So basically your comment that "Europe is a shithole" was complete and utter stupidity on your part and in fact your only point in this whole thing has been the whopping "revelation" that cost of living is higher in larger cities.
First, simmer down a bit, eh?
Second, and more directly, even the rural and suburban parts of many European nations (especially the Western nations) pale in comparison to the US in the context of cost of living, taxation, and economic utility. Meaning to say, I would not willingly choose to move from where I am now to Europe unless I could maintain a reasonably similar level of comfort for my family, and with mine and my wife's professions, that's a practical impossibility.
Proof?
And, again, if you define your wants as "Lots of land, a huge house in the middle of nowhere and a big car" Europe is not gonna give you that because they don't have the room and they aren't as stupid as North America is in building sprawling suburban hellholes.
Proof? I think first I'll have to see proof that Europe doesn't have suburbs. My inlaws living in the suburbs of London will be very surprised to hear this, I should think.
Yes, America is known for having significantly cheaper education than Europe. This is part of the reason everybody has access to all the best schools over there and no one ever decides against pursuing further education because of all the debt they would have to go into.
The U.S. has the highest rate of college attendance in the world. Go figure. Our wealth and success in not merely manifest in mindless consumption.
Just to maintain some perspective, I think people in the middle and upper-middle classes should lower their standards considerably and not be blowing their money on the next hi-def 3d plasma televisions. Is that fascism? I guess so but I stick by it because they've only been given (no I don't think they earned it) that lifestyle through the exploitation of people across the globe and by fucking up the environment and that it isn't sustainable anyways so they'll have to make do with less eventually.
That's not a very coherent argument, though. "People should have less despite their ability to afford it because I think they didn't earn it."
What are you, my grandfather? You going to tell me a sob story about working in a steel mill next?
People should have less because the externalities of the crap they're buying aren't built into the price of said crap.
E.g. all the clothes/shoes/electronics and crap that people buy are made by people making basically slave wages in factories that are raping the environment.
Also the giant SUVs that people own and the suburban communities that developed because of car dependence are entirely predicated on cheap gas whose price doesn't nearly take into account the price to clean up all of the environmental damage being done by resource extraction and consumption.
Yes, America is known for having significantly cheaper education than Europe. This is part of the reason everybody has access to all the best schools over there and no one ever decides against pursuing further education because of all the debt they would have to go into.
The U.S. has the highest rate of college attendance in the world. Go figure. Our wealth and success in not merely manifest in mindless consumption.
Is that per capita or total, and how does it spread out with relation to outcomes.
I would be really interest in the measurements there, because no way in hell can I see how as mentioned the UK or Germany are lower then the US.
I guess for Japan it's analytic vs memorisation that's keeping it down.
Suck it!
Tiger Burning on
Ain't no particular sign I'm more compatible with
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KlykaDO you have anySPARE BATTERIES?Registered Userregular
edited January 2010
I can totally understand Germany being lower than a lot of countries because our school system has become a joke and our youth is basically trying to be like retarded US teens, only because they are already retarded to begin with,they become double retarded.
Not necessarily definitive - it's weighted 2/3rd's for adult literacy and 1/3rd for primary, secondary and tertiary enrollment levels.
There's also the issue that it doesn't say much about overall success - you could rank fairly low but succeed as a nation provided you have a good system for stratifying your high achievers and others fail to beat you on gross numbers.
That entire index is fairly worthless for judging the quality of the education system of a country. For example, adult literacy rate could potentially be skewed by immigration, while tertiary education enrollment rates are a completely worthless statistic considering the significant difference in secondary and tertiary educational institutions in various countries.
I don't really see how adult literacy rate could be seriously skewed by the immigration of a country.
I haven't really gone over the numbers for that one, but considering how small the difference in adult literacy rate between developed nations tends to be, it seems possible (albeit, admittely, unlikely in most cases) to me.
Also it doesn't measure tertiary enrollment, it measures primary, secondary and tertiary enrollment.
"Primary, secondary and tertiary enrollment" surprisingly enough includes tertiary enrollment. So... I really don't see what you're getting at here.
You're arguing there's a signficiant difference in secondary and tertiary delineations between countries...which while true, would be eliminated by counting them all together. Any country which broke up tertiary would necessarily boost secondary and vice versa. The numbers simply shift from one area to another and add up the same way.
How do we break a system which now permeates every aspect of our lives?
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 5th January 2010
Who said this? “All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness.” Was it a. the boss of Greenpeace, b. the director of the New Economics Foundation, or c. an anarchist planning the next climate camp? None of the above: d. the former head of the Confederation of British Industry, who currently runs the Financial Services Authority. In an interview broadcast last Friday, Lord Turner brought the consumer society’s most subversive observation into the mainstream(1).
In our hearts most of us know it is true, but we live as if it isn’t. Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions which sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.
