Date: Thu, 02 Jul 1998 15:59:57 -0700
From: John Rogers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: (ICT-JOBS): The Social Costs of ICT
I'm no academic, nor am I executive director of a significant program
introducing ICT to rural areas.
Much of the discussion in this seminar has centered around job creation
using ICT. As an individual I have experienced, to some degree, and
witnessed to a greater degree, the social and environmental costs
associated with the "structural adjustments" brought on by increasingly
efficient technology.
I am, as some of my colleagues might say, a computer enthusiast. Raised
in an academic environment, I moved "back to the land" in the early
seventies after dropping out of college in Ohio. I spent 20 years
building houses, cabinets, and furniture. My work as a custom cabinet
maker was in direct competition with low-end products produced by highly
sophisticated CNC woodworking machines. While I was able to find work
in high-end markets, the amount of money I made often required me to
purchase my own furniture from a local big box retailer--and many other
products as well.
About seven or eight years ago two things happened:
* My brother gave me his old 8086.
* I became involved in a non-profit project aimed at producing
certified sustainably harvested wood products.
I wrote a business plan for the project. As part of this effort I came
to a better understanding of the role of technology in the forest
products industry. Right now I'm teaching an introductory level computer
literacy course at the local community college. The course covers the
core office applications: word processing, spreadsheets, databases,
presentation software, and internet e-mail/browsing.
My experience in cabinet making reflected a pattern that also pertained
in primary wood product manufacturing: increased efficiency, achieved
using technology investments and economies of scale, reduced employment.
As the level of physical and intellectual skills necessary to
accomplish manufacturing tasks declined, so did wages. Technological
efficiency, coupled with increased capital costs, maintained or
increased the throughput of raw materials necessary to achieve a
"sufficient" ROI.
In primary manufacturing, technology also compensated for the declining
quality of standing timber by using lower quality inventory for pulp,
oriented strand board, particle board and other types of panel stock.
This increased recovery *volumes* coming out the forests in this rural
area. These patterns exacerbated the polarization of the community
around environmental and social issues: environmental quality declined,
product quality declined, employment declined. Jobs or Owls? ... well,
really, neither.
In the forties and fifties the advent of the bulldozer, the logging
truck, and the chainsaw revolutionized the distribution of control over
the technology necessary to harvest big timber competitively. Prior to
this time you needed to build a railroad to the trees to transport logs
to the mill, and you needed a shipping company to get lumber to market.
Using portable equipment powered by internal combustion motors small
businesses could afford to cut, move, mill, and transport timber
products. Hundreds of small mills and logging operations sprang up.
The new technology provided access to previously inaccessible or
"marginal" forest resources. When coupled with the huge surge in home
building after WWII, a boom economy resulted which lasted until the
sixties or seventies. During this period control over the industry
reverted to a few, very efficient, high volume mills and consolidated
land ownerships. As a result the benefits of increased efficiency also
reverted primarily to the owners of capital which spearheaded the drive
to implement technological improvements--at least to those that did it
well--and small operations, unable to make the capital investment in
technology and knowledge, dwindled. Absolute employment declined.
Employment relative to volume of throughput declined rapidly.
I think there are some perspectives here which might inform the ICT
discussion.
1) The value of technology is tied to material throughput. I think this
continues to be true in the information age. The information people pay
for is information about material resources: the location of resources,
the transformation of resources into products, transportation of
resources, and markets for resources. There is a market for
entertainment (and other information products without material
substance), but the money that changes hands is derived from the
manufacturing sector--the production and exchange of material goods.
National accounting procedures may make it seem that you can increase
the information sector of an economy with any direct relationship to
manufacturing, but I think a global accounting would show that profits
from manufacturing ultimately provide the capital that drives the
entertainment market and the market for information management. In this
view, increases in ICT jobs in developed countries are tied to
management of manufacturing and agricultural efforts around the world. I
believe this is an exploitative relationship.
2) The benefits of technological innovation derive to those that own
and operate the technology. Declining IT prices create an opportunity
to increase well-being by redistributing ownership of the capacity to
manage technological efficiencies. Economies of "scale" are achievable
at lower levels of throughput. This points to the necessity for
training and education if this opportunity for small and micro
businesses is to be realized. However if the gyppo logging boom of the
fifties is any indication of what is to come, this redistribution, if it
is achieved at all, is likely to be short-lived without specific
structural support. In addition those jobs made obsolete by technical
efficiencies are held by people who are not likely (generally) to even
make the transition to data input technician much less multi-media
developer. The attitude that this is a hard, but necessary, adjustment,
necessary for the well-being of society as a whole, does not often take
into account the speed with which these transitions are happening.
Change is not happening over generations, it's happening right now, and
again a year later, and faster still five years later. We are talking
about a pace of change and self-guided education that is staggering for
the average individual, a pace which in and of itself will demand
tremendous resources.
