Ed Weick wrote:
>
> Arthur Cordell:
> >
> >Does this mean that we have to accept the unravelling of the success of
> >economic development as though it is entirely outside our control? Are
> >there no policy options or actions that we can develop?
> >
> >Much of my thinking and angst is to develop ways in which the broad
> >middle class can continue to be a broad middle class. It seems to be an
> >admission of failure to turn to citizens in other, less developed,
> >countries for lessons in life skills. For lessons in favela living.
> >This, it seems, is something we wish to avoid. A middle class, replete
> >with careers, etc. has been a core element in creating and maintaining
> >social cohesion. A lot of workers gave up a lot so that citizens in the
> >developed countries could have many aspects of universality. Sure, with
> >globalization there will be continuing pressures to harmonize downward.
Harmonize? You mean in the sense that no matter what cacaphony of
chemicals you dump together, they will eventually finish their
reaction process (e.g., mixing nitric acid and ammonia -- if my
recollection of High School chemistry still works for me...)?
> >I would question these pressures and argue that gloabalization is really
> >about trying to get others to move upaward: in environmental laws,
> >health and workplace safety, potable water, univeral literacy, etc. etc.
You don't mean this as an emiprical observation about corporate
reality, do you?
> >etc.
> >
> >There is a certain fatalism in Ed's posting, a certain feeling that
> >market forces have brought us here and the same forces will bring some
> >sort of resolution.
They certainly will. Every known bacterial plague throughout history
has had a resolution, too.... (I'm not so much arguing with you,
as lamenting what I seem to see happening around me, both
experientially and via "the media", e.g., the NYT....)
To repeat myself: One of the best times to have
lived in pre-20th Century Europe was right after the
Black Death, for, *if* you were alive then, there
was a great scarcity of labor which raised real wages
for about a century.
> >
> >If we know that a problem is developing, one for which there may be a
> >menu of possible remedies, it is , I believe, incumbent on policy
> >analysts to develop and maintain such remedies ready for thoughtful
> >hearing and analysis when conditions are appropriate and when the
> >political voice has identified the appropriate time and mustered
> >sufficient courage. >
I thought we had finally outgrown the naivete of "social
planning" -- didn't the Berlin Wall come down? Don't the
Russians now have freedom? Etc. Isn't human intelligence
a thing only to be applied to solving technical problems,
*not* to tinkering with the "free market" (a.k.a.: universal
willed a-mentia)?
>
> Ray Evans Harrell has taken me to task on this as well in a couple of
> off-list postings. I do have to admit I'm a pessimist, but hopefully not a
> fatalist. I see the three decades following WWII as being something of a
> golden age for those of us who were fortunate enough to be borne in the rich
> world. For a time, we could do almost anything we wanted to by way of
> economic development and social programming. Never mind that our prosperity
> derived from a disastrous war in which only we suffered no real destruction.
I have previously stated my assessment that for the nation
that came out of WWII with somewhere around 2/3 - 3/4 of the planet's
productive capacity, and which Hitler handed the great brain trust
influx
which we could never have grown at home, so that, e.g.,
Los Alamos was arguably the greatest collection of intelligence and
learning in history -- that for this nation to have ended up
like the lady jumping onto a table to escape a mouse
scurring on the floor,
in McCarthyist paranoia in the 50s and continuing fear of
the "Red Menace" up till Saint Ronald the Reagan slew the dragon --
was a massive failure of trusteeship (negligence) at best.
And, now, when it doesn't matter any more, what to we find,
but the mainstream media telling us as if it was obvious
all along that some of the things people like D.F. Fleming
bravely claimed in the 60s were true, e.g.,
that we overthrew democratically elected but "left
leaning" governments around the world....
And they have revealed the real (and morally monstrous!)
logic of "the Cold War": to get the Soviets to
compete in a game they didn't have the resouces to
play in, and thus to [economically] bankrupt themselves.
> In the 50s and 60s we saw prosperity going on forever.
Then the Captains of Industries saw lower cost
[out]sources for production. They don't get those
7 digit+ salaries for acting stupid! Of course,
neither do they get paid for being patriotic (no
irony intended here).
>
> Our world has become a much tighter and more difficult place since then. I
> do not deny the value of developing a range of policy options, explaining
> them to policy makers, and helping them to make wise choices. But I would
> argue that this has become a much more difficult and uncertain process than
> it used to be.
Those long hours the investment bankers put in have
paid off....
> Some thirty or forty years ago we could convince ourselves
> that almost anything would work.
Not really. CEOs those days often believed they had
some responsibility to constituencies other than the
Weltgerichte / Weltgeschike (sp? Hegel's notion that
the history of the world is the ethical judgment of the
world...) of each instant's
price of their company's stock, which is the
conveniently universal exculpation for everything they
decide to do *to* anybody (if we don't lay *you* off,
the company will go out of business and we won't be
able to pay *anybody*...).
