The Pie Is Shrinking So Much The 99% Are Beginning To Starve

This report was originally published by Charles Hugh Smith at PeakProsperity

Social movements arise to solve problems of inequality, injustice, exploitation and oppression. In other words, they are solutions to society-wide problems plaguing the many but not the few (i.e. the elites at the top of the wealth-power pyramid).

The basic assumption of social movements is that Utopia is within reach, if only the sources of the problems can be identified and remedied.  Since inequality, injustice, exploitation and oppression arise from the asymmetry of power between the few (the financial and political elites) and the many, the solution is a reduction of the asymmetry; that is a tectonic realignment of the social structure that shifts some power—economic and/or political—from the few to the many.

In some instances, the power asymmetry is between ethnic or gender classes, or economic classes (for example, labor and the owners of capital).

Social movements are characterized by profound conflict because the beneficiaries of the power asymmetry resist the demands for a fairer share of the power and privileges, while those who’ve held the short end of the stick have tired of the asymmetry and refuse to back down.

Two dynamics assist a social, political and economic resolution that transfers power from those with too much power to those with too little power: 1) the engines of the economy have shifted productive capacity definitively in favor of those demanding their fair share of power, and 2) the elites recognize that their resistance to power-sharing invites a less predictable and thus far more dangerous open conflict with forces that have much less to lose and much more to gain.

In other words, ceding 40% of their wealth-power still conserves 60%, while stubborn resistance might trigger a revolution that takes 100% of their wealth-power.

History provides numerous examples of these dynamics.  Once the primary sources of wealth-generation shifted from elite feudal landowners to merchants and industrialists, the wealth (and thus the political power) of the landed elites declined. As the industrialists hired vast numbers of laborers drawn from small farms and workshops, this mass industrialized labor became the source of the wealth generation; after decades of conflict, this labor class gained a significant share of the wealth and political power.

The civil rights and women’s liberation movements realigned the political and economic power of minorities and females more in line with their productive output, reducing the asymmetries of ethnic and gender privileges.

In broad-brush, progressive social movements seek to broaden opportunities and level the playing field by reducing the asymmetric privileges of dominant classes defined by power and privilege.  The core mechanism of this transition is the recognition and granting of universal human rights: the right to vote, the right to equal opportunity, and rights to economic security, i.e. entitlements that are extended universally to all citizens for education, healthcare, old-age pensions and income security.

Again in broad-brush, these movements have largely been categorized as politically Left, though many institutions deemed conservative (for example, various churches) have often provided bedrock support for progressive movements.

Social movements which seek to limit the excesses of state power tend to be categorized as conservative or politically Right, as they seek to realign the asymmetry of power held by the state in favor of the individual, family and the traditional social order.

The Expanding Pie Fueled Expanding Entitlements

Writer Ugo Bardi recently drew another distinction between Left and Right social movements: “Traditionally, the Left has emphasized rights while the Right has emphasized duties.”

As rights manifested as economic entitlements rather than political (civil liberty) entitlements, rights accrue economic costs. As Bardi observes: “Having rights is nicer than having duties, but the problem is that human rights have a cost and that this cost was paid, so far, by fossil fuels. Now that fossil fuels are on their way out, who’s going to pay?”

I would argue that the cost was also paid by higher productivity enabled by the technological, financial and social innovations of the Third Industrial Revolution, roughly speaking the interconnected advances of the second half of the 20^th century.

These advances can be characterized as expanding the economic pie; that is, generating more energy, credit, technological tools, opportunities, security and capital (which includes financial, infrastructural, intellectual and social capital) for all to share in a socio-political-financial allocation broad enough to make everyone feel like they were making some forward progress.

This long-term, secular expansion of the pie naturally generated more demands for additional entitlements and rights, as the economy could clearly support the extra costs of allocating additional wealth and resources to the many.  From the point of view of the few (the elites), their own wealth continued expanding, so there was little resistance to expanding retirement, education and healthcare entitlements.

But in the 21^st century, the expansion of the pie stagnated, and for many, it reversed. Adjusted for real-world inflation many households have seen their net incomes and wealth decline in the past decade.

Despite the endless media rah-rah about “growth” and “recovery,” it is self-evident to anyone who bothers to look beneath the surface of this facile PR that the pie is now shrinking. This dynamic is increasing inequality rather than reducing it.

The Shrinking Pie And Stagnant Productivity

It is a truism of economics that widespread increases in productivity are required to generate equally widespread increases in income and capital, i.e. productive wealth. To the consternation of many, productivity has stagnated since 2010; no wonder household income for all but the upper crust has gone nowhere.