As the Guardian revealed yesterday, the British government is now split over product placement in TV programmes: if it implements the policy proposed by Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, plots will revolve around chocolates and cheeseburgers and ads will be impossible to filter, perhaps even to detect. Mr Bradshaw must know that this indoctrination won’t make us happier, wiser, greener or leaner; but it will make the television companies £140m a year(2).
Though we know they aren’t the same, we can’t help conflating growth and well-being. Last week, for example, the Guardian carried the headline “UK standard of living drops below 2005 level”(3). But the story had nothing to do with our standard of living. Instead it reported that per capita gross domestic product is lower than it was in 2005. GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living. But the terms are confused so often that journalists now treat them as synonyms. The low retail sales of previous months were recently described by this paper as “bleak”(4) and “gloomy”(5). High sales are always “good news”, low sales are always “bad news”, even if the product on offer is farmyard porn. I believe it’s time that the Guardian challenged this biased reporting.
Those who still wish to conflate welfare and GDP argue that high consumption by the wealthy improves the lot of the world’s poor. Perhaps, but it’s a very clumsy and inefficient instrument. After some 60 years of this feast, 800m people remain permanently hungry. Full employment is a less likely prospect than it was before the frenzy began.
In a new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Sir Partha Dasgupta makes the point that the problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit(6). There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.
Most importantly, no deduction is made to account for the depreciation of natural capital: the overuse or degradation of soil, water, forests, fisheries and the atmosphere. Dasgupta shows that the total wealth of a nation can decline even as its GDP is growing. In Pakistan, for example, his rough figures suggest that while GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000, total wealth declined by 1.4%. Amazingly, there are still no official figures which seek to show trends in the actual wealth of nations.
You can say all this without fear of punishment or persecution. But in its practical effects, consumerism is a totalitarian system: it permeates every aspect of our lives. Even our dissent from the system is packaged up and sold to us in the form of anti-consumption consumption, like the “I’m not a plastic bag” which was supposed to replace disposable carriers but was mostly used once or twice before it fell out of fashion, or lucrative new books on how to live without money.
Orwell and Huxley proposed different totalitarianisms: one sustained by fear, the other partly by greed. Huxley’s nightmare has come closer to realisation. In the nurseries of the Brave New World, “the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying,’ they whispered, ‘I do love flying, I do love having new clothes … old clothes are beastly …We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending’”(7). Underconsumption was considered “positively a crime against society”(8). But there was no need to punish it. At first the authorities machine-gunned the Simple Lifers who tried to opt out, but that didn’t work. Instead they used “the slower but infinitely surer methods” of conditioning(9): immersing people in advertising slogans from childhood. A totalitarianism driven by greed eventually becomes self-enforced.
Let me give you an example of how far this self-enforcement has progressed. In a recent comment thread, a poster expressed an idea which I have now heard a few times. “We need to get off this tiny little world and out into the wider universe. … if it takes the resources of the planet to get us out there, so be it. However we use them, however we utilise the energy of the sun and the mineral wealth of this world and the others of our planetary system, either we do use them to expand and explore other worlds, and become something greater than a mud-grubbing semi-sentient animal, or we die as a species.”(10)
This is the consumer society taken to its logical extreme: the Earth itself becomes disposable. This idea appears to be more acceptable in some circles than any restraint on pointless spending. That we might hop, like the aliens in Independence Day, from one planet to another, consuming their resources then moving on, is considered by these people a more realistic and desirable prospect than changing the way in which we measure wealth.
So how do we break this system? How do we pursue happiness and well-being rather than growth? I came back from the climate talks Copenhagen depressed for several reasons, but above all because, listening to the discussions at the citizens’ summit, it struck me that we no longer have movements; we have thousands of people each clamouring to have their own visions adopted. We might come together for occasional rallies and marches, but as soon as we start discussing alternatives, solidarity is shattered by possessive individualism. Consumerism has changed all of us. Our challenge is now to fight a system we have internalised.
Is that per capita or total, and how does it spread out with relation to outcomes.
Per capita, obviously, total would be pointless.
This study has us as third behind Finland and Rep. Korea, but that was a few years ago and I know it's gone up here since then. The U.S. generally moves in and out of the top spot. NPR reported the U.S. in the top spot a couple years ago.
I'm not sure how you want to measure outcomes.
I also find that study interesting because it concludes that public money spent on tertiary education has no effect on enrollment, whereas public spending on primary and secondary education has a significant effect on tertiary enrollment. Makes sense to me.
So basically your comment that "Europe is a shithole" was complete and utter stupidity on your part and in fact your only point in this whole thing has been the whopping "revelation" that cost of living is higher in larger cities.
First, simmer down a bit, eh?
Second, and more directly, even the rural and suburban parts of many European nations (especially the Western nations) pale in comparison to the US in the context of cost of living, taxation, and economic utility. Meaning to say, I would not willingly choose to move from where I am now to Europe unless I could maintain a reasonably similar level of comfort for my family, and with mine and my wife's professions, that's a practical impossibility.
