Are jobs obsolete?

[s243a]

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We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings Video to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.

The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a "job."

The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we're in the digital age, we're using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.
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http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/0...ete/index.html

I'm not sure we have the productive capacity as stated above and I don't think jobs are obsolete but it is still some interesting comments.

[Coddfish]

It is interesting. In some ways, technology has done more harm to jobs than good, as one area that has been hit by it is certain labour jobs that workers used to do with their bare hands. Nowadays, bosses just want to save as much money as they can by having a machine do a task instead of another worker.

I'm still not convinced that jobs are obsolete though, with the baby boomers retiring and all. But it does make me wonder.

[s243a]

It is interesting. In some ways, technology has done more harm to jobs than good, as one area that has been hit by it is certain labour jobs that workers used to do with their bare hands. Nowadays, bosses just want to save as much money as they can by having a machine do a task instead of another worker.

I'm still not convinced that jobs are obsolete though, with the baby boomers retiring and all. But it does make me wonder.

Warning the following is quite speculative and I had little time to reason it out:

I don’t buy that we over produce given there are so many people with so little but people have been thinking we over produce since the time of Marx. Food costs are significant to most people. If we really produce that much food perhaps it is for biofuel. I know that technology has made us more efficient but we also demand more. We are always pushing for greater efficiency (e.g. gas millage) and safety. This results in a greater amount of man power to achieve this end and greater bureaucracies to regulate it.

We have chosen different values then providing for everyone. Some of the losses are due to greed. Well I recall the top 1% of the population having 90% of the wealth they only account for 30% of spending. Most of their wealth is tied up in assets (they don’t have large liquidity). I don’t think that 30% of spending was spread out over the rest of the population we would all be living in a Utopia but I still question the distribution of wealth.

The biggest thing we can do to make people better off is to produce more but abundance would lower prices and destroy the value of wealth for the rich. The money supply is only allowed to grow large enough so that shortage will always exist. By controlling the supply of money demand is held back creating artificial scarcity.