#but if we didn't actually get 30% richer in the last 7-8 years

[togglessymposium]

I notice that I’m confused. Adjusting for inflation and population, 75% of the 2023 Unites States GDP is… the economy in 2015 or 2016. From $76,000 per capita down to $57,000. Hardly the dark ages! This has pretty much always been true, right? At least in the modern era. If your entire economy is growing by a 4% a year, that compounds very quickly, and cutting a linear percentage off of that means going back in time a relatively modest amount. During the postwar boom, that would shrink down to only a couple years!

Going back in time to 2015 by making 3/4ths as much stuff (per capita) doesn’t even mean making 3/4ths of any given good; you can grow just as much food and offload the reduced production in to other stuff. In particular, you can trim down positional goods with a fairly minimal impact on quality of life, although I don’t know how much of the physical actually-real economy really is in that category. That seems like a difficult thing to measure, but I wouldn’t be enormously shocked to discover that some 15-20% of the actually-real economy gets thrown down the bottomless well of red-queen-race competitions; for example, shrinking the amount of wealth sunk in to advertising agencies would probably leave the relevant firms in basically the same relative position they are in now, with a slightly higher quality of life for the rest of us. And in a free market, allocation of resources should in theory take care of this ‘mostly automatically’, with the price of advertising rising faster than the price of food since demand for the latter is inelastic, perhaps helped along with some farm subsidies like we already have. So I don’t think that even necessarily puts you back the entire 25%, not in a way that matters!

Now, some of this may just be that economic growth numbers are basically fake, I suppose. Like, if the stock market goes up 10%, that doesn’t mean that the community has 10% more stuff to go around, it just means that a larger fraction of that stuff is controlled by the sort of people that own lots of stocks. But on paper it can look like the economy ‘grew’ for a bit, at least until inflation reaches its new equilibrium. But quite a lot of it is also real improvements in ‘worker productivity’, that is, in the force multiplier that technology offers to the typical man-hour in an aggregate of productive firms. And at least in principle, shrinking the overall labor-hour pool by 25% doesn’t seem like it would also tank the rate at which we reap these technological and capital gains; if we could grow at 4% per year in 2015 when the GDP per capita was $57,000, I don’t see why we couldn’t grow at 4% per year in 2023 if the GDP was $57,000 per capita. So we’d ‘keep pace’ in that sense, staying a fixed few years ‘behind schedule’, in exchange for workers getting an extra ten hours a week of leisure for their own use.

Now, this isn’t an argument that this plan is fine and we should just wave our magic wand and reduce full-time employment to 30 hours, because contra OP I do have a certain faith in the proposition that this stuff actually is complicated, even if robber barons do love to hide behind that complexity to justify their own evils. I’m not assuming this model is right. If nothing else, this would have to break as you cut back to really short work weeks like five hours. But I am saying that merely ‘making 25% less stuff’ doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it sounds, unless the GDP numbers are just wildly dissociated from the facts on the ground. For a 25% cut to be really scary, it seems like a great many other things have to be false, including most of what people point to to justify the current ordering of state power.

I'm up to the "I dunno maybe children working 13 hour shifts is bad, guys" part of Capital and it feels important to inform people that haven't read it yet that capitalists in the 19th century were not by any means wringing their hands and twirling their mustaches about employing children to squeeze out profits, they were hiring "experts" to write newspaper articles for them, explaining how "well, the socialists have these big demands about an 8-hour work day, and taking Saturdays off, but it's actually just so complicated, it's too complicated for most people to understand, we just NEED to hire children for night shifts because the stamina of their strong, youthful bodies is the only way we can survive as a business! It's science, you see. Economics doesn't work like that, just ask our economics professors at Oxford. You CAN'T turn a profit only working people 8 hours! Trust the experts, they know. It's just so complicated..."

That exact infuriating cadence that you read in New York Times articles, in the Atlantic Monthly, in the WaPo and all the other bourgeois rags where "everything is so complicated, and it's actually a lot more complicated than you think.." that has been around since the beginning. It is nothing new. So the next time you see some op-ed from Matt Yglesias or any of those other guys huffing their own farts about how "complicated" everything is, and how "unrealistic" a 30-hour work week is, remember that Marx was dealing with that exact class of "intellectuals" "explaining" how working 13 hours at age 10 was "vital" to the "moral fibre" of those poor kids.

