Bad Assumptions—“The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace” Edition

Folks-
It’s past time to go over some of the bad assumptions that have been made that allowed some of us to make bad decisions, and why these assumptions are so wrong. I’ll tackle two of the biggest ones in this essay.

For several years now I’ve been saying that Communists and Free-Marketeers (often Neo-Cons) make the exact same fundamental error in their respective basic assumptions. Both are great theories, but completely fail in real life. They fail because they both make the assumption that everyone will do what is best for everyone all the time, instead of taking advantage of anyone, and that policing is not necessary. Communists claim that the government, once in control of the marketplace, will police itself. Oddly, Free-Marketeers claim that once the government gets out of the marketplace, the marketplace will police itself. Both are completely, and very obviously, wrong.

The big problem with a completely free market, and Adams’ “Invisible Hand of the Marketplace,” is that it requires transparency in order to work. If you have no policing mechanism, or one that is ineffective for any one of dozens of reasons, then all you need is one person near the top, or a few lower down, to be dishonest or incompetent to bring the entire system down. Just ask Bernard Madoff’s investors. Communists put that trust into the hands of just a few people in political power, which is why the Soviet Union is no longer with us. Free-Marketeers put that power into the hands of corporate heads without supervision, which is why we’re in our current economic mess, not to mention the last several economic messes, including the tech bubble, the S&L collapse, the Great Depression, and so on.

The assumption by the Free-Marketeers is that “The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace” will punish the dishonest, corrupt, or incompetent through the customers and investors that would avoid them. The reality, which any neutral observer would report, is that the people that the “Invisible Hand” is supposed to punish when they are incompetent or corrupt are the ones in control of the information that the investors and customers need to make sound decisions. Distort the information and prevent the punishment until it’s too late.

Another important assumption of the Free-Marketeers that is wrong is that increases in efficiency are always a good thing. You often hear when one company takes over another that the increase in efficiency by eliminating redundancy will improve things. Often you won’t hear what things will improve. What it really translates as is firing people that have the same job at the other company will improve the bottom line of the combined company. That’s true, it probably will. If this kind of combination happens when the economy is in a boom cycle, the effect of people losing their job can even be fairly benign. However, this isn’t always, or even usually, the case. Often the effect of people losing their job is that these people have less money to throw around to buy things—like the things their former company made, or services they provide, and decrease their participation in our economy.

Let’s just take the efficiency argument out to it’s logical conclusion. An increase in efficiency is an attempt to reduce the capital outflow while maintaining income, or in other words, you don’t pay as much out as you get paid. This sounds good at first. Companies can increase efficiency by using less material or by eliminating jobs that don’t help the company as much. The problem is as a company starts getting significantly more efficient, the economy starts to feel the burden. More money from the economy tends to go to the company, and less comes out. In fact, a company that is 100% efficient has no capital outlays, just income. It would have no employees, even executives (hence, no payroll) and would produce nothing (so no cost of manufacturing or providing a service,) while paying no taxes or dividends. This kind of company would simply suck money out of the economy without contributing anything, being a kind of economic black-hole. Conservatives would argue that Government fits this description, but a company of this kind has no employees and produces nothing, and the government does not fit either definition by a large amount. A religion might come closer, but still doesn’t hit that target (too many employees.)

This is what most companies strive for. One of our problems that we are facing is that we won’t have a sufficient proportion of our population working and participating in our economy to keep it going, meaning fewer people are buying products and services, making companies get rid of employees, causing our economy to spiral downward. As large companies consider downsizing, or whatever they are calling layoffs today, the executives need to be asking themselves the question Henry Ford (yeah, I know) asked when someone pointed out to him that he didn’t have to pay his workers so much: “Then who would buy my cars?”

The reality is that the economy works best with a certain amount of inefficiency, and the hardest part of this to explain to people is that the amount of inefficiency that economy works best with is a constantly moving target. Most people want to hear a specific number, but that number will change depending on economic circumstances, specifically the ratio of jobs to labor. If there are a lot of jobs openings going unfilled, you can have an efficiency level that is high, because most people who want to work are doing so. If there are few jobs available, a greater amount of inefficiency will help to absorb these people and keep them participating in our economy. This may involve taking pay cuts at the executive level, or giving up hours or benefits at the worker level. Flexibility is key.

So, what are the solutions to these issues? Giving money without strings attached to corporations is not going to make the situation better. The New York Times has reported several times that the original bank bailout money is being used not to free up the credit market for either homeowners or businesses, but rather to pay off debt, buy other banks, and hang onto for later. We need more than this to improve our situation. We need money to be used to create jobs and improve our country. We need oversight of our corporations. The SEC and FDIC need to be doing their jobs, and we need to be certain that the next time money is handed to these people that it goes to where it is needed by our definition, not theirs.

To constantly keep the correct efficiency level of our corporations, the best way is to pass the “Employee Free Choice Act.” Negotiations are the best way to make sure we have the right staffing level, not simple corporate decision making, because corporations will always try to reduce staffing levels and payroll. Unions prevent that, but sometimes even they get out of hand. The best way is for Unions and businesses to negotiate often, at least yearly. This may seem a waste of time, but how else are you going to make sure employment levels are optimal?

In addition we need to be investing money as a country. This is what most conservatives, whether crackpot Free-Marketeers or not, would say individuals do when they get tax breaks, while failing to acknowledge that Governments can invest as well. Most of them fail to see that putting money into infrastructure or education is the way governments invest. We all benefit when we can contact each other more easily, when we can travel faster and with less damage to our vehicles, when power sources are steady, and when someone who otherwise couldn’t afford an education gets it and invents something we need, like a new cure. We have to fix our roads, bridges, communications, and educate our people. In short, corporate aid needs to have strings attached and can’t by itself be expected to pull us out of this depression.

