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
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