The Brave New World of Work

In the The Brave New World of Work, Ulrich Beck argues that the work society as we've known it is coming to an end. More and more people are ousted from their jobs by smart technologies. In the United States, all the but the highest-level workers are now unsure of their jobs and incomes. The idea of middle-class security is eroding, and so -- Beck believes they are related -- is worker enthusiasm for democratic practices like voting. Work here and in much of the West is increasingly resembling labor patterns in the Third World -- fluid, part-time, entrepeneurial, free-lance, self-directed. The idea of the "job for life" has disappeared, temporarily creating a political economy of insecurity. Down the road, he argues, this new kind of work society may actually be good for the world, creating a new kind of civil transnationalism, and enhancing our freedom and our civic lives. The Brave New World of Work author Ulrich Beck pages 202 publisher Polity Press rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-7456-2398-0 summary The end of the work society

Beck has written a surprising and provocative book about how working is changing radically under our very noses with little serious discussion in our media or political communities. We see stories all the time about employment rates, but most people have little or no sense of the radical changes affecting the nature of work.

Work has become unstable throughout the modern world, writes Beck, a professor of sociology at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. Skills can be suddenly devalued, jobs obliterated, social and welfare safety nets eroded. Companies merge, collapse, form and reform, often at the expense of their workers.

Fear and economic insecurity prevail among the middle-class majority as well as the underclass, writes Beck. "The United States is the only advanced country where productivity has constantly risen over the past twenty years, while the income of most of its citizens (eight out of ten) has either stagnated or declined. The average weekly earnings of 80 per cent of Americans in gainful employment dropped by roughly 18 per cent between l973 and l995, he reports, from $315 to $258 a week. At the same time, the real income of top managers soared by 19 per cent in just ten years between 1979 and 1989.

As entire industries rise or fall, as firms expand, shrink, separate, "downsize" and restructure, employees at all but the highest levels must go to work each day without knowing whether they will have their jobs or for how long. The newly unstable work society leads to the erosion of the middle-class and in our collective interest in civics. According to Beck, decline in civic participation and voting is directly tied to the decline of work society, which he says is closely linked to worker attitudes about democracy.

Is this all bleak? No, according to Beck. Although the loss of work security creates a temporary loss of security and social capital, he believes that down the road, this individuality and freedom -- much of it empowered by the same technology that has eroded work security -- will create a new kind of global citizen, one who is better informed, more communicative and civically-involved than before. He foresees a more inclusive kind of transnational society, with less nationalism and provincialism. The alternative facing the world is either collapse or political self-renewal, and he foresees the latter.

It's an interesting look at a subject that will affect almost every single American whose lives are being shaped by powerful technological forces they sense but don't quite understand. Work is a critical subject, and technology is changing it. In Brave New World of Work Beck helps us understand how and gives us some sense of how the new workplace might affect our futures.

You can purchase Brave New World of Work at Fatbrain.

Comments

technology

[perdida]

Technology has enabled me to write things that thousands of people read on the Internet. People actually go to the site to read what I and others have wrote. In the old days I'd have had to build a huge marketing and advertising and distribution enterprise to do this.

I think that if our schools trained people in how to work for themselves in the world of information, the new tech would support more people than it limits.

If it was "natural" for people to use self-published informational websites for much of their research, and to pay those people, then there would be lots more useful information on the Net and many more knowledgeable people supported by the Net.

It is our culture that trains us to use technologies in conservative ways -- as consumers or in support of traditional workplace methods-- rather than to create completely new information-centered industries.

Re:technology

[Rocketboy]

Technology has enabled me to write things that thousands of people read on the Internet.

How much are you paid to perform this service? How does it contribute to the economic welfare of your household? In broader terms, while it may be quite satisfying to you as an individual, how does it increase the welfare or economic wealth of whatever society in which you participate?

Just doing it isn't the issue; what we too often don't ask is why and what are the consequences? Ultimately, if no one adds material value to society then, regardless of the spiritual or cultural value of that society, it can not survive. There's a reason for the stereotype of the 'starving artist'. American society in particular and Western society in general is dependant upon the continual creation of new wealth. If the rewards of creating that new wealth are not seen as being reasonably fairly distributed but perhaps hoarded by an elite few, the wealth creation engine will slow or stop as unrewarded participants drop out. In the past the distibution mechanism was the periodic paycheck, along with important sundries such as affordable health care, education, markets in which to spend the wealth, and perhaps most importantly, managed expectations (a new car, a home of one's own, a chicken in every pot, college for the kids and an opportunity for one's offspring to do better for themselves.) That seems to be changing and, like all changes to fundamental societal mechanisms, the change will bring with it disruption, anger, resentment, and possibly violence. One would think that after a few thousand years of recorded history we'd have learned to manage our way through these periodic upheavals but no, here we go again.

