The end of work
Jeremy Rifkin argues that we are entering a new phase in history - one characterized by the steady and inevitable decline of jobs. The world, says Rifkin, is fast polarizing into two potentially irreconcilable forces: on one side, an information elite that controls and manages the high-tech global economy; and on the other, the growing numbers displaced workers, who have few prospects and little hope for meaningful employment in an increasingly automated world. The end of work could mean the demise of civilization as we have come to know it, or signal the beginning of a great social transformation and a rebirth of the human spirit.
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- > Oh, and by the way, the current worldwide depression will never end.
I think this is probably true. A related book is The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin, which I highly recommend.
- Women nearly doubled the workforce within a couple of generations, but the sky never fell. And that shift was largely precipitated by technological advances, such as the washing machine, reduced infant mortality, and birth control.
In as much as doubling the workforce is similar to halving the number of jobs in pre-existing categories, I don't see the sky falling. Like with women joining the workforce, the shift to more automation will stimulate new kinds of labor demand. And it's similarly likely to make education even more important and relevant.
That said, women joining the workforce is perhaps the single largest contributor to long-term stagnant wage growth. Such shifts are unlikely to prove the end of labor, but they do create significant displacement that requires serious attention. Nothing about the "free market" guarantees that the economy and labor system will adjust quickly enough within timespans relevant to maintaining the well-being of the individuals displaced.
I don't really think there'll be anything particularly challenging about the next shift. In simple terms I don't see how it could be much more problematic than the addition of women to the domestic workforce immediately followed by hundreds of millions of Chinese laborers joining the global industrial economy. We just don't appreciate how disruptive those historical events were because, despite the weak U.S. response (as compared to Germany), even unassisted the labor economy did a decent job of treading water. It's quite amazing in retrospect.
Theoretically we could learn from our past mistakes and not only adjust but come out ahead in terms of income growth and equality. OTOH, we could not learn from our past mistakes, and our current issues would only be compounded. On this I'm much more pessimistic. When the electorate and political culture still pine for a labor economy that is 2 or 3 epochs in the past (i.e. ancient history!), that doesn't bode well for their ability to commit to the demands of the future.
Even worse is the fact that the intellectual class seems oblivious that history is merely repeating itself. The books about robots and labor literally have almost identical titles to books I read in the 1990s in college seminars discussing the implications of women, China, the information economy, and of course the rise of robots. Some of them were written in the 1980s. One famous book, "The End of Work" (Jermey Rifkin, 1994) could probably be re-published today with nary an edit. People would find it just as timely and insightful as they did then, and it'll prove just as irrelevant 25 years from now as it is today. We saw neither the dystopia nor the paradise he envisioned, but rather (as always) a slow, systematic, and largely hidden reorganization of the labor economy that became evident, if at all, only in hindsight.
- I think this is a useless exercise. The economics of Star Trek won't be coherent, because it was pieced together through multiple series and some wishful thinking while retaining certain properties needed for the universe to be interesting. You can't have a TV show about drone ships flying around and beaming back exploration data via subspace.
Without Star Trek replicators in the foreseeable future, all the 3d printing and robots in the world will not give us unlimited amounts of basic materials needed. Concrete and glass might be virtually unlimited, but certain metals are definitely not. If those resource constraints lead to energy constraints, we'll have problems getting to any sort of proto-post-scarcity stage at current standards of living. AI might solve the problem, but the consequences of AI are unpredictable (singularity).
A few books on the subject worth mentioning, but not mentioned in the essay:
Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (fiction, set in a speculative world where the economic system is based on units of social status called whuffies; everyone is born with some, if I recall right (nope, apparently I was wrong, it's not zero-sum), and from there it's a free market).
Rifkin - The End of Work (nonfiction, takes a look at how society might function as jobs gradually disappear due to technology).
Iain Banks's Culture universe is mentioned in the further reading section, but it's completely post-scarcity on planet and orbital scales, with AIs running everything. The aforementioned books are much closer to home.
- Jeremy Rifkin - 1995 - The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work
In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminated tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. He predicted devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers would reap the benefits of the high-tech world economy, the American middle class would continue to shrink and the workplace become ever more stressful.
As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted the growth of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that would create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated scaling down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state funds to provide a "social wage" in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers.
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Jeremy Rifkin - 2005
http://www.foet.org/press/interviews/Spiegel-%20August%203%2...
European politicians often like to blame outsourcing for the disappearance of jobs. But in reality the work isn't going to the Chinese --it's going to the robots.
- 1995, Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work
The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1]
In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminated tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. He predicted devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers would reap the benefits of the high-tech world economy, the American middle class would continue to shrink and the workplace become ever more stressful.
As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted the growth of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that would create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated scaling down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state funds to provide a "social wage" in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers
- 1995, Jeremy Rifkin talked about the End of Work, saying we should plan for how to structure society as it was coming. He was ignored, and now we seem to be living the results of not planning for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work
The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1]
In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminates tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. He traced the devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers reap the benefits of the high-tech world economy, the American middle class continues to shrink and the workplace becomes ever more stressful.
As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted the growth of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that will create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated scaling down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state funds to provide a "social wage" in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers.[1]
