Text 1156, 61 rader
Skriven 2004-10-23 17:39:27 av Björn Felten (2:203/2)
   Kommentar till text 1155 av Jack Yates (1:3613/1275)
Ärende: "Proof" (was: FidoNews 21:38 [09/09]: Fidonews Information)
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 BF>>    That's just simple maths, and the time will come well within one
 BF>> generation. With the present economic growth numbers, one can easily
 BF>> see that China will pass USA in late 2009 and EU in early 2010. And
 BF>> there are no signs that those growth numbers will change significantly
 BF>> the next few years, or, if they do, it will most likely be to China's
 BF>> advantage, so the times of change-over will come sooner rather than
 BF>> later.

 JY> I hadn't bothered to figure that out; I do better with tools than I do
 JY> with pencils.

   Well, the tools of maths are now calculators and computers, rather than
pencils and slide rulers, so I tend to rely on those.

 JY> If it comes to that we will need a greater manufacturing capacity than
 JY> we now have; in WWII all of this country's factories turned to the
 JY> making of goods for the "war effort"; today our factories are in China.

   And how come? In this country, the 40 hour/week "rule" comes from a law that
we adopted in February 1970. By then 40 hours per week was rather optimal to
get all the common work in the society done. But we all, at least all of us old
farts, remember what it was like in 1970, don't we? It was long before the
microprocessor was invented, the integrated circuit was still on the
experimental stage, and not even the transistor had made it big into the
consumer market -- e.g. our TV sets still took some 30-60 seconds before the
tubes had heated up so we could watch them.

   Soon after that we got all kinds of wonderful inventions (mainly thanks to
the US taxpayers and the amount of money they invested on the NASA projects),
that made our industries raise their production rate by 3-4-5 and even more %
every year. So how did we all take advantage of this productivity raise? The
obvious (at least to me) choice would be to use e.g. 3% higher productivity as
a reason to reduce the working hours by 3%. But rather than that, "we" said
that all the workers should get a 3& salary raise, and then we sacked 3% of the
workers!?!?

   The net result was, of course, that all prices increased by, not only 3%,
but more like 4%, since we had to take care of those 3% that lost their jobs.
And the rest is history for a lot of our industries, that since then have moved
to greener pastures.

   I cannot help thinking, that a 3% decrease of working hours, rather than a
3% of salary raise that will result in nothing when it comes to what you pay
for e. g. in the grocery store, means 15 minutes per day. After four years
that's one hour per day and in 20 years you'd be down to something like four
hours per day, giving all the people in the third world the opportunity to take
over anything we've left behind.

   But I guess I must be missing some important factor in my maths here, or
else we would have seen this in at least *some* society in the world. Or can it
be so easy, that those in power still prefer the people to work their guts out,
so they don't have time to come up with some stupid ideas that will rock the
boat?


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