welcome back to me post

[iambebby]

well I am back! Cuba was depressing and somewhat fabulous, hard work, lovely, awful, and some other stuff amongst which being making me ill the whole damn time. no kidding! I had the obligatory stomach disorders for some of the time, and on top of that a honest-to-goodness regular british-like COLD (!? in 30 degrees! ohhhh and the humidity...) and

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[iambebby]

Pixie! :D thank you! I am excited to hear all of your name change stuff is going ahead and would like to say Kruzcynski is a terrific surname, is the 'cyn' pronounced 'chin'? I would definitely be proud telling people that was my name (though I wouldn't like to try and have a lot of people spell it. I have enough trouble with Bebbington)!

*muses* my uncle said the same thing. ;) it is a succinct statement of a incisive fundamental criticism of socialism! Still, your job at the moment, it doesn't really make best use of your skills and abilities, no? If you had a job that was more difficult than the video store (which did sound kind of a fun job), but also more challenging and in which you felt you achieved something worthwhile, well, how would you feel about doing that for the same money?

my central defence on the issue is that, in the jobs I've done and people I know have done, easier jobs tend very much to be more boring jobs. I suppose then you've (I mean I've!) got the two problems of a) whether you would be able to access a more suitable position in a socialist set up - which is at least not beyond the bounds of probability? after all, the whole application interview process etc etc etc is pretty ropey as things stand - and b) assuming that your current job is an indispensible part of the economy, who would do that instead of you for no more money than easy work.

perhaps b) could be addressed partly by organising work specifically so that some efficiency (not too much, hehe!) is traded against worker satisfaction (so proof-readers don't spend so much time doing the unpleasant bits, or what have you), partly by sharing out less interesting tasks amongst people with the more enjoyable jobs (also a potential efficiency loss it is true), and partly by allowing some differential earnings for jobs which are genuinely recognised as less pleasant to do.

I think such earnings differentials would be very different to the wage rates seen today, though, since I did some of the most soul-destroyingly dull and awful work of my life in a factory for £5/hour. Whilst people in highly-skilled creative jobs, likely to be the most rewarding, are also likely to be paid quite highly. And that sort of thing.

....So, all very speculative, yes, but at the same time none of the theoretical justifications for capitalism actually apply to any industrialised economy as it is because the fundamental assumptions (perfectly rational agents, an infinite number of suppliers for every good, perfect information on the part of seller and buyer, etc) rarely so much as come close to applying in any existing situation. So you have no way to reasonably expect that a capitalist system will deliver financial incentives to reward hard work/honest effort/what have you, and in fact a child in poverty in Sweden - high tax, high social welfare - is something like twice as likely to avoid poverty in adulthood than is a child in poverty in Britain - with lower taxes and less welfare. Which would seem to imply that in Sweden personal merit counts for more than it does in Britain, where your success is more closely linked to your parents' ability.

On the grounds of honesty and full disclosure I should also say that the US, with the least taxes and welfare of all, has social mobility rates very similar to those of Sweden, so it seems possible to conclude that tax rates and monetary reward have an unclear relation to the liklihood of a child's success being determined by their parents' social class (a lot probably depends on how the money is spent, and um...other factors).

So hehe the point of that digression was just to say that, whilst I could only claim that the success of socialism is plausible but not certain, since we don't really understand how the current system works, it doesn't seem unreasonable to want to experience with other options.

AND FINALLY! :) The upshot of it all and the point of my post, I guess, was that Cuba has been some sort of test of socialists' speculative suggestions, and it has had severe drawbacks (though I would point out that average life expectancy and literacy rates are roughly equal to that of the US, if not a little better. But fridge ownership and house sizes are probably a bit less impressive).