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Is it just me, or do working relationships seem to be getting slowly but steadily worse for the rest of you lately, too? Mostly in little ways yet, without any clear reason thus leaving one asking “why?” Why now? It seems like, if it isn’t just my imagination, it probably has something to do with economic conditions. I know I’m reluctant to put my foot down, even after many incremental moves towards “suck,” given the daunting prospect of trying to find replacement income. Multiply this millions of times over, and you’ve probably got means, motive and opportunity, as they say. Reported trends for “productivity” probably back this up too, to the extent that “productivity gains” are in many cases a matter of squeezing anxious workers to do more work for the same compensation.

What doesn’t seem to be getting slowly but steadily worse, though? Anthem jacked up my premiums by “only” 12% this year; I guess I’m just going to put up with that, too, for the time being. I’ve tried shopping around in recent years, and just ended up raising my deductible a couple of times. I don’t feel like I want to do so yet again, so I suppose I’ll just eat the extra expense and hope that maybe, somehow, something will offer relief in another year, or another year after that. Arguments over what, if any, cost-control effects will result from “Obamacare” or were even intended to result from it, as well as the long timeline for implementation, keep my expectations low.

Some things get cheaper, of course, particularly information technology products and services, though this is partly offset by the fact that we end up needing more and better versions of them to maintain their utility in a networked world. Meanwhile it’s just those few outlier categories of things one actually needs which keep going up, up, up in cost; The Atlantic had an item about this a while back. Health care, education, food (even if most Americans are still rich enough to take little notice), fuel (rather more obvious). How long can this go on?

Small wonder that a protest movement has finally erupted in America, with the great majority of us getting relentlessly squeazed from the direction of both income and expenses, for, oh, most of my life, give-or-take? (more…)

Okay, this one is going to be even more sketchy than usual, more of me just formalizing a conversation with myself than usual. But these ideas have been haunting me all day, and I think it’s to the point where they simply demand some kind of post for the record, if only my own personal record.

Remarkably, the comments in question appeared at cnn.com; these aren’t entirely new ideas of course and, indeed, I’ve puzzled over some of them for years now which is part of the reason they struck a chord with me. Still, I think Douglas Rushkoff’s comments about work, technology and our entire economic system are pretty thought-provoking.

As noted, I’ve asked questions myself, at times, about the idea that what we need are “jobs” given how most people seem to dislike their jobs and how we don’t seem to be suffering any kind of acute shortage of the goods and services which jobs produce. But I think Rushkoff really got me thinking with this bit:

We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working. […] Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

I added the emphasis to the last bit, because that’s what has really been obsessing me. Everything else seems fairly sound and self-evident; it’s been a very very long time since western, industrialized society has known a famine or other “real” shortage of anything. Even our energy-supply crunches have been relatively mild, and as much a product of cultural choices as real unavailability of sufficient energy. One of the various “crises” we anguish over is, even now, an obesity crisis, and while I don’t want to oversimplify things that’s still pretty much a crisis of abundance rather than of scarcity.

But Rushkoff really crystalizes the situation and its implications by pointing out that, in this context, high unemployment is decreasingly a problem of shortages in goods or services produced by working people, and increasingly a problem of shortages of opportunities for people to signal themselves as deserving recipients of a share of the economy’s overall production, per our prevailing system for doing so. Which is paid work, i.e., jobs.

This, too, seems fairly obvious when one thinks about it, but I’ve never had these concepts brought into such sharp focus. (more…)

The issue of “packing up and moving” has been on my mind for some months, now. Actually, as I have come to realize, a number of up-sticks-ing-related issues have been on my mind, which may ultimately be too disparate to synthesize into one grand, unified-field-theory post.

The loose theme of “I don’t like it here and I’ll leave” touches on a lot of concepts and phenomena. Immigration. Capital flight, broadly including such things as mega-profitable sports teams and other corporate gorillas extorting money and favorable laws from communities with the threat of relocating, as well as the notion that if we dare try to tax back any of the growing portion of society’s wealth which financiers are soaking up, they’ll go overseas and we’ll be sorry. And the benefits of freedom to leave one’s surroundings for a new start and how to weigh them against the risk of an ignorant, indifferent, “throw-away” social attitude.

There’s also my personal struggle with whether and moreover how to bail out on my home country, of course. Which got unexpected company, recently, with a declaration of similar ambition from my younger brother. And this, finally, gave me what seems like a useful perspective from which to consider at least some of these relocation issues. (more…)