Allowed HTML - you can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

15 thoughts on “Oh Happy Day”

  • tony_opmoc

    Whilst I am still trying to work out what the hell is actually going on..I read this on an American Website. I guess most people who contribute to this website vote for people like George Bush

    “I would like to make the point that for years we exported our manufacturing economy, first to japan, and then elsewhere….. We made up for the loss in wealth creation by selling off some assets and borrowing a little.

    But that’s okay, because we became a service, value add, and intellectual economy.

    But then, we began to export our value add economy, but that’s okay, because we substituted finance, insurance, and real estate…. We made up for the loss in wealth creation by selling off more assets, and borrowing a little more.

    But then we began to export those service jobs that didn’t require face to face interaction between servicer and client….. We made up for the loss in wealth creation by selling the last of our good assets, and borrowing a lot more.

    But then we began to export the intellectual economy by outsourcing our software design, engineering design, insurance underwriting, and other industries that didn’t require face tame with the client….. We made up for the loss in wealth creation by borrowing even more money, and print up a little bit extra…

    And when the finance blew up, and insurance blew up, and real estate blew up….. There was no way to make up for the loss in wealth creation.

    The moral of the story?

    We killed our golden goose for a feast, instead of being satisfied with just a slow steady stream of eggs.”

    So who exactly is in control?

    Who is screwing and impoverishing the entire World?

    Tony

  • JimmyGiro

    @ tony_opmoc

    The cheapest workforce will eventually win; and by winning become more expensive.

    The economies of the world will reach equilibrium when most countries pay their workforce slightly more than the bare essentials to exist.

    It isn’t so much as who is in charge, but what?

    Entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, drives the physical universe; I suspect it drives the economy as well. If it does, then the future is the cold thermal death of no resources.

  • Akmal

    Iam a guy from Uzbekistan, Samarkand who studying law at master’s.

    I have read your book of murder in Samarkand, and there is one thing you wrote is just such an immoral. That is ” By the uzbek tradition after marriage the bride becomes the family’s slave, wakes up at 4 o’clock in the morning to do al the job, and at night when she is totally tired is forced to have a sex by her husband and some other members of the family”. This is the thing which just unbeleivablely untrue at all. I thing nobody beleived that at all. I was so upset reading that kind of immorality about our nation, and was so happy of you being removed from our country in time.

  • Clark

    Akmal,

    how did you read that before Craig Murray left the country? Murder in Samarkand was written later…

  • techniclour

    Er, hey, this decent bloke had a decent day, remember?

    Akmal, you may not believe it but it still might be the general tradition. And even, from parts of the world I’ve visited (parts of India, Oman, Blackburn) a practice. Good for you for not agreeing with it. Of course men are much nicer than that, if they are at all free-thinking, or remain uncowed by a totalitarian male state.

  • Clark

    JimmyGyro

    yes, thermodynamics provides the ultimate limit. But intelligence can provide versatility within limits. Check out “Spreng’s Triangle”. Of course, it’s up to us humans to prove ourselves intelligent…

  • glenn

    Tony –

    Interesting summary.

    The real problems started when productivity and wages to a company’s workforce started to seriously diverge, under Reagan and Thatcher. Before that, wages and productivity kept track of each other since the industrial revolution.

    This divergence put more money into the hands of the wealthy classes, while workers had to borrow more to maintain their levels. We now find a couple routinely has to both work in order to maintain a household, when a single worker would have been sufficient in the past, and it’s still not enough – debt carried on rising.

    The outsourcing your reference mentions made the problem much worse, but is basically more of the same – increasing productivity, while failing to reward the workers with the benefits of that productivity. Indeed, productivity shot up while wages nose-dived in real terms, in a race to the bottom for the world’s cheapest workforce.

    The only way to finance something like this is hawking off a country’s assets (“Selling off the family silver”, in Harold MacMillan’s famous denouncement of Thatcher’s privatisations), and increasing debt.

    Thatcher and Reagan did both big time. Recall Thatcher’s “relaxing” of the rules on lending – the most important effect was to hugely increase the amount people could borrow. That started the housing boom, to the point that a typical house could now be worth 10-20 full years of post-tax average income.

    Then we could apparently use our homes as cash machines, “freeing the equity” in them, and keeping the whole ludicrous economy staggering along.

    That and much more along those lines got us pretty much where we are now.

Comments are closed.