We Have Nothing to Fear but the Ear Itself
Here is a plan: Find out what people are good at and reward them for doing it. That is what people need to hear.
With Miroslaw Manicki
It is important that we correct one critical error in the message people are getting with regard their futures, especially the futures of their jobs and lifestyle prospects. It is especially important that we spread the fix far and wide. If we don’t, we stand the chance of ending up in doggie do-do.
Here is the current line:
Thank you for your service to the [company/agency/school/rodeo/ government/association/store]. Your job is being phased out by a machine of some sort. It will be really great. I am sure that some ‘machine-polishing’ jobs will open up. Keep an eye peeled. You can apply for one of those. Meanwhile, there is a really nice little novel you can now read in your spare time, “Player Piano” by Kurt Vonnegut, who really saw this coming.
Everybody sees this coming. It lies at the heart of nightmares everywhere. This is the core message of social media once you get past the pleasantries.
There needs to be a better message
As a young bookstore affictionado and book buyer by the dozen, I ran across a favorite book of mine called “Drylongso: Self-portrait of Black America by John Langston Gwaltney”. He was a hot-shot anthropologist from Syracuse University who invested some of his sabbatical time “in the early 1970s in more than a dozen northeastern urban black American communities.” Here is a jewel of a quote by a woman named Ruth Shays. It pretty much covers what we are talking about.
When you don’t know when you have been spit on, it does not matter too much what else you think you know. Ruth Shays, as quoted by John Langston Gwaltney
Yet, here we are, staring into an apparently endless abyss. The machines are going to replace us, we are told, because there are things that they may be able to do better, but none of us is going to be able to buy any of the stuff that will arguably be better, cheaper, quicker to obtain, and likely be necessary to support life as we know it.
Then, again, we have the wild and woolley social media extravaganza to spread the word on this. As a result, people are going crazy, lashing out, and falling for any crazy scheme that comes their way. They know that there is spit coming their way, but they are not exactly sure where it is coming from.
They come from a misinterpretation of what makes the world wag. What life is about is living. In the course of crafting our lives we have natural inclinations to make things, to exercise our limbs, voices, brains, and imaginations. We like to see things and watch people that are easy on the eye. We are really into our senses, likely even to the point of inventing more than we came with.
We have dreams and aspirations. We desire each other. Well, that has to be modified somewhat. Some of us really want to be with others of us, a feeling that is not always reciprocated — both being processes that the rest of us like to witness.
Some people don’t like being around other people — they really, really do not like it. While not necessarily a bad thing, as the world is a very big place, it can turn ugly. It can turn into uncivilized and dangerous behavior, not to be encouraged. It can take problematic forms, including what the DSM-5 manual refers to as a: Conduct Disorder; Antisocial Personality Disorder; Other Specificied Disruptive, Impulse-Control, and Conduct Disorder; or Unspecified Disruptive, Impulse-Control, and Conduct Disorder.
Whew. There is probably more where those came from, too.
The idea came from a kind of modern magic: If we turn EVERYTHING into something of an open market and consider that all things can and must be monetized. The magic part is that if the prices can be sorted out independently and fairly, everything will come out OK. This is the famous Adam Smith “invisible hand” idea. We would have been better off if his writings had been kind of averaged out. I will comment on that later.
The invention of laziness
What do people who are considered lazy do in their spare time? They skip out of school — where do they go? They call in sick from work — what do they do?
Are they just having fun? News note: ‘Fun’ is big business. Perhaps whatever it is should be encouraged.
Are they doing something nefarious, that does harm to others and to the interests of all of us? Well, they shouldn’t do that. Some assistance in path correction is thus in order.
In 1933, Karl Polanyi documented the invention of laziness in “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.” This was an English development. One aspect of the Industrial Revolution was that the industrialists needed workers, while the people in England’s countryside lived agricultural lives, which involved a good deal of work in the Spring to plant and in the Fall to harvest, but much free time in-between.
