[p2p-research] US/European post-WWII experiences and social safety nets

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
> Maybe my essay here should be extended to be more about social forces
> affecting unemployment (even when unemployment number are low)? For 
> example,
> in the USA, everyone being expected to go to college has helped keep
> unemployment lower (creating jobs for professors and keeping people out of
> the labor pool). In theory, cradle-to-grave schooling could absorb any
> amount of excess workers (a trend we see all too much of in the USA
> already). So, at some point, we need to talk more about living conditions
> than about unemployment figures. Or, to quote John Taylor Gatto who often
> talks about how schooling is interwoven with economic assumptions:
>   http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
> "Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an
> abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you
> have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in
> systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs;
> the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live,
> and die there."

As I think more about this one point, I can wonder if maybe we should all 
just give in gracefully to this trend and focus on reforming schools on the 
assumption that they *will* be where most people will spend most of their 
lives in the future? :-) It seems that to date, I have alway heard most 
people (not homeschoolers or unschoolers or freeschoolers though) describe 
the number of people in school in a society with great pride, rather than 
derision. Maybe that pride is what could be built on to build better schools 
on the assumption, like "The Hotel California" or "The Village", you could 
never really leave such places?

Related:
"The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to 
Life/Work Planning" by Richard N. Bolles"
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/0913668583

So, essentially, is the future is everyone living on college campuses, with 
great dorms, lots of fun activities, and so on, with robots instead of 
low-paid immigrant workers to clean up after them and do the cooking?

And our cities and rural areas will then just become more and more 
college-like over time?

So, I'll add that to a list of alternatives that transcend market failure:
* peer production as a gift economy or building up a shared commons,
* home production for subsistence (with 3D printing, gardening, frugality),
* a guaranteed basic income spent in conventional markets,
* war to start the whole thing over, and
* cradle-to-grave college campus life with endlessly deferred college loans.

So, that does suggest that people working at universities or attending them 
should stop talking about the "real world", and should just start assuming 
school *is* the real world, and what happens outside of school is the 
anomaly. :-)

Which still might explain my own remaining yearnings for life around a nice 
college campus, walking to everything, having lots of good conversations, 
using the campus library and cafeterias, and so on, not giving a care to who 
owns patents or copyrights produced there or where the funding comes from or 
how much money it costs anyone to attend or how much they owe down the road. 
Essentially, such an idyllic college campus, when it worked well, might look 
like a prettified abundant USSR as described in its own propaganda. :-) And 
with any totalitarian aspects whitewashed away, with true academic freedom 
instead of "Disciplined Minds".

So, that idea links back to suggestions I made about a "post-scarcity 
Princeton", essentially giving everyone indefinately the opportunity to be 
faculty/staff/students at Princeton-like place:
   "Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for 
prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease "
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

Anyway, no doubt our real future will be a mix of all five of these things 
in some way.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/