If we glance at a chart of productivity, we see a strong correlation with speculative investment bubbles (the dot-com and housing bubbles 1995-2005) and speculative spikes fueled by central bank monetary stimulus (2009-10).  Absent bubbles and monumental excesses of central bank stimulus, productivity quickly sinks to its secular trend line: downwards.

This next chart depicts the long-term trend line of productivity through all four industrial revolutions. Note the decline concurrent with the 4^th Industrial Revolution (mobile telephony, the Internet, AI, robotics, peer-to-peer networks, etc.) and the depletion of cheap-to-access-and-refine oil:

The unwelcome reality is that the economy is changing in fundamental ways that cannot be reversed with policy tweaks, protests or wishful thinking.

Consider the percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) that goes to employee compensation (wages and salaried). Labor’s share of the GDP has been in a downtrend since 1970, which not coincidentally was the peak of secular productivity:

In this below chart of the distribution of wealth in the U.S., we find the same correlation to the downtrends in productivity and labor’s share of the economy.  The bottom 90% of households’ (the many) share of the wealth pie topped out in the early 1980s and has declined precipitously since, while the wealth of the top 0.1% (the few) has more than tripled since the late 1970s:

This next chart depicts the remarkable (and recent) spike income growth the few have recently enjoyed, at the expense of everyone else:

The increase in wealth and income inequality and the decline of productivity and labor’s share of GDP are the result of structural changes in the economy, changes with far-reaching consequences.

While it’s appealing to identify policies endorsed by self-serving insiders and elites as the source of these changes, that is far from the whole story. Much of this growing asymmetry stems from profound changes in the global economy that depreciate labor (as conventional labor is no longer scarce) and increase the gains of the top few in a “winner take most” allocation that benefits speculation, leverage and new ways of organizing labor and capital that reward the organizers far more than the users/participants.

In this new era of a steadily shrinking pie, the sources of inequality and related social problems have also shifted.  As a result, the social movements that were effective in the past are no longer effective today. Attempts to address rising inequality with the old tools are fueling frustration rather than actual solutions.

In Part 2 — Social Unrest: The Boiling-Over Point, we examine why our existing models for social change have slipped into ineffectual symbolic gestures that fuel fragmentation and frustration — and why that will lead to a dangerous boiling over of the 99% against the elites controlling the system.

When that happens (and it seems inevitable at our current trajectory), the rending of our social fabric will happen stunningly fast. The ensuing social disunity and disruption will be of the sort many alive today have never seen.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

Britain"s Gravest Economic Challenge Isn"t Brexit

Authored by Paul Wallace, op-ed via Reuters.com,

Few British budgets have mattered as much as the one that Philip Hammond will deliver to the House of Commons on Nov. 22.

The chancellor of the exchequer must shore up Theresa May’s perilously shaky government ahead of a vital Brexit summit of European leaders in mid-December. At the same time Hammond has to keep a grip on the public finances.

But the gravest challenge he faces is economic: Britain’s persistent productivity blight.

Productivity – output per hour worked – is the mainspring of economic growth.

In the decade before the financial crisis of 2007-08 productivity was increasing in Britain by just over 2 percent a year, outpacing the average for the other economies of the G7. But since the crisis British performance has been dismal. Although productivity jumped in the third quarter of 2017, prolonged weakness means that it is barely higher than its pre-crisis peak a decade ago. The recovery in GDP has been driven overwhelmingly by more labor input, a source of growth that is running dry – not least since the vote to leave the European Union delivered a message to curb immigration.

Other advanced economies have also experienced setbacks to productivity growth following the financial crisis. Where Britain stands out is in the severity of its reverse. The shortfall in productivity is the main reason real wages are now 4 percent lower than 10 years ago, a potent reason why the leave campaign prevailed in the Brexit referendum.

Productivity is so central to prosperity and to macroeconomic management – by determining how fast the economy can sustainably grow – that a gaggle of economic researchers have been busy in their labs trying to diagnose the now decade-long disease. Early detective work highlighted the impact of the financial crisis itself, which was especially severe in Britain. This held back productivity by throttling bank credit to new potentially fast-growing ventures and by jamming up the usual way in which capital moves from declining to advancing sectors. 

But as the crisis has receded and British banks have become better capitalized this explanation is less convincing. Longer-term forces appear to be in play in Britain and elsewhere. Firms at the technological frontier continue to forge ahead in raising productivity. However, the diffusion of their best practices within economies has slowed. An aging workforce is now acting as a drag. And the contribution to productivity from improved educational attainment is falling.