> We could pump money and planners into
> Canada's outbacks and, behold, have regional economic expansion. We could
> mobilize our young and restless, send them into the slums or aboriginal
> communities and achieve social change. We could establish a slate of
> universal social programs and make people happier, healthier and more
> self-sufficient. For a time, these things seemed to work.
Isn't Norway still doing this kind of thing, we have heard on this list
from Tor Forde?
> Some continue to
> work, but many represent money, hopes and dreams poured down a lot of tubes.
> The draining reality of a more competitive, tighter and difficult economic
> world has moved in. Policy options have become narrower, fewer, and more
> difficult to implement. Our ability to do real things (or think we can do
> them) has too often been replaced by smoke and mirrors.
>
> I recognize that the middle class has been a source of social cohesion in
> our society. But I would suggest that the middle class is a phenomenon
> which developed slowly during the first half of the 20th Century, literally
> exploded in the decades following WWII and is now in decline. From what
> statistical information I have seen, it is splitting, with the upper part
> getting richer and the lower part getting poorer. It is also splitting
> generationally. My adult kids, all well educated, are not nearly as well
> off as I was at their age, and only one of the three has a long-term job.
[snip]
> A proportion, probably much
> larger than at present, will, as I put it, "work strategically" out of small
> home offices or backyard shops, either as individuals or small groups
> assembled to do particular jobs. Since "middle class" implies security,
> tenure, steady pay and a relatively sedentary lifestyle, many of the latter
> will not see themselves as belonging to this class. However, because they
> will be educated and mobile and capable of generating enough income to look
> after their needs, they will not count themselves as among the poor either.
> What they might be called remains an open question. All we can say is that
> they already exist and that there will likely be more of them with the
> passage of time.
Here is what interests me most: "to work strategically". By that, I
understand doing activity which has no intrinsic meaning to the worker,
for
the indirect purpose of advancing one's economic / power position. This
is the antipodal opposite of Giovanni de Dondi's loving craftsmanship of
a single object (an astronomical clock, ca. 36" high) over a period of
16 years
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hall/3551/copiainglpresastr.htm
It is, less far from home,
the antipodal opposite of IBM sales reps singing peaens to
Tom Watson (I actually heard some of them doing this in 1978)
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ibmsongbook.html
It is a recipe for exactly one thing: the collapse of
civilization by radical dissociation of human motivation
away from understanding things "in their own right" (by which
I am not referring to any naive metaphysical "realism", but to
direct attention of mind and hand to whatever is "at hand").
It should become impossible to keep the trains running
at the point where nobody any longer knows anything about
trains but only about buying and selling tokens labelled:
train routes and equipment.... Perhaps the last
domain of knowledge to be lost will be statistics.
>
> There are, of course, all kinds of hybrid possibilities here. People could,
> as they do now, move from a career path to a strategic mode of work, or vice
> versa. Being on a career path would undoubtedly be preferable for most
> people.
It does seem that people like to engage in meaningful activity, and
conveniently, it seems there are ways to get some people interested in
the most obliquely derivative things (e.g., "derivatives" -- second and
higher order finance-capital concepts -- I know one person who
finds these things consumingly fascinating, and remunerative, too!).
> A great deal would therefore depend on the continued abundance of
> career type jobs. This is not too certain given automation, downsizing and
> re-engineering.
>
> I do appreciate Arthur's point about the middle class and the maintenance of
> social cohesion, by which I understand something like having faith in
> society and public institutions, and a willingness to help resolve serious
> social issues. Will it be possible for people who do not have a career path
> and must essentially behave selfishly to have such faith?
[snip]
> How can
> they be made to feel that the state is essentially benevolent and society
> good? An expanded employment insurance scheme or a guaranteed annual income
> would likely be a minimum. Yet here we run into our tighter, poorer and
> more difficult world and the question of affordability.
I believe the word "affordance" exists in English and means something
like commodiousness, provision to satisfy needs and aspirations, etc.
(I'm
taking a risk here, since I do not have a good enough dictionary
at hand at the moment).
I think it is in the sense of affordance that
we have a problem of affordability.
What the "global economy" (which
is really just the latest form of US and other First World economic
ordering
of the whole earth) seems to me to be buying at enormous cost is a
process of decreasing the "slack" in all systems to the point where
small mistakes have ever increasing potential for calamitous
consequences
and ever diminishing chance of being "caught", and where, ultimately,
few other
than the unemployed will have any time-off-task to be able to sleep
(but the latter will be so worried that sleep will come hard to their
unemployed hours, and will therefore not constitue any enticement
to the sleep-deprived...)....
A "head hunter" told me bluntly during my own recent
two months of unemployment: "You are too rigid. In today's
economy, if the boss says "Jump!" you ask: "How high?". My wife
works on a project everybody knows will never ship, but on which she
and her coworkers must work every night till 11PM and on Saturdays,
to keep up the pretense that it will ship and they need to give their
all to get it out...." Stanley Kubrick's most important film,
in my opinion, was "Paths of Glory".
[snip]
\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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