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

[Stan Rhodes]

I agree completely with Kevin about the red herring of automation.  Paul
seems obsessed with it.  Although I haven't managed to read every email and
link, I've thus far found none of it significantly compelling.  After one
attempt to encourage more active skepticism on his part, back near the
beginning of July, I quickly saw the writing on the wall.  However, until
now, I've been missing a trick performed right in front of my nose.  Now
it's caught my eye:

Paul, I assume you are the wikipedia user "Freevolution," who has written
most of the Wikipedia "jobless recovery" article, right?  You've linked to
it in multiple emails, including this one, quoting it with no mention that
you're essentially quoting yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery  Really man, what the hell?

Also, happy holidays, p2pr.
-- Stan

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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