Collapse - 6/1-15/2000

Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

Collapse trends - June 1-15, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

6/15/2000 omens -

[How's this for an example of an out-of-touch "representative"? -]
Abolish the estate tax, op ed by Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D, Brooklyn), NYT, A31.
...More than half those who paid death taxes in 1996 had estates valued at less than $1m, with most valued below $5m. These are not Rockefellers and Carnegies; they're the families next door.
[Nydia must live in a pretty swanky part of Brooklyn. Shore ain't many $1-5m families next door to us here in Somerville, Mass., and we suspect few in Brooklyn have such well-heeled next-door neighbors. Nydia has a Latino last name, but appears to be losing touch with the vast majority of her Latino compadres.]
..\..Unfortunately, the reality for family-owned small business is that one-third will be forced to sell or partially liquidate themselves to pay estate taxes on the owner's death....
[Well, in Paul Krugman's op ed yesterday, he says "And since only the amount over $675,000 is taxed, and the tax rate rises with the size of the estate, the bulk of each year's inheritance tax is actually paid by only a few thousand multimillion-dollar estates. This really is a tax levied almost entirely on the very, very well off.... So why did most members of the House vote to repeal a tax that yields $30B a year, yet doesn't touch the vast majority of their constituents? Perhaps because they were moved by sob stories about salt-of-the-earth family farmers and small-business men forced by estate taxes to [sell their farms and businesses and] abandon their heritage - although a quick check of the facts would have revealed that such stories are actually quite uncommon, and that the compromise bill offered by the Democratic leadership would have made them vanishingly rare." (See goodnews item on 6/14/00 "Death and taxes.") So which is it? Is it common for family businesses to be lost because of inheritance taxes or isn't it? Bob Herbert in his 6/26/00 op ed, "A handout for the very wealthy - Scare tactics and the estate tax," NYT, A21 says "She was wrong. Nothing remotely close to such businesses are even subject to estate taxes. So the idea of families being forced to liquidate them to satisfy the taxes is absurd."
[But even if it is common, what's so hard about rewriting the taxes to exempt reinvestment in the family business, if any?! To completely abolish one of our economy's few remaining wealth-centrifuging mechanisms because of an easily correctable glitch is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. As we said yesterday, it's no accident that every long-lasting culture has its "resets" where concentrated wealth is centrifuged. Things spark up a lot in the wake of each of these "jubilees" because the more centrifugation, the more dynamism, whereas the more concentration, the less circulation. Money may trickle down, but it absolutely POURS up, and the rich need to smarten up A LOT about reinvesting in their own consumer base via wages.]

6/14/2000 omens -

It's becoming easier, and more common, to combine corporate and family trips, by Joe Sharkey, NYT, C13.
[Kate - "The death of the vacation."]
US workers say high schools failing to prepare youths for work force, by Linda Johnson, Boston Globe, D7.
...but say colleges do somewhat better...according to a...telephone survey of 955 working adults and 59 job-seekers nationwide, which was conducted in May by the University of Connecticut's Center for Survey Research and Analysis. The results, released Monday, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points for the study, "Making the Grade? What American Workers Think Should Be Done to Improve Education"..\.. Workers also rated computer and specific occupational skills as far less important than general talents, including critical thinking, basic literacy and numeracy, and communications ability.... Traits such as strong work ethic, integrity, and sense of individual responsibility were rated very important by nearly twice as many respondents as were computer skills....
At least three out of four surveyed said these steps would help:
- mandatory high school exit exams
- yearly math and reading tests of third- through eighth-graders
- mandatory internships for high school students, and
- business involvement in shaping the curriculum
Even though many companies complain their growth is limited by a lack of skilled workers, US work force training trails efforts in other leading democracies, according to the report....
[...and trails efforts during and after World War II when there was a real labor shortage and not just a skills shortage among young workers. Evidently employers are so spoiled by the general labor glut that they're rejecting older workers - 17% unemployment in the over-50 age bracket in high tech - and shrugging off the expense of training younger workers any way they can, including whining for more visas for pre-trained young workers from overseas.]

6/13/2000 omens -

Fidelity funds seek safety of cash after tech [stock] slide, by Beth Healy, Boston Globe, D1.
[Aha, another depression condition is seen emerging here. In depressions, it's not that the money isn't there. It is there. But it's not in play. It's in cash and it's hidden under the mattress or some such, rather than out in circulation employing people.]

