[p2p-research] Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING

[Kevin Carson]

On 12/9/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:

>  Marshall Brain was the first person I read who was really explicit, step by
> step, about the link between automation and joblessness at all levels,
> especially in Manna. It had been said before for a long time, but he really
> seemed especially clear about it. And he makes clear an economic link in the
> sidebar here, written around 2002:
>   http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
>  """
>  The "Jobless Recovery" that we are currently experiencing in the U.S. is
> big news. See for example The Mystery of the 'jobless recovery':
>   "Consider these facts: Employment growth at the moment is the lowest for
> any recovery since the government started keeping such statistics in 1939.
> The labor force shrank in July as discouraged workers stopped seeking
> employment. The number of people employed has fallen by more than 1 million
> since the "recovery" began in the fall of 2001." [ref]

Paul, as interesting and well-argued as your posts on the subject are,
I'm afraid I'm extremely skeptical that automation is the primary
reason for the jobless recovery, or that that will be a primary cause
of structural unemployment in the near term.

For one thing, replacing humans with industrial robots is the kind of
expensive, capital-intensive investment that the old mass-production
industrial core was prone to in its heyday.

But the old manufacturing corporations are deliberately eschewing
investment in capital-intensive factory machinery, for the reasons
described by Piore and Sabel, and instead outsourcing production to
small-job shops in distributed supplier networks.  Those job-shops may
be more technically sophisticated than the factories they're
replacing, but it's the kind of sophisticated machine design that
expands the machine's usefulness as a craft tool in the hands of a
skilled worker.

More than anything, I think structural unemployment results from
excess industrial capacity and the lack of sufficient demand to run
industry at capacity.

And even for mass-production industry, it's of questionable economic
benefit.  For one thing, a robot hand with sufficient manual dexterity
to perform a wide range of delicate operations is great, but until
there's also a robot with the processing capability of the human mind
that's capable of the craft skills and judgment to run a range of
general-purpose machinery, the way a Japanese worker does on the shop
floor, robots are probably the least thing folks in Detroit have to
worry about.

The Japanese deliberately chose Taichi Ohno's reinvented version of
craft production with flexible machinery and a skilled work force,
over robotization and deskilling of the work force.


-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html