One reason the productivity setback has been particularly severe in Britain is that its apparently robust performance before the crisis was overstated and unsustainable. Banking activities ballooned on the basis of what turned out to be economically and socially harmful practices such as risky securitizations. Despite making up less than a tenth of the economy, the financial sector has been responsible for nearly a third of the productivity slowdown. Longstanding weaknesses in qualifications and skills have also become more damaging as business becomes more knowledge-based. Over a quarter of British working-age adults perform poorly in numeracy or literacy or both.

Investment is inadequate, too. Although firms have stepped up their capital spending after it collapsed during the recession, they have done much less so than in previous recoveries. Business investment is only 5 percent above its pre-crisis high a decade ago. At a similar stage in the recoveries following recessions at the start of 1980s and of the 1990s it was 63 percent and 30 percent higher than the respective previous peaks.

The reluctance to invest in turn is rooted in a financial and business culture that is especially and perniciously short-termist in Britain. Firms under pressure from the markets are reluctant to make the strategic investments needed to keep productivity moving ahead. And too many British managers are simply not good enough.

Although a definitive diagnosis of the British productivity disease remains elusive there is a surprising degree of consensus about the treatment needed to resuscitate the patient. The chancellor’s to-do list should include steps to tackle congested roads and overcrowded trains, to support the sciences, to foster R&D in the private sector, and to upgrade Britain’s poor skills. Since competition spurs higher productivity as new and smarter firms drive out older and less productive businesses, Hammond needs Britain to be as open an economy as possible.

The remedies make good sense but they will not rescue the chancellor, who has in any case already announced more spending on infrastructure. First, they will take time to be effective. Second, finding more money for austerity-hit public services such as policing and health will add to the pressures on the public finances. And third, Brexit is now contributing to the productivity malaise as businesses respond to corrosive uncertainties by curbing their investment plans and as Britain becomes less open to trade by leaving the EU. Raising taxes is always an option for a cash-strapped chancellor, but it would be highly unpopular − not least in the bitterly divided Conservative party.

When he presents his budget, Hammond can be expected to put a brave face on things. He will point to the fall in the budget deficit from a peak of almost 10 percent of GDP after the financial crisis to 2.3 percent of GDP in the financial year ending in March 2017. But what matters now is the future path of the public finances. Britain’s poor productivity prospects will box the chancellor in because GDP is the tax base and future revenues will be smaller to the extent that output per hour worked continues to stall.   

The harsh reality is that Brexit will blight the public finances by hurting productivity. While Prime Minister May might see Britain’s overriding priority as ensuring that next month’s summit enables the Brexit talks to move on to trade, she’ll have to broaden her focus if she hopes to stay in office long enough to secure a deal that minimizes the damage Brexit is inflicting on the economy.

To Increase America's Productivity, Ban This...

Aside from short-lived booms in the 1990s and 2000s, US productivity growth has averaged just 1.2% from 1975 up to today after peaking above 3% in 1972.

As we detailed previously, adjusting for the WWII anomaly (which tells us that GDP is not a good measure of a country’s prosperity) US productivity growth peaked in 1972 – incidentally the year after Nixon took the US off gold.

The productivity decline witnessed ever since is unprecedented. Despite the short lived boom of the 1990s US productivity growth only average 1.2 per cent from 1975 up to today.

If we isolate the last 15 years US productivity growth is on par with what an agrarian slave economy was able to achieve 200 years ago.

As we reported last year, users spent 51% of their total internet time on mobile devices, for a total of 5.6 hours per day snapchatting, face-booking, insta-graming and taking selfies.

It"s an everyday sight - people using their phones while sitting on the train, waiting for a bus, or even having a meal with their partner.

What exactly are they doing the whole time though?

When it comes to social networks, Verto Analytics may have the answer. The most time spent in the U.S. on a "mainstream" app is the 899 minutes per month of the average Facebook user.

The social network whose users invest the most time though is a networking app for gay, bi, and curious men - Grindr. WIth a huge 1,040 minutes on average, that"s over 17 hours every month.

In third place, Growlr is also a networking/dating app for homosexual men. The average user here spends 665 minutes per month.

In eighth, Twitter"s struggles are again highlighted, with only 176 minutes in Q3 2017.

Figures refer to usage across all platforms, not just mobile.

You will find more statistics at Statista

So, maybe in their next wide-ranging study, economists could include a test group of workers who leave their phones in a locker at the beginning of the work day, and try to measure how much their “productivity” improves. So, while every effort can be made by Ivory Tower academics to solve the problem of American worker productivity, perhaps it can be summed up simply as "Put The Smart-Phone Down!"

The Over-Quantification Of Life

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The idea that all endeavors can be distilled down to statistics has put us in the Over-Quantification Box.

