What would happen if - the poor disappear? -- or the middle class? -- or the rich?

[T Wolf]

Here is what prompted this question. Cited from ZDNet but couldn't find original.

"... Here is a thought I had recently. Say we wake up tomorrow morning to find all the working poor and unemployed had vanished in this country. The economy would instantly grind to a STOP. All the jobs and money not being spent would instantly cause everything to stop.

Now, say instead of the working poor and unemployed, everyone in the middle class vanished over night? I think the same would happen, maybe slightly slower, but the effect on our economy would be very quickly disastrous.

Now imagine that the richest 2 or 3 percent were instead to vanish over night? Would we even notice it as we rose and went to work? As far as I know, I would still have a job and my business would still run as usual. Most of the very rich are owners and in some cases CEO's granted, but they are not vital to the day to day operation of anything that I know of. Most businesses can run just fine without their owners and or CEO's.

In fact I would go further to say that the economy would improve dramatically cause ..... Businesses would be broken up and huge sums of cash, stocks and bonds would be divided up amongst many. Where there were several HUGE piles of wealth there would, after many a court battle, be many smaller sums of monies to spread around and to be spent flooding the economy with wealth and from that, there will be new rich but many smaller rich folk and far more opportunity than there is today for everyone to get a piece of it..."

The person who wrote this is speaking a basic truth here. They are important only because they say they are. But honestly, couldn't every "enterprise" whether a business or an organization, run as well without the top of the food chain?

Their only function is to authorize actions and decisions made by those who actually do the work. The only time we sit around is while waiting for one of them to make up their mind. Who really needs that?

I say, work down the ladder (in terms of "relocating" them to more purposeful work) until the efficiency, etc. starts to suffer. That means you have reached the proper level.

Works for me. How 'bout you?

[galileoreloaded]

1. I think it would depend on the amount of personal guarantees

utilized to fund the revolving lines of credit that many small and mid-sized privately held companies use...

[aquart]

2. "The poor will always be with you."

Jesus said it. You can't get rid of "The poor." Middle class? Yes. You can. They'll show up again later though. The rich will also always be with you. The rich are like a really stubborn stain.

[angstlessk]

4. well, maybe because they produce income for the rich????

heck if the rich went away..maybe the poor would become MIDDLE CLASS?

[Xenotime]

20. At least the homeless would have a place to live.

[bobbolink]

10. If you were to actually look around you, and then to heed the lessons of history, yes,

"getting rid of the poor" is not only possible, but happens all the time.

The problem is, the muddleclass don't want to see it, so they don't.

We are invisible, so we aren't missed.

[Hannah Bell]

17. the poor will be with you only so long as the rich are, because they create each other.

and the middle are in fact part of the larger "poor".

[Kalyke]

37. Which is better? Peroxide or bleach?

[shraby]

A very insightful truth!

[AnneD]

3. FRSP.....

French Revolution Severance Package.

[hughee99]

5. So it's your belief that an organization with no leadership would run

just as well as it did without it. Is this accurate? I'd agree that this might be the case in the VERY short term, but do you think this would be true over the long term as well?

[Greyhound]

8. Your supposition assumes that 'leadership' necessitates a larger take.

That is false.

Also, there are numerous companies operating all over the world that do not pay management more than the workers.

[hughee99]

9. No, not really,

but if you take away the top earners at almost any company, you are taking away "leadership". Some companies may have no employees that are in the top 2-3%, and would not be affected, but at how many companies have people in the top 2-3% that are NOT part of upper management?

The only industries I'm aware of where this would be the case would be in entertainment.

[Greyhound]

15. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Do schools teach nothing but obedience any longer?
:kick:

[hughee99]

18. Not in any way.

The OP is supposing what would happen if you take away the top 2-3% of the earners. It then went on to suggest that "Most businesses can run just fine without their owners and or CEO's."

I did go further, and suggest that it's not just the CEO's, but other top executives who may be in this 2-3% as well. In no way did I suggest that leadership necessitates a larger take, but are you arguing that they do not get a larger take right now? If they are getting a larger take now (large enough to put them in the top 2-3%), they would disappear. Then you would have a company running without those people.

My argument was that this company would run okay in the short term, but over longer periods of time, this company would have serious problems. I will add that this is especially true for companies in a dynamic and changing market (technology, for example).

[Greyhound]

21. Your argument is still baseless. It rest entirely on an unproven assumption. n/t

[hughee99]

22. Which argument?

That the top management in a company tend to be the highest paid employees, or that if a company's top management disappeared, the company would run well in the long term (or at least a well as it ran before)?

It's based on no more "unproven assumptions" than the argument that if a company's top management disappeared everything would run fine.

[Greyhound]

23. That the so-called top management is necessary to a company's long-term

health and therefore deserve a larger share of the company's product.

[hughee99]

24. My argument was ONLY that top management is necessary

to a company's long term success, I never said they deserve a larger share of the profit, I just acknowledged that they are currently getting it.

