The new Dylan exists already. His name is Jean-François Pauzé. The trouble for most of us here in North America is that he writes his songs in French for a Quebec band called the Cowboys Fringants.

In light of the OWS protests, I wrote a recent essay on the growing gap between the rich and poor (new window), and how we may be heading towards a new Middle Ages (yes, my blog sucks -- but I'm a former journalist, so I hope it doesn't suck too much!). I crunched per-capita private GDP data, and here's what I found -- I thought it may interest we Farkers who like discussions that are actually intelligent:



If that comes out too small to read, here's the gist: Since 1980, the average person's contribution to the private economy -- GDP minus government spending -- has been declining in real terms (adjusted for inflation -- a 3% rate compounded annually). What that means is that the U.S. economy is growing more and more dependent on a smaller and smaller group of people (ergo, the wealthy elite). In the long term, that cannot be good for anyone. Elsewhere in the article, I mention how a likely contributing factor is the so-called financialization of the U.S. economy (high finance is an increasing percentage of the economy while, say, the percentage contributed by manufacturing is declining).

It's also why GDP, the traditional method used to measure economic activity, is less relevant in a society with a large divide between rich and poor. Say you're on an island with nine other people, and you are rich while the others are dirt poor. As long as you are doing better, then the island as a whole can be said to be doing better since you comprise almost all of the island's economic activity. The island as a whole may be in an economic "recovery," but it will mean nothing to the nine other people.

In a nutshell, what I say is that a increasingly-smaller number of people have a monopoly on both income earned and wealth generated -- and that fact itself creates a "barrier to entry" in the market for these two things for the rest of us. Any monopoly, in the end, hurts the market and capitalism itself.

Anyway, just wanted to share my thoughts since I've been enjoying the threads on OWS. I'd be curious to hear any (constructive) feedback on my ideas. Just no trolls -- you'll go on ignore!

/ Pardon the plug, I'm a longtime Farker who's genuinely interested in what people who know economics think
// I'm usually in Israel threads since I'm an American Israeli in Jerusalem

Because all the best music has already been produced. Right.

At his peak Townes was better. Waits is better and always has been.

bostonguy: In light of the OWS protests, I wrote a recent essay ...

Your analysis is wrong.

"No" is the most powerful word in the English language, first in importance as it is the way to distinguish choice itself: "no - not that one, this one"

/also, i don't think those Adbusters types produce much in the way of overhyped folk music.

Retief of the CDT: bostonguy: In light of the OWS protests, I wrote a recent essay ...

Your analysis is wrong.

I'd love for you to tell me how. I'm always up for a good, civil discussion.

If there were any record producers still looking for good talent and if there were any radio stations willing to play it...maybe...

so, no.

It's sad how stuck in the '60's these people are. Wishing for a Kent State moment, now wanting a new 'Dylan'.

I just feel sorry for whoever the next Trotsky will be.

Once Bob Dylan went autotune, he sold out.

lol wat.



What a dumb article.

skinink: Once Bob Dylan went autotune, he sold out.

OK, that's pretty funny.

tomWright: It's sad how stuck in the '60's these people are. Wishing for a Kent State moment, now wanting a new 'Dylan'.

I just feel sorry for whoever the next Trotsky will be.

Yeah smart people are stuck in the 80's trying to blow zombie raygun.

After all the accusations of the Tea Party being a bunch of Nazi's, it is very telling just who the American Nazi Party endorses (new window).


Your friends say a lot about who you are.

/Not that fark would green something so damning of the left.

It would probably sound more like this, than a bunch of hippie guitars.

But it is fun to listen to Woody Guthrie, too.

tomWright: After all the accusations of the Tea Party being a bunch of Nazi's, it is very telling just who the American Nazi Party endorses (new window).


Your friends say a lot about who you are.

/Not that fark would green something so damning of the left.

You are truly a great thinker.

GAT_00: I hope not. The guy couldn't sing for shiat. Dylan as a new artist today would just write songs and sell them.

The best Dylan songs? Every single one of them better sung by someone else. But he can write.

One of my favorite albums is the soundtrack to I'm Not There. 33 songs by Dylan, and none of them are sung by him.

/Another good one is the reggae album "Is It Rolling, Bob?"

Woody Guthrie, Better world a'coming".

It's true measure of the success of the corporate propaganda in the last 40 years or so, that it sounds so strange to hear people singing so earnestly about the beneficial power of unions.

When the boomers are all dead, will we stop comparing everything to the 60s? The issues being protested here are pretty different. I'd say OWS has far more in common with the beginning of the 20th century than the 60s.

Tyrone Slothrop: One of my favorite albums is the soundtrack to I'm Not There

AMEN

Each song would have to be an hour and a half long to even touch on the most popular causes being brought up in any given protest.

skinink: Once Bob Dylan went autotune amplifier, he sold out.

And the dancing ladies kept their guns clean with citrus potion,
While the farmers grinned their knives like a stabbing ocean.

