Statistical argument for discarding the existing system

I thought I should write this because otherwise I will have to buy more toothpaste and multivitamin/mineral supplement pills. I have previously observed that "time limits are useful, but not for anything important." It does not seem there is any intent to seriously consider the accelerated work week as a solution to any of the various problems facing society, and the previous post showed that it is reasonable to think of this as an urgent matter which cannot wait for the types of events which are necessary for people to admit that the current system is flawed.

In the general case, it is necessary to compare prior expectations with the reality that resulted from a policy to determine that a 'mistake' occurred. Rationalization takes the form of not trusting the obvious conclusion that intentions did not match results, and instead manipulating the description of history such that no such mistake occurred. For example, describing the invasion of Iraq as having the purpose of "spreading democracy" instead of what many would have said at the time which is that it was to "find weapons of mass destruction". It is partly for this reason that statements of intentions are important, so that mistakes and therefore inaccurate standards of evaluation can be identified. There are other symptoms that there is, in fact, low awareness of the lack of "broad awareness of the varying reliability of primary signals" but this has been described elsewhere so no point in repeating it. Just thought I'd clear that up. Also I was going to mention the Evil Overlord list as a sort of example of how people take at face value things that aren't very realistic.

As I was saying, I was going to link to a post on this site which said something to the effect of "when the system is broken, you shall exploit the system to encourage people to fix it" but there are no Google search results for "you shall exploit". But that's the general idea. As I said above... the previous post is a reasonable argument that the system is broken and therefore the norms of society, held by a majority of the population, about what will lead to the best results can be ignored. For example, Confucius has a role in Chinese culture but his advice did not lead to the rapid adoption of energy and metal technologies and so China was subject to military exploitation, unlike Japan which rapidly modernized when the problem with its previous strategy became apparent.

This means it is up to business leaders in the private sector to use the accelerated work week if people want to fix unemployment etc., and of course this was an option from the start. I just didn't want to accuse people of slacking at work without evidence, due to the misinterpretations that this could lead to if managers tried harder to eliminate that inefficiency without a reduction in the average work week.

However, with the various assumptions having been countered—such as the assumption that "the US needs more rich people because lack of wealth is the only explanation for high unemployment!!1"—it is more likely that such a plan can proceed with confidence. One of the key points of previous posts was that people with high intelligence are likely to attempt to use "lack of conflict between their goals and society", or to put it another way behavior that is consistent with both the "conflict-avoiding" and "conflict-welcoming" strategies, as a signal to other people of similar intelligence.

For a business, what this means is simple: in addition to the advantages to the business and employees mentioned in previous posts, there is the additional advantage of attracting people of high ability who would like to have a lifestyle that benefits the economy, using the metric described in the post "The unemployed are just lazy!" of comparing the amount of money earned that comes from people richer than you to the amount spent, including housing costs, that goes to people richer than you.

An existing example of this premium to a business is found in a recent New York Times article on Apple's retail workers. The fact that people are reluctant to work for a business that pays lower-than-average wages is seen from this poll, where 20 out of 20 people rejected the idea of working for a company that paid lower than a "fair" wage rate. The fact that part-time work currently pays less is seen from a study by the Economic Policy Institute, although another article interestingly mentions that part-time workers are not covered by the Affordable Care Act which might make it easier to use different types of health insurance plans that are better at controlling costs as described in an earlier post.

The goals of the Republican party generally align with the principles in that previous post, people just need to recognize that, as another recent NYTimes article mentioned, it currently isn't practical to compare prices for different health care providers and so the method described in the previous post on this site would help with that.

Hmm... compare this description of how a company captures a monopoly market with this article about how the wealthy have roughly the same standard of living as everyone else, by the author of "Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs". There is also another recent article which says we should work less.

A final note, about the whole "buy local" thing. Imagine that money used to purchase goods from China went to a black hole, or maybe an extra-dimensional market that will sell any amount of goods at a constant price. Normally you would expect prices to go down if that money never returned to the United States, but of course the US can always just print more money to replace what was lost. Since the money leaves the system, it doesn't even cause inflation. Taxes could go to zero and printing money would support all government services. I don't know what people see wrong with this. On the other hand, if money does come back, then there is no reason to discriminate about the country of origin for goods, is there?

I don't know what to expect for how people will use the information on this blog. A different author said that conflict is indirectly the result of lack of choice; I later concluded that conflict can also be seen as "the search for the optimum global strategy and the attempt to eliminate local factors from the decision-making process without regard to inter-region movement and overall quality level"... if you could say that someone might want to choose to have a clear explanation for the origin of problems and what to expect from human behavior, or perhaps even a way to explain to someone else these things or judge the behavior of someone in terms of their expected current and future capabilities, I hope this blog has illuminated the relevant concerns.

