Adlai Stevenson said it well albeit in another context:
This self-described "egghead" was roundly trounced twice by the same man - war hero General Dwight Eisenhower. Talked into running on the Democratic ticket in 1952 by powerful party leaders, he lost, earning an embarassingly few 89 electoral votes to Eisenhower's 442. In his concession speech, the Unitarian and one-term Illinois governor quoted Abraham Lincoln, saying, "It hurts too much to laugh, but I'm too old to cry." <http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1856570_1856573_ 1856527,00.html%20#ixzz1eA8AltLz> http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1856570_1856573_1 856527,00.html #ixzz1eA8AltLz From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2011 4:39 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] One can only laugh There are several powerful currents which are now conjoining and carrying all of us along helplessly in advanced countries into a brand-new era. How powerful they are and will become relative to one another we can't possibly say. We can only juggle them around in our heads individually and try to imagine what the new era might be like in vague outline. But the currents themselves are easy to identify (in my opinion). They are: 1. Automation continuing apace, already producing in the last 20 or 30 years a surplus in the working population of advanced countries, mainly so far at the top and the bottom of the adult age range but will gradually spread upwards from the school-leaver as life-time unemployment; 2. The rising power of the scientific class mainly within transnational corporations, and a correlated diminution of credibility of the nation-state political class which is still overwhelmingly non-scientific despite the 300 years of industrial revolution; 3. A rising demarcation of wealth and income between what can be called a new meta-class (at present about 20-30% of existing advanced country populations) and the remainder for whom there's no hope given our present dysfunctional state education systems; 4. A reduction in family size, and thus indigenous populations, of advanced countries and, by way of the protection of jobs, a consequent rise in anti-mass immigration protest (which the political class is only just waking up to); 5. Increasing urbanization of the masses and a corresponding diminution in the daily time, space or energy able to be devoted to new consumer goods (if indeed any uniquely new ones exist any longer); 6. Innovation will increasingly switch from consumer goods to production and delivery systems. The present composition of GDP inputs (70% and 30% respectively) is likely to reverse within the next 50 years; the increase in the standard of living of countries, regions, cities, localities in the longer-term future will be better described in terms of the increasing energy efficiency of the necessary work to sustain them in their varied leisure pursuits rather than in monetary terms as now measured. 7. Many policies and functions are decreasingly carried out by nation-states and increasingly by specialized lateral transnational agencies; the remaining basic functions (e.g. civil protection) will be increasingly carried out by re-shaped and re-sized governances. Some sort of picture emerges in my mind and, maybe, one might have arisen in yours (or you may well dispute some of my projections!). Meanwhile, and quite separately from the above trends, we'll all have to experience what is likely to be a catastrophic breakdown in our present world currency system when governments finally realize that they can't get out of trouble any longer by printing more banknotes or inventing more varieties of pseudo currencies (e.g. special drawing rights [SDRs], troubled asset relief programs (TARPs), quantitative easing [QE] -- and the most risible one of them all so far, the European financial stability facility [EFSF] which, it seems, has died a death before it was able to be born!). Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/11/
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