A Labor Shortage Could Explain Negative Interest Rates

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-13/negative-interest-rates-could-their-cause-be-a-labor-shortage

by sdbrady • 7 years ago

3 6 7 years ago

neguim• 7 years ago

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It seems like there are (almost) unimaginable bottlenecks in technology creation, leadership and creativity. The contrast between thenear unlimited amount of capital available for value creating companies, and the almost universal lack of people who can reliably create those companies, is staggering. Why does school still prepare people for a world of zero sum, mediocre work? There has never been a larger, more diverse capital class, but it seems like people could not be trying harder to avoid being a part of it.

salawat2• 7 years ago

There has never been a larger, more diverse capital class, but it seems like people could not be trying harder to avoid being a part of it.

Because people don't really like Monopoly.

Not everyone seems to want to sit on, micromanage, or otherwise have their life degenerate into a real life version of savvy financial instrument user: the game.

There is living, raising a family, seeing the world, experiencing something truly singular, discovering something, realizing something no one else has, sacrificing for something importamt, or being satisfied merely living and existing sustainably.

Yet every day, a Market clamors for their participation. It demands they take their credit, consume it's output, entrust their life savings to it regardless of the risk or consequence.

Transact! Transact! Transact! It screams incessantly, unwilling to be silenced. If you cannot transact directly, hand the fruits of your sweat to someone that will! Feed me!

I'll insure you! Just give me a cut! I'll loan to you, but trade your debts and obligations to others involved in the original transaction!

It forces itself in the most unhealthy, self-reliance poisoning way into your life like a layer of poison gas traveling along the floor.

I'd suggest a read of Henry David Thoreau's Walden to understand that part of the Hunan psyche that seems to sit in rebellion to the modern financial system. There is life beyond the economic construct. Something beautiful, real, and worth finding, sharing, and experiencing that is robbed and trodden upon by the worldwide market. It is outright rejected and decried as savagery by the very tenets of decent economic theory. All actions under economic theory must be in search of profit, or in avoidance of loss. In reality though, a person may spend one's time to make some good in the world besides mere dollars and common cents.

To see communities and churches flourish; to see work done, and excess goods grown and gathered distributed between friends/adopted family merely because they are there and it seems the right thing to do.

It seems fitting that capital is caught in a tizzy looking for somewhere to be, and fears of a recession circle in the markets due to a lack of labor.

The next generation, like the latter born sibling, need not repeat the mistakes of those who came before to learn the lessons of the past. They are unconsciously drawn (or possibly even shielded, or explicitly warned away) from the banks, lenders and money men, and see the damage the financial system becoming the ultimate arbiter off all that is "good" and "worthwhile" has on the human spirit.

The dollar sign reigns supreme from it's bag, even as most are left struggling to find their financial footing from the get go as the Jack Welch's of the world play to the financier's tune, sacrificing the many, and the mission in a quest to deliver value to the shareholder and no one else. Why labor for their pittance of a wage? Why accept the slavery and encumberance of the responsibility for such a tethering of possibility? Why sacrifice my birthright as a free agent to these men and their ledgers?

Just as J. P. Morgan famously said of banking during Congressional testimony,

Untermyer: Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property? Morgan: No, sir. The first thing is character. Untermyer: Before money or property? Morgan: Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it … a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom

There is little to recommend the Market in terms of Character nowadays. It is volatile, unreliable, and as untrustworthy as those people we currently find ourselves attempting with great difficulty to share a sociopolitical sphere with.

Without trust, the underpinnings of the "the economy" comes undone. That trust has been eroded by government overreach, reckless banking, unrestrained excesses of the capital wielding class, and the splitting of the population into the shareholding vs. Non-shareholding class. No call to "then buy-in, damn you!" will succeed to move one who has experienced the economy as an impersonal predator of one's time and virtue. Who has toiled and toiled yet barely seems to make ends meet without taking any steps repugnant to their moral character.

"Chiding their ignorance" and attempting to correct it will not move them as well. Deep down, man is still animal as much as rational being, and the animal spirits that move us are just as connected to our feelings on the status quo as the instincts of wildlife in the midst of a forest fire.

It's a lot to unpack, but to summarize, the issue isn't economic, but one of Character. The financier/economist wishes (through actions if not through words) to lay claim to a role of primacy in everyday dealings and existence. They assert the systems of monies and transactions suffused all that man should ever do and and aspire to/for. Yet, that primacy comes at the price of blind trust being present. A commodity in precious supply nowadays. Solve that for laborer and shareholder/instrument holder alike, and you have the beginnings of a recovery in the works. Continue in the current direction at the system's own peril. It takes precious little to lose mankind's faith, especially in comparison to what it takes to restore it.

My 4.a.m. 2 cents at least.

chewz• 7 years ago

Thank you...

rogerkirkness2• 7 years ago

I actually read the whole thing you wrote and I still don't understand what your point is. Walden is a way for miserable people to justify that their misery comes from a place outside of themselves. True freedom is self control. It's not impossible to have self control in a market economy. It's also possible to not have self control in idealistic economies. If the world around you is not self determined, but interdependent, where money is a proxy for utility in a complex sense, adapting beats petty rebellion either way. Either you find a way to transcend it, and somehow make that vertically integrated idealistic existence sustainable, or you have to participate. I'm not arguing for the moral good, I'm arguing for the lack of alternatives. It's misery inducing to engage in petty rebellion when you could be winning instead. I feel like the capital class is pretty happy with their position, and if you look at where they come from it's basically all countries on earth and all social strata. The commonality is offering utility to the group. A lot of people just want less wealth ie. less inputs and outputs. That is as valid as it is impossible.

A Labor Shortage Could Explain Negative Interest Rates

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