They enjoyed this. For the most part, they lived off the land, which provided bounteous harvests in the lush land of England.
When the industrialists came calling, nobody wanted to work for them. For one thing, they had everything in the world that they wanted. They could read, they could invest time and effort into their hobbies. They could go out in a Summer day and have a grand picnic on the top of a hill. This wasn’t some kind of breathless conception of Utopia, this is how they and their ancestors had lived for generations.
The industrialists were offering up a Utopia of their own. Their version wasn’t really thought through, but the basics were that they were going to be able to put the people to work in factories of their design, designed for strict production outputs (certainly not for comfort), and sell the goods to the people of the world. If the people of the world didn’t want their goods (as in the case of China), they would rough them to the point that they would give in. In the case of China, even that didn’t work, so they tried opium, which worked as far as the British were concerned.
In the industrialists plan, the common people would work. All of the time. The work was as it presented itself — repetitious, awkward, and dangerous. Machines could wreak all kinds of havoc on one’s person. The air could be dank, poisonous, and smelly. What horrors could were piped out into the air and water around their plants.
There was more to this — no carrot and a bigger stick. The powers that were in England cut off the economy and society of the countryside by criminalizing private agriculture. Community gardens were declared out of bounds in favor of the grand English manors and lush, enourmous estates and aristocratic gardens we now see in the great British cinematic works.
As documented by Polanyi, when the people tried to support themselves directly with out-of-the-way gardens and hunting in the forests, they were arrested. Hello Australia (where they sent the ‘criminals’). Also, hello Marxism — a pretty obvious critique of very bad behavior in England at the time.
So the concept of an enforced “job” was developed. Along with it came the moral sin of “laziness”. This is when the tail, the economy, really started wagging the dog, society. This shift in policy is represented well by Talcott Parsons, who started out as an economist and ended up as a leader in social studies, particularly social action. This can be contrasted with priorities outlined by his colleague, Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter was socially aware, but retained economics as a priority over social policy.
It is important to note that in the older cultures, the traditional agricultural cultures, work was not optional. The people had nature to contend with, and nature is always a hard taskmaster.
There were people who did not contribute to the common weal, the common benefit, by working to plant and to harvest. They were dealt with differently in different cultures. Based in family and cultural, and community contexts, the people typically did not starve so much as something was found for them to do. This does not mean that there were not traditions and practices to punish such people that would not be considered mean or immoral or possibly shameful based on modern sensibilities.
What the people are left with
As mentioned earlier, what was established in England and then elsewhere was the idea that you had to have a “job” to earn money and that that money was one’s only gateway to survival. You couldn’t just go somewhere and provide some kind of service and be given what you really needed — it must be a negotiated job for money.
By the way, a curious condition exists now in ‘Brexit’ Britain, where there have been crops rotting in the fields and meat that needed to be shipped elsewhere to be processed while the people were suffering from a lack of food, with escalating prices. These are examples of breakdowns in fully monetized arrangements with respect to basic needs. Couldn’t people have been allowed to go into the fields to harvest the food, for example? Perhaps few would have, but that might be a result of socialization into the job-only culture.
In the early English system of Adam Smith and the Enlightenment, you had to negotiate your way into a job, typically competing against other potential workers, but also against prospective employers. Success would give you a golden key of a job, not a big one if you are not very good at negotiating.
Lucky was the employer that hired highly-skilled or talented workers that couldn’t negotiate. They would thus enjoy a windfall — which they may well never pass on to the people. I am reminded of a friend of my youth who went to New York and established a jazz band. From a small town in the middle of nowhere, he was able to hire world-famous musicians who could touch your heart with their music but couldn’t negotiate to save themselves.
There is a lot of that.
The point, though, is that if we could get machines to do all of the boring things, that would be a very good thing. Who wants to be bored?
I heard recently that the world’s ports would benefit by automating everything. One industry leader said that much of the current problem — made clear by the pandemic — comes from truck drivers, who are as he described them unpredictable and unreliable. He said that full automation would get rid of all of the kinks in the system and substantially improve the flow of products.