Correspondent Chad D. recently submitted a thought-provoking commentary on the Over-Quantification of Life:

"I think you could constructively explore the over-QUANTIFICATION of the US. Or we could call it the Wal-Martization of the US. The only that that counts is a number (i.e. price, sales, clients, patients, tickets, arrests, convictions, fines, sex partners, scores, averages, etc.).

What is missing is quality. I think you"ve mentioned something similar before talking about junk products with a short lifespan, but this way of doing things pervades our society.

I would argue that in nearly every area of society, quantity rather than quality rules the day. In the Criminal Justice system, officers and their immediate supervisors are evaluated based on how many tickets/arrests are made and/or how many complaints are answered. Prosecutors are judged by how many defendants go to jail. Judges are judged by how many cases they clear and how many cases are on their docket. Prisons want more prisoners. Legislators are rated on how many laws they passed. I remember Ron Paul was castigated for not passing many if any laws while in office.

I could go on with banking, investing, medicine, education, sports, farming, etc. Quality has been left in the dust by the system. The quality that remains is due to the good people who are still in the system. I don"t know what really drives this phenomena, but I would say that usury is part of it. Usury demands that the system go ever faster to "produce" more and more to feed its ever hungry stomach.

But there must be something more to it than that. Ideas/thoughts?"

Thank you, Chad, for an insightful introduction to a profound topic we all experience in daily life.

Let"s start with Chad"s reference to usury, i.e. interest on debt. When we borrow money, the interest we pay over the term of the loan can add up to far more than the sum borrowed, depending on the rate of interest and the duration of the loan.

Over time, indebtedness and the interest due on all the debt diminishes the net income remaining to pay for everything other than interest, and the household/ state / economy is hollowed out.

This is one reason for the biblical notion of debt jubilees, in which all debts are periodically forgiven to remove the drag of debt on debtors and the economy at large.

The only way to sustain expanding debt is 1) inflation, which enables borrowers to pay interest with "cheaper" money and 2) expanding income.

Let"s say I owe $10,000, and my annual wage is $30,000. With modest but sustained inflation, my wage eventually doubles (assuming it keeps up with inflation) while my debt remains $10,000 minus whatever principal I"ve paid.

Alternatively, if inflation is near-zero but my wage rises by 10% a year, eventually my wage will double to $60,000, while my debt remains $10,000 minus whatever principal I"ve paid.

I think Chad is describing something rather subtle but very real: expanding debts require an equivalent expansion of income, i.e. productivity, to provide debtors with enough income to service the rising debt loads and have enough left to pay the rest of their obligations and to fund the consumption the economy depends on for growth.

This is a driver of demand for increased productivity that is rarely if ever recognized. This demand for increased productivity then drives the over-quantification of the processes and outcomes of every sector and endeavor.

If we think back to the early days of industrialization, a key tool to identify bottlenecks in production and improve productivity was breaking down the entire process into discrete steps that could be measured and quantified.

Quality control was also quantified, which enabled the gradual improvement not just of production but of the quality of the output. This is the foundation of the Deming Prize for Development of Quality Control/Management in Japan, which recognizes contributions to Total Quality Management (TQM).

The prize honors Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who taught that "by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations can increase quality and simultaneously improve productivity."

It was all too natural, if fundamentally false, to reckon that these same statistical tools of quantification could be profitably applied to every field, from education to criminal justice to healthcare.

While certain aspects of these endeavors might benefit from being measured, counted and quantified, the idea that all endeavors can be distilled down to statistics has put us in the Over-Quantification Box Chad described: by relying solely on quantification, we"ve lost a truly useful sense of quality and outcome.

There are multiple problems with quantification. I often mention the key flaw: we only recognize what we measure. If it isn"t measured, it simply ceases to exist in a quantified world.

Another flaw: many activities and endeavors cannot be distilled down to statistics. We can go through the motions of counting something or other, but this process misses the essence of the endeavor or process.

We"re also tempted to invoke flawed methods of measure. Take the system many colleges now use in which students are invited to rate (quantify) their professors.

Any such survey method is self-selecting, i.e. the students who choose to rate their professors are self-selected. So if the 20% who dislike a teacher complete the survey while the 60% who liked the teacher do not, the teacher"s rating will be harmfully inaccurate.

Students are not unbiased observers. Those who received poor grades might seek a form of payback by giving the offending professor low marks.

There are even subtler flaws in what we measure and how we measure. In a previous Musings Report, I discussed the World War II-era damage reports on aircraft returning from bombing missions over Nazi Germany. The idea was to study the damage inflicted by fighters and flak with an eye on strengthening the aircraft"s weak points.

