What is Occupy Wallstreet?

[kandrathe]

Once again, you're deflecting. Opportunity is eroding, you even said so yourself, and thus so too is the equality of opportunity. You cannot have one erode and another stay the same when they are essentially the same. This is not arguing apples and oranges, this is arguing apples to apples. You cannot have opportunity erode while having the equality of opportunity stay the same, either both have to stay the same, both have to increase, or both have to decrease. They are tied together. If one erodes, so to does the other have to erode, they are not exclusive to each other, they are inclusive of each other.

Say I'm a business owner, and in 2008 I hire 100 new employees a year, and then due to recession and lack of sales I entrench and decide for 2009 and 2010 to hire 50, or zero new employees. This equally denied the opportunity to the pool of potential applicants. There is no inequality in presenting, or retracting the opportunity.

But, this is a much bigger picture as well. Being hired is one piece. How about education? Part of the stimulus bill increased the amount of money going to student aid. Opportunity is increased in that case. What about new business ventures? Again, part of the stimulus went to the Small Business Administration for expanding grants and loans to small business. Things are hampered by a credit crunch as banks swing the pendulum away from ridiculously easy credit.

I'm not deflecting here. I'm swirling around a bigger picture of what opportunity means both at the present, and historically. It means more than railing at the disproportionate wealth of the top 1%. It means more than a poverty rate that oscillates between 10% and 16% over three decades. It means more than getting every child through high school, and every high school graduate through college.

I think I've shown that mostly people are better off than they were a decade ago, and that most people do advance upwards in social mobility. I've acknowledged the current challenges and I've given my opinions on why I believe real opportunities contributing toward "The American Dream" are eroding. But, I believe it would be natural for people to be more pessimistic in the trough of a deep recession, or in the midst of a civil war, etc. Despite the hard times, more young people still believe they will do better than their parents.

Once again, try staying on topic. The fact is, opportunity has decreased and it continues to decrease. Jobs are being lost and not coming back because of the push for automation along with decreases in working condition (and s'posed increase in productivity which, in essence, is having less people do more).

I tend to step back from a problem and view it in it's larger context. I feel I am on topic. We don't know that lost jobs would not return. It would take some stepwise changes, such as reform of our tax code, to return the US as THE place to start or move your business.

Likewise, the wealth creation you state isn't really wealth creation, but wealth concentration as high paying jobs are being destroyed to create more low paying jobs that do not even come close to the same amount of wealth going out and that difference in wealth is going into the pockets of a few. As much as you want to say that rest of the world is better off, it is not. Those with large amounts of wealth are concentrating more wealth at the expense of those that were being paid good salaries now being decimated, those with extremely low salaries getting a few more pennies, and those with a high amount of wealth continue to concentrate that difference wealth lost from those that lost good salary positions as those positions were redistributed to much, much lowered salary positions.

You'd have to show some evidence to back this up. There are many service industry jobs being created, and manufacturing is taking a beating. But, the service sector also includes lawyers, doctors, nurses, financial, computer, etc.

Pete and I had a great exchange along these lines a couple of years ago. I was wondering what happens when people aren't really needed to run the economy. If you look at the productivity of farming, for example, where very few people produce the same or greater amounts of food. Or, more fully automated production, where machines and robots do most of the work. You put a roll a denim on one end of the machines, and various sizes of blue jeans get spit out the other end, and automatically bundled by size, and sent off to the inspectors. Instead of hundreds of people sitting at sewing machines, you've employed a few engineers, machinists, and repair technicians, and eliminated a lot of tedium. I still don't have an answer, because our psyche's are entrenched in the idea that everyone must find gainful employment in order to be a productive member of society.

So, this may be radical for me... But, one way to alleviate some of the unemployment problem would be to lower the age for social security, and to set the federal and state employee work weeks to 32 or 36 hours. Eventually, the rest of the culture would follow and a 32 hour work week would become normal. Then, maybe we'd go to a 24 hour work week, some day in the future.