(That "final note" was a while ago wasn't it...) It is well-known that money and existing connections are important in deciding who is elected for political office, especially at the national level. There can be little expectation that the system will lead to the accurate selection of the most competent leaders when so many voters expect other people to do their thinking for them. When people with influence within the existing framework are unwilling to support positive change, it is only natural to bypass that system and accomplish goals through other means.

"usagi" = reference to the rabbit in Rainbows End... and this video or maybe this one

"Villains by Necessity"

Why do I feel like this blog hasn't provoked anyone to action?

The name of the file that this blog post was saved to is "impact <date>". It was meant to be a reference to the anime "Neon Genesis Evangelion". I considered using the word 'instrumentality' for something but it turned out to be a reference to a work by a different author so it didn't seem appropriate.

So, to be clear, the result of a lack of "broad awareness of the varying reliability of primary signals" is that some people will feel it is the morally correct action for them to kill other people. The purpose is to cause people to feel that displaying the appearance of using the strategy toward conflict of fulfilling your own goals is an ethical thing to do.

Some examples I can think of are...

Vince Li — Additional info: 'Please kill me,' accused pleads

Anders Behring Breivik, as mentioned before. Additional info: "You have already killed my dad, I'm too young to die"

Nanjing in WWII might count.

The recent incident in Canada might have been a consequence of Vince Li talking about aliens, I haven't really read much about it.

The consequence is signal pooling for the action "kill someone", even if the event does not seem to be the result of provocation and that person appears to be innocent of crime. Which is, of course, a different sense of the word than what is generally meant when saying that a young person is "innocent".

Given the nonzero incidence rate of this type of event, it logically follows that anyone who would like to avoid being killed should support changes which encourage critical thinking and reward honesty, while also addressing the problems that can cause people to feel that killing random people is the morally correct thing to do.

These, quite simply, consist of several things: 1) a way of accomplishing reasonable economic goals in an ethical manner. 2) accurate standards of achievement, so that "succeeding" is neither too easy nor "too hard" in the sense of having additional restrictions that other people do not have.

The reason why accurate standards of achievement are difficult to find has been described in previous posts like this one. To summarize, it is due to ambiguity over whether problems in the world are the result of selfishness or just the limits of human intelligence and the current stage of society's progression.

I can't really say I expect this post to have any effect, but if I had a completely accurate assessment of the distribution of ability in the world I wouldn't have needed to start this blog, would I? So I hope I have proved that basically all problems in society are the result of stupidity, and that refusing to support the accelerated work week is equivalent to saying that you are prepared to defend yourself against attack by a random person who feels that it is the morally correct thing to do.

It's like some people don't take martial arts training when they're young. Honestly.

The case for radical change

Around 80% of people think their job makes the world a better place, while very few think their job might be making the world a worse place. This isn't surprising, because people who do not feel that, for example, Wall Street makes the world a better place are unlikely to work there despite that the average salary of a worker in the securities industry in New York City is $361,000.

One consequence of the accelerated work week is that some jobs will go away. This includes some jobs that people like doing, but this doesn't mean that work will disappear. It will just be done by people as a hobby, either because it was too dependent on inequality such as management consulting or because there are many people willing to do it for free. An article by a Nobel-Prize winner written from the perspective of someone 100 years in the future described a world where the only way to make a living as a scholar was as a celebrity giving paid lectures. It is possible that paid services on the Internet may become more popular as people gain more control of their income, but we have already seen how difficult it is to compete against high-quality free content.

The reason I mention this is that the economic profession might see reductions in demand and fewer jobs, similar to what science PhDs have been going through. And of course, the government depends on economists for accurate advice. But on the bright side, according to Wikipedia people with psychopathic tendencies are more likely to make the utilitarian choice in ethical dilemmas—such as destroying one job to create five others—and experiments on game theory and rational decision-making show that only economists and psychopaths follow the predictions of game theory.

It's possible that people will disagree about whether some jobs are necessary, just like people do now. In some cases the answer is simply to let the private sector take care of it, as more people will have a reliable income or the option to earn more due to tighter demand for labour. In other cases, such as the recent elimination of the statistical abstract produced by the United States government, we must accept that the system is not perfect and the need to defend the usefulness of a service or program helps instill confidence in government spending.

