By John Ballard
�The great materialistic progress which we have venerated for so long is on the verge of bankruptcy. We can no longer believe that we are born into this world to accumulate wealth and abandon ourselves to mortal pleasures. We were told the twentieth century was the most progressive that the world has ever known, but unfortunately the progression was in the direction of self-destruction.�
~~~~~~ M. P. Hall (1901-1990)"We have met the enemy... and he is us"
~~~~~~ Walt Kelly -- Pogo
The industrial revolution and modern technology have transformed the meaning and importance of work.
A growing number of Americans are becoming aware of the large and growing gap separating rich and poor even as we witness a virtual collapse of our economy.
Manufacturing jobs, once the source of good wages, comfortable benefit packages and the path to a secure retirement have been systematically sent to countries where they are being done by workers making much less, demanding few benefits.
Service jobs are replacing manufacturing jobs. Unlike the products of manufacturing which can have a long and useful life, services disappear faster than ice sculptures once they have been performed.
In the same way that ponzi schemes are not a good way to make a living, service jobs are NOT good replacements for manufacturing jobs. It was not his intention but professor Rosling's talk underscores this point. He was talking about how technology liberates the mind and body for more productive and enriching alternatives to a tedious lifetime of endless labor. But his example also shows how technology is slowly but surely making work obsolete altogether.
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet's colleague, put his finger on a number of elephants in our economic living room. (Banking is "evil" and contributed to the recession. In addition to being evil, bankers have also exhibited "megalomania" and "insanity" in fueling the boom.) I haven't read the transcript and have no way to know why he used the word "evil" to describe banking but I suspect he has the same reaction we all have to people who want to get something for nothiing..
It's an appealing idea -- getting something for nothing -- but in many ways those of us fortunate enough to be born after the onset of the industrial revolution are in that group. We may not literally be getting something for nothing, but we are getting a helluva lot for free. Thanks to an accident of birth and history the first people to domesticate animals for work had a better birthright than their forefathers who did everything the hard way. And so work, both physically and intellectually with the advance of math and science (and the mixed blessings of fossil fuels), has been getting easier to this day.
Thanks to a modern career I worked my whole working life in air-conditioned comfort but my father, an auto mechanic, did not. And he worked harder and loger than I, ending with a more modest retirement. His father, my grandfather, was a farmer and was feeding farm animals two weeks before he died in his seventies. Even he had advantages of rural electrification and a tractor that his father did not have, who farmed all his life with neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. And so it goes. The further back we trace our history, the more we find harder work in return for lifestyles with less discretionary time and energy.
Work in its traditional understanding is becoming obsolete. The challenge mankind faces is how best to multiply and spread the blessings of progress to as many people as possible. The history of politics can be measured by the availability of goods and services. Lenin's slogan was "Peace, Land and Bread!" Civil uprisings, genocides and most wars can be traced to shortages of essential resources.
My reflections this morning are inspired in part by a delightful and insightful op-ed in Dawn, one of Pakistan's leading papers, by Nadeem Paracha. Pakistan is in many ways a microcosm of the challenges I have described. Between now and the onset of senility (which I hope is still far away, but even at the most distant the challenge will not be resolved) I will be watching Pakistan for clues about how my grandchildren and the generations that follow them might live -- that is, if crazy people alive today don't first succeed in bringing about the extinction of the human species altogether.
I'm not sure that we even know how to define "progress." Much of what we call progress is actually, I think, a path to self destruction. I grew up working in steel plants, sort of the opposite of an air conditioned environment, and my aspiration did not lie in moving to an air conditioned desk job. I moved up to owning my own business, working in those same steel plants installing and repairing the machinery which I had once operated, sweating my butt off in summer and freezing it off in winter. To me that was progress: not to become more comfortable, or to make more money, but to be more creative and to go from "making things" to "making things work." Am I successful? Not by the standards of today's society. I live on a small Social Security pension, and my health is less than ideal. But I can point to steel plants which, many years after I retired, are still operating with machinery that I installed in cities from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I'm happy enough with that.
ReplyDeleteThe point is, I am not enriching myself at the cost of destroying my planet or disempowering my fellow man, but we, as human beings are doing doing precisely that. We live more and more comfortably and abundantly, in greater number and for longer lives, and the planet upon which we live is dying. How do we call that progress?
Good point.
ReplyDeleteAbout thirty years ago my wife and I moved out of downtown Atlanta to the suburbs where we were able to get a bigger house on a larger lot for a relatively good price. Lots of bang for the buck when you move out. But it wasn't long til the dense woods across our back fence was ripped apart as a massive apartment development got underway. A friend visiting from town looked out the back window one visit and said wryly, "I think they call it progress."
Another time I was riding through the North Georgia hill country with a priest whose congregation was made up of local people. I made the offhand remark that the landscape looked so peaceful I think I could live here forever.
He replied "Just be sure you don't over-romanticize it."
He knew that I might choose to live there, but he also knew well that many of those living there were not doing so out of choice and would not likely have either the chance or imagination to live anywhere else.
What we have now, compared with the past, is not necessarily guaranteed to be an improvement. But in most cases we have a lot more choices. The option to choose from among a sometimes impossible number of possibilities is what sets modern life apart from generations before. But is it progress? As you say, that's questionable.