The "NEW" Economy

[Em Emalb]

I was one of the 75,000 or so laid of by Lucent Technologies. I have witnessed first hand the processes described above, and let me tell you, it isn't pretty at all. I consider it a slap in the face the way things are occuring in this economy. Gone forever (it seems) are the days when people were respected for the work that was done, as opposed to the bottom line, cut-throat corporate world we are living in now. Looking out for number 1 used to not be my highest priority, being able to go home at night knowing I did a damned good job was. Boy how that has changed. I work for myself now, as an independant contractor, and life is much better. I have been burned once, and you will never see me burned again. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

Re:The "NEW" Economy

[Logic Bomb]

I will not diminish the wrenching horror of losing one's job. But this comment sounds exactly like ones from people who got laid off from factories in the 80s. "Whatever happened to hard work?..." "Used to be, a man could learn a trade, put in his 40 hours, and provide for his family...." What we discovered, with the advent of all these new technologies, as well as with the growth of practicing business across national borders, is that there are more efficient ways of doing things. Pidgeon-holing an individual into doing a single task for their entire working life is antithetical to the progress that capitalism values. And while, in that huge shift away from factories and manual trades in the US, many people lost their jobs, a lot of goods got cheaper for the rest of us because the labor required to make them wasn't so expensive anymore.

Assuming Katz got the point of the book right, I think the author hit the nail right on the head. We (meaning the post-industrialized nations) have seen a shift that requires everyone to be educated enough to learn whatever trade is needed at a given time. Technology now changes too fast for someone to spend 40 years fastening rivets or programming personal computers that run Windows. A society of citizens with sufficient education in science, technology and business will be flexible enough to keep up with the changing world and do exactly what our capitalist system says we should: keep getting more efficient and finding better uses of our time and resources. Until then, we will continue to experience the turmoil as seen by factory workers in the 80s and by the poster I'm replying to.

Re:The "NEW" Economy

[jthill]

But there's one thing missing from the process here: the historical justification for the owner taking the lion's share of the profit has been that he took a similar share of the risk. Now the profits are concentrating on the wealthy, and the risks on the working class -- i.e. everybody who can't live on dividends, interest and capital gains.

That's the political change that has to take place: capitalism has to distribute profit and risk equitably; as Jon says the book points out, nobody wants to play the role of pre-appointed loser.

Re:The "NEW" Economy

[cgleba]

"Technology now changes too fast for someone to spend 40 years fastening rivets or programming personal computers that run Windows."

Changing technology and the need for changing worker skill does not necessitate laying off workers as you imply. From what I have read in Japan large firms hire workers based mostly on thier ability to learn and adapt and then shuffle them around. Two years they'll work in sales next two years they'll work in engineering. You don't have "programmers" and "salespeople", you have an employees for company X.

This, along with the massive diversification of keiretsus (sp?) allow companies to have a very mobile work force that can fill in the needs of technology very quickly. That way they can give jobs for life in light of changing technology. You have to remember that the same keiretsu makes everything from canned tuna to cars to stereos to construction equipment (Mistubishi, etc) and handles it's own banking. It is the keiretsus that compete.

Re:The "NEW" Economy

[rho]

Go to the grocery store and buy a loaf of bread with your satisfaction of doing a damned good job.

Would you be satisfied with Lucent giving you a hearty handshake and a pat on the back for doing a good job? Or would you wrap that middle-manager's necktie around a ceiling fan until he forked over a check?

Please--spare me the working-class-blues routine. You wouldn't expect anything other than a bottom-line-oriented paycheck from your employer; why hold them to a different standard?

Tech workers in for rude surprises by 2015

[Ars-Fartsica]

Programmers have so far been insulated from most layoffs and foreign competition. This state of grace will probably erode by 2015.

Get ready to see your programming job get exported to India and China. Drop your mythical notions that all people in these countries know how to do is customer support.

On top of that, get ready to be "Moore's law'd'" out of most other programming jobs you might be thinking of taking - by 2015 computers will be fast enough that point-and-drool paint-by-numbers tools will be available to rapidly and idiotically autogenerate most of the code you write today with no discernable performance loss.

That said, middle class tech jobs will pay the bills nicely through 2010, after that I wouldn't get into programming for all of the tea in China, it will be a sucker's racket akin to the auto industry.

Re:Tech workers in for rude surprises by 2015

[trix_e]

I heard that same argument 5, 10 and 15 years ago. 4GLs were going to put programmers out of business as non-technical folks were going to be rolling out full-scale solutions in minutes...

