Fred Reed is still working away at his vocation of recent years: speaking to a mostly deaf American public about the more serious and fundamental problems confronting Americans or all of mankind in these early decades of the 21st century. That he takes himself, and his writing, less seriously than do many of our sages is to his credit. Not that all critics should write so tongue-in-cheek as does Fred in most of his essays, but we need our Mark Twains, who often speak in humor-laden wonder but always with some insight into the sheer strangeness of the peoples and cultures of the United States. Unfortunately for us all, we and Fred live at a time when American bigotry and closedmindedness (now called `exceptionalism’) have combined with our ignorance (history is now bunk not just to simple farm-boy technological geniuses but also to our leaders and even their highly credentionaled advisors) to make us a dangerous people to ourselves and to much of the world. Our only remaining criteria for our actions is: Does it make us feel good about ourselves? We are a people who think that high-school pep-rallies are the height of human cultural activity. We destroy the world which we’ll hand on to younger generations and feel good about ourselves because we give them lots of electronic junk at Christmas to make sure their minds and moral characters are turned to mush so that they can’t even react strongly against us, their enemies.
In this essay, A Matter That Should Give Us PAWS: The End Times of the Modern Economy, he points out that we don’t have just technical disruptions of the sort the United States suffered throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. Though our obvious technical problems are serious: such as those caused by central bank manipulation of currency and bonds, big-city bank manipulation of all sorts of markets including gold and silver and mortgages, movements of vast amounts of capital to the seeming goal of generating short-term profits for speculators and executives looking for huge bonuses. As serious as those more obvious problems are, there is a more fundamental disruption to human communities—`rot’ is perhaps a better word than `disruption’.
So it is that Fred tells us:
To date, the only way we know to distribute goods and services (houses, food, that sort of thing) is to have people work and pay them for it. It is an imperfect system, having been devised by humans, and pays a quarterback millions for throwing a pointy object to a downfield felon while a shock-trauma nurse can barely eat. Still, it has been reasonably serviceable.
Despite the apparent beliefs of even some of the most intelligent commentators on our economy, we are facing a radically different basic problem from, say, circa 1900 when some major crafts and entire industries were shrinking into niches or even disappearing completely. We aren’t seeing the shrinkage of horse-breeding operations and the associated leather-goods industries; we aren’t seeing the opening of the auto-industry. We are seeing the introduction of new modes of producing goods and providing services; we are seeing automated production of goods and provision of services with most men and women being on the outside of the entire system. It’s not so much that new products and services are replacing old as it is that the ways of manufacturing all products and providing all services are changing in ways which have eliminated many of the ways of making a living. And it’s far from clear that most of the human race can function as workers in this new environment and not really even clear that most of the human race is even needed as workers.
The world has grown richer and more complex than it was when our current ways of living and making a living grew up and we haven’t shown much willingness to deal with the situation—other than an occasional fascination with dystopian novels and movies of our prospects.
Something of the sort was shown in Disraeli’s novel, Sybil, which took place in the 1830s or so, a time when textile manufacturing skills had been replaced by sophisticated machinery and the craftsmen were less desirable as workers than their unskilled and uneducated or under-educated children. The United States took advantage of this transition quite well when the Lowells and others redesigned manufacturing operations to use the inclination of American men to acquire a variety of more general skills; those American men working in Yankee factories could out-produce those English teenagers. The jerry-rigged solution of the Yankee organizational geniuses have failed. Heck, those all-round Yankee workmen don’t even exist. My generation (born 1955) was mixed in this regard but I can remember some of the last such American workers nurturing their skills on the rolling rust-buckets they bought as their first cars. Now, you can’t work on your own car without a computer diagnostic system and you can’t repair what has been sealed in modular parts designed to be thrown away and replaced after 40,000 miles of service. Anyone who has access to Daddy’s modern machine-shop, and takes advantage of it, and anyone who goes to MIT, and goes through their remedial education courses for engineering students who can’t wire up a simple electrical outlet, will gain deep knowledge and powerful skills. Few have those options and our modern economy doesn’t seem to need many such workers, machinist or electrical engineer.
There are no solutions in sight because the modern factory can be automated to the point where it needs only one or more teams of experienced and perhaps highly skilled engineers along with a small number of blue-collar workers. As Fred notes, we aren’t looking at a transition to new types of jobs, perhaps in new locations or in new industries. Rather are we looking at a wholesale disappearance of jobs as machines are beginning to take over in vast expanses of the economy. New industries might arise to produce new goods or provide new services, but the robots will be there from the beginning. Robots are even beginning to replace some sorts of surgeons.
This might have a good ending centuries from now; many of the upward movements in human history involved periods of great suffering, especially at the beginning of those movements. But we are certainly heading into a very bad middle which might include such disasters as massive depopulations of large regions of the Earth, disease and famine and war might come upon us. Modern Europe began with the destruction of the Western Roman Empire by mass migrations which many historians think to have been more in the nature of peoples looking for better lives than of invasions by barbarian warriors—though there was some of that as well. The interested reader might wish to read Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe by Peter J Heather to gain an appreciation of the havoc which can result when there is a mismatch between economic opportunities in a region of the world and the needs and desires of the peoples in that region or bordering regions—where `bordering’ includes all who can see, for example, Germany on the television and read on the Internet about the prosperity of German corporations and generosity of German welfare systems. (I suspect bordering should also be generalized in our world to include the borders between inner-cities and prosperous suburbs or gentrified urban areas.)