This has always been about more than just creating jobs, of course. As mentioned in previous writings, lower inequality without a reduction of work just means higher resource consumption and more environmental problems. But if society is willing to plan for the future, income security resulting from job availability will allow us to create the proper incentives to switch to renewable energy sources before oil prices increase even further as well as prepare for any other problems we can anticipate.

And beyond that are the cultural and psychological issues which have resulted in the exploration of this topic being such a lengthy process. If most people think unemployment is an important problem, and yet it remains unfixed, it is natural to suspect something is wrong with the system and devote attention to whether it can be fixed. Conservatives are better able to rationalize away problems and so they tend to be happier, but if everyone was conservative we would probably have a much smaller government and higher unemployment and no interest in fixing it.

I was going to talk about how it isn't really ideal for it to be difficult to determine whether we should try to act ethical or just exploit the system, but is it really necessary? Negative effects of higher consumption is a better explanation for why people have been reluctant to support this concept, or just misunderstandings of why working less time at a high wage rate isn't really an option right now and how the accelerated work week would make it an option.

In summary the accelerated work week is about removing harmful effects from various assumptions and actions made with good intentions. The history of the United States is based around personal success, and there should be no significant harm to the economy or your social relations from exploring the available options for achieving nominal success. The accelerated work week accomplishes this by providing incentives which should lead to a reasonable number of employees who are willing to work less, earning a higher wage rate, if someone else wants to work overtime for a higher total income.

Furthermore, by balancing the goals that many people can reasonably expect to have, people are reminded that it is often difficult to determine the most effective course of action and so accurate systems encountered elsewhere in life, designed with good intentions of eliminating inefficiency, are less likely to lead to harmful assumptions about the infallibility of authority.

The fact that there can be harmful social results from being "too successful" can be seen through rhetoric against "the 1%". It is the middle class that is to blame for providing too much labour for high-paying occupations, which reduces job opportunities for recent college graduates with little work experience, but accusations are made only against the owners of capital without suggesting any realistic way for the 1% to fix the problem they are accused of creating.

So the existence of this question of whether a problem exists does not serve a very useful purpose. To some extent, knowing how to operate within a broken system does involve a form of "skill", but only in the same way that proficiency in the financial markets does. Society's reaction to the financial crisis and ensuing recession has proven, just like other crises before it like WWII, that people do want a well-functioning society and the only barriers are lack of confidence in the capabilities and intentions of other people, and so there should be no fears that fixing the immediate problem of unemployment will lead to decreased interest in addressing problems like global warming, the need for better energy sources, or resource depletion.

The first message

Last modified 07:49 PM PST, 10 Mar 2011. Same day as the Touhoku earthquake and tsunami going by either time zone.

Sent as three different copies to the contact address for the White House.

A followup to this blog post.

(Also emailed to "all" but with no accompanying text)

To: Obama administration
Re: State of the economy

"Six Degrees of Separation"

The main, or even the only problem with the economy is the lack of jobs. It is for this reason that China has allowed itself to finance a large amount of debt, as the training of productive capabilities within the framework of a common world goal has been seen as more important to both its entire economy and individual workers than the redemption of that debt.

This is how to fix the economy by increasing the number of jobs:
1) Reverse the payment structure for working so that instead of getting paid at an increased rate for working overtime, each individual is instead paid at increased rate for when the amount of time worked is significantly LESS than the agreed limit for full-time work.
2) Implement rationing of gasoline similar to what was recently done in Iran, so a certain amount is discounted while usage over that is taxed at an additional amount.

PLEASE ALLOW AN ECONOMIC ANALYST OR ADVISOR TO VIEW THIS. The motives which have lead to the current economic situation are not well-understood by most people, but the aggregate effects are as described.


Originally, economic production was the scarce asset in an economy. By building a windmill, or a watermill for grinding grain, economic output would increase. Over time, this changed to labour being scarce as production methods and technology became more refined, and then eventually to capital being scarce as economy of scale began to dominate due to greater knowledge dissemination. This led to the exploitation of workers and laws to prevent it.

The current situation has two aspects: lack of skilled workers due to greater depth of field specialization, and oversupply of labor for goods which have limited economic demand.

In regions of the world where the knowledge and capital required for more complex products are available such as the United States of America, the overabundance of labor for non-specialized fields persists because of attitudes that investing in more advanced skill sets would benefit neither the individual, nor society. Due to current production methods the marginal utility of money is low for most people, giving little perceived benefit from obtaining a higher wage. Further more, discretionary time and individual freedom may even decrease for specialized fields due to the cost and duration of required education, at exactly the time of life when mobility could be most desired and possibly even beyond that time.

