[This is Chapter
Six of Murphey’s book The Emerging Crisis of Economic Displacement.]
Chapter Six
THE
DISPLACEMENT OF EMPLOYMENT
Unfortunately, the path to fully realizing the
potential for improving the human condition won't be smooth. We would like to think that progress will
advance steadily and evenly, much as the nineteenth century faith in progress
envisioned it would. But there's a
hitch: technology is becoming more and more "non-labor-intensive." Though this has been underway for a long
time, the change is, in terms of its potential, just started, just as it is
with the exponential increase of science and technology itself. Even now, it remains hard to picture that in
the future farming, manufacturing and even services will need few people. Such a development is magnificent, of course
-- except that it scrambles the usual order of things. What we are accustomed to is that people
share in economic output because they earn income that allows them to be
consumers. A circularity between income
and consumption forms the basis for the present economic system. When the economy will no longer need to
employ large numbers of people and pay them wages, or there are jobs but they
are mostly "out on the margin," the question will become one of how
people are to receive income to be consumers.
In turn, without consumers, how will the production of goods and
services continue to be motivated and
funded?
This is the old
"underconsumption" or "purchasing power" problem that
socialist thought raised for over a century without a good basis for it. "Say's Law" -- that each producer's
output provides the demand for what others produce, so that in the mutuality of
multiple production there is no lack of demand -- was formulated early in the
nineteenth century as part of the general classical liberal rebuttal to the
many arguments that "the market can't work." Say's Law made good sense and has certainly
proved right about the working of modern economies. Now, however, non-labor-intensive processes
are coming in that will give the purchasing power shortfall a very real
foundation unless we restructure things wisely.
Despite all the turmoil created over
the past 20 years by "downsizing," displacement has been slight
compared to that which will occur during the next few years. This appears contradicted by the activity and
demand for skills created today by science, technology and the expanding world
economy. What we need to grasp, though,
is that the downsizings, layoffs and "early retirements" that we have
seen in recent years are not passing phenomena.
They are early manifestations of a long-term secular tendency that will
be of massive proportions.
A centuries-long shift of human effort
has taken place from agriculture into manufacturing and more recently into
services. Most of the world's population
worked in agriculture until well into the Industrial Revolution; in fact, Sir
James Goldsmith says 3.1 billion people worldwide still do to this day.[1] With the rise of industry, people left the
countryside and flooded into the newly emerging factory towns. Where this has occurred, the result is truly
astonishing: today only 2.5 percent of the American people are in agriculture
while at the same time farm output exceeds all prior records.[2] (It is true that a larger percentage are
involved if "agriculture-related industries" are considered, but
those who point to that as a seeming rebuttal appear to be evading the central
fact.) Now Paul Strassman tells us yet
another astonishing development: that "with robots, factories can operate
with less than 15% of the workforce."
This, in turn, has led to "an enormous expansion of employment in
the service sector."[3]
The move from manufacturing to
services (while there has been a continuing increase, also, in manufacturing
output) is demonstrated by Cohen and Zysman: "The data show a relentless
decline in manufacturing employment, from about 50 percent of all jobs in 1950
down to about 20 percent now [1987], and an irresistible increase in service
jobs, up to about 70 percent of all jobs."
Manufacturing in the United States had not increased
its net employment at all since 1973.[4] Business Week reported in 1994 that
during the 1980s "the service sector accounted for practically all of the
growth in jobs and corporate profits."[5]
The other advanced economies have
experienced much the same. Jaroslaw
Wieczorek reports that "in the United Kingdom, the share of manufacturing
employment was 33 percent in 1900 and remained at more or less the same level
until 1960... [but] by 1990, the share of manufacturing employment in the
United Kingdom was barely half its 1956 level." In Germany, "its share of 30 percent in
1990 seems relatively low compared with the 1969 peak of about 45
percent."[6]
The shift from one sector to another and
then to another has been a major fact of life for American blacks. Rifkin tells us the story. He says that northern manufacturing
increasingly drew upon southern blacks after World War I when immigration was
held in check. World War II caused even
more to migrate to the northern factory jobs for wartime production. "Then, in October 1944, an event took
place in the rural Mississippi delta that was forever to change the
circumstances of African-Americans" -- the first display of the mechanical
cotton picker, with each picker doing what 50 workers did before. Within five years, six percent of the South's
cotton was picked by the new machine; this jumped to 78 percent by 1964, and to
100 percent by 1972. At the same time,
farmers substituted chemical defoliants for chopping by hand. The result of all these things was that
"more than 5 million black men, women, and children migrated north in
search of work between 1940 and 1970."
