I think one has to figure time
into this. In the short-run, declines in particular industrial sectors
or the outsourcing of jobs will leave people stranded. In the
medium to long run, the economy and the labour force may adjust, but it should
not be taken for granted that it will. During the past century or so,
Canada has seen a large scale movement from primary industries to secondary
manufacturing to services. This movement has left many communities and
many workers stranded.
To remain in the game, each country must
be continuously creating new products and new jobs. However, there are two
problems with this scenario. The first has been considered by only a few
economists; the second, to my knowledge, has never been considered by any
economist at all so far .
The first is problem was first raised by the
Prof Fred Hirsch, an economics professor at Warwick University in his book,
The Social Limits to Growth (1976) that was published not long before
he died while in his 30s. He was mainly thinking of goods, services and
facilities that would be so much in demand by consumers that their very supply
would cause congestion and a deterioration in the environment for all. My own
elaboration of this is a slightly narrower one but, with the beneift of
hindsight, a more powerful one, I think. This is that the main congestion that
will strangle economic growth is that of lack of time and attention by the
prime consumer group -- the middle-class -- the class with enough disposable
income that always initiates new consumer items that are profitable enough to
drive the whole system. Increasingly, this class -- what I call the
initiatory class -- are now so time-starved and stressed in normal
daily and weekly life that they can barely cope with the consumer goods that
they already use in their limited spare time, never mind buying more.
Or maybe they are just tired of
the glut of stuff and don't want any more?
The second problem is
that there must be natural limits to the abilities of a population to respond
to higher job-skill requirements. In the prevalent political philosophy of the
last 30 or 40 years or so, the supply of skills was never seen to be a problem
because a government could simply pour more resources into education. However,
today, we need a growing proportion of very high-skill people to keep the
system going. Unlike 'New Age' thinkers who believe that there are no limits
to the abilities of the brain, those who are more practically involved with
this problem -- educationalists and neuroscientists -- know that our brains
are as finite in their processing abilities as they are in size.
What you may have is something
one might call a "betrayal factor". A few years ago, high tech was in
full flight in the Ottawa area, then known as "Silicon Vally North".
Ever so many bright young people bought into the industry, learned the
necessary skills, got high paying jobs, etc. Then the whole thing began
to crash. People got very badly burned. They had skills but little
to transfer them to. The next wave of young people would likely be more
cautious in what they committed themselves to learn. They would likely
opt for a broader, more universally transferable set of
skills.
The first problem above is already being
recognised as such and is usually termed the 'work-life balance' problem --
and it is growing. We are not entering the life of leisure and abundance that
many futurologists foretold a generation ago despite the fact that we have
more energy, technology and automation than ever before. Life is becoming more
stressful, particularly for those with professional responibilities. The
second problem doesn't register at all in the public consciousness yet.
However, in events such as the Chernobyl and Half Mile Island nuclear
accidents, the increasing number of electricity grid blackouts, the rapid
spread of antibiotic-resistant staphylococci and new varieties of influenza,
and so on, we have the first hints that we are beginning to live right on the
edge of our expertise.
Ah, yes, but I do think we learn
from our experience. If new nuclear plants are built, they will be less
prone to failure. I guess what I'm saying is that it is not really the
capacity of the brain that is important here. It is
the accumulation of knowledge that the collective brain has to work
with. We now know, or should know, far more than we did in the
fifties, sixties and seventies when the nuclear plants and power grids that we
still work with were put in place. There is good reason to believe that
it would be done better now and will probably be done even better thirty years
from now.
Ed
