Around the world are millions of people without jobs.

Poverty … is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man – it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.

— Patrick Colquhoun

In 1806, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, the petit aristocracy, the arrivistes, the ‘New Money’ recognized the need for a labor surplus to insure its lowest possible cost while guaranteeing at the same time an unquenchable demand for industrialization’s products. It also delivered the process of satisfying this demand from the pawn-brokers and shylocks of old to the hands of this merchant aristocracy by way of its banks …

John Yoo is not a political scientist by training but the former legal advisor to the Bush Administration and author of the notorious torture memos was also at APSA this year. He was scheduled to speak on (presumably in favor of) the expansion of executive power under the Lincoln administration for a panel organized by the conservative Claremont Institute.

As Yoo began his talk, a lone protestor stood up and denounced him as a war criminal, appealing to the members of the audience to walk out in opposition to his appearance at the conference.

The faulty idea is that industrialization and it instruments of mercantile capitalism can or will provide a level of employment that is proportionate to output, that is, when the business is operating at capacity there is work for all who seek it. This employment is to take place at the same time the capitalist is reducing his labor force in order to be ‘efficient’.

Keep in mind that in the U.S. we need to create over a million jobs a year just to keep up with population growth. Within the next decade or so, I think it’s likely that millions of jobs in both low skill areas and high skill occupations are going to increasingly susceptible to automation. If that happens, we’ll need to replace all those jobs while still keeping up with growth in the workforce. (And of course that’s on top of digging out of the massive unemployment hole we’re currently in).

As Krugman notes, one economist that has done extensive work in this area is David Autor of MIT. Autor co-authored a paper that looked at how computers have substituted for labor going all the way back to the 1960s and found that, as we might expect, routine and repetitive jobs are highly susceptible to automation. Autor has found that, as a result, the job market is currently polarized: A great many of the middle-skill jobs that used to support a solid middle class lifestyle have been automated — leaving us with high skill/high wage jobs that require lots of education and training and lots of low skill jobs with very low wages.

The problem I think we face in the future is that both the high-end jobs and the low-end jobs may erode quite rapidly as information technology advances. The key thing to understand here is that our definition of what constitutes a “routine and repetitive” job is changing over time. At one time a repetitive job may have implied standing on an assembly line. As specialized artificial intelligence applications (like IBM’s Watson for example) get better, “routine and repetitive” may come to mean essentially anything that can be broken down into either intellectual or manual tasks that tend to get repeated. Keep in mind that it’s not necessary to automate entire jobs: if 50% of a worker’s tasks can be automated, then employment in that area can fall by half. When you begin to think in these terms, it becomes fairly difficult to make a list of jobs that (1) employ large numbers of people and (2) are completely safe from automation.

If high skill jobs that require college degrees start getting substantially automated, that will threaten an important aspect of the social contract: if there’s anything left of the American Dream, it is the idea that if you work hard to educate yourself, you’ll have a better shot at prosperity. If that promise comes up short, it may ultimately destroy the incentive for broad-based pursuit of education. There’s significant evidence that this may already be happening: one study recent study suggests that as many as half of college graduates are ending up underemployed.

So if the high skill jobs begin to evaporate, those people will have to turn to lower-skill or trade jobs. We may see people who might otherwise have pursed advanced education competing for jobs as plumbers or mechanics.

— Martin Ford (Huffington)

The government provides ‘jobs’ for people in the sense that people are employed indirectly in the service of keeping their own peace. The only ‘product’ these distressed individuals have to ‘sell’ is their willingness to stand clear of revolutionary activities for a small fee. This is scraping the bottom of the employment barrel and the germ of totalitarianism. The next step is to hire the people for the same small fee to inform against their neighbors, to finger them as ‘enemies of the state’.

Whether they are or not is irrelevant as the setting one neighbor against the other is by itself the intention.

 
The real argument is not between capitalism and socialism but between totalitarianism and everything else.
 

Industrialization abets totalitarianism by isolating people from others under the pretense of ‘individuality’ while bombarding them with advertising. The outcome is the swell of conformity, those who cannot see beyond the limits of the products that define them.

At least they had jobs …

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee” Job.

The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?- Because one did survive the wreck.

It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

— Herman Melville ‘Moby Dick’

“By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State- (in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.”