This, of course, was the classic shift from agriculture into
manufacturing. Unfortunately, the
northern factories soon became automated and moved to the suburbs, leaving an
"urban industrial proletariat" in the core cities. Destitution and a declining tax base brought
deterioration to the northern cities. Services didn't really absorb the displaced
black workers, except in governmental employment. This is not the chapter in which we will
discuss the effects of the displacement, but of course they were devastating.[7] Angry voices sprang up, all of them missing
the main point. Alienated ideology among
the black leadership and American liberals has blamed "racism" and
the society at large, while conservatives like myself have understood the
problem to be caused by the attitude of "victimology" spawned by that
ideology, by welfare dependency caused by misplaced governmental paternalism,
and by the collapse of the black sexual ethic and family.
This
is similar to the "peasant pressure" that has been a major part
of modern history throughout the world. Paul Kennedy tells how during the eighteenth
century the major cities of Europe were "swelled by the drift of
population from the countryside," creating a situation where Paris had
grown to "between 600,00 and 700,000 people, including up to 100,000 vagrants
-- combustible materials for a social explosion." London increased from 575,000 in 1750 to
900,000 in 1801.[8] Peasants poured into the
newly-industrializing cities of late-nineteenth century Russia before the
revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and into Tehran under the Shah before the Islamic
fundamentalist backlash overthrew his pro-Western government. The Hudson Institute reported in 1987 that
"hundreds of millions of new workers [are] flooding into the cities of the
developing world."[9] William Greider says that "at the bottom
of the global wage ladder is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new recruits:
peasants leaving the bleak circumstances of rural subsistence for the cash
incomes offered by factory work."[10] Brazil offers a graphic example, where its
immense slums, the favelas, were created by the migration from the
countryside when in the 1950s the small farmer was displaced by intensive
agriculture.[11]
Here is what Paul Kennedy says about
the future of what I call "peasant
pressure": "In 1985 about 32 percent of the population of the
developing world lived in urban areas, but that figure is expected to rise to
40 percent by 2000 and to around 57 percent in 2025." He points to some astonishing figures about
the density of population: already there are "143,000 per square mile in
Lagos, Nigeria, and 130,000 per square mile in Djakarta, Indonesia, compared
with New York's mere 11,400 per square mile." As a result, "it seems unlikely that
there will not be great waves of migration in the twenty-first century,"
with "enhanced efforts to control migration... unlikely to succeed in face
of the momentous tilt in the global demographic balances." Instead of migrating, some people may
"retreat into fundamentalism and reject Western values (especially its conspicuous
consumerism)."[12] Readers who want a grippingly realistic
portrayal of what mass migration of destitute millions can mean to Europe and
America should read a book I recommended in the introductory chapter: Jean
Raspail's novel The Camp of the Saints, which tells of a giant flotilla
that leaves India and lands on the southern coast of France without opposition
from a European public so besotted with intellectual, moral confusion that it
has lost all will to survive.[13]
The
specifics of displacement
Of farmers
There is still more to say about
agricultural displacement. Rifkin tells
us "new breakthroughs in the information and life sciences threaten to end
much of outdoor farming by the middle decades of the coming century... leading to
a world without farmers."[14] Even before the indoor, factory-like farm
comes to predominate, fields will be farmed by "sophisticated computerized
robots."[15] As Third World farmers become more efficient,
farm production will multiply while at the same time hundreds of millions of
people there will be displaced. Paul
Kennedy tells how genetically engineered soybean or rapeseed threatens to
replace coconut oil, "upon [the export of] which one-quarter of the Philippine
population is at least partially dependent." He says the laboratory production of rubber
could put some 16 million workers out of work in such rubber-producing
countries as Indonesia and Malaysia.[16] In Europe, according to Edward Yoxen and
Vittorio Di Martino, the pressures from biotechnology are such that some
farmers fear extinction. Those authors
say that accelerating farm technology is making productivity grow faster than
demand, leading in Europe to falling land prices and ever fewer farms and farmers.[17]
Of workers
Economic theory tells us that if
wages are flexible there will, subject to some frictional disconnections,
always be a demand for as many people as want to work. In the next chapter, I will discuss the
stagnation of incomes and the polarization of wealth as an alternative to unemployment. For the present, it is enough for us to see
the impact of the new technology on the jobs that have existed. That impact has already been enormous even in
its incipient stages.
