dagblog - Comments for "Work, You Wretches!"

On your recommendation, I'm a

Michael Maiello — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 15:43:30 +0000

In reply to Check out the fifth comment

On your recommendation, I'm a third of the way through Light now. Thanks for the tip!

Check out the fifth comment

AmericanDreamer — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:51:23 +0000

In reply to The thing about robots doing

Check out the fifth comment in this thread, which also referenced the Martin Ford book The Lights in the Tunnel. My worldview is hereby slightly modified. Until now, I had thought that it is only women who say smart stuff in meetings or discussions that gets ignored, followed by a man saying the same thing, probably less well, and eliciting huzzahs all the way around the room for being a freakin' genius.

Yes, of course I am pulling your leg, anonymous, with an attempt at light-heartedness about an unfunny reality I'm sure many here at dag have experienced. I think there is less of an expectation in online threads that commenters will read all of the earlier comments in the thread before hitting send than there is that people in FTF or videoconferenced meetings will listen, or at least pretend to listen, to what is being said.

That said, I could swear that 80% of what gets said in meetings I attend is not actually heard, or at least is processed, if at all, somewhere in the medulla or amygdala or other primitive, low cognition parts of the brain. Which raises a variant of the tree-falling-in-the-woods-with-no-creature-on-hand-to observe it question: If a word is uttered in a meeting but not heard, was it spoken?

"Meetings: The Practical Alternative to Work" reads a sign a highly productive, frustrated colleague of mine has posted on her office door. Do any of you work at places where the meetings are actually good, productive? Surely there must be some such places, somewhere. How does that happen?

I've never been able to find

Orion — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:42:12 +0000

In reply to Work, You Wretches!

I've never been able to find it again but I recall reading a Woodrow Wilson address where he basically apologized for not having the means to spare people from having to work for a living. Can you imagine a president saying anything like that today?

No. One of America's most prominent commentators already spends most of his time bleating on about Wilson being the devil incarnate.

Thanks, Anonymous; I got lost

we are stardust — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 04:20:32 +0000

In reply to The thing about robots doing

Thanks, Anonymous; I got lost in the Google Cloud computing piece. The point at which so few have good jobs or discretionary income driving people from the service, causing it to tank...hmmm. We are such a short-sighted species. OT, but a thought: somewhere I read today that the future of the economic revival would be women. Maybe because they plan out for the future more often? (I only read the headline.)

The thing about robots doing

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 04:00:00 +0000

In reply to Work, You Wretches!

The thing about robots doing all the work sounds great....except that then most people don't have an income. So we don't have this great society where no one has to work...we have a few rich people getting all the profits and everyone else basically homeless.

The problem is that is exactly what's going to happen if things don't change.

For a great overview of this, see this book:

"The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1448659817

A free PDF is also available here: http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com

Also see the author's blog at http://econfuture.wordpress.com.

I think the issues raised in this book are among the most important that we will have to confront as a society. I encourage everyone to read it...

I was talking to a guy today

A Guy Called LULU — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 01:03:31 +0000

In reply to Work, You Wretches!

I was talking to a guy today who was working so many hours that he couldn't do anything else. Still, he knew enough people who were out of work that he felt lucky. It is a reminder how the union's success in getting time and a half after forty hours spread the work around until the cost of benefits made it cheaper to work two employee to death at 1&1/2rather than hire a third.
Just one more reason for single payer universal health care.

AA,I agree with Mead that

moat — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:45:13 +0000

In reply to I recommend reading some of

AA,

I agree with Mead that replicating the "Blue Model" is not a sufficient response to the problems facing our society but take exception to at least two elements he presents.

While the old manufacturing giants have passed away and a certain class of monopolies cannot operate in the global economy, there is nonetheless a "stable" class of wealthy people who intend to keep it the way they like it. So when Mead says: "The stable economic structure allowed a stable division of the pie", it is not like those people all disappeared or handed off their gains to mysterious elements that cannot be comprehended. It would be more accurate to say that the pie that has been moved to a Commanding Height above the grasping masses. Mead weakens his call for new solutions when he blows off considering one of the elements that caused the New Deal to come about.

I object to the notion that intellectuals are a protected industry that relies mainly on the perception of a false scarcity. The charge could certainly be leveled at the blowhards of various established institutes of broad disinformation but Mead doesn't acknowlege the real division of labor where years of work in specific disciplines is necessary to do certain kinds of work and study. Now if he were to look at how the academic world is generated by various means of production, then the contrast to the changes before the information age would be more about how things are made and less about a guild storing work.When looking at the disconnect between academic and "ordinary" discourse, I think Marcuse is correct that the lacuna is about keeping a critical activity from breaking up the monopoly of what can be said.

Yes, definitely. It was Star

EmmaZahn — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:37:25 +0000

In reply to Work, You Wretches!

Yes, definitely. It was Star Trek and other sci-fi stories that led to my ruination as a card-carrying capitalist drone. I say ruination because the daily grind really grinds when you realize how pernicious the prevailing worldview truly is; when you cannot even question any aspect of it without being demonized and dismissed as a commie socialist. Questioning the prevailing economic theories and interpretation of capitalism is heresy but I do it anyway. I am very, very lonely. :-)

I live in a red state and work(ed) in finance where it is difficult to find anyone like-minded. It has been almost as hard looking left online. Pre-2008 financial meltdown, so many progressives identified themselves as fiscally-conservative social progressives and almost all ran screaming from the liberal label. We are or were too comfortable econmically. Like passengers on the Titanic, never imagining the ship might sink.

As painful as the financial crisis may end up being, maybe there will be a silver lining if enough are shaken out of their economic rut.

More to come (hopefully).

The solutions to unemployment

Oxy Mora — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:26:00 +0000

In reply to Random thoughts: I thought it

The solutions to unemployment are WPA projects and, like you say, a massiver retooling of our infrastructure along energy efficient lines. Massive expenditures on education and technology. Sadly. I feel that that option, except for isolated projects, is not going to happen.

I just recalled the following

artappraiser — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:06:20 +0000

In reply to Work, You Wretches!

I just recalled the following with which I can throw a big wrench into this discussion:

What the whole world wants is a good job

Hey, mebbe the U.S. can continue to be the big revolutionary leader in the world by being the first to no longer be caring so much about having a "good job"? Go back to wanting some of those other things people used to say they wanted more, like "love, money, food, shelter, safety, and/or peace"?