If you're unemployed, it isn't because there's no work.
There is, and always will be work to be done.
What we don't always have is jobs.
Uh...what?
In this episode, we're looking at a uniquely capitalist failure:
meaningless jobs, and the unemployed masses.
"Meaningless jobs."
What is a meaningless job?
If someone is willing to pay you money, ANY amount of money,
then how is it meaningless to them?
If it were meaningless, they wouldn't pony up anything!
The only meaningless jobs are in government or some heavily regulated sector like banking.
Academia, too.
Used to be, colleges and universities just had a Dean.
Now they have a Vice Dean, a Sub-Dean, and, I kid you not, a "Deanlet"!
We'll unpack both of these phenomena and the different elements of a capitalist economy
that shape our relationship to work.
Our "relationship to work" is we exchange a certain amount of time and effort
in exchange for money.
We must feel that the money is worth more in our subjective viewpoint
than the time and effort we put in, or else we wouldn't do it!
Conversely, the employers must feel subjectively that the benefit they're getting
is worth more than the money they're paying us!
Otherwise, none of it would happen!
Every economic system to date has had its problems.
Only under capitalism, however, has finding meaningful and useful work been an issue.
Really?
ONLY under capitalism?
You can't find ANYONE in the Middle Ages struggling for meaning?
NO ONE in ancient Greece?
No Roman poets or anything?
You titled your video, "How Capitalism Ruined Work."
To say HOW it ruined work implies that it DID.
But you skipped over that step!
What did it do that constitutes ruining work?
By making it easier?
By making it more efficient?
By making it more comfortable, or cutting the number of hours needed to work to survive?
How is work "ruined" compared to how it was in hunter-gatherer cultures,
or even the Middle Ages?
It is a uniquely modern problem for an economy to be structured
so that hundreds of thousands of people are without a meaningful job.
So what "meaningful jobs" did peasants have?
And at the same time, hundreds of thousands have their most basic human needs going unmet.
Our modern society is the only one in which people are both going without food and shelter.
I...don't even know what to say to someone this stupid!
Going back before capitalism, the lack of food and shelter was COMMONPLACE!
And back in prehistory, it was the NORM!
ONLY under capitalism did a significant portion of the population
HAVE food and shelter with any degree of consistency!
In fact, before governments of the world ruined economies with COVID lock-downs,
which HAVEN'T WORKED, by the way, the global poverty rate,
thanks to capitalism, had been CUT IN HALF over the previous 20 years!
I mean, did you not even bother to look at the statistics?
All of us can look around at our communities, our cities, our country,
and see that there are things that need to be done,
that there are issues we can all agree upon and want to see resolved.
But we all know that there is only so much we can do as individuals.
Whether it's because we work long hours and need time to rest,
because we're unemployed and need to actively look for a job,
or because we're in a precarious situation ourselves,
most of us have barely enough time and energy if any at all
to feed the hungry, house the homeless,
or generally better our lives and those of the people around us.
And yet, SOMEHOW, horrible Capitalist America has BY FAR the greatest amount
of private voluntary social spending in the world!
And people generally give the same portion of their income in charity...EVEN if they're poor!
Funny thing is, socialists and progressives are LESS likely to engage in charitable giving.
Imagine that!
Many of us work jobs that feel completely devoid of meaning, that seem to help no one.
Then why would anyone pay us to do them?
And we still can't spend our time in more meaningful ways.
Thanks to capitalism, the working class today has FAR more leisure time
than they had at ANY POINT IN HISTORY.
Long gone are the days of walking into a bank,
asking to see the manager, and starting at a desk the same day.
Because banks are hyper-regulated, like I said.
But I have not one but TWO grown daughters
who were able to find steady work pretty much as soon as they started looking.
With NO experience.
Industrial jobs have steadily declined for decades.
You're gonna make me actually show it, aren't you?
For DECADES, it was INCREASING, NOT on a steady decline!
Until your buddy Obama got in power, that is.
But even then, with the exception of a couple of dips for the financial crisis and COVID,
it's at least held steady!
Oh, but let me guess, they're screwing them with lower, pay, huh?
Think again!
Wages and Salaries of private industrial workers have risen steadily.
And in case you think this means they're just cutting back hours to nothing,
that's also the case for their weekly earnings!
So IN WHAT WAY have industrial jobs "steadily declined"?
And even the relative security of a college education has waned
as more graduates go into low-wage or even unpaid entry-level jobs.
Funny how that happens when you devalue college with bogus degrees
like "Gender studies" or "Environmental science."
But it's a lot better if you actually go into, say, a STEM field.
Funny, that.
Of course, it doesn't help that your precious government has worked for half a century
to make college over TEN TIMES as expensive as it should be!
There is little hope that this generation will achieve the financial stability of our parents.
First of all, the statistics show the opposite.
Again, COVID notwithstanding; that's screwing up a LOT of stuff.
But again, it's not the disease, it's government's ridiculous response to it.
They absolutely could not have picked worse policies to implement!