Tevi Troy at the Hudson Institute
reported in May 1996 that "forty-three million jobs have been eliminated
in the United States since 1979. Many of
these downsized workers cannot find other jobs and, when they do, find them at
lower wages...."[18] Wallace Peterson cites a study telling how in
the United States between 1973 and 1986 a great many young males left the
workforce altogether, disappearing from unemployment statistics.[19]
Here are some specifics:
.
In 1989, the Arizona Republic reported that "it takes 50
percent fewer man-hours to produce a ton of steel today than it did at the
beginning of the 1980s." That same
year, the Sacramento Bee said the number of U.S. steelworkers had
dropped from 400,000 in 1980 to 155,000 in 1989 -- even as production
increased.[20]
.
William Greider wrote in 1997 that "General Electric tripled its
revenues and profits during the last fifteen years, while it shrank its
worldwide workforce from 435,000 to 220,000."[21]
.
Kevin Phillips tells how "General Motors announced that 15,000 of
its 99,000 salaried positions would be eliminated between 1991 and 1993,"
and says that a million and a half American white-collar workers lost their
jobs in the 1980s, a trend that would accelerate in the 1990s.[22]
.
Alfred Balk says that "in mining, since World War II employment has
fallen by 300,000 while production has risen by half. In textiles, yardage has remained constant
despite cutting 550,000 jobs."
"In 1987, Ford made 10 percent more cars than nine years earlier --
with 47 percent fewer production workers."
In the mid-1980s, "GM, in one restructuring, announced a cutback of
29,000 workers."[23]
.
Greider tells how in the two decades between 1971 and 1991 the worldwide
employment by "the world's 500 largest multinational corporations"
remained flat at "around 26 million people" while their sales
multiplied sevenfold.[24] David Boaz of the Cato Institute says that
during the 1980s "employment in the Fortune 500 fell by three-and-a-half
million."[25] In early 1996, Business Week reported
a study by Harvard business school professor Nitin Nohria of 100 of the United
States' largest companies; Nohria found that from 1978 to 1996 they laid off
three million workers, 77 percent of them white-collar. It was a net 22 percent of the companies'
total workforce.[26]
.
Fortune magazine cited the Hudson Institute in April 1996 as
projecting a loss of 160,000 jobs during the next few years in utilities
because of consolidations and restructurings.
The same article said "Deloitte & Touche's financial services
consulting group estimates that 450,000 banking jobs will vanish over the next
five to ten years," with the most vulnerable employees being
"tellers, clerks, and their supervisors."[27]
.
Jay Olnek tells how "U.S. flag merchant vessels employ[ed] 110,800
seamen" in 1947, compared to only 18,300 in 1981.[28]
.
