Rifkin - some final words
My comments on Jeremy Rifkin triggered quite a barrage of responses, and I thought that the best way of addressing these was via a single omnibus posting. I do apologize for the posting’s rambling character and for the very real possibility that I have misunderstood some of the points people were making. I now have to admit (grudgingly) that I’ve misunderstood Jeremy Rifkin. He is, as Tom Walker puts it, a "showman and an evangelist", a little like the mystics who wandered about medieval Europe proclaiming that the end of time was at hand. I should have recognized this because I have seen him perform on TV, where he said the most outrageous things with complete composure and absolute certainty. Tom challenges me on another point: "If Ed supposes that the continuing need for "doctors, lawyers" etc. will absorb all those sloughed off by manufacturing, he hasn't engaged the argument at the level of seriousness already clear twenty years ago in Bureau of Labor Statistics projections -- large percentage increases applied to small numbers are quantitatively insignificant compared to small percentage increases applied to large numbers." My point isn’t that sloughed-off labourers will become doctors and lawyers, though some may or their children may. Rather, my reference was to human ingenuity and inventiveness. If displaced, aware and motivated people will find a role for themselves even if they have to invent one; they won’t simply shrivel up and remain idle. I agree with Mike Gurstein’s point that "...we may only be seeing the end of "jobs" as we have known them and not the end of "work" and in fact, the transformation in the nature of "jobs" may be such as to increase the number of those "employed" while decreasing their security, stability, continuity, and so on." However, I do recognize that the displaced may have trouble staying aware and motivated. The larger point I’m making, it would seem, is that it is not computers or any other technology that creates social and economic change. It’s people working as individuals and through their institutions — institutions that people should be able to change if they are not fulfilling their needs. And I do recognize that bringing about institutional change is a very real problem in much of the world, and is often not possible without bloodshed and violence. I also take to heart Victor Milne’s point that many people have neither the intelligence nor the health to compete with the more robust of the species. For these people, one can only hope that support systems will be in place. We know that, historically, they rarely have been. Here I would also like to comment on Melanie Melanich’s review of Kevin Bale’s "Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy". I would not agree that "For the first time in human history there is an absolute glut of potential slaves." Slavery, with periodic gluts of slaves, is as old as time. Yet it is tragic that the situation Melanie describes exists now, after all that people have gone through to establish a better world throughout this century. To me, it represents a breakdown of moral order and a return to barbarism, in the much the same vein as ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo and NATO’s response in bombing the hell out of Serbia. It does not indicate that we can look forward to the next century with a great deal of hope, and may indeed suggest that there will be plenty of work in military fields if not in peaceful ones. Arthur Cordell suggests that production is not the economic problem, distribution is. I’m not really sure I agree. Currently, 80% of global GNP is produced by 20% of the world’s population living in the richest countries; while 80% of the population produces the remaining 20%. The advantage of the rich continues to grow. When it comes to distribution, one wonders about the extent to which the poor world be able to use what the rich world has to offer. The needs are very different. Poor countries would better be able to fulfill their needs themselves, and yet the capital to build up their productive base often comes from the rich world and is invested to fulfill the needs of the rich world, not the poor. Nike does not build plants in India to provide Indians with high quality footware. Even in rich countries, production caters mainly to those who have income. The needs of the poor, such as decent housing, are typically overlooked. Moreover, we have not even begun to tackle the problem of what we produce. Quite a lot of what the rich world produces is neither necessary nor useful and may indeed be harmful. Much of it is directly destructive (armaments) or insidiously destructive (greenhouse gases and other pollutants; rapid depletion of non-renewables). At the other end of the spectrum, many countries are unable to produce sufficient basic items such as foodstuffs, health and education. Arthur is also concerned about the changing role of
Re: The End of Work/The End of Jobs
Tom Walker wrote, in part: What has been > occuring instead is an INCREASED reliance on increasingly meaningless (to > productivity) criteria of hours of work, job tenure and individual > performance. What this means in practice is not "reward commensurate with > contribution" but a winner take all lottery. --- i am not sure that I understand what is happening in your model. Can you give me a scenario and take that the next step forward thank you tom abeles
Re: The End of Work/The End of Jobs
