Why is the world in such dire economic straits, and what can we do about it?

POSTED BY: SignyM
UPDATED: Sunday, August 23, 2026 20:19
VIEWED: 10090
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In 19th century America, there were a lot of very poor people. Days of robber barons, remember? Not a great time to be a native American, or a farmer or factory worker. And a lot of very serious economic depressions. Again, not seeing much of a solution there.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
My husband says the marble analogy is a bit flawed.

We are assuming that marbles means money, which means material resources.

He says, in reality, marbles means money, which means time. Hours and months and years in people's lives.

He says the 11th marble DOES exist. It is the future time of the debtor. When you pay interest, you are paying the time you already have PLUS the time you don't have yet. You are, in effect, selling portions of your future life into slavery.

The 11th marble, he says, is slavery.

I found that very interesting.

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Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons (1853-1942, labor activist and anarcho-communist)

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Hello,

That is an interesting interpretation, but I'm not sure the leap into slavery is justifiable.

If you let me have your car if I promise to drive you to the doctor on Tuescay, I would be making myself a slave under this interpretation. (Trading my future time for a valuable.)

Indeed, any time you promise to do anything for anybody in the future, you would be a slave under that interpretation.

While I like the Time is Money analogy, I don't think the Time is Slavery analogy works very well. In order to survive, we all must assign a portion of our tomorrows to the business of meeting our survival needs.

--Anthony



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"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner

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Originally posted by SignyM:
In 19th century America, there were a lot of very poor people. Days of robber barons, remember? Not a great time to be a native American, or a farmer or factory worker. And a lot of very serious economic depressions. Again, not seeing much of a solution there.

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You're just a pessimist.

There were a lot LESS poor people than before.

America was the first time that kind of window opened up for anyone to invent new technology. It closed very quickly again after that. But in that window, a lot was accomplished. It allowed the emergence of a middle class. Pretty significant new development in economic history, I'd say. No it didn't do enough, but I believe it could have had it had more time.


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Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons (1853-1942, labor activist and anarcho-communist)

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Indeed, any time you promise to do anything for anybody in the future, you would be a slave under that interpretation....While I like the Time is Money analogy, I don't think the Time is Slavery analogy works very well.

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That is because "slavery" is an extreme word that includes not only loss of ownership of our time, but loss of ownership of our will.

We need another word for losing ownership of small portions of our time/life, without losing all of our will. Like a mini- or quasi- or pseudo- slavery. Some people just call it employment, but that word is too culturally acceptable to drive home the point that there is little difference between a lifetime of debt and indentured servitude.

In other words, if you sell enough hours in your future life, you become a slave. I don't have an adequate word for selling small portions of your future life. Mini-slave? Hehe.

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Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons (1853-1942, labor activist and anarcho-communist)

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There were a lot LESS poor people than before.

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Got any data to back that up? Because the era that you refer to includes slavery, the Civil War, a lot of dead and displaced Indians, the railyway boom (which BTW was mostly a bubble, like the housing bubble today), robber barons, the Irish potato famine leading to a lot of destitute immigrants, and several really nasty depressions.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Got any data to back that up? Because the era that you refer to includes slavery, the Civil War, a lot of dead and displaced Indians, the railyway boom (which BTW was mostly a bubble, like the housing bubble today), robber barons, the Irish potato famine leading to a lot of destitute immigrants, and several really nasty depressions.

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All right. Let me hunt something down. First, I need to specify the time period I'm talking about. Etc.

But it's not like you couldn't come up with a list like that for EVERY century.

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Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons (1853-1942, labor activist and anarcho-communist)

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Just found this interesting article. Felt like it belongs on this thread.

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-28-year-old-is-making-sure-credit-
cards-wont-exist-in-the-next-few-years-2011-11

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Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons (1853-1942, labor activist and anarcho-communist)

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Got any data to back that up?

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OK, I'm back. First a caveat. I realize the "data" on poverty and standard of living vis a vis the first and second industrial revolutions are highly controversial amongst economists and historians. Datawise, we can argue forever, like global warming. So, what I would like to focus on instead are broader trends than specific "data."

I will quote some "data" or "observations" which you will accuse me of cherry-picking. Let me just say this up front. Yes, I will be quoting selectively to make my point. It does NOT mean what I omitted didn't happen or is being ignored. It only means that despite knowing there is a larger controversial picture, I want to underscore and spotlight certain trends I find significant.

Rough overview of Western economy.

Medieval times: Nobility owned everything. The rest were peasants in abject poverty, with a very small percentage comprising the "bourgeoisie" of merchants and educated professionals. Very little, if not impossible, vertical mobility.

First industrial revolution: After centuries and centuries of intractable monopoly of wealth by the nobility, wealth began to change hands into the bourgeoisie. Peasants/proletariat are still screwed--just how screwed they are is debatable. Poverty image changes from rural poor to urban poor. Growth spurts come with severe depressions. BUT, overall GDP shoots up and standard of living *begins* to improve for increasing numbers of people, but not percentages of people (because of a population explosion). Vertical mobility improves from impossible to improbable.

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https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

In the two centuries following 1800, the world's average per capita income increased over 10-fold, while the world's population increased over 6-fold.[2] In the words of Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas, Jr., "For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth ... Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before".

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Sidestepping the debate mines, I want to focus on the overall result of improved living conditions for increasing numbers of people, contrasted with those throughout most of human history. No one will dispute those better standards can be credited in part to industrialization.

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http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandtheStandardo
fLiving.html

The ideological underpinnings of the debate eventually faded, probably because, as T. S. Ashton pointed out in 1948, the industrial revolution meant the difference between the grinding poverty that had characterized most of human history and the affluence of the modern industrialized nations. No economist today seriously disputes the fact that the industrial revolution began the transformation that has led to extraordinarily high (compared with the rest of human history) living standards for ordinary people throughout the market industrial economies.

The standard-of-living debate today is not about whether the industrial revolution made people better off, but about when. The pessimists claim no marked improvement in standards of living until the 1840s or 1850s. Most optimists, by contrast, believe that living standards were rising by the 1810s or 1820s, or even earlier.... (snip)

What does “standard of living” mean? Economic historians would like it to mean happiness. But the impossibility of measuring happiness forces them to equate the standard of living with monetary measures such as real wages or real income. “Real income” is usually defined as money income adjusted for the cost of living, but not for effects of things such as health, longevity, unemployment, pollution, the condition of women and children, urban crowding, and the amount of leisure time. Although some new indexes attempt to capture the various dimensions of well-being, for most pra

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