If the value of ICT is tied to increased production efficiencies, and if
ICT indeed increases efficiency, measured in money, the result of
increased investment in ICT in a closed system must be increased
throughput--if well-paid employment is to be maintained. Current
patterns in distributing the benefits of the manufacture of wealth and
the consumption of raw materials indicate there are two limits to growth
in ICT employment.. The first limit is the relative limit of the market.
If production efficiencies continue to reduce the need for human
employees, without adequate distribution of the benefits of
technological efficiencies, who will buy the expanding supply of
products? The second limit is the absolute limit to material resources.
Technology, facilitated by ICT, may allow us to expand production
efficiently, but our resources will eventually be depleted. How much
throughput will be necessary to maintain employment levels adequate to
create a market for increasingly efficient production methodologies?
Maybe technology will enable us to substitute commonly available and
currently marginal resources for wood, fiber, ore, oil, and healthy
food--but it hasn't happened yet. If it does happen, I hesitate to
envision what that will mean for the planet, and by extension its
inhabitants.
Equitable distribution and awareness of environmental limits are no
longer "feel-good" issues for the impractical and the soft-hearted.
The answer to these questions, in my mind, is tied to the distribution
of the benefits of ICT and the application of technology to increasing
circular efficiencies in the use of raw materials in our manufacturing
cycles and increasing the marginal utility of durable goods.
I think that a community without ICT skills is fundamentally handicapped
in the current economy--vulnerable. I also think that the horizontal
linkages facilitated by the internet can help build social equity though
developing linkages within the community. A community can become aware
of its own resources in a new way, *and* aware of the number of other
communities facing similar issues around the world. These horizontal
linkages facilitate community capacity development, flexible business
networks, and other survival strategies for rural communities, thereby,
hopefully, building locally owned economic equity. However, without
local ownership, without distributed ownership, I doubt that ICT will
benefit the majority of current rural residents economically. In fact,
to go a step farther, I would suggest that without facilitating local
ownership on some level, either tax based or direct ownership of the
infrastructure, no amount of training will prevent the aggregation of
the benefits of efficiency at the top of the capital ladder that
occurred in the Pacific Northwest's gyppo logging boom from
continuing.
********************
None of this addresses real well-being. The more we use
technology, the more our day to day work is mediated by digital
processors and CRT's, the more distant we become from this fundamental
reality: we are running out of material to throughput and the quality of
what is left is experiencing an abrupt decline.
When you view forest productivity through a computer screen it looks
doable. When you go *outside,* away from the screen, and away from the
cubicle, it becomes obvious that the increases in efficiency and
productivity are justifying an incredible decline in quality. Today's
"well stocked" forest bears little resemblance to the forests rural
people in the northwest US remember from 40 or fifty years ago. The
quality of a stack of construction grade 2x6's in the lumber yard bears
little resemblance to the quality of a similar stack just 10 or 20 years
ago.
This decline in quality is happening across the board. IMO a tour
through the mall presents evidence of a similar decline in many other
sectors. Food tastes worse and contains more chemicals, furniture is
made out of plastic and fiberboard, cars and equipment don't last, toys
have gone from wood to plastic, we drive everywhere we go breathing the
exhaust of our neighbors. Discretionary time is increasingly spent on
the computer or watching TV. Social linkages are lost. All this is
made possible and even mandated by the dynamics of technology, profit,
and competition. ICT facilitates the process. Exporting this
development model to rural and developing areas is of dubious value. A
short-term patch for serious structural misalignments.
I'm not against technology, I'm fascinated by it. However, so far in
the ICT discussion I don't hear anyone considering the steps needed to
encourage ICT, and it's owners, to serve long-term *economic*
sustainability.
So here's a couple of suggestions. If ICT is going to contribute to
long-term stable employment patterns and real social well-being, it
needs to facilitate, and be implemented in, programmatic and economic
contexts that:
* increase economic value per unit of throughput (increase added
value)
* increase the longevity/durability/quality of products (increase
marginal utility)
* substitute local products for imported products (decrease energy
consumption per unit of throughput)
* invest in the identification and reduction of material waste in
product development, manufacturing, distribution, and disposal cycles
(reduce throughput and low entropy waste)
* reduce investments in capital intensive technologies which increase
throughput of marginal resources (reduce throughput)
* increase access to, distributed ownership of, and capacity to use,
low-volume, low-cost, efficient, and appropriate manufacturing and
communication technology (increase distributed capacity and control)
* implement decentralized social and economic structures which
facilitate and reflect the development of a dense, rich network of
relationships among community organizations, businesses, families, and
individuals (increase social equity)
* encourage collaborative networks of economic, social, and political
relationships between communities within regional economies and between
communities facing similar problems and following similar development
strategies on a global scale (build community and regional capacity)
Well, I've gone on a bit long here and I really should be doing other
things.
Thanks for a very informative discussion,
-John Rogers
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
