economic non-recovery (an update)
I've stated before that the methods used to calculate the health of our economy are incorrect. They favor corporate profiteering but ignore personal hardship. Economies exist because people need them; it should be its effect upon people by which we measure the health of any economy.
A recent article by the post-autistic economics crowd sums it up nicely, although I would edit their title to become "Obama's profitable non-recovery". The chart to the right explains the situation rather well. If you use metrics of corporations, things are looking up already. If you use metrics of personal hardship, however, a very different picture emerges.
A few weeks ago while I was working in the back yard, a neighbor in the alley stepped out of a car and asked me if I wanted a dog. I saw some sort of hound sitting in the back seat. The man offered a handful of cash to go with the animal. I said no. The man said they were having to move out of their house, couldn't take the dog with them, and were on their way to the Golden Valley humane society to drop off the dog. They would have preferred finding someone to take the dog directly, but I was unable to oblige.
- This morning, a noisy truck dropped off a large rubbish bin behind that same house. Afterwards, strangers started emptying material from the house and garage into the bin.
- This summer, these signs went up on the front lawn of someone a few houses down.
- A week or two ago, these signs went up two houses from the homemade business signs.
Someone posted an article that talks about how much this economic problem is hurting people. It complains about how little appears to be done at high levels to realize the fundamental nature of the problem (this problem isn't like prior problems) and address it with large changes. It mentions work sharing (people taking part-time jobs to work on the same tasks at different times of the day) as a solution that helped Germany maintain low unemployment numbers during their hard times.
I keep saying that we need a zero-growth financial system. We need a zero-growth society to go with it.