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

[Michel Bauwens]

Thanks Andrew.

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 2:40 PM, J. Andrew Rogers <reality.miner at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 12:15 AM, Michel Bauwens<michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > 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 ..
>
>
> I think this is a misdiagnosis.  Western industrialized work
> increasingly requires an exceptional amount of context that can't be
> gained except by spending inordinate amounts of time.  This is more an
> observation than a value judgement.  In all the multinationals I have
> experience with, the reason the American divisions generally
> outperformed European divisions by objective metrics was *not* because
> the Americans were smarter but because Americans spent so much bloody
> time immersed in the subject matter that they made better business
> decisions on average.  In short, they have a wetware computer utterly
> dedicated to the task. Perhaps not healthy, but effective and a
> harbinger of things to come.
>
> It is not the amount of labor, which any robot can do in many cases,
> but the amount of quality thinking. And a computer will be doing that
> too sooner rather than later. Most jobs are already make-work as it
> is, particularly in the government sector, and there are limits to how
> much make-work the economy can absorb. Naturally, the question is why
> we bother with make-work in the first place; we might be better off
> just handing those people a check to sit at home and get out of the
> way.
>


Hi Andrew, I'll leave it up to your judgment, I must admit never having
heard of objective metrics proven American companies to be  better than
European ones, whether there is a U.S. superiority. It is true that U.S.
workers generally work longer hours than their European counterpart, but I
have yet to see that this improves their decision-making. Anyway, that could
be my own euro-bias about well-rested minds, having a healthy social life
and time to read things that are unrelated to the job at hand. But I welcome
any stats that disprove this.

Apart from that, your arguments complement rather than contradict my
comparison with the East Asian choice of using more people for the same work
amount. In addition, educational levels still have to catch up (of course
this is only true 'on average', there are plenty of outstanding people on
this side of the ocean).





>
>
> > 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,
>
>
> This does not follow, most people in the industrialized world only
> have a job because it is still too expensive to automate what they do,
> *not* because what they do could not be automated.  The price coming
> down to the point where automation is a clear economic win is just a
> matter of time.
>

This is not really the argument. I'm arguing about the reasoning that
automation destroys the total number of jobs required. It hasn't happened,
automation has occured at the same time as a growing of the working
population, and I'm assuming that the recurring capitalist crisis of
overproduction are not directly related to automation. I also disagree that
1) every job can be automated; 2) every job "should" be automated. Again the
massage example, yes there are massage sofa's and automated water massage
machines, but given choice (and I have tried all of them), I still prefer a
human relationship than a machine. Again, given choice, would an elderly
Japanese prefer a humanoid robot as a companion, or a caring Indonesian
caretaker (I'm not talking about the choice of the Indonesian here, that's
yet another part of the story)


>
> Sure, some jobs can't be automated at the moment, but the number of
> such professions is not increasing.  Quite the opposite.
>

This may be true, but I would submit the following hypothesis: in a society
that is no longer driven by capital accumulation, a number of jobs might be
de-automated. Automation is not just a technical decision, but a economic
and political one. Different technological scenarios are possible in the
future.

There is nothing 'automatic' about 'automation'

Michel



>
>
> --
> J. Andrew Rogers
> realityminer.blogspot.com
>



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