That man, as head of global shipping company, is in a position to know. So, if full automation occurs in that sector, are we going to have a bunch of longshoremen and truck drivers out on the street now, jobless? Hello populism, and not the good kind.
This is an interesting prospect, as it is likely that the world’s ports are the least sociable places on Earth. How do you deal with an unemployed longshoreman?
Excuse me for stereotyping here, as I am sure that there are many fine people who work on the docks. I am considering the others here. In my limited experience at or near the docks of Long Beach and Oakland, there are some sketchy characters there. Those are the ones I am referring to. Do you take such people to the employment center and fill out the forms and do the crosswalk across the room to see the available jobs and see what pops up?
Indeed, what would pop up? From one perspective, where would we all want the prerogatives and decisionmaking skills and vocabularies of that bad kind of longshoremen to be prevalent next? Not in the schools. Not in the factories. Not in the hospitals.
Perhaps another approach is warranted. Put yourself in the position of the longshoremen in question. Without going into how they became longshoremen and what they faced on the job over time, it is something that they were showing up for work for? Is it possible that they behaved like “longshoremen” because they weren’t very happy with their lot in life, that they were doing it only for the money? If this is true, perhaps it would be wise to dig a little deeper for motive and for viable solutions.
Here is a question that could be posed to them: What would you do if you didn’t get paid for it?
You could ask that of a longshoreman, right? It would be interesting to hear what they would say. You might have to wait for it. The fact is, they might have to think about it for awhile before they can sort it out. The prospects may have been suppressed for a long time. It is possible that they would never have been asked that question or one like it before.
It is even unlikely that they were asked such things in school. That is an unquestioned travesty if true, as the very purpose of schools is to prepare us for life. If their programs have not be adaptable to each student to some degree, a hitch or two in their personal lives can lead them to a persistent personal hell, where they find themselves in a nowhere job with slim prospects, and dwindling financial rewards for the effort and sacrifice to boot.
Plans that have worked
It needn’t be complicated. If the machines take over (which obviously they cannot completly and should not) there will be more, better, and more available products. This should affect both prices and taxability — the government taking on an important role, as has been demonstrated in the emergency situation brought on by the pandemic.
People could be encouraged to form production and service cooperatives like the famous almond growers and orange juice people, etc. (who provide about 1/5 of all of our food as it stands). They could be paid in a variety of ways to “do their thing.” They might provide art. They might build things. They might entertain. They might ride around on horses. Who knows what it is that people like to do? Who knows what value those have to others that could serve as basis to compensate them?
The United States has shown that public and private institutions here can support such kinds of projects very well. We still benfit from the public art and the transportation infrastructure provided by skilled artisans from the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933 and the Works Progress Administration in 1935, along with other programs. This work has famously held up, as the craftsmen and artisans were allowed to do it up right.
You can see, perhaps through a glass darkly, the prospect for a longshoreman that always wanted to be an artist. It would be a plus to be able to team up with other artists on projects. Thus, there is a soul to be saved. Together, they could offer up projects to supplement basic supports from the government.
One thing that could be done to carry this out: The corporations benefitting from automation could pay that much less in payroll and that much more in transfer payments, including taxes. In some cases, they could offload costs by contracting with cooperatives as they present themselves.
An interesting aside: When Chinese workers contacted Leland Stanford’s Central Pacific Railroad Company to help in the construction of the United States Transcontinental Railroad, they came organized. They negotated as a group and they took care of themselves and their needs as a group. They were committed to the program to the degree that they slept in the tunnels they were digging. This was a sign of a strong tradition in such matters. This is an example of how corporate and cooperative enterprises could work together.
This isn’t what you would consider a Utopia, which can emerge from little more than a hunch. It is what is called civilization. We know much more about such things now than were ever did before. The old cultures were more sure-footed in their dance with nature. They had to be, as they lived with very little margin of error, otherwise the people suffered. They typically established granaries, for example, to feed the people in times of drought or natural disasters.
