Some comments:
-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas P. Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: November 22, 1998 6:58 AM
Subject: bizarre responses to my combinatorial stuff
>Recently I sent out a message called "more on the underlying
>combinatorial reasons for unemployment", and the responses I received
>seem so bizarre to me that I find it very hard to make a rejoinder.
>
>Nobody addressed the title issue at all.
>
>Jay Hanson said
>
>> This particular planet -- Earth -- already has too many people working.
>
>By how many, Jay? How much MORE unemployment do you want? 10%, 20%
>maybe? We all know you think the earth is overpopulated, but putting
>people out of work isn't going to solve that, unless they kill themselves
>in despair.
>
I think this is another instance of the problem I mentioned earlier, that we
sometimes talk at cross purposes because one person has in mind a fix for
the present economic regime and another person has in mind a more drastic
solution that will change all the rules. I don't think Jay Hanson "wants"
more unemployment in the sense of more people being without adequate income
to support life. He does view our current level of economic activity as so
damaging to the environment that he would feel the top priority is to
immediately begin reducing that activity, and he would presumably want the
unemployed to receive a Basic Income either for doing nothing or for doing
the kinds of things that most economists think have no economic
utility--writing poems or praying or whatever. Jay is right about the urgent
problem posed to the environment, but unfortunately a rational solution just
ain't gonna be adopted in the next decade or two.
>Tom Walker said
>
>> No combinatorial solution of the job matching problem can meet the a
priori
>> condition that it uphold the regime of compound interest ad infinitum.
>
>I really can't for the life of me figure out what the one thing has to do
>with the other.
>
Tom Walker has expressed himself at a very high level of generality, so I am
not sure just what problems he has in mind. Correct me if I am wrong, Tom,
but I think he is referring to the fact that the people controlling the
economy (corporations and international money markets) demand unlimited
growth. Generally they want at least 10 per cent increase in profits
annually. This would mean a doubling of profits every 7.2 years. On the face
of it that would mean more jobs, but they often achieve those profit
increases by squeezing costs, especially labor. Moreover, as Melanie
Milanich just pointed out, technology is not simply eliminating many job
positions; it is changing the very concept of job, so that it no longer
means a permanent full-time position with adequate pay and benefits. More
and more people are not getting jobs in the conventional sense but are
called in as contract workers for a short term and then dispensed with.
>Pete Vincent takes my notion of widespread job mismatch as implying
>that if employment were optimized we would have more economic
>activity, and then argues against it, because more economic activity
>would lead to more pollution and depletion of resources.
>
>I really don't get this at all. Take pollution -- I rather favour a
>policy of zero-emission, whereby industries just don't pollute, but
>the argument against that has always been economic -- it would be
>"too expensive". I also favour complete recycling, whereby all waste
>is recycled, but that again has been called "too expensive". And I
>favour a massive conversion to the use of solar energy, either
>directly through solar cells or indirectly through ethanol from
>biomass, but both of those seem to be "too expensive".
>
>Yes, I think we would have more economic activity and more wealth
>if employment were optimized, but I see it as a means of affording
>clean air, clean water, complete recycling, and drastically reducing
>our use of fossil feuls.
I think Pete Vincent's position is legitimate. I understood that your
contention was that solving the job assignment problem would produce full
employment under the present economic system. The present system and its
masters have next to no interest in environmental amelioration. Note that
the Business Council on National Issues is fighting the Kyoto Treaty
tooth-and-nail. Although Kyoto would benefit a few new businesses (eg. the
Ballard fuel cell technology) it would hurt far more of the old ones. I
think your paragraph immediately above reverses cause and effect. Optimizing
employment (under the present system) will do nothing to afford clean air
and clean water, etc. However, mandating clean air and clean water will
provide additional employment.
>
>There is so much in our society that we just don't seem to be able to
>afford, like good healthcare for everyone and better schools. I'm
>sure we can afford all of these things if more people are able to find
>truly suitable jobs. Is this so terribly hard to understand?
>
I think here you are accepting the propaganda of our business leaders that
we can no longer afford "good healthcare for everyone and better schools."