As to office work, Fred Block relates that "the initial period of
computerization created large numbers of low-skilled data-entry jobs -- many of
which have subsequently been eliminated with more sophisticated data-entry
systems... Entering information with an optical scanner is already cheaper than
hiring keypunchers in the Third World."[29]
.
The Economist says "telephone operators are being replaced
by voice-recognising computers, postal workers by address-reading machines,
bank tellers by cash-dispensing machines that can handle ten times as many
transactions in a day."[30]
.
"Electronic synthesizers have markedly reduced employment
possibilities for studio musicians," according to an ILO symposium.[31]
.
The Clinton administration in the United States instituted a
"national performance review" with the announced goal of cutting
252,000 government jobs, a goal that was later raised to 272,900.[32] This has had a major impact on all federal
government departments in the 1990s.
.
Librarianship is included in an article in Mother Jones in
October 1995 as among "professions facing extinction at the hands of
machines over the next 20 years."[33]
.
Even so obscure a profession as braille translator is going out. A news report in July 1997 says "the
demand for braille translation has declined... now that computer programs can
translate mass publications. The braille
language for reading has been besieged by audio tapes, voice-recognition
computers and other devices."[34]
.
In early 1997, Jeanne Oliver reported in Insight that in France
the unemployment rate had reached 12.6 percent.
"More than 1 million people have been out of work longer than a
year, a number that is rising...Young people especially are hard hit... Nearly
25 percent of those between 18 and 25 are officially unemployed but the real
figure is considered much higher. Young
people routinely are shunted into one training program after another,
interspersed with short-term or part-time jobs.
The majority of them live with their families... Fear of unemployment
also permeates France's management class...."[35]
Of firms
A vast churning is occurring among
business firms, where the struggle to survive amid lowest-cost world
competition leads to much desperate activity.
Larger-scale enterprises such as Wal-Mart, which has displaced countless
small-town retailers, have succeeded, although they will soon be threatened
themselves by direct consumer-factory transactions through the Internet. At the same time, the new technology lends
itself to tiny business units serving unique niche-markets. Firms and production facilities fly to the
places of lowest-cost labor, only to move again when a still-lower-cost
location is found; by 1992, there were 1800 U.S. manufacturing facilities, with
half a million workers, across the border in Mexico as part of Mexico's Maquiladora
program. MagneTek set up a
150,000-square-foot factory across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. By 1992, no television sets were made in
America; Zenith Corporation had just "turned out the lights" by
moving the final production from Springfield, Missouri, to Reynosa, Mexico.[36]
Here are some additional specifics:
.
The Kansas town of Winfield was hard-hit in January 1997 when
crayon-maker Binney & Smith closed its plant after 44 years, shedding 345
of the city's highest-paying jobs. The
company's CEO explained that "improvements in automated machines had
tripled production at the company's plant in Easton, Pa." The Wichita Eagle said "the
closing is the latest in a series of shutdowns that have devastated Cowley
County in recent years."[37]
.
IBM followed an employee-retention policy
until competition forced the company to abandon it in the mid-1980s, after
which the firm cut down from 405,000 workers to 225,000 by early 1996.[38]
.
Sears "has shed 50,000 people during the 1990s," according to Fortune
in the same 1996 article.
.
AT&T, Fortune said, "employs roughly 300,000 -- and
plans on reducing that number by two-thirds by 1998."
.
In November 1997, Eastman Kodak announced it was cutting 10,000 jobs in
the latest of a half-dozen restructurings that began in 1983.[39]
.
The same day, Fruit of the Loom, Inc., told the press it will discard
2,900 workers in the United States, which is 19 percent of its workforce in the
U.S., after already cutting 4,200 jobs in the preceding three months. It will close its plant in Louisiana and move
to lower-cost plants in other countries.
The news report said "Fruit of the Loom contended it has been forced
by the North American Free Trade Agreement and a global trade accord to look
for cheaper labor. Workers at its
American plants earn an average of $10 an hour; those overseas fetch as little
as 35 cents an hour."[40]
.
