----------
>From: Steve Kurtz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Dear Thomas,
>
>> Your argument about "natural/material" value, rather than token value has
>> some merit. I would appreciate your comments in the context of Galbraith
>> (not in quote) who gives these figures. 10% are employed in the knowledge
>> sector, 10% in the manufacturing of goods and 80% in the providing of
>> services.
Dear Steve:
I truly appreciate your lengthy answer. Rather than going through it point
by point and as I am probably, rather imperfectly trying to defend JG's
ideas, it is probably more honest for me to take some time to transcribe his
descriptions from which I made my comments.
Page 90 from Created Equal
As a first step, imagine a national economy entirely closed to trade. Such
an economy will have three basic types of activity in it. Some workers,
perhaps a fairly small number, will be employed as machine makers. Highly
skilled, they build the instruments that others use and develop the
technologies that lead from one generation to the next. We can call them
K-workers, where K stands for knowledge, or equally, for "capital goods."
K-workers are those who produce airplanes and machine tools and who write
software, as well as the architects and engineers and some of the other
professionals who give shape to the society in which we live. They include
Reich's symbolic analysts, and then some.
We can often usefully distinguish between the truly irreplaceable knowledge
workers, those who actually control the keys to the kingdom, and their
production-line subordinates within the knowledge-based industries.
Depending on the nature of the production process, the latter may, or may
not, be in a position to share the bonanza of a technological gold strike.
But the K-sector as a whole is the conceptual entity to be reckoned with,
right down to its janitors and secretaries in many cases.
A large number of workers will be employed using the machines designed in
the K-sector. They will produce the goods that the whole population
actually consumes: food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and
entertainment. They will do so in factories using machinery accumulated
over the years from the K-sector output. Some of their equipment will be
new, some older, some on the verge of retirement. We can call these
workers, the machine users, the C-sector, where C stands for "consumption
goods."
The C-sector, which includes much run-of-the-mill machinery and intermediate
goods production as well as all of the mass production of consumer goods, is
no monolith. Some factories are new, technologically advanced, up and
coming, and profitable. Others are old, run down, overstaffed, costly to
maintain, and barely able to turn a profit. Some C-sector factories employ
directly the amies of clerks, janitors, and secretaries they need to support
their productive operations-and pay these service workers wages scaled to
the C-sector norms. Others contract out their service functions and perhaps
pay less for these easily replaceable supporting workers.
This description of diversity within the C-sector is offered at the level of
the factory, but it can be extended to the full range of companies and of
industries as well. Companies are groups of factories. Industries are
groups of firms. At each level of grouping up, we will find differences of
efficiency, as unit cost, market power, and potential profitability at each
level of demand. (To use a fancy phrase from a new branch of mathermatics,
fractal theory, we can say that these entities are "self-similar at
different scales.) The C-sector is highly hetrerogenous.
Finally, there will be a large group of workers who use little or no capital
equipment, and who do not produce machinery or goods and are not employed by
companies that do. These are the service workers, the S-sector, who live by
their labor alone. They are the janitors, clerks, cashiers, secretaries,
hairdressers, nurses and orderlies, masseurs and masseuses who in the actual
economy of the United States make up 80 percent of the working population,
often employed in companies specialized to the provison of services and the
distribution of goods.
Thomas:
As I reread your answer, I am struck by the difference between JG's main
argument, that it is the inequality of wages that has created our current
problems in society, while your answer moves more into a wider environmental
aspect of the problems of our current industrial age. Both of you are
right, it is just the JG's carefully constructed analysis and the terms he
uses are designed to provide a proof that is different than that which
current economic theory holds as true. Your information, in my opinion, is
to prove that the current levels of population and their effect upon the
earth resources is the real problem. I agree with both of you.
Respectfully,
Thomas Lunde
>
> Dear Thomas,
>
> TL:
>> Your argument about "natural/material" value, rather than token value has
>> some merit. I would appreciate your comments in the context of Galbraith
>> (not in quote) who gives these figures. 10% are employed in the knowledge
>> sector, 10% in the manufacturing of goods and 80% in the providing of
>> services.
>
> A 'cradle to grave' analysis of many service occupations may surprise
> you. Fast food is called a 'service' industry. Think about the calories
> used to serve a hamburger: pump and transport water for irrigating
> fields, manufacture & transport petro-based fertilizers, pesticides &
> fungicides, run harvest machines, transport workers to & from fields,
> transport grain, process grains into cattle feed(incl transp. of
> employees), transport the feed to feedlots. Cowboys drive trucks now,
> the calves must be transported & have water pumped to them, waste
> removed...Then cattle shipped to slaughterhouses, electricity used to
> butcher, run conveyors, deliver via refrigerated trucks, warehouses,
> grinding & shaping patties, lighting and climate control at all
> processing stages, transporting patties to food outlets, transporting
> workers to food outlets, climate control, refrigeration, dishwasher
> machines, disposable napkins, mimipacks of salt/pepper/ketchup/relish,
> waste removal in restaurants...
>
> How would JG classify the above? What % "manufacturing of goods"?
>
>> Yes their may be limits on the amount of phospate or oil but in truth, it
>> seems that when it comes to employment most of us are exchanging human
>> energy for other humans satisfactions rather than hard manufactured goods.
>
> Waste sinks don't differentiate the human purpose or classification of
> the behavior producing the overload of pollutants! The electricity
> running our computers is made by converting resources into usuable
> energy and waste products, incl heat. And all we're producing is hot
> air. :-)
>
>> What does a lawyer, accountant, dance instructor
>
> Think of their locomotion, on job energy requirements, and
> infrastructure manufacture, maintenance, deterioration... required for
> their work. No element escapes as pure; to think requires calories!
>
>>, janitor or lawn service
>
> cleaning/fertilizing/pesticide/herbicide/fungicide chemicals, energy to
> run the waxing machine, vacuum, lawn mowers, leaf blowers..
>
>> employee create in terms of the limits of "natural/material" goods, other
>> than some small amount of supplies in paper or fuel or use of a building.
>
> It's not what the workers "create", it's what is utilized in the total
> process of existing as the most consumptive species on earth, no matter
> what the occupation.
> Not small. Huge. Include the manufacture of the buildings, transport &
> manufacture of all furniture, decor, plumbing, wiring, ducts, furnaces,
> air conditioners, continual energy usage, depreciation and replacement
> if every item involved.
>
>> In fact, if we went to a durable model of goods rather than a planned
>> obsolence model of goods, we could extend the life considerably of the
>> "natural/material" world.
>
> Yes, we could improve the situation somewhat. Have you heard of "Factor
> Four", or "Factor 10" These refer to improvement via clean technology of
> conservation and waste reduction. I wish it were as easy as you imply.
>
> Regards,
> Steve
>