Proof?
And, again, if you define your wants as "Lots of land, a huge house in the middle of nowhere and a big car" Europe is not gonna give you that because they don't have the room and they aren't as stupid as North America is in building sprawling suburban hellholes.
Proof? I think first I'll have to see proof that Europe doesn't have suburbs. My inlaws living in the suburbs of London will be very surprised to hear this, I should think.
Well Europe definately has suburbs, though the density and land use argument still stands as people talking about a suburb in the UK are talking about this:
rather than this:
When people move to the suburbs here they general do it for the 'quiet' rather than the 'space', you also almost never have suburbs not connect to the rail network, though thats more history than design.
I think it's important to point out at this juncture that this conversation, while informative, is ultimately meaningless. Nothing can be done to change it.
I wonder, how many people are posting to this thread from computers at their job? How many of them hate their job, but continue to do it because the only way to "survive" in this society is to whore your time out to one entity or another in exchange for money, which is essential to buy things, be those things food, shelter, or plasma screens?
I could be reading a book. Or learning to play an instrument. Or anything that might enrich my life, or grow me as a person. Instead, I'm posting in this thread to avoid work for 5 minutes, and waiting for my paycheck in a few days so that I can pay more bills and buy more things.
I think it's important to point out at this juncture that this conversation, while informative, is ultimately meaningless. Nothing can be done to change it.
I wonder, how many people are posting to this thread from computers at their job? How many of them hate their job, but continue to do it because the only way to "survive" in this society is to whore your time out to one entity or another in exchange for money, which is essential to buy things, be those things food, shelter, or plasma screens?
I could be reading a book. Or learning to play an instrument. Or anything that might enrich my life, or grow me as a person. Instead, I'm posting in this thread to avoid work for 5 minutes, and waiting for my paycheck in a few days so that I can pay more bills and buy more things.
Because that is the way it fucking is.
I, for one, am glad that Friday is my last day of employment for quite some time.
Understanding the function of our society and our political and economic systems is important. It certainly doesn't follow that we shouldn't think about changing the awful system at all. By that logic, we should all still exist under totalitarianism or absolute monarchy.
I think it's important to point out at this juncture that this conversation, while informative, is ultimately meaningless. Nothing can be done to change it.
I wonder, how many people are posting to this thread from computers at their job? How many of them hate their job, but continue to do it because the only way to "survive" in this society is to whore your time out to one entity or another in exchange for money, which is essential to buy things, be those things food, shelter, or plasma screens?
I could be reading a book. Or learning to play an instrument. Or anything that might enrich my life, or grow me as a person. Instead, I'm posting in this thread to avoid work for 5 minutes, and waiting for my paycheck in a few days so that I can pay more bills and buy more things.
Because that is the way it fucking is.
Eh. I care about having a nice collection of clothes, but given that I don't have a place of my own (staying in a dorm) I don't care about much else beyond making sure my computers work. Once I have a mostly permanent place, I'll probably still only invest in it in relatively minor ways. I'm not the sort to have a lot of company over, and I don't cook for myself.
The biggest expense for me is probably money spent going out with friends, at restaurants, at bars, that sort of thing. The accumulation of stuff, outside of clothing, isn't really something that has a lot of traction with me.
I think it's important to point out at this juncture that this conversation, while informative, is ultimately meaningless. Nothing can be done to change it.
I wonder, how many people are posting to this thread from computers at their job? How many of them hate their job, but continue to do it because the only way to "survive" in this society is to whore your time out to one entity or another in exchange for money, which is essential to buy things, be those things food, shelter, or plasma screens?
I could be reading a book. Or learning to play an instrument. Or anything that might enrich my life, or grow me as a person. Instead, I'm posting in this thread to avoid work for 5 minutes, and waiting for my paycheck in a few days so that I can pay more bills and buy more things.
Because that is the way it fucking is.
I, for one, am glad that Friday is my last day of employment for quite some time.
Understanding the function of our society and our political and economic systems is important. It certainly doesn't follow that we shouldn't think about changing the awful system at all. By that logic, we should all still exist under totalitarianism or absolute monarchy.
But, it can't be changed. At all. The current commercial structure of society arises very naturally as the evolution of the first man who traded a fish for a loaf of bread. It's resources. Unless you can produce everything you need, then you will be at the mercy of those that can produce it. Can you grow your own food? Raise your own livestock? Build your own house? Even if you have those skills... can you do it all, right now, without first paying someone for the land and supplies?
Everything is subject to the system of commerce. So long as society is built around commerce, there will be people interested in acquiring commercial wealth, and from that will naturally arise any and every method of doing so, such as building a self-reinforcing culture of consumerism.
I think it's important to point out at this juncture that this conversation, while informative, is ultimately meaningless. Nothing can be done to change it.
