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

[Michel Bauwens]

I wonder if anyone has seen the different documentaries on the Cuban
agricultural revolution?

Afther their own Peak Oil, they completely had to reconfigure agriculture,
to a knowledge-rich, but mostly organic model, which not only led to higher
productivity, urban agriculture that greened the cities, but a real rural
renaissance, and farmer coop members now earning twice as much as doctors
(these coops are independent, though regulated, from/by the state)

So in this case, in a scenario which ressembles what other countries are
going to go through, there is actually a revival of agricultural labour.

I'm remembering Sam suggesting a similar scenario for the U .S.

Again I therefore re-iterate, there's nothing 'automatic' about automation,
which may express itself quite differently in the future, especially in the
non-western world

and as Paul says, even a decline of 'jobs', doesn't destroy the need for
plentiful human activities ...

the jobless recovery is much less the result of automation, much more about
outsourcing the U.S. industrial production to cheap labour countries with
less automation than western countries (though they will eventually catch
up)

Japan, the most automated country in the world, has in fact increasing job
shortages in many sectors (though an increase in general unemployment after
this crisis)

again, and again, the simple equation automation = the end of work, is
simplistic, and not empirically validated,

Michel

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 10:02 PM, Paul D. Fernhout <
pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:

>  Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
>> 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-
>
> I actually agree with you about the human side of all this. :-) I've always
> maintained that, like in hunter/gatherer days, activities like raising
> children, comforting the dying, taking care of the infirm, helping
> neighbors, singing, dancing, sharing knowledge with others, exploring new
> ideas, learning, contemplating nature and the cosmos and the infinite, and
> many various ways of having fun can easily consume most of a person's day.
> And further, that such activities *should* consume most of the day. :-)
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
>
> The issue is exactly whether we should continue to talk about those sorts
> of
> activities as "work" though. Or even as "consumption". :-) If you look at a
> society like the Amish, much of which the USA pays for (entertainment,
> basic
> education, basic medical treatment, even barn construction) they might
> handle within their families and communities without money changing hands.
> (There of course may be other things exchanged, whether respect or a sense
> of obligation, but in a more personal peer-oriented way.)
>
> As Ryan suggests, labor economies may have fundamental differences with
> material economies. But perhaps they have different social and ethical
> dimensions too.
>
> To put in a few economic numbers, in the USA, agriculture has gone
> from 90% of the paid labor force to only 2% over the last 200 years.
> Manufacturing has gone from 30% to 12% over the last fifty years or so
> (with
> increasing imports, granted, but that 12% still probably produces more than
> that 30% did, given much productivity increase over that time by a factor
> of
> three or four). So, where are all the jobs going to come from today if
> agriculture has gone, and manufacturing is going? (And one difference is we
> can see advanced robots in widescale use that for the first time are
> getting
> *better* than humans at dexterous tasks, like they can operate on a heart
> while it is still beating, either teleoperated or automatically.) Sure, we
> need some millions of green energy jobs for the time being, but even then,
> once everyone has windmills and solar panels, the things last for decades
> with practically no maintenance, so there are not many long lasting jobs
> there.
>
> So, what are people doing within the money economy? The bulk of the
> remaining tasks are basically "service jobs". So, human activities I listed
> above are, for the most part now becoming paid "services". So, the real
> issue becomes, if agriculture and manufacturing are becoming to the point
> where practically no one needs to do them, then why should most "service
> jobs" be part of a market economy oriented around managing *material*
> scarcity? Services in a healthy community are not usually scarce the way
> manufactured goods used to be scarce. In the past, all these services,
> including massage, were for the most part not done for money most of the
> time. Sure there were wandering minstrels, traveling fortune tellers, and
> the world's oldest profession, but often these were looked down on as
> questionable paid "services" (all entertainment, really) and they were very
> rarely career aspirations for most people. Most of these other services
> were