I'm sure that programming skill and competency and efficiency will continue to increase in all countries, but so will the demand for these services as the countries themselves need this type of work as they develop...

So, I'm not going to worry too much about the sky falling just yet.

Re:Tech workers in for rude surprises by 2015

[Chibi]

On top of that, get ready to be "Moore's law'd'" out of most other programming jobs you might be thinking of taking - by 2015 computers will be fast enough that point-and-drool paint-by-numbers tools will be available to rapidly and idiotically autogenerate most of the code you write today with no discernable performance loss.

And who's going to create these magical "point-and-drool" applications? Programmers. I've no doubt the job market will be very different in 2015 from it is today, I don't think it'll be quite as bleak as you are making it out to be.

Think about HTML. Initially, you had to write it all yourself. Then, WYSIWYG (point-and-drool) applications started coming out (FrontPage, Netscape Composer, Dreamweaver). These can make life easier for those that know HTML, and allow those that don't know it to create a web page. But it still took programmers to create the program.

Also, I think you are underestimating the difficulty of some applications. While new technology might make old skills obsolete, this will only create a need for new skills (which you'd better learn).

Robert Anton Wilson talked about this

[revscat]

More and more people are ousted from their jobs by smart technologies.

Although I am no longer the fan of Robert Anton Wilson that I once was (despite the fact that I killed him), he spoke about this phenomenon in (IIRC) "Prometheus Rising". He felt that the increased automization of menial tasks would lead to a more educated society. Since all the "dumb jobs" would be taken over by computers, robots, etc., in order to survive people would have to educate themselves on tasks that cannot be performed by automatons.

This seems to be happening, at least to a degree, although there is another factor at work as well: cheap (nonunionized) international labor. There seems to be a point at which exploiting overseas workers is about as cheap as building a robot, sometimes cheaper.

Work doesn't seem to be going away

[pheonix]

Much like the automation efforts of the past, I don't think work will go "away" per se. It will change. The jobs will be different.

We no longer need some guy to stand around for .25 an hour on an assembly line setting screws into mounts so the next guy at .40 an hour can screw them in. We do need someone to do routine maintenance and programming at 20 an hour on the machines that do the job.

I don't think we have in the past, or will in the future, see a dramatic decrease in jobs. What we will see is some jobs going away and some magically appearing.

Who had a job programming 50 years ago?

For a few, perhaps

[sphealey]

Although the loss of work security creates a temporary loss of security and social capital, he believes that down the road, this individuality and freedom -- much of it empowered by the same technology that has eroded work security -- will create a new kind of global citizen, one who is better informed, more communicative and civically-involved than before.

People at the very top of the income, education, and internal self-direction scales tend to make claims of this nature. Sure, if you have a degree from Oxford/MIT/Tokyo, or rank very high in ambition or self-motivation, this type of world is a great place to live. Lose your job in New York? No problem - lots of openings in Sydney. I'll just call my college roommate in the AU Foreign Office and get the ball rolling.

The fact is (just as with Lake Woebegon), the vast majority of humans are average. They prefer stability and order to chaos and "opportunity". And the other fact is that in North America these orderly, stable, average people have built the civil society that we have today (Kabul anyone? Bagota? Jo'burg?) So now the cultural and economic elite is going to destroy any hope of economic stability to "improve opportunity".

Isn't there an old proverb that goes, "Be careful of what you wish for - you may receive it"?

sPh

Re:For a few, perhaps

[sphealey]

Okay, frankly, those are the only people I really care about progressing in the world anyways. I'm not sure what your point is. I couldn't give two flying shits for those with no ambition or self-motivation.

First, I wasn't talking about those with no education or self-motivation. If we assume that these traits are (like most things) distributed 20-60-20, I am talking about the 60% in the middle, not the 20% at the bottom. The bottom 20% is an entirely different discussion.

But the overall point of my post, which you seem to have missed, is this: If you are in the top 20%, great. Go to it. Earn a billion USD. But if in the process of doing so you take away the opportunity for the middle 60% to have a rasonable stable, satisfying, productive life (e.g. the archtypical "Joe Sixpack" in his 3 bedroom ranch), then you will most likely reap the whirlwind in the form of the destruction of the stable social order. Remember that the middle 60 outnumbers you at least 3-1.

A pretty high price to pay to provide extra "opportunity" for a few at the top, I would say.

sPh

Re:For a few, perhaps

[Tackhead]

> People at the very top of the income, education, and internal self-direction scales tend to make claims of this nature ["will create a new kind of global citizen, one who is better informed, more communicative and civically"]. Sure, if you have a degree from Oxford/MIT/Tokyo, or rank very high in ambition or self-motivation, this type of world is a great place to live. Lose your job in New York? No problem - lots of openings in Sydney. I'll just call my college roommate in the AU Foreign Office and get the ball rolling.

