The Brooklyn Project: see www.aesopinstitute.com includes the statement: “the current economic turmoil is lighting up the huge errors and abuses in the financial system. Correcting these problems at their root could conceivably open a path to a far wider distribution of wealth and opportunity.”
TARGET A 20 HOUR WEEK BY AGE 50 – SUPPLEMENTED BY INCOME FROM INVESTMENTS! As Jed has pointed out, utomation is accelerating and eliminating millions of jobs. Computers replace entire professions, for example, office secretary and elevator operator. The 500 largest firms in the world have sharply increased production and sales, while reducing the workforce. Jobless growth is leading toward one billion unemployed worldwide. The time has come to consider new ideas and open a path, consistent with democracy, freedom and enterprise, to generate widespread prosperity. As Herbert Marcuse suggested in Eros and Civilization, define toil as work not freely chosen, no matter how simple. Work we choose, no matter how difficult, falls under the psychological category of play. We can encourage efforts to gradually reduce the time people spend -- at work not chosen -- to twenty hours weekly. Money displaced from the nominal forty hour week will need to be replaced with sound, diversified investment income that is not dependent upon savings. As difficult as this may be to accomplish, the odds are great that it can be done. By age 50, a future work week consisting of five four hour days is one obvious possibility. As a thought experiment, examine the possibility of two ten hour days – with five days each week to employ and enjoy as you wish. The positive (and a few negative) implications will quickly become obvious. Most people are trapped by mortgage payments, car payments, etc., in jobs they do not love. There is a simple test: Would they continue to do the same work without pay? Only a few fortunate individuals have the freedom to learn who they are, and more important, who they might become, given the time for both spiritual reflection and inner growth, as well as genuine opportunities to prosper and contribute to the greater material good of mankind; not just in a narrow financial sense. Such truly free citizens would also help to insure an ongoing, enlightened, political discourse, not easily manipulated. Expanded ownership opportunities, such as those initiated by the late Louis Kelso (who initiated the goal of adjusting to automation by having half of one’s income derived from investments) and the Center for Economic and Social Justice, open doors to substantial second incomes. As a consequence the toil component of the work week can gradually diminish. See: www.cesj.org Perhaps, that might open the possibility of the most genuinely free society in human history. ________________________________ From: Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> To: vortex-L@eskimo.com Sent: Tue, August 10, 2010 3:46:49 PM Subject: Re: [Vo]:what our post industrial society may look like I wrote: We will have to find a way to give everyone what they need and want with a new kind of economy. Not communism, socialism or capitalism. All three are ways of allocating human labor, and they would be equally unworkable in a world where human labor is useless. I did not mean to suggest that communism, socialism and capitalism are equally good, or equally effective, or that these are the only economic systems ever invented. They are the main three still surviving in the modern world. They are mostly in mixed configurations depending on market sector; i.e., Japan is mostly big-corporate capitalist but their healthcare sector is socialist. Someone in the New York Times wrote a letter in response to this column, about unemployment: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/opinion/10herbert.html The letter says what I had in mind. It is well written. QUOTE: . . . There was a time in the early years of this country in which 90% of employed people worked on farms. An economy that did not have agriculture as the main source of livelihood was beyond imagining. . . . Our world is increasingly becoming one in which more and more jobs do not really require people at all. Productivity per worker is not a function of expertise, which is at an all-time low. Rather, it is the product of the automation of the workplace and of the tools at hand. This process could be much farther along than it is, but people are still somewhat cheaper than new technology. That will not remain the state of the workplace much longer. It is becoming increasingly necessary envision how an economy would work in which every job could be performed without humans at all. Who would own the means of production? How would people acquire purchasing power? Would these concepts even be relevant? Author John Varley described such an economy on the moon in "Steel Beach." Further exploration is definitely in order. We are taking the first baby steps into an economic landscape in which workers are increasingly superfluous. As Artificial Intelligence becomes a viable alternative, that phenomenon will spread into management. How to make such a world habitable for the average citizen is an intellectual challenge of the highest order, and urgency. . . . - Jed