I wonder, how many people are posting to this thread from computers at their job? How many of them hate their job, but continue to do it because the only way to "survive" in this society is to whore your time out to one entity or another in exchange for money, which is essential to buy things, be those things food, shelter, or plasma screens?
I could be reading a book. Or learning to play an instrument. Or anything that might enrich my life, or grow me as a person. Instead, I'm posting in this thread to avoid work for 5 minutes, and waiting for my paycheck in a few days so that I can pay more bills and buy more things.
Because that is the way it fucking is.
I, for one, am glad that Friday is my last day of employment for quite some time.
Understanding the function of our society and our political and economic systems is important. It certainly doesn't follow that we shouldn't think about changing the awful system at all. By that logic, we should all still exist under totalitarianism or absolute monarchy.
But, it can't be changed. At all. The current commercial structure of society arises very naturally as the evolution of the first man who traded a fish for a loaf of bread. It's resources. Unless you can produce everything you need, then you will be at the mercy of those that can produce it. Can you grow your own food? Raise your own livestock? Build your own house? Even if you have those skills... can you do it all, right now, without first paying someone for the land and supplies?
Everything is subject to the system of commerce. So long as society is built around commerce, there will be people interested in acquiring commercial wealth, and from that will naturally arise any and every method of doing so, such as building a self-reinforcing culture of consumerism.
You're mistaking practical restrictions for theoretical objections.
What good is a theory with no practical application?
There's a temporal issue. No intelligent theorist would ever claim that one can enact vast, sweeping changes in cultural and economic values. There are thousands upon thousands of smaller steps toward shifting a cultural idea.
For one, the currently capitalist bioethics makes the statement that we must consume less to continue consuming, we must produce less to continue producing. This is being sold to Americans, it is the proposed "green" cultural and economic shift that will "save the world".
All I'm trying to get across is that there is a middle ground between "there's nothing that can be done", and "we must do something right now" in which the careful, middle road is always the means of effecting change. October 1917 is a single moment in time existing within a theoretical tradition that went back nearly 200 years within the public eye.
All I'm saying is, this thread has largely focused on consumerism, and consumerism appears, to me, to arise naturally as an effect of a commercial society. How does one convert away from commerce? By self-sustainment, but that is improbable for individuals, and impossible for all of society. There isn't enough spread in resources to allow each person the ability to be self sufficient and produce what is needed.
Consumerism is tied to commercialism too deeply. You can't separate the two.
Feel free to correct me if my understanding of the situation is incorrect. I'm flexible, but I tend to put little faith in ephemerals like "hope" or "faith". If you have some practical ideas for ways to change the state of affairs, I'm all ears.
Blame it on a decade working in "Support". Define the problem, solve the problem.
Houn on
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited January 2010
I think it's important to point out at this juncture that this conversation, while informative, is ultimately meaningless. Nothing can be done to change it.
I wonder, how many people are posting to this thread from computers at their job? How many of them hate their job, but continue to do it because the only way to "survive" in this society is to whore your time out to one entity or another in exchange for money, which is essential to buy things, be those things food, shelter, or plasma screens?
I could be reading a book. Or learning to play an instrument. Or anything that might enrich my life, or grow me as a person. Instead, I'm posting in this thread to avoid work for 5 minutes, and waiting for my paycheck in a few days so that I can pay more bills and buy more things.
Because that is the way it fucking is.
All this is why being rich is rad as fuck - if you know how to organise your free time, you can actually do what you WANT to do.
Feel free to correct me if my understanding of the situation is incorrect. I'm flexible, but I tend to put little faith in ephemerals like "hope" or "faith". If you have some practical ideas for ways to change the state of affairs, I'm all ears.
Blame it on a decade working in "Support". Define the problem, solve the problem.
Well, I don't tend to get too anxious over the "this is the way it is" argument anymore. It's a very common place to end at, considering the history of the past 500 or so years.
The "practical" argument in a nutshell is that "we don't have to live this way", and that there are proposed models for putting ourselves into a more sensible political, economic and cultural model. The difference is generally that while socialists and theorists prior to the postmodern age were huge on the idea of "proposing a model state", most Leftists of the latter half of the last century began to understand that small shifts accompanied by re-examinations and step-by-step adjustments is more sane. In this particular case the idea would be to rein in the "free-market idolatry" and move ourselves into a more socialist model. This is what Lenin attempted with the NEP back in '21 (I believe). The idea, at the core, being that you're correct in asserting that "this is the way it is" and that we have to work with market forces, greed, etc. Adopting a socialist model of the state is the first step, followed by an examination and an evaluation of what works and what doesn't.
I suppose the point is that we don't know what, exactly, will and will not work. But there are certainly interim steps we can take to combat the sheer insanity of our current consumer culture.