— Thomas Hobbes

In the modern world all labor is industrial labor and all jobs are industrial jobs. The jobs that exist in a post-modern, post-petroleum world do not exist and cannot be imagined, because we are modern people with modern minds, inhabiting an industrial empire with industrial educations within a culture of modernity and centralization. We are trapped … in a failing state which walls us off from whatever the future might offer besides the failures and wastes of our current way of business. This is why transition is difficult or impossible, carrying the camel though the eye of the needle, we cannot go anywhere without hauling along modernity with all of its baggage.

In the industrial state, everything is measured by industrial means to industrial ends, the measure is always money and money worth. If something cannot be turned into ready money it has no use. It is thrown away or ruined if only to enforce the insecurities of modernity which cannot abide anything other than itself.

Foxconn to rely more on robots; could use 1 million in 3 years

Lee Chyen Yee and Clare Jim (Reuters)

Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, known for assembling Apple’s iPhones and iPads in China, plans to use more robots, with one report saying the company will use one million of them in the next three years, to cope with rising labor costs.

Foxconn’s move highlights an increasing trend toward automation among Chinese companies as labor issues such as high-profile strikes and workers’ suicides plague firms in sectors from autos to technology.

Contract manufacturers such as Foxconn, which also counts Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Nokia among its clients, are moving parts of their manufacturing to inland Chinese cities or other emerging markets.

They are also boosting research and development investments to lift their thin margins.

“Workers’ wages are increasing so quickly that some companies can’t take it longer,” said Dan Bin, a fund manager at Shenzhen-based Eastern Bay Investment Management, which invests in technology and consumer-related shares in China and Hong Kong.

“Automation is a general trend in many sectors in China, such as electronics. Of course some companies will consider moving their manufacturing overseas, but it’s easier said than done when the supply chain is here.”

The China Business News on Monday quoted Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou as saying the company planned to use 1 million robots within three years, up from about 10,000 robots in use now and an expected 300,000 next year.

Foxconn, whose listed units include Hon Hai Precision and Foxconn International Holdings Ltd, issued a statement later saying Gou told staff at its campus in Longhua, China, that he planned to move its more than 1 million employees up the value chain beyond basic manufacturing work.

STRIKES, SUICIDES

Foxconn, which has been plagued by a spate of workers’ suicides in its Chinese factories since last year, plans to use the robots for simple assembly line procedures, the statement quoted its chairman Gou as saying.

Since last year, China has been struck by a series of labor-related issues, such as high-profile strikes and suicide cases at well-known companies as heady economic growth fueled the need for wage increases.

Disposable communities, disposable youths: no jobs, no future, kicked out of school.

Utrecht: Ethnic Riots after Dutchman is Killed by Police

Paul Belien (Brussels Journal, 2007)

Ondiep, a working class neighbourhood in the Dutch town of Utrecht, is in turmoil. After the death last Sunday of Rinie Mulder, a 54-year old indigenous Dutchman who was shot by a police officer, non-immigrant citizens went on a rampage, burning cars, looting shops and arsoning a community centre in “inverted Paris style riots.” According to our sources the police officer who killed Mulder is a woman of Moroccan origin.

The Ondiep residents have been complaining for months about harassment and intimidation by immigrant youths of Moroccan origin. The Dutch mainstream media do not go into much detail about what is going on. Most of them do not mention the ethnicity of the victim and the police officer, though the riots clearly have an ethnic nature.

Apparently Mulder intervened when Muslim youths harassed a pregnant native Dutch woman. He was able to grab the knife of one of the youths. When the police arrived Mulder was shot because he had raised the knife. Witnesses say Mulder was indicating to the police that he had called for them.

Modernity promises utopia but cannot provide the means to obtain it. The measurement of everything by money favors the entrepreneurs who can obtain as much of it as they need at low cost: the same means elude labor which is required to meet the money terms set by the entrepreneurs for their own benefit. Meanwhile, the labor terms that allow satisfactory profits to entrepreneurs is unsatisfactory to the laborers. For hundreds of years modernity has strangled in the crib all alternatives to this stale division between managements’ wealth and labors’.

