Before I decided to come to Korea, I spent a long time deeply depressed due to my attempts to figure out what I was doing with my life. I was terrified of setting myself on a career path, and wanted to opt out of the whole system, and I think I'm beginning to be able to put into words why.
All the jobs I've ever wanted don't exist. As a child I was sure that starship commander, ambassador to an alien race, or robotics engineer would be available to me as career options. I've always known that I was more intelligent than those around me, and because of this I thought I had world-altering brilliance instead of recognizing the reality that I was very bright in a dull town and school system. My family and teachers always gushed over my potential. They seemed so confident that I would do something important and amazing, and they encouraged me with the oft told lie that I could be anything I wanted when I grew up with the result that I don't want any jobs that actually exist because they all fall lightyears short of my expectations. Now the times I spend sleeping in gutters are the highlights of my life. I have worked about a dozen shitty short term jobs to avoid having to face the fact that I will never explore the far reaches of the galaxy, or even live on the moon.
Another part of my dissatisfaction with careers is that I think that the current conception of jobs is growing ever more anachronistic. As far back as I can remember I have worked under the assumption that advances in technology and increases in population would make work unnecessary for most people. I think this is why I am so open to socialism: I think that in the near future there will be far less work that needs to be done than what would be sufficient to occupy people, and I don't like the idea of just inventing useless busywork to fill the ever growing gap. I have recently come to realize how unusual that assumption is, especially when talking to people a generation or two older than me. I have a tutor student who is the parent of one of the children at my school, and she was telling me about what a big problem old age was in Korea. People have been saving on the assumption of a shorter lifespan than the current average, and so they have come to need jobs in their old age, and there are no jobs available. The difference in our world views became clear to me as I was thinking how the problem was that society is stuck on the idea that people need to perform full time jobs in order to have their basic needs met when really we could all work less if we were willing to stop obsessing over careers and stop associating people's worths with their level of employment, whereas she saw the problem as being that people live too long now. With my assumption socialism seems nearly inevitable, with the only alternative being people doing things that were totally useless to themselves and others (and almost certainly devastatingly consumeristic). I'm beginning to see why many people have major issues with socialism since while I take it as a basic assumption to take into account whenever contemplating the future that there will be a massive gap between the work that needs to be performed and the available workers, the idea has clearly never even crossed their minds. It was one of those moments when I recognized a core assumption as what it was—an assumption—which let me recognize that it might not be shared.
In the meanwhile, though, I am performing the busywork of teaching English in a part of the world that will probably overtake the English speaking world in importance and prominence in the near future. However, I don't really think of myself as an English teacher, but as a world traveler, which is a job title that is probably as close as I can possibly come to living up to my childhood imaginings.
Update: I should mention that my musings on potential were influenced by
this comic.
13 comments:
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I actually think there is more than enough work that can and should be done, but that most of this work is not "profitable" by our current standards. This leads me to contemplate socialism as a more viable model than our current one (since it seems that most of the work our current system rewards is either "devastatingly consumeristic," as you put it, or exploitative/destructive to human beings and the environment), but I am deeply conflicted on the issue and tend to be pretty cynical about such things.
Good qualification; I meant 'profitable' work. I envisioned art, literature, philosophy, theoretical science, etc. booming due to people having increased time to pursue these unprofitable activities.
I just read a book on modern military robotics, and there is definitely work for you as a robotics engineer if you a) are still interested in that and b) don't mind going back to school for another 4-6 years.
I agree, at least in part, with the overall logic that you both see moving us in a direction toward socialism. I think though that its going to need a new word, because I think our new system should be different from socialism in the past, where the state apparatus has direct control or influence over the means of production. I don't think that's the way to go. Instead, I think government, hopefully acting as an extension of popular will (ok, that sounds dreamy, but I think we're closer than past experience says), will implement a much more progressive tax structure, and use that to fund safety nets.
I also think its important that the government promote policies that let people live comfortable lives for less money. For example, better public transportation will allow more people to live without cars, which are really expensive. We can also improve public education so that you don't need to buy a super expensive house if you want your kid to have a decent public school education and then mortgage that house again to pay for college. If people were more financially secure, more "unprofitable" enterprises (i.e. you can't make enough money to live off of) would move into the "profitable" category.
I'm glad people have brought up the idea of shifting the type of work the labor force does. Employing people in industries that value workers for their human interaction, creativity, and compassion rather than their ability to function as a cheap machine would definitely be a change I'd like to see.
However, I have to disagree with Landon that robots will soon be replacing human workers for most jobs. As white middle-class college grads living in the US, we tend not to see the vast amount of menial human labor that is required to keep our society functioning. Whether it's the Latino immigrants who harvest our crops and clean our sewers or the Asian factory workers who assembly our electronics, we still live in a very human-based economy. Those jobs are just too expensive to give to us, and too degrading to be visible to us.
Outside the US and Europe, countries are even farther away from a machine-based economy. In Tanzania, 90% of the population is still substance-farming.