6/11-12/2000 weekend omens -

["The sameness of the extreme opposites" -]
6/12 For today's wealthy parents, tips on brat control - What to do when little Johnny throws a tantrum for a gold card, by Blaine Harden, NYT, A32.
[We're all too familiar with the problems of kids gone bad at the low end of the income&wealth scale. In the extreme, such kids get tossed in jail and cost us taxpayers $25k-30k a year like every other inmate. Less well known, though those "lovely" Columbine kids were certainly not poor, are the problems with kids at the high end (if there is an end on this side) of the income&wealth scale. This article fills us in a bit, and offers a kind of Miss Manners for the over-monied, e.g. -]
If your 5-year-old asks how much money you make, and you make tons, then the appropriate reply is, "That is not a nice question"....
[How serious is the problem on this side of the scale?]
Rich kids are something of a growth industry in Manhattan and across the country, as the number of families worth $10m or more has jumped in the past decade to 275,000 from 65,000, said Edward N. Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University and editor of The Review of Income and Wealth.
[It would be nice to have right here the parallel numbers on the MEGAjump in the number of families sinking below our all-too-underestimated poverty line in the same 10-year period, just to avoid the obvious temptation to get insanely optimistic from these topside figures, when they actually bespeak deepening problems.]
At least 41,000 of those [over $10m] families live in New York City, constituting the largest concentration of the rich in any American city, Professor Wolff said....
[So what's the downside for the kids of the rich on the upside, you may ask? It's not so much jail - so prevalent on the downside - as suicide. Recall that this was the upshot of the Columbine "caper."]
Unmentioned by the press-shy parents at..\..last week's strategy session..\..in an auction room at Christie's filled with wealthy parents and grandparents...were the flameouts, drug overdoses and suicides that periodically burn the names of rich families - and their profoundly unhappy progeny - into the public mind. In Manhattan in the past 13 months,
- Raphael de Rothschild, 23, heir to one of the largest fortunes in the world, died of an apparent heroin overdose on a sidewalk;
- Robert Bingham, 33, a promising fiction writer and heir to a newspaper fortune, died of an apparent heroin overdose in his loft; and
- William Woodward III, 54, scion of a society family known as much for violent deaths as for wealth, took off his slippers and jumped to his death from his 14th-floor apartment on the Upper East Side.
[Under such circumstances, the wealthy might want to reconsider their present push to dismantle inheritance taxes, and just let their progeny move a few steps toward rejoining the human race.]
Judging from last week's two-hour advice session (and a videotape of last year's), three particularly vexing clusters of trouble confront parents trying to raise well-adjusted children in Park Avenue circumstances.
1. Motivation and discipline
  "You can buy whatever you want without lifting a pudgy finger"...Hume R. Speyer...trusts and estates lawyer.... Parents should show their children, by example, that meaning in life comes from work, education and concern for others - not from buying and bragging about clothes, cars, airplanes, apartments, summer houses and fancy foreign vacations. ...Parents should insist that children do real work around the house, even if means ordering servants to back off and let a child wash a dish, vacuum a rug or clean a closet.
  ["Washing a dish" etc. is "real work around the house"?!]
  ...A 19-year-old daughter from a Manhattan family...went off to an Ivy League college with a shiny new BMW convertible. When she wrecked it, her parents immediately bought her a Mercedes, and when she wrecked that, they immediately bought her a Lexus sport utility vehicle. "Parents will often go for the quick, easy solution, which often isn't the right way of dealing with the problem," said..\..Dr. Peter J. Walsh, [a] child psychiatrist.... "Take the time to teach her how to drive."
  [Keywords = "take the time" - impossible for Americans working 80-90+ hour workweeks, whether rich or "nonrich."]
2. Dealing with the nonrich
  [The only alternatives mentioned are: bragging or charity-]
  ...One parent...said he could not control the obnoxious bragging of his son about family money...common [behavior] among insecure rich kids trying to establish a sense of self. To smooth a child's entry into a world where most people are not rich, the panel [at the strategy session] agreed, parents should talk early and often with him about family money - and the obligations that go with it....
  [Guess these "obligations" go along with the "concern for others" mentioned above. Recall that "any system that depends for vital functions on charity is fatally flawed" because charity is discretionary, i.e., capricious. But this sentence introduces the concept of "a world where most people are not rich." Here's another that amplifies this "world" language -]
  When a rich child grows up in [a] nonrich world, there is always the possibility that he or she may marry a peson from that world....