The thrust of my post, though, is the obsolescence of work. And "work" used to presume human involvement. As technology displaces human workers a way must be found to feed, house, clothe and care for a swelling population of obsolete people. Along with preserving the planet, that is becoming our most compelling problem.
Excellent post. Because the relationship between labor, technology, and wealth cannot be allowed to be underestimated or misrepresented. The lion share of what we have; natural resources, technology, infrastructure, and education have progressed or evolved primarily on the collective backs of the people, either through their rightful citizen share of the bountiful land or the physical and intellectual advances funded through labor and collective taxation. The failure to understand that in effect, we as citizens, own these "things" and should rightfully share in the wealth generated by these things - will inevitably lock us into the archaic trajectory of war-lordism and serfdom, where the wealth generated by labor, ideas, and technology flows exclusively to the powerful few.
ReplyDeleteThis is essentially a political problem of transforming the aspirations, hard work, and sacrifice of the American dreams of a better future into a contradictory and convoluted construction of empty promises, self loathing, dependency, and isolation.
Thanks.
ReplyDeleteA small handful of self-made super-rich individuals seems to understand but they are few and far between. We all know the Buffett and Gates fortunes have been earmarked for philanthropy and in another century Andrew Carnegie was an outcast among his peers, the robber-barons, because of his philosophy of wealth.
The 'Andrew Carnegie Dictum' illustrates Carnegie's generous nature:
To spend the first third of one's life getting all the education one can.
To spend the next third making all the money one can.
To spend the last third giving it all away for worthwhile causes.
But these are the exceptions. In the same way that many ordinary people who never owned a slave believed in the institution of slavery, so too do many people today dream of becoming filthy rich, never pausing to think that real source fulfillment in life, like life itself, cannot be bought. A line from an old spiritual says "If living were a thing that money could buy, the rich would live and the poor would die."
One of my college professors said the Industrial Revolution took off faster in Britain than on the Continent, particularly France, because of their different philosophies of work. The Brits, he said, felt work was good, but the French saw work as necessary, but not necessarily good. Somehow we need to recover some of that thinking.
I've been watching the Greeks who may be on the right track. A local talk show host whose rhetorical skills are sharper than his grasp of politics and economics (Isn't that true of most so-called Conservatives?) was beating up the Greeks last week, saying they didn't have any good system of collecting taxes, a quarter of the population worked for the government at twice the wages of private-sector workers, etc. As he ranted I recalled this from a few days before.
Once--so the argument goes--countries in Greece's position would not have been forced to deflate, radically cut budgets (hence, services) or engender widespread anger from the poor and unemployed. They could have cheapened their currency and counted on cheaper exports to jump-start growth. The euro, however, is a kind of hammerlock rich European countries like Germany now have on them, a kind of IMF scold sitting on their shoulder, and advantaging--wait for it!--German exports. LINK
You see. Now that corporations have become persons, the next logical development is that countries ("sovereign," you know) are becoming the same, subject to over-arching infrastructures mostly put into place by -- you guessed it -- the corporations.
(Bernard Avishai, by the way, has another post worth checking in this regard. It links to a prescient piece he wrote four or five years ago.)
"A small handful of self-made super-rich individuals seems to understand"
ReplyDeleteI'm not impressed with the "self-made super-rich individuals" who "seem to understand." The fact that they are "giving away" large portions of their wealth does not much impress me. What impresses me, unfavorably, is that they made such vast sums to begin with.
Bill Gates is a thief and a usurer. He stole intellectual property on the most massive scale ever known, sold products on the market at prices inflated beyond the wildest avarice of the most evil robber barons of the "gilded age," and ruthlessly destroyed anyone who showed even the slightest sign of becoming a competitor. And I'm supposed to think that he is some sort of saint because he is giving away some money while living in a house that cost more to build than many small cities? I think not.
No argument from me. I'm not nominating anyone for sainthood. The Wikipedia list of robber barons is a Who's Who of graft, dishonesty, manipulation and selfishness gone wild. And Carnegie, according to a biographer I once heard interviewed by Terry Gross, was no exception. He accumulated his fortune using insider information that today would put him in jail and ran his steel mills with a cold-blooded contempt for ordinary workers that justified and invited organized unions that also came into being about the same time. When asked why he didn't pay employees better he said they would only waste any extra money drinking and gambling instead of improving their lives. He was not a saint by any means, but his overall philosophy of wealth set him apart.
ReplyDeleteWarren Buffet, though famously giving away his fortune, made sure that each of his children was first put in charge of his or her own individual foundation. I'm sure today's analogues of the robber barons have no desire to take chances on the loss of unearned generational wealth.
I've read that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has the reputation of being strict, micromanaging and parsimonious with its beneficence so your assessment of the Gates temperament is probably on target. We might say philanthropy is a socially agreeable way for selfish people to enjoy respectability. (It seems to be an article of faith for political contributors.)
When I saw Biltmore, the Vanderbilt estate in Ashville, NC, a guide said in order to have the place built a railroad had to be constructed to bring in what was needed. And apparently the place is in possession of a Vanderbilt heir to this day. So no, I haven't any illusions that even the most generous of rich people are worthy of sainthood. But in a few cases - too few - they sometimes realize when they have acquired MORE than enough.