Why should I support this economy? [View all]

I really don’t get some of the economic theory I hear. The biggest one is that our economy is based on ever-increasing amounts of sales, of everything. Not only do we need an increasing population (and we’re already at near unsustainable limits there), but each already existing individual needs to buy an increased amount of stuff every year in order for this system to succeed. And this on top of that, the price of everything keeps going up as well, while income doesn’t.

Does no one else see that we can’t keep this up forever? There’s a limit before the system falls apart – we can’t afford any more. We can’t sustain more population. We’ve been at the point for decades where we need a service that rents you somewhere to put the stuff you own that physically won’t fit in your home – George Carlin commented on that, for crap’s sake. I’d like to point out that if you’re not living with it, you can probably do without it. You’re already doing without it.

The accountant of an old boss I had kept telling him that it wasn’t enough to make a profit. If his profit didn’t increase by at least a specified (large) percentage above last year’s, it was exactly the same as failure. And this was after the increasing expenses were accounted for. Why?

There’s also the myth of ever-expanding, limitless productivity. There’s going to be a point where you’re doing as much as you can do. You have to sleep, you have to eat. You can only do more every single year for so long.

In the eighties, I worked for insurance companies and we had a particular business model come in. The first year, you got hired and hopefully met expectations. But in the anniversary meeting, you had to rate yourself on a number of areas, one to five. The supervisor would take this sheet and inform you, one by one, that you were wrong and not that good, and implying that you’d have to do significantly better to keep your job. People came out of these meetings crying. You had to list specifically the areas in which you could help the company more the next year. You got a little more than a cost of living raise.

So you told them everything you thought you could do. Next year, you did it all. Same meeting, same evaluation and same need to list several more promises you’d have to live up to. Same small raise. Now, you have to strain a little. Next year, same thing again. Eventually it became impossible. The raises stopped coming and the evaluations got lower and lower. You quit before you were fired.

The quitting was the point of all this. Some study had determined that long-time employees made too much. You needed to move them along approximately every five years and hire somebody else at entry level wage. We were interchangeable cogs and completely fungible. (A term my 4 year old stepson understood completely when something broke once – ‘Oh well. T’row out, buy new.” He was shocked to find out that didn’t happen everywhere.)

That program is still common. I shocked an immigrant one time by explaining it and how I personally beat it. No matter the questionnaire question, I put down ‘3’. Didn’t even read the questions. I knew I was ‘4 to 5’ on everything, and the interviewer knew it, too. They couldn’t possible defend a ‘2’ rating, but even if they had, I wasn’t emotionally invested. I gave them the minimum possible promises for the next year and I met them every time. I was there over ten years when the company closed our branch. I could have gone another five without breaking a sweat.

Yes, it was cynical as hell. In my defense, I’d have given them everything I could do, if the end game hadn’t been to get me to quit or fire me. I’ve never left another job where they didn’t have to replace me with two people. The insurance agency I left (to go to this corporation) brought in two clerks and a computer. The last time I saw the boss, he still wanted me to come back.

Anyway, productivity has a ceiling. Consumerism has a ceiling. None of this will work forever, because it can’t. And we’re wrecking the world trying to keep it going and trying to stave off the eventual end. We need to come up with a different sustainable theory and I don’t see anybody even trying to do that.

I’m quitting the system now. Actually, I quit some time ago. I work as hard as I can at my job. Then I go home and my at-home job is to figure out ways we can have a good-enough life while buying as little crap as possible. The current economy is going to have to get along without me.