Very true.

I rather like Ian Angell's take on it - in "The New Barbarian Manifesto", he says that yes, today's technological elite will remain mobile and today's middle class will vanish into the underclass.

The difference between Angell and Beck is that Angell (correctly, IMO) scoffs at the idea that the technological elite will be a "more communicative and civically-involved" citizen. Acting in their own (enlightened or otherwise) self-interest, such citizens may be more "global" and "better-informed", but they'll likely just relocate to wherever taxes are lowest and the underclass is kept at a safe distance.

The "hard problem" (if you're a government) will be retaining your knowledge workers (on whom your economy depends) while retaining the voting support of your service workers. Problem is, if your service workers vote themselves benefits to the point that it becomes more profitable for your global knowledge workers to leave, the knowledge workers will take off for more friendly markets, leaving your service workers with nothing to do, because nothing's being produced in your country anymore. Either way, the welfare state is toast.

Classic Angell essays: http://csrc.lse.ac.uk/angell.htm

Recommended Reading: PDFs of "The signs are clear: the future is inequality" and "Winners and Losers in the Information Age".

Representative quotation: "Democracy will degenerate to being the means of governing the immobile and dependent service workers."

I point out here that Angell doesn't see this as a "good thing" (as his admirers often do) or a "bad thing" (as do his detractors). His point, as an economist, is merely that such a change is inevitable, and that governments and individuals had better get ready for it.

Re:For a few, perhaps

[Ldir]

I couldn't give two flying shits for those with no ambition or self-motivation. If you can't get yourself to spend the time to improve, screw you, those that wish to improve will survive,and you'll starve.

In other words, "Let them eat cake"? Sounds pretty elitist to me.

If too many of the "elite" start thinking like this, we may all get a hard lesson in class warfare. Thanks mostly to the unconstrained greed of the "elite," the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bigger than ever, and it continues to grow. There ratio of haves to have-nots is also decreasing, i.e., the number of "elites" is shrinking while the ranks of the rabble swell. If you rub their noses in your success, show them your scorn, publically declare that you don't give "two flying shits" for them, sooner or later, a bunch of them will mill together and hand you your head.

The masses are a sleeping giant. Most people may not be very ambitious by your standards, but if you push too hard, if you make them angry, they may just get up off their collective butts and decide they've had enough. No matter how superior you may think you are, when you're outnumbered 1000 to 1, you're toast.

Look at the history of the world. How many regimes have been toppled because arrogant rulers thought the peasants were powerless?

Leave room in your brave new world for the well-being of the rest of humanity, or you too may become a lesson for future generations.

Enhancing our freedom and civic lives?

[sofar]

Down the road, he argues, this new kind of work society may actually be good for the world, creating a new kind of civil transnationalism, and enhancing our freedom and our civic lives.

Well, this looks very promising, but statistics and experience in Europe show people actually do less back to society in the form of volunteer work, societies and non profit organisations. My guess is the free work base we have laid out actually means we like our work better, but have less time and enthousiasm to do something back.

More and more people need day care for their children, health care jobs (the typical jobs-for-life) are very unattractive at the moment in the netherlands and shortages of personell are high, and costs for non-profit organisations are rising with prices so they cannot keep up with it anymore.

My point is there is also a down-side. We haven't explored the effects of this since we are in the middle of it (at least, in Europe and the US). The good thing is the typical work-80h-a-week-til-death stereotype in the US is fading, just as it has done in Europe, although it was less present there IMO. The down side of all this future will certainly surprise us.

Whoa: let's see step B, please

[JWhitlock]

Katz say the book claims that the declining job security has lowered the motivation for the working and middle to participate in the political process. This makes sense to me - politics usually starts locally. If you don't think you will hold on to your job for long, why fight for the union? If you think you might have to move to find work, why get involved in the neighborhood association? If you have moved to find work, and you may have to move again, why get interested in local politics?

Then Katz says the author claims that this mobile, insecure worker will become politically aware at a world level, and we'll have a whole new class of involved citizens.

I don't see how you get there from here. Where's step B?

It seems that workers may become more familiar with the global sources of their labor problems, but without the avenue of local solutions, then I don't see these people becoming political agents. More likely, they will complain about global and national problems, but be unable to think of a way to solve those problems.

In other words, a bunch of complainers, rather than folks who take action. Remind you of any online communities you know?

Sounds Like Jeremy Rifkin

[istartedi]

This sounds just like Rifkin's "The End of Work" in which he lamented the decline of ordinary labor and the rise of the "symbolic analyst" class amidst predictions of economic doom and gloom. His book was written in, wait for it... 1995. Just a few years later the tech boom put us on cloud 9. Now the business cycle has turned so doom books are becoming popular again. In fact, the publication of doom books may signal the bottom of the business cycle, just as articles featuring "the bull" or "the bear" in Time Magazine signal a turn in the stock market.

