Re: Jobs, stasis, and dynamism (was Re: Offshoring Tracker Launched)
Human progress consists of people finding ways to produce more of a good or
service with the same or fewer inputs (capital, labor, and materials). Over
time, this process leads to more of everything -- food, medicine,
information, toys, leisure time, etc. -- for the same effort, making the
world wealthier and everyone better off.
Sure. Fine. No argument at that level. 100% agreement.
So far.
In the short run, every such change "hurts" someone. Think of all the jobs
"lost" because we're writing things on computers (full of "offshored"
components) instead of on Remington typewriters -- or by dictating to
someone with a pad and pencil.
The problem is that all those jobs weren't "lost"; they are gone. No quotes. Every such change "hurts" someone? No! Every such change hurts lots of people. No quotes.
The macroeconomy surely benefits. But communities that were sucked into the manufacturing economy in decades past are devastated in the present. And real people actually suffer.
The fact that an ever-decreasing fraction of the population accumulates an ever-increasing fraction of the total wealth has real consequences in the lives of human beings who may not have been born with the social or intellectual capital that would enable them to adapt quickly to global change. In effect, you are simply dismissing them with a wave of your hand, writing off whole generations of people in thousands of communities that followed the political and economic leaders of earlier times to build what they believed would be a stable and secure future.
The conflict between those of us who embrace such changes and those who view
them with alarm is the fundamental conflict of our age, according to
Virginia Postrel. In her book, _The Future and Its Enemies_, she writes:
"How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals
and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis-a regulated, engineered
world? Or do we embrace dynamism-a world of constant creation, discovery,
and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and
learning? ... Do we think that progress requires a central blueprint, or do
we see it as a decentralized, evolutionary process? Do we consider mistakes
permanent disasters, or the correctable by-products of experimentation? Do
we crave predictability, or relish surprise? These two poles, stasis and
dynamism, increasingly define our political, intellectual, and cultural
landscape."
There is another plane with which we can define the fundamental conflict of our age--indeed of most ages--that runs orthogonal to the stasis vs. dynamism dichotomy. That is the individualism vs. communitarianism duality (one popular example is the Tragedy of the Commons). Our society swings like a slow pendulum from the ideal of compassion for the least among us to the ideal of the rugged frontiersman taking all he can get. Right now we seem to be in an orgiastic celebration of the latter, but as we move back toward the center, the two notions will come more nearly into balance and the virtues of both will be more sharply delineated than of late.
So what does this all mean? It means that offshoring is going to continue to happen. The economy will continue to grow and evolve. A couple of billion consumers in Asia will continue to buy more stuff, making every nation wealthier. And a lot of people are going to go broke, get divorced, become homeless, and die in the gutter as part of the price of progress. Is there anything that you or I can do about it? Probably not a lot.
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