{"id":2838,"date":"2008-07-08T05:05:26","date_gmt":"2008-07-08T10:05:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2838"},"modified":"2008-07-07T18:21:09","modified_gmt":"2008-07-07T23:21:09","slug":"notes-from-someone-who-was-in-the-new-economy-before-you-were","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2838","title":{"rendered":"Notes From Someone Who Was In The New Economy Before  You Were"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t normally fisk bloggers &#8211; and, indeed, I don&#8217;t want to &#8220;fisk&#8221; this, per se.\u00a0 There&#8217;s just so much in <a href=\"http:\/\/greatdivide.typepad.com\/across_the_great_divide\/2008\/07\/these-predictio.html\">this piece by Charlie Quimby<\/a> that deserves an answer from someone who&#8217;s <em>had<\/em> to get comfortable with the &#8220;new economy&#8221; back when most of this nation was still well within the &#8220;old economy&#8221; [*].<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Four bartenders prior to the shift change talk about one of their buddies who worked 100 hours last week at three jobs, including a 7:00 a.m. shift at Starbuck&#8217;s &#8220;so he can get benefits.&#8221; One bartender needs someone to cover for him on an upcoming shift, and though willing, no one could commit because they all had to check the schedules at their other jobs.<\/p>\n<p>Tending bar is one of those old economy jobs that&#8217;s likely to be around for awhile, and some of these guys may move on. But it will be to a one-paycheck career?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Good question.\u00a0 Some others that might need to be answered first to solve it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Do they <em>want<\/em> a one-paycheck career?<\/li>\n<li>What choices have they made to move them <em>toward<\/em> a one-paycheck career?\u00a0 They don&#8217;t just <em>happen, <\/em>these days.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p>Last week the <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.startribune.com\/local\/stpaul\/23305369.html\" target=\"_blank\">Strib<\/a><\/em> documented the case of a Hmong immigrant who works two janitorial jobs for $9 an hour, earning about $1,800 a month pre-tax, which goes to help support his parents and eight younger siblings. Tong Lee has limited English and no time to go to school.<\/p>\n<p>The future he sees for himself: Just working all the time.<br \/>\nAt least the bartenders can be charming and collect tips.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;d seem Mr. Lee and his family are doing something that&#8217;s very &#8220;old-economy&#8221;, something that people in immigrant families have always done in this country; have the oldest and most able work to help the younger ones succeed (and not just immigrants, either; a woman I knew in college, a black woman from rural Mississippi, started college at age 28 because she&#8217;d worked for ten years to put her siblings through school.\u00a0 Then, esconced in decent jobs, they repaid the favor).\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So is there some reason Mr. Lee&#8217;s siblings won&#8217;t turn around and help out?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Sure, kids in America can overcome the disadvantages of a broken home and teachers who under-estimate them. But to become a hedge fund manager, it still helps to be born speaking English and win a Harvard scholarship.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Leave aside the fact that speaking English (and speaking it properly) and going to Harvard &#8220;helps&#8221; whether you want to be a lawyer, teacher, poet, computer programmer, lesbian performance artist, physicist\u00a0<em>or <\/em>hedge fund manager; would someone please explain to me what is this fascination liberals have with &#8220;hedge fund managers?&#8221;\u00a0 Michelle Obama complained that our &#8220;best and brightest&#8221; are becoming &#8220;hedge fund managers&#8221; instead of social workers, nurses and teachers.\u00a0 So why is hedge fund management the <em>sine qua non<\/em> of American working life?\u00a0<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.startribune.com\/business\/22949299.html?location_refer=Most%20Emailed:St.%20Paul\" target=\"_blank\">Philip Falcone<\/a> made $1.5 billion last year betting against the home mortgage industry. There&#8217;s someone who&#8217;ll tell you his strategy helped some investors, but his outsized rewards required the mortgage market to blow up, so it&#8217;s not as if his creativity created anything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Nonsense.\u00a0 It created wealth out of an event that would otherwise not have.\u00a0 It allowed his fund participants to have money to save, to reinvest, to put in their gas tanks or spend at Saks or Dairy Queen, to <em>use<\/em> in the economy.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>He\u00a0 just played the speculation game better than anyone else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And had he not?\u00a0 Who&#8217;d be the better off?\u00a0 It&#8217;s not like his wealth <em>caused<\/em> the implosion in the mortgage market.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In the next wave of speculation, investors are betting on hunger, more or less. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/06\/05\/business\/05farm.html\" target=\"_blank\">Hedge funds are taking actual positions<\/a> in food production, where they buy up farm land and warehouse corn, for example, instead of just holding contracts.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The investors plan to consolidate small plots of land into more productive large ones, to introduce new technology and to provide capital to modernize and maintain grain elevators and fertilizer supply depots.<\/p>\n<p>But the long-term implications are less clear. Some traditional players in the farm economy, and others who study and shape agriculture policy, say they are concerned these newcomers will focus on profits above all else, and not share the industry\u2019s commitment to farming through good times and bad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>That &#8220;commitment&#8221; is utterly relative.\u00a0 The number of farmers in this country has been in freefall for decades.\u00a0 There are currently less than half a million full-time farmers in this country who make their living entirely from farming, and perhaps three times as many who make a good chunk of the family income doing other, non-farming things.