Victor Milne has come up with some well reasoned arguments as a counter to
the position I took on Jeremy Rifkin's "Work, Social Capital, and the
Rebirth of the Civil Society: A Blueprint for a New Third Sector Politics."
In particular, he takes me to task for being optimistic about future
employment when it does seem, as Rifkin argues, that computer based
technology is already eliminating jobs in some sectors. It would seem that,
Like Rifkin, Victor believes that the number of jobs available will actually
decline in the long run.
I don't think I'm being optimistic about future employment. All I'm saying
is that I don't expect computer technology per se to reduce the total number
of jobs available to the population of an advanced industrial society, or to
be a little more specific, to reduce the ratio of people employed to total
population. As is happening now, the application of computer technology
will lead to a reduction of employment in particular sectors, resulting in
fewer jobs in fields that can be automated. However, I argue that a
considerable proportion of the things people gainfully do cannot be
automated, and that workers whose jobs are eliminated will find new things
to do.
I'm suggesting this partly on the basis of our historic experience as an
industrial society. Each major innovation has initially had the effect of
displacing people. Home-based weavers were displaced by the early woolen
mills; carters and drayers by the early railroads; workers who assembled
cars piece by piece by the assembly line; workers who dug ditches or logged
manually by digging and logging machines, the purveyors of coal oil and
naphtha gas by the light bulb, etc. The innovative technologies which made
this possible were the steam engine, the internal combustion engine and
electrification. Throughout the process of industrial growth and
diversification, labour power was continually being displaced. Yet the
process also led to higher levels of productivity, rising incomes and far
greater choice, which created whole new species of demand and employment
that could not even have been dreamed of a century ago. While I do not deny
the importance of the computer, my view is that it is simply another step in
the sequence of innovation that has gone on since the beginning of the
industrial revolution. It will undoubtedly displace labour, but its
intelligent use will enable us to achieve far higher levels of productivity,
freeing us up to invent new applications and better uses for it, or to do
whatever else appeals to us.
I simply do not agree with Victor's view that "many elements of the
population simply don't have the aptitude to become knowledge workers and
as far as I can tell their children won't have it either." Something like
this is probably what the European industrial elite would have said to each
other when they looked at my central European peasant ancestors in 1850.
Yet millions of people who are the descendants of peasants have become
successful professionals, academics or businessmen. There are lots of kids
in the slums of today's big cities who could, with a change in
circumstances, become very effective knowledge workers. But this is my main
point: it's not the computer or any other innovative technology which
determines the position of these kids in life -- whether or not they will
amount to something and find satisfying remunerative work -- it's their
circumstances. A very bright kid trapped in a third world slum will usually
become a dulled and frustrated adult with a grade 3 education in a third
world slum, nothing more.
In my previous posting I suggested that very little of the unemployment one
encounters in a country such as Canada can be accounted for by
computer-based technological displacement. I now suggest that this is also
true of other countries. There is massive unemployment in Russia not
because of computers but because of systemic implosion. Though everyone
seems to be doing some gainful legal or illegal thing in the huge slums of
Brazil, people are very poor and cannot count on regular income. Again,
computers have had nothing to do with this. The economies of Southeast Asia
didn't collapse because of computers. They did so because of bad loans and
bad investments (though computers and the Internet did help move money out
once it started leaving). In general then, I would suggest that we need to
look more comprehensively at the causes and consequences of unemployment and
economic stagnation and refrain from pointing a finger at one little device
which, though important in terms of bringing about economic and social
change, is simply no more than one element in a vast and complex system. My
main quarrel with Jeremy Rifkin is that he should know more about the system
than he appears to and that, in the absence of knowledge, he tends to finger
the device. This, I would concede, is useful in getting us worked up, but
not too useful in helping us solve our social and economic problems.
Ed Weick
>Victor Milne:
>I thought I might as well wait for Ed to reply on this topic.