There are several reasons why we seem no longer able to afford what we could
once afford. When I was a child in the 1950's, approximately half of our tax
revenue (the public good) was collected from corporations and half from
individuals. Over the past four decades this has been shifted so that
individuals now pay about 90 per cent. There have been important negative
changes in the matter of our public debt. Instead of owing most of the debt
to ourselves, we now owe it to private (usually foreign) financial
institutions. And these private insitutions are making the most of it. As
one analysis after another shows, the years of deficits resulting in a
mountain of public debt were not caused by program spending but by high real
interest rates. StatsCan, I believe, estimated that government program
spending accounted for only 6 per cent of the debt. It is true that health
care and education are now more costly than they were in the old days--for
instance, there are expensive technologies in health care such as MRI
machines. However, I very much doubt that expenses in health care and
education have increased at a faster rate than the economy as a whole. Our
problem is simply that we have passively stood by and let the super-rich
hijack an ever-increasing proportion of our economy.
One other comment on the "combinatorial stuff" not related to the above. At
times you seem to be saying that solving the assignment problem would put
everyone in a job that he/she would enjoy doing. I frankly think this is an
illusion of someone in the professional classes.
To justify that statement, I'll have to get a bit autobiographical. My
original goal was to be a university professor (English literature). Around
the time I was finishing my doctoral work in the early 1970's, there was a
combinatorial implosion in this field, and I could not find a job. I spent
sometime teaching English as a second language which paid well enough
although I did not find it enjoyable. After a while I went into the ministry
of my church and gradually managed to burn myself out. The combinatorial
possibilities were not great for an ex-clergyman, and after three years of
searching in vain for a "professional" job, rather than seek welfare I
walked onto a construction site where they were hiring and told the foreman
in my best proletarian accents, "I never done this for a living, but I done
a hell of a lot of home renovation for myself." I worked as a construction
laborer for over a year and then migrated to factory work, not liking to
find myself up to my ass in water during cold weather and not liking the
sporadic layoffs. For the past 12 years I've done various jobs in a factory,
janitor, driver, shipper, and assembly work for a total of three employers.
My point in all this is simply that I've "looked at life from both sides
now" and think I see through some of my former illusions or rather
unquestioned assumptions.
I think professionals who are doing an interesting job develop the illusion
that someone will be interested in doing every job there is. So when someone
says he is bored or unhappy with his job, you assume that you can correct
the mismatch by (a) moving him to another job he will like and (b) moving
into his job someone else who would enjoy it. The bitter truth is that there
are many, many jobs that have to be done under our present system and
virtually no one enjoys doing them. Doing repetitive assembly work I just
switch my mind to other topics and endure the boredom, physical pain and
discomfort because I need to collect a pay cheque. Then I go home and
occasionally ride one of my wife's horses and usually spend a great deal of
time working on my website. This is very different from the way I used to
throw myself into my work when I was a clergyman or an academic. I want to
emphasize that my dislike for my work (and by the way I do a very good job
at it even though I'm bored out of my mind) has little nothing to do with my
former background. My less academically-inclined fellow workers are equally
bored. Like me they're mostly "good workers" who produce at high volume with
few mistakes, and like me they're just waiting for the final buzzer so that
they can go home and do something like work on their car or whatever their
hobby happens to be. It's my observation that there are a few factory jobs
which are not so subject to to boredom, for instance, the millwrights
(maintenance) and the toolmakers who are regularly confronted with new
problems to solve. Once in a long while the boredom lifts for the rest of us
because there is a rush order; being cooperative workers we do our best to
oblige and that gets the adrenalin flowing for a few hours, so that we don't
feel the time to be dragging on. However, 90 per cent of factory work is
unadulterated boredom. I imagine it's much the same for routine office work
and retail work such as being a supermarket cashier.
To repeat my point, you're simply not going to be able to fill every job
with a person who likes to do that, not until we have a world that is so
completely roboticized and computerized that everyone is given a living just
for doing whatever they feel like doing even if it doesn't result in any
saleable good or service. To believe otherwise is to indulge in the
illusions of a middle class professional who happens to have achieved a job
he enjoys doing, good fortune that our economic system supplies to only a
small minority of people. So I think solving the assignment problem will
never in and of itself produce a utopia. It will at best ameliorate the
present system by finding some decnt-paying (but possibly boring) jobs for
people who would not otherwise find them.
Victor Milne
FIGHT THE BASTARDS! An anti-neoconservative website
at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/pat-vic/
LONESOME ACRES RIDING STABLE
at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/