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, the number of farmers has been in freefall ever since society developed the concept of &#8220;surplus production&#8221;; 3,000 years ago, 99.9% of people farmed (or hunted and gathered); 500 years ago, 95% of people in Western civilization worked the land, mostly for subsistence and to pay taxes to nobles or chiefs.\u00a0 Today, it&#8217;s a tiny fraction of that.\u00a0<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cFarmland can be a bubble just like Florida real estate,\u201d said Jeffrey Hainline, president of Advance Trading, a 28-year-old commodity brokerage firm and consulting service in Bloomington, Ill. \u201cThe cycle of getting in and out would be very volatile and disruptive.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>As opposed to&#8230;what?\u00a0 Letting the market stay in its current, stagnant state?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But there&#8217;s some suspicion the investment is is simply a way around limits to speculating on commodities. Having possession of the commodities also helps limit some of their risk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And this is bad why?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There are other ways to speculate that get even closer to gambling. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.startribune.com\/opinion\/commentary\/22887144.html\" target=\"_blank\">Joel Stein writes<\/a> about prediction markets such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.intrade.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">InTrade<\/a> that allow people to place bets on things like politics, the economy, global warming and the top marginal income tax rate in 2011.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It&#8217;s like owning a fantasy baseball team: I no longer care about what&#8217;s best for the country, as long as I have money on it. I have no idea if Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida would make a great GOP vice president, but I do know it would make me $800.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Quimby and his source ignore the concomitant benefit; when money is on the line, people take these choices much more seriously, and study them much more carefully.\u00a0 And <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/1194\">that&#8217;s not just of idle importance<\/a>.\u00a0 As Steven Green noted in an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vodkapundit.com\/archives\/004139.php#004139\">article<\/a> about the same subject as my link&#8230;:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><em>The &#8220;market&#8221; for intelligence works, such as it does, opposite of the stock market. A guy who knows one important bit often can&#8217;t effectively share it with another guy in another agency who knows another important bit \u2013 and so two plus two ends up equaling something quite less than four. Those who simply have good hunches generally aren&#8217;t intel pros, and therefore aren&#8217;t given much credence by the government. And so hidden knowledge remains hidden, and good guesses go unheeded. Then people die. <\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>Now that is a truly grotesque system, yet that&#8217;s how the intelligence world has operated for approximately ever.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Would investors put their money on the line if there weren&#8217;t any profits to be made? Of course not. Yet today, we ask our military and intelligence professionals to risk their reputations and careers, working mostly in the dark, with zero extra incentive.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I guess it&#8217;s just a difference in perspective.<\/p>\n<p>Quimby:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The new economy venture that really ties it all together is <a href=\"http:\/\/technology.timesonline.co.uk\/tol\/news\/tech_and_web\/article648072.ece\" target=\"_blank\">gold farming<\/a>, where Chinese sweatshop workers labor away at online games like World of Warcraft. Their objective isn&#8217;t to win, but to harvest &#8220;gold&#8221; by successfully completing some aspect of the game, often by doing the same part of a quest over and over. The gold, which allows gamers to buy better weapons or create more valuable products, is sold for real money to actual players through online exchanges.<\/p>\n<p>In effect, the gold buyers get richer and become more powerful, while gamers who try to build value added products through honest play find their products devalued because the &#8220;investor&#8221; players don&#8217;t need them to build their own wealth. Meanwhile, in China, perhaps a hundred thousand gold farmers make better money than they could from real farming.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure what Charlie advocates, here &#8211; Congressional hearings?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But these things tend to have a solution of their own.\u00a0 Two words:\u00a0 Pet Rocks, Beanie Babies, Pokemon Cards.<\/p>\n<p>Oops.\u00a0 That was six words.<\/p>\n<p>Because the end game of such fripperies as Warcraft &#8220;Gold Farming&#8221; should be three times as obvious; either&#8230;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u00a0people will continue to be willing to trade their real wealth for imagined virtual wealth; no blood, no foul.<\/li>\n<li>people will <em>not <\/em>continue to do so; the &#8220;gold&#8221; market crashes and ends up as a side note on &#8220;VH1&#8217;s I Love the &#8217;00s&#8221;, complete with snarky comments by Danny Bonaduce.<\/li>\n<li>Warcraft fades, fads move on, people forget about it all.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Just saying &#8211; we have bigger things to worry about.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>[*] I got whacked from my first radio job when I was 17; I learned then that loyalty is as loyalty earns, and that one&#8217;s main goal, if one wishes not to be broke ones&#8217; entire life, is to always see to making oneself marketable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t normally fisk bloggers &#8211; and, indeed, I don&#8217;t want to &#8220;fisk&#8221; this, per se.\u00a0 There&#8217;s just so much in this piece by Charlie Quimby that deserves an answer from someone who&#8217;s had to get comfortable with the &#8220;new economy&#8221; back when most of this nation was still well within the &#8220;old economy&#8221; [*]. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2838\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}