<p>“In 1711, the Earl of Oxford, better known as Robert Harley,
established the South Sea Company in order to take over £10 million of
government debt, which was converted into shares of the South Sea
Company. In exchange, it received annual interest payments from the
government and the monopoly to trade with the King of Spain’s subjects
in South America. In addition, a year later the company obtained the
exclusive rights to sell slaves in South America. Right from the start
the company enjoyed great prestige, but profits were elusive, because
the Spanish King Philip V had refused to let the company send more
than one cargo of merchandise per year to South America, and even from
this slim venture, insisted on a share of the profits. Moreover, the
“Assiento”, the permission to transport Negro slaves to the South
American plantations, was fraught with high risks, since many slaves
died on the way, and the unarmed ships were frequently attacked by
buccaneers or were driven away by the Spanish coast guards who
participated in the slave trade by siding with privateers and pirates,
and therefore didn’t tolerate any competition.”</p>
<p>People have survived economic bubbles and collapses throughout
history. I suggest that people will continue to do so.</p>
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<p>If you are worried about the currency, get some gold or silver.</p>
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<p>Who taught them that the jobs would just be there?
Why did they believe them?
Jobs have been a problem on and off for a long time. Both in the
US and other countries. There are other countries that have it far
worse. If you like Denmark, give it a try. We have countries on our
list for moving to if jobs become too much of a problem in the US.</p>
<p>Instead of whining, though, make a plan and execute on it.</p>
<p>Denmark is nice, good for manual labour (said carpenters, plumbers, roofers etc).</p>
<p>I’m German btw, from Berlin, unemployment rate 13,2%.</p>
<p>I went to Australia and opened a business in a market thoroughly saturated in Berlin (and in general in Germany) but still about 5 years behind in the part of Oz I chose. I couldn’t finish formal education when I was at the right age for it due to illness and was not able to work in jobs open to non-degree applicants. </p>
<p>I’m saying this just to make my point a bit more clear: If jobs are not there where you like them to be, go somewhere else, and if the jobs you have open to you are not available to you due to some issue or because you don’t care for them or their conditions, create work.</p>
<p>Perhaps Germany is different in this, but I fall into the 20-something category and was never told that jobs are “just there”, more the opposite, it was always hammered into us, even in early high school, that work is scarce and one has to fight for it.</p>
<p>Does the US have work education in HS of some sort?</p>
<p>I don’t get the point of this rant. OP is angry, at who? for what? and to what end? Its been my personal experience that “Washington” is the cause, not the solution. The MLK reference seems misplaced. That was a social/human rights issue, not an economic one…</p>
<p>Re boomers: I’m thinking of my siblings and I, my wife and her siblings, and all of my first cousins. That’s 16 people, all born between 1949 and 1962, so pretty much the baby boom. All upper middle class – the fathers were two lawyers, two doctors, and a physicist-turned-executive. East Coast, West Coast, and in between.</p>
<p>Six out of 16 needed significant, if intermittent, parental financial support well into their 40s, although all but one (the youngest one) are self-sufficient now. They didn’t always live at home, but some did, sometimes, and some lived in pretty bad circumstances. Because one set of parents was divorced, their kids really didn’t have a home to go back to – the mother had a one-bedroom condo, and the father had a hostile second wife – plus they lived in an extremely depressed area where no one in his right mind would look for a job.</p>
<p>Others took very scrappy jobs to get started. My wife, a Yale summa, sold wholesale jewelry and did intake interviews on the night shift at a hospital ER. One of her sisters worked for a porn magazine (but needed help when it folded in a cloud of drug addiction). One of my sisters, a Stanford grad, grew her entire career from a part-time job as a secretary/go-fer.</p>
<p>In other words, things weren’t so clearly better in the late 70s - early 80s, or beyond.</p>
<p>Hey parent, no problem, the 17% mark was cracked in 2006 I believe, it had recovered a bit and then slid back again not long ago.</p>
<p>The 13.2% I’ve stated are from January 2012, it tends to change by season (Berlin has seasonal work for outdoor entertainment services, which vanish during the colder months).</p>
<p>It’s an “artist” city and all aka breadless ;-)</p>
<p>PS: the statistics for foreign workers (meaning visa holder with a foreign background, often with limited or no skills and insufficient German) report an unemployment rate of over 25% for Berlin - and that’s just the registered ones.</p>
<p>A great deal of the thinking that is going into these problems avoids the obvious, or so it seems to me. We are entering a new epoch in human history and we are discussing the upheavals it is causing only in terms of obsolete paradigms.<br>
Consider: globalization, global population growth, climate change, artificial intelligence, robotics, neuroscience, resource depletion, pollution. Each one of these indicates that we have to start thinking in entirely new terms in order to meet the future rationally.
Already the IBM Watson computer should be telling us that medicine, law, engineering, education and perhaps even politics are ripe for digital takeover. In China, manufacturing is using cutting edge robotic technology and other high tech manufacturing processes thus reducing the demand for labor even there where labor is so cheap and plentiful. I once pointed this out to a group of Chinese engineers and asked them what the plan was to give purpose to such a large population in the context of such efficiently mechanized production. Their answer was, “Art.”
In my opinion, we need to re-examine the competitive and individualistic premises that underlie capitalist economies. In a world of ever-increasing population, and the ever-increasing power of computers and industrial mechanization, the number of people required to produce the goods and services needed in the world (within the planet’s capacity to sustain that production and its effects) will decline, perhaps much more quickly than anyone can imagine. If we maintain our ‘producers take all’ approach to the distribution of those goods and services, we will soon produce the dystopian class divisions that are visible in the Third World today and that appear in ‘fiction’ like the movie “Brazil”.<br>
I’m no communist, but it seems that people are increasingly becoming obsolete. Classical capitalism, too, is becoming obsolete. Barring a global epidemic, or worse, we are going to have to start thinking about what to do with all the extra people on the planet after we no longer need them to run machines and fill out paperwork. IMO</p>