Higher education is a good solution both short-term and long-term to our problems. Giving people grants to stay in school in the short term reduces the labor pool, increasing wages, and in the long term increases the number of job options for those people and their wages when they attain them. It also makes them a bigger asset to the company that employs them. This is a win-win for the country.

Most importantly, we need to call those who insist on sticking to the completely free market idea crackpots, just as we do with Communists. Brand them with a catchy name, such as the “Free-Marketeers” as I have (feel free to copy me.) They have been completely discredited in the last couple of years, and we need to make sure they do not try to regain their respectability, or they will. Theirs is a simple and seductive chant. If we don’t make sure our children are aware of the dangers, then they will surely try to repeat our mistakes under the spell of these snake oil salesmen.

Media Opportunity in Disaster

By Ed Smallwood

This is an expanded version of a comment I made in an Openthread on The Daily Kos recently. Even if you read that posting, you may want to read this blog entry to see what I’ve added and reorganized.

Editor and Publisher predicts that several cities will be without a daily newspaper by 2010. The Miami Herald may be the first to go, but papers owned by the Tribune Company could beat it to the punch with their bankruptcy filing this week.

Some of the problems that the media are having are due to the current economic situation—many companies do not have as much to spend on advertising. Some of it is due to lost viewership. This is especially true for daily newspapers, but also local nightly newscasts are feeling the pinch as well. My feeling is that much of the lost readership of newspapers and lost viewership of local news is not because of shifting media habits—that’s just the symptom. Media habits are shifting because people feel that they are not getting the information they want from traditional sources. When you put on a TV news program that gives give both sides of an issue equal time and equal say in order to seem fair and balanced (yes, I typed it), even when one side is clearly wrong, people lose respect for you. They wonder why you are wasting their time on some loony. The main stream news organizations have, to a large extent, been cowed by pressure from these loonies (not always Republicans, but often enough) to give them equal or even more access by using the argument that the media (often called “the liberal media”) is not being fair in their presentation. We need news organizations that are strong enough to actually BE fair. Being fair doesn’t mean that the person with one poorly-done study gets equal say to someone who has 500 well done studies saying the opposite thing. Sometimes being fair involves telling someone that they are a batshit loony (ask any judge).

Right now we are in the time of the biggest economic upheaval that anyone has seen since the Great Depression. I can only hope that my last statement will be proved wrong in a positive way. But, with this historic economic disaster looming, there is a historic opportunity. Remember the overused saying that the Chinese symbol for disaster combines the symbols for danger and opportunity.

For virtually my entire life (40 years next month) the main stream media has been consolidating into the hands of just a few people. Now is the first time that this can change. Many of the holding companies for these media sources are going to go bankrupt in the next year because of dropping revenue from advertising, and because they borrowed heavily against now non-existent equity in those holdings. This means that they cannot refinance their debt to meet their obligations.

This may be an opportunity for those of us who would like to see reporting of the truth in the media. I'm guessing that with expanding problems for newspapers, CNN laying off their science and tech reporting staff, the Tribune Co. filing for bankruptcy, and Sumner Redstone's problems being just examples of what will be coming, there are likely to be main stream media (MSM) outlets in many markets that will become available to buy at firesale prices, certainly the lowest prices adjusted for inflation since the rules of media ownership were relaxed.

Right now everyone is facing an economic calamity. However, the rich can find themselves at a bigger disadvantage than the rest of us in this situation. The rich are trained to leverage other people’s money, mostly banks money, by investing a little bit of their own money and borrowing the rest. We have numbers going for us. Even in a depression, there will be more people making a living wage than there are rich people. Many of those wage earners will have a little bit to give for something like this. That is a whole different kind of leverage where the rich don’t have an advantage over us.

Yes, I know that there are people reading this who will say "it can't be done" and come up with all kinds of excuses why it won't work. The advantage goes to those who can organize better, and that’s something we CAN do. You just have to pool together enough people and their money to do it. Organization skills are more important in this case than being rich, and we do have some of those organizations in place—think Unions, political groups, and liberal churches. If you are reading this than you are witnessing one way to organize this kind of media take over. It will take hard work, but I am not willing to say that the conservatives can do something we cannot. The conservative elite didn't buy all of the media outlets overnight, and I'm willing to work at it over time as well. But if we are to do it, there has probably never been a better time to start than now.

It's well past time for the mainstream media to do it's job. This may be the only opportunity in our lifetimes to wrest some of these outlets from the hands of the corporate/conservative powers that be. I would love to be watching the news on KKOS in my area instead of the fast-food preprocessed pap we're getting now. I'd love to get involved in this kind of venture. We are going to need all kinds of people to help with something like this. Who would like to join me?

-Ed “Edly” Smallwood

Sources:

Editor and Publisher Article: “’Several Cities’ Could Have No Daily Paper As Soon As 2010, Credit Rater Says” by Mark Fitzgerald, Published Dec. 3, 2008. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003918781

Columbia Journalism Review Article: “CNN Cuts Entire Science, Tech Team” by Curtis Brainard, Published Dec. 4, 2008. http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/cnn_cuts_entire_science_tech_t.php

AP Article: “Tribune files for bankruptcy protection” by The Associated Press, Published Dec. 8, 2008. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081208/ap_on_bi_ge/tribune