From the age of labor to the labor of age

March 25, 2010 11:46 PM

Humans seem to be unemploying themselves very well.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere (32 comments total)

Wow! this sounds like me, but I'm only 30 and an American. Can I still join this group?
posted by parmanparman at 11:54 PM on March 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

In Paris, 63-year-old Carole Avayou would like to join that group. A technician with Air France-KLM since 1978, she had just turned 60 when she was served notice of compulsory retirement. She has taken her fight for work to court, after a vain protest including locking herself in the office.

"(I wanted them) to discuss things with me, hear my arguments. I put a piece of furniture behind the door and jammed the handle," she said by telephone.

French people really like to protest. It reminds me of the time Yahoo engineers Protested when the company announced it was going to close it's Paris R&D site.

Anyway, soon we'll have a legion of Japanese elder-care robots to handle this problem for us. And everything will be great. For a while ...
posted by delmoi at 11:56 PM on March 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

I couldn't figure out what that article was about except that some old people need jobs. Basically there's no work for anyone of any age, that pays decently, in the entire world.
posted by amethysts at 12:01 AM on March 26, 2010 [2 favorites]

universal general strike - I can get behind that.





(I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party)
posted by philip-random at 12:13 AM on March 26, 2010

I've read a few articles like this, and they always seem to ignore the possibilities that have emerged as a result of the EU. I'm quite seriously suggesting to my parents that they move to Bulgaria when they retire as it will increase the value of their pensions. If a large number of retirees moved to low cost areas, they could still retire early on a low income yet maintain a decent standard of living. Similarly, youth unemployment doesn't have to be a state-only concern, as greater geographical mobility should help smooth out high and low areas. Many eastern states have seen their youth unemployment drop substantially since joining.

If states age at different times and at different rates, then sharing the demographic burden makes good sense as well. While an EU pension system is perhaps unlikely, I think the future of social security in the EU will be interesting in this regard. The same goes for potential "Blue Card" scheme and loosening/refocussing of immigration rules that attract more highly-skilled migrants. While immigration is a hard issue in the EU, the benefits of slowing the demographic transition with migration are clear.
posted by Sova at 1:35 AM on March 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

The problem is that if a huge chunk of the population isn't working and we keep meeting sensible productivity targets (as opposed to those designed to maximize value for a wealthy minority), it begs the question of why we're threatened by the state and our employers with destitution if we do anything less than bust our asses.

An entire population that reminds us how many of our jobs only exist to be exploited and not out of genuine need or want . . . well, that can't be allowed to happen.
posted by mobunited at 1:47 AM on March 26, 2010 [15 favorites]

I'm quite seriously suggesting to my parents that they move to Bulgaria when they retire as it will increase the value of their pensions.

Are the bulgarians, or other poor euro countries going to want to pay for healthcare for a bunch of elderly people from wealthy countries? The costs might be lower, but I wonder how that works out.
posted by delmoi at 2:33 AM on March 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

That's not the only reason people don't pick up and move. You'll have to be quite infatuated with a country before leaving your children and possible grandchildren behind. It breaks up traditional family structure of grandma/&grandpa helping with offspring, which can make life tricky for the young parents - not to mention robs children of much interaction with their own blood.
posted by dabitch at 3:01 AM on March 26, 2010 [3 favorites]

Today's zombie films are a moral preparation for the coming holocaust against the elderly. They signal that stiffly walking people with sagging and unappetizing flesh, staring eyes, and general Parkinsonian symptoms, are not human. It's okay to kill them. In fact, it's fun and good to kill them. I fully expect my generation to be used as target practice.
posted by Faze at 3:53 AM on March 26, 2010 [9 favorites]

Secondign mobunited (minor solecisim aside). Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, features a solution to this problem - needless to say it doesn't turn out well.
posted by phrontist at 4:03 AM on March 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

See also: Adolfo Bioy Casares, Diary of the War of the Pig.
posted by nasreddin at 4:46 AM on March 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

delmoi: I'm almost certain that the insurance organizations in the wealthy countries will continue to foot the bill for their citizens who've paid into the programs for many years. An Austrian health insurance agency, for example, would probably prefer to pay for its older citizens to receive lower cost care in Bulgaria than they would if they stayed in Austria.