  [Note that we have subtly moved from "a world where most people are not rich" - but where a few people are (so it's a world belonging to both) - to a "nonrich world" (where the rich don't belong). This is probably the biggest single motivation for all those unmentioned suicides of wealthy scions - the sense that they do not belong in this world. They are freaks who can never hope to be "loved for themselves alone" but rather "just for their money." They have been doomed by the accident of birth to a separate, isolated, insulated world with impaired communications and feedback. The rich are different, said Scott Fitzgerald. Many long to rejoin the human race. The trouble is, this is obscured by the prevalent envy of the middle and lower brackets. The rich aren't allowed to be viewed with sympathy, just with sarcasm à la "Oh life is rough!" or "Yeah my heart bleeds!" That's why economic designers have to begin balancing the economic dimensions by balancing employment, not income or wealth. Take away work from someone who has too much (if you can define that - Timesizing has a way tied to "too little") and you're inherently giving them back something good, namely free time or leisure. Take away money from someone who has too much (if you can define that...) and it's not yet clear that you're inherently giving them back something good. Once we balance employment and notch up our sensitivities and expectations, we'll begin to sense more clearly that you are giving them back something good. But it's something we have difficulty conceptualizing today. We can say that it has something to do with satisfying the occasional/frequent longing of the rich to "rejoin the human race."]
  Mr. Speyer, the lawyer, said that prenuptial agreements were "a really good idea." But, he said, it is also true that "for the poor spouse, the process can be very unpleasant"....
  [You mean, as in "rubbing their faces in inferiority" and powerlessness??]
3. Giving it all to the children [the inheritance issue]
  "Do you 'owe' your children your lifestyle?" This question seemed to arouse the most passion from panelists and parents. All the experts argued that parents owed their children continuity with the luxurious lives to which they had allowed their children to become accustomed. "If they have lived...a life of plenty...they will have [become] really good at it in order to please you as their parents"..\..said George P. Davison, head of...a private school in Manhattan.... "Then, after [they've done] everything right for 21 years [if] you say, 'Sorry, you are out'...of course, they are going to be uncomprehending..\.. Of course, they are going to be angry...."
  Nor did the experts have an encouraging word to say about "incentive trusts" [which] give money on the basis of performance [e.g., becoming] a teacher, rather than a playboy. These arrangements...almost always make offspring crazy with rage, driving a wedge of resentment between parents and children. The panel agreed that it was usually better for all concerned for parents to give their children just enough money to be comfortable, although the experts offered few specifics as to what that might mean....
  [The series of dimensional balancings that Timesizing embarks us on, each tied to skills - skills & employment, skills & income, skills & wealth... - does provide an ever sharpening economic definition of "person" - and therefore, as a corollary, a definition "as to what just enough money might mean" in terms of a range in the general case.]
6/11 The earlier you retire, the harder it is to predict returns, by Kenneth Hooker, Boston Globe, F6.
[This headline offers an overlooked technical consideration for economic designers torn between standardizing on earlier retirement or on later retirement aka, in the extreme, lifelong employment. It boils down to the fact that we are in a position to make employment and wages more predictable than investment returns because of the common constancy of the passage of time and its usefulness as a general measure of remunerable activity aka "work." The reason is that the investment market is generally based on the labor market and not vice versa (except, of course, in one part of one sector, the financial part of the service sector). We have been moving away from stabilizing labor markets by countenancing increasing injections of unpredictability via the ridiculous, downturn-amplifying "strategy" of mass layoffs (the alternative being the downturn-cushioning and -minimizing strategy of timesizing). And it's no accident that our previously unpredictable investment returns are now getting VERY unpredictable. The financial markets always increase in erratic behavior as periods of job elimination such as the 1920s wear on. And since at bottom, the financial markets are based on a colossal amount of mutual faith and confidence (dependent, in turn, on common interest and shared experience and values; dependent, in turn, on sharing in many dimensions), which downsizing CEOs such as Chainsaw Dunlap and his ilk are damaging at every turn, careening financial markets eventually cascade and signal serious problems to the much-insulated and -isolated wealthy (but never to all of them - some just never "get it").]