The United States of America must recognize that, with the increase of production efficiency, personal income is no longer sufficient to predict individual benefit from labor when the time to expend that income is strictly limited. The Gross Domestic Product is no longer enough to serve as the sole measure of economic progress when it is not relevant to the goals that people have.


Why, then, do people work more than they are comfortable with? The marginal benefit from working beyond what is desired is tilted in favour of society due to the cost of knowledge specialization, which means that the employer has moral leverage in justifying the terms of an employment contract. Net employment in an economy is dependent on total supply of money available to consumers compared to prices, so if assuming that purchases of a fixed amount have identical effects on the economy and therefore employment regardless of the relative prices of the items purchased, an individual consumer's contribution to employment is linear to the amount of money they are able to spend.

Under the above assumption, the benefit to society from the first hour of work each week is the exact same as for hour 40. Similarly, working a reduced number of hours while someone else is employed in the same function suggests an identical effect on the economy from the marginal income of the new employee, while requiring greater investment in a specialized skill set which would not otherwise have been necessary.


The United States is no longer restricted by capital for investing in economic production, nor by the amount of labour, nor by knowledge needed to combine those two into useful products. The scarce element is economic demand compared to the level of production. By converting the wage structure so that an individual is seen as INCREASING this relative level of economic demand by working less, businesses can morally justify giving the option of more flexible work arrangements, which over the long time will justify individual decisions to invest in increased skill sets leading to a more balanced economy, greater employment, and a more equal distribution of income and wealth.

---

Edit: random songs~
Vedrim - No King Rules Forever
Vivaldi : The Four Seasons, "Summer" - 3, Presto
[PV] HD fripSide - only my railgun Official Video

Responsibility for changes to society

As laid out in a previous argument, knowledge specialization means that people may specify a goal without needing to concern themselves with the means by which society will reach that goal.

Unemployment is seen as the most important problem in the United States today. In a poll by Gallup, 39% of Americans named "unemployment or jobs as the most important problem facing the country". Despite that only 42% of respondents in a June 2011 New York Times/CBS poll thought that the government should create jobs through spending, an August 2011 poll found that 62% think that creating jobs should have a higher priority than cutting government spending.

It has become clear that while people may feel a moral responsibility to point out dishonesty, most people do not feel it is their job to verify or champion a solution to society's problems. Many people operate from the simple idea that the political leadership of a nation should be competent enough to fix any problems it has, including economic problems, and that failure to address problems is proof of incompetence and the need for a change of leadership. This is why Occupy Wall Street has not been more supportive of the accelerated work week; after all, some people actually get paid to think about this stuff. It is enough for the movement to point out its goals and what it sees as wrong with society — political corruption leading to high inequality and unemployment.

In no particular order...

A state employee who earns more than $160k in overtime pay each year on top of a base salary of $107k

New Jersey had 1,244 retirees each collecting more than $100k per year in state pensions

The United States is only 8th in world popularity, after Japan, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, China, France, and the European Union as a whole.

Most people's happiness is dependent on their immediate social environment, not their income

Some work cultures give a perverse incentive to spend more time at work "even if one is playing Tetris"

Threads made in attempt to convince Occupy Wall Street to support the accelerated work week

We’re Not All Rocket Scientists

More proof that jobs will continue to be available if we spend less time working

The current economic problems of the United States are the result of cultural inertia over the past century. We should not allow ourselves to be held back by ghosts of the past or their assumptions and prejudices.

The name of the concept, "the accelerated work week" is obviously subject to change but what is essential to convey is that choosing to work less is entirely optional. Some people value their time or have responsibilities at home. Other people are very willing to work 80 hours per week at some point in their life. This is also not just something in response to the immediate crisis. Rises in productivity can easily lead to higher inequality, which can in turn lead to things like excessive litigation in a battle over corporate profits or political lobbying using just a tiny fraction of a corporation's income.

This is done by corporations with even the highest reputations because it is completely legal to do. Instead of trying to deal with these problems as they occur, it is much better to avoid them simply by preventing wealth from easily accumulating in the first place. So it is best not to think of the accelerated work week as an "emergency" policy as a result of the unexpected financial crisis or persisting high unemployment. It is more a sort of historic inevitability given continuing increases in productivity and the aversion in the United States to the welfare state.

The Inflation Scam

The financial markets are very complex. This complexity leads to a transfer of wealth from stupid people to smart people, but this is a specialized kind of intelligence that relies heavily on knowledge of how the system works and the status of many different variables at any given point in time. Inflation plays a special role in that it encourages people to participate who are not fully prepared on what to expect and penalizes those who save money outside of the financial markets.