But also, it would be a LOT easier if it weren't for government running up massive debt
while the Fed prints so much money none of us can save anything,
and if we did it just gets eaten up by inflation!
And for those who entered the job market at the height of the pandemic particularly,
employment has been lagging far behind expected levels.
Uh, I don't know what kind of crap YOU'RE talking about, but basically EVERYWHERE—
that government still allows to be open, that is—is DESPERATE to hire people!
Check with your local grocery store, or restaurants, basically any store that's open.
Look at how much demand there is for stuff like carpentry.
And they're offering impressive wages for it!
That's how desperate they are for workers!
Three different elements of capitalist society play into our current relationship with work:
the profit motive, capitalism's purposeful misallocation of labor,
and the crises that are built into the system's proper function.
Wow. You don't know the first thing about Economic Business Cycle Theory, do you?
Malinvestments that result in the boom-bust cycle
are caused by an over-expansion of cheap credit by the central bank.
That creates the illusion of greater savings in the economy,
which in turn creates the illusion of greater demand.
If reading ACTUAL economists hurts your brain too much—
and not an ANTHROPOLOGIST like you hilariously cite—
I've actually got a couple of rap videos in the description that explain it pretty well.
I'm going to skip over him desperately and pathetically
attempting to explain all of this and failing.
Amidst all his meandering, the only points he makes
are long-debunked hating on cryptocurrencies
and the even-longer-debunked "planned obsolescence" crap.
As I've repeatedly shown, you get LESS wealth and income inequality
the more economically free a country is.
Really, he has NO excuse.
He also manages to state BOTH that monopolies are bad AND competition is bad!
Also, growth is bad, too!
How does someone like that manage to tie their shoes?
These are not the essential workers spotlighted by the pandemic
whom we all saw are foundational to our survival.
Uh-huh.
Why do you think we're in the mess we're in?
It's because IDIOTS WHO THINK LIKE YOU decided that these other jobs were unessential—
and NOW look at supply chains!
Maybe these jobs AREN'T as meaningless as you're trying to make them out to be!
If things were different, if we did cast off these pointless jobs that might as well not exist...
Uh, we just tried that!
It's been HIDEOUSLY destructive!
At this point we should acknowledge that there is currently a labor shortage in minimum wage,
particularly restaurant, jobs.
Show me ONE restaurant who's offering the minimum wage.
You CAN'T.
A more thinly stretched economy justifies austerity measures for out-of-touch governments.
It continues to concentrate wealth at the top.
Then how come it isn't actually HAPPENING that way?
How come when so-called "austerity" polices are put in place
(and that's a really stupid and misleading term that's only there to denigrate it),
wealth and income coefficients go DOWN?
Here we get to the final piece of the puzzle: the regular destabilization of capitalism.
Every few years in recent decades, about every five to ten years on average,
the entire economy crashes and enters a recession or depression.
Already covered why.
And it's NOT because of capitalism.
It's BECAUSE OF GOVERNMENT.
You yourself even mentioned banks being bailed out!
Well, WHO'S BAILING THEM OUT, EINSTEIN???
Who's perverting the incentives?
Who's privatizing profits and socializing losses?
Capitalism is when both profits AND losses are private.
For all your bleating about the profit motive, you NEVER ONCE mentioned loss aversion!
Why is that?
Because it would destroy your pathetic arguments and you know it?
Or are you just so mindbogglingly ignorant you're not even AWARE of loss-aversion?
As Marx observed and has been proven right time and time again...
This problem balloons until investing money is less and less useful.
You know, it's interesting that someone can say this many words
without THINKING about any of them!
Let's actually use our brains here, can we do that?
If investing money is less useful, then they need to encourage more investment.
How do they do that?
Interest rates go up.
Then more people save and invest.
Which means they're consuming less.
Which means they're deferring the value of what they've earned in exchange for future returns.
So the resources they WOULD have consumed are freed up,
and the borrowers can use those resources to create other products,
expand, hire new people, and so on.
So, what do you think happens when the central bank
gets desperate to push interest rates to the floor?
Exactly what I said earlier: they have to print money to create cheap credit.
So they're getting money WITHOUT having to raise interest rates to get more people to invest.
Which means those resources AREN'T freed up;
they're still being consumed, while the producers are grabbing for those very same resources
with the money they've borrowed.
And for awhile, this LOOKS like it's working.
But sooner or later, it's all gonna hit the fan,
as the resources just aren't there to sustain all of that in the long run.
THAT is where the bust comes from.
And I challenge ANYONE to refute it.
What we need is to better recognize the role jobs are meant to play.
The role jobs are meant to play is to create the products and services
that people SUBJECTIVELY think is good for them.
And since value is subjective, NO government, NO central planner
can decide who is and is not essential,
which products are worthwhile and which aren't,
which industries have too much investment and which ones don't have enough.
And the MINUTE that you forget that this is about individuals and their subjective preferences,
the MINUTE that you start thinking about the good of "society"
or whatever you call your glorious collective,
the minute that YOU start thinking YOU know what's better for people's lives than they do,
you start causing all the very same problems you're blaming capitalism for.
So, thanks for watching!
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