[heavyasafeather]

2023

1. What did you do in 2023 that you’d never done before?

I don't know if this counts because it’s not like I’ve never played any videogames before, but since I’m not really a gamer, and the only real game that I’ve actually enjoyed to the point of obsession was Far Cry: Primal, playing Hogwarts Legacy definitely took over my life.

I also finally pierced my ears... and then tried to hide it from my dad for about 4 months.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I told myself to workout during lunch or take the stairs more, and I barely did that. I usually don't make resolutions, I don't even know why I tried.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

--

4. Did anyone close to you die?

--

5. What countries did you visit?

--

6. What would you like to have in 2024 that you lacked in 2023?

Joji.

7. What date from 2023 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

May 13th, 2023 - I saw Joji at the Forum.

June 24th, 2023 - I pierced my ears.

August 6th, 2023 - I bought tickets last minute to see Joji at Bleached Fest.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Realizing I don’t want to be stuck at my current job, then telling my boss that I was unhappy and that I wanted to go to school, and him being really supportive.

Going back to school.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Telling some people that I was quitting my job.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Nope.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Any of the tickets to see Joji.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

?

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

If cancer was a person, I would murder that motherfucker. Also, I'm pretty sure my manager gaslighted me earlier this year.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Bills, school.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Joji at the Forum.

16. What song will always remind you of 2023?

The Cactus Blooms, "Mississippi" Hot Hot Heat, "Magnitude" Daneshevskaya, "Estuary Dig" Vaundry, "Odoriko" The Specials, "Gangsters"

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

i. happier or sadder? Sadder.

ii. thinner or fatter? Fatter.

iii. richer or poorer? I feel poorer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Skating.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Going to work.  Caring

20. How did you spend Christmas?

Christmas Eve: Literally binging The Last of Us. Christmas day: I went home, and didn't do shit for the rest of the day, except like play Hogwarts Legacy.

21. Did you fall in love in 2023?

With Special Agent Dale Cooper? Yeah, maybe.

22. How will you be spending New Years?

Probably binge watching some show with Adam. Yeah, he's got on Succession right now, but I'm not even paying attention.

23. How many one-night stands?

0.

24. What was your favourite TV program?

Orville! TWIN PEAKS!

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

If cancer was a person...

26. What was the best book you read?

--

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

...binaural beats?

28. What did you want and get?

To see Joji. I also got a Twin Peaks shirt for Christmas.

29. What did you want and not get?

To see Joji at the Crypto.com Arena in October.

30. What was your favourite film of this year?

The Whale. No Hard Feelings. Killers of the Flower Moon? I don't know. I can tell you what movies I hated: Incendies. or Brimstone. (No, they both were good - just what the fuck).

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I turned 32. The day of: I went to work, but my coworker made me cake. And then I went to Korean BBQ with my parents. The Monday before, my Japanese teacher made me dinner and bought me a piece of cake and flan, and we just hung out; it was pretty sweet of her, and she also got me a kiiroitori stuffed animal.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably satisfying?

Being able to start school right when I was wanting to quit my job.

Having the balls to tell people to shut the fuck up.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2023?

Scrubs.

34. What kept you sane?

Nothing - I’m pretty sure this is the most I’ve ever had a panic/anxiety attack. Weekends watching Twin Peaks.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Seriously? ...also young Kyle Maclachlan was a new one.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

I just... don't.

37. Who did you miss?

I'm not sure if I did. There's one person I think about often, but then I get just mad because I doubt they give a shit (or ever did for how seemingly easy it was for them to just drop me).

38. Who was the best new person you met?

You know, she's not new - but my Japanese teacher has been amazing - she's basically become my new grandma.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2023:

--

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

And I move lightly in the dawn. Try to, gently ever on the lee. Though, I liked summer light on you. If we ride a winter-long wind. Though, time's not what I belong to, and I'm not the season I'm in.