So, if you have a copy of Rifkin's book, you could probably save yourself some money on this one. Dust it off and read it again.

Technology making us more civic minded!

[bjohnson]

Ha! The technology that Beck so cheerfully says will create a 'global citizen' is being increasingly (and has always been used) to further, not erode oppression.

Instant communication?

Witness the WTO meetings: All Joe and Jane Average ever saw were images of raging anarchists bent on destruction of all that is good, followed by 15 minutes of commercials for gas-guzzling SUV's they don't need, hamburgers they shouldn't be eating and diet schemes they wouldn't need if they didn't eat those hamburgers and actually got their lazy asses out of the SUV's once in a while and got some excercize.

This technology has been advancing at a dizzying rate, as has the dehumanization of the lower and middle classes has accellerated.

But so long as the tevee drones on soothing crap about Rachel and Raymond, they don't care that things are really going to hell around them.

Not 'till it knocks on _their_ front doors, and it's too late then.

Mercenaries

[under_score]

I'm 30. I was one of the first people I know among my cohort to embrace the idea of becoming a mercenary for work. But over the last two years, more and more people my age, and younger are also taking that attitude: if the work doesn't suit me, I don't do it, ... and ... I decide the value of my work and my attitude and work ethic reflect that. Basically, salaried employees are slacking in response to perceived slights or injustices, or even based on what they think they are worth. Many of these things have existed among the "lazy" for many years, but they are becoming acceptable among the rank and file. That said, I am very sad about this. To me, ideally work should be a way of serving humanity, not serving myself. I think that any job, position, industry, etc. can be looked at and done with an attitude of serving humanity. The problem seems to be that corporations are going in the exact opposite direction and the response is therefore mercenary. Corporations (stockholders) always, always end up winning as compared to their employees. The stockholders are perfect mercenaries of capital, and to me it was only a matter of time before that attitude was learned and reflected in the employees. I haven't read this book, but I have read other similar works (e.g. Jeremy Rifkin has some stuff about this). It seems inevitable to me that in a capitalist environment this would happen. It also seems inevitable in a communist envionrment tho for different reasons. I personally think that we have to change the nature of our approach to education so that children grow up learning to serve humanity. Mind you, I'm sure lots of other people think that everyone becoming mercenary is a great thing...

Re:Sadly, it's all about IQ

[Art_XIV]

The dirty little secret here is that people with low IQs can't compete in a high tech economy

Well, sure they can... as corporate executives and marketing people. ;)

Agreed, and the masses will be more mollified

[Ars-Fartsica]

I agree with you and don't believe Katz's Utopian notion of the vibrant global citizen. More likely we'll be seeing a world where the middle class is solidly mollified by an international community that values security and observation, and a captive audience of consumers.

I don't see any reason why the unwashed masses who sit and drool in front of the TV now won't be sitting and drooling in front of the web.

This is not new

[garoush]

"The idea of middle-class security is eroding" and "fluid, part-time, entrepeneurial, free-lance, self-directed"

Let me see now, wasn't this how work used to be before the era of big corporation and manufacturing -- i.e.: The Industry Revolution?

Education is never 'over'

[jlower]

Keep learning and diversify as much as you can. Be interested in the type of business you work for, even if it doesn't seem to apply to your job.

My employer (an insurance company) would rather have competent programmers who have a deep understanding of the insurance industry than brilliant programmers who aren't interested in the business.

There's no particular need for programmers here to have insurance certifications but the bosses take notice when you do.

Well, it's been like that for ages...

[fsmunoz]

... but until recently the majority of people doing IT jobs were insulated from them; I distinctly remeber a ./ discussion about the need for unions in the IT field. Most ppl seemed to think that since chances were good that the demand was higher that the workforce available unions didn't made any sense... after all, we were all part of the 'New Economy', we laught at principles made in the XIX century my a bearded german! Most ppl couldn't even graps the principle of conflict between workers and bosses... after all, if ppl want best conditions, why, the Company is going to suffer, and then they will be out of job! Crazy fools!.

Now the same thing that gave birth to this kind of distinctive thinking is coming back for revenge. With the demand/workforce balance changing, and since most ppl in IT were oh-so-damn-liberal in what regards to workers rights - after all, they didn't need to - they are suffering the *same thing* that most other workers in traditional fields have suffered for *centuries*.

It's all so new.... but only to the ones that had illusions about the true nature of the relations between a worker and the guys in charge.

