The RICH Economy
Article by Robert Anton Wilson, from The Illuminati Papers
Short quote: “If there is one proposition which currently wins the assent of nearly everybody, it is that we need more jobs. ‘A cure for unemployment’ is promised, or earnestly sought, by every Heavy Thinker from Jimmy Carter to the Communist Party USA, from Ronald Reagan to the head of the economics department at the local university, from the Birchers to the New Left. I would like to challenge that idea. I don’t think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.”
So, what do you think, Dopers? Can we escape the necesity of holding down a job any time soon?
What would be the point??? The cleaner who does my toilets has told me repeatedly how life wouldn’t be worth living if she lost her job… imagine how it would be if everyone lost their jobs!!! Mass suicide.
Greenpiece, maybe she means that life wouldn’t be worth living if she had to go on welfare, or life wouldn’t be worth living if she had to be a a homeless panhandler. What if the alternatived to holding down a job were not so dire?
You are right, in order for an economic system to have any degree of flexibilty you need to have a certain amount of unemployment, called frictional unemployment. Of course this isn’t the sit on your ass all day and drink beer for years on end unemployment, this is the “between jobs” unemployment. Companies need some degree of flexibilty in adjusting their production function, if they can’t get rid of people then labor becomes a fixed cost and… blah, blah, blah… it isn’t good.
She LIKES cleaning my toilets, she’s told me that on many occasions… and frankly who wouldn’t? Close proximity to my excrement… etc… in a few years time, she could make a packet out of that on the black market.
…And if it were so healthy, what would the result be if everyone did it?
I think the best that can be said is that a SMALL amount of unemployment is necessary to the economy, to provide the mobility of labor required for new ventures. That’s why economists have historically considered anything less than 5-8% unemployment to be ‘full’ employment.
When we speak of unemployment we usually are taking about people who want jobs. If nobody had to work to keep body and soul together in reasonable comfort generally getting the things that we want without working I think that a lot fewer people would be working and unemployment would go down a lot.
I just glanced through the link in the OP, and it goes well beyond just pointing out the obvious that there will always be some people in between jobs etc. (Which is why an unemployment rate of 5% is usually thought to represent full employment IIRC) It posits that someday we will all be unemployed because there will be machines to do all the work. Without going into detail, I belieive this to be a typical utopian pipe dream, and we can all look forward to working for many many years to come!
Could it be that some of you have not followed my link? How shocking. Here’s a quote from further on in the article: “Let us regard wage-work – as most people do, in fact, regard it – as a curse, a drag, a nuisance, a barrier that stands between us and what we really want to do. In that case, your job is the disease, and unemployment is the cure. ‘But without working for wages we’ll all starve to death!?! Won’t we?’ Not at all. Many farseeing social thinkers have suggested intelligent and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment. Here are some examples.” (He then describes several plans.)
The article concludes with, “As Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people, once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, ‘What was it that I was so interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?’ The answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show.”
Well, I skimmed the link, and I don’t think the author is totally off the mark; heck, we already have a surplus of products and services, and most of the people producing this surplus would be happier if they worked less (and many, unlike Greenpiece’s cleaning lady, would prefer not to work at all). That said, I didn’t find his alternate plans particularly compelling, since most of them seemed to revolve around “the government” reimbursing the voluntarily unemployed for the wages they aren’t earning. I’d like to know where “the government” is supposed to be getting its money from, and why anybody would choose to be one of the people who do work under such a system. (I also think citing Ezra Pound as an economic theorist is … um, strange.)
What I really hope to see in my lifetime is universal underemployment – a standard thirty-five hour work week for everybody, with six weeks of paid vacation a year. That strikes me as a more equitable way to distribute our new-found leisure time, without running the risk of driving any cleaning ladies to suicide
I’m not holding my breath or quitting my job, but human beings have experienced radical transformations in how we manage to survive, including the Industrial Revolution (40-hour workweeks with 5 days on and 2 days off are not an immutable Law of Nature) and even more so with the Agricultural Revolution before the dawn of civilization. A lot of stuff has been written out there about hunter-gatherers, and a lot of it is probably too starry-eyed, but it is true that hunter-gatherers didn’t really have “jobs” in any sense we could recognize. In fact, our 21st Century First World conception of a “job” would probably be pretty alien to most people in most times and places in human existence.
And, to be really far out and get all the libertarians and anarchists salivating, a great many people have lived their entire lives without experiencing what we think of as “government”, either–though I would say that the experience of living in stateless societies has not always been a good thing. (And I’m not just talking about late 20th Century Lebanon or Somalia here.)
People need purpose to find meaning. As most people are unable to find meaning in anything other then material goods and competing with others, work is here to stay. Where else can we get both? I make more then many but less then others. I have a nicer car then some, etc…
Myself, I worked years to earn several degrees and work my way up the corporate ladder. If tomorrow I found out I never had to work again, I would walk away without a glance back.
This is an old argument - I was debating this ‘technology eradicated work’ argument in the 1980’s.
It’s a pipe dream. It assumes that as we get wealthier, people will want essentially the same things they want today. But all the evidence we have suggests that people will want more things as they get richer.
Or put it this way: At the turn of the century, over 90% of the population was engaged in farming and other activities related to delivering food. Today it’s what, 3%? How come we don’t have 87% unemployment?
If robots could make anything, and IF we didn’t have to expend any energy to maintain them or find the raw materials to build them, then people would just value other things. Art, maybe? Hand craftsmanship for its own sake. Or if we’re really wealthy, maybe we’ll want to build our own personal spaceships. Whatever.
But I don’t see the fundamental nature of man, which is to continue to strive to better his condition, changing any time soon.
Yeah, if you didn’t hunt or gather your food, you’d just starve to death. I mean, it’s not like other people are going to hunt or gather your food for you.
Well, it seems like I wandered into a thread where everyone, with the exception of perhaps Guinastasia and Rhum Runner, lives in either their parents house or a college dorm. Either that or you people think that everthing is created by magic.
Well, I couldn’t access the link, but let me assure you there is not a surplus of products and services. At least there is not enough of a surplus that 250 M Americans won’t ever have to create anything new ever again.
Um yes they did. The hunter-gatherer’s job was hunting and gathering. Their payment was not starving to death.
In our modern society, we have figured out that its better for people to specialize it producing certain things instead of trying to produce everything they need for themselves. We use money as a convenient form of exchange so we don’t need to constantly figure out the exchange rate of chickens to cows. So basically, you perform some work for society, get paid, and in return you get to take an equivalent amount of products and services.
The article is essentially bullshit. It shows no understanding of economics or monetary systems. Here’s the problem. If you give everyone a minimum income, what’s the incentive of anyone to work at all? There’s a lot of crappy jobs that need doing and they all can’t be performed by a computer.
And of course hunter-gatherers had “monetary systems”? Yes hunter-gatherers “worked”, they expended effort to survive, but the structure of their lives was totally different from ours.
Look, I’m not expecting to see any transformation like this in my lifetime, and I’m not even saying it will necessarily happen. But I do think it’s a bit silly to insist that humans will never, ever wind up living in some radically different society from the one we live in now–and beyond that, that it’s inconceivable that such a thing even could happen. It has happened before.
