I was musing with my students today that our entire economy is
something of a fantasy as no-one actually makes anything anymore and
we all do service tasks for each other. For instance, a small
outbreak of Horse Flu shut down the racing 'industry' for the weekend
and it was a disaster for tens of thousands of people who have part-
time weekend jobs in it and thousands of less casual workers who were
laid off. Horse racing for godsake!
We are all now meant to be lawyers, nurses, accountants, managers and
teachers because those are the new 'real' tasks while any kind of
production is old world and paid accordingly. However your minimum
wage concept is a real problem from what I can see - it's not exactly
a living wage. Given that the fate of a significant proportion of the
population in a service based 'tertiary' economy are destined to be
burger flippers and counter jumpers, those tasks need to be improved
in status. Perhaps you could do as the rest of the world has and
introduce a Goods and Service Tax approach - I can't see that being
popular but it is essential when most money is spent on services
rather than product.
We live on clouds and are at the mercy of catastophes. Reading 'Black
Swan - the Impact of the Highly Improbable' by Nassim Taleb where he
deals very nicely with the impact of catastrophic events quite
nicely. But describes the bird as unattractive. Rubbish! I have an
image of one on iStock...
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 29/08/2007, at 4:54 PM, Chris Crawford wrote:
> The problem with that argument is that ANYTHING can be done cheaper by
> people in very poor countries. Anything. So how can any of us compete?
> Answer is we can't. Here in the USA people like me who remember
> when it was
> possible for a man to graduate from high school and get a job paying a
> decent family-man wage have seen it become impossible for even
> college grads
> to survive because almost everything pays $6.50 an hour for new
> hires except
> Law, Nursing, Accountants and business managers, and teachers. And
> there
> just isn't enough of those kind of jobs to employ all the adults in a
> country with 300 million people.
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