One thing that's certain: As a legal resident of Austria, I can get necessary treatment (i.e. not elective) anywhere in the EU and have it reimbursed by the public Austrian insurance agency that insures me. I don't think it would be any different for Austrian citizens who retire and move to Bulgaria, either.
posted by syzygy at 5:34 AM on March 26, 2010

Does anyone else see this glimpse of something in the distance that looks either like post-capitalism or post-human?
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 5:52 AM on March 26, 2010

It looks like Soylent Green to me.
posted by spicynuts at 6:52 AM on March 26, 2010

It looks like Soylent Green to me.
**sigh**
I'll get the scoops.
posted by Lord_Pall at 7:21 AM on March 26, 2010

not to mention robs children of much interaction with their own blood.

I am eternally grateful to my own mother for moving back to Ohio when I was a child so that I could get to know my own grandparents.
posted by adamdschneider at 8:01 AM on March 26, 2010

The idea of retraining for a job as a retail supervisor at the age of 71...*trails off*

*signs Final Exit out of the library*
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:05 AM on March 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

robs children of much interaction with their own blood

And here I was thinking that seeing my blood outside my body was always a bad thing!
posted by WalterMitty at 8:18 AM on March 26, 2010

Stuff like this is complete bullshit. For wealthy countries, aging populations shouldn't be a problem for the exact same reason that the decline of people working in agriculture (to around 3% these days) doesn't mean impending starvation. China may not be sufficiently capital intensive to be able to have 50% of the population idle, but there's no economic reason that, say, France can't.

Productivity isn't the most important thing, it's the *only* thing. Modern economies are so productive that demographics just isn't important. Labor force participation is around 60-70% in the advanced industrial countries. Even if everyone worked from the day they were born to the day they died - if labor force participation were 100% - that would mean at most another 50% of output. In contrast, France has had a 200% increase in per-capita output since the 1970s.

In reality, this is just one more excuse to shift wealth away from the middle class. If France could afford retirement at 60 in 1970 (when per-capita GDP was a third of what it is today), then it can afford it today as well. Don't let anyone tell you different.
posted by bonecrusher at 8:47 AM on March 26, 2010 [6 favorites]

It depends very heavily on people's consumption function. If you spend every dollar (or more) you make you are in for a shock when the economy no longer has any utility for you. It is not impossible for a fifty year old human to be downsized and have fifty years of living expenses banked. He or she has to have foresight to economize over the time the capitalist paymasters have a use for them. It may be factual and it may be cruel but that is the system such as we are in it.

Wednesday is my last day. The people in the office who are staying seem a lot more bummed out about it than I. My boss looks like he just got kicked in the balls. I have no idea what his consumption function looks like.
posted by bukvich at 9:34 AM on March 26, 2010

Stuff like this is complete bullshit.

It doesn't matter how productive you are if your tax base isn't large enough to pay down your debt.
posted by furtive at 10:08 AM on March 26, 2010

We keep introducing new technologies that make virtually every task easier and faster to perform. Factory robots reduced the need for auto workers; spreadsheets reduced the need for bookkeepers; mechanical harvesters reduced the need for farmers.

At some point, only a few workers will be needed for most industries, people to direct the robots and machines and to keep them working. At some point, we will have significantly more people than jobs.

So why have we in America made the job the only honorable way to survive?

At some point, we as a society have enough things. We have enough houses for every family to have one, houses sitting empty because the families can't afford them. We have enough food for everyone to eat as much as they need, more than they need. We can produce enough medicine to give everyone the drugs they need--drugs are generally cheap once they've been invented and tested.

Capitalism works well at producing lots of things, but it sucks at distributing them to the people who need them.

We need something new.
posted by JDHarper at 10:28 AM on March 26, 2010 [7 favorites]

You know, I'm having trouble thinking of a model for understanding the problems that bonecrusher and JDHarper eloquently describe above that works better than Marx's old "seize control of the means of production" one — it seems to me like the inherent problem is that the ownership of, and as a result the benefits of, the cool stuff behind productivity increases belong to the small capitalist class rather than the large class of workers.

I guess the way I look at it (and I don't know if this is Marxian or not) is that the problem is distribution, but that the essential good that's not being distributed doesn't consist of the consumer goods that society produces, but rather the stake in society that should come with being a citizen, this stake being instead controlled by a few very wealthy stakeholders.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:08 AM on March 26, 2010

bonecrusher, I think the problem is that it was never affordable. It was always a pyramid scheme.
posted by dobie at 11:15 AM on March 26, 2010

I don't think it is narrow minded to think this is a problem restricted to just the old. They 'problem', if you choose to call it such, is that our means of production are so efficient that we don't really need as many people to labor at production.-old or young.

