We're presently working on several exciting conference ideas for 2010 and 2011. One will be before the Transvision 2010 meeting in Milan. Stay tuned for that.
And, of course, like every nonprofit we are always looking for new ways to support our work, even trying things that are a bit of a stretch for us. For instance, we are organizing a “Future of Medicine” cruise to the Bahamas October 10-17, 2010, with our co-sponsors, the Appignani Bioethics Center and the University of Montreal Bioethics Program. The curriculum will focus on healthy longevity, personalized medicine, and cognitive fitness. We’ll have top-notch speakers, films, and discussions, plus lots of time for sun, entertainment, food and drink. So it's time to plan a lovely and life-enhancing getaway with your loved one next October.
I’m personally grateful for my health, my family, the luck of accidentally being born into relative affluence in late capitalist USA, and for getting all my ya-yas out as a suburban youth in the 1970s before AIDS and meth. Okay, that’s enough paeans to my Puritan past.
I really want to talk about our jobless recovery and the opportunity it provides for technoprogressives to make the case for a post-work civilization. When two wage-earner families became the norm in the 1970s, the percent of the adult population in the labor force began to climb. Since 2000, however, that employment/population ratio has declined to 1980s levels and is likely to continue to decline as the Baby Boomers begin to retire.
We are now in the midst of permanent and rapid job loss and the growth of structural unemployment. The immediate cause of the job losses is the collapse of the bubbles in housing and finance. But this recession was just the catalyst for a more rapid adjustment to the post-industrial economy of the future, in which globalization and automation will steadily erode employment.
Globalization: China and India have barely been effected by this recession, and their economic growth is predicted to march along at 7-10 percent next year. These countries have large internal markets that are still developing, and they continue to benefit from the transfer of manufacturing and services from the North to the South. This is good for longer term global equality between North and South, but it also means the North will very quickly have to adapt to less employment.
Automation: Today, productivity per worker is at a six year high in the United States, meaning fewer workers can make more with new technology. In many sectors, investments in automation are producing greater profits than investments in additional human workers. The recession actually slowed down this trend because it gave employers the opportunity to suppress frightened workers' wages. As a consequence, John Henry looked like a slightly better deal in 2009 than the machine, if there had been any demand for the thwacking of railroad ties. But the subsistence needs of a human worker can only be ratcheted down so far, while the productivity/cost benefits of machines double every two years. As economist Allen Sinai recently said to the New York Times:
"It’s a change in the structure of the business cycle. . . There appears to be a new tendency to substitute against labor. It’s permanent, as long as there are alternatives like outsourcing and robotics."
We know there will be many who will use unemployment to argue for more social austerity, lower minimum wages, cutbacks in workplace safety and benefits, and less vacation time and leave. But we can also use joblessness to make the case for an egalitarian, abundant society that consciously embraces the end of work and provides a basic income for all.
For those of you who are fans of the basic income guarantee, there are two upcoming meetings to note:
Basic Income at a Time of Economic Upheaval: A Path to Justice and Stability?
April 15-16, 2010 -- Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Basic Income Earth Network
July 1-2, 2010 -- University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
We can also use the current downturn and jobless recovery as an opportunity to argue, as IEET assistant director Marcelo Rinesi does, for investment in continuous life-long learning as a way to keep skills linked to the employment opportunities that are produced.
We can use it as an opportunity to argue for experiments with local economic models and currencies, as IEET Fellow Doug Rushkoff does in Life Inc.
We can use it to force critical thinking about future economic and technological scenarios as IEET Senior Fellow Jamais Cascio has been doing in his essays for Fast Company.
We can use the current global economic downturn as an opportunity to push back on intellectual property overreach, and to advocate new peer-to-peer and open-source economics, as IEET interns Edward Miller and Parijata Mackey have been doing.
And we can ask, as Charlie Stross does, what a truly sustainable civilization looks like. Presumably it is not one that continues to go in this direction:
Have a nice weekend -- and after the eating, drinking and sleeping, see you back in the trenches next week!