Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Fred, what a treasure you are. 'Instead of "human development", how about "developing a substance abuse problem" or "having an affair"?' Yes, yes, and again yes! Great quote from Lord Keynes, too. A droll bird, that one.

The inability of Krugman and DeLong to look beyond the artificial scarcity imposed on the many by our capitalist system is quite amazing, really

Well, it could be that they're not seeing us getting out of capitalism at the same time machines replacing people goes to the next level. It's not as if there's no precedent.

I think most everyone here, forced to bet, would let the money ride on fewer jobs, less income with leisure time remaining roughly the same.

During the past 2 weeks, in a few different places, I've observed that several years back in a prior blog of mine, I suggested improving the "jobs" or "unemployment" problem with a simple solution:

halve the work week (20 hrs not 40)
double the work force (split a job in two)

I guess it's too simple to take seriously.

Or just give folk the independence so the "work" needed to keep society going might actually be satisfying... It's not too much or too difficult work per se that makes it onerous it's having a manager--or an "expert" in some fashion--tell you what to do and how to do it.

It's easy to be charming like Keynes when you grew up in Bloomsbury. And probably unfair to compare Krugman and DeLong to him, who after all are still just worker bees.

3x10=How do I afford food?

It seems that comments have been blocked for the post just up the page from here (Peter King's face as illustration).

That is where I intended to post this link to the Johnstone piece in today's Counterpunch...
http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone03072011.html
where it would be as off-topic as it is here. But the only appropriate place to put the link is so far down the page that this useful appreciation of the situation wrt US/Nato and Libya might not get the boost I would have it receive.

To the heavy lifters here: What if the rebellion in Libya is shown to be heavily CIA backed and promoted? Would/should that alter one's attitude about Qaddafi?

keynes
here lovely as it is and as epater the philistine rentier as it appears
might not suggest one trend we've seen in the norther advanced exploitation zone
a reversal
yup we've seen these last 35 years ...job time per pop-head expanding
look into many windows at 10 am
and you find no one at home
for many households job attendance has risen even as wage rates stagnate

one off set
an estimate of reduced total
in house household chore hours

what is that n per week
since the age of appliances major and minor hit the homestead

many of those hours are now sold on the market or at least offered on the market eh ??

and then there's the household care hours
child care elder care ec etc
down as institutions take over more of that burden
--even as households pre 18's decline in number --

the participation rate of able spirits
18-65 has risen substantially since 1948

get your hands on the numbers
and you find

--as i'm sure we all have once or twice
over the years --

the bulk of our job class in norte amigo
has not participated
in the largesse of science/technology
and
its consequent compound growth
in output value per hour
by reducing hours

we have exploitation rates

and we have the greater skew in "earned income rates "

-- pre tax ---

now add in a transfer system based on payroll taxes
and the great health premium gouge ...
upshot
the bigger hunk of america has gone no where
closer to mr k's emerald city
in the last 40 years

if you come from better incomed and wealthed households
of course you can follow the gold brick road
stay in "schooling "
join the reserve army of the "creative and free " class
much larger now then in puccini's day
live max off the transfer system and
passed along family earned scraps
factotum the job market

but alas that lovely state of affairs like most others is wasted on twenty somethings
including the harrows of the chinaski job market

---

if we want to structure jobs as oxy suggests
we can
but we have to vastly up thye transfer systems tax yield
lift it off payroll onto value added and wealth
and produce a very large and high reaching

earned social wage
the eitc pumped to ten times its present size

then say 30 hours of job attendeance would eran you
a decent living
none of this is about doable
its all about the threat to exploitation
it contains

"... It's not too much or too difficult work per se that makes it onerous it's having a manager--or an "expert" in some fashion--tell you what to do and how to do it."
if you want to maximize output per hour
you are going to have work drivers

even piece work pay and assembly lines and tips and commissions don't squeeze out enough effort and care without foreman

and

like beat cops need precinct
sargents and captains

foremen and supervisors need
a pyramid of line management
enforcing the enforcement on the enforcers below

this per se
is not restricted to exploitative oppressive production systems

it will be with us as long as pay
and market prices/revenues
follow the quantity and quality of work
performed

hence the eitc approach
to societies conflicting tasks of performing necessary labor as efficiently as possible
and at the same time providing a living income to all job class types

a certain set of libertarians suggest markets can be substituted for hierarchy

history suggests otherwise
and has since the NEP was introduced to revolutionary russia

you're a damn ignorant naif or blatant fool
if you think
lenin enjoyed the notion
of rehiring all those
"managers and engineers "
to restore industrial /store /office
production systems to anything like
"internationally competitive " output rates
simply
because
he adored
the pyramid of power option
for its own sake
ala orwells inner party brutes

as to why such international rates of output needed to be restored

well
revisit keynes project above as cited
the road there goes thru satanic mills
with or without privateers profit

i hear the cry
"what about job site conditions ???"