A news report on dairy farming in late 1996 spoke of a nationwide trend
that "has been reducing dairies all over the country at a fairly steady
rate for the last two decades." It
said "in 1995 and 1996 the trend has escalated steeply. Nationally, there were 647,000 farms with
milk cows in 1970, according to the Agriculture Statistics Service. There were only 140,000 in 1995." It speaks of "mega-dairy
operations" that have taken the place of the small farm.[41] Business Week says the same thing has
happened in hog production.[42]
Of industries
Whole industries are engaged in
profound churning, with a struggle to survive similar to that of individuals
and firms.
.
Business Week in late 1995 told about the changes occurring in
deep-water oil and gas production. Large
platforms costing almost $1 billion are giving way to automated production
technology located on the ocean floor.
Pumps will get the oil and gas to shore.[43]
.
In the steel industry, the minimills, which melt steel scrap, have
become major competitors alongside the major steel companies. "Their secret," according to Business
Week, is "state-of-the-art technology, nonunion labor, and flexible
mills near their markets." At the
same time, the large steel companies, after being protected by the Reagan
administration's "voluntary restraint arrangements" limiting imports,
have become competitive again by invested many billions of dollars in
modernization and drastically cutting their workforce.[44]
.
William Davidow refers to a "process of disintermediation --
getting rid of services that are in the middle." This will go far toward eliminating
wholesalers, retail stores, publications carrying advertising, travel agents,
automobile dealers, stockbrokers, and even educational institutions.[45] As this occurs, the present economy will change
beyond recognition.
.
Historian-businessman Otto Scott says "U.S. shipyards are gone:
vanished into the mist of ‘free trade' that has turned so many U.S. heavy
industries over to other countries and peoples.
The vessels that arrive in our ports are virtually all foreign-owned,
built in foreign shipyards."[46]
.
Although The Economist opines that "technology will never
replace teachers,"[47]
there is a real question of whether universities will continue to exist. "Distance-learning" is coming in
rapidly, with a great many educational suppliers beginning to compete through
the Internet and interactive video. They
will offer students accredited courses, degrees and various credentials at a
fraction of the present cost. If, to
speak hypothetically, a student can take a for-credit course on the
"History of Western Civilization" from an Oxford professor, and
receive Oxford credit, for $11 instead of a similar course from a local
university for $300, who's to say that the latter won't be under threat of extinction?
Parker Rossman says "millions of students take courses electronically,
many scholars use electronic networks for global-scale research projects, and
other signs point to the emergence of a worldwide electronic university." The National University Teleconferencing
Network was established as early as 1982 to offer programs by satellite. Two years later the National Technological
University was formed as a consortium of engineering departments, and offers
degrees. The "Mind Extension
University" awards MBA degrees through cable television. Rossman tells of research showing that
distance-learning students do as well as students in classrooms. He mentions that Herbert London of New York
University predicts "the end of the university as most Americans picture
it."[48]
The impact on university personnel
is already apparent. Business Week
has reported a nationwide move to weaken tenure, saying it "is being
driven as universities struggle with high costs." Here's a fact worth noting: "Some 47% of
university faculty now are part-timers, vs. 32% in 1980, according to the
AAUP."[49]
The challenge to public universities
becomes especially clear when we consider that their funding has been based on
"credit-hour production"; i.e., the number of students taught. The funding of teaching has then carried with
it, as if it were an incidental, the "community of scholars" that
make up the heart and soul of a true university. The professors do some teaching but mainly
pursue a life of the mind. If the
teaching function disappears in a welter of electronic competition, will state
legislatures make the leap from the old funding method to one that will simply
pay to maintain the community of scholars as such? Will contributors to private university
endowments make the leap, too? It is
doubtful in both instances, since continued funding will require a higher level
of appreciation of the scholarly function per se than probably
exists. My experience as a professor is
that most friends think I am enjoying time off while I'm home writing a book or
an article.