You can tell which cultures were better at this, as they grew larger. There is much to be learned as to how they garnered such success. It is clear that it wasn’t automatic. In China, there were four things that came together, thought up and deployed in about 200 BCE.
- The four stoops. This was a very creative way to take a stalk of rice, a grain not unlike wheat, and cultivated it in water in a way that did not strip the soil of nutrients, allowing for continuous cultivation. It required several steps, each involving the act of stooping.
- The waterworks. This was a community effort to make sure that slowly moving, muddy water could be run through the rice paddies at all times during growing seasons. Highly creative waterworks were built and maintained for generations.
- The Mandarinate. There was a testing mechanism throughout China to establish mastery of Confucian principles by young men, who were thus appointed as local leaders. Their jobs didn’t really involve Confucian actions, but the rigor of the program made them suited to grain counting and management, overseeing waterworks, and dealing with local squabbles.
- The evernormal granaries. This speak for themselves. This was grain storage to be distributed to the people when the rice production system did not function from natural or other causes.
- Commercial opportunities. The villagers had to work continuously to support the rigors of the four stoops. Nonetheless, they were encouraged to supplement their efforts in commercial ways through trade, crafts, and other marketable activities.
Similar patterns have been noted in ancient Sumer, ancient Africa, and pre-Columbian America. This is not Utopian, but historical, inherently practical, and observable in our current societies at some level.
Plans that could work
No, no, no — we are not proposing to put you into the rice fields. The point is, the four stoops and the rest of the plan was a brilliant program that someone came up with a couple of thousand years ago as a means of sustaining a population, one that allowed that population and its associated culture to grow substantially. Can we be so smart now?
This brings us to Adam Smith idea number two. The famous one, “The Wealth of Nations,” was published in 1776. The non-famous one, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” was published earlier, in 1759. It presents a very different picture than the latter work, with its magical outcomes based on the most base of objections — the desire for gain at all costs.
Here is how Smith starts out his moral sentiments work:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to his, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, whicn we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759
Is this the same person that wrote about placing the prospects of all of the people in the line of fire of chimeric markets? Truly it is, but the message here is not likely to be emblazoned on the walls of the New York Stock Exchange or even whispered in the halls of financial capitalism where the laissez faire religion of ‘immaculate reconciliation’ holds sway.
Smith does bring up important points that are both pertinent and thought-provoking. Can we care about others? Is that safe? Can we be concerned with the well-being of others where we do not have an interest — which is to say, a financial interest? If so, how about that for an invisible hand?
Interestingly, there were additions to his 1759 publication and his 1776 publication alike. In 1817, twenty-seven years after he died, subsequent publication of the following phrases wax poetic about needs faced by of all of us:
The preservation and healthful state of the body seem to be the objects which nature first recommends to the care of every individual. The appetites of hunger and thirst, the agreeable and disagreeable sensations of pleasure and pain, of heat and cost, etc., may be considered as lessons delivered by the voice of nature herself, directing him what he ought to choose, and what he ought to avoid, for this purpose. The first lessons which he is taught by those to whom his childhood is entrusted, tend, the greater part of them, to the same purpose. Their principal object is to teach him how to keep out of harm’s way. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1817, 27.
This is far afield from blithe consideration of outcomes as per the “invisible hand.” Keeping out of harm’s way applies to the entirety of us just as it applies individually. Could it be that the works of Dr. Smith were not fully understood?
It is helpful to have the one man to study. In a sense, Smith was the one who started it all, the mad dash to marketize everything and everyone. According to his history in the Great Books, he never declared any departure from his work in moral sentiments. His father had been the comptroller of customs for Scotland. Later, Smith himself was commissioner of customs for Scotland in his later years. He did have his practical side. He was captured by gypsies when a boy. Not everyone can say that.