so long as there's a class struggle and its peak class war
maximum output per hour will reign over the systems as they clash with each other

that is
godwin esque "spontaneous voluntary bit by bit conversion" to the small is beautiful
and waste min a morality
school of philosphy of life aside
ie
tinker bell jimnny cricket miracles aside

hortense gets the sissy paine
baked
apple cobbler
for this line

"I think most everyone here, forced to bet, would let the money ride on fewer jobs, less income with leisure time remaining roughly the same"

"Well, it could be that they're not seeing us getting out of capitalism at the same time machines replacing people goes to the next level. It's not as if there's no precedent."

True. I still think it's worth pointing out that the whole frame of reference is constricted by what K-punk calls "capitalist realism", and that there are alternatives, even if they are still far from being realized.

To be fair, I should also point out that Krugman has a laudable column wherein he uses this evidence to denounce the parchment pimps:

Degrees and Dollars
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html

we might all benefit from reading the comments of others b4 commenting ourselves
and
when one rings a chime acknowledge it

as a real denizen of comment cages here and there
i find it annopying at a minimum
when repeats go down without either alluding to earlier comments
or at least a mea culpa i"i haven't read all the comments above

yes fb

frug has at broken with the reich line
in work of nations
about 20 years late

the real; competition is the cost of local skill production
we can't compete with chindia here
anymore then at the skill less level
without drastic reformulation of exchange rates

huh? Which comments are you referring to?

one of the horrors of this format
consecutive comments take on an often unintended inter link

at other sites one can attach
the comment to an existing comment

keeps things clear

fb this isn't directed at your immediately preceeding comment
or the one b4 that really

except possibly this ....
" I still think it's worth pointing out that the whole frame of reference is constricted by what K-punk calls "capitalist realism", and that there are alternatives, even if they are still far from being realized."
and this

"none of this is about doable
its all about the threat to exploitation
it contains "

in an attempt to boost what i take to be a great topicwell presented by fb

i have once again flooded the rice paddy beyond the point of proper culivation

but i sure wish we could get in to this in detail
get a real thread rolling here
you know 150 comments or so
its a very central front
in the future conception kampf eh ??t

pinko libertarians and frei korps radicals
much saturated with green pietisms and
in constant revulsion
from the surrounding hog chow on wheels
that is mitel amerika
have all sorts of notions baked and unbaked
that orbit this topic

oh gosh
why don't i just return to no comment mode

none of this is about doable
its all about the threat to exploitation
it contains

Ahh ... there's the rub. So much rubbing, in fact, that there is now a fire.

you're a damn ignorant naif or blatant fool
if you think
lenin enjoyed the notion
of rehiring all those
"managers and engineers"

Calls up two points of reference:

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fear_of_Freedom

2) http://www.lyricstime.com/fugazi-ex-spectator-lyrics.html

...and (1) being most relevant, while (2) is just a synaptic connection.

Weren't electric appliances going to give home-makers endless leisure time?

Raise your hand if you have too much leisure thanks to your vacuum cleaner, your washing machine, your electric iron, your self-cleaning oven...

One thing I've noticed is that the introduction of automation has the effect of raising expectations. In the home, these expectations lead to more stuff (15 shirts to wash instead of 3; 9 rooms to clean instead of 2) and higher standards of, e.g., cleanliness. In manufacturing these become increased throughput and greater accuracy.

Automation just raises the bar. And while it does displace the workers whose jobs are now performed by machines, there are many new jobs in building, maintaining, and servicing the machines.

Education is where Americans play puppets about social class, as Frances Fitzgerald argued. And the fiction that going back to college or culinary school is a smart move is being pushed hard right about now. Main result? Student debt bubble.

But, FWIW, I have to object to the technocratic bullshit in that story about computers replacing lawyers, good as that might sound to us here at SMBIVA. I work as a paralegal. Our main client started using an e-discovery service, in exactly the hope that it would reduce our bills. Result of the "service?" The files are even more jumbled now than ever; our bills are unchanged. It simply requires a human eye to prepare a mountain of papers for litigation.

This e-discovery thing is a fad and a con. Of course the NYT peddles the notion without any actual investigation.

This e-discovery thing is a fad and a con.