Mathematician Abraham Wald hit on a profound flaw in the methodology: the really important damage reports could not be filed, because it was the bombers which had been shot down that held the vital clues to the aircraft"s weaknesses. The aircraft that had been shot down could not be studied, so they effectively ceased to exist. This fatally distorted the results of the statistical analysis.

Here is a link that describes the study: Survivorship Bias

The goal of improving productivity is laudable, but justice (and many other aspects of human society) cannot be reduced to counting convictions. This dependence on quantification creates perverse incentives to game the system and push up the numbers to evoke a success that is phantom.

The infamous "body counts" of the Vietnam War come to mind, as do prosecutors" heavy reliance on plea bargaining to up their conviction count.

Students are now slavishly instructed to serve one goal: to improve their scores on tests that like the WWII bomber study, ignore what cannot be measured easily, yet is actually vital.

Quantification is easier than actually studying complex problems and situations, and it can generate an illusion of knowledge and insight. This is the danger of over-quantification and Big Data, that is, the over-reliance on over-quantification to make assessments and judgments about endeavors in which the key dynamics and meanings cannot be captured or illuminated by quantification alone.

Infrastructure 'Stimulus' - Chinese Ghost Cities & The Big Money Drain

As President Trump"s "Infrastructure Week" comes to an ignominious end, NIRP Umbrella"s Alex Deluce reminds us that spending money on bridges to nowhere and cities of the future is anything but the stimulating panacea it is talked up to be...

Is a Chinese credit bubble in the cards? Well, it will be interesting to see if China’s authorities can get through the unwind of US $3 trillion worth of excess credit and the distressed debt on banks’ balance sheets.

From 2009 to 2016, more than 10 trillion of Chinese investment was thrown at infrastructure, ghost cities, and corruption thanks to a helping hand from the Chinese banks and foreign lenders eager to participate in the Chinese growth story.

In fact, hundreds of new cities in China are essentially empty. The hope is that rural population someday move in.

Roughly 40% of the 300 million Chinese expected to move into a town by 2030 will mostly be moving to smaller cities in the “chengzhenhua” system.

As OfTwoMinds" Charles Hugh Smith recently explained, building bridges to nowhere isn"t just a waste of money in the present; it saddles the economy with productivity-draining costs for decades to come.

If there is anything the political left, right and center can agree upon, it"s the lasting benefits of spending more (borrowed) money on infrastructure: roadways, rail lines, airports, seaports, pipelines, dams, electrical lines and so on: the physical networks of advanced civilization.

That Roman roadways constructed 2,000 years ago are still visible illustrates the longstanding value of reliable infrastructure: Roman political control and trade depended on roadways and sea transport to tie the sprawling empire together.

This is the basic assumption behind the notion that virtually any and all infrastructure spending will create value far into the future.

But is this really true? Does rebuilding and/or adding infrastructure create economic value?

To answer, we need to look at two issues: productivity and cost-benefit.

Infrastructure creates new value when it boosts productivity, generally by lowering costs of moving goods, energy, etc.

The value created by increased productivity must far outweigh the cost.

Consider the classic "bridge to nowhere" infrastructure project: a bridge is constructed between a sparsely populated island and the mainland. The payoff is a handful of residents are spared the time and inconvenience required to ship their vehicles between the island and mainland on a ferry.

Does this time savings translate into increased productivity, or merely extra leisure? And what was the cost to gain this very modest increase in leisure/productivity? Spending tens of millions of dollars on the bridge actually reduces the productivity of the entire economy due to the opportunity cost: the millions of dollars could have been more productively invested elsewhere, and spending the money on a low-value-creating bridge deprived the economy of the capital, labor etc. that could have been better invested in productivity-generating projects.

As correspondent Bart D. explains, opportunities to boost productivity via new infrastructure are scarce:

Why anyone believes that building "infrastructure" somehow promotes economic growth in this day and age (as though it were 1950’s) is delusional. The reason "infrastructure" worked back then to build economic activity was simply because it lagged behind the burgeoning private industry. These days there is no ‘hard industry’ left to "lag behind." Building a bigger road between the suburbs and the Mall won’t create prosperity for anyone except the owners of the road building company. Unlike a 1950’s road linking a steelworks to a port or a Beef farm to a meatworks."

In other words, when commerce already exists but is cumbersome, infrastructure that smooths the flow yields enormous productivity gains.

One example of this from history is the construction of the first stone bridge across the Seine River in Paris. This single structure changed commerce, tourism and social relations in the city, as it enabled two carts to pass side by side and enable pedestrians to cross the river safely.

For more on this impact of a single durable, commerce-enabling bridge in Paris, read this book: How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City.