6/10/2000 omens -

[Voluntary slavery getting more & more popular in America -]
Dot-com volunteer finds happiness - There should be more to a job than just a paycheck, op ed by Kristina Eldredge, NYT, A27.
I'm one of the 140 employees laid off this week by APBNews.com.... When we were told on Monday that the company had no more money to pay us, it seemed too fast, like everything else we did.... But the company wanted to try to keep the site up until the end of the week in the hope that an investor might come up with money to keep it going longer. We were offered the chance to help with this project - without pay.
[Wow, a golden opportunity! - to be a slave.]
At first I balked at this idea.... By the time I got home, the shock of losing income, stability and contact with co-workers had sunk in, and I cried for two hours.... I'd worked with the same people every day for eight months. We'd all lost our jobs in one fell swoop, and I hadn't evey stayed to commiserate. It felt all wrong.
The next day I went in, feeling strange as I walked through the lobby.... My emotional conflict about severing ties with the company became secondary as I was immediately handed two long stories to proofread. I read them without enthusiasm.... A day went by. And I went back.... I was given more work, and I did it with less resentment than I had the earlier day. I thought, this is sort of fun. A designer who used to work at the site but was between jobs had come back to volunteer.... A supervisor joked that he was working harder than he had when he was being paid....
As volunteers, we could come and go as we pleased. We could even work or not work, according to our needs. A lot of people used the computers to get job leads. Sandwiches appeared. There was a peculiar balance of our personal needs and our workplace needs.
["Workplace needs" without pay? That ain't no workplace, honey. Dat's a plantation, an' you is one happy slave. What about your "personal needs" to eat tomorrow, and the next day....?]
The world of work doesn't produce many weeks like this, weeks when you work not for money, but because you feel a certain tie to a community that you had thought was held together entirely by everyone's financial interest.
[Up to 1863, the world of work produced plenty of weeks like this. In fact, every week was like this for the plantation and other slaves south of the Mason-Dixon line. How about an "Announcement: We are repealing the Proclamation of Emancipation for the convenience of high-tech workers who want to forego monetary payment for their services to high-tech high-rollers"?]
Somehow the atmosphere is better when the whole enterprise is in trouble, because the uncertainty brings the workers in a company together against the outer world.
[Funny, that's exactly what war does.]
You feel concern for the people involved, a desire to help, a sense of providing something of value.
[She keeps mentioning community, togetherness, concern for other people.... This is exactly what we don't have when top executive pay is 400 times that of ordinary employees. It's exactly what is draining out of our society as the income gap widens. And it's widening because government (and finally the unions) in 1933 picked the wrong all-in-one issue: they picked minimum wage instead of maximum workweek.
- Adjust the minimum wage upward and you still keep losing ground, as we have for the last 67 years, with the exception of the War years and the generation it took for workforce replacement and displacement after the War.
- Adjust the maximum workweek downwards and everything gets better, because you engage market forces to raise wages and benefits in a flexible way.
[So what? So if this keeps up we'll be in permanent depression like old Dixie, because there are no domestic markets for the output of our work. Why? Because nobody's getting paid, that's why, and selling stuff, like, needs some people with MONEY to sell it to?! Remember the Ford-Reuther paradox - Ford, "Let's see you unionize these robots!" Reuther, "Let's see you sell them cars."]
Why, when there was a monetary price on our work, were these feelings so much harder to come by?
[Because then the situation was sustainable, of course. It was continuable. Without monetary payment for your work, the situation is just so warm and cozy - and temporary. And that situation is so like wartime. Unless we humans can get our jollies in sustainable situations, we will always, consciously or sub, INDUCE WAR. And today, sustainability takes sharing the vanishing work, defined as time you get PAID FOR. If we continue to let the money concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, that don't have time to spend it, we'll continue to suction the markets away from our own mega investment targets. The more concentration, the less circulation. Once again we are heading toward a relearning of this lesson the hard way. Let's try to be ready to solve the coming Great Depression II intelligently this time, by worksharing via maximum workweek and overtime-to-training&hiring conversion, instead of botching it again as we did in 1933 and requiring another world war to get the superfluous human working hours out of the job market instead of just peacetime work rationing. Let's look into flexible market-oriented work sharing programs, like Timesizing, now before the desperation of depression is upon us. God forbid we should grab for whatever half-assed "New Deal" another Saint FDR ignorantly cobbles together, lest s/he realize too late that the shorter workweek was the real unrecognized all-in-one solution (as the real FDR realized two years too late in 1935). Keynesianism and the Teddy Kennedy's great liberal grocery list of issues may be all very lovely, but they are unstrategic, energy-diffusing, and we have been steadily losing ground with them for the last 30 years once the gory "glow" of World War II wore off.
[So what else is in it for the big boys? Some of them have the imagination to dream of immortality. But we will need their deaths as long as they cannot find appropriate and market-oriented ways to share their huge overage - their deaths centrifuge their overage - less now that we're dismantling the inheritance tax. That overage itself will need war to undistort the most fundamental market, the job market, and restore enough spending power to the multitudes that they can absorb their own technology-magnified output. And that takes less time per person than our technology level of 1840 (80 hrs/wk) or 1940 (40 hrs/wk), not more. As long as CEOs take the short-term strategy of using technology to replace people (alias consumers) instead of making it easier for them, they will be inducing depression and depression's only current effective solution, war (because war abolishes unemployment). And war can get pretty dangerous for CEOs too, especially in the nuclear age.]