The result is that people have an unrealistic idea of the gains that can be had from uneducated investment in financial markets and the true value to the nation from variations in prices offered in those markets. It is possible to make a profit from such an investment, but this is only because governments continuously spend money to redistribute wealth to the poor which also allows professionals in the financial sector to obtain an even higher return on investment. In a society without deficit spending or significant redistribution from taxes, many people would no longer see significant returns from investment and the best choice would often be simply to allow saved money to collect a low rate of interest in a bank account.

In other words, for some people to see realized profits—and not just future profits if prices are still high when the decision is made to exit the market—there must be other people who are losing money in the financial markets. At our current levels of productivity, workers in the financial sector and their wealthy clients end up with much more money than they can spend, removing money from circulation which leads to unemployment if prices do not decrease. It then becomes necessary for the government to provide the losers in the market with more money so this cycle, and the economy as a whole, does not stall. Fixing this situation requires ending the policy of continuous inflation so people do not feel the need to take risks which they underestimate, and also preventing harmful effects from occurring when someone does gamble away their money to the profit of other market participants.

It is important to understand that the use of the accelerated work week, which would reduce unemployment and inequality and allow for an end to inflation, could cause significant short-term harm in the markets as participants deleverage and long-term expectations of price increases fueled by government spending disappear. Retirement or other types of funds with insufficient agility due to complacent management could suffer large losses as prices drop.

Explanation of Leveraged Investments and Risk

The idea of financial leverage is relatively simple. You borrow money, but unlike when purchasing something using a credit card there is almost no chance that you will be unable to pay back the loan because the product you buy can be immediately resold at a very similar price. This means there is very little risk for creditors as you can be required to forfeit certain assets if current market prices require it. To succeed, then, requires not only knowing when to buy and when to sell but also how much risk to take on in the expected fluctuations of one or more market prices.

Since the investor takes on the risks, loans can be obtained at low rates and profits can be very high if the future market price, and variations on the way, can be accurately predicted in a way that other market participants have not done. However, these potential gains are also the source of market instability since that instability rewards those who correctly judge risk at the expense of those who underestimate risk in their attempt to maximize gain.

Due to the size and complexity of the financial markets, this instability compounds itself as opportunities for profit from misevaluation of risk occur momentarily throughout the system. While fluctuations smaller than the difference between buy and sell prices at any given moment cannot be profited from, the inherent tension between many opportunities for profit and the possibility of unexpected price changes of various ranges and durations prevent any participant from ever eliminating uncertainty about the best investment choice at any point in time.

What this means is that even a profitable investment would not be held continuously by an optimal participant. Momentary events elsewhere in the system mean that cash would best be used elsewhere, either to buy into something like a certain corporation's stock shares just before interest the stock attracts reaches a critical point with slightly less competent participants buying into the same stock a few moments later (to be sold at a peak to successively slower and less competent market participants) or to "short" a stock just before it drops drastically in price. That transaction completed, the funds would be shifted back to the previous investment which offers a slightly lower continuous rate of return for the amount of cash that is held in reserve for the expected level of risk.

You may think that, when investing in futures for example, it is best to use the maximum leverage ratio and retain only the cash reserve required in the contract terms that define the loan, but this underestimation of risk is exactly what allows other people to profit and you to lose your investment. Due to the competition for investment described above, timing is also important to understand future price changes and can depend not only on the product itself (such as cost of potential storage for a futures contract) but also factors that cause the market's attention to focus on certain products at any given point in time.

The complexity of the above factors are what make it difficult for any single investment manager to provide consistent returns above the market average. Any manager who did would be pressured to accept more funds, which would lead to more income for the investment manager but the number of opportunities they see for investment would not significantly increase, meaning that more recent investors in the fund would benefit at the expense of previous investors, driving down the effective rate of return until it is roughly the same as for every other investment manager.

The point of the above is just to show that taking on too much risk is just as bad as taking on no risk at all, and most people are not really suited to analyzing the financial markets nor should they need to. The end result of the profits of the financial sector is something which most people are already aware of—wasteful government spending on programs and jobs that people feel do not justify their cost to taxpayers or that lead to further deficit spending and inflation.

However, since many non-financial corporations also have high profits, we can't say that the financial sector (which includes investment banking and companies like Goldman Sachs) is a bad thing since it does lead to more jobs for smart college graduates. This is why job creation outside of government is necessary before ending the policy of continuous inflation and its indirect subsidy of financial profits.

