The Most Subversive Question

What is the most subversive question? No, it’s not “Why?” unless you happen to be a three-year-old, or perhaps a thirteen-year-old. I’ve been thinking a lot about jobs, automation and the nature of the economy, and realized that one of the most subversive questions that one could ask, that both locates you in an economic evolution and that should be critical for everyone yet is all too seldom truly answered, is:

“What do I want to do with my life?”

Why is this subversive? Because it upends one of the most profound assumptions that most of us make tacitly, usually even subconsciously: that our lives are not our own. In America, in the 21st century, the assumption is that we will spend twelve to twenty years of our lives training for our jobs, which will then occupy 65–75% of our wakening hours (usually those when we have the most energy), and leaving us with a window of about 15% that we can call our own. We will do these jobs for another forty five to fifty years, after which we hit “retirement”. Retirement, if we have any money left over from trying to get by day to day, we will spend in some kind of blissful paradise on cruise ship, golf courses, and hot tubs on our houses on the beach, driving very expensive cars and buying luxury meals — at least until we end up in a nursing home.

This is the American dream today, and we worry about robots taking out precious jobs because they will keep us from doing what we would naturally be doing anyway if we didn’t have jobs. Think about that a second.

Reframe the question another way: “If you did not have to worry about feeding yourself or your family, about shelter, about medical care if you get sick or injured, about getting where you need to get to, what would you want to do with with your life?”

I would be writing books and articles, studying at university and writing papers on ontology and data modeling, taking walks with my girls, meeting with my peers. My wife would probably be writing her novels and articles, one daughter would spend her time designing and sewing costumes, attending conventions, drawing cartoons, my other would be writing stories, designing video games and reading about history. One brother would spend his time working on rebuilding old cars, fixing his house, riding his motorcycle and taking his kid fishing while that kid was still a kid, the other would write books and novels, spend more time with his new wife, while she would teach grade school — because she enjoys teaching grade school.

Do any of these have value? Yes, most of them. I had a discussion today with an acquaintance of mine who came up to thank me about some observations I’d made over some problems he’d been having with SVG in designing aircraft parts for a major aircraft company, then he laid out a problem he was having about SVG metadata (future article, btw) that I again made suggestions on, which might save them a few hundred hours down the road.

The point here is that I pretty much described what I would do regardless. I don’t currently have “a job”. I have a meaningless title, because I run my own company. I consult, and sometimes I may be very, very busy for weeks on end, and when I am busy I’m usually quite well paid, but I have no guarantee I will be able to pay my bills next month.

A whole lot of people just voted for a salesman to save them from the machines, and from the “latte-sipping liberals” that seem to have created those machines. A few statistics are worth bearing in mind about those machines. I can lay out the numbers (and will, in the near future) but suffice it to say that there are about 5% fewer potential jobs created each decade than the one before it, even as the population rises by about 10% per decade.

These don’t sound like big numbers, but over a long enough period (say fifty years) this means that there are 50% fewer full-time jobs than there were in 1967 (taking into account population growth). This should evince cries of alarm, and I think the year 2016 was the first time people actually realized it, though they confused machines with immigrants. The immigrants aren’t the problem — they never really have been. They are simply a smokescreen for the fact that jobs are disappearing faster than they are being created due to automation. This has been going on through Republican administrations and Democratic ones, and because the incoming administration has evidenced even less clue about what’s going on than the last one, the result will be that, despite rhetoric to the opposite, the number of jobs created with continue to fall relative to the number destroyed.

Now, most of the reason for people’s anxieties about the future is perfectly understandable. In the economy which we were in for most of the twentieth century, you spent forty hours of generally full-time work making enough money to meet your “Mazlow minimum” for food, clothing, shelter, transportation and entertainment. Once you met that objective, your weekend was yours, your evenings were yours. Commutes were manageable. You probably worked in a factory, maybe in the white collar professional enclaves, and the money you made let you buy a car every few years and one of those new-fangled television things. You could comfortably save money, and the company cared for you from mailroom to boardroom. School was affordable, if you scrimped and saved a bit. Christmas was usually piled high with presents. The wife stayed at home (especially after the war) because there was really no need for a second income.

Today, both spouses are struggling to get enough work, and the kids are staying at home because housing has become unaffordable. Work is boring — not because it is inherently tedious, there’s just not enough of it to fill every hour that people are at work. Part-time work, almost unheard of sixty years ago except for the emerging fast food trade, has become the rule rather than the assumption, and most of that work is guarding other people’s stuff. It has also become more sporadic and unpredictable, meaning that you cannot secure large blocks of time anymore.

When not working at their job, everyone is trying to do something to bring more money in, because cereal boxes now contain 72% less cereal than they did twenty years ago, at higher prices, because houses continue to become increasingly unobtainable to buy outright, so are leased or rented, usually only for a few years at a time.

We have become divided into red states and blue states. The Red State’s symbol has become the pickup truck — big, oil guzzling, with a gun-rack on the back window, festooned with bumper stickers proclaiming allegiance to God, the NRA, freedom and the idiocy of lie-berals. The Blue State’s symbol has become the Prius, electrically powered, compact, ski-rack on the roof, with a Starbucks logo and “My other ride is a broom” much more quietly displayed. Yet we’re both struggling.

Blame is easy to assign, and usually wrong. The former machinist in a closed Detroit auto-plant is likely to blame the damned immigrants for taking up all of “America’s jobs” despite the fact that most of the jobs that immigrants take are the ones that nobody else will, or they’ll blame those latte-loving liberals. The people in the blue states are facing higher costs for everything — city living is expensive, and the money, while good on paper, just doesn’t go anywhere near far enough when a hovel starts at $800,000. They respond by not having kids, or even not marrying. They, in turn, blame the top 1% on up.

