18, 2013. (Gordon Brown, a Labour member of the British Parliament, is a former chancellor of the Exchequer and prime minister.)

—————

Nothing endangers globalization more than the yawning governance gap – the dangerous disparity between the national scope of political accountability and the global nature of markets for goods, capital, and many services – that has opened up in recent decades. When markets transcend national regulation, as with today’s globalization of finance, market failure, instability, and crisis is the result.

Dani Rodrik, National Governments, Global Citizens, Project Syndicate, March 12, 2013. (Dani Rodrik is Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.)

—————

Around the world, policies, technologies, and extended learning processes have combined to erode barriers to economic interaction among countries. Pick any indicator: trade relative to global GDP, capital flows relative to the global capital stock, and so forth – all are rising.

But economic policies are set at the national level, and, with a few notable exceptions like trade negotiations and the tracking of terrorist funding and money laundering, policymakers set goals with a view to benefiting the domestic economy. And these policies (or policy shifts) are increasingly affecting other economies and the global system, giving rise to what might be called “policy externalities” – that is, consequences that extend outside policymakers’ target environment.

Michael Spence, The Blurry Frontiers of Economic Policy, Project Syndicate, September 19, 2013. (Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Academic Board Chairman of the Fung Global Institute in Hong Kong.)

COMMENTS

In certain quarters of American society, one can find rejoicing over the condition of the U.S. economy. Just today, the Federal Reserve began its long anticipated tapering of its bond buying program for stimulating the U.S. economy, citing enough economic progress to do so.

Given the quotes above, one has to wonder, however, whether a small change in Fed policy in the U.S. will have much effect one way or the other. The bond buying program is only one in a global sea of public policy mechanisms that affect the U.S. economy. And some of those other policy mechanisms are being manipulated by actors in the world economy that are quite powerful – the EU, China, the BRICS nations.

It must also be pointed out that the effects of the Fed’s decisions are not contained by U.S. political borders. Those consequences are spread across the world economy through the global financial system, and some or many nations will be harmed by those effects. Actions bring reactions and we do not know whether those reactions will conspire with Fed policy to improve employment and incomes in the U.S. or conspire against Fed policy to further damage employment and income growth in the U.S.

See my Blog Posts under Global Economic Governance for more sources and comments.

Tom Friedman’s Jobs World is Interesting But a Bit Flat

SOURCE ITEMS

In today’s hyperconnected world without walls — when more Indians, Chinese, computers, robots and software can perform more average blue-collar and white-collar jobs — the only high-wage jobs are increasingly high-skill jobs

…

Our kids face three big adjustments. First, to be in the middle class, they will need to be constantly improving their skills over their lifetime. Second, to do that, they will need a lot more self-motivation. … And third, countries that thrive the most will be the H.I.E.’s — the high imagination-enabling countries — that attract and enable talent to be constantly spinning off new ideas and start-ups, the source of most new good jobs.

Thomas Friedman, Can’t We Do Better?, New York Times, December 7, 2013.

COMMENTS

Tom Friedman is almost always worth reading, but he has yet to acknowledge a societal development that is one of the most consequential for the world’s working families – the transformation of the role that work plays day in and day out in distributing the world economy’s newly created wealth.

Ironically, Friedman identifies the very forces that are undoing the role of work in distributing newly produced wealth, but fails to follow through. He takes us right to the door through which he could walk us to the real solutions to growing poverty and inequality. He then turns away and offers up the same old failed conventional wisdom.

Friedman and so many others define the problem of low wage jobs and growing inequality as due to the inadequacies of workers (low skills, outdated skills, lack of drive). They fail to seriously consider the possibility that the world of work is changing in such fundamental ways that no feasible amount of improvement in the skill levels of working people or change in their approaches to getting and keeping jobs can reverse the trend toward lower wages and greater poverty and inequality.

As Friedman rightly notes, global integration and advancing productive technologies have great consequences for working families and societies, but not because they are creating demand for highly skilled workers and destroying demand for low skilled workers. The core systemic change is that those forces are producing an enormous and growing surplus of labor, both skilled and unskilled.

The role of machine energy in the production of the world’s goods and services has advanced to such a large proportion of the combination of human energy and machine energy that the available human energy far exceeds the demand for human energy. Even human thinking energy is being displaced by machine energy.

The trend shows up in the long term decline in the proportion of the world’s population that is employed. Friedman and others apparently believe that this trend won’t eventually bring us to a point in time when more than half the world’s people are effectively outside the world of work.

How then will we distribute the world economy’s newly created wealth day after day?

The era in which employment could be the primary way in which a person could legitimately claim a fair share of the world economy’s income is nearly over. Yet Friedman and other experts still have not asked the question in public of what will give a person a right to a fair share of income in this increasingly jobless world.

The world’s people desperately need a new kind of right to income, and until we invent that right, inequality will keep getting worse and more of the world’s people, including Americans, will be shoved into lives of destitution, begging, scavenging, and violence.

Investors Seem to Prefer Easy Money Over Real Economic Investments

SOURCE ITEMS

U.S. stocks declined a fifth day after improving economic data boosted bets the Federal Reserve will curb its monthly bond purchases sooner than estimated.

U.S. Stocks Decline as Economic Data Fuel Stimulus Bets, Nick Taborek and Callie Bost, Bloomberg, December 5, 2013.

COMMENTS

I hesitate to comment. It must be obvious that this investor behavior is not good for job growth.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: