Harry, the production of the
particular pair of shoes ends when they are in the hands of the consumer, but
the production of all shoes produced by Hokey Shoes continues on and on. I
don't know who gets the other $40 dollars. Some of it would go into taxes
and some would go into taxes, some into normal wages and salaries and some into
the inflated salaries and benefits of the CEO and his senior staff.
I wrote the Hokey Shoe piece after
looking up some material on "holonic enterprises" on the web. It showed
clusters of people here, clusters there, circles identified as resources in
several places, arrows going thing way and that, information moving around like
crazy, "mediators" ensuring that the right connections were being made and that
the information moved to the right places. After looking at it for a bit,
I thought, hey, wait a minute, it looks new and shiny, but isn't still all about
making the highest profit at the lowest possible cost! I then remembered
all of the stuff I'd been reading about jobs being moved offshore where labour
is very cheap and the miserable conditions under which that very cheap labour
works. I'm afraid that I got a little angry at the thought of
professorlets and miniprofessors devising ways of making exploitation even more
efficient and profitable.
And, yes, you are right. The
cheap labour in India would not likely be in a different position if the shoe
factory was not there. But I think that says something about the state of
the world, doesn't it?
Ed
Ed,
Production ends when the product is in the hands of the consumer. (That's
Classical stuff, but surely the neo-Classicals don't think much differently.)
So, the shoe is put together by cheap labor in India. (However, don't
complain about their low wages. They would get no more - or less - if the
shoe factory wasn't there.)
So, a pair of shoes is made for (say) a dollar.
It's transported to Los Angeles by ship - not a particularly expensive way
to move the goods - maybe adding 50 cents to the pair.
So, the shoes move on their way to Walmart, where I can buy them for
$41.50. In my hands, production is finished.
We know the Indian workers get a dollar for the shoes. What producers get
the other $40?
Harry
--------------------------------------------
Ed wrote:
>I may be missing the point, but I really wonder how different "holonic
>enterprises" might be from what is already going on in the current
>corporate world. Might we not already have enterprises capable of lateral
>thinking in the multi-national corporations of today? Take the Hokey Shoe
>Company for example. The CEO of Hokey does not know how to make
>shoes. He spends his time thinking, mostly linearly, about how to keep
>the corporation solvent (or make it even more solvent) and about how to
>keep his shareholders happy. He does not know much about branding or
>marketing, so that is the job of another VP and his cluster of people,
>mostly all linear thinkers. Responsible to him would be the people that
>design shoes. They would have to know an awful lot about consumer
>preferences, materials, etc., but, again, this is mostly linear stuff.
>
>Perhaps the most important person in the organization would be the guy who
>coordinates everything, perhaps the CEO, but perhaps a VP of, say,
>coordination. He might be a lateral thinker because he would have to know
>something about shoe design, about branding and marketing, about people
>who actually make the shoes and about the resources that go into
>them. Information about all of the aspects of the enterprise would have
>to be accessible to him because the efficiency of the organization as a
>whole would greatly depend on the decisions he made. It would be up to
>him to put all of the various aspects of the enterprise together in order
>to produce the least cost and most satisfying Hokey shoes.
>
>Prior to the era of instant information and communication exchange (read
>"Internet"), the shoes would probably have been made locally. Now they
>can be made anywhere in the world where the price is right, perhaps India,
>where labour is dirt cheap. In India, the VP Coordination would work
>through a number of middlemen who would find women willing to work twelve
>hours a day for peanuts and under continuous threat of being replaced by
>someone willing to work thirteen hours a day for fewer peanuts. While
>labour in India would be dirt cheap, the VP would still have to move
>product to rich world markets, but improvements in global transportation
>(and the growing glut in transportation capacity) would not make this very
>expensive.
>
>A couple of decades ago, the shoes would have been made in Seattle or
>wherever Hokey is located. The labour force would have been local and
>unionized, and the shoe makers would only have worked eight hours a
>day. Costs would have been relatively high, so, if improving technology
>permitted it, it would make a good deal of sense to move manufacturing to
>a low cost place like India where there are few labour standards. As for
>the people who once made Hokey shoes locally, some might have found other
>jobs and some might not have. Tant pis.
>
>Ed Weick
>
>----------
>All:
>
>The weaving of ideas and threads about linear and non-linear thinking
>resonates with aspects of a paper I'm developing having to do with
>(for lack of a better term) emergent ambient intelligence, and so I'd
>like to add a bit of my current effort into those threads.
>
>The folks with whom I'm very fortunately working at the moment are
>greatly talented and highly gifted electrical and computer engineers.
>They're exploring ideas originating with Koestler's notion of the
>"holonic enterprise" and, based on this, are beavering away in their
>respective crafts to come up with robust and elegant algorithms that
>describe, account for and allow calculation, prediction and
>simulation in whatever varieties of nested hierarchical computational
>networks they study and develop. Their application questions address
>enhancing the computational capacities of organizations, especially
>in industries of various sorts, to deal more effectively, efficiently
>and productively with all the new complex, extended, nested,
>electronically-networked emerging virtual organizations we've
>recently created, in which we are all embedded, and of which we are
>all a part: herewith is 'network thinking' beyond the orchestra pit.
>
>The current discussion threads about linear and non-linear thinking
>are addressing far more than what Kolb thought of as learning cycles.
>So far in the exchange, I think there's an implicit comparison being
>made between the notions of receiving new experiences essentially
>through a more or less passive stance (that is, standing on the
>shoulders of all that we've learned and, to the best of our
>abilities, adding those new experiences to our foundation), versus
>actively exploring and seeking new experiences of an entirely
>different order (essentially, using those shoulders to raise
>ourselves up, and then leave them behind to climb new, unexplored and
>previously-unexperienced peaks -- some of which my only be generated
>as a result of our extended climbing effort).
>
>Here, I think we can usefully employ some of the interesting concepts
>being used by my engineering colleagues in their work discovering
>"ins and outs" of new emerging complex virtual networks having to do
>with their holonic enterprises. The conceptual models they are
>exploring and developing have some isomorphism with the beautiful
>mish-mash of connections, nodes, channels, synaptic gaps and
>bioelectrochemical mixtures that flicker and swirl among the nested
>hierarchies of our neurons, and all the other systems that support
>and maintain them.
>
>Here we are not falling into the old metaphoric trap of saying "the
>brain is a computer", but instead are usefully applying the more
>flexible and helpful comparison of "the computer and our brain are
>similar in some ways". Being careful to make this distinction, we
>can advance the notion that the brain and the computer have complex
>features that suggest they are types of system ecologies. We can
>rapidly spread our conceptual fields regarding ecologies to think
>about all other such systems: for example, without robust nested
>networks and sub-systems of a great many varieties, functions and
>descriptions, our bodies (and, presumably, everything likewise
>connected to this example) would simply not be. Considering
>everything from algae to ponds, to lakes and rivers and thence to
>oceans, from alpine meadows to deserts and forests, from fields of
>corn to ocean-bottom 'black smokers', to dust storms and thunderheads
>to biomes of every description, we see a huge variety of
>interconnected networks of nested hierarchical systems and
>sub-systems, furiously (and otherwise) engaging each other with
>countless energy, materials and information transactions.
>
>Man-made things and systems of things are little different from this.
>We can think of what are appearing as our new nanotechnologies, or
>our old familiar washing machines and fancy new laptop computers;
>automobiles old and new, production lines, supply chains and
>spaghetti junctions; the shop floors and quality circles and
>inventories and distribution centres and retail outlets, and all the
>things that have converged and continue to do so, over and over and
>over, to shape our realities; the homes we live in, the skyscrapers,
>the cities and our the largest spreading interlinked conurbations;
>our phone networks, power systems and infrastructure grids of every
>type and description, all the way to the Internet -- every one of
>them complex networked nested hierarchical systems and sub-systems,
>again engaging each other with countless energy, materials and
>information transactions.
>
>All of these networked ecologies are engaged in processes of bounded,
>robust, networked computation, all interacting, all dependent on,
>steered by and making use of thresholds with varying permeability and
>purpose and countless channels of varying size and capacities, all
>comprised of vibrant tuned and self-tuning networks carrying and
>supporting every conceivable energy, material and information
>transaction.
>
>I paint this image because I suspect that our senses of, or what has
>been discussed as 'lateral thinking' and 'linear thinking', of
>creativity and inventiveness and adaptability, of foundations of deep
>robust knowledge permitting our excitement and pleasure of design,
>exploration, discovery and achievement, and perhaps of eventually
>arriving at what we hope really does turn out to be wisdom -- I
>suspect all of these are features of our own emergent ambient
>intelligence that resides at all levels of our own holonic enterprise.
>
>My electrical and computer engineering friends are pretty sure they
>are on the right track, that their investigative and exploratory
>efforts will lead them to develop new and very useful computational
>tools applicable to and capable of dealing with the growing levels of
>systemic complexity and ever-increasing speed of our aforementioned
>transactions; and, of course, being agents in a holonic enterprise,
>what they develop will recursively add to that complexity as well as
>enhance capacities to understand and deal with it. They are sure we
>will understand holonic enterprises better, and as a result will be
>able to make improved use of them as they evolve and self-organize
>into areas, features, capacities and niches we can't even imagine. I
>think my engineering friends will successfully accomplish what
>they've set out to do.
>
>I also suspect that our minds are just like that. I think that our
>colleagues in many fields are doing the equivalent of what so many of
>our greatest trail-breaking explorers have already accomplished --
>explorers such as Galileo, Copernicus, Liebniz, Newton, Boole, Frege,
>Russell, Einstein, Gödel, and Feynman, to name just a few. With
>their variously-focused efforts, they reveal, explore, explicate,
>model and apply facets of what our minds already have the potential
>to do, and thereby create the spaces where innovation can take place.
>As with the development and application of the telescope and
>microscope, for example, and the emergence of conceptual models of
>non-euclidian geometry, of formalism, intuitionism and logicism, of
>chaos and complexity theory and all that has been thereby generated
>and continues to flow from them, they provide new scientific,
>conceptual and organizational tools that amplify, enhance and combine
>anew our already-present capacities, to allow us to reach into
>nascent levels of perception and abstraction and worlds with orders
>of magnitude far beyond what we ever once thought we could perceive,
>think about, or imagine. But now, we do this, we will continue to do
>this, and even more so. And we will do it well.
>
>All of this emphasizes that what we think of as 'linear' and
>'lateral' thinking are necessary parts of the whole. When we
>appreciate really good, first-class jazz, read an article that
>reveals a new and powerful insight, or when we gaze down at the
>valley from the wonderful vantage point of the peak that may have
>taken us the equivalent of our lifetime to first see and finally
>scale, every step we have taken is of both varieties. 'twas always
>thus, methinks.
>
>Cheers / Bob Este / Ph.D candidate / U of Calgary
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Futurework mailing list
><mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
>
>---
>Incoming mail is certified Virus Free.
>Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
>Version: 6.0.520 / Virus Database: 318 - Release Date: 9/18/2003
****************************************************
Harry Pollard
Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles
Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042
Tel: (818) 352-4141 -- Fax: (818) 353-2242
http://home.comcast.net/~haledward
****************************************************
Production ends when the product is in the hands of the consumer. (That's
Classical stuff, but surely the neo-Classicals don't think much differently.)
So, the shoe is put together by cheap labor in India. (However, don't
complain about their low wages. They would get no more - or less - if the
shoe factory wasn't there.)
So, a pair of shoes is made for (say) a dollar.
It's transported to Los Angeles by ship - not a particularly expensive way
to move the goods - maybe adding 50 cents to the pair.
So, the shoes move on their way to Walmart, where I can buy them for
$41.50. In my hands, production is finished.
We know the Indian workers get a dollar for the shoes. What producers get
the other $40?
Harry
--------------------------------------------
Ed wrote:
>I may be missing the point, but I really wonder how different "holonic
>enterprises" might be from what is already going on in the current
>corporate world. Might we not already have enterprises capable of lateral
>thinking in the multi-national corporations of today? Take the Hokey Shoe
>Company for example. The CEO of Hokey does not know how to make
>shoes. He spends his time thinking, mostly linearly, about how to keep
>the corporation solvent (or make it even more solvent) and about how to
>keep his shareholders happy. He does not know much about branding or
>marketing, so that is the job of another VP and his cluster of people,
>mostly all linear thinkers. Responsible to him would be the people that
>design shoes. They would have to know an awful lot about consumer
>preferences, materials, etc., but, again, this is mostly linear stuff.
>
>Perhaps the most important person in the organization would be the guy who
>coordinates everything, perhaps the CEO, but perhaps a VP of, say,
>coordination. He might be a lateral thinker because he would have to know
>something about shoe design, about branding and marketing, about people
>who actually make the shoes and about the resources that go into
>them. Information about all of the aspects of the enterprise would have
>to be accessible to him because the efficiency of the organization as a
>whole would greatly depend on the decisions he made. It would be up to
>him to put all of the various aspects of the enterprise together in order
>to produce the least cost and most satisfying Hokey shoes.
>
>Prior to the era of instant information and communication exchange (read
>"Internet"), the shoes would probably have been made locally. Now they
>can be made anywhere in the world where the price is right, perhaps India,
>where labour is dirt cheap. In India, the VP Coordination would work
>through a number of middlemen who would find women willing to work twelve
>hours a day for peanuts and under continuous threat of being replaced by
>someone willing to work thirteen hours a day for fewer peanuts. While
>labour in India would be dirt cheap, the VP would still have to move
>product to rich world markets, but improvements in global transportation
>(and the growing glut in transportation capacity) would not make this very
>expensive.
>
>A couple of decades ago, the shoes would have been made in Seattle or
>wherever Hokey is located. The labour force would have been local and
>unionized, and the shoe makers would only have worked eight hours a
>day. Costs would have been relatively high, so, if improving technology
>permitted it, it would make a good deal of sense to move manufacturing to
>a low cost place like India where there are few labour standards. As for
>the people who once made Hokey shoes locally, some might have found other
>jobs and some might not have. Tant pis.
>
>Ed Weick
>
>----------
>All:
>
>The weaving of ideas and threads about linear and non-linear thinking
>resonates with aspects of a paper I'm developing having to do with
>(for lack of a better term) emergent ambient intelligence, and so I'd
>like to add a bit of my current effort into those threads.
>
>The folks with whom I'm very fortunately working at the moment are
>greatly talented and highly gifted electrical and computer engineers.
>They're exploring ideas originating with Koestler's notion of the
>"holonic enterprise" and, based on this, are beavering away in their
>respective crafts to come up with robust and elegant algorithms that
>describe, account for and allow calculation, prediction and
>simulation in whatever varieties of nested hierarchical computational
>networks they study and develop. Their application questions address
>enhancing the computational capacities of organizations, especially
>in industries of various sorts, to deal more effectively, efficiently
>and productively with all the new complex, extended, nested,
>electronically-networked emerging virtual organizations we've
>recently created, in which we are all embedded, and of which we are
>all a part: herewith is 'network thinking' beyond the orchestra pit.
>
>The current discussion threads about linear and non-linear thinking
>are addressing far more than what Kolb thought of as learning cycles.
>So far in the exchange, I think there's an implicit comparison being
>made between the notions of receiving new experiences essentially
>through a more or less passive stance (that is, standing on the
>shoulders of all that we've learned and, to the best of our
>abilities, adding those new experiences to our foundation), versus
>actively exploring and seeking new experiences of an entirely
>different order (essentially, using those shoulders to raise
>ourselves up, and then leave them behind to climb new, unexplored and
>previously-unexperienced peaks -- some of which my only be generated
>as a result of our extended climbing effort).
>
>Here, I think we can usefully employ some of the interesting concepts
>being used by my engineering colleagues in their work discovering
>"ins and outs" of new emerging complex virtual networks having to do
>with their holonic enterprises. The conceptual models they are
>exploring and developing have some isomorphism with the beautiful
>mish-mash of connections, nodes, channels, synaptic gaps and
>bioelectrochemical mixtures that flicker and swirl among the nested
>hierarchies of our neurons, and all the other systems that support
>and maintain them.
>
>Here we are not falling into the old metaphoric trap of saying "the
>brain is a computer", but instead are usefully applying the more
>flexible and helpful comparison of "the computer and our brain are
>similar in some ways". Being careful to make this distinction, we
>can advance the notion that the brain and the computer have complex
>features that suggest they are types of system ecologies. We can
>rapidly spread our conceptual fields regarding ecologies to think
>about all other such systems: for example, without robust nested
>networks and sub-systems of a great many varieties, functions and
>descriptions, our bodies (and, presumably, everything likewise
>connected to this example) would simply not be. Considering
>everything from algae to ponds, to lakes and rivers and thence to
>oceans, from alpine meadows to deserts and forests, from fields of
>corn to ocean-bottom 'black smokers', to dust storms and thunderheads
>to biomes of every description, we see a huge variety of
>interconnected networks of nested hierarchical systems and
>sub-systems, furiously (and otherwise) engaging each other with
>countless energy, materials and information transactions.
>
>Man-made things and systems of things are little different from this.
>We can think of what are appearing as our new nanotechnologies, or
>our old familiar washing machines and fancy new laptop computers;
>automobiles old and new, production lines, supply chains and
>spaghetti junctions; the shop floors and quality circles and
>inventories and distribution centres and retail outlets, and all the
>things that have converged and continue to do so, over and over and
>over, to shape our realities; the homes we live in, the skyscrapers,
>the cities and our the largest spreading interlinked conurbations;
>our phone networks, power systems and infrastructure grids of every
>type and description, all the way to the Internet -- every one of
>them complex networked nested hierarchical systems and sub-systems,
>again engaging each other with countless energy, materials and
>information transactions.
>
>All of these networked ecologies are engaged in processes of bounded,
>robust, networked computation, all interacting, all dependent on,
>steered by and making use of thresholds with varying permeability and
>purpose and countless channels of varying size and capacities, all
>comprised of vibrant tuned and self-tuning networks carrying and
>supporting every conceivable energy, material and information
>transaction.
>
>I paint this image because I suspect that our senses of, or what has
>been discussed as 'lateral thinking' and 'linear thinking', of
>creativity and inventiveness and adaptability, of foundations of deep
>robust knowledge permitting our excitement and pleasure of design,
>exploration, discovery and achievement, and perhaps of eventually
>arriving at what we hope really does turn out to be wisdom -- I
>suspect all of these are features of our own emergent ambient
>intelligence that resides at all levels of our own holonic enterprise.
>
>My electrical and computer engineering friends are pretty sure they
>are on the right track, that their investigative and exploratory
>efforts will lead them to develop new and very useful computational
>tools applicable to and capable of dealing with the growing levels of
>systemic complexity and ever-increasing speed of our aforementioned
>transactions; and, of course, being agents in a holonic enterprise,
>what they develop will recursively add to that complexity as well as
>enhance capacities to understand and deal with it. They are sure we
>will understand holonic enterprises better, and as a result will be
>able to make improved use of them as they evolve and self-organize
>into areas, features, capacities and niches we can't even imagine. I
>think my engineering friends will successfully accomplish what
>they've set out to do.
>
>I also suspect that our minds are just like that. I think that our
>colleagues in many fields are doing the equivalent of what so many of
>our greatest trail-breaking explorers have already accomplished --
>explorers such as Galileo, Copernicus, Liebniz, Newton, Boole, Frege,
>Russell, Einstein, Gödel, and Feynman, to name just a few. With
>their variously-focused efforts, they reveal, explore, explicate,
>model and apply facets of what our minds already have the potential
>to do, and thereby create the spaces where innovation can take place.
>As with the development and application of the telescope and
>microscope, for example, and the emergence of conceptual models of
>non-euclidian geometry, of formalism, intuitionism and logicism, of
>chaos and complexity theory and all that has been thereby generated
>and continues to flow from them, they provide new scientific,
>conceptual and organizational tools that amplify, enhance and combine
>anew our already-present capacities, to allow us to reach into
>nascent levels of perception and abstraction and worlds with orders
>of magnitude far beyond what we ever once thought we could perceive,
>think about, or imagine. But now, we do this, we will continue to do
>this, and even more so. And we will do it well.
>
>All of this emphasizes that what we think of as 'linear' and
>'lateral' thinking are necessary parts of the whole. When we
>appreciate really good, first-class jazz, read an article that
>reveals a new and powerful insight, or when we gaze down at the
>valley from the wonderful vantage point of the peak that may have
>taken us the equivalent of our lifetime to first see and finally
>scale, every step we have taken is of both varieties. 'twas always
>thus, methinks.
>
>Cheers / Bob Este / Ph.D candidate / U of Calgary
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Futurework mailing list
><mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
>
>---
>Incoming mail is certified Virus Free.
>Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
>Version: 6.0.520 / Virus Database: 318 - Release Date: 9/18/2003
****************************************************
Harry Pollard
Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles
Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042
Tel: (818) 352-4141 -- Fax: (818) 353-2242
http://home.comcast.net/~haledward
****************************************************
>
> ---
> Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
> Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
> Version: 6.0.520 / Virus Database: 318 - Release Date: 9/18/2003
>
