I'd say your definition could be fine, but I just don't think it's happening. In fact I find the transparency of the internet is making the power of businesses dwindle even further. How many people would have heard of the AT&T/Tmobile merger 20 years ago? I hear about it every day and I'm not even in the US anymore
edit: or how many people would know what really caused the build up and crash during the financial crisis? There's a lot more information available that demands accountability, where before it was much easier for companies to sweet things under the carpet.
Does the transparency really matter, though? It's not very important if you know about the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, because there's nothing that you can do about it. If you're a shareholder of either company, or work in the government, you might have some leverage to affect the process, but then you'd know about it anyways.
As for the financial crisis, ha! How many people know what really caused it even now, despite the availability of the information? And what good has that done? Nothing has changed, and the firms that caused the crisis have had no penalties and operate pretty much the same way that they ever did. There was no accountability, even with information like Goldman Sachs massively shorting the market while peddaling the very securities they were betting so heavily against.
I'll agree that I don't know that major corporations are necessarily more powerful now than in the past, though I think that that is the case with some companies.
Automation does not always mean efficiently in practice as much as it does in theory.
Except that the phone robots are very efficient for the companies that use them, even while they are worse for the callers. You might spend 20 minutes navigating the automated menus when a live operator could have routed your call in 20 seconds. But the robot can handle tons of people at once, compared with a single human operator, and it also helps to ease the load on whatever person ultimately is supposed to receive the call.
As for lower quality service, it's not something that you can really affect as a consumer. Are you going to buy a different brand product becuase company A has a robot phone operator? How would you know before you're made the purchase? And when a company gets large enough, they realize the efficiency boost from the robot operator and so they start using it too. Soon, you don't have any alternatives, but still want/need the products.
[font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"]
Society needs jobs for the uneducated, though. There are many who either do not have the resources to become educated, or who are mentally handicapped. And it's not like we have the best education program in the world with schools closing down and extra curricular activities being cut. (But that was discussed well enough[color="#ff00ff"] in another thread.) Point is, any plan that relies on us having a good education system is flawed,[/font]
But even among those who have the opportunity and privilege to be educated, schools are becoming factories for manufacturing only marketable skills into the workforce. Schools don't empower students to succeed in the world, the enslave them to work for the world. When the advertise that you'll learn "valuable skills", they don't mean skills that will enrich your life, they mean it looks good on a resume.
If you're right about education levels needing to rise, i think we're absolutely boned.
[/quote]
You're arguing a couple of points that don't support each other very well. You say that schools are terrible and manufacture only students with marketable skills. These are certainly related. However, in an economy like the one I described, marketable skills won't be the sorts of things that schools fill students with now. There will be few McJobs waiting for a low-skill graduate. Education will either improve (not necessarily through the public school system), or you will have some serious class divisions which will be resolved some other way.
There will still be lower-tiered jobs that don't require a ton of education. Machines need maintenance staff to run as much as they need engineers to design them; mechanic might well become a much broader trade than it is today. Plenty of direct service positions will remain. Buildings will still need janitors, and so on. And as I mentioned, there will always be a need for administrative staff, and any number of other opportunities.
Education does need to improve. Capitalists won't reject the benefits of automation because the population isn't educated enough to find other labor. Globalization has shifted a lot of low-skilled work away from areas that traditionally relied on it. Jobs that vanish this way aren't going to come back. You can try to shuffle the people who lose those jobs to other, similar work, and that will be fine as long as there's enough of it to go around and it doesn't vanish too. You can develop skills which are more relevant in the new marketplace (that's education). Or you can deal with unemployment. Any place that chooses option 3 will stagnate. Any place that successfully uses option 2 can grow. Any place that chooses option 1 will tread water, if that.
The saving grace of this process is that it isn't instantaneous. We can work to manage relatively small numbers of people displaced this way bit by bit, and lay plans for future adjustments. You are correct that we will be boned if this isn't addressed. But the global trend will produce at least some place that will improve education, and their economies will adjust more successfully to automation.
Google "usa produce food feed world". I thought i'd link an article but i couldn't pick just one. We produce well over enough food to feed the entire Earth. Since there's more supply than demand--i'm not economist here, but--why isn't it that food is so cheap that living costs go down? I think one of the problems is that most of the food we eat is heavily processed, so we're not only paying for the ingredients. Even if i could by beef for 50 cents a pound, i don't think gas would be any cheaper. I pay 50 bucks a week for food to survive, but my rent is much higher.[/quote]
Production of food at the current scale is enough to feed everyone, but it isn't enough to reduce the monetary value of food to a negligible amount. Not to mention that no matter how cheaply food is produced here, it will cost additional money to ship it to another country, a price which will not respond to a lower cost of production for food. Inflation also causes prices to rise, and if the decreases in manufacturing cost don't cover that increase and more, the sticker price will still go up.
It doesn't matter if other goods get cheaper or not. If any necessary goods become cheaper, your cost of living decreases. You pay $50 per week for food. If you could get the same food for $10 per week, then the cost of living has decreased for you.
Recently federal workers have come under fire and their unions lost bargaining rights. The corporate executives are able to evade taxation despite being the very people you'd think should be contributing the most. There's always NAFTA, which restricts unions and workers rights. It seems to me the government has been succumbing for many many years. Of coarse, there's always the pendulum argument. I hope i live to see it swing the other way.
[/quote]
Money is always going to have an influence on politics, and people with a lot of money are always going to enjoy advantages that others do not. That's why they pay lower taxes now than in the past. In the past, when taxes were higher, they had access to things like Swiss bank accounts that the average joe did not. Unions are fairly weak right now, but before unions existed they were perfectly weak. I don't know that the government is more susceptible to corporate influence now than at other points in history (though it may be). But my position is that the institution of government will not likely give way to pure, de-centralized corporate dominance replacing it.
