Arthur,
"Timesizing" is not the answer to job sharing because the higher the
income, prestige, power, perks or intrinsic interest of a particular job or
profession the more that its practitioners will control the entry of too
many others and resist the knowledge-sharing that's required.
This is why, in an age of increasing automation and specializations, a new
globalized meta-class is building on the separation of the professional
middle-classes of the last two centuries and gradually becoming a
permanency. In an age when a steadily increasing proportion of young people
face a lifetime of make-work or no-work, I cannot see what the answer may
be, given the present institutional set-up -- educational, institutional,
political.
Unless, of course, the youngsters themselves start to produce the answer.
The vast majority of innovations throughout history occur to young people
(while their frontal lobes are still developing with millions of new
neurons) and, what with their mobile phones, there never has been such a
generation that is so well-connected with their peers as now, or as wary of
the protective world of the adults.
A simple idea of Alan Turing (conceived when he was 24) and subsequent work
in parental garages by other youngsters has produced the personal computer.
A simple idea of Tim Berners-Lee (conceived when he was 34) has produced
the Internet. What with nucleic acids being able to be bought off the
shelf, and a sufficiency of garages and youngsters, one never knows what
wonderful new DNA sequences may be contrived in the years to come which
will blow the present economy right off course -- and perhaps produce
job-sharing and interesting pursuits for everybody this time.
Keith
. At 20:09 17/07/2010 -0400, you wrote:
<http://www.timesizing.com/2ts.htm>http://www.timesizing.com/2ts.htm
The standard response to technological innovation today is downsizing,
rationalized by the myth that "technology creates more jobs than it
destroys." The myth is belied by companies' repeated success in getting
taxbreaks by threatening to take their jobs elsewhere, by the huge
increase in <http://www.timesizing.com/1mkwkegs.htm>makework in both
public and private sectors, and by mounting numbers of people on welfare,
<http://www.timesizing.com/3disab.htm>disability,
<http://www.timesizing.com/1homless.htm>homelessness,
<http://www.timesizing.com/2jailvu.htm>prison, forced
<http://www.timesizing.com/1retire.htm>retirement and forced
"self-employment" with no clients. Globally, downsizing has turned the
goal of competitiveness into a race to the bottom and darkened the world's
economic and ecological outlook. But the good news is that very few
changes in approach can stop the downturn and get everything spiralling
UPward again.
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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