It's so pitifull to see - and I know them first-hand - ppl that during the 90's laughed at other ppls problems and said that they were badly-paid, unemployed, etc, because they were lazy and unfit now being in the damn some situation they joked about then.

Transnacional society, better opportunities? You bet. Capital has no nacionality, never had, so it already know how to play that game. The mantra of "being able to work in what country I want" is not so great when there are thousands of ppl doing the exact thing you do for less money.

(oh, and yes, I'm marxist, just in case someone misses the point and 'acuses me' of such).

fsm

One day we'll all be out of work...

[Saeger]

One day our technology (nanotech, AI, robotics, etc.) will free us from having to do any real work ourselves.

But what happens to a society in which no individual NEEDS to work anymore in order to ensure his survival?

(and what will we do with the landlords? :)

--

The future was supposed to be great

[Junior J. Junior III]

Machines would do all the work, and we'd lead pampered lives of luxury with a standard of living unimagined by previous generations.

Then, someone realized that if people aren't needed to do the work, rather than taking care of them and letting them live comfortable, fulfilling lives, we can just leave them out of the equation entirely. More profits to the few who are still needed to keep the machines running, and to those who actually own the machines.

The result? Mass unemployment, mass poverty, mass misery.

Human beings are becoming obsolete parts of that machine we call The Economy. Those who are still useful only serve to keep fueling the Economy to further render homo sapiens obsolete.

Once the obsolescence process is complete, there will be an extinction. But don't be too sad about it. The machines which will have replaced us will be a far superior race than we.

Re:The future was supposed to be great

[Junior J. Junior III]

In the short term consumers are necessary, but even consumerism can be automated. And what's more, it will be far more efficient once it is.

A couple quick thoughts from a 'young' 25 year old

[2nd Post!]

I don't want to be 'locked' into a 'job for life'.

I also don't think being middle class is an 'entitlement'.

To truly make a living, I need to provide services and products other people want to pay for. *Everyone* has to live with that constraint.

Up until this decade, products could only be made laboriously, by hand, by individuals, or by factories, cheaply. You get the expensive one offs and the mass produced cheapos.

This is changing. Printers and print technology makes anyone a publisher. Websites and computers makes anyone an information and entertainment provider. Power tools and other equipment makes anyone a cabinetmaker or artisan.

It used to be that being skilled was available to only those who found a master to teach them. Today *everyone* can be skilled. Everyone can fiberglass, woodwork, paint, sew, cook, write, and carve. In a few years you can add to that list: Everyone can program, model, and make movies.

I don't know about anyone else, but standards of living has raised. I don't *have* to be an accountant for 40 years. I don't *want* to be an accountant for 40 years. I'm a QA person right now, but I look forward to a time when I'm not. I can go get a certification in architecture and I can go back to school and become an architect, and with my own hands and my own resources, build my own house. I can grow my own food. I can do *everything*

This is of course very inefficient :)

The point being is that being comfortable and being happy is not something that is being taken away by the eroding of the middle class. It should be as simple as maximizing yourself and figuring out in any situation, what can I offer to people as a service to get money? Information technology is helping to make that kind of search even easier than ever, too.

Of course I'll be called optimistic and unrealistic, but how else can you be? If you face the future with thoughts of doom and gloom, what's motivating you to keep walking, instead of layiing down to die?

American puritanism and long hours of work

[peter303]

America leads the world in yearly work hours (1940 hours), with the except of Japan and Korea. Northern European countries have fallen from near 3000 at the beginning of the 20th century to 1500 or less now. This includes leaves and long vacations. In fact the number of American work hours have increased in the past couple decades due to more women working full time, and the overtime work ethic.

Why is this? One explanation is the Puritan morality that "work is good". This reappears in cycles- the 50s/60s Corporation Man, 80s Yuppie, 90s Dot.commer.
Another explanation is the tax and benefits structure. You dont get decent benefits until you work fulltime. To the employer, high employee overhead mans working existing employees more rather than hiring several to do the total work.

Re:American puritanism and long hours of work

[cgleba]

"with the except of Japan and Korea".

Your correct, and to add to your argument I don't know about Kroea but I know in Japan that their "workplace" is not like ours. They spend a lot more hours then we do "at work", but they do not labor the entire time. From what I observed when I was in Japan they look at the workplace as almost a second family. When there's big news they all gather and watch the TV. They excercise in the morning together, etc. "At work" for them does not necessarily mean "working" as we think of it.

They have a 30 hour work week in France.

Why, then, do Americans work so damn much? Why do we have pressure to work more even though we are working so much? The only answer I can think of is Marxian with the good old "exploitation of labor", etc.

programmers per computer declining?

