Ed Weick wrote,
> I know that I'm being enormously unfair to Rifkin because
> I've only been able to read the first few pages of anything
> he's written without feeling that I'm being fleeced by a con man.
I can sympathize with Ed's reaction because Rifkin DOES use some pretty
goofy hyperbole. He's a showman and an evangelist, two characteristics that
can be off-putting to sober thinkers (and I take Ed to be a sober thinker).
My defence of Rifkin is that, without looking at my notes, I can name four
or five books that came out in the 5 or 6 years before Rifkin's The End of
Work, which contained excellent scholarship and close argumentation and
presented their conclusions with all due moderation and qualification. These
books documented some of the same main trends that Rifkin emphasized and had
almost no impact on public discussion.
Rifkin is a popularizer of ideas and undoubtedly this makes him a vulgarizer
of those ideas. It's unfortunate that the discussion of Rifkin often gets
stuck at the level of criticizing or defending Rifkin's vulgarizations
rather than seeing the appeal of Rifkin's book as a barometer of a broader
public unease and groping about the evolving status of paid work.
Saying that "unemployment in the US has been very low during the past
decade" doesn't really answer the unease. For one thing, "the past decade"
drastically overstates the duration of the fabled "golden era" of U.S. job
creation, which has only really settled in over the past _half_ decade.
Before that, people in the U.S. were still talking about the "jobless
recovery".
Second, the U.S. job creation record over the last five years has to be
contrasted with the record in much of the rest of the world. The shallow
response to that disparity is to hold up U.S. economic policies as a model
for job creation elsewhere, as if Dollar hegemony and the ability to run
enormous trade deficits indefinitely had nothing to do with it. This is not
to say that the U.S. jobs have been somehow "wrung out" from other
countries' losses, only that the conditions that have allowed phenomenal
U.S. job growth in the past five years are exceptional. Exceptional is too
mild a word, a better word would be *bizarre*.
In response to Ed's "So what?" about the virtual elimination of
manufacturing jobs, the consequences are both different and WORSE than the
title of Rifkin's book implies. If Ed supposes that the continuing need for
"doctors, lawyers" etc. will absorb all those sloughed off by manufacturing,
he hasn't engaged the argument at the level of seriousness alreadly clear
twenty years ago in Bureau of Labor Statistics projections -- large
percentage increases applied to small numbers are quantitively insignificant
compared to small percentage increases applied to large numbers. The "new
opportunities" of the future will be for janitors, security and prison
guards and non-medical health and personal care attendants.
The potential is there, however, for ever more "new opportunities" which
contribute ever less to anything resembling individual and social wealth.
Rifkin underestimates the job creation potential of a parasitic and
pathological economy -- iatrogenic growth, to use Jonathan Rowe's
expression. The issue isn't just "where will the jobs come from" as Ed
implies, but what -- and who's -- purposes will be served.
To dismiss Rifkin's image of a bipolar world as "not how things are now, nor
are likely to be . . . in the future" is to simply wave aside mountains of
evidence. Only if one defines "the world" as the top 20% of the population
in the rich nations could one even contemplate ignoring the disparities.
To say that "new technology is not locked up in some fortress" is to beg the
question of the relationship between knowledge and income. A lack of
knowledge or of access to technology may well be a barrier to income. This
does not mean, however, that the acquisition of knowledge or access to
technology provides a path to income. There is the old Aristotilean
distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions. The "opportunity to
input and access output" is simply not the same thing as having access to
income. Old style barriers like having a small child to care for or not
being in favour with the dispensers of contract largesse are as formidable
as ever, even for those with credentials, experience and technological savvy.
To conclude, as Ed does, that our leaders and ourselves are addressing the
question of how to share productivity gains broadly is a hyperbole of a very
different kind from those that Rifkin indulges in. Rifkin extrapolates
flamboyantly from trends to arrive at his hyperbolic assertions. Ed abjectly
states the opposite of the trend as it's inevitable outcome. Both may be
fantasies, but Rifkin's fantasy at least opens up the questions, rather than
closing them off.
regards,
Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
