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Topic: virus: weekly chat: Poverty and Global Inequality (Read 947 times) |
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David Lucifer
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Enlighten me.
  
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Re: virus: weekly chat: Poverty and Global Inequality
« Reply #1 on: 2004-03-16 19:42:42 » |
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> /join #virus on irc.lucifer.com:6667 at 9pm CST, 10pm EST 03.15.04
Oops typo. That should be 03.16 (tonight).
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rhinoceros
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My point is ...
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Re:virus: weekly chat: Poverty and Global Inequality
« Reply #2 on: 2004-03-16 22:20:07 » |
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[Lucifer]
Some background for tonight's chat on Poverty and Global Inequality:
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2499118
/join #virus on irc.lucifer.com:6667 at 9pm CST, 10pm EST 03.16.04 (corrected)
[rhinoceros]
I read tis article. I think I saw some strawmen around the corner (phrases such as "as many of them do" and "in other words"). But I am not going to go into this at this time. I'll only pause at one paragraph.
<quote>
But goods and services are not just lying around waiting to be grabbed by the greediest or most muscular countries. Market economics is not a zero-sum game. America consumes $10 trillion worth of goods and services each year because it produces (not counting the current-account deficit of 5% or so of the total) $10 trillion of goods and services each year.
<end quote>
[rhinoceros]
Is that so? Let's do a mental experiment... Let's build a wall arount America and run a computer simulation to see what happens...
Talking about value produced, I read this amusing article in Salon a few days ago.
"We don't support that"
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/02/23/no_support/
We're not here to help fix your computer. We just want to get you off the phone. A tech-support slave tells his hellish tale.
<snip>
Outsourcers are paid by the computer manufacturer based on the number of calls they handle. The more calls we take, the more the outsourcer is paid. So naturally everything that happens in this vast carpeted warehouse of cubicles is done with an eye toward speed. Our managers stress something called "average call time," which is simply the average amount of time a tech spends on each call. They want us to be under 12 minutes. <snip> Twelve minutes can sometimes be difficult even if you know what you're doing. It is impossible if you don't have a clue.
<snip>
When Chad saw fit to interrupt the endless series of card games and movies it was with detailed lessons on how to use our phones and log our calls. We learned that these things were key. If we remembered nothing else, as long as we could answer the phones and provide records that we'd done so, the company would be paid every time we thanked someone for calling technical support.
<snip>
The Mantra is simply, "We don't support that."
<snip>
Punters, Givers, Formatters
A punter is someone who gets rid of problems by giving them to someone else. Punters tell customers that their problem is not really with their computer, but with their software, their printer, their phone lines, solar flares, whatever they can make sound believable. Then a punter will look at the piece of paper hanging above their phone and read you those four magic words. We don't support that. If you want your problem fixed, a punter will tell you, you'll have to call someone else.
<snip>
It's not that Loni isn't smart. In fact, he's wickedly so. He can listen to a person having problems with the mouse and spin a plausible story as to why it is really something the person needs to be discussing with the phone company. He can take a call about a modem and convince the customer that she needs to contact her embassy. He doesn't lack intelligence, just tools. Like the rest of us, all Loni was really taught was The Mantra,....
<snip>
Karen is part of a growing group called givers. Like punters, they don't really solve any problems, but instead of just asking you to call someone else, givers want you to have a parting gift. They'll listen to your problem and then randomly choose a piece of hardware to send you. Of course it won't solve anything, but givers have discovered that people usually calm down and start agreeing as soon as they think you're sending them something to fix the problem. And by the time they get the new part and discover it has no effect, they'll call back and someone else will have to figure out how to deal with them. Givers are really just punters with style, and they find their tactic very satisfying. Karen and her ilk get to spend all day playing Santa.
<snip>
Ted is someone I don't speak to. Ted is a formatter. Ted, and those like him, have only one solution to their customers' problems. Erase everything on the computer's hard drive and start over from scratch.
<snip>
t seems logical that if you wanted to find the best, most proficient technicians you could simply look at their call times. Those who routinely turned in the lowest call times must possess superior troubleshooting and problem-solving skills that enable them to handle so many calls so quickly. But those of us who take the calls know that's not true. The most proficient technician with a wealth of knowledge at his fingertips can't hold a candle to your average punter or giver. But if you're just looking for an expert at getting off the phone and getting back on again, you could not do better than Charles.
