The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: April 2016

The Market Fairy Will Not Solve the Problems of Uber and Lyft

Image by Admit One

Image by Admit One

Here is the thing about Uber and Lyft (and much of the “sharing economy”).

They don’t pay the cost of their capital.

The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human.

These business models are ways of draining capital from the economy and putting them into the hands of a few investors and executives. They prey on desperate people who need money now, even if the money is insufficient to pay their total costs. Drivers are draining their own reserves to get cash now, but, hey, they gotta eat and pay the bills.

This sharing economy shit works in a shitty economy. In a good economy, where people have what they need, it doesn’t work.

The cab company model, with medallions and so on, was exploitative. It wound up charging customers too much, but it did cover its own costs–mostly. Uber and Lyft charge too little and siphon too much of what they charge back to themselves.

The model which made sense was the model of car-sharing, where company-owned cars could be used by those who had bought memberships in the company. This meant that the actual cost of the cars had to be covered. It was far cheaper than cabs, but not as cheap as Uber or Lyft (and you had to drive yourself). Something like that, but with drivers, could have worked.

For that matter, Uber- and Lyft-style apps could work with regulated wages sufficient to pay costs in particular markets.

The market will not miraculously produce a capital-replacing living wage. If it should do so in any particular market, that is happenstance; luck, not social physics.

This is a social action problem; a race to the bottom issue. It makes sense, individually, to race to the bottom.  Company execs and investors get rich, consumers get cheaper rides and drivers get money they need. But this isn’t win, win, win. It’s a long con. And not a very long one, either.

The cheaper wages paid to drivers, and thus the cheaper rides, also drive business with capital structures which make social sense out of business. They can’t compete with, “Drive your car into the ground, make less than minimum wage.”

Because it is a social action problem, what needs to be done is to take a game which leads to some people winning while destroying capital and people and move it to a game where everyone wins and capital and people are not destroyed. This can only be dealt with socially, by government.

“Thou shalt pay at least the capital replacement cost + a living wage for the market and shall take only an additional X percent for providing your app. If thou dost not we shall toss thine ass into prison.”

That is the social solution. It is not “The Market Fairy of supply and demand will make sure that fair, sustainable solutions always occur. All praise the Market Fairy.”

Until we stop pretending the Market Fairy is going to solve social action problems, we won’t actually solve those problems.


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Climate Change and Heat

In India:

India’s pre-monsoon heat has intensified, forcing thousands of people to stay indoors as they struggled to avoid blistering conditions.

Much of the country was reeling as temperatures continued to rise. Day time highs were running up to seven degrees above the seasonal average.

These temperatures will continue to rise until the summer rains arrive on the southwesterly monsoon, but those rains are not expected to arrive until around June 1.

These sort of events will become more common and more severe. Large parts of the most populous parts of the world will become essentially uninhabitable.

When these people start to move, the current refugee dislocations around the world will be as nothing.


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Things That Should Have Been Done Yesterday, #1

Ban of all consumer goods, worldwide, that are made with non-bio-degradable or otherwise non-naturally break-downable materials. Phase in period with increasing taxes, 20 percent per year for five years, at which point ban is in place.

Companies with life-saving or critical infrastructure items may apply for temporary exemptions.

All plastic packaging. Phase in, one year. It’s not necessary, it’s killing the oceans and overflowing landfills.

If it won’t biodegrade, it shouldn’t be in widespread use.


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Slow Posting

I have a fever, not sure for what, and will likely not be posting much (perhaps at all) for the next few days.

Please feel free to use this post as an open thread.

The Panama Papers Leak

You’ve probably read about it already. A Panamian law firm had its files leaked, and they reveal how rich people store money offshore to avoid taxes. In some cases legally, in some cases illegally, and, in pretty much all cases, unethically.

This is why we can’t have nice stuff: The rich simply don’t want to pay for a decent society. They just want to be filthy rich.

There are all sorts of additions to that, but that is the essence.

There is no such thing as a good society in which to live that is not relatively egalitarian. Of course, you can all be equal in poverty, but strangely enough, unless it’s desperate poverty, those people tend to be happy. Moving to the cities to get involved with China’s “economic miracle” meant an actual decrease in happiness. When the Chinese government tries to close traditional villages, the villagers often fight, and by that I don’t mean “protest,” I mean crack skulls and even, on occasion, actually fight the army and win.

Rich people caused the financial crisis, got bailed out, then insisted that poor people had to be punished for it.

If you want a good society, you keep the rich poor.

The other rule is that no one gets to opt out of anything which matters. The rich and powerful must use the same schools, airplanes, security, health care, roads, and military service as everyone else.

An absolutely fair draft, a medical system where better care cannot be bought by money or forced by power, where the children of the rich go to the same universities and schools as the poor will be a good society. A society where everyone uses public defenders chosen by lottery is a society with a fair justice system

Why? Because this forces the rich ensure that those schools, hospitals, and so on, work.  And no, your average billionaire is not subjecting his wife to a TSA porno scan and pat down. TSA agents only get to pull aside and molest hotties who aren’t part of the .1 percent.

