Good points, Ken. I'll respond in this colour. Notice though that my answer get shorter as I go down your posting. Long afternoon. Tired, I guess.
Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Ed Weick To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2007 12:06 PM Subject: [Futurework] More hope for today! From a freind in response to my gloomy posting of yesterday on our miserable future prospects: One bizarre fact to consider: Canada and the US are at full employment. Apparently, anyone that wants a job can get a job. The fact that manufacturing jobs are disappearing does not seem to be impacting opportunities for employment. But I do wonder what kinds of jobs people are getting. When I was in my teens, I got a job in a sawmill that fed a large pulp and paper mill. Without even being aware of it, I became a union member and was paid a wage which had been negotiated with the employer. I had quite a lot of protection against being laid off or being targeted in some other way. I would expect, or hope, that people who work in large industrial enterprises are treated similarly today, though I do wonder how safe there jobs are. We've had a number of consolidations and plant closures around here that have put a lot of people out of work. Small towns have been devastated because some of the firms that closed were the towns' main sources of income. And I wonder whether being employed means that much anymore. When you walk into Wal-Mart, you're not dealing with employees, you're dealing with "associates", whatever they are. I remember when machines were first introduced in the manufacturing process - displacing unskilled workers, and causing the same sort of hand-wringing as outsourcing to third world countries does today. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and George Orwell's 1984 heralded the coming of the end. What happened instead was a huge increase in wealth (and new jobs). In Canada, statistics indicate that GDP per capita approximately doubled in real terms between 1970 and 2005, but are we really that much better off? In 1970, some wives worked but many stayed home. Now the much more typical pattern is that both husband and wife are in the labour force and the kids go to daycare. This is partly a matter of preference - women have become educated and career oriented - but it may also be partly a thing of necessity. Two incomes are needed to run a household in the style and manner to which we have become accustomed. Even more bizarre, our citizens are so busy working at full employment that they don't even have the time to manufacture their own replacements. Projections into the near future say there aren't going to be enough people to meet existing requirements for service type jobs - never mind the manufacturing jobs that are steadily being lost. The result: India, China, and Mexico are going to become the defacto manufacturer of new Canadian citizens - because we all just too busy working to do it ourselves. China, with its one child policy, may not be of much help. I would suspect that, in India, there aren't going to be too many kids in professional and technical families either. They may have a kid or two, but a lot of their money will likely go into improving their life style. By continuing to buy manufactured products from third world countries, we are pulling up the standard of living of third world countries much more efficiently than other alternatives - such as just handing out money. It's not because we're altruistic that we are buying from China and India. It's because they make many of the things we need, or think we need, more cheaply than we do. And they may be better at handing out money than we are. A considerable proportion of the US fiscal deficit is covered by China buying US Treasury Bills, for example. The US also has a very large trade deficit with China and other Asian countries. In today's world, it's very difficult to say who is propping up who. If we didn't buy products from third world countries, and instead hid behind tariffs, etc., then developing countries wouldn't have money to buy resources, wouldn't attract investment, and wouldn't be buying high-end products and technology from developed countries. Again, in today's world, its very difficult to assess who is propping up who, and who is the giver and who the taker. If manufacturing wasn't being done in China, Mexico, India, etc., then we would be faced with wage inflation, price inflation, and economic stagnation. As it is, wage inflation and product prices are very stable - and everyone still has a job - very close to the utopian state that Karl Marx envisioned when he invented the concept of socialism. I don't think Marx would buy your argument. United States does seem to have lost it's way, directing massive amounts of money towards military activities, when the same amount of money spent solving it's energy problem would have quickly resulted in a 10 fold return on it's investment. Oh well, Rome too had it's problems... and we know what happened to them. History does have a habit of repeating itself. One day the Americans will figure this out. I'll respond to this one off-list. If there is one thing you can count on, it's that capitalism is ruthlessly efficient - and it always finds a way. Yup! Somehow I think it's all going to work out. Hope so! Ken If you want to see what Ken does, go to http://www.imgmaker.com/ . -----Original Message----- From: Ed Weick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 09:14 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Your gloom for today Of all of the many things that happened in the rich world during the 20th Century, a couple stand out. One is the shift away from a goods producing economy and toward a services producing economy. The other is the development of technology permitting instantaneous communication and shipment of services from one part of the globe to another. Given the connective technology, it really doesn't matter where services are produced. They can be produced anywhere and instantly delivered to another part of the world. But what is needed to produce them is an appropriately educated and motivated labour force. As another major 20th Century trend, such a labour force has come into being. Approximately 1.5 billion technically and service orientated workers are now available in China, India and other parts of the developing world. And these workers are willing to provide their services and skills at a much lower wage than workers in the rich world. It is not only services that have become internationalized. Goods production can take place anywhere that has an appropriately skilled and organized labour force. In the case of a large variety of cheap consumers goods, the developing world now produces and the rich world buys. But it is not only cheap consumers goods that are at issue. As the developing world becomes more skilled and educated, it will produce many of the more specialized and sophisticated products used by the rich world. Exports listed for China include machinery and equipment, plastics, optical and medical equipment. China is moving up rapidly in automobile and electronic goods production. What might this mean for workers in Canada and the US? In Canada, it would seem to mean a gradual shift out of many lines of manufacturing and services and a greater dependence on the more traditional resource sectors, especially oil and natural gas. This possibility is not as open to the US, and what may happen there is the kind of continuing industrial disintegration typified by the rust belt of the Midwest and the eastern seaboard. Plants producing goods that can be made more cheaply abroad and offices providing communications based services will close and workers will be laid off, losing not only their wages but in many cases also their access to health care and pensions. I could go on and move the prognostication into the longer term when underemployed, debt-ridden America is no longer able to buy from China and India and when Canada begins to find its natural resources less abundant, but I won't do that. I've spread enough gloom for today. Ed ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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