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Hi Sally,
I've been a lurker on the FW list for several years, often passing on
pieces to my friends on a list for progressive Democrats here
in California.
I wonder if you or anyone else is thinking about what else will change
as we come to work less (or not at all).
Commute traffic will greatly decrease along with the need for the
infrastructure that supports it, police, auto repair, gas stations
and their suppliers, eateries, highway signs, road construction and
repair, etc.
People will not need as many business suits, cleaners, shoe shine stands,
etc.
We won't be needing as many business lunches, conventions and
teleconferencing and business air travel.
We won't be needing direct mail advertising and third class mail as we
come to depend more on email and the web.
We won't need as many trade schools and business schools, business journals,
trade magazines, stock market reports and investment councilors and brokers.
When we add it all up, the changes in the economy are so huge that it is
very challenging to understand what life would be like. And harder to
understand if we would be any happier.
It all depends on how the economy is structured, of course. How will
purchasing power be distributed? Will there be rich and poor? Will the
smart be better off than the less-smart? Will parents be able to pass on
wealth to their heirs?
Some people will be required to design new tools and manage the old, but
productivity is assumed to be so high that many fewer are required. It is
difficult to predict what will become of product diversity and consumer
choice. Will there be only a limitted selection of products because only
the most efficient producer will dominate the supply chain?
I suspect that all this is discussed in academic circles and I don't have
the time to pursue this further, but it all makes for interesting reading
for us occassional listeners-in.
dennis paull,
los altos, california
>Ray wrote:
>snip
>>"I think we will eventually have to accept that the holistic non literal
>>nature is best left to the highest and most creative activities that
>>humanity can conceive while the concept of "Jobs" in the old "hired
>>hands" sense may very well pass away.
>>
>>It could be one of the ironies of history that "jobs" will become as
>>they were in Peru during the Inca and in China in the Cultural
>>Revolution something that everyone does for a few short months
>>as a kind of tax for the system. The rest of the time will be given
>>to creative work or maybe even no work at all.
>>
>>I have trouble with the no work idea maybe because of the
>>Baptists on the reservation and they may have been right about the
>>psychological need for it. But I don't believe we have begun to ask
>>the questions on this yet."
>
> Ray - You've just summarized what I'm working on, which is how to
>re-arrange society, via a Basic Income, so that when 'jobs' fade away, the
>transition to what James Robertson calls 'ownwork' can be as painless as
>possible. To me, the end of 'wage slavery' is a cause for
>celebration--there will always be good work (arts and other) to do and most
>jobs just get in the way. The Baptists probably sold the model of human
>beings that holds us to be inately lazy and evil, only whipped into shape
>by fear of god and coercion by our betters. I never bought.
>
>Sally
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