The Crowing One on
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited January 2010
In my opinion a large part of the problem is that culturally, we have not taken any notice WHATSOEVER of what kinds of motivation actually work with people. We have also made no notice whatsoever of how people's minds work; 1 hour of your time when you are turned on, interested and engaged can be worth (literally) 6 when you are bored and just watching a clock. It's rather like when the soviets temporarily switched ot a 10 day week and productivity went down; every paper I've ever seen on the effects of reducing work hours shows that it increases productivity (especially if you give people flexibility about when they work and give them some way of blowing off steam while they're at work, eg gym/table tennis/what-have-you), but nobody in middle managements knows this stuff.
It would be funny if it wasn't so fucking tragic.
EDIT: I'm referring above to results found by psychologists, not those snake-oil selling shitbags who claim to help companies structure their human resources.
The 20 hour work week would be such an immense boon.
There are studies that say "40 hours is the optimal week", but I honestly don't buy it.
People tend to be more motivated and generally feel better if they can look out a window once in a while, but those are reserved for middle management. See, work hard, and maybe one day you too can buy yourself a window!
And let's not kid ourselves here, "moving up the ladder" is pretty much an exercise in commercial exchange; you're just not buying it with money, but loyalty and flattery.
The 20 hour work week would be such an immense boon.
There are studies that say "40 hours is the optimal week", but I honestly don't buy it.
People tend to be more motivated and generally feel better if they can look out a window once in a while, but those are reserved for middle management. See, work hard, and maybe one day you too can buy yourself a window!
And let's not kid ourselves here, "moving up the ladder" is pretty much an exercise in commercial exchange; you're just not buying it with money, but loyalty and flattery.
Exactly.
I think a solid, grounded example of change would be to rein in defining "success" as profit cash-flow alone.
The Crowing One on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
The 20 hour work week would be such an immense boon.
There are studies that say "40 hours is the optimal week", but I honestly don't buy it.
People tend to be more motivated and generally feel better if they can look out a window once in a while, but those are reserved for middle management. See, work hard, and maybe one day you too can buy yourself a window!
And let's not kid ourselves here, "moving up the ladder" is pretty much an exercise in commercial exchange; you're just not buying it with money, but loyalty and flattery.
Exactly.
I think a solid, grounded example of change would be to rein in defining "success" as profit cash-flow alone.
While I acknowledge the harm that consumerism does across the globe I still think it is capable of doing some good. Understanding marketing is beginning to look like understanding the dissemination of information and values. Just because I'm so cynical about a revolution I think the best we can hope for is a few integral cultural changes.
Muckraking seems to be back in fashion now with the Michael Moore films, Food Inc, Supersize Me and others being shown in theaters and seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Generally they focus on the affect of society on ourselves instead of other people living in other countries. While the U.S. does send out an enormous amount of aid to developing nations this is usually because people are being manipulated via guilt or pity and this charity can often do more harm than good. Instead of going through the same short ritual that's happening now with Haiti people need to make a sustained and educated effort to better things in a way that's motivated by the principle of "making the world a better place for everyone and not just yourself or your children". Also I think we can decide as a nation that we are willing to work less hours if it means buying less stuff. I've heard estimates as low as 14 hour work weeks for a bare minimum work schedule.
On a larger scale I think capitalism is a self-destructive system. Adam Smith said it best, "Where there is no moral framework, no ethical sensibility, the market ends up devouring all the other sectors, and then devours itself." I am a humanist and so while the gradual decline of industrial civilization that seems to be coming closer every year seems like a great opportunity to change a flawed system it'll probably be a giant suckfest for most people on earth.
Talleyrand on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I am a humanist and so while the gradual decline of industrial civilization that seems to be coming closer every year seems like a great opportunity to change a flawed system it'll probably be a giant suckfest for most people on earth.
Especially for those people in the third-world who instead of making shoes and televisions for $1.00/day will go back to inter-community bartering and halt all development whatsoever.
But I guess that's cool. National Geographic always needs a new tribe of mud hut dwellers to showcase.
The 20 hour work week would be such an immense boon.
There are studies that say "40 hours is the optimal week", but I honestly don't buy it.
Society would just start developing to satisfy the needs of "overtimers" instead of "fulltimers."
I'm not sure where you guys get this "40 hour work week" crap from. Every job I've ever had you end up doing far more then that, and it's rather expected. You don't, and you won't last long. The better paying, and more authority I had at the job, the longer I worked.
psychotix on
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
The 20 hour work week would be such an immense boon.
There are studies that say "40 hours is the optimal week", but I honestly don't buy it.
Society would just start developing to satisfy the needs of "overtimers" instead of "fulltimers."
I'm not sure where you guys get this "40 hour work week" crap from. Every job I've ever had you end up doing far more then that, and it's rather expected. You don't, and you won't last long. The better paying, and more authority I had at the job, the longer I worked.
If you're talking about a bullshit ladder-climbing job, then yes, that's how it works.