[peter303]

The mainframe computers throught 1960s had ten or more programmers per computer. 1970s minicomputers require a couple. Then came the personal computer and the mass software industry. There are now 100 million personal computers (home and business) now in the US at least, plus ten billion embedded computers in cars, appliances, traffic lights, etc. Maybe a million programmers now at the most. So we've seen a steady a drop of programmers per computer from 10 to .0001 in the past 40 years, a factor of 100,000 or a bit slower than moores law.

Money creation is the problem

[joss]

The idea that everybody should work is a fairly modern one. It's become tangled up with our lives and economy in various ways that made sense at the time but are now a hindrance.

Increasing automation should make us all better off, but doesn't. The problems boil down to the concept "if I can't get a job, I won't have any money". To properly fix this we need to overhaul the way money works. The real problem is that we have a debt based economy which *forces* us to perpetually invest efficiency gains rather than enjoying them.

You're probably thinking: what the fuck am I talking about. Sorry - it's not easy to convey how this works or what's wrong with it in a few sentences and it's extremely difficult to find decent information about this online. You won't find it in most economic texts, but these are so full of holes it's a wonder that economics as a discipline has more respect than astrology.

The problem boils down to the fact that almost all money today is created in the form of debt. Extra stuff gets created constantly. As more stuff is created, either more money needs to be created or prices need to fall otherwise nobody could afford to buy it an afford to buy it. Currently money is created faster than stuff which is why we have positive inflation rates. However this money is all created in the form of debt. Governments don't make money [cash is only about 4% of money in system] - private banks *invent* money by lending out more than they borrow. When you write a check, you are effectively using a currency printed by your bank. Since interest must be paid on loans money is only loaned to those who will invest it, ie almost all the created money is targeted for investment. The monetary system keeps society on a technological conveyor belt.

So, we live in a system where the humans are being automated out of the system, but none of these advancements *can* go towards making life more pleasant or free. In fact, people must work more and more. It doesn't have to be like this, and there is a simple solution, but it'll never happen while humanity is asleep. People spend their entire adult lives trying to aquire something that they don't understand to even the slightest degree. It's funny how people can be so obsessed with money, but if you ask them where it comes from all you get is a blank stare or some irrelevent crap about the mint.

Understanding this stuff is not difficult but it does require thinking clearly about things that we normally don't think about at all, and there are lots of aspects to it - pollution, poverty, ever decreasing quality of consumer goods. An intelligent and informative book that explains this stuff and related ideas quite thoroughly is "Confronting Tyranny - The case for monetary reform" by Mike Rowbotham, but this is hard to get hold of.

brave old world of work

[Bekwin]

There is nothing new about these ideas except the fact that their application has become transnational and cosmopolitan in scope.

Karl Marx, writing in ca. 1867 penned these words:

"Modern Industry ...continually... revolutionises the division of labour within society, and incessantly launches masses of capital and of working people from one branch of production to another. ...(T)his absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Modern Industry, and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, dispels all fixity and security in the situation of the labourer...(and) constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his detail function, to make him superfluous....a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a
social calamity. This is the negative side.....Modern Industry,...compels society, under the penalty of death, to replace the detail worker of to-day, crippled by the life long repetition of
one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully
developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any changes of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."

This is from Capital, Vol 1, Chapter XV, Machinery and Modern Industry, section 9, pp 486- 488 (my edition, at least).

Marx always thought that the positive potential of
Modern Industry to produce educated well rounded human beings would always subordinated to the necessary pursuit of short run profits inherent in the capitalistic way of doing things.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose

Bekwin

Bad logic

[Dirk Pitt]

Sure hand-made code will always have its panache, just like hand-made cars do. How many manufacturers still make cars by hand?

This is a bad analogy. Making cars is equivalent to burning CDs--it doesn't take much expertise, just follow the template, pop the rivet, answer the wizard.

The creation of a car starts and ends short of the manufacturing line with the expert manipulations of engineers and designers. Nothing has dumbed down these guys work, if anything, it's gotten more and more complex, and more in demand, as have the tools (CAD/CAM/CAE). Saying that the phase-out of assembly programming will eventually progress to 'easy' programming is like saying the phase-out of drawing boards by CAD will someday make for 'easy' car/skyscraper/cell phone design. I don't see mechanical engineers becoming paint-by-numbers morons by 2015, so how can you apply this idea to an equally complex engineering discipline?

Widening income gap.

[edinho]

Why is no one talking about the expanding gulf of earnings mentioned in the review? 80%(!!!) of Americans have their effective income reduced by 19% in about 20 years (about 1% per year average), yet the "top managers" have their income increased by 19 % in 10 years (about 2% per year). And we are talking about US of A, the most powerful state in the world, ever. We are not even talking about some other much sorrier places.