One of the ways we will know that governments are finally serious about inequality is when they brutally crack down on tax evasion. It isn’t that hard to do, despite what everyone says. I’ve worked in a major financial institution; money going in and out of the country is examined, data is sent to authorities, etc. This stuff can be tracked easily, structuring is easy to detect, and a few criminal sentences (not fines) in high security prisons would make the point nicely.

If you make your money in country X, you pay taxes there. Money is a public utility. If you want to take it out of the country, the government acting for the people has the right to make that difficult, and indeed, tax it again or limit it.

Cyrptocurrencies like blockchain are, in part, a way for ordinary people to move money out of countries just like rich people do. This is a corrupt solution to a real problem: Our elites are corrupt, so we want to have the same right to be as corrupt as them–instead of insisting the corruption end.

There is no war but class war. The rich understand this, they have always understood it.

You keep the rich poor and weak, or they will eat you alive. Then they’ll kill you. The death toll from the 2008 financial collapse is in the millions, by any reasonable modeling of its consequences.

This is about your life, your death, and how well you live.

You should probably make it about the rich’s life, death, and how well they live.

Reasonable accommodations (a la Corbyn or Sanders) will be made. If they are not, unreasonable accommodations will be made. The rich will die or suffer in the same numbers as the poor.

But as a percentage, there just aren’t that many rich.

Too bad.

Update: Clinton supported the Panama free trade deal.

Here’s what Sanders said at the time:

Then, why would we be considering a stand-alone free trade agreement with this country?

Well, it turns out that Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing wealthy Americans and large corporations to evade U.S. taxes by stashing their cash in off-shore tax havens.  And, the Panama Free Trade Agreement would make this bad situation much worse.

Each and every year, the wealthy and large corporations evade $100 billion in U.S. taxes through abusive and illegal offshore tax havens in Panama and other countries.

According to Citizens for Tax Justice, “A tax haven . . . has one of three characteristics: It has no income tax or a very low-rate income tax; it has bank secrecy laws; and it has a history of non-cooperation with other countries on exchanging information about tax matters.  Panama has all three of those. … They’re probably the worst.”

Mr. President, the trade agreement with Panama would effectively bar the U.S. from cracking down on illegal and abusive offshore tax havens in Panama.  In fact, combating tax haven abuse in Panama would be a violation of this free trade agreement, exposing the U.S. to fines from international authorities.

In 2008, the Government Accountability Office said that 17 of the 100 largest American companies were operating a total of 42 subsidiaries in Panama.  This free trade agreement would make it easier for the wealthy and large corporations to avoid paying U.S. taxes and it must be defeated.  At a time when we have a record-breaking $14.7 trillion national debt and an unsustainable federal deficit, the last thing that we should be doing is making it easier for the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in this country to avoid paying their fair share in taxes by setting-up offshore tax havens in Panama.

Vote Clinton! She’ll make sure your job gets sent overseas and that the rich don’t pay tax.


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Will Capitalism Be Replaced By Something Better?

The short answer is: “Who knows?”

The longer answer is “probably not,” simply because we have such a mess coming down the road in terms of climate change, resource exhaustion, imperial collapse, and so on.

But the answer isn’t “No.”

The answer is that it is possible. Not likely, but not so unlikely as to be a write off not worthy of consideration.

Far better systems can be thought up, I believe. I believe it’s even possible those systems would work with human nature well enough to be viable (a.k.a., are not utopian, in the impossible sense).

I also think they are our best alternative.

Wait? What?

Yeah. I think the odds are less than even that we pull it off, but I also think it is our best chance.  Sometimes the best bet you’ve got just isn’t a very good bet. We either fix the way our economic system works (how we turn resources into goods and services) and our political system works (how we make group choices) or we could go extinct. Better case scenarios involve billions of deaths and amazing amounts of suffering.

Of course, dividing the problem in two is wrong. Capitalism isn’t “just” an economic system.  The great mistake of the social sciences was changing from “political economics” to “economics.” Capitalism is a political choice, but it’s also how we make most of our group choices.

The right is right. Ideas matter, and the ideas on the ground during a crisis are important.  We’ve got a lot of crises ahead of us. That is bad, but it is also our hope. Setting up to win those crisis points is what matters. The neoliberals won the last one (the financial crisis), but no one wins them all.

It would be good if we had some radical options on the floor which would also make most of humanity better off, provide for freedom, and so on.

So figure out what you want to replace capitalism (or how it can be radically fixed); and do look seriously at the political system. Democracy is not going to be immune from the fallout (nor is the sort of one-party state China runs.)

We can create a better world, but that doesn’t mean we will. It’s up to us, to humanity, in the largest sense.


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