> provided in a more peer-to-peer way, either as gifts or through some social
> exchange.
>
> And today, the internet can provide more entertainment than most people
> need. In fact, preventing access to that entertainment is now considered
> another "service problem" to create jobs and eliminate job seekers:
> "'Internet addict' killed at Chinese boot camp: 16-year old boy beaten to
> death by camp supervisors"
>
> http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/-internet-addict-killed-at-chinese-boot-camp-622960
>
> I'll admit that "healer" and "minister" were classic service professions
> that many aspired to -- but sometimes those services protected themselves
> in
> a guild-like way of keeping knowledge private, or other tricks of the
> trade.
> And it was only in the last hundred years that your chances of living
> generally went up when you saw a doctor, instead of down. :-( Handwashing
> helped some with that:
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
> "The First Clinic had an average maternal mortality rate due to puerperal
> fever of about 10% (actual rates fluctuated wildly). ... Semmelweis
> described desperate women begging on their knees not to be admitted to the
> First Clinic. Some women even preferred to give birth in the streets,
> pretending to have given sudden birth en route to the hospital (a practice
> known as street births), which meant they would still qualify for the child
> care benefits without having been admitted to the clinic. ..."
>
> I guess as I see it, the free market has through the past few thousand
> years
> been *mostly* about goods, not services, in terms of overall volume (I
> include the "service" of shopkeeping and trading as essentially about
> goods). There have been non-good related service offerings
> (apprenticeships,
> for one example), but they have been at the edges (and even then, in many
> case often related directly with things like repairing objects or learning
> how to produce them). And even many of the highest prestige service
> professions like lawyer and minister were generally related to maintaining
> a
> pyramidal social order. So, maybe what has been unsaid by many economists
> (maybe some do?) is that the transition to a "service economy", or
> essentially, corporatizing basic human interactions (activities in the past
> performed by friends, family, and neighbors), is *unhealthy* socially? And
> maybe it would be better organized informally somehow, rather than through
> exchanging ration units (dollars)? So, again, the need to be more p2p.
>
> And even if one can make an argument for a highly structured health care
> system or legal system (perhaps even with rationing), does that argument
> really apply all the way through every helping profession or every personal
> service?
>
> John Taylor Gatto suggests compulsory schooling has been part of all that,
> to destroy communities and make people more dependent on authorities to do
> the organizing in a pyramidal way, or on a market dominated by large
> organizations to supply services most people no longer have confidence they
> can do for themselves. From:
>  http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
> "Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system
> has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful
> readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based
> economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the
> Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant
> people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type
> economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?"
>
> Some key issues in the ongoing economic transition back to a
> hunter/gatherer
> lifestyle (but with technology) are:
> * demand saturation;
> * exponentially increasing automation and productivity;
> * the end of a need for extrinsic guarding (given robot guards or no
> guards;
> * improved peer relations;
> * greater cooperation;
> * decreasing corruption in government by better surveillance; and
> * the ending of compulsory schooling (or at least its marginalization
> through the internet which is full of useful information and ideas).
>
> So, there may always be things to do and people to do them (like raising
> children), but the point, is, will they be "jobs" and will "ration units"
> play a major role in how such activities are organized?
>
> === Some more thoughts on why I believe that:
>
> On the consumption side, I agree that consumption levels have risen and
> that
> has forestalled "the end of work". That's why these trends have been slower
> to play out:
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
> Or as written about here in the 1990s:
>  "The Overworked American"
>  http://users.ipfw.edu/ruflethe/american.html
>
> Still, I feel it likely demand in the USA for stuff and bigger houses has
> been saturated in many ways. And there are counter trends to more stuff
> like
> environmentalism and the "voluntary simplicity" movement too. And even if