I find this trend very alarming, but not unexpected. The top dogs make the rules, and guess whose benefit are the rules for? This is really the same situation throughout the history of civilization, which is exploitation.

Exploitation?! How can that be? Why not? It is the trend in human history, it is what a person in power does to keep his advantage (in general). Except that in an "advanced democracy" like USA, the exploitation assumes a more advanced form. It is not done with guns to the head, it is done with more legal means, which is threat of loss of income. Wait till the high tech "globalization" hits you (and I think it will be much sooner that 10-15 years), and your job is now being done someone else in India or China (no disrespect to workers in that country at all!). Then you sit there and wonder: what the hell happened? Then you think and remember who benefits from all this, and who makes the rules, and how come the rules seem right, but the outcome feel so damn wrong?

There is no simple answer, really. Just interesting to watch the world whirl along. A few people get the carrot, a wast majority just keep chasing thinking that they can get the carrot. I think it helps to know what is going on, even though one can't realistically change the situation.

Cheers.

Change: From 1900 to 2000

[Courageous]

At the beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of workers in the U.S. were dedicated to agrarian jobs. Obviously, within a very short time period there was massive social change as the the majority of work shifted from agricultural pursuits to industrial pursuits where it peaked at over 60% in the mid 60%. During the early part of this period, there was much public grief as everyone complained how horrible it was that people were working in factories and the sort. There was much hysterionics as various alarmists talked about the disaster in the making.

By the year 2000, less than 2% of the U.S. population was dedicated to agricultural work. Agricultural producitivity expanded something like 200 fold during this period. With the wonderful, colorfully, jaundiced lens of hindsight, of course, we know this was no disaster.

Something similar is happening now. The 1960s saw the beginning of the decline of industry in the U.S., and it's been steadily decreasing ever since.

Service jobs are beginning to rule the day, and -- just like the early 1900's -- hysterionic alarmists are espousing their doomsday predictions (n.b.: I'm not accusing the author of the book of this, just a general observation).

A close examination of the tranformation, however, yields the information that the very fastest growing sections of the service sector are the professional services. We are quickly becoming a society where specialized knowledge rules the day. Lawyers, physicians, engineers, hell even the mechanics and secretaries are workers who need to understand computers and computing.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, except to point out that by 2100 and most likely a lot sooner very few people will be in jobs directly attached to manufacturing. We'll be one giant service economy.

C//

Re:Change: From 1900 to 2000

[Courageous]

If you were to take a contemporary of the 19th century and have them examine the living standards of a contemporary of the early 21st century, they would see a world of such abundance they would scarcely be able to believe it. Imagine, if you will, a world a century from now where manufacturing productivity expanded with the same magnitude as the expansion of productivity from the last century to this one. This roughtly describes a world with 200 times the manufacturing productivity that we have today. Things, once expensive, have negligible cost.

Economics is about scarce resources. So one has to ask: what in the next century will be scarce? Contact with real live human beings will be its own commodity, I suspect. Intellectual property will be a commodity, I also suspect. And note that no matter how much automation we develop, the need to have people there to make it all work properly seems to constantly increase, rather than decrease.

These are the forces you can expect to see at work over the next few decades and throughout the century. I won't speculate on how A.I. might transform all that. That's a long way off, still.

C//

Re:How's that?

[Courageous]

The second was written a couple of years ago, and asserts that innovation and openness to change will keep the American programmer on top for years.

One of the ongoing memes in American culture is our eagerness for new technology and ideas. Many Americans falsely believe that many of the worlds most important inventions were actually invented here. They weren't. The vast majority of them were invented somewhere else first and then blithely ignored. What happened here is that the invention was adopted.

The continued presence or absence of our technological eagerness and flexible predicates our future success.

This is one of the reasons I think the Japanese will fly very high indeed across the 21st century. They have an appetite for technology that exceeds even our own.

There are many cultures world wide that have this appetite now. I firmly believe that this will quite reliably predict the success of these countries through the 21st century, mitigated of course by outside influences.

The converse is also true. Look at the cultures that repudiate technology; they're practically guaranteed to remain impoverished has-been countries which any of the dominate players could roll over on a whim.

N.B.: I'm not making any claim that America is the superior culture in this regard any more. I will say, however, that we are on the list.

C//

What is holding the "peasants" down?

[roystgnr]

I'll grant you, the difference between someone making $60K and someone making $600K is often an accident of birth... but the difference between $16K and $60K is rarely more than motivation. The "peasants" won't revolt against their economic leaders for the same reason they won't revolt against their political leaders: because democracy and capitalism allow those people who are dissatisfied with their place in the system to change it peacefully. During what other "toppled regime" has that been true?