6/09/2000 omens -

[Gutsy Latvian buys 1/4 of NYT op ed page to drive home some points we'd sooner forget -]
Putin's war, by Aivars Slucis of Minn., NYT, A31.
...The only complaint one hears from the 150 million Russians [about Putin] is that the killing of the less than one million Chechens is going too slow. Many Russians propose reviving and expanding Stalin's plan to destroy the Chechens by removing them all from Chechnya.... This is exactly what the Russians did to the 230,000 Latvians living in Russia in the 1930s....
Hector, in Homer's Iliad, said, "Let me not die ingloriously and without struggle, but let me first do some great things that shall be told among men hereafter." Truly, in the last 50 years...the Chechen people have done "some great things," their young men have "not died ingloriously and without struggle." The Chechens have set a new standard for bravery. We have seen a new Thermopylae.
While the third (1940s; 1994-96; 1999-2000) Russian genocidal war against the Chechens continues, Western leaders and bankers are doing business as usual with Russia.... If a country is rich or large enough, its crimes against humanity will be ignored and Putin can continue his war on the Chechens [and China its war on its dissidents - ed.].
The West, however, forgets that ignoring such evil can have tragic, unexpected consequences. The West pretended not to see when the Russians killed five million Ukrainians in the 1930s, but that [opened the door] to the Holocaust which soon followed....

6/6/2000 omens -

Parties' soft-money donations continue to soar, report says, by Adam Clymer, NYT, A20.
...as both parties almost doubled the soft-money totals raised four years ago in the last presidential [election] year, and House and Senate candidates also set records in the 15 months that ended March 31, the Federal Election Commission reported today....
- Republican...$86m compared with $45m in 1995-96
- Democrat...$77m compared with $40m in 1995-96
Morgan Stanley is cited for discrimination against women, by Patrick McGeehan, NYT, C1.
...opening the door for lawsuits - and possibly a class action - against the firm.... The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said it had seen evidence of "a pattern and practice" of discrimination against women employed in Morgan Stanley's institutional stocks division. The case stems from a complaint filed with the commission in 1998 by Allison K. Schieffelin, a trader of convertible bonds, who said she had repeatedly been denied a promotion because of her sex. ...The evidence...supported Ms. Schieffelin's contention that less-deserving men had been promoted to the top rank of managing director while she had remained a principal [and] the firm had retaliated against Ms. Schieffelin for making her complaints....
[Boycott these bozos!]
Plain talk about retirement - In the long run, Americans may need to work longer, by Robert Samuelson, Boston Globe, D4.
...In the long run, Americans need to work longer and pay for more of their own retirement. Doing otherwise is a policy of social insecurity....
[Is this a "booming economy"? Is this the promise of technology? This is pathetic! And Timesizing can reverse this deteriorating trend caused by our lack of progress on any sort of robust technology of sharing.]
Finally, a dose of dot-common sense, by David Stephenson (teaches Internet business at Bentley College in Waltham, MA), Boston Globe, D4.
...What are the lessons of the dot-com shakeout?
- ...Just because consumers can do it online doesn't mean they will.
- ...[Don't] impose additional tasks on consumers, with questionable benefits in return. [E.g.,] set up a separate account to a a 25-pound bag of dog food and have it FedEx'd...to save a buck [instead of just getting it] at the grocery store....
- ...There are limits to the [cutting out the middleman on] the Web. Not all intermediaries are bad. [E.g., a] neighborhood travel agent...uses Web services but brings years of experience to bear [and may know of an unbelievably low-priced package deal that your e-xclusive colleagues won't find because it includes a hotel room you won't use]....
- ...[an] e-commerce site doesn't have that full shopping experience \e.g., compared to toysmart.com\ a fun storefront toy store two blocks from my house...has many of the same toys at slightly higher prices, but it lets me open the box, play with the toy, and easily return it....
- ...Amazon.com \is still\ saddled with all of the old logistical problems...building warehouses and making major investments in logistics!...
Companies...that do a good job of combining interactive experiences with a human face will do well in the brave new world of e-commerce.

