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laodan discovered 4 months ago- Eroding Western living standards in Asia Times by Martin Hutchinson
it is pretty clear that income levels in the West are converging with those in the more competently run emerging markets. The bad news is that in the years ahead this is likely to happen through an absolute decline in Western living standards. ... Thus the economic histories of a high proportion of the Western population under 30, except the very highly skilled, will involve repeated bouts of unemployment, with job changes involving not a move to higher living standards but an angry acceptance of lower ones. By 2030, it is possible that the median real income in the United States and Western Europe may be no more than 50-60% of its level today. ... Expansive governments will employ ever higher proportions of Western populations in unproductive ways, thus increasing exponentially the burden on their unfortunate taxpayers and quickening the exit of jobs. ... Once the world competes once again on a level playing field, with high-quality education and infrastructure as available in Bangladesh as in Baltimore, and no gigantic surplus mob of the unskilled, living standards will begin to increase in tandem worldwide, with both the ex-rich countries and ex-poor countries benefiting. Eroding Western living standards This article describes how the spreading of the logic of capital is equalizing incomes around the globe. In the West incomes come down while they go up in the South. This will go on until the whole earth becomes an economic level playing field for capital holders. This presentation is the vision of big capital that, in the seventies, gave the impulse to the movement toward globalization undertaken in large part through the Trilateral Commission. The bet behind this vision is that the logic of capital will finally impose itself as the ultimate value of a universal order emerging eventually out of the chaos wrought upon us by globalization. But what about: - The side-effects of modernity: these are now being addressed by the propagandists of this globalization of modernity as being unsolvable (climate change is real but we can do nothing to stop it). Their implicit meaning being that globalization should continue unabated. Later on they'll justify the starving of four-fifth of the world population as a collateral damage of progress. - Peak resources: they have no doubt that the peaking of oil and other resources will be solved by science and technology. Their belief in rationality is akin to religious. It is an unquestioning belief.
- Eroding Western living standards in Asia Times by Martin Hutchinson