In my field, you get paid more by having more experience certified training under your belt. It's not uncommon for experienced and certified staff members where I work to make well more than their mid-level superiors. I know I do. Plus, I work a lot less and never have to be on-call.
I think it's important to point out at this juncture that this conversation, while informative, is ultimately meaningless. Nothing can be done to change it.
I wonder, how many people are posting to this thread from computers at their job? How many of them hate their job, but continue to do it because the only way to "survive" in this society is to whore your time out to one entity or another in exchange for money, which is essential to buy things, be those things food, shelter, or plasma screens?
I could be reading a book. Or learning to play an instrument. Or anything that might enrich my life, or grow me as a person. Instead, I'm posting in this thread to avoid work for 5 minutes, and waiting for my paycheck in a few days so that I can pay more bills and buy more things.
Because that is the way it fucking is.
All this is why being rich is rad as fuck - if you know how to organise your free time, you can actually do what you WANT to do.
It's also why consumerism is bad. The imbued mentality that you must buy things, that solutions to problems in your life are bought and paid for rather then perhaps built, adapted around etc. leads to the endless cycle.
It is a very real problem that there are a lot of people have seen no problems with spending all their money to buy things right away regardless of the fiscal future that represents for them. The equity crisis was very much helped along by the fact that the middle-middle class bought huge houses and then spent up big to fill them. You can do one of those things and definitely shouldn't do both.
Posts
Proof? I think first I'll have to see proof that Europe doesn't have suburbs. My inlaws living in the suburbs of London will be very surprised to hear this, I should think.
People should have less because the externalities of the crap they're buying aren't built into the price of said crap.
E.g. all the clothes/shoes/electronics and crap that people buy are made by people making basically slave wages in factories that are raping the environment.
Also the giant SUVs that people own and the suburban communities that developed because of car dependence are entirely predicated on cheap gas whose price doesn't nearly take into account the price to clean up all of the environmental damage being done by resource extraction and consumption.
Is that per capita or total, and how does it spread out with relation to outcomes.
From here (wiki).
I guess for Japan it's analytic vs memorisation that's keeping it down.
Suck it!
There's also the issue that it doesn't say much about overall success - you could rank fairly low but succeed as a nation provided you have a good system for stratifying your high achievers and others fail to beat you on gross numbers.
Also it doesn't measure tertiary enrollment, it measures primary, secondary and tertiary enrollment.
So a high score means a high rate of all 3, though it could also mean a high number of any individual one.
"Primary, secondary and tertiary enrollment" surprisingly enough includes tertiary enrollment. So... I really don't see what you're getting at here.
How do we break a system which now permeates every aspect of our lives?
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 5th January 2010
Who said this? “All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness.” Was it a. the boss of Greenpeace, b. the director of the New Economics Foundation, or c. an anarchist planning the next climate camp? None of the above: d. the former head of the Confederation of British Industry, who currently runs the Financial Services Authority. In an interview broadcast last Friday, Lord Turner brought the consumer society’s most subversive observation into the mainstream(1).
In our hearts most of us know it is true, but we live as if it isn’t. Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions which sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.
As the Guardian revealed yesterday, the British government is now split over product placement in TV programmes: if it implements the policy proposed by Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, plots will revolve around chocolates and cheeseburgers and ads will be impossible to filter, perhaps even to detect. Mr Bradshaw must know that this indoctrination won’t make us happier, wiser, greener or leaner; but it will make the television companies £140m a year(2).
Though we know they aren’t the same, we can’t help conflating growth and well-being. Last week, for example, the Guardian carried the headline “UK standard of living drops below 2005 level”(3). But the story had nothing to do with our standard of living. Instead it reported that per capita gross domestic product is lower than it was in 2005. GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living. But the terms are confused so often that journalists now treat them as synonyms. The low retail sales of previous months were recently described by this paper as “bleak”(4) and “gloomy”(5). High sales are always “good news”, low sales are always “bad news”, even if the product on offer is farmyard porn. I believe it’s time that the Guardian challenged this biased reporting.
Those who still wish to conflate welfare and GDP argue that high consumption by the wealthy improves the lot of the world’s poor. Perhaps, but it’s a very clumsy and inefficient instrument. After some 60 years of this feast, 800m people remain permanently hungry. Full employment is a less likely prospect than it was before the frenzy began.
In a new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Sir Partha Dasgupta makes the point that the problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit(6). There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.
Most importantly, no deduction is made to account for the depreciation of natural capital: the overuse or degradation of soil, water, forests, fisheries and the atmosphere. Dasgupta shows that the total wealth of a nation can decline even as its GDP is growing. In Pakistan, for example, his rough figures suggest that while GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000, total wealth declined by 1.4%. Amazingly, there are still no official figures which seek to show trends in the actual wealth of nations.
You can say all this without fear of punishment or persecution. But in its practical effects, consumerism is a totalitarian system: it permeates every aspect of our lives. Even our dissent from the system is packaged up and sold to us in the form of anti-consumption consumption, like the “I’m not a plastic bag” which was supposed to replace disposable carriers but was mostly used once or twice before it fell out of fashion, or lucrative new books on how to live without money.