6/04-05/2000 omens -

6/05 Americans enjoy 70 healthy years, behind Europe, UN says, by Barbara Crossette, NYT, A10.
UNITED NATIONS...- The United States falls behind almost every country in Europe as well as Canada, Australia and Israel in what the World Health Organization [part of the UN] calls "healthy life expectancy," according to a report released [yester]day.... Japan leads the world...74.5 healthy years....
[Must be the heritage of Japan's recently dismantled guaranteed lifetime employment. Expect to see this lead lost now that Japan is copying America's downsizing and disposable-employee "strategies."]
At the very bottom of the scale is battered Sierra Leone...fewer than 26 years....
6/04 Vanguard founder Bogle urges [mutual fund] industry back to investing roots, by Dunstan Prial, AP via Boston Globe, J2.
'This industry has lost its way. A half-century ago it was far more an investment business that a marketing business. Today the reverse is true.' John Bogle, Vanguard Group founder....

6/03/2000 omens -

May's labor data indicate economy could be slowing - 116,000 jobs lost - Biggest drop in 8 years, with unemployment edging up to 4.1% [from 3.9%], by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, front page.
...responding to the Fed's 6 interest rate increases over the last year..\..with blacks and Hispanics absorbing most of the loss....
[No wonder America the Beautiful has them disproportionately represented in its prisons, at $25,000-30,000 per head cost to taxpayers. Here's a d*mn good reason to take interest-rate fiddling out of the hands of the Fed chairman (like Dave Barry's US Senator, a "white male millionaire working for YOU") and put it to regular, electronic, binding referendum - and add massive voter-registration campaigns for blacks and Hispanics. "No pain without input" is the modern translation of the the slogan that originally kickstarted America, "No taxation without representation."]
Jobs disappeared in almost every sector of the economy, except government, where the hiring of 357,000 census takers for the once-a-decade population count offset the decline in business jobs.
[Funny how unemployment "dropped" from 4.0 to 3.9%, but now it's just "edging up" from 3.9 to 4.1. And if we adjusted for the unsustainable census hiring, we'd show a loss of 473,000 jobs, nearly half a million. Bear in mind that when the US economy was really humming, during World War II, any unemployment rate over 2% was viewed with alarm. And today's "low unemployment" rate isn't counting today's real problem anyway = under-employment. That would be the phenomenon of the working poor. The multitudes stitching together multiple part-time jobs with low pay and no benefits. Not to mention our historical record homelessness and our world record incarceration. Time to cut the excuses and rationalizations and share the vanishing work, as the legions of automata and computers and robots march into the economy, in ever increasing numbers. The most advanced, gradual and market-oriented work-sharing design? Timesizing, introduced by the French right's voluntary Robien law (scan down to "Nations" section). Step-by-step outline in Timesizing, Not Downsizing. And Timesizing keeps the consumer base in proportion with the production base by acknowledging the direct flowthrough from employee earnings and job security on one side and consumer spending power on the other. It keeps these factors in sync by massive automatic reinvestment in training and hiring, made market-oriented by using the incidence of overtime to target, trigger, pace and fund the more or less continuous training and hiring. Today's "win-lose capitalism" lets rich-boy nervousness about economic "overheating" clobber growth, and inflict maximum pain on the working poor, who are least able to bear it. The "win-win capitalism" of tomorrow, debugged with Timesizing, (A) has a lot less nervousness about economic "overheating" and (B) puts any pain squarely on those who are most able to bear it, and indeed, least feel it at all - first, wealthy managers/employers and second, workoholics. "But won't the poor proliferate?" Not if we also put the difficult looming decisions on immigration and population policy to public referendum as well.]
[Stock traders continue to rejoice at their own unrecognized doom -]
Nasdaq records best week ever, pointer blowout (to B1), front page.
...soaring 6.44% yesterday after the government announced that unemployment rose in May and wages were nearly flat....
[Where the hey do they think the markets are going to come from to support their huge over-investment in productivity (witness bloated P/E ratios) - not to mention "e-tailers" (e-retailers) - need we mention NatureCompany.com, Boo.com, Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, ToySmart.com, RedRocket.com, CyberShop.com, CraftShop.com (many of which you can find in the annals of our bankruptcy webpage) and probably others that didn't show up in the NYT or the Boston Globe? But then, they're concentrating so much wealth that should be centrifuged into wages and spending that, hey, where else do they have to put it? They simply don't have time to spend that kind of dough. Timesizing centrifuges it via the continuous, economy-wide, market-oriented reinvestment of overtime $$advantage in training and hiring.]