tom abeles wrote: >Tom Walker wrote, in part: > > What has been >> occuring instead is an INCREASED reliance on increasingly meaningless (to >> productivity) criteria of hours of work, job tenure and individual >> performance. What this means in practice is not "reward commensurate with >> contribution" but a winner take all lottery. >--- > >i am not sure that I understand what is happening in your model. Can you >give me a scenario and take that the next step forward That's a good question. With the application of science and technology to industrial processes, productivity becomes increasingly SOCIAL and not individually attributable. Karl Marx noticed phenomenon this nearly 150 years ago in the Grundrisse: "to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose 'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production." Some sense of the scale of change can be had by looking at labour productivity statistics over the longer period. Labour productivity per hour in the U.S. in 1992 was approximately 13 times what it was in 1870. During the same period, the average annual hours worked per person employed was nearly cut in half, from 2,964 in 1870 to 1,589 in 1992. On average, then, a worker in 1992 produced seven times as much per year in slightly more than half as many hours. Much of that productivity gain, by the way, occurred between 1929 and 1973. I suppose one could say that the average individual U.S. worker in 1992 worked 13 times harder than the average worker in 1870 or was 13 times more skilled or some intermediate combination of increased skill and effort. I suppose. Another way of looking at the change, though, is that "inorganic nature", rather than the worker, has been made to do more of the work: "No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body -- it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth." All this may sound very grand indeed if one forgets that the "inorganic nature" in question largely has consisted of the consumption of non-renewable fossil fuels. Over the past 20 years or so there has been a marked polarization of income which has been intensified by a polarization of annual hours worked -- that is to say that (on average) those earning at a higher hourly rate have also been working progressively more hours per year. Often this dispersion has been described as a "skills gap" or an "education premium", thereby attributing the change to differences in individual ability, knowledge or effort. Considering the major source of productivity gains over the past century or so, however, it would be better to look at the dispersion in income as a bounty paid to the most prodigious consumers of energy. That is to say, relatively small differentials in skill or educational credentials become the warrants for relatively large differentials in entitlements to consume energy at work. Individuals are then compensated roughly in accordance with those later entitlements and not the original more modest differences in ability, knowledge or effort. Leaving aside the element of randomness relating individual success in obtaining employment to credentials, we might find, for example that A, with 20 years of schooling obtains a warrant to consume 40 units of energy per hour at work while B, with only 16 years of schooling obtains a warrant to consume a mere 20 units per hour. As a result, A may well "produce" twice as much per hour as B, thus "justifying" much higher compensation. regards, Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
Re: Beyond Rifkin?
Jim Dator wrote, in part: > It all shows the lunacy of a system which still requires people to "work" > even though their labor is not needed--what is needed is their "purchasing > power." Can't this be achieved without their having to "work for it" if > there are so few truly "needed" jobs?? Janitors? Hamburger Flippers? and > Lawyers for heaven's sake!! Speak of make work! --- First we must go back to Jim's discussion of the "cashless" society. The difference between the rich and the poor is that if everyone called a halt to the game and asked that everyone levelize their accounts by paying off their debt, the rich could liquify their assets and pay off their credit cards while most others could not. Its like a poker game at the end of the night- throw in your coins or your deed to the ranch. The rich are securitized, often by holding the assets of the poor capitve. This is what has happened in Mexico and in the far east. The bakers were asked to "put" and they had to reach into their pile of assets and liquify. Some didn't have enough liquidity so the government paid the debt and borrowed the money which they will repay by taxing the poor and inflating the currency. It is the poor in the developing countries who pay so that the bankers AND THE POOR IN THE DEVELOPED COUNTRIES can maintain their life style. After all, goods sold cheaply because of the sweat in SE Asia lets poor americans think that they are in hog heaven when they go to Wal Mart Now we look at Jim's proposition that we are "making work" to affect an economic exchange and we wonder how that can be since today some human hand has to get the automobiles to the show room and some nanny has to be paid so that the lawyer husband and wife can go to the courts and write the torts. We don't live in a world where there is useless employment, we live in a world where some who are employed are able to consume more for their hours work than another person. Hmm, let's see. What happens when Indira Ghandi Open University starts offering fully accredited futures courses to students at the University of Hawaii at one tenth the price. Time to liquify some of those retirement annuities? thoughts? tom abeles
Re: Beyond Rifkin?
Hi Jim I am all eyes and ears-lay your model on the table tom Jim Dator wrote: > > Well, while I was scribbling off line, Arthur, as usual, has said it well. > It is an issue of "effective demand": Plenty of goods (too many for Earth > to sustain, probably)... > What to do? > > .If I am basically correct in what I just wrote, then viable solutions are > not too difficult to derive conceptually, but since almost no one is > willing to accept the analysis, they find it impossible to consider viable > solutions seriously.
