This article suggest that not everyone in a society today needs to have a job for all production needs to be filled. Instead, jobs are only necessary as a means of proving that one is worthy of consuming the things produced by others. The reason for this change from the past is primarily due to technological development. Just as mechanization during the Industrial Revolution eliminated the need for a great deal of employees, electronic automation and communication continue to do so. The example of this used in the article is that of the US postal service. People today send much less mail now due to alternatives like email and electronic billing which are more convenient. Because of this the postal service will likely have to largely scale back or shut down entirely up to 600,000 unemployed.
The writer of this article suggests that employment does not need to be "productive" in the sense that it used to be. Instead, more people can concentrate on creative endeavors like writing books. However, it does little to address those who are not needed in the production of necessities, but who are also not well suited to these kinds of pursuits.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/
2 comments:
This is an interesting article to read. While all the politicians and media are talking about the importance of job, they ignored that job is only a byproduct of economic activities. Without boosting economic activities, job policies is only a waste of money. Thinking of the basic micro economic function, where wage is the marginal productivity of labor, which has to equal to the marginal revenue; otherwise firms will be broken.
The job stimulus plans are like what Aristotle says that they misplaced the intermediate goods to end good, which will not achieve what is envisioned. The ultimate method for job stimulus will only happen if the production output is increasing.
I feel in the same way too. The pure statistic cannot state so much about the society. Clearly, our technology, thus productivity has dramatically increased in the past decades, which on the other hand, results with an increasing of unemployment. We cannot always catch the pace of labor transformation and adjustment. With the even more speedy technology enhancement, this gap could only be bigger in the future.
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