6/02/2000 omens -

Blinded by our love affair with the market - Gloomy look at historical stock trends casts clouds over Wall St., Main St., by Syre & Stein, Boston Globe, D1.
...The stock market, as measured by the S&P 500 index, has returned an average of 18% for the past 18 years.... But imagine, hard as it may be, that the party is over. Imgaine that we are entering a period where the stock market goes into an extended funk, where every dip is not followed by an immediate rebound (like yesterday's), where returns are mediocre, rather than spectacular....
In [Robert Shilller's] gloomy new book, "Irrational Exuberance," the Yale economist points out some unpleasant historical realities. He notes that every time the market has had a long run-up, and P/E ratios have reached new highs as they have recently, the subsequent 20-year period has been characterized by miserable stock-market performance.
[We explain this with our patented "Astrophysical Economics" - the wealthy figure out new ways to get more than their share, thus decontrolling the centripetal forces on wealth, decommissioning the centrifugal forces, and damaging their own consumer base and source of effective demand. For awhile this looks to them like the New Jerusalem, but when the consumer base runs out of consumer credit, trying to maintain its previous living standards, there's just no market support for all the gigantic production facilities that the wealthy have invested in - their wealth concentration has strangled the markets away from their own mega-investments. The unimaginably top-heavy economy topples. Ka-plop, plop, plop. (Never happens cleanly.)]
Bad times followed good at the beginning of the century, after the Crash of 1929 and after 1966, another high-water mark for stocks. In a recent interview with Barron's, Shiller said: "It is certainly plausible to me that the Dow could [still] be trading at the current level of 10,000-11,000 twenty years from now.
David Wyss...the chief economist at S&P's DRI is forecasting a period of below average stock-market returns for the next 10 years...based largely on economic fundamentals. He reasons that much of the bull market can be explained by the gradual decline in interest rates and inflation over the past 20 years. That decline made stocks more attractive than other investments and allowed P/E ratios to climb dramatically. "That process is over," said Wyss. "We have gone about as low on rates and inflation as we can."
[Always the focus on cosmetics, never on roots. Interest rate manipulation by the Fed is artificial and cosmetic. The huge background reality is that there is much much MUCH more concentrated money available to put into investments of ALL kinds, because of the steepening power gradient between employers and employees as we incessantly inject work-saving technology into the economy and use it to replace people instead of making their lives easier by cutting the workweek. The national workweek, which unlike its previous 150-year history has been frozen at 40 hours for the past 60 years, functioned as a maximum workweek from 1940 to 1970 when the genuine global labor shortage due to the huge kill-off of World War II gave labor, unionized or not, some real leverage at the bargaining table and throughout the economy. But from 1970 to 2000, it has functioned as a minimum workweek. During this period, labor's position has been weaker and weaker, as mounting technology and mounting human replacement (downsizing) has cumulatively increased labor's surplus and reduced labor's leverage and share of technology's astronomical productivity bonus. Where has this untaken share gone? Some may have "trickled down" to the poor but it has absolutely POURED UP to the rich. Where have the rich put it? They know of no other place to put it but investments, primarily the stock market. Money has concentrated from wages to Wall Street, which is about to get a lesson in what it's based on (the consumer base). It's the usual cyclical self-pyramiding scheme involving the stock market, and it's high time we got wise (or wyss) to it, because without worksharing (and wealth sharing/centrifugation) via workweek reduction, or our only effective centrifugation mechanism, historically, is war - the military-industrial complex - though that may be getting supplemented today by incarceration - our rapidly bloating prison-industrial complex.]
...We are like people who fall in love with New England on gorgeous days in the fall when the leaves are changing color....