> increasing demand has somewhat further to go (many people in the USA and
> abroad do live without decent housing and health care and many other things
> we now accept as "basics"), improvements in productivity will balance
> increasing demands, leading to a net job loss. These productivity
> improvements come in several ways (US employers have squeezed their
> employees with unpaid labor), but the best ways may be through automation
> and better design, like with multi-functional appliances like the iPhone or
> 3D printers.
>
> I agree with Ryan about overemployment and overpay. One big reason is, many
> of these professions just make work for each other. Many professions have
> long been "trafficking in drug users" and become addicted to the problems
> they claim to solve. Example:
>  "Trafficking in Drug Users: Professional Exchange Networks in the Control
> of Deviance" by Jim Beniger
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Trafficking-Drug-Users-Professional-Sociological/dp/0521276802
> Or as above, beating teenagers to death to save them from the internet. :-(
>
> Most countries get by better than the USA with less lawyers, teachers,
> guards, judges, soldiers, and so on. So, a vast percentage of the US
> population is involved in guarding functions. Two complementary guarding
> examples are US police guarding against US citizens escaping the country by
> using drugs, and US soldiers guarding foreign oil pipelines to make the
> products the citizens are supposed to be buying instead of the drugs. (In
> general I would discourage people from using drugs, of course; it is better
> to fix our society so less people want to escape it, IMHO.)
> Or in China, there are now people who guard against escaping the country
> through the internet.
>
> Most key medical personnel are in artificially short supply with
> artificially high rates of pay, limited only by the number of slots in
> medical schools and the high cost of medical school tuition, much of which
> just goes to other doctors as a sort of pyramid scheme. That could easily
> change with cheaper medical education through the internet and through
> simulations. Relative to paying a doctor US$400K a year as a professor,
> running would-be medical students through computer simulations is a lot
> cheaper. Sure, there needs to be hands on stuff -- but I'm talking
> elimintating most of the cost of learning to be a doctor eventually. This is
> only the beginning:
>  "Trauma Center: Second Opinion [Wii]"
>  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rjGb382Xfc
> Sure, that is unrealistic; but it shows the potential -- many people have
> networked game consoles in their home that could teach them much of modern
> medicine. Even more direct physical activities like surgery can be taught
> through force feedback robotics:
>  "Butcher attempts simulator op"
>  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8050883.stm
> "Using simulators to train surgeons makes them quicker and better, a Danish
> study has shown. The research, published in the British Medical Journal,
> comes after Sir Liam Donaldson, England's chief medical officer, called for
> more simulation training in the NHS. "
>
> And robots are even filling in for patients:
>  "Robot Patient Says "That Hurts""
>  http://gizmodo.com/172552/robot-patient-says-that-hurts
> "If you looked like this dude, you'd be saying "That hurts" as well. This
> is a robot pre-programmed with 8 different medical conditions. It has 24
> sensors under its soft, warmish silicone skin and can respond to proddings
> and pokings with vocal complaints. Designed as a teching aid, they've
> discovered that laying hands on a robot makes you more ready to handle
> squirmy, wet, and stinking human beings."
>
> And even dentistry:
>  "Japanese Dental Students Use a Robot Patient"
>
> http://www.switched.com/2009/07/08/japanese-dental-students-use-a-robot-patient/
> "No one likes going to the dentist, so imagine the discomfort of being a
> patient for a dentist-in-training. So, in order to avoid pain, damage, and
> deep dental trauma, BBC reports that a professor at the Nippon Dental
> University Hospital in Tokyo has developed an interesting solution. A
> sensor-laden, blinking and gurgling robot named Simroid acts as feedback,
> documenting and alerting the trainee when he or she has dug too deep or
> accidentally touched the robot inappropriately. The entire session is
> recorded to be later reviewed by professors or students."
>
> Now, is that fun, or what? :-) A chance to realistically "play doctor" with
> few consequences. :-) And, imagine though, how much the spread of these
> physical simulators might improve general medical skills among peers. Sure,
> things can and will go wrong -- I'm mainly pointing to a general trend. And
> while these robot patients are expensive and rare now, in twenty years,
> there is no reason these things might cost very little. Five year olds might
> be playing dentist with real tools on grown-up sized robots. :-) My kid