Replacing existing infrastructure is also problematic. It may well be necessary, but since it won"t boost regional productivity (since it"s merely replacing existing structures), it acts as a tax on the regional economy: if the replacement costs $1 billion and generates no real gains in productivity, it is in essence a tax that bleeds capital from the economy that could have been productively invested elsewhere.

Rebuilding a bridge generates higher spending on materials and wages, but if it doesn"t generate additional productive capacity equal to its cost, this additional spending (in our world, always paid for with borrowed money that accrues interest for decades to come) runs out once the project is complete, but the costs of paying for the replacement continue on for decades.

As a rule of thumb, if a replacement bridge costs $1 billion, it will cost users and taxpayers $3 billion over the life of the loan/bond that funded the project.

Borrowing immense sums to spend on infrastructure that doesn"t boost productivity actually cripples an economy by channeling scarce capital and tax revenues into projects that only boost spending for a few years at best, while the costs of borrowing the money pile up for decades to come.

In other words, building bridges to nowhere isn"t just a waste of money in the present; it saddles the economy with productivity-draining costs for decades to come.

This high future cost for no-productivity gain infrastructure effectively bleeds the economy of income and capital for decades, for the temporary sugar-high of infrastucture spending today.

A rigorous cost-benefit analysis might conclude that some aging, marginal infrastructure should be torn down rather than replaced. If self-driving vehicles will reduce vehicles on the roads significantly-- and some estimates range as high as an 80% reduction in traffic--perhaps we should wait for this technology to mature before spending trillions of dollars on infrastructure that is about to be under-utilized.

We should instead ask: where are the big gains in productivity going to come from going forward? The answers to that question should guide our public and private investment decisions.

In the meantime, we should question whether proposed infrastructure spending is actually an "investment in our future" or just another bureaucratic boondoggle designed to enrich crony-cartels and justify rising bureaucratic budgets:

Smartphone Addiction Tightens Its Global Grip

How long is it since you last used your phone? Chances are, you"re using it right now to view this post. Analysts from Statista"s Digital Market Outlook have revealed that the amount of time we"re spending with our smartphones online has increased substantially over the last few years.

You will find more statistics at Statista

The term "smartphone addiction" is by now pretty well-established (you can take a test here to see if you might be a sufferer). As our infographic shows, across the world, this addiction seems to be tightening its grip. Of the countries surveyed, smartphone owners in Brazil spend by far the most amount of time online. The average user in 2016 spent close to 5 hours per day surfing - more than twice as long as in 2012.

Perhaps this explains the collapse of global worker productivity, as we detailed previously, adjusting for the WWII anomaly (which tells us that GDP is not a good measure of a country’s prosperity) US productivity growth peaked in 1972 – incidentally the year after Nixon took the US off gold.

The productivity decline witnessed ever since is unprecedented. Despite the short lived boom of the 1990s US productivity growth only average 1.2 per cent from 1975 up to today. If we isolate the last 15 years US productivity growth is on par with what an agrarian slave economy was able to achieve 200 years ago.

The Answer to the economic dilemma of our time is simple then - "Put The Smartphone Down"... but then again, what will happen to Amazon, Google, Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and all the "real" economy drivers behind the stock market illusion?

Business Investment Might Be Trump's Achilles' Heel

The U.S. economy is suffering from a major long-term problem: business investment is weak. Unless President Trump solves this problem, it will prove to be his Achilles’ heel. 

As the accompanying chart shows, net private domestic business investment (gross investment – capital consumption) is relatively weak and has been on a downward course since 2000. Indeed, ever since the Dot-Com bubble burst, private investment has been in the tank. Neither the policies of the George W. Bush nor Barack Obama offered an elixir. Investors turned their collective thumbs down on both presidents.   

 

So, just why is private investment so important? It is what fuels productivity.  With little fuel, we should expect weak productivity numbers in the U.S. Sure enough, as shown in the accompanying chart, the rate of growth in productivity is weak and has been trending downward. The U.S. is in the grips of the longest slide in productivity growth since the late 1970s. This is alarming because productivity is a key ingredient in determining wages, prices and economic output.

 

When we take a look at aggregate demand in the economy, which is measured by final sales to domestic purchasers, it is clear that the U.S. is in the midst of a growth recession. Aggregate demand, measured in nominal terms, is growing (4.32%), but it is growing below its trend rate of 4.70%. As the chart below shows, the below-trend growth in nominal aggregate demand has characterized the U.S. economy for a decade. To put this weak growth into context, there has only been one post-recession recovery since 1870 as weak as the current one: the one following the Great Depression. 

 

Will President Trump be able channel Harry Houdini and extricate the U.S. from its private investment drought? He just might. If Trump can stay focused on developing supply-side tax reforms and deregulation initiatives, he might alter what has been an ugly private investment environment. If not, private investment will continue to be a drag on the U.S. economy, and his economic legacy.

