Incidentally, Obama did address the employment
and "made in America" problem forcefully, in a speech yesterday. See:
<http://thepage.time.com/prepared-remarks-obama-on-the-economy-in-cleveland-ohio/>http://thepage.time.com/prepared-remarks-obama-on-the-economy-in-cleveland-ohio/
QUOTE: ". . . We see a future where we invest in
American innovation and American ingenuity; where
we export more goods so we create more jobs here
at home; where we make it easier to start a
business or patent an invention; where we build a
homegrown, clean energy industry because I
don't want to see new solar panels or electric
cars or advanced batteries manufactured in Europe
or Asia. I want to see them made right here in
America, by American workers. . . ."
He has some concrete proposals to reduce the kind
of thing I described in the development of the
CFL, where GE invented it but Ellis Yan developed it.
Other politicians have also made a serious effort to come to grips with this.
Anyway, Robin van Spaandonk wrote:
>Hal Fox thought that cold fusion would bring about so many new
>technologies that overall it would expand employment . . .
Cheap energy => cheap recycling
" ?=> cheap water ?=> more agriculture
" => cheaper transportation => lowers cost of everything
...so look for more jobs in every field, but especially in recycling and
agriculture.
Yeah, those are some of the things I covered in
my book. No doubt cheap energy will spur the
development of new fields and some increase in
employment. But I do not think it is a foregone
conclusion that the jobs created will outnumber
those that are lost. Looking at previous
innovations, it depends on the nature of the new
technology, the market, the absolute limit to how
much of the product people need or want, and
various other complex factors that may be difficult to anticipate. For example:
Ice. This used to be a major industry. First
people cut ice from ponds and shipped it to
Florida. Later, when my father was a boy, they
made it in factories and the iceman delivered it
by horse and wagon. That provided lots of
employment overall. Nowadays practically no one
works in the ice business, except for a few
companies that sell ice in grocery stores. The
reasons are that we can make ice ourselves, and
there is a natural upper limit to how much ice most people want.
Hydroelectricity. Dams in Georgia that used to
employ hundreds of people now have one or two, or
zero. (Except during overhauls.)
Automobiles. These seem to generate more work
then they save! What with road construction which
"costs as much as a small war, with similar
casualties" (Clarke) and need to constantly
manufacture and repair the things, the automobile
is the politician's dream machine. Everyone wants
one and they call for massive employment. On the
other hand, auto factories have far less workers than they used to.
Food. In the 20th century the farm population
declined from 30% to less than 3%. Lots of people
are now employed making and marketing fast food,
but it seems to be a major threat to our health,
and I do not think that industry has much of a future.
I expect that indoor factory farms will employ
practically no one, only robots, because that is
more hygienic. Within 100 years I expect that
will be the only kind of farm we have. The
Japanese food factory I described in the book is
out of business, but others are springing up and
becoming popular. Some restaurants in Japan
feature fully-automated machines that grow
lettuce. This was featured on the news.
It is very difficult to judge whether the new
industries spawned by cold fusion will cause a
net increase or decrease in employment. Energy is
critical for physical industries --
manufacturing, transportation, agriculture and so
on. Not for twiddling bits or making
entertainment. Programming, managing and the like
are not energy-intensive, and a large decrease in
energy cost will not affect them much, or change
the way they do things. The trend in all physical
work is relentlessly toward less employment --
fewer and fewer people -- until you have things
like a YKK zipper factory in Georgia that makes a
significant fraction of all the zippers in the
world with maybe 6 people present in the room
with machine, judging by a photo I saw. It seems
to me that cheap energy is likely to accelerate
this trend. In recycling, for example, cheap
energy will allow the Molten Metals Technology
approach, in which you drop all of your trash and
scrapped goods into a sealed vat of molten metal
-- iron -- and then you sort out the gas-phase
products, which are mainly individual elements,
not compounds. Break everything down, in other
words. Obviously this has to be completely
automated! It should be far less labor intensive
than sorting out cans and old computer parts by
hand, or shipping computers off to China where
people use 17th century technology to recycle
parts while they poison themselves and the environment.
(Molten Metals Tech. also went out of business.
Just about every company I get interested or
recommend does. Either I am inept at picking
winners or I am attracted to companies that are
20 years ahead of their time. Fortunately for me
I do not actually invest in these things.)
I may be wrong about YKK. An on-line source says
that YKK Georgia employs 1,400 people:
<http://www.globalatlanta.com/article/17159/>http://www.globalatlanta.com/article/17159/
I'll bet more of them are doing administrative
work (sales and whatnot) than operating machines.
- Jed
