M. Gustave im The Grand Hotel Jobcenter

M. Gustave: 

You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization 

left in this barbaric slaughterhouse 

that was once known as humanity. 

Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, 

humble, insignificant… 

oh, fuck it.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Ein Nachtrag in Referenz zu Bonuszahlungen an GFs der Jobcenter bei Erreichen von Performancezahlen. Da GFs ohnehin recht üppig honoriert werden, hat ein Bonus in solchen Fällen einen besonderen Tropus. Er symbolisiert Prestige, Honneurs und Werthaltigkeit jenseits des Pekuniären.

In consumption generally, economic exchange value (money) is converted into sign exchange value (prestige, etc.); but this operation is still sustained by the alibi of use value. 

Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign.

Träger des Arbeitslosengeld II sind die Agenturen für Arbeit und kreisfreien Städte oder die Kreise (Kommunen).

Agentur für Arbeit trägt	Kommune trägt
Regelleistung Arbeitslosengeld II	Kosten der Unterkunft und Heizung
Sozialgeld	Leistungen für Bildung und Teilhabe
Mehrbedarfe	einmalige Leistungen
Eingliederungsleistungen	flankierende Dienstleistungen

"...this is not the only force driving men to thievery. There is another that, as I see it, applies more specially to you Englishmen."

"What is that?" said the Cardinal.

"Your sheep", I said, "that commonly are so meek and eat so little; now, as I hear, they have become so greedy and fierce that they devour human beings themselves. They devastate and depopulate fields, houses and towns. For in whatever parts of the land sheep yield the finest and thus the most expensive wool, there the nobility and gentry, yes, and even a good many abbots -- holy men -- are not content with the old rents that the land yielded to their predecessors. Living in idleness and luxury without doing society any good no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive harm."

Sir Thomas More, Utopia, Book 1

via Ecological Headstand

Simon Wren-Lewis stösst ein oft wenig beachtetes Problem an:

Inequality and the common pool problem

Discussion of the minimum wage often focuses on whether the measure is good for the low paid worker (e.g. will they lose their job as a result?). If distributional issues are considered, it generally involves the employer and employee (see for example the case of the Agricultural Wages Board discussed here). Sometimes discussion might stretch to firms doing something that could impact on other workers, like raising prices. However, if changes in the minimum wage have no impact on the overall level of GDP, higher real wages for low paid workers must imply lower real incomes for someone else.

The same logic can be applied to high executive pay, but it is often ignored. Here is part of one comment on my original post that was left at the FT: “the rise in incomes at the very top ... may be a worry in the dining halls of Oxford but in many decades not one person has mentioned such a worry to me. What worries people here, especially those at the bottom of the income distribution, is the decline in real wages …” But if higher executive pay has not led to higher aggregate GDP that pay has to come from somewhere.