I Have No Idea What I'm Doing

Some Advice

https://twitter.com/HKesvani/status/1365648166360604675

• https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-terrible-t-mobilesprint-merger-must-be-undone/

• 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.

• 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/

• 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.

• https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy8qza/amazon-owned-twitch-bans-amazons-union-busting-ads

• 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.

• 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

• Shareholder Primacy

  “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.