Life Inc: finally its facts trickle up

From Bob Herbert today’s NYTimes, courtesy Andrew Mayer:

The recession officially started in December 2007. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by the gross domestic product, fell by about 2.5 percent. But employers cut their payrolls by 6 percent.

In many cases, bosses told panicked workers who were still on the job that they had to take pay cuts or cuts in hours, or both. And raises were out of the question. The staggering job losses and stagnant wages are central reasons why any real recovery has been so difficult.

“They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output,” said Professor Sum. “Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.”

That kind of disconnect, said Mr. Sum, had never been seen before in all the decades since World War II.

In short, the corporations are making out like bandits. Now they’re sitting on mountains of cash and they still are not interested in hiring to any significant degree, or strengthening workers’ paychecks.

Combine this with the fact that corporate profits over their net worth has been going down for thirty years, and you get an even more nuanced understanding of the problem: not even the corporations will be able to turn a profit for very much longer. They have collected all the money, but don’t know how to make more out of the money they have. All they can do is sell major assets to the Chinese (like Ford selling Volvo today). So even corporate shareholders are losing in this scenario.

It’s all quite simple, even if it took me close to 300 pages to explain how we got here in Life Inc. I was thinking that book came out too late (after the beginning of the economic crash) but now I’m thinking it may have come out too soon! At least there’s the paperback coming early next year, along with resources for people who need to earn a living in the current economic environment.

Or take a look at Alan Greenspan’s latest comments to Meet the Press. When I say something like this, they call me socialist:

“Our problem, basically, is that we have a very distorted economy, in the sense that there has been a significant recovery in a limited area of the economy amongst high-income individuals who have just had $800 billion added to their 401(k)s and are spending it and are carrying what consumption there is.

“Small business, small banks, and a very significant amount of the labor force” — is caught in “tragic unemployment” that is pulling down the country.

Essential Reading

I’m putting together something in place of a bibliography for my next book: a VERY short list of essential reading for people who want to understand digital media. I’m thinking of getting it down to ten books or essays.

But which ones?

I want people to understand the biases of media, how interactive media is social, how technology has agendas of its own, how human beings and technology co-evolved, the nature of technology and markets and, perhaps most of all, how to program. (Or how to understand what programming is, even if you don’t want to program yourself.)

So I am really open for suggestions. I’m currently looking at
Out of Control – Kevin Kelly
Hacker Ethic – Mackenzie Wark
Virtual Communities – Howard Rheingold
On the Human Use of Human Beings – Norbert Weiner
maybe “Multimedia,” the collection of essays including Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Englebart, Licklider, and most of the pioneers of computing and networking.

What would you put? What books are essential and required reading for someone to negotiate the digital realm? And what was your favorite introduction to programming? I learned it from a person, and would be interested to hear who got it from a text. Or a program, even.

Finished Another Book

Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age.

Should be out by the end of September, in print and e-formats, from the absolutely independent publisher OR Books.

This is going to be very interesting.

Harvey Pekar died

I wasn’t expecting this one. I hope he gets to meet my mom.

Makes the fact that I’m currently “collaborating” with him on a comic all the more strange. We will still finish it, no matter what.

In brief: Harvey influenced my thinking about writing – and the world – as profoundly as any professor, mentor, or friend I’ve ever had. He was a genuinely good and absolutely brilliant person, who proved that success can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

We love you, Harvey Pekar.

Taking Back the World: The Web Comic

Artist Seth Kushner’s web comic interpretation of me and Life Inc. Fascinating stuff, and the last in a series he has been working on all year for act-i-vate. See it first, here.

Buffett says “We’re coming back!”

But he really means, “please, everybody say we’re coming back!”

In an interview published today in HuffPost, billionaire and investment guru Warren Buffett assured Americans that their economy was on the rise. No depression, just recovery.

But where he revealed his true agenda was in his advice for Obama: speak with “enormous confidence” about the nation’s economic future.

Buffett is trying to take the first step, going out on a limb to speak confidently about the failing economy. He believes – and there’s some merit to this – that if everyone can be made to believe the economy is recovering, then it will recover. Businesses will hire more people and those people will earn more money and be able to buy the things made by the businesses.

Except it doesn’t work like that, anymore.

We actually have to break the false connection between having a “job” and having enough stuff. I believe we could take care of pretty much everyone’s needs – at least in America – with all of us being employed perhaps 10% of the time. There’s really not that much work to be done. In fact, it’s our excess work and production that give us more work to do.

We see that as a good thing, because we all want jobs. But we only want jobs because we need a way to evaluate who gets to have the stuff that there’s actually too much of.

We are coming back, but not the way Warren says. Or at least no the “we” that Warren is talking about.

Sell

Yes, this is really it. The beginning of a true end-of-cycle economically.

If you own “stocks,” use these bounces to get out completely. If you have to park your money somewhere, consider yourself lucky you have money to park.

The object of the game for those who actually have capital is not how to grow it, but how to keep it. Capital has driven our economy since 1300, and the recent bull market was the end of a cycle that began in the mid-1700′s.

The fact that it is ending is not the end of the world at all. It just means that there’s a whole lot of money out there with no place to go. People can’t find a place to park their money because there’s more money looking for investment than there is stuff to invest in.

And that’s because we’re finally in a technological era where great innovations are more about reducing the need to spend time, resources, and energy than they are about increasing it. iPads aside, of course.

I’ve been working hard on a book, and I know I should be updating everyone on facts and ideas relevant to Life Inc and the end of corporatism. I will in a few weeks.

In the meantime, learn to do real things and how to create value for other people. Make friends with your neighbors or, if necessary, neighbors out of your friends.

This is not a nightmare scenario, no matter what “they” say it is. No need for apocalypse, regression, or guns. That’s all silliness.

Good times ahead.

Sheila Rushkoff – 1935-2010

My mom past away this morning, after a long and quite private battle with leukemia. She went her own route with alternative therapies, but ultimately succumbed.

I’ll be a little less responsive than usual for while, so please pardon that – there is a whole lot to take care, but nothing nearly as challenging as attending to her. I am already relieved, and I promise I’ll be back to a renewed pace, with significantly less worries, within a few days.

Photo forthcoming.

Pekar and Rushkoff Comic

The first installment of a comic book featuring Harvey Pekar and me, drawn by Sean Pryor, just went up at the Pekar Project on Smithmag.net.

Check it out here.

The Scotsman gives Life, Inc. Four Stars!

I haven’t gotten stars, before. It is nice.

LIFE INC:
BY DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
(Vintage, £9.99) ★★★★
ONE recent Christmas Eve, Douglas Rushkoff was mugged in his Brooklyn neighbourhood. It was an up-and-coming area. So he did something public-spirited – he logged on to his local website and posted a note warning other residents of the threat. You’d think they’d be pleased. They weren’t. They were angry. They thought it might adversely affect property prices. Money, Rushkoff realised, is distorting our values: “We look to the DowJones average as if it were the one true vital sign of our society’s health.”