Are jobs obsolete?

S O F I

Administrator
Staff member
#1
I try to stay away from anything CNN-related because it's mostly bird poop but this op-ed raises some interesting points.

I've bolded points I deem interesting but I encourage you to read the whole article.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/index.html

(CNN) -- The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology's slow but steady replacement of working humans. Unless an external source of funding comes in, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That's 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms.
We can blame a right wing attempting to undermine labor, or a left wing trying to preserve unions in the face of government and corporate cutbacks. But the real culprit -- at least in this case -- is e-mail. People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment and other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps.
New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.
We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.
And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs -- as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there's something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.
I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks -- or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?
We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings
to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.
Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.
The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a "job."
The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we're in the digital age, we're using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.
While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn't this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?
Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.
The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised. The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.
But there might still be another possibility -- something we couldn't really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.
We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.
This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.
For the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends.
I like how the article points out the problems but it falls flat when he proposes solutions. It seems that, in the end, all he says is what we already know. America has moved away from manufacturing into a service-based and information-based economy. To put it in really simple, popular terms, the money is not in making or assembling a car but consulting other people into how to make it most efficiently and with high quality. It's not about building a product, but about selling the idea of how the product should be. You get the point.

Also, he seems to allude that creative activity through digital production is different from the traditional means of work. It isn't really. Most likely and quite often, the skills you need to be successful in the work he mentioned (making games, writing books, solving problems, educating others, etc) are the skills that will enable to you find a traditional job. Also, it still doesn't address key macroeconomic issues like aggregate demand and cyclical employment.
 

Pittsey

Knock, Knock...
Staff member
#2
I was thinking that after the banking crisis we will be moving more into manufacturing. I haven't got time right now, but I will read the article.
 

masta247

Well-Known Member
Staff member
#3
We're at a point where it's too hard to tell. There are too many premises to consider and frankly we can go in many different ways, it's a change that's not going to happen fast anyway since it would need a totally different system.
You know, a lot of things could change judging by the needs of the society alone, but people like it the way it always was, and revolutionary changes almost never succeed because people are too afraid of them, even if they make perfect sense and carry little risk. And usually people who are in charge of accepting a change are those who enjoy the profits of a current system and any changes are not in their favor. Yeah, a very general response from me but whenever someone comes with a better idea people don't want it.
 

ARon

Well-Known Member
#6
This really reminds me of The Venus Project that was brought up in one of those Zeitgeist documentaries. Not enough time to talk about it but yeah
 

The.Menace

Well-Known Member
Staff member
#7
Well I habe a solution for a similar problem ....it goes a lil bit into the same direction.... even though I wouldn't say jobs are obsolete.

So, we don't have jobs for everybody. Because there are a lot of people, we reproduce every day plus robots do many jobs for us, agreed. One more problem is that we turn older, therefore we are asked to stay in the job longer so it all works out with the rent. Fine, the problem is, that means we need to create even more jobs, because older people occupy theirs longer and longer... we face this problem, everywhere in the western world obvisouly. The solution? We'd just have to define a fulltime job as 30 hours per week, instead of 40 hours+. Sounds strange, maybe it is and someone is going to say it's socialist, but think about it. It's truely the only simple way to accomplish more occupation for everybody.... Of course, the pay would have to stay the same, like a big raise for all workers. Why? Because economy needs customers. And as seen in the financial crises, one problem is that the people don't earn enough while banks other corrupt institution gather more and more. So to break the cycle, we'd have to raise what people earn per hour, but they deserve it anyway. Plus we'd have a lot of positiv side effects by going with a 30 or 35 hour weeks ..... like, children actually get raised by their parents maybe instead of the TV (because single parent ma has to work her ass of day&night etc) ... but don't get me started.

One more thing about the USA. Every 7th american is considered poor. At the same time, the low in country demand is a big problem. Yet many fail to see the connection. And social benefits are supposed to get cut every year. But that's wrong. Not (only) cause of moral, no, it's economical important - because if that group of people that can't buy shit gets larger and larger, the so called economy won't get going. people call it socialist to support a poor family, and yes some are lazy etc, nevertheless in the system that we have, we gotta provide them with at least some money. Also, people that are poor and just get some to survive, don't save that money they get, they usually spend it all right away on housingcosts, food, etc ..... which means it goes back into the economy.

The second paragraph here was a lil off topic maybe, but well, the first wasn't. I like the idea. I think it would make sense. I don't think we'll get it, because cooperations want the maximum from their workers, by all means. But for the people and the country, I think the idea would be nice. I don't think we can give up working in general, we aren't there yet. But I agree that there are just too many people for not enough jobs right now. this would help to 'create more job'.
 

Pittsey

Knock, Knock...
Staff member
#8
^^^

But the rich are getting richer. So wealth is obviously there. It just is getting spread around. Capitalism is going to get to a point where it implodes. Soon companies like DHL will have devoured most smaller companies. The fat cats will be the fattest they've ever been and the western world will start living in poverty - Italy adn Greece are on their way.... We can't sustain the model we are currently on. Maybe a capitalist / socialist hybrid is the way forward.
 
#11
Universal income!

We can feed the poor easily but the rich are never satisfied. Some people are so deluded that they think money, in other term energy is infinite that we can all get rich forever. Is money flexibility? Sometime it seems like it’s as rigid as a skyscraper that don’t sway.
 
#14
Good news guys. I’ve been pre-approved for more debt!

A fact that Venezuela hating politicians hate to come across - The US postal service is the biggest Socialism we have in America!
 

Latest posts

Donate

Any donations will be used to help pay for the site costs, and anything donated above will be donated to C-Dub's son on behalf of this community.

Staff online

Members online

Top