This piece was originally published on Forbes. 

A Study Just Showed Why Working from Home Is Better Than Going into Work

(ANTIMEDIA) According to a new study, people who work from home are both more efficient at their jobs and better at collaborating with fellow employees. The data falls in line with other recent studies, which demonstrate that the once-common notion of remote workers eating potato chips in their pajamas may be quickly becoming a thing of the past.

“It may sound counter-intuitive, but employees are apt to work more efficiently and collaboratively when operating remotely,” reports Market Watch, according to a “new study released Tuesday by video and voice collaboration technology company Polycom, Inc., and Human Resources executive network and research firm Future Workplace…”

Of the more than 24,000 employers researchers surveyed, 62% were already taking advantage of the what they find to be the benefits of working from home. Of that number, 98% claimed that “anywhere working” increases productivity.

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“There’s a stigma that remote workers are disconnected from the rest of the team, yet this study proves that they are more sociable and proactively reach out to develop strong relationships,” Jeanne Meister, a partner at Future Workplace, told Market Watch. “The new technology tools that enable communication and collaboration are actually motivating workers to pick up the phone, seek face time and create lasting bonds.”

Meister pointed out that digital communication from one person to another, as opposed communication that occurs in a traditional office setting, allows workers to get a better feel for fellow employees as human beings:

“You beam into someone’s personal space at home, and you see not only the person but what’s important to that person in their home office.”

According to Cassidy Solis, a workplace flexibility specialist at the Society for Human Resource Management, remote working can actually encourage loyalty in employees, as well.

“Employees in a flexible workplace are more engaged and have less intention to leave employers,” she told Market Watch. “They appreciate the trust and pay it back to their employers 10-fold with loyalty.”

Other recent studies have demonstrated a growing fondness for remote employment, as well as a growing frustration with open office work plans.

“Shared work environments, and in particular hot-desking, are associated with increases in distraction, negative relationships, uncooperative behaviors and distrust,” a 2016 study from the Auckland University of Technology concluded. Another 2017 research study revealed that half of office employees surveyed have issues with noise in the workplace.

Remote working, according to the latest study, also aids in a person’s overall daily balance and can be helpful in reducing stress. And all the while, Meister says, it’s important to remember that employees aren’t the only ones benefiting from this type of relationship:

“We often talk about productivity and work life balance for employees, but it also offers employers access to global talent.”

Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo

Servitude In America's Plantation Economy

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The only possible output of low social capital is rising inequality.

One of the themes I"ve been addressing since 2008 is the neocolonial-plantation structure of the U.S. economy. The old models of colonial exploitation that optimized plantations worked by cheap imported labor (or situated in peripheral nations with plenty of cheap labor) have, beneath the surface, been adapted to advanced capitalist democracies.

The adaptations have been so successful that not only do we not even recognize the Plantation structure--we love our servitude within it.

As noted yesterday, the current mode of production optimizes the commoditization of everything: computer chips, fish and chips, labor, expertise, everything.

This commoditization optimizes the Plantation Model of integrated production, global supply chains and distribution to global marketplaces, a hierarchical management focused on maximizing profits to send back to the owners, a ruthless focus on lowering costs via labor arbitrage (commoditize the work so it can be performed anywhere labor is cheaper/more desperate) and a fanatical desire to eliminate competition or fix prices via cartels to ensure high profits.

Global capital has optimized the Plantation Model in the form of global corporations. Wal-Mart is the quintessential example. Like a classic agricultural plantation, Wal-Mart enters a region with a diverse, employment-rich ecology of small businesses and supply chains of local and regional manufacturers and distributors, and it bulldozes the entire "forest" of businesses, suppliers and distributors with the irresistible blade of integrated global supply chains and "lower prices, always."

Wal-Mart replaces the localized economy with a low-pay, highly efficient plantation economy in which the townpeople"s only choice is to work for Wal-Mart or scrape out a living feeding the Wal-Mart workers, doing their laundry, etc.--exactly as on a classic plantation.

On a classic plantation, the wages are low and the "company store" offers easy credit, binding the workers to the corporation not just for wages but for credit.

Those few who manage to save up enough capital to start small service businesses-- laundry, cafes, etc.--must do so in the shadow of the Company, which can always drive them out of business should they speak against their corporate overlords.

A once-diverse landscape is reduced to a monoculture wasteland dependent on subsidies, either implicit or explicit. Wal-Mart"s low wages leave many of its workers" families on state aid or food stamps to survive, and so it prospers on the backs of taxpayers who subsidize its low wages.