I tend to think unemployment is not so much a problem, but a function of a healthy automated economy. Instead of railing against it and trying to find ways to keep everyone working, we should probably start preparing for the time when we realize it is not necessary, nor in humanities best interest to keep our entire population productive.
posted by psycho-alchemy at 1:19 PM on March 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

I tend to think unemployment is not so much a problem, but a function of a healthy automated economy.

And so on. I couldn't agree more.

Problem is, we temperate zoned western-worlders have got a deep-seated "busy-ness" urge that wants constant feeding. Genetic? No. Definitely learned. It starts around age six when we jam kids into learning institutions, condemn fun and pleasure, reward sweat, toil, PAIN.
posted by philip-random at 1:54 PM on March 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

The standard economic counter to your beliefs, p-a and p-r, is Say's Law. If your job can be done with a machine, you can do something else and now the total output is the old stuff you used to do *and* the new stuff. Profit!

Around 3% of Americans are farmers today. It used to be close to 100%. That doesn't mean we should expect 97% unemployment.

And there's no "pyramid scheme" in dedicating some percentage of economic output to retirees, dobie. Retirees receive real benefits - housing, clothing, medical care, Hummel figurines, Oldsmobuicks, and binges at the Old Country Buffet. If the a modern economy can do that today (and it does), it can do it tomorrow, when it will be even wealthier.

Anyone who claims that we can't do this is lying. What they really mean is that they have other areas they want economic output to be directed towards. In my experience, they usually mean that money would be better spent amusing our richest douchbags. Well fuck them. Fuck them right in the ear.
posted by bonecrusher at 3:30 PM on March 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

You'll have to be quite infatuated with a country before leaving your children and possible grandchildren behind.

What if your kids have moved somewhere completely different already?
posted by jacalata at 5:36 PM on March 26, 2010

You Can't Tip a Buick: "I guess the way I look at it (and I don't know if this is Marxian or not) is that the problem is distribution, but that the essential good that's not being distributed doesn't consist of the consumer goods that society produces, but rather the stake in society that should come with being a citizen, this stake being instead controlled by a few very wealthy stakeholders."

Nope, you're pretty much spot-on; that's Marxism down to a tee. The confusion between that and the output / means of production comes because Marx (to a small extent) and others before and after him (to a much greater extent) liked to enumerate the things that go into your "stake in society that should come with being a citizen", highlight them as being indicators of a certain status, and wrap them up in the 19th century attractive ideal of a class struggle.

The concept is about societal stake; the illustration uses material goods as an indicator of that stake. Come the Revolution, you won't be forced to trade down your Lamborghini (or trade up your Zhiguli) for a Buick - you'll have what you need* to fully enable your participation in society according to your abilities, be it Zhiguli, Buick, or Lambo, but everybody's societal stake will be equal.

(* Issues regarding the implementation of this policy will be left for a future meeting of the Glorious People's Working Committee For The Appropriate Distribution Of Resources ;-)
posted by Pinback at 1:09 AM on March 28, 2010

The standard economic counter to your beliefs, p-a and p-r, is Say's Law. If your job can be done with a machine, you can do something else and now the total output is the old stuff you used to do *and* the new stuff. Profit!


Say's law assumes that there is an infinite number of value producing jobs, I tend to disagree.

Also I would argue that greater and greater production for no other purpose than greater economic activity is not the recipe for a healthy society, nor a sustainable trend, unless you have unlimited resources.
posted by psycho-alchemy at 1:30 AM on March 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

unless you have unlimited resources.

And of course the arts are one area where there are pretty much unlimited resources, certainly of imagination, and as everything continues to digitize pretty much everything else.

Hmmm? We should all be artists.
posted by philip-random at 9:24 AM on March 31, 2010

psycho-alchemy: "Also I would argue that greater and greater production for no other purpose than greater economic activity is not the recipe for a healthy society, nor a sustainable trend, unless you have unlimited resources."

That really is the ultimate rub for humanity, isn't it? Can we say that any of our resources is unlimited? The first one that comes to mind is sunlight because once that baby blows, so does our present home. However, sunlight is only unlimited as long as the skies are clear. If it ever permanently clouds up, that diminishes that one greatly, if not eliminating it. Sure, there are the proposals for space-based solar collectors that beam the energy down to Earth, but we're not quite there yet. I guess, as was mentioned, as long as there are humans, there will be the human-based stuff like creativity. Whatever happens, it's pretty interesting stuff to ponder.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 6:07 AM on April 1, 2010