Plan for the Future

It is not realistic to expect government agencies to spend less money. Suppose that jobs in the private sector provide on average X utility to society. You are the head of a government agency, and some people who work for you provide X utility while others only provide X/2 utility. The government is offering to give you even more money so you can "create jobs". Do you 1) Accept the money, and employ more X/2 utility workers. 2) Reject the money and let another government department have it. 3) Fire your existing X/2 utility workers so you can return even more money to Congress and taxpayers.

Suppose you chose the third option. Now, government has become very efficient but unemployment is even higher. The tax money went back to taxpayers, which mostly means the rich, and they already have plenty of money so even if they spend some of the savings it will probably just go to corporate profits and back to another rich person. As we can see from this example, and also from the Great Depression, "a more efficient government" does not really help anything when the 'problem' is high productivity and inequality.

So as you can see, we need a more innovative solution. The accelerated work week where high-income workers are given the choice to work less time would solve unemployment and reduce inequality in any country. For example, the main trading partner of Greece is Germany which has a reputation for high-quality products. Greece has one of the longest average workweeks of all European Union countries but a very high youth unemployment rate right now. If high-income Greek people were to work less, they might be more willing to purchase locally made products instead of high-quality but more expensive German products, reducing the trade deficit and causing money to circulate within the economy. This leads to more jobs and tax revenues to pay off debt. Meanwhile, unemployment in Germany rises due to lower exports to Greece, which increases German spending on social security unless they also start using the accelerated work week.

Here in the United States, the amount that people think the federal government wastes has risen to 50 cents out of every dollar. We must take a stand against inflation and wasteful government spending. Our political leadership must promise to make any necessary legislative changes in support of the accelerated work week. If they do not, we vote them all out of office no matter what party they are, and any candidate we vote for must promise to end the lifetime pension benefit for all past and future members of Congress as well as support the accelerated work week.

This will end unemployment, lead to reduced inequality by reducing profits for all corporations that sell to consumers in the United States, and allow a policy of no more inflation. This will lead to lower crime, allow us to give more attention to environmental issues, and have many other positive benefits. The younger generation understands that all of this is possible, and so this is what we should do.

Paranoia and the "Culture of Fraud"

In a recent interview the leading Republican presidential candidate admitted that there is a confirmed relationship between government spending and GDP, and that a depression or recession would be a bad thing to cause. In an older story, a Wall Street insider described the financial markets as a fraud supported by the US government to keep money flowing through the economy by whatever means necessary.

The issue, of course, is that people don't like the idea of wasteful government spending or inflation but are willing to vote out of office any political party that doesn't fix problems with the economy. It would therefore be in the interests of politicians to support the accelerated work week which would create jobs without government spending.

But if we spend less time working and contribute less to tax revenues, maybe Russia will take over the world? After all, the Russian leadership is known to be very clever and competent and the US has many powerful world enemies. North Korea frequently declares its intention to retaliate against any aggression by "US Imperialists" and this is not a threat to be taken lightly. But the truth is, if those on the upper end of the income scale decide to work and earn less, things like housing and health care costs will go down as well and we can simply adjust the tax brackets to ensure that we can afford to protect US interests throughout the world.

You might wonder why the accelerated work week was not thought of before, and whether there is some hidden reason why it wouldn't work. Nuclear weapons are part of the reason, which have removed the need for major states to perpetually prepare for war in order to maintain peace. The increase in agricultural productivity is another, which allowed a shift to a service economy with increasingly small objective contributions to society from new types of jobs that have been created. When inequality and unemployment are high, any job that leads to increased consumption and demand for work is beneficial to the economy but it would be better to prevent wealth from accumulating in the first place.

Other than these, there is no real reason except a fear of being wrong... or a fear of being right. But lying imposes a cost on someone who is aware of that dishonesty, with the only justification for this cost being if there was no benefit from lying; and so it is better to be able to accomplish goals without resorting to deception. This includes whether you feel able, without cost to yourself, to complete goals that others see as important.

Notes II

Same as before, change extension to zip and open as archive.