<snip>
After smashing all the records for technicians Charles is now looking to rewrite the record book for mentors. Mentors tend to average two minutes a call with each technician. Charles is shooting for under 20 seconds. Charles does not want to hear what your problem is, he's already got the answer, and it's the same one he gave when he was a technician. In the fine print of your warranty it states that we will support the computer in its original condition.
[rhinoceros]
I'll stop here. The story is simple. The company which employs these people gets paid by the number of calls.
Services such as transportation and trade can be said to produce value because value is not intrinsic to the goods. It is a function of demand, which means that it is related to the consumer of the goods in the context of a market.
I have also heard arguments about the value produced by the stock market... placement of capital in such a way that it produces value... This case is less clear, because the capital -- something which nobody is happy to explain where it came from in the first place -- rallies a diverse workforce in different countries and backgrounds and rewards them not according to their abilities or their needs but according to how the capital itself is currently distributed in the world. The law of demand and offer is valid as long as the market has not caused revolt to its participants, but it is only a calculation tool. It does not tell us anything about the "why".
But I am stil stumped when it comes to this tech support story. Where is value produced?
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rhinoceros
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Re:virus: weekly chat: Poverty and Global Inequality
« Reply #3 on: 2004-03-22 08:08:45 » |
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This is somehow related to last week's chat on poverty, global unequality and "The Economist". You will have to watch an ad to access the full article.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/22/economist/
Debunking the Economist -- again
By James K. Galbraith
<snip>
And so we find, in wide circulation, the curious (even weird) claim that worldwide economic inequality has been falling thanks to a "new golden age of global capitalism."
Last August, the Economist put about this claim. I debunked it before the audience of the British Web site OpenDemocracy.net. Clive Crook of the Economist then responded to me, and I rebutted him. All of this is on record, here (http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-7-30-1483.jsp), here (http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-7-30-1485.jsp) and here (http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-7-30-1495.jsp). But some people don't learn, and here we are again.
<snip>
In the new version of its article, the Economist does say of China and India that "Neither country is an exemplar of free market capitalism -- far from it." Funny, I used almost exactly the same words in my first critique of their earlier article, saying: "Anyway, neither China nor India is an exemplar of free-market globalisation." This little bit of crypto-plagiarism tells you all you need to know about the standards the Economist applies, where this issue is concerned.
Both China and India steered free of Western banks in the 1970s, and spared themselves the debt crisis. Both continue to maintain capital controls to this day, so that hot money cannot flow freely in and out. Both continue to have large state sectors in heavy industry to this day. And China, for that matter, continues to be run by the Communist Party, which is not the institution most noted in history for devotion to the free market. (More analysis on China can be found here -- http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/web/workingpaper/utip16.pdf.)
(Confession: In the mid-1990s I served as chief technical advisor to a Chinese State Planning Commission project on macroeconomic reform, a job that centered on advising them as to which Western economists to talk to, and which ones to avoid. I loved the second part of that job.)
<snip>
So once again, we have to ask: Is this the golden age of global capitalism, really? Or is it something closer to a golden age of reformed socialism in two places (China and India) -- alongside an age of disasters for those who followed the prescriptions favored by the Economist? In truth, countries that followed the IMF-World Bank prescriptions to the letter -- Argentina, say, or Russia in the early 1990s -- have seen catastrophe worse in every way than the Great Depression of the 1930s was for us. Is it any wonder that the electorates in both places firmly reject the neo-liberal model?
<snip>
Confronting the problems of the stricken Third World will require a balanced approach. What the poorest countries need perhaps most of all is sustainable finance, permitting them to build their infrastructure, their human resources, their public health systems and their industries -- both for domestic consumption and foreign trade. This is an old formula. But it is one with a track record: It worked in Europe after World War II, and then in Japan, Korea and in China, each of which saw decade after decade of sustained growth and industrial transformation.
Here's the rub: Pursuing these goals will require placing the world's private financiers under a degree of regulation and control -- such as we used to have in the real golden age of development, from 1945 to 1970. That, of course, is not on the Economist's agenda. But it should be on ours.
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