Dateline February 13, 2012 TWICE (This Week In Consumer Electronics)
“CE Business Model Changes Are Overdue” Editor-In-Chief Steve Smith states that this year Japanese CE manufacturers found a bleak $17 billion loss, citing among other factors, the lingering effects of a lackluster world economy. Japanese CE makers can’t manufacture as inexpensively as their Korean and Chinese counterparts. Their… problems are industry problems. As a result there has been a “race to the bottom,” chasing market share with overly distributed product lines with little regard to profit.
I think a more fundamental cause the losses is the fact that productive capital ownership is not distributed broadly with technology rapidly displacing labor workers whose earning power is being reduced, which in turn reduce the demand for products and services because there is less progressively less earnings going to workers who make their contribution through labor. If more and more people were connected to the ownership of productive capital as the economies grow, the earnings of capital would become more broadly distributed and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth. We cannot sustain mass production without mass human consumption. Because the “systems” are rigged to benefit the 1 percent ownership class and further concentrated ownership, the 99 percent non-owners will continue to loose earning power. Without a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, further development of technology and globalization will undermine the majority of people throughout the world and make it impossible for more than a minority of citizens to achieve middle-class status. The symptoms of dysfunction are capital ownership concentration and inadequate consumer demand, the effects of which translate into poverty and economic insecurity for the 99 percent majority of people who depend entirely on wages from their labor or welfare and cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. The production side of the economy is under-nourished and hobbled as a result.