The big lie is that modernity puts an end to poverty. It doesn’t, it can’t: industrialization and modernity create poverty. Population growth abetted by modernity outstrips modernity’s ‘productive capacity’, which is another fraud perpetrated by big business. Productivity exists when workers are unable to produce, when business is ‘efficient’.

Modernity leaves ruin in its wake: it strip-mines labor the same way it strip-mines everything else. Modernity does not create wealth but relieves it from others who simply do not possess the tools to discern it under their feet. Modernity concentrates wealth and directs it to the managers, who leave just enough to cheat labor into behaving in the managers’ interests. There is no example of managers ever allowing their workers to become as wealthy as the managers have become themselves. No man or woman has ever become as wealthy as a manager by way of industrial labor. Only do the managers themselves become wealthy, those who value money above all else and inject the same values into the workers to make them ‘hopeful’.

Uighur rioting in China. China is already past the point where the largest percentage of the population are informants; here the scores have been settled.

Figure 1: Unemployment in major nations for 2010-11 measured by Bureau of Labor Statistics methods. Arrows indicate youth riots in countries with high unemployment except the US: French and Netherlands outbursts took place in 2007, the rest this year or last.

Unemployment would appear to be a relatively inexpensive and direct matter to solve by the government putting people directly to work. Doing so is difficult because it ends the private enterprise’ monopoly over job provision and its ability to thereby ration demand. A government that provides jobs competes against the interests of its entrepreneurs.

It has been best for the private interests that the government pay people not to work rather than pay them to work. The private sector’s jobs monopoly remains intact while the social penalties that attach themselves to idleness become the property of government! Business in this manner — particularly big business — permits government to stigmatize itself: it becomes the enabler of social disorder even as it bails out the private interests by lifting the cost of idled labor. This is the true meaning of ‘Keynesianism’: the stimulation of the economy by amputating private costs and stitching the dead limbs onto the public.

This is where economists ‘get it wrong’. The idea of enlightenment is pre-industrial, modernity has hollowed out enlightenment and turned it into another buzzword:

Michael Hudson: What do you mean “failure”? Your perspective is from the bottom looking up. But the financial model has been a great success from the vantage point of the top of the economic pyramid looking down. The economy has polarized to the point where the wealthiest 10 percent now own 85 percent of the nation’s wealth. Never before have the bottom 90 percent been so highly indebted, so dependent on the wealthy. From their point of view, their power has exceeded that of any time in which economic statistics have been kept.

You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite.

Who was Patrick Colquhoun?

 

Merchants were losing an estimated £500,000 worth of stolen cargo annually from the Pool of London on the River Thames. A plan was devised to curb the problem in 1797 by an Essex Justice of the Peace and master mariner, John Harriot, who joined forces with Patrick Colquhoun and utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. Armed with Harriot’s proposal and Bentham’s insights, Colquhoun was able to persuade the West India Planters Committees and the West India Merchants to fund the new force. They agreed to a one year trial and on 2 July 1798, after receiving government permission, the Thames River Police began operating with Colquhoun as Superintending Magistrate and Harriot the Resident Magistrate.[5]

With the initial investment of £4,200, the new force began with about 50 men charged with policing 33,000 workers in the river trades, of whom Colquhoun claimed 11,000 were known criminals and “on the game.” The river police received a hostile reception by riverfront workers not wishing to lose their supplementary income. A mob of 2000 attempted to burn down the police office with the police inside. The skirmish that followed resulted in the first line of duty death for the new force with the killing of Gabriel Franks.

Nevertheless, Colquhoun reported to his backers that his force was a success after its first year, and his men had “established their worth by saving £122,000 worth of cargo and by the rescuing of several lives.” Word of this success spread quickly, and the government passed the Marine Police Bill on 28 July 1800, transforming it from a private to public police agency. Colquhoun published a book on the experiment, The Commerce and Policing of the River Thames. It found receptive audiences far outside London, and inspired similar forces in other countries, notably, New York, Dublin, and Sydney.

Where do we go from here?

The ordinary economic discussion about employment becomes a three-way conversation that includes Keynes on one point, the Chicago School and Milton Friedman on another and Marx at the third point: that is the rehabilitated Marx by way of David Harvey; “Is it time to look beyond capitalism toward a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be responsible, just and humane?”

Let’s see where that conversation might end up?