The American Non-Recovery: Jobless Nation Still Lacks Jobs

@Lockheed Ventura So if we get more in line with places like India and China which practically have slave-labor economies, that's somehow going to be healthy? Nonsense. Globalization is nothing but a loophole around labor laws which we spent more than a century to put in place, and which are what took this nation from one of the slave-labor economies to one of the most prosperous in the world. The greedy imbeciles at the top of the food chain are now trying to undo all that and they must be stopped.

@Lockheed Ventura Let me mention that I am all for globalization if it's defined as prosperity for the whole planet (as opposed to it being isolated to US, EU and a few others). Here is how that should be done: the whole world should be one nation, with every human having exactly the same rights (the rights like we have here). That's the only way to do it. Otherwise, it's just big corporations exploiting the humans who live in the nations that don't give their workers any rights.

@Lockheed Ventura Except that the fortunes of the middle (or "laboring") classes have been in decline now for about 40 years. As Wolff put it, capital took the huge gains it realized from increased productivity and lent a good part of it to the workers instead of paying it as wages.

What Niko said.

@Niko Bellic : As Lockheed mentioned briefly, an American-style "middle class lifestyle" for every human being would equal total environmental collapse, all economic issues aside. Unfortunately, that's the gold standard to which developing economies are currently aspiring (or at least pledging fealty).

The decline of the American middle class really doesn't affect this much at all. 1.3 billion Chinese people are expecting cars and Levittown houses within their lifetimes.

@Gef the Talking Mongoose : To be clear, I'll say that that prosperity for all is not a bad goal. In fact, it's probably one of the few decent, human goals we can have. But "prosperity" is going to have to be radically redefined away from the American suburban ideal to have any chance of being economically or environmentally sustainable. As a diehard urbanite, I've never been particularly in love with "everyone gets a car! and another car! and standalone house with a garage for both of them!" but that's the expectation that's currently being set for and by developing nations.

Oh, and culling a few of the more venal overconsumers from the top of the economic food chain couldn't hurt, either. But that's more of a personal-satisfaction deal than anything that would really shift the development goals of emerging economies.

@Lockheed Ventura

good troll, 8/10

"declining standard of living for the majority of Americans" could be presented as a reasonable outcome – if that decline had a semi-rational quantitative target and endpoint. Complete, sudden denial of housing, food, & healthcare for a hundred million capable working adults in a country with extreme wealth concentrated in the top 1% = not a reasonable outcome. See the image Choire attached to the post? Yes, this is an angry mob scenario developing.

@brianvan Yup. After all, it's not the American standard of living eroding at a moderate pace for all. It's the American standard of living eroding slowly for most, and absolutely disappearing (complete destitution) for an increasingly large minority. That is most definitely NOT good.

In other words, if mass unemployment (and, over time, an increasingly large pool of non-working citizens) is the new norm, you're going to have to find something better to do with them than HOPE they don't end up sleeping under bridges. As American society is set up now it's simply almost impossible to live without a job.

@brianvan @brianvan What you call trolling, might just be stating things that Americans are in complete denial about. I hope you are right, and there is some sort of easy fix for the economy, that Obama can pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat.

Or maybe we are facing long term secular changes in the economy, and we need face this fact head on. Perhaps extreme wealth differentials among nations are impossible in an open trading system. Can we have that discussion?

My point is that high unemployment should not be treated as some sort of "mystery" that our national leaders are trying to solve. It is the direct result of policy decisions that both political parties endorse wholeheartedly.

@Lockheed Ventura I agree with you completely that this is likely the "new normal", which is to say the jobs are NOT coming back. Which means we're either going to have to redistribute wealth, set up literal poorhouses, or pay people to dig ditches to prevent a powder keg type scenario. The political system in this country has reached an intractable point where it's essentially impossible to raise taxes so I'm not sure how any of those things would be accomplished.

Basically, we're all fucked, and things are either going to get really sad or really bloody or both.

> high unemployment should not be treated as some sort of
> "mystery" that our national leaders are trying to solve. It is
> the direct result of policy decisions that both political
> parties endorse wholeheartedly.

Right. So how about we chuck both political parties and start over?

@Gef the Talking Mongoose I wasn't talking about "American way of life" (especially not in contrast to "European") in terms of the way we spend our money and waste resources. I was talking about democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. I agree: urban life is the way to go (plus farms and villages, of course) … suburbs should simply be banned, they are absolutely unsustainable.