He continually revised his moral sentiments works, which showed consistency on that score as seen in the 1817 publication — interestingly taken out in Boston. Given the breadth of his publications, it is unlikely that he intended his work to be taken to the extreme that we see in our day.
What is the message?
We have a start. We know that we need to plan. We have both the pandemic and the antics of one Vladimir Putin to thank for that.
We have the dog. It has a tail. That is another good starting point.
Smith does say this in his “Wealth of Nations”:
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, 33.
Such words ring true in our day, where there are many who work two and three jobs, who struggle with unstable prices for necessities, and who wonder at the proclaimed progress brought on by the application of science, innovation, automation, and education.
You know the tail is wagging the dog when you hear that “we cannot afford healthcare for the people,” for example. The civilized way is to figure out how to care for the health needs of the people. Then you work on how to account for it. This is one of those areas where the idea of open markets is wacky.
I have to talk a little Frederich Hayak, the high priest of ‘markets everywhere.’ He said that it is impossible to know everything there is to know about the elements of a transaction. That is why you need a market and a market transaction to sort them out.
That was specious talk then and it is fatuous now. In a medical situation, what is needed can be known. Granted, his argument holds in the current world, where grift and greed are wildly uncontrolled at every level of health and medical systems. This isn’t to say that answers couldn’t be known if there was a concerted effort to establish a comprehensive approach to find them. In our contemporary world, we see a very large tail and a tiny dog that is trundled to and fro by that tail.
The question isn’t whether we have the money, it is whether we have the capacity. Take the American works projects referred to earlier. In the 1930s, the economy had wound down to a minimum. Still, could things be done? Yes, projects could be organized, people could be brought on, and amazing things could be done. We still drive on many of the roads that were thus built; we still enjoy many of the solid buildings with their unique and functional architectural features.
In 2018, I documented fifty-seven cooperative projects in modern North America, many of them still ongoing [https://tinyurl.com/4y2tjvp8]. Some of these are famous — referenced earlier. One impediment to cooperation is the difficulty of documenting barter transactions due to tax code complications.
Contemplating solutions, I admit that the cost accountant in me starts to sing while reading Smith’s detailed accounting of all factors leading to pricing decisions. These can be found in the section in The Wealth of Nations’ “The Price of Commodities.” The following is an example of his style.
…if the one species of labour requires an uncommon degree of dexterity and ingenuity, the esteem which men have for such talents will naturally give a value to their produce, superior to what would be due to the time employed about it. Such talents can seldom be acquired but in consequence of long application, and the superior value of their produce may frequently be no more than a reasonable compensation for the time and labour which must be spent in acquiring them. In the advanced state of society, allowances of this kind, for superior hardship and superior skill, are commonly made in the wages of labour; and something of the same kind must probably have taken place in its earliest and rudest period. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 20.
When I read this, I see “esteem”… “naturally give a value” … “superior to what would be due” … “allowances of this kind” … “are commonly made” … “something of the same kind must probably have taken place.” These are uplifting statements on price-setting. I think few in our day would make the case that this is the case.
It could be the case, dependent on the nature and strength of societal ties. If there is a fault in Smith’s position, it is that somehow he may have assumed that the readers of “The Wealth of Nations” also read “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” They did not.
So, part of a solution should call on a higher order of camaraderie among the people. Such a thing cannot be imposed, but possibly it could be brought out of the shadows, where we can only hope that it survives. We can perhaps adjust paths of resources in the direction of cooperative efforts. It is possible that the roots and branches of compassion are not strong. It will take time for new roots to take hold, but policy can work to make contemporary cooperative projects more successful and to extend the reach of related efforts.
Finally, we need to concentrate on the people. The future lies in their talents, not the supposed wonders of machines. We, many of us, are chained to stupid jobs that we carry out for the money alone. Somewhere, some time, things got messed up, so here is where we are. Is it too late to get a life? Will it be possible to live that life if I am no longer chained to that life of a ‘longshoreman’ or whatever it is?