For title, see for example... [English]
Scooter - Ramp! (The Logical Song) (Official Video HQ) - YouTube
New! Poll Beta - .999~ = 1
Poll: ".999~ = 1"

And

The Moon Does Not Exist

It doesn't seem like anyone reads this blog though... so like any unread blog, random songs~
【GUMI】嘘とダイヤモンド【オリジナル曲PV付】 - YouTube
【GUMIオリジナル】 正義粉砕 【NfN】 - YouTube

A Nonviolent Solution to the Political Conflict in the United States

Who bears the cost when someone is looking for paid work but unable to find any? The answer is usually some combination of family, friends, or the state. Indirectly, welfare provided by the federal government is paid either by taxpayers or by all holders of wealth through inflation. It is the responsibility of anyone subject to these costs to decide whether to accept them as the price of maintaining social stability within the current system, or to support changes so that these costs are no longer incurred.

Until now, many people have assumed that it was not possible to eliminate these costs because it would be even more expensive for the government to create jobs through additional spending. Economists have never offered a clear explanation for why the business cycle exists, or what leads to job creation at the end of a recession, and so many people have been forced to rely on ideological explanations for what is wrong with our economy.

These explanations are all wrong. The poor cannot volunteer to work for lower wages because ownership of land and restrictions on building drive up housing prices, and even if every single job opening in the United States today was filled there would still be millions of people out of work. We have plenty of educated workers in every field and over $1 trillion in student debt. The rich do create jobs through spending and many give generously to philanthropic efforts. The government does waste money through unnecessary programs and costs but this leads to more jobs, not fewer.

It is the middle class who allow unemployment to remain as high as it is. 56% of the population, as well as the Congressional Budget Office and Moody's, agree that higher taxes and government spending would lead to growth[1], but only 42% think that the government should create jobs in this manner[2]. In a democracy, it is the people who ultimately define the goals of government, not the elected leaders or a wealthy elite, and so our high levels of unemployment have continued.

This is not to say that the majority of people want unemployment to exist. Prior to the financial crisis, 68% of the population thought that money and wealth in the US "should be more evenly distributed among a larger percentage of the people". The fact that this proportion dropped sharply to 58% after the crisis and has remained at that level suggests that people incorrectly assume that the United States is lacking the wealth necessary to support more and higher-paying jobs[3].

Concerns about the economy have gradually been replaced with concerns about unemployment as the most important issue facing the nation, but ideological conservatives continue to promote the delusion that tax cuts on the rich lead to more "real" jobs than the same amount of government spending, as evidenced by the significant numbers of people who do not believe that higher government spending and taxes would lead to growth. This low valuation of truth is obvious when only 27% of registered voters think that the leading Republican presidential candidate says what he believes instead of what people want to hear, but 46% would choose to vote for him over the current US President[1]. Confusion about what is wrong with the economy is the result of deliberate efforts to limit the size of government or reduce assistance to the poor and unemployed.

At the heart of this lack of regard for the unemployed is the idea that if those without jobs were truly willing and fit to do the work requested by those in society who are able to pay, they would be able to find work. This ignores some simple facts about how the economy works. Sales and business deals are not made solely on the basis of product price or even product quality—there are many other factors, like social connections and brands, that determine which transactions are completed and reduce competitiveness.

Someone may have gone to college and be a brilliant expert in their field, but because their credentials are not prestigious enough they are not even be able to get an interview. A company might make outstanding products but because they do not personally know the CEO of a corporate client, they lose a contract to someone who does. An unemployed worker might be dedicated and skilled, but because this is difficult to prove and a workplace requires social compatibility as much as it does efficiency, their job application is rejected and a less productive existing worker continues to earn a higher wage.

The harmful effect of this simplified version of reality is that it causes people to assume that it is better for those with proven ability in a profession to work harder than to entrust the unemployed with a task they might not have experience with. To see how ridiculous this is, apply it to one of the most dangerous activities in the United States which, regardless of its risks, almost everyone eventually learns to do—driving a car.

There is no need for everyone to work as long as possible out of the mistaken belief that the United States is somehow lacking in the amount of wealth possessed by its rich. If we reject this idea unemployment can easily be fixed, without higher government spending and taxes, simply by adopting the accelerated work week. Instead of showing our dedication by working long hours, we use our time more efficiently by focusing on core tasks and completing the workload as quickly as possible. This front-loads our productivity and allows less important work to be done by another employee or, if necessary, by working longer hours at a reduced wage rate to recognize the lower contribution to the business's success or our lower productivity as a natural response to a longer work week.

Some might argue that the workers of our society are uniformly oppressed with low wages, or are too addicted to their consumer lifestyles to ever accept the slight reduction in workload and pay that would allow a business to hire additional employees. Contrary to this expectation, most of even the top 1% of income work in occupations where it would be possible to choose a reduction of pay and workload[4]. The stereotype of golf-playing managers who depend on their subordinates for all real work while they network with their peers may be unfair but more responsibility by employees in dictating their own work processes would reduce the need for management as well.

