Tuesday, July 21, 2015

What Happens When "Producers" Don't Need "Consumers"?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)
How many citizens remember the definition of a tangent, from high school geometry?

Much has been written recently about automation disintermediating currently "secure" human jobs, and the supposedly dire threat that any and all newly invented tools now pose to human culture and humans themselves. Few stop to ponder the fact that we've been inventing labor-saving tools since the first twig was poked into a termite nest, long before the first flint chopper was knapped. New tools have always posed a transient challenge, followed by the freedom to turn our attention to other things.

Now, however, supposedly modern humans seem to be having problems TURNING THEIR ATTENTION to bigger and better things.
Uh, ... maybe OCD* is the problem, not tools or automation?
Consider (but please don't get overly side tracked on the specifics of) just one of many, many examples, hat tip to Shai Schechter
"Truck driving most common job in 29/50 US states. What will happen when trucks don't need drivers.

Oh, I don't know. What did our ancestral primates (and their teeth) do, when gnawing raw meat from bones was replaced by cooked meat sliced with flint knives?

Can we please NOT descend into discussion of the trivia related to each & every such "what happens" question, and instead ponder what things will be like 2, 3 & 7 or more generations out? My persistent point is that our smorgasboard of new options worth exploring swamp each and every negative associated with population growth and our new inventions. I call this the Traveling Entrepreneur's Task, but it's also the Context Nomad's Task or the "SOCIAL-SPECIES DILEMMA," and it's at the heart of the utility & purpose of fiat currency, or denomination of ongoing (& expanding) Public Initiative. We've been doing that for ~3.5 billion years on planet Earth. Let's not lose track of that.

3 seconds of stopping to think produced this response.
I'd worry more about invention of the auto-consuming robot. What happens when "producers" don't need "consumers"? :(
Pun intended. But seriously, take our aversion to thinking .... PLEASE!

Is it too much to ask fellow citizens for, say, 60 seconds of silent, actual thought? What might THEY come up with, if asked to respond to this question?

Years ago, when visiting elementary schools for the NIH, to help reconsider science education, I used to ask this type of questions of kids. Up to 5th grade, kids everywhere had no problem demonstrating truly astounding imagination! You couldn't contain it! Sadly, you could palpably see the intellectual repression kicking in somewhere in 6th grade, in the form of repressed imagination regarding the future, replaced with too much slavery to "efficient performance" in the transient present. Much of the original imagination of student humans had - unimaginably - been contained and destroyed, reminiscent of the destruction of the once limitless Bison and cod fisheries of the Grand Banks.
NeoClassical Ideology & Collapse Of Human Imagination ... will that be our epithet?
For now, let's leave these dangling options for readers to explore on their own, unimpeded by any restrictions. The rising ranks of unemployed should have plenty of time to think, instead of just mindlessly watch tv.

Please notify me if any NeoClassical mouth-breathers re-discover the concept of infinite tangents, and then apply it to reconsideration of our instantaneous position on the evolutionary path of homo sapiens. Where do we go from here? Off on some random tangent?  Or do we THINK about the continuous, strenuous thinking required to keep within striking distance of our unpredictable survival path?  Well?

The murky images in my crystal ball imply submergence of a new sub-species of humans, destined for rapid extinction. Dumbo NeoClassicoSenseless, or the "DNCi" - disappearing from reality faster than a receding hairline, warbling their erble logic all the way. 

The sad part is how many passive homo sapiens may needlessly follow them off on some fixed tangent, & over the nominal cliffs the DNCi invent.

What's in YOUR crystal ball? Just the present view imposed by the DNCi, or endless new options worth exploring?




* Really, I'm surprised that adhering to NeoClassical Economics isn't on this list
    Or maybe it is, and we just don't notice? 
    Here's another thought:
     If variant wiring of many neurons within one central nervous system can produce OCD behavior in one individual, can variant policy wiring in public discourse produce OCD behavior in a nation's government? Since we're in charge of constantly rewiring both examples .... can't we fix or at least significantly mitigate both, with careful, persistent management, training and practice?  Say, isn't that called Democracy, and acting like a co-owner?






11 comments:

John said...

Truck driving is the most common job in 29 out of 50 states? Can this possibly be right? More than, say, retail workers or those working in catering?

Shai said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Shai said...

The statistic comes from https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-us-like-a-human-driven-truck-b8507d9c5961. Scott's source, in turn, is http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state. There they elaborate that the numbers may have bias, as "trucking" is actually "truck, delivery and tractor drivers", whereas other jobs are split more narrowly (primary and secondary school teachers are separated, for instance). Incidentally, your example of retail sales clerk is top only in Nevada :-) If you can find the hard numbers from the study they reference I'd be interested to see them, but the fact remains a) a hell of a lot of people are currently driving vehicles along monotonous routes, and b) it's fascinating to watch how technology makes jobs obsolete, and new jobs form to take their place.

