At 09:39 PM 11/19/98 -0800,[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Tom Walker) wrote:
>Pete Vincent
>
>>I think it could hardly be called _Rifkin's_ theory, as it has been
>>around an awfully long time, being discussed explicitly, for example,
>>in Robert Theobald's 1964(?) book.
>
>I'd give it a much older pedigree than that. Stephen Leacock started out as
>a political economist and wrote a very interesting piece on the same theme
>in 1921. M. King Hubbert's "Man hours and production" dates from the mid 1930s.
>
>Regards,
>
>Tom Walker
....... or by Bertrand Russell, about that time:
INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION - Friend or Foe
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 manufacture 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 in 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 around instead of being
a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
.. In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays - 1935
////////\\\\\\\\
Don Chisholm
416 484 6225 fax 484 0841
email [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Gaia Preservation Coalition (GPC)
http://www.envirolink.org/orgs/gaia-pc
personal page: http://home.ican.net/~donchism/dchome.html
"There is an almost gravitational pull toward putting out of mind unpleasant
facts. And our collective ability to face painful facts is no greater than
our personal one. We tune out, we turn away, we avoid. Finally we forget,
and forget we have forgotten. A lacuna hides the harsh truth." -
psychologist Daniel Goleman
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