> already did that with this:
>  "Shrek 2 Rotten Root Canal Play-Doh Set"
>  http://www.amazon.com/Shrek-Rotten-Root-Canal-Play-Doh/dp/B00015Q1IE
> So, we'll see this improve... So, medical costs should drop as medical
> experience becomes widespread, the same way computer skills were once rare
> but now many people know how to do lots of computer basics and more advanced
> things.
>
> Plus, as with computers, technology gets easier to use. I'm not sure how
> good it really is, but you can now use a laser wand on teeth to see if they
> have cavities, and you can use a cup that fits over the tooth to treat small
> cavities with ozone, and then use a remineralizing mouth rinse. Even if
> ozone is not as good as conventional treatments (I don't know) it is likely
> easier for amateurs to do for peers.
>  http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080131093057AAPGE9O
>
> And once people *seriously* start rethinking dentistry and medicine from
> the point of view of how can it be deskilled, we may see even more
> innovations in such directions. Of course, the best way to do dentistry and
> doctoring is from prevention. Like better nutrition, fighting against
> advertising:
>  http://www.honestfoodguide.org/
>
> From my own experience around technology firms, most technology work is
> also unnecessary -- duplicating existing products, making proprietary
> versions of things from scratch, competing instead of cooperating. Almost
> all software is redundant (99.9% of it or more, and I say that as a
> programmer. :-) And most software would be far better built on a flexible
> core (like Lisp or Smalltalk), now that saving machine cycles and memory are
> not such a big deal most of the time.
>
> Choice is better up to a point; then it becomes a tyranny of
> incompatibility and decisions.
> "The Tyranny of Choice"
>
> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=0006AD38-D9FB-1055-973683414B7F0000
> """
> Americans today choose among more options in more parts of life than has
> ever been possible before. To an extent, the opportunity to choose enhances
> our lives. It is only logical to think that if some choice is good, more is
> better; people who care about having infinite options will benefit from
> them, and those who do not can always just ignore the 273 versions of
> cereal
> they have never tried. Yet recent research strongly suggests that,
> psychologically, this assumption is wrong. Although some choice is
> undoubtedly better than none, more is not always better than less.
>  This evidence is consistent with large-scale social trends. Assessments
> of well-being by various social scientists--among them, David G. Myers of
> Hope College and Robert E. Lane of Yale University--reveal that increased
> choice and increased affluence have, in fact, been accompanied by decreased
> well-being in the U.S. and most other affluent societies. As the gross
> domestic product more than doubled in the past 30 years, the proportion of
> the population describing itself as "very happy" declined by about 5
> percent, or by some 14 million people. In addition, more of us than ever
> are
> clinically depressed. Of course, no one believes that a single factor
> explains decreased well-being, but a number of findings indicate that the
> explosion of choice plays an important role.
> """
>
> Even the issues Andrew raises, whether US Americans are more productive
> than
> others, is to some degree an issue of *competition*. If the firms were not
> trying to outguess each other, the problems would not be so complex. And
> without so much corruption related to privatizing profits and socializing
> costs, the decisions would not be made so badly for the rest of us
> (example,
> we would have moved to renewables decades ago over external cost issues).
> Ultimately, while this is hard for even me to believe :-), the internet has
> the potential to decrease government corruption in the long term (David
> Brin's "The Transparent Society").
>
> We are also not anywhere close to the amount of jobs we can eliminate with
> just existing technology over the web (for example, ordering local
> groceries
> or products to pick up at a local store, or have delivered by a
> self-driving
> van). In general, self-driving vehicles will eliminate huge numbers of
> workers.
>
> We could eliminate a whole huge set of government jobs by replacing "needs
> based" support (which requires people to check eligibility and income) with
> a basic income.
>
> Advertising has created all sorts of "needs" like owning a snowmobile or
> motorboat you might use a few days a year instead of renting one (or just
> enjoying nature by snowshoeing or canoeing). Not all jobs may be easily
> fully automated, but at the very least, automation lets a few people do
> more
> production.
>
> So, there are all sorts of reasons people in the USA are doing too much and
> charging too much for it.
>  http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
>
> Even some of the highest paid professions like lawyers and medical
