only if you make them so by definition. i'm distinguishing "career" from wage labor. they differ in a number of pretty straightforward ways. wage labor is tightly coupled to time. career is not, sometime coupled to outcomes, largely coupled to history, path dependence and position, "social capital".
i want a crumplable one.
this insight, by @ryanlcooper.com, reflects something structural, not cultural. we decoupled consumption from work, most consumption is financed from income other than wage labor, returns to wealth or social capital. "career" replaces work as a path to a good life. they are far from the same thing.
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fascism is a prion.
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absent intervention, the money goes to the scarce factor. what will the scarce factor be? maybe not compute! but it seems unlikely it will be labor, as it briefly was during the Fordist era.
A larger share of people are employed in care, yes. A smaller fraction are employed as high-bargaining-power doctors. There’s the rub. The existence of a surplus doesn’t create a mass middle class of consumers capable of directing production toward the general welfare rather than rich luxuries.
It is not a “normal pattern”. It happened *late* viz the industrial revolution, after that revolution immiserated generations, only thanks to labor militancy and postwar social democracy. You take other people’s hard work and pocket it as nature. 1/
The work is harder now, because (as Marx observed but mistook for something permanent), the particularities of 19-20c factory production were susceptible to mass worker disruption and therefore bargaining power via labor organization. That is less and less the case with contemporary production. 2/
If labor militancy won’t work, what we have left is social democracy, or something new and unexpected. Whatever it will be, there is nothing normal or natural or inevitable about it. /fin
it does not almost definitionally become a small part of the economy. it only becomes a small part of the economy if the automated producers have little market power, which in fact is not our recent experience. 1/
and even if you posit somehow brutal competition in automated production, that doesn’t solve the problem of how incomes to the broad public come to be and in a reasonable distribution. 2/
what becomes the basis by which my caring for your mom entitles me to some share of the robots’ production? we can’t all care for Elon’s lovely mom. /fin
it can only help the people directly attached to the firms generating the outsize revenue. those are increasingly few, very lucky, workers.
Everyone does deserve to participate and contribute and have that be recognized and remunerated. 1/
But no magic insists, and it will be increasingly hard for policy to engineer, a wage setting process that results in (1) a large enough share of the economy going to wages and (2) a sufficiently compressed distribution of those wages to form the basis of a decent society. 2/
In particular, high-bargaining-power work is increasingly automated, there will always be jobs for people, but much of it may be care work and provision of discretionary services, neither of which imbue workers with bargaining power or command high wages. 3/
One way or another, we will have to find means to give the broad public shares of the production endowed by all that automation, that is of property income. 4/
That doesn’t have to be structured in a way that feels like government charity for losers. But it will have to happen, if we don’t want to live in an Elysium-style stratified society. /fin
i don’t think it can address the political effects of wealth inequality. and going forward, trying to run a decent society on the basis of wages alone as a source of income for most people will be very challenging, as production of many goods and services becomes more capital intensive.
(i’m not one of the deriders… i hope to write something about that soon.)
“The Democratic Party has its own class of big-dollar donors, and as a result tends to be skittish about imposing a sufficiently rigorous taxation regime to make a dent in [wealth] inequality. But if the American republic is to survive into the medium term, it simply must be done.” @ryanlcooper.com
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is it possible to impeach, convict, and remove over the course of an afternoon?
a political system that makes the joker commander-in-chief of its armed forces might stand some reform.
he never won a majority, only a slight plurality.
"Mad World" (feat. Gary Jules) - Official Music Video
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i know it seems a stretch, but i kind of think us v trump is the moment. it’s when legal constraint stopped being load bearing, law became only a kind of loose advice, for the leader + exemplar of the state. after that, how are any constraints supposed to beheld sacred, reliably honored + enforced?
maybe it’s because i’ve been out of the country awhile, but i’m gobsmacked how into taco tuesday i suddenly find myself.
it’s the kind not for cuties.