As long as material wealth is the ultimate good in our society, corporations will find it in their benefit to have some segment of the world's population which they can exploit. Most Americans want to have more toys than someone else. I don't think sufficient material resources will bring about socialism, I think a shift in cultural values (perhaps brought on by economic collapse) will bring about a willingness to let go of excess. Maybe then people will be willing to consider socialism.
Ben,
You brought up a lot of issues I want to comment on. Hopefully I'll get to them all.
I think the answers here depend on whether or not current trends extend into the future. Yes, there are millions of menial jobs in America that won't be replaced by machines or efficiency or what not anytime soon. But, as a percentage of the total total workforce, its been shrinking over the last 100+ years. We live in a country that's 82% urban, and something like 3% farmers. Yes, there are many menial jobs left on the far, but there are fewer than there were 20 or 40 or 100 years ago. Our material wealth (I'll come back to this in a second) has allowed us to increasingly mechanize and replace menial labor with "non-menial" labor. The same thing has happened even in the white-collar workplace. We don't employ armies of file clerks anymore - computers have replaced them. More of the workforce (though probably still a minority, even in the USA) consists of jobs where you need to think on your own (hence the rising demand for educated graduates).
The same trends can be currently seen in much of the so-called developing world. According to the CIA World Factbook, China is now 43% urban, and growing at a steady clip of 2.7%. India's 29% and growing at 2.5%. Pakistan is 36% and growing at 3%. The CIA has Tanzania at 25% urbanization and growing at 4.2%, so I'm not sure how 90% are subsistence farmers. I guess it depends on how you define "urban" and "substance farming." And yes, many of these people are working in a way we might consider to be human machines, but that's what the United States went through in the late 19th and early 20th century as well.
So yes, a number of menial jobs have been exported to other countries. But many have been mechanized as well, and I don't think that trend should be ignored.
Will these trends continue? Now, that's a big, big if. I'd like to think it will, but I'm not sure. To be completely rational about it, food per capita production has been shrinking since the mid-1980's. Destruction of crop-land is increasing, especially in vulnerable tropical regions. Its unlikely that world population will continue to expand through the end of the century.
I'm still hopeful that if everything goes well, we can avoid a sharp drop in population (read mass starvation/war), but I actually don't think whether we avoid this or not will have much to do with the behavior of American consumers or corporations or a combination of the two, but with what policies the specific countries arrive at and how badly global warming fucks things up.
In fact, I don't think that's what most Americans believe that material wealth is "the ultimate good". Its much more subtle than that. If you asked people, I don't think that's what they would say. They would emphasize family, community, friends and other things. No, the values we need to change are HOW WE VIEW family, community, etc. I think we need to redefine how Americans think of personal responsibility, work ethic, and individual rights. We need to expand our definition of family and communal obligation.
But in the end, no matter what American consumers do, we're going to be running low on all kinds of stuff going forward. If we don't use it, someone else will. I really think that what matters going forward will be our social policies - family planning, more equal (or socialist) distribution of wealth, relative peace, etc. - and how those in turn effect our material economy. I don't think it takes a minimum amount of material wealth to have a more equitable and "socialist" society. That's the only way I can see a relatively peaceful and painless resolution of the crunch ahead.
I agree that the trend is present, I just don't think it's going to it is going to eliminate menial human labor anytime soon (including in urban areas).
I agree that our future will largely be determined by national social policies. My point is more that in a democracy, the national policies don't change unless the attitudes of the electorate change.
My point was that I'm beginning to understand why my views are so different than that of the electorate, since I'm beginning to see which values and beliefs underlie which political positions.
Also, I wasn't just thinking about robots replacing humans as workers, but also greater efficiency and greater yield due to technological advances and increasing (and increasingly educated and trained) populations. I don't think that labor, menial or otherwise, is going to disappear, I just don't think that there will be nearly as much of it as there will be people willing to do it. The reason that people are disdainful of the unemployed is that there is an assumption that they aren't trying to get a job or are too incompetent to get one, but increasingly there simply are not enough jobs, especially during times of troubled economies. Even more noticeably for the people we know, there are not enough high quality jobs for all of the people who are qualified to do them.
I'll agree with that.
The job shortage also affects other problems, like world hunger. It would be a mistake to improve the efficiency of farms in developing countries because it would create massive unemployment: "As long as there isn't a sufficiency of living wage, non-farm jobs, nor the educational infrastructure to make that viable, subsistence and small-scale farming must not be undermined"
http://food.change.org/blog/view/sustainability_and_hunger
This post reminded me of this:
"Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"
- Bertrand Russell (published 1932)
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
The Russell quote fits what I mean exactly. Nice find, Eliot.
Also, I seem to have stumbled onto a topic we all want to talk about, judging by the fact that this post has at least as many comments as any other ten.
Must be something about the future of the job market that strikes a chord with recent graduates :).
Having read the comic I'm concerned about Reed's charter. The profession of "Neverwas" seems to undermine Reed's mission to provide education with no direct professional application.
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