The alternative is not some fantasy of "old-time America"--this model still exists where citizens refuse to submit to the mono-tyranny of "low prices."

Isn"t it odd how this statement--the nation does not exist to benefit corporations, corporations exist to benefit the nation and its citizenry --sounds breathtakingly revolutionary in today"s politics of experience?

One of the key concepts in the Survival+ critique is the politics of experience. This is an elusive concept because what we take for granted is invisible to us, and we have to go back in time, so to speak, to rediscover a history in which the experience of daily life was quite different from the present.

Today, we accept it as "normal" that marketing worms into every once-private area of our lives. Not that long ago, adverts and marketing were limited to print media (newspapers and magazines) and TV--fundamentally passive media.

The key concept in all marketing now is supremely pernicious: any advert or campaign which reaches deep into the last refuges of privacy is considered highly valuable.

Where the only public adverts were once billboards, now there are adverts on the shopping carts in the supermarket--another violation of what could be considered temporary private space--and on the floor of the supermarket. Even the rubber dividers used to separate one"s own purchases from the next customers now display an advert.

The colonization of the plantation of the mind is now complete. It is not coincidental that those citizens who "consume" the most media are also the biggest buyers of junk food and its accompanying junk worldview based on consumption, faux novelty ("get the new chicken-bacon-cheese-double-burger today!") and a passive disengagement from the real world: we endlessly watch cooking shows rather than actually cook real food in our own kitchens.

The plantation of the mind optimizes consumption, impulse buying and short-term thinking: just buy the junk we"re pushing, and what happens to you afterward is your problem.

Experience itself has become so derealized that we don"t even recognize our perceptions and experiences have been organized into neatly internalized plantations.

It doesn"t have to be this way. As I explain in the Survival+ / Survival+ The Primer chapter entitled The Crisis of Neoliberal (Predatory) Global Capitalism, global capitalism has reached the limit of the plantation model in terms of exploiting new colonies around the globe and exploiting new sources of cheap, abundant energy.

The only possible output of a hyper-financialized Plantation Economy is rapidly increasing wealth and income inequality--precisely what we see now.

What we need is a social economy, an economy that recognizes purposes and values beyond maximizing private gains by any means necessary, which is the sole goal of hyper-financialized Plantation economies.

Given the dominance of profit-maximizing corporations and the state, we naturally assume these are the economy. But there is a third sector, the community economy, which is comprised of everything that isn’t directly controlled by profit-maximizing companies or the state.

What differentiates the community economy from the profit-maximizing market and the state?

1. The community economy allows for priorities and goals other than maximizing profit. Making a profit is necessary to sustain the enterprise, but it is not the sole goal of the enterprise.

2. The community economy is not funded by the state.

3. The community economy is locally owned and operated; it is not controlled by distant corporate hierarchies. The money circulating in the community stays in the community.

4. The community economy is not dominated by moral hazard; the community must live with the consequences of the actions of its residents, organizations and enterprises.

The community economy includes small-scale enterprises, local farmer’s markets, community organizations, social enterprises and faith-based institutions. Its structure is decentralized and self-organizing; it is not a formal hierarchy, though leaders naturally emerge within civic and business groups.

The Plantation Economy institutionalizes poverty, parasitic finance, externalized costs, moral hazard (since the corporate/state overseers do not live in the community being cannibalized) and centralized wealth and political power. These are the only possible outputs of the hyper-financialized Plantation Economy.

Once the Plantation Economy has displaced the community economy, opportunities for work and starting small enterprises shrivel, and residents become dependent on state social welfare for their survival. By eliminating the need to be a productive member of the community, the welfare state destroys positive social roles and the inter-connected layers of the community economy between the state and the individual.

When the individual receives social welfare from the state, that individual has no compelling need to contribute to the community or participate in any way other than as a consumer of corporate goods and services. State social welfare guts the community economy by removing financial incentives to participate or contribute.

Why is the community economy so important? The community economy is first and foremost the engine of social capital, which is the source of opportunity and widely distributed wealth.

Corporations cannot replace communities for the simple reason each organization has different purposes and goals. The sole purpose and goal of a corporation is to expand capital and profits, for if it fails to do so, it falters and expires.

The purpose of a community is to preserve and protect a specific locale by nurturing social solidarity: the sense of sharing a purpose with others, of belonging to a community that is capable of concerted, collective action on the behalf of its members and its locale.

It is not accidental that the current system of corporations, banks and the state increases inequality and erodes the community economy: the only possible output of low social capital is rising inequality.

(I discuss community economies in my book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All.)

We have a choice. We can continue loving our servitude in our Plantation Economy, or we can choose another model and another mode of production.