The alternative is for us to agree that we would rather the unemployed live off of welfare and use whatever means necessary to survive than provide a stable source of income by having the government create jobs through higher spending. In its own way, this would still be upholding the ideals of freedom and independence that the United States was based on—since any unemployed worker who spends more effort to find a job would be condemning someone else to permanent joblessness, the ranks of the unemployed would be filled not only with those who are unable to find a job, but also the altruistic.

Any abuse of welfare entitlements or government services would be transformed into a moral act of taking from the rich to give to the poor, similar to the story in English history of the heroic outlaw named Robin Hood. There would be no shame in using or even selling food stamps when their cost is borne by an uncaring society that prefers deception about the effects of economic policy over providing a job and an honest income for all individuals.

It is then up to taxpayers and others who provide support to the unemployed to vote for job creation to end this situation, whether through more government spending or by encouraging the use of an accelerated work week.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/19/us/politics/20120419_poll_docs.html
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/06/30/business/20110630poll-full-results.html
[3] http://www.gallup.com/poll/147881/americans-divided-taxing-rich-redistribute-wealth.aspx
[4] http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/who-are-1-and-what-do-they-do-living

The Traitors Within Us

We have a problem in this country. There is a group of people with so much hate in their hearts that they are willing to accept injury to themselves if it will deprive the target of their hatred of enjoyment of life.

No, it isn't Occupy Wall Street and the top 1%. It is those who oppose doing anything to help the unemployed because they view people who haven't been able to find work as not deserving of help. Polls suggest that this group consists of a significant portion of our society, but their willful dishonesty and distortion of facts has lead to an even larger influence such that unemployment is still high nearly four years after the financial crisis and recession that caused the loss of millions of jobs here in the United States.

It is our responsibility to the unemployed and those whose careers have been delayed by the recession to identify these harmful elements of society and end their influence. Their selfish attitudes may be the result of malice or just stupidity, but we cannot allow them to poison our democracy any longer.

Surprisingly, it is not the super rich who are responsible for our economic problems. Most entrepreneurs come from the middle class, and the rich generally do not invent new product types or services that lead to more employment nor do they need to—the rich create jobs simply by spending money. As a historical trend the top 1% have been gaining a greater share of income without an equal increase in spending, but this is entirely the fault of us as consumers for making spending choices that result in high corporate profits that go to the rich.

Then who are the harmful elements in society who oppose creating jobs for the unemployed? The answer is simple. It is the middle class who benefit from high levels of inequality and unemployment and those elements of the poor they can delude into helping them. Polls show that, with unemployment still high and inequality at a level not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930's, almost three fifths of the US population think that money and wealth should be more evenly distributed but less than half support government spending as the way to address the problems facing our society. Unemployment hurts all workers, yet these people allow it to continue.

As a nation we could easily create enough jobs for everyone by working less and compensating for the drop in income by buying fewer status symbols. This would allow those with advanced education or skills to find appropriate work while lowering the profits of corporations that depend on selling overpriced items and services to the affluent. But it is precisely the reduction in inequality this would cause that makes it understandable that some people would oppose this plan. Lower unemployment would mean higher wages for the poor which is of no concern to the super rich who can pay for anything, but it would cause problems for businesses that depend on exploiting low-wage workers to make a profit or that provide certain services to the rich that would see lower demand, such as Wall Street and the financial sector. Even corporations that do not sell to the rich might be forced to lower their prices to maintain the same volume of sales, which could lead to a reduction of income for the more well-paid members of an organization.

So it is important to understand that some people in the middle class have a very real interest in maintaining current levels of inequality. Some people might be deluded into thinking that the economic crisis has hurt the rich when the truth is just the opposite, but the continued efforts of those on the progressive portion of the political spectrum and the limited impact of the protests of Occupy Wall Street have shown that misperception is only part of the problem. Some people like how unequal the United States has become and think they can get away with ignoring our nation's problems, or worse, actively trying to make them worse by further reducing government spending in a time of economic need.

It's time to show them that they're wrong. We cannot allow those who work for large corporations to suffer with the knowledge of the profits they help to create while society refuses to help the unemployed by providing a source of income. Whether it is through [work conservation](http://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/) or any of the myriad of solutions that involve more government spending and taxation, we will not allow this state of affairs to continue any longer. Whether it is a third or even a majority of the population who support oppression of the underprivileged members of society, our victory is already assured since creatures of darkness are not known to thrive in sunlight.