> specialists are possible to eliminate by making information available
> through the internet and by structuring the systems that are surrounding
> those activities more. It's the same way as on the factory floor -- why
> create a "smart" bin picking robot when you can just have the parts
> delivered nicely organized in palettes where they have been put as they
> were
> produced? Why lose the orientation of the part at one point, only to have
> to
> pay to put it back somewhere else? There are several aspects of our society
> where we let things get complex on the assumption a human is there to deal
> with a problem, where it we change a system end-to-end, or systematize a
> complex task into little parts, then there is less of a problem. So, if we
> have less property crime, there is less need for lawyers to deal with it;
> but also if the court processes are streamlined, there is less need for as
> many lawyers.
>
> Marshall Brain talks about this in Manna, with people wearing headsets that
> tell them what to do, step by step:
>  http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna2.htm
> """
>  Then there were all the unemployed people. Between Manna improving
> efficiency and forcing out the managers, plus overseas outsourcing taking
> out white collar jobs, plus machines like the automated checkout lines and
> burger flippers coming on line and so on, there were plenty of people who
> were unemployed. Unemployed people went around all day applying to jobs.
> But
> in a sense, that was pointless. All of the interconnected Manna systems
> knew
> every single person in the job pool. Manna also knew the performance of
> every single person who had ever worked in the system. You were in an
> incredibly bad spot if you were unemployed.
>  Then there were all the people being managed by Manna. They all made
> minimum wage. If you were wearing a headset at work you were making minimum
> wage and everyone knew it. And everyone knew that if you did not do what
> Manna told you to do, as fast as Manna told you to do it, you would be
> unemployed and making nothing.
>  And then there was everyone else -- the doctors, lawyers, accountants,
> office workers, executives, politicians. The executives and politicians
> made
> a ton of money and they were never going to be wearing headsets. Joe Garcia
> at Burger-G was making $100 million per year and flaunting it like a rock
> star.
>  And Manna was starting to move in on some of the white collar work force.
> The basic idea was to break every job down into a series of steps that
> Manna
> could manage. No one had ever realized it before, but just about every job
> had parts that could be subdivided out.
>  HMOs and hospitals, for example, were starting to put headsets on the
> doctors and surgeons. It helped lower malpractice problems by making sure
> that the surgeon followed every step in a surgical procedure. The hospitals
> could also hyper-specialize the surgeons. For example, one surgeon might do
> nothing but open the chest for heart surgery. Another would do the arterial
> grafts. Another would come in to inspect the work and close the patient
> back
> up. What this then meant, over time, was that the HMO could train
> technicians to do the opening and closing procedures at much lower cost.
> Eventually, every part of the subdivided surgery could be performed by a
> super-specialized technician. Manna kept every procedure on an exact track
> that virtually eliminated errors. Manna would schedule 5 or 10 routine
> surgeries at a time. Technicians would do everything, with one actual
> surgeon overseeing things and handling any emergencies. They all wore
> headsets, and Manna controlled every minute of their working lives.
>  That same hyper-specialization approach could apply to lots of white
> collar jobs. Lawyers, for example. You could take any routine legal problem
> and subdivide it -- uncontested divorces, real estate transactions, most
> standard contracts, and so on. It was surprising where you started to see
> headsets popping up, and whenever you saw them you knew that the people
> were
> locked in, that they were working every minute of every day and that wages
> were falling.
> """
>
> Anyway, that's all part of why I think, barring plague or war, we will see
> a jobless recovery, if not even more unemployment. This is the background
> trend; the economic bubbles and outsourcing magnify it in the USA, of
> course, but it would be happening regardless of them. Still, the rest of the
> world may be slower to see this. So, we'll see rising employment in various
> other countries for a time as they go up these curves. But, I'd suggest,
> those curves in other countries will happen a lot faster than in the USA.
> And what happens in China when 3D printers take off or robots became really
> cheap? Let's hope something good. :-)
>
> --Paul Fernhout
> http://www.pdfernhout.net/
>
>
> 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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