This last group is doing well, largely because of tax policies that have let them hide most of their actual income. Yet even here, the pinch is felt. Investments that gave returns north of 10% are now getting only 5%, fewer companies are going public, and many stalwarts, big retail in particular, are sliding into the abyss. They are frightened by talk of taxing the rich, because the rich are no longer anywhere near as rich as they used to be.

“What do I want to do with my life?”

People do not want more jobs. They say they do, and mean it, but that’s not really what they want. What they want is stability. They want to know that they can feed their family healthy food three times a day. They want to know they can continue living in their house without fear of being kicked onto the streets. They want to know that if they or their children or their parents get sick, it won’t bankrupt them. They want to know that they have clothes appropriate for the season.

Take a look at people who are actually retired — not the ones that are in the commercials, those have always been fantasy constructs sold by Madison Avenue to sell cars, condos, investment vehicles and, lately, potency medication. Most real retirees are busy doing what they wanted to do for years, but couldn’t. The work they do is meaningful and real, but because it is not intended to make someone else wealthier in some fashion, it doesn’t get done.

They worry that their fixed income will run out, and they have to fight the very real temptation of going back into the workforce just to top off the tanks. A lot of them voted for Trump because this wasn’t the America they were promised, not just for themselves, but because they are often desperately supporting their children and grandchildren. Whether he can deliver is arguable, but the point here is that they can see the cognitive dissonance between what has been promised and what has been truly delivered.

Perhaps — indeed, there really is no perhaps about it — the concept of job needs to be redefined. If you look at the promise of automation and the direction of the solar income (where automation is going), it actually makes a lot of sense. Manufacturing is shifting to the notion of just in time production: produce what’s needed, when it’s needed, with just enough redundancy to weather disruptions (3D printing). Stop moving the consumer to the product, and move the product to the consumer instead. Reduce the amount of travel (and the number of office buildings) that are unnecessary (commuting to businesses, business travel) in favor of virtual communication.

Get away from the pretense of illegal immigration to harvest our goods, and man our hotels by recognizing guest worker statuses. Build a single payer insurance system, possibly as a network of state exchanges, with sensible cross state recognizance, because the massive corporations that once supported such an approach have been replaced by millions of micro-corporations where a private insurance system is no longer feasible. Make education truly affordable, not just simply a way of keeping banks afloat, because the economy needs educated workers more than it needs more bank plutocrats.

Finally, recognize that the problem here is that you cannot have an economy where the people who sell are rewarded disproportionately to the people who produce and not have it collapse. This system IS collapsing. It has been collapsing for a while. It is only more obvious that it is collapsing in the Red States because there is nothing there to replace it. The economies in the Red States have generally been focused on mass production, processing and distribution, and all of these are highly inefficient (far beyond setting aside some redundancies).

You need large amounts of energy to produce goods in this economy, which translates into large amounts of money, with those closest to the deal making generally taking the lion’s share of that. It is an inflationary economy that is coming up against very real limits in terms of resource consumption, energy consumption and waste and heat production. No amount of denialism will change that.

The new economy is a deflationary one — it’s one that recognizes that our environment has changed, that we cannot continue to assume that we can pull resources from elsewhere (through colonization, through outsourcing or elsewhere) without fighting other people for those same resources … and without more and more often losing. It is an adaptation that is happening elsewhere, and one that will be one of the biggest impacts upon trade, politics and society globally in the twenty-first century.

The new economy can work … everywhere. The challenge is that it requires that we challenge our priorities. Japan is actually a pretty good case study here. Japan covered this area first, and is perhaps twenty years ahead of the US. By the standards of the older materials economy, Japan appears a basket case — it has been in a seeming deflationary recession for a while, investments simply are not returning enough to make them worthwhile, and its highly rigid corporate infrastructure has relaxed considerably, even as the number of ultra-high net-worth individuals has been dropping.

Curiously enough, though, it’s become stable. Basic needs are met, people have more time for doing what they want to do, and the young are finding opportunities doing what they want, meaning that there is an equilibrium point there. It’s just not acting like a petroleum based economy more, but is now a solar one. Scotland, Finland, Iceland, even Germany, the powerhouse of Europe, seem to be heading this way, to the consternation of economists globally.

It’s also not strictly a Red State vs. Blue State issue, though we need to recognize that a Red State Solar economy will look different. Internet connectivity is crucial, if only because that communication backbone is a necessary part of the equation. I have a cousin who works as a large animal geneticist, and has been consulting globally. His farm in Illinois grows life-stock for breeding, and also sells power via a windfarm where feed corn once grew. He’d like to hire more staff, but to do that he needs people who know their way around a computer, needs people who can create 3D printed harnesses and other specialized equipment and others with similar expertise, but he also wants people who have the farm in their blood.

This is why he bemoans the current state of affairs, because those working hardest to bring back the past for themselves are destroying the future for their children and grandchildren.

“What do I want to do with my life?”

I’m expecting this article will get a fair number of brickbats thrown at it, because it flies in the face of many people’s political opinions. My personal belief is that we’ve reached a stage where Federal government solutions are no longer effective, especially in the face of a retrenchment toward a failed economic direction.

To me, I think that it is important that all of us ask ourselves the above. I think the more that we start asking what we personally want, the more we will come to a consensus that the existing notion of “a job” as a paid corporate chair-sitter is no longer satisying anyone’s needs, other than those who are unable to conceive anything different. Decide to do something meaningful for you, and chances are, you will be doing something meaningful for others as well. Perhaps this is as simple as saying:

“I want to live.”

Kurt Cagle likes asking subversive questions.