I have to disagree. E-discovery is a solution to a problem that was created by computers in the first place. Thanks to digital communications, digital documents preparation, and digital storage, every office now has access to orders of magnitude more "documents" than a comparable office fifty years ago. This makes litigation discovery exponentially more difficult by those same orders of magnitude (because processing and cross-referencing 10 times more documents is about 100 times more difficult). In my experience, E-discovery is a necessary tool for complex litigation now. But it is only necessary because of EXTRA work created by machines. In other words, this is an example of expectations rising with the introduction of new technologies, just like washing machines, word processors, etc have changed people's expectations about cleanliness and document formatting.

MD,

It's an asinine General Counsel who imagines discovery (or any other aspect of litigation, for that matter) can be automated. Of course for a short period, between the call for automation and the realization that it's a clusterfuck, GC can get paid nicely and look to another Corporate Lilypad where s/he can land and then croak "RIBBIT!"**

That's really what it's all about in America, 2011 anyway: get something for your own self, who cares about the fallout?!

____________________

**Frog-ese for "I got mine, sucka!, screw youse loozahs!"

PS -- just saw Picador's reply.

I'm talking about a different thing than what Picador's discussing. There's a difference between electronic document archiving (which carries its own problems of forgery etc) and automating litigation as if to think a machine can craft a suitable, long-term-defensible discovery response... or generate a useful discovery request.

Picador, I appreciate that e-discovery must have some utility. In our field, personal injury (read: automobile) law, the packages we get back aren't completely pointless. The carry with them a breakdown of medical procedures and costs that would be very labor intensive for lawyers to prepare. But these are mostly useful for claims adjusting purposes, not litigation.

But in big business law firms, I'm sure e-discovery has it uses. But it still ain't replacing lawyers, as the NYT and Krugie would have it. No way.

steve
all quite true about expectations
rising with productivity
but only up to a point
in the long run gains are made
iirc
surveys indicate an average
drop of 20 hours in total household housekeeping hours
cleaning repairing cooking etc
since the 40's

" many new jobs in building, maintaining, and servicing the machines."
but the net effect is less job hours in total
thus without seriously reduced job hours
less jobs

the real disaster in litigation
was the berger court introduction of practically unlimited discovery
thru the deposition portal
fuel this with corporate litigation budgets and you got potlatch baby

the real disaster in litigation
was the berger court introduction of practically unlimited discovery
thru the deposition portal

I don't quite get that argument, op.

I think it has more to do with the simpler point you caboose'd:

fuel this with corporate litigation budgets and you got potlatch baby

...but much more than potlatch because potlatch (as I understand it) was periodic and ceremonial, not consistently done as day-in, day-out practice. Though one surely could argue that it was the potlatch itself, and not its timing, that established order/hierarchy.

I'd suggest the problem is much more systemic: the idea that competing lies (litigation) yields the truth. Back to Willie and his opening line in A Frolic of His Own, eh?

Mr Cybernetic's 1949 letter to Walter Reuther:
http://libcom.org/history/father-cybernetics-norbert-wieners-letter-uaw-president-walter-reuther

But in big business law firms, I'm sure e-discovery has it uses. But it still ain't replacing lawyers, as the NYT and Krugie would have it. No way.

I have to admit, I couldn't bring myself to click through to the NY Times, so I'm sure I was missing your point.

Anyone who argues that litigators are going to get replaced by hyper-efficient robots might note that, in an adversarial legal system, the amount of money devoted to a given matter generally corresponds to the mutual value of that matter to the parties, not to some pre-determined quantum of work that needs to get done. Krugman, an exemplary product of the Economics academy, apparently thinks every job (lawyer, gangster, warlord, panhandler) can be modeled as the sequential production of widgets.

OP:

I only ever skip your posts. Sometimes I just can't do the kind of close-reading that I usually only reserve for like T.S. Eliot or philosophers like Sprigge.

I don't think the machines raised cleanliness expectations. Read Flora Thompson's "Lark Rise", for instance.

Households actually used to devote a crazy number of unpaid labour hours to cleaning and domestic chores. Meanwhile, domestic servants formed a significant proportion of the total paid labour force.

Hot running water on demand, clothes washing machines, and vacuum cleaners have saved enormous, repeat enormous, amounts of human drudgery.

However, all those labour hours saved were not to the benefit of the house workers.

Instead, the house workers went into the paid labour force. They boosted overall production of goods and services. For a generation or two, they also boosted household incomes.

However, the tendency of liberal capitalism is to push down wages. Net result: all the labour hours once spent on domestic drudgery, is now spent in office cubicle drudgery, and most of the net increase of social output is captured by the capitalist.

But please don't blame my vacuum cleaner.