Of national
economies
Rifkin says that "vanilla is
the most popular flavor in America" and that "in Madagascar alone,
which produces more than 70 percent of the world's harvest [of vanilla], 70,000
peasant farmers rely on this single crop for their livelihood." It has been discovered, however, that the
expensive hand-pollination that goes into raising a vanilla orchard can be
replaced by inexpensive gene-splicing techniques. Vanilla can be made in large laboratory vats
"by isolating the gene that codes for the vanilla protein and cloning it
in a bacterial bath." This makes
the Madagascar farmers obsolete.[50] In this we see a prototype of what is going
to face the countries and peoples who are not high-tech.
Will
skilled and service jobs fill the void?
When both high-skill tasks and services become
non-labor-intensive, the displacement that has been in progress for centuries
will have reached a culmination. To
those who fail to see this, high-tech and services are often looked to together
as an inexhaustible frontier to absorb labor.
This reflects the faith of the free market devotee, whose philosophy
tells him that in a market economy there will always be endless things to do,
since scarcity is a given and human wants are infinite.
But is it true?
Hardly. If the principal services come to be
performable with only minor, rather than mass, human effort, we get to what
Rifkin calls "the end of work."
Edward Chase's review of Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio's The
Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work says those authors
"dismiss the lingering expectation that the high-tech era will ultimately
provide more employment. ‘The new
technology has fewer parts and fewer workers and produces more product. This is true not only in traditional
production industries but for all workers, including managers and technical
workers.'"[51]
Many services are coming to require less
human effort, as our review of the displacement has already shown. A quick scan of the following developments
will underscore that many services are becoming unneeded and that whatever
takes their place is not likely to require mass human effort either:
.
Fred Block points out that "the initial period of computerization created
large numbers of low-skilled data-entry jobs," but that many "have
subsequently been eliminated with more sophisticated data-entry
systems."
.
He cites J. David Roessner's The Impact of Office Automation in
Clerical Employment, 1985-2000 to the effect that clerical jobs in the
banking industry will have declined by 30 percent between 1985 and 2000.
.
Keypunch jobs might for a while be exported to low-wage countries, but
this won't be for long. He says that
"entering information with an optical scanner is already cheaper than
hiring keypunchers in the Third World."[52]
.
Matzner and Wagner say that in the manufacture of an aircraft wing
"software gauges, computer-controlled coordinate measuring machine [sic] may
cut hundreds or thousands of hours from inspection tasks...."[53] [This is an example that illustrates, too,
the gray area that has come into being between services and manufacture. How do you count "inspection"?]
.
The same authors talk about computer-aided drafting's replacing manual
drawing in architectural firms.
Productivity rises sharply, "sometimes by factors of ten or
more."[54]
.
Middle-management and staff positions are disappearing. Writing in 1994, Wallace Peterson says that
"since mid-1980, over two million middle-management jobs have been
permanently eliminated."[55] Murray Weidenbaum tells how "when senior
executives can receive up-to-the-minute information on a computer screen on
their desks, a cadre of middle managers and corporate staffers is no longer
needed to collect and interpret that information."[56]
.
Because firms are becoming able to interface with their customers by
online telecommunications, Harald Malmgren foresees a drastic reduction in the
sales forces of large businesses.[57] The skills needed in retailing "are
being reduced as a result of the computer-mediated centralization of the
information process," according to Ken Ducatel.[58] Wholesalers, too, "are becoming
redundant" as large marketing firms and even consumers deal directly with
the factory.[59]
What about high-tech? It will continue to employ a rush of new
talent to feed its rapid development and implementation. This need will be so great that for many
years there will be vast opportunity there for those with the intelligence and
aptitude. Because rapid innovation will
remain a feature of society unless we allow our civilization to fall apart
under the pressure of all this, new opportunities will continue to arise in
perpetuity for such people. But high
technology's long-term tendency is to make its own workforce redundant. The present technology will be
non-labor-intensive itself once it reaches maturity, and later innovations are
likely to be non-labor-intensive as well.