Orwell and Huxley proposed different totalitarianisms: one sustained by fear, the other partly by greed. Huxley’s nightmare has come closer to realisation. In the nurseries of the Brave New World, “the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying,’ they whispered, ‘I do love flying, I do love having new clothes … old clothes are beastly …We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending’”(7). Underconsumption was considered “positively a crime against society”(8). But there was no need to punish it. At first the authorities machine-gunned the Simple Lifers who tried to opt out, but that didn’t work. Instead they used “the slower but infinitely surer methods” of conditioning(9): immersing people in advertising slogans from childhood. A totalitarianism driven by greed eventually becomes self-enforced.
Let me give you an example of how far this self-enforcement has progressed. In a recent comment thread, a poster expressed an idea which I have now heard a few times. “We need to get off this tiny little world and out into the wider universe. … if it takes the resources of the planet to get us out there, so be it. However we use them, however we utilise the energy of the sun and the mineral wealth of this world and the others of our planetary system, either we do use them to expand and explore other worlds, and become something greater than a mud-grubbing semi-sentient animal, or we die as a species.”(10)
This is the consumer society taken to its logical extreme: the Earth itself becomes disposable. This idea appears to be more acceptable in some circles than any restraint on pointless spending. That we might hop, like the aliens in Independence Day, from one planet to another, consuming their resources then moving on, is considered by these people a more realistic and desirable prospect than changing the way in which we measure wealth.
So how do we break this system? How do we pursue happiness and well-being rather than growth? I came back from the climate talks Copenhagen depressed for several reasons, but above all because, listening to the discussions at the citizens’ summit, it struck me that we no longer have movements; we have thousands of people each clamouring to have their own visions adopted. We might come together for occasional rallies and marches, but as soon as we start discussing alternatives, solidarity is shattered by possessive individualism. Consumerism has changed all of us. Our challenge is now to fight a system we have internalised.
http://www.monbiot.com
This study has us as third behind Finland and Rep. Korea, but that was a few years ago and I know it's gone up here since then. The U.S. generally moves in and out of the top spot. NPR reported the U.S. in the top spot a couple years ago.
I'm not sure how you want to measure outcomes.
I also find that study interesting because it concludes that public money spent on tertiary education has no effect on enrollment, whereas public spending on primary and secondary education has a significant effect on tertiary enrollment. Makes sense to me.
Well Europe definately has suburbs, though the density and land use argument still stands as people talking about a suburb in the UK are talking about this:
rather than this:
When people move to the suburbs here they general do it for the 'quiet' rather than the 'space', you also almost never have suburbs not connect to the rail network, though thats more history than design.
I wonder, how many people are posting to this thread from computers at their job? How many of them hate their job, but continue to do it because the only way to "survive" in this society is to whore your time out to one entity or another in exchange for money, which is essential to buy things, be those things food, shelter, or plasma screens?
I could be reading a book. Or learning to play an instrument. Or anything that might enrich my life, or grow me as a person. Instead, I'm posting in this thread to avoid work for 5 minutes, and waiting for my paycheck in a few days so that I can pay more bills and buy more things.
Because that is the way it fucking is.
I, for one, am glad that Friday is my last day of employment for quite some time.
Understanding the function of our society and our political and economic systems is important. It certainly doesn't follow that we shouldn't think about changing the awful system at all. By that logic, we should all still exist under totalitarianism or absolute monarchy.
Eh. I care about having a nice collection of clothes, but given that I don't have a place of my own (staying in a dorm) I don't care about much else beyond making sure my computers work. Once I have a mostly permanent place, I'll probably still only invest in it in relatively minor ways. I'm not the sort to have a lot of company over, and I don't cook for myself.
The biggest expense for me is probably money spent going out with friends, at restaurants, at bars, that sort of thing. The accumulation of stuff, outside of clothing, isn't really something that has a lot of traction with me.
But maybe my clothing thing is sufficient.
But, it can't be changed. At all. The current commercial structure of society arises very naturally as the evolution of the first man who traded a fish for a loaf of bread. It's resources. Unless you can produce everything you need, then you will be at the mercy of those that can produce it. Can you grow your own food? Raise your own livestock? Build your own house? Even if you have those skills... can you do it all, right now, without first paying someone for the land and supplies?
Everything is subject to the system of commerce. So long as society is built around commerce, there will be people interested in acquiring commercial wealth, and from that will naturally arise any and every method of doing so, such as building a self-reinforcing culture of consumerism.
You're mistaking practical restrictions for theoretical objections.
There's a temporal issue. No intelligent theorist would ever claim that one can enact vast, sweeping changes in cultural and economic values. There are thousands upon thousands of smaller steps toward shifting a cultural idea.
