You guys should start by contacting Mike Hollingshead and reading his unpublished manuscript on the Myth of Canada. Then you should read Lawrence Levine's Massey Lectures at Harvard on "Highbrow/Lowbrow The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America" and then go to "The Winner Take All Society by Frank and Cook for the economic history. There were 66,000 opera houses in America at the end of the 19th century. 1,300 in the farm state of Iowa alone. The economic histories about agrarianism and the highly trained peasants who came to America from just about everyplace except for England who kept their serfs almost as slaves. There were Dutch opera houses in Iowa, Middle European opera houses in Kansas and Missouri and even Oklahoma had Indian Opera houses where the wealthy Indians, before they were disenfranchised and even murdered for their money by the Sooners. The pisspoor gold miners of Colorado rioted when they were cheated out of a few bars of La Sonnambula by a traveling troupe at the Teller Opera House in Central City.
My point is simple. If those opera houses gave one performance a year by their local company, there were jobs for 66,000 tenors in late 19th century America. But of course there were many more than "one" performances by local repertory companies and they also built the sets, constructed the technology and worked in the local hardware stores. Everyone did service jobs. Everyone had been, within one or two generations, trained servants. That's why even the trained, literate, house slaves in New Orleans had tickets alongside the lower classes in the opera capital of America in the 19th century. New Orleans. Not counting bassos, sopranos, Mezzos, etc. As culture was absorbed by the wealthy, who themselves had been pisspoor, in a massive takeover of both time and space with the advent the railroad and the second industrial revolution, those service jobs were absorbed by two things. First all complex culture in the lower classes went into the churches and thus America is culturally fundamentalist, radical right wing religion down to the present while the wealthy absconded with the high class European secular culture. But America before 1880 was founded on a secular covenant. You can see it in the village architecture of every village in New England with the secular Common, like the Common in Boston and all over New England. Secondly, the rise of electronics made the poor able to become consumers without bothering the wealthy in their live performance opera and concert halls. The wealthy called that "the cultured class" and their economist whores even came up with an official name for it. "Productivity." As for complex culture and "service" (servants) the wealthy today consider themselves to be the "owners" of American Complex Culture while the poor are religious. But t'was not always so, if you knew anything about American history. (These folks that I listed were on my board of advisors and we did quite a lot of research about it at the highest levels. The best one could call the assumptions about history here is encased in the word duplicitous. Keith is understandable, Harry is California. Too much sun and easy living:>))) The point is simple. Americans have always done everything. The breakdown into simple jobs is 1880s second Industrial Revolution stuff with primarily the ignorant Irish immigrants who were agrarian and Catholic. They imprinted on the factory whistle but American resisted standard time down to 1918. They were proud of their culture. They were not Renaissance Men ala Europe but "Jacks of all Trades" and inventive. Yes they were also farmers but not very good at that. They destroyed the prairie and created the dustbowl as a result. They were much better at doing almost anything including inventing new factory ideas and singing opera. They still do in my home state of Oklahoma where Dame Eva Turner said she heard the greatest voices on the planet. Service jobs aren't new. Until Henry Ford and John Rockefeller, we had always done everything. The concept of "wealth production" is, however, strictly for the useless class. I've come to believe from Harry that Henry George should have studied C.S. Pierce more seriously. Pierce was the great philosopher with an Andalusian gypsy wife who saved his writings when Harvard would have consigned them to the garbage can. Everyone, who was a real person, knew that concept of "wealth creation" as value was meshugina when it was proposed. Now we are in a time of mad hatters and white rabbits and tea parties who make up anything and the dummies believe it. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Friday, October 08, 2010 2:01 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION; Harry Pollard Subject: Re: [Futurework] The only exception -- was Living within our means At 15:43 07/10/2010 -0700, Harry wrote: There is a big argument among Georgist teachers about including service givers in our course. The difference is of course that after Labor has labored there is more wealth. After a service giver has labored, there is less wealth (unless he doesn't eat). We are teaching a science that deals with the production of wealth. Well, if Georgists are to be relevant in the modern world then I think that it's about time that they turned their attention to the services which hardly existed in Henry George's time when 80-90% of the population were either agricultural or industrial workers. We now have vast government services, plus sizeable professional services (with a large chunk of financial services within it), plus an increasing make-work sector which is rotating services among itself in what is essentially a surplus part of the population which is not adding economic value. My thinking is that once we [Georgists] have satisfactorily dealt with production we can turn our attention to services. But you haven't dealt satisfactorily with production yet! You are still thinking in terms of Land+Labour+Capital as its exclusive factors. Although people were, and are, obviously involved in Production, it was and is only their muscular (or mental) energy that is involved in routinized tasks that can also be done by machines. The advent of the automated factory for agricultural and industrial production is essentially Land+Energy+Capital, just as it is in the natural world -- Land+Solar energy (directly or indirectly) + DNA. But both are static systems, as it were. To have movement and change a fourth factor needs to be added in both cases: Land+Energy+Capital+Innovation in economics, Land+Solar energy+DNA+Mutations in nature. Once you have taken people, as people, out of the production formula (using robots instead) you can then consider them as real people in the services/consumption sector where people act fully in the round as people and transact with one another and will always be required. The Services/Consumption side of the Production-Consumption equation (a completely balanced one in normal times) is to do with the way that the production-made profit is subsequently distributed. Once you can see my point then we can argue productively! Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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