Folks, you ever regret paying off a debt because it makes you lazy and slovenly? Show of hands.
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Anosmia Awareness Day
https://twitter.com/HKesvani/status/1365648166360604675
Andrew’s Couch
T-Mobile/Sprint
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-terrible-t-mobilesprint-merger-must-be-undone/
No, you can’t make me think about money! Absolutely not!
App-based banking service Simple is shutting down - The Verge
Every budgeting app presupposes I want to think about moeny all the time and I absolutely do not.
Amtrak News
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/02/22/amtrak-is-growing-will-it-finally-get-the-subsidy-it-deserves/
Communist boondoggles
http://blog.darice.com/kids-crafts/how-to-make-boondoggle-keychains/
F-35 lol
The US Air Force Quietly Admits the F-35 Is a Failure - ExtremeTech
It’s the Ferrari of the sky
[T]he F-35 supply chain does not have enough spare parts available to keep aircraft flying enough of the time necessary to meet warfighter requirements. “Several factors contributed to these parts shortages, including F-35 parts breaking more often than expected, and DOD’s limited capability to repair parts when they break.
AD: Orson Welles for Paul Masson
Twitch Bans Amazon’s Anti-Union Ads
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy8qza/amazon-owned-twitch-bans-amazons-union-busting-ads
The Review E-conomy
Everybody wants you to review everything you buy now, because of the algorithms
Stop emailing my wife me to ask me to review things.
Especially don’t email me to review a thing I purchased two months ago. I’ve forgotten all about it.
Millionaire Regrets Paying Off House Early
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/11/paying-off-your-mortgage-early-biggest-downside-says-self-made-millionaire.html
Financial Ronin
1970s Was The Inflection Point
https://theweek.com/articles/486362/where-americas-jobs-went
Profits
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the-gap-between-worker-pay-and-productivity-is-so-problematic/385931/
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
Deregulation
Deregulation was big in the 70s, championed by Alfred Kahn, the Brookings Institution, and the AEI
Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976
Airline Deregulation Act of 1978
Staggers Rail Act of 1980
Motor Carrier Act of 1980
The telephone system was increasingly de-regulated throughout the 70s
Oil/Energy Crises
In 1973, the embargo imposed by OPEC led to oil prices rising 300%
Union Membership
Just read “A Collective Bargain” by Jane McAlevy, okay
50 Years Of Shrinking Union Membership, In One Map - Planet Money - NPR
Private union membership numbers in US
1973: 24.2%
2014: 6.6%
2020: 10.2%
The Shrinking American Labor Union - The New York Times
Why did union decline take off in the 70’s?
Mostly, prosperity blinded workers and unions to businesses increased use of bad labor law issued in the late 40’s (ie., taft-hartly and NLRB decisions)
Starting in the 1970s, employers began to shift this balance once again. They became much more politically active than they had been in the mid-century years, and they began to push to limit government regulation on multiple fronts such as the environment, consumer rights, and labor (Hacker and Pierson 2010). As part of this renewed conservative activism, employers ramped up their resistance to established unions and new union organizing. They did so, in part, because they faced a new economic paradigm created by a variety of emerging trends. First, financialization shifted the locus of economic power from manufacturing to banks and investment firms. Second, U.S. corporations, which were the world’s economic leaders in the years after World War II, faced more global competition as countries like Germany and Japan got back on their feet. Third, the rate of profit for private business fell by 29% between 1965 and 1973, and among manufacturers it fell by more than 40% (Brenner 2006). And finally, U.S. employers were more heavily saddled by social welfare costs, like health care and pensions, than were their global competitors because of the U.S.’s employer-based social welfare system (Hacker 2002).
Explaining the erosion of private-sector unions: How corporate practices and legal changes have undercut the ability of workers to organize and bargain - Economic Policy Institute
Unfriendly courts
Between 1940 and 1969, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the unions’ position nearly 80% of the time.
After 1970, that percentage has dropped to only 50%
Percentage of labor force participating in NLRA elections each year declines
1950’s - 1960’s: 1%
1970’s: 0.78%
1980’s: 0.28%
Percentage of NLRB elections won to form a union
1940’s: 80%
1977: 50%
Percentage of first contract wins for unions:
1950’s: 86%
1970’s: 70%
1990’s: 56%
Increased charges of unfair labor practice (ULP) (rose 7x from 1950-1980)
Increase in captive audience sessions
Increase in anti-union consultant firms
Transition from majority private to majority public sector union membership
Civil Rights movement lead to legislation that got a huge quantity of women and POC into federal and state jobs, and thus union jobs
Sadly, if you reduce the state, as neoliberalism started to do, that means you’re losing a bunch of Union Jobs and there’s not much you can do to stop it.
Public unions inherently weaker
Can’t strike, subject to the whims of 50 states’ laws
Inflation
1973 & 1979 food and energy shocks
Keynesian economics works if you have a solid welfare state, but if you don’t: oops
Outsourcing
The rise of information technology allowing instantaneous, cheap communication over very long distances helped encourage outsourcing and offshoring
Outsourcing allows reduction of labor costs and thus increased profits
When did offshoring become so prevalent?
The trend began in earnest in the late 1970s at large manufacturers such as General Electric. GE’s then CEO, Jack Welch, who was widely respected by other corporate chieftains, argued that public corporations owe their primary allegiance to stockholders, not employees. Therefore, Welch said, companies should seek to lower costs and maximize profits by moving operations wherever is cheapest. “Ideally,” Welch said, “you’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy.” Not only did GE offshore much of its manufacturing, so did its parts suppliers, which were instructed at GE-orchestrated “supplier migration seminars” to “migrate or be out of business.”
How’s GE doing now? Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh not great.
Collapse of Bretton Woods
“In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires…the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation…and his primary responsibility is to them.”
— Milton Friedman. “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits”. The New York Times. September 13, 1970.
Shareholder primacy led to the rise of stock-based compensation for executives
In 2019, Jerry Useem writing in The Atlantic and prominent Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders writing in The New York Times argued that shareholder theory, which promoted a rise in stock-based compensation, has led executives to enrich themselves by implementing stock buybacks—often to the detriment of the companies they work for. The critics argued this diverts company funds away from potentially more profitable or socially valuable avenues, like research and design, reduces productivity, and increases inequality by delivering money to higher-paid employees who receive stock-based compensation and not to lower-paid employees who do not.
