Unemployment rates are severely under tracked.

[binary solo]

NJ5 said:

binary solo said:

Unemplyment figures are notoriously fudgable, because there are all sorts of ways you can exclude people from official figures. It's much easier to determine the number of people who are employed (especially in countries that have a PAYE income tax system).

If you want to enjoy the benefits of the current economic system you have to accept the costs: intermittent recession, a minimum 4% unemployment rate to keep wage growth in check, periods of increased unemployment to flatten out wage growth for a while, economic growth largely fueled through debt that eventually tips an ecopnomy into negative growth when some of the worst debt is written off.

I don't think the benefits of the current economic system require that lending be so wild as to result in things like subprime lending.

That seems more like a failure of too much deregulation combined with the greed of the banking sector (and their customers' greed of course).

Rather interestingly the banking sector is giving out more bonuses today than before the crisis, thanks to the largesse of the government bailouts.

And you don't think those things you identify are fundamentally part of the economic system? Sure as hell they are. The current economic system basically rewards / encourages short term greed at the expense of long term sustainability / economic stability.

And because the current political system is a captive of the current economic systems there not only needs to be a fundamental economic change but the political systems in ALL countries needs to be transformed; not just tinkery reforms like campaign finance reform, but establishing an entirely new democratic model. When you have campaigning in a system which necessarily costs money, you're going to have monied interests calling the shots, and playing both sides. So it's not campaign finance reform that's needed, you basically need to eliminate campaigning. Trouble is people lack the intellectual capacity to envisage a democratic structure without campaigning (people have totally swallowed the fallacy that democracy requires campaigning (and political parties) to work well, when the exact opposite is in fact the case). And they are blind to democratic systems that are working without campaigning or partisanship. And of course there is no incentive on the part of the politcal and economic establishment to change things, because it's working for them.

So if the people who hold all the cards are happy with the economic and political status quo, and the most recent GFC has done nothing to really briung about change, what is it that will, in the end, acheive real political and economic transformation?