As automation rises, the skill level needed to be economically productive rises too
I’d argue survival today requires -less- skill than survival, say, three hundred years ago. I know exactly one person who possesses the knowledge to create a seine, and yet every single one of my great-great uncles and aunts possessed this knowledge, in a landlocked area several hundred miles from any substantial body of water—because sometimes that was the difference between eating and starving.
There’s a tendency of people to underestimate the level of skill, and overestimate the level of effort, required to live without modern technology. We live in a very unusual time, where it is possible to survive without any productive skills whatsoever; it isn’t even strictly necessary to be able to read and write, or do math.
Society today is a lot more complex, but that doesn’t necessarily mean -people- are.
I guess one needs to distinguish between ‘survival’ and being economically productive in one’s contemporary society. Maybe a 1700s farmer would be more able to survive than me, and maybe a hunter-gatherer would be even more able to survive—that isn’t the point. The point is that since the industrial revolution, one could participate in the wage economy and be rewarded quite well, even if the skills you had weren’t deemed particularly valuable by that wage economy.
This becomes even more clear if one looks at the 30-odd years since WWII. In Western countries, a manual worker with fairly low skills was a comfortable member of the middle class. Since the mid-70s we’ve seen a shift in inequality. A lot of the good jobs nowadays require college degrees. This trend seems likely to continue: take Apple. If a robot can make an iPad, they don’t need low-skilled manual workers, but they still need highly-skilled designers etc. The skill level needed to be economically productive has risen and looks set to continue to rise.
We live in a very unusual time, where it is possible to survive without any productive skills whatsoever
Not for the two billion people at the bottom, not really. They’re just invisible to a Westerner who doesn’t deliberately investigate the details of their misery. The occasional scandal over the conditions in third-world sweatshops, plantations, etc only underscores the framework of the situation; there wouldn’t be sweatshops if huge masses of people had alternatives to fighting for scraps from the West’s table.
Sweatshops pay higher than average wages. There are alternatives, the alternatives are worse.
Sweatshops don’t represent a deviation to the worse. They represent a deviation for the better. We look at them and see how bad people have things and get upset—and completely ignore how much worse things would be without them. You say these people are invisible, but the really invisible people are the people who the West never interacts with at all, and are significantly worse off for it. People who complain about sweatshops tick me off, because they never offer a real solution; their solutions are always “fair trade”, which is always about protectionist policies that ensure these people never get a fighting chance at those scraps from the West’s table.
Yes. My comments were addressing specifically Western concerns, because that is where fubarobfusco’s comment seemed to be coming from.
I’d argue survival today requires -less- skill than survival, say, three hundred years ago. I know exactly one person who possesses the knowledge to create a seine, and yet every single one of my great-great uncles and aunts possessed this knowledge, in a landlocked area several hundred miles from any substantial body of water—because sometimes that was the difference between eating and starving.
There’s a tendency of people to underestimate the level of skill, and overestimate the level of effort, required to live without modern technology. We live in a very unusual time, where it is possible to survive without any productive skills whatsoever; it isn’t even strictly necessary to be able to read and write, or do math.
Society today is a lot more complex, but that doesn’t necessarily mean -people- are.
I guess one needs to distinguish between ‘survival’ and being economically productive in one’s contemporary society. Maybe a 1700s farmer would be more able to survive than me, and maybe a hunter-gatherer would be even more able to survive—that isn’t the point. The point is that since the industrial revolution, one could participate in the wage economy and be rewarded quite well, even if the skills you had weren’t deemed particularly valuable by that wage economy.
This becomes even more clear if one looks at the 30-odd years since WWII. In Western countries, a manual worker with fairly low skills was a comfortable member of the middle class. Since the mid-70s we’ve seen a shift in inequality. A lot of the good jobs nowadays require college degrees. This trend seems likely to continue: take Apple. If a robot can make an iPad, they don’t need low-skilled manual workers, but they still need highly-skilled designers etc. The skill level needed to be economically productive has risen and looks set to continue to rise.
Btw, completely agree with fubarobfusco.
Not for the two billion people at the bottom, not really. They’re just invisible to a Westerner who doesn’t deliberately investigate the details of their misery. The occasional scandal over the conditions in third-world sweatshops, plantations, etc only underscores the framework of the situation; there wouldn’t be sweatshops if huge masses of people had alternatives to fighting for scraps from the West’s table.
Sweatshops pay higher than average wages. There are alternatives, the alternatives are worse.
Sweatshops don’t represent a deviation to the worse. They represent a deviation for the better. We look at them and see how bad people have things and get upset—and completely ignore how much worse things would be without them. You say these people are invisible, but the really invisible people are the people who the West never interacts with at all, and are significantly worse off for it. People who complain about sweatshops tick me off, because they never offer a real solution; their solutions are always “fair trade”, which is always about protectionist policies that ensure these people never get a fighting chance at those scraps from the West’s table.
Yes. My comments were addressing specifically Western concerns, because that is where fubarobfusco’s comment seemed to be coming from.