[Greyhound]

26. Then ther may be some miscommunication here.

In all my years of working for and around companies from the tiny to the way too big (including the government), I've yet to see any "top managers" that earn their pay, nor have I ever seen any that are vital to the company's success. Most frequently I've seen "top management" holding the company back for their personal profit or ego. Rarely do these decision makers know anything about what they are deciding.

It wasn't always so and I'm sure there are still exceptions, but all in all, they are a net loss. Usually the CEO's assistant would make a far better decision maker.

[hughee99]

28. In my experience,

(at tech companies), top management has been pretty effective in identifying opportunities, finding new markets, and targeting specific features, products and release dates, which has kept the companies I've worked for profitable (and me, employed). They certainly don't do all the work that is necessary to make this happen, but when the companies have come to forks in the road, they've made good decisions. Those decisions, left to people lower on the food chain, may not have been made the same way, and I know a number of mid-level managers that have left because of disagreements with top management over situations that top management turned out to be correct about.

I'm not saying that this necessarily means that top management deserves such a disproportionate amount of the profits, but without anyone in these positions, there may have been many bad decisions made.

[Greyhound]

29. That's interesting because my field was IT, before they turned it into a desert,

and my experiences were exactly the opposite. The decision makers were well versed in meaningless jargon and didn't have a clue what any of it meant, so they ended up spending enormous amounts of company money buying defective "packages" that were eventually discovered to be a complete waste. The perfect prey for the sales weasels.

What I see today is the evolution of that situation, bloated, oversold, expensive "tools" doing the job badly, if at all. And they are run by "IT guys" that don't know anything beyond what icon to drag or which script to copy in and when it blows up have no clue what the they even did, let alone how to fix it.

But it does appear that our disagreement is not that far apart and depends mostly on our personal experiences. Still, we've kept this thread going for awhile.

Perhaps another thread dedicated to the advance/decline of the state of IT would be appreciated?

[socialist_n_TN]

33. Elected Worker Councils could run ANY industry..........

as well as any CEO. AND do it cheaper.

[hughee99]

35. It looks like I'm not the only one making unproven assumptions. n/t

[JackRiddler]

27. Oh! So banksters, predators and legacy "philanthropists" are LEADERS. Now I get it.

Thanks! Obviously we live entirely from their generosity and, um, leadership.

But if that's what they are -- "leaders" -- then aren't they answerable for the disasters we've been led into? What do you do when the captain's irresponsibility sinks the ship? Do you give him a new one, and let the suckers drown? Apparently.

[hughee99]

30. I didn't recommend anything of the sort.

I'm not suggesting that the deserve the proportion of profits that they get, that some of them aren't responsible for the disasters we've been led into, or that they be given a new ship after sinking the old one, but to continue your analogy, how well does a ship work with no one at the wheel? The people in these positions are just like people in any other position, some are good, some aren't. Do you believe that without leadership, and organization will usually perform just as well (or better) over longer periods of time?

[JackRiddler]

32. Democracy is not a ship, owners are not captains, and your question is a distraction from class war.

[hughee99]

34. This was your analogy, not mine.

And while Democracy may not be a ship, how well do you think government would run without top administration officials and leadership roles in congress?

[JackRiddler]

36. Sigh.

You're right, by the way, I introduced that metaphor. Sorry. Just didn't like the way you used it.

You were talking about the rich as the "necessary" leadership. I question that. The rich as a class are not a leadership, unless you mean leadership of the global class war that has made them so incredibly richer and screwed the world.

I'm not sure we're going to get very far on this subthread. Seems there are a host of assumptions on both sides we probably don't share, and that would involve volumes from each of us to define.

[hughee99]

38. I didn't say that the rich are necessarily "leaders"

it's just that many people who are currently leaders are also currently in the top 2-3% of earners. Leadership itself is necessary, and if tomorrow, a significant proportion of leaders disappeared (as suggested in the OP) there would be significant problems.

I agree that there are likely many assumptions on both our parts that are either unclear or unshared.

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Terry in Austin]

11. Sounds like a great plan -- let's try it and find out! -nt

[Greyhound]

7. No organism needs the parasites that live on it, quite the opposite.

They cannot exist without us while we don't need them at all.
:kick: & R

[Desertrose]

25. +1

[astral]

12. When the middle class disappears they will be the poor

The point is to get us all at serf-dom level. It's pretty quick and easy for them to just remove all the jobs and sit back and watch what happens for a while.

[Duer 157099]

13. We need to test this hypothesis out in real life

Starting with the most obvious scenario

[dimbear]

14. It's very easy to make new poor people. n/t

[DonCoquixote]

16. In practice

Let's say you have 100 people working, out of those 100 people, every one has an idea. Boil those down to about 10 ideas, after much talking..when the choice to do something is needed, which out of those 10 ideas gets done?

and as far as this goes:
Their only function is to authorize actions and decisions made by those who actually do the work. The only time we sit around is while waiting for one of them to make up their mind. Who really needs that?

Sometimes that is needed because you cannot do two things at once..one person does one thing one does another, and you get a cacophony of mess.

[slackmaster]

19. Kind of like the movie "A Day Without Mexicans" only with more guacamole

:shrug:

[Luciferous]

31. Ha, that movie was the first thing I thought of when I read the OP