It’s nothing to do with automation. They are making the same recommendations they might have made at any time in the past 20+ years.
Honestly, if you called up the World Bank and asked them how to fix a blocked toilet, they would tell you to deregulate your labour market.
Lords and masters versus peasants, vassals, serfs, peons, the proletariat. the haves and have nots now with the 1% owning over half the wealth. what could go wrong other than revolts and a breakdown of society? but then again who has time to revolt when you’re exhausted trying to survive?
A good first step would be to stop giving corporate welfare to companies that aren’t cooperatives. As it is right now, things like tax breaks for large corporations are only increasing concentration of wealth.
our solution to every problem is to throw money at it
Not really. Our solution to every problem is to PRETEND to throw money at it, starve the solution for real funding, ignore positive results that come from appropriately funded and run systems, and then declare “well it’s not working” and tear it down, or sell it off to private interests who immediately monetize the solution and weaponize it against the poor.
In fact, when you look at problems addressed by legislation and appropriate funding, the solutions often work great. Sex education courses, for example, along with handing out free birth control, have been shown to significantly reduce teen pregnancies and venereal disease. Medicaid has been instrumental in helping poor people be healthier and more productive in their lives. But you’ll never hear that from the right-wing as they continue to try and starve those programs to produce failures so they can kill them all.
Another example: look at our military. Never starved of funding, quite possibly the greatest in the world, with technological achievements decades ahead of most other nations. Apparently if you throw money at a problem, you’ll end up with so many solutions that some of them are seriously ridiculous, but you WILL get results. I’d just rather we poured a trillion dollars a year into our people, their health and education, rather than more weapons of mass destruction.
Agreed, but I’m starting from their premise that old-fashioned exploitation of human workers is “necessary to stop employers from simply investing in automation and eliminating workers altogether.”
They’re using automation as a bogeyman in much the same way that it’s used to explain why a company acquired by vulture capitalists failed – “it was the Internet/e-commerce/robots! Pay no attention to the crushing debt imposed on the company and the compensation of top managers at Bain Capital after the company was sold for parts!” The real problem to be addressed in both cases is greed.
The report does not contemplate the possibility that the world’s governments would just raise taxes on corporations and their investors to provide for all their citizens.
Agreed, but this rejoinder doesn’t contemplate the possibility that if the world’s corporations and investors see their tax rates go up, those same corporations and investors will replace jobs with automation to make up the added cost from new taxes.
Employee ownership is something to aim for here, IMO. Of course, the World Bank would never really consider such a thing.
I didn’t see that in the article that Cory linked to (if it was, I missed it)…where did you get that quote from? I’d like to see it in context, to help me understand better. Is the World Bank actually advocating slavery, or is it describing one possible outcome in the future if a certain path is taken? (or something else entirely?) I don’t doubt you, I’d just like to see it in context.
(Also: Hi, welcome to the bbs!)
It was time to let the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization (nee GATT) drown flailing and horrified, begging for a life saver as the people of the world laughed, jeered and urinated on them when they were first institutionalized. If you think there was ever a reason for these institutions to exist other than support power on a global scale at the expense of the majority of people on a global scale you are either (a) utterly lacking in compassion, or (b) ignorant.
I agree with everything you just said.
I took it as satire. The World Bank is essentially recommending a solution of pre-20th-century wage slavery in the developing world, so taking out the word “wage” doesn’t change the resulting quality of life all that much.
And the basic problem with the World Bank is that they mainly exist to create a small class of very rich people in very poor countries.
The World Bank makes noises about cutting corruption, stop draining money from projects to benefit everyone in the country, but that’s mainly against the worst cases that are in danger of defaulting on the loan payments.
Thanks! That was some satire. But I bet you that’s what they are thinking…
Oh! Thank you. That hadn’t occurred to me. 
Heh, I am a little dense.
Good one!
Here in lies the fundamental misunderstanding of how financial ‘aid’ works.
Financial ‘aid’ is never given in such amounts as to actually change the status quo in any significant way. It’s a trickle, and it’s meant to be a trickle, because if countries were to become self sufficient, they would no longer need the lender states, and thus the lenders would lose something far more valuable than money, influence.
When you get a loan, from the IMF at least, you are required to hire the services of an advising firm (based in a lending country), which will then tell you how to spend that money (largely buying the services of corporations in a lending country). So the money that was loaned is essentially recouped within a few years, but the loan balance stays the same, because it was never ‘paid back’ to the lender. Now add interest and keep your nose to grindstone because you’ll never actually receive a loan big enough to solve your problems, so you are in perpetual debt as money flows out of your country.
This ensures that lending countries have influence over developing countries that they can use should they ever become an impediment to the progress of the benefactors of lending countries: multinational corporations. This also means (largely for military powers such as the US, Russia, China, and the UK) have a place to land and refuel should they ever need it, but with the exception of maintaining ‘international’ trade lanes, this is mostly just posturing to win more countries to lean on one side or the other. Tensions between super powers further drive the little countries of the world to pick a side.
Free Trade was a huge boon for the US as it restructured the world economy after World War II, and it was prosperous for a lot of people in the US, because no other country could compete, except the Soviet Union, but I’ll talk about that next time. The essential point is that free trade is still a massive boon for US corporations, just not the people of the US. A little bit of the money has been spread around, but most of it just continues to be funneled to the top.
The only way to sustain the funneling is to continue printing money at a rate that rapidly outpaces the discovery of new resources that money could represent. It’s the only way to keep paying for things while money does not circulate, it accumulates like an edema in one part of the body and everything suffers for it.
That’s why I would go with these guys:
The prospect of losing their lives is not a threat. The prospect of losing their wealth and power is.
They figure even a corporate BoD is smart enough to figure that out
You’ll get Repetitive Strain Injury in your trigger finger and need to buy stock in the Union Metallic Cartridge Company
You have told the entire truth here.