>
>As Ed and others know, I believe Rifkin's central thesis is correct, that
>technology is reducing the number of available jobs in the long run. I'm
>much more dubious about his proffered remedy of the "third sector" or
>"volunteerism" as I believe he was calling it in "The End of Work."
>
>I don't see so much ground for optimism about future employment as Ed seems
>to. It is true that the new technology creates some new wants and hence
some
>employment opportunities. There were no website designers 10 years ago.
>However, for several reasons I believe there will be a net loss of jobs and
>many displaced workers who will not have the abilities to fit into the new
>knowledge economy.
>
>1. When we consider the application of digital technology to manufacturing
>and many areas of the service industry, it makes no economic sense to
>believe that it will create more jobs than it destroys. If internet banking
>eliminates a payroll of $x million dollars in tellers' salaries, plainly
the
>banks and their technology suppliers combined must be spending
significantly
>less than $x million dollars on the new jobs created to supply and service
>the technology.
>
>2. Even if there were no net job loss (which I don't concede) many elements
>of the population simply don't have the aptitude to become knowledge
workers
>and as far as I can tell their children won't have it either. (I can resist
>sideswiping Ian Ritchie's other posting from Leadbetter. As I read
>Leadbetter's glowing account of living by his wits as if everyone could
>achieve economic salvation by setting up as an independent knowledge
worker,
>I thought to myself, this man has never talked to a welder who was laid off
>when a shipyard closed down. He frankly doesn't have a clue about the
>situation of the ordinary factory worker or waitress; his salvation is only
>for some of those who were downsized out of the elite managerial class.)
>
>3. In its general application the computer revolution is like no technology
>that ever occurred before. It's not simply factory workers who are being
>eliminated. Bank tellers are going too. How many living breathing
>receptionists do you get to talk to now? Supermarket workers are on the
>block. Let's not forget the wide swath that computers cut through middle
>managers way back in the 1980's. Some of them, I understand, ended up on
the
>streets of Toronto.
>
>4. An extension of the previous point. I don't believe the knowledge
>industry is immune to automation. Ten years ago my younger son got his
>diploma as a computer technician (Certified Electronics Technician). He's
>doing all right, thank you. However, I was rather taken aback five years
ago
>to read a StatsCan release which said that the number of computer techs had
>shrunk by 40% in the years 1990-95. This was attributed to the use of
>modular components. Since getting above the technician level, my son has
>several times told me that the job seems to be going downhill now in terms
>of numbers and pay. When he was working for a large ISP in the USA, the
>techs had nothing to do at an installation but hook up a few cables; all
the
>software configuration that was formerly done on site was now done over the
>phone lines. He's now working for a computer security company, and he tells
>me that the ability to send secure transmissions over the internet backbone
>has eliminated a large number of technical jobs with large corporations
that
>formerly had to maintain a Wide Area Network.
>
>I could go on at length, but I think that's enough to establish that it's
at
>least plausible that computer technology will result in a drastic net loss
>of jobs over the next few decades.
>
>As for Rifkin's "third sector" or "volunteerism" I found this notion very
>fuzzy and got no clear picture of the mechanism by which it would
supposedly
>produce jobs.
>
>Maybe part of the problem is that as a Canadian I consider much of what
>Rifkin calls the third sector to be properly part of the public sector;
>e.g., health care.
>
>Ed writes: "At least in our lifetimes and probably even those of our
>> grandchildren, we will continue to need doctors, lawyers, nurses,
>gardeners,
>> prosthetists, mechanics, farmers, teachers, transportation workers,
>> stockbrokers, engineers, architects, insurance salesmen, politicians and
a
>> variety of other skilled and knowledgeable people."
>
>I agree that many of those careers will continue--though there may be far
>fewer farmers, and maybe the world would be a better place without
>stockbrokers!--but notice how many of the careers named fall within the
>publicly-supported sector of health care and education. To my mind, the
>question is who is going to fund those workers?
>
>Victor
>
