Re: The end of work?

[Ed Weick]

 

 

Ed Wrote:

Thomas Lunde: 

Your thesis of growth from original idea to  larger employment is well buttressed by several historical examples.  However, the computer has the potential in speed and computing power to seriously eliminate things that we humans do. 

Weick:

I don't think so.  Though I don't have numbers on this, I would be willing to bet that the microchip has created far more work than it has displaced.  A whole complex multinational industry has been created around it.  Granted, however, that most of the people who were displaced would not have picked up the newly created jobs.

While it is true that the rate of unemployment in the industrial world is now higher than it was before the computer, I would suggest that this is not because of the computer.  It is probably due to factors such as slowed growth after the destruction of world war II was repaired and the decline in some of the more traditional sectors of the economy, such as mining, agriculture and fishing.  Other probable factors are rigidities in the wage structure in the case of Europe, the end of the Cold War, migrations from poor parts of the world where unemployment is usually not measured to wealthy parts whre it is measured, etc.

Thomas:

And so your exponential growth idea can just as easily be applied to an invention that negates our usefulness in the production of things and  eliminates the need for our participation in the creation of things. 

Weick:

I wasn't refering to "exponential growth".  What I was talking about was surges of growth following a major innovation - the idea first formulated by Schumpeter.  While blowing away some industries, it creates whole new ones.  Even the new industries grow old and are in turn displaced by something new.  The growth process is not exponential.  It's jerky and uneven.  Fast at times, slow at others, and at times even negative.  While the general trend for the past two hundred years has been upward, it could hardly be characterized as being exponentially upward.

Thomas:

So the real problem may not be our modern version of the steam engine which went a long way to eliminate the horse, but the whole infrastructure we have divised to distribute purchasing power and create an accumulation of wealth.  How can you have an economy when there is minimal employment to create markets?

Weick:

I don't think that we, as you put it, devised an infrastructure that determined power and wealth.  I would suggest that we inherited it.  It's probably as old as humanity.  If in some situations it was not there initially, as at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, it most certainly was there a few years later.  The best thing about democratic societies is that some important aspects of power are shared - e.g. equality before the law; one man one vote.  Others are not, but even here there may be remedies.  I most certainly do not have the economic power of Conrad Black, but if I worked for him I would try very hard to form (or join) a union to protect myself from his economic power.

And, frankly, I don't see a scenario of minimal employment.  Quite apart from the innovations idea, the so-called civilized world has demonstrated an enormous power to destroy what it has built.  Think of it.  Two major wars this century plus a whole bunch of smaller ones.  In this century, much of our prosperity has been based on destruction and the need to rebuild, and if not always actual destruction, then certainly the possibility of it encapsulated in the Cold War.  While I don't like the thought of  this kind of thing being repeated again, I am certain that it will be.

But to get back to the argument of my previous posting, what I may have been doing in some sense was celebrating the ingenuity and flexibility of humankind.  We are capable of enormous adjustment.  Take agriculture.  As agriculture became more mechanized and efficient, there was an enormous displacement of people from farms.  If people were so inflexible, you would have seen many people crowding the fences around farms hoping to be let back in again.  That didn't happen.  The surplus farm population moved to the cities and found other things to do.  I would suggest that most people displaced by computers have already done, or will do, something quite similar.

Best regards,

Ed Weick