Tom Hickey said...

Truck drivers get fairly well paid, especially in comparison with retail. The previous policy of long runs has been changed to hubs and shorter runs per driver. Nw drivers can spend a lot more time at home than the days of crosscountry. Plus it is a natural fit for displaced farm workers used to driving tractors since adolescence.

Driving an 18-wheller takes some skill, although it can be learned by taking a month-long intensive course. It's a semi-skilled profession, and drivers consider themselves professionals. There's a mystique about it in the US. Very interesting sub-culture.

Some people do it part time just because they love truckn'. Even some people who are very well off and don't need the $. Sort of like the motorcycle "gangs" in the SF Bay Area made up of doctors and lawyers one sees cruising Northern California on weekends. It's the feeling of power. BTW, there are a significant number of women on board now, too, driving trucks and bikes instead of just coming along for the ride.

Roger Erickson said...

For Pete's sake! Does it matter WHICH current jobs are threatened by changing contexts?

Please plug in any example you want, but then please get on to discussing the potential adaptation.

The whole purpose here was to trigger discussion of aggregate adaptation to change, and why we're not yet getting to that, NOT to obsess over which particular soon-obsolete pastimes are or aren't most most frequently seen at this time.

No comments?

Peter Pan said...

If there is profit to be made, jobs will be created. There is no effort to reduce unemployment with a job guarantee or public works programs. Thus, the unemployed can adapt to being unemployed.

There's your context, now go change it.

Roger Erickson said...

"If there is profit to be made, jobs will be created."

Bob, that is EXACTLY what the NeoClassical mouthbreathers say! And it won't work, no matter how hard you try to use a police state hammer square pegs into round holes.
did you read the prior post?
http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2015/07/representation-of-dynamic-creation-in.html

And personal profit is NOT how any social species, including humans, operates. Have you looked at Graeber's book?
http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The-First-000-Years/dp/1612191290

Anyone paying attention in anthropology-101 or biology-101 would have told you Graeber was right, before he had to document the obvious & well known, for unlearned audiences. [Reality is still ignored by most, no matter how well known by a few. That's why academia is largely academic.]

The nuances of distributed behaviors drive social species to adapt in complex ways that CANNOT be explained by simplistic drives for personal "profit." "Profit" itself cannot be instantaneously defined well enough to explain all the ways people act out their individual drives.

At the least, humans, like all social species, act out an algorithm involving two polynomial lists of drives.
Survival follows a recombinant Sum[C(i)+G(j)]

where C(i) represents all the drives that keep system components (citizens) alive & adequately provisioned

and G(j) represents all the drives that keep the social system (culture) growing

All the stuff economists talk about gets lost in the variance of each polynomial, and doesn't come close to explaining the dynamic, constantly recombining, running Sum of those two input sets.

That's why when imagined economics & real politics meet, the former always goes out the window.

Roger Erickson said...

Scratch an MMT student, and you get a NeoClassical economist. :(

PragCap, Kervick, Bob, .... etc, etc, etc

Fiat currency operations are NOT about individuals making personal gains in the stock market. It's about making people aware of aggregate options worth exploring.

Tom Hickey said...

Anyone paying attention in anthropology-101 or biology-101 would have told you Graeber was right, before he had to document the obvious & well known, for unlearned audiences. [Reality is still ignored by most, no matter how well known by a few. That's why academia is largely academic.]

This is the great weakness of disciplinary education a model. It breaks the wholeness analytically and never repairs it synthetically.

The world badly needs a meta-disciplinary model based on general systems theory.

This is why Kenneth Boulding switched out of economics and into general systems theory as one of the co-founders. He was somewhat of a precursor of MMT, btw, and Randy has written about him.

Roger Erickson said...

Great point, Tom. Couldn't agree more.

GST became trivially not-helpful to the mass of specific researchers, but should STILL replace economics .... if there was any intelligent life to be found in that discipline.

GST, stripped of over-primises to physics/chemistry/biology/etc, should be tremendously useful for universities seeking to fuse English/Philosophy/Anthropology/etc into "Liberal Arts" and "Social Sciences."

SETI should turn it's attention to helping to vet economic faculty & students.

ps: both GST and MMT should drop the trailing T as inappropriate. Replace it with an O.

General Systems Operations
Modern Monetary Operations

Peter Pan said...

The profit motive does not create enough jobs. That is the context we live in, where job creation is limited to a single criterion. Capiche?

Solutions have been proposed, from job guarantees to universal incomes, to job sharing. If the economy were run for people, it is easy to imagine a context where automation and increased productivity benefits everyone.

Bill Mitchell and like-minded individuals have stressed the harm done by long term unemployment, but politically the only thing we hear is the chirping of crickets. Who will be the first to organize around this issue? The Luddites? They'll have my support.