[p2p-research] What's different about this economic downturn? -- the severe unemployment

[Michel Bauwens]

within capitalism, jobs are dependent on the demand side ... and the policy
of neoliberalism has been to gut the popular demand side by focusing on the
top 1-10% .. if you'd restore the part of labour, demand would be restored
...

overemployed is more difficult to gauge, certainly if you live in one of the
East Asian countries which has chosen industrious development over
industrial development, then you'd see that a typical westerner is doing the
job of 3-4 people over here .. so it doesn't look much like overemployment
seen from this side ... I would rather say most people are overworked, hence
there is underemployment ..

overpricing is I guess a matter of global competition ... services are less
subject to that than industrial products and the more complexity embedded in
knowledge work, the more unique it becomes ...

there is another way to look at it: as we are able to be more and more
productive and create more and more social wealth, many people could share
more of humanity's wealth ... but this requires a different redistribution
of human wealth ..

I do not give credence though to the automation argument of paul .. this has
been a recurrent theme in every crisis, yet employment has been growing
steadily, with woman entering the workforce etc... The simple reason is:
human needs are evolving,and there is plenty of cultural work, environmental
work, relational work that is very hard to automate, and even should not be
automated ... (machine massage sucks, for example, because it doesn't give
you the human relation that is part and parcel of such a service). There is
enough 'work' for everybody, even given industrial automation,

but of course, a deeper question is whether we should continue to talk about
'work' at all ..

Michel

On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> For those watching for the end of capitalism...it is the loss of employment
> that has people particularly spooked.  No one knows where future paying jobs
> are coming from...several industries...e.g. academia, social networking,
> manufacturing, traditional energy, banking, law, government, seem overpriced
> and overemployed.
>
> http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/20090904.gif
>
> --
> Ryan
>
>
>
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