I'm, like, yer new Dylan, man.

bostonguy:
First of all, you forgot to adjust private GDP for inflation. Second, using flat 3% inflation for the last 50 years doesn't work. It's been everywhere from 14% to 0%, and when that happens matters. the reason you get that gap opening and then closing is that inflation was high in the 1960s and 70s, so the gap between your unadjusted "private GDP" and your adjusted per-capita GDP rises then. It's also why you give a per capita GDP that's so low in the 60s. I don't know how you calculated your inflation or what base year you used, but those numbers are not right. Inflation adjusted GDP per capita in the US has not risen ten fold in 50 years.
In your analysis, you confuse average as in mean with average as in median. If the mean per capita contribution to GDP is falling (if your calculations were right), that doesn't indicate that we are more dependent on the elite, because they get weighted the same as anyone else. It would mean that the government is taking a larger share of GDP, which it isn't (based on your numbers, it's a steady 20-21 percent, except for a dip in 2000). What you'd need to find is the median private sector worker's contribution to GDP.
You have a point in that income inequality is rising, and factors like expensive college and terrible public education in poor areas create barriers to social mobility. You're also right that GDP is not the best way to measure welfare in a highly unequal economy.

Joe Six-Keg: Who cares if there's new "protest music" coming out of OWS? All it does is add a further level of obfuscation and complexity to the protests.

pretty much this, coupled with the idea that I think a protest should stand on its own. For a while I was hearing "Why doesn't RATM perform at OWS?" and all I could think of is "Why can't you give a shiat without someone else's endorsement? Also, that would be kind of cheesy." (the MTV-ised politics of Battle of LA-era RATM also turned me off from them as well, but that's another debate entirely.) Write about what you want to write, but I've always thought the Protest Song Hero bit was rather corny.

bostonguy: Retief of the CDT: bostonguy: In light of the OWS protests, I wrote a recent essay ...

Your analysis is wrong.

I'd love for you to tell me how. I'm always up for a good, civil discussion.

It's a joke, son; you're supposed to yuck it up!

But seriously, depending on which method was used to compute GDP, I don't think it is valid to separate out government spending that way - certainly if the production or income methods were used. Even if the expenditure method of computing GDP was used (which treats government spending as a term), it's too convolved with the private sector to use your approach in that a lot of government spending is through contracts to private companies and re-enters the private economy. Government spending isn't really a direct contribution to GDP, it is a reallocation of resources within GDP. (You can get in to arguments that government can artificially inflate GDP via monetary policy, but that is messy and has other consequences.)

I don't at all dispute the economy is highly distorted. Just not convinced your approach to computing income disparity is valid, or that it is significantly "worse" now; perhaps just more obvious because of the historic looting of the last 5-6 years (equal blame to both US "parties"). I'd argue it goes on because the uber-rich can "game" the system and distort the natural economy by using political power, but that's another discussion.

neon_god: bostonguy:
First of all, you forgot to adjust private GDP for inflation. Second, using flat 3% inflation for the last 50 years doesn't work. It's been everywhere from 14% to 0%, and when that happens matters. the reason you get that gap opening and then closing is that inflation was high in the 1960s and 70s, so the gap between your unadjusted "private GDP" and your adjusted per-capita GDP rises then. It's also why you give a per capita GDP that's so low in the 60s. I don't know how you calculated your inflation or what base year you used, but those numbers are not right. Inflation adjusted GDP per capita in the US has not risen ten fold in 50 years.
In your analysis, you confuse average as in mean with average as in median. If the mean per capita contribution to GDP is falling (if your calculations were right), that doesn't indicate that we are more dependent on the elite, because they get weighted the same as anyone else. It would mean that the government is taking a larger share of GDP, which it isn't (based on your numbers, it's a steady 20-21 percent, except for a dip in 2000). What you'd need to find is the median private sector worker's contribution to GDP.
You have a point in that income inequality is rising, and factors like expensive college and terrible public education in poor areas create barriers to social mobility. You're also right that GDP is not the best way to measure welfare in a highly unequal economy.

Thanks for your thoughts! For my inflation calculations based on per-capita private GDP, I used 1960 as the baseline and then added 3% compounded annually each year.

But your point about using each year's specific inflation-rate is extremely accurate. I'll recalculate as soon as I have a chance!

Skleenar: Woody Guthrie, Better world a'coming".

It's true measure of the success of the corporate propaganda in the last 40 years or so, that it sounds so strange to hear people singing so earnestly about the beneficial power of unions.

Why, of course! It can't possibly be due to the actions of the unions themselves.

Retief of the CDT: It's a joke, son; you're supposed to yuck it up!

Ah, I see! LOL. Even as someone who was originally a writer by trade, it's still hard sometimes to know the tone of a commenter. My apologies for the terse response.

And thanks for your thoughts on my analytical method as well -- I'll definitely take it into account when I re-run the numbers!

GAT_00: The best Dylan songs? Every single one of them better sung by someone else. But he can write.

This. With the possible exception of "Subterranean Homesick Blues." I really like Dylan's version of that one.