For one, the currently capitalist bioethics makes the statement that we must consume less to continue consuming, we must produce less to continue producing. This is being sold to Americans, it is the proposed "green" cultural and economic shift that will "save the world".
All I'm trying to get across is that there is a middle ground between "there's nothing that can be done", and "we must do something right now" in which the careful, middle road is always the means of effecting change. October 1917 is a single moment in time existing within a theoretical tradition that went back nearly 200 years within the public eye.
Consumerism is tied to commercialism too deeply. You can't separate the two.
Blame it on a decade working in "Support". Define the problem, solve the problem.
All this is why being rich is rad as fuck - if you know how to organise your free time, you can actually do what you WANT to do.
Well, I don't tend to get too anxious over the "this is the way it is" argument anymore. It's a very common place to end at, considering the history of the past 500 or so years.
The "practical" argument in a nutshell is that "we don't have to live this way", and that there are proposed models for putting ourselves into a more sensible political, economic and cultural model. The difference is generally that while socialists and theorists prior to the postmodern age were huge on the idea of "proposing a model state", most Leftists of the latter half of the last century began to understand that small shifts accompanied by re-examinations and step-by-step adjustments is more sane. In this particular case the idea would be to rein in the "free-market idolatry" and move ourselves into a more socialist model. This is what Lenin attempted with the NEP back in '21 (I believe). The idea, at the core, being that you're correct in asserting that "this is the way it is" and that we have to work with market forces, greed, etc. Adopting a socialist model of the state is the first step, followed by an examination and an evaluation of what works and what doesn't.
I suppose the point is that we don't know what, exactly, will and will not work. But there are certainly interim steps we can take to combat the sheer insanity of our current consumer culture.
It would be funny if it wasn't so fucking tragic.
EDIT: I'm referring above to results found by psychologists, not those snake-oil selling shitbags who claim to help companies structure their human resources.
There are studies that say "40 hours is the optimal week", but I honestly don't buy it.
People tend to be more motivated and generally feel better if they can look out a window once in a while, but those are reserved for middle management. See, work hard, and maybe one day you too can buy yourself a window!
And let's not kid ourselves here, "moving up the ladder" is pretty much an exercise in commercial exchange; you're just not buying it with money, but loyalty and flattery.
Exactly.
I think a solid, grounded example of change would be to rein in defining "success" as profit cash-flow alone.
Co-signed.
While I acknowledge the harm that consumerism does across the globe I still think it is capable of doing some good. Understanding marketing is beginning to look like understanding the dissemination of information and values. Just because I'm so cynical about a revolution I think the best we can hope for is a few integral cultural changes.
Muckraking seems to be back in fashion now with the Michael Moore films, Food Inc, Supersize Me and others being shown in theaters and seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Generally they focus on the affect of society on ourselves instead of other people living in other countries. While the U.S. does send out an enormous amount of aid to developing nations this is usually because people are being manipulated via guilt or pity and this charity can often do more harm than good. Instead of going through the same short ritual that's happening now with Haiti people need to make a sustained and educated effort to better things in a way that's motivated by the principle of "making the world a better place for everyone and not just yourself or your children". Also I think we can decide as a nation that we are willing to work less hours if it means buying less stuff. I've heard estimates as low as 14 hour work weeks for a bare minimum work schedule.
On a larger scale I think capitalism is a self-destructive system. Adam Smith said it best, "Where there is no moral framework, no ethical sensibility, the market ends up devouring all the other sectors, and then devours itself." I am a humanist and so while the gradual decline of industrial civilization that seems to be coming closer every year seems like a great opportunity to change a flawed system it'll probably be a giant suckfest for most people on earth.
Especially for those people in the third-world who instead of making shoes and televisions for $1.00/day will go back to inter-community bartering and halt all development whatsoever.
But I guess that's cool. National Geographic always needs a new tribe of mud hut dwellers to showcase.
Society would just start developing to satisfy the needs of "overtimers" instead of "fulltimers."
I'm not sure where you guys get this "40 hour work week" crap from. Every job I've ever had you end up doing far more then that, and it's rather expected. You don't, and you won't last long. The better paying, and more authority I had at the job, the longer I worked.
If you're talking about a bullshit ladder-climbing job, then yes, that's how it works.
In my field, you get paid more by having more experience certified training under your belt. It's not uncommon for experienced and certified staff members where I work to make well more than their mid-level superiors. I know I do. Plus, I work a lot less and never have to be on-call.
It's also why consumerism is bad. The imbued mentality that you must buy things, that solutions to problems in your life are bought and paid for rather then perhaps built, adapted around etc. leads to the endless cycle.
It is a very real problem that there are a lot of people have seen no problems with spending all their money to buy things right away regardless of the fiscal future that represents for them. The equity crisis was very much helped along by the fact that the middle-middle class bought huge houses and then spent up big to fill them. You can do one of those things and definitely shouldn't do both.