As the technology becomes self-automated and "user friendly,"
fewer skills are needed to run it, so that less high-skilled labor is
required. This is referred to in the
literature as "de-skilling."
Harald Malmgren says that "production systems that become possible
with CIM [computer integrated manufacturing] (such as robotics, automated
transfer, laser processing, and new techniques for precision forming and
shaping) will tend to reduce the significance of labor...."[60]
The Economist says that
"even the skilled are at risk.
Already, clever computer programs can diagnose some illnesses just as
well as doctors can. A robot that will
perform hip replacements is under development in California. Some American companies are using Resumix, a
computerised hiring system, to screen job applicants. In 1993, a ‘computer-generated' novel was
deemed no worse than hundreds of humanly crafted love stories published each
year."[61]
In our discussion of the processes
causing the displacement in Chapter 10 we will see that the worldwide flight to
low-pay sources of labor affects the high-skilled as well as the low-skilled
(but that it won't be long before even the low-pay workforces of either type
are eclipsed by even-lower-cost technology).
Otto Scott confirms this when he says "the industrial migration
that began with steel and the garment industries, automotives, aeronautics,
shipbuilding and mining among others is now moving to computer chips, computer
programming and equipment design centers in China, India, Singapore, Hong Kong,
Taiwan and Australia -- and South America."[62]
From all this, it would seem that there is a
strong empirical case, under impending circumstances, against the faith of
those who hold that there will always be inexhaustible sources of work. The ready rebuttal is that "no one has
ever been able to foresee what will occupy people in future
generations." Along these lines,
Peter Huber argues that "technology does indeed transform the nature of
work... But it doesn't end it... Rifkin... allows for no happy surprises, no
unexpectedly favorable developments, no unanticipated opportunities for new
kinds of workers."[63] My philosophy professor from years ago, John
Nelson at the University of Colorado, writes me with a similar expectation:
"The bottomlessness of men's appetites, their technological inventiveness,
their past accumulations of wealth or capital, the same effects can plausibly
be maintained to hold good now as in the past... Inventors producing, through
further innovations in technology and design, new goods and thus new appetites and
their satisfaction."[64]
What this rebuttal misses is that we
have never before seen a situation in which every field of endeavor will
potentially be met by a technology that minimizes work. The situation is sui generis. We don't have to engage in the "lump of
labor fallacy" (the simplistic view that there is just a fixed amount of
work to be done in the world) to realize this.
There are no doubt vast future undertakings that human beings will
adventure upon, including space and perhaps oceanic colonization. There is no end to the things that need doing
just to bring everybody in the world up to the existing standard of living in
the developed countries, much less to the standard that is visible even today
as a potential. So there is no thought
of having a fixed amount of things to do.
The question is whether they will employ hundreds of millions, even
billions, of people. The president of
one of Europe's conglomerates was on the mark recently when he asked,
"Tell me where? In what jobs? In what cities? Which companies?"[65]
The easiest and most common recourse is to say that
"people must train themselves to be highly skilled, to work flexibly and
to be comfortable with considerable insecurity." Today's literature is filled with this
prescription. But it is wishful
thinking, engaged in by commentators who seem willing to grasp at any straw or
to think only incompletely about a problem.
They are excellent people, but they forget two fundamentals: (a) First,
that half the members of the human race are below 100 in I.Q. and have always
found employment in repetitive tasks.
These are people who have little aptitude for flexibility and little
tolerance for ambiguity. It is no slur
against them to point this out; it does not reflect upon their character or
worth as human beings. But it does
negate the expectation that they can en masse "turn to high-skill
training" and take jobs where they are counted on to make complex
decisions as masters of advanced technology.
(b) Second, that there just won't be enough high-skilled work, under any
conceivable scenario, for billions of people to perform. There won't be that much to occupy the
citizenry even in one of the advanced economies, much less in the less
developed countries.
ENDNOTES