Fuggin Bizzy: GAT_00: The best Dylan songs? Every single one of them better sung by someone else. But he can write.

This. With the possible exception of "Subterranean Homesick Blues." I really like Dylan's version of that one.

Shelter from the Storm?

A-hem

I, for one, think Jacob Dylan is ugly and looks like a horse.

bostonguy: Retief of the CDT: It's a joke, son; you're supposed to yuck it up!

Ah, I see! LOL. Even as someone who was originally a writer by trade, it's still hard sometimes to know the tone of a commenter. My apologies for the terse response.

And thanks for your thoughts on my analytical method as well -- I'll definitely take it into account when I re-run the numbers!

Yeah, tone doesn't come through - was worried it might not click; thanks for staying civil. Cain's "your analysis is wrong" comment was making the talk show rounds last week; Thom Hartmann was (humorously) saying something to the effect that it's now the perfect response to any analysis.

Further to this, to me the problem isn't really the disparity in and of itself, it's how the disparity came in to being, the lack of upward mobility, and the lack of downward mobility (eg accountability). I don't care if someone gets uber-rich fairly. But they shouldn't game the political system to do it, and if they screw up, they should become uber-poor and I shouldn't be forced at gunpoint to pay for their screw-up.

Khazar-Khum: I once asked a relative if you needed to be stoned to enjoy "Happiness Is A Warm Gun". She said you needed to be stoned to enjoy the whole of the late 60's music scene.

You both have horrific taste in music. Great song.

uh... there's a pro-gay, Canadian punk band named Propagandhi that cut a couple a albums like ten years ago with this one song "and we thought nation-states were a bad idea" that fits this whole situation pretty well.
YouTube, song only. (new window)
lyrics: "publicly subsidized! privately profitable!" that's the anthem of the upper-tier (the puppeter untouchable). we focus a moment, nod in approval and bury our head back in the bar-codes of these
neo-colonials while our former nemesis (ah, the romance!): the nation-state, now plays fund-raiser
for a new brand of power-concentrate. try again, but now we're confused- what is "class-war"? is
this class war? yes, this is class war. and i'm just a kid- i can't believe that i gotta worry
about this kind of shiat! what a stupid world! yeah, this is just beautiful... absolutely no
regard for principle. what a stupid world. 1) born 2) hired 3) disposed! where that job lands, everybody knows and you can tell by the smile on the ceo's that the environmental
restraints are about to go. you can bet that laws will be set to ensure the benefit of unrestricted
labor-laws (all kept in place by displaced government death squads). they own us. they
produce us. they consume us. can you farking believe this? what a stupid world. fark this
bullshiat display of class-loyalties. the media and "our" leaders wrap it all up in a flag- their
farking shiat-rag. hooray!

This thread:

Dylan? Meh.
Name dropping of obscure artists you've never heard.
Dylan didn't have autotune, so he sucks.
A recommendation to listen to a particular music, identified only by obscure album covers you've never seen.
Dylan did drugs.
A chart of the economy, because there aren't already enough threads where that might actually be appropriate.
Dylan? Meh.

Of course!

Khazar-Khum: Skleenar: Woody Guthrie, Better world a'coming".

It's true measure of the success of the corporate propaganda in the last 40 years or so, that it sounds so strange to hear people singing so earnestly about the beneficial power of unions.

Why, of course! It can't possibly be due to the actions of the unions themselves.

Exactly. His world is so simple. It's always the mega corporate conspiracies.

From the real world, it's the union members themselves that left in droves, or choose not to join when they actually have the option. This is why the labor movement has transformed into tightly connected government lobbies trying to force union participation where it never belonged (public sector) and little else. Power and money. The unions are just like any other group comprised of humans, only they don't really create anything.

/much more sympathetic to small union shops

BloodySaxon: The unions are just like any other group comprised of humans, only they don't really create anything.

Ironic that you would post this in a thread about anti-Wall Street protests.

About labor.

This can never happen. Due to our willing enslavement to corporations, none of us listen to one artist anymore. We all have our own thing, our own music, our own sound, our own set of beats to set us free. This is what makes us unique, and we're worth it.

/this post brought to you by ipod.

A new Dylan? It looks like they'll be scrounging... their next... meeeeeeeeal!

/no new Dylan, or Seeger, or Guthrie, or that annoying angry woman :p
//today's kids just aren't that 'together'
///and being less together than Bob was is really farking sad

wo. jacob dylan has an eagle. can i date him? wait, is he even gay?

All you Dylan haters can suck it. As Jan Wenner said once, Bob Dylan is the greatest rock and roll singer of all time - no one is better, and no one even comes very close.

That notwithstanding, I've thought about this a lot: guys like Dylan, Elvis, Lennon, and (more recently) Kurt Cobain often get saddled with the sobriquet "the voice of his generation." That's a lot of responsibility to place on any rock and roll singer. But here's the thing - I grew up in the 70's. Who's the "voice" of my generation? Barry Manilow? KC, with or without his Sunshine Band? It's depressing.